Home The journalistic beginning is palpable in V. Astafiev’s story “ Sad detective “, but the main thing that defines this work is “cruel” realism. The prose of “cruel” realism is merciless in depicting horrors Everyday life

. The story concentrates criminal episodes from the life of the provincial town of Veysk, and in such quantity that it seems implausible that so much negativity, so much dirt, and blood could be concentrated in such a small geographical space. Here are collected monstrous manifestations of the collapse and degradation of society. But there is both an artistic and real justification for this.

V. Astafiev makes us horrified by reality, he awakens ears accustomed to information not only with the meaning of crimes, but also with their number. The pumped-up facts, destinies, and faces mercilessly plunge one into a reality that is terrible in its bitterness and lack of motive for crimes. This brutal realism combines fictional and real episodes into a single canvas, imbued with angry pathos.

V. Astafiev sharply raises the question of the people. That idealized image of a single people - a lover of truth, a passion-bearer, which was created in previous decades (1960-80s) in “village prose”, does not suit the writer. He shows in the Russian character not only what makes one touch. Where then does the dump truck hijacker, who killed several people in a drunken stupor, come from, or Venka Fomin, who threatens to burn the village women in the calf barn if they don’t give him a hangover? Or that pet guy who was humiliated in front of women by more arrogant suitors, and in revenge he decided to kill the first person he met. And for a long time, he brutally killed a beautiful student with a stone in the sixth month of pregnancy, and then at the trial he shouted: “Is it my fault that such a good woman was caught?..”

The writer discovers in man a “terrible, self-devouring beast.” He speaks the merciless truth about his contemporaries, adding new features to their portrait.

The children buried their father. “At home, as usual, the children and relatives cried for the deceased, drank heavily - out of pity, at the cemetery they added - damp, cold, bitter. Five empty bottles were later found in the grave. And two complete ones, with a muttering voice, are now a new, cheerful fashion among highly paid hard workers: with force, richly not only spend your free time, but also bury it - burn money over the grave, preferably a pack, throw after the departing bottle of wine - maybe the poor thing will want a hangover in the next world. The grieving children threw bottles into the hole, but they forgot to lower their parents into the land.”

Children forget their parents, parents leave their tiny child in an automatic storage room. Others lock the baby at home for a week, leading him to catch and eat cockroaches. The episodes are interconnected by a logical connection. Although V. As-tafiev does not make any direct comparisons, it seems that he simply strings one after another onto the core of the hero’s memory, but in the context of the story, between different episodes there is a force field of a certain idea: parents - children - parents; criminal - the reaction of others; people - “intelligentsia”. And all together adds new touches to the image of the Russian people.

V. Astafiev does not spare black tones in national self-criticism. He turns inside out those qualities that were elevated to the rank of virtues of the Russian character. He is not admired by patience and humility - in them the writer sees the causes of many troubles and crimes, the sources of philistine indifference and indifference. V. Astafiev does not admire the eternal compassion for the criminal, noticed in the Russian people by F. Dostoevsky. Material from the site

V. Astafiev, in his desire to understand the Russian character, is very close to Gorky’s “Untimely Thoughts,” who wrote: “We, Rus', are anarchists by nature, we are a cruel beast, dark and evil slave blood still flows in our veins... There are no words, which it would be impossible to scold a Russian person - you cry with blood, but you scold..." V. Astafiev also speaks with pain and suffering about the beast in man. He brings terrible episodes into the story not in order to humiliate the Russian people, to intimidate, but to make everyone think about the reasons for the brutality of people.

“The Sad Detective” is an artistic and journalistic story, marked by sharp analysis and merciless assessments. “Detective” by V. Astafiev is devoid of the happy ending element inherent in this genre, when a lone hero can tame the evil that has broken through and return the world to the norm of its existence. In the story, it is evil and crime that become almost the norm in everyday life, and Soshnin’s efforts cannot shake it. Therefore, the story is far from an ordinary detective story, although it includes crime stories. The title can be interpreted both as a sad crime story and as a sad hero whose profession is a detective.

Didn't find what you were looking for? Use the search

NOVEL BY V. P. ASTAFIEV "THE SAD DETECTIVE"

V.P. Astafiev is a writer whose works reflect the life of people of the 20th century. Astafiev is a person who knows and is close to all the problems of our sometimes difficult life.

Viktor Petrovich went through the war as a private and knows all the hardships of post-war life. I think that with his wisdom and experience he is one of those people whose advice and orders you should not only listen to, but try to follow. But Astafiev does not act as a prophet, he simply writes about what is close to him and what worries him. Although the works of Viktor Petrovich belong to modern Russian literature, the problems that are often raised in them are more than one thousand years old.

Eternal questions of good and evil, punishment and justice have long forced people to look for answers to them. But this turned out to be a very difficult matter, because the answers lie in the person himself, and good and evil, honesty and dishonor are intertwined in us. Having a soul, we are often indifferent. Everyone has a heart, but we are often called heartless. Astafiev’s novel “The Sad Detective” raises the problems of crime, punishment and the triumph of justice. The theme of the novel is the current intelligentsia and the current people. The work tells about the life of two small towns: Veisk and Khailovsk, about the people living in them, about modern morals. When people talk about small towns, the image of a quiet, peaceful place appears in the mind, where life, filled with joys, flows slowly, without any special incidents. A feeling of peace appears in the soul. But those who think so are mistaken. In fact, life in Veisk and Khailovsk flows in a stormy stream. Young people, drunk to the point where a person turns into an animal, rape a woman old enough to be their mother, and the parents leave the child locked in the apartment for a week. All these pictures described by Astafiev terrify the reader. It becomes scary and creepy at the thought that the concepts of honesty, decency and love are disappearing. The description of these cases in the form of summaries is, in my opinion, an important artistic feature.

Hearing every day about various incidents, we sometimes don’t pay attention, but collected in the novel, they force us to take off our rose-colored glasses and understand: if it didn’t happen to you, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t concern you. The novel makes you think about your actions, look back and see what you have done over the years. After reading, you ask yourself the question: “What good and good did I do? Did I notice when the person next to me felt bad?” You begin to think that indifference is as evil as cruelty. I think that finding answers to these questions is the purpose of the work.

In the novel "The Sad Detective" Astafiev created a whole system of images. The author introduces the reader to each hero of the work, talking about his life. The main character is police operative Leonid Soshnin. He is a forty-year-old man who was injured several times in the line of duty and should retire. Having retired, he begins to write, trying to figure out where there is so much anger and cruelty in a person. Where does he keep it? Why, along with this cruelty, does the Russian people have pity for the prisoners and indifference to themselves, to their neighbor - a disabled person of war and labor? Astafiev contrasts the main character, an honest and brave operative worker, with policeman Fyodor Lebed, who quietly serves, moving from one position to another. On especially dangerous trips, he tries not to risk his life and gives the right to neutralize armed criminals to his partners, and it is not very important that his partner does not have a service weapon, because he is a recent graduate of a police school, and Fedor has a service weapon. In a bright way in the novel is Aunt Granya - a woman who, not having her own children, gave all her love to the children who played near her house at the railway station, and then to the children in the Children's Home. Often the heroes of the work, who should cause disgust, cause pity. Urn, who has transformed from a self-employed woman into a drunkard without a home or family, evokes sympathy. She screams songs and pesters passers-by, but she becomes ashamed not for her, but for the society that has turned its back on the Urn. Soshnin says that they tried to help her, but nothing worked, and now they simply don’t pay attention to her. The city of Veisk has its own Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky. Astafiev does not even change the names of these people and characterizes them with a quote from Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” thereby refuting the well-known saying that nothing lasts forever under the sun. Everything flows, everything changes, but such people remain, exchanging clothes of the 19th century for a fashionable suit and shirt with gold cufflinks of the 20th century. The city of Veisk also has its own literary luminary, who, sitting in his office, “enveloped in cigarette smoke, twitched, squirmed in his chair and littered with ashes.” This is Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrokvasova. It is this man, whose description brings a smile, that moves local literature forward and further. This woman decides what works to print. But not everything is so bad, because if there is evil, then there is also good. Leonid Soshnin makes peace with his wife, and she returns to him again along with her daughter. It’s a little sad that the death of Soshnin’s neighbor, Tutyshikha’s grandmother, forces them to make peace. It is grief that brings Leonid and Lera closer together. The blank sheet of paper in front of Soshnin, who usually writes at night, is a symbol of the beginning of a new stage in the life of the protagonist’s family. And I want to believe that their future life will be happy and joyful, and they will cope with grief, because they will be together.

The novel "The Sad Detective" is an exciting work. Although it is difficult to read because it is too scary pictures describes Astafiev. But such works need to be read, because they make you think about the meaning of life, so that it does not pass colorlessly and emptyly. I liked the work. I learned a lot of important things and understood a lot. I met a new writer and I know for sure that this is not the last work by Astafiev that I will read.

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials from the site were used http://sochok.by.ru/

Leonid Soshnin brought his manuscript to a small provincial publishing house.

“Local cultural luminary Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrovasova,” editor and critic, inappropriately flaunting her erudition and chain-smoking—an unpleasant type of ostentatious intellectual.

The manuscript stood in queue for publication for five years. It seems they gave the go-ahead. However, Syrovasova considers herself an indisputable authority and makes sarcastic jokes about the manuscript. And he makes fun of the author himself: a policeman - and in the same place, become a writer!

Yes, Soshnin served in the police. I honestly wanted to fight - and I fought! - against evil, was wounded, which is why at forty-two he was already retired.

Soshnin lives in an old wooden house, which, however, has heating and sewerage. From childhood he was left an orphan and lived with his aunt Lina.

All life kind woman she lived with him and for him, and then suddenly decided to improve her personal life - and the teenager was angry with her.

Yes, my aunt has gone on a rampage! She also stole. Its “commercial department” was sued and imprisoned at once. Aunt Lina was poisoned. The woman was rescued and after the trial was sent to a correctional labor colony. She felt that she was going downhill and enrolled her nephew in an air traffic police school. The timid, shy aunt returned and quickly went to her grave.

Even before her death, the hero worked as a local police officer, got married, and had a daughter, Svetochka.

Aunt Granya's husband, who worked in the firehouse, died. Trouble, as we know, does not travel alone.

A poorly secured croaker flew out of the maneuvering platform and hit Aunt Granya on the head. The kids were crying and trying to pull the bloodied woman off the rails.

Granya couldn’t work anymore, so she bought herself small house and acquired living creatures: “a dog Varka, cut off on the tracks, a crow with a broken wing - Marfa, a rooster with a knocked out eye - Under, a tailless cat - Ulka.”

Only the cow was useful - the kind aunt shared her milk with everyone who needed it, especially during the war years.

She was a holy woman - she ended up in a railway hospital, and as soon as she felt better, she immediately began to do laundry, clean up after the sick, and take out bedpans.

And then one day four guys, mad with alcohol, raped her. Soshnin was on duty that day and quickly found the villains. The judge slapped them with eight years of maximum security.

After the trial, Aunt Granya was ashamed to go out into the street.

Leonid found her in the hospital guardhouse. Aunt Granya lamented: “Young lives have been ruined! Why were they sent to prison?

Trying to solve the mystery of the Russian soul, Soshnin turned to pen and paper: “Why are Russian people eternally compassionate towards prisoners and often indifferent to themselves, to their neighbor - a disabled person of war and labor?

We are ready to give the last piece to a convict, a bone crusher and a bloodletter, to take away from the police a malicious hooligan who has just raged, whose arms have been twisted, and to hate his co-tenant because he forgets to turn off the light in the toilet, to reach such a degree of hostility in the battle for light that they can do not give water to the sick..."

Policeman Soshnin faces the horrors of life. So he arrested a twenty-two-year-old scoundrel who had killed three people “out of drunkenness.”

- Why did you kill people, little snake? - they asked him at the police station.

- But they didn’t like the hari! — he smiled carelessly in response.

But there is too much evil around. Returning home after an unpleasant conversation with Syrokvasova, the former policeman encounters three drunkards on the stairs who begin to bully and humiliate him. One threatens with a knife.

After futile attempts at reconciliation, Soshnin scatters the scum, using the skills acquired over the years of work in the police. A bad wave rises in him, he can barely stop himself.

However, one hero had his head split on a radiator, which he immediately reported to the police by phone.

Initially, Soshnin’s encounter with stupid, impudent evil does not cause embitterment, but bewilderment: “Where does this come from in them? Where? After all, all three seem to be from our village. From working families. All three went to kindergarten and sang: “The river begins with a blue stream, but friendship begins with a smile...”

Leonid is sick of it. He reflects on the fact that a force that fights against evil cannot be called good either - “because a good force is only creative, creating.”

But is there a place for creative power where, commemorating the deceased in the cemetery, “grieving children threw bottles into the hole, but forgot to lower their parents into the land.”

One day, a scoundrel who arrived from the Far North in a drunken spirit stole a dump truck and began circling around the city: he hit several people at a bus stop, smashed a children's playground to pieces, crushed to death a young mother and child at a crossing, and knocked down two old women walking.

“Like hawthorn butterflies, the decrepit old women flew into the air and folded their light wings on the sidewalk.”

Soshnin, the senior patrol officer, decided to shoot the criminal. Not in the city - people are all around.

“We drove the dump truck out of town, all the time shouting into a megaphone: “Citizens, danger!

Citizens! A criminal is driving! Citizens..."

The criminal taxied to a country cemetery - and there were four funeral processions! A lot of people - and all potential victims.

Soshnin was driving a police motorcycle. On his orders, his subordinate Fedya Lebeda killed the criminal with two shots. He didn’t immediately raise his hand; first he shot at the wheels.

It’s amazing: on the criminal’s jacket there was a badge “For saving people in a fire.” He saved - and now he kills.

Soshnin was seriously injured in the chase (he fell along with the motorcycle); the surgeon wanted to amputate his leg, but still managed to save it.

Leonid was interrogated for a long time by the judicial purist Pesterev: really couldn’t do without blood?

Returning from the hospital on crutches to an empty apartment, Soshnin began to study in depth German, read philosophers. Aunt Granya looked after him.

Madame Pestereva, the daughter of a rich and thieving director of an enterprise, a teacher at the Faculty of Philology, runs a “fashionable salon”: guests, music, intelligent conversations, reproductions of paintings by Salvador Dali - everything is feigned, unreal.

The “learned lady” turned student Pasha Silakova, a large, blooming village girl, into a housekeeper, whom her mother pushed into the city to study. Pasha would like to work in the field, become a mother of many children, but she is trying to delve into science, which is alien to her. So she pays for decent grades by cleaning the apartment and going to the market, and also bringing food from the village to everyone who can help her in some way.

Soshnin persuaded Pasha to transfer to an agricultural vocational school, where Pasha studied well and became an outstanding athlete in the entire region. Then “she worked as a machine operator along with the men, got married, gave birth to three sons in a row and was going to give birth to four more, but not those who are taken out of the womb with the help of caesarean section and jumping around: “Oh, allergies! Ah, dystrophy! Ah, early chondrosis..."

From Pasha, the hero’s thoughts turn to his wife Lera - it was she who persuaded him to take up the fate of Silakova.

Now Lenya and Lera live separately - they quarreled over something stupid, Lera took her daughter and moved.

Memories again. How did fate bring them together?

Young police officer in the city with a telling name Khailovsk managed to arrest a dangerous bandit. And everyone in the city whispered: “The same one!”

And then Leonid met on the way the arrogant, proud fashionista Lerka, a student at the pharmaceutical college, nicknamed Diva. Soshnin fought her off from the hooligans, feelings arose between them... Lera’s mother pronounced the verdict: “It’s time to get married!”

The mother-in-law was a quarrelsome and domineering person - one of those who only knows how to command. The father-in-law is a golden man, hard-working, skilled: He immediately mistook his son-in-law for his son. Together they “cut” the cocky lady for a while.

A daughter, Svetochka, was born, but strife arose over her upbringing. The economicless Lera dreamed of making a child prodigy out of the girl, Leonid took care of moral and physical health.

“The Soshnins increasingly sold Svetka to Polevka, subject to grandma’s poor inspection and inept care. It’s good that in addition to the grandmother, the child had a grandfather, he didn’t let the child torment the child with crops, he taught his granddaughter not to be afraid of bees, to smoke on them from a jar, to distinguish flowers and herbs, to pick up wood chips, to scrape hay with a rake, to herd a calf, to choose eggs from chicken nests, I took my granddaughter to pick mushrooms, pick berries, weed beds, go to the river with a bucket of water, rake snow in winter, sweep the fence, ride on a sled down the mountain, play with the dog, pet the cat, water the geraniums on the window.”

While visiting his daughter in the village, Leonid accomplished another feat - he fought off the village women from the alcoholic, former prisoner, who was terrorizing them. The drunk, Venka Fomin, wounded Leonid, got scared and dragged him to the first aid station.

And this time Soshnin pulled out. We must pay tribute to his wife Lera - she always looked after him when he was hospitalized, although she joked mercilessly.

Evil, evil, evil falls on Soshnin - and his soul hurts. A sad detective - he knows too many everyday incidents that make you want to howl.

“...Mom and Dad are book lovers, not children, not young people, both over thirty, had three children, fed them poorly, looked after them poorly, and suddenly the fourth appeared. They loved each other very passionately, even three children bothered them, but the fourth was of no use at all. And they began to leave the child alone, and the boy was born tenacious, screaming days and nights, then he stopped screaming, only squeaked and pecked. The neighbor in the barracks couldn’t stand it, she decided to feed the child porridge, climbed through the window, but there was no one to feed - the child was being eaten by worms. The child’s parents were not hiding somewhere, not in a dark attic, in the reading room of the regional library named after F. M. Dostoevsky, in the name of that very greatest humanist who proclaimed, and what he proclaimed, shouted with a frantic word to the whole world that he did not accept any revolution , if at least one child suffers...

More. Mom and dad had a fight, mom ran away from dad, dad left home and went on a spree. And he would have walked, choked on wine, damned, but the parents forgot at home a child who was not even three years old. When they broke down the door a week later, they found a child who had even eaten dirt from the cracks of the floor and learned to catch cockroaches - he ate them. In the Orphanage the boy was taken out - they defeated dystrophy, rickets, mental retardation, but they still can’t wean the child from grasping movements - he still catches someone...”

The image of Grandma Tutyshikha runs like a dotted line through the entire story - she lived wildly, stole, was imprisoned, married a lineman, gave birth to a boy, Igor. She was repeatedly beaten by her husband “for her love for the people”—out of jealousy, that is. I drank. However, she was always ready to babysit the neighbors’ kids, from behind her door she was always heard: “Oh, here, here, here, here...” - nursery rhymes, for which she was nicknamed Tutyshikha. She nursed, as best she could, her granddaughter Yulka, who started “walking” early. Again the same thought: how is good and evil, revelry and humility combined in the Russian soul?

Neighbor Tutyshikha is dying (she drank too much balm, and there was no one to call an ambulance - Yulka went out on a party). Yulka howls - how can she live without her grandmother now? Father from her expensive gifts only pays off.

“They saw off Grandma Tutyshikha to another world in a rich, almost luxurious and crowded way - my son, Igor Adamovich, did his best for his own mother.”

At the funeral, Soshnin meets his wife Lera and daughter Sveta. There is hope for reconciliation. The wife and daughter return to Leonid’s apartment.

“In a temporary, hasty world, the husband wants to get a ready-made wife, and the wife again wants a good, or better yet, a very good, ideal husband...

“Husband and wife are one Satan”—that’s all the wisdom that Leonid knew about this complex subject.”

Without family, without patience, without hard work on what is called harmony and harmony, without raising children together, it is impossible to preserve goodness in the world.

Soshnin decided to write down his thoughts, added wood to the stove, looked at his sleeping wife and daughter, “placed a blank sheet of paper in a spot of light and froze over it for a long time.”

The main task of literature has always been the task of relating and developing the most current problems: in the 19th century there was a problem of finding the ideal of a freedom fighter, at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries there was the problem of revolution. In our time, the most pressing topic is morality. Reflecting the problems and contradictions of our time, masters of words go one step ahead of their contemporaries, illuminating the path to the future. Viktor Astafiev in the novel “The Sad Detective” addresses the topic of morality. He writes about the everyday life of people, which is typical for peacetime. His heroes do not stand out from the gray crowd, but merge with it. Showing ordinary people suffering from the imperfections of life around them, Astafiev raises the question of the Russian soul, the uniqueness of the Russian character. All the writers of our country have tried to solve this issue in one way or another. The content of the novel is unique: main character Soshnin believes that we invented this riddle of the soul ourselves in order to keep silent from others. Peculiarities of the Russian character, such as pity, sympathy for others and indifference towards ourselves, we develop in ourselves. The writer tries to disturb the reader's souls with the fate of the heroes. Behind the little things described in the novel, there is a problem posed: how to help people? The life of the heroes evokes sympathy and pity. The author went through the war, and he, like no one else, knows these feelings. What we saw in war can hardly leave anyone indifferent, or not cause compassion or heartache. The events described take place in peacetime, but one cannot help but feel the similarity and connection with the war, because the time shown is no less difficult. Together with V. Astafiev, we think about the destinies of people and ask the question: how did we get to this? The title "The Sad Detective" doesn't say much. But if you think about it, you will notice that the main character really looks like a sad detective. Responsive and compassionate, he is ready to respond to any misfortune, cry for help, to sacrifice himself for the benefit of complete strangers. The problems of his life are directly related to the contradictions of society. He cannot help but be sad, because he sees what the lives of the people around him are like, what their destinies are. Soshnin is not just a former policeman, he brought benefit to people not only out of duty, but also out of his soul, he has a kind heart. Astafiev gave a description of his main character through the title. The events described in the novel could happen now. In Russia ordinary people It has never been easy. The time period of which events are described in the book is not specified. One can only guess what it was after the war. Astafiev talks about Soshnin’s childhood, about how he grew up without parents with Aunt Lina, then with Aunt Granya. The period when Soshnin was a policeman was also described, catching criminals, risking his life. Soshnin recalls the years he has lived and wants to write a book about the world around him. Unlike the main character, Syrokvasova is far from a positive image. She is a typical figure of modern fiction. She is tasked with choosing whose works are published and whose not. Soshnin is just a defenseless author, under her power among many others. He is still at the very beginning of his journey, but he understands what an incredibly difficult task he has taken on, how weak his stories are, how much the literary work to which he has condemned himself will take from him without giving anything in return. The reader is attracted by the image of Aunt Granya. Her tolerance, kindness and hard work are admirable. She devoted her life to raising children, although she never had her own. Aunt Granya never lived in abundance, did not have great joys and happiness, but she gave all the best she had to the orphans. At the end, the novel turns into a discussion, a reflection of the protagonist about the fate of the people around him, about the hopelessness of existence. In its details the book does not have the character of a tragedy, but in general outline it makes you think about sad things. A writer often sees and feels much more behind the seemingly ordinary fact of personal relationships. The fact is that, unlike others, he analyzes his own feelings more deeply and comprehensively. And then a single case is elevated to a general principle and prevails over the particular. Eternity is expressed in a moment. Simple at first glance, small in volume, the novel is fraught with very complex philosophical, social and psychological content. It seems to me that the words of I. Repin fit “The Sad Detective”: “In the soul of a Russian person there is a trait of special, hidden heroism... It lies under the cover of personality, it is invisible. But this is the greatest force of life, it moves mountains... She merges completely with her idea, “she is not afraid to die.” This is where her greatest strength is: “she is not afraid of death.” Astafiev, in my opinion, does not let the moral aspect of human existence out of sight for a minute. his work caught my attention.

The novel "The Sad Detective" was published in 1985, during a turning point in the life of our society. It was written in the style of harsh realism and therefore caused a surge of criticism. The reviews were mostly positive. The events of the novel are relevant today, just as works about honor and duty, good and evil, honesty and lies are always relevant. The novel describes various moments in the life of former policeman Leonid Soshnin, who at the age of forty-two was retired due to injuries received in the service. I remember the events of different years of his life. Leonid Soshnin's childhood, like almost all children of the post-war period, was difficult. But, like many children, he did not think about such complex issues of life. After his mother and father died, he stayed to live with his aunt Lipa, whom he called Lina. He loved her, and when she began to walk, he could not understand how she could leave him when she had given him her whole life. It was ordinary childish selfishness. She died shortly after his marriage. He married a girl, Lera, whom he saved from pestering hooligans. There was no special love, he just, as a decent person, could not help but marry the girl after he was received in her house as a groom. After his first exploit (capturing a criminal), he became a hero. After this he was wounded in the arm. This happened when one day he went to calm down Vanka Fomin, and he pierced his shoulder with a pitchfork. With a heightened sense of responsibility for everything and everyone, with his sense of duty, honesty and fight for justice, he could only work in the police. Leonid Soshnin always thinks about people and the motives of their actions. Why and why do people commit crimes? He reads a lot of philosophical books to understand this. And he comes to the conclusion that thieves are born, not made. For a completely stupid reason, his wife leaves him; after the accident he became disabled. After such troubles, he retired and found himself in a completely new and unfamiliar world, where he was trying to save himself with a “pen”. He did not know how to get his stories and books published, so they lay on the shelf of the editor Syrokvasova, a “gray” woman, for five years. One day he was attacked by bandits, but he overcame them. He felt bad and lonely, then he called his wife, and she immediately realized that something had happened to him. She understood that he always lived some kind of stressful life. And at some point he looked at life differently. He realized that life doesn't always have to be a struggle. Life is communication with people, caring for loved ones, making concessions to each other. After he realized this, his affairs went better: they promised to publish his stories and even gave him an advance, his wife returned, and some kind of peace began to appear in his soul. main topic novel - a man who finds himself among the crowd. A man lost among people, confused in his thoughts. The author wanted to show the individuality of a person among the crowd with his thoughts, actions, feelings. His problem is to understand the crowd, to blend in with it. It seems to him that in the crowd he does not recognize people whom he knew well before. Among the crowd, they are all the same, good and evil, honest and deceitful. They all become the same in the crowd. Soshnin is trying to find a way out of this situation with the help of the books that he reads, and with the help of the books that he himself tries to write. I liked this work because it touches on eternal problems man and the crowd, man and his thoughts. I liked how the author describes the hero’s relatives and friends. With what kindness and tenderness he treats Aunt Grana and Aunt Lina. The author portrays them as kind and hardworking women who love children. How the girl Pasha is described, Soshnin’s attitude towards her and his indignation that she was not loved at the institute. The hero loves them all, and it seems to me that his life becomes much better because of these people’s love for him.

V.P. Astafiev is a writer whose works reflect the life of people of the 20th century. Astafiev is a person who knows and is close to all the problems of our sometimes difficult life. Viktor Petrovich went through the war as a private and knows all the hardships of post-war life. I think that with his wisdom and experience he is one of those people whose advice and orders you should not only listen to, but try to follow. But Astafiev does not act as a prophet, he simply writes about what is close to him and what worries him. Although the works of Viktor Petrovich belong to modern Russian literature, the problems that are often raised in them are more than one thousand years old. Eternal questions of good and evil, punishment and justice have long forced people to look for answers to them. But this turned out to be a very difficult matter, because the answers lie in the person himself, and good and evil, honesty and dishonor are intertwined in us. Having a soul, we are often indifferent. We all have a heart, but we are often called heartless. In Astafiev's novel "The Sad Detective" the problems of crime, punishment and the triumph of justice are raised. The theme of the novel is the current intelligentsia and the current people. The work tells about the life of two small towns: Veisk and Khailovsk, about the people living in them, about modern morals. When people talk about small towns, the image of a quiet, peaceful place appears in the mind, where life, filled with joys, flows slowly, without any special incidents. A feeling of peace appears in the soul. But those who think so are mistaken. In fact, life in Veisk and Khailovsk flows in a stormy stream. Young people, drunk to the point where a person turns into an animal, rape a woman old enough to be their mother, and the parents leave the child locked in the apartment for a week. All these pictures described by Astafiev terrify the reader. It becomes scary and creepy at the thought that the concepts of honesty, decency and love are disappearing. The description of these cases in the form of summaries is, in my opinion, important artistic feature . Hearing every day about various incidents, we sometimes don’t pay attention, but collected in the novel, they force us to take off our rose-colored glasses and understand: if it didn’t happen to you, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t concern you. The novel makes you think about your actions, look back and see what you have done over the years. After reading, you ask yourself the question: “What good and good did I do? Did I notice when the person next to me felt bad?” You begin to think that indifference is as evil as cruelty. I think that finding answers to these questions is the purpose of the work. In the novel "The Sad Detective" Astafiev created a whole system of images. The author introduces the reader to each hero of the work, talking about his life. The main character is police operative Leonid Soshnin. He is a forty-year-old man who was injured several times in the line of duty and should retire. Having retired, he begins to write, trying to figure out where there is so much anger and cruelty in a person. Where does he keep it? Why, along with this cruelty, does the Russian people have pity for the prisoners and indifference to themselves, to their neighbor - a disabled person of war and labor? Astafiev contrasts the main character, an honest and brave operative worker, with policeman Fyodor Lebed, who quietly serves, moving from one position to another. On especially dangerous trips, he tries not to risk his life and gives the right to neutralize armed criminals to his partners, and it is not very important that his partner does not have a service weapon, because he is a recent graduate of a police school, and Fedor has a service weapon. A striking image in the novel is Aunt Granya - a woman who, without children of her own, gave all her love to the children who played near her house at the railway station, and then to the children in the Children's Home. Often the heroes of a work, who should cause disgust, cause pity. Urn, who has transformed from a self-employed woman into a drunkard without a home or family, evokes sympathy. She screams songs and pesters passers-by, but she becomes ashamed not for her, but for the society that has turned its back on the Urn. Soshnin says that they tried to help her, but nothing worked, and now they simply don’t pay attention to her. The city of Veisk has its own Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky. Astafiev does not even change the names of these people and characterizes them with a quote from Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” thereby refuting the well-known saying that nothing lasts forever under the sun. Everything flows, everything changes, but such people remain, exchanging clothes of the 19th century for a fashionable suit and shirt with gold cufflinks of the 20th century. The city of Veisk also has its own literary luminary, who, sitting in his office, “enveloped in cigarette smoke, twitched, squirmed in his chair and littered with ashes.” This is Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrokvasova. It is this man, whose description brings a smile, that moves local literature forward and further. This woman decides what works to print. But not everything is so bad, because if there is evil, then there is also good. Leonid Soshnin makes peace with his wife, and she returns to him again along with her daughter. It’s a little sad that the death of Soshnin’s neighbor, Tutyshikha’s grandmother, forces them to make peace. It is grief that brings Leonid and Lera closer together. The blank sheet of paper in front of Soshnin, who usually writes at night, is a symbol of the beginning of a new stage in the life of the protagonist’s family. And I want to believe that their future life will be happy and joyful, and they will cope with grief, because they will be together. The novel "The Sad Detective" is an exciting work. Although it is difficult to read, because Astafiev describes too terrible pictures. But such works need to be read, because they make you think about the meaning of life, so that it does not pass colorlessly and empty. I liked the piece. I learned a lot of important things and understood a lot. I met a new writer and I know for sure that this is not the last work by Astafiev that I will read.

• Download the essay "" in ZIP archive
• Download essay " Review of the novel by V. P. Astafiev, a sad detective story" in MS WORD format
• Version of the essay " Review of the novel by V. P. Astafiev, a sad detective story" for print

Russian writers

Lesson objectives: to give short review the life and work of the writer; reveal the problems posed in the novel; to interest students in the work of V.P. Astafiev; develop the ability to conduct a discussion.

Lesson equipment: portrait and exhibition of the writer’s books, photographs.

Preliminary task: preparation of individual tasks (message, expressive reading of passages).

During the classes

Teacher's opening speech

The work of any writer cannot be considered separately from his biography, because without life’s difficulties, without experience, without sorrows and joys, no artist grows. The environment in which a person was born and lived undoubtedly leaves an imprint on his character, worldview, and, for a creative person, on his works. Viktor Petrovich Astafiev is one of the brightest representatives of Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, whose writing activity constantly came into contact with his fate.

Student message

Viktor Petrovich Astafiev was born in Siberia, in the village of Ovsyanka, Krasnoyarsk Territory, on the night of May 2, 1924. He lost his mother early (she drowned in the Yenisei), and was raised in the family of his grandparents, then in an orphanage. He ran away from there, wandered, went hungry... The boy found himself an orphan with a living father, who, after the death of his wife, soon started another family and did not care about his son. The years of Astafiev's childhood and adolescence were similar to the destinies of his peers. The books that the teenager read avidly saved his soul. The writer will talk about this in the stories “Theft” and “The Last Bow”.

Shortly before the Great Patriotic War He will graduate from the FZO school, work at the railway station, and in the fall of 1942 he will go to the front. Wounded three times, shell-shocked, he will still survive and start a family. He will tell about the difficult post-war years in the story “The Cheerful Soldier”. During these difficult years, V.P. Astafiev and his family lived in the Urals - it was easier to find work there.

He wrote his first story while on duty at night at a sausage factory. The story about the fate of signalman Moti Savintsev was praised and published in the Chusovskoy Rabochiy newspaper. This happened in 1951. And from that moment on, V.P. Astafiev devoted his entire life to writing, about which he will say this: “Writing is a constant search, complex, exhausting, sometimes leading to despair. Only mediocrity, accustomed to using “secondary raw materials,” lives an easy and comfortable life. I am the author of short stories, novels, among which there are some that have received recognition from readers, translated into many languages, every time I approach a new thing with fear, then I “accelerate, enter” into it until I finish - I don’t know any peace.”

This attitude towards one’s work indicates high responsibility.

Viktor Astafiev's prose developed in the classical traditions of Russian literature by L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky. Philosophical understanding of life, the role of man on earth, love for the motherland and home, good and evil in relation to the world, especially to its defenseless representatives - children, women, old people, animals, nature, the role of family - these are not all moral questions , which Viktor Astafiev solves in his works.

The poet N. Novikov has the following poems:

Nothing can ever be returned
How not to etch spots in the sun,
And, on the way back,
Still won't come back.
This truth is very simple,
And she, like death, is immutable,
You can return to the same places
But go back
Impossible…

Yes, it is impossible to return thoughtlessly destroyed nature - the home of man. She will repay with devastation of the soul. Viktor Astafiev is well aware of this and wants to warn about the impending disaster. This desire is the writer’s pain, his melancholy and bitter anxiety. Listen to an excerpt from the final chapter “There is no answer for me” of the novel “The King Fish”.

Student performance

“Mana! I looked for the red comb of the Mansky bull. No! The hydrobuilders brushed it off. And the beautiful river itself is bristling with hummocks of rafted timber. A bridge has been built across Mana. When they drilled soil for supports at the mouth of the river, wood was found in the samples at a depth of eighteen meters. Drowned and buried forest, more and more larch - it almost does not rot in water. Maybe our descendants will also thank us for at least the wood reserves made for them in such a cunning way?
Goodbye Mana! And forgive us! We tortured not only nature, but also ourselves, and not always out of stupidity, more out of necessity...
My native Siberia has changed. Everything flows, everything changes - hoary wisdom testifies. It was. That's it. It will be so.
There is an hour for everything and a time for every task under heaven;
A time to be born and a time to die;
There is a time to plant and a time to pluck out what is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal;
A time to destroy and a time to build;
A time to cry and a time to laugh;
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones;
A time to be silent and a time to speak.
So what am I looking for? Why am I suffering? Why? For what? There is no answer for me.”

Each time gives rise to its own questions that we must answer. And today we must torment ourselves with these questions and answer them in order to preserve our lives. This is also discussed in the novel “The Sad Detective”.

Student message

“The Sad Detective” was published in the 1st issue of “October” magazine for 1986. The atmosphere of those years was the beginning of perestroika. The authorities have taken a course towards transparency in all spheres of public life. In many works there was an appeal to the material modern life and activity, unprecedented in the literature of previous years, even sharpness in expressing the author’s position. Unsightly pictures of modern life and the spiritual impoverishment of man were revealed to the reader. Such material also determined the genre of the “Sad Detective” - a variant of a journalistic accusatory diary. It was in the journalism of the 80s of the 20th century that the signs of a new literary and social situation clearly manifested themselves. Is it possible to consider it a coincidence that the style of Astafiev’s novel “The Sad Detective” echoes the writing principles of the writers of the sixties of the 19th century, who proclaimed their goal and purpose of literature to be the education in a person of freedom, responsibility and consciousness. That is why the novel “The Sad Detective” requires thoughtful reading and deep understanding.

Analytical conversation

• Try to convey the emotional perception of this work. What feelings did you have?

(Feeling of heaviness, depression due to a string of senselessly cruel acts, due to the fact that human dignity is violated).

• How do you understand the title of the novel, why is it a sad detective story? What is the reason for the author’s sadness?

(With the fact that the lives of people dear to him are being destroyed, villages are dying, that life in the city and in the countryside is limited and closed. It’s sad because the foundations on which human kindness has eternally rested are collapsing).

• In many of Astafiev’s works, do the characters express his aesthetic ideal and moral position? Are there such heroes in the novel “The Sad Detective”?

(Yes, first of all, this is Leonid Soshnin, a former police detective. His sad story about his own misadventures and troubles environment confirms the capacious significance of the novel's title. Leonid Soshnin is a caring, honest, principled, selfless person. He resists evil out of conscience, not out of service.

Students also celebrate such heroes as Aunt Granya, Aunt Lina, Markel Tikhonovich, Pasha Silakova. Giving examples from the text, they conclude that these heroes are the ideal of a person for Astafiev, and note that Aunt Granya is the ideal of kindness and compassion. How many children did she replace their mother with, instilling a love of work, honesty, and kindness. But she herself lived very modestly, without income. And she didn’t have children of her own, but only kindness was born from her kindness. When cruel people offended Aunt Granya, and she forgave them, Leonid Soshnin suffered pain from the injustice of what was done. Every time he wanted to run after Aunt Granya and shout at the whole people so that she would forgive him “and all of us”).

• In our difficult times, there are also many orphans and orphanages. Are those people who help orphanages and take in children doing the right thing? Can only wealthy people do this?

(When answering this topical question, the guys give examples from their life observations (street children, the state of orphanages, the sale of children abroad, etc.). When solving a difficult issue, they naturally think positively, realizing that the issue is not financial situation those people who want to give the warmth of their heart to a child. Will they ever be able to do this? There is no clear answer. But the conversation that took place is a grain of good thrown into their souls).

• Why, appreciating the kindness and generosity of Aunt Granya, does the author state: “It’s easy... comfortable for a criminal to live among such kind-hearted people”?

(Perhaps this is one of the most difficult questions in the novel. This is an attempt by both the writer and the readers to comprehend the Russian soul with merciless truth. It becomes bitter because kindness develops into forgiveness. Many critics reproached Astafiev for speaking disrespectfully about the Russian character , that all-forgiveness comes from the breadth of the soul of a Russian person. But this is not so. Through the mouth of his hero Leonid Soshnin, the writer says that we ourselves invented the riddle of the soul and that all-forgiveness comes from the inability to respect oneself. The writer is right in asserting that one cannot celebrate Easter without experiencing it. post. The sobriety of the author’s view does not detract from compassion for those who, through their own and our fault, find themselves on the edge of the abyss. The novel acutely poses the problem of the deformation of good and evil. that it is necessary to actively resist evil).

• But how to make sure that human evil does not have the opportunity to ripen?

(This idea is very important for the writer. Answering this question, students note that the basis of relationships between people should be love, kindness, respect, and conscience will remind you of responsibility for everyone living nearby. A person who knows how to prevent evil with kindness is writer's ideal).

• Astafiev wrote: “How often we throw around lofty words without thinking about them. Here is a doldonim: children are happiness, children are joy, children are light in the window! But children are also our torment! Children are our judgment on the world, our mirror, in which our conscience, intelligence, honesty, neatness are all visible.” How do you understand the writer's words?

Can we say that the theme of family in the novel is also one of the main ones?

• (As a result of reasoning, we come to the conclusion that the writer talks with great sorrow about cases of family discord, the inferiority of human relationships. He draws our reader’s attention to how they are brought up and what is taught in the family, to the “spirit” of the family).

How do Oktyabrina Syrovasova, the alcoholic Urna, Leonid Soshnin’s mother-in-law, Soshnin’s wife raise their children, how do Yulka’s mother and grandmother Tutyschikha raise them?

• (Students tell episodes from the novel, analyze them and come to the conclusion that Astafiev is writing about a dangerous type of women who strive to become like men. Oktyabrina Syrovasova, an activist from the cultural front, is disgusting, who believes that only she is able to choose whose works to publish and whose no. The alcoholic Urna is disgusting. She, unfortunately, is a phenomenon of our reality. A woman who is a drunkard is worse than a man. Those who replace spiritual education with material well-being are also disgusting).

Listening to your answers, I want to note that V.P. Astafiev in many of his works speaks about the woman-mother with special sensitivity.

Left an orphan, he lovingly carried her bright image with him throughout his life. In his autobiographical article “Participating in all living things...” the writer calls on us, readers, to treat a woman, a mother, with care. He will write a wonderful story about his mother, “The Last Bow.”

If I were given the opportunity to repeat my life, I would choose the same one, very eventful, joys, victories and defeats, delights and sorrows of loss, which help to feel kindness more deeply. And I would ask only one thing from my fate - to leave my mother with me. I have missed her all my life and miss her especially acutely now, when age seems to compare me with all older people, and that calm comes that mothers patiently wait for, hoping at least in old age to lean against their child.

Take care of your mothers, people! Take care! They come only once and never come back, and no one can replace them. This is being told to you by a person who has the right to trust – he outlived his mother.”

Why did V.P. Astafiev capitalize only two words at the end of the novel: “Earth and Family”?

(The family in the novel is spoken of as the foundation not only of the state, but also of civilization. These two family houses cannot be destroyed. If you destroy the family, the Earth house will collapse, and then the person will die. The world of the family and the world of nature are always in an eternal, inseparable, although and contradictory unity, the violation of which threatens degeneration and death).

Astafiev will develop this idea in his novel “The Fish Tsar,” with which we began our conversation about the writer’s work. Thus, Viktor Petrovich Astafiev helps us think about many moral problems, and most importantly, he talks about lack of spirituality not in the sense of a lack of cultural interests (although about this), but in the sense of a lack of responsibility, when a person forgets to ask himself and shifts responsibility to everyone: the school, the team, the state.

Optional homework

• An essay on the topic “The theme of family in V.P. Astafiev’s novel “The Sad Detective.”
• An essay on the topic “How is the theme of good and evil revealed in V.P. Astafiev’s novel “The Sad Detective”?”
• An essay on the topic “What similarities with Russian classics did you notice in the novel “The Sad Detective”?”
• Read one of the named works by Astafiev and give a brief review about it.

Literature

1. Astafiev V.P. Stories. Stories. M.: Bustard, 2002 (Library of Russian classical fiction).
2. Astafiev V.P. “Participated in all living things...” // Literature at school. 1987, no. 2.
3. Russian literature of the 20th century. 11th grade, in two parts. Edited by V.V. Agenosov. M,: Bustard, 2006.
4. Zaitsev V.A., Gerasimenko A.P. History of Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century. M., 2004.
5. Ershov L.F. History of Russian Soviet literature.
6. Egorova N.V., Zolotareva I.V., Lesson developments in Russian literature of the 20th century. Grade 11. M.: Vako, 2004.
7. Petrovich V.G., Petrovich N.M. Literature in basic and specialized schools. 11th grade: Book for teachers. M.: Sfera, 2006.