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"The Stingy Knight"- a dramatic work (play), conceived in 1826 (the plan dates back to the beginning of January 1826); created in the Boldino autumn of 1830, it is part of Pushkin’s cycle of small tragedies. The play was filmed.

The Miserly Knight shows the corrupting, dehumanizing, devastating power of gold. Pushkin was the first in Russian literature to notice the terrible power of money.

The result in the play is the words of the Duke:

...Terrible century - Terrible hearts...

With amazing depth, the author reveals the psychology of stinginess, but most importantly, the origins that feed it. The type of stingy knight is revealed as a product of a certain historical era. At the same time, in the tragedy the poet rises to a broad generalization of the inhumanity of the power of gold.

Pushkin does not resort to any moral teachings or discussions on this topic, but with the entire content of the play he illuminates the immorality and crime of such relations between people in which everything is determined by the power of gold.

Obviously, in order to avoid possible biographical connections (everyone knew the stinginess of the poet’s father, S.L. Pushkin, and his difficult relationship with his son), Pushkin passed off this completely original play as a translation from a non-existent English original.

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See what “The Miserly Knight” is in other dictionaries: The hero of the dramatic scenes of the same name (1830) by A. S. Pushkin (1799 1837), a miser and a miser. A common noun for people of this type (ironic). encyclopedic Dictionary winged words and expressions. M.: Locked Press. Vadim Serov. 2003 ...

Dictionary of popular words and expressions - “THE MISTERY KNIGHT”, Russia, Moscow theater “Vernissage”/Culture, 1999, color, 52 min. Teleplay, tragicomedy. Based on the drama of the same name by A. S. Pushkin from the series “Little Tragedies”. Cast: Georgy Menglet (see MENGLET Georgy Pavlovich), Igor... ...

Encyclopedia of Cinema Noun, number of synonyms: 1 miser (70) Dictionary of synonyms ASIS. V.N. Trishin. 2013…

“There is nothing to say about the idea of ​​the poem “The Miserly Knight”: it is too clear both in itself and in the title of the poem. The passion of stinginess is not a new idea, but genius knows how to make the old new...,” he wrote, defining the ideological nature of the work. G. Lesskis, noting some “mystery” of the tragedy in relation to its publication (Pushkin’s reluctance to publish the tragedy under his own name, attributing authorship to the non-existent playwright of English literature Chanston), believed that the ideological orientation is still extremely clear and simple: “In contrast to the rather mysterious the external history of the play, its content and conflict seem simpler than in the other three." Apparently, the starting point for understanding the ideological nature of a work was, as a rule, an epithet, which forms the semantic center of the title and is a key word in the code meaning of conflict resolution. And therefore the idea of ​​the first play in the series “Little Tragedies” seems “simple” - stinginess.

We see that this tragedy is devoted not so much to stinginess itself, but to the problem of its comprehension, the problem of comprehension of morality and spiritual self-destruction. The object of philosophical, psychological and ethical research becomes a person whose spiritual beliefs turn out to be fragile in the ring of temptation.

The world of knightly honor and glory was struck by a vicious passion; the arrow of sin pierced the very foundations of existence and destroyed moral supports. Everything that was once defined by the concept of “knightly spirit” was rethought by the concept of “passion”.

The displacement of vital centers leads a person into a spiritual trap, a unique way out of which can only be a step taken into the abyss of non-being. The reality of sin, realized and determined by life, is terrible in its reality and tragic in its consequences. However, only one hero of the tragedy “The Miserly Knight” has the power to understand this axiom - the Duke. It is he who becomes an involuntary witness to a moral catastrophe and an uncompromising judge of its participants.

Stinginess, indeed, is the “engine” of tragedy (stinginess as the cause and consequence of wasted spiritual strength). But its meaning is visible not only in the pettiness of the miser.

The Baron is not just a stingy knight, but also a stingy father - stingy in communicating with his son, stingy in revealing to him the truths of life. He closed his heart to Albert, thereby predetermining his end and destroying the still fragile spiritual world of his heir. The baron did not want to understand that his son would inherit not so much his gold, but his life wisdom, memory and experience of generations.

Stingy with love and sincerity, the Baron withdraws into himself, into his individuality. He withdraws himself from the truth of family relationships, from the “vanity” (which he sees outside his basement) of the world, creating his own world and Law: the Father is realized in the Creator. The desire to possess gold develops into an egoistic desire to possess the Universe. There should be only one ruler on the throne, and only one God in heaven. Such a message becomes the “footstool” of Power and the cause of hatred towards the son, who could be the successor of the Father’s Cause (this does not mean a destructive passion for hoarding, but the cause of the family, the transfer from father to son of the spiritual wealth of the family).

It is this avarice that destroys and marks with its shadow all manifestations of life that becomes the subject of dramatic comprehension. However, the latent, gradually “emerging” causal foundations of depravity do not escape the author’s gaze. The author is interested not only in the results of completion, but also in their primary motives.

What makes the Baron become an ascetic? The desire to become God, the Almighty. What makes Albert want his father dead? The desire to become the owner of the baron’s gold reserves, the desire to become a free, independent person, and most importantly, respected for both courage and fortune (which in itself, as a promise to existence, but not to being, is quite understandable and characteristic of many people of his age) .

“The essence of a person,” wrote V. Nepomnyashchy, “is determined by what he ultimately wants and what he does to fulfill his desire. Therefore, the “material” of “small tragedies” are human passions. Pushkin took three main ones: freedom, creativity, love [...]

His tragedy began with the desire for wealth, which, according to Baron, is the key to independence and freedom. Albert strives for independence - also through wealth [...]."

Freedom as an impetus, as a call for the implementation of plans, becomes an indicator, an accompanying “element” and at the same time a catalyst for action that has moral significance(positive or negative).

Everything in this work is maximally combined, syncretically focused and ideologically concentrated. The inversion of the commanded origins of being and the disharmony of relationships, family rejection and clan interruption (moral disconnection of generations) - all these are marked by the fact of the reality of synth e zy (synthetically organized indicators) of spiritual drama.

The illogical relationship at the level of Father - Son is one of the indicators of moral tragedy precisely because the conflict of a dramatic work receives ethical significance not only (and not so much) when it is resolved vertically: God - Man, but also when the hero becomes an apostate in real-situational facts, when consciously or unconsciously the “ideal” is replaced by the “absolute”.

The multi-level nature of meanings and conflict resolutions also determines the polysemy of subtextual meanings and their interpretations. We will not find any unambiguity in the understanding of this or that image, this or that problem, noted by the author’s attention. Pushkin's dramatic work is not characterized by categorical assessments and extreme obviousness of conclusions, which was characteristic of classic tragedy. Therefore, when analyzing his plays, it is important to carefully read every word, note the changes in the intonations of the characters, and see and feel the author’s thought in every remark.

An important point in understanding the ideological and content aspect of the work is also the analytical “reading” of the images of the main characters in their inextricable correlation and direct relation to the level facts of resolving a conflict that has an ambivalent nature.

We cannot agree with the opinion of some literary scholars, who see in this work, just as in “Mozart and Salieri,” only one main character, endowed with the power and right to move the tragedy. Thus, M. Kostalevskaya noted: “The first tragedy (or dramatic scene) - “The Miserly Knight” - corresponds to the number one. The main, and essentially the only hero is the Baron. The remaining characters in the tragedy are peripheral and serve only as a background to the central person. Both philosophy and character psychology are concentrated and fully expressed in the monologue of the Miserly Knight [...]."

The Baron is undoubtedly the most important, deeply psychologically “written out” sign image. It is in correlation with him, with his will and his personal tragedy, that the graphically marked realities of Albert’s co-existence are visible.

However, despite all the visible (external) parallelism of their life lines, they are still sons of the same vice, historically predetermined and actually existing. Their visible differences are largely explained and confirmed by age, and therefore time, indicators. The Baron, struck by an all-consuming sinful passion, rejects his son, generating in his mind the same sinfulness, but also burdened by the hidden motive of parricide (at the end of the tragedy).

Albert is just as driven by conflict as the Baron. The mere realization that his son is the heir, that he is the one who will come after, makes Philip hate and fear him. The situation, in its tense intractability, is similar to the dramatic situation of “Mozart and Salieri,” where envy and fear for one’s own creative failure, an imaginary, justifying desire to “save” Art and restore justice force Salieri to kill Mozart. S. Bondi, reflecting on this problem, wrote: “In “The Stingy Knight” and “Mozart and Salieri”, a shameful passion for profit, stinginess that does not disdain crimes, envy that leads to the murder of a friend, a brilliant composer, are seized by people accustomed to the universal respect, and, most importantly, considering this respect well deserved [...] And they try to convince themselves that their criminal actions are guided either by high principled considerations (Salieri), or if passion, then some other, not so shameful, but high (Baron Philip)."

In “The Stingy Knight,” the fear of giving everything to someone who doesn’t deserve it gives rise to perjury (an act whose final results are in no way inferior to the effect of poison thrown into the “cup of friendship”).

A vicious circle of contradictions. Perhaps this is how conflict should be characterized of this work. Here everything is “grown” and closed on contradictions and opposites. It would seem that father and son are opposed to each other, antinomic. However, this impression is deceptive. Indeed, the initially visible focus on the “sorrows” of poor youth, poured out by the angry Albert, gives reason to see the difference between the heroes. But one has only to carefully follow the son’s train of thought, and their immanent moral kinship with their father becomes obvious, even if marked in its original principle by oppositely polar signs. Although the baron did not teach Albert to appreciate and take care of what he dedicated his life to.

In the time period of the tragedy, Albert is young, frivolous, wasteful (in his dreams). But what happens next? Perhaps Solomon is right when he predicts a stingy old age for the young man. Probably, Albert will someday say: “I didn’t get all this for nothing...” (meaning the death of his father, which opened the way for him to the basement). The keys that the baron tried so unsuccessfully to find at the moment when life was leaving him will be found by his son and “the mud will be given to drink with the royal oil.”

Philip did not pass it on, but according to the logic of life, by the will of the author of the work and by the will of God, who tests the spiritual fortitude of his children by testing, against his own desire he “threw away” the inheritance, just as he threw down a gauntlet to his son, challenging him to a duel. Here the motive of temptation arises again (stating the invisible presence of the Devil), a motive that sounds already in the first scene, in the first voluminous monologue-dialogue (about the broken helmet) and the first ideologically significant dialogue (dialogue between Albert and Solomon about the possibility of getting his father’s money as soon as possible). This motive (the motive of temptation) is as eternal and old as the world. Already in the first book of the Bible we read about temptation, the result of which was expulsion from Paradise and the acquisition of earthly evil by man.

The Baron understands that the heir wants his death, which he accidentally admits, which Albert himself blurts out: “Will my father outlive me?”

We must not forget that Albert still did not take advantage of Solomon’s offer to poison his father. But this fact does not in the least refute the fact that he has a thought, a desire for the speedy death (but not murder!) of the baron. Wanting to die is one thing, but killing is something completely different. The knight’s son turned out to be unable to commit the act that the “son of harmony” could decide to do: “Pour... three drops into a glass of water...”. Y. Lotman noted in this sense: “In The Miserly Knight, the Baron’s feast took place, but another feast, at which Albert would have had to poison his father, was only mentioned. This feast will take place in “Mozart and Salieri”, connecting these two otherwise so different plays into a single “montage phrase” by “rhyme of provisions”. .

In “Mozart and Salieri,” the words of the hero of the first tragedy, detailing the entire murder process, are restructured into the author’s remark with the meaning “action - result”: “Throws poison into Mozart’s glass.” However, in a moment of intense spiritual tension, the son accepts his “father’s first gift,” ready to fight him in a “game” in which life is at stake.

The ambiguity of the conflict-situational characteristics of a work is determined by the difference in the initial motives for their occurrence and the multidirectional resolution. Level sections of the conflict are found in the vectors of moral movements and signs of spiritual disharmony, marking all the ethical messages and actions of the heroes.

If in “Mozart and Salieri” the opposition is defined by the semantics of “Genius - Craftsman”, “Genius - Villainy”, then in “The Miserly Knight” the opposition occurs in the semantic field of the antithesis “Father - Son”. The level difference in the initial indicators of spiritual drama also leads to differences in the final signs of its development.

Understanding the moral and philosophical issues of “The Miserly Knight”, one should draw a conclusion about the all-importance of the ethical sound of Pushkin’s tragedy, the comprehensiveness of the themes raised and the universal level of conflict resolution. All vector lines of action development pass through the ethical subtextual space of the work, touching on the deep, ontological aspects of human life, his sinfulness and responsibility before God.

Bibliography

1. Belinsky Alexander Pushkin. - M., 1985. - P. 484.

2. Lesskis G. Pushkin’s path in Russian literature. - M., 1993. - P.298.

3. “Mozart and Salieri”, Pushkin’s tragedy, Movement in time. - M., 19с.

In “small tragedies” Pushkin confronts the mutually exclusive and at the same time inextricably linked points of view and truths of his heroes in a kind of polyphonic counterpoint. This combination of opposite principles of life is manifested not only in the figurative and semantic structure of the tragedies, but also in their poetics. This is clearly manifested in the title of the first tragedy - “The Miserly Knight”.

The action takes place in France, in late Middle Ages. In the person of Baron Philip, Pushkin captured a unique type of knight-usurer, generated by the era of transition from feudal relations to bourgeois monetary relations. This is a special social “species”, a kind of social centaur, bizarrely combining the features of opposite eras and ways of life. Ideas about knightly honor and his social privilege are still alive in him. At the same time, he is the bearer of other aspirations and ideals, generated by the growing power of money, on which a person’s position in society depends, to a greater extent than on origin and titles. Money undermines, blurs the boundaries of class and caste groups, and destroys the barriers between them. In this regard, the importance of the personal principle in a person increases, his freedom, but at the same time responsibility - for himself and others.

Baron Philip is a large, complex character, a man of enormous will. His main goal is the accumulation of gold as the main value in the emerging new way of life. At first, this accumulation is not an end in itself for him, but only a means of gaining complete independence and freedom. And the Baron seems to achieve his goal, as evidenced by his monologue in the “basements of the faithful”: “What is not under my control? As a certain demon, I can now rule the world...”, etc. (V, 342-343). However, this independence, power and strength are bought at too high a price - the tears, sweat and blood of the victims of the baron's passion. But the matter is not limited to turning other people into a means of achieving his goal. The Baron ultimately turns himself into only a means of achieving this goal, for which he pays with the loss of his human feelings and qualities, even such natural ones as those of a father, perceiving his own son as his mortal enemy. So money, from a means of gaining independence and freedom, unnoticed by the hero, turns into an end in itself, of which the Baron becomes an appendage. It is not for nothing that his son Albert speaks about money: “Oh, my father sees them not as servants or friends, but as masters, and he himself serves them... like an Algerian slave, - Like a chained dog” (V, 338). Pushkin, as it were, rethinks the problem posed in " Caucasian prisoner": the inevitability of finding slavery on the paths of individualistic escape from society instead of the desired freedom. Egoistic monopassion leads the Baron not only to his alienation, but also to self-alienation, that is, to alienation from his human essence, from humanity as its basis.

However, Baron Philip has his own truth, which explains and to some extent justifies his position in life. Thinking about his son - the heir to all his wealth, which he will get without any effort or worries, he sees in this a violation of justice, the destruction of the foundations of the world order he affirms, in which everything must be achieved and suffered by the person himself, and not passed on as an undeserved gift from God (including the royal throne - here there is an interesting overlap with the problems of “Boris Godunov”, but on a different basis in life). Enjoying the contemplation of his treasures, the Baron exclaims: “I reign!.. What a magical shine! Obedient to me, my power is strong; In her is happiness, in her is my honor and glory!” But after this he is suddenly overcome by confusion and horror: “I reign... but who, after me, will take power over her? My heir! Madman, young spendthrift. The interlocutor of debauched debauchees!” The Baron is horrified not by the inevitability of death, parting with life and treasures, but by the violation of the highest justice, which gave his life meaning: “He will waste... And by what right? Did I get all this for nothing... Who knows how many bitter abstinences, curbed passions, heavy thoughts, Daytime worries, sleepless nights All this cost me? that he acquired with blood" (V, 345-346).

There is a logic here, a harmonious philosophy of strong and tragic personality, with its consistent, although it did not stand the test of humanity, truth. Who is to blame for this? On the one hand, historical circumstances, the era of advancing commercialism, in which the unrestrained growth of material wealth leads to spiritual impoverishment and turns a person from an end in itself into merely a means of achieving other goals. But Pushkin does not relieve responsibility from the hero himself, who chose the path of achieving freedom and independence in individualistic isolation from people.

The image of Albert is also connected with the problem of choosing a life position. It is simplistic to see his common interpretation as a shredded version of his father's personality, in which, over time, the traits of chivalry will be lost and the qualities of a moneylender-hoarder will triumph. In principle, such a metamorphosis is possible. But it is not fatally inevitable, because it also depends on Albert himself whether he will retain his inherent openness to people, sociability, kindness, the ability to think not only about himself, but also about others (the episode with the sick blacksmith is indicative here), or will he lose these qualities, like his father. In this regard, the Duke’s final remark is significant: “Terrible age, terrible hearts.” In it, guilt and responsibility seem to be evenly distributed - between the century and the “heart” of a person, his feeling, mind and will. At the moment of development of the action, Baron Philippe and Albert act, despite their blood relationship, as bearers of two opposing, but in some ways mutually correcting truths. Both have elements of both absoluteness and relativity, tested and developed in each era by each person in his own way.

In “The Miserly Knight,” as in all other “small tragedies,” Pushkin’s realistic mastery reaches its peak - in the depth of penetration into the socio-historical and moral-psychological essence of the characters depicted, in the ability to consider in the temporal and particular - the enduring and universal. In them, such a feature of the poetics of Pushkin’s works as their “dizzying brevity” (A. Akhmatova), which contains the “abyss of space” (N. Gogol), reaches its full development. From tragedy to tragedy, the scale and meaningful capacity of the depicted images-characters increases, the depth, including moral and philosophical, of the depicted conflicts and problems of human existence - in its special national modifications and deep universal “invariants”.

After “Boris Godunov,” Pushkin wanted to express in dramatic form those important observations and discoveries in the field of human psychology that had accumulated in his creative experience. He planned to create a series of short plays, dramatic sketches, in which, in an acute plot situation, the human soul was revealed, seized by some kind of passion or manifesting its hidden properties in some special, extreme, unusual circumstances. A list of titles of plays conceived by Pushkin has been preserved: “The Miser,” “Romulus and Remus,” “Mozart and Salieri,” “Don Juan,” “Jesus,” “Berald of Savoy,” “Paul I,” “The Demon in Love,” “Dmitry and Marina", "Kurbsky". He was fascinated by the sharpness and contradictions of human feelings: stinginess, envy, ambition, etc. From this list of dramatic plans, Pushkin realized only three: “The Miserly Knight,” “Mozart and Salieri” and “The Stone Guest” (“Don Juan” ). He worked on them in 1826-1830. and completed them in the fall of 1830 in Boldin. There he also wrote another “small tragedy” (not included in the list) - “A Feast during the Plague.” Pushkin is not afraid to sharpen situations as much as possible, to create rarely encountered circumstances in drama in which unexpected aspects are revealed human soul. Therefore, in “small tragedies” the plot is often built on sharp contrasts. The miser is not an ordinary bourgeois moneylender, but a knight, a feudal lord; the feast takes place during the plague; the famous composer, proud Salieri kills his friend Mozart out of envy... Striving for maximum brevity and conciseness, Pushkin in his “small tragedies” willingly uses traditional literary and historical images and plots: the appearance on stage of heroes familiar to the audience makes a long exposition explaining the characters unnecessary and character relationships. In “small tragedies”, Pushkin uses purely theatrical means of artistic influence much more often and with greater depth and skill: music in “Mozart and Salieri”, which serves there as an affinity for characterization and even plays a decisive role in the development of the plot - a cart filled with dead people passing by feasting during the plague, the lonely “feast” of a stingy knight in the light of six cinders and the shine of gold in six open chests - all these are not external stage effects, but genuine elements of the dramatic action itself, deepening its semantic content. Small tragedies represent another peculiar, Pushkin's solution to those philosophical problems in poetry that came to the fore in Russian literature, especially after the tragic events of December 1825, is characteristic. During Pushkin’s lifetime, the cycle was not published in full; the title “Little Tragedies” was given during posthumous publication. The study of man in his most irresistible passions, in the extreme and most secret expressions of his contradictory essence - this is what interests Pushkin most of all when he begins to work on small tragedies. Small tragedies are closer to drama in terms of genre. To some extent, Pushkin’s dramaturgy goes back to the rigid plot structure of the “Byronic” poems: fragmentation, climax, etc. The first of the small tragedies was the tragedy “The Miserly Knight”. Pushkin finished work on it on October 23, 1830, although, apparently, its original plan, like most other small tragedies, dates back to 1826. At the center of the tragedy is the conflict between two heroes - father (Baron) and son (Albert). Both belong to the French knighthood, but different eras his stories. “The Stingy Knight” is a tragedy of stinginess. Stinginess here appears not as something unambiguous and one-dimensional, but in its hidden complexity and inconsistency, volumetric, Shakespearean. At the center of Pushkin’s tragedy is the image of the baron, a stingy knight, shown not in the spirit of Moliere, but in the spirit of Shakespeare. Everything about the baron is based on contradictions, he combines the incompatible: a stingy man and a knight. The knight is overcome by a passion for money that drains him, and at the same time he has something of the poet. Famous proverb says: you can mourn your love, but you cannot mourn your money. The Baron refutes this proverb. He doesn’t even mourn the money, but does more - he sings a hymn to them, high praise:

Like a young rake waiting for a date

With some wicked libertine

Or a fool, deceived by him, so am I

I've been waiting all day for minutes to get off.

To my secret basement, to my faithful chests...

Bron reaches out to money not just as a miser, but as someone hungry for power.

Money becomes a symbol of power, and that is why it is especially sweet for the baron. This is a sign of the times. This is a sign not even of the medieval time in which the action nominally takes place, but of Pushkin’s time. This is the tragedy of Pushkin's time. The baron's passion for gold and power is explored by Pushkin in all its psychological subtleties. In money, the baron sees and glorifies not just power, but the secrecy of power. What is sweet for him is not the obvious, but precisely the hidden power, which he alone knows about and which he can freely dispose of. All this conveys the terrible, deep truth of the tragedy. The tragedies of the century, when everything lofty in life becomes a miserable slave of yellow power, when because of money all close ties are broken - the most sacred ties: a son goes against his father, a father against his son; slander and poison become permitted weapons; In place of natural heartfelt ties between people, only monetary ties dominate. Albert is a young knight, the son of a stingy Baron, the hero of a tragedy. Albert is young and ambitious, for him the idea of ​​chivalry is inseparable from tournaments, courtliness, demonstrative courage and equally ostentatious extravagance. The feudal avarice of the father, elevated to a principle, not only condemns his son to bitter poverty, but deprives him of the opportunity to be a knight in the “modern” sense of the word, that is, a noble rich man who despises his own wealth. The tragedy begins with a conversation between Albert and the servant Ivan. Albert discusses the sad consequences of the tournament: the helmet is broken, the horse Emir is lame, the reason for his victory, “and courage... and wondrous strength,” is stinginess, anger at Count Delorge because of the damaged helmet. So the name “The Miserly Knight” fully applies to both the Baron and Albert. The tragedy continues with the scene of Albert’s humiliation in front of the moneylender Solomon, whom the knight despises and, in fact, is not averse to hanging. A chivalrous word is nothing to the moneylender, who transparently hints to Albert about the opportunity to “accelerate” the long-awaited moment of receiving an inheritance. Albert is furious at Solomon's baseness. But then Albert demands that Ivan take the chervonets from Solomon. In the palace scene, Albert complains to the Duke “about the shame of bitter poverty,” and he tries to admonish his stingy father. The Baron accuses his own son:

He, sir, unfortunately, is unworthy

No mercy, no attention...

He... he me

The son accuses his father of lying and is challenged to a duel. Pushkin tests his hero. Albert not only accepts the Baron’s challenge, that is, demonstrates that he is ready to kill his father, he raises the gauntlet hastily, until the father changes his mind and deprives his son of the opportunity to make a “Solomon’s decision.” However, the scene is constructed in a deliberately ambiguous way: Albert’s haste may also be due to the fact that he has already followed the base advice, poured in poison, in which case the duel for him is the last opportunity to give the parricide the appearance of a “knightly” duel, which was started on the initiative of the Baron himself. For the “new” knighthood, unlike the “old”, money is important not in itself, not as a mystical source of secret power over the world, for it it is only a means, the price of a “knightly” life. But in order to pay this price, to achieve this goal, Albert, who professes a “noble” philosophy, is ready to follow the base advice of the “despicable usurer.” All interpretations of the image of Albert (and the Baron) come down to two “options”. According to the first, the spirit of the times is to blame (“Terrible century, terrible hearts!”); each of the heroes has its own truth, the truth of the social principle - new and outdated (G.A. Gukovsky). According to the second, both heroes are to blame; The plot pits two equal lies against each other - the Baron and Albert (Yu.M. Lotman). The Duke evaluates the behavior of the heroes from the inside of knightly ethics, calling the eldest a “madman” and the younger a monster. This assessment does not contradict Pushkin’s. The Baron is the father of the young knight Albert; brought up in a previous era, when belonging to knighthood meant, first of all, to be a brave warrior and a rich feudal lord, and not a servant of the cult of a beautiful lady and a participant in court tournaments. Old age freed the Baron from the need to put on armor, but his love for gold grew into a passion. However, it is not money as such that attracts the Baron, but the world of ideas and feelings associated with it. This sharply distinguishes the Baron from numerous “misers” of Russian comedy of the 18th century, including from “Skopikhin” by G.R. Derzhavin, the epigraph from which was originally a prelude to the tragedy; The “crossing” of the comedic-satirical type of miser and the “high” hoarder type of Baron will occur in the image of Plyushkin in “Dead Souls” by N.V. Gogol. In the second, central scene of the tragedy, the Baron goes down to his basement (a metaphor for the devil's sanctuary) to pour a handful of accumulated gold coins into the sixth chest - “not yet full.” Here the Baron confesses to gold and to himself, then lights candles and arranges a “feast”, a cross-cutting image of “Little Tragedies”, that is, he performs a kind of sacrament, serves a kind of mass to gold. Piles of gold remind the Baron of a “proud hill” from which he mentally looks at everything that is under his control - at the whole world. The Baron’s recollection of the widow, who now brought an “old doubloon,” “but before, with three children, she was kneeling in front of the window for half a day, howling,” is negatively connected with the parable of the poor widow who donated her last mite to the temple. This is an inverted image of the gospel scene. The Baron thinks of himself as God, since money gives him unlimited power; gold for the Baron is only a symbol of power over existence. Unlike Albert, he values ​​money not as a means, but as an end, for the sake of it he is ready to endure hardships no less than a widow with children, for their sake he conquered passions. The father considers his son an enemy not because he is bad, but because he is wasteful; his pocket is a hole through which the shrine of gold can leak. But gold, for the sake of which passions are defeated, itself becomes a passion - it defeats the “knight” Baron. To emphasize this, Pushkin introduces the moneylender Solomon, who lends money to the poor son of the rich man Baron and ultimately advises him to poison his father. On the one hand, the Jew is the opposite of the Baron; he values ​​gold as such, and is devoid of even a hint of “sublimity” of feelings, even such a demonic sublimity as the Baron’s. On the other hand, the “exalted” hoarder Baron is ready to humiliate himself and lie in order not to pay for his son’s expenses. Summoned by the latter’s complaint to the Duke, he behaves not like a knight, but like a dodging scoundrel; the “pattern” of his behavior completely repeats the “pattern” of Solomon’s behavior in the first scene of the tragedy. And the “knightly” gesture (the glove is a challenge to a duel) in response to the accusation of lying, thrown by Albert in the presence of the Duke, only sharper highlights his complete betrayal of the spirit of chivalry. “A terrible age, terrible hearts,” says the Duke, concluding the dramatic action, and Pushkin himself speaks through his lips. Two days after The Stone Guest was completed, on November 6, Pushkin’s last Boldino tragedy was completed I wanted to kill.... The source for it was the dramatic poem by the English poet John Wilson “City of Plague”. Pushkin used book sources, but used them freely, subordinating him to his own ideological and artistic goals. In the tragedy “A Feast in the Time of Plague,” the treatment of book sources was even more free than in “The Stone Guest.” Pushkin took one passage from the English poem, inserted songs, changed the content of the latter, and composed one of them - the Chairman's song - again. The result was a new, independent work, with a deep and original thought. The very name of Pushkin's tragedy is original. In it you can see a reflection of the personal, autobiographical facts, facts of reality. In the fall of 1830, when the tragedy was written, cholera was raging in the central provinces of Russia, Moscow was cordoned off by quarantines, and the route from Boldin was temporarily closed to Pushkin. “A Feast in the Time of Plague” artistically explores a high passion for life when it manifests itself on the brink, on the edge of death, despite possible death. This is the ultimate test of a person and his spiritual strength. In the tragedy, the main place is occupied by the monologues of the heroes and their songs. They contain not only and not so much a story about what is happening, but even more so a confession of faith. Monologues and songs embody different human characters and different norms of human behavior in conditions of fatal inevitability. The song of yellow-haired Mary - in honor of the high and eternal love capable of surviving death. This song embodies all the greatness, all the power feminine

. In another song - the song of the Chairman, Walsingam - the greatness of the masculine and heroic. Walsingham is the hero of the tragedy, who buried his mother three weeks ago and a little later his beloved wife Matilda, and now presides over a feast in the middle of a plague-ridden city. Scottish Mary sings a song about dead Jenny. The feasters despair of faith and defy inevitable death. Their fun is the madness of the doomed, knowing about their fate (the breath of the plague has already touched the participants of the feast, so this is also a ritual meal). After a sad song, the experience of fun is more acute. Then, following a cart with dead bodies driven by a black man (the personification of hellish darkness), Walsingham sings himself. The song, composed for the first time in his life by Walsingham, sounds in a completely different key: it is a solemn hymn to the Plague, praise to despair, a parody of church chants:

Like from the naughty Winter,

Let's also lock ourselves away from the Plague!

Let's light the lights, pour glasses,

Let's drown fun minds

Let us praise the reign of the Plague.

Walsingham's song both opposes and complements Mary's song. In both of them, the ultimate, not only male and female, but human height is fully revealed - the disastrous height and greatness of man. Walsingham's song is the artistic and semantic culmination of the tragedy. It sounds like a hymn to human courage, which is familiar and dear to the rapture of battle, a hopeless struggle with fate itself, a feeling of triumph in death itself. The song of Chairman Walsingham is a glory to the only possible immortality of man in this disastrous, tragic world: in a hopeless and heroic duel with the irresistible, man endlessly rises and triumphs in spirit. This is a truly philosophical and unusually lofty thought. It is not for nothing that Walsingham uses “gospel” style in his anti-God song; he glorifies not the Kingdom, but precisely the Kingdom of the plague, the negative of the Kingdom of God. Thus, the Chairman, placed at the center of the last of the “small tragedies,” repeats the “semantic gesture” of other heroes of the cycle: Walsingham’s hymn endows the plague feast with sacred status, turning it into a black mass: pleasure on the edge of death promises the mortal heart a guarantee of immortality. The Hellenic high pagan truth sounds in Walsingham's song; it is opposed in Pushkin's tragedy by the words and truth of the Priest, reminding of loved ones, of the need for humility before death. The priest directly compares the feasters to demons. Having sung the hymn to the Plague, the Chairman ceased to be “just” the manager of the feast, he turned into its full-fledged “celebrant”; from now on, only a servant of God can become the plot antagonist of Walsingham. The priest and the Chairman get into an argument. The priest calls Walsingham to follow him, not promising deliverance from the plague and mortal horror, but promising a return to the meaning lost by the feasters, to a harmonious picture of the universe. Walsingam flatly refuses, because a “dead emptiness” awaits him at home. The Priest’s reminder of his mother, who “cries bitterly in the very heavens” for her dying son, has no effect on him, and only “Matilda’s pure spirit,” her “forever silent name,” uttered by the Priest, shakes Walsingam. He still asks the Priest to leave him, but adds words that were impossible for him until this moment: “For God’s sake.” This means that in the soul of the Chairman, who remembered the heavenly bliss of love and suddenly saw Matilda (“the holy child of light”) in paradise, a revolution took place: the name of God returned to the limits of his suffering consciousness, the religious picture of the world began to be restored, although the recovery of the soul was still far. Realizing this, the priest leaves, blessing Valsingham. The Priest's truth is no less the truth than Walsingham's truth. These truths collide in tragedy, confront and mutually influence each other. Moreover: in Walsingham, a Hellenic in the strength of the poetic and human spirit and at the same time a man of the Christian age, at some point, under the influence of the words of the Priest, both truths are internally conjugated.

This lesson extracurricular reading carried out after studying several works by A.S. Pushkin: the drama “Boris Godunov” (episode “Scene in the Miracle Monastery”), the story “ Stationmaster" and "Blizzard".

Lesson objectives:

• teach to analyze a dramatic work (determine the theme, idea, drama conflict),
• give the concept of dramatic character;
• develop the ability to work with the text of a literary work (selective reading, expressive reading, role reading, selection of quotes);
• bring up moral qualities personality.

During the classes

1. The history of the creation of “Little Tragedies” by A.S. Pushkin(teacher's word).

In 1830, A.S. Pushkin received a blessing to marry N.N. Goncharova. The troubles and preparations for the wedding began. The poet had to urgently go to the village of Boldino, Nizhny Novgorod province, to arrange the part of the family estate allocated to him by his father. The cholera epidemic that suddenly began kept Pushkin in rural solitude for a long time. Here the miracle of the first Boldino autumn happened: the poet experienced a happy and unprecedented surge of creative inspiration. In less than three months, he wrote the poetic story “The House in Kolomna”, the dramatic works “The Miserly Knight”, “Mozart and Salieri”, “A Feast during the Plague”, “Don Juan”, later called “Little Tragedies”, and also created “Belkin's Tales”, “The History of the Village of Goryukhin”, about thirty wonderful lyric poems were written, the novel “Eugene Onegin” was completed.

The relationship between a person and the people around him - relatives, friends, enemies, like-minded people, casual acquaintances - is a topic that always worried Pushkin, so in his works he explores various human passions and their consequences.

In “Little Tragedies” the poet seems to travel through space and time along Western Europe, with him the reader finds himself in the late Middle Ages (“The Miserly Knight”), the Renaissance (“The Stone Guest”), and the Enlightenment (“Mozart and Salieri”).

Each tragedy turns into a philosophical discussion about love and hate, life and death, the eternity of art, greed, betrayal, true talent...

2.Analysis of the drama “The Miserly Knight”(frontal conversation).

1) -Which of the following topics do you think this drama is dedicated to?

(Theme of greed, the power of money).

What money-related problems might a person have?

(Lack of money, or, conversely, too much of it, inability to manage money, greed...)

Is it possible to judge the theme and idea of ​​the work by the title of this drama?

2) "The Miserly Knight" - can a knight be stingy? Who were called knights in medieval Europe? How did knights appear? What qualities are characteristic of knights?

(Children prepare answers to these questions at home. This can be individual messages or homework ahead of time for the whole class.

The word "knight" comes from the German "ritter", i.e. horseman, in French there is a synonym “chevalier” from the word “cheval”, i.e. horse. So, initially this is what they call a horseman, a warrior on a horse. The first real knights appeared in France around 800. These were fierce and skillful warriors who, under the leadership of the leader of the Frankish tribe Clovis, defeated other tribes and by 500 conquered the territory of all of present-day France. By 800 they controlled even more of Germany and Italy. In 800, the Pope proclaimed Charlemagne Emperor of Rome. This is how the Holy Roman Empire arose. Over the years, the Franks increasingly used cavalry in military operations, invented stirrups and various weapons.

By the end of the 12th century, chivalry began to be perceived as a bearer of ethical ideals. The chivalric code of honor includes such values ​​as courage, courage, loyalty, and protection of the weak. Betrayal, revenge, and stinginess caused sharp condemnation. There were special rules for the behavior of a knight in battle: it was forbidden to retreat, to show disrespect for the enemy, it was forbidden to deliver fatal blows from behind, and to kill an unarmed person. The knights showed humanity to the enemy, especially if he was wounded.

The knight dedicated his victories in battle or in tournaments to his lady, so the era of chivalry is also associated with romantic feelings: love, infatuation, self-sacrifice for the sake of the beloved.)

Finding out the meaning of the word “knight”, students come to the conclusion that the title of the work “The Stingy Knight” contains a contradiction: a knight could not be stingy.

3)Introduction to the term "oxymoron"

Oxymoron – an artistic device based on the lexical inconsistency of words in a phrase, a stylistic figure, a combination of words that are opposed in meaning, “a combination of the incongruous.”

(The term is written down in notebooks or linguistic dictionaries)

4) - Which of the drama heroes can be called a stingy knight?

(Barona)

What do we know about the Baron from scene 1?

(Students work with the text. Read out quotes)

What was the fault of heroism? – stinginess
Yes! It's easy to get infected here
Under one roof with my father.

Yes, you should have told him that my father
Rich himself, like a Jew...

Baron is healthy. God willing - ten, twenty years
And he will live twenty-five and thirty...

ABOUT! My father has no servants and no friends
He sees them as masters;...

5) Reading the Baron's Monologue (Scene 2)

Explain where the baron's stinginess came from? What is the main character trait of the Baron that dominates all others? Find a keyword, a key image.

(Power)

Who does Baron compare himself to?

(With the king commanding his warriors)

Who was the Baron before?

(A warrior, a knight of sword and loyalty, in his youth he did not think about chests with doubloons)

What has changed, who has he become now?

(As a moneylender)

How do you understand the term " dramatic character"? (Explanation of the term is written in notebooks)

6) Vocabulary work.

We explain the meaning of the words “money lender” (you can choose the same root words “growth”, “grow”), “code of honor”, ​​“pigskin” - parchment with a family tree, with a coat of arms or knightly rights, “knightly word”.

7) Analysis of scene 3.

What does the Duke say about the Baron? What was the baron's name, what do we learn about him from his greeting to the Duke?

(Philip is the name of kings and dukes. The Baron lived at the Duke’s court, was first among equals.)

Did the knight in the baron die?

(No. The Baron is insulted by his son in the presence of the Duke, and this increases his insult. He challenges his son to a duel)

Why did the Baron, who was a real knight, become a moneylender?

(He was accustomed to power. In the days of his youth, power was given by the sword, knighthood, baronial privileges, military deeds)

What has changed?

(Time)

Another time comes and with it another generation of nobles. What is the Baron afraid of?

(Ruin of accumulated wealth)

What can you say about the baron’s son, Albert? How is his life? Can we call him a knight?

(For him, a knightly word and “pigskin” are an empty phrase)

What motivates Albert when he surprises everyone with his courage at the tournament?

(Stinginess)

Is Albert himself a miser, like his father?

(No. He gives the last bottle of wine to the sick blacksmith; he does not agree to poison his father and commit a crime for money)

What can be said about the relationship between father and son - Baron and Albert?

(The Baron accuses his son of plotting parricide, of trying to rob him)

8) Read by role the scene of a quarrel between father and son.

What caused the quarrel?

(Because of money)

What does the Baron think about in the last minutes of his life?

(About money)

Read last words Duke.

He died God!
Terrible age, terrible hearts!

What century is the Duke talking about? (About the age of money)

3. Conclusions. The final part of the lesson.(Teacher's word)

The basis of any dramatic work is conflict. Thanks to him, the action develops. What caused the tragedy? (The meaning of the terms is written down in the notebook)

This is the power of money that rules people. The power of money brings great suffering to the world of the poor, crimes committed in the name of gold. Because of money, relatives and close people become enemies and are ready to kill each other.

The theme of stinginess and the power of money is one of the eternal themes of world art and literature. Writers different countries dedicated their works to her:

• Honore de Balzac "Gobsek"
• Jean Baptiste Moliere "The Miser"
• D. Fonvizin “Undergrowth”,
• N. Gogol “Portrait”,
• « Dead Souls» (image of Plyushkin),
• "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala"

4. Homework:

1. Read N. Gogol’s story “Portrait”;
2. In your notebooks, write a detailed answer to the question “How can you explain the name of the drama “The Miserly Knight”?
3. Prepare a report on the topic “The Image of the Miser in World Art.” (Individual task)

To the question: What is the main idea of ​​Pushkin’s “The Miserly Knight”? And why was this work called that? given by the author MK2 the best answer is the main theme of "The Miserly Knight" - psychological analysis human soul, human "Passion". (However, like all the books from the collection “Little Tragedies”). Stinginess, a passion for collecting, hoarding money and a painful reluctance to spend even one penny of it - is shown by Pushkin both in its destructive effect on the psyche of a person, a miser, and in its influence on family relationships. Pushkin, unlike all his predecessors, made the bearer of this passion not a representative of the “third estate,” a merchant, a bourgeois, but a baron, a feudal lord belonging to the ruling class, a person for whom knightly “honor,” self-respect and the demand for self-respect are paramount first place. To emphasize this, as well as the fact that the baron’s stinginess is precisely passion, a painful affect, and not dry calculation, Pushkin introduces into his play next to the baron another usurer - the Jew Solomon, for whom, on the contrary, the accumulation of money, unscrupulous usury is simply a profession that gave him the opportunity, a representative of the then oppressed nation, to live and act in a feudal society. Stinginess, the love of money, in the minds of a knight, a baron, is a low, shameful passion; usury, as a means of accumulating wealth, is a shameful activity. That is why, alone with himself, the baron convinces himself that all his actions and all his feelings are based not on a passion for money, unworthy of a knight, not on stinginess, but on another passion, also destructive for those around him, also criminal, but not so base and shameful, and covered with a certain aura of gloomy sublimity - on an exorbitant lust for power. He is convinced that he denies himself everything he needs, keeps his only son in poverty, burdens his conscience with crimes - all in order to be aware of his enormous power over the world. The power of a stingy knight, or rather, the power of money, which he collects and saves all his life, exists for him only in potential, in dreams. In real life, he does not implement it in any way. In fact, this is all self-deception of the old baron. Speaking of the fact that lust for power (like any passion) could never rest on the mere consciousness of its power, but would certainly strive to realize this power, the baron is not at all as omnipotent as he thinks (“... from now on rule in peace I can...", "as soon as I want, palaces will be erected..."). He could do all this with his wealth, but he could never want to; he can open his chests only in order to pour accumulated gold into them, but not in order to take it out. He is not a king, not the lord of his money, but a slave to it. His son Albert is right when they talk about his father’s attitude towards money. For the baron, his son and heir to the wealth he has accumulated is his first enemy, since he knows that after his death Albert will destroy his life’s work, squander and squander everything he has collected. He hates his son and wishes him dead. Albert is portrayed in the play as a brave, strong and good-natured young man. He can give the last bottle of Spanish wine given to him to the sick blacksmith. But the baron’s stinginess completely distorts his character. Albert hates his father because he keeps him in poverty, does not give his son the opportunity to shine at tournaments and holidays, and makes him humiliate himself in front of the moneylender. He openly awaits the death of his father, and if Solomon’s proposal to poison the baron evokes such a violent reaction in him, it is precisely because Solomon expressed the thought that Albert had driven away from himself and which he was afraid of. The mortal enmity between father and son is revealed when they meet at the Duke, when Albert joyfully picks up the glove thrown to him by his father. “So he dug his claws into her, the monster,” says the Duke indignantly. It was not for nothing that Pushkin in the late 20s. began to develop this topic. In this era and in Russia, bourgeois elements of everyday life increasingly invaded the system of serfdom, new characters of the bourgeois type were developed, and greed for the acquisition and accumulation of money was fostered.

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Boldino autumn is one of the most fruitful periods in Pushkin’s life. The cholera epidemic found the writer on his father's estate, in Boldino. Many works were born here, including “The Miserly Knight.” In fact, the idea for The Miserly Knight originated earlier, in 1826. However, Alexander Sergeevich finished this text only in 1830. As you know, Pushkin was involved in a magazine - the famous Sovremennik. Therefore, it is not surprising that the work was published on the pages of this particular publication in 1836.

Mystical collisions of “The Stingy Knight”

There is one curious point connected with this play. The fact is that Pushkin included autobiographical moments here. However, these details from the writer’s life touched on a very delicate topic - the stinginess of Alexander Sergeevich’s father. To confuse readers a little and literary critics, Pushkin provided his work with a subtitle - “From Chenston’s tragicomedy.” Chanston (or William Shenstone) is an 18th-century writer who, however, does not have any similar works. The tradition of the 19th century required that the name of this author be written as “Chenston”, so sometimes confusion arises regarding names.

About the theme and plot of the work

“The Miserly Knight” is considered the first text from the cycle of dramatic sketches by Pushkin. These are short plays, later called “Little Tragedies”. Alexander Sergeevich had an idea: to devote each play to revealing a specific side of the human soul. And Pushkin wanted to write not just about a side of the soul, but about passion - an all-consuming feeling. In this case we're talking about about stinginess. Alexander Sergeevich reveals the depth of a person’s spiritual qualities, showing these qualities through poignant and unusual plots.

About the heroes and images of “The Miserly Knight”

Baron image

The Baron is perhaps the key image from this Pushkin masterpiece. The hero is famous for his wealth, but the baron's stinginess is no less than his wealth. The author does not spare words when describing the baron's wealth: chests full of gold, coins... However, the hero leaves everything intact, without pulling anything out of the chests. This is how Albert describes Baron:

ABOUT! my father has no servants and no friends
He sees them as masters; and he serves them himself.
And how does it serve? like an Algerian slave,
Like a chained dog. In an unheated kennel
Lives, drinks water, eats dry crusts,

He doesn’t sleep all night, he keeps running and barking...

According to the baron, he is omnipotent with money. You can buy everything for gold coins, because everything is for sale - love, virtues, atrocities, genius, artistic inspiration, human labor... All the baron is interested in is wealth. The hero is even capable of murder if someone wants to appropriate his money for themselves. When the baron suspected his son of this, he challenged him to a duel. The Duke tried to prevent the duel, but the Baron dies just from the thought of losing his money.

This is how Pushkin metaphorically shows that passion can consume a person.

Thus, the Baron can be described as a mature man, wise in his own way. The Baron was well trained, brought up in old traditions, and was once a valiant knight. But now the hero has concluded the whole meaning of life in accumulating money. The Baron believes that his son doesn’t know enough about life to trust him with his money:

My son doesn't like noise social life;
He is of a wild and gloomy disposition -
He always wanders around the castle in the forests,
Like a young deer...

Image of money

Money could be counted in a separate way. How does the Baron perceive wealth? For the baron, money is masters, rulers. These are not tools, not means, not servants at all. Also, the baron does not consider money as friends (as the moneylender Solomon did). But the hero refuses to admit that he has become a slave to money.

Solomon has a different attitude towards money. For a moneylender, money is just a job, a way to survive in this world. However, Solomon also has a passion: in order to get rich, the hero even suggests that Albert kill his father.

Albert's image

Albert is twenty years old, and youth takes its toll on the young man: the hero longs to enjoy life. Albert is depicted as a worthy young knight, strong and brave. Albert easily wins knightly tournaments and enjoys the attention and sympathy of women. However, only detail torments the knight - complete dependence on his own father. The young man is so poor that he has no money for knightly uniform, a horse, armor, or food. The hero is constantly forced to beg before his father. Despair pushes the knight to complain about his misfortune to the duke.

So he dug his claws into it! - monster!
Come on: don't you dare look into my eyes
Appear as long as I myself
I won’t invite you...

Duke image

The Duke in Pushkin's work is depicted as a representative of the authorities who voluntarily takes on these difficult obligations. The Duke condemns the era in which he lives, as well as the people (for the callousness of their hearts), calling them terrible. So - into the mouth of this hero - the author puts his own thoughts about his contemporary era.

The Duke always tries to be fair:
I believe, I believe: noble knight,
Someone like you won't blame his father
Without extremes. There are few such depraved ones...
Rest assured: your father
I will advise you in private, without noise...

Ivan's image

The play also features a minor character, Ivan, Albert’s young servant. Ivan is very devoted to his young master.

About the problems of the text

In his “Little Tragedies,” the writer examines a certain vice. As for “The Stingy Knight,” here the author is interested in depicting stinginess. This, of course, is not one of the deadly sins, however, stinginess also pushes people to destructive actions. Under the influence of stinginess, a worthy person sometimes changes beyond recognition. Pushkin represents heroes submissive to vices. And so in this play, vices are portrayed as the reason why people lose their dignity.

About the conflict of the work

The key conflict of Pushkin's work is external. The conflict unfolds between the baron and Albert, who claims the inheritance due to him. According to the baron, money should be treated with care, and not wastefully. And suffering teaches such an attitude. The Baron wants to preserve and increase his wealth. And the son, in turn, strives to use money to enjoy life.

The poem “Village” by Pushkin is an example of a work written far from the bustle of the city. We offer our readers

The conflict causes a clash of interests of the heroes. Moreover, the situation is significantly worsened by the Duke's intervention. In this situation, the baron slanders Albert. The conflict can only be resolved tragically. One side must die for the conflict to end. As a result, the passion turns out to be so destructive that it kills the baron, who is represented by that same stingy knight. However, Pushkin does not talk about Albert’s fate, so the reader can only speculate.

About the composition and genre of “The Miserly Knight”

The tragedy includes three episodes. In the first scene, the writer talks about the situation of the baron's son. Albert suffers from material need because the baron is excessively stingy. In the second scene, the reader is introduced to the baron's monologue, reflecting on his passion. Finally, in the third scene, the conflict gains scale; the Duke, one of the most just characters, joins the conflict. Without wanting it or expecting it, the Duke accelerates the tragic outcome of the conflict. The baron, obsessed with passion, dies. The climax is the death of the miserly knight. And the denouement, in turn, is the Duke’s conclusion:

Terrible age, terrible hearts!

In terms of genre, Pushkin’s work is definitely a tragedy, because central character dies at the end. Despite the small volume of this text, the author managed to succinctly and succinctly convey the essence.

Pushkin set out to present the psychological characteristics of a person who is obsessed with a destructive passion - stinginess.

About the style and artistic originality of “The Miserly Knight”

It should be said that the author created Pushkin’s tragedies rather for theatrical production than for reading. There are many theatrical elements in the work - for example, look at the image of a stingy knight, a dark basement and shiny gold. In addition, critics consider this text a poetic masterpiece.

Mystical and biblical overtones of the work

However, Pushkin puts deeper meanings into his text than it seems at first glance. The Baron is not attracted to wealth in itself. The hero is more interested in the world of ideas and emotions associated with gold. This is the difference between the image of the baron and the images of “misers” from Russian comedies of the 18th century (as an example, we can recall the heroes from the works of Derzhavin). Initially, Alexander Sergeevich took the epigraph from Derzhavin’s text called “Skopikhin”. In literature, writers tend to create several types. The first type is comedic-satirical (the miser), and the second type is high, tragic (the hoarder). The Baron, accordingly, belongs to the second type. The combination of these types is observed in Gogol’s “ Dead souls", and specifically - in the personality of Plyushkin.

High drive image

This image is fully revealed in the baron’s monologue, presented in the second part of “The Stingy Knight.” The author describes how the baron goes to the dungeon of his castle. This, in turn, is a symbol of the altar in the underworld, the devil’s sanctuary. The hero pours a handful of coins into the chest. This chest is not yet fully filled. This scene presents the hero's confession to himself. In addition, here Pushkin gives a common leitmotif for the entire cycle of tragedies - a feast by candlelight. Such a feast pleases both the eyes and the soul - it is a sacrament, a mass for money.

This is the mystical subtext of Pushkin’s work, which is combined with gospel paraphrases from the baron’s confession. Pushkin describes the gold piled in heaps with the image of a “proud hill.” Standing on a hill, towering above the surrounding world, the baron feels power. The lower the hero bends over gold, the stronger, the more his passion rises. And passion is the embodiment of the demonic spirit. The reader probably noticed a similar image in the Bible: The Devil promises Jesus Christ world power. To demonstrate his power, the Devil lifts Christ to a high hill. Sometimes literary scholars see the baron as an inverted image of God. Considering that gold is a symbol of power over the world, the baron’s words about reign are not surprising.

Another question is why the Baron treats his son as an enemy. This is not related to moral qualities Alberta. The reason is the youth's extravagance. Albert's pocket is not a place where gold accumulates, but an abyss, an abyss that absorbs money.

Antipodean images

In order to focus attention on the destructive nature of passions, the writer introduces an antipodean character, contrasting the image of the main character. The baron's antipode is the usurer (Jew). Solomon lends money to Albert, but ultimately pushes the young man to kill his father. However, the young knight does not want to commit such a sin and drives the moneylender away.

“Am I wandering along the noisy streets...” is a work that reflected Alexander Pushkin’s philosophical reflections on eternal questions. We invite classics lovers to familiarize themselves with

The moneylender wants gold as a medium of exchange. There are no sublime emotions here, like the Baron. This can also be seen in Solomon's behavior. The moneylender's method of action reveals the hero to be a scoundrel rather than a knight. In this context, it is symbolic that the author identifies individual characters as a separate category of knights.

Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich

Stingy Knight

(SCENES FROM CHANSTON'S TRAGICOMEDY: THE COVETOUS KNIGHT )

In the tower.

Albert And Ivan

Albert

By all means in the tournament

I will appear. Show me the helmet, Ivan.

Ivan hands him a helmet.

Punched through, damaged. Impossible

Put it on. I need to get a new one.

What a blow! damned Count Delorge!

And you repaid him handsomely:

How you knocked him out of the stirrups,

He lay dead for a day - and it’s unlikely

I recovered.

Albert

But still he is not at a loss;

His breastplate is intact Venetian,

And his own chest: it doesn’t cost him a penny;

No one else will buy it for themselves.

Why didn’t I take off his helmet right there?

I would take it off if I weren’t ashamed

I'll give you the Duke too. Damn Count!

He'd rather punch my head in.

And I need a dress. Last time

All the knights sat here in the atlas

Yes to velvet; I was alone in armor

At the ducal table. I made an excuse

I got to the tournament by accident.

What can I say today? O poverty, poverty!

How she humbles our hearts!

When Delorge with his heavy spear

He pierced my helmet and galloped past,

And with my head open I spurred

My Emir, rushed like a whirlwind

And he threw the count twenty steps away,

Like a little page; like all the ladies

They rose from their seats when Clotilde herself

Covering her face, she involuntarily screamed,

And the heralds praised my blow, -

Then no one thought about the reason

And my courage and wondrous strength!

I was furious about the damaged helmet,

What was the fault of heroism? - stinginess.

Yes! It's not hard to get infected here

Under one roof with my father.

What about my poor Emir?

He keeps limping.

You can't drive it out yet.

Albert

Well, there’s nothing to do: I’ll buy Bay.

Inexpensive and they ask for it.

Inexpensive, but we don’t have money.

Albert

What does the idle Solomon say?

He says he can't take it anymore

To lend you money without collateral.

Albert

Mortgage! where can I get a mortgage, devil!

I told you.

Albert

He groans and squeezes.

Albert

Yes, you should have told him that my father

Rich himself, like a Jew, whether it’s early or late

I inherit everything.

I told.

Albert

He squeezes and groans.

Albert

What a grief!

He himself wanted to come.

Albert

Well, thank God.

I won't release him without a ransom.

They knock on the door.

Included Jew.

Your servant is low.

Albert

Ah, buddy!

Damned Jew, venerable Solomon,

Come here, I hear you,

You don't believe in debt.

Ah, dear knight,

I swear to you: I would be glad... I really can’t.

Where can I get money? I'm completely ruined

Helping the knights all the time.

Nobody pays. I wanted to ask you

Can't you give me at least some of it...

Albert

Robber!

Yes, if only I had money,

Would I bother with you? Full,

Don't be stubborn, my dear Solomon;

Give me some chervonets. Give me a hundred

Until they searched you.

If only I had a hundred ducats!

Albert

Aren't you ashamed of your friends?

Don't help out?

I swear...

Albert

Full, full.

Are you asking for a deposit? what nonsense!

What will I give you as a pledge? pig skin?

Whenever I could pawn something, long ago

I would have sold it. Ile of a knight's word

Isn't it enough for you, dog?

Your word,

As long as you are alive means a lot, a lot.

All the chests of the Flemish rich

Like a talisman it will unlock for you.

But if you pass it on

To me, a poor Jew, and yet

You will die (God forbid), then

In my hands it will be like

The key to a box thrown into the sea.

Albert

Will my father outlive me?

Who knows? our days are not numbered by us;

The young man blossomed in the evening, but today he died,

And here are his four old men

They are carried on hunched shoulders to the grave.

Baron is healthy. God willing - ten, twenty years

He will live twenty-five and thirty.

Albert

You're lying, Jew: yes, in thirty years

I'll be fifty, then I'll get money

What will it be useful to me?

Money? - money

Always, at any age, suitable for us;

But the young man is looking for nimble servants in them

And without regret he sends here and there.

The old man sees them as reliable friends

And he protects them like the apple of his eye.

Albert

ABOUT! my father has no servants and no friends

He sees them as masters; and he serves them himself.

And how does it serve? like an Algerian slave,

Like a chained dog. In an unheated kennel

Lives, drinks water, eats dry crusts,

He doesn't sleep all night, he keeps running and barking.

And the gold is calm in the chests

Lies to himself. Shut up! some day

It will serve me, it will forget to lie down.

Yes, at the baron's funeral

Will spill more money, rather than tears.

May God send you an inheritance soon.

Albert

Or maybe...

Albert

So, I thought that the remedy

There is such a thing...

Albert

What remedy?

I have an old friend I know

Jew, poor pharmacist...

Albert

Moneylender

The same as you, or more honest?

No, knight, Tobiy’s bargaining is different -

It makes drops... really, it’s wonderful,

How do they work?

Albert

What do I need in them?

Add three drops to a glass of water...

Neither taste nor color is noticeable in them;

And a man without pain in his stomach,

Without nausea, without pain he dies.

Albert

Your old man is selling poison.

Albert

Well? borrow money instead

You will offer me two hundred bottles of poison,

One chervonets per bottle. Is that so, or what?

You want to laugh at me -

No; I wanted... maybe you... I thought

It's time for the baron to die.

Albert

How! poison your father! and you dared your son...

Ivan! hold it. And you dared me!..

You know, Jewish soul,

Dog, snake! that I want you now

I'll hang it on the gate.

Sorry: I was joking.

Albert

Ivan, rope.

I... I was joking. I brought you money.

Albert

Jew leaves.

This is what it brings me to

Father's stinginess! The Jew dared me

What can I offer! Give me a glass of wine

I'm trembling all over... Ivan, but money

I need. Run after the damned Jew,

Take his ducats. Yes here

Bring me an inkwell. I'm a cheat

I'll give you a receipt. Don't enter it here

Judas of this... Or no, wait,

His ducats will smell of poison,

Like the silver pieces of his ancestor...

I asked for wine.

We have wine -

Not a bit.

Albert

And what he sent me

A gift from Spain Remon?

I finished the last bottle this evening

To the sick blacksmith.

Pushkin wrote the tragedy in the 20s of the 19th century. And it was published in the Sovremennik magazine. The tragedy of the Miserly Knight begins a series of works called “Little Tragedies.” In the work, Pushkin exposes such a negative trait of human character as stinginess.

He transfers the action of the work to France so that no one would guess that we are talking about a person very close to him, about his father. He is the one who is the stingy one. Here he lives in Paris, surrounded by 6 chests of gold. But he doesn’t take a penny from there. He will open it, take a look, and close it again.

The main goal in life is hoarding. But the baron does not understand how mentally ill he is. This “golden serpent” completely subjugated him to his will. The miser believes that thanks to gold he will gain independence and freedom. But he does not notice how this serpent deprives him of not only all human feelings. But he even perceives his own son as an enemy. His mind was completely confused. He challenges him to a duel over money.

The son of a knight is a strong and brave man, he often emerges victorious in knightly tournaments. He's good-looking and I like him female. But he is financially dependent on his father. And he manipulates his son with money, insults his pride and honor. Even the most strong man you can break your will. Communism has not yet arrived, and money still rules the world now, as it did then. Therefore, the son secretly hopes that he will kill his father and take over the money.

The Duke stops the duel. He calls his son a monster. But the baron is killed by the very thought of losing money. I wonder why there were no banks back in those days? I would put the money at interest and live comfortably. And he, apparently, kept them at home, so he was shaking over every coin.

Here is another hero, Solomon, who also had his eye on the wealth of the stingy knight. For the sake of his own enrichment, he does not disdain anything. He acts cunningly and subtly - he invites his son to kill his father. Just poison him. The son drives him away in shame. But he is ready to fight with his own father for insulting his honor.

Passions have run high, and only the death of one of the parties can calm the duelists.

There are only three scenes in the tragedy. The first scene - the son confesses his serious financial situation. The second scene - the stingy knight pours out his soul. The third scene is the intervention of the Duke and the death of the stingy knight. And at the end of the day the words sound: “Terrible age, terrible hearts.” Therefore, the genre of the work can be defined as tragedy.

The precise and apt language of Pushkin’s comparisons and epithets allows us to imagine a stingy knight. Here he is sorting through gold coins in a dark basement amid the flickering light of candles. His monologue is so realistic that you can shudder, imagining how villainy in the blood crawls into this gloomy damp basement. And licks the knight's hands. It becomes scary and disgusting from the picture presented.

The time of the tragedy is medieval France. The end, a new system - capitalism - is on the threshold. Therefore, a stingy knight, on the one hand, is a knight, and on the other hand, a usurer, lends money at interest. That's where he got such a huge amount of money.

Everyone has their own truth. The son sees in his father a chain dog, an Algerian slave. And the father sees in his son a flighty young man who will not earn money by his own hump, but will receive it by inheritance. He calls him a madman, a young spendthrift who participates in riotous revels.

Option 2

The genre versatility of A.S. Pushkin is great. He is a master of words, and his work is represented by novels, fairy tales, poems, poems, and drama. The writer reflects the reality of his time, reveals human vices, and seeks psychological solutions to problems. The cycle of his works “Little Tragedies” is the cry of the human soul. The author in them wants to show his reader: what greed, stupidity, envy, and the desire to get rich look like from the outside.

The first play in Little Tragedies is The Miserly Knight. It took the writer four long years to realize the plot he had planned.

Human greed is a common vice that existed and exists in different times. The work “The Miserly Knight” takes the reader to medieval France. The main character of the play is Baron Philip. The man is rich and stingy. His chests of gold haunt him. He does not spend money, the meaning of his life is only accumulation. Money has consumed his soul, he is completely dependent on it. The Baron also manifests his stinginess in human relationships. His son is an enemy for him, who poses a threat to his wealth. From once upon a time noble man he became a slave to his passion.

The baron's son is a strong young man, a knight. Handsome and brave, girls like him, often participates in tournaments and wins them. But financially Albert depends on his father. The young man cannot afford to buy a horse, armor, or even decent clothes for going out. The bright opposite of the father, the son is kind to people. The difficult financial situation broke the son’s will. He dreams of receiving an inheritance. A man of honor, after being insulted, he challenges Baron Philip to a duel, wanting him dead.

Another character in the play is the Duke. He acts as a judge of the conflict as a representative of the authorities. Condemning the knight's act, the Duke calls him a monster. The very attitude of the writer to the events occurring in the tragedy is embedded in the speeches of this hero.

Compositionally, the play consists of three parts. The opening scene is about Albert and his plight. In it, the author reveals the cause of the conflict. The second scene is a monologue of the father, who appears to the viewer as a “mean knight”. The ending is the denouement of the story, the death of the possessed baron and the author’s conclusion about what happened.

As in any tragedy, the outcome of the plot is classic - the death of the main character. But for Pushkin, who managed to reflect the essence of the conflict in a small work, the main thing is to show a person’s psychological dependence on his vice - stinginess.

The work written by A.S. Pushkin back in the 19th century is relevant to this day. Humanity has not gotten rid of the sin of accumulating material wealth. Now the generational conflict between children and parents has not been resolved. Many examples can be seen in our time. Children renting their parents to nursing homes in order to get apartments is not uncommon now. Said by the Duke in the tragedy: “Terrible age, terrible hearts!” can be attributed to our 21st century.

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Since ancient times, clothing had not only a formal meaning - to hide nudity, but also represented a symbolic element that was used in society. For example, people were once proud to own skins

Stingy knight.

The young knight Albert is about to appear at the tournament and asks his servant Ivan to show him his helmet. The helmet was pierced through in the last duel with the knight Delorge. It is impossible to put it on. The servant consoles Albert with the fact that he repaid Delorge in full, knocking him out of the saddle with a powerful blow, from which Albert’s offender lay dead for a day and has hardly recovered to this day. Albert says that the reason for his courage and strength was his rage over his damaged helmet.

The fault of heroism is stinginess. Albert complains about poverty, about the embarrassment that prevented him from removing the helmet from a defeated enemy, says that he needs a new dress, that he alone is forced to sit at the ducal table in armor, while other knights flaunt in satin and velvet. But there is no money for clothes and weapons, and Albert’s father, the old baron, is a miser. There is no money to buy a new horse, and Albert’s constant creditor, the Jew Solomon, according to Ivan, refuses to continue to believe in debt without a mortgage. But the knight has nothing to pawn. The moneylender does not give in to any persuasion, and even the argument that Albert’s father is old, will soon die and leave his entire huge fortune to his son does not convince the lender.

At this time, Solomon himself appears. Albert tries to beg him for a loan, but Solomon, although gently, nevertheless resolutely refuses to give money even on his word of honor. Albert, upset, does not believe that his father can survive him, but Solomon says that everything happens in life, that “our days are not numbered by us,” and the baron is strong and can live another thirty years. In despair, Albert says that in thirty years he will be fifty, and then he will hardly need the money.

Solomon objects that money is needed at any age, only “a young man looks for nimble servants in it,” “but an old man sees reliable friends in them.” Albert claims that his father himself serves money, like an Algerian slave, “like a chained dog.” He denies himself everything and lives worse than a beggar, and “the gold lies quietly in his chests.” Albert still hopes that someday it will serve him, Albert. Seeing Albert's despair and his readiness to do anything, Solomon hints to him that his father's death can be hastened with the help of poison. At first, Albert does not understand these hints.

But, having understood the matter, he wants to immediately hang Solomon on the castle gates. Solomon, realizing that the knight is not joking, wants to pay off, but Albert drives him away. Having come to his senses, he intends to send a servant for the moneylender to accept the money offered, but changes his mind because it seems to him that they will smell of poison. He demands to serve wine, but it turns out that there is not a drop of wine in the house. Cursing such a life, Albert decides to seek justice for his father from the Duke, who must force the old man to support his son, as befits a knight.

The Baron goes down to his basement, where he stores chests of gold, so that he can pour a handful of coins into the sixth chest, which is not yet full. Looking at his treasures, he remembers the legend of the king who ordered his soldiers to put in a handful of earth, and how as a result a giant hill grew from which the king could survey vast spaces. The baron likens his treasures, collected bit by bit, to this hill, which makes him the ruler of the whole world. He remembers the history of each coin, behind which are the tears and grief of people, poverty and death. It seems to him that if all the tears, blood and sweat shed for this money came out of the bowels of the earth now, there would be a flood.

He pours a handful of money into the chest, and then unlocks all the chests, places lighted candles in front of them and admires the shine of gold, feeling like the ruler of a mighty power. But the thought that after his death the heir will come here and squander his wealth makes the baron furious and indignant. He believes that he has no right to this, that if he himself had accumulated these treasures bit by bit through hard work, then he certainly would not have thrown gold left and right.

In the palace, Albert complains to the Duke about his father, and the Duke promises to help the knight, to persuade the Baron to support his son as it should be. He hopes to awaken fatherly feelings in the baron, because the baron was a friend of his grandfather and played with the duke when he was still a child.

The baron approaches the palace, and the duke asks Albert to hide in the next room while he talks with his father. The Baron appears, the Duke greets him and tries to evoke memories of his youth. He wants the baron to appear at court, but the baron is dissuaded by old age and infirmity, but promises that in case of war he will have the strength to draw his sword for his duke. The Duke asks why he does not see the Baron’s son at court, to which the Baron replies that his son’s gloomy disposition is a hindrance. The Duke asks the Baron to send his son to the palace and promises to teach him to have fun. He demands that the baron assign his son a salary befitting a knight.

Turning gloomy, the baron says that his son is unworthy of the duke’s care and attention, that “he is vicious,” and refuses to fulfill the duke’s request. He says that he is angry with his son for plotting parricide. The Duke threatens to put Albert on trial for this. The Baron reports that his son intends to rob him. Hearing these slander, Albert bursts into the room and accuses his father of lying. The angry baron throws the glove to his son. With the words “Thank you.” This is my father’s first gift.” Albert accepts the baron’s challenge. This incident plunges the Duke into amazement and anger, he takes the Baron’s glove from Albert and drives his father and son away. At that moment, with words about the keys on his lips, the Baron dies, and the Duke complains about “a terrible age, terrible hearts.”

The theme of “The Miserly Knight” is the terrible power of money, that “gold” that a sober bourgeois merchant encouraged the people of the “Iron Age”, the “merchant age” to accumulate back in 1824 in Pushkin’s “Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet”. In the monologue of Baron Philip, this knight-usurer, in front of his chests, Pushkin depicts the deeply inhuman nature of the “immediate emergence of capital” - the initial accumulation of piles of “gold”, compared by the stingy knight with the “proud hill” of a certain ancient king, who ordered his soldiers to “demolish the lands handfuls into a pile": * (Looks at his gold.) * It seems not a lot, * But how many human worries, * Deceptions, tears, prayers and curses * It is a ponderous representative! * There is an old doubloon... here it is. * Today the Widow gave it to me, but not before * With three children, half a day in front of the window * She was on her knees howling. * It rained, and stopped, and started again, * The pretender did not move; * I could have driven Her away, but something whispered to me, * That she had brought me her husband’s debt, * And she would not want to be in prison tomorrow. *And this one? This one was brought to me by Thibault * Where could the sloth, the rogue, get it? * Stole, of course; or maybe * There on the high road, at night, in the grove. * Yes! If all the tears, blood and sweat, * Shed for everything that is stored here, * All of a sudden came out of the bowels of the earth, * There would be a flood again - I would choke * In my faithful basements. Tears, blood and sweat - these are the foundations on which the world of “gold”, the world of the “merchant century” is built. And it is not for nothing that Baron Philip, in whom “gold” suppressed and disfigured his human nature, simple and natural movements of the heart - pity, sympathy for the suffering of other people - compares the feeling that covers him when he unlocks his chest with the sadistic sensations of a perverted killers: * ... my heart is pressing * Some unknown feeling... * Doctors assure us: there are people * who find pleasure in murder. * When I put the key in the lock, the same thing * I feel what they should feel * They, stabbing the victim with a knife: pleasant * And scary together. Creating the image of his “miserly knight”, giving a vivid picture of his experiences, Pushkin also shows the main features, features of money - capital, everything that he brings to people with him, brings into human relations. Money, gold for Baron Philip is, in the words of Belinsky, an object of super-possession, a source of supreme power and might: * What is not under my control? like a certain Demon * From now on I can rule the world; * As soon as I want, palaces will be erected; * Into my magnificent gardens * Nymphs will come running in a playful crowd; * And the muses will bring me their tribute, * And the free genius will be enslaved to me, * And virtue and sleepless labor * They will humbly await my reward. Here the peculiar figure of Pushkin’s knight-usurer acquires gigantic dimensions and outlines, grows into an ominous, demonic prototype of the coming capitalism with its boundless greed and insatiable lusts, with its crazy dreams of world domination. A striking example of thwarting such superpower of money is the same “miserly knight”. Completely alone, secluded from everything and everyone in his basement with gold, Baron Philip looks at his own son - the only person vitally close to him on earth, as his worst enemy, a potential murderer (the son really cannot wait for his death) and the thief: he will squander, throw to the wind after his death all the wealth he selflessly accumulated. This culminates in the scene where the father challenges his son to a duel and the joyful readiness with which the latter “hurriedly picks up” the glove thrown to him. Marx noted, among other things, the special aesthetic properties of the so-called “noble metals” - silver and gold: “They are, to a certain extent, native light, extracted from underworld, since silver reflects all light rays in their original mixture, and gold reflects the color of the highest voltage, red. The sense of color is the most popular form of aesthetic feeling in general.”1 Baron Philip of Pushkin - we know - is a kind of poet of the passion with which he is seized. Gold gives him not only intellectual (the thought of his omnipotence, omnipotence: “Everything is obedient to me, but I obey nothing”), but also purely sensual pleasure, and precisely with its “feast” for the eyes - color, brilliance, sparkle: * I want for myself Today we will arrange a feast: * I will light a candle in front of each chest, * And I will open them all, and I myself will begin * Among them, I will look at the shining piles. * (Lights a candle and unlocks the chests one by one.) * I reign!.. * What a magical shine! Pushkin very expressively shows in the image of the “miserly knight” another consequence that naturally follows from the “damned thirst for gold” characteristic of capitalist accumulation. Money, as a means, for a person obsessed with a damned thirst for gold, turns into an end in itself, the passion for enrichment becomes stinginess. Money, as “an individual of universal wealth,” gives its owner “universal domination over society, over the entire world of pleasures and labor. This is the same as if, for example, the discovery of a stone gave me, completely independently of my individuality, mastery of all sciences. Possession of money puts me in relation to wealth (social) in exactly the same relation as the possession of the philosopher's stone would place me in relation to the sciences.

"The Stingy Knight" analysis of the work - theme, idea, genre, plot, composition, characters, issues and other issues are discussed in this article.

History of creation

“The Miserly Knight” was conceived in 1826, and completed in the Boldin autumn of 1830. Published in 1836 in the magazine “Sovremennik”. Pushkin gave the play the subtitle “From Chenston’s tragicomedy.” But the writer is from the 18th century. Shenston (in the tradition of the 19th century his name was written Chenston) there was no such play. Perhaps Pushkin referred to a foreign author so that his contemporaries would not suspect that the poet was describing his relationship with his father, known for his stinginess.

Theme and plot

Pushkin's play “The Miserly Knight” is the first work in a cycle of dramatic sketches, short plays, which were later called “Little Tragedies.” Pushkin intended in each play to reveal some side of the human soul, an all-consuming passion (the stinginess in “The Stingy Knight”). Spiritual qualities and psychology are shown in sharp and unusual plots.

Heroes and images

The Baron is rich, but stingy. He has six chests full of gold, from which he does not take a penny. Money is not servants or friends for him, as for the moneylender Solomon, but masters. The Baron does not want to admit to himself that money has enslaved him. He believes that thanks to the money sleeping peacefully in his chests, everything is within his control: love, inspiration, genius, virtue, work, even villainy. The Baron is ready to kill anyone who encroaches on his wealth, even his own son, whom he challenges to a duel. The duke prevents the duel, but the baron is killed by the very possibility of losing money. The Baron's passion consumes him.

Solomon has a different attitude towards money: it is a way to achieve a goal, to survive. But, like the baron, he does not disdain anything for the sake of enrichment, suggesting that Albert poison his own father.

Albert is a worthy young knight, strong and brave, winning tournaments and enjoying the favor of the ladies. He is completely dependent on his father. The young man has nothing to buy a helmet and armor, a dress for a feast and a horse for a tournament, only out of despair he decides to complain to the duke.

Albert has excellent spiritual qualities, he is kind, he gives the last bottle of wine to the sick blacksmith. But he is broken by circumstances and dreams of the time when the gold will be inherited by him. When the moneylender Solomon offers to set Albert up with a pharmacist who sells poison to poison his father, the knight expels him in disgrace. And soon Albert already accepts the baron’s challenge to a duel; he is ready to fight to the death with his own father, who insulted his honor. The Duke calls Albert a monster for this act.

The Duke in the tragedy is a representative of the authorities who voluntarily took on this burden. The Duke calls his age and the hearts of people terrible. Through the lips of the Duke, Pushkin also speaks about his time.

Issues

In every little tragedy, Pushkin gazes intently at some vice. In The Miserly Knight, this destructive passion is avarice: the change in personality of a once worthy member of society under the influence of vice; the hero's submission to vice; vice as a cause of loss of dignity.

Conflict

The main conflict is external: between a stingy knight and his son, who claims his share. The Baron believes that wealth must be suffered so as not to be squandered. The Baron's goal is to preserve and increase, Albert's goal is to use and enjoy. The conflict is caused by a clash of these interests. It is aggravated by the participation of the Duke, to whom the Baron is forced to slander his son. The strength of the conflict is such that only the death of one of the parties can resolve it. Passion destroys the stingy knight; the reader can only guess about the fate of his wealth.

Composition

There are three scenes in the tragedy. From the first, the reader learns about Albert’s difficult financial situation, associated with his father’s stinginess. The second scene is a monologue of a stingy knight, from which it is clear that passion has completely taken possession of him. In the third scene, the just duke intervenes in the conflict and unwittingly becomes the cause of the death of the hero obsessed with passion. The climax (the death of the baron) is adjacent to the denouement - the Duke’s conclusion: “A terrible age, terrible hearts!”

Genre

“The Miserly Knight” is a tragedy, that is, a dramatic work in which main character dies. Pushkin achieved the small size of his tragedies by excluding everything unimportant. Pushkin's goal is to show the psychology of a person obsessed with the passion of stinginess. All “Little Tragedies” complement each other, creating a three-dimensional portrait of humanity in all its diversity of vices.

Style and artistic originality

All “Little Tragedies” are intended not so much for reading as for staging: how theatrical the stingy knight looks in a dark basement among gold flickering in the light of a candle! The dialogues of the tragedies are dynamic, and the monologue of the miserly knight is a poetic masterpiece. The reader can see how a bloody villain crawls into the basement and licks the hand of a stingy knight. The images of The Miserly Knight are impossible to forget.

In “small tragedies” Pushkin confronts the mutually exclusive and at the same time inextricably linked points of view and truths of his heroes in a kind of polyphonic counterpoint. This combination of opposite principles of life is manifested not only in the figurative and semantic structure of the tragedies, but also in their poetics. This is clearly manifested in the title of the first tragedy - “The Miserly Knight”.

The action takes place in France, in the late Middle Ages. In the person of Baron Philip, Pushkin captured a unique type of knight-usurer, generated by the era of transition from feudal relations to bourgeois monetary relations. This is a special social “species”, a kind of social centaur, bizarrely combining the features of opposite eras and ways of life. Ideas about knightly honor and his social privilege are still alive in him. At the same time, he is the bearer of other aspirations and ideals, generated by the growing power of money, on which a person’s position in society depends, to a greater extent than on origin and titles. Money undermines, blurs the boundaries of class and caste groups, and destroys the barriers between them. In this regard, the importance of the personal principle in a person increases, his freedom, but at the same time responsibility - for himself and others.

Baron Philip is a large, complex character, a man of enormous will. His main goal is the accumulation of gold as the main value in the emerging new way of life. At first, this accumulation is not an end in itself for him, but only a means of gaining complete independence and freedom. And the Baron seems to achieve his goal, as evidenced by his monologue in the “basements of the faithful”: “What is not under my control? As a certain demon, I can now rule the world...”, etc. (V, 342-343). However, this independence, power and strength are bought at too high a price - the tears, sweat and blood of the victims of the baron's passion. But the matter is not limited to turning other people into a means of achieving his goal. The Baron ultimately turns himself into only a means of achieving this goal, for which he pays with the loss of his human feelings and qualities, even such natural ones as his father’s, perceiving his own son as his mortal enemy. So money, from a means of gaining independence and freedom, unnoticed by the hero, turns into an end in itself, of which the Baron becomes an appendage. It is not for nothing that his son Albert speaks about money: “Oh, my father sees them not as servants or friends, but as masters, and he himself serves them... like an Algerian slave, - Like a chained dog” (V, 338). Pushkin, as it were, rethinks anew, but realistically, the problem posed in “Prisoner of the Caucasus”: the inevitability of finding slavery on the paths of individualistic escape from society instead of the desired freedom. Egoistic monopassion leads the Baron not only to his alienation, but also to self-alienation, that is, to alienation from his human essence, from humanity as its basis.

However, Baron Philip has his own truth, which explains and to some extent justifies his position in life. Thinking about his son - the heir to all his wealth, which he will get without any effort or worries, he sees in this a violation of justice, the destruction of the foundations of the world order he affirms, in which everything must be achieved and suffered by the person himself, and not passed on as an undeserved gift from God (including the royal throne - here there is an interesting overlap with the problems of “Boris Godunov”, but on a different basis in life). Enjoying the contemplation of his treasures, the Baron exclaims: “I reign!.. What a magical shine! Obedient to me, my power is strong; In her is happiness, in her is my honor and glory!” But after this he is suddenly overcome by confusion and horror: “I reign... but who, after me, will take power over her? My heir! Madman, young spendthrift. The interlocutor of debauched debauchees!” The Baron is horrified not by the inevitability of death, parting with life and treasures, but by the violation of the highest justice, which gave his life meaning: “He will waste... And by what right? Did I get all this for nothing... Who knows how many bitter abstinences, curbed passions, heavy thoughts, Daytime worries, sleepless nights All this cost me? that he acquired with blood" (V, 345-346).

There is a logic here, a coherent philosophy of a strong and tragic personality, with its own consistent, although it did not stand the test of humanity, truth. Who is to blame for this? On the one hand, historical circumstances, the era of advancing commercialism, in which the unrestrained growth of material wealth leads to spiritual impoverishment and turns a person from an end in itself into merely a means of achieving other goals. But Pushkin does not relieve responsibility from the hero himself, who chose the path of achieving freedom and independence in individualistic isolation from people.

The image of Albert is also connected with the problem of choosing a life position. It is simplistic to see his common interpretation as a shredded version of his father's personality, in which, over time, the traits of chivalry will be lost and the qualities of a moneylender-hoarder will triumph. In principle, such a metamorphosis is possible. But it is not fatally inevitable, because it also depends on Albert himself whether he will retain his inherent openness to people, sociability, kindness, the ability to think not only about himself, but also about others (the episode with the sick blacksmith is indicative here), or will he lose these qualities, like his father. In this regard, the Duke’s final remark is significant: “Terrible age, terrible hearts.” In it, guilt and responsibility seem to be evenly distributed - between the century and the “heart” of a person, his feeling, mind and will. At the moment of development of the action, Baron Philippe and Albert act, despite their blood relationship, as bearers of two opposing, but in some ways mutually correcting truths. Both have elements of both absoluteness and relativity, tested and developed in each era by each person in his own way.

In “The Miserly Knight,” as in all other “small tragedies,” Pushkin’s realistic mastery reaches its peak - in the depth of penetration into the socio-historical and moral-psychological essence of the characters depicted, in the ability to consider in the temporal and particular - the enduring and universal. In them, such a feature of the poetics of Pushkin’s works as their “dizzying brevity” (A. Akhmatova), which contains the “abyss of space” (N. Gogol), reaches its full development. From tragedy to tragedy, the scale and meaningful capacity of the depicted images-characters increases, the depth, including moral and philosophical, of the depicted conflicts and problems of human existence - in its special national modifications and deep universal “invariants”.