It is customary to combine works of fiction into three large groups, called literary genera - epic, drama and lyrics.

Epic and drama have a number of common properties that distinguish them from lyrics. In epic and dramatic works, events that take place in space and time are recreated! It depicts individuals (characters), and? S relationships, intentions and actions, experiences and statements. And although the reproduction of life in the epic and drama invariably expresses the author's understanding and assessment of the characters' characters, readers often think that the events depicted took place independently of the author's will. In other words, epic works, and especially dramatic ones, can create the illusion of their complete objectivity.

Drama and especially the epic have unlimited ideological and cognitive possibilities. Freely mastering life in its spatial and temporal extent, the authors of epic and dramatic works can paint vivid, detailed various pictures of being "in its variability, conflict, diversity" "and at the same time penetrate into the depths of people's consciousness, recreate their inner life. able to capture a variety of characters and their relationship with life circumstances.Drama and epic, in other words, "act" in an infinitely wide sphere of content: they have access to any themes, problems and types of pathos.

Epic and dramatic works, however, differ sharply from each other. The organizing formal beginning of the epic is the narration of the events in the life of the characters and their actions. Hence the name of this kind of literature (gr. Epos - word, speech). The means of subject depiction are used here most freely and widely.

In drama (gr. Drao - acting), there is no narrative in any developed form. The text of the work consists primarily of the statements of the characters themselves, through which they act in the depicted situation. The author's explanations for the words of the heroes are reduced to the so-called remarks (fr. Remarquer - to notice), which have only an auxiliary meaning. The specificity of the drama as a literary genus is determined by its intended use for stage production.

The word "lyric" is derived from the ancient Greek name for the musical instrument lyre, to the accompaniment of which verbal works were performed (sung). Lyricism differs from epic and drama primarily in the subject of its depiction. There is no detailed and detailed reproduction of events, actions, relationships between people. Lyrics artistically masters mainly the inner world of a person as such: his thoughts, feelings, impressions. The subjective principle of human life is embodied in it as much as possible. However, the feeling of complete, "absolute" subjectivity of the lyrics, which sometimes arises when reading it, is illusory: lyric creativity contains deep cognitive generalizations.

Speech in the lyrics acts primarily in its expressive (expressive) function, it directly and actively embodies the emotional attitude to the life of the speaker (the bearer of speech) - the so-called lyric hero. Therefore, the speech structure of a lyric work is its most important formal beginning: the nuances of word use and the construction of phrases, as well as the rhythmic ordering of the text, are especially significant here.

The concept of a literary genus arose in ancient aesthetics, in the works of Plato and Aristotle. In the third chapter of Aristotelian Poetics, it is said about the existence in poetry (that is, the art of words) of three "ways of imitation": from himself, as Homer does, or so that the imitator remains himself, without changing his face, or presenting all the persons portrayed as acting and active " (20, 45). The "ways of imitation" designated by Aristotle were later called literary clans. This concept characterizes

Epos, lyrics and drama were formed at the earliest stages of the existence of society, in primitive syncretic creativity. Al-r N. Veselovsky dedicated the first of three chapters of his "Historical Poetics" to the origin of literary families (36, 200-313); in it he argued that literary genera arose from the ritual choir of primitive peoples.

The ritual choir, accompanying the dance and mimic actions, included, according to Veselovsky, exclamations of joy and sadness, which expressed collective emotionality. Lyrics arose from such exclamations, which later separated from the rite and acquired artistic independence. Lyro-epic songs (cantilens) were formed from the performances of the lead singer (luminaries) of the ritual choir. From these songs, which later also separated from the rite, heroic poems (epics) arose. And finally, drama emerged from the exchange of remarks among the participants in the ritual choir.

The theory of the origin of literary clans, put forward by Veselovsky, is confirmed by many facts from the life of primitive peoples known to modern science. So, there is no doubt the emergence of theatrical performances (and on their basis - and drama) from ritual games.

At the same time, Veselovsky's theory does not take into account that the epic and lyrics could be formed independently of ritual actions. Mythological legends, from which prosaic legends (sagas) and fairy tales subsequently developed, appeared outside the ritual chorus. They were not sung, but the representatives of the tribe told each other. Lyrics could also arise outside the rite. Lyrical self-expression took place in production (labor) and everyday relations of primitive peoples. Thus, there were different ways of forming literary clans, and the ritual choir was one of them.

Under the influence of the literary process, ideas about childbirth changed in one way or another. They were brought into the system by representatives of German aesthetics of the late 18th - early 19th centuries: in the works of Schiller and Goethe, and later - Schelling and Hegel. In line with the ideas of these authors (primarily Hegel), Belinsky developed his theory of literary genera in his article "The Division of Poetry into Genera and Species" (1841). He saw in epic, drama, lyrics

certain types of content and differentiated genera with the help of the categories of "object" and "subject" of artistic knowledge. Epic works were associated with the idea of ​​an object. “Epic poetry,” wrote Belinsky, “is primarily objective, external poetry, both in relation to itself and to the poet and his reader” (25, 9). And further: “The poet is not visible here; the world, plastically determined, develops by itself, and the poet is only, as it were, a simple narrator of what happened by itself ”(25 10). Lyrics, on the contrary, was understood as the sphere of the poet's subjectivity. “Lyric poetry, - we read in Belinsky, - is mainly poetry subjective, internal, the expression of the poet himself ”(25, 10). Finally, drama was seen as a "synthesis" of objectivity and subjectivity. A work of this literary kind, according to Belinsky, “is a reconciliation of opposing elements - epic objectivity and lyrical subjectivity” (25, 16).

This concept of literary genders summarizes centuries of artistic experience. Many of the thoughts expressed by Belinsky were inherited by Soviet literary criticism, for which the emphasis on the meaningful functions of generic forms is especially important.

At the same time, there is a certain one-sidedness in the named article: not only drama, but also any work of fiction combines objectivity (that is, reflects reality) and subjectivity (since it expresses the writer's comprehension of life). Belinsky himself repeatedly spoke about this in his later works. In particular, he emphasized the importance of the subjective principle in epic works, primarily in novels and stories.

Along with the division of literature into genera (epic, lyric, drama), there is a division of it into poetry and prose. In everyday speech, lyric works are often identified with poetry, and epic - with prose. This usage is imprecise. Each of the literary genera includes both poetic (poetic) and prosaic (non-poetic) works. The epic in the early stages of art was most often poetic (epics of antiquity, French songs about exploits, Russian epics and historical songs, etc.). Epic in their generic basis, works written in verse are not uncommon in the literature of modern times ("Don Juan" by Byron, "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin, "Who should live in Russia

good "Nekrasov). In the dramatic kind of literature, both poetry and prose are also used, sometimes combined in the same work (many of Shakespeare's plays, "Boris Godunov" by Pushkin). And the lyrics, mostly poetic, are sometimes prosaic.

Other, more serious terminological problems arise in the theory of literary genera. The words "epic" ("epic"), "dramatic" ("drama"), "lyric" ("lyricism") denote not only the generic features of the work in question, but also their other properties.

Epic is called the majestically calm, unhurried contemplation of life in its complexity and diversity, the breadth of view of the world and its acceptance as a kind of wholeness. In this regard, they often speak of the "epic world outlook", artistically embodied in Homer's poems and a number of later works ("War and Peace" by L. Tolstoy). Epicity as an ideological and emotional mood can take place in all literary genres - not only in epic (narrative) works, but also in drama ("Boris Godunov" by Pushkin) and lyrics ("On the Kulikovo Field" by Blok). It is customary to call drama a state of mind associated with a tense experience of some kind of contradiction, with emotion and anxiety. And finally, lyricism is a sublime emotionality, expressed in the speech of the author, narrator, characters. Drama and lyricism can also be characteristic of all literary families. Thus, L. Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina" and Tsvetaeva's poem "Longing for the Motherland" are full of drama. Lyricism is imbued with Turgenev's novel "A Noble Nest", Chekhov's plays "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard", stories and stories by Paustovsky.

It is therefore important to distinguish, on the one hand, epic, drama, and lyrics as literary genera, and on the other, epic, dramatic, lyricism as the emotional mood of the works.

Section two

LITERARY WORK AS AN ARTISTIC WHOLE

it is called an idea. But this term will be explained
later, but for now, note that the content of the artistic
works contains different sides, for defining
division of which there are three terms - subject,
problematic, idein o-e emotional

grade. The analysis, of course, must begin with what characteristic phenomena of reality are reflected in this work. This is a question about the peculiarities of the topic.

Literary birth

When we talk about a literary genre and genre, we are talking about a type of literary work. Literary genre and genre is a specific type of literary work. The point is that a literary work does not exist by itself. It exists only as a representative of a certain kind and genre. It is impossible to create a literary work that would be completely different from any other literary work. Historical life works also live only as representatives of a certain kind and genre.

A literary work is a combination of unique properties that determine its individuality. On the other hand, in any literary work there are some typical properties, which, on the contrary, bring this work closer to some other works, i.e. there are typical properties. We highlight the types of literary works. The degree of correlation between the individual and the typical depends on the stage of development of literature, literary direction.

Definition of literary genus according to Tamarchenko:

Literary genre is a concept that is introduced on the one hand to designate a group of genres that have similar structural features. On the other hand, to differentiate (distinguish) the basic possibilities of verbal creativity.

Ode, elegy, sonnet, message - lyrics. On the basis of common (structural) features, the lyrics will differ from other genders. Lyrics, epic and drama have the basic possibilities of verbal and artistic creativity.

The generic properties of a literary work are the most general, universal, supra-historical properties. Genres are, on the contrary, a historically developed type of literary work.

Criteria for delimiting literary genders

Aristotle sees art as an imitation of beautiful nature. From the point of view of Aristotle, there are three ways of imitation: telling about an event as something separate from oneself (for example, the epic of Homer); remaining oneself, without changing one's face (lyrics); you can imitate by showing all the persons depicting as actors and actors (drama).

At the heart of the distinction between literary genders, Aristotle lays the type of relationship between the subject of the utterance and the subject of speech.

In the 19th century, literary genera began to be thought of as types of artistic content. Everything objective according to Hegel in the drama is the manifested subjective will of the individual.

Hegel regarded drama as the highest kind of literature. At the beginning of the 20th century, linguistic and psychological interpretations of literary genera appear.

The linguistic interpretation correlates literary genders with the phenomena of language, with the categories of person and time. Lyrics - first person, drama - second person, epic - third person. Lyrics - present tense, epic - past tense, drama - future tense.

The psychological interpretation correlates literary birth with the category of the psyche. Epic - memory, lyrics - performance, drama - will.

Vadim Valerianovich Kozhinov in the article "Problems of literary genres and genres" (collection "Theory of Literature. Main issues in historical coverage. Volume 3") says that on the one hand, all of the above concepts gave a lot of productive in the study of literary genres, on the other hand , they cannot be considered completely productive, because in these concepts, when describing the types of literature, signs associated with the structure of the literary work itself are not taken into account.

Not taking into account aspects of the literary work itself, Kozhinov lists the signs associated with the structure of the literary work itself: a different volume of the verbal text (conciseness in the lyrics, limited dimensions in the drama, spaciousness, length in the epic), the nature of time and the pace of development (instantaneousness, accuracy in the lyrics , perfection, slowness in the epic, striving for the future in the drama), the way of joining (free adherence in the epic, a tough causal relationship between episodes - drama, the unity of the lyric plot - lyrics), the specificity of compositional and speech forms (lyrics - monologue, drama - dialogue, epic - mixing). Kozhinov writes that the generic properties of a literary work are the most general, universal, which exist both on the surface of the text and at its depth.

In modern literary criticism, all the previous criteria (conditions) are taken into account

It is customary to describe the modern approach according to three criteria:

1) Compositional speech organization

Each literary genus has its own subject of image. One subject of speech is the lyrics, the primary and secondary subject of speech is the epic, the alternation of remarks plus the author's remarks is the drama. This is the most superficial criterion.

2) The nature of the development of action in a literary work. The type, situation, events, composition that underlie the development of actions. P.S. can be decisive.

3) Subject-semantic sphere. The literary genus has its own subject of depiction. Modern literary criticism considers literary genera as architectonic forms, i.e. as a form of organization of life values.

According to the traditional point of view, we have three literary kinds: lyric poetry, epic poetry and drama. However, there were other points of view regarding the number of literary genera. In the 20th century, there was an attempt to substantiate the novel as a fourth literary genus. V. Dneprov published an article "The novel as a new kind of poetry." There have already been attempts by other literary scholars to substantiate satire as the fourth literary kind, but these points of view have not been fixed in literary criticism. In addition to works that clearly relate to a particular literary genus, there are works that combine the features of different literary genders. These are intergeneric forms. The ballad is just an intergeneric form (lyroepic).

In addition to intergeneric forms, there are also extrageneric forms (works that have only a small degree of generic characteristics, or even lack them at all) (epigram, sketch).

Lyrics as a kind of literature

1. The subject of lyrics as a literary kind

2. Specificity of the lyrical event and lyrical plot.

3. Semantic structure of a lyric work

In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel defines the subject of lyrics as follows: the subject of lyrics is an expression of the content and activity of inner life itself. All words in this formulation are significant for Hegel. Moreover, the word "expression" is especially significant. Gennady Nikolaevich Pospelov in the textbook "Introduction to Literary Studies" says that the subject of lyrics is the inner life itself. Despite the fact that Pospelov refers to Hegel, in Pospelov's formulation the word "expression" is omitted, and Pospelov's approach cannot be considered sufficiently productive, because Pospelov's approach does not allow us to draw boundaries between lyric poetry and other literary genera. It is very simple to prove this: if we consider such a genre as a psychological novel. The subject of the psychological novel is the inner life. But this will not mean at all that we will attribute the psychological novel to the lyrics. And therefore, Pospelov's approach does not always work.

In order for the expression of the inner life (according to Hegel) not to be accidental, the inner life of the subject itself must be poetic. This means that the feelings and experiences of the subject, in addition to their uniqueness (singularity), must have a certain universal, universal significance. In the lyrics, the universality of the subject's experiences is achieved not by the subject of the image (according to Hegel, the content and the subject can be accidental), but is born in the form of a poetic work, the form of a lyrical expression. In the lyrics, the question "HOW?" Is important. Lyrics presupposes a special status of the poetic word in a lyric work. From Tamarchenko's point of view, a lyric event is always an event of expression or an event of the birth of a poetic word. The search for a word, a name for expressing one's own inner life is an integral part of a lyrical event, and sometimes its entire content. It is no coincidence that one of Mandelstam's poems begins with the line "I forgot the word what I wanted to say."

"This morning, this joy ...". The last line "It's all spring" sums it up. Fet's example proves that a lyric event is an event of utterance or an event of the birth of a poetic word. The subject of lyrical experience absorbs the external world, experiences it in his inner element (inside himself) and, after the external world has become something internal for him, expresses it, finding the appropriate word for this.

The lyrics suggest a minimum distance between the author and the hero, the author and the reader, the hero and the reader. “These are my words, I feel the same way” - this is the typical reaction of the reader to a lyric work. Such a reader's reaction is explained by the special status of the lyric character. The lyrical character is characterized by extreme validity (the subject of appearance, social status, age characteristics. One of the properties of a lyric character is his anonymity (namelessness). Just because of the generalization of the lyric character, the reader can easily identify with him. At the same time, logical connections between words in the lyrics can However, in spite of the lack of logical connections, the lyrics still have a great power to inspire the reader.

3. Semantic structure of a lyric work. (according to the concept of Tamara Isaakovna Silman). This concept is outlined in the book On Lyrics. It proceeds from the fact that artistic time is organized in a special way in the lyrics. In the lyrics, a moment can be experienced as eternity, and eternity as a moment. Based on this, Silman distinguishes two parts in a lyric work: empirical and generalizing. How to differentiate between them? In the empirical part, a variety of the objective world appears, clearly separated from each other time plans, specific facts of the biography of the subject of the experience appear. In the generalizing part, universal time appears (when the past, present and future are pulled together into one point). This is both a moment and an eternity at the same time. The generalizing part captures the moment when the subject of the experience comprehends the timeless essence of what is happening, the timeless meaning of what is happening.

Nr. monostikh Giuseppe Ungaretti

“And I love you, I love you; and this is endless suffering. " There is a specific fact about the biography of the lyrical hero. And this fact is assigned to the present.

"When the yellowing cornfield is worried ...". The first stanza is about autumn, the second about spring, and the third about winter. And the fourth is a generalizing part, since there universal time appears. Universal tense is usually grammatically expressed using the present tense, but not always. Universal tense does not depend on the verb form.

Tarkovsky's poem "Ballet" consists of 6 stanzas. The first five contain a description of the ballet performance (empirical part). The fifth stanza ends with the question "So what is art?" The sixth stanza is a kind of answer to the question. The verbs in it are in the future tense, but the tense there is universal, tk. this is the answer to the question of what art is considered AT ALL. The generalizing part very often stands at the end of a lyric work, but not always (it can stand at the beginning, in the middle, it can be torn apart by the empirical part). The empirical part in a lyric work may be absent altogether, a generalizing part is present in any lyric work, because universal time is one of the main properties of lyrics.

Pasternak has a poem "The Definition of Poetry".

In a similar spirit - as the types of attitude of the speaker ("the bearer of speech") to the artistic whole - the types of literature were repeatedly considered later, right up to our time. However, in the XIX century. (initially - in the aesthetics of romanticism) a different understanding of the epic, lyricism and drama was consolidated: not as verbal and artistic forms, but as some intelligible entities fixed by philosophical categories: literary genera began to be thought of as types of artistic content. Thus, their consideration turned out to be torn away from poetics (the doctrine of precisely verbal art). So, Schelling correlated lyric poetry with infinity and the spirit of freedom, epic with pure necessity, while in drama he saw a kind of synthesis of both: the struggle between freedom and necessity. And Hegel (following Jean-Paul) characterized the epic, lyrics and drama with the help of the categories "object" and "subject": epic poetry is objective, lyrical poetry is subjective, while dramatic poetry combines these two principles. Thanks to V.G. Belinsky, as the author of the article "The Division of Poetry into Genera and Types" (1841), the Hegelian concept (and the corresponding terminology) took root in Russian literary criticism.

In the XX century. the kinds of literature were repeatedly correlated with various phenomena of psychology (memory, representation, tension), linguistics (first, second, third grammatical person), as well as with the category of time (past, present, future).

However, the tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle has not exhausted itself, it continues to live. The genus of literature as types of speech organization of literary works is an indisputable supra-epoch reality, worthy of close attention.

The theory of speech, developed in the 1930s by the German psychologist and linguist K. Buhler, sheds light on the nature of the epic, lyric and drama, who argued that utterances (speech acts) have three aspects. They include, firstly, message about subject of speech (representation); Secondly, expression(expression of the speaker's emotions); third, appeal(the speaker's address to someone, which makes the statement itself an action). These three aspects of speech activity are interrelated and manifest themselves in different types of utterances (including artistic ones) in different ways. In a lyric work, speech expression becomes the organizing principle and dominant. The drama accentuates the appellative, actually effective side of speech, and the word appears as a kind of act performed at a certain moment in the development of events. The epic also widely relies on the appellative principles of speech (since the composition of the works includes the statements of the heroes, marking their actions). But dominant in this literary genus are messages about something external to the speaker.

With these properties of the speech tissue of lyrics, drama and epic, other properties of the genus of literature are organically connected (and are predetermined by them): methods of the spatio-temporal organization of works; the originality of the manifestation of a person in them; forms of the author's presence; the nature of the text's appeal to the reader. Each of the kinds of literature, in other words, has a special, inherent only complex of properties.

The division of literature into genders does not coincide with its division into poetry and prose (see pp. 236–240). In everyday speech, lyric works are often identified with poetry, and epic works with prose. This usage is imprecise. Each of the literary genera includes both poetic (poetic) and prosaic (non-poetic) works. The epic in the early stages of art was most often poetic (epics of antiquity, French songs about exploits, Russian epics and historical songs, etc.). Epic in their generic basis, works written in verse are not uncommon in the literature of the New Time ("Don Juan" by J. NG Byron, "Eugene Onegin" by A. Pushkin, "Who Lives Well in Russia" by N.А. Nekrasov). In the dramatic type of literature, both poetry and prose are also used, sometimes combined in one and the same work (many plays by W. Shakespeare). And the lyrics, predominantly poetic, are sometimes prosaic (remember Turgenev's "Poems in Prose").

More serious terminological problems arise in the theory of literary genera. The words "epic" ("epic"), "dramatic" ("drama"), "lyric" ("lyricism") denote not only the generic features of the works in question, but also their other properties. Epic is called the majestically calm, unhurried contemplation of life in its complexity and versatility, the breadth of view of the world and its acceptance as a kind of wholeness. In this regard, they often talk about the "epic world outlook", artistically embodied in Homer's poems and a number of later works ("War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy). Epicity as an ideological and emotional mood can take place in all literary genres - not only in epic (narrative) works, but also in drama ("Boris Godunov" by A.S. Pushkin) and lyrics (cycle "On the Kulikovo Field" by A.A. . Block). It is customary to call drama a state of mind associated with a tense experience of some kind of contradiction, with emotion and anxiety. And finally, lyricism is a sublime emotionality, expressed in the speech of the author, narrator, characters. Drama and lyricism can also be present in all literary genres. So, the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "Anna Karenina", poem by MI Tsvetaeva "Homesickness". The novel by I.S. Turgenev's "Nest of Nobility", plays by A.P. Chekhov's "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard", short stories and novels by I. A. Bunin. Epic, lyricism and drama, thus, are free from an unambiguously rigid attachment to epic, lyricism and drama as types of emotional and semantic "sounding" of works.

The original experience of differentiating these two series of concepts (epic - epic, etc.) in the middle of this century was undertaken by the German scientist E. Steiger. In his work "Basic Concepts of Poetics" he characterized the epic, lyrical, dramatic as phenomena of style (types of tonality - Tonart), linking them (respectively) with concepts such as representation, memory, tension. And he argued that every literary work (regardless of whether it has the external form of an epic, lyric or drama) combines these three principles: "I will not understand the lyrical and dramatic if I associate them with lyrics and drama."

Epos, lyrics and drama were formed at the earliest stages of the existence of society, in primitive syncretic creativity. The first of three chapters of his "Historical Poetics" A. Veselovsky, one of the largest Russian historians and theorists of 19th century literature. The scientist argued that literary clans arose from the ritual choir of primitive peoples, whose actions were ritual dance games, where imitative body movements were accompanied by singing - exclamations of joy or sadness. The epos, lyrics and drama were interpreted by Veselovsky as developing from the "protoplasm" of ritual "choric actions".

From the exclamations of the most active members of the choir (lead singer, luminaries), lyric-epic songs (cantilens) grew, which eventually separated from the rite: "Songs of a lyric-epic character are the first natural separation from the connection between the choir and the rite." the original form of poetry proper was, therefore, the lyric-epic song. Epic narratives were subsequently formed on the basis of such songs. And from the exclamations of the choir as such, the lyrics grew (initially group, collective), which over time also separated from the rite. The epic and the lyrics are thus interpreted by Veselovsky as "a consequence of the decay of the ancient ritual chorus." The drama, the scholar argues, arose from the exchange of chorus lines and lead singers. And she (in contrast to the epic and lyrics), having gained independence, at the same time “retained the entire<…>syncretism "of the ritual choir and was a kind of its semblance.

The theory of the origin of literary clans, put forward by Veselovsky, is confirmed by many facts known to modern science about the life of primitive peoples. So, undoubtedly, the origin of the drama from ritual performances: dance and pantomime were gradually more and more actively accompanied by the words of the participants in the ritual action. At the same time, Veselovsky's theory does not take into account that the epic and lyrics could be formed independently of ritual actions. Thus, mythological legends, on the basis of which prosaic legends (sagas) and fairy tales were subsequently consolidated, arose outside the chorus. They were not sung by the participants of the mass rite, but were told by one of the representatives of the tribe (and, probably, not in all cases such a story was addressed to a large number of people). Lyrics could also be formed outside the rite. Lyrical self-expression arose in the production (labor) and everyday relations of primitive peoples. Thus, there were different ways of forming literary families. And the ritual choir was one of them.

In the epic genus of literature (others - gr. epos - word, speech) the organizing beginning of the work is narration about characters (characters), their fates, actions, mentality, about the events in their lives that make up the plot. This is a chain of verbal messages or, more simply, a story about what happened earlier. There is a temporal distance between the conduct of speech and the subject of verbal designations inherent in narration. It (remember Aristotle: the poet tells "about the event as something separate from himself") is conducted from the outside and, as a rule, has a grammatical form past tense. The narrator (narrator) is characterized by the position of a person who remembers what happened earlier. The distance between the time of the depicted action and the time of the narration about it is perhaps the most essential feature of the epic form.

The word "narrative" is used in different ways as applied to literature. In a narrow sense, this is a detailed designation in words of what happened once and had a temporal extent. More broadly, narration also includes descriptions, that is, the recreation through words of something stable, stable or completely motionless (such are the majority of landscapes, characteristics of everyday life, features of the characters' appearance, their states of mind). Descriptions are also verbal images of periodically repeating. “Sometimes he was still in bed: / They carry notes to him,” says, for example, Onegin in the first chapter of Pushkin's novel. Likewise, the narrative fabric includes the author's reasoning, playing a significant role in L.N. Tolstoy, A. France, T. Mann.

In epic works, the narration connects to itself and, as it were, envelops the statements of the actors - their dialogues and monologues, including internal ones, actively interacting with them, explaining them, supplementing and correcting them. And the literary text turns out to be a fusion of narrative speech and the statements of the characters.

Works of an epic kind make full use of the arsenal of artistic means available to literature, freely and freely master reality in time and space. However, they do not know the limitations in the volume of the text. The epic as a kind of literature includes both short stories (medieval and Renaissance short stories; humor of O'Henry and early A.P. Chekhov) and works designed for prolonged listening or reading: epics and novels covering life with an extraordinary breadth. Such are the Indian Mahabharata, the ancient Greek Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Forsyte Saga by J. Galsworthy, and Gone with the Wind by M. Mitchell.

An epic work can "absorb" such a number of characters, circumstances, events, destinies, details that are inaccessible to any other kind of literature, or any other kind of art. At the same time, the narrative form contributes to the deepest penetration into the inner world of a person. Complex characters are quite accessible to her, possessing many features and properties, incomplete and contradictory, in motion, formation, development.

These possibilities of the epic kind of literature are not used in all works. But the word "epic" is strongly associated with the idea of ​​the artistic reproduction of life in its entirety, of the disclosure of the essence of the era, of the scale and monumentality of the creative act. There is no (neither in the sphere of verbal art, nor outside of it) groups of works of art that would so freely penetrate simultaneously both into the depths of human consciousness and into the breadth of people's existence, as stories, novels, and epics do.

In epic works, the presence of narrator. This is a very specific form of artistic reproduction of a person. The narrator is a mediator between the depicted and the reader, often acting as a witness and interpreter of the shown persons and events.

The text of an epic work usually does not contain information about the fate of the narrator, about his relationship with the actors, about when, where and under what circumstances he leads his story, about his thoughts and feelings. The spirit of the story, according to T. Mann, is often "weightless, ethereal and omnipresent"; and "there is no division for him between" here "and" there. " At the same time, the narrator's speech has not only pictoriality, but also expressive significance; it characterizes not only the object of the statement, but also the speaker himself. In any epic work, the manner of perceiving reality is imprinted, inherent in the one who narrates, his inherent vision of the world and the way of thinking. In this sense, it is legitimate to talk about the image of the narrator. This concept has firmly entered the everyday life of literary criticism thanks to B.M. Eikhenbaum, V.V. Vinogradov, M.M. Bakhtin (works of the 1920s). Summing up the judgments of these scientists, G.A. Gukovsky wrote in the 1940s: “Any image in art forms an idea not only of the depicted, but also of the depicting, medium of presentation<…>The narrator is not only a more or less concrete image<„.>but also a certain figurative idea, principle and appearance of the bearer of speech, or otherwise - certainly a certain point of view on what is being stated, a psychological, ideological and simply geographical point of view, since it is impossible to describe from anywhere and there can be no description without a descriptor. "

The epic form, in other words, reproduces not only the narrated, but also the narrator, it artistically captures the manner of speaking and perceiving the world, and ultimately - the mindset and feelings of the narrator. The character of the narrator is revealed not in actions and not in direct outpourings of the soul, but in a kind of narrative monologue. The expressive beginnings of such a monologue, being its secondary function, are at the same time very important.

There can be no full-fledged perception of folk tales without close attention to their narrative manner, in which gaiety and slyness, life experience and wisdom are guessed behind the naivety and ingenuousness of the one who leads the story. It is impossible to feel the charm of the heroic epics of antiquity without grasping the sublime structure of the thoughts and feelings of the rhapsode and the narrator. And even more so it is inconceivable to understand the works of A.S. Pushkin and N.V. Gogol, L.N. Tolstoy and F.M.Dostoevsky, N. S. Leskov and I. S. Turgenev, A. P. Chekhov and I. A. Bunin, M. A. Bulgakov and A. P. Platonov beyond comprehending the "voice" of the narrator. A lively perception of an epic work is always associated with close attention to the manner in which the narration is conducted. A reader sensitive to verbal art sees in a story, novella or novel not only a message about the life of the characters with its details, but also an expressively significant monologue of the narrator.

There are different ways of storytelling available to literature. The most deeply rooted and presented is the type of storytelling in which there is, so to speak, an absolute distance between the characters and the one who reports them. The narrator recounts the events with equanimity. Everything is intelligible to him, the gift of "omniscience" is inherent in him. And his image, the image of a creature ascended above the world, gives the work the flavor of maximum objectivity. Significantly, Homer was often likened to the Olympian celestials and called "divine."

The artistic possibilities of such a story are considered in the German classical aesthetics of the Romantic era. In the epic “a storyteller is needed,” we read in Schelling, “who, by the equanimity of his story, would constantly distract us from too much participation in the characters and direct the attention of the audience to net result ”. And further: “The narrator is alien to the characters<…>he not only surpasses the audience with his balanced contemplation and adjusts his story in this way, but, as it were, takes the place of “necessity”.

Based on such forms of narrative dating back to Homer, the classical aesthetics of the 19th century. argued that the epic kind of literature is the artistic embodiment of a special, "epic" worldview, which is marked by the maximum breadth of outlook on life and its calm, joyful acceptance.

Similar thoughts about the nature of narration were expressed by T. Mann in his article “The Art of the Novel”: “Perhaps the element of narration is the eternal Homeric principle, this prophetic spirit of the past, which is infinite like the world, and which knows the whole world, most fully and worthily embodies the element of poetry. " The writer sees in the narrative form the embodiment of the spirit of irony, which is not a coldly indifferent mockery, but full of cordiality and love: "... this is greatness, nourishing tenderness for little", "a view from the height of freedom, peace and objectivity, not overshadowed by any moralizing."

Such ideas about the substantive foundations of the epic form (despite the fact that they are based on centuries of artistic experience) are incomplete and largely one-sided. The distance between the narrator and the characters is not always updated. This is already evidenced by ancient prose: in the novels "Metamorphoses" ("The Golden Donkey") by Apuleius and "Satyricon" by Petronius, the characters themselves tell about what they have seen and experienced. Such works express a view of the world that has nothing to do with the so-called "epic world outlook."

In the literature of the last two or three centuries, almost prevailed subjective narration. The narrator began to look at the world through the eyes of one of the characters, imbued with his thoughts and impressions. A striking example of this is the detailed picture of the battle at Waterloo in Stendhal's "Parma monastery". This battle is not reproduced in Homeric style: the narrator seems to be reincarnated as a hero, young Fabrizio, and looks at what is happening through his eyes. The distance between him and the character practically disappears, the points of view of both are combined. Tolstoy sometimes paid tribute to this method of depiction. The battle of Borodino in one of the chapters of "War and Peace" is shown in the perception of Pierre Bezukhov, not experienced in military affairs; the council of war in Fili was presented in the form of impressions of the girl Malasha. In Anna Karenina, the races in which Vronsky participates are reproduced twice: once experienced by himself, the other - seen through Anna's eyes. Something similar is characteristic of the works of F.M. Dostoevsky and A.P. Chekhov, G. Flaubert and T. Mann. The hero, to whom the narrator approached, is portrayed as if from the inside. “We need to be transported into the character,” Flaubert remarked. When the narrator approaches any of the heroes, improperly direct speech is widely used, so that the voices of the narrator and the character merge into one. Combining the points of view of the narrator and characters in the literature of the XIX-XX centuries. caused by the increased artistic interest in the originality of the inner world of people, and most importantly - by the understanding of life as a set of dissimilar attitudes to reality, qualitatively different horizons and value orientations.

The most common form of epic storytelling is third person story. But the narrator may well appear in the work as a kind of "I". It is natural to call such personified narrators speaking from their own, "first" person storytellers. The narrator is often at the same time a character in the work (Maxim Maksimych in the story "Bela" from "A Hero of Our Time" by M.Yu. Lermontov, Grinev in "The Captain's Daughter" by A.S. ball ", Arkady Dolgoruky in" Teenager "by FM Dostoevsky).

Many of the storytellers-characters are close (though not identical) to the writers by the facts of their life and their mentality. This takes place in autobiographical works (the early trilogy of Leo Tolstoy, "The Lord's Summer" and "Bogomolye" by IS Shmelev). But more often the fate, life positions, experiences of the hero, who became the storyteller, are noticeably different from those inherent in the author ("Robinson Crusoe" by D. Defoe, "My Life" by AP Chekhov). At the same time, in a number of works (epistolary, memoir, narrative forms), the narrators express themselves in a manner that is not identical with the author's and sometimes diverges from it quite sharply (about someone else's word, see pp. 248–249). The narratives used in epics seem to be quite varied.

Dramatic works (others - gr. drama - action), like epic ones, recreate the series of events, the actions of people and their relationships. Like the author of an epic work, the playwright is subject to the "law of developing action." But there is no detailed narrative-descriptive image in the drama. The author's speech itself is auxiliary and episodic here. These are the lists of characters, sometimes accompanied by brief descriptions, the designation of the time and place of action; descriptions of the stage setting at the beginning of acts and episodes, as well as comments on individual remarks of the characters and indications of their movements, gestures, facial expressions, intonation (remarks). It all adds up side the text of the dramatic work. Basic its text is a chain of characters' utterances, their remarks and monologues.

Hence a certain limitation of the drama's artistic possibilities. The writer-playwright uses only a part of the subject-pictorial means that are available to the creator of a novel or an epic, a short story or a story. And the characters of the characters are revealed in the drama with less freedom and completeness than in the epic. "Drama I<…>I perceive, - T. Mann remarked, - as the art of silhouette and I feel only the narrated person as a volumetric, integral, real and plastic image ”. At the same time, playwrights, in contrast to the authors of epic works, are forced to limit themselves to the volume of verbal text that meets the needs of theatrical art. The time of the action depicted in the drama must fit into the strict framework of the stage time. And the performance in the forms usual for the New European theater lasts, as you know, no more than three or four hours. And this requires an appropriately sized dramatic text.

At the same time, the author of the play has significant advantages over the creators of stories and novels. One moment depicted in the drama is tightly adjacent to another, adjacent one. The time of the events reproduced by the playwright during the "stage episode does not shrink or stretch; the characters in the drama exchange remarks without any noticeable time intervals, and their statements, as KS Stanislavsky noted, form a continuous, continuous line. imprinted as something past, then the chain of dialogues and monologues in the drama creates the illusion of the present. Life here speaks as if from its own face: between what is depicted and the reader there is no intermediary narrator. The action is recreated in the drama with maximum immediacy. as if in front of the reader's eyes. "All narrative forms, - wrote F. Schiller, - transfer the present into the past; all dramatic ones make the past present."

The drama is focused on the requirements of the scene. And theater is a public, mass art. The performance directly affects many people, as if merging together in response to what is happening in front of them. The purpose of the drama, according to Pushkin, is to act on the multitude, to engage their curiosity "and for the sake of this to capture the" truth of passions ":" The drama was born on the square and constituted a popular amusement. The people, like children, require entertainment, action. The drama presents him with extraordinary, strange occurrences. The people demand strong feelings<..>Laughter, pity and horror are the three strings of our imagination, shaken by the art of drama. " Especially close ties are connected with the dramatic kind of literature with the sphere of laughter, for the theater was consolidated and developed in an inextricable connection with mass celebrations, in an atmosphere of play and fun. “The comic genre is universal for antiquity,” noted O. M. Freidenberg. The same can be said about the theater and drama of other countries and eras. T. Mann was right when he called the "comedian instinct" "the fundamental principle of all dramatic skill."

It is not surprising that the drama gravitates towards the outwardly effective presentation of the portrayed. Its imagery turns out to be hyperbolic, catchy, theatrically bright. “Theater requires<…>exaggerated wide lines both in voice, declamation, and gestures, ”wrote N. Boileau. And this property of the performing arts invariably leaves its mark on the behavior of the heroes of dramatic works. “As in the theater he played,” Bubnov (“At the Bottom” by Gorky) comments on the frenzied tirade of the desperate Tick, who, by an unexpected intrusion into the general conversation, gave him a theatrical effect. Significant (as a characteristic of the dramatic kind of literature) Tolstoy's reproaches to W. Shakespeare for the abundance of hyperbole, which allegedly "violates the possibility of artistic impression." "From the very first words," he wrote about the tragedy "King Lear", "one can see exaggeration: exaggeration of events, exaggeration of feelings and exaggeration of expressions." In assessing Shakespeare's work, L. Tolstoy was wrong, but the idea of ​​the great English playwright's adherence to theatrical hyperbole is absolutely correct. What has been said about "King Lear" with no less reason can be attributed to antique comedies and tragedies, dramatic works of classicism, to the plays of F. Schiller and V. Hugo, etc.

In the 19th-20th centuries, when the desire for everyday authenticity prevailed in literature, the conventions inherent in drama became less obvious, they were often reduced to a minimum. At the origins of this phenomenon is the so-called "bourgeois drama" of the 18th century, the founders and theorists of which were D. Diderot and G.E. Lessing. Works of the greatest Russian playwrights of the 19th century. and the beginning of the XX century - A.N. Ostrovsky, A.P. Chekhov and M. Gorky - are distinguished by the reliability of the recreated life forms. But even when the Playwrights were set on plausibility, the plot, psychological and speech hyperboles remained intact. Theatrical conventions made themselves felt even in Chekhov's drama, which showed the maximum limit of "lifelike". Let's take a look at the final scene of Three Sisters. One young woman, ten or fifteen minutes ago, broke up with a loved one, probably forever. Another five minutes ago learned about the death of her fiancé. And so they, together with the elder, third sister, summarize the moral and philosophical results of the past, reflecting to the sounds of a military march about the fate of their generation, about the future of mankind. It is hardly possible to imagine this happening in reality. But we do not notice the implausibility of the ending of The Three Sisters, as we are accustomed to the drama perceptibly changing the forms of people's life.

The foregoing convinces of the validity of the judgment of A. S. Pushkin (from his already cited article) that “the very essence of dramatic art excludes plausibility”; “Reading a poem, a novel, we can often forget and believe that the described incident is not fiction, but the truth. In an ode, in an elegy, we can think that the poet was portraying his real feelings in real circumstances. But where is the plausibility in a building divided into two parts, one of which is filled with spectators who have agreed, etc. ”.

The most important role in dramatic works belongs to the conventions of speech self-disclosure of heroes, whose dialogues and monologues, often saturated with aphorisms and maxims, turn out to be much more extensive and effective than those remarks that could be uttered in a similar life situation. Replicas "to the side" are conditional, which, as it were, do not exist for other characters on the stage, but are clearly audible to the audience, as well as monologues uttered by the heroes alone, alone with themselves, which are a purely stage method of bringing out internal speech (there are many such monologues as in ancient tragedies, and in the drama of modern times). The playwright, setting up a kind of experiment, shows how a person would express himself if in the spoken words he expressed his moods with maximum completeness and brightness. And speech in a dramatic work often acquires a resemblance to artistic-lyrical or oratorical speech: the heroes here tend to express themselves as improvisers-poets or masters of public speaking. Therefore, Hegel was partly right, considering the drama as a synthesis of the epic principle (eventfulness) and the lyrical (speech expression).

Drama has, as it were, two lives in art: theatrical and literary itself. Forming the dramatic basis of the performances, being in their composition, the dramatic work is also perceived by the reading audience.

But this was not always the case. The emancipation of the drama from the stage was carried out gradually - over a number of centuries and ended relatively recently: in the 18th-19th centuries. World-significant examples of drama (from antiquity to the 17th century) at the time of their creation were practically not recognized as literary works: they existed only as part of the performing arts. Neither W. Shakespeare nor J. B. Moliere were perceived by their contemporaries as writers. The “discovery” of Shakespeare as a great dramatic poet in the second half of the 18th century played a decisive role in consolidating the concept of drama as a work intended not only for stage production, but also for reading. From now on, dramas began to be read intensively. Thanks to numerous printed editions in the XIX-XX centuries. dramatic works proved to be an important form of fiction.

In the XIX century. (especially in its first half) the literary merits of the drama were often put above the stage ones. So, Goethe believed that "Shakespeare's works are not for bodily eyes," and Griboyedov called his desire to hear the poems "Woe from Wit" from the stage "childish". The so-called Lesedrama (reading drama), created with a focus primarily on perception in reading. Such are Goethe's Faust, Byron's dramatic works, Pushkin's little tragedies, Turgenev's dramas, about which the author remarked: "My plays, unsatisfactory on stage, may be of some interest in reading."

There are no fundamental differences between Lesedrama and a play that is directed by the author to stage production. Dramas produced for reading are often potentially stage-based. And the theater (including the modern one) persistently seeks and sometimes finds keys to them, evidence of which is the successful staging of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" (first of all, this is the famous pre-revolutionary performance of the Moscow Art Theater) and numerous (although far from always successful) stage readings Pushkin's little tragedies in the XX century.

The old truth remains in force: the most important, the main purpose of the drama is the stage. “Only with a stage performance, - noted A. N. Ostrovsky, - the author’s dramatic fiction receives a completely finished form and produces exactly that moral action, the achievement of which the author has set himself the goal”.

The creation of a performance based on a dramatic work is associated with its creative completion: the actors create intonational-plastic drawings of the roles played, the artist decorates the stage space, the director develops mise-en-scenes. In this regard, the concept of the play changes somewhat (some of its aspects are given more attention, others - less attention), is often concretized and enriched: the stage performance introduces new semantic shades. At the same time, the principle of paramount importance for the theater is fidelity of reading literature. The director and the actors are called upon to convey the staged work to the audience as fully as possible. Fidelity to the stage reading takes place where the director and the actors deeply comprehend the dramatic work in its major content, genre, style features. Stage performances (as well as film adaptations) are legitimate only in cases where there is agreement (albeit relative) between the director and the actors with the range of ideas of the writer-playwright, when the stage actors are carefully attentive to the meaning of the staged work, to the peculiarities of its genre, features of its style and to the text itself.

In the classical aesthetics of the 18th – 19th centuries, in particular by Hegel and Belinsky, drama (primarily the genre of tragedy) was viewed as the highest form of literary creativity: as the “crown of poetry”. A number of artistic eras have in fact shown themselves primarily in the art of drama. Aeschylus and Sophocles during the heyday of ancient culture, Moliere, Racine and Cornelle during the period of classicism were unmatched among the authors of epic works. Goethe's work is significant in this respect. All literary genera were available to the great German writer, but he crowned his life in art with the creation of a dramatic work - the immortal Faust.

In past centuries (up to the 18th century), drama not only successfully competed with the epic, but often became the leading form of artistic reproduction of life in space and time. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, theatrical art played a huge role, accessible (as opposed to handwritten and printed books) to the widest strata of society. Secondly, the properties of dramatic works (depiction of characters with pronounced features, reproduction of human passions, gravitation towards pathos and grotesque) in the "pre-realistic" epochs fully corresponded to general literary and general artistic tendencies.

And although in the XIX-XX centuries. the socio-psychological novel, the genre of an epic kind of literature, has moved to the forefront of literature; dramatic works still hold a place of honor.

The lyrical experience appears as belonging to the speaker (the bearer of speech). It is not so much denoted by words (this is a special case), as with maximum energy expressed. In the lyrics (and only in it) the system of artistic means is entirely subordinated to the disclosure of the integral movement of the human soul.

The lyrically imprinted experience perceptibly differs from the directly vital emotions, where amorphousness, indistinctness, and chaos take place, and often predominate. Lyrical emotion is a kind of clot, the quintessence of a person's emotional experience. "The most subjective kind of literature," wrote L. Ya. Ginzburg about the lyrics, "like no other, it strives to the general, to the depiction of mental life as universal." The underlying experience of a lyrical work is a kind of spiritual enlightenment. It is the result of creative completion and artistic transformation of what has been experienced (or can be experienced) by a person in real life. “Even at that time,” N. V. Gogol wrote about Pushkin, “when he rushed about himself in the daze of passions, poetry was a sacred thing for him, like some kind of temple. He did not enter there unkempt and untidy; He did not bring in anything rash, rash from his own life; disheveled reality did not enter there naked<…>The reader heard only one fragrance, but what substances burned out in the poet's chest in order to release this fragrance, no one can hear. "

The lyrics are by no means confined to the sphere of people's inner life, their psychology as such. She is invariably attracted by states of mind that signify a person's focus on external reality. Therefore, lyric poetry turns out to be an artistic assimilation of states not only of consciousness (which, as GN Pospelov insistently says, is primary, main, dominant in it), but also of being. These are philosophical, landscape and civil poems. Lyric poetry is able to easily and widely capture spatio-temporal representations, to connect expressed feelings with the facts of everyday life and nature, history and modernity, with planetary life, the universe, the universe. At the same time, lyrical creativity, one of the forerunners of which in European literature are the biblical Psalms, can acquire a religious character in its most striking examples. It turns out to be (recall the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov "Prayer") to "natural prayer" captures the thoughts of poets about the higher power of being (ode to G.R.Derzhavin "God") and his communication with God ("The Prophet" by A.S. Pushkin ). Religious motives are very persistent in the lyrics of our century: V.F. Khodasevich, N.S. Gumilyov, A.A. Akhmatova, B.L. Pasternak, from among modern poets - with O.A Sedakova.

The range of lyrically embodied concepts, ideas, emotions is unusually wide. At the same time, lyric poetry, to a greater extent than other types of literature, tends to capture everything that is positively significant and valuable. She is not able to bear fruit, locked in the field of total skepticism and world-rejection. Let us turn again to the book by L.Ya. Ginzburg: “By its very essence, lyric poetry is a conversation about significant, lofty, beautiful (sometimes in a contradictory, ironic refraction); a kind of exposition of the ideals and values ​​of a person. But also anti-values ​​- in grotesque, in denunciation and satire; but it is not here that the long road of lyric poetry runs. "

The lyrics find themselves mainly in a small form. Although there is a genre lyric poem recreating experiences in their symphonic diversity ("About This" by V.V. Mayakovsky, "Poem of the Mountain" and "Poem of the End" by MI Tsvetaeva, "Poem without a Hero" by AA Akhmatova), the volume of the poem. The principle of the lyrical kind of literature is “as short and as complete as possible”. Aspiring to the ultimate compactness, the most "condensed" lyric texts are sometimes similar to proverbial formulas, aphorisms, maxims, with which they often come into contact and compete.

The states of human consciousness are embodied in the lyrics in different ways: either directly and openly, in sincere confessions, confessional monologues filled with reflection (recall the masterpiece of SA Yesenin "I do not regret, I do not call, I do not cry ..."), or mostly indirectly, indirectly) in the form of an image of external reality ( descriptive lyrics, primarily landscape) or a compact story about some event (narrative lyrics). But almost in any lyric work there is a meditative beginning. Meditation (lat... meditatio - pondering, reflection) call an agitated and psychologically tense meditation about something: “Even when lyric works seem to be devoid of meditation and outwardly mostly descriptive, they only turn out to be fully artistic if their descriptiveness has a meditative "Subtext"... The lyrics, in other words, are incompatible with the neutrality and impartiality of tone that is widespread in epic narratives. The speech of the lyric work is full of expression, which here becomes the organizing and dominant principle. Lyrical expression makes itself felt in the choice of words, and in syntactic constructions, and in allegories, and, most importantly, in the phonetic-rhythmic construction of the text. To the fore in the lyrics are "semantic-phonetic effects" in their inextricable connection with the rhythm, usually intensely dynamic. In this case, the lyrical work in the overwhelming majority of cases has a poetic form, while the epic and drama (especially in the epochs close to us) turn mainly to prose.

Speech expression in the lyrical kind of poetry is often brought to the maximum, as it were. Such a number of bold and unexpected allegories, such a flexible and rich combination of intonations and rhythms, such heartfelt and impressive sound repetitions and similarities that lyric poets willingly resort to (especially in our century), neither "ordinary" speech, nor the statements of the heroes in epic and drama, neither narrative prose, nor even poetic epic.

In the full expression of lyric speech, the usual logical ordering of statements is often pushed aside to the periphery, or even eliminated altogether, which is especially characteristic of the poetry of the 20th century, largely anticipated by the work of the French Symbolists of the second half of the 19th century (P. Verlaine, St. Mallarmé). Here are the lines of L.N. Martynov dedicated to art of this kind:

And headstrong speech,
The order in the scale breaks,
And the notes go upside down
To lie in wait for the voice of reality.

"Lyrical disorder", familiar to verbal art before, but prevailing only in the poetry of our century, is an expression of artistic interest in the hidden depths of human consciousness, in the origins of emotions, in complex, logically indefinable movements of the soul. Turning to speech, which allows itself to be "self-willed", poets get the opportunity to talk about everything at the same time, swiftly, at once, "excitedly": "The world here appears as if taken by surprise by a sudden feeling." Let us recall the beginning of a lengthy poem by B.L. Pasternak "Waves", opening the book "Rebirth":

Everything will be here: the past
And what I still live on
My aspirations and foundations,
And seen in reality.

Expressiveness of speech makes lyrical creativity related to music. This is what P. Verlaine's poem "The Art of Poetry" is about, which contains an appeal to the poet to feel the spirit of music:

For music, only business.
So, don't measure the way.
Almost ethereal prefer
Anything too flesh and body<…>
So the music is the same again and again!
Let it be in your verse with acceleration
Shine in the distance transformed
Another heaven and love.

((Translated by B.L. Pasternak))

In the early stages of the development of art, lyric works were sung, the verbal text was accompanied by a melody, it was enriched with it and interacted with it. Numerous songs and romances still testify that the lyrics are close to music in their essence. According to M.S. Kagan, lyric poetry is "music in literature", "literature that has taken on the laws of music."

There is, however, a fundamental difference between lyrics and music. The latter (like dance), comprehending the spheres of human consciousness, inaccessible to other types of art, at the same time is limited to what it conveys general character experiences. Human consciousness is revealed here outside of its direct connection with any specific phenomena of being. Listening, for example, to Chopin's famous etude in C minor (op. 10 no. 12), we perceive all the impetuous activity and sublimity of feeling that reaches the tension of passion, but we do not associate it with any particular life situation or any particular picture. The listener is free to imagine a sea storm, or a revolution, or the rebellion of a love feeling, or simply surrender to the elements of sounds and perceive the emotions embodied in them without any object associations. Music is able to plunge us into such depths of spirit that are no longer associated with the idea of ​​some single phenomena.

Not so in lyric poetry. Feelings and volitional impulses are given here in their conditioning by something and in a direct focus on specific phenomena. Let us recall, for example, Pushkin's poem "The daylight has gone out ...". The poet's rebellious, romantic and, at the same time, sorrowful feeling is revealed through his impression of the environment (the “gloomy ocean,” “a distant coast, the noonday lands of magical lands” that flutters under him, ). The connection of consciousness with being is transmitted by the poet, otherwise it cannot be in verbal art. This or that feeling always appears as a reaction of consciousness to some phenomena of reality. No matter how vague and elusive the mental movements captured by the artistic word may be (recall the poems of V.A.Zhukovsky, A.A. impressions are coupled.

The bearer of the experience expressed in the lyrics is usually called lyrical hero... This term, introduced by Yu.N. Tynyanov in his 1921 article "Blok", is rooted in literary criticism and criticism (along with the synonymous phrases "lyric self", "lyrical subject"). The lyrical hero as “I-created” (MM Prishvin) is spoken of not only in terms of individual poems, but also their cycles, as well as the poet's work as a whole. This is a very specific image of a person, fundamentally different from the images of narrators-storytellers, about whose inner world we, as a rule, do not know anything, and the characters of epic and dramatic works, who are invariably distanced from the writer.

The lyrical hero is not only connected by close ties with the author, with his attitude to the world, spiritual and biographical experience, mental attitude, manner of speech behavior, but it turns out (almost in most cases) to be indistinguishable from him. The lyrics are mostly autopsychological.

At the same time, the lyrical experience is not identical with what was experienced by the poet as a biographical person. The lyrics not only reproduce the feelings of the author, it transforms them, enriches them, creates anew, elevates and ennobles them. This is exactly what Pushkin's poem "The Poet" is about (".. only a divine verb / Touches the ear to the ear, / The poet's soul flares up, / Like an awakened eagle").

At the same time, in the process of creativity, the author often creates with the power of imagination those psychological situations that in reality did not exist at all. Literary critics have repeatedly been convinced that the motives and themes of Alexander Pushkin's lyric poems do not always agree with the facts of his personal fate. The inscription made by A.A. Block on the margins of the manuscript of one of his poems: "There was nothing like that." In his poems, the poet captured his personality either in the image of a young monk, an admirer of the mystically mysterious Beautiful Lady, in the "mask" of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or in the role of a frequenter of St. Petersburg restaurants.

Lyrically expressed experiences can belong both to the poet himself and to other persons who are not like him. The ability to “instantly feel someone else's as your own” is, according to A.A. Feta, one of the facets of poetic talent. The lyrics, in which the experiences of a person markedly different from the author are expressed, are called role(as opposed to autopsychological). These are the poems "There is no name for you, my distant ..." Blok - the spiritual outpouring of a girl living with a vague expectation of love, or “I was killed near Rzhev” by A.T. Tvardovsky, or "Odyssey to Telemaku" by I.A. Brodsky. It even happens (though this rarely happens) that the subject of a lyric utterance is exposed by the author. Such is the "moral person" in the poem by N.А. Nekrasov of the same name, who caused many sorrows and misfortunes to those around him, but persistently repeated the phrase: "Living in accordance with strict morality, I did not harm anyone in my life." The earlier definition of lyrics by Aristotle (the poet “remains himself, without changing his face”) is thus imprecise: a lyric poet may well change his face and reproduce an experience belonging to someone else.

But the mainstream of lyric creativity is poetry, not role-playing, but autopsychological: poems that are an act of direct self-expression of the poet. Readers cherish the human authenticity of the lyrical experience, the direct presence in the poem, according to V.F. Khodasevich, “the living soul of the poet”: “The personality of the author, not hidden by stylization, becomes closer to us”; the dignity of the poet consists "in what he writes in obedience to the real need to express his feelings."

Lyric poetry in its dominant branch is characterized by the charming spontaneity of the author's self-disclosure, the "openness" of his inner world. So, delving into the poems of A.S. Pushkin and M.Yu. Lermontov, S.A. Yesenin and B.L. Pasternak, A.A. Akhmatova and M.I. Tsvetaeva, we get a very vivid and multifaceted idea of ​​their spiritual and biographical experience, the circle of their minds, and their personal destiny.

The relationship between the lyric hero and the author (poet) is understood by literary critics in different ways. The judgments of a number of scientists of the 20th century, in particular M.M. Bakhtin, who saw in the lyrics a complex system of relations between the author and the hero, “I” and “the other,” and also spoke about the constant presence of the choral principle in it. This idea was developed by S.N. Broitman. He argues that lyric poetry (especially epochs close to us) is characterized not by "mono-subjectness", but by "intersubjectivity", that is, the imprinting of interacting consciousnesses.

These scientific innovations, however, do not shake the usual idea of ​​the openness of the author's presence in a lyric work as its most important property, which is traditionally denoted by the term “subjectivity”. “He (lyric poet. - V.Kh.), - Hegel wrote, - maybe inside myself look for motivation for creativity and content, dwelling on internal situations, states, experiences and passions of your heart and spirit. Here, the person himself in his subjective inner life becomes a work of art, while the epic poet is served by a character different from himself, his exploits and the incidents that happen to him. "

It is the completeness of the expression of the author's subjectivity that determines the originality of the perception of the lyrics by the reader, who is actively involved in the emotional atmosphere of the work. Lyrical creativity (and this again makes it related to music, as well as to choreography) has the maximum inspiring, infectious power ( suggestiveness). Getting acquainted with a novella, novel or drama, we perceive the depicted from a certain psychological distance, to a certain extent detached. At the will of the authors (and sometimes on our own), we accept or, on the contrary, do not share their mindsets, approve or disapprove of their actions, mock them or sympathize with them. Lyrics is another matter. To fully perceive a lyric work means to be imbued with the poet's mindset, to feel and once again experience them as something of your own, personal, intimate. With the help of condensed poetic formulas of a lyric work between the author and the reader, according to the exact words of L.Ya. Ginzburg, "lightning-fast and error-free contact is being established." The poet's feelings become at the same time our feelings. The author and his reader form a kind of single, inseparable "we". And this is the special charm of the lyrics.

The clans of literature are not separated from each other by an impenetrable wall. Along with works that certainly and wholly belong to one from literary families, there are those that combine the properties of any two generic forms - " bipartite education "(expression of B.O.Korman). About works and their groups belonging to two kinds of literature during the XIX-XX centuries. has been said repeatedly. Thus, Schelling characterized the novel as "a combination of epic and drama." The presence of the epic principle in the drama of A. N. Ostrovsky was noted. B. Brecht described his plays as epics. For the works of M. Maeterlinck and A. Blok the term "lyrical dramas" was stuck. Deeply rooted in verbal art lyro-epica, which includes lyric-epic poems (established in literature since the era of romanticism), ballads (with folklore roots), so-called lyric prose (usually autobiographical), works where lyrical digressions are "connected" to the narrative about events, as, for example, in "Don Juan" by Byron and "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin.

In literary criticism of the XX century. Attempts have been made repeatedly to supplement the traditional "triad" (epic, lyric, drama) and to substantiate the concept of the fourth (or even fifth, etc.) kind of literature. Along with the three "former" ones, the novel (VD Dneprov), and satire (Ya.E. Elsberg, Yu.B. Borev), and the script (a number of film theorists) were staged. There is a lot of controversy in such judgments, but literature really knows groups of works that do not fully possess the properties of an epic, lyric or drama, or even lack them at all. It is legitimate to call them out-of-line forms.

First is essays... Here, the authors' attention is focused on external reality, which gives literary scholars some reason to place them in a number of epic genres. However, in essays, the series of events and the narrative itself do not play an organizing role: descriptions dominate, often accompanied by reasoning. Such are "Khor and Kalinych" from Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter", some works by G.I. Uspensky and M.M. Prishvin.

Secondly, this is the so-called literature "Stream of consciousness" where it is not the narrative presentation of events that prevails, but the endless chains of impressions, memories, and emotional movements of the bearer of speech. Here consciousness, most often appearing disordered, chaotic, as it were, appropriates and absorbs the world: reality turns out to be “covered” by the chaos of its contemplations, the world is placed in consciousness. The works of M. Proust, J. Joyce, Andrey Bely have similar properties. Later, representatives of the "new novel" in France (M. Butor, N. Sarrott) turned to this form.

And finally, it definitely does not fit into the traditional triad essay, which has now become a very influential field of literary creativity. At the origins of essays are the world famous "Essays" by M. Montaigne. The essay form is an effortlessly free combination of summarizing messages about single facts, descriptions of reality and (most importantly) reflections on it. Thoughts expressed in essay form, as a rule, do not pretend to be an exhaustive interpretation of the subject, they allow for the possibility of completely different judgments. Essayism gravitates towards syncretism: the artistic principles themselves are easily combined here with the journalistic and philosophical ones.

Essayism almost dominates in the works of V.V. Rozanova ("Solitary", "Fallen Leaves"). She made itself felt in the prose of A.M. Remizov ("Posolon"), in a number of works by M.M. Prishvin (first of all "Eyes of the Earth" are recalled). The essay principle is present in the prose of G. Fielding and L. Stern, in Byron's poems, in Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" (free conversations with the reader, thoughts about a secular person, about friendship and relatives, etc.), "Nevsky Prospect" .V. Gogol (beginning and ending of the story), in the prose of T. Mann, G. Hesse, R. Musil, where the narrative is abundantly accompanied by the reflections of the writers.

According to M.N. Epstein, the basis of essays is a special concept of a person - as a bearer of not knowledge, but opinions. Its vocation is not to proclaim ready-made truths, but to split the stale, false integrity, to defend free thought, moving away from the centralization of meaning: here there is a "coexistence of the personality with the becoming word." The author attaches a very high status to the relativistically understood essay: it is the “inner engine of the culture of the new time”, the focus of the possibilities of “super-artistic generalization”. Note, however, that essay studies by no means eliminated traditional generic forms and, moreover, it is able to embody a world attitude that is opposed to relativism. A striking example of this is the work of M.M. Prishvina.

So, we can distinguish between the generic forms proper, traditional and reigning supreme in literary creativity for many centuries, and the “extra-clan”, non-traditional forms, rooted in the “post-romantic” art. The former interact with the latter very actively, complementing each other. Nowadays, the Platonic-Aristotelian-Hegelian triad (epic, lyric, drama), as you can see, is largely shaken and needs to be corrected. At the same time, there is no reason to declare the habitually distinguished three types of literature obsolete, as is sometimes done with the light hand of the Italian philosopher and art theorist B. Croce. Among Russian literary critics, A. I. Beletsky expressed a similar skepticism: “For ancient literatures, the terms epic, lyric, and drama were not yet abstract. They designated special, external ways of transmitting the work to the listening audience. Having passed into a book, poetry abandoned these modes of transmission, and gradually<…>species (meaning the genus of literature. - V.Kh.) became more and more fiction. Is it necessary to continue the scientific existence of these fictions? " Disagreeing with this, we note: literary works of all epochs (including modern ones) have a certain generic specificity (the form is epic, dramatic, lyrical, or the forms of an essay, "stream of consciousness", essay, which are not uncommon in the 20th century). Generic affiliation (or, on the contrary, the involvement of one of the "extra-clan" forms) largely determines the organization of the work, its formal, structural features. Therefore, the concept of "kind of literature" in the composition of theoretical poetics is inalienable and essential.

The existing genre designations capture various aspects of the works. Thus, the word "tragedy" states the involvement of this group of dramatic works in a certain emotional and semantic mood (pathos); the word "story" speaks about the belonging of works to the epic genus of literature and about the "average" volume of the text (less than that of novels, and more than that of short stories and short stories); the sonnet is a lyric genre, which is characterized primarily by a strictly defined volume (14 verses) and a specific system of rhymes; the word "fairy tale" indicates, firstly, the narrative and, secondly, the activity of fiction and the presence of fantasy. Etc. B.V. Tomashevsky reasonably remarked that, being "many different", genre features "do not give the possibility of a logical classification of genres on any one basis." K. Such warnings must be heeded. However, literary criticism of our century has repeatedly outlined and, to some extent, carried out the development of the concept of "literary genre" not only in a specific, historical and literary aspect (studies of individual genre formations), but also in a theoretical one. Experiments in the systematization of genres in the supra-epoch and world perspective were undertaken both in domestic and foreign literary criticism.

Consideration of genres is unimaginable without referring to the organization, structure, and form of literary works. The theorists of the formal school persistently spoke about this. So, B.V. Tomashevsky called genres specific "groupings of techniques" that are compatible with each other, possess stability and depend "on the setting of origin, purpose and conditions of perception of works, on imitation of old works and the literary tradition arising from this." The scientist characterizes the features of the genre as dominating in the work and determining its organization.

Inheriting the traditions of the formal school, and at the same time revising some of its provisions, scholars paid close attention to the semantic side of genres, using the terms “genre essence” and “genre content”. The palm here belongs to M.M. Bakhtin, who said that the genre form is inextricably linked with the theme of the works and the features of the world outlook of their authors: “In genres<…>over the centuries of their lives, forms of vision and understanding of certain aspects of the world have been accumulating. Genre is significant construction: "The artist of the word must learn to see reality through the eyes of the genre." And more: “Every genre<…>there is a complex system of means and methods of understanding reality. Stressing that the genre properties of works constitute an indissoluble unity, Bakhtin, at the same time, distinguished between the formal (structural) and substantive aspects of the genre. He noted that such genre names, rooted in antiquity, such as epic, tragedy, idyll, which characterized the structure of works, later, when applied to the literature of the New Age, “are used as a designation genre essence .

Bakhtin's works do not directly say what the genre essence is, but from the general totality of his judgments about the novel (they will be discussed below) it becomes clear that they mean the artistic principles of mastering a person and his connections with the environment. This deep aspect of genres in the 19th century. was considered by Hegel, who characterized the epic, satire and comedy, as well as the novel, using the concepts of "substantial" and "subjective" (individual, ghostly). At the same time, genres were associated with a certain kind of understanding of the "general state of the world" and conflicts ("collisions"). In a similar way, A.N. Veselovsky.

In the same vein (and, in our opinion, closer to Veselovsky than to Hegel) - the concept of literary genres by G.N. Pospelov, who in the 1940s undertook an original experience in the systematization of genre phenomena. He distinguished between genre forms "external" ("closed compositional and stylistic whole") and "internal" ("specifically genre content" as the principle of "figurative thinking" and "cognitive interpretation of characters"). Evaluating the external (compositional and stylistic) genre forms as meaningfully neutral (in this, Pospelov's concept of genres, which has been repeatedly noted, is one-sided and vulnerable), the scientist focused on the inner side of genres. He singled out and characterized three supra-epoch genre groups, basing their differentiation on the sociological principle: the type of relationship between the artistically comprehended person and society, the social environment in a broad sense. “If works of national-historical genre content (meaning epics, epics, odes. - V.Kh.),- wrote G.N. Pospelov, - learn life in aspect establishment of national societies if the works of romance comprehend the formation of individual characters in private relations, then works of "ethological" genre content reveal condition national society or some part of it ”. (Ethological, or moral-descriptive, genres are works such as "Travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow" by AN Radishchev, "Who Lives Well in Russia" by NA Nekrasov, as well as satire, idyll, utopia and dystopia). Along with the three named genre groups, the scientist singled out one more: mythological containing "folk figurative-fantastic explanations the origin of certain phenomena of nature and culture ”. He attributed these genres only to the "pre-art" of historically early, "pagan" societies, believing that "the mythological group of genres, during the transition of peoples to higher levels of social life, did not receive its further development."

The characteristics of genre groups given by G.N. Pospelov, has the dignity of clear consistency. However, it is incomplete. Now, when the ban on discussing the religious and philosophical problems of art has been lifted from Russian literary criticism, it is easy to add to what scientists have said that there exists and is a deeply significant group of literary and artistic (and not only archaic and mythological) genres, where a person is related not so much to the life of society , how much with cosmic principles, universal laws of the world order and higher forces of being.

Such is parable, which dates back to the epochs of the Old and New Testaments and "from the substantive side is distinguished by a gravitation towards the deep" wisdom "of a religious or moralistic order." This is life, which became almost the leading genre in the Christian Middle Ages; here the hero is attached to the ideal of righteousness and holiness, or at least aspires to it. Let's call and mystery, also formed in the Middle Ages, as well as religious and philosophical lyrics, at the origins of which - the biblical "Psalms". According to Viach. Ivanov about the poetry of F.I. Tyutcheva, A.A. Feta, Vl. S. Solovyov ("The Roman Diary of 1944", October), "... there are three of them, / In the earthly the unearthly saw their sight / And who foreshadowed the way for us." The named genres, which do not fit into any sociological constructions, can rightfully be defined as ontological(using the term of philosophy: ontology is the doctrine of being). This group of genres also involves works of a carnival-laughter nature, in particular comedy: in them, as M.M. Bakhtin, the hero and the reality surrounding him are correlated with existential universals. The origins of the genres that we called ontological are mythological archaic, and above all, myths about the creation of the world, called etiological (or cosmological).

The ontological aspect of genres is highlighted in a number of foreign theories of the 20th century. At the same time, genres are viewed primarily as describing being as a whole in a certain way. In the words of the American scientist K. Burke, these are systems of acceptance or rejection of the world. In this series of theories, the most famous is the concept of N.G. Fry, stated in his book The Anatomy of a Criticism (1957). The genre form, it says, is generated by the myths about the seasons and the rituals corresponding to them: “Spring personifies the dawn and birth, giving rise to myths<..->about awakening and resurrection, - expounds I.P. Ilyin, the thoughts of a Canadian scientist are about the creation of light and the death of darkness, as well as the archetypes of dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry. Summer symbolizes the zenith, marriage, triumph, giving rise to myths about apotheosis, a sacred wedding, a visit to paradise and the archetypes of comedy, idyll, and knightly romance. Autumn, as a symbol of the setting of the sun and death, gives rise to the myths of the decay of vital energy, the dying god, violent death and sacrifice, and the archetypes of tragedy and elegy. Winter, personifying darkness and despair, gives rise to the myth of the victory of the dark forces and the flood, the return of chaos, the death of the hero and the gods, as well as the archetypes of satire. "

The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, attracts close attention of literary scholars and critics. It also becomes the subject of thought for the writers themselves. At the same time, this genre remains a mystery to this day. The most different, sometimes opposite opinions are expressed about the historical fate of the novel and its future. “His, - wrote T. Mann in 1936, - prosaic qualities, conscientiousness and criticism, as well as the wealth of his means, his ability to freely and efficiently dispose of display and research, music and knowledge, myth and science, his human breadth, his objectivity and irony make the novel what it is in our time: a monumental and dominant type of fiction. " O.E. Mandelstam, on the other hand, spoke about the decline of the novel and its exhaustion (article "The End of the Novel", 1922). In the psychologization of the novel and the weakening of the outwardly eventful beginning in it (which took place already in the 19th century), the poet saw a symptom of decline and the eve of the death of the genre, which has now become, in his words, "old-fashioned."

In the modern concepts of the novel, one way or another, the statements about it made in the last century are taken into account. If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre ("The hero, in whom everything is petty, is suitable only for the novel;" mundane reality "and at the same time -" a mirror of the world and<…>of his age ”, the fruit of“ a fully mature spirit ”; as a "romantic book", where, in contrast to the traditional epic, there is a place for a relaxed expression of the moods of the author and heroes, and humor and playful lightness. “Every novel must harbor the spirit of the universal,” wrote Jean-Paul. Thinkers at the turn of the 18th – 19th centuries have their theories of the novel. justified by the experience of modern writers, primarily I.V. Goethe as the author of books about Wilhelm Meister.

The comparison of the novel with the traditional epic, outlined by aesthetics and criticism of romanticism, was developed by Hegel: “Here<…>again (as in the epic. - V.Kh.) shows in its entirety the richness and versatility of interests, states, characters, living conditions, a wide background of the integral world, as well as an epic depiction of events. " On the other hand, the novel lacks the inherent epic “ initially poetic state of the world ", there are" prosaically ordered reality "and" the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of everyday relations. " This conflict, Hegel notes, "is resolved tragically or comically" and is often exhausted by the fact that the heroes come to terms with the "ordinary order of the world", recognizing in it "a genuine and substantial beginning." Similar thoughts were expressed by VG Belinsky, who called the novel an epic of private life: the subject of this genre is “the fate of a private person”, ordinary, “everyday life”. In the second half of the 1840s, the critic argued that the novel and a related story "were now at the head of all other kinds of poetry."

In many ways it has something in common with Hegel and Belinsky (at the same time complementing them), M.M. Bakhtin in works about the novel, written mainly in the 1930s and awaiting publication in the 1970s. Based on the judgments of the writers of the 18th century. G. Fielding and K.M. Wielanda, a scientist in his article "The Epic and the Novel (On the Methodology of Researching the Novel)" (1941), argued that the hero of the novel is shown "not as ready and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, brought up by life"; this face "should not be" heroic "neither in the epic nor in the tragic sense of the word, the novelist combines both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious." At the same time, the novel captures the "living contact" of a person "with an unprepared, becoming modernity (unfinished present)." And he "more deeply, substantially, sensitively and quickly" than any other genre, "reflects the formation of reality itself" (451). The main thing is that the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of discovering in a person not only properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized possibilities, a certain personal potential: “One of the main internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the hero’s inadequacy of his fate and his position,” a person here can to be "either more than your destiny, or less than your humanity" (479).

The above judgments of Hegel, Belinsky and Bakhtin can legitimately be considered as axioms of the theory of the novel, mastering the life of a person (primarily private, individual biographical) in dynamics, formation, evolution and in situations of complex, as a rule, conflicting relations between the hero and the environment. The novel invariably presents and almost dominates - as a kind of "super theme" - artistic comprehension (we will use the well-known words of A.S. Pushkin) "self-permanence of man", which constitutes (let us add the poet) and "the guarantee of his greatness", and the source of grievous falls, dead ends and catastrophes. The ground for the formation and consolidation of the novel, in other words, arises where there is interest in a person who has at least relative independence from the institutions of the social environment with its imperatives, rituals, rituals, which is not characterized by “herd” involvement in society.

The novels widely capture the situations of the hero's alienation from the environment, emphasize his lack of root in reality, homelessness, everyday wandering and spiritual wandering. Such are the "Golden Donkey" by Apuleius, the knightly novels of the Middle Ages, "The Story of Gilles Blaz from Santillana" by A.R. Lesage. Let us also recall Julien Sorel ("Red and Black" by Stendhal), Eugene Onegin ("A stranger to everything, not bound by anything," the Pushkin hero complains about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Herzen's Beltov, Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov with F.M. Dostoevsky. Novel heroes of this kind (and they are innumerable) "rely only on themselves."

The alienation of a person from society and the world order was interpreted by M.M. Bakhtin as necessary dominant in the novel. The scientist argued that here not only the hero, but also the author himself appears unrooted in the world, remote from the principles of stability and stability, alien to legend. The novel, in his opinion, captures "the disintegration of the epic (and tragic) integrity of man" and carries out "a laughing familiarization of the world and man" (481). “The novel,” wrote Bakhtin, “has a new, specific problematic character; it is characterized by eternal rethinking - reappraisal ”(473). In this genre, reality “becomes a world where there is no first word (ideal beginning), and the last has not yet been said” (472–473). Thus, the novel is viewed as an expression of the skeptical and relativistic world outlook, which is thought of as a crisis and at the same time having a perspective. The novel, Bakhtin argues, prepares a new, more complex human integrity “at a higher level<…>development ”(480).

There are many similarities to Bakhtin's theory of the novel in the judgments of the famous Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic D. Lukacs, who called this genre the epic of the deheated world, and the psychology of the novel hero - demonic. He considered the subject of the novel to be the history of the human soul, which manifests itself and cognizes itself in all sorts of adventures (adventures), and its prevailing tonality was irony, which he defined as the negative mysticism of epochs that broke with God. Considering the novel as a mirror of growing up, the maturity of society and the antipode of the epic that captures the "normal childhood" of mankind, D. Lukacs spoke about the recreation of this genre of the human soul, lost in an empty and imaginary reality.

However, the novel does not completely immerse itself in the atmosphere of demonism and irony, the disintegration of human integrity, the alienation of people from the world, but it also opposes it. The hero's reliance on himself in the classical novels of the 19th century. (both Western European and Russian) appeared most often in ambiguous coverage: on the one hand, as a "self-standing" worthy of a person, sublime, attractive, enchanting, on the other, as a source of delusions and life defeats. "How wrong I was, how I was punished!" - Onegin exclaims sadly, summing up his secluded free path. Pechorin complains that he did not guess his own "high purpose" and did not find a worthy application for the "immense powers" of his soul. Ivan Karamazov in the finale of the novel, tormented by his conscience, falls ill with delirium tremens. “And may God help the homeless wanderers,” - said about the fate of Rudin at the end of Turgenev's novel.

At the same time, many heroes of the novel strive to overcome their solitude and alienation, thirst for a connection in their destinies “with the world” (A. Blok). Let us recall once again the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin, where the hero imagines Tatiana sitting at the window of a rural house; as well as Turgenev's Lavretsky, Goncharovsky Raysky, Tolstoy's Andrei Volkonsky, or even Ivan Karamazov, who at his best moments rushed to Alyosha. Such novel situations were characterized by G.K. Kosikov: “The" heart "of the hero and the" heart "of the world are drawn to each other, and the problem of the novel is<…>in the fact that they have never been able to unite, and the hero's fault for this sometimes turns out to be no less than the world's fault. "

Another thing is also important: in the novels, a significant role is played by heroes, whose independence has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, relying only on themselves. Among the characters in the novel, we find those who, using the words of M.M. Prishvin about himself, it is legitimate to call "figures of communication and communication." Such is the “overflowing with life” Natasha Rostova, who, in the words of S.G. Bocharova, invariably "renews, frees" people, "defines them<…>behavior". This heroine L.N. Tolstoy naively and at the same time convincingly demands "immediate, now open, direct, humanly simple relations between people." Such are Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoevsky. In a number of novels (especially persistently - in the works of Charles Dickens and Russian literature of the 19th century), the spiritual contacts of a person with a reality close to him and, in particular, family ties are presented in an uplifting and poetic manner ("The Captain's Daughter" by AS Pushkin; "The Cathedrals" and "A Weak Family" by NS Leskov; "A Noble Nest" by IS Turgenev; "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy). The heroes of such works (remember the Rostovs or Konstantin Levin) perceive and think the surrounding reality not so much alien and hostile to themselves as friendly and akin. It is inherent in them that M.M. Prishvin called "kindred attention to the world."

The theme of the House (in the lofty sense of the word - as an irreducible existential principle and indisputable value) persistently (most often in tensely dramatic tones) resounds in the novels of our century: J. Galsworthy ("The Forsyte Saga" and subsequent works), R. Martin du Gard ("The Thibault Family"), W. Faulkner ("Noise and Fury"), MA Bulgakov ("The White Guard"), MA Sholokhova ("Quiet Don"), B.L. Pasternak ("Doctor Zhivago"), V., G. Rasputin ("Live and Remember", "Deadline").

The novels of epochs close to us, as you can see, are to a large extent focused on idyllic values ​​(although they are not inclined to put forward the situation of human harmony and reality close to him). Even Jean-Paul (having in mind, probably, such works as "Julia, or New Eloise" by J.J. Rousseau and "Weckfield Priest" by O. Goldsmith) noted that idyll is "a genre akin to the novel." And according to M.M. Bakhtina, “the meaning of the idyll for the development of the novel<…>was huge. "

The novel absorbs the experience not only of idylls, but also of a number of other genres; in this sense it is like a sponge. This genre is able to include in its sphere the features of an epic, capturing not only the private life of people, but also events of a national-historical scale ("The Parma Cloister" by Stendhal, "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, "Gone with the Wind" by M. Mitchell) ... Novels are able to embody the meanings characteristic of the parable. According to O.A. Sedakova, “in the depths of the“ Russian novel ”there is usually something like a parable”.

The involvement of the novel in the traditions of hagiography is undoubted. The life principle is very clearly expressed in the work of Dostoevsky. Leskovsky's "Soboryans" can rightfully be described as a novel-life. Novels often take on the features of satirical moral description, such as, for example, the works of O. de Balzac, W.M. Thackeray, "Resurrection" by L.N. Tolstoy. As M.M. Bakhtin, far from being alien to the novel (especially the adventurous-roguish one) and the familiar-laughter, carnival element, originally rooted in the comedy-farcical genres. Viach. Ivanov, not without reason, characterized the works of F.M. Dostoevsky as "tragedy novels". "The Master and Margarita" by M.A. Bulgakov is a kind of myth-novel, and R. Musil's Man Without Properties is an essay novel. T. Mann called his tetralogy "Joseph and His Brothers" a "mythological novel" in his report on it, and its first part ("Jacob's Past") - a "fantastic essay". The work of T. Mann, according to the German scientist, marks the most serious transformation of the novel: its immersion into mythological depths.

The novel, as you can see, has a twofold content: firstly, specific to him (“self-constancy” and the evolution of the hero, manifested in his private life), and secondly, which came to him from other genres. The conclusion is legitimate; genre essence of the novel synthetic... This genre is capable of combining, with unconstrained freedom and unprecedented breadth, the substantive principles of many genres, both comic and serious. Apparently, there is no genre beginning from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.

The novel, as a genre prone to synthetics, is sharply different from others that preceded it, which were "specialized" and acted on certain local "areas" of artistic comprehension of the world. He (like no other) proved to be able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, contradictions and wealth. Novel freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras enjoy this freedom in a variety of ways.

The multifaceted nature of the novel creates serious difficulties for literary theoreticians. Almost everyone who tries to characterize the novel as such, in its universal and necessary properties, is tempted to a kind of synecdoche: replacing the whole with its part. So, O.E. Mandelstam judged the nature of this genre from the "career novels" of the 19th century, whose heroes were carried away by Napoleon's unprecedented success. In the novels, which accentuated not the volitional aspiration of a self-asserting person, but the complexity of his psychology and internal action, the poet saw a symptom of the decline of the genre and even its end. T. Mann, in his judgments about the novel as full of soft and benevolent irony, relied on his own artistic experience and, to a large extent, on the novels of Goethe's upbringing.

Bakhtin's theory has a different orientation, but also local (primarily towards Dostoevsky's experience). At the same time, the writer's novels are interpreted by scientists in a very peculiar way. Dostoevsky's heroes, according to Bakhtin, are primarily carriers of ideas (ideology); their voices are equal, as is the author's voice in relation to each of them. This is seen polyphonicity, which is the highest point of novelistic creativity and an expression of the writer's non-dogmatic thinking, his understanding that a single and complete truth "is fundamentally incompatible within the limits of one consciousness." Dostoevsky's novels are viewed by Bakhtin as an inheritance of the ancient "menippean satire." Menippea is a genre "free from legend", committed to "unbridled fantasy", recreating "adventure ideas or truth in the world: on earth, and in the underworld, and on Olympus. " She, says Bakhtin, is a genre of "last questions" that carries out "moral and psychological experimentation" and recreates "split personality", "unusual dreams, passions bordering on insanity."

Other, not involved in polyphony, the variety of the novel, where the writers' interest in people rooted in the reality close to them prevails, and the author's "voice" dominates the voices of the heroes, Bakhtin evaluated less highly and even spoke about them ironically: he wrote about "monological" one-sidedness and the narrowness of the "manor-house-room-apartment-family romances", as if they had forgotten about the presence of a person "on the threshold" of eternal and unsolvable questions. At the same time, L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov.

In the long history of the novel, two of its types are clearly visible, more or less corresponding to the two stages of literary development. These are, firstly, highly eventful works based on external actions, the heroes of which strive to achieve some local goals. Such are the adventurous novels, in particular the roguish, chivalrous, "career romances", as well as adventure and detective novels. Their plots are numerous links of event nodes (intrigues, adventures, etc.), as is the case, for example, in Byron's Don Juan or A. Dumas.

Secondly, these are novels that have prevailed in literature for the last two or three centuries, when one of the central problems of social thought, artistic creativity and culture in general became spiritual self-permanence of a person. Internal action successfully competes with external action: eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the consciousness of the hero in its versatility and complexity, with its endless dynamics and psychological nuances, comes to the fore (about psychology in literature, see pp. 173-180). The characters of such novels are portrayed not only as striving for some particular goals, but also comprehending their place in the world, understanding and realizing their value orientation. It is in this type of novels that the specificity of the genre in question manifests itself with maximum completeness. The reality close to a person (“daily life”) is assimilated here not as a deliberately “low prose”, but as a part of genuine humanity, the trends of the given time, universal principles of existence, most importantly, as an arena of the most serious conflicts. Russian novelists of the 19th century they knew well and persistently showed that "tremendous events are less test for human relations) than everyday life with minor displeasure."

One of the most important features of the novel and a related story (especially in the 19th-20th centuries) is the close attention of the authors to the surrounding heroes microenvironment, the influence of which they experience and on which they are influenced in one way or another. Outside of recreating the microenvironment, it is very difficult for a novelist to show the inner world of a person. At the origins of the now established novel form is the dilogy of I.V. Goethe about Wilhelm Meister (these works T. Mann called "deep into inner life, sublimated adventure novels"), as well as "Confession" by J.J. Rousseau, "Adolphe" B. Konstan, "Eugene Onegin", in which the "poetry of reality" inherent in the works of Alexander Pushkin is conveyed. Since that time, novels focused on a person's connections with a reality close to him and, as a rule, giving preference to inner action, have become a kind of center of literature. They influenced all other genres in the most serious way, even transformed them. According to M.M. Bakhtin, happened Romanization verbal art: when a novel comes to "big literature", other genres are dramatically altered, "more or less" romanized "." At the same time, the structural properties of genres are also transformed: their formal organization becomes less strict, more relaxed and free. We will turn to this (formal-structural) side of genres.

Literary genres (in addition to content, essential qualities) have structural, formal properties that have different degrees of certainty. At earlier stages (up to and including the era of classicism), it was the formal aspects of genres that were brought to the fore and were recognized as dominant. Verse dimensions (meters), and stanzaical organization ("solid forms", as they are often called), and an orientation towards certain speech constructions, and principles of construction became genre-forming principles. Complexes of artistic means were strictly assigned to each genre. Rigorous prescriptions regarding the subject of the image, the construction of the work and its speech tissue were pushed to the periphery and even neutralized the individual author's initiative. The laws of the genre imperiously subordinated to themselves the creative will of the writers. “Old Russian genres,” writes D.S. Likhachev, - are much more associated with certain types of style than genres of modern times<…>Therefore, we will not be surprised by the expressions "hagiographic style", "chronographic style", "chronicle style", although, of course, individual deviations can be noted within each genre. " Medieval art, according to the scientist, “seeks to express a collective attitude towards what is depicted. Hence, much in it depends not on the creator of the work, but on the genre to which this work belongs.<…>Each genre has its own strictly elaborated traditional image of the author, writer, “performer”.

Traditional genres, being strictly formalized, exist separately from each other, separately. The boundaries between them are clear and distinct, each "works" on his own "foothold". Such genre formations are They follow certain norms and rules that are developed by tradition and are obligatory for authors. The canon of the genre is “a certain system sustainable and solid(italics mine .- V.Kh.) genre characteristics ".

The word "canon" (from others - gr... kanon - rule, prescription) was the title of a treatise by the ancient Greek sculptor Polycletus (5th century BC). Here the canon was perceived as a perfect model, fully realizing a certain norm. The canonicity of art (including verbal art) is conceived in this terminological tradition as the strict adherence of artists to the rules, allowing them to come closer to perfect examples.

Genre norms and rules (canons) were originally formed spontaneously, on the basis of rituals with their rituals and traditions of folk culture. "Both in traditional folklore and in archaic literature, genre structures are inseparable from extra-literary situations; genre laws merge directly with the rules of ritual and everyday decency."

Later, as reflection strengthened in artistic activity, some genre canons took on the appearance of clearly formulated provisions (postulates). Regulatory instructions to poets, imperative attitudes almost dominated the teachings of the poetry of Aristotle and Horace, Yu.Ts. Scaliger and N. Boileau. In normative theories of this kind, genres, which already possessed certainty, acquired maximum order. The regulation of genres, carried out by aesthetic thought, reached its highest point in the era of classicism. So, N. Boileau in the third chapter of his poetic treatise "Poetic Art" formulated very strict rules for the main groups of literary works. He, in particular, proclaimed the principle of three unities (place, time, action) as necessary in dramatic works. Distinguishing sharply between tragedy and comedy, Boileau wrote:

Sadness and tears are the funny eternal enemy.
The tragic tone is incompatible with him in any way,
But a humiliating comedy serious
Amuse the crowd with a scabrous sharpness.
In a comedy, you can not joke unbridled,
You cannot entangle a thread of living intrigue,
You can not be awkwardly distracted from the plan
And the thought in emptiness all the time to spread.

Most importantly, normative aesthetics (from Aristotle to Boileau and Sumarokov) insisted that poets follow indisputable genre models, such as the epics of Homer, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In the era of normative poetics (from antiquity to the 17th – 18th centuries), along with genres that were recommended and regulated by theorists (“genres de jure”, in the words of S.S. for centuries that did not receive theoretical substantiation, but also possessed stable structural properties and had certain substantive "predilections". These are fairy tales, fables, short stories and similar to the latter, laughable stage works, as well as many traditional lyric genres (including folklore).

Genre structures have changed (and quite dramatically) in the literature of the last two or three centuries, especially in the post-romantic era. They became malleable and flexible, lost their canonical rigor, and therefore opened up wide areas for the manifestation of individual author's initiative. The rigidity of the distinction between genres has exhausted itself and, one might say, sunk into oblivion along with classicist aesthetics, which was resolutely rejected in the era of romanticism. "We see, - wrote V. Hugo in his programmatic introduction to the drama" Cromwell ", - how quickly the arbitrary division of genres collapses before the arguments of reason and taste."

The “decanonization” of genre structures made itself felt already in the 18th century. Evidence of this is the works of J.J. Russo and L. Stern. The novelization of literature of the last two centuries has marked its "exit" beyond the framework of genre canons and, at the same time, the erasure of the former boundaries between genres. In the XIX-XX centuries. "Genre categories are losing their clear outlines, genre models for the most part are disintegrating." These, as a rule, are no longer isolated from each other phenomena that have a pronounced set of properties, but groups of works in which certain formal and substantive preferences and accents are more or less clearly visible.

The literature of the last two centuries (especially the 20th century) encourages us to talk about the presence in its composition of works devoid of genre definiteness, such as many dramatic works with a neutral subtitle "play", fiction of an essay character, as well as numerous lyric poems that do not fit into the framework of any genre classifications. V.D. Skvoznikov noted) that in the lyric poetry of the 19th century, starting with V. Hugo, G. Heine, M.Yu. Lermontov, "the former genre certainty disappears": "... lyrical thought<…>reveals a tendency to more and more synthetic expression ", there is" atrophy of the genre in the lyrics. " “No matter how you expand the concept of elegiacity,” says the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov's "January 1st", - all the same, one cannot escape the obvious circumstance that we have a lyrical masterpiece before us, and its genre nature is completely indefinite. Rather, it does not exist at all, because it is not limited by anything. "

At the same time, the stable genre structures did not lose their significance either in the era of romanticism or in subsequent eras. Traditional genres with a long history with their formal (compositional and speech) features (ode, fable, fairy tale) continued and continue to exist. The "voices" of long-existing genres and the voice of the writer as a creative individual each time somehow merge together in a new way in the works of A.S. Pushkin. In epicurean poems (anacreontic poetry), the author is similar to Anacreon, Parni, early K.N. Batyushkov, and at the same time very clearly manifests itself (remember "Play, Adele, do not know the sadness ..." or "From me evening Leila ..."). As the creator of the solemn ode "I have erected a monument to myself not made by hands ..." the poet, likening himself to Horace and G.R. Derzhavin, paying tribute to their artistic manner, at the same time expresses his own credo, completely unique. Pushkin's fairy tales, original and inimitable, are at the same time organically involved in the traditions of this genre, both folklore and literary. It is unlikely that a person who first gets acquainted with these creations will be able to feel that they belong to one author: in each of the poetic genres, the great poet manifests himself in a completely new way, finding himself not like himself. This is not only Pushkin. The lyrical epic poems of M.Yu. Lermontov in the tradition of romanticism ("Mtsyri", "Demon") with his folk - poetic "Song of<…>merchant Kalashnikov ". This kind of "proteic" self-disclosure of authors in various genres is seen by modern scholars in Western European literatures of the New Age: "Aretino, Boccaccio, Margarita of Navarre, Erasmus of Rotterdam, even Cervantes and Shakespeare appear as different individuals in different genres."

Structural stability is also possessed by those newly emerging in the 19th – 20th centuries. genre education. So, there is no doubt the presence of a certain formal-meaningful complex in the lyric poetry of the Symbolists (gravitation towards universals and a special kind of vocabulary, the semantic complexity of speech, the apotheosis of mystery, etc.). The presence of structural and conceptual commonality in the novels of French writers of the 1960s – 1970s (M. Bugord, A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarrott, and others) is indisputable.

Summarizing what has been said, we note that literature knows two kinds of genre structures. These are, firstly, ready-made, complete, solid forms (canonical genres), invariably equal to themselves (a vivid example of such genre education is a sonnet, alive and now), and, secondly, non-canonical genre forms: flexible, open to all sorts of transformations , perestroika, renewal, what are, for example, elegies or novellas in the literature of the New Time. These free genre forms in the epochs close to us come into contact with and coexist with non-genre formations, but without some minimum of stable structural properties of genres do not exist.

In each historical period, genres are related to each other in different ways. They, according to D.S. Likhachev, "enter into interaction, support each other's existence and at the same time compete with each other"; therefore, it is necessary to study not only individual genres and their history, but also “ the system genres of each given era ".

At the same time, genres are assessed in a certain way by the reading public, critics, creators of "poetics" and manifestos, writers and scientists. They are interpreted as worthy or, on the contrary, not worthy of the attention of artistically enlightened people; both high and low; as truly modern or outdated, exhausted; as backbone or marginal (peripheral). These assessments and interpretations create hierarchy of genres that change over time. Some of the genres, a kind of favorites, happy chosen ones, receive the highest possible appreciation from some authoritative authorities - an assessment that becomes generally recognized or at least acquires literary and social significance. Genres of this kind, based on the terminology of the formal school, are called canonized.(Note that this word has a different meaning than the term "canonical", which characterizes the genre structure.) According to VB Shklovsky, a certain part of the literary era "represents its canonized crest," periphery, without becoming authoritative and not riveting attention to themselves. Canonized (again, following Shklovsky) is also called (see pp. 125–126, 135) that part of the literature of the past that is recognized as the best, summit, exemplary, that is, a classic. At the origins of this terminological tradition is the idea of ​​sacred texts that have received official church sanction (canonized) as indisputably true.

The canonization of literary genres was carried out by normative poetics from Aristotle and Horace to Boileau, Lomonosov and Sumarokov. Aristotelian treatise gave the highest status to tragedy and epic (epic). The aesthetics of classicism also canonized "high comedy", sharply separating it from the folk-farcical comedy as a genre of low and inferior quality.

The hierarchy of genres also took place in the minds of the so-called mass reader (see pp. 120–123). So, the Russian peasants at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. gave an unconditional preference to "divine books" and those works of secular literature that echoed with them. The lives of the saints (most often reaching the people in the form of books written in an illiterate, "barbaric language") were listened to and read "with reverence, with enthusiastic love, with wide eyes and with the same wide open soul." The works of an entertaining nature, called "fairy tales", were regarded as a low genre. They were very widespread, but aroused a disdainful attitude towards themselves and were rewarded with unflattering epithets ("fables", "fables", "nonsense", etc.).

The canonization of genres also takes place in the "upper" layer of literature. Thus, in the era of romanticism, marked by a radical genre restructuring, a fragment, a fairy tale, and also a novel (in the spirit and manner of "Wilhelm Meister" by IV Goethe) were ascended to the top of literature. Literary life of the 19th century (especially in Russia) is marked by the canonization of socio-psychological novels and stories, prone to life-likeness, psychologism, everyday authenticity. In the XX century. experiments were undertaken (to varying degrees, successful) canonization of mystery drama (the concept of symbolism), parody (formal school), epic novel (aesthetics of socialist realism of the 1930s – 1940s), as well as the novels of F.M. Dostoevsky as polyphonic (1960-1970s); in Western European literary life - the novel of the "stream of consciousness" and the absurdist drama of tragicomic sound. The authority of the mythological principle in the composition of novel prose is now very high.

If in the era of normative aesthetics were canonized high genres, then in times close to us, those genre principles that previously were outside the framework of "strict" literature rise hierarchically. As V.B. Shklovsky, there is a canonization of new themes and genres, which hitherto were secondary, marginal, low: “The bloc canonizes the themes and rates of the“ gypsy romance ”, and Chekhov introduces the“ Alarm Clock ”into Russian literature. Dostoevsky elevates the methods of the tabloid novel into a literary norm. " At the same time, traditional high genres evoke an alienated and critical attitude, they are thought of as exhausted. “In the change of genres, it is interesting to see the constant displacement of high genres by low ones,” noted B.V. Tomashevsky, noting the process of "canonization of low genres" in literary modernity. According to the scientist, followers of high genres usually become epigones. In the same spirit, M.M. Bakhtin. Traditional high genres, according to him, are prone to "stilted heroization", they are characterized by convention, "unchanging poetry", "monotony and abstractness."

In the XX century, as you can see, the hierarchical rise is mainly genres new(or fundamentally updated) as opposed to those that were authoritative in the previous era. At the same time, the places of leaders are occupied by genre formations with free, open structures: the subject of canonization, paradoxically, turns out to be non-canonical genres, preference is given to everything in literature that is not involved in ready-made, established, stable forms.

In the epochs close to us, marked by the increased dynamism and versatility of artistic life, genres are inevitably involved in the struggle of literary groups, schools, trends. At the same time, genre systems are undergoing more intense and rapid changes than in previous centuries. Yu.N. Tynyanov, who argued that "there are no ready-made genres" and that each of them, changing from epoch to epoch, acquires that greater significance, moving to the center, then, on the contrary, relegating to the background or even ceasing to exist: "In the era of decay, what "Some genre, he moves from the center to the periphery, and in its place from the trifles of literature, from its backyards and lowlands, a new phenomenon emerges into the center." So, in the 1920s, the focus of attention of the literary and near-literary environment shifted from the socio-psychological novel and traditionally high lyric poetry to parody and satirical genres, as well as to adventurous prose, which Tynyanov spoke about in his article "Gap".

Emphasizing and, in our opinion, absolutizing the rapid dynamics of the existence of genres, Yu.N. Tynyanov made a very sharp conclusion rejecting the significance of inter-epoch genre phenomena and connections: “The study of isolated genres outside the signs of the genre system with which they relate is impossible. Tolstoy's historical novel is not correlated with the historical novel by Zagoskin, but correlated with contemporary prose ”. This kind of emphasis on intra-epoch genre confrontations needs some adjustment. Thus, "War and Peace" by L.N. Tolstoy (we note, supplementing Tynyanov) it is legitimate to correlate not only with the literary situation of the 1860s, but, as links in one chain, with the novel by M.N. Zagoskin "Roslavlev, or the Russians in 1812" (there are a lot of rolls here, far from accidental), and with a poem by M.Yu. Lermontov's "Borodino" (Tolstoy himself spoke about the influence of this poem on him), and with a number of stories of ancient Russian literature filled with national heroism.

The relationship between dynamism and stability in the existence of genres from generation to generation, from era to era requires an open-minded and careful discussion, free from "directional" extremes. Along with genre confrontations in the composition of literary life, genre traditions are fundamentally significant: continuity in this area (about continuity and tradition, see pp. 352–356)

Genres constitute the most important link between writers of different eras, without which the development of literature is unimaginable. According to S.S. Averintseva, "the background against which one can view the silhouette of a writer is always two-fold: any writer is a contemporary of his contemporaries, comrades in the era, but also a successor of his predecessors, comrades in the genre." Literary critics have repeatedly spoken about the “memory of the genre” (MM Bakhtin), about the “burden of conservatism” gravitating over the notion of the genre (YV Stennik), about “genre inertia” (SS Averintsev).

Arguing with literary scholars who linked the existence of genres primarily with intra-epochical confrontations, the struggle of trends and schools, with "superficial variegation and hype of the literary process," M.M. Bakhtin wrote: “The literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable,“ eternal ”trends in the development of literature. The genre always retains undying elements archaic... True, this one. archaic is preserved in him only due to its constant renewal, so to speak, modernization<…>The genre is revived and renewed at each new stage in the development of literature and in each individual work of a given genre<…>Therefore, the archaic, preserved in the genre, is not dead, but eternally alive, that is, capable of renewal<…>Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. That is why the genre is able to provide unity and continuity of this development. " And further: "The higher and more complex the genre has developed, the better and more fully it remembers its past."

These judgments (the pivotal one in Bakhtin's concept of the genre) need critical correction. Not all genres go back to the archaic. Many of them have a later origin, such as, for example, Lives or novels. But in the main, Bakhtin is right: genres exist in big historical time, they are destined to live a long life. These are supra-epoch phenomena.

Thus, genres carry out the beginning of continuity and stability in literary development. At the same time, in the process of the evolution of literature, already existing genre formations are inevitably renewed, and new ones also arise and are consolidated; the relationship between genres and the nature of the interaction between them are changing.

The genres of literature are connected with extra-artistic reality by very close and diverse ties. The genre essence of the works is generated by the world-wide significant phenomena of cultural and historical life. Thus, the main features of the old heroic epic were predetermined by the peculiarities of the era of the formation of ethnic groups and states (about the origins of heroism, see p. 70). And the activation of the novelistic principle in the literatures of the New Time is due to the fact that it was at this time that the spiritual self-stability of a person became one of the most important phenomena of primary reality.

The evolution of genre forms (remember: always meaningfully significant) also largely depends on shifts in the social sphere itself, which is shown by G.V. Plekhanov on the material of French drama of the 17th-18th centuries, which made its way from the tragedies of classicism to the "philistine drama" of the Enlightenment ...

Genre structures as such (like generic ones) are a refraction of forms of non-artistic existence, both socio-cultural and natural. The principles of composition of works, enshrined in the genre tradition, reflect the structure of life phenomena. I will refer to the judgment of the graphic artist: “Sometimes you can hear a dispute<…>is there composition in nature? There is!<…>Because this composition was found by the artist and the artist was elevated. " The organization of artistic speech in a particular genre also invariably depends on the forms of non-artistic statements (oratorical and colloquial, familiar-public and intimate, etc.). The German philosopher of the first half of the 19th century spoke about this. F. Schleiermacher. He noted that the drama, when it emerged, took from life conversations that are common everywhere, that the chorus of tragedies and comedies of the ancient Greeks has its primary source in the meeting of an individual with the people, and the life prototype of the artistic form of the epic is a story.

Forms of speech affecting literary genres, as shown by M.M. Bakhtin, are very diverse: “All our statements have definite and relatively stable typical forms of construction of the whole... We have a rich repertoire of oral (and written) speech genres. " The scientist distinguished between primary speech genres, which developed “in the conditions of direct speech communication” (oral conversation, dialogue), and secondary, ideological (oratory, journalism, scientific and philosophical texts). Artistic and speech genres, according to the scientist, are secondary; for the most part, they consist of "various transformed primary genres (dialogue replicas, everyday stories, letters, minutes, etc.)."

Genre structures in literature (both possessing canonical rigor and free from it), as you can see, have life analogues, which determines their appearance and strengthening. This is a sphere genesis(origin) of literary genres.

The other is also significant, receptive(see p. 115) side of the links between verbal and artistic genres with primary reality. The fact is that a work of one or another genre (let us turn again to MM Bakhtin) is focused on certain conditions of perception: “... for each literary genre<…>characteristic are their special concepts of the addressee of a literary work, a special feeling and understanding of their reader, listener, public, people. "

The specificity of the functioning of genres is most evident in the early stages of the existence of verbal art. This is what D.S. Likhachev on Old Russian literature: “Genres are determined by their use: in worship (in its various parts), in legal and diplomatic practice (article lists, chronicles, stories about princely crimes), in the atmosphere of princely life (solemn words, glory, etc.) .) ". Likewise, the classicistic ode of the 17th – 18th centuries. was a link in the solemn palace ritual.

Folklore genres are inevitably associated with a certain environment of perception. Farcical comedies were originally part of the mass festival and were part of it. The tale was performed during leisure hours and was addressed to a small number of people. A relatively recent ditty is the genre of a city or village street.

Having gone into the book, verbal art has weakened ties with the life forms of its development: reading fiction is successfully carried out in any setting. But here, too, the perception of a work depends on its genre and generic properties. Drama in reading evokes associations with a stage performance, narration in a fairy-tale form awakens in the reader's imagination a situation of lively and relaxed conversation. Family and everyday novels and stories, landscape sketches, friendly and love lyrics with the soulful tonality inherent in these genres can evoke in the reader a feeling that the author is specifically addressed to him as an individual: an atmosphere of trusting, intimate contact arises. Reading the same traditional-epic, filled with heroic works gives the reader a feeling of spiritual fusion with some very broad and capacious "we". The genre, as you can see, is one of the bridges connecting the writer and the reader, a mediator between them.

The concept of "literary genre" in the XX century. was repeatedly rejected. “It is useless to be interested in literary genres,” the French literary critic P. van Tigem said after the Italian philosopher B. Croce, “which the great writers of the past followed; they took the most ancient forms - epic, tragedy, sonnet, novel - does it matter? The main thing is that they have succeeded. Is it worth investigating the boots in which Napoleon was shod on the morning of Austerlitz? " ...

At the other extreme of the comprehension of genres - the judgment about them by M.M. Bakhtin as the "leading heroes" of the literary process. The above prompts us to join the second view, making, however, a corrective clarification: if in the “pre-romantic” epochs the face of literature was really determined primarily by the laws of the genre, its norms, rules, canons, then in the 19th – 20th centuries. a truly central figure in the literary process was the author with his widely and freely carried out creative initiative. The genre now turned out to be "the second person", but by no means lost its significance.

Notes:

An unpublished chapter from "Historical Poetics" by A.N. Veselovsky // Russian Literature. 1959. No. 3. P. 118.

The history of literary criticism as such is not considered in any detail by us. Special works are dedicated to her. Cm.: Nikolaev P.A., Kurilov A.S., Grishunin A.L. History of Russian literary criticism. M., 1980; G.K. Kosikov Foreign literary criticism and theoretical problems of the science of literature // Foreign aesthetics and theory of literature of the XIX-XX centuries: Treatises, articles, essays. M., 1987. Summarizing coverage of the fate of domestic theoretical literary criticism of the XX century. Hopefully, will be undertaken in the coming years.

Pospelov G.N. Aesthetic and artistic. M., 1965. S. 154-159.

Mukarzhovsky Y. Research in aesthetics and art theory. P. 131.

Pospelov G.N.... On the question of poetic genres // Reports and messages of the philological faculty of Moscow State University. Vyl, 5. 1948, pp. 59–60.

Pospelov G.N.... Problems of the historical development of literature. M., 1972.S. 207.

Averintsev S.S. Parable // Literary encyclopedic dictionary. M., 1987. See also: Tyupa V.I. The artistry of Chekhov's story. M., 1989. S. 13–32.

Cm.: Burke K... Attitudes Toward History, Los Altos, 1959; L.V. Chernetz... Literary genres. S. 59–61.

Ilyin I.P... N.G. Fry // Contemporary Foreign Literary Critics: A Handbook. Countries of capitalism. Part III. Moscow, 1987, p. 87-88.

Over the past two or three decades, monographs by V.D. Dneprov, D.V. Zatonsky, V.V., Kozhinov, N.S. Leites, N.T. Rymar, N.D, Tamarchenko, A. Ya. Esalnek dedicated to the history and theory of the novel. Let us also call: Zur Poetik des Romans. Hisg. von V. Klotz. Darmstadt, 1965; Deutsche Roman theorien. Hrsg. von R. Grimm. Fr. a M., 1968.

Bakhtin M.M... Aesthetics of verbal creativity. P. 279. See also: Medvedev P.N... Formal method in literary criticism. (Bakhtin under the mask. The second mask.) P. 145-146.

Likhachev D.S. Poetics of Old Russian Literature. P. 55.

L.V. Chernetz... Literary genres. P. 77.

Cit. Quoted from: L.V. Chernetz Literary genres. P. 51.

Cm.: Bakhtin M.M... Literature and aesthetics. P. 451.

The genus of literature are large associations of literary and literary works according to the type of attitude of the speaker ("the carrier of speech") to the artistic whole. Three kinds are distinguished: drama, epic, lyric poetry.

This division is traced back to Aristotle's Poetics.

Since ancient times, it has been customary to combine works of a verbal and artistic nature into 3 large groups: epic, lyric, drama. In the 20th century. due to the development of individual, author's methods in the literature, not everything can fit into this triad. Already Plato in his treatise "State" talked about poetry, conscience, that the poet in his creation and can directly speak on his own behalf, without mixing something else, that it works in praises, this is the most important means of lyricism. The poet can also construct works as an exchange of speeches between heroes, without using his own words. This is a characteristic of drama. The poet can combine his words with the words of others, which belong to the heroes. This is epic. He also calls this mixed, last kind of poetry storytelling. Aristotle expresses similar judgments in his Poetics, but emphasizes that there are 3 different ways of imitating reality. This kind of view, when the division of literature into 3 large groups was considered according to the type of relationship between the speaker of speech and the artistic whole, persisted until the 19th century, until the aesthetics of romanticism, which was based on philosophical categories, began to be developed. In particular, F. Schelling in "The Philosophy of Art" indicates that in this division the type of artistic content is important: lyrics are infinity and spiritual freedom; epic is pure necessity; drama unites freedom and necessity. His ideas are developed by Hegel, saying that the lyrics are subjective, the epic is objective, the drama unites both. These ideas are developed by Belinsky. It turns out that in the aesthetics of romanticism there was a gap between the content and form of the work, poetics, that is, the speech activity present in a literary work, was ignored. In the 20th century. with the development of strict linguistics, more attention began to be paid to the speech organization of the work. The German scientist Bular said that speech acts have 3 aspects:

1. Representation - some kind of message about an object.

2. Expression some expression of the speaker's emotions.

3. Appeal - an appeal of the speaker to someone, which becomes defining.

According to Bulard, this or that aspect is dominant in the genus of literature. Expression prevails in a lyric work, an active side works in a dramatic work, and an epic work combines 3 principles. The division of literature into genders does not coincide with its division into prose and poetry, as in the everyday idea of ​​them. Each of these groups can include both poetic and non-poetic works. In the 20th century. are increasingly inclined to the point of view of the German writer Novalis, who back in the 19th century. said that pure division is very difficult, that the epic is actually that where the epic principle prevails more, the drama is the dramatic, etc. Therefore, when the term lyrical, dramatic, epic is used in the theory of literature, it is not only about generic properties, but also about a certain tonality of a literary work. It is customary to associate with the epic a certain multidimensional picture of the world (Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov. Turgenev's novels are quite lyrical, The Brothers Karamazov is called a tragedy novel, since drama is associated with the tension of what is happening). In any case, the balance between content and form is further maintained.

Plato writes about the kinds of poetry in The State: a poet can speak directly on his own behalf (lyrics), there can be an exchange of speeches of heroes without the poet's words (drama), he can combine his words with the words of the characters (epic). Similar in "Poetics" by Aristotle: as three ways of imitation. Since the 19th century - not as verbal and artistic forms, but as intelligible entities, fixed by philosophical categories, that is, the genus is equal to the type of artistic content.

Schelling: lyrics - the endless spirit of freedom, epic - pure necessity, drama - synthesis - the struggle between freedom and necessity.

Hegel (following Jean Paul): the epic is objective, the lyrics are subjective, the drama is these two principles.

Belinsky's article "The Division of Poetry into Genera and Types" (1841) in Otechestvennye Zapiski (Otechestvennye Zapiski) coincides with the Hegelian concept, but refers not to Homer, but to his contemporary literature (Pushkin, Gogol, etc.). In the beginning - Hegel's scheme, at the end - confusion, violation of the scheme. (But Hegel did not highly value lyrics, since the objective, reasonable, substantial was more important to him, for Belinsky poetry - the highest kind of art - everything is subject to her). Poetry realizes the meaning of an idea, everything internally goes deep into the external.

1. Epic poetry is a certain closed reality, the poet is not visible, the world is plastically determined and develops by itself, the poet is only a narrator.

2. Lyric poetry - penetration into the inner sphere, the realm of subjectivity, the world in itself, not coming out.

3. Dramatic poetry - 1 + 2, the inner ideal is subjective, and the outer real is objective.

20th century - a synthesis of literary genders: a novel, lyric-epic poems, plays with epic elements, lyric drama (Blok's Balaganchik).

Criteria for the delimitation of literary genders. Generic properties of a literary work. The system of literary genera.

Attempts to classify literature by genus were made already in antiquity, for example, by Plato. The organization of the narrative was taken as a basis: from the author's "I" (this partly correlates with modern lyrics); from heroes (drama); in a mixed way (with modern eyes - an epic). Somewhat with different accents, but also from the narrative, Aristotle tried to solve the problem of childbirth. In his opinion, one can narrate about something separate from oneself (epic), directly from oneself (lyrics), or give the right to narrate to the heroes (drama).
Even in relation to ancient literature, this methodology was not flexible enough, and the subsequent development of literature even casts doubt on it. So, V.V. Kozhinov justly noted that the famous "Divine Comedy" by Dante, according to this classification, would have to be called lyrics (it was written from the I), but this is undoubtedly an epic work.

In the 19th century, the classical scheme of dividing literature into childbirth was proposed by G. Hegel... Simplifying somewhat Hegel's terminology, we can say that the epic is based on objectivity, that is, interest in the world itself, in events external to the author. At the heart of the lyrics –interest in the inner world of the individual(primarily the author), that is, subjectivity. Hegel considered drama to be a synthesis of lyrics and epic; here there is both objective disclosure and interest in the inner world of the individual. Often conflict is at the heart of the drama- the clash of individual aspirations. But this conflict itself is revealed as an event. Clarifying this thesis, we can say that, for example, Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit" objectively shows the conflict of individuals (Chatsky and representatives of Famus society).
This is the logic of Hegel, which strongly influenced the development of theoretical thought. However, let us immediately note that in relation to the drama, Hegel's ideas raise many questions. Until we go into details, this will be discussed when we talk about the drama.
Hegel's theory for a long time determined the view of the generic division of literature. It was adapted to the conditions of Russian literature by VG Belinsky in his article "The Division of Poetry into Genera and Species", where the philosophical and aesthetic principles of Hegel were reformulated into terminology more familiar to the literary critic and critic. In Russian literary criticism of the 19th century and in Soviet science, it was the Hegelian approach (in Belinsky's interpretation) that was undoubtedly dominant.

Schelling - work "Philosophy of Art". The most important category of romanticism is freedom... It is the delimitation of literary genders. An epic is an image of a situation of necessity. Lyrics is freedom. Drama is a combination of lyric and epic elements.
Necessity is opposed to freedom. Here is the problem of choice. The hero does it on his own, but then everything develops under the sign of necessity.

Hegel said: "The hero in a dramatic work reaps the fruits of his own deed."

Genus(psychol.) - a poetic expression of a poetic state: lyrics - feelings, epic - thoughts, drama - pain.
Based on these categories:
1) persons: 1 p. - lyrics, 2 p. - drama, 3 p. - epic.
2) Time: lyrics - present, epic - past, drama - future.
3) correlates of the linguistic or speech hierarchy.

Generic properties(Kozhinov).
- on the surface of the text.
the core of the text.

Generic levels:
1) Surface layer - subject-speech organization (system of intra-text statements).
2) The objective world. The diversity of being in its entirety. The hero in the work has many qualities. “Anger is an individual property” (Iliad).
3) Deep level. The nature of the deployment of an action “the type of contradictions underlying the deployment of an action.

Hegel:
The action of the epic work is based on the situation.
The action of a dramatic work is based on a collision ("collision"), and the situation is outside the main circle of artistic depiction.

Drama is not interested in diversity. Retardation - slowing down the action.

Literary birth system: relies on the poetic expression of a psychological state.
Lyrics are a poetic expression of feelings.
Drama is a poetic expression of will.
An epic is a poetic expression of being and thought.