The literary process of the era includes. Contemporary literary process

Literary process

The language of the writer, the techniques of his writing, his favorite means of representation, and finally, his inherent syntax - all this together constitutes what we call the individual author's style. The word "style" itself comes from the ancient Greekstylos- the names of the wax-writing stick. At first, there was a transfer of meaning - a metonymy:stylos'o mbegan to call the handwriting of a person who wrote with a sharpened stick. It is curious that handwriting in the meaning of an individual literary manner, two millennia later, again entered the verbal use. But he entered not as a synonym for style, but as his younger brother. We are talking about the individual style of Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, but in praise of the young poet, we will say that he is developing his own style.

The famous saying: "Style is a person" quite accurately expresses the essence of difficult question... And that is to say, it belongs to Buffon - a naturalist, not a humanist. He lived in France in the 18th century, when the books of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau were followed by their living authors, who were a clear confirmation of the truth he had discovered.

Of course, there are always people who speak only because they have the ability to speak. This remark also dates back to Buffon's time, and its end is even more vicious than the beginning: "Just as monkeys have the ability to swing by hanging on their tails." And of course, if such people put their speech on paper, the saying of the great Frenchman will be difficult to attribute to them.

But we are examining not a sad exception, but a brilliant rule, according to which the style of Goethe and Napoleon, Lomonosov and Peter I expressed these powerful characters in different ways, but with equal clarity. At different times and in different circumstances, the character can behide from one side or the other. The writing style and writing style may be correspondingly dissimilar. Early works, it happens, are sharply different not only in content, but also in the very manner of writing from later ones. Affects style and targeting. The same Napoleon, distinguished by the detailed clarity of orders, cynically declared that appeals to the people should be short and unclear.

We would like to draw your attention to one more circumstance. A clearly expressed style is always a sign of a sharp individuality of talent, but in no way of its size. This is a necessary explanation for the Buffon formula. Indeed, Zoshchenko or Babel possessed the only inherent style that made it possible to guess their authorship from one or two lines. But, of course, neither one nor the other never even pretended to compare their talents with Tolstoy's genius.

The development of a style fills the first years of writing, work on a style continues throughout his life. And this is an indispensable condition of natural artistic talent. Without it, the most polished works are stillborn children. But even with giftedness and work own style produced by a few. For most, the highest and not always achievable praise is the recognition of an independent handwriting.

Hemingway left us strong pages in The Holiday That Is Always With You, telling us about the early days of his work.

“I always worked until I was able to achieve something, and always stopped work, already knowing what was going to happen next. This gave me overclocking for tomorrow. But sometimes, taking on new story and not finding a beginning, I sat down in front of the fireplace, squeezed the juice from the peel of small oranges directly into the fire and looked at the blue flashes of the flame. Or he stood by the window, gazed at the rooftops of Paris and thought: “Don't worry. You wrote before, you will write now. You only have to write one real phrase. The most real one you know. " And in the end I wrote the real phrase, and everything else followed. Then it was easy, because one real phrase always emerged from what was seen, heard, experienced. If I tried to write exquisitely and floridly, like some authors, I was convinced that I could painlessly cross out all these decorations, throw them away and start the story with a real simple phrase that I had already written ”.

“I went there almost every day because of Cézanne and to see paintings by Manet and Monet, as well as other impressionists whom I first met at the Art Institute in Chicago. Cezanne's painting taught me that some real simple phrases not enough to give the story the volume and depth that I was trying to achieve. I learned a lot from him, but I could not clearly explain what exactly. Besides, it's a secret. "

That's it: a secret. Everything seems to be decomposed into primary elements, at least take all the constituent parts in your hands and examine what they are, but in the end no one can "clearly explain" anything. Secret. And so in art and literature all the time. You lead, you lead a logical chain, and suddenly - an unseen moment - it slipped away from you. And "Yaroslavna still yearns at the appointed hour on the fortress wall." And she, and Hemingway, and Cezanne are connected together.

Without wishing to repeat ourselves, let us nevertheless recall that the individual style of a writer is influenced by many factors, and above all objective ones. The writer does not live in an airless space, his personality is formed by time, environment, life. The circle of his observations expands or shrinks, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, not at all of his free will. Hemingway remarks: “... I decided that I would write from a story about everything I know. I tried to stick to this rule whenever I wrote, and it was very disciplined. " By that time he knew a lot, but the most voluminous and strong impression of his youth was the first World War, and it broke out, regardless of his desire or unwillingness. Here the connection between the objective and the subjective is extremely tangible.

I am making this important explanation, as it were, in the margins. The primacy of objective factors has been emphasized all the time in the book, and I am afraid to once again touch upon known things with a school pointer. However, this is fromthe step will help me move on to talking about style in a broader sense of the concept.

Whole epochs are known in the cultural life of peoples, marked by a certain community aesthetic views... This community was quite contradictory, opposing tendencies of social development were expressed in it, but battles were decided with weapons of a similar type. The titanic art of the Renaissance, which found its highest expression in the accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, grew in inseparable connection with the same titanic literature, where the gigantic figures of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais towered. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European art developed in the changing forms of Baroque, Rococo, Classicism, and inner unity with literature, for reasons that we will not go into, was violated. It is possible - and this is being done - to be attributed to the baroque in the literature of Torquato Tasso with "Jerusalem Liberated", and to the rococo - Gozzi with "Turandot", but relative coincidences will not give the desired repetitions. Classicism seems to have similar features here and there. In art, he invisibly emerged from the Baroque, correlating with it, like a strict and well-mannered son with a beautiful, magnificent, but pretentious mother. If we continue the comparison, then in the face of Rococo he acquired a lively and cutesy sister, who looked with a grin at his noble brother. The Versailles ensemble captured all these family ties in their architectural embodiment.

Classicism originated and took shape in France. He responded to the mood of the times. After the religious storms of the 16th century, after La Rochelle and the Fronde (superficially but colorfully described by A. Dumas in the novels The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years Later), the political life of France entered the strict state banks. Long reign of the sun king Louis XIV rigidly regulated the public and private life of the French. Everyone knew their place in the estate monarchy - villein, bourgeois, abbot, chevalier. Villans - peasants, as a matter of fact, were not taken into account. The ground that supported all three official estates lay underfoot, and the gazes of the people who trampled on it turned to more interesting subjects. The passions that troubled their fathers subsided. Mercantilism was banging accounts under dry fingers Colbert. The recent effervescence of characters and temperaments seemed a ridiculous and ugly violation of decency. The absolutism of the state brought about the demand for a moral and aesthetic absolute. Art was looking for a framework, literature - for unbreakable rules. In search of a clear structure, they turned to antique samples. They seemed to be eternal and unchangeable standards. Single samples, a single concept of beauty, a single taste - this is how succinctly you can define the aesthetic attitude of classicism.

Ancient artists, writers, sages discovered the eternal rules of art. Following them, development and detailing will cause new Age Pericles. At first glance, such a self-closing of intentions seems to be a sharp step back after the relaxedness of the Renaissance. In fact, this is not the case.

The authoritarianism of classicism was entirely based on the indisputable authority of the human mind. Everything and everyone obeys him, as the supreme master of human deeds and actions. Passions Must be controlled and obeyed by reason. They can be selfish, and reason will put them in a strict framework of moral duty. The conflict between passion and reason leads to disaster - this is usually the scheme of the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, the great playwrights of French classicism, whose plays are still on the stage of Parisian theaters.

The rise of reason lowered religious thought from its pedestal, opening the way for sound explanations of human actions. Accurate regulation, which sometimes led to the "unfolding on the shelves" of all ethical and aesthetic categories, was necessary at this stage in the development of social consciousness. Such periods usually occur after people have accumulated a huge spiritual material and there is a natural need to understand it. The magnificent chaos of the Renaissance predetermined the brilliant dryness of classicism - these are different turns of the same spiral.

And was classicism really that dry? Within its strictly outlined framework, the great talents of Corneille and Racine, the mighty genius of Moliere, and the deep talent of Boileau developed. The latter in his "Poetic Art" formulated all the basic principles of the style, the most prominent theorist of which he became.

The poet should place everything deliberately,

Beginning and end into a single flow to drain

And, having subdued the words of his indisputable power,

Skillfully combine disparate parts.

Slenderness, clarity, clarity of the work was one of the main requirements of Boileau.

Classicism, based on ancient poetics, put forward its own theory of genres. They were divided into "high" and "low"; tragedy was declared their crown. The normativity of classicism required the strictest observance misunderstood ancient canon, expressed in the formula "the unity of place, time and action." When applied to drama, it meant that the viewer must maintain the complete illusion of the naturalness of what is happening on the Stage. And this naturalness can be achieved by the fact that the time required for the development of the action will exactly correspond to the time spent by the viewer. That is, all events should unfold over the course of three to four hours, and moreover, in one place. Deviations from the rule allowed that events developed within one day, but not more. Such a richness of action required skillful intrigue, and the playwrights of classicism were its brilliant masters. Writers have been conforming to these rules for a long time. "Crazy Day, or The Marriage of Figaro" by its very name indicates that the action is in a comedy. Beaumarchais develops within the classical canon. Fonvizinsky's "Minor" and Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit" also obey these rules.

Classicism from France spread throughout Europe, but received the first strongest blows again in his homeland from the enlighteners of the 18th century. We will talk about this a little later. He came to Russia as a ready-made sample. Kantemir and Trediakovsky became its first heralds. On Russian soil, it developed in relation to national conditions and gave very original modifications. The successors of Peter's work, as Russian writers felt they were, were enlightened by ideas. Post-Petrine literature consolidated and developed a new education in the struggle against the old forms of everyday life, life, and thinking. The struggle was sharp and merged with the political struggle. Kantemir was its most active participant and mover. A short the reign of Peter II - the son of Tsarevich Alexei - the opponents of Peter's reforms belatedly decided to use it for their own purposes. They removed Menshikov, a thieving but loyal servant of Peter, from the road, and returned Evdokia, the disgraced queen, from exile. The capital was moved again from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The old boyar families returned to power, which had not yet reached the hand of the fourteen-year-old emperor. Outside actions foreshadowed a deeper change. It would hardly have been possible to turn history back, but this threat, apparently, was sensitively felt by his contemporaries. And during the change of reign, when Peter II unexpectedly died of smallpox, the supporters of the reform decisively removed the reactionary nobility from the helm of the government, intending to finally take power into their own hands. Antiochus Cantemir became one of the leaders of the younger generation who followed the precepts of Peter. With his literary activities, he supplemented the political and social. As a matter of fact, they were fused together. His "Satires" - the younger genre of classicism - were filled with lively topical content. Scourging the concrete shortcomings of society, he called for overcoming spiritual inertia, selfish feelings, backwardness and ignorance in the name of new, much more humane than the previous ideals.

Russian classicism from the very beginning refused to follow blindly antique theme... The predominance of national motives is characteristic of the historical drama of Sumarokov and Ozerov. The poetry of Lomonosov and Derzhavin is distinguished by lofty civic pathos. The greatness of Russia, the victories of Russian arms, the assertion of civil valor became the main content of the odic poetry of the 18th century. Young Pushkin's lines:

Derzhavin and Petrov sang a song to the heroes

With strings of thunderous lyres, -

well convey the essence of this pathos.

The poets of that time were filled with a sense of the significance of their mission. MA Dmitriev describes a charming scene in Trivia from the Stock of My Memory: “Petrov was of an important appearance. He wrote some odes while walking around the Kremlin: and behind him someone was carrying paper and an inkwell. At the sight of the Kremlin, he was filled with delight and wrote. Strange, but at the same time beautiful. "

The younger genres of classicism - fable and satire - are being instilled in Russia. The great realism of I.A.Krylov grew up on prepared soil. Krylov himself, in his youth, also went through the strict school of classicism, and it cannot be said that this somehow hindered the development of his enormous talent. Within the framework of classicism, creative activity Fonvizin and Knyazhnin - the largest Russian comedians who gave the first excellent examples of this genre in Russia.

But the wind of time changed its direction. Interest in the personality, pushed into the background by the absolutist state, was awakened with renewed vigor. Classicism, which put in the first place the category of civic moral duty, more and more resembled an uncle-resonator from a moralizing play. The audience was still patiently listening to his monologues, but their hearts turned to the sorrowful and sweet experiences of the young lovers. Dignified admiration for the heroes wrapped in a toga gave way to sympathy for imperceptible people with their usual needs, misdeeds, feelings. Art, in fact, is very sensitive to the coming changes, and the melodic bell of sentimentalism - oddly enough - foreshadowed the sound of the alarm bell of the Great French Revolution. Clever Voltaire saw the root of the issue when, with disgust, he called the masterpiece of sentimentalism "New Héloise" J.-J. Rousseau's "stupid, bourgeois, immoral and boring" work. The definition “bourgeois” is important for us, let the rest of the epithets remain on the conscience of the Ferney sage.

Indeed, the "third estate" was gaining strength everywhere. And now it (and not him!) Began to dictate its tastes to society. What did these future masters of life care about Agamemnons, Medea and Phaedrus? They wanted to see themselves on stage and in the book! Aristocratic strata, always greedy for amusing innovations, gladly accepted the imperceptibly imposed game. Marie Antoinette herself - the last queen of old France - headed new fashion... In the costume of a villager - he really suited her! - She enthusiastically played out a sentimental idyll on a specially built farm in the Versailles Park. The game went by all the rules: the queen once milked a real cow with her own hands. I was lucky enough to visit Little Trianono, and I could personally imagine what was happening here nearly two hundred years ago. The queen - according to a contemporary - in a straw hat runs through the gardens, forcing her retinue to drink milk and fresh eggs, drags the king, reading in the grove, to have breakfast on the grass, then he watches how the cows are milked, then he fishes in the lake, or, sitting on the turf, rests at the embroidery or at the spinning wheel, like a simple peasant woman.

But what the aristocracy was taking for new fun wore a completely different coloring in the eyes of the "third estate" and its spokesmen. It is no coincidence that the birthplace of sentimentalism this time turned out to be England, where the "third estate" a hundred years earlier, by the hands of Cromwell and the Puritans, had won a crushing victory over feudalism. It was in England that the first writers of the new trend began to paint pictures of rural life, describe the peaceful labors and joys of commoners, opposing them to the spoiled mores of the nobility. The names of Thomson with his "Seasons", Gray with his "Country Cemetery" and Jung with his "Nights", now half-forgotten, then thundered all over Europe. And in distant Russia, the young Kazan merchant Gabriel Kamenev exclaimed prayerfully:

Oh Jung! The Comforter Philosopher!

Give me strength, be a teacher!

In England, however, sentimentalism brought forward such undeniably great writers as Richardson and Stern, who left their mark on an entire era. The names of the heroes Richardson-Pamela, Clarissa, Grandison - became household names among the reading public of that time. Remember the exclamation in Eugene Onegin: “Cousin! Do you remember Grandison? " - when old women sort out the hobbies of youth in their memory. Lawrence Stern, author of Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey, can rightfully be called not only a great, but a great writer. By the way, the new style got its name from the name of his work. Richardson's sensitivity in Stern's novels is combined with clever humor, and perhaps that's why they don't tire the reader even now. Tristram Shandy describes the everyday life of England; the heroes of the novel are modest people like Mr. Shandy, Corporal Trim and Uncle Toby. They are drawn with good-natured humor and cause strong sympathy in the reader's heart. " Sentimental journey"- a masterful and heartfelt work, which the author himself called" a peaceful journey of the heart in search of nature and for all spiritual attractions, capable of instilling in us more love for our neighbors and for the whole world than we usually feel. "

In France, the ground for sentimentalism was paved by the incomparable "Manon Lescaut" by the Abbot Prevost and "The Life of Marianne" by Marivaux. The Richardson and Stern translations caused the crystallization of an already saturated solution. In "New Eloise" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, still shaky ideas took shape in a coherent concept. The return to mother nature, the cult of naturalness, purity and clarity of thoughts and intentions were external signs of deep processes. We must not forget that after the “New Eloise” appeared the famous “Social Contract” by Rousseau (just a year later!), Where the individual and society, the individual and the state were boldly equalized in rights. Classicism, with its idea of ​​duty, understood in the form of an almost deified law, moral and state, which people must unquestioningly follow, received a ramming blow. The emancipation of the individual, raised to the banner in the very first days of the 1789 revolution, was proclaimed in the pages of sentimental novels twenty to thirty years earlier. New Eloise gave birth to dozens of similar works, among which the most resounding success fell on Paul and Virginia by Saint-Pierre. Sentimentalism became the leading style of the time. Future leaders of revolutionary terror, including Saint-Just and Robespierre, were sincere adherents of sentimentalism. Incidentally, this determines something in their characters, formed under the influence of Rousseau and Saint-Pierre. They read the young Bonaparte, and his phraseology (but no more) also preserved traces of this style in some places.

In Germany, the young Goethe gave the supreme example of sentimentalist prose in The Sorrows of Young Werther. The success of the novel was tremendous. They fell in love with imitation of the young hero, dreamed, and grieved, and even committed suicide. Correspondence between Werther and Lotte was studied as a gospel, from which all the reading public of that time drew feelings and thoughts. Epistolary prose has become for a long time - and not only in Germany - one of the leading lines of literature.

On Russian soil, sentimentalism arose relatively late. Resistance to the lofty style and pompous content of the poems of classicism made itself felt even in Bogdanovich's Darling. The poem evoked an enthusiastic reception from his contemporaries. The ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche (in Russian translation - Dushenka) was presented with a mocking smile, pure and clear language, alien to boring rhetoric. The epitaph on the death of the author of a playful poem conveys to us the impression she made on the then readers:

Why blacken that grave with inscriptions,

Where Darling alone can replace everything?

But sentimentalism as a style was embodied in the work of Karamzin. His "Letters of a Russian Traveler" and "Poor Liza" became, as it were, literary manifestos of the style. Sensitive appeals to the reader, frank confessions, praises of an unassuming life in the bosom of nature overwhelm these works. It is difficult to read them now, they seem naive and even sugary. But their role in literature and in society was serious. First of all, in them, in a quiet and timid, but pure voice, genuine humanity spoke. Let the phrase: "Why were we not born in those days when all people were shepherds and brothers" - remained a phrase in the mouths of a sentimental Russian nobleman who traveled around Europe. But this phrase sounded against the close noise background of the thundering slogan: "Freedom, equality and fraternity" - and involuntarily evoked seditious associations even against the wishes of the law-abiding author. The “letters” involved the reader in the circle of common European interests, the effect of co-presence with an inquisitive and humane traveler fully achieved the goal. "Poor Liza", describing the sad story of a seduced peasant girl, was very far from reality, except perhaps indicating the place of action - Moscow and its environs. But the very fact that the reader's attention was drawn to the fate of such an inconspicuous heroine testified to a lot. Liza's pale, almost shadowy figure made people of all walks of life shed bitter tears.state. This means that there is already a public need for democratic heroes, at least first by name. And "Poor Liza" can be safely put at the beginning of the row, in which they will then stand " Stationmaster"And" Humiliated and offended. " The humanity of Karamzin was reflected not so much in the portrayal of the heroine as in the attitude towards her, and the receptive reader highly appreciated the humanity of the author.

Within the framework of sentimentalism, preparations were made for the final formation of the literary language, carried out by Pushkin. great poet treated Karamzin with great respect, calling him one of his teachers. The use of simple and everyday objects inevitably caused the democratization of the language, its convergence with the vernacular. The merit of Karamzin is undeniable here.

Sentimentalism in its purest form did not long dominate the minds in Russia. Elements of sentimentalism could also be observed in such realistic works as "A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" by Radishchev, but they made themselves felt more from the outside than from the deep side. Early Zhukovsky was also inclined towards him, but these were the last splashes. Already during Karamzin's lifetime, Russian literature began to develop in other directions. If classicism and sentimentalism belong almost entirely to the past, then this cannot be said of romanticism. Everything will depend on what content we introduce into the concept.

In his article "On the Russian Story and Gogol's Stories," Belinsky defines romanticism in comparison with realism. “Poetry,” says the critic, “embraces and reproduces the phenomena of life in two, so to speak, ways. These methods are opposite, although they lead to the same goal. The poet either recreates life according to his own ideal, depending on the image of his view of things, on his attitude to the world, to the century and the people in which he lives, or reproduces it in all its nakedness and truth, remaining faithful to all the details, colors and shades its reality. Therefore, poetry can be divided into two, so to speak, sections - the ideal and the real. "

So, the romantic beginning (in the old terminology - ideal) is different from the realistic (or real) by the preponderance of recreating over recreating. PereThis weight is not always obvious, and Belinsky himself further notes that, "however, there are points of contact where these two elements of poetry converge and merge." In support of this idea, he cites the works of Byron, Pushkin, Mitskevich, Schiller. But the distinction between the two principles is drawn, so to speak, on the general point, and in the future we will be guided by Belinsky's formula in view of its simplicity and clarity.

It has the main emphasis: the ideal according to which the poet is re-creating life depends "on the image of his view of things, on his attitude to the world, to the century and the people in which he lives ...". From this it follows that the content of the ideal may be different, and, for example, the romantic of the 18th century recreated life, guided by completely different views on things and treating the world, the century, the people in a completely different way than the romantic of the 20th century. And therefore, romanticism can be reactionary and revolutionary, progressive and regressive.

Literary history draws a picturesque picture occurrences and downfalls of ideal models of romanticism. Replacing them with others, corresponding to the spirit of the times, sometimes happened unusually quickly, and sometimes stretched out for long periods, but it happened and will continue to happen due to, as they say, the well-known postulate: "Everything flows, everything changes."

Romanticism owes its appearance to the same XVIII century... Its roots must be sought in educational philosophy, which, through the lips of Diderot and Lessing, ridiculed the conventional rules of classicism and pointed out the role of feeling and inspiration in art. Developing alongside sentimentalism, the new style turned out to be incomparably more active in appropriating social functions. Schiller's "robbers", who appeared on the scene seven years before the Bastille was taken, sounded stronger than any cannon shot at the fortress of all-European absolutism. The revolutionary pathos of this play is such that even almost a hundred and fifty years later, it performed its propaganda task on the stage of the Red Army theaters during the Civil War.

But in the same Germany, among the younger contemporaries of Schiller - Novalis and Tieck, romanticism takes on a completely different color. The subjective principle, highlighted by the enlighteners in the name of freeing the individual from the iron shackles of absolutism, is unusually hypertrophiedXia and turns precisely against the educational ideology. Feelings are separated from reason, and mystical properties are attributed to them. The newly emerging mysticism seeks historical correspondences in the dead time of the Middle Ages, which is endowed with ideal features... The revolutionary romanticism is being replaced by reactionary romanticism, in rare conformity with the change of historical scenery - it is no longer the Phrygian cap of the sansculotte that hovers over Europe, but the bear cap of the Napoleonic grenadier. This romanticism has its good sides: interest in folk roots, to old fairy tales and legends, folklore and philology receive a strong impetus to development. But retrogradeness threatens to poison these fresh shoots with the poison of chauvinism and nationalism.

And now the mighty talent of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann explodes from within this Gothic romanticism. German philistinism, dressed in romantic clothes, receives blow after blow, inflicted by the brilliant swordsman. Beautiful clothes turn to tatters under an irrepressible sword. And there is nowhere to dodge - the fight takes place on the same familiar ground, beloved by all romantics of that time. It is enclosed among the monastery fences and fortress walls, it is crossed by doubles and ghosts, but their groans and sighs are drowned out by the devilish laughter of the narrator and commentator.

Hoffmann's brilliant sarcasm prepared the great irony of Heine for development, in whose work revolutionary romanticism took a crushing revenge over reactionary one. Germany was the font of early romanticism, and on its example it is possible to understand what changes the concept of romanticism underwent over a relatively short period of time.

Having understood this, we can omit information about romanticism in England, France, Italy and other countries. In relation to national and historical conditions, in general, similar processes took place there. Let us name only as lofty landmarks the names of the greatest writers who appeared in literature under romantic banners. This is, first of all, Byron, who gave the name, view and norms of behavior to an entire generation. Not only with a pen, but with his entire life, he created a wonderful image of a fighter and rebel, a champion of independence and freedom. Hugo in France, Slovak in Poland were the leaders of romanticism. Young Mickiewicz and Balzac also paid tribute to him.

In Russia, romanticism made a fascinating impression on the youth who grew up after the fire of Moscow and the capture of Paris. In fact, he became the psychology of Decembrism. In the words of twenty-year-old Odoevsky, uttered on the Senate Square: “We will die! Oh, how gloriously we will die! " - this mood splashed out without a trace. Here, not just one life, but death itself is re-created in accordance with the ideal.

Young Pushkin's romanticism developed in direct and close connection with Decembrism. And not only his ideas, but also the moods of these angels of Russian freedom penetrated Pushkin's work.

Lermontov's talent matured in the gloomy time that came after the defeat of the Decembrists. And the romanticism of his first works takes on a corresponding color. But in the immortal Parus, with its final lines:

And he, rebellious, asks for the storm,

As if there is peace in the storms! -

the thought is communicated not only about personal freedom.

In The Guerre of Our Time, Lermontov, represented by Grushnitsky, will cross out the fashion for romanticism. But he didn't! thousands of resurrected Grushnitskys immediately began to call themselves the Pechorins. This fad marked all the 40s and even the 50s, up to the appearance of the Bazarovs, during which the very existence of the Grushnitskys became incredible. Incidentally, this is the negative side of romanticism: its characters, due to their attractive dissimilarity, inevitably cause the paradox of similarity. After the resounding success of Gorky's first stories, a lot of progression began to speculate that they belonged to the trample class.

But - since we have already started talking about him - the romanticism of the young Gorky quickly spread its mighty wings over the external exoticism of vagabond, which first of all caught the eye of the gloomy reader of the 90s. The sound of these wings in the Song of the Falcon and the Song of the Petrel foreshadowed the first Russian revolution. None of the writers felt her closeness as sensitively as Gorky. The whole the pathos of his early works was just a re-comprehension of reality in accordance with future events. Gorky's revolutionary romanticism gave rise to the romantic line of Soviet literature, which we will talk about a little later.

But Gorky entered the history of world culture primarily as great realist... Belinsky's thought about the contact of two principles, when the romantic and the realistic merge together, is repeatedly confirmed by the example of Gorky's work, and not only early, but also later. And yet, if we take it as a whole, then the realistic principle always prevails in him. After all, even in the nairomantic "Song of the Petrel" its background, motive, and finally, the concept itself is such that the lines; "Let the storm break out stronger!" - immediately became the militant slogan of the revolution. And she was so real!

Belinsky, as you remember, confirmed his idea with references to Byron, Pushkin, Mitskevich, Schiller. It can be illustrated by the work of many, many more artists of the word. But we must now figure out what this second principle is, or a method, in the words of Belinsky.

Even with the most general view of the literary process, we will be convinced that the realistic way of reproducing reality is, of course, dominant in literature. He - I want to say more precisely - is the most natural. This is, as it were, the most direct and clear path from object to subject. It is significant that literary styles and trends determined themselves only with the help of this factor. Romanticism (remember Tieck and Novalis) emphasized remoteness from reality, naturalism exaggerated proximity to it.

I would venture to use a comparison that has long become commonplace, but in this case, somewhat updated. The stream makes its way through the grooves and valleys, it washes the channel in them and rushes into the unseen far. An obstacle arises, the stream either destroys it, leaving foamed rapids behind, or it spills and changes the channel, but it continues to flow again along the ground; it can rise to the upper layers of the atmosphere unless it evaporates, but then it will cease to be a stream.

This allegory has very simple substitutions. Literature is inseparable from reality, and the most funTastic fictions are formed from the realities of life. Violent eddies and eddies are as explainable as quiet shallow waters, by certain conditions of "place and action." They create a temporary flow pattern - the gaze is amazed either by the foaming rapids, or calmed down by a smooth flow. But the stream remains a stream and continues to dig a channel in new open spaces.

The work of great writers most fully embodies the meaning and direction of the literary movement. And we call Dante, Shakespeare and Swift realists by no means out of blind adherence to the current definition. The phantasmagoric nature of "The Divine Comedy", "The Tempest", "Gulliver's Travels" is, as it were, a bizarre channel dug by a stream in the solid rock of the era.

As a matter of fact, all the greatest achievements of literature belong to realism. An objective view of reality sharpens the ability to generalize disparate phenomena. And realism, represented by its best representatives, developed this ability to the highest degree. Engels said that he "presupposes, in addition to the truthfulness of the details, the truthful reproduction of typical characters in typical circumstances." The definition is very significant. A talented writer achieves this typification within a certain framework. They are usually limited to a precise length of time and equally precise boundaries of space. In this sense, we can talk, for example, about the heroes of Böll and Remarque, Priestley and Snow. For great writers, there are no such restrictions. Typical characters, while remaining national, grow in them into universal human, typical circumstances cover an entire era and are visible in the following times. We have already named, but will once again call Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, Hamlet and Othello, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver, Gargantua and Faust - images deservedly called world and eternal.

True realism is always human, because it corresponds to the natural human desire to see the objective state of things and draw effective conclusions from it. Striving, of course, often remains a striving, and although conclusions are drawn, they are not applied to action, but this is no longer the fault, for example, of the great humanists of the 20th century - Maxim Gorky and RoRolland, Anatole France and Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann and Theodor Dreiser. They did everything they could, and it is hoped that the seeds they threw into the soil will sooner or later throw out such stalks that will finally drive out all harmful weeds from human consciousness.

Realism in Russia has reached perfect samples in the works of the great Russians writers XIX century. Beginning with Pushkin and Gogol, all our literature developed in a realistic direction. She reached her heights in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Their influence on world literature is enormous - such luminaries as Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann and Heinrich Mann, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, called the authors of The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace their teachers.

To tell about Russian realism means to retell the entire history of our literature. She is well known to the reader from everyday reading, and school and university courses have introduced this acquaintance to the outlined shores. And we will not dare to walk along them with a cursory step.

We only note that realism XIX century is not accidentally called critical realism. He has always been a denouncer of the dark sides of society, fearlessly ripping off the bandages from his ulcers and revealing them to the light. Turn the pages of history, and you will see what a blow to serfdom was Gogol's Dead Souls and Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter, how the wrathful satire of Saltykov-Shchedrin scourged the autocracy, how Chernyshevsky's story What Is to Be Done? Became a reference book for several generations of the revolution. The literature of critical realism has become the true conscience of Russian society, and an angry, irreconcilable, exacting conscience.

The reader brought up on such literature, figuratively speaking, meant bread, and not cakes, as the daily bread of art. And the dazzling fireworks of Russian decadence, scattered with colored lights at the beginning of the 20th century, could not compete in the mind of this reader either with Chekhov's table lamp, or with the dim windows of the Bunin villages, or with the factory lights of Gorky. For the fate of this short-term current, it is extremely significant that its most prominent and brightest representatives quickly outgrew all the "isms" of decadence and became the standard-bearers of realism. And it is quite natural that symbolism, futurism, imagism became the property of specialists, and the great realistic creativity of Blok, Mayakovsky, Yesenin - the property of the country, people, history.

In literary criticism, there are many discrepancies, and the concepts of style and trend, method and method are sometimes merged, sometimes separated in various works of scientists. For example, naturalism, as a style based on the reproduction of life without evaluating and understanding its phenomena, is sometimes delimited from the literary movement that bears the same name and became famous thanks to Zola and his school. This division seems to me to be very arbitrary, and, as you have already noticed, I did not adhere to it. But the method as a concept must be allocated to a special category.

You, too, have probably noticed that, speaking about the styles of classicism and sentimentalism, I applied this concept to romanticism less confidently and completely omitted it in the conversation about realism. Indeed, it is impossible to consider realism as a single style. It is more reasonable, following Belinsky's definition, to talk about a realistic way or a method of reproducing reality. Since reality is changeable, then the method must inevitably undergo changes along with it. And the realistic method of the great masters of the Renaissance is different from the method of the realists of the 18th century and the Russian writers of the 19th century. In general terms and main lines, they are similar and successive, but their goals and objectives are different. And the goal in art and literature determines, in fact, their effective direction.

In the history of mankind there has not been an example of such a sharp change of epochs that occurred in 1917. No one will name the dates of the beginning of the Renaissance, no one will name the dates of its end. Even the storms of the English Revolution of the 17th century and French XVIII centuries could not completely break feudalism. In England, for a long time, he coexisted with the new order of things, gradually becoming bourgeois and capitalizing. In France, he still made himself felt: from the outside - in the titles of Napoleonic marshals, from a deeper side - in the restoration of 1815 - 1830s. But our old landlord-capitalist system was completely swept away! Without any remnants and without any roundabout! Obrazothe first socialist state in the world was formed. The content of life in the vastness of the former Russian Empire has completely and completely changed. The reality of Lenin's country was in no way like the reality of tsarist Russia.

The art of the victorious people was filled with new content, reflecting fundamental changes in the life of the country. And the realistic method, which has always dominated Russian art, has accordingly acquired new features. The fundamental significance of these features was so great that the very concept of the realistic method required a new definition.

The artistic method that guides Soviet art and literature is called the method socialist realism. From what we said above, it clearly follows that socialist realism is not someone's speculative construction: it existed long before it was named. Strictly speaking, this is how any phenomenon of reality declares its objective existence before the human mind determines its place in the system of cognition. Schoolchildren are often confused by the fact that Gorky's "Mother", for example, is referred to the literature of socialist realism, although this work was created under the conditions of tsarist Russia, when the victory of socialism was still far away. But the Russian proletariat and its vanguard, the Leninist party, were the bearers of socialist ideology. Gorky's work was devoted to serving the working class, it was saturated with the ideas of Bolshevism, and "Mother" became one of the first works in which a completely new content gave rise to a new method of depicting reality. The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat was portrayed from the point of view of the revolutionary proletariat itself.

Leafing through the history of literature, we will find numerous examples of such seeming (of course, in the eyes of schoolchildren) inconsistencies. Just remember the realism of the French enlighteners, which arose long before the revolutionary explosion of 1789.

Gorky's work was of great importance for the formation and development of the method of socialist realism. Its main principles for the first time received artistic disclosure and embodiment precisely in the productionIah of the great proletarian writer. These principles can be defined in the basic provisions - loyalty to the truth of life, Leninist partisanship and nationality. Young Soviet literature brightly and talentedly embodied these principles in the living fabric of its first works. The new method, which met the new historical conditions, has not yet received a name, but has already been adopted by a large galaxy of writers of the 1920s. It turned out to be extremely flexible and capacious, did not exclude, but assumed thematic, stylistic and genre variety... Mayakovsky's civic pathos and Yesenin's heartfelt lyrics characterize the breadth of the tonal sound of Our poetry of those and subsequent years. In prose, the scope is no less wide: Fadeev's Defeat and Furmanov's Chapaev determine the stages of its development, just like Fedin's Cities and Years and A. Tolstoy's Walking Through the Torment. Drama, inseparable from the theater, puts on the stage "Armored train 14-69" Vs. Ivanov at the Moscow Art Theater and "The Bedbug" by Mayakovsky staged by Meyerhold.

The new method presupposes the development of the romantic line: the revolution is still very young, the first years are coming Soviet power, and in the romantic works of that time, her living and youthful blood pulsates. The major sounds of Bagritsky and Lugovsky in poetry, Green and Lavrenev in prose convey the tonality of the feeling of life of those years.

The thirties are marked by the collectivization and industrialization of the country. Soviet literature, which has already acquired vast experience in ideological and artistic skill, effectively responds to events and is actively involved in national affairs. Building socialism from a task becomes a reality. During these years, a new method gets its name. But only a name, since it had entered the practice and theory of our art long before that.

Thematic, stylistic and genre diversity is striking again when looking at the literature of that time. Its movement is uneven, but this movement is steady and unstoppable, which is called development. The great epic of Sholokhov ends Quiet Don", Begun by him in the late 20s, and his" Virgin Soil Upturned "appears, continues with the printing of splendidny "Peter I" by A. Tolstoy. The lyrical landscape of Prishvin and the satire of Ilf and Petrov, the romanticism of Paustovsky and the analyticism of Tynyanov find their place in the wide current of literature. Drama takes on new wings in Vishnevsky's Optimistic Tragedy and Afinogenov's work. In poetry, Aseev and Pasternak, Tikhonov and Selvinsky, B. Kornilov and P. Vasiliev, Rylsky and Sosyura, Charents and Vurgun create brilliant examples of lyrics and epic - this is the true maturity of their work.

The hardest test that befell the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War ended with the triumph of victory over German fascism. It was a triumph for the entire Leninist system, the entire socialist system. Literature in those years became the spiritual weapon of the people in their struggle for the freedom and independence of their homeland. The outstanding epic of Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin", the journalism of Leonov, Sholokhov, the lyrics of the poets of the Great Patriotic War will forever remain a living memory of this feat of hers.

In the post-war period, the method of socialist realism has been developed by our literature as applied to the enormous long-term task set before the people by our party — the building of communism. In this regard, its basic principles receive new content. The vital truthfulness of the depiction of reality becomes inseparable from the vital truth of our society in its movement towards communism. This is a defining trend in our literature, and it is impossible to ignore it. Leninist partisanship acquires special significance in art and literature in the increasing ideological struggle imperialist and socialist forces now taking place in the world. The nationality grows into an awareness of the common goal towards which two hundred and fifty-nine million Soviet people strive, in disclosing heroic their aspirations, in understanding their international duty to the working people of the whole world.

It is necessary to emphasize the multinationality of our literature. This is a completely new phenomenon that has no examples and precedents in history. Preserving national identity, developing best traditions their classics, Ukrainian and Belarusian, Georgian and Armenian, Lithuanian and Kazakh, together with Russian and other literatures of our country, make up one great whole. And just as the names of the great writers of these peoples - Pushkin and Shevchenko, Kemine and Tumanyan, Rainis and Vagif - are in the same row for us, so the writers and poets of the Soviet country are in the same row. And for us the names and works of Sholokhov and Tvardovsky, Gamzatov and Mezhelaitis, Smelyakov and Gonchar, Smuul and Martynov, Lukonin and Bazhan and many masters of the pen are close and dear - they all constitute the pride of our united Soviet literature.

Lenin's national policy equips us with a clear knowledge of the goal: everything that is directed towards the unity of the Soviet peoples, we support completely: everything that is directed towards their separation, we completely reject. Soviet literature is the literature of a new historical community of people - the Soviet people. It has become an effective force of Lenin's internationalism, and its enduring merit is that it unites peoples with its prophetic, wise, fraternal word.

Our literature is truly great, it fully deserves this definition. Having absorbed the opposite rivers and streams, she united them in a powerful and impetuous stream, unstoppably moving into the distant far. Immortal creations of human genius shine like guiding beacons along the entire course of the stream - "The Lay of Igor's Campaign" and "The Knight in the Panther's Skin", "Shakhnama" and "Eugene Onegin", "Kobzar" and "Anush", "War and Peace" and " The Brothers Karamazov "," Twelve "and" Out of the Voice "," Quiet Don "and" Vasily Terkin "and many more. And how many more of them will be erected ahead!

Literature requires a historical approach. A historical view of poetics became possible after the concept of world literature (introduced by Goethe)... 20s 19th century - the transition of ideas about the literary process from a normative to a historical view of literature - Goethe. He revered the Greek literature as a model, tk. a beautiful person is depicted there.

late 19th century The abandonment of the orientation towards the ideal norm became possible when the idea of ​​a single and continuous evolutionary(linear and progressive) movement of history was supplanted by the concepts of stage development (Veselovsky, Spengler, Taylor, Danilevsky).

10-20 years 19th century cyclical the concept of history (Danilevsky, Spengler) Rejection of the simplified concept of unidirectional and linear progress in history, incl. and the history of literature. “Each phenomenon completes a cycle of two opposite phases, cat. and give by their opposite the commonality of a sequential course ... The phenomenon moves from the previous to the next, enters the opposite and in this opposite direction is forwarded to the next. " (the extreme form of cyclism is the idea of ​​closed cultural and historical worlds).

2nd floor 19th century - comparative historical study of literatures (comparative studies) and historical poetics... “The main premise of the history of literature is. the unity of the socialist process. development of mankind, which in turn determines the unity of the development of literature. Similarity between ideologies belonging to the same stage of social development, regardless of the presence or absence of contact between them. The fulcrum is the study of similar or similar litas. phenomena among different peoples. Further - a broad scientific generalization and understanding of the laws governing the change of artistic eras.

Further, Chernetz goes about literary criticism, theory and history of literature, since every aspect is important for understanding the multi-layered and multinational nature of the world literature. process. (see related questions)

Historical poetics studies the genesis and development of the aesthetic object, the general principles of aesthetic vision and artistic thinking, the subjective architectonics of works (the relationship of the author, hero, reader), archetypal forms of the image and plot, genera and genres. East poetics revealed 3 large stages in the development of world literature (the most generalized picture of the development of literature today):

The first stage (syncretic, mythopoetic) - the era of syncretism (remember folk.). It lasts from the ancient Stone Age to the 7th-6th centuries. BC. in Greece and the first centuries A.D. in the East. Syncretism - "originality archaic art(lack of authorship, clear boundaries between participants and authors). Syncretism is not confusion, but lack of difference. This is a time of slow development of the basic and primary principles of artistic thinking, subjective forms, figurative languages, plot archetypes, genera and genres (i.e. these are ready-made forms for the subsequent development of art).

Second stage (rhetorical, traditionalist) begins in the 6-5th centuries BC in Greece and the first centuries AD in the East and lasts until the middle - 2 half of the 18th century in Europe and the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the East, i.e. about 2, 5 thousand years .. The external sign of the stage is the appearance poet and rhetoric, in the cat. aesthetic thought begins to separate from other forms of ideology and reflect on literature and on the emerging new principles of culture.

"Poetics" of Aristotle, antique rhetoric.

This stage is extremely scattered and variegated. It is united by a new generative cultural and aesthetic principle, the cat. replaced syncretism. This principle in science has not yet been sufficiently defined. But this is not traditionalism, cat. as well as syncretism is based on generalities, not canon, tk. this quality is common to both stages of literary development. More specific for this stage - reflexivity and rhetoric (love of deduction, the prevalence of the general over the particular, the attitude towards ready-made forms). But this is only one side.

Logical procedures of thinking and self concept were different. The concept is not a pure abstraction, it is the so-called. eidos- The "idea" of objects is inseparable from the concrete-sensual image, the fusion of figurative-poetic principles. Hence the rational-logical beginning. Therefore, it would be nice to name the generative principle of this stage (as in the first - syncretism), says Chernetz, eidetic poetics... In this situation

reflectivity is one of the principles of discrimination

canon - border

As an image they will not end. separated from the concept (the same eidos), and the canon will not end. separated from reflection. The artist can reflect on the event, but only as a subject involved in it, and not as an outside observer.

Just in case, I give the concept REFLECTION- a type of philosophical thinking aimed at comprehending and substantiating one's own prerequisites, requiring the turning of consciousness on itself. That is, in another way, in a broad sense, we can say that this is awareness or abstraction.

Third stage (individual author) (mid - 2 half of the 18th century in Europe and at the turn of the 19-20th in the East and continues to this day). A new generative principle that replaced the eidetic one. The image and the idea acquired an autonomous status. The artistic image acquires its own meaningfulness, not reducible to an abstract idea. The artistic word becomes specific (in relation to other types of speech - everyday, mythological). It gets a modal status, i.e. expresses a very special reality - artistic. Artistic reality Is an opportunity, a probability. Art from the game, the rules of the cat. were asked before it began (canon) turns into a game, the rules of the cat. add up along the way. Poetics of Artistic Modality as a non-canonical stage in the development of art. The process of de-canonization of genres.

Now about literary directions.

The staging of the development of literature records only the most profound, structural changes, shifts in artistic consciousness. A more detailed, specific literary process is needed, in accordance with the pleasant periodization of national, regional, world li-r, one way or another, always correlated with historical periodization.

One of essential concepts associated with the literary process is the concept literary direction ... Its most important features:

specifically, historically har-r- connection with a certain period in the development of national, regional, world literature,

formation based on a specific artistic (creative) method

programmatic indicating high level artistic self-consciousness of writers, is clearly manifested in the creation of aesthetic manifestos, which constitute a kind of platform for unification. writers.

Pospelov: Differentiation of the concepts of "flow" and "direction": the current mb. spontaneous, and can be "directed"; literature cannot develop outside of currents, while Sophocles, Boccaccio and Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare worked outside of trends. The emergence of trends is a sign of the maturity of literature. They arise when “a group of writers of a particular strange and epoch unites on the basis of some kind of creative program and creates their works, focusing on its provisions.

Basic lit. directions.

Baroque(from mid 16th century + 17th century)

reflected ideas about the complexity, diversity, variability of the world. Baroque is characterized by contrast, tension, dynamism of images, affectation, striving for grandeur and splendor, for combining reality and illusion

disappointment in the humanistic pathos of the Renaissance art, the emergence of tragic moods.

striving for diversity, for summing up knowledge about the world, inclusiveness, encyclopedism, which sometimes turns into chaos and collecting curiosities, striving for the study of being in its contrasts

Bright representative - Calderon (Spain)

In Russia - Polotsky, Medvedev, Istomin. The main genres are patoral, tragicomedy, burlesque.

16th century - Pleiad(we all remember the Pleiades, I will not reprint it). With the creation of the Pleiades, one of the essential signs characteristic of the future lit. direction - creation manifest.(Defense and glorification of the French language). The Pleiad was the first, but not very wide lit. direction, cat. named itself school.

Even more clearly the signs of lit. directions: classicism. Manifesto - "Poetic Art" Boileau.

In Russia: Lomonosov, Sumarokov, etc.

Classicism is based on ideas rationalism coming from philosophy Descartes. Work of fiction, from the point of view of classicism, should be built on the basis of strict canons, thereby revealing the harmony and consistency of the universe itself. Interest for classicism is only eternal, unchanging - in each phenomenon, he seeks to recognize only essential, typological features, discarding random individual features. The aesthetics of classicism attaches great importance to the social and educational function of art. Classicism takes many rules and canons from ancient art ( Aristotle, Horace).

Classicism establishes a strict hierarchy of genres, which are divided into high ( Oh yeah, tragedy, epic) and low ( comedy, satire, fable). Each genre has strictly defined features, the confusion of which is not allowed.

sentimentalism (pre-romanticism (pre-romanticism))

The dominant of "human nature" sentimentalism declared feeling, not reason, which distinguished it from classicism... Without breaking with Enlightenment, sentimentalism remained faithful to the ideal of a normative personality, however, the condition for its implementation was considered not a "reasonable" reorganization of the world, but the release and improvement of "natural" feelings. Hero educational literature in sentimentalism is more individualized, its inner world is enriched with the ability to empathize, responsive to what is happening around. By origin (or by conviction) the sentimental hero is a democrat; the rich spiritual world of the commoner is one of the main discoveries and conquests of sentimentalism.

The most prominent representatives of sentimentalism - James Thomson, Edward Jung, Thomas Gray, Lawrence Stern(England), Jean Jacques Rousseau(France), Nikolay Karamzin(Russia).

Romanticism (first third of the 19th century) - reaction to Education

The assertion of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the image of strong passions, a spiritualized and healing nature.

Romanticism first appeared in Germany, among writers and philosophers Jena school (W. G. Wackenroder, Ludwig Thicke, Novalis, brothers F. and A. Schlegeli)

It is believed that Romanticism in England largely due to German influence. In England, its first representatives are poets "Lake school"

Russia - Zhukovsky, Ryleev, Pushkin ...

trends (in a different sense than Pospelov's): civic romanticism (Byron, Ryleev, Pushkin), religious and ethical romanticism (Chateaubriand, Zhukovsky)

faithful reproduction of typical characters in typical circumstances.

Belinsky said about natural school, his father was a cat. he considered Gogol.

realism of the 19th century - critical (depicting the prospects for the development of the society, elements of utopianism)

as the direction is based on a realistic method, the cat. was developed by Belinsky.

It existed as a direction until the end of the 19th century, although the method itself continued to live.

End of 19th century - symbolism (the beginning of modernism). It is called both the direction and the school. - one of the largest trends in art (in literature, music and painting), which arose during France in the 1870s-80s. and reached the greatest development at the turn XIX and XX centuries, primarily in the France, Belgium and Of Russia... Symbolists radically changed not only different kinds art, but also the very attitude towards it. Their experimental nature, drive for innovation, cosmopolitanism and wide range of influences have become a model for most modern art movements. Mysticism, symbolism, expansion of artistic impressionability.

Imagism, acmeism, futurism, expressionism and some. other

Socialist realism- artistic method literature and arts built on socialist concepts of the world and man. Painter had to serve with his works of building a socialist society. Therefore, he must portray life in the light of the ideals of socialism. The concept of "realism" is literary, and the concept of "socialist" is ideological... They are contradictory in themselves, but in this theory of art they merge. As a result, the norms and criteria dictated by the Communist Party were created, and the artist had to create in accordance with them.

The literature of socialist realism was an instrument of party ideology. The writer was “ engineer»Human soul. With his talent, he influenced the reader as propagandist... He brought up the reader in the spirit of the party and at the same time supported her in the struggle for victory. communism... The subjective actions and aspirations of the individual had to correspond to the objective course of history. True, in the sense of socialist realism, this is not what follows from the artist's own experience, but what the party considers typical and worthy of description. Therefore, in the center of the work, there must have been a positive hero:

In the center of the work, there must have been a positive hero.

Representatives: Alexander Fadeev , Alexander Serafimovich Nikolay Ostrovsky Konstantin Fedin, Dmitry Furmanov, Maksim Gorky

Postmodernism prerequisites for the emergence - denied. attitude to a rational explanation of the world, complete disillusionment with humanistic values, generally recognized authorities, rejection of the idea of ​​the integrity of the world. Perception of the world as chaos. The gravitation towards the image of the unconscious, the accidental

Russian postmodernists to one degree or another are writers Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin

1 Because in this lecture Stepanov also included psychology, it will be on the ticket just in case.

2This term was first introduced and substantiated on the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity.

3 The entire paragraph is a quote from the article: Bakhtin M.M. Forms of time and chronotope in the novel.

4G.E. Lessing.

5I think the cliff symbol is much wider, but I have given the most obvious meanings.

6All that is given in a condensed font is from Bakhtin. It may not be necessary, but I thought it was worth knowing.

What is the literary process?

This term, firstly, denotes literary life a certain country and era (in the totality of its phenomena and facts) and, secondly, the centuries-old development of literature on a global, worldwide scale.

Literary process in the second sense of the word is the subject of comparative historical literary criticism.

Literary process- the historical movement of national and world literature, developing in complex connections and interactions. The literary process is at the same time a history of the accumulation of aesthetic, spiritual and moral values, an indirect, but steady expansion of humanistic concepts. Until a certain time, the literary process has a relatively closed, national character; in the bourgeois era, with the development of economic and cultural ties, ". from a multitude of national and local literatures, one world literature is formed."

The study of the literary process involves the formulation and solution of many complex, complex problems, the main of which is to clarify the patterns of the transition of some poetic ideas and forms to others, old to new, entailing a change in styles, literary trends, trends, methods, schools, etc. a meaningful form of literature reflecting a life shift, a new historical situation?

Writers are involved in the literary process with new artistic discoveries that change the principles of studying man and the world. These discoveries are not made from scratch. The writer certainly relies on the traditions of both close and distant predecessors, participants in the literary process of domestic and foreign literatures, in one form or another using all the experience gained in artistic development humanity. We can say that the literary process is a struggle of artistic ideas, new and old, bearing in itself the memory of the old, the vanquished. Each literary trend (trend) puts forward its leaders and theorists who declare new creative principles and refute the old ones, as exhausted by literary development.

So, in the 17th century. in France, the principles of classicism were proclaimed, strict rules of "poetic art" were established to counterbalance the willfulness of the baroque poets and playwrights. But at the beginning of the XIX century. romantics sharply opposed all norms and rules of classicism, declaring that rules are crutches and genius does not need them (see Romanticism). Soon the realists rejected the subjectivism of the romantics, putting forward the demand for an objective, truthful depiction of life. But even within one school (direction, trend), there is a change of stages. “For example, in Russian classicism, the role of the initiator was played by Kantemir, whose work ended in the very beginning of the 40s. XVIII century In the works of M.V. Lomonosov, A.P. Sumarokov, V.K. v early XIX c., classicism receives its completion and ceases to exist as a certain literary movement". "The change in the stages of classicism was determined by the convergence of literature with reality" (LI Timofeev).

An even more complex picture is presented by the evolution of critical realism in Russian literature XIX in .: A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, I. A. Goncharov, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. P. Chekhov. It is not just about different artistic individualities: the character of realism itself, the knowledge of man and the world, is changing, deepening. " Natural school”, Which opposed romanticism and created masterpieces of realistic art, already in the second half of the century was perceived as a kind of canon that fetters literary development. The deepening of the psychological analysis of LN Tolstoy and FM Dostoevsky marked a new stage in realism in comparison with the "natural school". At the same time, it should be emphasized that, unlike the development of technology in the history of art and literature, new artistic discoveries do not cross out old ones. Firstly, because great works created on the basis of the “old” principles of human studies continue to live in new generations of readers. Secondly, because these "old" principles themselves find life in new eras. For example, folklore in "Quiet Don" by MA Sholokhov or the principles of the 18th century enlighteners. (see Enlightenment) in the drama of the German writer of socialist realism B. Brecht. And finally, third: even when the experience of predecessors is rejected in sharp polemics, the writer still absorbs some part of this experience. Thus, the gains of psychological realism in the 19th century. (Stendhal, Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy) were prepared by romantics (see Romanticism), their close attention to the personality and her experiences. The memory of the previous ones seems to live in new discoveries.

An important role for understanding the literary process is played by the study of the influence of foreign literatures on literary process domestic (for example, the importance of J.G. Byron or I.F.Schiller for the development of literature in Russia) and domestic literature to foreign ones (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, M. Gorky in the literatures of the world).

The literary process is very clearly revealed in the history of different genres. So, if we consider the development of the novel on a European scale, then we can trace the change artistic methods and directions (currents). For example, M. Cervantes' novel "Don Quixote" is characteristic of the Renaissance, "Robinson Crusoe" by D. Defoe - for the Age of Enlightenment, "Cathedral Notre dame de paris"V. Hugo - for the era of romanticism, the novels of Stendhal, O. de Balzac, C. Dickens, I. S. Turgenev, L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky represent critical realism XIX century. And a completely new stage (and new types) of the novel is put forward by the literature of socialist realism: "The Quiet Don" by MA Sholokhov or "The Seventh Cross" by A. Zegers, "The Communists" by L. Aragon. It is essential to emphasize here that the literary process in different countries goes through similar stages and the development of the genre, method, style reflects these stages.

The literary process is a historical movement of national and world literature, developing in complex connections and interactions. The literary process is at the same time a history of the accumulation of aesthetic, spiritual and moral values, an indirect, but steady expansion of humanistic concepts. Until a certain time, the literary process has a relatively closed, national character; in the modern era, with the development of economic and cultural ties, "... one world literature is formed from a multitude of national and local literatures."

Krylov, Pushkin, Zhukovsky and Gnedich in Summer garden... Artist G. Chernetsov.

The study of the literary process involves the formulation and solution of many complex, complex problems, the main of which is to clarify the patterns of the transition of some poetic ideas and forms to others, old to new, entailing a change in styles, literary trends, trends, methods, schools, etc. a meaningful form of literature reflecting a life shift, a new historical situation?

Writers are involved in the literary process with new artistic discoveries that change the principles of studying man and the world. These discoveries are not made from scratch. The writer certainly relies on the traditions of both close and distant predecessors, participants in the literary process of domestic and foreign literature, using in one form or another all the experience accumulated in the artistic development of mankind. We can say that the literary process is a struggle of artistic ideas, new and old, bearing in itself the memory of the old, the vanquished. Each literary trend (trend) puts forward its leaders and theorists who declare new creative principles and refute the old ones, as exhausted by literary development.

So, in the 17th century. in France, the principles of classicism were proclaimed, strict rules of "poetic art" were established to counterbalance the willfulness of the baroque poets and playwrights. But at the beginning of the XIX century. romantics sharply opposed all norms and rules of classicism, declaring that rules are crutches and genius does not need them (see Romanticism). Soon the realists rejected the subjectivism of the romantics, putting forward the demand for an objective, truthful depiction of life.

But even within one school (direction, trend), there is a change of stages. “So, for example, in Russian classicism, the role of the initiator was played by Kantemir, whose work ended in the very beginning of the 40s. XVIII century In the works of M.V. Lomonosov, A.P. Sumarokov, V.K. at the beginning of the 19th century, classicism gets its completion and ceases to exist as a definite literary movement. " "The change in the stages of classicism was determined by the convergence of literature with reality" (LI Timofeev).

An even more complex picture is the evolution of critical realism in Russian literature of the 19th century: A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol, I.A.Goncharov, I.S. Turgenev, F.M.Dostoevsky, A.P. Chekhov. It is not just about different artistic individualities: the character of realism itself, the knowledge of man and the world, is changing, deepening. The "natural school", which opposed romanticism and created masterpieces of realistic art, was perceived already in the second half of the century as a kind of canon that fetters literary development. The deepening of the psychological analysis of LN Tolstoy and FM Dostoevsky marked a new stage in realism in comparison with the "natural school".

At the same time, it should be emphasized that, unlike the development of technology in the history of art and literature, new artistic discoveries do not cross out old ones. Firstly, because great works created on the basis of the “old” principles of human studies continue to live in new generations of readers. Secondly, because these "old" principles themselves find life in new eras. For example, folklore in "Quiet Don" by M. A. Sholokhov or the principles of the 18th century enlighteners. (see Enlightenment) in the drama of the German writer of socialist realism B. Brecht.

And finally, thirdly: even when the experience of predecessors is rejected in sharp polemics, the writer still absorbs some part of this experience. Thus, the gains of psychological realism in the 19th century. (Stendhal, Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy) were prepared by romantics (see Romanticism), their close attention to the personality and her experiences. The memory of the previous ones seems to live in new discoveries.

An important role for understanding the literary process is played by the study of the influences of foreign literature on the literary process of domestic (for example, the importance of J.G. Byron or I.F.Schiller for the development of literature in Russia) and domestic literature on foreign (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, M. Gorky in the literatures of the world).

The literary process is very clearly revealed in the history of different genres. So, if we consider the development of the novel on a European scale, then we can trace the change in artistic methods and directions (trends). For example, M. Cervantes' novel "Don Quixote" is characteristic of the Renaissance, D. Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" for the Age of Enlightenment, "Notre Dame Cathedral" by V. Hugo - for the era of romanticism, the novels of Stendhal, O. de Balzac, C. Dickens, I. S. Turgenev, L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky represent the critical realism of the 19th century. And a completely new stage (and new types) of the novel is put forward by the literature of socialist realism: "The Quiet Don" by MA Sholokhov or "The Seventh Cross" by A. Zegers, "The Communists" by L. Aragon. It is essential to emphasize here that the literary process in different countries goes through similar stages and the development of the genre, method, style reflects these stages.

1. The literary process as part of the general historical process. Social conditioning and relative independence of literary development.

2. The problem of national identity of the literary-historical process. General and special in the development of national literatures.

3. Intraliterary connections. Continuity. Traditions. Innovation.

Bibliography

1) Good D.D.... Literary process and its laws // D.D. Good. From Cantemir to the present day. - M., 1972. - T.1.

2) Zhirmunsky V.M... Introduction to Literary Studies: a course of lectures. - SPb, 1996.

3) Historical and literary process: Problems and methods of study / ed. A.S. Bushmina. - L., 1974.

4) Literary encyclopedic dictionary / under the general. ed. V.M. Kozhevnikov and P.A. Nikolaev. - M., 1987.

5) Literary process / ed. G.N. Pospelova. - M., 1981.

6) Literary encyclopedia terms and concepts / ed. A.N. Nikolyukin. - M., 2003.

7) Ozmitel E.K... Literature theory. - Frunze, 1986.

8) Palievsky P.V... Literature and theory. - M., 1978.

9) Pospelov G.N.... Problems of the historical development of literature. - M., 1972.

10) encyclopedic Dictionary young literary critic / comp. IN AND. Novikov. - M., 1988.

The term "Literary Process" originated at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. XX century and has become widely used since the 60s. The very same concept was formed during the XIX-XX centuries as the comprehension of literature as a historically changing integrity (already in the XIX century the terminological expressions “literary evolution” and “literary life of the era” were used).

Literary process usually defined as the historical movement of national and world literature, developing in complex connections and interactions; historical existence, functioning and evolution fiction... The literary process at every historical moment includes both the literary works themselves and the forms of their social existence: publications, editions, literary criticism, reader reactions, etc.

The fact that the world literary process is part of the socio-historical process, was already realized by the philosophers of the 18th century G. Vico (Italian) and I. Herder (German), later G. Hegel and others.

According to V.E. Khalizev, we correlate the literary process with the stages of social development of mankind (mythological archaic, antiquity, the Middle Ages, modern times, modern times). It is stimulated by the need of writers (not always conscious) to respond to shifts in historical life, to participate in it, and to influence public consciousness. Thus, literature changes in historical time primarily under the influence of social life.

Literary critic E.N. Kupreyanova explains the close relationship of literary development with the development of social consciousness as a whole and with the historical change of its leading forms (religious - in the Middle Ages, philosophical - in XVII-XVIII centuries, scientific and political - in the XIX-XX centuries) also by the fact that the main subject of the image in fiction is the subject of all the humanities, including philosophy.

Contemporary literary criticism regards the literary process as conditioned by cultural and historical life. At the same time, it is emphasized that literature "... cannot be studied outside the holistic context of culture ... and directly correlated with socio-economic and other factors ... The literary process is an integral part of the cultural process."

However, most of scientists notes that the development of literature has relative independence and characterized unevenness(the flourishing of art is not in accordance with overall development society, as evidenced by Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, The Lay of Igor's Host, Shakespeare's works, etc.).

As you know, history itself unfolds unevenly: on the general path of socio-economic development, some peoples come out ahead, others lag behind. Such unevenness is one of the driving forces of the historical process. In every great era a push forward is created in some one region of the world, and under the influence of this push, a corresponding movement arises in other regions. This is how it happens in socio-economic history, and so it happens in literary history.

The other side of the literary process is associated with the dialectic of similarities and differences between the literatures of different peoples and nations. Modern literary criticism reveals both the features of the typological similarity of literary evolution in all peoples and nations, and its essential difference in quality: the general, world-historical tendencies of the literary process are manifested in individual literatures in different ways. In other words, the literary process is guided by two interacting factors: national-cultural tradition and the impact of foreign culture. In the development of any national literature, we can identify both the general (characteristic of all literature) and the special (inherent only for individual literature).

G.N. Pospelov, speaking about the laws of the historical development of literature, argues that different peoples go through in their social life, although not identical, but still analogous stages of historical development. And it is natural that at these stages their social life in all its contradictions reveals some common properties. Hence, in the views, ideals of different peoples, some common features are also manifested, which are reflected in the works of fiction. Pospelov calls these common features a stadial community in the literature of different peoples. As an example of a stadial community, he cites ancient literature created by the ancient Greeks and Romans. The scientist notes that, despite the political differences in the social life of Greece and Rome, their literature has significant common properties (mythological imagery, poetic form, civic outlook, abstract characteristics of heroes, predetermined solutions to conflicts, etc.).

“Differences in each national literature, at one stage or another of its historical development,” the literary critic further asserts, “arise because the writers who create this national literature usually belong to different social strata and social movements. As a result, they have different social views, ideals, ideological aspirations, which, becoming "prerequisites" for their work, are expressed in different artistic ideas and lead to the creation of works that differ in content and form, in their style. " The thought expressed is confirmed by the following example: if Aeschylus and Sophocles created mainly civil heroic tragedies based on legendary and mythological plots, then Euripides also used these plots, but created tragedies of personal family and domestic passions.

The unity of the national and the international can also be shown on the example of the history of Mordovian literature, which in its development, on the one hand, took into account the experience of Russian classics, on the other, was based on traditions oral poetry Mordovian people.

All of the above leads to the conclusion that in every national literature there is a typological one that makes it akin to other national literatures, and a special feature that distinguishes it. Both are in dialectical unity.

According to V.G. Belinsky, "... Each nation borrows from another, especially what is alien to its own nationality, giving in exchange to others what constitutes the exclusive property of its historical life and that is alien to the historical life of others."

Each nationality has its own special strong traits, hand, its dignity, with which it enriches the human world. The originality of each of the national literatures and the originality of each stage in historical development literature opens up opportunities for multilateral and complex connections and interactions in time and space. According to the literary critic B.G. Reizova, national literature live a common life only because they are unlike one another; the originality of some stimulates interest in them from other literatures and develops a system of international relations.

One of the regularities of the literary process is the historical continuity or dialectical the relationship of tradition and innovation.

The problem of inheriting progressive and overcoming outdated traditions remains always relevant. According to the literary critic A.S. Bushmin, in order to understand the process of development of literature, it is important to know not only what it takes from the past centuries, but also what inheritance it rejects, with what and why it is hostile in this inheritance. Without assimilating viable and without overcoming outdated traditions and replacing them with new ones dictated by the requirements of modernity, the very concept of a new historical stage, forward movement, and progress is inconceivable.

In different periods of the history of literature and literary criticism, the problem of continuity was solved in different ways. Theorists of classicism, for example, believed that main goal creativity is following classic designs antiquity; sentimentalists and romantics, on the contrary, when solving the problem of continuity, started from the dogmatic norms of classicism. Such approaches to the problem of succession suffered from the absence of dialectics.

Bushmin A.S. argues that in relation to the past, the nihilistic formula “only rupture, enmity”, proclaimed, for example, by Russian futurists, proletkultists and supporters of similar views in other literatures, and the epigone’s formula “only acceptance, consent”, which the opponents of everything new adhere to, are equally unsuitable ... The pseudo-innovation of some and the conservatism of others ultimately turn out to be a hopeless dispute with history: it goes on as usual, discarding the claims of individuals and groups trying to stop the objective law of historical succession from working.

The entry of the tradition of the elders into the work of the younger is a complex process. Elements consciously or unwittingly perceived literary tradition enter into the artist's thinking in interaction with the impressions of his life experience, supplemented by the work of creative imagination, undergo a deep transformation, enter into unique relationships and poetic associations.

The writer's innovation is the cumulative result of talent, life experience, a keen attitude to the demands of the time, a high general culture and professional skill based on the knowledge of artistic samples.

Artistic creation is never a simple use of ready-made forms. Including tradition, at the same time, it is each time a new act of artistic cognition of reality, carried out in new forms. The search, creation, improvement of forms for the artists of the word is always a thought process.

A genuine work of art is a highly integrated system in which the elements of the tradition enter as its own internal elements.

The interaction of the inherited and the personal in a work of art turns out to be so complex and interpenetrating that it is always difficult to answer the question of what belongs to tradition and what to the author, and the more difficult, the larger the artist, the more powerful his creative power. And not because there is no tradition here or its role was insignificant, but because it was mastered deeply creatively, ceased to be only a tradition, becoming an organic element of the spiritual development of society at a given time.

CONTROL QUESTIONS:

1. What is the “literary process”?

2. What patterns of the literary process are distinguished by contemporary literary critics?

3. What is tradition and innovation in literature?

4. What is the manifestation of the unity of the national and the international in fiction?