Images of the trickster hero and the Picaro hero (based on the example of the story "The Fashionable Lawyer" by Taffy (N. A. Lokhvitskaya)

Paterikina Valentina Vasil'evna ORCID: 0009-0008-9367-4130 Doctor of Philosophy Professor; Department of Theory and History of Arts; Lugansk State Academy of Culture and Arts named after Mikhail Matusovsky 294214, Russia, Luhansk region, Alchevsk, Gmyri str., 41, sq. 28 zelenlist@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

As a part of universal human culture, laughter culture is embedded in the socio–historical context, performing a number of functions. According to Henri Bergson's definition, expressing the individual or collective, laughter has the function of correcting vices, suppressing the special absent-mindedness of people and events ^{[1, p. 58]}. F. M. Dostoevsky called laughter the surest breakdown of the soul. By conveying socio-cultural experience based on the bifurcation of the world, laughter culture acts as an emotional reflection on the absurdity and absurdity of existence. The actual and timeless levels of laughter culture contain humor, irony, wit, sarcasm, caricature, parody, and pun, reflecting momentary timeless reactions to the absurdities of existence. The discrepancy between the real and the ideal, the existent and the due, is embodied in humor, irony, satire, manifested in laughter ^[2], creates its own disordered world.

Literature review

Various aspects of laughter culture, its patterns, and traditions were developed by S. S. Averintsev, M. M. Bakhtin (the author of the term "laughter culture"), A. N. Veselovsky, L. V. Karasev, V. F. Kolyazin, D. S. Likhachev, Yu. M. Lotman, A. F. Losev, Yu. V. Mann, E. M. Meletinsky, A. M. Panchenko, L. E. Pinsky, N. V. Ponyrko, V. Ya. Propp, O. M. Freudenberg. In the modern cultural space, the structure, production, and state of laughter culture are analyzed by V. N. Bedenko, M. V. Borodenko, A. N. Burykin, N. B. Burykina, L. S. Likhacheva, A.V. Peshkova, O. S. Redkozubova, I. Y. Rogotnev, K. A. Fadeeva, and others.

The literature of the Russian space is replete with trickster characters who find themselves in various situations, created by them, disrupting the usual course of events. Characters from chronicles, anonymous satirical poems, works by A. D. Kantemir, A. P. Sumarokov, N. I. Novikov, D. I. Fonvizin, K. N. Batyushkov, K. F. Ryleev, A. A. Bestuzhev, E. A. Baratynsky, V. I. Dahl, N. V. Gogol, A. K. Tolstoy, N. A. Nekrasov, F. M. Dostoevsky, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, V. S. Kurochkin, D. D. Minaev, L. N. Trefolev, N. A. Leikin, V. G. Korolenko, V. M. Garshin, A. P. Chekhov, L. N. Andreev, N. A. Lokhvitskaya (Teffi), I. I. Dymov, A.M. Glikberg (Sasha Cherny), A. T. Averchenko, E. A. Pridvorov (Demyan Bedny), A.S.Grinevsky (Alexander Green), M. A. Bulgakov, V. V. Mayakovsky, M. M. Zoshchenko, I. A. Fainzilberg (Ilya Ilf), E. P. Kataev (Evgeny Petrov), D. I. Yuvachev (Daniil Kharms), S. V. Mikhalkov, F. A. Iskander, V. M. Shukshin, V. P. Aksenov, V. N. Voynovich, V. V. Yerofeyev, S. D. Dovlatov, V. O. Pelevin introduce unpredictability into the usual course of events

The comic form and tragic content of N. A. Lokhvitskaya's short story "The Fashionable Lawyer"

As a form of communication and self-assessment of society through play, laughter culture reflects the existence of an anti-world with its chaotic nature. But the worlds of anti-culture are not outside of society.: they are created by specific people – creators and bearers of a funny culture. Laughter culture has its own characters, characters who create or notice situations, accumulating manifestations of situations that cause laughter. Such characters include some heroes of myths, works of oral folk art and literature. Buffoons, buffoons, fools, rascals, fools, adventurers are irritants of peace, destroyers of a stable current, carriers of a disordered state, embodying the heroes of a ridiculous anti-world.

One of these images is a trickster, a hero of myths, legends– a troublemaker, a provocateur. In the analysis of this hero, Karl Kerenyi sees an image beyond time, a peculiar archetype that manifests itself in all peoples at all times ^[3]. Possessing cunning and unpredictability, the trickster represents the spirit of disorder, the life of the body, without subordination to anyone, only hunger and lust, hungry for pain and suffering. Paul Radin gives the same characterization to the trickster, noting his ambivalence as a creator and a destroyer, a requester and a supplicant, a dupe and a winner. He has no inherent moral and social values, but it is through his passions that his values and norms manifest themselves ^[3].

The archetypal image of the trickster is opposed by such authors as T. O. Beidelman, E. Besso, J. S. Kirky and other researchers of the nature of the trickster, noting that this character belongs to individual cultures without specific unifying features. But such opposite approaches to analyzing this character only confirm the multivariability of his qualities.

From the series of named authors, giving an account that this is by no means a complete list of those writers who allow themselves to be looked into as if in a mirror through the heroes of their works, it is necessary to single out those who created during the turn of the late XIX–early XX centuries. For Russia, this is a crucial and turbulent period of breaking old traditions, the development of market relations, the defeat in the war with Japan, the post-revolutionary reaction, the eve of the First World War, and the eve of the October Revolution. During this period, there was a demand for laughter, as for quite material things, which gave rise to a galaxy of laughing and laughing professional writers in this market demand ^{[4, p. 20]}.

By this time, the laughing culture was moving into a different field from exposing social vices to acquiring the features of political exposure. Among those who did not castigate, denounce, or resent through satire, the works of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, who took the pseudonym Taffy, stand out. The elegiac irony of her stories does not contain anger, accusation, but only "tenderness and pity." Using the example of one of her short stories, "The Fashionable Lawyer," the author analyzes an image that combines the features of a trickster, whose tragicomedy lies in a misunderstanding of the seriousness of the finale of the action. This is a trickster of a special order, which differs from the usual character in that it is more complex in characterization, despite its apparent linearity.

Analyzing the philosophy of laughter, L. V. Karasev distinguishes the laughter of the body and the laughter of the mind ^{[5, pp. 17-23]}. The first, most ancient type of laughter, archaic, shows the forces of a healthy body, its saturation, power, impulse, and energy of birth. This ritual laughter is a manifestation of joy associated with the pleasures of the body. The laughter of the mind, not of the body, rises to the intellectual differences of the imperfection of life, the differentiation of the ethical duality of the world by distinguishing good from evil.

Taffy's work reflects exactly this kind of laughter, which shows not the bodily needs, but the needs of the mind and reflects the diversity of public relations. Justifiably disliking being treated as a humorist, Taffy develops her own style, finding her niche in a laughing culture without denunciation, without the demands of immediate world reconstruction. Without assuming the pose of an onlooker, the writer sympathizes with her characters without distancing herself from them. The combination of laughter and tears undoubtedly belongs to high art, the secret of which is indescribable ^[6]. With a note of sadness, Taffy expresses the needs of the mind for laughter, without descending to the archaic laughter of a well-fed body. Sadness and non–condemnation, the bitter wind of eternity, the prophetic simplicity of Ecclesiastes - that's what is closest to her ^[7]. By managing to combine mutually exclusive things, Taffy foresaw the coming catastrophes of the coming 20th century and was ready for them. Understanding everything about humanity, its flaws and imperfections, nevertheless, she continued to love it ^[8].Taffy embodied her idea that tenderness is the meekest, timid, divine face of love that goes along with her sister pity in her stories.

Among the authors of the Satyricon magazine, united by A. Averchenko, were S. Cherny, O. Dymov, A. Bukhov, L. Andreev, S. Marshak, A. Kuprin, S. Gorodetsky. The range of authors varied, but for ten years, from 1908 to 1918, Taffy was among the staff whose works were constantly published. Although 32 of Taffy's short stories were published in 298 issues of the magazine ^[9], this did not prevent her from becoming an iconic figure among the authors of the funny culture of Russia at the beginning of the century and the first half of it. The nobility of human nature is manifested, among other things, in humor, according to Arkady Averchenko, one of the Russian humorists of the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. But he did not observe the utilitarianism of humor, perhaps because of this feature humor is attractive ^{[10, p. 51]}. The characters of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, who painted the minutiae of a small life, collecting types of human personalities who were remembered for their love of the world in spite of adversity, are not utilitarian ^{[11, p. 173]}.

The characters in the writer's stories represent cultural archetypes, one of which is the trickster hero, a collective image of mythological, literary characters. The story "The Fashionable Lawyer" is just such a character, containing the features of a trickster and a picaro, but not in a classic version, but in an interweaving of features.

As a demonic and comic understudy of a cultural hero, according to the definition of E. M. Meletinsky, he is opposed to the cultural hero, unsuccessfully copying him. The ambivalence of the trickster lies in the function of a mediator between what has happened and what may yet come. It is characterized by liminality, which consists in abandoning the previous social function and moving to one that has not yet occurred ^[12]. Through the game, including language, the trickster finds himself beyond morality, but often the trickster characters find a balance between the forces of good and evil.

Another type of world culture is picaro, which arises from the broader image of the trickster hero. As a derivative of the ramified concept of the trickster, Picaro ignores established norms of behavior, having an isolated position. Picaro is mercantile, depending on the owner, capable of treacherous deeds for his entertainment. The unifying principle for the trickster and Picaro lies in activity as in a game, the desire to make the world more perfect by looking at it from a different angle, shown by both the trickster and Picaro.

The plot of the story "The Fashionable Lawyer" is very simple: the court heard the case of Semyon Rubashkin, accused of spreading disturbing rumors about the dissolution of the first Duma through a newspaper. The story begins without nervous tension, quite calmly and rhythmically, because for the defendant, his wife and friends everything seems like a game. The perception of such a state body of justice as the court, which inspires excitement, since the fate of two opposing sides is being decided, is initially set up by the characters of the story for irony. The strangeness of the situation caused the defendant himself, his wife and friends to make jokes that suggest the course of further turbulent developments. Taffy indicates the vectors of what can happen through the jokes of the characters about the prospects of prison, Siberia, and the remarriage of the accused's wife in the event of his impossible (as it seemed, but did not turn out) transfer by court order. Semyon Rubashkin himself took care of the fine, which was the last thing he could face after the lawyer's words about warning the defendant to take heart.

The dynamics of the action and the tension appeared after the lawyer "jumped out. His face turned purple, his eyes bulged, and his neck was swollen. It seemed as if he had choked on a mutton bone" ^[13]. The writer uses the verbs "jumped out, exclaimed" to show the nervous dynamics that the unnamed fashionable lawyer identified. He has no name, because he is the personification of a faceless defense that does not even represent the interests of official authorities, and the court transfers all powers to a lawyer, for whom the courtroom is a theater. The chairman of the court asks to clear the hall first from the public, then from the witnesses: the words of the lawyer were so convincing, not defending, but accusing. If the beginning of the story outlined in fragments through close people what could have happened to the accused in an ironic form, then the lawyer outlined the prospects in a tragic form, attributing non-existent sins to the accused. The fashionable lawyer is a trickster character who intrudes into the situation without an invitation from the accused, without a fee (because he is offensive) for his work, but out of principle. And the principle of a fashionable lawyer was to satisfy his own ambitions by publishing an article with a defensive speech that became an accusatory one. But there should be no typos in it – this worried the fashionable lawyer the most. "What can I do! The nightmare of Russian reality," he sums up what happened, bringing the defendant to the gallows. But the nightmares are being prepared by such nameless ambitious tricksters, for whom the typos of their own newspaper article are more important than human life.

A modest newspaper scribbler, Semyon Rubashkin, through the pathetic speech of a lawyer, becomes a representative of a formidable and powerful party, secretly and namelessly leading a mighty movement that is destined for a year in prison, or Siberia, or the scaffold without the consolation of a priest with his own noose around his proud neck. The paradox is that, while elevating his client to heroic proportions on an increasing scale, the lawyer presents him not just as a newspaper scribbler, but as "a great fighter whom word of mouth will make a legendary hero of the Russian revolution." After the pathos with cliched phrases, there is a sharp decline when a lawyer deposes his client not just to a state of humiliation, but to physical destruction without the right to request clemency.

The fashionable lawyer, grotesquely portrayed by Taffy, in the mask of an actor playing the main role in a court hearing, cancels out all the characters and makes them secondary. He receives a loud ovation from the youth after successfully delivering a defensive speech, bowing with a friendly smile. This is a state of spirituality that comes to the actor at the moment of the highest tension, but Taffy combines the sublime and the earthly in a gentle touch: the lawyer eats sausages and drinks a glass of beer after the court session. The writer herself noted the attitude to laughter in the tradition of good old literature as to laughter "through tears", "having previously coughed four times" ^[13]. This situation of getting a laugh in the story takes place on the juxtaposition of high-sounding cliched phrases and the realities of life. A hundred years before the appearance of postmodernism in literature, Taffy (the characters of Venedikt Yerofeyev and Viktor Pelevin) beat the poster of conventional pathos through the persona of a lawyer – a kind of trickster and picaro.

Picaro is a rascal, a buffoon, and a fool, but a fashionable lawyer feels like neither one nor the other, nor the third: the tragedy of a comic or tragic situation lies precisely in the seriousness of the lawyer's actions.

The rogue is a natural character in folklore, myth, and world literature, since they reflect all manifestations of human character, including the desire to occupy a dominant position in the hierarchy of relationships through intrigue, while remaining in his place in this hierarchy ^[14].

The lawyer did not help to cope with the absurdity of the world, as befits buffoonery, but brought even more misunderstanding and tragedy. Describing the buffoon, V. P. Darkevich notes the opposition of the ordered and rational world to the buffoon's own chaotic and absurd vision of the world ^{[15, p. 285]}. He constantly adds credibility to his speech with gestures and verbal phrases. Taffy emphasizes with the verbs "jumped up, shouted" the dynamics of a lawyer who constantly appeals to the judges. His speech consists of exclamations and questions to himself, to the judges, and to those present, who are all one person to the lawyer. A clever prankster, symbolizing the forces of chaos, the jester helps to overcome human vices. But this character has by no means overcome vices, and, being endowed with intelligence, does not rid humanity of vices. The confusion that led to the tragedy was not caused by representatives of the law, namely, a self-appointed lawyer who did not imagine himself to be a buffoon in any way.

The image of a fool in folklore is multifaceted: its essence is revealed in the inversion of meanings, when external laziness, inability to act, and ignorance conceal a breakthrough that surpasses active, knowledgeable characters. Researcher of Russian folklore A.D. Sinyavsky defines the purpose of a fool so that he proves the futility of labor, knowledge, and effort to achieve a goal ^{[16, p. 42]}. The fool's success is assured by itself, and the path to it is not externally manifested, but lies in his hidden wisdom. It is difficult to classify a lawyer as a fool, according to this definition: he is not lazy, active, smart enough in building a line of defense that has turned into an accusation, talkative, emotional in achieving personal success.

Picaro, who soberly evaluates the inside of being, reflects the general being ^[17] and accepts any life position as a mask. But in this case, the first part of the characterization of Picaro's image about M. M. Bakhtin's sober assessment of the underside of being does not apply to the hero of the story, since the fashionable lawyer is far from going beyond the boundaries of his condition and is unable to evaluate the results of his speech. Playing with someone else's human life remains a game in which there can only be one winner – a fashionable lawyer. The second part of Bakhtin's definition of accepting any life position as a mask fits very well into the character of this character, since the mask was originally worn by a stern defender-accuser with furrowed eyebrows on a purple face and a swollen neck. Subsequently, the mask is replaced by another one – complacency, spirituality from a fully played role. But for an actor, a mask is a disguise that can be removed and put on, it is not identified with the person who is trying it on. In Taffy's story, the lawyer changes externally for the reader and the public, but not internally for himself. This is his nature, not perceived by him and not evaluated by him when going beyond himself, his ego.

Conclusion

Combining the features of a fool, a rascal and a buffoon, Picaro in the lawyer's character is multidimensional and necessary. It is multidimensional because it only partially coincides with the proposed characteristics of researchers of this type, and is necessary because without his game and provocation, the narrative would not have taken place.

If we take as a starting point the position that the trickster and Picaro have independent characteristics, then the image of a fashionable lawyer, derived in Taffy's story of the same name, contains features of both the trickster and Picaro. The Trickster embodies cunning, stupidity, and shades the main character in myths. According to these characteristics, the lawyer absolutely does not coincide with the classical ideas of the trickster: he is not cunning, not stupid, without setting off any of the other characters, he himself becomes the main character of the story. The goal of his game, the classic image of the trickster, involves the overthrow of power, but the lawyer does not deliberately set out to overthrow the role of the chairman of the court: it happens by itself. What a lawyer can successfully handle, according to the trickster characterization, is creating a situation and dominating it. The lawyer is not on the side of evil, but he is the embodiment of good, which leads to evil.

Like Picaro, who does not always create something useful, the hero of Taffy's story not only does not create, but also acts as a destroyer of other people's destinies.

The comic lightness of the form and the tragedy of the inner content form a peculiar whole of Taffy's story "The Fashionable Lawyer", where the main character partially embodies the features of the classic image of the trickster and Picaro.