The theme of family and family relationships has been one of the main themes in the works of Russian writers since ancient times and until the end of the twentieth century. Tolstoy shows three types of family: the Oblonskys, the Levins and the Karenins. The paths to family "happiness" or "unhappiness" are different. It all depends on what a man and a woman invest in building their family, what is their measure of responsibility to themselves and to each other. According to Leo Tolstoy, family happiness arises only when a husband and wife are able to become each other's support and support. Tolstoy L. N., as an outstanding psychologist who studied the human soul, understood that the family is the basis of the foundations, so in his works he constantly emphasized the importance of this social institution.
the theme of the family, L. N. Tolstoy, the novel " Anna Karenina, relationships
In the traditions of Russian literature, both in modern prose and in the prose of the X1X century, the theme of the family acts as the moral basis of life and everyday life. Many works of classical literature of the XIX century in an open or veiled form permeates the "family thought". One of them is the novel by Leo Tolstoy "Anna Karenina", in which there are no historical figures or world events.
The author does not give lyrical, journalistic or philosophical digressions in the work. But the discussions caused by the novel after its publication were not limited to purely literary interests due to the fact that the main theme of the work was the theme of family discord.
After completing the work on the novel, L. N. Tolstoy admitted that " the society modern to Anna Karenina is close and understandable to him, in this regard, it was easier for the writer to delve into the feelings and thoughts of the novel's contemporaries, which is of significant importance in the artistic depiction of the existing reality. This is the "all-day" content of the novel "from modern life" [8].
The success of" Anna Karenina " turned out to be huge, it was read in all circles of educated Russian and foreign society. This fact is explained by the central line of the plot. Heroes in search of the meaning of life, its awareness and acceptance. To express the author's thoughts, all significant characters are in the state of this search: characters who lead a thoughtless and desperate existence, characters who are not capable of self-awareness, of passing the life path, of spiritual purification.
What is the reason for the tragedy in the novel? There are many points of view on this score: there are those who believe that the whole thing is in the social conditions of that time, namely, the legal and social complexity of divorce and the public condemnation of adultery; others say that the tragedy is that Anna did not meet a single person who would support her.
Tolstoy L. N. thinks about the problems of family and marriage, especially in 1870, especially the reality that surrounded him contributed to this. In 1872, the unofficial wife of the landowner Bibikov, Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, threw herself under the train. The Tolstoy family knew the deceased well. It is her fate that is reflected in"Anna Karenina".
The idea of the novel is the image of a married woman from high society who ruined herself. Tolstoy wanted to make this woman compassionate, not guilty. The prototype of Karenina was Pushkin's eldest daughter Maria Hartung, who did not accept Tolstoy's courtship and did not throw herself under the wheels.
The novel, on which Tolstoy worked for 4 years, begins with the thought "All happy families are similar to each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" [6, p. 5]. These words are the "psychological key" to the work: unhappy families are in the center of attention. Then the phrase "Everything is mixed up in the Oblonsky house" [6, p. 5]. The novel begins with the collapse of the family, the destruction of human relations.
The paths to family "happiness" or "unhappiness" are different. It all depends
on what a man and a woman invest in building their family, what is their measure of responsibility to themselves and to each other. It is not by chance
that such an ethical category as "conscience" and "shame" becomes of great importance in the novel [3, p. 30].
The main problem of the work is revealed by the example of several family couples: Anna-Alexey Karenin, Dolly-Steve Oblonsky, Kitty-Konstantin Levin. Tolstoy shows three types of family: the Oblonskys, the Levins and the Karenins.
The Oblonsky family. The novel begins with a conflict in this family. Stiva cheated on Dolly with a young governess. Dolly can't forgive him. Anna intervened, she manages to restore the fragile peace in the Oblonsky family [3, p. 31]. Tolstoy considers this family unhappy. Dolly has 6 children, and they are constantly experiencing difficult situations.
Stiva is a kind, sociable person, loves life very much, but the role of a family man is not for him. He does not know how to manage money, because of this, his wife and children are always in need. Stiva is prone to hobbies with other women. Dolly is very loyal. She dreams of taking revenge on her husband and comes up with an image of a man in love with her, but she is always busy with the house and children. She is offended by her husband for the fact that he lives cheerfully, and she grew old early because of children and family life. The spouses quarrel and reconcile, they feel happy. All this is thanks to Dolly: she forgave the betrayal, constantly closes her eyes to her husband's lifestyle, is insightful, kind.
At the wedding of Kitty and Levina, she remembers her love for her husband. After a visit to Anna and Vronsky, Dolly reviews a lot for herself: using Anna's example, she sees that happiness is not in money, not in clothes, not in having free time and not in how much her husband expresses his love. Anna has all this, but she is unhappy and full of fears. She thinks with horror about the only child of Anna and Vronsky (the girl Anya), and is glad that she has six of them. This family is not perfect, but they are real people who together overcome obstacles, misunderstandings, negative sides of each other. They know how to forgive, ask for forgiveness and love, raise children and build a life together.
The Oblonskys ' world is a patriarchal Moscow. The Oblonsky family bears the imprint of a traditional Russian family [3, p. 31].
The Levin family. Levin is a landowner, lives in the village, runs a large and complex farm. The ancestral home "was Levin's whole world." He speaks with pride about the patriotism and aristocracy of his ancestors. The period of the ruin of the "noble nests" is coming, Levin understands the inevitability of this system." He is trying to understand the mystery of new social relations and his place in life. Levin is a dreamer, soberly looks at life and fights for his happiness, maintaining mental balance, is close to nature (he is happy when he hears the rustle of dry leaves and sees how the grass grows under them), its natural laws, sees this as the key to his happiness and family well-being.
The marriage with Kitty is happy, they understand each other, but Levin's spiritual needs are beyond the family. The further development of Russia is important for him. The ideal is a large and friendly peasant family that cares about everything. Levin is looking for the truth of life. The description of Levin's life forms one of the plot lines in the novel, but does not contradict the general idea and composition.
Anna's spiritual torments and Levin's search for truth are interrelated aspects of life in the post – reform era, showing the crisis in the destinies of people and ways to overcome it. Levin can be called a portrait of Tolstoy. The writer invested in Levin his views, manners, a tendency to rebel against generally recognized authorities, sincerity, a negative attitude towards the zemstvo and the court, a passion for farming, relations with peasants, and disillusionment with science. Like Tolstoy, Levin lives in the country, not in the city.
Researchers call Levin's portrait a photograph of Tolstoy's 70s, because only one period of Tolstoy's life was reflected in Levin's experiences. The main thing that distinguishes Tolstoy and Levin is creativity. Instead of creativity, Levin writes an article about workers, it reflects Tolstoy's passion for agriculture, which has already passed during the writing of "Anna Karenina".
The Karenin family. Alexey Alexandrovich Karenin is Anna's husband, a high-ranking statesman, influential in secular society. He is respected for his honesty, decency, and prudence. He is hardworking, purposeful and orderly in his affairs and feelings, lives "on schedule". Work takes up all his time, sometimes he treats his wife and son disdainfully, hides his true feelings. Alexey Alexandrovich loves his family and values it. When Karenin finds out about the connection between Anna and Vronsky, his weakness is revealed – his inability to show his feelings. It depends on generally accepted norms. He does not fight for his love, tries to find a reasonable solution instead of increasing his tenderness for his wife, closes himself in work. Karenin decided to leave everything as it is, but constantly reminds Anna about decency. The family of Anna and Karenin is a European type of family [3, p. 31]. He forgives her and selflessly loves when Anna is in a serious condition after giving birth to her daughter, sincerely cares about her, is ready to raise the daughter of Anna and Vronsky. Anna comes to her senses and leaves him again, he again weakens, although by nature a fighter.
Vronsky, on the contrary, shows character and determination. At the end of the novel, it turns out that Karenin is still a weak person hiding behind a uniform. After Anna's death, his career stops, there is also stagnation in household affairs, until Countess Lidia Ivanovna took up them. He is still a wingman, begins to attend a secret religious circle. After Anna's death and Vronsky's departure, she brings up their daughter.
It should be noted that Anna did not marry Alexey Alexandrovich out of love, and he himself did not have strong feelings for his wife, as well as for everyone around him. Only duty, service, and decency cared about Karenin, and his wife aspired to love. At first, all the tenderness was concentrated in her son Seryozha, and then Alexey Vronsky appeared in her life, and the heroine could not resist passion. Anna's family collapses like a house of cards when love comes to her, turning into passion [3, p.31].
Anna and Vronsky converge, but the family does not work out, since they both do not have a developed family instinct, which means that they are not able to experience family happiness, which, according to Leo Tolstoy's deep conviction, occurs only when a husband and wife are able to become support and support for each other. Tragic is the finale of an unhappy love [1, p. 155], doomed to suffering from the very beginning [3, p. 30-31]. The collapse of the traditional foundations of the family institute was one of the first in Russian literature established by L. N. Tolstoy. Anna challenged society, and society rejected her, as it was not capable of adopting a style of behavior leading to the collapse of the family. If subjectively Anna's act can be explained by the state of falling in love, then objectively, with the help of her own actions, she undermined the institution of the family.
The novel features two storylines-Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin.
The first is an unhappy path, the second is a happy one. Tolstoy showed the crisis of [5, p. 360], an old family based on public morality. He contrasts artificial family life with natural relationships.
The author tried to outline ways out of the crisis.
The first way. Anna Karenina deliberately goes to break with her husband, and therefore with the legalized norms of morality in the noble society. The reason is the awakening of a sense of personality and true love. This is a tragedy of the individual and society. Anna defends her right to life, love, happiness without secular shackles. The death of Anna is a lesson of Tolstoy-the teacher. According to the writer, family is the main thing in a person's life. Anna abandoned her husband and child, sacrificed family ties for love. This is her strength and at the same time her sin. Tolstoy believed that it could not have happened to her otherwise. Suicide is an impulse to which she gave herself after a quarrel with Vronsky, a fatal accident.
On the other hand, the motive of retribution. She wants to punish him. The last words to Vronsky: "You will repent of this" [7, p. 333]. Another motive of remorse: Anna sees death as the only way out for Alexey Alexandrovich, Seryozha and for her. At the moment of these thoughts, a candle goes out in the room (Symbol! Love has gone out). And Anna herself is like a burnt-out candle, which no longer has a basis to continue burning and living. Before her death, she was tormented by nightmares about "a dirty ugly peasant in a cap who is doing something over iron" [7, p. 349].
Internally, without realizing it yet, Anna was ready for death. She said to Kitty: "I have come to say goodbye to you" [7, p. 339]. Dolly similarly: "So goodbye, Dolly" [7, p. 340]. Anna rethinks her relationship with Vronsky. The thoughts addressed to the cheerful company "You will not leave yourself" [7, p. 342, are addressed to her. She has nowhere to go, but she doesn't want to die either. She clings to life, but without a chance: she writes a note to Vronsky, but it does not reach her, goes to visit Dolly, but neither Dolly nor Kitty understand her, can not help. Anna tries to console herself with her love for Seryozha, but she blames herself for having exchanged her love for her son and was able to live without her. She was finished off by a note from Vronsky, written in a careless handwriting. "No, I will not let you torment yourself, "[7, p. 348] - she thought. The thought and memory of the man crushed at the station on the day of her first meeting with Vronsky prompted her to a decision. "There, in the very middle, and I will punish him and get rid of everyone and myself" [7, p. 348]. She crossed herself and rushed between the cars. Anna didn't want to die. She fell on her hands and tried to get up immediately, horrified by what she had done. But it was too late: "something huge, inexorable pushed her into the head" [7, p. 349]. It was fate. Anna felt the impossibility of fighting.
And again Tolstoy is a teacher: you can't resist punishment, you just had to ask for forgiveness. He describes Anna's death cruelly. It is important that even after death, Anna wants to live: "curly hair on the temples" [7, p. 339], "a charming face with a half-open rosy mouth", in "unclosed eyes begging for life, a terrible expression that reminds Vronsky of her words that he will repent" [4, p. 484].
The second way. Levin has everything like Tolstoy. The marriage of Kitty and Levin made him the happiest man, a family man, but his gap in relations with society did not smooth out. He perceives capitalism as a universal disaster, resists its onset. For him, the main thing is the economy. He lovingly fertilizes the land, grows crops. But the feeling that the question of changing the socio-economic structure of the whole country cannot be solved in this way leads Levin into contradictions. He compares his personal life with the life of the peasants and concludes that the solution of problems is based on the rapprochement of the ruling classes with the people. The truth is on the side of the people. Levin's spiritual quest is the path of Tolstoy's reflections on his own life 10 years after "War and Peace". These searches continue the line of Olenin ("Cossacks"), Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov, with the difference that Levin, unlike his predecessors, looks for the reasons for his own failures not in the absence of useful activities, but in the economic structure of society [2, p.101].
The heroes of the work from the point of view of realizing the meaning of life are divided into two groups. For some, it is the side of life that is important, which absorbs personal desires and needs; others, having passed through complex spiritual searches, come to "detachment", to renounce the individualistic and connect with the supra-individual, which is not realized by the characters of the novel as something concrete, but in the form of an aspiration will inspire Tolstoy's hero to continue his life path, giving it a sacred meaning.
The moral position about the meaning of the meaning of the life of the heroes of the novel by Leo Tolstoy, mainly personal, universal, individualism and the relationship of the "cathedral" principle is the ideology of the Slavic people and Westerners.
The problem of the meaning of life occupies an important place in the work of Leo Tolstoy. The evolutionary analysis of the hero of the novel "Anna Karenina" proves that this question plays an important role here – by organizing the ideological structure of the book as a whole and individual episodes of the work, it allows us to better understand the peculiar characteristics of the characters and restore the philosophical picture of the mood of that particular era drawn on it.
The novel "Anna Karenina" has a lot of literary evidence of how difficult it was to formulate the idea of choosing the path of cultural and historical development in Russia at that time, in an era of significant social changes. The writer, through his work "Anna Karenina", helped the reader to see the problems of current life and think about possible ways to solve and eliminate them. The author reacted very subtly and sensitively to the negative changes that occurred in the surrounding reality. Naturally, he could not pass by the changes that the family underwent in the era of the XIX century.
Tolstoy L. N. saw a crisis in the surrounding society, the separation of people. And only a family with its unity can resist external problems and help a person find the meaning of life. Therefore, the "family thought" [3, p. 30] occupies a central place in the novel "Anna Karenina".
The author sympathizes with Anna, but she destroyed the family, L. N. Tolstoy condemns this. The novel begins with a description of the Oblonsky family. The father of the family, Steve, Anna's brother, cheated on his wife Dolly with a governess. This man lives easily and cheerfully, justifies all his vices, treason for him is an inevitability, quite explicable by the cooling to his wife, who has become ugly from many births. Dolly is deeply offended by the current situation: she brings up the children, does the housework, surrounds everyone in the house with care. And the husband pays with black ingratitude. However, she had enough spiritual strength to save her family, and for this L. N. Tolstoy admires her.
Konstantin Levin is also caught up in spiritual searches. His thoughts echo those of Anna, he is even on the verge of suicide, but he has found meaning in serving people and society. This hero found happiness in the family as well. At first it seemed impossible: his beloved Kitty Shcherbatskaya, Dolly's sister, was in love with Vronsky, who left her, then the girl suffered, and only after worries and doubts did the heroes unite. At first, they quarreled, could not find understanding, Levin did not even love his son. However, the hero realized that the family contains all the most important things, he must and wants to protect them and love them. This understanding came to him in an episode with a thunderstorm, when Levin was afraid for his loved ones who were captured by the elements. He managed to understand the value and meaning of life, and his wife and son helped him. The life of Kitty and Konstantin is instructive for many couples who break up after the first quarrel, without even trying to find understanding.
The family of Kitty and Levin at Tolstoy serves as a symbol of the renewal of Russia. It is not by chance that the theme of a harmonious family completes the novel [3, p. 32].
Thus, we can conclude that the collapse of the traditional foundations of the family institution was one of the first in Russian literature established by L. N. Tolstoy. Anna challenged society, and society rejected her, as it was not capable of adopting a style of behavior leading to the collapse of the family. If subjectively Anna's act can be explained by the state of falling in love, then objectively, with the help of her own actions, she undermined the institution of the family.
Tolstoy L. N. is an outstanding psychologist who studied the human soul, who understood that the family is the basis of the foundations, therefore, in his works he constantly emphasized the importance of this social institution.
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