Social problems of Gorky's play “At the bottom. M. Gorky's play "At the bottom" in a summary Love triangle in the play at the bottom

Despite the fact that Maxim Gorky's play "" is already over a hundred years old, it continues to be staged in many theaters around the world. This work, which showed the life of people who have sunk to the bottom, has not lost its relevance in our time. Gorky showed us the daily life of the poorest stratum of the population in its usual expression.

The action of the play takes place in a rooming house, which sheltered people of different age categories, different professions. Many of them used to have another life, but now they are all at the bottom of this life.

Speaking about the social conflict of the play, it is worth noting that it is ambiguous and multifaceted. It is revealed in the confrontation between the inhabitants of the rooming house and its owners, and also manifests itself in the personal tragedy of each hero of the work and the reasons that made them sink to the bottom of life.

To understand the conflict between the inhabitants of the rooming house and its owners, it is necessary to understand what kind of people they were.

So, Mikhail Kostylev was the owner of the rooming house. He was a hypocritical and greedy person. On the one hand, he gave shelter to the needy, and on the other hand, he ripped off their last money for living.

His wife Vasilisa was also disgusted with the inhabitants of the rooming house. She was in love with Vaska Ash, and was constantly jealous of him for her sister Natalya. Over Natalia Vasilisa, together with her husband, were tormented with special zeal. Natalya, on the contrary, was a quiet girl and did not allow herself to argue with her sister and her husband.

In the relationship between two sisters, Gorky showed us how social status affects the relationship of two people, even though they were sisters.

Vaska Pepel was one of the inhabitants of the Kostylevo rooming house. He said to himself that since childhood he was called a thief. Therefore, all his life he did nothing more than steal. It should be noted that Vasilisa encouraged the occupation of Ash by buying stolen things from him.

An unenviable fate was another inhabitant of the rooming house - Anna. She was sick with a fatal disease and was living her last days. Her husband, a locksmith Kleshch, has been waiting for the death of his wife for a long time. She was a burden to him. He thought that after Anna's death he would be able to earn money and start a new life. But this was not destined to happen. Anna lived and endured, endured daily humiliation, beatings from her husband. There was no place for joy and happiness in her life. The girl no longer remembered when she ate and dressed to the full, something different from old rags.

The person who could not find an application for his knowledge and skills, and now found himself in a rooming house with its other inhabitants, was Satin. From an early age he worked on the telegraph, was fond of reading. But now he has become a beggar, not expecting anything from life. From the old days, he had only a few intricate words in a foreign language, which he liked to show off to the others.

Orphan Nastya was forced to sell her body in order to somehow make ends meet. She was a dreamer. Nastya was fond of love stories and believed that someday true love would overtake her. For her dreaminess and naivety, the girl endured daily ridicule from other inhabitants of the rooming house.

Another inhabitant of the rooming house was Bubnov. Here he found himself because he found out about the betrayal of his wife and, not finding a better option, went to the rooming house to Kostylev.

In my opinion, the most tragic fall to the bottom was the fall of the Baron. He was a former nobleman, held a high position. But now he is forced to spend time with those people whom he simply did not notice before. The baron often recalled his past "well-fed" years. From that life, he only had an arrogant manner of communicating with others.

The next inhabitant of the rooming house was a man of the scene, a man who bathed in applause, but who, succumbing to a bad habit, rolled down. The worst thing is that the Actor understands the cause of his suffering, but he cannot do anything about it.

Now all these once different people are equal in their lack of rights. They find themselves at the bottom of life and are forced to come to terms with their fate. These people have no future, they only have memories of a past life. All of them are united by one road - the road down into the abyss. Such a life destroyed all human feelings and qualities in the inhabitants of the rooming house and gave rise not only to social, but also to moral degradation.

A ray of light for the inhabitants of the rooming house is the old man Luka, who tried to "stir up" them, giving them hope. Unfortunately, it was already too late, no one could find the strength to climb up again. The actor commits suicide, Vaska Pepel was exiled to Siberia, the rest of the inhabitants of the rooming house suffered a bad fate.

Maxim Gorky in his play "At the Bottom" tried to show us the powerlessness of a person burdened with social problems, how important it is to be able to solve them in time in order to change your life.

Throughout his work, M. Gorky was interested in man, personality, the mysteries of his inner world. Human thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, strength and weakness - all this is reflected on the pages of M. Gorky's play "At the Bottom". Her characters are people of the beginning of the 20th century, the era of the collapse of the old world and the beginning of a new life. But they differ from the rest in that society has rejected them. These are outcasts, people of the “bottom”.

The place where Satin, Actor, Bubnov, Vaska Pepel and others live is scary and unsightly: “A basement that looks like a cave. The ceiling is heavy stone vaults, sooty, with crumbling plaster.” Why did the inhabitants of the rooming house find themselves at the “bottom” of life, what brought them here? The actor was killed by addiction to alcohol: “Earlier, when my body was not poisoned by alcohol, I, an old man, had a good memory ... And now ... it's over, brother! It's all over for me!

" Vaska Pepel came from a "thieves' dynasty" and he had no choice but to continue his father's work: "My path is marked for me! My parent spent all his life in prisons and ordered me too ... When I was little, I was already called a thief at that time, son of thieves ... ”. Bubnov, a former furrier, left the workshop because of his wife's infidelity and fear of her lover: “...

only there was a workshop for my wife ... and I stayed - as you can see! The baron, ruined, went to serve in the "state chamber", where he committed embezzlement.

Satin, one of the most colorful figures of the rooming house, is a telegraph operator in the past. He went to jail for killing a man who insulted his sister. Almost all the inhabitants of the “bottom” tend to blame not themselves, but external life circumstances for the fact that they find themselves in a distressed situation. I think that if these circumstances had turned out somehow differently, the overnight stays would still have suffered the same fate. This is confirmed by the phrase said by Bubnov: “Although, to tell the truth, I would drink the workshop away ...

I have a binge, you see...” Apparently, the catalyst for the fall of these people was the absence of some kind of moral core, without which there is and cannot be a person. As an example, we can cite the words of the Actor: “I drank my soul away, old man ... I, brother, died ... And why did I die? I didn't have faith...

I'm done..." The very first serious test for everyone ended in the collapse of his whole life. Meanwhile, the Baron could improve his affairs not by stealing public funds, but by investing the money he has in profitable business; Satin could teach a lesson to the abuser of his sister in another way; and for Vaska Pepel, would there really be few places on earth where no one knows anything about either his past or himself? And so it is possible to tell about many inhabitants of "bottom". Yes, they have no future, but in the past there was a chance not to get here, but they did not use it. Now they can only live with illusions and unrealizable hopes. The actor, Bubnov and the Baron live in memories of an irrevocable past, the prostitute Nastya indulges in dreams of great true love.

And at the same time, people, one more humiliated than the other, rejected by society, are endless disputes. The disputes are not so much about daily bread, although they live from hand to mouth, but about spiritual and moral problems. They are interested in such issues as freedom, work, equality, happiness, love, talent, law, pride, honesty, conscience, compassion, patience, pity, peace, death ... All this worries them in connection with an even more important problem : what is a man, why did he come to earth, what is the true meaning of his being?

Bubnov, Satina, Luka can generally be called the philosophers of the rooming house. All the heroes of the play, with the exception, perhaps, of Bubnov, reject the "bedroom" way of life, hope for a twist of fate that will bring them from the "bottom" to the surface. So, locksmith Kleshch says: “I am a working person ...

I've been working since I was little... Do you think I won't break out of here? I’ll get out, I’ll rip off my skin, and I’ll get out ... Here, wait, ”the wife will die ...” Chronic drunkard The actor hopes for a miraculous hospital with marble floors that will restore his strength, health, memory, talent and applause from the audience. The unfortunate sufferer Anna dreams of peace and bliss in the afterlife, where she will finally be rewarded for her patience and torment. Desperate Vaska Pepel kills the owner of the rooming house Kostylev, seeing in him the embodiment of vital evil.

His dream is to go to Siberia and start a new life there with his girlfriend. All these illusions are supported by the wanderer Luka. Luke has the skill of a preacher and comforter. Gorky portrays him as a doctor who considers all people to be terminally ill and sees his vocation in hiding this from them and alleviating their pain.

But life at every step refutes Luke's position. Sick Anna, to whom Luke promises divine retribution in heaven, says: “Well ... a little more ... I would like to live ... a little!

If there will be no flour ... here you can be patient ... you can!

” The actor, believing at first in his recovery from alcoholism, at the end of the play takes his own life. The true price of Luke's consolations is determined by Vaska Pepel: “You, brother, well done! You lie well...

Fairy tales are nice! Lie, nothing ... not enough, brother, pleasant in the world!” Luke is full of sincere pity for people, but he is unable to change anything, to help the inhabitants of the rooming house to live a different life. Satin, in his famous monologue, rejects such an attitude as humiliating, implying some kind of wretchedness and inconsistency of those to whom this pity is directed: “You must respect a person! Do not regret, do not humiliate him with pity, you must respect!

” I think that these words express the position of the writer himself: “Man! .. It sounds ... proud!” What is the further fate of the inhabitants of the rooming house?

It's not hard to imagine her. Let's say, Klesh. At the beginning of the play, he is still trying to get out of the “bottom” and live a normal life.

It seems to him that “here the wife dies”, and everything will magically change for the better. But after the death of Anna, Kleshch, left without money and tools, gloomily sings along with others: “I won’t run away anyway.” And indeed, he will not run away, like all the other inhabitants of the rooming house. What are the ways of saving the people of the “bottom” and do they exist at all? About ten or fifteen years ago, schoolchildren wrote that the only way out was the socialist reorganization of life, the destruction of the existing system.

In my opinion, the real way out of the situation is outlined in Sateen's speech about the truth. People will be able to rise from the "bottom" only when they learn to respect themselves, gain self-esteem, become worthy of the title of Human. A person for Gorky is an honorary name, a title that must be earned.

June 14 2011

Gorky's play "At the Bottom" was written in 1902. Gorky for a long time could not find the exact title of his work. Initially, it was called Nochlezhka, then Without the Sun, and finally, At the Bottom.

In Gorky, the audience first saw the world of the outcasts, unfamiliar to them. Such a harsh, merciless truth about the life of the social lower classes, about their hopeless fate, the world dramaturgy has not yet known. In the rooming house there were people of the most diverse character and social status.

A special load in the drama falls on the conflict, the sharp clashes of the characters on significant occasions for them. At the same time, there can be no extra people in the drama - all the characters must be involved in the conflict. The presence of social tension is already indicated in the title of the play. But we cannot say that social conflict organizes drama. This tension is devoid of dynamics, all attempts of the characters to leave the "bottom" are in vain. Perhaps the drama is organized by a love conflict, traditional for many plays. It would seem strange the appearance of such a pure feeling in such an atmosphere of dirt and poverty. But the heroes of Gorky do not pay attention to the dirt and stench, they are used to such a life, to each other and almost do not notice those around them. Each character exists as if by itself, lives its own life. Therefore, at the beginning of the play, all those present speak at once, without waiting for an answer, weakly reacting to the comments of others. Kvashnya is proud that she is a free woman, unmarried, and this angers Klesch. He has his dying wife in his arms, Nastya, a fallen woman, reading "Fatal Love", which causes the Baron to ironically laugh. Nastya, a prostitute, dreams of bright and pure love, but this only causes the laughter of others. The girl is trying to get out of the vicious circle, leave the rooming house and start a new one, but these are just her dreams.

But there is indeed a love line in the play. It is created by the relationship of Vasilisa, Vaska Pepel, Kostylev's wife, the owner himself and Natasha.

The plot of a love story begins when Kostya Lev appears in the rooming house. From a conversation with the inhabitants, it is clear that he is looking for his wife Vasilisa there, who is cheating on him with Vaska Pepel. With the advent of Natasha, the love story begins to develop. For her sake, Vaska Pepel leaves Vasilisa. In the course of the development of this conflict, it becomes clear to us that his relationship with Natasha enriches Vaska, revives him to a new life. Vaska Pepel never had a profession. For him, there are no ideals, he does not strive to work, as he lives by theft. However, kindness and naivete have been preserved in this person, he is drawn to purity and goodness. But Vaska Pepel falls into the slavery of "the powers that be." The owner of the rooming house, Kostylev, turns out to be an even lower person: he does not give Vasily the money for the stolen watch, believing that Pepel owes him so much. His wife Vasilisa is also in bondage to her husband, who is twice her age. She is also unhappy, and her love for Vaska Pepl is a challenge to family despotism. For the sake of Vasilisa, the thief is ready to commit - to kill Kostylev. Vasilisa flared up with terrible hatred for her sister Natalya when she found out about her lover's betrayal. She is ready to kill her, if only to save Vasily for herself. The culmination, the highest point in the development of the conflict, is fundamentally taken out of the scene by the author. We do not see Vasilisa scalding with boiling water. We learn about this from the noise and screams behind the scenes and from the conversations of the roommates.

The love conflict in the play, of course, is one of the facets of the social conflict. The love line shows that the anti-human conditions of the “bottom” cripple a person, and the most exalted feelings in such conditions lead not to the enrichment of the personality, but to death or hard labor.

Having unleashed a love conflict in such a terrible way, Vasilisa achieves all her goals at once. He takes revenge on his former lover Vaska Pepl and his rival Natasha, gets rid of her unloved husband and becomes the sole owner of the rooming house. There is nothing human left in Vasilisa, and this shows us the enormity of the social conditions in which the inhabitants of the rooming house are forced to live.

But the love conflict cannot become the basis of the dramaturgical conflict of the play, since, unfolding in front of the overnight stays, it does not affect them themselves. They do not participate in them, remaining only third-party viewers.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save - "Love conflict is part of the general social. Literary writings!

In the play, two plot senses coexist in parallel. The first can be attributed to everyday action, and the second has a philosophical connotation. These two lines develop independently of each other and exist on different planes - external and internal.

outer plan

The action takes place in a rooming house owned by Mikhail Ivanovich Kostylev, a 51-year-old man who lives with his 26-year-old wife Vasilisa Karlovna.

The author of the play calls the guests of the doss house "former people" and ranks them among the lower social strata of society. In addition, poor working people also live here.
The main characters of the play are 40-year-old Actor, Satin and locksmith Andrei Mitrich Klesch with his 30-year-old wife Anna, 28-year-old thief Vaska Pepel, 24-year-old girl of easy virtue Nastya, 44-year-old Bubnov, 33-year-old Baron, 20 years old Alyoshka and persons without indication of age - hookers Krivoy Zob and Tatarin. Sometimes Vasilisa's 50-year-old uncle, policeman Medvedev, and 40-year-old dumpling saleswoman Kvashnya come to the rooming house. All of them are in a difficult relationship with each other and often quarrel.

Vasilisa loves Vaska and tells him all the time about the murder of her elderly husband. She wants to become a full-fledged hostess. Looking ahead a bit, let's say that in the second part of the play Pepel starts a fight with Kostylev and accidentally kills him, after which he goes to prison. Vaska is crazy about 20-year-old Natalya, who is Vasilisa's sister. Because of jealousy for Vaska Pepl, Natalia is regularly beaten by the hostess of the rooming house.

The actor, who at one time shone on the stages of theaters in the province under the name Sverchkov-Zavolzhsky, and Satin constantly drink and play cards. Satin often plays a dishonest game.

A native of the nobility, Baron at one time "lost his fortune" into the wind and exists as the most unfortunate inhabitant of a doss house.

Andrei Mitrich Kleshch works as a plumber in order to constantly buy medicines for his sick wife Anna, who will die at the end of the play, and her husband, who dreamed of a new life, will still remain “at the bottom”.

During another drinking bout, a wandering man named Luka enters the doss house. He begins to tell the guests about their bright future, and Anna promises heaven in heaven. Luka told the Actor that there is a special hospital where drunk people are treated, and he advises Natalya and Ash to run away from this place. But when the most urgent need arises for the moral support of the wanderer, he leaves, leaving the inhabitants of the rooming house alone with their problems. As a result, the Actor commits suicide. At the end of the play, a song is performed by the characters. Satin, having learned about the death of the Actor, says that he ruined a good song for them.

internal plan

The play talks about Sateen's worldview and Luke's philosophy of life, and the doss house is a generalized symbol of the dead end of the human race, which lost faith in God at the beginning of the 20th century, but did not have time to strengthen itself in its own strength. It is for this reason that all the characters in the play look doomed. They do not see tomorrow ahead of them. World development is moving towards its decline. Satin understands this and does not try to give people hope that is not destined to come true. He tells Klesh about the futility of his labors. But if you act according to his judgments, then how will people live? According to Mitrich, they will starve to death. On the other hand, if you work only for food, then why live?

In the play, Satin is portrayed as a radical existentialist who understands that the world is unfair and there is no God. But he is opposed to the reflections of Luke, whose meaning of life is to show pity for the disadvantaged people. He is even ready to tell a lie, if only the unfortunate becomes at least for a moment easier. People sometimes need to give at least some hope for life.

From the lips of Luke comes a parable about a man looking for a righteous land, and a learned man who indicates on the map that there is no such place on Earth. Then the first had no choice but to commit suicide, which the Actor subsequently does.

Luke is shown in the play not as a simple wanderer, but as a consoling philosopher who says that one must live no matter what. Man cannot predict his future. He is destined to go all the way to the end. Sateen and Luke have an argument. The first often agrees with the second. After the appearance of Luka in the rooming house, Sateen begins to talk about the Man whom he does not feel sorry for and does not console, but speaks openly about the fact that life itself has no meaning. Thus, Satin is trying to encourage this very Man to protest against the usual way of life and gain self-respect. His main idea is that you should not despair and you need to realize your uniqueness in this universe. "Man - that sounds proud!"

Man is an invariable part of society, its main element. In the complex mechanism of life, he always has to subordinate personal motives and interests to social frameworks that protect him, and, at the same time, become the cause of spiritual unfreedom. Limitations and standards put forward by the environment, sometimes can not curb the strength of the human character, his desire for knowledge of the world and self-expression. Therefore, the conflicts between the individual and the collective are reflected in many works of Russian literature. One of these works is M. Gorky's drama "At the Bottom". The action takes place in a rooming house for the poor, where people of various kinds have gathered, but they are all rejected by society. Each of them has his own life tragedy, which is based on simple human weaknesses.

1. Once rejected by society, having found himself on the “social bottom”, a person is no longer able to rise, to cope with the vicissitudes of fate. So says one of the inhabitants of the rooming house - Bubnov. Life for him has lost its significance: once he owned a dyeing workshop, the hero suddenly loses everything. Thrown "to the bottom", having lost faith in people and the truth, having survived the betrayal of his wife, now he is convinced that everything in the world is subject to cruel and immutable laws, which it is pointless to resist. The idea of ​​getting out of the rooming house, changing the usual course of things and starting a new life seems absurd to Bubnov. “All people on earth are superfluous ...” - the hero notes. Abandoned by the environment, he is embittered at society and is incapable of faith and forgiveness.
2. “A person can do anything - if only he wants to,” another hero of the play, the new guest of the rooming house, the wanderer Luka, is sure, who enters into a conditional conflict with the ideological statements of Bubnov. Luke is a mysterious old man, almost blissful, who knows where he came from and where he is heading. Nobody knows about his fate, however, according to the preacher, a lot of grief and difficulties fell to his lot. However, the righteous man is sure that one can cope with the external ugliness, cruelty of life and society, it is enough to believe in a person, inspire hope in him, albeit sometimes deceptive. “You can’t always cure the soul with the truth,” the old man is convinced, consoling the heroes of the rooming house. Rejected by society, like the other characters in the play, Luke continues to believe in the inhabitants of the "bottom", in the high destiny of each of them.
3. Despite the seeming doom of life, some of the heroes do not lose faith in a bright future, they dream of rising from the bottom of the social to a better stage of life. Vaska Pepel is a rebellious character in the play. His father was a thief, and he himself was accustomed to such a craft from childhood. Unlike other characters, Pepel is initially rejected by society as a lost person, whose fate is predetermined and known in advance. He seeks to change himself, thereby proving to the team that his share can be better, and he himself can become an honest and decent citizen. He loves Natasha, dreams of taking her away from the rooming house, where she is forced to endure her sister's beatings, and moving to Siberia, where no one will know about his past, and, therefore, will not be judged for past mistakes.
4. "Man - that sounds proud!" - asserts his bitter truth, another guest of the rooming house, a former telegraph operator Satin. He is convinced that human life is expensive, so everyone needs sympathy. Satin, like Luke, is compassionate towards his neighbors, ready to help those in need. However, being on the social "bottom" makes him indifferent to life in general. He does not see the point in action, so he consciously destroys himself. Once sent to prison for murder, and now living in a rooming house, he does not want to change, because he considers existence "on the bottom" to be the natural course of existence. He rejects a society in which he no longer sees the truth. The truth, in his opinion, is in the person himself, however, even before that Satine does not care. Broken by circumstances, he refuses to fight, remaining indifferent to his future fate.
5. Doomed to death, the heroes of the play inevitably go to the bottom. They are connected by a common destinies and the situation in which they are, the tragedy of the surrounding world, which rejected each of the guests of the rooming house for various reasons. The actor, who has successfully performed on stage in the past, now drinks heavily. He dreams of recovering from alcoholism and returning to the stage, constantly quoting famous literary passages. However, the realization of one's own weakness, the oblivion of society, the inability to get out of poverty push the hero to suicide. Other characters in the drama are also looking for "truth in wine": Andrey Mitrich Kleshch, a locksmith, found himself at the bottom due to his wife's illness. With her death, he expects relief from the burden of responsibility, but loses his job, becoming even more embittered at people and having lost the last goal of existence, messing around with Satin. The heroes are unable to find the right path, expelled from the collective to the social “bottom”, they die there, deprived of hope for the future.