In the same spirit - as the types of relation of the speaker ("speech carrier") to the artistic whole - the types of literature were repeatedly considered later, up to our time. However, in the 19th century (originally - in the aesthetics of romanticism) a different understanding of the epic, lyrics and drama was strengthened: 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 teachings specifically about verbal art). So, Schelling correlated the lyrics with infinity and the spirit of freedom, the epic with pure necessity, but in the drama he saw a kind of synthesis of both: the struggle of 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 terminology corresponding to it) took root in Russian literary criticism.

In the XX century. the types of literature were repeatedly correlated with various phenomena of psychology (recollection, 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 types of literature as types of speech organization of literary works are an undeniable supra-epochal reality worthy of close attention.

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

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

The division of literature into genera does not coincide with its division into poetry and prose (see pp. 236–240). In everyday speech, lyrical works are often identified with poetry, and epic works with prose. This usage is inaccurate. Each of the literary genera includes both poetic (poetic) and prose (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 works written in verse are not uncommon in the literature of the New Age (“Don Juan” by J. N. G. Byron, “Eugene Onegin” by A. S. Pushkin, “Who Lives Well in Russia” by N.A. Nekrasov). In the dramatic kind of literature, both poetry and prose are also used, sometimes combined in the same work (many plays by W. Shakespeare). Yes, and lyrics, mostly poetic, sometimes prose (recall Turgenev's "Poems in Prose").

There are also more serious terminological problems in the theory of literary genders. The words “epic” (“epic”), “dramatic” (“dramaticism”), “lyrical” (“lyricism”) denote not only the generic features of the works in question, but also their other properties. Epic is called majestically calm, unhurried contemplation of life in its complexity and diversity, the breadth of the view of the world and its acceptance as a kind of integrity. In this regard, they often talk about the "epic worldview", artistically embodied in Homer's poems and a number of later works ("War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy). Epicness 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 (“On the Kulikov Field” by A.A. . Block). It is customary to call dramatism a state of mind associated with a tense experience of some contradictions, with excitement 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", a poem by M.I. Tsvetaeva "Longing for the Motherland" Lyricism is imbued with the novel by I.S. Turgenev "The Nest of Nobles", plays by A.P. Chekhov "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard", stories and novels by I. A. Bunin. Epos, lyrics and drama, thus, are free from unambiguously rigid attachment to epic, lyricism and drama as types of emotional and semantic "sound" of works.

The original experience of distinguishing between these two series of concepts (epos - epic, etc.) was undertaken in the middle of our century by the German scientist E. Steiger. In his work "Basic Concepts of Poetics", he characterized the epic, lyrical, dramatic as phenomena of style (tonality types - Tonart), linking them (respectively) with such concepts 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 the dramatic if I associate them with lyrics and drama."

§ 2. Origin of literary genres

Epos, lyrics and drama were formed at the earliest stages of the existence of society, in primitive syncretic creativity. The first of the three chapters of his "Historical Poetics" A.N. Veselovsky, one of the greatest Russian historians and literary theorists of the 19th century. The scientist argued that literary genera 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. Epos, lyrics and drama were interpreted by Veselovsky as having developed from the “protoplasm” of ritual “choir actions”.

From the exclamations of the most active members of the choir (singers, luminaries), lyrical-epic songs (cantilenas) grew up, which eventually separated from the rite: “Songs of a lyrical-epic nature seem to be 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. On the basis of such songs, epic narratives subsequently formed. And from the exclamations of the choir as such, lyricism grew (originally group, collective), which, over time, also separated from the rite. The epic and lyrics are thus interpreted by Veselovsky as "a consequence of the decay of the ancient ritual choir." The drama, the scientist claims, arose from the exchange of remarks of the choir and the singers. And she (unlike the epic and lyrics), having gained independence, at the same time "preserved the entire<…>syncretism" of the ritual choir and was a kind of its likeness.

The theory of the origin of literary genera, put forward by Veselovsky, is confirmed by many facts about the life of primitive peoples known to modern science. So, the origin of the drama from ritual performances is undoubted: 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 epic and lyric poetry could be formed independently of ritual actions. Thus, mythological tales, on the basis of which prose legends (sagas) and fairy tales subsequently became firmly established, arose outside the choir. They were not sung by the participants in the mass ritual, but were told by one of the representatives of the tribe (and, probably, such a story was far from being addressed to a large number of people in all cases). Lyrics could also be formed outside the rite. Lyrical self-expression arose in the production (labor) and domestic relations of primitive peoples. Thus, there were different ways of forming literary genera. And the ritual choir was one of them.

In the epic kind of literature (other - gr. epos - word, speech) the organizing beginning of the work is story about characters (characters), their destinies, actions, mindsets, 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. Narrative is characterized by a temporal distance between the conduct of speech and the subject of verbal designations. It (remember Aristotle: the poet tells “about an event as something separate from himself”) is conducted from the outside and, as a rule, has a grammatical form past tense. The narrator (telling) is characterized by the position of a person who recalls 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 a variety of ways when applied to literature. In a narrow sense, this is a detailed designation in words of what happened once and had a temporal duration. In a broader sense, the narrative also includes descriptions, i.e., recreating by means of words something stable, stable or completely motionless (such are most of the landscapes, the characteristics of the everyday environment, the features of the appearance of the characters, their states of mind). Descriptions are also verbal images of the periodically repeating. “He used to be still in bed: / They carry notes to him,” says, for example, about Onegin in the first chapter of Pushkin's novel. In a similar way, the narrative fabric includes author's reasoning, playing a significant role in L. N. Tolstoy, A. France, T. Mann.

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

Works of the epic kind make full use of the arsenal of artistic means available to literature, easily and freely master reality in time and space. However, they do not know the limitations in the amount of text. Epos as a kind of literature includes both short stories (medieval and renaissance short stories; O'Henry's and early A.P. Chekhov's humor) and works designed for prolonged listening or reading: epics and novels covering life with extraordinary breadth. Such are the Indian "Mahabharata", the ancient Greek "Iliad" and "Odyssey" by Homer, "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy, "The Forsyte Saga" by J. Galsworthy, "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 either other types 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, possessing many features and properties, incomplete and contradictory, in motion, formation, development are quite accessible to her.

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

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

The text of an epic work usually does not contain information about the fate of the narrator, about his relationship with the characters, about when, where and under what circumstances he tells his story, about his thoughts and feelings. The spirit of the story, according to T. Mann, is often "weightless, incorporeal and omnipresent"; and "for him there is no separation between 'here' and 'there'. And at the same time, the narrator's speech has not only figurativeness, but also expressive significance; it characterizes not only the object of the utterance, but also the speaker himself. In any epic work, the manner of perceiving reality is imprinted, inherent in the one who narrates, his vision of the world and his way of thinking. In this sense, it is legitimate to speak of character of a narrator. This concept has become firmly established in 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: “Every image in art forms an idea not only about the depicted, but also about the depicting, the carrier of the presentation.<…>The narrator is not only a more or less concrete image<„.>but also a certain figurative idea, principle and appearance of the speaker, 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 image of the narrator is found 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 behind the naivety and ingenuity of the one who tells the story, gaiety and cunning, life experience and wisdom are guessed. It is impossible to feel the charm of the heroic epics of antiquity without catching the sublime structure of thoughts and feelings of the rhapsodist and storyteller. And even more unthinkable is the understanding of 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 outside the comprehension of the “voice” of the narrator. A lively perception of an epic work is always associated with close attention to the manner in which the story is told. A reader sensitive to verbal art sees in a story, story or novel not only a message about the life of the characters with its details, but also an expressively significant monologue of the narrator.

Literature has different modes of storytelling. The most deeply rooted and presented is the type of narration in which there is, so to speak, an absolute distance between the characters and the one who reports on them. The narrator recounts events with unruffled calmness. Everything is clear to him, the gift of "omniscience" is inherent. And his image, the image of a creature that has ascended above the world, gives the work a flavor of maximum objectivity. Significantly, Homer was often likened to the celestial Olympians and called "divine".

The artistic possibilities of such a narrative are considered in the German classical aesthetics of the era of romanticism. In the epic, “a narrator 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 listeners to net result. And further: “The narrator is alien to the actors<…>he not only surpasses the listeners with his balanced contemplation and sets his story in this way, but, as it were, takes the place of "necessity" .

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

Similar thoughts about the nature of narration were expressed by T. Mann in the article “The Art of the Novel”: “Perhaps the element of narration is the eternal Homeric beginning, this prophetic spirit of the past, which is infinite like the world, and to which the whole world is known, 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 the small”, “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. Antique prose already testifies to this: in the novels "Metamorphoses" ("The Golden Ass") by Apuleius and "Satyricon" by Petronius, the characters themselves talk about what they saw and experienced. Such works express a view of the world that has nothing to do with the so-called "epic worldview".

The literature of the last two or three centuries has almost been dominated by 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 vivid example of this is the detailed picture of the Battle of Waterloo in Stendhal's Parma Monastery. This battle is by no means reproduced in a Homeric way: the narrator, as it were, reincarnates 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 way of depicting. The Battle of Borodino in one of the chapters of "War and Peace" is shown in the perception of Pierre Bezukhov, who was not experienced in military affairs; the military council in Fili is presented in the form of impressions of the girl Malasha. In Anna Karenina, the races in which Vronsky takes part 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 approached by the narrator is depicted as if from within. “You need to transfer yourself to the character,” Flaubert remarked. When the narrator approaches one of the characters, indirect 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 19th–20th centuries. caused by the increased artistic interest in the originality of the inner world of people, and most importantly - 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. Pushkin, Ivan Vasilievich in L.N. Tolstoy's story "After ball”, Arkady Dolgoruky in “The Teenager” by F. M. Dostoevsky).

By the facts of their lives and mindsets, many of the narrators-characters are close (although not identical) to the writers. This takes place in autobiographical works (the early trilogy of L.N. Tolstoy, "The Summer of the Lord" and "Praying Man" by I.S. Shmelev). But more often, the fate, life positions, experiences of the hero who has become a narrator differ markedly from what is inherent in the author (“Robinson Crusoe” by D. Defoe, “My Life” by A.P. Chekhov). At the same time, in a number of works (epistolary, memoir, tale forms), the narrators speak in a manner that is not identical to the author's and sometimes differs quite sharply from it (on someone else's word, see pp. 248–249). The modes of narration used in epic works seem to be very diverse.

§ 4. Drama

Dramatic works (other - 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. Actually, the author's speech here is auxiliary and episodic. Such are the lists of actors, sometimes accompanied by brief characteristics, designation of time and place of action; descriptions of the stage situation at the beginning of acts and episodes, as well as comments on individual replicas of the characters and indications of their movements, gestures, facial expressions, intonations (remarks). All this constitutes side dramatic text. Basic its text is a chain of statements of characters, their replicas and monologues.

Hence some limited artistic possibilities of the drama. The writer-playwright uses only a part of the visual means that are available to the creator of a novel or epic, short story or short story. And the characters of the characters are revealed in the drama with less freedom and fullness than in the epic. "Drama I<…>I perceive, - noted T. Mann, - as the art of the silhouette and I feel only the told person as a voluminous, integral, real and plastic image. At the same time, playwrights, unlike the authors of epic works, are forced to limit themselves to the amount of verbal text that meets the requirements 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 familiar to the new European theater lasts, as you know, no more than three or four hours. And this requires an appropriate size of the dramatic text.

At the same time, the author of a play has significant advantages over the creators of short stories and novels. One moment depicted in the drama closely adjoins another, neighboring one. The time of the events reproduced by the playwright during the “stage episode is not compressed or stretched; the characters of the drama exchange remarks without any noticeable time intervals, and their statements, as K.S. Stanislavsky noted, form a continuous, continuous line. is captured as something past, then the chain of dialogues and monologues in the drama creates the illusion of the present time. Life here speaks as if from its own perspective: there is no intermediary narrator between what is depicted and the reader. The action is recreated in the drama with maximum immediacy. It flows as if before the eyes of the reader. "All narrative forms," ​​wrote F. Schiller, "carry the present into the past; all dramatic forms make the past present."

Drama is stage oriented. Theater is a public, mass art. The performance directly affects many people, as if merging into one in response to what is happening before them. The purpose of the drama, according to Pushkin, is to act on the multitude, to occupy its curiosity” and for this purpose capture the “truth of passions”: “Drama was born on the square and constituted the amusement of the people. The people, like children, require entertainment, action. The drama presents him with extraordinary, strange happenings. The people demand strong sensations<..>Laughter, pity and horror are the three strings of our imagination, shaken by dramatic art. The dramatic genre of literature is especially closely connected with the sphere of laughter, for the theater was consolidated and developed in close connection with mass festivities, in an atmosphere of play and fun. “The comic genre is universal for antiquity,” remarked O. M. Freidenberg. The same is true to say about the theater and drama of other countries and eras. T. Mann was right when he called the "comedian instinct" "the fundamental principle of any dramatic skill."

It is not surprising that drama gravitates towards an outwardly spectacular presentation of what is depicted. Her imagery turns out to be hyperbolic, catchy, theatrical and bright. "The theater requires<…>exaggerated broad lines both in voice, recitation, and in gestures, ”wrote N. Boileau. And this property of stage art invariably leaves its mark on the behavior of the heroes of dramatic works. “How he acted out in the theater,” Bubnov (At the Bottom by Gorky) comments on the frenzied tirade of the desperate Klesh, who, by an unexpected intrusion into the general conversation, gave it theatrical effect. Significant (as a characteristic of the dramatic kind of literature) are Tolstoy's reproaches against W. Shakespeare for the abundance of hyperbole, because of which the possibility of an artistic impression is allegedly violated. “From the very first words,” he wrote about the tragedy “King Lear,” one can see an exaggeration: an exaggeration of events, an exaggeration of feelings and an exaggeration of expressions. L. Tolstoy was wrong in assessing Shakespeare's work, but the idea of ​​the great English playwright's commitment to theatrical hyperbole is completely justified. What has been said about "King Lear" with no less reason can be attributed to ancient comedies and tragedies, dramatic works of classicism, to the plays of F. Schiller and V. Hugo, etc.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, when the desire for worldly authenticity prevailed in literature, the conventions inherent in the drama became less obvious, often they were reduced to a minimum. At the origins of this phenomenon is the so-called "petty-bourgeois drama" of the 18th century, the creators and theorists of which were D. Diderot and G.E. Lessing. Works of the largest Russian playwrights of the XIX century. and the beginning of the 20th 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 set their sights on plausibility, plot, psychological, and actually verbal hyperbole persisted. Theatrical conventions made themselves felt even in Chekhov's dramaturgy, which was the maximum limit of "life-likeness". Let's take a look at the final scene of The Three Sisters. One young woman broke up with a loved one ten or fifteen minutes ago, probably forever. Another five minutes ago found out about the death of her fiancé. And now they, together with the eldest, third sister, sum up the moral and philosophical results of the past, thinking 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, because we are used to the fact that the drama significantly changes the forms of people's life.

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

The most important role in dramatic works belongs to the conventions of speech self-disclosure of the characters, 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 “aside” 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 characters alone, alone with themselves, which are a purely stage technique for bringing out inner speech (there are many such monologues as in ancient tragedies, and in the dramaturgy of modern times). The playwright, setting up a kind of experiment, shows how a person would express himself if he expressed his moods with maximum fullness and brightness in the spoken words. And speech in a dramatic work often takes on a resemblance to artistic lyrical or oratorical speech: the characters 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 beginning (eventfulness) and the lyrical (speech expression).

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

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. The world-famous 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. Molière were perceived by their contemporaries as writers. A decisive role in strengthening the idea of ​​drama as a work intended not only for stage production, but also for reading, was played by the “discovery” in the second half of the 18th century of Shakespeare as a great dramatic poet. From now on, dramas began to be read intensively. Thanks to numerous printed publications in the XIX-XX centuries. dramatic works proved to be an important variety of fiction.

In the 19th century (especially in its first half) the literary merits of the drama were often placed above the scenic ones. So, Goethe believed that "Shakespeare's works are not for bodily eyes", and Griboedov called his desire to hear the verses of "Woe from Wit" from the stage "childish". The so-called Lesedrama (drama for reading), created with the installation primarily on perception in reading. Such are Goethe's Faust, Byron's dramatic works, Pushkin's small 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 the Lesedrama and the play, which the author is oriented towards stage production. Dramas created for reading are often potentially stage dramas. And the theater (including the modern one) stubbornly seeks and sometimes finds the keys to them, evidence of which is the successful productions of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" (first of all, this is the famous pre-revolutionary performance of the Art Theater) and numerous (though far from always successful) stage readings Pushkin's little tragedies in the 20th century.

The old truth remains in force: the most important, the main purpose of the drama is the stage. “Only when performed on stage,” A. N. Ostrovsky noted, “does the author’s dramatic fiction take on a completely finished form and produce exactly the moral action that the author set himself as a goal to achieve.”

The creation of a performance based on a dramatic work is associated with its creative completion: the actors create intonation-plastic drawings of the roles they play, the artist designs the stage space, the director develops the mise-en-scenes. In this regard, the concept of the play changes somewhat (more attention is paid to some of its sides, less attention to others), it is often concretized and enriched: the stage production introduces new elements into the drama. semantic shades. At the same time, the principle of paramount importance for the theater is reading fidelity literature. The director and actors are called upon to convey the staged work to the audience with the maximum possible completeness. Fidelity in stage reading takes place where the director and 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 (even if relative) between the director and actors and the circle of ideas of the writer-playwright, when the stage figures are carefully attentive to the meaning of the staged work, to the features of its genre, the 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 considered as the highest form of literary creativity: as the “crown of poetry”. A whole series of artistic epochs has, in fact, manifested itself predominantly in the dramatic art. Aeschylus and Sophocles in the heyday of ancient culture, Moliere, Racine and Corneille in the time of classicism had no equal among the authors of epic works. Significant in this respect is the work of Goethe. All literary genres 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. This is due to a number of reasons. First, the theatrical art played a huge role, accessible (unlike handwritten and printed books) to the widest strata of society. Secondly, the properties of dramatic works (the depiction of characters with pronounced features, the reproduction of human passions, the attraction to pathos and the grotesque) in the "pre-realist" era fully corresponded to general literary and general artistic trends.

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

§ 5. Lyrics

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

A lyrically imprinted experience differs significantly from directly life emotions, where amorphousness, indistinctness, and randomness take place, and often prevail. Lyrical emotion is a kind of clot, the quintessence of a person's spiritual experience. “The most subjective kind of literature,” L. Ya. Ginzburg wrote about lyrics, “it, like no other, strives for the general, for the depiction of mental life as universal.” The experience underlying the lyrical work is a kind of spiritual insight. It is the result of creative completion and artistic transformation of what is experienced (or can be experienced) by a person in real life. “Even in those days,” N.V. Gogol wrote about Pushkin, “when he himself rushed into the passions, poetry was sacred to him, like some kind of temple. He did not enter there untidy and untidy; he brought in nothing thoughtless, reckless 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 emit this fragrance, no one can hear.

Lyricism is by no means confined to the sphere of the inner life of people, their psychology as such. She is invariably attracted to mental states that signify a person's focus on external reality. Therefore, lyric poetry turns out to be an artistic mastery of states not only of consciousness (which, as G. N. Pospelov insistently says, is primary, main, dominant in it), but also of being. Such are philosophical, landscape and civil poems. Lyrical poetry is capable of capturing spatio-temporal ideas easily and widely, connecting 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 is the biblical Psalms, can acquire a religious character in its most striking examples. It turns out (remember M.Yu. Lermontov's poem "Prayer") "congenial to prayer" captures the thoughts of poets about the higher power of being (ode of G.R. Derzhavin "God") and his communication with God ("Prophet" by A.S. Pushkin ). Religious motifs are very persistent in the lyrics of our century: V.F. Khodasevich, N.S. Gumilyov, A.A. Akhmatova, B. L. Pasternak, among modern poets - O. A. Sedakova.

The range of lyrically embodied concepts, ideas, emotions is unusually wide. At the same time, lyrics, to a greater extent than other types of literature, tend to capture everything that is positively significant and of value. It is not capable of fruitfulness, locking itself in the realm of total skepticism and world-rejection. Let us turn once again to the book by L.Ya. Ginzburg: “At its very essence, lyricism is a conversation about significant, high, beautiful (sometimes in a contradictory, ironic refraction); a kind of exposition of the ideals and life values ​​of a person. But also anti-values ​​- in the grotesque, in denunciation and satire; but it is not here that the high road of lyric poetry passes.

Lyric finds itself 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 M.I. Tsvetaeva, “Poem without a hero” by A.A. Akhmatova), the scope of the poem. The principle of the lyrical kind of literature is “as short as possible and as full as possible”. Aspiring to the ultimate compactness, the most "compressed" lyrical texts are sometimes like proverbial formulas, aphorisms, maxims, which are often in contact and compete with.

The states of human consciousness are embodied in the lyrics in different ways: either directly and openly, in sincere confessions, confessional monologues full of reflection (recall S.A. Yesenin’s masterpiece “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t 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 lyrical work there is a meditative beginning. Meditation (lat. meditatio - thinking, reflection) is called an excited and psychologically intense reflection on something: “Even when lyrical works seem to be devoid of meditativeness and outwardly mostly descriptive, they only turn out to be fully artistic if their descriptiveness has a meditative "subtext". Lyrics, to put it another way, are incompatible with the neutrality and impartiality of tone widely used in epic narratives. The speech of the lyrical 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. "Semantic-phonetic effects" come to the fore in the lyrics in their inextricable connection with the rhythm, as a rule, tense and dynamic. At the same time, the lyrical work in the vast majority of cases has a poetic form, while the epic and drama (especially in eras close to us) turn mainly to prose.

Speech expression in the lyrical kind of poetry is often brought, as it were, to the maximum limit. 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, which lyric poets willingly resort to (especially in our century), neither "ordinary" speech, nor the statements of heroes know. in epic and drama, neither in narrative prose, nor even in verse epic.

In the full expression of lyrical speech, the usual logical ordering of statements is often pushed to the periphery, or even eliminated altogether, which is especially characteristic of the poetry of the 20th century, which was largely preceded 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 devoted to the art of this kind:

And the speech is self-willed,
The order in the scale breaks,
And the notes go upside down
To wake up the voice.

The “lyrical disorder”, familiar to verbal art even earlier, 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 experiences, in complex, logically indefinable movements of the soul. Turning to a speech that allows itself to “be free-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 B.L. Pasternak "Waves", opening the book "Rebirth":

Everything will be here: experienced
And what I still live
My aspirations and principles
And seen in reality.

The expressiveness of speech makes lyrical creativity related to music. P. Verlaine's poem "The Art of Poetry" is about this, containing an appeal addressed to the poet to be imbued with the spirit of music:

It's just a matter of music.
So, don't measure the way.
Prefer almost incorporeality
Everything that is too flesh and body<…>
So music again and again!
Let in your verse with overclocking
Shine in the distance transformed
Another sky and love.

((Translated by B.L. Pasternak))

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

There is, however, a fundamental difference between lyrics and music. The latter (like dance), while comprehending the spheres of human consciousness that are inaccessible to other types of art, at the same time is limited to what conveys general character experiences. Human consciousness is revealed here outside of its direct connection with some 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 loftiness of feeling, reaching the intensity of passion, but we do not associate this with any particular life situation or any particular picture. The listener is free to imagine a sea storm, or a revolution, or the rebelliousness of a love feeling, or simply surrender to the elements of sounds and perceive the emotions embodied in them without any subject associations. Music is able to immerse us in such depths of the 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 conditionality by something and in a direct direction to specific phenomena. Recall, for example, Pushkin's poem "The daylight went out ...". The rebellious, romantic and at the same time sad feeling of the poet is revealed through his impression of the environment (the “gloomy ocean” surging under him, “the distant shore, the lands of midday magic lands”) and through memories of what happened (about the deep wounds of love and youth faded in storms). ). The poet conveys the connections of consciousness with being, 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 emotional movements captured by the artistic word are (recall the poems of V.A. Zhukovsky, A.A. Fet or the early A.A. Blok), the reader will find out what caused them, or, at least, with what connected with impressions.

The bearer of the experience expressed in the lyrics is usually called lyrical hero. This term, introduced by Yu.N. Tynyanov in the 1921 article Blok, is rooted in literary criticism and criticism (along with the synonymous phrases “lyrical self”, “lyrical subject”). They talk about the lyrical hero as “I-created” (M.M. Prishvin), meaning not only individual poems, but also their cycles, as well as the work of the poet 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, know nothing, and the characters of epic and dramatic works, which are invariably distanced from the writer.

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

At the same time, the lyrical experience is not identical to what the poet experienced as a biographical personality. The lyrics do not just reproduce the author's feelings, they transform, enrich, recreate, elevate and ennoble them. This is exactly what A. S. Pushkin’s poem “The Poet” is about (“.. only a divine verb / Touches the sensitive ear, / The poet’s soul will start up, / Like an awakened eagle”).

At the same time, the author in the process of creativity often creates those psychological situations with the power of imagination that did not exist at all in reality. Literary critics have repeatedly been convinced that the motives and themes of A. S. Pushkin's lyrical 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, or in the “mask” of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or as 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 “feel someone else’s instantly as your own” is, according to A.A. Feta, one of the facets of poetic talent. Lyrics that express the experiences of a person who is noticeably different from the author are called role-playing(as opposed to autopsychological). These are the poems “There is no name for you, my distant ...” A.A. Blok - a spiritual outpouring of a girl living in 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 (although this rarely happens) that the subject of a lyrical utterance is exposed by the author. Such is the “moral man” in the poem by N.A. Nekrasov of the same name, who caused many sorrows and troubles to those around him, but stubbornly repeated the phrase: "Living in accordance with strict morality, I did no harm to anyone in my life." Aristotle's earlier definition of lyric (the poet "remains himself without changing his face") is thus inaccurate: the lyric poet may well change his face and reproduce an experience that belongs to someone else.

But the mainstay of lyrical creativity is not role-playing poetry, but autopsychological: poems that are an act of direct self-expression of the poet. 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 lies "in the fact that he writes in obedience to the real need to express his feelings."

Lyricism in its dominant branch is characterized by the charming immediacy of the author's self-disclosure, the "openness" of his inner world. So, delving into the poems of A.S. Pushkin and M.Yu. Lermontova, 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, range of mindset, personal fate.

The relationship between the lyrical hero and the author (poet) is perceived by literary critics in different ways. The opinions 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 invariable presence of the choral principle in it. This idea was developed by S.N. Broitman. He argues that lyric poetry (especially the epochs close to us) is characterized not by “monosubjectivity”, 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 lyrical work as its most important property, which is traditionally denoted by the term "subjectivity". “He (lyric poet. - W.H.), - Hegel wrote, - maybe inside himself look for motivation for creativity and content, dwelling on internal situations, states, experiences and passions of one's heart and spirit. Here the man himself in his subjective inner life becomes a work of art, while the epic poet is served by a hero different from himself, his exploits and 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, contagious power ( suggestiveness). Getting acquainted with a short story, novel or drama, we perceive what is depicted from a certain psychological distance, to a certain extent detached. By the will of the authors (and sometimes of our own) we accept or, on the contrary, do not share their mindset, approve or disapprove of their actions, mock them or sympathize with them. The lyric is another matter. To fully perceive a lyrical work means to be imbued with the mindset of the poet, to feel and once again experience them as something of one's own, personal, sincere. With the help of condensed poetic formulas of a lyrical work between the author and the reader, according to the exact words of L.Ya. Ginzburg, "lightning-fast and unmistakable contact is established" . The poet's feelings become at the same time our feelings. The author and his reader form a single, inseparable "we". And this is the special charm of the lyrics.

§ 6. Intergeneric and extrageneric forms

The genres of literature are not separated from each other by an impenetrable wall. Along with works that unconditionally and wholly belong to alone from literary genera, there are also those that combine the properties of any two generic forms - “ two-kind formations "(B.O. Korman's expression). On works and their groups belonging to two types of literature during the 19th–20th centuries. has been said repeatedly. Thus, Schelling characterized the novel as "a combination of the epic with the drama." The presence of the epic beginning in the dramaturgy of A. N. Ostrovsky was noted. B. Brecht characterized his plays as epic. The works of M. Maeterlinck and A. Blok were given the term "lyrical dramas". Deeply rooted in verbal art lyro-epic, which includes lyric-epic poems (established in literature since the era of romanticism), ballads (having folklore roots), the so-called lyrical prose (usually autobiographical), works where lyrical digressions are “connected” to the narrative of events, as, for example, in Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

In literary criticism of the XX century. Repeated attempts have been made to supplement the traditional "triad" (epos, lyrics, drama) and to substantiate the concept of a fourth (or even fifth, etc.) kind of literature. Next to the three "former" ones, the novel (V.D. Dneprov), and satire (Y.E. Elsberg, Yu.B. Borev), and the script (a number of film theorists) were put. There is a lot of disputable 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 altogether. It is right to call them non-generic forms.

First, this essays. Here the attention of the authors is focused on external reality, which gives literary critics some reason to put them in a number of epic genres. However, in the essays, the series of events and the narrative itself do not play an organizing role: descriptions dominate, often accompanied by reasoning. These are “Khor and Kalinich” 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 not the narrative presentation of events prevails, but the endless chains of impressions, memories, mental movements of the speaker. Here, consciousness, which most often appears disordered, chaotic, seems to appropriate and absorb the world: reality turns out to be “veiled” with the chaos of its contemplations, the world is placed in consciousness. The works of M. Proust, J. Joyce, Andrei Bely have similar properties. Later, representatives of the "new novel" in France (M. Butor, N. Sarrot) turned to this form.

And finally, it definitely does not fit into the traditional triad essay, which has now become a very influential area of ​​​​literary creativity. At the origins of essays are the world-famous "Experiments" ("Essays") by M. Montaigne. The essay form is a casually free combination of summarizing reports about single facts, descriptions of reality and (which is especially important) reflections on it. Thoughts expressed in essay form, as a rule, do not claim to be an exhaustive interpretation of the subject, they allow the possibility of completely different judgments. Essayistics gravitates towards syncretism: the beginnings of art proper here are easily combined with journalistic and philosophical ones.

Essayistics almost dominates in the work of V.V. Rozanova ("Solitary", "Fallen Leaves"). She made herself felt in the prose of A.M. Remizov ("Salting"), in a number of works by M.M. Prishvin (first of all, "Eyes of the Earth" are remembered). The essayistic 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 Prospekt" N .IN. Gogol (the beginning and the end of the story), in the prose of T. Mann, G. Hesse, R. Musil, where the narration is abundantly accompanied by the thoughts of the writers.

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

* * *

So, there are distinguishable generic forms proper, traditional and undividedly dominating in literary creativity for many centuries, and forms "extra-generic", non-traditional, rooted in "post-romantic" art. The first interact with the second very actively, complementing each other. Today, the Platonic-Aristotelian-Hegelian triad (epos, lyrics, drama), apparently, is largely shaken and needs to be corrected. At the same time, there is no reason to declare the three types of literature habitually distinguished as 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 spoke in a similar spirit: “For ancient literatures, the terms epic, lyric, drama were not yet abstract. They denoted special, external ways of transmitting a work to a listening audience. Going into the book, poetry abandoned these modes of transmission, and gradually<…>types (meaning the genres of literature. - V.Kh.) became more and more of a fiction. Is it necessary to continue the scientific existence of these fictions? Disagreeing with this, we note: literary works all epochs (including modern ones) have a certain generic specificity (the form is epic, dramatic, lyrical, or 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 "non-generic" 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.

Existing genre designations fix various aspects of works. Thus, the word "tragedy" states the involvement of this group of dramatic works in a certain emotional and semantic mood (pathos); the word “tale” speaks of the belonging of works to the epic kind of literature and of the “average” volume of the text (smaller than that of novels, and greater than that of short stories and short stories); the sonnet is a lyrical 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 noted that, being "many different", genre features "do not provide the possibility of a logical classification of genres on some one basis." It is impossible not to heed such warnings. However, the 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 the specific, historical and literary aspect (studies of individual genre formations), but also in its own theoretical aspect. Experiences in the systematization of genres in the perspective of supra-epochal and worldwide have been undertaken both in domestic and foreign literary criticism.

§ 2. The concept of "substantial form" as applied to genres

Consideration of genres is unimaginable without referring to the organization, structure, form of literary works. The theorists of the formal school insisted on this. So, B.V. Tomashevsky called genres specific "groupings of techniques" that are compatible with each other, have stability and depend "on the environment of the emergence, purpose and conditions for the perception of works, on imitation of old works and the resulting literary tradition." The scientist characterizes the features of the genre as dominant in the work and determining its organization.

Inheriting the traditions of the formal school, and at the same time revising some of its provisions, scientists have paid close attention to the semantic aspect 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 themes of the works and the features of the worldview of their authors: “In the genres<…>over the centuries of their lives, forms of vision and understanding of certain aspects of the world are accumulated. Genre is meaningful construction: "The artist of the word must learn to see reality through the eyes of the genre." And again: "Each genre<…>is a complex system of means and methods of understanding mastery of reality. Emphasizing that the genre properties of the works constitute an indissoluble unity, Bakhtin at the same time distinguished between the formal (structural) and the substantive aspects of the genre. He noted that such genre names rooted in antiquity as epic, tragedy, idyll, which characterized the structure of works, later, as applied to the literature of the New Age, “are used as a designation genre essence .

Bakhtin’s works do not directly mention what constitutes a genre essence, but from the totality of his judgments about the novel (they will be discussed below), it becomes clear that these are the artistic principles of mastering a person and his connections with the environment. This deep aspect of genres in the XIX century. considered by Hegel, who characterized the epic, satire and comedy, as well as the novel, involving 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) is the concept of literary genres by G.N. Pospelov, who in the 1940s undertook an original attempt to systematize genre phenomena. He distinguished between genre forms "external" ("a closed compositional-stylistic whole") and "internal" ("genre-specific content" as the principle of "figurative thinking" and "cognitive interpretation of characters"). Having regarded the external (compositional-stylistic) genre forms as meaningfully neutral (in this, Pospel'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-epochal genre groups, using the sociological principle as the basis for their differentiation: the type of relationship between an 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, - they know life in the aspect formation 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 moralistic, genres are works such as A.N. Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”, N.A. Nekrasov’s “Who Lives Well in Russia”, as well as satires, idylls, utopias and dystopias). Along with the three named genre groups, the scientist singled out another one: mythological containing "folk figurative and fantastic explanations 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” .

Characteristics of genre groups, which is given by G.N. Pospelov, has the advantage of a clear system. However, it is incomplete. Now, when the ban on the discussion of the religious and philosophical problems of art has been lifted from domestic literary criticism, it is not difficult for scientists to add to what has been said that there is and is a deeply significant group of literary and artistic (and not just archaic and mythological) genres, where a person is correlated not so much with the life of society , how much with the cosmic principles, the universal laws of the world order and the higher forces of being.

Takova parable, which dates back to the eras of the Old and New Testaments and "from the content side is distinguished by its attraction to the deep" wisdom "of a religious or moralistic order" . Takovo 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 are the biblical "Psalms". According to Vyach. 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 sight of the unearthly / And foretelling us the way.” The named genres, which do not fit into any sociological constructions, can be legitimately defined as ontological(using the term of philosophy: ontology - the doctrine of being). This group of genres also includes works of a carnival-comic nature, in particular comedies: in them, as shown by M.M. Bakhtin, the hero and the reality surrounding him are correlated with existential universals. The origins of the genres that we have called ontological are mythological archaic, and above all, myths about the creation of the world, called etiological (or cosmological).

The ontological aspect of genres comes to the fore in a number of foreign theories of the 20th century. Genres are considered, first of all, as describing being as a whole in a certain way. In the words of the American scientist C. Burke, these are systems of acceptance or rejection of the world. In this series of theories, the concept of N.G. Fry, stated in his book Anatomy of Criticism (1957). The genre form, it says, is generated by myths about the seasons and their corresponding rituals: “Spring represents the dawn and birth, giving rise to myths<..->about awakening and resurrection, - sets out I.P. Ilyin the thoughts of a Canadian scientist - 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, chivalric romance. Autumn, as a symbol of sunset and death, gives rise to the myths of the withering of vital energy, the dying god, violent death and sacrifice, and the archetypes of tragedy and elegy. Winter, personifying darkness and hopelessness, gives rise to the myth of the victory of dark forces and the flood, the return of chaos, the death of the hero and gods, as well as the archetypes of satire.

§ 3. Novel: genre essence

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 reflection of the writers themselves. However, this genre still remains a mystery. A variety of, sometimes opposing opinions are expressed about the historical fate of the novel and its future. “His,” wrote T. Mann in 1936, “prose qualities, consciousness and criticism, as well as the wealth of his means, his ability to freely and quickly dispose of display and research, music and knowledge, myth and science, his human breadth, his objectivity and irony make the novel what it is today: a monumental and dominant form of fiction. O.E. Mandelstam, on the other hand, spoke of 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 external-event principle in it (which took place already in the 19th century), the poet saw a symptom of the decline and the threshold of the death of the genre, which has now become, in his words, "old-fashioned".

In modern concepts of the novel, one way or another, 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 small, is only suitable for a novel”; “Inconsistencies with the novel are inseparable”), then in the era of romanticism he rose to the shield as a reproduction of “ ordinary reality" and at the same time - "mirror of the world and<…>of his age”, the fruit of “a fully mature spirit”; as a "romantic book", where, unlike the traditional epic, there is a place for a laid-back expression of the mood of the author and heroes, and humor and playful lightness. "Every novel must shelter within itself the spirit of the universal," wrote Jean-Paul. Thinkers of the turn of the 18th–19th centuries developed their theories of the novel. substantiated by the experience of modern writers, first of all, I.V. Goethe as the author of books about Wilhelm Meister.

The comparison of the novel with the traditional epic, outlined by the aesthetics and criticism of romanticism, was deployed by Hegel: “Here<…>again (as in the epic. - W.H.) appears in its entirety the richness and versatility of interests, states, characters, living conditions, a wide background of a holistic 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 orderly reality" and "the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the prose of everyday life that opposes it." This conflict, Hegel notes, "is resolved tragically or comically" and often ends with the fact that the heroes come to terms with the "ordinary order of the world", recognizing in it "a true and substantial beginning." Similar thoughts were expressed by V. G. 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 the story related to it "have now become at the head of all other genres of poetry."

Much in common with Hegel and Belinsky (at the same time supplementing them), M.M. Bakhtin in works on the novel, written mainly in the 1930s and awaiting publication in the 1970s. Based on the judgments of the writers of the XVIII century. G. Fielding and K.M. Wieland, a scientist in the article "Epos and the Novel (On the Methodology of the Study of the Novel)" (1941) argued that the hero of the novel is shown "not as ready-made and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, brought up by life"; this person "should not be" heroic "neither in the epic nor in the tragic sense of the word, the romantic hero 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 the unfinished, becoming modernity (the unfinished present)”. And it "more deeply, essentially, sensitively and quickly" than any other genre, "reflects the formation of reality itself" (451). Most importantly, the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of discovering in a person not only properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized opportunities, a certain personal potential: “One of the main internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the inadequacy of the hero of his fate and to be "either greater than one's destiny, or less than one's humanity" (479).

The above judgments of Hegel, Belinsky and Bakhtin can rightly be considered as axioms of the theory of the novel, which explores the life of a person (primarily private, individually biographical) in dynamics, formation, evolution and in situations of complex, as a rule, conflict relations between the hero and others. The novel is invariably present and almost dominates - as a kind of "super-theme" - artistic comprehension (to use the well-known words of A.S. Pushkin) "man's independence", which constitutes (let us add the poet) and "the guarantee of his greatness", and the source of woeful falls, life's dead ends and catastrophes. The ground for the formation and strengthening of the novel, in other words, arises where there is interest in a person who has at least relative independence from the establishment of the social environment with its imperatives, rites, rituals, which is not characterized by "herd" inclusion in society.

In the novels, situations of the hero's alienation from the environment are widely depicted, his lack of roots in reality, homelessness, worldly wandering and spiritual wandering are emphasized. Such are Apuleius' Golden Ass, chivalric novels of the Middle Ages, A.R. Lesage. Let us also recall Julien Sorel (“Red and Black” by Stendhal), Eugene Onegin (“Alien to everything, not bound by anything,” the Pushkin hero complains about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Herzen Beltov, Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov in F.M. Dostoevsky. This kind of novel characters (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 appear 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 ludicrous familiarization of the world and man" (481). “The novel,” Bakhtin wrote, “has a new, specific problematic; it is characterized by eternal rethinking - reappraisal" (473). In this genre, reality "becomes a world where the first word (the ideal beginning) is not there, and the last has not yet been said" (472-473). Thus, the novel is seen as an expression of a skeptical and relativistic worldview, which is conceived as a crisis and at the same time having a perspective. The novel, Bakhtin argues, prepares a new, more complex integrity of man "on a higher level<…>development” (480).

There are many similarities with the Bakhtinian 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 godless world, and the psychology of the novel hero - demonic. He considered the subject of the novel the history of the human soul, manifesting itself and knowing itself in all sorts of adventures (adventures), and its predominant tone was irony, which he defined as the negative mysticism of eras that broke with God. Considering the novel as a mirror of growing up, the maturity of society and the antithesis of an epic that captured the “normal childhood” of mankind, D. Lukacs spoke about the re-creation of the human soul lost in empty and imaginary reality by this genre.

However, the novel does not completely plunge into the atmosphere of demonism and irony, the disintegration of human integrity, the alienation of people from the world, but it is opposed to it. The hero's reliance on himself in the classical novels of the 19th century. (both Western European and domestic) appeared most often in a dual coverage: on the one hand, as a worthy human "independence", sublime, attractive, bewitching, on the other - as a source of delusions and defeats in life. “How wrong I was, how punished!” - Onegin exclaims woefully, summing up his solitary free path. Pechorin complains that he did not guess his own “high purpose” and did not find a worthy application for the “immense forces” of his soul. Ivan Karamazov at the end of the novel, tormented by his conscience, falls ill with delirium tremens. “And God help the homeless wanderers,” Rudin’s fate is said at the end of Turgenev’s novel.

At the same time, many novel characters strive to overcome their solitude and alienation, they yearn for “a connection with the world to be established in their destinies” (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, Goncharov's Raisky, Tolstoy's Andrey Volkonsky, or even Ivan Karamazov, who in his best moments aspires to Alyosha. This kind of novel situations was 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 are never allowed to unite, and the guilt of the hero for this sometimes turns out to be no less than the guilt of the world.

Something else is also important: in novels, heroes play a significant role, whose self-reliance has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, relying only on themselves. Among the novel characters, 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, liberates" people, "defines them<…>behavior". This heroine L.N. Tolstoy naively and at the same time convincingly demands "immediately, 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), spiritual contacts of a person with a reality close to him and, in particular, family ties ("The Captain's Daughter" by A.S. Pushkin); "Cathedrals" and "The Seedy Family" by N. S. Leskov; "Nest of Nobles" by I. S. Turgenev; "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" by L. N. Tolstoy). The heroes of such works (remember the Rostovs or Konstantin Levin) perceive and think of the surrounding reality not so much as alien and hostile to themselves, but as friendly and akin. They are characterized by the fact that M.M. Prishvin called "kind attention to the world."

The theme of the House (in the high sense of the word - as an irremovable existential principle and indisputable value) persistently (most often in intensely dramatic tones) sounds in the novels of our century: in J. Galsworthy ("The Forsyte Saga" and subsequent works), R. Marten du Gard ("The Thibault Family"), W. Faulkner ("The Sound and the Fury"), M.A. Bulgakov ("The White Guard"), M.A. Sholokhov ("Quiet Flows the Don"), B.L. Pasternak ("Doctor Zhivago"), V, G. Rasputin ("Live and Remember", "Deadline").

The novels of the eras close to us, apparently, are to a large extent focused on idyllic values ​​(although they are not inclined to bring situations of harmony between a person and a reality close to him to the forefront). Even Jean-Paul (probably referring to such works as "Julia, or New Eloise" by J.J. Rousseau and "The Weckfield Priest" by O. Goldsmith) noted that the idyll is "a genre related to the novel". And according to M.M. Bakhtin, "the significance of the idyll for the development of the novel<…>was huge."

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

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

The novel, as can be seen, has a dual content: firstly, it is specific for him (the “independence” and evolution of the hero, revealed in his private life), and secondly, which came to him from other genres. Legal conclusion; genre essence of the novel synthetic. This genre is able, with unconstrained freedom and unprecedented breadth, to combine the content principles of many genres, both comic and serious. Apparently, there is no genre principle from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.

The novel, as a genre prone to synthesizing, 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) was able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, inconsistency and richness. Romanesque freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras use this freedom in a variety of ways.

The diversity of the novel creates serious difficulties for literary theorists. Almost everyone who tries to characterize the novel as such, in its general and necessary properties, is tempted to a kind of synecdoche: the replacement of the whole by 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 the unprecedented success of Napoleon. In the novels, which emphasized not the strong-willed aspiration of a self-affirming 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 filled with mild and benevolent irony, relied on his own artistic experience and, to a large extent, on the novels of I. W. Goethe's upbringing.

Bakhtin's theory has a different orientation, but also a local one (first of all, towards the experience of Dostoevsky). At the same time, the writer's novels are interpreted by scientists in a very peculiar way. The heroes of Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, are primarily the bearers of ideas (ideologies); their voices are equal, as is the voice of the author in relation to each of them. This is seen polyphony, 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 novelism is considered by Bakhtin as an inheritance of the ancient "menippean satire". menippea is a genre "free of legend", committed to "unbridled fantasy", recreating the "adventure ideas or truth in the world: both on earth, and in the underworld, and on Olympus. She, Bakhtin argues, is a genre of "last questions", carrying out "moral and psychological experimentation", and recreates "a split personality", "unusual dreams, passions bordering on insanity.

Other varieties of the novel, not involved in the polyphony of the novel, where the writers' interest in people rooted in a reality close to them prevails, and the author's "voice" dominates the voices of the characters, Bakhtin assessed them less highly and even spoke of them ironically: he wrote about "monologic" one-sidedness and the narrowness of “manor-home-room-apartment-family novels”, as if they had forgotten about the person’s being “on the threshold” of eternal and insoluble questions. At the same time, they were called L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov.

In the centuries-old history of the novel, two types of it are clearly visible, more or less corresponding to two stages of literary development. These are, firstly, acutely eventful works based on external action, the characters of which strive to achieve some local goals. Such are adventurous novels, in particular picaresque, chivalric, "career novels", as well as adventure and detective novels. Their plots are numerous chains of event knots (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 the literature of the last two or three centuries, when one of the central problems of social thought, artistic creativity and culture as a whole has become spiritual human self-sufficiency. Here, the inner action successfully competes with the external action: the eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the hero’s consciousness in its diversity and complexity, with its endless dynamics and psychological nuances, comes to the fore (for psychologism in the literature, see pp. 173–180). The characters of such novels are depicted not only striving for some particular goals, but also comprehending their place in the world, clarifying and realizing their value orientation. It was in this type of novels that the specificity of the genre, which was discussed, affected with maximum completeness. The reality close to man (“everyday life”) is mastered here not as a deliberately “low prose”, but as part of true humanity, the trends of this time, the universal principles of being, and most importantly, as an arena of the most serious conflicts. Russian novelists of the 19th century. they knew well and persistently showed that "amazing events are a lesser test for human relations) than everyday life with petty displeasures."

One of the most important features of the novel and its sister story (especially in the 19th–20th centuries) is the authors' close attention to the characters' environment. microenvironment, the influence of which they experience and which they influence 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 (T. Mann called these works “in-depth into the inner life, sublimated adventure novels”), as well as “Confession” by J.J. Rousseau, "Adolf" B. Constant, "Eugene Onegin", which conveys the "poetry of reality" inherent in the works of A. S. Pushkin. Since that time, novels, focused on the connections of a person with a reality close to him and, as a rule, giving preference to internal action, have become a kind of center of literature. They most seriously influenced all other genres, even transformed them. According to M.M. Bakhtin, happened Romanization verbal art: when the novel comes to "great literature", other genres change dramatically, "to a greater or lesser extent" romanized "". At the same time, the structural properties of genres are also transformed: their formal organization becomes less strict, more relaxed and free. It is to this (formal-structural) side of genres that we turn.

§ 4. Genre structures and canons

Literary genres (in addition to content, essential qualities) have structural, formal properties that have a different measure of certainty. At earlier stages (up to and including the era of classicism), it was the formal aspects of genres that came to the fore and were recognized as dominant. The genre-forming beginnings were both meter and strophic organization (“solid forms”, as they are often called), and orientation to certain speech constructions, and principles of construction. Complexes of artistic means were strictly assigned to each genre. Strict regulations regarding the subject of the image, the construction of the work and its speech tissue were pushed to the periphery and even leveled the individual author's initiative. The laws of the genre dominated the creative will of the writers. “Old Russian genres,” writes D.S. Likhachev - are much more associated with certain types of style than the genres of modern times.<…>Therefore, the expressions “hagiographic style”, “chronographic style”, “chronographic style” will not surprise us, although, of course, individual deviations can be noted within each genre. Medieval art, according to the scientist, “strives to express a collective attitude towards the 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 developed 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 its own "bridgehead". Genre formations of this kind are. They follow certain norms and rules that are developed by tradition and are obligatory for authors. The genre canon is "a certain system sustainable And solid(emphasis mine. - W.H.) genre features".

The word "canon" other - gr. kanon - rule, prescription) was the name of the treatise of the ancient Greek sculptor Polykleitos (5th century BC). Here the canon was perceived as a perfect model, fully realizing a certain norm. The canonicity of art (including verbal) is conceived in this terminological tradition as the strict adherence of artists to the rules, allowing them to approach perfect models.

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

Later, as reflection became stronger 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 on poetry by Aristotle and Horace, Yu.Ts. Scaliger and N. Boileau. In normative theories of this kind, genres, already possessing certainty, acquired the maximum orderliness. 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. Sharply distinguishing between tragedy and comedy, Boileau wrote:

Despondency and tears funny eternal enemy.
The tragic tone is incompatible with him,
But humiliating comedy is serious
To amuse the crowd with the sharpness of the obscene.
You can't joke around in comedy
You can not confuse the thread of living intrigue,
It is impossible to be embarrassingly distracted from the idea
And the thought in the void all the time to spread.

Most importantly, normative aesthetics (from Aristotle to Boileau and Sumarokov) insisted that poets follow indisputable genre patterns, which are, first of all, 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 the genres that were recommended and regulated by theorists (“de jure genres”, in the words of S.S. Averintsev), there were also “de facto genres”, for a number of centuries, which did not receive theoretical justification, but also possessed stable structural properties and had certain substantive “predilections”. Such are fairy tales, fables, short stories and similar comic stage works, as well as many traditional lyrical 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 have become malleable and flexible, have lost their canonical rigor, and therefore have opened up wide open spaces for the manifestation of individual author's initiative. The rigidity of the distinction between genres has exhausted itself and, one might say, has sunk into oblivion along with the classic aesthetics, which was resolutely rejected in the era of romanticism. “We see,” V. Hugo wrote in his programmatic preface 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 Zh.Zh. Russo and L. Stern. The romanization of literature of the last two centuries marked its "exit" beyond the genre canons and, at the same time, the erasure of former boundaries between genres. In the XIX-XX centuries. "genre categories lose their clear outlines, genre models for the most part fall apart" . As a rule, these are no longer phenomena isolated from each other with a pronounced set of properties, but groups of works in which one or another formal and substantive preferences and accents are seen with greater or lesser clarity.

The literature of the last two centuries (especially of the 20th century) encourages us to speak also about the presence in its composition of works devoid of genre definition, such as many dramatic works with a neutral subtitle "play", artistic prose of an essayistic nature, as well as numerous lyric poems that do not fit into the scope 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 definition disappears": "... lyrical thought<…>reveals a tendency towards more and more synthetic expression", there is a "atrophy of the genre in the lyrics". “No matter how you expand the concept of elegiacity,” M.Yu. Lermontov's "January 1st" - all the same, one cannot get away from the obvious circumstance that the lyrical masterpiece is in front of us, and its genre nature is completely indefinite. Or rather, it does not exist at all, because it is not limited by anything.

At the same time, genre structures that have stability have not lost their significance either at the time of romanticism or in subsequent eras. Traditional, centuries-old genres 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-sounding poems (Anacreontic poetry), the author is like Anacreon, Guys, early K.N. Batyushkov, and at the same time very clearly manifests itself (remember “Play, Adele, do not know sadness ...” or “Leila’s evening from me ...”). As the creator of the solemn ode “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands ...”, the poet, likening himself to Horace and G.R. Derzhavin, paying tribute to their artistic style, 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, turning out to be 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 about<…>merchant Kalashnikov. This kind of “proteic” self-disclosure of authors in various genres is seen by modern scientists in the Western European literatures of the New Age: “Aretino, Boccaccio, Margarita of Navarre, Erasmus of Rotterdam, even Cervantes and Shakespeare in different genres appear as if they are different individuals” .

Structural stability is also possessed by the newly emerged in the 19th–20th centuries. genre education. So, there is no doubt the presence of a certain formal-content complex in the lyric poetry of the Symbolists (gravitation towards universals and a special kind of vocabulary, semantic complexity of speech, the apotheosis of mystery, etc.). The presence of a structural and conceptual commonality in the novels of French writers of the 1960s–1970s (M. Bugor, A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarrot, 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 a genre formation is the sonnet, which is still alive today), and, secondly, non-canonical genre forms: flexible, open to all kinds of transformations. , perestroika, updates, what, for example, are elegies or short stories in the literature of the New Age. These free genre forms in the epochs close to us come into contact and coexist with non-genre formations, but genres cannot exist without some minimum of stable structural properties.

§ 5. Genre systems. Canonization of genres

In each historical period, genres correlate with each other in different ways. They, according to D.S. Likhachev, "interact, 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 " system genres of each given epoch.

At the same time, genres are evaluated 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 genre hierarchies which change over time. Some of the genres, some kind of favorites, happy chosen ones, receive the highest possible assessment from any authoritative instances - an assessment that becomes generally recognized or at least acquires literary and social weight. 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 V. B. Shklovsky, a certain part of the literary era “represents its canonized crest”, while its other links exist “deafly”, on periphery, without becoming authoritative and without drawing attention to itself. Canonized (again after Shklovsky) is also called (see pp. 125-126, 135) that part of the literature of the past, which is recognized as the best, top, exemplary, that is, classics. 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. The Aristotelian treatise gave the highest status to tragedy and epic (epopee). The aesthetics of classicism also canonized "high comedy", sharply separating it from folk-farcical comedy as a low and inferior genre.

The hierarchy of genres also took place in the minds of the so-called mass reader (see pp. 120–123). So, Russian peasants at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. gave 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 illiterately, in “barbaric language”) were listened to and read “with reverence, with rapturous love, with wide-open eyes and with the same wide-open soul.” Works of an entertaining nature, called "fairy tales", were regarded as a low genre. They were very widely used, but they aroused a dismissive attitude towards themselves and were awarded unflattering epithets (“fables”, “fables”, “nonsense”, etc.).

The canonization of genres also takes place in the "upper" layer of literature. Thus, at the time of romanticism, which was marked by a radical restructuring of genres, a fragment, a fairy tale, and also a novel (in the spirit and manner of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister) were elevated to the top of literature. Literary life of the XIX century. (especially in Russia) is marked by the canonization of socio-psychological novels and short stories, prone to lifelikeness, psychologism, and everyday authenticity. In the XX century. attempts were made (successful to varying degrees) to canonize mystery dramaturgy (the concept of symbolism), parody (formal school), epic novel (aesthetics of socialist realism of the 1930s–1940s), as well as novels by F.M. Dostoevsky as polyphonic (1960-1970s); in Western European literary life - the novel of the "stream of consciousness" and absurd dramaturgy 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 canonized high genres, then in times close to us, those genre principles that were previously outside the framework of “strict” literature rise hierarchically. As noted by V.B. Shklovsky, there is a canonization of new themes and genres that were hitherto secondary, marginal, low: “Blok canonizes the themes and tempos of the “gypsy romance”, and Chekhov introduces the “Alarm Clock” into Russian literature. Dostoevsky elevates the methods of the boulevard novel into a literary norm. At the same time, traditional high genres evoke an alienated critical attitude towards themselves, they are thought of as exhausted. “In the change of genres, the constant displacement of high genres by low ones is curious,” noted B.V. Tomashevsky, stating the process of "canonization of low genres" in literary modernity. According to the scientist, followers of high genres usually become epigones. In the same vein, M.M. Bakhtin. Traditional high genres, according to him, are prone to "stilted glorification", they are characterized by conventionality, "unchanging poetry", "monotonity and abstractness".

In the 20th century, as can be seen, genres rise hierarchically. 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: paradoxically, non-canonical genres turn out to be the subject of canonization, preference is given to everything in literature that is not involved in ready-made, established, stable forms.

§ 6. Genre confrontations and traditions

In the epochs close to us, marked by the increased dynamism and diversity of artistic life, genres are inevitably involved in the struggle of literary groups, schools, and trends. At the same time, genre systems are undergoing more intense and rapid changes than in past centuries. Yu.N. Tynyanov, who argued that “there are no ready-made genres” and that each of them, changing from epoch to epoch, acquires either greater significance, moving to the center, or, on the contrary, relegating to the background or even ceasing to exist: “In the era of decomposition of what of any genre, it 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 lyrics to parodic and satirical genres, as well as adventurous prose, as Tynyanov spoke about in the article “The Interval”.

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-epochal genre phenomena and connections: “The study of isolated genres outside the signs of the genre system with which they correlate is impossible. Tolstoy's historical novel is not correlated with Zagoskin's historical novel, but is correlated with contemporary prose. This kind of emphasis on intraepochal genre confrontations needs some adjustment. So, “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 also - as links in one chain - with the novel by M.N. Zagoskin "Roslavlev, or Russians in 1812" (there are many roll calls, far from accidental), and with a poem by M.Yu. Lermontov "Borodino" (Tolstoy himself spoke about the influence of this poem on him), and with a number of stories of ancient Russian literature full of national heroics.

The relationship between dynamism and stability in the existence of genres from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch needs an unbiased and cautious discussion, free from "directive" extremes. Along with genre confrontations, genre traditions are fundamentally important in literary life: continuity in this area (for 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. Averintsev, "the background against which the silhouette of a writer can be seen is always two-part: any writer is a contemporary of his contemporaries, comrades in the era, but also a successor to his predecessors, comrades in the genre." Literary critics have repeatedly spoken about the “memory of the genre” (M.M. Bakhtin), about the “burden of conservatism” weighing on the concept of the genre (Yu.V. Stennik), about “genre inertia” (S.S. Averintsev).

Arguing with literary critics, who associated the existence of genres primarily with intra-epochal confrontations, the struggle of trends and schools, with "the superficial variegation and hype of the literary process", M.M. Bakhtin wrote: “The literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable, “eternal” tendencies in the development of literature. Genre always retains undying elements archaic. True, this one. the archaic is preserved in it only thanks to its constant update, so to speak, modernizing<…>The genre is revived and updated at each new stage in the development of literature and in each individual work of this genre.<…>Therefore, the archaic, preserved in the genre, is not dead, but eternally alive, that is, capable of being updated.<…>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 this development." And further: "The higher and more complex the genre has developed, the better and more fully it remembers its past."

These judgments (basic in Bakhtin's conception of the genre) need to be critically corrected. Not all genres date back to the archaic. Many of them are of 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 epic phenomena.

Genres thus 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 updated, as well as new ones arise and become stronger; relationships between genres and the nature of interaction between them change.

§ 7. Literary genres in relation to non-artistic reality

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

The evolution of genre forms (we recall: always meaningful in content) also largely depends on shifts in the social sphere itself, which is shown by G. V. Plekhanov on the material of French dramaturgy of the 17th–18th centuries, which made its way from the tragedies of classicism to the “petty-bourgeois drama” of the Enlightenment .

Genre structures as such (like generic ones) are the refraction of forms of non-artistic being, both socio-cultural and natural. The principles of the composition of works, fixed by the genre tradition, reflect the structure of life phenomena. I will refer to the judgment of the graphic artist: “Sometimes you can hear an argument<…>Is there composition in nature? There is!<…>Since this composition was found by the artist and exalted by the artist. The organization of artistic speech in a particular genre also invariably depends on the forms of non-artistic statements (oratory 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, at its inception, took from life the conversations that are 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 vital prototype of the artistic form of the epic is a story.

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

Genre structures in literature (both those with canonical rigor and those free from it) seem to have life analogues, which determine their appearance and strengthening. This is a sphere genesis(origin) of literary genres.

Another significant receptive(see p. 115) the side of the connections of verbal and artistic genres with the primary reality. The fact is that a work of one genre or another (let us turn again to M.M. Bakhtin) is oriented towards certain conditions of perception: “... for each literary genre<…>are characterized by their own 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. Here's what D.S. says Likhachev about Old Russian literature: “Genres are determined by their use: in worship (in its various parts), in legal and diplomatic practice (lists of articles, annals, stories about princely crimes), in the atmosphere of princely life (solemn words, glory, etc. .)" . Similarly, the classic ode of the XVII-XVIII centuries. was part of the solemn palace ritual.

Inevitably associated with a certain environment of perception and folklore genres. Comedies of a farcical nature originally formed part of the mass festival and were part of it. The tale was performed during leisure hours and addressed to a small number of people. A relatively recent ditty appeared - the genre of a city or village street.

Having gone into the book, verbal art has weakened the ties with the life forms of its development: reading fiction is successfully carried out in any environment. But here, too, the perception of a work depends on its genre-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 domestic novels and short stories, landscape essays, friendly and love lyrics with a sincere tone inherent in these genres can evoke in the reader the feeling that the author is addressing him as an individual: an atmosphere of trusting, intimate contact arises. Reading traditionally epic, heroic works gives the reader a feeling of spiritual fusion with a certain very broad and capacious “we”. Genre, as you can see, is one of the bridges connecting the writer and the reader, an intermediary between them.

* * *

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

At the other extreme of understanding genres is M.M. Bakhtin as about the "leading heroes" of the literary process. The foregoing encourages adherence to the second view, however, making a corrective clarification: if in the “pre-romantic” era the face of literature was indeed determined primarily by the laws of the genre, its norms, rules, canons, then in the 19th-20th centuries. truly the central figure of the literary process was the author with his widely and freely carried out creative initiative. From now on, the genre turned out to be “the second person”, but by no means lost its significance.

Notes:

An unpublished chapter from A.N. Veselovsky // Russian literature. 1959. No. 3. S. 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; Kosikov G.K. Foreign literary criticism and theoretical problems of the science of literature // Foreign aesthetics and theory of literature of the 19th–20th centuries: Treatises, articles, essays. M., 1987. A summary coverage of the fate of Russian theoretical literary criticism of the 20th century, one hopes, will be undertaken in the coming years.

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

Mukarzhovsky Ya. Studies in aesthetics and art theory. S. 131.

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

Averintsev S.S. Parable//Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1987. See also: Tyupa V.I. The art of Chekhov's story. M., 1989. pp. 13–32.

Cm.: Burke K. Attitudes Toward History, Los Altos, 1959; Chernets L.V.. literary genres. pp. 59–61.

Ilyin I.P. N.G. Fry //Modern Foreign Literary Critics: A Handbook. countries of capitalism. Part III. M., 1987.S. 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. Rymarya, N.D., Tamarchenko, A.Ya. Esalnek devoted to the history and theory of the novel. Let's also call it: 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.) S. 145–146.

Likhachev D.S. Poetics of ancient Russian literature. S. 55.

Chernets L.V.. literary genres. S. 77.

Cit. by: Chernets L.V. literary genres. S. 51.

Cm.: Bakhtin M.M.. Questions of literature and aesthetics. S. 451.

Epos, lyrics and drama were formed at the earliest stages of the existence of society, in primitive syncretic creativity. The first of the three chapters of his "Historical Poetics" A.N. Veselovsky, one of the greatest Russian historians and literary theorists of the 19th century. The scientist argued that literary genera 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. Epos, lyrics and drama were interpreted by Veselovsky as having developed from the “protoplasm” of ritual “choir actions”.

From the exclamations of the most active members of the choir (singers, luminaries), lyrical-epic songs (cantilenas) grew up, which eventually separated from the rite: “Songs of a lyrical-epic nature seem to be 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. On the basis of such songs, epic narratives subsequently formed. And from the exclamations of the choir as such, lyricism grew (originally group, collective), which, over time, also separated from the rite. The epic and lyrics are thus interpreted by Veselovsky as "a consequence of the decay of the ancient ritual choir." The drama, the scientist claims, arose from the exchange of remarks of the choir and the singers. And she (unlike the epic and lyrics), having gained independence, at the same time "preserved the entire<...>syncretism” of the ritual choir and was a kind of its likeness 1 .

The theory of the origin of literary genera, put forward by Veselovsky, is confirmed by many facts about the life of primitive peoples known to modern science. So, the origin of the drama from ritual performances is undoubted: 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 epic and lyric poetry could be formed independently of ritual actions. Thus, mythological tales, on the basis of which prose legends (sagas) and fairy tales subsequently became firmly established, arose outside the choir. They were not sung by the participants in the mass ritual, but were told by one of the representatives of the tribe (and, probably, such a story was far from being addressed to a large number of people in all cases). Lyrics could also be formed outside the rite. Lyrical self-expression arose in the production (labor) and domestic relations of primitive peoples. Thus, there were different ways of forming literary genera. And the ritual choir was one of them.

ON THE CONCEPT OF "GENRE"

Literary genres are groups of works that are distinguished within the framework of the genres of literature. Each of them has a certain set of stable properties. Many literary genres have their origins and roots in folklore. The genres that have reappeared in proper literary experience are the fruit of the combined activity of the initiators and successors. Such, for example, is the lyric-epic poem that was formed in the era of romanticism. Not only J. Byron, A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov, but also their much less authoritative and influential contemporaries. According to V.M. Zhirmunsky, who explored this genre, “creative impulses come from great poets”, which are later transformed into a literary tradition by other, secondary ones: “Individual signs of a great work turn into genre signs” 1 . Genres, as you can see, are supra-individual. They can be called cultural-historical individualities.

Genres are difficult to systematize and classify (unlike the genres of literature), stubbornly resist them. First of all, because there are a lot of them: in each artistic culture, genres are specific (haiku, tanka, gazelle in the literatures of the countries of the East). In addition, the genres have a different historical scope. Some exist throughout the history of verbal art (such as the ever-living fable from Aesop to S.V. Mikhalkov); others are correlated with certain epochs (such, for example, is the liturgical drama in the composition of the European Middle Ages). In other words, genres are either universal or historically local.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that the same word often designates profoundly different genre phenomena. So, the ancient Greeks conceived an elegy as a work written in a strictly defined poetic size - an elegiac distich (a combination of hexameter with a pentameter) and performed by a recitative to the accompaniment of a flute. This elegy (its ancestor - the poet Kallin) VII BC) was characterized by a very wide range of themes and motives (glorification of valiant warriors, philosophical reflections, love, moralizing). Later (among the Roman poets Catullus, Propertius, Ovid), elegy became a genre focused primarily on the love theme. And in modern times (mainly the second half of the 18th - early 19th century), thanks to T. Gray and VA Zhukovsky, the elegiac genre began to be determined by the mood of sadness and sadness, regret and melancholy. At the same time, the elegiac tradition, dating back to antiquity, continued to live at that time. So, in the Roman Elegies written in elegiac distich, I.V. Goethe is sung about the joys of love, carnal pleasures, epicurean gaiety. The same atmosphere is in the elegies of Guys, which influenced K.N. Batyushkov and young Pushkin. The word "elegy" seems to mean several genre formations. The elegies of early eras and cultures have different features. What is an elegy as such and what is its supra-epochal uniqueness, it is impossible to say in principle. The only correct definition is the definition of elegy "in general" as a "genre of lyrical poetry" (the Brief Literary Encyclopedia limited itself to this little-speaking definition, not without reason).

Many other genre designations (poem, novel, satire, etc.) have a similar character. Yu.N. Tynyanov rightly argued that "the very features of the genre evolve." In particular, he noted: “... what was called an ode in the 20s of the 19th century, or, finally, Fet, was called an ode not according to the signs that during Lomonosov’s time” 2 .

Existing genre designations fix various aspects of works. Thus, the word "tragedy" states the involvement of this group of dramatic works in a certain emotional and semantic mood (pathos); the word “tale” speaks of the belonging of works to the epic kind of literature and of the “average” volume of the text (smaller than that of novels, and greater than that of short stories and short stories); the sonnet is a lyrical 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 "multiple" genre features "do not give the possibility of a logical classification of genres on any one basis" 3 . In addition, authors often designate the genre of their works arbitrarily, out of line with the usual word usage. So, N.V. Gogol called "Dead Souls" a poem; "House by the road" A.T. Tvardovsky has the subtitle "lyrical chronicle", "Vasily Terkin" - "a book about a fighter."

Naturally, it is not easy for literary theorists to navigate the processes of genre evolution and the endless “discordance” of genre designations. (studies of individual genre formations), but also the actual theoretical one. Experiences in the systematization of genres in a supra-epochal and world perspective were undertaken both in domestic and foreign literary criticism 5 .

In ancient times, art was syncretic (Greek. synkretismos- connection) character. Music, dance and poetry (song or just rhythmic sounds and body movements) did not exist separately. Gradually, each of these categories of primitive art became isolated. Thus, various areas of art arose, and within each of them further delimitation also took place. Within the literature, three independent sections or types were defined - epic, lyric and drama.

Each of the genera corresponds to a certain function of the poetic word and develops its artistic specificity.

epic(gr. epos- word, speech, story) - the epic form of poetry that originated in ancient times is a story about an important event for the whole tribe or people. This narrative could be both poetic and prose. In the epic, events seem to be independent of the narrator, who strives for maximum objectivity of the image and seems to be absent from the work. Only in the 18th-20th centuries did the author cease to hide his presence and begin to address the reader directly. Over time, the forms and functions of the epic become more complex and develop.

The epic begins to use a variety of ways to convey events. At first, as already noted, it was an impersonal story, which described in detail the appearance of the characters and the objects surrounding them. The characters in the epic resort to monologues and dialogues; The story is usually told in the past tense. In the epic of modern times, the author already becomes a participant and director of events, and all temporary forms are used in their depiction.

Lyrics(gr. lyricos- sung to the sounds of a lyre) was defined by Aristotle as a narrative in which "the imitator remains himself, without changing his face." In other words, the lyrics convey the inner world of the individual, reflect her emotions.

Drama(gr. drama- action). Drama is intended to be performed on stage and is based on action aimed at resolving some kind of conflict. What is happening in the drama is perceived as taking place at the present moment, although the events reproduced in the drama can be attributed to the past or the future. Unlike epic and lyric poetry, drama operates only with the characters' own speech (monologues and dialogues). If the epic and lyrics have an internal division into separate episodes (chapters, stanzas) and this division is largely arbitrary (chapters can be lengthy and short), then in drama such division is more rigidly conditioned. For the convenience of the audience and the concentration of the forces of the actors, the drama is usually divided into acts or actions of equal volume with pauses (intermissions) between them.

Literary genres, by virtue of a long tradition, tend to synthesis between themselves and other forms of art. So, for the epic, the union with painting and graphics is indicative (antique frescoes and images on household utensils, as a rule, illustrate the most important events of the epic, and the book subsequently acquires "pictures"). Lyrics, especially in the early stages of development, were inseparable from music. And now some varieties of lyrics are directly related to singing and musical accompaniment. The drama was originally close to pantomime (Greek. pantomimos- imitating everything) - a solo dramatized dance, and later found a verbal expression. Fine arts (decorations) and music (vaudeville, opera) also find application in drama.

Literary genders also tend to interpenetrate. In the epic there are elements of drama and lyrics, in the lyrics - epic, etc.

The tradition of tribal division, founded by Aristotle, was canonized in the era of classicism and has become commonly used up to the present. At the same time, a number of literary scholars, especially foreign ones, propose to abandon this classification as unsuitable for comprehending all the possibilities that are unique in their quality of works of art.

Nevertheless, in the practice of literary criticism, the concept kind exists as an aesthetic category and involves the inclusion in its scope of a wide range of works, united by similar features. Since each individual work differs from another, despite a number of common features, it becomes necessary to clarify the formulation of its features. Thus, there is a need for a finer division of the varieties of a work of art - and the concept kind. It should be emphasized that there is still no absolutely clear terminology in literary criticism. So, many researchers, along with the term "genus" also use "genre"(French genre- genus, species), although most often under the "genre" they understand the "species". Finally, the term "genre" also contains the concept of "genre form", that is, about the features of the ideological and emotional interpretation of what is depicted within the same type (pastoral, adventure, historical novel, etc.). Some theorists believe that satire can be classified as a separate genus, sometimes the novel is classified as a literary genus, and not a genre.

Considering this circumstance, we will consider the main varieties of literary genres in their most common interpretation, starting with the epic. Its oldest variety is epic(gr. eropoi¿a, epos- word, narrative and poieo- I create). At an early stage in the development of literature, the epic was a monumental form of work that highlighted problems of tribal or national significance. Initially, the epic had a poetic form and was a story about the heroic period of history, inhabited by semi-mythical heroic heroes. The heroes of this era confront the enemy-invaders and punish the villains. At first, the epic existed orally, in the transmission of poets-storytellers, then acquiring a written form.

Almost every nation created its own epics and kept them in the collective memory for centuries. The oldest epic known to us is the Sumerian-Akkadian "Tale of Gilgamesh" (about the 3rd millennium BC). In India, these are the Mahabharata and Ramayana, in Greece, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in France, the Song of Roland, in Russia, the cycles of heroic epics, in Armenia, David of Sasun, among the Turkic-speaking peoples - "Manas" and "Alpamysh", etc. The heroic epos is characterized by an imperturbably calm tonality of the narration and attention to all the details of life (the description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad). Belinsky noticed that the author in the epic "still looks at the event through the eyes of his people, without separating his personality from this event."

The age-old experience of nameless storytellers was taken into account by professional writers. The epic techniques were used in his work by the Roman poet Virgil ("Aeneid", 1st century BC), in Portugal - Camões ("Lusiades", 16th century), in France - Voltaire ("Henriad", 18th century). ), in Russia - N. Gogol ("Dead Souls"), L. Tolstoy ("War and Peace"), M. Sholokhov ("Quiet Don"), in Germany - T. Mann ("Joseph and His Brothers") etc.

Born from an epic poem(gr. poiema- creation), embodied in many varieties. Some scholars believe that the poem is the offspring of all three literary genres, since one can find many poems where there is almost no plot as such; there are also poems constructed according to the dramatic principle in the form of a dialogue or even a monologue. The vast majority of poems are written in verse, but there are also poems in prose ("Dead Souls" by N. Gogol).

A poem is considered to be a large poetic work in which the plot-narrative organization is clearly expressed. A prominent role in the poem belongs to the narrator - the lyrical hero. There are different types of poems. Among them heroic poem(“Liberated Jerusalem” by the Italian poet T. Tasso, 1580; “Rossiyada” by M. Kheraskov, 1779), in which historical characters usually perform great deeds; didactic("Works and Days" by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, VIII-VII centuries BC or "Experience about Man" by A. Popa, 1757), which aim to capture the achievements of labor activity or science.

burlesque poem(French burlesque, from ital. burlesco- playful) had a comic character, determined by the contrast between the topic and the way it was interpreted. Sometimes instead of the term "burlesque" another is used - "travesty" (ital. travestire- dress up). In burlesque, the "high" theme is stated in an emphatically "low style", as, for example, in the "Aeneid" by I. Kotlyarevsky (1798), where the adventures of the ancient Roman hero are described using reduced everyday vocabulary, and the characters are put in rudely comic situations.

The heyday of the poem is the era of romanticism. The romantic hero, standing above the vulgar everyday life, suffers from discord with others and fights for his own freedom and independence. In the romantic hero, first of all, the author's "I" is expressed. That is why the romantic poem by Byron, Shelley, Musset, Pushkin, Lermontov has such a strong subjective-lyrical beginning, while the prosaic details of being are hardly touched upon.

In realistic poetry, the poem loses its position somewhat. Nevertheless, in the work of N. Nekrasov and N. Ogarev, she is found ("Pedlars", "Frost, Red Nose", "Who Lives Well in Russia", "Russian Women" by N. Nekrasov and "Village", "Prison", "The story of a stage officer" N. Ogarev).

The end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century was marked by the emergence of prose genres, but this did not lead to the disappearance of the poem, which acquired a new sound. In Nekrasov's poems everyday life was poeticized. At the new stage of development, the poem, according to A. Blok, also cannot be imagined otherwise than "with life and plot", but at the same time its lyrical-psychological modulation is enhanced. Such are "Retribution" and "Twelve" by A. Blok, "Anna Snegina" by S. Yesenin, "Poem of the End" by M. Tsvetaeva, "Vasily Terkin" by A. Tvardovsky, "Oz" by A. Voznesensky and others.

In Soviet literature, the concept of "poem" retains its original - heroic - pathos, although a number of works, defined by their authors as a poem, have nothing in common with the poem in terms of genre (N. Pogodin's play "The Poem of the Ax", A. Makarenko's autobiographical narration "Pedagogical poem", screenplay by A. Dovzhenko "Poem about the sea").

Epic genres include novel(French roman, english, novel). In the Middle Ages, any work written in Romance, and not in the Latin language that dominated literary and scientific circles, was called a novel. The novel is a work deployed in time and space, in the center of which is an epic story about the fate of one or more characters in connection with other heroes.

The novel has its own long and rich history, the origins of which go back to antiquity. It was then that a way of novelistic thinking developed, which differed from that used by the creators of epics. In the novel, according to Belinsky's definition, the subject of the image becomes a complex of "feelings, passions and events of private and inner life."

The ancient novel still preserves some traditions of mythology; event dynamics prevail in it, obscuring the inner world of the characters so far. Such is the adventure-allegorical novel of the Roman writer Apuleius "Metamorphoses", also known as "The Golden Ass" (II century AD). But already in his contemporary Greek Long in the novel "Daphnis and Chloe" adventures recede into the background, and the author's attention is focused on depicting the feelings of lovers.

In the Middle Ages, in the XII-XIV centuries, the romance, adopting both tendencies. Along with the transfer of the individual psychology of the hero (though still in the most general terms), an important place in the chivalric romance is occupied by the description of numerous, often fantastic adventures. For several centuries, anonymous novels about the legendary King of the Britons Arthur and his knights were very popular, as well as an anonymous novel about ideal love "The Tale of Tristan and Iseult", Chrétien de Troy's novel "Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart" (XII century).

The attraction of chivalric romances was so great that in Spain they were dealt with as a public calamity by church authorities. Cervantes' great novel, Don Quixote, arose in part from a desire to satirize the many crafts that exploited the theme of chivalry. The chivalric romance penetrated into Russia already in modern times (XVII-XVIII centuries) and was a reworking of Western European samples in the domestic way ("The Tale of Peter the Golden Keys", "Bova the King", etc.). By the end of the 18th century, the Russian chivalric romance was forced into the space of the so-called "popular literature"(cheap editions, designed for undemanding, illiterate readers).

The medieval novel often had a poetic form, sometimes with the addition of prose parts. Subsequently, the European novel becomes exclusively prosaic, and a deviation from this norm - Pushkin's novel in verse "Eugene Onegin" is perceived by contemporaries as an innovative work.

Following the romance of chivalry, there is also pastoral romance(lat. pastoralis- shepherd), which has even more ancient roots than knightly. In ancient Greece, in III century BC e. in the works of Virgil, Theocritus, and a century later in the works of Moschus and Bion, the so-called bucolic poetry(gr. boucolos- shepherd), praising the happy life of toiling villagers close to nature (its main forms were idyll And eclogue). This is where the concept of "idyll" comes from, denoting a state of inner silence and peace, harmony with the environment. In the 15th-16th centuries, the pastoral novel became popular in the literatures of Europe, and the name of one of them "Arcadia" by J. Sannazaro (1504) became a symbol of a corner of serene life, full of love and bliss. In the 17th century, the pastoral romance acquires a distinctly aristocratic coloration: nature in it becomes only an elegant decoration for the gallant verbiage of curled and discharged "shepherds". In modern speech, the word "pastoral" has a somewhat ironic connotation, indicating the affectation and sugariness inherent in this genre.

Real life has always been far from idyllic, and the more complex the social structure of society became, the less idyllic the relations between classes became. The aggravation of relations between the estates was clearly reflected in adventurous everyday life, or picaresque novel. The picaresque novel arose at the end of the 15th century in Spain and there, almost immediately, it acquired a classical form that remained practically unchanged for more than three centuries. The main protagonist of the picaresque novel is a clever rogue, an adventurer who by all possible means makes his way to the upper strata of society. The narration in it is usually conducted on behalf of the hero as his story or recollection of the experience. The hero goes through many steps of the social ladder and observes life not from its front side. The moral promiscuity of the character finds an explanation in exposing the various vices of society, where everyone is concerned only with their own success.

The first brilliant example of a picaresque novel was the anonymous work of the Spanish author "Lazarillo from Tormes, his hardships and misadventures" (1554). In Spain, the famous "Biography of the rogue Guzmán de Alfarache" by Alemán y de Enero (1604) and "The life story of a rogue named Don Pablos" by F. Quevedo y Villegas (1625) were also created.

The Spanish picaresque novel also had an impact on literature in a number of other European countries. The best examples of this genre are the novel by the German writer X. J. K. Grimmelshausen "Simplicissimus" (1669), the books by the Frenchman A. R. Lesage "The Lame Demon" (1707) and "The History of Gilles Blas from Santillana" (1715–1735). In Russia, under the influence of French translations and alterations, the picaresque novel appears in the second half of the 18th century and still exists at the beginning of the 19th century.

("A Handsome Cook, or the Adventures of a Depraved Woman" by M. Chulkov, 1770; "Russian Zhil Blaz, or the Adventures of Prince Gavrila Simonovich Chistyakov" by V. Narezhny, 1814; "Ivan Vyzhigin" by F. Bulgarin, 1829), and even in the 20th century ("The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf" by I. Ilf and E. Petrov; "Confessions of the Adventurer Felix Krul" by T. Mann).

In the era of classicism, the picaresque novel was supplanted by drama and lyrics, and only in the era of the Enlightenment did novel narrative again become in demand. Now, while maintaining the dynamics of the plot, the novel begins to gravitate towards psychologism. There is a new version of it - family novel. At the forefront in such a novel is a psychological analysis of "ordinary" (compared to the heroes of a picaresque novel or a classicist drama) characters.

Indicative in this sense are "Pamela" (1742) and "Clarissa Harlow" (1748) by the English prose writer S. Richardson. In an effort to capture the spiritual world of their characters in as much detail as possible, sentimental writers often resort to first-person narration, use the form of a diary, correspondence, which makes it possible to reveal all the nuances of a changeable "natural" feeling. It is from such positions that the novel “Julia, or New Eloise” (1761), which has become a standard for contemporaries, was written in the letters of the French writer and philosopher J. J. Rousseau. Following the authors of the picaresque novel, sentimentalists also touch on social problems, but they do not so much expose the vices of society as they warn against bad examples. Sentimentalists also created a special novel genre - travel romance, whose hero wanders around the wide world and observes life and customs in foreign lands, although he is most interested in his own experiences. Such are the world-famous novel by the Englishman L. Stern "Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" (1768) and Letters of a Russian Traveler (1795) by N. Karamzin close to this genre.

The English novelists of the 18th century, who, against a broad social background, depicted a hero acting and changing his attitude to life under the influence of external circumstances (G. Fielding "The Story of Tom Jones, a Foundling", 1749 and T. Smollet "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle", 1751), groping for principles realistic portrayal of reality. One of the first steps in this direction is historical novel, the ancestor of which is rightly called the English writer W. Scott.

W. Scott developed the principles of building a novel in which the fate of fictional characters is recreated against the backdrop of a real socio-historical conflict. In the works of the English novelist, for the first time, a prominent role is assigned to the people, and it is in their midst that the author finds the embodiment of high moral qualities. The strength of Scott's novels is also a thorough knowledge of the details of life and the language of past times, which he depicts. But in general, the writer's work is still characterized by a romantic orientation (the idealization of the Middle Ages, the attraction to mysticism, the "chosenness" of the central characters, etc.).

W. Scott's books found a warm response from his contemporaries and gave rise to many adherents. In Italy, this is A. Manzoni's novel "The Betrothed", in France - "Chuans" by O. Balzac and "93rd Year" by V. Hugo, in Russia - "Yuri Miloslavsky, or Russians in 1612" by M. Zagoskin and "Icy house "I. Lazhechnikova.

The historical European novel, which survived its heyday in the 1810s-1830s, remains one of the most popular genres to this day. Let us trace the fate of at least the Russian historical novel. The middle of the 19th century in Russia is a time of fierce ideological disputes and disagreements, writers are primarily concerned with solving modern social and moral problems, but even then and later the works of far from first-class historical novelists enjoy the attention of readers: E. Salias ("Pugachevtsy", 1874), Sun. Solovyov ("The Young Emperor", 1877; "The Tsar Maiden", 1878), D. Mordovtseva ("Idealists and Realists", 1876; "The Great Schism", 1884, etc.). The historical novel also developed intensively in the Soviet era: "Emelyan Pugachev" by V. Shishkov, "Genghis Khan" and "Batu" by V. Yan, "Sevastopol Strada" by S. Sergeev-Tsensky, "Dmitry Donskoy" by S. Borodin, "Original Russia" V. Ivanov, "The Cruel Age" by I. Kalashnikov, a series of novels by D. Balashov, novels by V. Pikul. Many works on historical themes were also created abroad (G. Senkevich, J. Lindsay, M. Druon, and others).

As an offshoot of the historical novel, whose heroes, wandering the seas and land, find themselves in the center of significant events around the middle of the 19th century, there arises adventure novel, or, as it is also called, adventurous. The pedigree of the adventure novel goes back to the ancient Greek, knightly and picaresque novel, in which, as we know, a lot of space was given to the adventures of the heroes.

A strict definition of an adventure novel is hardly possible, since elements of an adventurous plot are present to one degree or another in all the above-mentioned varieties of the novel genre. Should the novel by A. Dumas "The Three Musketeers" be considered a historical or adventure novel, or can it be classified as a historical adventure or even just a romantic work, since Dumas handled historical facts very freely? The most complete signs of the adventure genre - sharp plot twists, contrast of characters, lack of psychological depth of characters, which determine the dynamism of the action - can be traced in works that seem to fall out of the array of "big" literature. However, due to the lack of psychological analysis, the formulation of complex social or philosophical problems, it would be wrong to consider the adventure genre as "second-class" literature, since it has other tasks, which are to glorify the courage and will, resourcefulness and courage of heroes, to tell about unknown countries and mysterious incidents, etc. This range of questions has always interested the general reader, especially youth, it is no coincidence that the adventure novel had and will have the widest readership. And nowadays, the novels of F. Marietta, T. Mine Reed, L. Boussenard, R. Haggard, P. Benoit, R. Kipling, already outdated by many criteria, are reprinted and are in high demand, and not only among young people.

In Russian literature, the adventure genre has not become as widespread as in Europe and America (J. Conrad, J. London, F. Bret Hart), but it also has a number of works that can be put on a par with foreign classics of this genre (books by A. Green, A. N. Tolstoy, A. Rybakov and others).

close to adventure and detective novel(English) detective- detective). The beginning of the detective was laid by the short story by E. Po "Murder in the Rue Morgue" (1841), in which the protagonist is an amateur detective, endowed with brilliant intellectual abilities. Through deduction, he reconstructs the entire course of events in separate fragments and discovers the culprit of the crime.

The image of Sherlock Holmes, created by the English writer A. K. Doyle, gained world fame. Soon the detective becomes cramped within the framework of the story, and he takes on a novel form. Like an adventure novel, a detective story is primarily a novel of action (the novels by E. Gaboriau, G. Leroux, P. Ponson du Terraille, E. Wallace, D. Hammett, etc.), but the tendency to demonstrate intellectual capabilities of the hero, the development of psychological motivations for the actions of the characters along with the characteristics of the social environment (A. Christie, J. Simenon, R. Stout, Boileau and Narcejac, M. Cheval and P. Vale and others). The Russian detective story developed sluggishly until the middle of the 20th century. Among the representatives of this genre, the works of L. Sheinin, L. Ovalov, the Vainer brothers, S. Vysotsky and others should be mentioned, but, as a rule, their artistic level is not too high. The genre of the political detective was exploited most actively in Soviet literature (V. Kozhevnikov, Yu. Semenov). The Russian detective has been doing well lately.

In the 19th century, there appears science fiction novel. Although fantasy (gr. fantastic- the art of imagining) and belongs to one of the oldest components of creativity, the conjugation of fiction with the data of science begins to be carried out only in an era when scientific and technological progress began to have a noticeable impact on the development of society. One of the first exponents of faith in the unlimited possibilities of science and technology was the French writer J. Verne. In his numerous novels, translated into almost all European languages ​​(20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1870; Mysterious Island, 1875; 500 Million Begums, 1879; Lord of the World, 1904, etc.), J. Verne created the images of eccentric scientists, whose discoveries are used to the detriment of humanity by villains, and fighters for social justice, who rely on the use of the fruits of science for the benefit of all peoples, which later became standard among his successors and imitators. In his books, the writer pointed to many branches of human society, where the introduction of technology will make life easier. As shown by researchers of the French science fiction writer, many of J. Verne's predictions were successfully put into practice over time. In psychological terms, the works of J. Verne are usually somewhat straightforward (however, science fiction, like the detective story, has a different scale of aesthetic values, and psychological depth is not mandatory for it). With the creative activity of J. Verne, the very emergence of the term "Science fiction"(English) science fiction).

Another trend in science fiction was outlined in the work of the English writer G. Wells. In his novels The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898) and The Invisible Man (1897), the writer does not consider the invention as such. He was only interested in the social and psychological consequences of scientific and technological progress. In the novel "The First Men in the Moon" (1901), Wells created perhaps the first example of a dystopia. Utopia(gr. ou- no and topos- a place; in other words, a place that does not exist) is one of the stable prose types of narration, although it can be framed as a novel, as a story, and even as a scientific treatise. A classic work of this kind, the name of which defined the whole genre, "Utopia" (1516) by the English statesman and philosopher T. More, who depicted the ideal structure of the state from his point of view. Subsequently, this task attracted many writers and thinkers (T. Campanella, F. Bacon, A. Veltman, V. Odoevsky and many other writers, the famous fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna in N. Chernyshevsky's "What is to be done?"). The weakness of a utopia is that it always reflects ideas limited by the era and personal predilections of the author, which seem to him to be universal. So, T. Mor did not see anything special in the fact that happy Utopians use forced and slave labor. Wells, in many of his books, warned against blind faith in the omnipotence of science.

Fiction of the 20th century basically followed the path laid by G. Wells (the warning novels of G. Huxley "Brave New World", J. Orwell's "1984", R. Bradbury's "451 ° Fahrenheit", etc.).

Russian science fiction began with "Aelita" and "Hyperboloid of engineer Garin" by A. Tolstoy, in which the genre form was only a shell for exposing capitalism and asserting the idea of ​​a revolutionary renewal of the world. The anti-utopian novel by E. Zamyatin "We" (published abroad in 1924, and in our country saw the light only in the late 1980s) was a kind of antipode of A. Tolstoy's novels, because it contains "conquests" revolutions were presented in the guise of totalitarianism.

The ideological atmosphere in the USSR, decreed by the authorities, contributed to the emergence of only such works, the heroes of which, overcoming all sorts of obstacles, look to the future with confident optimism (novels by A. Kazantsev, A. Adamov, I. Efremov, etc.). Only in the 1960s-1980s did books appear that introduce the idea that in the realm of "victorious socialism" idyllic prosperity is unlikely to ever be achieved (the novels by A. and B. Strugatsky "Monday begins on Saturday", " It's hard to be a god", "Snail on the slope", "Roadside picnic", "Beetle in an anthill", etc.).

In modern science fiction, works based on a fairy tale are widespread (English, fantasy), presented in the works of R. Zelazny, W. le Guinn, K. Simak, K. Bulychev and many other science fiction writers. Particularly indicative of this direction is the fairy-tale trilogy of the Englishman J. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" (1954-1955), so popular that societies of "Tolkienists" have arisen all over the world, which discuss the problems posed in the trilogy and reproduce the scenes in a playful way. from the lives of Tolkien's characters.

And yet the main acquisition of the 19th century was the novel, the authors of which did not delve into the past, did not try to foresee the future, but sought to embrace and illuminate the diversity of the human personality in its various relationships with other individuals and the society of the present.

Stendhal is already moving from a story about a private fate to an image of the main "call of the times" ("Red and Black", 1831). The search for social patterns of being permeated the work of Balzac, who sought to identify the social, moral and other laws that contemporary society is forced to observe. After Balzac, writers rely not only on life experience and imagination - they try to discover the social and philosophical background of the actions of their heroes, to prove that in the moral and psychological sense, any person, regardless of his social status, is worthy of attention and respect. The social sciences are now coming to the aid of the writer's intuition and fantasy.

During the 19th century, many masterpieces were created that captured a whole gallery of images that became common nouns for subsequent generations (Rastignac, Gobsek, Pickwick, Bovary, Tartarin, Dombey). Particularly noticeable were the successes in the field of psychological and social analysis in French (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert) and English (Dickens, Thackeray, and others) literature.

From the middle of the 19th century, the time of the "Russian novel" began, which, despite the fact that it arose later than the European one, developed very intensively. Russian novelists, starting with Pushkin, also consider the fate of their heroes as a derivative of the socio-political structure. In the works of Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Goncharov, the actions and psychology of the characters are determined by upbringing and, above all, by the influence of the "environment", which was understood as a combination of socio-economic circumstances.

The discovery of world artistic significance was the depiction of L. Tolstoy's psychological portrait in motion and contradictions. Refusing to reproduce the character as a kind of fraction, where the numerator is the main property of this character, its "core", and the denominator is the circumstances that affect the actions of the individual, and the numerator remains unchanged, no matter how the denominator changes. Tolstoy created images of world significance (Pierre Bezukhov, Platon Karataev, Anna Karenina, Fedor Protasov and others). Unlike his predecessors, Tolstoy showed that human psychology is changeable, just as life itself is changeable (a smart person can find himself in a stupid position, a kind person is sometimes capable of cruelty, etc.). According to the apt definition of N. Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy discovered the "dialectics of the soul."

It is also difficult to overestimate the contribution made to the formation of a novel of a new type by F. Dostoevsky, whose lessons are still being learned by artists all over the world. Exploring the character of a "private" person living in a narrow, closed world, Dostoevsky sees in his heroes certain universal figures associated with "all-human" existence. The inconsistency of any soul, its throwing between "heaven" and "earth", a passionate desire to find the Truth, for the knowledge of which any person pays with suffering - these are the central motives of Dostoevsky's work.

Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are primarily concerned with the search for moral solutions to "eternal questions", but, like all Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century, their works are imbued with burning topicality. The heroes of their books take to heart the political and social problems of their fatherland and the whole world.

Without understanding and continuing the traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the work of D. Galsworthy, R. Martin du Gard, T. Mann, R. Rolland, K. Chapek, W. Faulkner, G. Böll, J. Steinbeck, Kobo Abe and many other writers whose works recreate a wide panorama of the complex and often tragic social life that exists both thanks to and despite the efforts of its individual participants. Almost all heroes lose the battle with life and painfully search for the origins of their failures and the meaning of human existence in general. This is the result of observations of the reality of many artists at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. Until the middle of the 20th century, the theme of the absurdity of being was developed in their books, the concreteness of the image is replaced by symbols of things and phenomena, and the meaning of what is happening is interpreted in mythological terms (J. Joyce, F. Kafka, G. Marquez, etc.).

After the Second World War, disappointment in the eternal humanistic values ​​gives rise to an existentialist novel (J.P. Sartre, A. Camus, etc.), which preaches the cosmic loneliness of a person and the deliberate doom of any attempts to change anything in the world, while at the same time asserting the freedom of the individual. In the 1950s and 1970s, primarily in France, a trend arose known as the "new novel" or "anti-novel" (N. Sarrot, C. Simon, A. Robbe-Grillet and others). The "new novel" is characterized by an appeal to the elements of the unconscious as determining the meaninglessness of the existence of all living things, the primacy of a hero-free and plotless narrative, and the affirmation of the priority of a literary device over content.

For the novel of the 1980s-1990s, the mythological saturation of the narrative is indicative, no matter what time it refers to (W. Eco "The Name of the Rose", G. Marquez "One Hundred Days of Solitude", etc.). The writing technique here also prevails over the content.

Since the USSR was behind the ideological "Iron Curtain" for seven decades, the development of the novel in it, as well as all art in general, followed a path different from the Western one. Until the end of the 1920s, writers still perceived the ideas of their Western counterparts and exchanged artistic discoveries. After the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), at which socialist realism was proclaimed as the main method of art, Russian literature was administratively declared the sole guardian and defender of humanism (and the literatures of the republics that were part of the USSR were also attached to it). All other currents in world literature were classified as reactionary and dead ends.

Soviet multinational literature, patronized by the party, was obliged to be guided by the principles of depicting life in its revolutionary development and to educate the reader in the spirit of communism on the example of numerous modifications of the image of a "real person". Everything that did not fit into the framework of socialist realism could not see the light (novels by A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov, V. Grossman) or was published abroad (B. Pasternak, A. Sinyavsky and others).

Only after the political thaw (late 1950s - early 1960s) did novels appear in which the multicolor and drama of the "beautiful and furious world" (A. Platonov) are depicted taking into account universal moral values ​​(Yu. Trifonov, V. Rasputin , V. Astafiev, V. Belov, Ch. Aitmatov, F. Iskander and others). These works could not fit into the Procrustean bed of socialist realism - it was not for nothing that Soviet literary criticism made a timid attempt to define the current state of Russian literature as "realism without shores", but this "sabotage" was soon suppressed by vigilant guardians of ideological foundations. And the novels of A. Solzhenitsyn, the publication of which the leading magazines of the country informed readers more than once, were not published until the end of the eighties.

And only the collapse of the totalitarian system in the USSR gave writers the opportunity, along with the classical form of the novel, to experiment in the field of form and content (the work of V. Pietsukh, L. Petrushevskaya, Ven. Erofeev, V. Pelevin, T. Tolstoy, F. Gorenstein, etc.) . In the last two decades of the 20th century, the works of A. Bitov, G. Vladimov, V. Makanin and others created earlier were also in demand.

In the literary hierarchy, after the novel comes the story. Tale- this is an epic work, a kind of intermediate stage between a novel (large form) and a short story or short story (small form).

The boundary between the novel and the short story cannot always be clearly marked. For example, Turgenev's novel "Rudin" can formally be called a story, while Pushkin's story "The Captain's Daughter" to a large extent satisfies the requirements for a novel.

In ancient Russian literature, any narrative, story, claiming to be an objective presentation of events, was called a "story", while a work of a subjective-lyrical nature was called a "word". Thus, already the titles in the literature of the XII-XVII centuries informed the reader about the direction of the work ("The Tale of Igor's Campaign", "The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land", "The Tale of Peter and Fevronia", "The Tale of Grief-Misfortune").

In modern Russian and foreign prose, the boundaries between the novel and the story are very flexible, and the difference between them cannot always be accurately determined.

In the classical story, the static components of the plot are in the foreground - the psychological state of the hero, the landscape, the interior, etc. The plot in the story is not as dynamic as in the novel, an important place in the story is given to the narrator, often speaking in the first person ("The Enchanted Wanderer" N. Leskov, "Childhood" by M. Gorky).

The story repeats almost all novel modifications, with the exception of the early ones (picaresque and chivalric novels). In addition, there is another special kind of story - philosophical story, almost unparalleled in novel form. In a philosophical story, everything is subordinated to the disclosure of some political or philosophical thesis. It was a widespread genre of the Enlightenment, especially loved by Voltaire, who worked on solving the problem of "world evil" ("Zadig, or Fate", "Candide, or Optimism", "Micromegas").

Story- one of the dominant genres in modern prose. Almost until the end of the 19th century, a story was understood not so much as a specific genre form, but as a manner of narration in a novel or story, and only A. Chekhov fixed in the mind of the reader the difference between a story as a small form and a story and a novel.

Currently, a story is a short narrative work in which a limited number of characters act and a single event is described. The story requires the author to be laconic in the narrative, which is usually achieved by a strict selection of the details of the description or the characteristic features of psychology and actions. For example, in A. Chekhov's story "The Daughter of Albion", a psychological portrait of an English governess is created by emphasizing her permanent expression. "Looks at everything with contempt..." "She slowly turned her nose in the direction of Gryabov and measured him with a contemptuous glance. From Gryabov she raised her eyes to Otsov and poured contempt on him." "A haughty contemptuous smile ran across her yellow face." True, emphasizing details in a portrait or interior is not the prerogative of only small forms. Let us recall the description of the estate and dwelling of Sobakevich or Manilov in Dead Souls.

The type of story is short story(ital. novella- news). The short story has all the hallmarks of a story, but differs from it in a greater tension of the plot and a reduction in descriptive space, and an unexpected, paradoxical denouement is indicative of the short story. Having arisen in the Renaissance in Italy ("Decameron" by Boccaccio), the short story spread throughout Europe, although the short story, along with the story, notes its second birth already in the 19th century.

The heyday of the short story falls on the period of romanticism (E. T. A. Hoffman, E. Poe). Maupassant successfully performed in the novel genre. In the literature of the 20th century, the American writer O. Henry became a recognized master of the short story. In modern foreign literature, the short story gravitates toward grotesque images and sophisticated sophistication of form (X. Borges, X. Cortazar, J. Cheever). In Russian literature of the last decades of the 20th century, the short story is represented in the works of F. Iskander, A. Kim, A. Bitov.

Feature article differs from the story and the short story in the absence of a single conflict to be resolved and a significant amount of descriptiveness. For the essay, the documentary nature of the image and the journalistic sharpness are also indicative. On the example of some real event, often naming specific persons, the author clearly states his attitude to the described.

Essays can be divided into actually artistic, documentary and journalistic. In an artistic essay, we are talking about types and characteristic phenomena described from nature; literal correspondence with reality is not so important here ("Petersburg organ-grinders" by D. Grigorovich, "Essays of the Bursa" by N. Pomyalovsky). The journalistic essay brings to the reader's judgment any topical problems of our time, fixing the real names of the participants in the events, the time and place of what is happening, the author does not hide his attitude to the events (V. Ovechkin's books of essays "Regional Weekdays", "A Calf Butted an Oak" by A. Solzhenitsyn). The task of a documentary essay is to inform the reader about certain aspects of the current time, although this does not at all exclude problems. A documentary essay is a means of prompt response to what is happening, it is intended for publication in a newspaper or magazine, which, along with topicality, also determines the short duration of its sound.

close to essay feuilleton(from the French feuille- sheet). The existence of a feuilleton is inseparable from a magazine or newspaper. The feuilleton that arose in France at the beginning of the 19th century is characterized by the indispensable relevance of the topic, which receives a humorous or satirical sound in a small work. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the recognized "kings of the feuilleton" were A. Amfiteatrov and V. Doroshevich.

In Soviet times, M. Bulgakov, M. Zoshchenko, S. Narignani, L. Likhodeev, N. Ilyina and others performed in this genre.

Pamphlet(English, pamphlet- a sheet that is held in the hand) differs from the feuilleton in its political sharpness, precise addressing (the depicted person may not be named by name, but is easily recognizable), the obvious exaggeration of characters and the uncompromising position of the author. The pamphlet in Europe has a long history (the pamphlets of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Swift, Voltaire, Hugo), while in Russia it became widespread only from the middle of the 19th century (Belinsky, Herzen, Gorky).

Within the boundaries of the epic genre, there is also a genre of memoirs. Memoirs(lat. memory- memory, memories) can be written in the form of a confession or diary, a story about the experience (usually in the first person, although there are also memories in the third person). The value of memoirs lies not so much in their artistry, but in the reliability and significance of the events in question ("Notes" of Catherine II, memoirs of W. Churchill). It should be noted that not a single memoirist manages to achieve complete objectivity: wittingly or unwittingly, he seeks to justify his mistakes and mistakes, emphasize his significance, etc. J. Rousseau).

A number of epic genres are directly related to folklore. First of all, this fairy tale, one of the oldest varieties of the epic. The tale is an oral story with a predominance of a fantastic element. The fairy tale reflects the most ancient folk concepts about the arrangements of the world, about good and evil, etc. Since the fairy tale was intended for oral transmission, as a result of centuries of functioning, the same fairy story can exist in several versions.

Since the 18th century, fairy tales have been written down by scientists and writers ("A Thousand and One Nights", Russian fairy tales collected by A. Afanasyev; German fairy tales written down by J. and V. Grimm). Writers from all over the world turn to fairy tales (E. T. A. Hoffman, H. K. Andersen, Ch. Perrot, M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, L. Tolstoy, E. Schwartz, F. Krivin). The literary fairy tale, which arose in the 19th century and exists to this day, differs from the folk tale in that the former contains a psychological development of characters, and the plot echoes the present; strengthened in the literary tale and humorous beginning.

A fable is also close to a fairy tale - a short poetic allegorical story with an instructive ending. A prose fable is also possible. The fable originated in the 5th-6th centuries BC. e., and its ancestor is the ancient Greek sage Aesop. By his name, allegorical speech, so characteristic of the fable genre, is called "Aesopian language". The Panchatantra (Pentateuch) monument of ancient Indian literature of the 3rd-4th centuries, created on the basis of folklore, became a source of fable plots well-known all over the world.

Due to its brevity, imagery and accuracy of conclusions, the fable was a success in all walks of life. The universal human typicality of situations and their assessment in the fable make it an unfading genre, which, despite its seeming "simplicity", continues to exist today. In Russia, for example, these are the fables of D. Bedny, S. Mikhalkov, the prose fables of F. Krivin, continuing the traditions of I. Dmitriev and I. Krylov.

Akin to a fable parable- edifying-allegorical genre, characterized by symbolic fullness. A parable usually does not exist on its own, but in some literary context and serves as an artistic proof of a certain thesis, which may not be formulated directly. Only actions and their moral results appear in the parable, the psychology of the characters is not covered in it (the parable of the prodigal son; about the slave who did not increase the treasures entrusted to him, in the Gospel). The parable became widespread in the era of the emergence of Christian literature, although it is already found in the texts of the Old Testament. The parable has penetrated into literature since the end of the 19th century (A. Camus, F. Kafka, W. Faulkner, and others, who, according to the laws of the parable, create large genre forms - the novel and the story).

Centuries-old existence has and joke(gr. anekdotos- unreleased). For the first time, the concept of an anecdote arises as early as the 5th century in Byzantium and is associated with a brief instructive episode from the biography of a particular historical person. Then oral miniature narratives (sometimes an anecdote can consist of only 4–5 phrases) of a comic nature, often politically pointed, began to be called an anecdote. In the 20th century, an anecdote is always anonymous. It is based on a witty and unexpected denouement and most often touches on political or social issues. Anecdotes are most often in opposition to the existing system. Starting from the 15th century, jokes began to appear in the form of printed collections, but in the USSR they always functioned only orally, since political jokes were considered by the authorities as "hostile propaganda." In recent years, in Russia, jokes have also received printed distribution (see, for example, "The History of the Soviet State in Traditions and Anecdotes", collected by Yu. Borev. M., 1995).

In the Middle Ages, something close to a joke arises fabliau(French fabliau, from lat. fabula story, fable). Fablio is a short story based on external comedy and characterized by crude humor. Fablio ridicules universal human vices: greed, hypocrisy, stupidity, debauchery, etc. Like an anecdote, fablio influenced the development of the novel.

The kinship with the anecdote reveals and facies(lat. facetia- joke, sharpness) - a short comic story with a dynamic plot. During the Renaissance in Italy, facia began to figure among literary genres. In Russia, it has become widespread since the end of the 17th century, being borrowed from Poland, hence its then Russian name - "zhart" (a joke). Facetia in Russian literature of the 18th - early 19th centuries was quite common - some facies, for example, were included in N. Kurganov's famous "Pismovnik", which was repeatedly reprinted (second half of the 18th century).

Lyrics- a literary genre in which, unlike the epic, it is not the subject of the image that dominates, but the attitude of the author towards it. The lyrics operate with expressive forms of speech and are directly connected with the verse. The plot in lyrical works is poorly expressed and may be absent altogether. In the foreground in the lyrics is an image-experience, pursuing the goal of revealing the reality subjectively perceived by the author or some of its individual aspects. "The purest form of lyrics is meditation - concentrated reflection, self-contemplation, a direct stream of consciousness coming from the innermost depths of the author's "I".

Lyrics and epic, as already noted, are interpenetrating. In an epic work with a detailed plot, so-called "lyrical digressions" are often found, and the whole work as a whole can be colored with lyricism (novels and stories by M. Prishvin, "Vladimir country roads" by V. Soloukhin). You can also point to some lyrical genres characterized by a clearly expressed plot (poem, ballad, some varieties of song).

Epos and lyrics differ in the time of the depicted action. In the epic, the past tense predominates, while the lyrical work usually conveys the event or the feelings of the hero as occurring at the present moment. The lyrics are not characterized by detailed descriptions, detailed motivations. The lyrics seek to convey the uniqueness of an individual experience, enhanced to a universal scale, which allows the reader to perceive the lyrical work as a reflection of his own feelings.

Lyric forms do not have such a clear organization as in the epic. Lyrical genres are mainly distinguished by the specific content of the spiritual movement expressed in them (lyric poetry, love, landscape, philosophical, etc.). Such a clear division is indicative of the aesthetics of the past - antiquity, the Middle Ages. But already in the 18th and even more so in the 19th-20th centuries, such definitions were unproductive, since lyrical genres are almost never found in their pure form. Let's ask ourselves, for example, the question: can B. Pasternak's poem "In everything I want to get to the very essence ..." (1956) be attributed to any of the traditional genres? However, when studying the history of literature, it becomes necessary to be familiar with the main lyrical genres. Let's briefly characterize them.

Oda (gr. ode- song). In antiquity, this term first denoted any song in general, and then they began to call a lyrical choral song in honor of a person or event. In ancient Greece and Rome, the ode was one of the most common genres, then, until the 16th century, it was forgotten and was brought back into use by the efforts of the French poet Ronsard.

The era of classicism led to a new life of the odic genre, which became one of the main ones in poetry. The classicist ode praised statesmen and the monarch. Ode during this period generously uses the mythology of antiquity and develops a stately structure of speech and means of strict rhythm. Such are the odes of Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, M. Lomonosov.

In the era of pre-romanticism, the genre features of the ode begin to blur (odes by G. Derzhavin), and in the 19th century the ode almost loses its canonical signs (odes by V. Hugo, J. Keats, etc.). The 20th century, with its inclination towards intimate lyrics, refuses the ode as a rhetorical genre, and if the ode is still used by any poet, it is only in a figurative or ironic sense ("The time has come to ode / Talk about the fish farmer" E. Bagritsky, "Ode to the Revolution" by V. Mayakovsky). Nevertheless, the solemn tone of the ode did not completely disappear in the 20th century. "The official Soviet poetry of the era of totalitarianism was filled with odic intonations".

Elegy(from Greek. elegos- a mournful song) - a lyrical work imbued with a mood of sadness, and the narration in the elegy is conducted mainly in the first person. In ancient Greece, military prowess or patriotism were also the subject of an elegy (Tirteus - VII century BC). Subsequently, the sphere of the elegy was only the image of the joys and sorrows of love, and in Roman poetry the circle of the image in the elegy becomes even narrower - only suffering from unhappy love (Callimachus, Tibull, Ovid).

The elegy is found both in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, without, however, receiving much distribution. A new flowering of the elegiac genre comes along with romanticism (A. Chenier, E. Parny and others).

In Russia, elegy appears in the poetry of V. Trediakovsky and A. Sumarokov and becomes one of the favorite genres in the work of V. Zhukovsky, K. Batyushkov, A. Pushkin and E. Baratynsky. Meditative beginning (lat. meditation- in-depth reflection), inherent in the elegy, is preserved in the poetry of the 20th century (A. Blok, R. M. Rilke, N. Zabolotsky and others).

Hymn(gr. hymnos- praise) - a solemn song in honor of the gods or heroes. Varieties of the anthem dithyramb(from Greek. dithyrambos- choral song) - a chant composed in honor of Dionysus and accompanied by a stormy orgiastic dance, and paean(from Greek. paion- healer, savior) - a cult song in honor of Apollo. Over time, the anthem became an obligatory accessory of developed religious cults. Known hymns performed in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and India.

Christianity gave rise to new varieties of hymns: akathist(hymn in honor of Our Lady) kontakion(the similarity of the poem to a religious plot) and canon(9 songs on the plots of the Old Testament).

A secular modification of the hymn arises in the skeptical 18th century. First of all, this is the Marseillaise (words and music by C. Rouget de Lisle), which became the anthem of the Great French Revolution. In the 19th-20th centuries, every country acquires a hymn that expresses the ideology of the state in poetic form. In Russia, over the past two centuries, the anthem has changed several times.

Satire(lat. satura- mixture) - in antiquity a poetic genre in which the object of the image appears as something internally untenable, subject to ridicule. In the literature of ancient Rome, satire becomes a denunciatory genre (Horace, Juvenal), and over time, satire loses its genre definition and turns into a kind of literary genre. In satire, according to the definition of F. Schiller, "reality as a kind of imperfection is opposed to the ideal as the highest reality", and the satirical "ideal" is expressed through the "anti-ideal", that is, by depicting such a reality that violates moral or other social norms. Satire in the broad sense of the word is characterized by an appeal to allegory, to fantasy, to a philosophical understanding of reality.

So, having expanded the boundaries of its existence, satire turned from lyrics into epic and became a way of depicting ("Don Quixote" by Cervantes, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by M. Twain, "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik" by J. Hasek, "The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Soldier Ivan Chonkin" by V. Voinovich).

One of the varieties of satirical poetry that originated in ancient Greece is epigram(gr. epigramma- inscription) - a short poem in which a specific person or some social phenomenon is ridiculed. An epigram usually serves as a means of literary or social struggle and can be biased, but it becomes widely known when it expresses a general opinion. Such, for example, is the epigram of V. Gilyarovsky:

We have two misfortunes in Russia:

Below is the power of darkness,

Above the darkness of power.

In the era of antiquity arose and epitaph(gr. epitaphios, from epi- over, on and taphos- grave) - a tombstone inscription, most often made in poetic form. In this form, the epitaph has survived to the present day, although in recent years a detailed prose and verse epitaph has rarely been found. In the 19th century, on many tombstones one could find an epitaph borrowed from V. Zhukovsky's poem "Rural Cemetery" (1802):

Passerby, pray over this grave;

He found shelter in her from all earthly anxieties;

Here he left everything that was sinful in him,

With the hope that his savior, God, is alive.

In some cases, the epitaph could be addressed to a fictitious addressee and be satirical in nature (for example, the epitaphs of R. Burns).

Madrigal(from ital. madrigale- a song in the native language) is opposite in direction to the epigram and is a small poem of a love-complimentary nature, mainly addressed to a specific person. Madrigal originated in Italy in the 16th century and was popular in European salon poetry of the 17th-18th centuries. In Russia, the authors of madrigals were A. Sumarokov and N. Karamzin. There is a madrigal in Pushkin and Lermontov, in whom it sometimes acquires an ironic sound. Such, for example, is Pushkin's madrigal "To Sosnitskaya's Album".

You could combine with coldness of heart

Wonderful heat of captivating eyes.

Whoever loves you is very stupid, of course;

But whoever does not love you is a hundred times more stupid.

Message- a poetic work in the form of a letter and addressed to one or more specific persons. The epistle genre was already widespread in antiquity (Horace, Ovid), it was also used by modern poets, both European and Russian ("My Penates. Message to Zhukovsky and Vyazemsky" and "To Gnedich" by K. Batyushkov, "Message to Siberia" Pushkin). Some researchers find it possible to attribute to the genre of the prose message the type of literary appeal, which in the second half of the 20th century was called "open letter" ("Letter to Gogol" by V. Belinsky, "Letter to the leaders of the Soviet Union" by A. Solzhenitsyn).

One of the oldest lyrical genres, not associated with any particular situation or addressee, is song. The song is a poetic work, due to a certain melody. Initially, the song existed within the boundaries of folklore, and the text of the song and its musical accompaniment were created simultaneously, and the song itself gravitated towards a ritual ritual.

As a literary genre, the song originated in Ancient Greece (7th-5th centuries BC), and at the same time it was divided according to thematic features: wedding songs, hymn songs, elegy songs, love songs, drinking songs, etc.

In the Middle Ages, the song was mainly of a love nature (Provencal canzone), although it could also affect socio-political problems (sirvent).

A special place in the song genre occupied ballad. Initially, a ballad was a love song associated with rhythmic dance during performance (Provence. ballair- dance). Over time, the ballad lost its dance refrain, and then the song performance, and turned into a literary genre.

Approximately in the second half of the 18th century, the ballad acquires those features that are still defining for the ballad genre. The ballad becomes a lyrical epic work with a tense dramatic plot, usually on a historical theme, the solution of which also allows for the presence of a fantastic element. Among romantics, the ballad becomes one of the most popular genres. Schiller's ballads ("Cup", "Glove"), Goethe ("Forest King"), which subsequently received musical accompaniment, are well known. In Russian literature, the recognized master of the ballad was Zhukovsky ("Lyudmila", "Theon and Aeschines", etc.). Ballads were also written by Pushkin ("The Song of the Prophetic Oleg"), and Lermontov ("The Airship"), and A. K. Tolstoy ("Vasily Shibanov"). In modern poetry, the ballad genre is not common, although one can also mention the ballads of N. Tikhonov, E. Bagritsky, P. Antokolsky, E. Yevtushenko and others.

A special kind of song is a literary song. It may first appear as a poem that was not intended for singing, and then, sometimes without the knowledge of the author, acquire musical accompaniment and become a song proper. In this form, the literary song began to exist in the second half of the 18th century and immediately declared itself brilliant examples (songs by R. Burns, P. J. Beranger). In Russia, the first literary songs became widespread, first in educated circles, and then became the property of the people. There was also an opposite effect. The connection between a literary song and folklore is clearly seen in the work of A. Koltsov, N. Nekrasov, I. Nikitin. Some of their works have turned into folk songs, the text of which is known to everyone, and the author is known to few. So, for example, for almost a century and a half, the song "Glorious Sea - Sacred Baikal ..." lives as a folk song, based on a poem by the Siberian local historian D.P. Davydov, who composed his work in 1858.

Song music was composed by leading composers already in the 19th century (I. Gurilev, A. Verstovsky, A. Alyabyev). Composers collaborated especially with songwriters in the second half of the 20th century (I. Dunaevsky, M. Blanter, D. Pokrass, A. Pakhmutova, A. Petrov, and others).

One of the manifestations of the song genre is romance(French romance- Romanesque), acting simultaneously as a poetic and musical work, intended for solo singing with instrumental accompaniment. The music of romances based on the verses of famous poets was composed by composers of all countries (Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Sviridov, etc.). In a romance, the content and musical means are usually more complex than in songs, although the exact distinction between a romance and a song is not always easy to draw.

In the last third of the 19th century, a specific kind of song genre took shape in Russia - ditty- an improvised short, usually four-line song, designed for simple musical accompaniment (accordion, balalaika). Chastushka can be performed without music. It originated in the village, then moved to the city, but never became a full-fledged part of urban folklore. The ditty is mainly dominated by love themes, but along with it, satirical or humorous is widespread. There is a ditty on the stage - satirical or parodic, but in general the ditty disappears before our eyes.

The third literary genre is drama. Drama belongs simultaneously to literature and theater. The success of a theatrical production depends not only on the merits of the text (although this circumstance is the most important), but is also largely determined by the performance of the ensemble cast, the director's interpretation, artistic and musical arrangement, etc.

Drama, in comparison with lyrics and epic, has distinct features.

In the drama, the action is in the foreground, due to which the characters in the drama are outlined with sharp strokes. In the characters that are brought out in the drama, the conflict element prevails, arising from socio-historical or universal moral contradictions.

Most dramatic works are built on the external unity of action, in which all events and characters are subject to the same principle. Ancient theater (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes) and drama of the 16th-19th centuries were based on this principle. In the overwhelming majority of dramatic works, the unity of action remains inviolable, since, according to the stage conditions, the number of characters in the drama is less than in the novel, and they have to act in a limited temporal and spatial sphere, so the author is forced to reckon with these circumstances and declare his ideas in a pointed form.

In the drama there is only one means of characterizing the characters - direct speech, expressed in monologues and dialogues. The personality of the author, his thoughts and feelings in the drama are transmitted only through the actions of the characters and the pathos that animated the work. The only way the author has to explain the psychology and appearance of the characters is remarks. However, remarks, with rare exceptions (plays by B. Shaw), are brief instructions for the director, actors and artist who designs the performance. For the viewer, if he has not read the play, the remark disappears.

From ancient times until almost the end of the 19th century, drama remained the most widespread form of verbal art. The theater was attended by hundreds and thousands of spectators, while the number of readers was much smaller. There are several reasons for this. Drama allows you to perceive thoughts and images in living pictures, and the acting allows you to emphasize the author's idea, conveying it even to an inexperienced viewer, which creates a single "field of attraction" in the auditorium. And finally, the theater is not only a pulpit from which they preach, but also a festive place of communication, distracting from everyday worries. It is no coincidence that plays fail in reading, and there are few people who like to read a play and not watch it in the theater.

The development and improvement of cinema has shaken and largely undermined the powerful attraction of the theatrical spectacle. This process has intensified with the advent of television. And yet, neither cinema nor TV has killed and will not kill the theatre, because the acting "live" and the very atmosphere of the auditorium have an impact that surpasses the possibilities of cinema and television, despite all the technical marvels that are inaccessible to the theater. This was understood in the 1920s and 1930s, when large luxurious cinemas were created, the decoration and atmosphere of which were designed to imitate theatrical ones.

From drama in the broadest sense of the word (drama as a genus) one should distinguish drama - a literary form.

The oldest form of drama is tragedy(gr. tragos- goat and ode- song), arising as a play out of scenes associated with the cult of veneration of the god of winemaking Dionysus. During the ritual performance, a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus - hence the name.

Tragedy as a dramatic form took shape in ancient Greece around the 5th century BC. e. The content of the ancient Greek tragedy is based on conflicts that affected the interests of the people and were elevated to a universal level. This explains the enduring sound of ancient tragedies - Aeschylus or Sophocles. According to Aristotle, tragedy causes a feeling of fear and compassion, which contributes to the purification of the soul (catharsis).

A new stage in the development of the possibilities of tragedy is the Renaissance. Shakespeare's tragedies are permeated with the pathos of the drama of human life in a whirlpool of passions and desires and at the same time sound like a hymn to the glory of the energy and life-giving power of the human mind. Shakespeare brought everyday and comic beginnings to the harsh sublimity of ancient tragedy, abandoned the monotonous nature of characters and included colloquial elements in the high vocabulary.

Shakespeare did not have direct successors for a long time. Following the "English bard" playwrights of the era of classicism were primarily equal to the "high" antiquity, the achievements of which were declared exemplary. The rationalistic dramaturgy of classicism gravitated toward "mathematical" compositional perfection, demonstrating the primacy of duty to feeling (Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, and others).

The genre of tragedy did not die out even during the period of romanticism, when the aesthetics of rationalism was supplanted by the poetry of stormy individual passions (Schiller, Goethe, Hugo).

In Russian literature, tragedy arose along with the emerging classicism (plays by Sumarokov, Knyaznin, Kheraskov, Ozerov) and, as a reflection of the aesthetics of classicism, existed until the beginning of the 19th century.

A new stage in the development of Russian tragedy began with the advent of Pushkin's Boris Godunov. He built his work on completely new principles, which seemed unacceptable to most of his contemporaries. Using the achievements of Shakespeare, the poet boldly combined the tragic and the comic, "high" and "low", making the object of the image not the fate of the individual, but "the fate of the people."

Since the middle of the 19th century, tragedy has not been a frequent guest on the Russian stage (historical trilogy by A. K. Tolstoy, "Thunderstorm" by A. Ostrovsky, which the author himself called a drama).

In Soviet times, the genre of tragedy was practically not in demand due to the general ideological orientation towards cheerful art. Indicative in this sense is the title of V. Vishnevsky's play Optimistic Tragedy (1933), which tells the story of the transformation of an anarchist detachment into a disciplined regiment of the Red Army and its selfless death for the victory of the common proletarian cause. European tragedy was devoid of such a major mood, although it did not lose its humanistic pathos (R. Rolland, J. P. Sartre, J. Anouilh, and others).

Tragedy in the ancient tradition was opposed to comedy (Greek. komodia, from komos- a merry procession and ode- song). Comedy in antiquity was understood as a stage work with a happy ending, and the characters and events in it were presented in a funny way. Unlike tragedy, where gods and heroes acted, comedy characters belonged to the lower classes.

Modern comedy is designed to ridicule that which in the social or moral spheres is contrary to social norms. A positive hero is not required for a comedy. The ideal, in the name of which any phenomenon is ridiculed, can be represented through the negation of the "improper".

To create comic situations, the author has two main possibilities: the comedy of external positions (falls, the character’s inability to navigate correctly in an unfamiliar environment, the appearance of one hero under the name of another, etc.) and speech means (irony, parody, alogism, paradox).

The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes is considered the father of comedy. In ancient Rome, the works of Terentius and Plautus were famous. Antique comedy revolved around the themes of the private life of a person from the lower classes.

Medieval comedy borrowed a lot from carnival processions, in which stable characters were developed, exposed to ridicule (stingy, quarrelsome, deceived husband, etc.), and a number of repetitive situations.

This is how the poetics of the Italian comedy of masks (ital. commedia dell "arte), where characters familiar to the viewer (Doctor, Harlequin, Pulcinella, Pantalone, etc.) played impromptu scenes that were frankly farcical or buffoonish in nature. Farce (from lat. farcio- to fill) - comedy inserts in the mysteries (see below). These scenes were filled with a rude free-thinking spirit, and they also met recognizable characters (a rogue servant, a pedant scholar, a simpleton husband, etc.). close to farce buffoonery(ital. buffonata- clowning) - episodes or situations based on a roughly emphasized comedy of situations (pouring water, hitting with a stick, falling, etc.). Buffoonery makes itself felt most clearly in modern circus clowning.

The comedy of masks is indicative of the period of the formation of the European national theater. Subsequently, only separate elements of the comedy of masks will remain in dramaturgy, although its traditions have not completely disappeared to this day (for example, directorial works by V. Meyerhold, "Princess Turandot" staged by E. Vakhtangov, etc.).

In the poetics of classicism, comedy belonged to the category of low genres, but it was the comedies that immortalized the name of Moliere, in whose work bright stage situations are combined with the relief of characters. Another masterpiece of French comedy of the 18th century, The Marriage of Figaro by P. Beaumarchais, is based on the same principles.

As dramaturgy develops, the emphasis in situation comedy shifts to the complex architectonics of intrigue, and the comic of situations is replaced by the comic of characters. The transitional link from the comedy of characters becomes vaudeville(French vaudeville, from Vau de Vire- the area in Normandy where this genre originated; according to other data - voix de ville city ​​voices). The first news about vaudeville dates back to the 15th century, but then it was not yet particularly widespread.

Vaudeville in the 18th century was called couplet songs with a repetitive chorus, which were an indispensable attribute of fair performances. Later, it was the presence of song couplets that complemented or commented on the comedic action that became the hallmark of vaudeville. For the vaudeville of the 18th - the first half of the 19th century, a complex intrigue built on love relationships, saturation puns, unexpected situations with a mandatory successful outcome. In vaudeville, difficult problems are not posed, and if they arise, they are solved easily and simply, often as a result of a happy accident. The most striking examples of vaudeville were created in France in the 19th century and are represented by the works of E. Scribe and E. Labiche. In Russia, the vaudevilles of N. Khmelnitsky, A. Shakhovsky, D. Lensky, P. Karatygin, N. Nekrasov enjoyed the greatest success. And in the 20th century, the viewer was attracted by the vaudeville "Lev Gurych Sinichkin, or the Provincial Debutante" (1839), which, despite the fact that this is an alteration of the French original performed by D. Lensky, is so close to the domestic mores of the first half of the last century that it seems an original work.

In parallel with vaudeville in Russia, a genre of the so-called "noble", or "secular", comedy. The heroes of the secular comedy belonged to the noble "enlightened" class, the action in it revolved around a love affair, there was also a revealing moment in the secular comedy (ridicule of life beyond its means, secular prejudices, gallomania, etc.). Quite often secular comedy also served authors as a means of settling literary scores (parodying literary opponents). A. Shakhovskoy, N. Khmelnitsky, M. Zagoskin performed in the secular comedy genre. Artwork by A. Griboedov stands apart in this row. "Woe from Wit", being formally a typical "noble" comedy, pushes the narrow framework of a love affair and is based on the "drama of ideas", and the language of the play is a brilliant example of a laid-back lively speech, mastered only in Krylov's fables before Griboyedov.

A new flourishing period of Russian comedy begins in the 1840s. At the beginning of this period, there is N. Gogol's comedy "The Inspector General" and his other plays, from which the theater of A. Ostrovsky grows. In the plays of this playwright there is no clear line between the comic and the tragic, the characters are ambiguous, and the action is driven not so much by a love affair as by social and moral and psychological conflicts. For more than three decades, the Russian theatrical repertoire was determined primarily by the works of Ostrovsky, who had a strong influence on the development of Russian drama.

The essence of the comedy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is determined by the intensity of psychologism and the almost complete oblivion of the tradition of the comedy of masks. The comic nature of the situation gives way to the so-called "undercurrents" in the development of the plot ("The Cherry Orchard" by A. Chekhov). The almost forgotten genre of tragicomedy, which arose back in the Renaissance, is gaining new distribution. In the 20th century, tragicomedy reflects a sense of the relativity of social and moral criteria that arose in society after numerous social cataclysms of the 20th century. In modern tragicomedy (F. Durrenmat, J. Anouil, E. Ionesco, S. Beckett) it is impossible to single out the predominance of tragic or comic principles - they only reinforce each other, lead to unresolved, "postponed" conflict. However, it is precisely for this effect that modern tragicomedy is designed.

The result of the development of vaudeville poetics was operetta. The operetta, which originated in France in the middle of the 19th century, is a comedy-oriented work, and the proportion of musical accompaniment and vocal and dance scenes in it increases significantly compared to vaudeville. It is not for nothing that the author of an operetta is usually called not a playwright, but a composer (operettas by Strauss-son, Lehar, Kalman, Offenbach, etc.). Russian operetta arose already in the 20th century (operettas by I. Dunaevsky, Yu. Milyutin, V. Solovyov-Sedov).

Opera(ital. opera- I compose) is defined in dictionaries as "a type of theatrical art in which the stage action is closely merged with music - vocal and orchestral" and does not appear in literary reference publications, like operetta. Meanwhile, both operetta and opera still do not exist without a literary text. In the works of the 18th-century Italian poet-librettist P. Metastasio, the opera is sometimes called a "lyrical tragedy", and in the characterization of the world-famous 19th-century German composer R. Wagner, it is emphasized that he "brought opera closer to drama." Thus, while recognizing the main dependence of opera and operetta on music, one cannot at the same time reject them from literature.

So far we have spoken of drama only as a literary genus. But the term "drama" has another meaning. Actually drama is called one of the varieties of drama - a literary kind.

Drama occupies an intermediate position between tragedy and comedy. Like tragedy, drama is based on socio-psychological conflicts, but the conflict in drama is not as tense as in tragedy, and can have a relatively happy ending. Like comedy, drama revolves in the sphere of private life, which the playwright does not try to "correct" with laughter, but seeks to analyze the essence of the conflicts depicted in the drama. In drama, as in tragedy, a serious tone prevails, but nevertheless, comedy is not at all contraindicated for it.

Antiquity did not know drama as an independent form, although elements of drama are already present in the tragedies of Euripides and his successors. One of the first stages in the design of the drama was liturgical drama(gr. leiturgia- mass, the main Christian church service). In the 9th-13th centuries, it was a theatrical performance on the themes of the Old and New Testaments, played out during the Christmas and Easter services, so that newly converted Christians could visually familiarize themselves with church history (for example, "Act about Adam", XII century).

In the XIV-XVI centuries, the liturgical drama was transformed into mystery(from Greek. mysterion- secret, mystery). Mystery, which also drew stories from the Bible, left the gates of the church to the city square and the fair. Following episodes of religious content in the mysteries followed interludes(lat. Intermedius- located in the middle) - comic, farcical episodes, far from religiosity, and even parodying the main plot line. Over time, this trend only intensified, which caused displeasure in clerical circles, and from the middle of the 16th century, mystery plays were banned in most European countries. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, attempts were made in France and Germany to revive the mystery in new forms, which, however, were not crowned with success. V. Mayakovsky adapted the mystery shell to create a revolutionary heroic action ("Mystery Buff", 1918), emphasizing the parodic beginning in it.

Close affinity with the mystery had and morality(from lat. moralis- moral), which also originated in the XIV-XVI centuries. Morality was a folk performance of an instructive nature, the thematic range of which was very wide: from religious and philosophical subjects to historical, everyday and fairy tales. The morality characters had to be understood allegorically, which the audience was reminded of by the constant attributes of the characters (for example, Death appeared in a shroud, with a scythe and an hourglass, the World with a palm branch, etc.).

Drama in its modern sense does not appear earlier than the first half of the 18th century and receives the name "bourgeois drama". She opposed the "high" images and ideas of classicism and testified to the movement of art towards democratization.

The playwrights of this era (D. Diderot, G. Lessing, P. Beaumarchais, etc.) cease to bring kings and dukes to the stage, abandon the pathos of classicism and make people from the "third estate" the heroes of events, proving that the whole spectrum is available to common people. human feelings. Lessing's drama "Minna von Barnhelm" (1767) became one of the examples of such works.

Following the petty-bourgeois drama, melodrama also arises (gr. melos- song, melody and drama action, drama). Identification signs of melodrama are increased emotionality, sometimes turning into affectation, tension and intricacy of intrigue and moralistic sharpness. Melodrama originated at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries and exists to this day. One of the most long-lived melodramas was the melodrama of the French playwright V. Ducange "Thirty Years, or the Life of a Player" (1827), firmly established in the repertoire of European and Russian theaters. In the 20th century, melodrama migrated from theater to cinema and television screens.

Drama in its modern sense has come a long and difficult path, taking a leading place in the world of drama, and to characterize its development means to reproduce the history of all drama as a whole. Therefore, we confine ourselves to pointing out its most important stages. Romantic drama (first third of the 19th century), the pinnacle of which is represented by the works of V. Hugo; realistic drama (from plays by A. Ostrovsky, A. Sukhovo-Kobylin, A. Chekhov to dramas by G. Ibsen, G. Hauptman and L. Tolstoy); symbolist drama (M. Maeterlinck, G. Hofmannsthal, A. Blok). As a special period in the history of drama, one should consider the drama of the Soviet period, the general orientation of which depended on state ideological attitudes - in support of them, and sometimes in polemics with them (plays by V. Vishnevsky, K. Trenev, N. Pogodin, L. Leonov, K. Simonova, V. Rozova, M. Shatrova and others).

Domestic drama, like all literature in general, in recent years tends to mix the dramatic and the comic, the real and the symbolic, the sublime and the naturalistic.

The trend towards interpenetration and mixing of genres in literature and literary criticism, among other things, was expressed in the fact that any work (novel, fable, poem or newspaper feuilleton) began to be perceived as a text in general.

The concept of "text" is ambiguous. At first, it was associated with the works of antiquity: Assyrian, Old Russian, etc. texts. textum(lat.) is also fabric, clothing, connection, structure, style, style. textus- structure, plexus, coherent presentation. techo- weave, weave, combine and compose. Thus, the text is understood as something that did not exist in nature and was created by man, and all the elements of this text are skillfully interconnected.

In linguistics, a stricter definition of the text is given: it is "a work of a speech-creative process that has completeness, objectified in the form of a written document, literary processed in accordance with the type of this document; a work consisting of a title (title) and a number of basic units ... combined by different types lexical, grammatical, stylistic connection, having a certain purposefulness and pragmatic attitude" . Sometimes instead of the term "text" the term "discourse" is used, which was originally used to refer to works of oral speech. However, at present, discourse is more related to the conversational process, in which several interlocutors can participate.

The text is studied in three directions - in textual criticism, in poetics (see chapter I) and in hermeneutics. Hermeneutics (gr. hermeneia- interpretation, explanation) is engaged in the interpretation of texts, and not only ancient, but also of relatively recent origin. So, without a hermeneutic commentary, many passages of The Master and Margarita by M. Bulgakov or The Twelve Chairs by I. Ilf and E. Petrov remain "dark" for the reader.

The hermeneutic commentary depends on the era: some realities, generally understood at the time of the creation of a literary text, eventually pass away, and new generations need to clarify names, facts, ideas, concepts, etc.

Any literary text can be interpreted in different ways. It is known that for N. Dobrolyubov and his like-minded people, Oblomov and "Oblomovism" were a symbol of apathy and stagnation, and Stolz was a representative of soulless capitalism. N. Mikhalkov, in his film version of Goncharov's novel in Oblomov, appreciates the subtlety of the soul and romantic daydreaming, opposing them to the dry rationalism of Stolz. "... Nekrasov's poem "Railway" ... is dedicated to the denunciation of Russian officials who built the railway on the blood and bones of ordinary people. The poet Nekrasov himself probably thought so." At the end of the 20th century, in line with the neo-mythologized consciousness, the "Railway" in the interpretation of a modern researcher appeared as a glorification of the "construction sacrifice". "According to a fairly universal mythological idea, the building is stronger, the more human victims are brought to its altar (this is the basis of one of Sergei Parajanov's film masterpieces, The Legend of the Surami Fortress"). Nekrasov would be horrified by such an interpretation, but he himself poem "The Poet and the Citizen" writes:

Modern dictionary-reference book on literature. S. 246. Galperin I. R. Text as an object of linguistic research. M., 1981. S. 18.

Rudnev V.P. Dictionary of culture of the XX century. M., 1998. S. 307.

The theory of literary gender in classical aesthetics and modern science. The subject and "method of imitation" as a substantive basis for distinguishing between the epic, the lyrics of the drama . The peculiarity of generic poetics (“measures, composition and connections of elements” - V. Kozhinov), which is formed in the zone of a certain generic meaning. Characteristics of its components: the preferred volume of works, spatio-temporal connections and compositional-speech forms. Interaction of literary genres in the development of literature.

The concept of the genre as a way of structural and content organization of a work, a historically established, stable type of modeling the "image of the world". The system of genre-forming factors. Genre content and genre form. Installation on the reader's perception in the structure of the genre. Carriers of the genre: subjective organization of a work of art, its spatio-temporal structure, associative background, intonation-speech tone. General and individual in the genre. The memory of the genre and its renewal. Genre genus . Epic, lyrical and dramatic genres.

It has long been customary to combine verbal and artistic works into three large groups, called literary genera. This epic, drama And lyrics. Although not everything created by writers (especially in the 20th century) fits into this triad, it still retains its significance and authority in literary criticism.

Socrates discusses the types of poetry in the third book of Plato's treatise The State. The poet, according to Socrates, can, firstly, directly speak on his own behalf, which takes place “mainly in dithyrambs” (in fact, this is the most important property of lyrics); secondly, to build a work in the form of an “exchange of speeches” of heroes, to which the words of the poet are not mixed, which is typical for tragedies and comedies (such is drama as a kind of poetry); thirdly, to combine your own words with the words of strangers belonging to the characters (which is inherent in the epic): “And when he (poet. - V.Kh.) cites other people's speeches, and when he speaks on his own behalf in the intervals between them, it will be a story" 1 . The selection by Socrates and Plato of the third, epic kind of poetry (as mixed) is based on the distinction between the story of what happened without attracting the speech of actors (gr. diegesis) and imitation through deeds, actions, spoken words (gr. mimesis).

Similar thoughts about the types of poetry are expressed in Aristotle's Poetics. Three ways of imitation in poetry (verbal art), which are the characteristics of epic, lyric poetry and drama, are briefly described here: as Homer does, or in such a way that the imitator remains himself, without changing his face, or representing all the depicted persons as acting and active.

In the same spirit, as types of the relationship of the speaker (“the speaker”) to the artistic whole, the types of literature were repeatedly considered later, up to our time. However, in the 19th century (originally in aesthetics romanticism) a different understanding of the epic, lyrics and drama was also strengthened: not as verbal and artistic forms, but as certain 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 teachings specifically about verbal art). Thus, Schelling correlated lyricism with infinity and the spirit of freedom, epic with pure necessity, and saw in the drama a kind of synthesis of both: the struggle between freedom and necessity 3 . 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 beginnings 4 . 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 terminology corresponding to it) took root in Russian literary criticism.

In the XX century. the types of literature were repeatedly correlated with various phenomena of psychology (recollection, 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 genres of literature as types of speech organization of literary works are an undeniable supra-epochal reality worthy of close attention.

The theory of speech developed in the 1930s by the German psychologist and linguist K. Buhler, who argued that utterances (speech acts) have three aspects, sheds light on the nature of the epic, lyrics and drama. They include, firstly, message about the subject of speech (representation); Secondly, expression(expression of the speaker's emotions); third, appeal(appeal of the speaker to someone, which makes the statement actually an action) 2. These three aspects of speech activity are interconnected and manifest themselves in different types of statements (including artistic ones) in different ways. In a lyrical work, speech expression becomes the organizing principle and dominant. Drama emphasizes the appellative, actually effective side of speech, and the word appears as a kind of act performed at a certain moment in the unfolding of events. The epic also widely relies on the appellative beginnings of speech (since the composition of the works includes the statements of the characters that signify their actions). But messages about something external to the speaker dominate in this literary genre.

With these properties of the speech fabric of lyrics, drama and epic are organically connected (and it is precisely by them that they are predetermined) that other properties of the genres of literature are also: space-time organization of works; the originality of the manifestation of a person in them; forms of presence of the author; the nature of the appeal of the text to the reader. Each of the genres of literature, in other words, has a special complex of properties inherent only to it.

The division of literature into genera does not coincide with its division into poetry And prose. In everyday speech, lyrical works are often identified with poetry, and epic works with prose. This usage is inaccurate. Each of the literary genera includes both poetic (poetic) and prose (non-poetic) works. The epic in the early stages of art was most often poetic (epics of antiquity, French songs about exploits, Russian epics, historical songs, etc.). Epic works written in verse are not uncommon in modern literature (“Don Juan” by J. N. G. Byron, “Eugene Onegin” by A. S. Pushkin, “Who Lives Well in Russia” by N.A. Nekrasov). In the dramatic kind of literature, both poetry and prose are also used, sometimes combined in the same work (many plays by W. Shakespeare, "Boris Godunov" by AS. Pushkin). Yes, and lyrics, mostly poetic, sometimes prose (recall Turgenev's "Poems in Prose").

There are also more serious terminological problems in the theory of literary genders. The words “epic” (“epic”), “dramatic” (“dramaticism”), “lyrical” (“lyricism”) denote not only the generic features of the works in question, but also their other properties. epic called the majestically calm, unhurried contemplation of life in its complexity and diversity, the breadth of the view of the world and its acceptance as a kind of integrity. In this regard, they often talk about the "epic worldview", artistically embodied in Homer's poems and a number of later works ("War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy). Epicness as an ideological and emotional mood can take place in all literary genres - not only in epic (narrative) works, but also in drama (dramatic trilogy by A.K. Tolstoy) and lyrics (the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” by A.A. Blok ). dramatic It is customary to call the state of mind associated with the intense experience of some contradictions, with excitement and anxiety. And finally lyricism- this is 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", a poem by M.I. Tsvetaeva "Longing for the Motherland" Lyricism is imbued with the novel by I.S. Turgenev "The Nest of Nobles", plays by A.P. Chekhov "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard", stories and novels by I. A. Bunin. Epos, lyrics and drama, thus, are free from unambiguously rigid attachment to epic, lyricism and drama as types of emotional and semantic "sound" of works.

The original experience of distinguishing between these two series of concepts (epos - epic, etc.) was undertaken in the middle of our century by the German scientist E. Steiger. In his work "Basic Concepts of Poetics", he characterized the epic, lyrical, dramatic as phenomena style(tone types-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 poetry) combines these three principles: "I will not understand the lyrical and dramatic if I associate them with lyrics and drama" 1.

Epos, lyrics and drama were formed at the earliest stages of the existence of society, in primitive syncretic creativity. The first of the three chapters of his "Historical Poetics" A.N. Veselovsky, one of the greatest Russian historians and literary theorists of the 19th century. The scientist argued that literary genera 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. Epos, lyrics and drama were interpreted by Veselovsky as having developed from the “protoplasm” of ritual “choir actions”.

From the exclamations of the most active members of the choir (singers, luminaries), lyrical-epic songs (cantilenas) grew up, which eventually separated from the rite: “Songs of a lyrical-epic nature seem to be 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. On the basis of such songs, epic narratives subsequently formed. And from the exclamations of the choir as such, lyricism (group, collective) grew up, which, over time, also separated from the rite. The epic and lyrics are thus interpreted by Veselovsky as "consequences of the decay of the ancient ritual choir." The drama, the scientist claims, arose from the exchange of remarks of the choir and the singers. And she (unlike the epic and lyrics), having gained independence, at the same time "preserved the entire<...>syncretism” of the ritual choir and was a kind of its likeness 2 .

The theory of the origin of literary genera, put forward by Veselovsky, is confirmed by many data on the life of primitive peoples known to modern science. So, the origin of the drama from ritual actions is undoubted: 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 epic and lyric poetry could be formed independently of ritual actions. Thus, mythological legends, on the basis of which prose legends (sagas) and fairy tales were subsequently consolidated, arose outside the choir. They were not sung by the participants in the mass ritual, but were told by one of the representatives of the tribe (and, probably, such a story was far from being addressed to a large number of people in all cases). Lyrics could also be formed outside the rite. Lyrical self-expression arose in the production (labor) and domestic relations of primitive peoples. Thus, there were different ways of forming literary genera. And the ritual choir was one of them.

The genres of literature are not separated from each other by an impenetrable wall. Along with the works, unconditionally and wholly owned alone from literary genera, there are also those that combine the properties of any two generic forms - "bigeneral formations"(B.O. Korman's expression) 1 . On works and their groups belonging to two kinds of literature during the XtX-XX centuries. has been said repeatedly. Thus, Schelling characterized the novel as "a combination of epic and drama" 2 . The presence of the epic beginning in the dramaturgy of A.N. Ostrovsky. B. Brecht characterized his plays as epic. The works of M. Maeterlinck and A. Blok were given the term "lyrical dramas". Deeply rooted in verbal art lyro-epic, which includes lyric-epic poems (established in literature since the era of romanticism), ballads (having folklore roots), the so-called lyrical prose (usually autobiographical), as well as works where lyrical digressions are “connected” to the narrative of events, as, for example, in Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

In literary criticism of the XX century. Repeated attempts have been made to supplement the traditional "triad" (epos, lyrics, drama) and to substantiate the concept of a fourth (or even fifth, etc.) kind of literature. Next to the three "former" novels (V.D. Dneprov), and satire (Y.E. Elsberg, Yu.B. Borev), and the script (a number of film theorists) were placed 3 . There is a lot of controversy in such judgments, but literature really knows groups of works that do not fully possess the properties of epic, lyricism and drama, or even lack them altogether. It is right to call them non-generic forms. To some extent, this applies to essays. Here the attention of the authors is focused on external reality, which gives literary critics some reason to put them in a number of epic genres. However, in the 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 Kalinich” from Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter”, some works by G.I. Uspensky and M.M. Prishvin.

The so-called literature does not quite fit into the framework of traditional literary genres. "stream of consciousness" where not the narrative presentation of events prevails, but the endless chains of impressions, memories, emotional movements of the speaker. Here, consciousness, which most often appears disordered, chaotic, seems to appropriate and absorb the world: reality turns out to be “veiled” with the chaos of its contemplations, the world - placed in consciousness 1 . The works of M. Proust, J. Joyce, A. Bely have similar properties. Later, representatives of the "new novel" in France (M. Butor, N. Sarrot, A. Robbe-Grillet) turned to this form.

And, finally, it definitely does not fit into the traditional triad essay, which has now become a very important and influential area of ​​\u200b\u200bliterary creativity. At the origins of essays are the world-famous "Experiments" ("Essays") by M. Montaigne. The essay form is a casually free combination of summarizing reports about single facts, descriptions of reality and (which is especially important) reflections on it. Thoughts expressed in essay form, as a rule, do not claim to be an exhaustive interpretation of the subject, they allow for the possibility of completely different judgments. Essayistics gravitates towards syncretism: the beginnings of art proper here are easily combined with journalistic and philosophical ones.

Essayistics almost dominates in the work of V.V. Rozanova ("Solitary", "Fallen Leaves"). She made herself felt in the prose of A.M. Remizov ("Salting"), in a number of works by M.M. Prishvin (first of all, "Eyes of the Earth" are remembered). The essayistic beginning 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 Prospekt" N .IN. Gogol (the beginning and the end of the story), in the prose of T. Mann, G. Hesse, R. Musil, where the narration is abundantly accompanied by the thoughts of the writers.

According to M.N. Epstein, the basis of essayism is a special concept of a person - as a carrier not of knowledge, but of opinions. Its vocation is not to proclaim ready-made truths, but to split the inveterate, false integrity, to defend free thought, moving away from the centralization of meaning: here there is a “coexistence of the personality with the emerging word.” The author attaches a very high status to the relativistically understood essayism: it is the “internal engine of the culture of the new time”, the focus of the possibilities of “super-artistic generalization” 2 . Note, however, that essayism has by no means eliminated traditional generic forms and, moreover, it is able to embody a world attitude that opposes relativism. A vivid example of this is the work of M.M. Prishvin.

Thus, there are distinguishable generic forms proper, traditional and undividedly dominating in literary creativity for many centuries, and forms "extra-generic", non-traditional, rooted in "post-romantic" art. The first interact with the second very actively, complementing each other. Today, the Platonic-Aristotelian-Hegelian triad (epos, lyrics, drama), apparently, is largely shaken and needs to be corrected. At the same time, there is no reason to declare the three types of literature habitually distinguished as 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: “For ancient literatures, the terms epic, lyric, drama were not yet abstract. They denoted special, external ways of transmitting a work to a listening audience. Going into the book, poetry abandoned these modes of transmission, and gradually<...>types (meaning the types of literature.- V.Kh.) became more and more of a fiction. Is it necessary to continue the scientific existence of these fictions? 1 Disagreeing with this, we note that most literary works of all eras (including modern ones) have a certain generic specificity (epic, dramatic, lyrical form).

Generic affiliation (as well as greater or lesser involvement with "non-generic" principles) 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.

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15. The concept of rhythm. Units of rhythm (verse, meter, foot, rhyme, stanza). Rhythm as a constructive factor of verse.
Rhythm(Greek rhythmós, from rhéo - flow), the perceived form of the flow of any processes in time, the basic principle of the formation of temporary arts (poetry, music, dance, etc.). This concept is applicable to the spatial arts insofar as they presuppose a process of perception unfolding in time. Variety of manifestations Rhythm in various types and styles of art, as well as outside the artistic sphere ( Rhythm speech, labor processes, etc.) gave rise to many different definitions Rhythm, in connection with which the word " Rhythm» does not have terminological clarity. Among the definitions Rhythm 3 main groups can be identified. In the broadest sense Rhythm- the temporal structure of any perceived processes, formed by accents, pauses, division into segments, their grouping, ratios in duration, etc. Rhythm speech in this case is pronounced and audible accentuation and articulation, which does not always coincide with semantic articulation, graphically expressed by punctuation marks and spaces between words. In music Rhythm- this is its distribution in time or (more narrowly) - the sequence of durations of sounds, abstracted from their height (rhythmic pattern, in contrast to melodic). This descriptive approach is opposed by points of view that recognize Rhythm a special quality that distinguishes rhythmic movements from non-rhythmic ones; but they give opposite definitions to this quality. One of them understands Rhythm as regular alternation or repetition and proportionality based on it; ideal Rhythm- Accurately repeating swings of a pendulum or beats of a metronome. The aesthetic impression of such rhythmic movements is explained by the “economy of attention”, which facilitates perception and contributes to the automation of muscular work (for example, when walking). In speech, automation manifests itself in a tendency towards equal duration of syllables or spaces between stresses. More often, speech is recognized as rhythmic only in verse (where there is a certain order of alternation of syllables, stressed and unstressed or long and short), which leads to the identification Rhythm from meter(in music - with tact, musical meter). But it is precisely in poetry and music, where the role Rhythm is especially great, it is often opposed to meter and is associated not with correct repetition, but with the difficult to explain “sense of life”, the exciting power of striving forward, etc. “Rhythm is the main force, the main energy of verse. It cannot be explained” (V. V. Mayakovsky, “How to make poetry”). Contrary to the definitions Rhythm based on commensurability (rationality) and stable repetition (statics), the emotional and dynamic nature is emphasized here Rhythm, which can also appear without a meter (in rhythmic prose and free verse) and absent in metrically correct verses.

Rhythm (Greek - “proportionality”, “harmonicity. The concept of rhythm belongs to the most general and generally accepted features of poetic speech. Rhythm is usually understood as the correct alternation, repetition of identical elements. It is this property of rhythmic processes - their cyclicity - that is one of the foundations of versification. Each poetic phrase, each line has its own special rhythm, which we feel when reading. And when tapping or chanting, this rhythm becomes quite obvious. It is the presence of a rigid rhythm that allows the verses to fall on the music, become songs. Under the verses, you can march, dance, do exercise, that is, to perform rhythmic actions.Language flair, rhythmic hearing should have every poet, and if a person does not have these skills, then no rules of versification will help.

“Rhythm is the main force, the main energy of the verse. You can't explain it, you can only talk about it the way you talk about magnetism or electricity. Magnetism and electricity are types of energy. Rhythm can be one in many verses, even in all the work of the poet, and this does not make the work monotonous, since the rhythm can be so complicated and difficult to arrange that you can’t get to it even with several large poems, ”V. Mayakovsky considered.

The main difference between poetic and prose speech is in their different rhythmic organizations. Outside of rhythm there is no art of the word, but the rhythm of prose, subject mainly to syntax, is changeable and whimsical, here - "always" St. George's Day ". In a poetic work (or in a part of it), the rhythm in one way or another predictable. The speech stream is divided into relatively short and measurable segments, sound sequences (Greek. stichos- row; lat. prosa, from prorsa- straight, simple). The word "verse", in addition to its broad meaning (synonyms: poetic speech, poetry), means unit of rhythm. And “if the internal structure of the verse is determined by the phonetic features of the language, the national poetic tradition, then the division of speech into similar verses is characteristic of all systems of versification. This is a sign, so to speak, international. expressive graphics: each verse is usually written on a separate line; sometimes it is divided into sublines (“ladder” by V.V. Mayakovsky). The breakdown of the text into verses-lines opens up additional opportunities for the poet - in comparison with the prose writer - the possibility of rhythmic emphasis, special intonation of certain words, phrases.
The verse is rhythmic unity; according to the playful words of A.S. Pushkin, who compared poetic speech with a military formation, and a poet with a commander, “here every verse looks like a hero” (“House in Kolomna”). Being a unit of rhythm, the verse has special signs of its completion: after all the border between the verses should be noticeable! In Russian poetry, the signs of the end of a verse are a pause between lines, a stress constant, a clause, and also a rhyme (although the latter is not required). Let us briefly consider each of these "signals" of the rhythmic completion of the verse.
Interverse pause. In a printed (written) poetic text, the border between the verses is indicated by graphics, the breakdown of speech into lines; when reciting, it is necessary to maintain appropriate pauses.
Thanks to them, poetic speech sounds generally much slower than prose, and complex syntax is easier to perceive here.

METER is a term of ancient versification, literally: the measure of a verse, that is, the designation of that unit, which underlies the rhythm of a given poetic work. This content did not have a particularly stable meaning: by meter they meant both a poetic line (verse), and part of a line (for example, dipodia), and a foot (iamb, trochee), and a certain sequence of feet (for example, hexameter), and then strophic formations (for example . "Horatian meters"). The concept of meter in the theory of ancient (ancient Greek) verse also had a broader meaning, denoting generally poetic measured speech, in contrast to rhythm, which ancient theorists denoted not only the size, but also the chant associated with this size. The fact that the concept of M. has arisen in ancient verse, the rhythm of which is associated with the temporal longitudinal ratios of syllables (the so-called quantitative versification), fixes it precisely with ancient verse, as opposed to the newest verse, which is based on the ratio of stressed and unstressed syllables (the so-called qualitative versification); in this sense, metrical verse is ancient verse, based on isochronism (see), i.e., on equality in time of the rhythm units of the verse. Already in the Middle Ages, therefore, theorists contrasted the concepts of rhythm and rhythm, meaning by the first ancient verse (quantitative), by the second - a new verse based on stress. So.arr. the concept of rhythm in a broad sense is specific in relation to the concept of rhythm, denoting one of the systems of versification (antique). However, this concept is also used by many in relation to modern verse, which is hardly justified and leads to misunderstandings, since a new content is already being inserted into the term M..

FOOT is the primary rhythmic unit in a verse and is a combination of a stressed syllable with one or two unstressed ones. Since the rhythm is carried out by dividing speech into equal intervals, the foot is the one on which this equal-length is carried out. The meaning of the foot lies precisely in the fact that the rhythmic reading of any whole foot of the poem requires the same time, in the fact that all feet have isochronism (simultaneity). The feet are two-syllable - binary rhythms, - and three-syllable - ternary rhythms. The isochronism of the foot is realized, as the corresponding experiments show, only if the foot begins with a stressed syllable; hence it follows that the foot cannot begin with an unstressed syllable, and the so-called "iamb" is not a foot. An unstressed syllable before a stressed one at the beginning of a line is an unstressed attack (anacrusis) and does not count towards isochronism. Thus, the main and only stops are the binary stop with a stressed and two subsequent unstressed syllables and the ternary stop with a stressed and two subsequent unstressed syllables, i.e. what school metrics calls in our country "trochee" and "dactyl". "Iamb" is formed by a monosyllabic anacrus, "amphibrach" - by it, "anapaest" - by a two-syllable anacrus. A huge number of feet that existed in quantum verse (pyrrhic - two short ones, spondei - two long ones, bakhii - two long ones and one short one, ionics - three long ones and one short one, horiyamb - a combination of trochaic and iambic, antispastus - a combination of iambic and trochaic, prokelevsamatic - four short ones, tribrachs - three short ones, paeans - three short ones, one long one, etc.) do not exist in stressed verse, and attempts to use them end either in the game of half-impacts or various types of paused or profitable stops. The trinity dactylic foot has something in common with the ancient, so-called. cyclic dactyl, the third unstressed syllable does not have a weak semi-stress (see the analysis of the logaedic poem by Vyach. Ivanov in the pause scheme in Bozhidar's book "Chanting Unity", M. 1916). Generally speaking, in the foot there is no need for the stress of a stressed syllable to be precisely in such and such a measure (cf. the dimensional calculation of syllables in quantitative verse) is stronger than that which is called unstressed, in the space of a line, and even more so in a poem, these ratios can change very much , it is only necessary that the ratio of percussion be in favor of the rhythmically percussive one. Eg. (Pushkin), in the foot "Poison drips through its bark" we have a percussive anacrus (Bely calls such cases in the iambic scheme decelerations or spondees), but its accent is weaker than the rhythmic "cap"; within a verse such phenomena are rare and follow the same pattern, that is, -e., as a general rule, the extra semi-stress (“spondeic”) is weaker than the rhythmic ones, the diminishing semi-stress (only metric, without vocabulary, according to Bely - acceleration or “pyrrhic”) is stronger than its unstressed one.

FOOT (ancient Greek πους lat. pes) is a term of ancient metrics, which means a combination of long and short syllables, regularly repeated in a verse. S. is the rhythmic unit of ancient verse, that is, the smallest rhythmic group subordinated to one main rhythmic stress. S.'s composition fluctuates from two to six seas (see). The strong part of the S., marked by rhythmic stress, was at first called thesis; weak, in which there is no rhythmic stress, - harsis. Later metrics began to designate the strong part of the foot as arsis, and the weak part as tesis.

(Greek rhythm?s - dimensionality), a complex of sounds repeated in different lines of a poetic text in the same position. Rhyme helps the reader to feel the intonational articulation of speech and forces them to correlate the meaning of those verses that it unites. It is impossible to say exactly in which national literature this phenomenon arose, because ideas about rhyme are historically variable. In the ancient literature of the European south, the future rhyme with its function to mark the boundaries of related speech segments (phrases or verses) was replaced by homeoteleuton - the method of selecting words with monotonous endings, and in the early medieval poetry of the European north - alliteration(cm. Tonic). A.S. Pushkin(“On Classical and Romantic Poetry”) pointed out that rhyme spread in European poetry as a result of the activities troubadours Provence. There are three hypotheses about the appearance of rhyme in Provence in the 11th century: according to the first, rhyme was borrowed from medieval Latin literature, where it clearly manifested itself in the 9th-10th centuries; according to the second, the rhyme was borrowed from the Arabs of Spain, since rhyme spread in Arabic poetry in the 8th century; the third - the rhyme is borrowed from the oral tradition of the Celts, who inhabited the territory of Provence at the beginning of our era; in Irish and Welsh (i.e., Celtic) poetry by the 8th century. there were rhymes. It can be added that the phenomenon of rhyme is known to all peoples to one degree or another, and rhymes could originate in different national cultures. After the appearance of rhymes in European literature, their absence in a poetic work began to be denoted by the term blank verse.
Currently, there are numerous classifications of rhymes, which are based on different features. A sufficient rhyme is the repetition of a stressed vowel sound, supplemented by a repetition of a supporting consonant: she is at the window (if the stressed vowel is the last sound in a word, such rhymes are called open). If the rhyme does not match the supporting vowels, but all the percussion sounds (covers - howls), it is called poor. If the sound similarity moves from the end of the word to its beginning, the rhyme is called rich (I'm dying - to the edge), and if it covers the entire word, then deep (we'll drive it with the law).
There are other types of rhyme. In exact rhymes, all sounds after the stressed vowel coincide (talking - dying); in approximate, individual sounds after the stressed vowel do not match (lay down - life); in assonances, starting with the shock, only vowels coincide (devastation - reason); in dissonances, all sounds coincide, except for the stressed vowel (about style - on a chair); in differently stressed sounds, the sounds of rhymed words coincide, but stressed vowels occupy different positions in them (about glasses - butterflies); in non-equal syllables in the stressed part, a different number of syllables (externally - pearls); in compound, the sound complex fits in one of the words, but goes beyond the second, rhyming with it (grow from the year - cheerfulness); in punning, the repetition of the sounds of one word completely covers several other words (grow up to a hundred - old age); banal rhymes use words that are often found in poetry (blood - love); exotic words are used that are rarely found (bolívar - boulevard).

STANZA- a combination of verses in a certain order. This order is determined by a well-known system of rhymes, connected with the greater or lesser rhythmic and grammatical completeness of one or another verse combination. The latter as a whole is, of course, the result of a complex creative process. A certain combination of poems is dictated to the poet, along with other elements of the embodiment of a given idea, by the nature of this particular idea, and, ultimately, by the peculiarity of the worldview of this poet. As for the connection between a well-known idea and a well-known stanza, we can cite as an example the usual four-line stanza with the usual three-line rhyme ( first verse with third And second from fourth) from Pushkin: "I remember a wonderful moment." Despite the commonness of the stanza, Pushkin made it unrecognizable, thanks to the repetition of rhyming, as a result of which one stanza seems to merge with another, and a single stanza is obtained, built on 4-5 rhymes, one sonority and lacy arrangement of which reflects the transition from the music of the “wonderful moments', when 'appeared you"through" the languor of sadness hopeless» to the music of the new « awakening", when again appeared" the genius of pure beauty"and resurrected" and life, and tears, and love". (We have described the whole range of moods and rhymes). Concerning the question of the connection between the general worldview of the poet and the well-known character of the verse, let us point out at least Tyutchev's stanza: Tyutchev does not have the so-called solid stanzas (see tertsina, sonnet, etc.), and he often cannot stand the simple stanza he himself has chosen . This is undoubtedly connected with the constant struggle in the poet of the night and day beginnings, of which the first told him that “the thought uttered is a lie” and that if one cannot express oneself at all, then all the more it is impossible to open oneself in a cage of “solid form ...”

Combinations of verses seem to be completely inexhaustible, because stanzas can be modified both in connection with the arrangement of rhymes (as indicated above), and in connection with the number of combined verses (4, 5, 9, etc.), and in connection with whether they consist stanzas from verses of the same meter or from verses of different meters, etc.

The grammatical composition of the stanza is also of significant importance, for, for example, individual stanzas of Lermontov’s: “When the yellowing field is agitated,” the stanzas representing parts of the time period have a completely different sound and occupy a different place in the rhythmic pattern of the poem as a whole than they would occupy a similar stanzas constructed in the same way, be they completely independent sentences. This is extremely striking in the case of strophic, as if destroying the independence of the stanza, but at the same time giving it a peculiar shade. The concepts of the form and content of a verse must necessarily be considered in the context of the postulates of philosophical and phenomenological knowledge, just like the concepts of movement, rhythm and measure - in the same context with them as the aesthetic categories of harmony, grace and beauty. Harmony is the conceivable substance of an aesthetic object, and measure is the material substance of such an object. Measure is a form of harmony, and harmony is the content of an aesthetically conscious measure. Harmony cannot be measured, but it is possible to discover and study the constructive principle that underlies the aesthetic object and which determines the very existence of an aesthetically significant measure. Such a principle is divine proportion rhythm or the law of the "golden section", which, being universal the law of artistic form, mathematical symbols encodes not only the quantitative and qualitative states of an aesthetic object, but at the same time the very process of transition from one qualitative state to another. The method of rhythmic-harmonic accuracy, which is based on divine proportion rhythm, allows "checking harmony with algebra", reflecting in a single criterion the aesthetic and formal parameters of a literary text. The movement of poetic thought is realized in rhythm. Rhythm is a general and specific concept: rhythm is nothing but a way of self-development of poetic thought. Rhythm is connected with the very essence of creativity and perception of a work of art, rhythm is an aesthetically significant movement of poetic thought, organized according to the law of harmony; “rhythm makes tangible harmony” (E.G. Etkind), rhythm (unlike meter) is an “aesthetically conscious norm” (B.V. Tomashevsky), rhythm is “the core, constructive factor of verse” (Yu.N. Tynyanov ). The categorical trinity "rhythm-form-content" is an artistic (aesthetically significant) "formula" of verse, in which the rhythm of the verbal level plays the role of an organizer of an aesthetically significant movement, localized within a specific measure - a stanza (strophoid). Rhythm is an immanent and, at the same time, latent qualitative and quantitative basis of verse, which, on the one hand, is found by the poet and implicitly fixed by him in the text, and on the other hand, this is the essential characteristic of verse that is discovered (or not detected) by the reader in the process. co-creative understanding of the poetic world of the author. Rhythm is inseparable from content: “Content and rhythm,” A. Bely wrote, “in most cases coincide. Rhythm breaks through directly: it directly accompanies meaning.” In a more formal presentation, rhythm, being an object of scientific interest, acts as a single "rhythm-meaning". But it is the "rhythmic content" that takes shape in the verse as a measure of one's own self-limited self-development. Such a form in strophic works is a stanza, and in astrophic works - a strophoid.

Thus, the harmony of verse, felt primarily in the harmony of rhythm, manifests itself in the stanza of a poetic text, which is a measure of the self-limited self-development of poetic thought. Measure as an aesthetic category is considered in this context as a "qualitatively defined quantity, primarily as an immediate" given (Hegel). It is from these positions that we define harmony as such an aesthetically conscious measure that "nothing can be added, subtracted, or changed without making it worse" (Alberti). The idea of ​​harmony as "unity in diversity" and of measure as an aesthetically significant form opens the way to a clear and constructive understanding of the nature of the strophic rhythm of Russian classical (Pushkin's) verse: "rhythm in art - in particular, poetic - appears as unity in diversity" (V.E. Kholshevnikov). In a poetic text, the "unity" of a stanza is predetermined by its syllabic (syllabic) volume, and the "diversity" is determined by the variability in the use of different rhythmic forms of one or another poetic meter. The choice for a line of one or another rhythmic form, carried out by the poet intuitively rather than consciously, is connected not only with the position of this line in the stanza; this choice has a clear tendency to be determined by the rhythmic-estatic principle of self-development of poetic thought within a certain verse space-time, i.e. within the stanza. A stanza as a measure of a poetic text is a quantitative and qualitative speech construction polished by poetic experience, in which the dynamic trinity "rhythm - form - content" acquires its aesthetically significant material completeness.

http://www.philology.ru/literature1/grinbaum-01.htm

http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_literature/4416/%D0%A1%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B0

http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_literature/4003/%D0%A0%D0%B8%D1%84%D0%BC%D0%B0

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http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_literature/4406/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B0

16. Systems of versification. Change of poetic systems in Russian poetry. The essence of the reform of M.V. Lomonosov-V.K. Trediakovsky.
Versification systems:

• Antique versification
• Syllabic system of versification
• Syllabo-tonic system of versification
• Tonic system of verse

Varieties of poems

• Acrostic
• Blank verse
• free verse
• Vers libre
• mixed verse
• Poems in prose

Meters and dimensions of the verse

• Anapaest
• Amphibrachius
• Dactyl
• Meters, feet and sizes
• Chorey

Figurative speech

• Comparisons
• trails
• figures
• epithets

• Ballad stanza
• Limericks
• odic stanza
• Onegin stanza
• Octaves
• Sonnets
• Tercynes
• quatrains

Rhyme and its varieties

• Hyperdactylic rhyme
• Dactylic rhyme
• Feminine rhyme
• Masculine rhyme
• Rhyme is exact and inexact
• Rhyming systems

Requirements for the writer's style

• Correctness of speech
• Speech Accuracy
• Purity of speech
• Clarity of speech

The rhythm of a verse can only be realized in a particular system of language. The versification system consists of the phonetic features of a given language (stress, syllables, intonation, sounds). For example, in French and Polish, the fixed weak stress does not allow it to be used as a rhythm-forming factor. All syllables are approximately equal in duration and stress, so the syllable became the factor that formed the basis of the versification of these languages ​​(rhythm in poetry is indicated by an equal number of syllables). This is a syllabic system. In ancient Greek, sounds differ significantly in longitude - the rhythm is set by the alternation of short and long syllables - this is the metric (ancient) system. Russian versification developed in a complex manner, with "jumps" from one system of versification to another. Initially, Russian folk verse was born as a tonic, intonation ("The Tale of Igor's Campaign", "Yaroslavna's Lament"). However, starting from the 15th century, Russian poets used the syllabic system of versification borrowed from the Polish language (Skorinin, Kubasov, Polotsky, Kantemir). Such verses for the Russian ear sounded like prose, if they were not read in a singsong voice, smoothing out the stresses. In the 18th century, Lomonosov initiated a reform of Russian versification, laying the foundation for syllabo-tonic verse. Derzhavin and Pushkin contributed to the revival of the original intonational versification, finally establishing the syllabo-tonic system, which is still used today. So, all systems of versification are divided into two main categories - metric (quantitative, or quantitative) and dismetric (qualitative, or quantitative). Metric systems of versification - antique, syllabic-tonic, syllabic, tactometric; their common feature is the structure of the verse on the principle of rhythmic modifications. Dismetric systems - alliterative verse, accent verse (drummer), intonational-phrasal (phrase) and raeshny. Accent (speech) versification systems are divided into three main groups: syllabic, syllabic-tonic and tonic. All groups are based on the repetition of rhythmic units (lines), the commensurability of which is determined by the given arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables within the lines, regardless of their quantitative ratios, and the expressiveness of which depends on the intonational-syntactic (and not musical) structure of the verse.

Tonic versification

The simplest form of the accent system is tonic verse, in which the commensurability of lines is based on the more or less constant preservation of a certain number of stresses in each line with a variable number of unstressed syllables (both in the line as a whole and between stressed syllables). The same number of stresses in each line may not be observed in practice, but this does not change the rhythmic pattern. In the simplest way, the tonic verse can be indicated by the scheme: "×′ ×′ ×′", where "′" is a stressed syllable, and "×" is a variable number of unstressed syllables. Depending on the number of stresses in a line, its rhythm is determined: three-beat, four-beat, etc.

Syllabic versification

Syllabic verse is a tonic verse in which the number of syllables in a line and the place of some stresses (at the end and in the middle of a line) are fixed. The remaining stresses (at the beginning of each half line) are not fixed and may fall on different syllables. The scheme of syllabic verse differs from the scheme of tonic verse in that in it the construction of the type “×′ ×′” at the beginning of a half-line or verse will end with an accent already on a fixed syllable, for example. in Alexandrian verse - on the 6th and 12th syllables.

§ 2. ORIGIN OF LITERARY GENERATIONS

Epos, lyrics and drama were formed at the earliest stages of the existence of society, in primitive syncretic creativity. The first of the three chapters of his "Historical Poetics" A.N. Veselovsky, one of the greatest Russian historians and literary theorists XIX in. The scientist argued that literary genera 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. Epos, lyrics and drama were interpreted by Veselovsky as having developed from the “protoplasm” of ritual “choir actions”.

From the exclamations of the most active members of the choir (singers, luminaries), lyrical-epic songs (cantilenas) grew up, which eventually separated from the rite: “Songs of a lyrical-epic nature seem to be 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. On the basis of such songs, epic narratives subsequently formed. And from the exclamations of the choir as such, lyricism grew (originally group, collective), which, over time, also separated from the rite. The epic and lyrics are thus interpreted by Veselovsky as "a consequence of the decay of the ancient ritual choir." The drama, the scientist claims, arose from the exchange of remarks of the choir and the singers. And she (unlike the epic and lyrics), having gained independence, at the same time "preserved the entire<...>syncretism" of the ritual choir and was a kind of its likeness.

The theory of the origin of literary genera, put forward by Veselovsky, is confirmed by many facts about the life of primitive peoples known to modern science. So, the origin of the drama from ritual performances is undoubted: 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 epic and lyric poetry could be formed independently of ritual actions. Thus, mythological tales, on the basis of which prose legends (sagas) and fairy tales subsequently became firmly established, arose outside the choir. They were not sung by the participants in the mass ritual, but were told by one of the representatives of the tribe (and, probably, such a story was far from being addressed to a large number of people in all cases). Lyrics could also be formed outside the rite. Lyrical self-expression arose in the production (labor) and domestic relations of primitive peoples. Thus, there were different ways of forming literary genera. And the ritual choir was one of them.