Determination of the word grotesque in literature briefly. What is grotesque in literature? Definition and examples

Determination of the word grotesque in literature briefly. What is grotesque in literature? Definition and examples

Grotesque is a literary artistic reception that is born at the junction of reality and fiction. Wanting to emphasize some features or phenomena, the authors change, deform them, striving for an implausible increase, expansion.

Grotesque is used in the literature to immerse the reader in an absurd, sometimes the crazy world and thereby help him realize the absurdity and the disadvantage of drawn ideas, phenomena. What is happening in the works often resembles a narcallic nonsense, dreams of crazy or aliens.

The determination of grotesque includes the ratio of the image with reality in order to emphasize the obvious, striking fantasticity and absurdity.

Also there is a deliberable commerity or tragic farce, designed to reduce sympathy for heroes and make fun of them even in their distress. The reader is strengthened and wants to awaken, but the author's goal is to take possession of attention so that after reading only an understanding of the veiled idea of \u200b\u200bthe work remains.

Examples of grotesque in literature

The images arising from the end of the Consciousness in hypertrophied form are most often intended to influence the subconscious, thus issuing secret thoughts and secret throwing. Characteristic examples that make it possible to understand what grotesque in the literature is:

  1. Weave sleep and reality, and the dream is necessarily saturated with terrible details, dangerous and huge images, such as Tatiana's sleep in which the beloved becomes a bear, surrounded by monsters or a Skolnikov's sleep, in which the great evil appear in the image of the old woman.
  2. The transformation of the part into an integer, such as in the story of the "nose" of Gogol, the Nose of the official goes and becomes an independent citizen.
  3. Complete identity change, as in the story "Transformation" of Kafki, in which the hero becomes a disgusting insect and dies.
  4. The revival of the dead and its active and often destructive actions, the example of the sandy man of the gofman.
  5. The discharge of the comic or tragicomic effect, the scene in which the hero challenges himself with cucumber in the "Stories of one city" Saltykov -Chadrin.

Sometimes whole novels are a unique combination of grotesque images:

  • "Master and Margarita" M. Bulgakov (chase of the homeless wave and his retinue, Master and Margarita meeting, description of Bala Voland),
  • "Dead souls" n Gogol (images of the heroes, with whom the chicters are found),
  • "Castle" kafki,
  • poetry of Mayakovsky (Earth's physicity, having worked people, reviving weapons).

Grotesque - (from fr. - Freaky, intricate; Funny, comic, from ital. - Grotto) - image of people, items, parts in visual art, theater and literature in a fantastically exaggerated, ugly-comic form; A peculiar style in art and literature, which emphasizes the distortion of generally accepted norms and at the same time compatibility of real and fantastic, tragic and comic, sarcasm and harmless soft humor. The grotesque necessarily disrupts the boundaries of believing, gives the image some conventionalness and displays an artistic image outside the probability, consciously deforming it. The grotesque style was obtained in connection with the ornaments found at the end of the 15th century Raphael and his students during excavations in Rome ancient underground buildings, grottoes.

These strange images of the image are freely combined various picturesque elements: human forms passed into animals and vegetable, human figures grew out of the cups of colors, the vegetable shoots were walked with unusual buildings. Therefore, at first Grotesque began to call distorted images, the uglyness of which was explained by the closest area itself, which did not allow the right drawing. In the future, the grotesque style was based on a complex composition of unexpected contrasts and inconsistencies. The transfer of the term to the reference area and the genuine flourishing of this type of image occurs in the era of romanticism, although the appeal to the receivers of satirical grotesque occurs in Western literature much earlier. Elevative examples of this is the books of F. Rabl "Gargantua and Pantagruel" and J. Swift "Hollyvier journey." In Russian literature, the grotesque was widely used when creating bright and unusual artistic images N.V. Gogol ("Nose", "Notes of Crazy"), M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin ("Story of one city", "Wild landowner" and other fairy tales), F.M. Dostoevsky ("Double. Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin"), F. Sologub ("Small Dev"), M.A. Bulgakov ("Fat Eggs", "Dog's Heart"), A. White ("Petersburg", "Masks"), V.V. Mayakovsky ("Misteria-Buff", "Klop", "Banya", "Provered"), A.T. Tvardovsky ("Terkin on that light"), A.A. Voznesensky ("Oza"), E.L. Schwartz ("Dragon", "Naked King").

Along with satirical, grotesque can be humorous when the qualities of the reader are embodied with the help of a fantastic principle and in fantastic forms of appearance and behavior of the reader, as well as tragic (in the works of tragic content telling about attempts and the fate of the spiritual definition of the individual.

In contrast to the life-like conditional image or deforms the outlines of reality, breaking its proportions, sharply facing real and fantastic, either forms the image so that behind depicted (whether it is the phenomenon of nature, the creatures of the animal kingdom or the attributes of real reality) refers to the implied, second meaning image plan. In the first case, in front of us grotesque, in the second - allegory and symbol.

In the grotesque image, it is not easy to conjugate real and fantastic, because both can be dispersed in different shaped structures. In a variety of works, the characters are real and fantastic, but here there is nothing grotesk in mom. The grotesque in the literature occurs when the real and fantastic face in a single image (most often it is a grotesk character).

It is necessary that the character's artistic fabric pass like a "crack", hacking his real nature, and fiction fastened to this gap. It is necessary that the Gogol Major Kovaleva suddenly disappeared on the unknown reason, so that he can go to the general uniform and began to raise on the Avenue of the Northern Capital. Or to give a dobron-obedient cat of the Craisler's Musician Craisler, as if partially parodying the actions of his owner, began to might in love, exactly, exactly how did the studiosuses and the burea prose.

On the other hand, the grotesque is subject not to because it defiantly destroys the life-like logic of reality. It is conditional and due to the special nature of his fiction. The fantastic, concluded in Grotesque, should not seriously qualify for the representation of another, reality "reality". That is why the web of Jerome Bosch is not grotesk. ESChatological horror, spilled on them, does not belong to reality: he is from the world of apocalyptic prophecies. In the same way, the sphere of grotesque fantastic images of the medieval knightly novel, his spirits, fairies, wizards and twins (Blond Isolde and Dark-haired Isolde in Tristan and Isolde) are not a naive feeling of the "second" existence. The Prosaic Hoffmanovsky Archivist Lindglist ("Golden Pot") in his fantastic hatch may be an all-mixture magician, but this second Lick is being conditioned as much as the ironically dual nature of the Gofman Golden pot: whether he is an attribute from the country of Ginnistan, then Is it just a spicy detail of burgher houses.

In short, the grotesque opens the spaciousness for the irony, extending and on the "proceedible". Grotesque Nimalo does not seek to give himself for the phenomenon of "other being". Hofman, however, he would like to range between the two worlds, but this oscillation most often through it is ironic. In the same place where Kharofman really arises in the "other world" ("Mayorate"), the gams are no longer up to grotesk fun (at least inseparable with a drastic tragedy) - there (as, for example, in his "night" novels) It reigns romantically terrible, and it is quite uniform, that is, it is the "foremost" nature.

Refusing life-like logic, grotesque, naturally, refuses from any externally vitality of motivation. In the draft version of the Gogol Tale "Nose" we meet the following explanation: "However, all this, which is not described here, see Major in a dream." Gogol took this phrase in the final autograph, took off, obeying the errorless of the face of artistic truth. Leave it this clarification in the text of the story, and the whole phantasmagoria would be motivated quite vitality, psychologically natural, at least the illogical "logic" of sleep. Meanwhile, Gogol was important to preserve the feeling of the absurdity of the depicted reality, absurdity penetrating all the "cells" of it and the component of the general background of life in which anything is possible. The fantastic convention of the grotesque here cannot be questioned by any psychological motivation: she needs Gogola to emphasize the essence, the law of reality, by virtue of which she, so to speak, is immanently insane.

The convention of Grotesque is always aimed precisely to the essence, in her name she explodes the logic of life-like. Kafka had to turn her hero of Gregor to the fantastic insect (the story "Transformation") in order to stronger the absoluteness of the alienation, the abundance of which, the more obvious that it extends to the family clan, seemingly designed to resist the disunity, splitting the world. "Nothing dismisses like everyday life," Kafka recorded in his diary.

The grotesca suggests a special, almost the maximum degree of fiction in handling the material of reality. It seems that this freedom is already on the verge of a matter, and it seems that she could pour into the cheerful sense of complete domination over the reproaching, and often tragically absurd reality. In fact, sucking heterogeneous, loosening the causal relations of being and visiting the domination of the need, playing accidents, is it not entitled to feel the creator of grotesque to feel in this world of a funny artistic "self-adequacy" by a demiurge reproducing the universe card?

But with the obvious as if all the freedom of the freedom of Grotesque is not easily, and the "self-wiring" of the artist is nothing more than a framework. The dare of fantasy is connected in Grotesque with a chain of thoughts. After all, both are directed here to expose the life law. Harfman's crumb of Tsakhas ("Chrick Tsakhs, on the Nick CynNober") - just a funny loaf, the efforts of the fellow Fairy Rosabelweede endowed with the ability to transfer other people's advantages, talent and beauty. The tricks of his cunning, he makes grief and confusion to the world of lovers, in which still alive and dignity and good. But as if the Korpmanovsky fantastic geridity goats are uncomfortable, and he completes, by the will of the author, the tricks of his most comic way, drown in Krinka with milk. And if it seems, it seems not to confirm that the free spirit of groteskaya fantasy, thickening the atmosphere of life absurdity, is always able to discharge it, because the spirits caused by him, as if always in his power. If ... if it were not for the "composition" of the life soil, in which the roots of the Hoffmanov image deeply goes. The soil is the "iron and iron", "Torgashka", according to Pushkin's expression, and it does not cancel it by a capricious impulse of imagination. The thirst to devalue everything that the spirit of the Spirit is noted, replacing and compensating for the absence of its own spiritual forces with a leveling equivalent of wealth ("gold hairs" of the zinnoboker and there is a sign of this predatory and leveling force); The audacity and pressure of the insignificant, sweeping on its way the truth, good and beauty, - all this, which will be established in the bourgeois attitude to the world, was captured by Hoffmann at the very beginning of birth.

The ironic fun grotesque not only does not exclude tragedy, but also assumes it. In this sense, the grotesque is located in the aesthetic region of seriously funny. Grotesque is full of surprises, quick transitions from funny to serious (and vice versa). The very line between comic and tragic here is erased, one imperceptibly flows into another. "Laughter through tears" and tears through laughter. Comprehensive trancedia of being. The triumph of the soulless civilization over the culture created an inexhaustible nutrient medium for Grotesque. Allowed from the life of everything that is obliged to the full blooming of the organic principle of being, multiplying the impersonal-mechanical forms in everything, including in human psychology, the predominance of its herd instincts over individual, ethical relativism, blurring the border between good and evil, is such a reality that feeds the variety of grotesk forms in the literature of the XX century. Grotesque in these conditions increasingly acquires a tragic color. In the Roman Kafka "Castle" a dead bureaucratic automation of life, like the church, the castle's neighborhood is sprawling, this nest absurd, gained demonic strength and power over people. The power is the more inevitable that, according to the thought of Kafki, "the person lives a subconscious attraction to the refusal of freedom." History over the absurdity alone with a cleaning force of laughter Grotesque XX century no longer succeed.

The grotesque put forward by the artist to the center of the work creates a kind of "infectious" radiation, exciting almost all areas of the image and above all style. Groteskoy style is often saturated with ironic art grimers, demonstratively by alogic "structures", the comic pretense of the author. Such is the Gogol style in the story "nose", the style that falls a thick "shadow" of the grotesk character. Imitation of indescribable frivolity, nude inconsistency of judgments, comic enthusiasm about the little things - this is how everything comes from the character. This psychological "field" blends in the narration of Gogol, and the most syllable of the author turns into a mirror reflecting the grotesk object. Therefore, and in the style of Gogol, the absurdity of peace and man penetrates. The grotesca initiates special style mobility: fluent transitions from the bag to irony, connecting to the author's speech tissue of the imitated voice and intonation of the character, and sometimes the reader (narrative passage, the final story "nose").

The logic of Grotesque pushes the author to such storylock, which naturally flow from the "semi-infantastic" nature of the character. If one of the Shchedrian city holders ("the history of one city") stuffed head, excessing seductive gastronomic fragrance, it is not surprising that one day it is thrown on it with knives and forks and devour. If the ugly Gofman Zinnober is a pitiful dwarf, then there is nothing incredible in that in the end he falls into the crinke and sinks in milk.


Grotesque (from Ital. Grottesco is a fancy from Grotta -Hrota) - a peculiar style in the literature, which is emphasized by distortion or mixing the norms of reality and compatibility of contourers - comic and tragic, fantastic and real, etc. Whole literary directions denied Grotesque, arguing that in exaggeration, distortion is not loyalty to "Nature".

Why the reader knows that the baby Gargantua, who came out of the ear of Gargamel, who ate sixteen big barrels, two small and six pots of bits, shouts as if inviting everyone to drink: "Drink, drink, drink." And how to believe that 17,913 cows were allocated for feeding the baby, and 1105 elbows were taken by white woolen matters. And, of course, no gram of truth will find a prudent reader in the story about how, having decided to repay the Parisians for a bad reception, "... Gargantua dismissed his wonderful Gulfik and the top so abundantly watched them that 260,418 people drowned, not counting women and children. "

The grotesque world is the world of conjected to the extreme of exaggeration, often fantastic.

In it, parts of the human body grow threateningly, the scale of phenomena, the size of things and objects changes. At the same time, phenomena and objects go out for their quality boundaries, cease to be themselves.

Type of grotesque imagery is also inherent mythology, archaic art. The term itself appeared much later. When excavations in one of the photos of ancient Rome, the ornaments were found, represented by strange, bizarre weavers of plants, animals, human faces.

Mixing human and animal forms is the most ancient view of Grotesque. In the language, the word grotesque has consolidated in the meaning of a strange, unnatural, bizarre, analogical, and in this reflection of the most important side of aesthetic phenomenon inherent in all kinds of art.

Grotesque in the literature can be not only a reception, an element of style, staining the work into analogous tone, but also in the method of typing. The vertices of his art of the era of the revival of the "Gargantua and Pantagruel" Rabela, "praise stupidity" Erasmid Rotterdam.

In aesthetic respect, the grotesque in the literature is a reaction to the "Principle of Truthfulness", on the art of pedantic loyalty "Nature". A romanticism became such a reaction to the art of classicism. At this time, the awareness of the aesthetic essence of Grotesque comes.

After the appearance of "prefaces to the" Cromwell "(1827) B. Hugugo the popularity of this term has increased. Grotesque often externally unprecedented." Joke "in which" so many unexpected, fantastic, fun, original, called Pushkin "Nose" of Gogol. Rabel in the introduction to the novel addresses readers, "good disciples and other idlers" with a request not to judge the external fun, without thinking as it should, not start laughing.

The grotesque image is committed to extreme generalization, identification of quintessence of time, history, phenomena, human being. This grotesque image is akin to the symbol. Grotesque "Shagreen Leather" was placed Balzac over the "Lower Layer" of works - "scenes of morals". Gogol's "Shinel" is not only not so much the protection of a "little man", how many quintessence of the insignificant of his being. According to Saltykov-Shchedrin, the "History of one city" arose to imagine the very essence of the characteristic features of Russian life, which make it not quite convenient. "

The grotesque in the literature is the artistic unity of contrasts: the top and bottom of the human body (at Rabell), fabulous and real (at the gofman), fiction and life (Gogol). "The grotesque image," wrote M. Bachtin, "characterizes the phenomenon in a state of its change, unfinished metamorphosis, in the stage of death and birth, growth and formation." The scientist showed the ambition of the grotesque image of the People's Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which he simultaneously rinses and approves unlike the denial of the new time satire.

In the grotesque of the Renaissance of paramount importance, there was a contrast of the top and the Niza of the human body, their interchanges. In the realistic grotesque contrast of social. In the story of Dostoevsky "Boboc" are brought together social top and bottom. Barynka Avdota Ignatievna is annoyed by the close neighborhood of the benchmark. Comic in the story of the memory of the grave "society" about the last real, domanic hierarchy. Grotesque contrast penetrates the fabric of the work, expressing in sharp interruptions of the author's speech and speech of heroes.

Realistic art brings unprecedented "psychologicalization of grotesca" (Y.mann). In realistic grotesque, not only the phenomena of the outside world, but also the human consciousness itself, the topic of twins, started by the Gogolian "nose", arises in the literature (after all, the Stat adviser's nose is the double of stupid, vulgar Major Kovalev). The topic of Dostoevsky is developing in the story "Double" and in the "meeting" scene of Ivan Karamazov with a feature.

In the grotesque work, the writer "convinces" the reader in the possibility of the coexistence of the most incredible, fantastic with the real, usual. Fantastic in it is the most pointed reality. Hence the underlined plastic accuracy in the description of the nose and the interlacing of incredible with the scenes of everyday vulgarity in Gogol Tale. In the story of "Bobok" his Excellency, the late Major Major Major plays with the late supervisory advisor to Lebestechikov in the preference. Fantastic crushes and enlarges reality, changes the proportions. Fantasy is not an author's head. She is often "removed" by the writer: in the "journey of Gullyer" the swift - accurate, comically pedantic description of the place and time of action, the scrupulous view of the names and dates, in the "double" of Dostoevsky - the denial of illusiveness, the fantasticity of what is happening, which each time is accompanied by the appearance of a double - Golyadkin - Share. Fantastic is exposed by the writer as an artistic reception, from which at one time it can be refused for further inappropriate. Often the realistic grotesque, the examples of which we led is fully built on the game of various image planes. Sometimes the grotesque work is a parody, such as the "history of one city" Saltykov-Shchedrin.

The grotesque is based on not only the maximum increase - hyperbole, but also metaphor. The metaphoric nature of grotesque scenes in the Poem T.Shevchenko "Sleep", water from which from the king's cry, strictly retaining the hierarchy - from the most "puzzled" to "small", "his minions fall into the land. Satyric grotesque of political poetry T. Shevchenko, ascending to folklore traditions, the traditions of Gogol, Mitskevich, was an innovative phenomenon, he was preceded by Satyric Grotesque Saltykov-Shchedrin.

Art developed the traditions of romantic and realistic grotesque. So, under the influence of the traditions of Hoffman, Gogol, Dostoevsky was born a grotesque style F.Kafki. For the Kafka, a combination of fabulous fantastic, nightmare events with a plausible image of the details of life and the "normal" behavior of people in unusual situations are characteristic. The Hero of the Kafka Kafka "Transformation" The commander, waking up, sees himself turned into an insect.

Grotesque is The type of conditioned fantastic imagery, demonstratively violating the principles of truth-like, in which bizarre and alogically combines the figurative plans and artistic details in reality. Grotesque Ornaments were namedfound at the end of the 15th century. Raphael during the excavations of the ancient Roman term tit. A distinctive feature of these images is a free combination of pictorial elements: human forms passed into animals and vegetable, the figures of people grow out of the cups of colors, the vegetable shoots were walked with chimers and bizarre buildings. These ornaments mention in their book by B. Sellini ("Life Benvenuto Chellin", 1558-65), about their features writes I.V.Goyat, calling them Arabestes. The transfer of the term into the area of \u200b\u200bliterature and the real flourishing of this type of image occurs in the era of romanticism F.Shlegel in the "letter of novel" (1800) considers grotesque as the expression of the spirit of time, his only, along with "personal recognition", a romantic efficiency. On the grotesque, as a characteristic feature of the literature of romantic, unlike the "Form of the Dead" - the literature of the classical, indicates in the manifesto of the French romanticism "Preface to the Kromel drama" (1827) V.Gyugh. The problem of Grotesque addressed S. Bodler in the article "On the nature of laughter and comic in plastic arts", opposing laughter as "just a comic" grotesque as "absolutely comic." The term grotesque became especially popular in the 20th century, initially due to innovative phenomena in theatrical art (VE. Meyerhold), subsequently in connection with the spread of ideas expressed in the book M.M. Bakhtin about F. Barla (1965).

The grotesque could arise in those genres of literature, where the inappropriateness of the fiction was obvious and the author, and the reader (listener). These are the comedian antiquity genres (the comedies of Aristophan, Golden Opel (2nd century), Apuleuya, Humorous and Satyric Works of the Renaissance, Folklore, may be attributed to grotesque works. Starting from the 18th century, grotesque is built mainly on violating the accepted reality reproduction system, With which fiction is in a kind of conflict (grotesque story N.V. Gogol, F.M.Dostoevsky, "History of one city", 1869-70, M. Saltykova-Shchedrin). Grotesque can be humorousWhen the discrepancy between the appearance and behavior of the characters literally embodies the qualities of the characters in the fantastic forms of appearance and behavior of the characters in fantastic forms of appearance and behavior of characters. However, it is in a satire directed for the most part for a ridicule of social vices, where fantastic images perform in the most generalized form, some of the meaningful possibilities of grotesque are fully revealed, in particular, its allegorization. The grotesque can also be tragic - in works with tragic situations, when fate and spiritual confusion of the person are put in the center. This can be an image of the personality suppression by instincts of biological existence ("transformation", 1916, F.Kafki), the motive of a collision with a doll adopted for a person ("Sandy man").