In the literature of the 18th century, a work appeared that gave the reader a new look at man. This is the story “Poor Liza” by N.M. Karamzin. Attention here is paid not to social position and status in society, but to the inner world of feelings, the emotional side of human nature. The author himself called his creation a “sentimental story.”

“This Tale” tells the reader the sad love story of the young peasant woman Lisa and the rich nobleman Erast. They met by the road where Lisa was selling flowers. Erast really liked this fair-haired, blue-eyed girl, besides, she was pure in soul and very modest. Lisa “worked day and night,” selling her canvases, collected berries, and flowers in order to somehow feed herself and her mother. They lived very poorly, barely making ends meet. But Lisa is a very cheerful girl, she loves life and enjoys every new day.

Erast belongs to the noble class, he is handsome and rich. He sincerely falls in love with the girl and is even ready to leave the world for her sake. But the weakness of his character and dependence on money gives their love story a tragic ending.

“Beautiful Liza” and “dear Erast,” as the author calls them, truly love each other. The author openly talks about their sensual relationship. Reading these lines, you involuntarily find yourself enveloped in the tenderness of hugs and touches, affectionate words and “filled gazes.” Social status is not a barrier to love. But still, material well-being decides everything in one’s favor. Erast decides to marry a rich widow. His financial situation requires serious support; he cannot do without money. And Liza cannot live without Erast. Not having survived the bitter betrayal, Lisa throws herself into the pond: “I can’t live... I can’t!”

N.M. Karamzin tells the reader that Erast, having learned about the death of his beloved, “was unhappy until the end of his life. Having learned about Lizina’s fate, he could not console himself and considered himself a murderer.” The author sympathizes with him, because Erast will never again know such pure and sincere feelings that Lisa had for him. The author also sympathizes with Lisa. Her hopes were shattered and her trust was shattered into small pieces. He feels sorry for his favorite heroes, he lived them with them " sad story this." But their love was so beautiful...

Karamzin became the head of a new direction in Russian literature - sentimentalism. The main theme of sentimental literature is touching feelings, emotional experiences of a person, “the life of the heart.” Karamzin was one of the first to write about the joys and sufferings of modern, ordinary people.

Karamzin's story "Poor Liza" brought enormous success, which revolutionized the public consciousness. For the first time in the history of Russian prose, Karamzin turned to a heroine endowed with everyday traits. His words “even peasant women know how to love” became popular. In his story Karamzin shows interest in to the common man, to the world of his feelings and experiences.

Karamzin grieves, cries over the fate of poor Liza, is indignant, talking about the act of the weak and flighty Erast, who destroyed Liza.

Who is Lisa, because of whom sensitive readers and especially female readers shed streams of tears?

Lisa is a poor peasant girl who is left an orphan early on. She lives in one of the villages near Moscow with her mother - a “sensitive, poor old woman”, from whom Lisa inherits her main talent - the ability to love devotedly. To support herself and her mother, Lisa, “not sparing her tender youth,” takes on any job. In the spring she goes to the city to sell flowers.

There, in Moscow, Lisa meets the young nobleman Erast “with a fair mind and a kind heart, kind by nature, but weak and flighty.” He spent his life in secular pleasures, but he soon became bored with them. Lisa's beauty made a strong impression on him, and "it seemed to him that he had found in Lisa what his heart had been looking for for a long time." He falls in love with a spontaneous, indifferent girl “with the love of a brother,” and admires his “shepherdess.”

However, soon the platonic love between young people turns into sensual, and it is then that he realizes that his love has begun to fade away. Lisa was no longer in his eyes the “immaculate angel” who delighted his soul.

What about Lisa? And Lisa “only lived and breathed for them.” But gradually she begins to notice the change taking place in Erast. He explains his coolness by concern: he needs to go to war. However, in the army he does not so much fight the enemy as lose at cards. To improve his affairs, he has to marry a rich elderly widow.

Sensitivity - this is how the main advantage of Karamzin’s stories was defined. Sensitivity is a central character trait of Lisa. She trusts the movements of her heart, lives with “tender passions.” Ultimately, it is ardor and bitterness that lead Lisa to death.

The motif of seducing a pure and immaculate girl, which is found in many of Karamzin’s works, takes on a social meaning in “Poor Liza.” Karamzin was one of the first to introduce the contrast between city and countryside into Russian literature. In the story "Poor Liza" a village man - a man of nature - finds himself defenseless, falling into urban space where laws other than natural laws apply. It’s not for nothing that Lisa’s mother tells her that she always worries about her, worries, and prays to the Lord God to keep her from all troubles. By doing this, she seemed to predict everything that happened later.

It is no coincidence that the first step on the path to disaster is the insincerity of Liza, who for the first time, “stepping back from herself,” hides, on Erast’s advice, their love from her mother. But before, she always shared her secrets with her mother. Later, it is in relation to her dearly beloved mother that Lisa will repeat Erast’s worst act. He will try to “pay off” Lisa, driving her away, giving her a hundred rubles. But Liza will do the same, sending her mother that money along with the news of her death. Naturally, Lisa’s mother did not need this money, nor did she herself. Liza’s mother, having heard about the terrible death of her daughter, could not bear it, “her blood cooled with horror - her eyes closed forever.”

The tragic outcome of the love between a peasant woman and an officer confirms the rightness of her mother, who warned Liza at the very beginning of the story: “You still don’t know how evil people They might offend the poor girl."

But Erast alone cannot be blamed for this tragedy. Yes, he betrayed Lisa, betrayed him because of his carelessness and love of cards. Yes, he turned out to be a scoundrel and a coward. But what happened was also Lisa’s fault. She herself threw herself into Erast’s arms, love eclipsed everything, for his sake she was ready to do anything. “I will soon forget my soul rather than my dear friend!” - this is what she said to herself.

Erast's betrayal greatly shocked Lisa. She understood that, according to the moral concepts of that time, she had no other choice but to commit suicide. She throws herself into the pond.

Erast was unhappy until the end of his life. He realized that Lisa’s death was his fault; he considered himself a murderer. He ruined not only Lisa and her mother, but also his own life. Until the very last days In his life, he came to the place of Lisa’s death.

Such a tragedy happened to a simple peasant girl. And only the grave by the pond, to which unhappy girls in love came to cry and grieve, and the empty hut, reminded of Lisa’s deplorable fate

Such a trend in Russian literature as sentimentalism came from France. It is mainly aimed at describing the problems of human souls.
In his story “Poor Liza” Karamzin talks about the love between representatives different classes. Lisa is a peasant woman, Erast is a nobleman. The girl lives with her mother near Moscow, earns money selling flowers, where she met a representative of the nobility. Erast is a naturally kind man with a fair amount of intelligence.

At the same time, he is quite frivolous,

Careless and weak-willed. This is also expressed in his love for Lisa, which turned out to be not as strong as the reader would have liked.
Having lost greatly at cards, Erast wants to improve the current situation by marrying a wealthy widow, betraying Lisa with this act. This greatly shocked the weak-spirited peasant woman, which leads to her death - the girl throws herself into the pond.
The predetermining factor in the ending of the story is class inequality. Marriage between a peasant woman and a nobleman is impossible. Lisa knew how to love, but this did not mean that such love would make her happy.

The story was to show that personal qualities people are of much greater importance than wealth, and nobility cannot replace deep feelings.
Being a great humanist, Karamzin did not recognize serfdom. A person with a subtle soul could not accept the possibility of some people to control the destinies of others. Despite the fact that the tragically deceased main character was not a serf, but only a free peasant, class lines separated them.

And even Lisa’s strong, sincere love for Erast could not erase it.
It cannot be said that in the story the author inclines the reader to the side of one of the heroes. Karamzin only forces the reader to make a choice between pure feelings and material values. The image of the main character tells us about this. Erast is interesting, but with a contradictory character.

But the poetic nature could not resist the desire to live in abundance, in return high feelings. Natural kindness gives way to selfishness, which is accompanied by cruelty and the ability to deceive, which led to the death of Lisa. When Erast learns that the girl has died, he finds no consolation and calls himself a murderer.

Thus, Karamzin once again emphasizes that regardless of the class to which a person belongs, he should not be exempt from responsibility for those actions that lie on his conscience.

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32. The story begins with a description of the cemetery where the girl Lisa is buried. Based on this picture, the author tells the sad story of a young peasant woman who paid with her life for her love. One day, while selling lilies of the valley collected in the forest on the street, Lisa met the young nobleman Erast. Her beauty, naturalness and simplicity captivated the devastated social life aristocrat. Each new meeting strengthened the love of the young [...]
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37. Karamzin’s story “Poor Liza” is one of the first sentimental works of Russian literature. The author placed special emphasis on the feelings and experiences of the characters. The work was largely innovative in terms of themes, interpretation of characters and stylistic means. One of these features was the introduction of a narrator-narrator as a full-fledged hero of the story. He not only describes events for us, [...]
38. For Karamzin, the village becomes a center of natural moral purity, and the city - a source of debauchery, a source of temptations that can destroy this purity. The writer's heroes, in full accordance with the precepts of sentimentalism, suffer almost all the time, constantly expressing their feelings with abundantly shed tears. As he himself admitted
39. Karamzin’s best story is rightly recognized as “Poor Liza” (1792), which is based on the educational idea of ​​​​extra-class value human personality. The problems of the story are of a social and moral nature: the peasant woman Liza is opposed to the nobleman Erast. The characters are revealed in the heroes' attitude to love. Lisa’s feelings are distinguished by their depth, constancy, and selflessness: she understands perfectly well that she is not destined to be Erast’s wife. Twice during [...]
40. A huge success among Russian readers early XIX century, Karamzin’s story “Poor Liza” was used, which had a significant influence on the formation and development of new Russian literature. The plot of this story is very simple: it boils down to a sad love story between the poor peasant girl Lisa and the rich young nobleman Erast. The main interest of the story lies in Lisa’s spiritual life, in the history of the heyday and [...]

We are preparing for the Unified State Exam. Essay-reasoning: N.M. Karamzin “Poor Liza”

Karamzin's story is rightfully considered the pinnacle of Russian prose of sentimentalism. The author puts human feelings in the foreground; he is interested in the spiritual qualities of the heroes, regardless of social status in society.

In this essay, I would like to pay attention internal state and the experiences of the main character of the story - Lisa. She is an ordinary peasant girl, with a pure soul and a kind heart. But her fate is quite tragic, despite her love of life.

The first blow for her is the death of her father, after which Lisa appears to us as strong, despite her early years, and a hardworking girl. Not every person can have this strong character and don’t give yourself any slack in such situations. If we consider the human spirit of that time and the present as a whole, in my opinion, now, when life values ​​have shifted, the soul has become more vulnerable to minor emotional influences from society, perhaps we show this weakness in a closed form, not as the generation before us. Thus, we see the spiritual difference in different time periods.

The second point of emotional shift is the meeting with Erast. That trembling and at the same time fear of the first meeting with the hero at Lisa’s house, all this revives the heroine and gives her a breath of fresh air and a surge of new, not yet discovered by her emotions. She is overcome by a feeling of love and happiness. Erast, being a person from high society, has other spiritual values ​​that do not coincide with the peasant way of life. He has a detrimental effect on the heroine’s pure heart, hurting him with empty promises and discussions about a future life together. At first he circles Lisa in a loving and sweet captivity of feelings, and after playing with her, taking away the immaculate initial images that were the main interest for Erast, he first condemns the heroine to languid expectations of a meeting, then breaks not only her heart, but also undermines the emotional balance of her soul. If we again talk about the topic of love now and talk about the hero’s actions, we can see that in our time this happens more often, and this is not determined only by social status, it happens regardless of this. At that time, such a love story ended much more pitifully and left a big imprint on the reputation among society. In ours, such strict morals no longer exist, since a different branch of the generation occurred, and such a situation would be more loyal to society; in general, we can briefly state that this is the norm. But it would be much better if it were not considered such.

In conclusion of the reflection on the topic of the sensory and spiritual world of the main character, I want to say that Lisa is shown to us as a strong, but at the same time vulnerable girl. It was interesting for me to speculate and draw parallels different eras namely in the change in a person’s spiritual qualities. Show their differences and analyze this situation that Lisa had to endure.

The story of N.M. Karamzin's "Poor Liza" was written in 1792. This work in many ways became a milestone in Russian literature. It was an example of Russian sentimentalist prose.
It is known that the founder and developer of sentimentalism was N.M. Karamzin. This direction was based on attention to human feelings, to the world of the human soul, regardless of class and rank.
Sentimentalist literature did a lot for the development of the Russian literary language. She brought a whole layer to it new vocabulary, gave a model for a different language - elegant, sophisticated, “salon”.
This work dedicated to revealing the soul, the world of feelings of a simple girl from the people. The name itself - “Poor Lisa” - shows that the main character It is the peasant woman Liza who appears, and the author is primarily interested in her spiritual tragedy.
By bringing his Liza to the fore, Karamzin asserted a humanistic idea. He was convinced that all people are equal, that all of them, regardless of class and wealth, experience the same feelings, want to love, suffer from betrayal, cry and rejoice at the same things. And the feelings of a peasant woman are equivalent in importance to the feelings of an aristocrat, and, perhaps, more noble, pure, sublime.
The work is based on the love story of a poor girl Lisa for to a young nobleman Erast. Lisa is described in ideal tones. This is a beautiful, hardworking girl who was forced to go to work because her father died. Lisa was left with her sick mother in her arms. Her loving daughter could not allow her to work. That's why Lisa goes to town to sell flowers. It was there that she met Erast.
This young rake led a riotous lifestyle. He was fed up with secular beauties; affairs with them were nothing new for the hero. In Lisa, Erast saw freshness, charming purity and naivety - something that women did not have high society. Erast quickly became interested in the girl and met her mother.
Lisa’s mother seemed to sense something was wrong and warned her daughter about the dangers lurking in the city. But it was too late. Lisa fell in love with Erast with all the strength of her innocent soul. Class prejudices and fears receded before her love. She gave all of herself to Erast: “When,” Lisa said to Erast, “when you tell me: “I love you, my friend!”, when you press me to your heart and look at me with your touching eyes, ah! Then it happens to me so good, so good that I forget myself, I forget everything except Erast.”
But what is this “noble lucky one”? What were his feelings towards Lisa? The author writes that Erast reveled in their relationship while it was spiritual, almost friendly. Seeing immeasurable love in the girl’s eyes, the hero rose in his eyes and stroked his pride. “I will live with Liza, like brother and sister, I will not use her love for evil and I will always be happy!” - thought Erast.
But as soon as the relationship between him and Lisa became carnal, the young man lost interest in the girl. The novelty disappeared, interest disappeared, and routine, boredom, ordinariness appeared. Erast began to move away from his beloved and finally announced to her that he was going to war. Lisa’s grief and fears knew no bounds, but what could she do? Erast promised to remember his sweetheart.
Hard times have come for Lisa. Everything around her seemed dull, sad, and painful. But in an instant the girl’s heart was completely broken. She found out that her Erast was marrying someone else. This womanizer wasted money in the army and has now found himself a rich widow. He forgot to think about Lisa.
Of course, the girl could not bear such a blow. What could she do? Only take her own life, because her heart was broken and her honor was violated. Lisa throws herself off the water.
The ending of the story becomes even sadder because Lisa’s mother also dies after learning about her daughter’s death. And Erast’s fate was unfortunate. He could not forgive himself for the death of Lisa until the end of his life.
Interestingly, there is one more thing in the story actor- this is the author. He actively participates in the narrative, sympathizes with Lisa with all his heart, like an adult comrade, he scolds Erast.
It is the image of the author that brings great lyricism and provides examples of “salon” language: “He kissed her, kissed her with such fervor that the whole universe seemed to her to be burning in fire!”, “They hugged - but chaste, bashful Cynthia did not hide from them behind a cloud : their embrace was pure and immaculate,” “She threw herself into his arms - and at this hour purity had to perish!”
The story “Poor Liza” was the first example of sentimentalist prose in Russia. It, in addition to its artistic merits (language, style, attempt to convey the psychological state of the characters), proclaims a valuable idea. According to Karamzin, all people are equal and equally worthy of respect. Moreover, commoners can be more noble than nobles.
It was Karamzin who showed that the main character of a work of literature can be a simple person, the world of his feelings, the life of his heart.