Characteristics of Plyushkin in the poem “Dead Souls”: description of appearance and character. Heroes of “Dead Souls” - Plyushkin (briefly) What Plyushkin looked like
In the poem by N.V. Gogol “ Dead Souls“all heroes have their own special portrait characteristics. One of the most important characters is Stepan Plyushkin. His image personifies miserliness, and his surname has become a household name. What is the portrait of Plyushkin in the poem “Dead Souls”.
Portrait description of Plyushkin
Plyushkin is one of the main characters in the poem “Dead Souls”. Unlike other heroes, Gogol describes in detail lifestyle, life story, and the events that led him to his current state. In the work he appears last, after Manilov, Sobakevich and Korobochka. In comparison with other characters, he neglected himself greatly: he appeared before Chichikov in rags, with such an unkempt appearance that Chichikov for a long time could not understand whether it was a man or a woman. It would seem that a rich landowner with several villages and a thousand serfs should look representative and correspond to his status. However, Plyushkin looks more like a beggar who wants to give alms.
Plyushkin's appearance shocks even Chichikov, who has seen a lot different people different social status. This is how Plyushkin’s appearance is described: “He happened to see a lot of all kinds of people […] but he had never seen anything like this…” (Chichikov’s impression of Plyushkin). His face was the most ordinary, thin, unshaven and completely nondescript. The nose was hooked and several teeth were missing. In addition to Plyushkin’s repulsive appearance, his clothes were old and shabby, at one glance at which a feeling of disgust appeared: “... by no means or effort would it be possible to get to the bottom of what his robe was made of: the sleeves and upper flaps were so greasy and shiny that they looked like for yuft*, the kind that goes into boots; in the back, instead of two, there were four floors dangling, from which cotton paper came out in flakes. He also had something tied around his neck that couldn’t be made out: a stocking, a garter, or a belly, but not a tie...”
Character of Plyushkin
Plyushkin is a controversial figure. He is rich, but lives like the poorest of the peasants. His house is full of food, but he does not eat it, leaving it to rot in the cellars. When meeting him, it is difficult to determine his gender. There is not an ounce of compassion in this man. His serfs are dying from hunger and unbearable living conditions. Plyushkin, having the opportunity to help them, makes no effort. His character is absurd, he constantly argues with peasants and other landowners. With all this, he is very religious and God-fearing.
However, he did not always have such a bad character. During his youth, he had an adored wife and three children. At some point in his life, a turning point occurred: his wife died, and his son and daughter left their father’s house of their own free will. The fire in Plyushkin’s soul went out, he began to fill his life with things, forgetting about people.
Plyushkin - dead soul
The title of the poem is very symbolic. “ Dead souls“Here are not only deceased serfs, but also officials and the landowners themselves. Plyushkin is a typical representative of his class. This bad guy, who is difficult to sympathize with. Not noticing anything around, this person strives only to accumulate. His bins are full of food that could feed the entire village, but all these gifts of nature only rot, spreading a fetid smell around.
And if N.V. Gogol often describes other landowners in a satirical vein, then the author has neither irony nor sarcasm left to describe the portrait of Plyushkin. This person is so hopeless that nothing can change him. Plyushkin is truly a “dead soul”.
This article will help schoolchildren write an essay on the topic “Portrait of Plyushkin in the poem “Dead to the Soul.” This text reveals the characteristics of the character’s character, and also describes in detail external characteristics Stepan Plyushkin.
Work test
Plyushkin Stepan
- the fifth and last of the “series” of landowners to whom Chichikov turns with an offer to sell him dead souls. In the peculiar negative hierarchy of landowner types derived in the poem, this stingy old man (he is in his seventh decade) occupies both the lowest and the highest level at the same time. His image represents complete mortification human soul, the almost complete death of a strong and bright personality, completely consumed by the passion of stinginess, but precisely for this reason capable of resurrecting and transforming. (Below P., of the characters in the poem, only Chichikov himself “fell”, but for him the author’s plan preserved the possibility of an even more grandiose “correction.”)
This dual, “negative-positive” nature of P.’s image is indicated in advance by the ending of the 5th chapter; Having learned from Sobakevich that a stingy landowner lives next door, whose peasants are “dying like flies,” Chichikov tries to find out the way to him from a passing peasant; he doesn’t know any P., but he guesses about whom we're talking about: “Ah, patched!” This nickname is humiliating, but the author (in accordance with the end-to-end technique “ Dead souls") from satire instantly moves to lyrical pathos; admiring the accuracy of the folk word, he praises the Russian mind and, as it were, moves from the space of a morally descriptive novel into the space of an epic poem “like the Iliad.”
But the closer Chichikov is to P.’s house, the more alarming the author’s intonation; suddenly - and as if out of the blue - the author compares himself as a child with his present self, his then enthusiasm with the current “coolness” of his gaze. “Oh my youth! oh my freshness! It is clear that this passage applies equally to the author - and to the “dead” hero, whom the reader will meet. And this involuntary rapprochement of the “unpleasant” character with the author in advance removes the image of P. from that series of “literary and theatrical” misers, with an eye on whom he was written, distinguishes him from the stingy characters of picaresque novels, and from the greedy landowners of the morally descriptive epic, and from Harpagon from Molière’s comedy “The Miser” (Harpagon has the same hole as P.’s below his back), bringing, on the contrary, closer to the Baron from Pushkin’s “The Miserly Knight” and Balzac’s Gobseck.
The description of Plyushkin's estate allegorically depicts desolation - and at the same time the “cluttering” of his soul, which “does not grow rich in God.” The entrance is dilapidated - the logs are pressed in like piano keys; Everywhere there is a special disrepair, the roofs are like a sieve; the windows are covered with rags. At Sobakevich’s they were boarded up at least for the sake of economy, but here they were boarded up solely because of “devastation.” From behind the huts one can see huge piles of stale bread, the color of which is similar to scorched brick. As in a dark, “through the looking glass” world, everything here is lifeless - even the two churches that should form the semantic center of the landscape. One of them, wooden, was empty; the other, stone, was all cracked. A little later, the image of an empty temple will be metaphorically echoed in the words of P., who regrets that the priest will not say “a word” against the universal love of money: “You cannot resist the word of God!” (Traditional for Gogol is the motif of a “dead” attitude towards the Word of Life.) The master’s house, “this strange castle,” is located in the middle of a cabbage garden. The “Plyushkinsky” space cannot be captured with a single glance, it seems to fall apart into details and fragments - first one part will be revealed to Chichikov’s gaze, then another; even the house is in some places one floor, in others two. Symmetry, integrity, balance began to disappear already in the description of Sobakevich’s estate; here this “process” goes in breadth and depth. All this reflects the “segmented” consciousness of the owner, who forgot about the main thing and focused on the tertiary. For a long time he no longer knows how much, where and what is produced on his vast and ruined farm, but he keeps an eye on the level of the old liqueur in the decanter to see if anyone has drunk.
The desolation “benefited” only the Plyushkino garden, which, starting near the manor’s house, disappears into the field. Everything else perished, became dead, as in a Gothic novel, which is reminiscent of the comparison of Plyushkin’s house with a castle. It’s like Noah’s Ark, inside of which there was a flood (it’s no coincidence that almost all the details of the description, like in the Ark, have their own “pair” - there are two churches, two belvederes, two windows, one of which, however, is covered with a triangle of blue sugar paper ; P. had two blond daughters, etc.). The dilapidation of his world is akin to the dilapidation of the “antediluvian” world, which perished from passions. And P. himself is the failed “forefather” Noah, who from a zealous owner degenerated into a hoarder and lost any certainty of appearance and position.
Having met P. on the way to the house, Chichikov cannot understand who is in front of him - a woman or a man, a housekeeper or a housekeeper, “rarely shaving beard"? Having learned that this “housekeeper” is a rich landowner, the owner of 1000 souls (“Ehwa! And I’m the owner!”), Chichikov cannot get out of his stupor for twenty minutes. Portrait of P. (long chin, which has to be covered with a handkerchief so as not to spit; small, not yet extinguished eyes run from under high eyebrows like mice; a greasy robe has turned into yuft; a rag on the neck instead of a handkerchief) also indicates a complete “loss of "A hero from the image of a rich landowner. But all this is not for the sake of “exposure,” but only for the sake of recalling the norm of “wise stinginess” from which P. was tragically separated and to which he can still return.
Previously, before the “fall,” P.’s gaze, like a hardworking spider, “ran busily, but efficiently, along all ends of its economic web”; Now the spider entwines the pendulum of the stopped clock. Even the silver pocket watch that P. is going to give - but never gives - to Chichikov in gratitude for “getting rid of” dead souls, and they are “spoiled.” A toothpick, which the owner may have used to pick his teeth even before the French invasion, also reminds us of a bygone time (and not just stinginess).
It seems that, having described the circle, the narrative returned to the point from which it began - the first of the “Chichikovsky” landowners, Manilov, lives just as outside of time as the last of them, P. But there is no time in Manilov’s world and never has was; he has lost nothing - he has nothing to return. P. had everything. This is the only hero of the poem, besides Chichikov himself, who has a biography, has a past; The present can do without the past, but without the past there is no path to the future. Before the death of his wife, P. was a zealous, experienced landowner; my daughters and son had a French teacher and madame; however, after this, P. developed a widower “complex”; he became more suspicious and stingier. He took the next step away from the path of life determined for him by God after the secret flight of his eldest daughter, Alexandra Stepanovna, with the captain and the unauthorized assignment of his son to military service. (Even before the “flight” he considered the military to be gamblers and wasteful people, but now he is completely hostile to military service.) The youngest daughter died; son lost at cards; P.'s soul became completely hardened; “The wolf hunger of stinginess” took possession of him. Even the buyers refused to deal with him - because he is a “demon”, not a person.
The return of the “prodigal daughter,” whose life with the captain’s captain turned out to be not particularly satisfying (an obvious plot parody of the ending of Pushkin’s “ Stationmaster"), reconciles P. with her, but does not relieve him of his destructive greed. After playing with his grandson, P. did not give Alexandra Stepanovna anything, but he dried the Easter cake she gave her on his second visit and is now trying to treat Chichikov to this cracker. (The detail is also not accidental; Easter cake is an Easter “meal”; Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection; by drying the cake, P. symbolically confirmed that his soul had become dead; but in itself the fact that a piece of cake, albeit moldy, is always kept by him , is associatively connected with the theme of the possible “Easter” revival of his soul.)
Clever Chichikov, having guessed the substitution that occurred in P., “retools” his usual opening speech accordingly; just as in P. “virtue” is replaced by “economy”, and “rare qualities of the soul” by “order”, so they are replaced in Chichikov’s “attack” to theme of the dead shower. But the fact of the matter is that greed was not able to take possession of P.’s heart to the last limit. Having completed the deed of sale (Chichikov convinces the owner that he is ready to take on the tax costs of the dead “for your pleasure”; the economic P.’s list of the dead is already ready, unknown to what need), P. ponders who could reassure her in the city on his behalf, and remembers that the Chairman was his school friend. And this memory (the course of the author’s thoughts at the beginning of the chapter is completely repeated here) suddenly revives the hero: “... on this wooden face<...>expressed<...>a pale reflection of feeling." Naturally, this is a random and momentary glimpse of life.
Therefore, when Chichikov, not only having acquired 120 dead souls, but also having bought runaways for 27 kopecks. for the soul, leaves from P., the author describes a twilight landscape in which the shadow and light are “completely mixed” - as in the unfortunate soul of P.
The gallery of persons with whom Chichikov enters into transactions is completed by the landowner Plyushkin - “a hole in humanity.” Gogol notes that such a phenomenon is rare in Rus', where everything likes to unfold rather than shrink. The acquaintance with this hero is preceded by a landscape, the details of which reveal the soul of the hero. Dilapidated wooden buildings, dark old logs on the huts, roofs resembling a sieve, windows without glass, covered with rags, reveal Plyushkin as a bad owner with a deadened soul. But the picture of the garden, although dead and deaf, creates a different impression. When describing it, Gogol used happier and lighter colors - trees, “a regular sparkling marble column”, “air”, “cleanliness”, “neatness”... And through all this one can see the life of the owner himself, whose soul has faded away, like nature in the wilderness this garden. In Plyushkin’s house, too, everything speaks of the spiritual disintegration of his personality: piled-up furniture, a broken chair, a dried lemon, a piece of rag, a toothpick... And he himself looks like an old housekeeper, only his gray eyes, like mice, run from under his high eyebrows . Everything dies, rots and collapses around Plyushkin. The story of the transformation of a smart person into a “hole in humanity,” which the author introduces us to, leaves an indelible impression. The extreme degree of human degradation was captured by Gogol in the image of the richest landowner in the province (more than a thousand serfs) Plyushkin. The indelible imprint of the hero’s life practice, his relationship to the world is carried by Plyushkin’s portrait; it clearly indicates erasure human personality , its death. To an outsider's eye, Plyushkin appears to be an extremely amorphous and indefinite creature. His only purpose in life is to accumulate things. As a result, he does not distinguish the important, the necessary from the trifles, the useful from the unimportant. Everything he comes across is of interest. Plyushkin becomes a slave to things. The thirst for hoarding pushes him along the path of all sorts of restrictions. But he himself does not experience any unpleasant sensations from this. Unlike other landowners, his life story is given in full. She reveals the origins of his passion. The greater the thirst for hoarding becomes, the more insignificant his life becomes. At a certain stage of degradation, Plyushkin ceases to feel the need to communicate with people. The character's biography allows us to trace the path from a "thrifty" owner to a half-crazy miser. "Previously, he was a good, zealous owner, even his neighbors went to him to learn how to manage things. But his wife died, the eldest daughter married a military man, his son began to make a career in the army (Plyushkin was extremely hostile towards the military), and soon both the youngest daughter and he was left alone and became the guardian of his wealth. But this wealth was worse than poverty. It accumulated without a purpose, not finding not only a reasonable, but also any use. He began to perceive his children as plunderers of his property, not experiencing any joy in meeting with them. As a result, he found himself completely alone. Plyushkin sank to an extreme degree in senseless hoarding. As a result, that moral degradation of the individual began, which made a good owner a “hole in humanity,” a sickly miser who collects all sorts of rubbish, be it old a bucket, a piece of paper or a feather. This comparison indicates the pettiness, suspicion, greed of the hero. Like a mouse drags into a hole everything it finds, so Plyushkin walked along the streets of his village and picked up all kinds of garbage: an old sole, a shard, a nail, a rag. He dragged all this into the house and put it in a pile. The landowner's room was striking in its squalor and disorder. There were dirty or yellowed things and things piled up everywhere. Plyushkin turned into some kind of asexual creature. The tragedy of loneliness is playing out before us, developing into a nightmarish picture of lonely old age. To an outsider's eye, Plyushkin appears to be an extremely amorphous and indefinite creature. “While he (Chichikov) was looking at all the strange decorations, a side door opened and the same housekeeper whom he had met in the yard came in. But then he saw that it was rather the housekeeper than the housekeeper; The housekeeper, at least, doesn’t shave her beard, but this one, on the contrary, shaved, and, it seemed, quite rarely, because his entire chin with the lower part of his cheek looked like a comb made of iron wire, which is used to clean horses in a stable.” Despite the general amorphous appearance of Plyushkin, some sharp features appear in his portrait. In this combination of formlessness and sharply prominent features - all of Plyushkin. “His face was nothing special,” “one chin only protruded very far forward, so that he had to cover it with a handkerchief every time so as not to spit; the small eyes had not yet gone out and ran from under their high eyebrows, like mice, when, sticking their sharp muzzles out of the dark holes, pricking their ears and blinking their whiskers, they look out to see if a cat or a naughty boy is hiding somewhere, and sniff the very air suspiciously.” . Small running eyes, diligently looking out for everything around, perfectly characterize both petty greed and Plyushkin’s wariness. But when depicting Plyushkin’s portrait, the writer pays special attention to the hero’s costume. “His attire was much more remarkable: no amount of effort or effort could have been used to find out what his robe was made of: the sleeves and upper flaps were so greasy and shiny that they looked like the kind of yuft that goes into boots; in the back, instead of two, there were four floors dangling, from which cotton paper came out in flakes. He also had something tied around his neck that couldn’t be made out: a stocking, a garter, or a belly, but not a tie.” This description vividly reveals the most important feature of Plyushkin - his all-consuming stinginess, although nothing is said about this quality in the description of the portrait.
Seeing Plyushkin for the first time, Chichikov “for a long time could not recognize what gender the figure was: a woman or a man. The dress she was wearing was completely indefinite, very similar to a woman’s hood, on her head was a cap worn by village courtyard women, only her voice seemed somewhat hoarse for a woman: “Oh, woman! - he thought to himself and immediately added: “Oh, no!” “Of course, woman!” It could never have occurred to Chichikov that he was a Russian gentleman, a landowner, the owner of serf souls. The passion for accumulation disfigured Plyushkin beyond recognition; he saves only for the sake of hoarding... He starved the peasants, and they are “dying like flies” (80 souls in three years). He himself lives from hand to mouth and dresses like a beggar. With the eerie mien of a half-crazy man, he declares that “his people are painfully gluttonous, and out of idleness they have acquired the habit of cracking food.” About 70 peasants from Plyushkin escaped and became outlaws, unable to endure starvation. His servants run barefoot until late winter, since the stingy Plyushkin has only boots for everyone, and even then they are put on only when the servants enter the vestibule of the master's house. He considers peasants to be parasites and thieves, hates them and sees them as beings of a lower order. The very appearance of the village speaks of the hopeless lot of serfs. The deep decline of the entire serf way of life is most clearly expressed in the image of Plyushkin.
Plyushkin and others like him slowed down the economic development of Russia: “On the vast territory of Plyushkin’s estate (and he has about 1000 souls), economic life froze: mills, fulling mills, cloth factories, carpentry machines, spinning mills stopped moving; hay and bread rotted, luggage and stacks stopped turning into pure manure, flour turned into stone, cloth, linens and household materials were scary to touch. Meanwhile, on the farm, income was collected as before, the peasant still carried the quitrent, the woman carried the linen. All this was dumped in the storerooms, and that’s all it became rot and dust." In the village of Plyushkina, Chichikov notices “some kind of special disrepair.” Entering the house, Chichikov sees a strange pile of furniture and some kind of street trash. Plyushkin is an insignificant slave of his own things. He lives worse than “the last shepherd of Sobakevich.” Countless wealth is wasted. Gogol’s words sound warning: “And to what insignificance, pettiness, nastyness a person could descend! He could change so much!.. Anything can happen to a person.” Plyushkin folded pieces of paper, pieces, sealing wax, etc. A symbolic detail in the interior is: “a clock with a stopped pendulum.” So Plyushkin’s life froze, stopped, and lost connections with the outside world.
Plyushkin begins to be indignant at the greed of officials who take bribes: “The clerks are so unscrupulous! Before, it used to be that you would get away with half a piece of copper and a sack of flour, but now send a whole cart of cereals, and add a red piece of paper, such love of money!” And the landowner himself is greedy to the last extreme. In the scene of buying and selling dead souls, the main feature the hero is stinginess brought to the point of absurdity, crossing all boundaries. First of all, Plyushkin’s reaction to Chichikov’s proposal attracts attention. With joy, the landowner is speechless for a moment. Greed has so permeated his brain that he is afraid of missing out on the opportunity to get rich. He had no normal human feelings left in his soul. Plyushkin is like a block of wood, he doesn’t love anyone, he doesn’t regret it at all. He can only experience something for a moment, in this case the joy of a good deal. Chichikov quickly finds a common language with Plyushkin. The “patched” master is only concerned about one thing: how to avoid incurring losses when making a deed of sale. Soon the landowner's usual fear and concern return to him, because the deed of sale will entail some expenses. He is unable to survive this.
From the scene of the purchase and sale of “dead souls” one can learn new examples of his stinginess. So, Plyushkin for all the servants: both young and old, “had only boots, which were supposed to be in the entryway.” Or another example. The owner wants to treat Chichikov to a liqueur that used to contain “boogers and all sorts of rubbish,” and the liqueur was placed in a decanter that “was covered in dust, like a sweatshirt.” He scolds the servants. For example, he addresses Proshka: “Fool! Eh, you fool! And the master calls Mavra “robber.” Plyushkin suspects everyone of stealing: “After all, my people are either a thief or a swindler: they will steal so much in a day that there will be nothing to hang a caftan on.” Plyushkin deliberately becomes poor in order to “snatch” an extra penny from Chichikov. What is characteristic in this scene is that Plyushkin bargains with Chichikov for a long time. At the same time, his hands tremble and shake with greed, “like mercury.” Gogol finds a very interesting comparison, indicating the complete power of money over Plyushkin. The author’s assessment of the character is merciless: “And to what insignificance, pettiness, and disgust a person could condescend! Could have changed so much!” The writer calls on young people to preserve “all human movements” in order to avoid degradation, so as not to turn into Plyushkin and others like him.
The description of the hero's life and morals reveals all his disgusting qualities. Stinginess has taken up all the space in the character’s heart, and there is no longer any hope of saving his soul. The deep decline of the entire feudal way of life in Russia was most realistically reflected in the image of Plyushkin.
The image of Plyushkin is important for implementation ideological plan the entire work. The author in the poem poses the problem of human degradation. The hero completes the portrait gallery of landowners, each of whom is spiritually insignificant than the previous one. Plyushkin closes the circuit. He is a terrible example of moral and physical degeneration. The author claims that “dead souls” such as Plyushkin and others are ruining Russia.
Plan
1. The history of writing the poem “Dead Souls”.
2. The main task that N.V. set for himself. Gogol when writing a poem.
3. Stepan Plyushkin as one of the representatives of the landowner class.
4. Appearance, life and morals of Stepan Plyushkin.
5. The reasons for the moral decay of the hero.
6. Conclusion.
The famous poem by N.V. Gogol " Dead Souls"was written in 1835. It was during this period that such a direction as realism gained particular popularity in literature, the main goal of which was a truthful and reliable depiction of reality through a generalization of the typical features of a person, society and life in general.
Throughout creative path N.V. Gogol was interested in the inner world of man, his development and formation. The writer set his main task when writing the poem “Dead Souls” to be able to comprehensively show the negative features of the landowner class. A striking example of such a generalization is the image of Stepan Plyushkin.
Plyushkin does not appear in the poem right away; he is the last landowner to whom Chichikov pays a visit during his journey. However, for the first time short reviews Chichikov learns about his way of life and character in passing during his conversations with Nozdryov and Sobakevich. As it turned out, Stepan Plyushkin is a landowner who is already over sixty, the owner of a large estate and more than a thousand serfs. The hero is distinguished by his particular stinginess, greed and mania for accumulation, but even such an unpleasant characteristic did not stop Chichikov and he decided to get to know him.
Chichikov meets the hero on his estate, which was in decline and devastation. Was no exception main house: all the rooms in it were locked, except for two, in one of them the hero lived. It seemed that in this room Plyushkin put away everything that caught his eye, any little thing that he later did not use anyway: these were broken things, broken dishes, small pieces of paper, in a word - junk that no one needed.
Plyushkin's appearance was as unkempt as his house. It was clear that the clothes had long since fallen into disrepair, and the hero himself looked clearly older than his years. But it wasn’t always like this... Until recently, Stepan Plyushkin lived a measured, calm life, surrounded by his wife and children on his native estate. Everything changed overnight... Suddenly the wife dies, the daughter marries an officer and runs away from her home, the son goes to serve in the regiment. Loneliness, melancholy and despair took possession of this man. Everything that seemed to support his world collapsed. The hero lost heart, but the last straw was the death of his outlet - his youngest daughter. Life was divided into “before” and “after”. If quite recently Plyushkin lived only for the well-being of his family, now he sees his main goal only in the senseless filling of warehouses, barns, rooms of the house, in the moral annihilation of himself... he is going crazy. The stinginess and greed that developed every day finally broke the thin and previously strained thread of relations with the children, who were ultimately deprived of his blessing and financial support. This reveals the hero’s special cruelty towards loved ones. Plyushkin loses his human face. It is no coincidence that in the first minutes of meeting the hero, Chichikov sees in front of him a sexless creature, which he mistakes for an elderly woman - the housekeeper. And only after several minutes of reflection, he realizes that in front of him is still a man.
But why exactly is this so: moral exhaustion, a ruined estate, a mania for hoarding? Perhaps, by doing so, the hero was only trying to fill his inner world, his emotional devastation, but this initial hobby over time grew into a destructive addiction, which, at the root, eradicated the hero from the inside. But he just lacked love, friendship, compassion and simple human happiness...
Now it is impossible to say with complete confidence what the hero would be like if he had a beloved family, the opportunity to communicate with children and loved ones, because Stepana Plyushkina N.V. Gogol portrayed exactly this: a hero who “lives an aimless life, vegetates,” being, in the words of the author of the poem himself, “a hole in humanity.” However, in spite of everything, in the hero’s soul there still remained those human feelings that were unknown to the other landowners whom Chichikov visited. Firstly, there is a feeling of gratitude. Plyushkin is the only one of the heroes who considered it correct to express gratitude to Chichikov for the purchase of “dead souls”. Secondly, he is no stranger to a reverent attitude towards the past and towards the life that he now so lacked: what inner inspiration ran across his face at the mere mention of his old friend! All this suggests that the flame of life has not yet gone out in the hero’s soul, it is there and it is glowing!
Stepan Plyushkin certainly evokes pity. It is this image that makes you think about how important it is to have loved ones in your life who will always be there: both in moments of joy and in moments of sadness, who will support, lend a hand and stay close. But at the same time, it is important to remember that in any situation you must remain human and not lose your moral character! You need to live, since life is given to everyone, in order to leave behind a memorable mark!