Father Fedor - character of the novel "The Twelve Chairs" by Ilf and Petrov
Fedor Ivanovich Vostrikov | |
---|---|
Creator | Ilya Ilf , Evgeny Petrov |
Artworks | "The Twelve Chairs " |
Floor | male |
Family | Wife Katerina Aleksandrovna |
Occupation | |
Role | Mikhail Pugovkin |
Father Fedor Ivanovich Vostrikov - character of the novel with Twelve Chairs (1928), priest of the church Frol and Laurus in the county town of N. The desire to gain treasures makes the hero travel through the cities and resist the intrigues of competitors. The image of the character and his role in the novel were ambiguously perceived by critics and served as a pretext for literary controversy.
Content
Character Story
The first version of the novel “The Twelve Chairs”, published in the journal Thirty Days (1928), differed from its subsequent editions. Preparing a book edition of the work, Ilf and Petrov made serious corrections to the text, reworked individual chapters and episodes. According to the literary critic Boris Galanov, the writers got rid of numerous “small, fragmentation, trifling” details that were present in the original version, and at the same time filled the book with really bright details. Corrections touched and one of the most prominent characters in the novel - the father of Fyodor Vostrikov. If in Thirty Days the competitor Ostap Bender and Kisa Vorobyaninov looked like a “purely vaudeville ” hero, who had just descended from the pages of the early comic miniatures of Ilf and Petrov, then in later versions the authors added “new colors” to him [1] .
According to the first version, the entrepreneurial fervor of Fyodor’s father was not limited to the breeding of rabbits and the creation of “marble washing soap”; The list of Vostrikov's projects for early enrichment also included the dog Nerka, which he bought “for 40 rubles on the Miussky market”. She was supposed to bring a regular elite offspring from the groom-medalist, but on the way to the future wealth, “the one-eyed dog Marsic, famous throughout the street for its depravity,” got up [2] .
Literary critic Benedict Sarnov , who studied the history of the novel, noted that the young authors “with joyful mischief parodied everything that came into their field of vision” [3] . The beginning of their work on the work coincided with the publication of the book “Letters of F. M. Dostoevsky to His Wife ” (1926). Comparing the texts of the letters of the Russian writer and the character of “The Twelve Chairs”, Sarnov drew attention to a number of almost literal coincidences, including the signatures: “Your eternal husband Fedya Dostoevsky ” - “Your eternal husband Fedya” [4] :
The second adventure is that I bought an umbrella ...
He put an umbrella in the corner and went out, forgetting about him.
Half an hour later, he caught himself, I went and did not find: they took away
Sunday, the shops are closed tomorrow, if it rains tomorrow,
what will happen to me Went and bought, and it seems
most vile, silk, for 14 marks (according to ours up to 6 rubles).
From the letter of F. M. Dostoevsky to his wife [5]Yes! I completely forgot to tell you about
strange case that happened to me today.
Admiring quiet Don, I stood at the bridge. Here
the wind arose and carried your brother's cap into the river
the baker's. I had to go on a new expense: bought
English cap for 2 p. 50 to .
From a letter from Fyodor’s father to Katerina Alexandrovna [5]
Reviews and controversies
In one of the first significant reviews of the novel, which appeared in the Literary Gazette in the summer of 1929, it was said that Ilf and Petrov succeeded in combining irony, tact and ridicule in their work. The author of the publication, Anatoly Tarasenkov, commented on the “Twelve Chairs” as a whole approvingly and recommended them for further publications. The only thing that criticism seemed superfluous is the storyline associated with Father Fedor: according to Tarasenkov, it was “purely artificially stuck to the main plot of the novel and made poorly” [6] [7] .
As literary critic Yakov Lurie , Father Fedor, noticed more than any of the other characters in the novel, he got it from critics. In the same 1929, the reviewer of the magazine “ October ” wrote that the episode from the chapter “Under the Clouds”, in which the priest who had climbed onto a cliff, began to lose his mind, “is meant for laughter” and is included in the work exclusively “for more fun” [8 ] .
The discussion around this character continued decades later. If Benedict Sarnov believed that the imitation of the classic style, which is present in the letters of Father Fyodor to his wife Katerina Alexandrovna, is justified, especially given the fact that Fyodor Mikhailovich himself sometimes “resorted to the same parody of other people's texts,” literary critic Lyudmila Saraskina responded called Ilf and Petrov "new rastinyak ", who delivered "a blow" to the vertex points of "Dostoevsky" [8] [9] .
Character and Fate
Father Fedor was not lucky not only with critics - his novel fate also turned out to be "not only comical, but also tragic." None of the methods of enrichment invented by him turned out to be a success, including the treasure hunt of Claudia Ivanovna Petukhova. At first, the unlucky “diamond hunter” fell victim to the manipulations of the head of the archive, Bartholomew Korobeinikov; then, holding in his hands a warrant for the headset of Generalsha Popova, Vostrikov, in search of useless furniture, wandered around the country; having finally bought chairs and not finding a treasure in them, he was left completely alone “five thousand kilometers from home, with twenty rubles in his pocket” [8] .
The range of opinions about Father Fedor is quite large. Boris Galanov saw in the character of the "possessor", with whom Vostrikov remained "at all stages of his spiritual and civic career" [1] . The literary critic Wanda Supa ( Polish Wanda Supa ) agrees with him, believing that the image of this character bears the traits of self-interested Moliere heroes [10] . Among the defenders of Vostrikov is Jacob Lurie - in his opinion, Father Fedor is “naive and good-natured,” and his tragic fate is akin to Panikovsky ’s story from the novel “The Golden Calf ” - the heroes are united not only by the sad ending, but also by the theme of the rebellion of a little man , ascending again to Dostoevsky [8] .
Hero Route
The daughter of Ilya Ilf - Alexander Ilyinichna - in the article “The Muse of long-distance wanderings” traces the routes of “diamond-hunters”, noting that at certain points they coincide with competitors, then diverge and fully fit closer to the end of the novel. Father Fedor’s route includes at least ten key points: the county town N → Stargorod → Kharkiv → Rostov-on-Don → Baku → Cape Verde → Makhinjauri → Batum → Tiflis → Cross Pass → Darial Gorge [11] .
The hero tells about his travel impressions in letters, in each of which there is an invariable theme: "There is no longer any Bruns here." In a letter sent from Kharkov, Vostrikov asks his wife to take 50 rubles from her son-in-law and send them to Rostov. From the Don shores, Father Fedor notifies Katerina Alexandrovna about the “terrible expensiveness” and invites her to prepare for new expenses: this time you need to sell the “diagonal student uniform”. The traveler tells about Baku as a big city, which “is picturesquely washed by the Caspian Sea, ” and immediately adds that it’s impossible to get to Bruns, now living on the Green Cape, due to lack of money: “They sent 20 here by telegraph”. Then the letters are replaced by telegrams: Father Fyodor urgently asks his mother to sell anything and send 230 rubles for the purchase of "found goods"; that, in turn, responds with a desperate dispatch: “I have sold everything left without one penny ... Katya” [11] .
According to the law of the genre, the journey can end happily. The journey could end in fiasco. The motive for losing treasure is as traditional as the treasure hunt. In our case, the journey ends tragically ... It is unlikely that Father Feodor will leave the walls of a psychiatric hospital [11] . |
Movie Aviation
Over the years, the role of the father of Fyodor was played by Rem Lebedev , Mikhail Pugovkin , Rolan Bykov , House Deluxe and other actors. Among the numerous screen versions of the novel, the literary writer Boris Roginsky singled out Leonid Gaidai’s film version , in which the interior of the Vostrikov dwelling reminds of the decoration of the Fyodor Dostoevsky Museum :
And Ilf and Petrov were sometimes signed by a pseudonym - F. Tolstoevsky. Haidai’s little mischief turned into great hooliganism. However, as with them, it is completely unkind and fairly securely hidden [13] .
Father Fyodor in the interpretation of Pugovkin - not a villain. His hero, being in a situation of temptation, cannot but take advantage of the chance; he sincerely believes that the treasures of Madame Petukhova now do not belong to anyone and that whoever turns out to be more agile and more agile will be able to find them. However, the path to diamonds turns out to be so thorny that the character of Pugovkin is not able to preserve the original complacency for a long time - he “at first warms up, then melts, reaches red heat until it explodes and dies under the terrible pressure of fallen hope” [14] .
- 1962 - Twelve Chairs ( Cuba ) (Rene Sanchez)
- 1966 - 12 chairs ( Rem Lebedev )
- 1970 - Twelve Chairs (USA) ( House Deluxe )
- 1971 - 12 chairs ( Mikhail Pugovkin )
- 1976 - 12 chairs ( Rolan Bykov )
- 2004 - Twelve Chairs (FRG) (Boris Raev)
- 2005 - Twelve Chairs ( Yuri Galtsev )
Monument to Father Fedor
In 2001, a monument to Fyodor Vostrikov was erected in Kharkov. The novel character looks similar to the performer of the role of Fyodor’s father in the painting by Mikhail Pugovkina in Gaydayev - this is a traveler holding a teapot and a letter to Katerina Alexandrovna. The inscription, carved on a pedestal, is a fragment of the hero's epistolary story about another point in its long route: “Kharkiv is a bustling city, the center of the Ukrainian Republic . After the province, it seems that I have gotten abroad. ”
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 Galanov, 1961 .
- ↑ Ilya Ilf, Yevgeny Petrov. Twelve chairs . - M .: Vagrius , 2000. - 464 p. - ISBN 5-264-00504-4 .
- ↑ Sarnov, 2007 , p. ten.
- ↑ Sarnov, 2007 , p. eleven.
- ↑ 1 2 Sarnov, 2007 , p. 12-13.
- ↑ Anatoly Tarasenkov. The book, which is not written // Literary Gazette . - 1929. - № 17 June .
- ↑ Michael of Odessa, David Feldman. Literary strategy and political intrigue // Friendship of Peoples . - 2000. - № 12 .
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Jacob Lurie. In the land of unscared idiots. The book about Ilf and Petrov . - SPb. : Publishing House of the European University in St. Petersburg, 2005. - ISBN 5-94380-044-1 .
- ↑ Lyudmila Saraskina. LF Tolstoevsky vs. F. Dostoevsky // October . - 1992. - № 3 . - p . 188-197 .
- ↑ Wanda Supa. Satirical legacy of I. Ilf and E. Petrov yesterday and today // Studia Wschodnioslowianskie. - 2012. - Vol . 12 .
- ↑ 1 2 3 Alexandra Ilf. Muse of distant wanderings // Almanac "Deribasovskaya - Rishelievskaya". - 2013. - № 54 .
- ↑ Shilova I. Mikhail Pugovkin // Actors of Soviet cinema . - M .: Art , 1973. - T. 9. - p. 226-240. Archived copy from May 27, 2015 on Wayback Machine
- ↑ 1 2 Boris Roginsky. An intellectual, a superman, a mannequin - what next? The screen version of the novels of Ilf and Petrov // Star . - 2005. - № 11 .
- ↑ Shilova, 1973 , p. 228.
Literature
- Boris Galanov. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. A life. Creativity . - M .: Soviet writer , 1961. - 312 p.
- Benedict Sarnov. Living classics // Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov . - M .: Eksmo , 2007. - P. 9-21. - 944 s. - (Anthology of Satire and Humor of Russia of the XX century). - ISBN 978-5-699-17161-3 . Archived May 27, 2015. Archived copy from May 27, 2015 on Wayback Machine
- Jacob Lurie. In the land of unscared idiots. The book about Ilf and Petrov . - SPb. : Publishing House of the European University in St. Petersburg, 2005. - ISBN 5-94380-044-1 .