About the typical in realistic fiction. Worldview problems
1.The moral height that Tolstoy reached - a man - is the result
huge, never-ending internal work, the highest exactingness towards oneself, a merciless analysis of one's behavior, overcoming one's weaknesses (ambition, vanity, inconsistency, failure to fulfill plans, manifestation of laziness, inaccuracy, Tolstoy himself points out these shortcomings.
2. Tolstoy sees the meaning of life in serving people. You can't live for yourself alone. This is spiritual death. Take as little as possible from people and give as much as possible to people. This idea is repeated many times in the writer's diaries. And the happiest years in his life Tolstoy considered those when he devoted himself entirely to the good of the people, to work in the Yasnaya Polyana school founded by him, to helping the hungry.
3. Tolstoy’s life credo was unshakable, which he never betrayed: “To live honestly, you have to tear, get confused, fight, make mistakes, start and quit, and start again and quit again, and fight and lose forever. And calmness is a meanness of the soul ”.
4. Tolstoy's teaching on non-resistance to evil by violence should be understood correctly. “Whatever people try to free themselves from violence,” wrote L.N. Tolstoy, - one cannot free oneself from him: violence. " However, evil must be resisted by all possible means: protests, the printed word, and most importantly, good deeds.
5. The theory of non-resistance to evil by violence is associated with Tolstoy's doctrine of moral
self-improvement. "This theory is not a panacea for social ills. But overcoming one's weaknesses and shortcomings, educating in oneself more perfect human qualities, no doubt, is a good both for oneself and for society.
"What to do? - ask the same rulers, subordinates, revolutionaries, and public figures, implying by the question "What to do?" ... always the question of what to do with others, but no one asks what to do with myself ", - remarks Tolstoy. To start, according to Tolstoy - you need to start yourself by fostering a sense of responsibility for your deeds and actions. This is the basis of human moral culture.
The writer's belief in man, in the endless possibilities of his mind and will, was reflected in the theories of self-improvement.
Already in 1891, Tolstoy foresaw the collapse of the old institutions of life: "No matter how hard we try, there is still a collapse ahead ..." During the revolutionary events of 1905, Tolstoy sent a letter to a close relative of the tsar in which he fearlessly declares: , denying and condemning all existing order and power and directly declaring this. " Although Tolstoy withdrew from the revolution, he understood well the anti-popular nature of the government and spoke sharply about its activities. And, of course, the following words of Tolstoy are called not to obedience: "... today the hanging, the torment of people has caused indignation, an unkind, evil feeling towards the hangmen." "The death penalty in our time clearly shows that the rulers are bad, lost people and that, therefore, to obey them ... harmful and shameful ..."
As you can see, life made adjustments to the teachings of Tolstoy. Not everything was easy with faith in God. The following entries were found in Tolstoy's diary: “At night and in the morning, it seems that a state of coldness that had never existed before, doubts about everything, the main thing in God, in the fidelity of understanding the meaning of life, was found” (09/02/1909);
“I saw in a dream the denial of God and also an objection to my idea of the general better structure of life as a result of refusal to fight” (12.24.1909). These excited notes are enough to represent the contradictions in Tolstoy's views. There was only one thing the writer did not doubt - “It is true that the meaning of life of each individual person ... is in increasing his love for people and constantly doing good. Do not wait until life provides such an opportunity, but look for it. "
Excerpts from memoirs portray Tolstoy as a man of a huge and versatile culture, in a vivid way of thinking, his speech was inexpressibly beautiful. In dealing with people, he was cordial, unusually delicate and simple, but everyone who met him felt the power of his intellect, the scale of his personality.
Here is what Gorky remarked: “He will come out - small. And all at once will become smaller than him. "
In the memory of people, Tolstoy is not only a great writer, but also a man of the highest morality, selflessness, kindness, and selfless service to people.
It is most natural to begin characterizing a writer by talking about his public appearance. A person always represents a part of a complex social collective that influences him from the outside and in whose life he participates with a greater or lesser measure of activity. Any work, including the work of a writer, invariably carries social functions. The goals of the writer are not individual, his material is taken from the sphere of human experience, the subject of his attention is the reader, whom he seeks to educate with the power of his creativity.
“A poet,” Belinsky pointed out, “is first of all a man, then a citizen of his land, a son of his time. The spirit of the people and the time cannot act on them less than on others. " And at the same time, a poet is a literary figure performing extremely important in the field of human consciousness. According to Dobrolyubov's expressive definition, literature is "an element of social development", "the language, eyes and ears of a social organism." Shchedrin wrote that "literature is nothing more than a focus in which the highest aspirations of society are concentrated." The world's foremost writers speak with delight and pride of the lofty tasks facing fiction. "An artist," wrote Gorky, "is a herald of his class, his battle tube and first sword, an artist always and insatiably longs for freedom - there is beauty and truth in it!" Gorky called literature "the all-seeing eye of the world, an eye whose gaze penetrates into the deepest recesses of the life of the human spirit." “An artist,” Gorky said later, “is the feeling of his country, of his class, his ear, eye and heart; he - voice of his era ”.
Lenin insistently emphasized the writer's dependence on the social environment in which he grew up: "You cannot live in society and be free from society." In the first years of socialist construction, he spoke about the dependence of art on the people it serves: “Art belongs to the people ... It should unite the feeling, thought and will ... of the masses, and raise them up. It should awaken artists in them and develop them. " Today, at the time of the creation of the communist system, the party is fighting to ensure that literature and art are always inextricably linked with the life of the people.
The public image of the writer is synthesis his beliefs, knowledge and life experience. The artist of the word, according to the remarks of the Armenian writer Stefan Zorian, “only then will he become a master when he knows life to the very depths ... And this requires firm convictions that have become the flesh and blood of the writer ...” These “convictions” form the writer's worldview, which he is guided by in all his artistic creation. The writer's worldview reflects his views on humanity, people, society, on the historical past and the present.
The worldview of a writer may be limited by the interests of a conservatively-minded stratum of society, and then it harms his artistic creativity, makes it smaller and dries it up. Such is Scribe, a consistently bourgeois artist who studied, as Herzen put it, "the slightest bends" of this property-owning class, depicting reality from the point of view of its interests.
In the past, very often the worldview of even progressive writers was notable for inconsistency. Goethe, according to Engels' description, was “sometimes colossally large, sometimes shallow; then it is a rebellious, mocking genius despising the world, then a cautious, contented, narrow philistine » . But in this deeply contradictory worldview, the progressive principle decisively prevailed over philistinism. It was this progressive principle that nourished the most valuable aspects of Goethe's work for us, opened the way for him to a true reflection of reality.
Gogol's worldview was also limited and inconsistent. He, according to Chernyshevsky, “was struck by the ugliness of the facts, and he expressed his indignation against them; about the sources from which these facts arise, what connection is between the branch of life in which these facts are encountered, and other branches of mental, moral, civil, state life, he did not think much. " In this respect, Shchedrin is free from Gogol's "instinctive" view of Russian reality, from that "tightness of the horizon" that was Gogol's historical and social misfortune. And this is because, unlike Gogol, the noble enlightener of the 1930s, Shchedrin was, in his outlook, a revolutionary democrat, a “party man,” as he once called himself.
But Gogol's worldview also had its deeply progressive sides. It was them that Lenin had in mind when he spoke of the ideas of Belinsky and Gogol, "which made these writers dear ... to every decent person in Russia ..." Artistic images of Gogol beat immeasurably further than he wanted as a person of his environment. It follows from this that the realistic power of a writer, based on the advanced aspects of his worldview, often triumphs over his prejudices. As Turgenev said, "to accurately and strongly reproduce the truth, the reality of life, is the highest happiness for a writer, even if this truth does not coincide with his own sympathies." But this "striving to reproduce truth, reality" is based on certain progressive aspects of the writer's worldview, which is deeper and more organic than some of his "sympathies". The nature of this contradiction was characterized by Gorky, who wrote: "The work of a writer is distinguished not only by the strength of direct observation and experience, but also by the fact that the living material on which he works has the ability to resist the arbitrariness of the class sympathies and antipathies of the writer." As we will see later, this ability of living material to resist the arbitrariness of the writer is reflected in his work, in particular on the image and plot (see below, pp. 334–339 and 408–410).
The characteristic that Dobrolyubov gave to the worldview of the writer is extremely significant. “In the works of a talented artist, no matter how varied they are, one can always notice something in common that characterizes all of them and distinguishes them from the works of other writers. In the technical language of art, it is customary to call it outlook artist. But it would be in vain for us to bother to bring this world outlook into certain logical constructions, to express it in abstract formulas ... His own view of the world, which serves as the key to characterizing his talent, must be sought in the living images he creates. " It is this concrete, sensual, figurative form of worldview that leads the artist of the word to the fact that in his work he objectively often refutes what he believes in as a person, and, conversely, asserts what as a person treats with distrust. Such is, for example, Balzac. Full of legitimist prejudices, at the same time, Engels pointed out, "saw the inevitability of the fall of his beloved aristocrats and described them as people who did not deserve a better fate ... ”In this and in the fact that the writer "saw the real people of the future where they were the only one to be found at that time, ”and that was one of the greatest victories of old Balzac's realism.
The worldview of a writer is not only what he believes in, but also what how he penetrates with the deep gaze of the artist into reality, and what he, as a result of this penetration, captures in his work.
Chernyshevsky declared: "My only merit - but important, more important than any skill in writing - is that I understand things more correctly than others." Exactly this correct understanding of things, stemming from the writer's worldview, helped the most prominent artists of world literature to create their masterpieces. It helped Shakespeare write Hamlet, for the person who wrote Hamlet fully understood Hamlet's illness. This "correct understanding of things" contributed enormously to Balzac's success. It also helped the progressive German writer to outstrip contemporary society in his insight: as Engels wrote, “what neither the government nor the liberals noticed, at least one person saw already in 1833; his name, however, was Heinrich Heine. "
In order to successfully complete the tasks before him, the writer must first of all educate yourself. To achieve this, the writer is helped by the culture of all advanced, progressive humanity influencing him - and above all the culture of the nation that raised him. He is born as her son. Throughout the entire creative activity of the writer, his filial love for the homeland grows and strengthens in him. That is why the first social quality of a writer, like any other cultural figure, is his blood connection with his homeland, his patriotism.
Since childhood, the writer has been imbued with a deep love for the nature of his native land. In the early years, he assimilated the characteristic features of folk psychology, got acquainted with the life of the masses, and absorbed their interests. From childhood, admiration for folklore lives in him, the treasures of which reach the future writer and directly, through the stories of others, through the first books he read, etc. At the same time, he gets acquainted with the apt and figurative language of his people. "Homeland," Aseev points out, "begins with love for the word, for its language, for its history, its sound."
But patriotism is not only and not so much in the sources of the culture on which the writer relies, and not in his views alone. The writer's very work, his most vital work, is patriotic. Pushkin's patriotism is his ardent service to the cause of liberating his people from the oppression of autocracy and serfdom, this is his hatred of the oppressors and his deep love for the common people of the then Russia. At the same time, this is the creation of a literary language by Pushkin and, with the help of the latter, literature, which has become available to depict the entire completeness of Russian reality, all the depths of the inner world of man.
Patriotism has two primordial and worst enemies - leavened nationalism and groundless cosmopolitanism. The first asserts: only what is created by the hands of a given people is good. Declaring their people "exceptional", nationalists ignore what is happening abroad, despise other peoples. Cosmopolitans completely remove the task of original development, treating everything that constitutes a truly living nerve of culture — its blood connection with national life, with the reality of the native country. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are two deeply reactionary extremes that converge in a misunderstanding of the value of the original development of national literature.
Rejecting nationalism and cosmopolitanism, patriotic writers affirm the principle of critical development of all the wealth of world culture in the name of the needs of their country and their culture.
Already Belinsky more than a century ago came out to fight both of these hostile ideological systems. “Some,” he wrote in 1848 about the Slavophiles and Westernizers, “rushed into a fantastic nationality, others - into a fantastic cosmopolitanism in the name of humanity”. The great Russian critic was distant and hostile to both the isolationist pathos of the zealots of Russian patriarchalism and the supposedly humanistic pathos of those who replaced the concept of the national with the concept of the human. “The human,” Belinsky pointed out, “does not come to the people from outside, from worthlessness, and it always manifests itself in it nationally.”
Patriotism is part of the flesh and blood of all the activities of the artist of the word; it is clearly reflected in the very methods of writing. The writer seeks to know his country, the whole world, in order to correctly portray them. He takes a direct part in the social struggle, gets to know the mass of people, makes long journeys. He observes reality, introducing into his field of vision the most diverse phenomena of life, getting to know different peoples of the globe, depicting its most diverse places. All this boundless fund of life experience and observations is clothed by the writer in a figurative form. No matter how varied in its forms the artistic work of the writer, it always pursues the goal of creating a work not only worthy of the people to which the artist belongs, but also a leading work, which is a part of the people's struggle. Consciousness of blood connection with the homeland helps the writer to define his creative tasks, multiplies his strength, leads him forward, to new and new achievements.
The best writers of the past thought about the reader incessantly. Belinsky also noted that when a work is artistic, “readers see living images in its faces, and not ghosts, rejoice at their joys, suffer from their sufferings, think, reason and argue among themselves about their meaning, their fate ...” Writers of the past centuries did not think of their work outside the sympathetic perception of it by the reader. Dostoevsky pointed out that "it is always dearer and more important for a writer to hear a kind and encouraging word directly from a sympathetic reader than to read any ... praise in print." Leskov said: "the spiritual connection that forms between the reader and the writer is understandable to me, and I think that it is dear to any sincere writer."
Gleb Uspensky's impressions from the letter to him from fifteen St. Petersburg proletarians testify to what joy the communication with his readers gave the writer at that time. “We, workers, literate and illiterate, have read and listened to your books, in which you talk about us, a simple, gray people. You speak of him fairly ... ”Ouspensky was deeply moved by these artless lines of letters from ordinary Russian people; he greeted in the last "a new, fresh lover of literature", the first representatives of the rising "mass of a new, future reader."
However, under the conditions of pre-October Russia, there was no strong connection between the writer and his readers - external reasons, mainly of a censorship and political nature, interfered with its establishment. Before the revolution, Serafimovich “instinctively felt all the time”: “I am not reading the desired reader who interested me, for whom I thought about every color, every little stroke at night. “My” reader was unattainable for me: I knew that he was overwhelmed by unbearable animal labor, grief and poverty, that he sometimes had no time for books, that he was illiterate. "
Gorky spoke with particular force about the importance of the reader for the creation of the literature of socialist realism. In a letter to novice writers, he pointed out that “the literary work only more or less strongly affects the reader when the reader sees everything that the writer shows him, when the writer gives him the opportunity to also“ imagine ”- add, add - pictures, images , figures, characters, given by the writer, from his reading, personal experience, from his stock, the reader, impressions, knowledge. From the fusion, coincidence of the experience of the writer with the experience of the reader, artistic truth is obtained - that special persuasiveness of verbal art, which explains the power of the influence of literature on people. " "... Never before, - emphasized Gorky, - the writer was not so interesting, so close to the mass of readers, as close, interesting he is in our days, here, in the Union of Soviets ..."
Blok proved the validity of these Gorky statements "by contradiction." In the dead of 1909, he said that "the last and only true excuse for a writer is the voice of the public, the incorruptible opinion of the reader." In the soul of the artist of the word “there should always be a hope that at the most necessary moment the reader’s voice will be heard, encouraging or condemning. It’s not even a word, not even a voice, but a kind of light breath of the soul of the people, not of individual souls, but of a collective soul ”.
These hopes have come true only in our time.
I took every opportunity to oppose my work to Pushkin's. They called this "the polemic of Nekrasov with Pushkin", and in their articles they abundantly quoted such works of Nekrasov, which, at a superficial glance, could indeed be considered anti-Pushkin. But only at a superficial glance.
For the first time, this polemic was outlined with sufficient clarity in Nekrasov's poem "Muse" (1851).
Born into the family of the Polish aristocrat Apollo Kozhenyowski, romantic poet, follower of A. Mickiewicz. Conrad got his first idea of English literature as a child from his parents' translations of W. Shakespeare's plays. A contradictory attitude towards Russia was formed in him, if their family with the participation of the father of the national liberation movement was subjected to administrative expulsion to Vologda in 1863
In 1874, the young man unexpectedly left the Krakow gymnasium in Marseille, where he was hired as a sailor. In 1878 Konrad tried to kill himself.
In A. I. Solzhenitsyn's novel In the First Circle, which is rich in reflections on the appointment of a writer in Russia, we find frequent reviews on a topic of interest to us. These reviews belong both to the narrator himself and to characters close to him in spirit. One of the episodes of the novel (chapter sixty-two) is dedicated to our frank "male conversation" between two in-laws: the "famous" Soviet writer Nikolai Galakhov and Soviet diplomat Innokenty Volodin.
And it seemed that this would be the beginning of immortality ... "Now (during the novel action) or.
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For many countries of Western Europe, the 15th century was a turning point in their development. A new era began - the era of the collapse of the feudal system and the emergence of bourgeois social relations, which destroyed the feudal isolation of economic relations, their limitedness and required space for the further development of productive forces. Only now, in fact, were the foundations for the late development of large-scale production being laid. The Writer's Diary, which he writes almost entirely himself, requires a tremendous amount of work, but he still publishes two novels: The Teenager and The Brothers Karamazov, which he considers to be his masterpiece. Not wrong. In this main work, he again returns to the main themes of his work. Opening the book, the reader finds himself in a chaotic world where the real is intertwined with.
The phantoms that are found in those twilight lands do not need food or sleep, and, because they close their eyes to rest, they are immediately possessed by dreams.
The annual turnover of rural life in our country not long ago (and in some places - and still, although in fragments) was very
interesting is the system of rituals and services: prayers, magical acts and meals - victims, to which the old Ukrainian
supported and managed his relationship to the pre-Christian world: to those forces that are ruled, to his
human surroundings and to those generations that have gone down to whom he inspired his own truth.
The writer Maxim Gorky reflects in his work about the polarity of views on the world. In the first person, the author describes a person with a worldview that differs from the point of view of the "crowd".
Indicative is the episode of Kapendyukhin's perception of the narrator's words that if he were rich, he would certainly buy books. The Cossack, who asked the question, turned away from him in annoyance. People always dream of changes for the better, but when the majority does nothing for this.
When changes do begin, there are many skeptics who condemn the actions of others.
Gorky believes that people are not able to perceive acts that are unusual for them positively, even clearly good ones. An example of this is the act of the protagonist and his friend. Together with Pavel, the narrator laundered the dying Davydov, but those around him laughed at the assistants, as if they had done something shameful.
I think the author is right in his vision of the problem of worldview. Society, unfortunately, is like a herd; it rejects dissent. Deprived of critical thinking, people always consider other views to be wrong, which leads to disastrous results.
You can turn to the work "Doctor Who", the protagonist of which stands out for his intelligence. This extraordinary quality is perceived as a threat, they even wanted to hide it in a magic box from which there is no way out.
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Artistic typification and worldview of the writer
The writer, reproducing real reality, artistically typing its phenomena, inevitably expresses his point of view, his sympathies and antipathies. The writer's likes and dislikes, no matter how brightly individual they are, are basically determined by social conditions. The essence of every person, and, consequently, of a writer, “is not an abstract inherent in a separate individual. In its reality, it is the totality of all social relations. "
In a class society, the artist reflects, creatively reproduces the characters and phenomena of life, always from certain class positions.
M. Gorky remarkably said: “The writer is the eyes, ears and voice of the class. He may not be aware of this, deny it, but he is always and inevitably the organ of the class, its sensory. "
The social position of the writer manifests itself in one way or another in all aspects of a work of art, but it is most directly and directly expressed in the selection, assessment and disclosure of typical human characters.
Each class has well-known ideals and aspirations, goals and objectives. Expressing them, writers in their works highlight certain social characters, social types.
The writer's ideological position is manifested not only in the selection of the typical, in the focus on certain social phenomena, but also in their assessment. In accordance with his progressive or reactionary views, the writer depicts typical life phenomena either in their true essence or in a distorted manner.
What phenomena of the life process the writer considers typical, how he evaluates their connection with other phenomena, what he puts forward as positive or negative, leading or secondary - this expresses his understanding of life, his ideological and aesthetic, social, class position.
The worldview of a writer determines the nature of his vision of the world and the degree of truthfulness of his artistic creations.
The more progressive the worldview of the writer, the more correct his understanding of the world, the more faithfully and fully he is able, with an equal degree of talent and skill, to reproduce typical characters and phenomena of reality.
The leading role of the worldview in the creative process, in artistic typification is confirmed by the entire history of world literature.
Everything great, truly artistic in literature is created, as a rule, by progressive classes and writers. Everything truly aesthetic is affected in one way or another by the influence of progressive ideas, the liberation struggle of the people, and the reflection of the truth of life. For example, the Western European bourgeoisie created "miracles of art" (Marx and Engels) precisely at the time when it was progressive, when its subjective aspirations coincided to one degree or another with the objective course of social development. Representatives of the progressive and reactionary nobility participated in the creation of Russian literature along with other classes. But the best works that have stood the test of time, as a rule, belong to representatives of not reactionary, but progressive nobility, such as Radishchev, Griboyedov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev.
Fiction reflects the struggle of classes defending their ideas and interests.
In an antagonistic society, the class struggle has different stages and degrees of development. At the higher stages, it takes on a political character and takes shape as a struggle between parties. “In a society based on the division of classes,” teaches Lenin, “the struggle between hostile classes inevitably becomes, at a certain stage of its development, a political struggle. The most integral, complete and formalized expression of the political struggle of classes is the struggle of parties. "
Thus, the concept of class is not identical with the concept of partisanship. Party membership is the highest manifestation of social consciousness and class struggle; it is associated with the conscious protection of the socio-political interests of a particular class. Lenin points out that partisanship obliges "in any assessment of an event to directly and openly take the point of view of a certain social group."
At the same time, it is impossible to mechanically identify the partisanship of organizational-political, literary-journalistic and scientific activities with the partisanship of artistic creativity. Lenin warned that "the literary part of the party business of the proletariat cannot be stereotypically identified with other parts of the party business of the proletariat."
In artistic creation, socio-political views are manifested more complexly, less directly and directly than in philosophy, political economy, history and other social sciences.
The partisanship of a writer in any era is not necessarily associated with his organizational entry into one or another political party, as hostile to us bourgeois critics abroad, as well as home-grown vulgarizers and simplists, strive to present. The partisanship of a writer is determined by the nature of his political convictions.
Partisanship, as a conscious protection of the socio-political interests of a certain class, manifests itself in different ways, depending on specific historical conditions.
Thus, the revolutionary democrats saw themselves as spokesmen for the interests of the common working people, in particular and especially the peasantry, and called themselves representatives of the "party of the people." The partisanship of the revolutionary democrats imparted to their artistic creativity an ideological clarity, which was expressed in the emphasized relevance of social problems that met the most important needs of the then social development, in open communication with the oppressed people, in the sharp opposition of the interests of the landowners to the interests of the peasants, in ardent hatred of the oppressors of the people, in a direct appeal peasants to indignation, to a revolutionary uprising. But the partisanship of the revolutionary democrats was not consistent and strict. Some degree of inconsistency in socio-political views is inherent in revolutionary democrats, as well as their predecessors. Chernyshevsky was a revolutionary democrat, but in his ideas about socialism and the ways of building it, he remained a utopian socialist. Nekrasov, being an unstable, weak person, hesitated between Chernyshevsky and the liberals, etc.
The partisanship of the various classes is not the same in the form of its expression. The exploiting classes, defending their socio-political positions hostile to the people, most often hypocritically hide their partisanship and act as champions of non-partisanship. That is why Lenin pointed out that "non-partisanship is a bourgeois idea." While creating parties, these classes hide their interests behind false phrases about the protection of allegedly national, general, and universal needs and requirements.
At the same time, it must be said that many even progressive writers, due to the contradictory nature of their worldview, quite sincerely considered and consider themselves alien to any class, political interests, free and independent from the influences of the class struggle. Among Russian writers such were, for example, A.K. Tolstoy, Korolenko and Chekhov.
The highest form of partisanship is the proletarian, communist partisanship. This partisanship is carried out as a direct, open and consistent defense of the social and political interests of the working class.
The essence of the partisanship of the working class, manifested in its literature, is classically revealed in Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature."
“Literary work,” Lenin argued in this article, “must become a part of the general proletarian cause, the“ wheel and cog ”of one single, great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literary work should become an integral part of organized, planned, united Social Democratic Party work. "
The working class, defending its socio-political ideas, defends the vital needs, needs and aspirations of all working people. Therefore, the working class is interested not in concealing, but in the broadest explanation of its political positions. In order to draw millions of working people into the liberation movement, the working class is striving in every way to raise the social and political consciousness of the entire working people. This is the reason that "partisanship is a socialist idea." Lenin explained: "Strict partisanship has always been and is being defended only by the Social Democracy, the party of the class-conscious proletariat."
Bourgeois critics, seeking to discredit the literature of socialist realism, shout that the proletarian partisanship allegedly limits the freedom of the writer and leads to sectarianism. But this is sheer slander.
The proletarian partisanship, representing the socio-political views of the most advanced, consistently revolutionary class that defends the interests of all working people, is the highest expression of objectivity. This partisanship not only does not restrict writers, but, on the contrary, determines their unlimited creative freedom, no longer imaginary, but true, real. This partisanship completely frees writers from narrow-group social ties, makes them consistent exponents of feelings, thoughts and aspirations of all strata of the working people, determines the complete clarity of their goals and objectives and gives them the opportunity for a truly scientific vision and the most truthful depiction of life.
Communist partisanship opens up to writers such opportunities for an objective, broad and deep view of the world, which could not have been possessed by writers of any literary trend that preceded socialist realism. Given equal conditions of talent and skill, outside of which there can be no truly artistic creativity, it is the communist party spirit that ensures the creation of works that are the most aesthetically perfect.
Lenin, contrasting literature that is hypocritically free, but in fact connected with the bourgeoisie, with the exploiting classes, literature is really free, organically connected with the working class, with the working people, wrote: “This will be free literature, because not self-interest and not a career, but an idea socialism and sympathy for the working people will recruit more and more forces into its ranks. It will be free literature, because it will serve not the jaded heroine, not the bored and obese "top ten thousand", but millions and tens of millions of workers who make up the flower of the country, its strength, its future. It will be free literature, fertilizing the last word of the revolutionary thought of mankind with the experience and living work of the socialist proletariat, creating constant interaction between the experience of the past (scientific socialism, which completed the development of socialism from its primitive, utopian forms) and the experience of the present (the real struggle of the workers' comrades). "
Lenin's dream of a party, socialist, truly free literature consistently connected with the people was realized and is being embodied by the best writers of socialist realism.
These writers, party and non-party, are proud of their connection with the people and their Communist Party. In serving the people and their party, they draw strength and inspiration.
“We live,” wrote M. Gorky in his article “On Socialist Realism,” “in a happy country where there is someone to love and respect. In our country, love for a person should arise - and it arises - from a feeling of surprise in front of his creative energy, from the mutual respect of people for their boundless labor collective power, creating socialist forms of life, out of love for the party, which is the leader of the working people of the whole country and the teacher of the proletarians. of all countries ".
Emphasizing his open connection with the working class, Mayakovsky exclaimed:
I am happy that I am a particle of this power, that even tears from the eyes are common. It is impossible to receive communion stronger and cleaner great feeling by name - class!
N. Ostrovsky's works arose from a passionate desire "to be something useful to his party, to his class." Describing the ideological orientation of the novel Born by the Storm, he said: “The leitmotif of my new book is devotion to the Motherland. When reading my book, I want the reader to be seized by the most beautiful of feelings - the feeling of loyalty to our great party. "
The work of Gorky, Mayakovsky, Sholokhov, Fadeev, N. Ostrovsky, Fedin, Tvardovsky, Isakovsky and many other representatives of socialist realism organically merged with the national movement led by the Communist Party. The literature of socialist realism consciously subordinated itself to the interests of Soviet state policy and became part of the national struggle for communism.
Communist partisanship permeates all the best works of Soviet literature. So, for example, the communist partisanship in M. Sholokhov's novel "Virgin Soil Upturned" is manifested in the open defense of the interests of the people, the working class and the peasantry, in the consistent assertion of the advantages of the collective economy over the individual one, in showing the leading role of the Communist Party in the process of socialist restructuring of the countryside, in the correct understanding and portraying the social forces and typical characters of the post-October village, in exposing the bourgeois-kulak forces hostile to Soviet power.
The communist partisanship of the literature of socialist realism is also expressed in the fact that at every stage of the development of socialist society, literature comes out with themes, problems and ideas that effectively help the struggle of the Soviet people, the Communist Party in the implementation of concrete historical tasks determined by this period. For example, during the Great Patriotic War, the literature of socialist realism came out with themes and ideas aimed at defending the Motherland, against fascism. In the postwar period, Soviet literature was actively involved in the heroic struggle of the Soviet people for the restoration of the national economy destroyed by the fascists, for further socialist construction, for a gradual transition from socialism to communism, for world peace.
Soviet writers, both party and non-party, displaying their communist party spirit, have created wonderful works filled with genuine truthfulness, high ideology and artistry. And the higher the ideological and political level of Soviet writers, the more consciously they manifest communist partisanship, the more, of course, with talent and skill, they reproduce with greater truthfulness, completeness, depth and acuteness the typical characters and phenomena of both modern and past life. ... Such works as "The Artamonovs Case" by M. Gorky, "Chapaev" by D. Furmanov, "Iron Stream" by A. Serafimovich, "Cement" by F. Gladkov, "Love Yarovaya" by K. Trenev, "Virgin Soil Upturned" serve as convincing evidence of this. and “Quiet Don” by M. Sholokhov, “How the Steel Was Tempered” by N. Ostrovsky, “Walking Through the Torment” by A. Tolstoy, “First Joys” by K. Fedin, “Young Guard” by A. Fadeev, essays by V. Ovechkin.
Communist partisanship is the leading principle of socialist realism that determines its success. That is why any statements against this principle, direct or veiled, appearing in the foreign press are essentially directed against the method, theory and practice of socialist realism.
There are writers who defend the social and political interests of their class openly and directly. The most striking example of this is the representatives of socialist realism.
There are writers who defend the social and political interests of their class, hiding behind hypocritical phrases about non-partisanship. This is how reactionary bourgeois writers operate.
But there are writers whose work often conflicts with their socio-political views.
Some critics and literary scholars perceive the writer's worldview to be too simplistic. The writer's worldview is a complex unity of political, philosophical, economic, historical and other views. The worldview is not only complex, but often very contradictory. It has both strengths and weaknesses. And these contradictions, the strengths and weaknesses of the writer's worldview, inevitably manifest themselves in his work.
The worldview of the writer is all the time under the more or less direct influence of social conditions, life connections and the facts that the writer encounters. While the weaknesses of his worldview limit the artist's creativity, the strengths have a beneficial and positive effect, contribute to the truthful reproduction of reality. Real reality, the objective logic of its facts, often introduces tendencies into the writer's work that contradict his socio-political views. There are numerous examples in the history of literature when the objective meaning of works to one degree or another does not coincide with the subjective intentions of their authors. In a letter to MM Kovalevsky, Marx points out: “... it is necessary for a writer to distinguish between what an author actually gives and what he gives only in his own understanding. This is true even for philosophical systems: so, two completely different things - what Spinoza considered the cornerstone in his system, and what actually constitutes this cornerstone. " Such an example is Balzac, whose socio-political views and practice of artistic creation are in clear contradiction. According to his socio-political views, Balzac was a defender of the reactionary nobility, but with all this “his satire was never more poignant, his irony was more bitter than when he forced those people whom he sympathized most with - aristocrats and aristocrat. The only people about whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration are his most ardent political opponents, Republicans ... ".
The ideas that the iron logic of life, objective facts imperiously interfere in the creative process, correct and change the original author's intentions, have been repeatedly expressed by the creators of works of art themselves.
So, M. Gorky, in contrast to vulgar sociologists, argued that "the breadth of observations, the richness of everyday experience often equip the artist with a force that overcomes his personal attitude to facts, his subjectivism."
L. Tolstoy in a conversation with N. Rusanov said: “In general, my heroes and heroines sometimes do things that I would not want: they do what they should do in real life and as happens in real life, and not what I would like to".
The presence of writers with a contradictory worldview, writers whose work is in more or less contradiction with their socio-political views, serves as convincing evidence of the fallacy of the assertion that the problem of typicality is always a political problem and the typical is the main sphere of manifestation of partisanship.
Indeed, is it possible that the proposition of typicality as a problem "always political" can be guiding in the study of the work of such complex, contradictory writers as Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, A.K. Tolstoy, Y. Polonsky, Leskov, L.N. . Thick? What can this situation lead to when understanding the work of writers like Maikov, Fet, Tyutchev?
Simplifying, impoverishing and distorting their creative appearance, we will be forced to characterize Turgenev only as a noble liberal, Goncharov only as a bourgeois liberal, Fet only as a noble reactionary, Dostoevsky of the post-reform period as an exponent of petty-bourgeois reactionaryism, etc. But their work clearly does not fit into the vulgar sociological schemes just mentioned.