What is prose in Russian? What is prose? How did prose, or epic, work arise?
prose
and. Greek ordinary speech, simple, unmeasured, without size, opposite gender. poetry. There is also measured prose, in which, however, there is no syllable size, but a type of tonic stress, almost like in Russian songs, but much more varied. Prose writer, prose writer, prose writer writing in prose.
Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. D.N. Ushakov
prose
prose, plural no, w. (Latin: prosa).
Non-poetry literature; opposite poetry. Write in prose. Above them are inscriptions both in prose and verse. Pushkin. Modern prose. Pushkin's prose.
All practical, non-fiction literature (outdated). Until now, our proud language is not accustomed to postal prose. Pushkin.
trans. Everyday life, everyday life, something that is devoid of color, brightness, liveliness. Among our hypocritical deeds and all sorts of vulgarity and prose. Nekrasov. Prose of life or everyday prose.
Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. S.I.Ozhegov, N.Yu.Shvedova.
prose
Non-poetry literature, as opposed to poetry. Fiction. Write in prose.
trans. Everyday, everyday life. Everyday item of life.
adj. prosaic, -aya, -oe (to 1 meaning).
New explanatory dictionary of the Russian language, T. F. Efremova.
prose
Rhythmically unorganized speech.
Non-poetry literature.
trans. decomposition Boring monotony; everyday life, everyday life.
Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1998
prose
PROSE (from Latin prosa) oral or written speech without division into commensurate segments - poetry; in contrast to poetry, its rhythm is based on the approximate correlation of syntactic structures (periods, sentences, columns). Initially, business, journalistic, religious-preaching, scientific, memoir-confessional forms developed. Fiction (short story, tale, novel) is predominantly epic, intellectual, in contrast to lyrical and emotional poetry (but possible lyrical prose and philosophical lyrics); originated in ancient literature; from the 18th century came to the fore as part of verbal art.
Prose
(lat. prosa),
artistic and non-fictional (scientific, philosophical, journalistic, informational) verbal works that lack the most common feature poetic speech(breakdown into verses).
In a narrower and more common sense, it is a type of word art, literature, correlated with poetry, but differing from it in special principles of creation. art world and organization of artistic speech. See Poetry and Prose.
Wikipedia
Prose
Prose- oral or written speech without division into commensurate segments - poetry; in contrast to poetry, its rhythm is based on the approximate correlation of syntactic structures (periods, sentences, columns). Sometimes the term is used as a contrast fiction in general, scientific or journalistic literature, that is, not related to art.
Examples of the use of the word prose in literature.
She continued the conversation about small things, about mundane things: “However, I got distracted, but the conversation was not about prose, but about poetry.
Generally autobiographical prose, critical articles and poetry constitute for Grigoriev the three cornerstones of his work, being in a peculiar relationship with each other.
If I belonged to the elite, I would spend more money than effort, If I lived in the Paleolithic, I would crush my neighbor’s skull with a club, When I would measure the racetrack in circles, I would show remarkable agility, But if I could suddenly write poetry, I would instantly stop prose speak.
The model reproduces the style and partly the vocabulary of early Anglo-Saxon prose using rhythmic and alliterative techniques.
Rhythmization prose, the alliterations, assonances, and rhymes abundantly found in him, due to the special pathos of his inherent manner, create the impression of floridity, designed for a special effect.
To do this, he used the baggage of metaphors, comparisons, antitheses and other embellishments of classical rhetoric, and borrowed the tool of alliteration from his native poetry to give his prose bright sound color.
That is why cante jondo, and especially sigiriya, gives us the impression of being sung prose: any sense of rhythmic meter is destroyed, although in fact the lyrics are composed of tercets and quatrains with assonant rhyme.
Both then and now the absurdity of such a statement is obvious to me, although Tsirlin was not alone - this was evidenced by the speeches of some historians at the discussion about historical prose.
The poem addressed to Wigel ends with the words: I will be glad to serve you - In verses, prose, with all my soul, But, Vigel - have mercy on my ass!
I love the Gnessin school for the song, for the excess prose, for the yellow color that is presented to November like a bunch of mimosa.
The new age of Gothic took hold in the mid-seventies of the eighteenth century, which found expression in prose, poetry and art.
Phillips began to write for tabloid magazines, and, in addition, processed entire mountains of almost hopelessly graphomaniacal prose and the lyrics sent to him by amateur writers who hoped that Phillips's magic pen would help them see their works in print - all this allowed him to lead a fairly independent lifestyle.
The latter will become characteristic feature and all subsequent autobiographical works Grigoriev in verse and prose.
Only in the early prose Grigoriev, one can detect direct traces of Heine’s influence.
If Guiraldez had not absorbed French metaphorism and American-British structuralism, we would not have had classical Argentine prose!
PROSE is the antonym of verse and poetry, formally - ordinary speech, not divided into selected commensurate segments - poetry, in terms of emotional and semantic - something mundane, ordinary, mediocre. In fact, the dominant form in the literature of two, and in Western Europe- the last three centuries.
Back in the 19th century. all fiction, including prose, was called poetry. Nowadays only poetic literature is called poetry.
The ancient Greeks believed that poetry uses a special speech, decorated according to the rules set out by its theory - poetics. Verse was one of the elements of this decoration, the difference between the speech of poetry and everyday speech. Oratory was also distinguished by ornate speech, but according to different rules - not poetics, but rhetoric ( Russian word“eloquence” literally conveys this feature of it), as well as historiography, geographical descriptions and philosophical works. Antique novel as the least “correct” one stood lowest in this hierarchy, was not very taken seriously and was not recognized as a special layer of literature - prose. In the Middle Ages religious literature was too separated from secular, strictly artistic, prose in both of them to be perceived as something unified. Medieval entertaining and even edifying works in prose were considered incomparable with poetry as such, which was still poetic. The Greatest Novel Renaissance - “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) - belonged more to grassroots literature associated with folk laughter culture than to official literature. M. Cervantes created his “Don Quixote” (1605, 1615) as a parody novel, but the implementation of the plan turned out to be much more serious and significant. In fact this is the first prose novel(the chivalric romances parodied in it were mostly poetic), which was recognized as a work of high literature and influenced the rise of the Western European novel more than a century later - in the 18th century.
In Russia, untranslated novels appeared late, from 1763. They did not belong to high literature; a serious person had to read odes. IN Pushkin era foreign novels of the 18th century. young provincial noblewomen like Tatyana Larina were keen on them, and an even more undemanding public was interested in domestic ones. But sentimentalist N.M. Karamzin in the 1790s. has already introduced prose into high literature- in the neutral and unregulated genre of the story, which, like the novel, was not included in the system of recognized classic genres, but also not burdened, like it, with unprofitable associations. Karamzin's stories became poetry in prose. A.S. Even in 1822, Pushkin wrote in a note about prose: “The question is, whose prose is the best in our literature? - Answer: Karamzin.” Ho added: “This is still not great praise...” On September 1 of the same year, in a letter he advised Prince P.A. Vyazemsky to seriously engage in prose. “They are tending to summer to prose...” - Pushkin noted, anticipating his poems in the sixth chapter of “Eugene Onegin”: “They are tending to summer to harsh prose, / They are driving summer to the naughty rhyme...” Author romantic stories A.A. In letters of 1825, he twice called on Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) to take up the novel, as later N.V. Gogol - move from stories to great work. And although he himself made his debut in prose in print only in 1831, simultaneously with Gogol (“Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”) and, like him, anonymously - “Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin,” thanks primarily to the two of them in the 1830s gg. An epochal turning point has occurred in Russian literature, which has already occurred in the West: from predominantly poetic it becomes predominantly prosaic. This process ended in the early 1840s, when “A Hero of Our Time” (1840) by Lermontov (who had extensive plans in prose) and “ Dead Souls” (1842) Gogol. Nekrasov then “proseized” the style of verse poetry.
Poems regained their leadership for a relatively long period only at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. (“Silver Age” - in contrast to Pushkin’s “golden”), and then only in modernism. The modernists were opposed by strong realist prose writers: M. Gorky, I.A. Bunin,
A.I. Kuprin, I.S. Shmelev, A.N. Tolstoy and others; for their part, symbolists D.S. Merezhkovsky, Fedor Sologub, V.Ya. Bryusov, Andrei Bely, in addition to poetry, created new prose. True, and in Silver Age(N.S. Gumilev), and much later (I.A. Brodsky) some poets put poetry much higher than prose. However, in the classics XIX-XX centuries, both Russian and Western, there are more prose writers than poets. Poems were almost completely squeezed out of drama and epic, even from lyric epic: in the second half of the 20th century. the only Russian poem of the classical level is Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero,” which is predominantly lyrical and began by the author back in 1940. Poems remained mainly for lyricism, and modern lyric poetry by the end of the century, as in the West, had lost a mass, even a wide readership, remained for a few fans. Instead of a theoretically clear division of the types of literature - epic, lyricism, drama - a vague but familiar one was fixed in the language: prose, poetry, drama (although lyrical miniatures in prose, strained poems and completely ridiculous dramas in verse are still being created).
The triumphant victory of prose is natural. Poetic speech is frankly conventional. Already L.N. Tolstoy considered it completely artificial, although he admired the lyrics of Tyutchev and Fet. In a small space of a lyrical work that is intense in thought and feeling, poems look more natural than in lengthy texts. The verse has a lot of additional expressive means compared to prose, but these “supports” are archaic in origin. In many countries of the West and East modern poetry uses almost exclusively free verse (free verse), which has no meter or rhyme.
Prose has its structural advantages. Much less capable than verse of influencing the reader “musically,” it is more free in the choice of semantic nuances, shades of speech, and in the transmission of “voices.” different people. “Diversity”, according to M.M. Bakhtin, prose is inherent to a greater extent than poetry (see: Artistic speech). The form of prose is similar to other properties of both the content and form of modern literature. “In prose there is unity crystallizing from diversity. In poetry, on the contrary, there is diversity developing from a clearly declared and directly expressed unity.” Ho for modern man unambiguous clarity, “head-on” statements in art are akin to banality. Literature XIX and even more than the 20th century. prefers as a basic principle a complex and dynamic unity, a unity of dynamic diversity. This also applies to poetry. By and large, one pattern determines the unity of femininity and masculinity in the poems of A.A. Akhmatova, tragedy and mockery in the prose of A.P. Platonov’s seemingly completely incompatible plot and content layers - satirical, demonic, “evangelical” and the love connecting them - in “The Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov, novel and epic in “ Quiet Don” M.A. Sholokhov, the absurdity and touching character of the story by V.M. Shukshin “Weirdo”, etc. Given this complexity of literature, prose reveals its own complexity compared to poetry. That's why Yu.M. Lotman built the following sequence from simple to complex: “colloquial speech - song (text + motive) - “classical poetry” - literary prose.” At developed culture speech, the “assimilation” of literary language to everyday language is more difficult than the clear, straightforward “dissimilarity” that poetic speech originally was. Thus, it is more difficult for a student to draw to draw a life that is similar than that which is dissimilar. Thus, realism demanded more experience from humanity than pre-realist movements in art.
One should not think that only verse has rhythm. Spoken speech is quite rhythmic, like normal human movements - it is regulated by the rhythm of breathing. Rhythm is the regularity of some repetitions in time. Of course, the rhythm of ordinary prose is not as orderly as that of poetry, it is unstable and unpredictable. There is more rhythmic (in Turgenev) and less rhythmic (in Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy) prose, but it is never completely unordered. Syntactically prominent short sections of text do not differ greatly in length; they often begin or end rhythmically in the same way two or more times in a row. The phrase about the girls at the beginning of Gorky’s “Old Woman Izergil” is noticeably rhythmic: “Their hair, / silky and black, / was loose, / the wind, warm and light, / playing with it, / jingled with the coins / woven into it.” The syntagmas here are short and commensurate. Of the seven syntagmas, the first four and sixth begin with stressed syllables, the first three and sixth end with two unstressed (“dactylic” endings), inside the phrase the same way - with one unstressed syllable - two adjacent syntagmas end: “wind, warm and light” (all three words are rhythmically identical, consist of two syllables and are stressed on the first) and “playing with them” (both words end with one unstressed syllable). The only, last syntagma ends with an accent, which energetically ends the entire phrase.
The writer can also play on rhythmic contrasts. In Bunin’s story “Mr. from San Francisco,” the fourth paragraph (“It was the end of November...”) contains three phrases. The first is small, it consists of the words “but they sailed quite safely.” The next one is huge, half a page, describing the pastime on the famous “Atlantis”. In fact, it consists of many phrases, separated, however, not by a period, but mainly by a semicolon. They are like sea waves, lapping one another continuously. Thus, everything that is discussed is practically equalized: the structure of the ship, the daily routine, the activities of passengers - everything, living and inanimate. The final part of the gigantic phrase is “at seven they announced with trumpet signals what was the main goal of this entire existence, its crown...” Only here the writer makes a pause, expressed by an accent. And finally the last, final phrase, short, but as if equated with the previous one, so information-rich: “And then the gentleman from San Francisco hurried to his rich cabin to get dressed.” This “equation” enhances the subtle irony about the “crown” of this entire existence, that is, of course, dinner, although it is not deliberately named, but only implied. It is no coincidence that Bunin later described in such detail his hero’s preparation for dinner and his dressing in a hotel in Capri: “And then he again began to prepare, as if for a crown...” Even the word “crown” is repeated. After the gong (analogous to the “trumpet signals” on Atlantis), the gentleman goes to the reading room to wait for his not quite ready wife and daughter. There he suffers a blow from which he dies. Instead of the “crown” of existence there is non-existence. So rhythm, rhythm disruptions, and similar rhythmic semantic “roll calls” (with some reservations we can also talk about the rhythm of imagery) contribute to the merging of all elements of the text into a harmonious artistic whole.
Sometimes, since late XVIII century, and most of all in the first third of the 20th century, writers even metrized prose: they introduced into syntagmas the same sequence of stresses as in syllabic-tonic verses, but did not divide the text into poetic lines; the boundaries between syntagmas remained unpredictable. Andrei Bely tried to make metered prose almost a universal form; he used it not only in novels, but also in articles and memoirs, which greatly irritated many readers. IN modern literature metrized prose is used in some lyrical miniatures and as individual inserts in larger works. When in a continuous text the rhythmic pauses are constant and the metered segments are equal in length, the sound of such a text is indistinguishable from a poetic text, like Gorky’s “Songs about the Falcon and the Petrel.”
Prose(Latin prōsa) is speech without division into commensurate segments, the rhythm of which is based on the approximate correlation of syntactic structures. It is also non-poetic literature.
Unlike poetry, prose does not have significant restrictions on rhythm and rhyme. It provides authors, as M. M. Bakhtin noted, with wider “opportunities for linguistic diversity, the combination in the same text of different manners of thinking and speaking: in prosaic artistry (most fully manifested in the novel).” Prose, in particular, is many times superior to poetry in genre diversity.
A copywriter needs to be able to create both prose and poetic works. Knowledge of poetry enriches the language of a prose writer. As K. Paustovsky noted:
“Poetry has one amazing property. She returns the word to its original virgin freshness.”
Types and genres of literature
All literary works can be combined into three large groups, called literary genera and including both poetic and prose texts:
- epic,
– drama,
- lyrics.
Lyroepic is also distinguished as a separate genus and some intergeneric and extrageneric forms are distinguished.
Although there is a division into genders, there can be “generic intersection” in literary works. So maybe epic poem, lyrical story, dramatic story, etc.
In each of literary families includes works of a certain genre.
Literary genres– these are groups of works collected according to formal and substantive characteristics. We can also say that a genre is a historically emerging and developing type work of art, having a certain set of stable properties (size, speech structures, principles of construction, etc.). Genres provide continuity and stability in literary development.
Over time, some genres die out and are replaced by others. Also, “remaining” genres can become both more and less popular - both among authors and among readers. To form or change literary genres influenced by historical reality. For example, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the detective novel, the police novel, the science fiction novel, and the ladies' (“pink”) novel developed powerfully.
Classification of genres is not an easy task, because different genres can have the same properties.
Historically, genres were divided into two groups: “high” and “low”. So, in the early literary times the lives of saints were classified as “high,” and works of entertainment as “low.” During the period of classicism, a strict hierarchy of genres was established: high ones are ode, tragedy, epic, low ones are comedy, satire, fable. Later, fairy tales and novels began to be classified as “high” ones.
Today they talk about high literature (strict, truly artistic, “literary top”), and about mass literature (“trivial”, “popular”, “consumer”, “paraliterature”, “contemporary literature”, “literary bottom”). The first is intended for people who are reflective, educated, and knowledgeable about art. The second is for the undemanding majority of readers, for a person “not familiar (or little familiar) with artistic culture“who does not have developed taste, who is unwilling or unable to think independently and appreciate works, who seeks mainly entertainment in printed materials.” Mass literature is characterized by schematism, the use of stereotypes, clichés, and “authorlessness.” But popular literature compensates for its shortcomings with dynamically developing action and an abundance of incredible incidents.
Classical literature and fiction are also distinguished. Classic literature- these are those works that are the pinnacles of creativity and which modern authors should be equal to.
As they say, a classic is something that is written with the tastes of future generations in mind.
Fiction (from the French belles lettres - belles lettres) is usually called non-classical narrative prose, which belongs to mass literature, but is not at the very “bottom”. In other words, fiction is the middle mass literature, located between the classics and pulp fiction.
A copywriter must have a good understanding of the specifics of the types and genres of literary works. For example, mixing or substituting genres can easily “kill” a text for a reader who expects one thing and gets another (instead of “comedy” - “drama”, instead of “action” - “melodrama”, etc.). However, a thoughtful mixture of genres can also work effectively for a specific text. Final result will depend on the literacy and skill of the copywriter. He must know the “laws of the genre.”
More detailed information on this topic can be found in the books of A. Nazaikin
Prose is the antonym of verse and poetry, formally - ordinary speech, not divided into separate, commensurate rhythmic segments - poetry, in an emotional and semantic sense - something mundane, ordinary, ordinary; in fact the dominant form in European literatures since the 18th century (in terms of the prevalence of fiction, even since the 17th century); in Russian - from the second third of the 19th century, although throughout the entire 19th century artistic literature, including prose, continued to be called poetry. In the 19th and 20th centuries, prose was by far the predominant form of epic and drama; prose works were much less common. lyrical works(“poems in prose”). IN colloquial speech The 20th century, which penetrated into the loose language of the history of literature and criticism, the theoretically clear triad of “epic - lyricism - drama” was practically replaced by the triad of “prose - poetry - drama”. IN literary sense prose forms are preceded by poetry.
Prose in antiquity
In antiquity, prose, unlike poetry, which was governed by the rules of poetics, was governed by the rules of rhetoric. Like poetic poetic speech, it in a certain way was decorated, but the methods of this decoration were different from those in poetry. The Western European Middle Ages continued to classify only poetry as poetry, but the expansion of the readership led to the spread of more unartificial prose: from the middle of the 13th century, prose adaptation of poetic novels began, sung poetry interspersed with prose in the story of the first third of the 13th century “Aucassin and Nicolet”, then in “New Life” (1292) Dante’s prose autobiography includes poetic lyrics created by the author in 1283-90 with commentary. The Renaissance was marked by the flourishing of the short story, first of all, “The Decameron” (1350-53) by G. Boccaccio. Among the most outstanding works Renaissance literature - F. Rabelais's comic epic "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (1533-64), but it is close to the unofficial folk carnival culture, is not included in the hierarchy of traditional genres and is only conventionally called a novel. A distant harbinger of the future triumph of the novel genre was “Don Quixote” (1605-1615) by M. Cervantes. In Chapter XIVII, Part 1, the priest, while condemning chivalric romances, still highly appreciates the possibilities of their form (here, in indirect speech, Cervantes actually affirms the form of his own work as worthy of recognition as a contemporary literary theory).
Prose gradually gained ground from verse. In Shakespearean tragedy, especially comedy, their mixing was the norm, although prose was used mainly in “low” episodes. In the 17th century, the Spanish picaresque was actively created, analogues of which appeared in other countries. Despite the fact that classicism still classified prose under the department of rhetoric and recognized it only in philosophical dialogue, historical narrative or description, journalism, confession, the novel was accepted as a peripheral, entertaining genre, devoid of a moral purpose and addressed to an inexperienced reader - even in France, a trendsetter of classicist norms and tastes, prose penetrated into various genres. Back in the 16th century, the first French original comedy in prose (“The Rivals” by J. de La Taille, 1573) and tragicomedy (“Lucelle” by L. Lezhar, 1676) appeared. At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, P. de Larivee wrote nine prose comedies. The strict theorist of classicism J. Chaplin spoke in favor of “free” speech in drama and considered rhymed text on stage absurd, citing examples of Italian plays in prose. Moliere created several of his best comedies in prose, including Don Juan (1665), The Miser (1668), and The Philistine of the Nobility (1670), which was highly appreciated by some contemporaries, but in practice for a long time there was no continuation. In the dispute about the “ancients” and the “news”, which began in 1684, the latter defended the rights of prose. English prose of the late 17th - early 18th centuries was represented by the translated “heroic” and short novelistic (A. Ben, W. Congreve) novel, historical and legendary narrative (R. Boyle), in Germany of the 17th century the superficial gallant adventure novel about love stories in the court environment, addressed to readers who did not belong to it.
The 18th century was the time of approval of prose in developed European literatures. In England, these are the satires of J. Swift, the “comic epics” of G. Fidding and other writers, sentimental and Gothic novels, in Germany - the works of I.V. Goethe, in France - the work of S. L. Montesquieu, A. F. Prevost d'Exile, Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau and others. Sometimes the genre boundaries of poetry and prose were deliberately erased: Montesquieu, declaring in “Persian Letters” (1721 ) poet, a funny and grotesque figure, created two poems in prose, A. de La Motte Udar wrote an ode in prose Abbé Prevost in 1735 declared that rhyme denigrates the very idea of poetry and destroys the poetic gift. But the defenders of the verse were stronger. The most significant of them was the prose writer Voltaire, who clearly related his philosophical stories more to philosophy than to literature. In The Temple of Taste (1731) he ridiculed the theory of the prose poem, to which Lamotte-Udard unsuccessfully objected. Until the beginning of the 19th century, prevailing theories did not recognize prose. Even I.F. Schiller in 1797 did not approve of Goethe’s “Year of the Teachings of Wilhelm Meister” (1795-96); the latter agreed with him and in “Maxims and Reflections” he called the novel “a subjective epic in which the author asks permission to reinterpret the world in his own way” (Collected Works: In 10 volumes), which Goethe had a clear anti-romantic orientation.
Nevertheless, the 18th century is the century of the decisive advance of prose and a more lenient attitude of theory towards the novel. For its time, F. Fenelon’s allegorical philosophical and political novel “The Adventures of Telemachus” (1693-94), as well as the work of the 17th century Scottish author who wrote in Latin, J. Barclay (Barkley) “Argenida” (1621), were of fundamental importance. In post-Petrine Russia, where verse had to be improved at the expense of artistic prose for a long time, both attracted the attention of V.K. Trediakovsky. He translated Fenelon’s novel into hexameters, but translated “Argenida” into prose in 1751, and earlier in “A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Poems...” (1735) he reported: “Epic, witty, amazing, and sometimes superior to Homer and Virgil’s fictions written in prose, I don’t hope that there are more in any other language than there are in French, which they call novels. However, all such novels can hardly outweigh Barclay’s Argenide in goodness.” The presence of such examples made it possible for the appearance in Russia of works that were clearly not aimed at the “grassroots reader”, such as the Masonic novels of M.M. Kheraskov (60-90s of the 18th century). But highest achievements Russian prose of the 18th century before N.M. Karamzin belong to the field of satire of various kinds (comedies by D.I. Fonvizin, the story by I.A. Krylov “Kaib”, 1792, and fictionalized journalism “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”, 1790, A.N. Radishcheva). Karamzin, with his sentimental stories of the 1790s, first introduced prose into high literature. Previously, prose was considered incomparable with poetry, although it had more readers (translated novels were especially popular, and since 1763, when the first works of F. A. Emin appeared, domestic novels); Karamzin's prose was recognized by the most educated and sophisticated, and at the same time, a fairly wide readership.
Western European romanticism brought a certain balance of poetry and prose: although poetry had the strongest emotional impact, the most popular writer in Europe and Russia was W. Scott as a historical novelist. Subsequently, the authority of prose was supported by the late romantic works of V. Hugo and J. Sand. Among Russian romantics, the novelist A.A. Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) enjoyed relatively short-lived fame, but the highest achievements of romanticism in Russia were poetic. In the 1830s, somewhat later than in the West, an epochal turning point occurred: A.S. Pushkin wrote more prose than poetry, the prose of N.V. Gogol appeared, in 1840 - the first Russian socio-psychological and philosophical novel“Hero of Our Time” by M.Yu. Lermontov. Subsequently, a galaxy of great prose writers appeared, including L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky. As in the West, the dominance of prose in Russia became unconditional, with the exception of the beginning of the 20th century, when the achievements of poetry in general were higher, although prose, especially modernist prose, was fundamentally updated. At the end of the 20th century, poetry almost all over the world moved to the periphery of literature, became the property of relatively few amateurs, and even outwardly imitated prose: in many countries, almost all of it was created in free verse.
Prose has its structural advantages. Much less capable than verse of influencing the reader with the help of specific rhythmic and melodic devices, the functions of which were revealed by Yu.N. Tynyanov in the book “The Problem of Poetic Language” (1924), prose is more free in the choice of semantic nuances, shades of speech, in the transmission "voices" of different people. “Diversity”, according to M.M. Bakhtin, is inherent in prose much more than in poetry. The scientist identified the following “types of prosaic words” (more precisely, any narrative, but mainly prosaic). The first is a direct word directly aimed at its subject, a usual designation, naming something. The second type is an object word, the word of the depicted person, different from the author’s, conveying the social, national, cultural, age and other specifics of the characters’ speech, which was represented little or not at all in traditionalist literature. The third type, according to Bakhtin, is the word “two-voice”, with an attitude towards someone else’s word; A “two-voice” word can be both the author’s and the character’s word. There are three varieties here. The first is an evaluatively “unidirectional” two-voiced word: stylization, the story of a narrator, the non-objective word of the hero - the bearer of the author’s intentions, first-person narration. The “word” of the speaker, a character who is not negative for the author, more or less merges with the author’s “word”. If the speaker (writer) is disapproved or ridiculed through supposedly his own speech, a “multidirectional”, predominantly parodic, two-voiced word arises. The third type of two-voiced word is defined by Bakhtin as an “active type,” or a reflected alien word. Based on the remarks of one participant in the dialogue, one can guess the content and emotional coloring replicas of another. In the same row are hidden internal polemics (the character proves something to himself by arguing with himself), polemically colored autobiography and confession, hidden dialogue, and in general any word with an “eye” on someone else’s word (conversations are conducted differently with different interlocutors). The “active type” is most characteristic of Dostoevsky, who is less interested in the objective word (the second type): individual or social signs speeches are not as significant as the characters’ semantic polemics with themselves and others; according to Bakhtin, the author participates in the struggle of points of view - in terms of the organization of the narrative, and not the general idea of the work - on an equal basis with the characters, without dogmatically imposing anything on them. Prose has its own rhythm, different from poetry, and sometimes meter, turning into metered prose.
The word prose comes from Latin prosa, from prosa oratio, which means directly directed, simple speech.
Having left the management of genres on the site to the authors themselves, I thought that creative people have at least the slightest idea about the area in which they create.
People's heads are a real mess. They haven’t come up with any genres to somehow stand out from the crowd. Among the genres were “we went hiking”, and “nighties”, and “about humanism”, and “maniacs”...
This article is compiled based on materials from Wikipedia, literary sites and encyclopedias.
Let's start with the definition of prose given in literary encyclopedia(copied from Wikipedia):
Prose (lat. prosa) - oral or written speech without division into commensurate segments - poetry; in contrast to poetry, its rhythm is based on the approximate correlation of syntactic structures (periods, sentences, columns). Sometimes the term is used as a contrast between fiction in general (poetry) and scientific or journalistic literature, that is, not related to art.
And here is another definition (Dahl's dictionary):
Prose- ordinary speech, simple, unmeasured, without meter, the opposite of poetry. There is also measured prose, in which, however, there is no syllable size, but a type of tonic stress, almost like in Russian songs, but much more varied. Prose writer, prose writer, prose writer writing in prose.
IN different sources prose genres (their number) are different. I will dwell only on those regarding which there are no discrepancies.
NOVEL- a large narrative work with a complex and developed plot. A work of large form may have several storylines(Remember L.N. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”).
STORY- a type of epic poetry, close to the novel, depicting some episode from life; It differs from the novel in less completeness and breadth of pictures of everyday life and morals. This definition of genre is characteristic exclusively of the Russian literary tradition. The ancient meaning of the term - “news about some event” - indicates that this genre has absorbed oral histories, events that the narrator personally saw or heard about. An important source of such “stories” are chronicles (“The Tale of Bygone Years”, etc.). IN ancient Russian literature“story” was any narration about any actual events. In Western literary studies, the definitions “novel” or “short novel” are used for prose works of this kind.
STORY- small epic genre form fiction is small in terms of the volume of life phenomena depicted, and hence in terms of the volume of its text.
NOVELLA(Italian novella - news) - a literary short narrative genre, comparable in volume to a story (which sometimes gives reason for their identification), but differing from it in genesis, history and structure. It's narrative prose genre, which is characterized by brevity, sharp plot, neutral style of presentation, lack of psychologism, unexpected outcome.
ESSAY(from the French essai “attempt, trial, essay”, from the Latin exagium “weighing”) - a prose essay of small volume and free composition, expressing individual impressions and considerations on a specific occasion or issue and obviously not claiming to be a defining or exhaustive interpretation of the subject . In terms of volume and function, it borders, on the one hand, with scientific article and a literary essay (with which an essay is often confused), on the other, with a philosophical treatise.
BIOGRAPHY- an essay that sets out the history of the life and activities of a person.
EPIC- monumental in form epic work, characterized by national problems. A complex, long history of something, including a number of major events. (The same "War and Peace", which is both a novel and an epic) The roots of the epic are in mythology and folklore.
FAIRY TALE(literary) - epic genre: a fiction-oriented work closely related to folk tale, but, unlike it, it belonged to a specific author, did not exist in oral form before publication and had no variants.
FABLE- a poetic or prose literary work of a moralizing, satirical nature. At the end of the fable there is a short moralizing conclusion - the so-called morality. Characters Usually animals, plants, things appear. In the Bible we find, for example, the fable about how the trees chose a king for themselves (Judges 9.8ff.), or the story about the thorn and the cedar (2 Kings 14:9). These stories come very close to parables.
PARABLE-parable - a short moralizing story in an allegorical form. V. Dahl's dictionary interprets the word “parable” as “teaching by example.”
A parable generally exists and can only be properly understood in a specific context. For example, the gospel parable of the sower is the sermon of Christ, which he delivers to a crowd of people. Then it becomes clear that the “Sower” is Jesus Christ, the “seed” is the word of God, the “earth”, “soil” is the human heart.
MYTH(from the Greek mytos - legend) - in literature - a legend that conveys people’s ideas about the world, man’s place in it, the origin of all things, about Gods and heroes. These are legends about the first ancestors, gods, spirits and heroes. The mythological complex, which takes syncretic visual-verbal forms in rituals, acts as specific method systematization of knowledge about the world around us. Among the features of the myth: an arbitrary (illogical) connection of plots and the identity of the signifier and the signified, personification of natural phenomena, zoomorphism, an increase in zoomorphic elements in archaic layers of culture.
