In the village of Milyukovo, in the remote Sychevsky district of the Smolensk province, the priest Vasily Dokuchaev had a third son, named Vasily after his father.
The village of Milyukovo, where Vasily Dokuchaev spent his childhood, is located on the banks of the small Kachni River. The boy, together with his friend, Grigory Pyukov, spent whole days on the river. They went to the Holy Well, to the Gridnevsky Stream and other places along the banks of the Kachni. The boys watched with interest the work of the peasants, who dug out from the loose coastal sediments the massive trunks of fossil oak, strong as stone, preserved there; it was used to make all sorts of things needed in the household. Sometimes some bones were found near the tree trunk. Friends were jealous of one of the boys, whose father found a huge tooth of an unknown animal in the river sediments. It was later determined that it was a mammoth tooth.
In the spring, when after the Kachni flood the entire river valley was covered with lush grasses, the children disappeared into the flooded meadows, where blue lakes teeming with small fish and tadpoles were hidden between the grasses.
But this free life did not last long. The boy grew up, and it was time to think about teaching. The priest, after consulting with his wife, decided to take his youngest son, as well as his eldest, to Vyazma, to a religious school. The large family of nine people was constantly in need. The sons of a large-family rural priest had one path - free “state-funded” education in a bursa, and then either to become priests or sextons.
They served a prayer service in the Dokuchaevs' house, sat down, as was customary according to tradition, on benches, sat for a minute in silence, got up, kissed each other and, after listening to the mother's parting words, got on the cart and set off. The father took his son to the city of Vyazma to chisel the psalter and chety-menaion in the bursa.
Theological schools in Russia have long been in a deplorable state. Even at the beginning of her reign, Catherine II noted that “the bishop’s seminaries consisted of a very small number of students, a poor institution for the sciences and meager content.” Repeated attempts to reform the bursa, especially active at the beginning of the 19th century, despite the participation in them of such figures as M. M. Speransky, did not lead to anything positive.
At the time when Dokuchaev got into the bursa, it was very similar to the bursa described by Pomyalovsky. Dokuchaev himself subsequently spoke about this more than once. Dokuchaev’s life during these years was not much different from the life of Karas and other heroes of Pomyalovsky’s “Essays on Bursa”. Newcomers were subjected to bullying according to all the rules carefully developed by the students, who boasted of the rudeness of their morals. This was the first test, and those who passed it won a certain respect from their comrades. Thus, the students tried to develop a hardening in themselves that would help them endure all the bullying and flogging that befell everyone, even exemplary ones, from the point of view of their superiors. Therefore, disregard for physical pain was valued above all else. The comrades could confidently rely on such a student, who is silent even when he is flogged “in the air”: he will not let you down, he will not become a fiscal. And the spiritual authorities diligently propagated sneaking, created special “black books”, where everything that the informers reported about everyone was entered. From among the students, the authorities appointed seconders, whose duty was to flog their comrades, censors, who monitored order in the classroom, and auditors, who were supposed to check the preparation of lessons every day and assign appropriate points in special notebooks - notates. In addition to them, there were also senior dormitories and senior dormitory attendants. This entire complex system of subordination was created by the authorities to fight the partnership, organized since time immemorial by the first students, who were forcibly imprisoned for scholastic cramming and bequeathed to their descendants fierce resistance to the authorities and hatred of them. But the efforts of the bursa leaders to corrupt students with the despotic power of one over the other did not always lead to the desired results. There were, of course, among the censors, auditors and other persons in the Bursak hierarchy there were bribe-takers and extortionists, but honest, albeit harsh, traditions of camaraderie helped the Bursaks defend their rights in these terrible conditions. Of course, only the strongest and most seasoned could defend them. Most of the bursa students were crippled both physically and mentally.
Dokuchaev passed the first test relatively easily - this was usually the case with all newcomers arriving from the village. Courage and resourcefulness, developed in games and fights with village boys, endurance and independence, acquired in communication with nature, tempered their characters, made them more independent and persistent. It was different with the city newcomers. According to the cruel traditions of the Bursa, they were tested for a long time and without leniency in order to wean them from “veal tenderness.” And according to the unwritten Bursat code, “calf tenderness” was considered conversations and memories about home, about family, about relatives. In everything related to personal life, over the long years of staying at the bursa, isolation was developed, which left an imprint on the character of its students for the rest of their lives. After the first step, Dokuchaev had to take the second - to become one of the “inveterate” ones. An inveterate one, according to Pomyalovsky’s definition, is a zealot of antiquity and traditions, he stands for the freedom and liberty of the student, he is the main pillar of comradeship. The inveterate ones were divided into three types: the good ones - “foolish gentlemen”, the reckless ones - “these were not stupid at all, but reckless lazy people” and, finally, the third type - this is the head - the first in teaching and the last in behavior. Dokuchaev was a head. Despite his aversion to the subjects he studied and especially to the teaching methods, he had excellent grades. But successes did not save from “May”, as the students called fresh birch rods. If during the school year the teacher had nothing to complain about, then at the end of the year, as a true supporter of “sectional pedagogy,” he flogged the student precisely because he had never been flogged.
Dokuchaev hated the teaching methods in the bursa, the scholastic subjects studied, and the measures of influence. There was only one method of teaching - cramming, or, as they said in the bursa, chiselling. The drilling of incomprehensible theological subjects became even more absurd because the teachers did not consider it necessary to explain to their students the meaning of the sciences being drilled into them, but simply asked them “from now to now.” Naturally, such a teaching only brought suffering to the unfortunate students, who composed a song about this:
How blessed are those peoples,
Of which strong natures
They didn’t know our torment,
They didn't know science.
In some subjects, teachers allowed so-called “objections”: students were allowed to argue and speak on the same issue from different, but strictly defined by the authorities, positions. The topics were: “Can the devil sin?”, “Does original sin contain, as in embryo, mortal sins, voluntary and involuntary?”, “Will Socrates and other pious philosophers of paganism be saved or not?”
Such scholastic exercises, filled with empty, worthless sophistry, were considered the crown of wisdom and therefore were allowed very rarely. Dokuchaev was particularly hated by the so-called “homiletics” - the doctrine of church preaching. Dokuchaev renamed it “gummy rubber”; apparently, it resembled rubber in its ductility. “Gummilastika” haunted him for more than one year. Its many-year course was divided into several large independent parts: fundamental or principled homiletics, material homiletics, formal or constructive homiletics, evangelical homiletics, apostolic homiletics. This immense scholastic subject had to be crammed day after day, year after year.
Many students, despairing of overcoming such wisdom, signed up for the “eternal zeros” - the auditor, without asking them for a lesson, put a zero next to their names every day. They moved to Kamchatka, played, or even simply slept under their desks. They were not afraid of Rozog and were waiting for a happy day when they, who had been sitting in each class for several years, would be expelled from the bursa on the basis of the “law on overage” and they would go in search of a suitable place - a sexton, a bell-ringer, a church watchman. Dokuchaev was not one of the eternal zeros. His natural abilities and brilliant memory gave him the opportunity to overcome these hated objects with relative ease. But if he differed from the eternal zeros in his successes in the sciences, then in his behavior he followed all the traditions of the Bursat partnership. And the main thing in these traditions was to cause all sorts of troubles to his superiors, to make any sacrifices if this could annoy the inspector.
The most strictly prohibited things in the bursa were drunkenness and playing cards. But out of hatred for the oppressors, both were considered especially honorable among the students. After it was announced that drunkenness would lead to expulsion from the seminary, it began to take on large proportions and subsequently had a detrimental effect on the fate of many students. To a certain extent, Dokuchaev did not escape this vice.
The last years of Dokuchaev's stay at the seminary coincided with turbulent years in the history of Russia and Russian social thought. The problems of eliminating serfdom, which worried all the progressive minds of the country, turned out to be unresolved even after the peasant reform of 1861. But all the revolutionary-democratic forces of the country were already in motion and had a fruitful influence on the development of Russian science. The works and articles of A. I. Herzen, V. G. Belinsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov, D. I. Pisarev gave a great impetus to the materialistic development of natural sciences in Russia. In one form or another, the revolutionary democratic ideas of Russian enlighteners also reached the hermits of theological seminaries. There is an interesting testimony about this from one of the reactionary churchmen, Archbishop Nikanor of Kherson, who wrote: “... in the early sixties there were communities of liberals who caught seminarians in their nets, imposed on them books of their spirit for development, books predominantly of natural science content.” And indeed, even students during this period took part in the discussion of social and scientific problems. Hatred towards scholasticism and all methods of bursat education, which had previously manifested itself only in all sorts of “exploits” directed against the authorities, began to pour out into other, more mature forms: “free-thinking started even within the seminary,” Archbishop Nikanor said with regret.
Dokuchaev graduated from the seminary with honors and, as the best student, was sent to the state account to St. Petersburg, to the Theological Academy.
V.V. Dokuchaev - seminarian.
The class is over. Kids are playing.
We take school at a time when it ended period of forced education and began to act law of great age. There were years - they are long gone - when not only young children, but also bearded children, by order of the authorities, were forcibly expelled from villages, often from sextons' and sextons' places, to teach them writing, reading, arithmetic and church rules in a bursa. Some were betrothed to their brides and sweetly dreamed of a honeymoon, when a thunderstorm came and married them to Pozharsky, Memorsky, the psalter and the practice of church singing, introduced them to May(with rods), starved and cold. In those days, even in the parish class, the majority were adults, and there was nothing to say about other classes, especially seminaries. They didn’t keep enough elderly people for a long time, but after teaching them to read and write for a year three four, released act as a sexton; and the students who were younger and more zealous about science, at about thirty years of age, often more than that, reached theological course (senior seminary class). Relatives, crying, howling and lamenting, sent their chicks off to science; The chicks returned home with deep hatred and disgust for the place of formation. But that was a long time ago.
Time has passed. A consciousness gradually penetrated into society - not of the benefits of science, but of its inevitability. It was necessary to undergo at least parish training in order to even have the right to a sexton’s place in the village. Fathers themselves drove their children to school, desks were quickly replaced, the number of students increased and, finally, grew to such a level that they could not fit into the school. Then they invented the famous law of great age. Fathers have not yet abandoned the habit of sending their children to science as adults. Often they brought sixteen-year-old boys. Having studied in four classes of the school for two years, such things were done over-aged; this reason was noted in title student (in the certificate) and sent behind the gate(excluded). There were up to five hundred students in the school; Of these, a hundred or more received the title annually; a new mass arrived to replace them from villages (the majority) and cities, and a year later they were poisoned behind the gate new hundred. Those who received the title became novices, sextons, watchmen, church and consistory scribes; but she half-staggered around the diocese without specific activities, not knowing where to go with her titles, and more than once the terrible news flashed that all the homeless would be recruited into soldiers. Now it is clear how the school set was maintained, and it is clear why we meet half-grown adults in a dark and dirty classroom.
There is slush and a sharp wind outside. The students don’t even think about going to the yard; at first glance it is noticeable that there are more than a hundred people in the huge class. What a varied population of the class, what a mixture of clothes and faces!.. There are twenty-four-year-olds, there are twelve-year-olds. The disciples split into many groups; The games are coming - original, like everything original in the bursa; some walk alone, some sleep, despite the noise, not only on the floor, but also on desks, above the heads of their comrades. There is a groan in the classroom from the voices.
Imost of the people who will meet in our essay will bear the nicknames that they were given in the partnership, for example Mitakha, Elpakha, Tavlya, Shstiukhaya Chabrya, Khor, Spit, Omega, Erra-Koksta, Katka etc., but we cannot do this with Semyonov: the Oursaki gave him a nickname that no censorship would allow - extremely indecent.
Semyonov was a good-looking boy, about sixteen years old. The son of a city priest, he behaves decently and is dressed cleanly; it is immediately clear that the school did not have time to completely erase from him the traces of home life. Semyonov feels that he urban, and the city comradeship looked contemptuously at them and called them women; they love mothers and mother’s buns and gingerbreads, they do not know how to fight, they are cowards of the rod, they are a powerless people and under the protection of their superiors. For the partnership, the rare city was an exception to this rule. Semenov’s face was strange - there was no way to decipher it: sad and at the same time cunning; fear of comrades mixed with hidden hatred. Now he is bored, and he, staggering from corner to corner, does not know how to amuse himself. He tries to keep himself away from his comrades, alone; but everyone formed parties, played different games, sang songs, talked; and he wanted to share his leisure time with someone. He approached those playing with pebbles and said timidly:
Brothers, accept me.
“The goose is not a pig’s friend,” they answered him.
Don't you want this? - said the other, placing his well-fed fig with a large dirty nail on his thumb under his very nose...
Before it hits you in the neck, get out! - added the third.
Semyonov walked away sadly; but he was not particularly impressed by the words of his comrades. He definitely got used to it a long time ago and has tolerated the rude treatment.
Gentlemen, piping hot!
Goroblagodatsky.
Semyonov, together with the others, went to the table, near which a game of pebbles was also going on between two overage people, and, moreover, Goroblagodatsky was the second strongman in the class, and Tavlya was the fourth. The faces surrounding the players grinned pleasantly, expecting an entertaining spectacle.
Well! - said Tavlya.
Goroblagodatsky put his hand on the table, spreading his fingers on it. Tavlya placed five small stones on his hand in the most inconvenient way.
Go ahead! - he said.
He threw up the stones and caught only three of them.
In two! - those around him picked it up.
Write, brother, letters to your parents,” Tavlya added for his part.
Goroblagodatsky, without answering, put his left hand on the table. Tavlya threw a stone into the air, during its flight he managed to pinch Goroblagodatsky’s hand with terrible force and again caught the stone.
The crowd laughed.
The game of pebbles is probably known to everyone, but at school it had original additions: here it is tweezers, and moreover tweezers cold, lukewarm, hot and blazing hot, which went to the loser. The youngest, greenest one played without tweezers parish, and with the tweezers blazing hot, the reader is now present.
A huge dirty school room. Classes are over, and the students are having fun with games.
Quite recently the “period of forced education” ended, when everyone, regardless of age, had to take a full course of science. Now the “law of great age” has begun to operate - upon reaching a certain age, a student is expelled from school, and he can become a scribe, sexton, or novice. Many cannot find a place for themselves. There are rumors that such people will be taken as soldiers.
There are more than a hundred people in the class. Among them are twelve-year-old children and adults. They play “pebbles”, “shvychki”, “lenten”, “fast”. All games are necessarily associated with causing pain to each other: pinching, clicking, hitting, and so on.
Nobody wants to play with Semyonov, a sixteen-year-old boy, the son of a parish priest. Everyone knows that Semyonov is a fiscal man. The class is getting dark. The students are having fun by singing, organizing noisy games of “little pile”, but suddenly everything calms down. In the darkness you can hear someone being whipped. These comrades are punishing fiscal Semenov. Embittered, Semenov runs to complain.
Classes begin. Someone is sleeping, someone is talking... The main method of studying in Bursats is meaningless “doing”, cramming. That's why no one wants to study.
The inspector and Semenov appear in the classroom, complaining about their offenders. One of them, by order of the inspector, is flogged and they promise to flog every tenth student the next day. The students decide to take revenge on Semenov. At night they insert a “pfimfa” into his nose, that is, a cone with burning cotton. Semyonov ends up in the hospital, and he himself does not know what happened to him. By order of the authorities, many are flogged, and many in vain.
Early morning. Bursatsky bedroom. The students are woken up and taken to the bathhouse. They walk through the city noisily, quarreling with all passers-by. After the bath, they scatter around the city in search of what is lying badly. The students are especially distinguished by their nicknames Aksyuta and Satan. Having eaten the stolen goods, the students are in a good mood and tell each other in class legends about the former times of the school: about the tricks of the students, about how they used to flog...
Classes begin. Teacher Ivan Mikhailovich Lobov first flogs Aksyuta, who has not learned his lesson, then asks the others, distributing punishments. During class he has breakfast. Lobov never explains the lesson. The next lesson - Latin - is taught by teacher Dolbezhin. He also flogs everyone, but his students love: Dol-bezhin is honest, does not take bribes and does not favor fiscal officials. The third teacher, nicknamed Old Man, is especially ferocious when drunk: along with flogging, he also applies other, more sophisticated physical punishments.
Aksyutka is hungry: Lobov ordered him to be left without lunch until he moves to Kamchatka. Aksyutka either studies well and sits at the first desk, or she doesn’t study at all. Lobov is tired of such changes: he prefers that Aksyutka never study.
In the courtyard of the school, two women - an old woman and a thirty-year-old - are waiting for the director and throw themselves at his feet. It turns out that this is the “fixed bride” and her mother, who have come “for the grooms.” The fact is that after the death of a clergyman, his place is “assigned” to the family, that is, it goes to the one who agrees to marry his daughter. The sexton and her daughter have to go to Bursa to find a “breadwinner”.
A new type of teacher is emerging in the bursa. Among them is Pyotr Fedorovich Krasnov. He, compared to others, is a kind and considerate person, opposes too harsh punishments, but abuses moral punishments, mocking ignorant students in front of the whole class.
Aksyutka, together with another student nicknamed Satan, manages to steal bread from the Bursat baker Tsepka. Aksyutka drives Tsepka crazy, he chases after the arrogant student, and meanwhile Satan steals the bread.
The attendant calls the grooms to see the bride. The authorities recognize Vasenda, Azinus, and Aksyutka as suitable grooms. The first two are inhabitants of “Kamchatka”, engaged only in ecclesiastical sciences. Vasenda is a practical, thorough person, Azinus is stupid, careless. Students go to the bride's show. Vasenda does not like both the bride and the place, but Azinus decides to get married, although the bride is much older than him. Aksyutka simply called himself the groom in order to eat from the bride and steal something.
And in the bursa they are starting a new game - a parody of a wedding...
Karas dreamed of being a student from early childhood, because his older brothers were students and were very proud of him. When Karas the newcomer is brought to the bursa, he rejoices. But he is immediately showered with ridicule and various bullying from his comrades. On the very first day he is whipped. Karas enters the seminary choir. Instead of singing, he only tries to open his mouth. His comrades “name” him Karas, the ceremony of “naming” is very offensive, Karas fights with the offenders, and Lobov, who saw the scene of the fight, orders Karas to be flogged. This brutal flogging produces a turning point in Karas’s soul - a terrible hatred for the bursa appears, and dreams of revenge appear.
A student nicknamed Silych, the first hero of the class, declares that he will patronize Karas so that no one dares to offend him. Under this protection it becomes easier for Karas to live. He himself tries to defend the “oppressed,” especially the Bursatsky fools. Karas resolutely denies Bursat science and does not want to study.
Vsevolod Vasilyevich Razumnikov, a teacher of church singing, the law of God and sacred history, is a rather progressive teacher: he introduces a system of mutual teaching. But Karas cannot comprehend church singing, and Razumnikov punishes him: he does not let him go home on Sundays. There is a danger hanging over Karas that he will not be allowed to go home for Easter.
The arithmetic teacher, Pavel Alekseevich Livanov, arrives. He is helpless when drunk, and the students mock him.
On Saturday, Karas does all sorts of outrageous things out of frustration that he is not allowed home. It’s a Sunday afternoon in Bursa, and Karas begins to think about escape. He heard that some of the younger “runners” were caught, but were forgiven, others were whipped, but still they did not notice that somewhere in the wood yard the fugitives were “being saved.” But on the same day, the captured “runner” Menshinsky is brought in. He is whipped half to death, and then taken on a matting to the hospital. The crucian carp gives up thoughts of escape. He decides to "escape" from church singing in the hospital. He manages to get sick, the terrible lesson takes place without him, and Karas is sent home for Easter...
A new caretaker appears at the bursa. The former one, nicknamed the Stargazer, was a kind man and, unable to bear the horrors of the bursa, preferred to retire to his apartment, which gave him great mystery in the eyes of the bursaks. In general, by this time a lot had changed in the school: punishments had been softened, there were fewer overage students...
Retold
Dedicated to N. A. Blagoveshchensky
The class is over. Kids are playing.
We take school at a time when it ended period of forced education and began to act law of great age. There were years - they are long gone - when not only young children, but also bearded children, by order of the authorities, were forcibly expelled from villages, often from sextons' and sextons' places, to teach them writing, reading, arithmetic and church rules in a bursa. Some were betrothed to their brides and sweetly dreamed of a honeymoon, when a thunderstorm came and married them to Pozharsky, Memorsky, the Psalter and the custom of church singing, introduced them to May(with rods), starved and cold. In those days, even in the parish class, the majority were adults, and there was nothing to say about other classes, especially seminaries. They didn’t keep enough elderly people for a long time, but after teaching them to read and write for a year three four, released act as a sexton; and the students who were younger and more zealous about science, at about thirty years of age, often more than that, reached theological course (senior seminary class). Relatives, crying, howling and lamenting, sent their chicks off to science; The chicks returned home with deep hatred and disgust for the place of formation. But that was a long time ago.
Time has passed. Little by little, awareness penetrated into society - not of the benefits of science, but of its inevitability. It was necessary to undergo at least parish training in order to even have the right to a sexton’s place in the village. Fathers themselves drove their children to school, desks were quickly replaced, the number of students increased and finally grew to the point that they could not fit into the school. Then they invented the famous law of great age. Fathers had not yet abandoned the habit of sending their children to science as adults and often brought sixteen-year-old boys. Having studied in four classes of the school for two years, such things were done over-aged; this reason was noted in title student (in the certificate) and sent behind the gate(excluded). There were up to five hundred students in the school; Of these, a hundred or more received the title annually; a new mass arrived to replace them from villages (the majority) and cities, and a year later they left behind the gate new hundred. Those who received the title became novices, sextons, church watchmen and consistory scribes; but they were half wandering around the diocese without any specific activities, not knowing where to go with their titles, and more than once the terrible news flashed that all the homeless would be recruited into soldiers. Now it is clear how the school set was maintained, and it is clear why we meet half-grown adults in a dark and dirty classroom.
There is slush and a sharp wind outside. The students don’t even think about going to the yard; at first glance it is noticeable that there are more than a hundred people in the huge class. What a varied population of the class, what a mixture of clothes and faces!.. There are twenty-four-year-olds, there are twelve-year-olds. The disciples split into many groups; the games are coming - original, like everything else in the school; some walk alone, some sleep, despite the noise, not only on the floor, but also on desks, above the heads of their comrades. There is a groan in the classroom from the voices.
Most of the people we meet in our essay will bear the nicknames that they were given in the partnership, for example: Mitakha, Elpakha, Tavlya, Six-Eared Thyme, Khor, Spit, Omega, Erra-Koksta, Katka etc., but we cannot do this with Semyonov: the students gave him a nickname that no censorship would allow - extremely indecent.
Semyonov was a good-looking boy, about sixteen years old. The son of a city priest, he behaves decently and is dressed cleanly; it is immediately clear that the school did not have time to completely erase from him the traces of home life. Semyonov feels that he urban, and the city comradeship looked contemptuously, called them women: they love mummy and mummy’s buns and gingerbreads, they don’t know how to fight, they are cowardly with the rod, they are powerless people and are under the patronage of their superiors. For the partnership, the rare city was an exception to this rule. Semenov’s face was strange - there was no way to decipher it: sad and at the same time cunning; fear of comrades mixed with hidden hatred. Now he is bored, and he, staggering from corner to corner, does not know how to amuse himself. He tries to keep himself away from his comrades, alone; but everyone formed parties, played different games, sang songs, talked; and he wanted to share his leisure time with someone. He approached those playing pebbles and said timidly:
- Brothers, accept me.
“The goose is not a friend to the pig,” they answered him.
– Don’t you want this? - said the other, placing his well-fed fig with a large dirty nail on his thumb under his very nose...
- Before it hits you in the neck, get out! - added the third.
Semyonov walked away sadly; but he was not particularly impressed by the words of his comrades. He definitely got used to it a long time ago and tolerated rough treatment.
- Gentlemen, piping hot!
- Goroblagodatsky.
Semyonov, together with the others, headed to the table, near which a game of pebbles was also going on between two overage people, and, moreover, Goroblagodatsky was the second strongman in the class, and Tavlya was the fourth. The faces surrounding the players grinned pleasantly, expecting an entertaining spectacle.
- Well! - said Tavlya.
Goroblagodatsky put his hand on the table, spreading his fingers on it. Tavlya placed five small stones on his hand in the most inconvenient way.
- Go ahead! - he said.
He threw up the stones and caught only three of them.
- In two! - those around him chimed in.
“Write letters to your parents, brother,” Tavlya added for his part.
Goroblagodatsky, without answering, put his left hand on the table. Tavlya threw a stone into the air, during its flight he managed to pinch Goroblagodatsky’s hand with terrible force and again caught the stone.
The crowd laughed.
The game of pebbles is probably known to everyone, but at school it had original additions: here it is tweezers, and moreover cold, lukewarm, hot tweezers And blazing hot, which went to the loser. The youngest, greenest one played without tweezers parish, and with the tweezers blazing hot, the reader is now present.
Meanwhile uterus(the main stone) was flying in the air, and Tavlya, with his huge hands, twisted the skin on his partner’s hand and pulled it with ferocity. After twenty tweezers the hand became very red, after fifty it turned blue.
- Do you like it? – Tavlya asks, looking into his eyes.
The enemy is silent.
- Do you like it?
Again no answer.
- Get him up, get him up! - people around say.
- Cry, then I’ll forgive you! - says Tavlya.
- Make sure you don’t have to cry yourself! – answered Goroblagodatsky. The healthy fellow endured severe pain in his arm, but only a gloomy look revealed what he was feeling.
- What, uncle, does it hurt?
Tavlya gave such a pinch that Goroblagodatsky involuntarily clenched his teeth. Everyone started laughing.
- Belly or death?
The strong pinch was repeated as the audience laughed. There was no gloating or hostile mockery in this laughter; comrades saw only the comic side in everything. Only Semyonov smiled in a special way; his pleasure was not like the pleasure of others, and indeed, he secretly repeated in his soul:
“That’s how it should be, that’s how it should be!”
It's reached a hundred...
- Well, to hell with you! – Tavlya finally concluded.
Goroblagodatsky deeply hated Tavlya and decided to play with him in the hope of remaining the winner and challenging him more than in the heat of the moment. Both of them were Sophomores. Each educational institution has its own legends. The aborigines of the school, forcibly imprisoned behind a book, formed themselves partnership, which became hostile to to the authorities and bequeathed to his descendants hatred of him. The management, for its part, also became hostile to the partnership and, in order to contain it within its borders school instructions(code of rules for behavior and teaching), invented an entire bureaucratic system. Knowing that any kingdom divided into one would not stand, it gave some comrades under the rule of others, wanting to introduce civil strife among them. These authorities were: senior bedrooms e – from the second district; senior duty officers- from the dormitories, managing a weekly queue throughout the school; censors - overseeing behavior in the classroom; auditor– listening to lessons in the morning and marking points in notates(special notebook for points); finally, the last power and perhaps the most terrible - seconder, a student who, on the orders of the teacher, flogged his comrades. All these authorities were chosen from sophomores. A student, having sat at his desk for two years, remained in the same class for another two years due to laziness and lack of success: this one was called a sophomore. It is very natural that such a student learned something from the teachers’ lessons and therefore knew more than a first-year student; This was taken into account by the authorities, and the calculation was correct: the second-year students, wanting to keep power in their hands, studied diligently, and most of them took first place, because it was not mediocrity, but laziness that made them second-year students. These are the foundations of the school bureaucracy, with the help of which the authorities wanted to destroy the partnership.
One nasty thing came out of all this. The second-year students had complete confidence from their superiors; a complaint against them was an insult to the caretaker and inspector; their despotism has developed to the highest degree, and nothing weakens the spirit of an educational institution more than the power of a friend over a friend; the censor, auditor, elders and seconds were given full opportunity to do whatever they wanted. The censor was something like a king in his kingdom, the auditors made up the court staff, and the second-year students made up the aristocracy. Moreover, the sophomores, having spent an extra two years, naturally became adults, and therefore physical strength was on their side. Finally, for the same reason, they knew the rituals and forms of their class, the character of the teachers, and the ability to deceive them. The newcomer, without the help of the sophomore, did not know how to take a step. The management, introducing such despotism, thought that it would introduce sneaking and denunciation into the partnership. That’s not what happened at all: during school sophomores Only such reptiles were born in the partnership, disgusting reptiles like Tavlya, and such wild characters as Goroblagodatsky. They hated each other because they used the power given to them for different purposes. Tavlya was also hated by other strongmen - Lashezin and Benelyavdov; Everyone hated and despised him.
Tavlya, as a second-year auditor, and as a strongman at that, was an intolerable bribe-taker, extorting money, buns, portions of beef, paper, and books from his subordinates. In addition to all this, Tavlya was a moneylender. Growth in the school, with its absurd pedagogical structure, was unscrupulous, arrogant and cruel. It has never been and never will be on such a scale. It’s not at all uncommon, but on the contrary – the norm, when ten kopecks, taken on one week period, paid fifteen kopecks, that is, for a generally accepted loan for a year, this will come out twenty-five times capital for capital. At the same time, it should be noted that if the debtor, according to the condition, did not pay the debt in a week, then after the next week he was obliged to bring twenty kopecks instead of fifteen. It is not known since when such growth became the custom of the bursa; Tavlya was not the only one who committed flayers; he was only more visible than others. The need for a loan has always existed. The censor or auditor demanded a bribe; not giving is a disaster, but there is no money, so the first-year student goes to his friend, but the moneylender, agrees to any percentage, just to get rid of the cruel future retaliation. A loan is usually guaranteed with a fist or the constant opportunity to spoil the debtor, because only sophomores took risks on growth. It should be noted that most of the burden in this regard fell on the townspeople, because they went home every Sunday and brought money with them; Therefore, everyone leaned on the townspeople, although even one of them was already considered a rich man who received a ten-kopeck piece for a week. Therefore, many were in unpayable debt and were often on the run. Tavli’s vulgar... rotten and depraved nature was fully revealed under the despotism of the second year. He lived as a gentleman and didn’t want to know anyone; Notes and vocabulary were written to him, from which he studied; he himself will not get up to drink water, but shouts: “Hey, Katka, drink!” The guards scratched his heels, or else he ordered them to take a penknife and scrape between the hairs in his head, clearing this filthy head of dandruff, which for some reason was called flesh; forced him to tell him fairy tales, but certainly scary ones, but if it wasn’t scary, it would blow his mind; and what else could Tavli serve as suppressors for him in case of deep depravity! With all this, he was cruel to those who served him. “Do you want it,” says Katka, eat hazel grouse?- and begins to pinch his subordinate’s hair. “Mama petted you on the head like that; wait, I’ll show you how daddy strokes”; after that, pointing your finger against wool(hair), he held it tightly from the beginning of the forehead to the end of the back of the head. “Have you seen Moscow?” - he asks the student and puts his wide, sweaty, nasty palms to the teacher’s ears, squeezes his head between them and then, lifting him into the air, says: “Do you see Moscow now? there she is.” He killed his comrades sled, that is, he will place the student on the seat of the desk face up, raise his legs and bend them towards his face. To spit in the face of a comrade, to hit him and to harm him in every possible way was the need of his soul. It was known to his comrades that he once took fledgling sparrow chicks from a nest, took them by their thin legs and tore the sparrows into pieces. A minority hated him; most feared and hated.
Goroblagodatsky had a strong but wild nature. Sophomore year affected him completely differently than Tavla. He was positive proof that the authorities had made a mistake in their calculations, introducing despotism of student over student and thereby wanting to introduce sneaking and denunciation into the partnership. Partnership found support in despotism itself. The second-year students became the keepers of legends and, having inherited hatred of their superiors, used the power given to them to spoil the same superiors. The censor, the auditor, the seconder took the side of the partnership, and at the head of them all, in the course that we are describing, stood Goroblagodatsky. Drunkenness, sniffing tobacco, autocratic absences from school, fights and noise, various absurd games - all this was prohibited by the authorities, and all this was violated by the camaraderie. The absurd hammering and Spartan punishments embittered the students, and they did not embitter anyone as much as Goroblagodatsky.
He was inveterate.
Inveterate is characterized by both internal and external make-up. He walks with the trump card on his hat, arms crossed, right shoulder forward, with a brave transition from foot to foot; his whole figure says: “Do you want me to punch you in the face? You think I won’t dare” - he rarely gives way to anyone, he will bypass the boss far just to avoid a bow. Goroblagodatsky supports the most indecent cause, if it relates to the harm of higher authorities, soaks wild things. He is a zealot of antiquity and tradition, stands for the freedom and freedom of the student and, if necessary, will not spare either his reputation or his title for this sacred cause. He is the main pillar of camaraderie. Students with such valor were usually called inveterate. But the inveterate ones were of different kinds: some of them were called good; these were foolish gentlemen, but they adhered to the same principles; others were called desperate: These were not stupid at all, but reckless lazy people; Goroblagodatsky was inveterate head: he walked first in doctrine and last in behavior. The head and the reckless one cleverly spoiled the authorities, but the good one stupidly: for example, he suddenly laughs in the teacher’s face and shows him the fig; they will whip up the good one, and after a while he will again commit some stupid insolence. But none of the inveterate ones was as salty to the authorities as Goroblagodatsky. If they smeared the housekeeper of the door intolerable weaklings(liquid buckwheat porridge), an unloved teacher had lice in his fur coat, the inspector's pig's legs were broken or its tail was torn off, the caretaker's cellar was robbed, a whole row of glass was knocked out at night - all these were the deeds of Goroblagodatsky, who boldly led the good and the bad into dirty tricks with his superiors. When it was necessary to organize a strike against the authorities, Goroblagodatsky was again the horse breeder: under his influence, the inveterate instigated the recently flogged and generally dissatisfied; these worries the whole class, the most humble and meek begin to make noise and threaten, the camaraderie is excited - and a Bursatsky scandal is brewing, which in the local language is called riot. Protestants know in advance that they will not achieve anything from their superiors: if, for example, they were fed slaughter, looks like carrion, then they are sure that even after the outrage they will eat the same carrion; but at least they will lose their anger, and then flog themselves the tenth.
Goroblagodatsky, like an inveterate one, often got it from his superiors; over the course of seven years he was flogged three hundred times and an infinite number of times subjected to other various punishments of the bursa; but, in any case, it must be said that he was still not beaten enough: for his various tricks he should have been punished at least five times more, but he was clever and cunning. In the bursa, the inveterate ones invented many ways to deceive the authorities. Particularly remarkable was the technique called - put it in a circular pattern. For example, they will take away A’s snuff box; A. says that she is not his, but V.; V. refers to D., D. to A.; A. again to B. - here’s a circular one: find whose snuffbox it is. Thirty people were brought into the circle, and then Solomon himself would not be able to figure out who should be flogged. During riots they always resorted to a circular approach. “Why did you shout during class?” - “So-and-so taught me.” - “Why are you doing this?” He refers to the other, and a commotion ensues in which the devil himself will break his leg. To defraud a partnership was considered a crime, to deceive the authorities was considered a feat and virtue. It happened that the wrong person was flogged, but the punished rarely revealed the culprit. The students recognized voluntary consciousness of wrongdoing as vulgarity and cowardice; on the contrary, whoever lied more and more brazenly to his superiors, shamelessly shut himself up, mixed things up masterfully, swore and swore to the utmost, stood highly in the eyes of the Bursat community. But in this respect too, Goroblagodatsky stood above everyone else; after long practice in scandals of various kinds, he acquired skill in the most resourceful denial. Others simply did not admit to the offense, but he, with self-confident insolence, looking straight into the boss’s eyes, snapped, and at that time such offended innocence was written on his face that an experienced physiognomist and psychologist would have been confused. He played the role of the innocent to such an extent that he considered himself innocent and never confessed under the vines. He despised everything that came from his superiors and valued nothing: therefore, rods, slaps, deprivation of lunch, kneeling, prostrations, etc., had absolutely no moral significance for him. The punishment was so shameful, devoid of meaning and full only of pain and screaming that Goroblagodatsky, who was flogged publicly in the dining room in front of five hundred people, not only did not hesitate to appear before his comrades immediately after the flogging, but even boasted to them. Complete shamelessness before the boss’s rod created a local saying: They don’t sow turnips, they only flog them. But what’s better: a second, a comrade who flogs his comrades, was respected and loved by them, because he also served in their forces; skilled in his craft, he tore his comrades hard, and the vines whistled through the air as the good head lay beneath them. Goroblagodatsky was flogged a lot; It happened to him that he even received up to a hundred blows, and therefore he endured the rods more easily than his comrades, as a result of which he treated any kind of punishment with absolute contempt. They placed him on his knees on the sloping board of the desk, on its protruding edge, forced him in two wolf fur coats to make up to two hundred prostrations, sentenced him to hold a heavy stone in his raised hand, without lowering it, for half an hour or more (there is nothing to say, the authorities were inventive), fried they hit him on the cheeks with a ruler, sprinkled salt on his cut body (believe that these are facts) - he endured everything in a Spartan manner: after the punishment his face became fierce and wild, and hatred for his superiors accumulated in his soul. We saw in Goroblagodatsky the tolerance of physical pain when Tavlya asked him in the heat of the moment.
But theft, gossip, damage to other people's things and all sorts of nasty things were not considered vices only in relation to the authorities, but in itself the partnership was honest, and from this side Goroblagodatsky appears in a new light. He did not take a single bribe, impartially and fairly noted points to the subordinates, did not show off over them, often defended the weak, loved to intervene in quarrels and, although dispotally, always resolved them fairly; he constantly salted moneylenders and bribe takers. His community loved and respected him.
We said that Goroblagodatsky deeply hated Tavlya for his vile nature; but he plays with him with pebbles: he wants to win and torment Tavlya.
Having finished the tweezers, Tavlya suggested slyly:
- Would you like some more?
Tavlya played stones very well and relied on himself.
- Let's! - Goroblagodatsky stubbornly answered.
The stones clicked again.
Semyonov watched the players from afar. Semenov was the third type of school, created by the same Bursat administration. The Partnership announced it today fiscal
The authorities understood that through their pedagogical structure of the bursa they had not achieved the goal, but instead of abandoning the school rules, they followed the path of absurdities further. A new official appeared - the fiscal, who secretly reported to his superiors everything that was happening in the partnership. It is understandable how much hatred the students had for the earpiece; and indeed, an enormous amount of meanness was required to decide on fiscalism. Capable and diligent students never misbehaved; they already occupied a prominent place on the list; secret informers have always been mediocre and mean-spirited cowards; for poor service, the authorities transferred them from class to class, like efficient students. But we said that the partnership itself was honest and therefore did not respect those students who, for a bribe to the boss, through family ties, through patronage, and even more so for fiscalism, did not take their place on the list. In addition, the students were quite rightly convinced that the earphone conveyed not only what actually happened in the partnership, but also slandered them, because the fiscal had to prove in every possible way his zeal to the authorities. But when he conveyed even the truth to the inspector or superintendent, even then he aroused hatred and anger in the class: for example, the children are going to have a drinking binge, tear off the tail of the economic pig, sneak away to a familiar washerwoman, or have some other fun, and suddenly the inspector, having been notified in advance, instead of having fun he tore them not to the stomach, but to death. True, in most cases, given the invincible tenacity of the students, denunciations did not lead to punishment, but the authorities still knew how to make useful use of denunciations. How to explain why the inspector punished two students differently for the same crime? This was mostly explained by the fact that the student, who had been severely punished, was denounced through fiscal officers. The authorities especially did not tolerate those individuals who hated and persecuted the headphones. All the sneaky information obtained through the headphones was entered into black book. This book was of great importance when transferring from class to class; then many were unexpectedly given wolf passports: These are the same titles, only with a note in them about bad behavior; Such titles were explained only by the black book.
Semyonov felt, but was afraid to believe him, that the partnership guessed that he was fiscal. He clearly noticed that no one wanted to say a word to him, and the first measure against the earphone was silence: the whole class, and sometimes the whole school, agreed not to say a word, except for abuse, with the fiscal. The situation is terrible: to live for whole weeks among living people and not hear a single friendly sound, to see repulsive contempt and disgust on all faces, to be quite sure that no one will help with anything, but on the contrary, will happily do evil... And indeed, the fiscal In the partnership he became outside the protection of any laws: he was slandered, subjected to punishment, his things were stolen and broken, his clothes and books were torn, he was beaten and tortured. Other behavior regarding the fiscal was considered dishonest.
But the authorities still in vain corrupted forever several dozen people, turning them into earphones: school life developed in its absurd forms, and the partnership did what it wanted.
Semenov, looking at those playing with pebbles, grinned maliciously.
- Piping hot! - Goroblagodatsky shouted.
There was something sinister in his voice. Tavlya chickened out and turned pale for a minute. There's a crowd around the table again. Again the stone flies in the air, but now Tavlin’s hand lies on the table; in vain he relied on himself: Goroblagodatsky took all eight horses in one go, and Tavlya was cut off on the fifth...
- There will be no end! - Goroblagodatsky said sternly.
Tavlya was apparently a coward. Those around did not laugh: they saw that things were getting serious, that Goroblagodatsky was taking revenge.
It reached a hundred. Tavli's hand became swollen from the hefty tweezers. He endured terrible pain, finally could not stand it and said pleadingly:
- Come on, that’s enough!..
“After two hundred, ask for mercy,” answered Goroblagodatsky.
- It hurts!..
- It will be even more painful.
On the one hundred and seventieth pinch, Tavli’s hand turned dark blue. He felt the crowbar all the way to his shoulder...
- Enough, Vanya... what will it be?
Instead of answering, Goroblagodatsky fiercely pinched Tavlya.
Tavlya knew that Goroblagodatsky’s word was inviolable, but he felt such severe pain throughout his entire arm that he could not help but ask:
- Leave it... you got your fill.
“Just say the word, I’ll pump you two hundred more!..” Goroblagodatsky gave the tweezer more than hotly. Tavlya couldn’t stand it: tears flowed down his cheeks.
Finally two hundred.
- Now ask for forgiveness!
No matter how painful it is for Tavla, it’s a shame to ask for forgiveness.
- Come on, leave it alone!
- Why did you mock me just now?
- So it’s a joke!
- So you dare, you animal, to joke with me?
He pinched Tavlya cruelly.
- Well, forgive me, Vanya...
Goroblagodatsky was definitely sorry to end the torment of Tavli, whom he hated. He gathered all his strength, and from the last pinch Tavli’s hand turned black.
- It will be from you. Are you full?.. - asked Goroblagodatsky.
As soon as Tavlya was freed, the fear in his soul was replaced by rage and anger.
- Scoundrel! - he said. - Listen, don’t hurt me! I'll hit you in the teeth!
“Here’s the mug, go,” said Goroblagodatsky, presenting his face...
Tavlya lost himself in rage and dealt a deafening blow to his enemy, but received an even bigger one in return. A fight ensued...
“This is how it should be, this is how it should be!..” - Semenov’s soul stirred...
Tavlya was so stunned with anger that, despite his torn hand, he did not yield to Goroblagodatsky, although he was stronger than him. Anger so intoxicated Tavlya and increased his strength that it was difficult to decide on whose side the victory remained... Goroblagodatsky also harbored this resentment in his soul.
After the fight, Goroblagodatsky went to the bucket to drink; on the road he came across Semenov. He slapped Semyonov and continued on his way as if nothing had happened. Semyonov looked at him angrily, but did not dare utter a word.
After standing for a while in the middle of the class, Semenov began wandering aimlessly from corner to corner between the desks, stopping here and there.
He watched how they played leapfrog,- the game is probably known to everyone, and therefore we will not describe it. Elsewhere two guys broke gingerbread cookies that is, standing with their backs to each other and clasping their hands near the elbows, they took turns throwing each other on their backs; this was done quickly, which is why one swinging figure was made up of two faces. At the stove, the seconder, nicknamed Supina, learned his skill: in his hands were excellent vines; he waved them and quilted stripes in the air that would lie on the body of his comrade. On the third desk they played stitches: this delicate game consists of closing one player's eyes, tilting his head and throwing clicks into his head, and he must guess who hit him; If you didn’t guess right, go back to bed; If he guessed right, he will be replaced by the one who was guessed right. Semyonov saw how his comrade was shot at the head with a whole charge of shrapnel and how he, getting up, grabbed his head with his hands.
“That’s how it should be!” – he repeated in his heart and went to the fifth desk.
There, one game was played with three leaves and another with socks: a famous card game in which the loser is hit on the nose with a deck of cards.
Semyonov moved to the seventh desk and admired how six wooed. These six, holding the desk with their hands, swayed back and forth.
On the next desk, Mitaha was doing Theotokos on high heels, that is, he sang “Worldwide Glory” in a good voice and clicked his fingers to the beat. Immediately, Nonsense (nickname) played the white hair, fingering his fat lips, which, slapping one another, according to local expression, were shaken. The third artist tried to pronounce as quickly as possible: “There is a shelf of half a container of peas under the ceiling,” “Don’t over-sex our sexton,” “Whey from yogurt.”
Finally Semyonov made his way to the wall. Here Omega and Six-Eared Thyme played spitting. Both tried to spit on the wall as high as possible. The game was on lubricant Six-Eared Thyme spat higher.
The deep interest of representatives of progressive social thought of the 60s in the problems of upbringing and education is one of the characteristic features of the era. One of the reasons that prompted Pomyalovsky to turn to the image of the bursa was the topicality and relevance of issues of upbringing and education in the 60s of the 19th century. The rotten system of serfdom revealed its ulcers here too. Issues of upbringing and education worried Pomyalovsky throughout his short creative life.
Pedagogical views of N.G. Pomyalovsky took shape under the influence of advanced theories of that time, developed in the works of N. A. Dobrolyubov, K. D. Ushinsky, N. I. Pirogov. A staunch opponent of the education system, which resorts to corporal punishment, kills the child’s initiative, fetters the development of his mental abilities and sets as its goal the education of an obedient slave, Pomyalovsky established himself already in the essay “Vukol”, where the pedagogical and journalistic emphasis, artistic the image alternated with the reasoning and reflections of the educator-teacher. In another story, “Andrei Fedorovich Chebanov” (1863), he criticizes the teaching method that raises little “cosmopolitans” who do not understand the character of their people, do not know their nature, language, and customs. In these works, the object of typification is children of the nobility. However, in “Essays on the Bursa” the problem of upbringing and education was solved together with the problem of the position and life fate of the commoner; criticism of the bursa grew into denunciation of the entire social system of that time.
The material for describing the bursa in Pomyalovsky’s “Essays...” was the life and character of the Alexander Nevsky parish and theological school, where the writer studied from 1843 to 1851.
The horrors described by Pomyalovsky were not exceptional phenomena. They took place not in the distant wilderness, not on the outskirts of Russia, but in the capital, in the outwardly brilliant and decorous imperial Petersburg. In the first half of the 19th century, religious schools were one of the most widespread educational institutions. But the same morals, the same system - sometimes only in a slightly more beautiful form - reigned in cadet corps, closed institutes and even in gymnasiums.
The program of theological schools was very meager. Sacred history, church regulations, church music singing, and from general education subjects - only the basics of the Russian language and arithmetic. The information on geography and history provided for by the program was the most insignificant: “the beginnings of history and geography, especially sacred and church history.” Knowledge of living foreign languages was considered unnecessary, but cramming Latin and Greek took a lot of effort. But even within this meager program, teachers were mostly limited to asking them to memorize “from now to now” from an absurd archaic textbook. The ignorance of Bursat teachers was often anecdotal; They themselves sometimes did not know basic things, were unable to explain anything to the students, and did not want to bother themselves with explanations.
Pointless mechanical rote learning reigned supreme in almost all theological schools of the Russian Empire. Conscious assimilation was considered not only an unnecessary luxury, but even freethinking. And this led to the fact that “a student, entering school from under his parents’ roof, soon felt that something new was happening to him, something he had never experienced, as if nets were being lowered before his eyes. One after another, in an endless series, and prevents you from seeing objects clearly; that his head stopped acting inquisitively and boldly and became like some kind of drug in which you just squeeze a spring - and then your mouth opens and begins to throw out words, and in words - amazing! “there is no thought, as it happened before” - this is what Pomyalovsky wrote in “Essays on Bursa”.
The need for corporal punishment was not in doubt; the rod and merciless beatings were the main methods there of influencing students and instilling in them the rules of good behavior, morality and religion. Although in “Winter Evening in Bursa” there was not yet that striking picture of general and everyday flogging, it appeared in all its sophistication in “Bursatsky Types”. Spanking was a daily occurrence and a nightmare for the bursa. And not her alone - home, school, national education. Punishment, especially punishment with rods, was almost a universal means of Russian pedagogy. “Let us remember that N. Pirogov energetically began to eradicate such a means in 1858. A year later, he again, already as a trustee of the Kyiv educational district, tried to abolish it. It didn't work out. Domestic teachers did not imagine such a revolutionary reform: “To deny that even with a rod one can act without harm and even successfully would mean to reject the fact.” Pirogov was forced to agree not with the abolition, but with the limitation of corporal punishment. Extremely sensitive to all kinds of compromises, N. Dobrolyubov immediately responded with the article “All-Russian illusions destroyed by rods.” He called the question “to hit or not to hit” one of the hottest issues in modern literature. In Pirogov’s compromise, Dobrolyubov grasped the future of the fate of the reforms of that time - they are illusory, supporters of the traditional way of life are gaining the upper hand, compromises from within will undermine any reform in Russia.
The clergy avoided solving the problem: “... the question of the use or non-use of corporal punishment in the state stands apart from Christianity,” Metropolitan Philaret wrote then. - If the state can refuse this kind of punishment, finding the milder forms of it sufficient: Christianity will approve of this meekness. If the state finds it inevitable in some cases to use corporal punishment: Christianity will not condemn this severity, as long as the punishment is fair and not excessive.” So “they beat babies, whistled rods in religious and secular educational institutions, in the homes of Orthodox Christians.” (47.46-47).
There were too many at that time who agreed to consider physical punishment as one of the educational measures and busily discussed its relative place in the general pedagogical system. The bosses and teachers could not arouse in their students anything other than burning self-hatred. Before their eyes, the students behaved relatively calmly, but secretly “shit” with pleasure in response to cruel punishments and persecution.
Another main problem of the Bursa Essays is the problem of personality. Recently, the problem of man, personality, individuality, etc. has become the “subject of research” in almost all sections of philosophy and social and humanitarian knowledge. (34, 5)
As noted by Professor V.M. Golovko “For literary studies, a general philosophical understanding of such categories as “man”, “personality”, “individuality” is of methodological importance. This helps to differentiate the object of study (artistic and philosophical concept of man, genre “concept of man” or “concept of personality”, concept of man and reality as the basis of the creative method, man in the artistic world of the writer, characterology and the problem of determination, literary type, hero, type of individuality etc.), to comprehend the specifics of the artistic expression of the relationships between the “generic”, “species” and the individual in a person.” (24, 49)
To analyze the concept of personality in the work of a writer or literature of a certain period, works of a wide variety of genres can be used (although “personality” is an artistic category, first of all, of a novel genre “event”): in any work one or another measure of expression of a person’s personal characteristics is revealed, in In all genres, the social nature of man is considered in certain aspects.
Pomyalovsky, revealing the problems of personality, the problem of the formation of a child, harshly shows that in such conditions, students are unlikely to turn out to be a real person.
When creating the characters of the heroes, it is crucial for Pomyalovsky to clarify the influence of the social environment on the personality and fate of a person. In those cases when a writer sets as his goal to show the dialectic of character development, he embarks on an artistic experiment, consciously and emphatically changing external circumstances, exploring the effect of a sharply different environment on a person and then recording the final result. So, for example, the essay “Vukol” depicts the fate of an ugly, but intelligent and naturally kind boy who grew up under happy circumstances: kind parents, a wealthy family. Life under the wing of a kind mother had its effect on Vukol, the good inclinations of his nature developed: intelligence, kindness. Soon, under the influence of changed circumstances, the boy's character changes. Vukol becomes unsociable and only alone with himself does he live like a child. Finally, the rods have a stunning effect on him: “from a submissive, quiet, downtrodden child, he suddenly became wild and vindictive.”
Determining the role of the external environment in the fate of the heroes, Pomyalovsky gradually rises to a new, higher level of artistic analysis, compared to his first essays “Vukol” and “Danilushka”. The environment in them was outlined, first of all, as a specific environment, which was typical of the “natural school” of the 40s. In his seminar note “On the laws of thinking and the influence of the environment on human development,” Pomyalovsky wrote: “It is difficult to explain the full force and gradual influence of external circumstances on a person’s head.” In “Essays on the Bursa,” depicting children and young men corrupted by the Bursa science and education system, Pomyalovsky diverted the blame from both students and teachers, indicating a specific external source, the root cause of all evils - typical circumstances rooted in the social structure. Pomyalovsky came to an understanding of this already in the story “Dolbnya,” which is one of the initial sketches of “Sketches of the Bursa”: “But it’s not the student, it’s not he who is to blame for all this dirty trick, all the phenomena of his life necessarily follow from the conditions under which he grows and develops. And it’s not the teachers who are to blame - they themselves were hit in the dark with a hammer that was heavy on healthy thought, forging their brains like a piece of iron... Routine is to blame, time and circumstances are to blame, society itself is to blame for allowing its children to be raised according to the hammering system.”
Hatred of the authorities and all-consuming boredom, the absence of any rational activity gave rise to that desperate mischief that M. Gorky so subtly characterized in his story “In People”: “I read Pomyalovsky’s Bursa and am also surprised: it is strangely similar to the life of an icon-painting workshop; I know so well the state of boredom boiling over into cruel mischief.” In such an atmosphere they were jammed, naturally. Positive qualities and abilities of children, which absolutely no one was interested in. All disputes were resolved with a fist and a punch. Usury and theft, wild, stupid entertainment, cynicism and cruelty flourished in Bursa.
The brutal and senseless punishments to which the student was subjected forced him to seek salvation (they hid in latrines, in the woodshed, ran away into the forest or home). Often they were “saved” in the hospital, for which purpose they caught a cold.
They developed scabies on their bodies, looked at the sun to get night blindness, pricked their necks with pins, etc.
Usury was supported in Bursa by bribery. Which, in turn, was generated by the “witty” invention of the authorities, who created an entire system of control over the younger ones from older students. One of these senior students, the censor, was supposed to oversee the behavior of the class; others, auditors, listened and gave the students points, on the basis of which the teacher gave proper admonitions; the third, the seconds, were the instruments of these admonitions: they were in charge of the rods, and they themselves, on the orders of the teacher, flogged their lazy or playful comrades.
These dignitaries went about their work methodically and with love. All these rulers - censors, auditors and seconds - relied on the same food as other students: they all starved, but they were given power over the masses and thanks to it various offerings, bribes, and payoffs.
“Tavlya, as a second-year auditor, and as a strongman at that, was an intolerable bribe-taker, extorting money, buns, portions of beef, paper, and books from his subordinates. In addition to all this, Tavlya was a moneylender... The need for a loan has always existed. The censor or auditor demanded a bribe; not giving is a disaster, but there is no money; so he goes, he agrees in advance to any percentage, just to get rid of the cruel future retaliation. The loan is usually guaranteed with a fist or the ever-present opportunity to spoil the debtor, because only sophomores risked growth.” (8, 246-247) (“Winter evening in Bursa”).
In the description of the “school bureaucracy” with its power of the strong over the weak, despotic violence, slander, bribery, theft by servants of the already pitiful burlatsky treasury, a copy of the bureaucratic system of tsarist Russia is visible.
In the minds of student Karas, who is experiencing the oppression of the school, the idea begins to ripen that it is bad not only in the school, but in modern reality in general. And like Dobrolyubov, who managed to see the entire dark kingdom of Russia behind the facts and situations from the life of the “dark kingdom” of wild and wild boars, Pomyalovsky, who reproduces with factual accuracy the life and customs of the Bursa, had every reason to say with bitterness: “In life, the same Bursa.”
This defining feature of typification in the “Essays on Bursa” was clear to the representative of revolutionary-democratic criticism D.I. Pisarev, who saw in the Bursa depicted by Pomyalovsky not only a typical Russian school, but also phenomena of reality that are easily comparable with other spheres of public life, in particular with prison. In his article “Dead and Perishing,” the critic noted: “... calling Bursa a Russian school does not at all mean to offend the Russian school. When considering the internal structure of the bursa, we should not at all think that we are dealing with some exceptional phenomenon, with some especially dark and stuffy corner of our life, with some last refuge of dirt and darkness. Nothing happened. Bursa is one of the very many and, moreover, one of the most innocent manifestations of our widespread and comprehensive poverty and wretchedness.”(6, 88-89)
The angle from which the theological school is viewed in “Essays on the Bursa” also determines the pathos of Pomyalovsky’s denial of the Bursa. This reflected the active democratism of the advanced commoners, whose position was diametrically opposed to the liberal one. The critic of liberal orientation P. Annenkov wrote about the “bloody pages” of Pomyalovsky’s work, about the paintings “unbearably gloomy” and at the same time “extremely lively.” However, he resolutely did not recognize the starting position from which the denunciation of the theological school was carried out in the “Essays of the Bursa”. P. Annenkov wrote that there are no healthy principles in Pomyalovsky’s works, and since they are not there, then there is no point in thinking about reforms. But Pomyalovsky does not even think about improving, updating, or reforming the bursa. He rejects it outright, due to the complete absurdity of that “science”, the breeding ground of which is the bursa. He writes in the essay “Grooms of the Bursa”: “If Lobov, Dolbezhin, Batka and Krasnov did not use unnatural and terrible teaching measures, then, I assure you, a rare student would begin to study, because science in the bursa is difficult and absurd. Lobov, Dolbezhin, Old Man and Krasnov inevitably resorted to moral and physical violence. This means that the whole reason is mainly not in the teachers and not in the students, but in the students’ science, so that it disappears from this world.”
The author's initial position in assessing the bursa determines the features of the depiction of this social phenomenon and the basic principle in creating typical characters of both teachers and students. All of them, ultimately, are victims of church science and the Bursat pedagogical system.
Unlike V. Krestovsky, who wrote about the bursa teachers - “noble mentors” (“Baritone”), Pomyalovsky does not restrain himself and gives sharply critical assessments of the bursa teachers.
Old Man is truly terrible with his “bloodthirstiness” and “brutal instincts; this virtuoso is a torturer of children, merciless and unlimited in his fanaticism.
He “used to put you on your knees for a whole year, for a whole third, for a month,... forced you to bow to the stove, kiss the rods, sec..., in one word - an artist in his field, but under a drunken hand.” Matching him is Lobov, who appears in class only “with a long birch whip,” and who has come up with a super-punishment—flogging “in the air.” These are people in whom the bursa has eradicated everything human, turning them into bloodthirsty executioners.
However, the author also finds positive features in the images of Dolbezhin, Krasnov, and Razumnikov. So, for example, Dolbezhin, for all his cynicism and wild rudeness, “was honest”, “did not take bribes from his parents.” Teacher Krasnov is “a handsome man, with a sympathetic face, by nature a kind and delicate person.” But none of them thought of driving away the rod - the only way to force the student to study, a necessary surrogate for teaching” in the student body.
Teachers, just like students, are victims of the school. And besides, they themselves went through this school. Pomyalovsky manages to compare the characters of teachers with the characters of students. So “Lobov bordered on Tavla in character, Dolbezhin bordered on Goroblagodatsky.” Dolbezhin resembled the so-called “inveterate students; he, like the camaraderie, hated “urban people.” Drawing the universal method of the teacher Lobov, the author asks: “What is this teacher in his youth - unfinished or crossed?”
In “Essays...” Pomyalovsky continues the explanation he began in “Meshchansky Happiness” of “the relationship of the plebeian to the nobility.” The author enters into polemics with noble writers who depicted the childhood years of their heroes in rosy colors. So, for example, L. N. Tolstoy in “Childhood”, S. T. Aksakov in “Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson” describe childhood in bright, joyful colors; The child’s worries and unpleasant experiences are depicted primarily as a consequence of more or less accidental misunderstandings and are absorbed in the atmosphere of childish purity, carelessness and spontaneity. “You, golden time of childhood happiness, the memory of which so sweetly and sadly excites the soul of an old man! Happy is the one who had it, who has something to remember!” - Aksakov exclaims in “Memoirs”, completing his autobiographical trilogy.
A kind of childhood of Pomyalovsky is “Essays on the Bursa”. There is no hint of such bright colors and moods in them. With the pages of “Essays on Bursa” stained with children’s blood, Pomyalovsky shows what suffering befalls a child from a mixed class environment. Entering into polemics with other authors, Pomyalovsky writes: “Everyone is sure that childhood is the happiest, most innocent, most joyful period of life, but this is a lie: given the terrifying system of our education, headed by black teachers deprived of childbearing, this the most dangerous period in which it is easy to become corrupted and perish forever.” (“Runners and Saved Bursas”).
The young heroes of L. Tolstoy and S. Aksakov are protected from soul-traumatic experiences; their thoughts are focused around the idea of moral self-improvement (L. Tolstoy). They serenely contemplate nature, all the benefits that civilization can decorate a child’s childhood are available to them.
Pomyalovsky’s young heroes experience such deep and serious suffering “that a person cannot forgive even when he becomes an adult.” The author reveals this in the most detail and with the greatest psychological depth using the example of Karas, who at school “happened to be spanked four times in one day (during the course of his school life, certainly four hundred times).” Moral and physical suffering bring this student to complete hopelessness and deep despair. And only extraordinary willpower and the ability to resist save him from moral ugliness. The image of Noodles is very expressive - an example of how the talents of commoners perish in difficult conditions. This ugly student, with a spiritual face, had great talent for music. “His always, most sincere dream was to have his own violin and learn to play it, but the dream remained a dream: now he is somewhere a shepherd of monastery cows and, they say, plays the horn very well.” (“Runners and Saved Bursas”).
Having told about the sad adventures of one student, Pomyalovsky ironically: “That’s how infancy is the best time of our life!” These words echo similar ironic notes in N. Nekrasov’s poem “Motherland” (1846):
Memories of the days of youth - famous
Under the great name of luxurious and wonderful, -
Filling my chest with both anger and melancholy,
They pass in front of me in their entirety...
The gallery of Bursak types in Pomyalovsky’s work is rich and varied, and at the same time, all Bursaks are marked by a single fate: most of them, as D.I. noted. Pisarev, doomed to certain death, and not only the thief Aksyutka, who was already a complete man in the bursa, but also Vanya Goroblagodatsky, who had many good qualities. Endowed with great physical strength (and in the bursa it was valued above all else, because with it, first of all, the bursak asserted himself), sometimes he used it not in the best possible way (for example, in a competition with Tavlya, when force was used for retaliatory cruelty), but on his own Goroblagodatsky was an extraordinary person, an “impeccably honest” man, he studied well, and one can hope that he will emerge from the bursa as a decent man and will remain so, for “whoever was not corrupted by the bursa in his youth is unlikely to be corrupted by subsequent life” (6, 127 ). And yet, Pisarev predicted a dramatic fate for him, since the course did not attract him to life, did not carve in him a spark of love for any occupation, and therefore this passionate nature, devoid of an active life, will inevitably perish. And the worst thing is that people like Goroblagodatsky die because they remain human. Bursa did not give its students a real basis for life, developed anger in them, and deprived them of support for positive principles.
Bursa is just one of the most disgusting manifestations of autocratic-church obscurantism and cruelty. Pomyalovsky, like other revolutionary-democratic writers, showing the dark sides of Russian reality, not isolating them from the entire social system, but, on the contrary, in close connection with it, tries in his “Essays on the Bursa” to attract public attention to the problems of education and upbringing in educational institutions. institutions in Russia, in particular in Bursa. In addition, he showed the problem of “unequal childhood conditions for the children of a commoner in comparison with the childhood of a master.” The solution to these problems cannot be achieved without a radical change in the social system.
Thus, N.G. Pomyalovsky belongs to the group of democratic writers who came to literature in the late 50s and early 60s. It is close to it both in the nature of the problematic being developed, the object of typification itself, and in the direction of the search for visual means. But in his vision of the world, his method of reflecting it, and the results of his writing, Pomyalovsky is original. It is not without reason that, singling out Pomyalovsky from the galaxy of democratic writers of this period, M. Gorky considered him a talented and stern realist.
An analysis of the problems of the studied “Essays on Bursa” showed that the author poses several pressing problems. These are, firstly, personality and interpersonal relationships; secondly, the problem of the influence of the environment on the development of the child and, finally, the problem of training and upbringing. The reflection of these problems in their work was made from the position of a democratic writer of the 60s of the 19th century, i.e. harsh, truthful, realistic.
