Shtoss

The artist Lugin, on his return from Italy to St. Petersburg, is exhausted from spleen . He cannot finish the female portrait he started. In a conversation with maid of honor Minskaia ^[1], he laments that people’s faces have recently seemed yellow (“people have lemons instead of heads”), and an unknown voice whispers the same address in his ear with a tongue twister: “in Stolyarny lane, "at the Kokushkin bridge , the house of the titular adviser Shtoss, apartment number 27."

On the advice of Minsk in the early November morning, Lugin sets off in search of the coveted address. In the dirty Stolyarny Lane, his attention is drawn to the building without a sign with the name of the owner. “Something told him that he recognized the house at first glance, although he had never seen him.” The janitor confirms that a certain Stoss recently bought a house. Apartment 27, according to him, is empty and, apparently, brings misfortune to its inhabitants: one went bankrupt, the other died.

Having examined the "bad" apartment, Lugin decides to immediately move there from the hotel. He feels the "expecting abyss", but cannot stop. He is particularly curious about the “waist-length portrait hanging in the last room, depicting a man of about forty in a Bukhara robe,” apparently ^[2] - an inveterate player. Instead of the name of the artist, the bottom of the portrait is displayed in red letters: “Sereda”.

In the middle of the night, an aged figure from the portrait is to Lugin — a gray-haired, hunched old man with vague outlines. “Something white, vague and transparent fluttered near him”: as it will become clear later, a young daughter. "That was not an earthly being - that was paint and light instead of forms and body." When asked by Lugin about his name, the old man asks: “What?”

The old man offers to skip the shtoss , and puts his companion at stake. Every night, the game resumes, and Lugin loses over and over again. Playing for the perfect creation becomes the goal of his life: "he was very happy about it." Visits to the mysterious old man last night and night for a month. Seeing that his money is running out, Lugin begins to sell off his property. He realizes that something needs to be decided. And “he made up his mind” - on this phrase the text breaks off.

The autograph of the story passed from the collection of the Chertkov library to the State Historical Museum . It ends with the words "desperate heart was compressed." The last four lines of the journal publication in the original are missing.

The draft plan of the story has survived: “ At the lady; faces are yellow. Address. House: an old man with a daughter, invites him to throw. Daughter: in despair, when the old man wins - Shuler: the old man lost his daughter to <...> Doctor: a window . "

In the notebook presented to the author by V.F. Odoevsky , the ending of the novel is outlined: “ But who are you, for God's sake? - What? answered the old man, blinking with one eye. - Shtos! - repeated in horror Lugin. A sharpie has a mind in his fingers. - Bank - Sudden . ”

From these sketches, Lermontologists conclude that the written story is close to completion ^[2] . Lermontov supposed to end it with the death of his hero ^[2] . Perhaps Lugin should have jumped out of the hospital window ^{[3] [4]} . Night visions in this case could be explained as the fruit of his frustrated consciousness.

After 17 years, in a letter to Alexander Dumas, Countess E.P. Rastopchina recalled that Lermontov read an unfinished story in the Karamzins' house in the spring of 1841, on the eve of his departure for the Caucasus ^[5] . No further evidence of this has been preserved.

Lermontologists of pre-revolutionary times rarely spoke of “Shtoss” ^[2] . In the best case, the story was described as a fantastic exercise in the spirit of “ Melmoth ”, Gogol's “ Portrait ”, Pushkin’s legends or Balzac’s fantastic stories ^[6] . Attention was also drawn to the borrowing of individual motives from Hoffmann (“ Player ’s Happiness ”) ^{[3] [7] [8]} .

In Soviet literary criticism, the concept of Lermontov’s movement from romanticism to critical realism dominated. Based on this, his last experience in prose was decided not to be connected with the Gothic tradition of romanticism, but with the natural school of the 1840s. ^[9] However , E. Найди. Naiditsch , recognizing the “ physiological nature of the images of individual scenes of Petersburg life”, notes that the story breaks out of the framework of the finished scheme: its protagonist is “immersed in a surreal world of visions and ghosts” ^[8] .

V. E. Vatsuro insists that in Lermontov’s latest work “fantasy does not turn into reality, but reality, crude, empirical, sensually perceptible, hides fantasy in itself” ^[10] . The internal plot of the story, according to Vatsuro, is as follows. The artist, being unable to capture his unaccountable ideal on canvas, finds him in the world of dreams and night visions, after which he “enters into the struggle for which he must die” ^[10] .

According to the author of the monograph “ Gothic novel in Russia ”, the fantastic (“Gothic”) prose of romanticism is characterized by the motive of the posthumous life of a criminal spirit, which is under the spell:

He is forced as a ghost to periodically repeat the scene of his crime, as a rule, in the same place and at the very time when it was committed. The Lermontov old man apparently committed his crime ^[11] on Wednesday, and every Wednesday he is forced to lose his daughter again in an empty house. "The daughter is desperate when the old man wins." Obviously, losing the old man would destroy the vicious circle and free her or both of them, most likely for the grave ^[10] .

• "Shtoss" (   Russia , 2014 ) - an independent film adaptation, shot in the style of silent cinema [1] .

• “ Stoss into Life ” - the story of Boris Pilnyak (1928) about the last days of Lermontov’s life

• Screen adaptation in the style of silent cinema (2014)