What are traditions in literature? Literary process

General idea of ​​the literary process. Tradition and innovation

The final chapter of our book, devoted to the literary process, is perhaps the most difficult from a methodological point of view. The fact is that in order to adequately understand the laws of the literary process, it is necessary to at least in general imagine the body of literary works of different eras and cultures. Then the logic of the formation of genres, the projection of some cultures onto other eras, and the patterns of stylistic development begin to emerge. But a novice philologist, of course, almost never has such a historical and literary base, so there is always a danger of turning the conversation into pure scholasticism: a student can honestly “memorize” some information, but the real, living content of theoretical positions is not yet available to him. It is difficult, for example, to talk about the features of the Baroque style if most readers do not know a single poet of this era.

On the other hand, it is also unrealistic to clarify each position in detail with many examples, each time plunging into the history of literature - this would require the use of enormous material that goes beyond the scope of our manual and which the student physically cannot cope with. Therefore, finding a balance between what is necessary and what is sufficient is very difficult.

Understanding all these objective difficulties, we will be forced to greatly schematize the presentation, focusing only on the most important aspects. There is simply no other way, in any case, the author does not know of a single manual where different facets of literary the process would be covered quite fully and accessible for a novice philologist. There are many excellent studies devoted to different aspects of the literary process, but to bring together together there is a huge and contradictory material, making it accessible to a junior student, and even within the confines of one chapter, is a completely unrealistic task.

Therefore, the proposed chapter is only an introduction to the problem, which briefly outlines the main issues related to the study of the literary process.

The literary process is a complex concept. The term itself appeared relatively recently, already in the 20th century, and gained popularity even later, only starting in the 50s and 60s. Before this, attention was paid to some individual aspects of literary relationships, but the literary process was not comprehended in its entirety. In the full sense of the word, it has not been comprehended even today; only the main components of the literary process have been identified, and possible research methodologies have been outlined. Summarizing various views, we can say that understanding the literary process involves solving several scientific problems:

1. It is necessary to establish connections between literature and the socio-historical process. Literature, of course, is connected with history, with the life of society, it reflects it to some extent, but it is neither a copy nor a mirror. At some moments, at the level of images and themes, there is a rapprochement with historical reality, at others, on the contrary, literature moves away from it. Understanding the logic of this “attraction-repulsion” and finding transitional links connecting historical and literary processes is an extremely complex task and hardly has a final solution. As such a transitional link “from life to literature,” either religious-symbolic forms or social stereotypes (or, in the terminology of A. A. Shakhov, “social types”), which are formed in society in a certain period and embodied in art, were considered; then the socio-psychological atmosphere in society (in the terminology of Yu. B. Kuzmenko - “social emotions”); then the structure of the aesthetic ideal, reflecting both ideas about a person and aesthetic traditions (for example, this approach is typical for the works of N. A. Yastrebova), etc. There were a lot of concepts, but the mechanism for transforming historical reality into works of art remains a mystery . At the same time, attempts to find this transition link stimulate the emergence of interesting research, unexpected and original concepts in both domestic and foreign aesthetics. Let's say, it is the search for these links, at the same time concrete historical and “transhistorical” (in the terminology P. Bourdieu), then are of the same type for any moment in history, gives rise to the concept of “new historicism” - one of the most popular methodologies in modern Western European science. According to the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, the author of this concept, it is useless to “impose” any general laws on history based on today’s coordinate system. You need to start from the “historicity of the object”, that is, every time you need to enter into the historical contextof this work. And only by comparing the set with such In the image of the data obtained, including the historicity of the researcher himself, we can notice elements of commonality and “overcome” history. P. Bourdieu’s concept is popular today, but all questions it, Of course it doesn't take off. The search for an adequate methodology continues, and definitive answers are hardly possible.

2. In addition to “external” connections, that is, connections with history, psychology, etc., literature also has a system of internal connections, that is, constantly relates itself to its own history. Not a single writer of any era ever begins to write “from scratch”; he always consciously or unconsciously takes into account the experience of his predecessors. He writes in a certain genre, in which centuries-old literary experience has been accumulated (it is no coincidence that M. M. Bakhtin called the genre “memory of literature”), he looks for the type of literature that is closest to himself (epic, lyric, drama) and inevitably takes into account the laws adopted for this type . Finally, he absorbs many of the author’s traditions, correlating his work with one of his predecessors. All this adds up internal laws development of the literary process, which do not directly correlate with the socio-historical situation. For example, the genre of an elegiac poem, permeated with sadness and sometimes tragedy, can manifest itself in different sociohistorical situations, but will always correlate itself with the genre of elegy - regardless of the desire and will of the author.

That's why the concept of “literary process” includes the formation of generic, genre and stylistic traditions.

3. Literary process can be viewed from another point of view: how the process of formation, development and change of artistic styles. Here a number of questions arise: how and why styles arise, what influence they have on the further development of culture, how an individual style is formed and how important it is for the development of the literary process, what are the stylistic dominants of a certain era, etc.

It is clear that we will receive any comprehensive understanding of the literary process only if we take into account all these issues, if these issues themselves are understood systematically and interconnected. At the early stages of mastering the science of philology, these relationships are not yet felt, so further conversation will be conducted more in an analytical than in a synthetic manner; first you need to understand the different components of the literary process, and only then, having more experience, establish connections between these components.

Tradition and innovation - the most important components of the literary process. There is not a single great work of literature that is not connected by thousands of threads with the context of world culture, but in the same way it is impossible to imagine a significant aesthetic phenomenon that has not enriched world literature with something of its own. Therefore, tradition and innovation are flip sides of the same coin: true tradition always presupposes innovation, and innovation is possible only against the backdrop of tradition.

One of the most famous philologists of the 20th century, M. M. Bakhtin, who constantly returned to this issue, wrote this: “Every truly significant step forward is accompanied by a return to the beginning (“originality”), or more precisely, to a renewal of the beginning. Only memory can move forward, not oblivion. The memory returns to the beginning and updates it. Of course, the terms “forward” and “backward” themselves lose their closed absoluteness in this understanding; rather, through their interaction they reveal the living paradoxical nature of movement.”

In another work, Bakhtin creates a wonderful metaphor: “Great works of literature take centuries to prepare, but in the era of their creation only the ripe fruits of a long and complex ripening process are harvested. Trying to understand and explain a work only from the conditions of its era, only from the conditions of the immediate future, we will never penetrate into its semantic depths.” Developing this idea, the author continues: “The semantic treasures that Shakespeare put into his works were created and collected over centuries and even millennia: they were hidden in the language, and not only in the literary one, but also in such layers of the popular language that had not yet entered before Shakespeare in literature, in diverse genres and forms of speech communication, in the forms of powerful folk culture ».

Hence one of Bakhtin’s central ideas, which is directly related to the problem of tradition and innovation, is the idea of ​​world culture as dialogical space, in which different works and even different eras constantly echo, complement and reveal each other. Ancient authors predetermine modern culture, but the modern era also makes it possible to discover in the brilliant creations of antiquity those meanings that were not visible or recognized in those days. Thus, any new work is dependent on tradition, but paradoxically, the works of bygone eras depend on modern culture. The modern reader is “born” by Shakespeare, but Shakespeare also reveals to him such semantic depths that neither the contemporaries of the brilliant playwright, nor he himself could feel. Thus, time in the space of culture loses the “linearity” so familiar to us (from past to future), it turns into living movement in both directions.

V.V. Musatov considered the problem of tradition with slightly different emphases. In his opinion, any artist strives to create an “individual hypothesis of existence,” so every time he correlates the experience of his predecessors with his era and his destiny. Therefore, tradition is not just “copying” techniques, it is always a complex psychological act when someone else’s world is “tested” by one’s own experience.

So, “tradition” is a very comprehensive concept, fundamental for an adequate perception of the literary process.

So far we have talked about the philosophical, general aesthetic meaning of the term “tradition”. At a more specific level, several “problem points” can be identified related to tradition and innovation.

Firstly, it is not always easy to separate concepts “tradition”, “canon”, “imitation”, “stylization”,"imitation" etc. If today we associate with “epigonism” “empty imitation”, which does not enrich culture in any way (this word itself has negative connotation), then, for example, with imitation and canon everything is more complicated. Not all imitation is epigonism; an open orientation towards some model can lead to significant aesthetic results. For example, in Russian lyric poetry the word “imitation” is allowed as a kind of genre qualifier: “In imitation of the Koran,” “In imitation of Byron,” etc. We encounter the same thing in numerous poems beginning with “From ...”: “From Heine”, “From Goethe”, etc. Interesting cases are possible here. For example, the famous program poem by A. S. Pushkin “From Pindemonti”, at first glance, openly refers to the work of the Italian poet, but in reality this is a hoax; I. Pindemonti never had such a poem. The question arises: why does Pushkin refer us specifically to this name; Is this an accident, a “trick” to deceive censorship, or did the poet still feel some kind of internal resonance between his lines and the poetry of this author? There is no consensus among scientists on this issue. But in any case, it is in this poem that Pushkin formulates his poetic credo:

Other, better rights are dear to me;

I need a different, better freedom:

Depend on the king, depend on the people -

Do we care? God be with them.

Nobody

Don't give a report...

In other cases, a direct focus on a well-known text can lead to the creation of a genuine author's masterpiece. Thus, Pushkin’s “little tragedy” “A Feast in the Time of Plague” is, as you know, the author’s translation of one act from J. Wilson’s play “City of the Plague” (1816). In general, Pushkin follows Wilson’s text, but adds two songs “on his own”: Mary’s song and the famous “Hymn to the Plague”:

Everything, everything that threatens death,

Hides for the mortal heart

Inexplicable pleasures -

Immortality, perhaps, is a guarantee!

And happy is the one who is in the midst of excitement

I could acquire and know them.

So, praise be to you, Plague,

We are not afraid of the darkness of the grave,

We will not be confused by your calling!

We drink glasses together

And the rose maidens drink the breath, -

Perhaps... full of Plague!

These insertions radically change the whole picture; from John Wilson’s not-so-famous play, Pushkin gives birth to a masterpiece.

However, in many cases, a work written “in imitation” does not have much artistic value and indicates the author’s helplessness and insufficient talent. Ultimately, as always in creativity, it’s all about talent.

It is even more difficult to “separate” tradition and canon. The canon is the norms accepted in a given culture and strictly observed.. The canon imposes rather strict restrictions on the author's freedom of expression, thus being a “binding tradition.” Archaic forms of culture, for example, many genres of folklore, were so associated with the canon that they left almost no room for authorial “liberties.” In this sense, we can talk about the “authorship” of folklore texts only metaphorically; in folklore there is a “collective author”. Ancient consciousness did not draw a line between “what is known to me” and “born by me” (in other words, between what I I know some text and the fact that I created), therefore any text was easily assigned to those who knew it. Gradually, the boundaries of “us and foe” became stronger, and in many cultures, for example, in medieval eastern poetry or in Russian icon painting, the canon began to be perceived as an “external” condition obligatory for the author. But within the canon the author’s vision of the world was already evident. That is why, for example, the Russian icon is so diverse while strictly observing the Orthodox canon.

In modern secular culture, the canon does not play such a role, although, naturally, any artist experiences some restrictions imposed by the established tradition. However, these restrictions are no longer rigid, and cultural traditions are so diverse that they provide the author with almost limitless possibilities.

SecondlyWhen talking about tradition, we must remember that it manifests itself at different levels. Let's look at this in a little more detail.

Tradition of the theme assumes that the author, when determining the thematic spectrum of his work, constantly correlates his decision with those that have already been found by culture. Let's say, the theme of Christ's truth, confirmed by his suffering and death, finds thousands of artistic solutions that take each other into account and polemicize with each other. It is enough to recall M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” to feel that the author simultaneously continues and violates (or develops) the established tradition. It is no coincidence that many supporters of the Orthodox canon do not accept Bulgakov’s novel, considering it “the gospel of Satan.”

Tradition of image (character). The tradition of the image or its variant, the tradition of character, involves taking into account decisions already accumulated by culture regarding a particular character. Sometimes it manifests itself directly, most often in this case some well-known image becomes emblematic and highlights the character of the hero. Thus, N.S. Leskov, defining his heroine Katerina Lvovna as “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” immediately creates a Shakespearean background against which the heroine looks different: more tragic and larger-scale.

In other cases, echoes are visible at the level of the heroes’ psychology, their actions, and relationships. At one time, A.D. Sinyavsky, somewhat crudely, characterized the relationship between a man and a woman in classical Russian literature: “A woman was a touchstone for a man in literature. Through his relationship with her, he discovered his weakness and, compromised by her strength and beauty, climbed off the stage on which he was going to act out something heroic, and went, bent over, into oblivion with the shameful nickname of an unnecessary, worthless, superfluous person.”

Sinyavsky is too straightforward, but the structure of the relationship is captured quite accurately. And it is not difficult to see that this structure was proposed to Russian culture by A. S. Pushkin in “Eugene Onegin”, other authors (I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N.Tolstoy) one way or another already followed the Pushkin tradition.

Tradition of the genre – one of the most powerful in world culture. Genre represents forms of author’s self-expression found and adopted by literature. The genre fixes the features of the narrative, and - in many cases - the theme, and the types of pathos, and the features of conflicts, etc. Therefore, the chosen genre is always to some extent binding. Let's say, a poet writing an ode inevitably finds himself in the depths of the thousand-year-old tradition of this genre. Although there is a huge distance between the odes of M.V. Lomonosov and, for example, “Ode to the Revolution” by V. Mayakovsky, many common features dictated by the tradition of the genre are striking.

National tradition associated with the system of values ​​​​accepted in a particular culture: ethical, aesthetic, historical, etc. As a rule, the artist absorbs world culture through the national, the reverse way practically impossible. The Russian writer is open to world cultural experience, but this experience is refracted through the cultural experience of the nation. This was well reflected by M. Yu. Lermontov in his youthful poem:

No, I'm not Byron, I'm different

A still unknown chosen one,

How he is a wanderer persecuted by the world,

But only with a Russian soul.

The poet declares his openness to the world of Byron, his closeness to the brilliant English bard, but Byron is refracted through the “Russian soul.” As a result, we have not one of Byron's countless imitators, but a great Russian poet who has gained worldwide fame.

A poet who grows from the depths of national culture can become a world poet. But, if you imagine some abstract “world poet,” he will not be able to become a national poet. The now popular expression “man of the world” should not be absolutized. People of the world are not born, but become.

Tradition of artistic techniques combines lexical, syntactic, rhythmic, plot-compositional, etc. techniques for constructing a text. In many cases, the tradition of techniques catches the eye, for example, a poet who writes with a “ladder” will immediately be in line with Mayakovsky’s tradition. In other cases, it is less recognizable, but any work in one way or another uses already found artistic techniques. Like any tradition, the tradition of techniques is enriched by new finds, becoming more complex and multifaceted.

Style tradition in a sense, it synthesizes all the possibilities outlined above. Style consists precisely of figurative-thematic, genre, etc. unity. Here we can talk about the author’s traditions (for example, Pushkin’s or Nekrasov’s) or about the tradition of certain movements or even eras (for example, the traditions of antiquity in the culture of classicism, the romantic tradition in modern poetry, etc.).. 6, No. 16, Jun., 1927.

Sinyavsky A. (Abram Tertz) What is socialist realism // http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/synyavsky/1059651903.html

Introduction

St. Petersburg is an unusual city. And the exact date of its birth (1703), and the place where it was founded (Finnish swamps are not a traditional place for building Russian cities; all ancient capitals - Kiev, Pereyaslavl, Moscow - stand on the high banks of the river, on the hills), and the goals pursued by Peter the Great, in the midst of the war with the Swedes, establishing a new capital on the border of the empire, and, finally, the city owes its further unusual fate to the very name of its sovereign founder.

The city, created contrary to the laws of nature, in defiance of the elements, was perceived as a miraculous, supernatural phenomenon, and it was created by a man to whom the standards of ordinary human existence are not applicable - Peter the Great. “Grad Petrov” struck the imagination, first of all, with the fabulous speed and orderliness of its creation. Compared to other European capitals that grew gradually and spontaneously, St. Petersburg was perceived as a “deliberate”, “fictional” city, “pulled” (Merezhkovsky) out of the ground. To contemporaries and heirs of Petrova’s fame, Petersburg appeared as the embodiment of a daring challenge thrown in several directions at once:

Petersburg was built on the border as a challenge to Russia's enemies;

The city became the new capital of the Russian Empire: in contrast to the old one - Moscow; built almost on the border, St. Petersburg was a challenge to the natural flow of history, because was founded far from the economic and cultural center of the country;

And finally, the city on the banks of the Neva became a challenge to the elements of nature.

That is why, from the very cradle, St. Petersburg history was intertwined with St. Petersburg mythology, in which the main place belonged not only to the city itself, but also to its founder. The mythology of the city developed in two main directions. Petersburg was perceived as a kind of living creature that was brought to life by supernatural forces. But were these forces good or evil?

On the one hand, it was believed that these forces were of a divine nature, since only a deity could create a city contrary to the laws of nature. Ideas about the glory of the Fatherland were associated with St. Petersburg; and then, after the death of Peter, tradition deified the founder of the northern capital, giving him supernatural features. After all, a mere mortal would not be able to fight with nature and defeat it. One of the legends about the founding of St. Petersburg belongs to Odoevsky:

“They began to build a city, but when they lay a stone, the swamp will be sucked away; A lot of porridge has already been piled up, rock on rock, log on log, but the swamp takes everything into itself and at the top of the earth only swamp remains. Meanwhile, Tsar Peter built a ship and looked around: he saw that his city was gone. “You don’t know how to do anything,” he said to his people, and with that word he began to lift rock after rock and forge it in the air. So he built a whole city and lowered it to the ground.” It is characteristic that this legend, although it belongs to the literary tradition, is told as a folk legend, an epic, although among the peasant common people the appearance of St. Petersburg and its founder was perceived in a completely different way.

The second line in the depiction of St. Petersburg is traditionally associated with folk tales. But this is only part of the legends that were more widespread among the Old Believers, for even in the popular consciousness the image of Peter the Great was quite contradictory, and his city was seen differently. But in the Old Believer oral tradition, St. Petersburg - a city that undermines the traditional order of life sanctified by religious consciousness - was the embodiment of the “kingdom of the Antichrist.” His appearance on Russian soil signaled the proximity of the end of the world. The same anti-God, anti-people evil forces that gave birth to the monstrous city will overthrow it into primordial chaos.

And as soon as this non-Russian city - generated by the will of Peter - the Antichrist - disappears, true faith and righteous life will return to Rus'.

In 1845, Belinsky wrote: “People are used to thinking about St. Petersburg as a city built not even on a swamp, but almost on air. Many seriously claim that this is a city without a historical shrine, without legends, without connections with its native country, a city built on stilts and calculations.” In some ways, it seems natural, although a little unusual, for the expression of popular opinion by a representative of a heterogeneous democracy. Although, on the other hand, by this time (mid-19th century) St. Petersburg, even in the literary tradition, began to be perceived as an unnatural, undivine city.

Petersburg is often compared to Rome. But if in literature the “city of Petrov” is “eternal Rome”, an immortal city, then in folk mythology it is “doomed Rome” - Constantinople. However, no matter how one looked at St. Petersburg: as a city that demonstrated the victory of reason over the elements or as a perversion of the natural order, the correct course of events - a city founded at the mouth of a river, on the seashore, by both traditions - was perceived as opposition natural, i.e. ideal artificial city.

Petersburg, as a great city, turned out to be not the result of a complete victory of culture over the elements of nature, but a place where the dual power of nature and culture reigns from year to year, from century to century. In the St. Petersburg myth, it is this struggle that becomes the main indicator of the border existence of the city / Petersburg is as if between a rock and a hard place - between an element that has not been completely defeated and a barrier created by human hands - stone embankments, dams. St. Petersburg is at the edge of the abyss, on the verge of “this” and “otherworldly” worlds, the illusory and fantastic nature of phenomena reigns in it.

But what would be a miracle in another city is a pattern here in St. Petersburg.

It must be said that the image of St. Petersburg - a ghostly, phantasmagoric city - did not develop in the Russian literary tradition from the moment the city was founded. The entire XVIII century. Russian Piites praised Northern Palmyra and its great founder. St. Petersburg was the embodiment of harmony, a young city, whose greatness will be fully revealed only in the future, but which is beautiful today. This tradition was started by Sumarokov:

"Erected by his hand

From Neptune's ferocity

City, refuge of peace.

Safe from stormy disasters,

Where over clear water.

Alexandrov holds the temple above the clear Neva.”

("Ode to the Victory of Peter I")

Peter the Great, the tamer of the elements, was also the ruler of the world.

The same tradition of praising the beautiful new capital and the works of Peter the Great was continued by Lomonosov and Derzhavin. Northern Palmyra was not a legend; there was no struggle between the city and the elements. On the contrary, the beauty of St. Petersburg lies in the harmonious combination of nature and art.

Beginning of the 19th century did not bring significant changes to this tradition. Thus, in 1818 Vyazemsky wrote:

“I see the wonderful, majestic city of Petrov,

According to the king's mania, erected from blat,

The hereditary monument of his mighty glory,

His descendants decorated it a hundred times.

Art here has been at war with nature everywhere.

And it marked its triumph everywhere.

The power of the mind subdued the rebellion of the elements,

Whose commanding voice, in spite of nature,

Moved and dragged out of the wild desert

Masses of eternal rocks to spread out strongholds

Along the banks of your northern rivers there are heads,

Magnificent and bright Neva...

The sovereign work of Peter and the mind of Catherine

The slow work of centuries has been accomplished in one single century.”

The first who grasped the motive of the struggle between nature and human creativity, which continues in St. Petersburg to this day, was Batyushkov, but even he remained unknown to the tragic power and depth of this struggle, because the poet was fascinated by the life of the city, which arose from a harmonious combination of nature and human genius.

There was, perhaps, no writer in Russian literature who would not say anything about St. Petersburg. Therefore, it is hardly possible to cover everything associated with this city in one work.

In the development of the “St. Petersburg theme” in the literature of the 19th - early 20th centuries. we can highlight the main milestones: the St. Petersburg cycle of A.S. Pushkin, “Petersburg Tales” by N.V. Gogol, St. Petersburg in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky, and, as the completion of the St. Petersburg theme, A. Bely’s novel “Petersburg,” where all previous works about the “city of Petrov” were reflected in a refracted light and rethought form.

Even in the works of these writers, St. Petersburg appears as a multicolored city, illuminated from different sides. In this work, the task was to consider the literary tradition, in which St. Petersburg appears as a city, as if located on the border of two worlds - the real and the fantastic - a ghostly, extraordinary city.

A.S. Pushkin was the first to create the image of a phantasmagoric city in The Queen of Spades and The Bronze Horseman, moving away from the tradition of the 18th century. - praise of the “city of Petrov” and its sovereign founder. This Petersburg and the place it occupies in Pushkin’s work are discussed in most detail in Khodasevich’s article “Pushkin’s Petersburg Stories” and A. Bely’s work “Rhythm as Dialectics.”

Much has also been written about Gogol’s “Petersburg Tales”. But it is the fantastic, and not the social, side of events that is considered in the book by O.G. Dilaktorskaya “The Fantastic in Gogol’s Petersburg Tales.” Gubarev also paid great attention to this issue in his work “Gogol’s Petersburg Tales.”

F.M. Dostoevsky is often rightly called “the creator of the image of St. Petersburg,” but this is Petersburg “underground,” a city of poverty and misery, although another city occasionally appears in Dostoevsky’s works - a “magic dream,” a ghostly fairy tale, a dream. We see this kind of Petersburg in the story “A Weak Heart” (which almost literally repeats “Petersburg Dreams in Poems and Prose”) and in the novel “Teenager”. The most interesting discussion of Dostoevsky's ghostly city and its connection with the Gogol tradition can be found in A. Bely's work “Gogol's Mastery.”

The “Silver Age” of Russian literature gave many wonderful works about the “city of Peter”, continuing the “St. Petersburg theme” in literature, but, perhaps, no one better than A. Bely combined and rethought everything that was written about St. Petersburg - the ghost city. In A. Bely’s “Petersburg” you can also meet the heroes of A.S. Pushkin (of course, changed over the century), and with Gogol’s characters, and the very image of the city is often inspired by the writer Dostoevsky. All these plot interweavings, internal quotes and borrowings are analyzed in detail in D. Dolgopolov’s work “A. Bely and his novel "Petersburg".

It was Bely and his novel that ended the line of a ghostly, fantastic city in literature, where the supernatural events occurring in it are most real.

Many works are devoted to the problem of literary St. Petersburg. One of the most interesting, showing the change in the attitude of writers towards St. Petersburg in the 19th century, is the work of N.P. Antsiferov “The Soul of St. Petersburg. Petersburg by Dostoevsky. True story and myth of St. Petersburg." In 1384, the University of Tartu published a collection of articles dedicated to St. Petersburg and the “Petersburg theme” in literature, where articles by V.L. deserve special attention. Toporova, V.M. Lotman, R.D. Timenchik and others.

Most of the above-mentioned works and articles are devoted to literary analysis of works of art about St. Petersburg. The aesthetic aspect is affected to a lesser extent. Therefore, in this work an attempt is made to characterize the fantastic Petersburg of Pushkin and Gogol, the ghostly Petersburg of Dostoevsky and the symbolic city of A. Bely from the point of view of their symbolic meaning. The Russian literary tradition contains rich material for understanding the aesthetic phenomenon of St. Petersburg.

Fantastic Petersburg of Pushkin and Gogol

A.S. Pushkin created his own unique image of St. Petersburg, which, on the one hand, is the result of the work of writers of the entire previous century, and, on the other hand, a prophecy about the future fate of the city. Pushkin, in a number of his works, gave rise to the literary myth of St. Petersburg; These works are rather conventionally combined into a cycle of “Petersburg stories”.

Pushkin was the first to see two Petersburgs: the first is the city of white nights from Eugene Onegin:

“...in the summer sometimes,

When it's clear and light

Night sky over the Neva

And the waters are cheerful glass

Doesn’t reflect Diana’s face...”;

newborn “city of Petrov” from “Arap Peter the Great”: “... a newborn capital, which rose from the swamp by the mania of the autocratic hand. Exposed dams, canals without embankment, wooden bridges everywhere showed the recent victory of human will over the resistance of the elements. The houses seemed hastily built. In the whole city there was nothing magnificent except the Neva, not yet decorated with a granite frame, but already covered with military and merchant ships”; a beautiful city that emerged from the swamps by the will of Peter the Great and transformed by his heirs:

“The city is lush, the city is pale,

Spirit of bondage, slender appearance.

The vault of heaven is green and pale,

Boredom, cold and granite."

Petersburg is just as coldly beautiful in the introduction to The Bronze Horseman. All these descriptions of the northern capital are different, but they have one thing in common: they show the beautiful and majestic Petersburg, a symbol of man’s victory over the elements, standing on the banks of the Neva, dressed in granite, beautiful not by nature, but humanized by its beauty; Its wide streets and straight, arrow-like avenues are bright on white nights, but this stone beauty is cold, a person feels like a stranger in it, it delights the eyes, but does not warm souls and hearts.

But there is another St. Petersburg - the city of Kolomna and Vasilievsky Island, almost a suburb, with small houses and cozy gardens, a city where only the hero of Pushkin’s St. Petersburg stories can exist - a small man yearning for peace and quiet. The brilliance of Peter’s creation, which brought to the city, along with the tamed elements, the possibility of its rebellion, the unreliability, fragility of existence, a certain fantastic unusualness of existence on the verge of nature and culture, is alien to him and does not need him. “Let the souls freeze from the cold and the bodies of its inhabitants become numb - the city lives its own super-personal life, develops towards achieving its great and mysterious goals.”

It is precisely the confrontation between the little man and his desire to find his quiet, native corner in the coldly beautiful capital, and the majestic, fantastic city (on whose side it sometimes becomes clear that the evil spirits - they say it was she who helped Peter build the highlander in the swamps) and dedicated to Pushkin's St. Petersburg stories. From the point of view of V. Khodasevich, these stories “can be connected with each other not only by the fortune-telling and foggy features of the St. Petersburg air,” but mainly by a completely specific theme, interpreted differently, but clearly expressed in the final words of “The Secluded House on Vasilievsky” : “Where does the devil get this desire to interfere in worldly affairs?”

Based on the assumption that the main theme in the St. Petersburg stories is the struggle of man against supernatural evil forces, Khodasevich presents the structure of the St. Petersburg stories as follows:

“Secluded house on Vasilyevsky”

“House in Kolomna” “Bronze Horseman” “Queen of Spades”

Initiative of the dark forces Initiative of the dark forces Human initiative

(Comic resolution) (Comic resolution) (Tragic resolution)

It seems to me that, despite the grain, the peculiarities of a person’s relationship with dark forces and the interweaving of plot moves and motives wandering from one story to another (for example, Evgeniy’s bride, like the main character of “The House in Kolomna”, is called Parasha; and the groom Vera "A Secluded House on Vasilyevsky" and the hero of "The Bronze Horseman" are petty officials; the descriptions of small houses and their inhabitants on Vasilievsky and Kolomna are also similar, etc.), Khodasevich is not entirely right in defining the main theme of the St. Petersburg stories. The main theme and main character of these stories is St. Petersburg, an unusual and fantastic city: but everything unreal that happens in it should be attributed not to the works of Satan, but to the very nature of this city. That special “St. Petersburg air,” the influence of which on the unity of St. Petersburg stories is not taken into account by Khodasevich, is the main thing that determines the course of events in these stories, perhaps the main thing that was the reason for Pushkin’s creation of such dissimilar works, nevertheless, united in one cycle.

The most vivid image of a border city belonging to two worlds appeared in “The Bronze Horseman,” although, reading the introduction to the poem, we might think that Pushkin here only continues the tradition of the 18th-century Piites, chanting “the city of Petrov”:

“...A hundred years have passed, and the young city,

There is beauty and wonder in the midnight lands,

From the darkness of the forests, from the swamps of blat,

He ascended magnificently, proudly...

Along busy shores

Slender communities crowd together

Palaces and towers; ships

A crowd from all over the world

They strive for rich marinas;

The Neva is dressed in granite;

Bridges hung over the waters;

Dark green gardens

Islands covered it...

I love you, Petra's creation!

I love your strict, slender appearance,

Neva sovereign current,

Its coastal granite,

Your fences have a cast iron pattern,

of your thoughtful nights

Transparent twilight, moonless shine...

And the sleeping communities are clear

Deserted streets and light

Admiralty needle,

And, not letting the darkness of the night

To golden skies

Osha dawn, replacing another

He’s in a hurry, giving the night half an hour...”

This ode to Pushkin continues the tradition of poets of the 18th century. - the tradition of praise and deification of Peter and the city he created. But Pushkin does not strive to describe the splendor of the capital, but to show a different, fantastic city where extraordinary events can occur - a dead countess appears to Hermann, Eugene is pursued by the Bronze Horseman. When we read about these seemingly incredible incidents that contradict our realistic mindset, we cannot understand whether it is a dream, a crazy vision, or perhaps reality. After all, a city founded on swamps cannot be created by an ordinary person, but only by the wondrous genius of a superman, his “fatal will.” And the founder, conveying his supernaturalism to the city, could not leave it forever - in the image of the Bronze Horseman (the symbol of St. Petersburg) he remained in the city to keep an eye on what was happening in it, to pacify the rebellious elements that from time to time try to take over the city created against the will and laws of nature.

The flood of 1824, described by Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman, was terrible. Most of St. Petersburg was destroyed, many buildings were damaged, especially on the outskirts. Many people died. Here is what Griboedov, who was in St. Petersburg at that time, wrote about the flood: “Everything on this side of the Fontanka up to Liteinaya and Vladimirskaya was flooded. Nevsky Prospekt was turned into a rough strait; the embankments of the various canals disappeared, and all the canals merged into one. Centenary trees in the Summer Garden lay in ridges, uprooted, with their roots up... The Kashin and Potseluev bridges were moved from their places. The Khrapovitsky (bridge) was torn away from the bridge fortifications; the Bertov Bridge, incapable of passage, also disappeared. The view was of Vasilyevsky Island. Here, in the neighborhood, several hundred houses no longer existed: one, and that was an ugly pile in which the foundation and roof were all mixed up.” (As this description of the destroyed house reminds us of what poor Eugene saw at the site of his bride’s house, having difficulty getting there as soon as the water began to subside).

The flood lasted two days, turning streets into canals, squares into islands or lakes, and on the islands themselves the water swept away everything that had been created by human hands. “Many fences were knocked down; Roofs were blown off some houses; there were barges, gallots and boats in the square; the streets were cluttered with firewood, logs and various rubbish - in a word, there were pictures of open destruction everywhere.” (Karatygin).

Such were the consequences of the flood, which deprived poor Eugene of his only joy - his beloved girl. Of course, many people died in these two days, and grief came to more than one person, but Pushkin chose as his hero the most ordinary official, about whom we know, strictly speaking, only his name, but all other moments of his life (service, origin)‚ if they are mentioned, then in passing; We don’t even know his last name. And this little man was destined to awaken the Bronze Horseman - the guardian spirit, eh. maybe the evil genius of St. Petersburg. And the elements pushed them together.

The image of water, the element, occupies a very large place in The Bronze Horseman, and it is important not only in itself, as the destructive force of the rebellious Neva, but also as a connecting thread between Peter the Great and Eugene. The flood is described as if from two sides; it “doubles” in the eyes of the reader. For Evgeny, a rebellious element is something terrible that a person cannot even imagine coping with. Peter the Great built a city on the banks of the Neva, thinking that human genius would defeat nature, but, having transformed from a superman, a brilliant emperor and warrior into the Bronze Horseman, he was able to bewitch the rebellious water, the king over the villainess - the elements. The city itself is unshakable, the fate of the flood overtakes only the “poor boats” of downpours of ordinary people who float along the flooded capital along with the coffins. And the powerless Tsar Alexander the First turns into only a shadow, an illusion, and the true ruler of the city remains not even Peter, but his all-powerful incarnation - the Bronze Horseman.

There is a folk legend about the Bronze Horseman himself, in which the monument is perceived as a living, only petrified king on a horse for the time being: “When there was a war with the Swedes, Peter rode on this horse. Once the Swedes caught our general and began to skin him alive. They reported this to the tsar, but he was hot-tempered, immediately galloped off on a horse, and forgot that the general was being skinned on the other side of the river, he needed to jump over the Neva. So that he could jump more dexterously, he directed his horse towards this stone, which was now under the horse, and from the stone he thought to wave across the Neva, and would have waved, but God saved him. As soon as the horse wanted to fly off the stone, a large snake suddenly appeared on the stone, as if it was waiting, wrapped itself around the horse’s hind legs in one second, squeezed its legs as if with pincers, stung the horse - and the horse did not move, and remained on its hind legs.”

There is also a legend that when the horse jumps from the mountain, then, together with the Antichrist Tsar, the entire unclean, non-Russian city will fall into the abyss.

But the years passed, and the Bronze Horseman ceased to be the embodiment of Peter the Great, but became an “idol on a bronze horse,” self-valuable and autocratic. The world in which he reigns is a superhuman world; a world where the Petrovo affair turns into petrified autocracy, and Eugene’s belief that the one who created this city must protect its inhabitants collapses and leads the defenseless official to madness. It is precisely the hope in the omnipotence of the sovereign (one of whom cannot, and the other does not want to cope with the elements), as it turns out, imaginary, that destroys a person. Evgeniy, who has lost faith in the inviolability of the city of Petrov, no longer has either a goal in life or the possibility of future happiness. He is already crushed by the grief that has befallen him, along with the elements. But there must be a culprit for this - and who is he if not the one

“...by whose will the fatal

Was the city founded under the sea?

And isn’t he the “lord of fate” that Eugene turns his silent reproaches to him? After all, even in a moment of insane courage, Evgeny does not dare to express to the Bronze Horseman all the pain that has accumulated in his soul, to blame him for all his suffering. He just decides to throw a vague reproach to the king: “Too bad for you...” and immediately rushes to run.

Peter (or, more precisely, the Bronze Horseman) is present in the poem as a direct (and therefore difficult to comprehend) embodiment of limitless power, rising above human capabilities, interests, feelings, above ordinary human concepts of good and evil. Both the Bronze Horseman and St. Petersburg - as his creation - put pressure on people’s lives, but, at the same time, they delight them: in both cases, they force them to bow and subjugate them to their will. The Bronze Horseman is not Peter, but a symbol of the perversion of the meaning of the concept of “Peter’s work.” And St. Petersburg, a city whose history is inseparable from the history of the life and work of Peter the Great, more obviously than any other phenomenon in Russian history, appears to Pushkin’s poetic consciousness as an arena of the collision of several great truths, which, with their contradictions and struggle, determine the historical movement. It was precisely the ambiguity of Pushkin’s assessment of the activities of Peter the Great and his creation of St. Petersburg that gave rise to a multiplicity of interpretations of the poem. A. Bely, for example, perceived the “Bronze Horseman” as “a monument dragged from one meaning to another and attached first to one king, then to another, or erected first by one reign, then by another.”

Belinsky considered Peter in “The Bronze Horseman” to be a representative of the collective will, as opposed to the personal, individual principle - Eugene. Merezhkovsky, on the contrary, believed that it was Peter who was the expression of the personal principle of heroism (the deification of one’s Self), and Evgeny was the exponent of the impersonal, collective will (the renunciation of one’s Self in God).

As long as the Bronze Horseman stands on a huge stone in the middle of the city he created, this city will stand, despite the attempts of the elements to return the place that once belonged to them.

In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin reproduces, with the help of stylizations and references, many points of view - individual and collective - on St. Petersburg. It is the enormity of the theme of St. Petersburg and Peter the Great that forces Pushkin to turn to such “stereoscopic” lighting; and the poet’s very opinion about the historical era that St. Petersburg began, and about Peter’s transformations, was not unambiguous, and therefore so many different styles were brought together in one work, and so many different points of view.

It is difficult to determine the role of the city itself in the poem, however, it is in Pushkin that we first find the opposition of two oppositely structured cities, practically not communicating with each other: the center - the outskirts; “palace” part of St. Petersburg - Kolomna, Vasilyevsky Island. Pushkin created his poem as if on the border of two traditions in literature - the glorification of the “city of Petrov” was becoming a thing of the past, images of peripheral, “not ceremonial” St. Petersburg appeared in literature. After Pushkin, the depiction of the outskirts of St. Petersburg and the life not of great people, but of an ordinary, “little man” lost in the cold spaces of the northern capital, became the dominant trend in literature.

This is how he defines tradition in literature: “Tradition in literature is something that the writer does not create himself, but finds ready-made, invented by others: this is the closest spiritual environment in which literary activity takes place, an environment that leaves a stamp on individual acts of creativity. The most original writer does not create everything himself: some aspects of his work are original in relation to given ideas and forms, but others are inherited by tradition” (Kareev N.I. Literary tradition in the West. Voronezh. 1886. P.47)

Kareev emphasizes the interaction of creativity and tradition in the literary tradition. He writes the following: “...the basis of literary evolution is the interaction of creativity and tradition, and this is not the exclusive ability of one literary evolution, but the essence of each. Take any kind of activity, everywhere you will see that, in addition to the pragmatism of cause and effect, well-known well-trodden paths play a role in it, which we reduce to the concept of culture: the political activity of the people is determined by the state system, the scientific activity of society is determined by the stock of existing knowledge and an arsenal of developed methods" (Kareev N.I. Literary tradition in the West. Voronezh. 1886. P.45)

A) literary language(literary language as opposed to colloquial, style, versification, etc., etc.),

V) form of literary works(construction of a work, external techniques, etc.),

d) their ideas( those.

He notes that: “Literary language has the greatest stability, ideas have the least stability: the first depends exclusively on one and, moreover, slowly occurring linguistic process, the second are under the constant and very complex influence of the entire course of life. In the content of literary works, traditionalism is expressed either in the form of reworking old plots (for example, the Carolingian epic at the beginning), or in the depiction of only known objects (for example, a chivalric romance), or in the preference for a well-known specific image that already existed in literature (for example . Roland) or a more abstract character and type (ascetic, knight, miser, hypocrite, etc.), etc. - and in general, the course of life has a greater influence on the content of literary works than on their form, which in in turn, it can be either a monotonous template, or a wider frame, less restrictive of freedom of creativity than any template” (Kareev N.I. Literary tradition in the West. Voronezh. 1886. P.330-331)

He further states that: “Literary traditions have earlier or later beginnings and are often interrupted, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, sometimes without a trace, sometimes with the stopping of some relic in other traditions. The emergence and cessation of traditions depends on general historical conditions" (Kareev N.I. Literary tradition in the West. Voronezh.

Kareev emphasizes that the literary tradition does not remain unchanged, it is gradually modernized. The literary tradition of one people is often influenced by the literary traditions of another, the process of displacement of one literary tradition by another occurs, or their interpenetration and interaction occurs. During the period of early literary eras, Kareev argues, the power of tradition prevails over creativity, but with development there is an intensification of personal creative moments, literary creativity acquires not an unconscious-collective character, but a personal-conscious one.

About the cultural and social spheres: “..all these spheres are not only contained in the whole of social life, like in a wheel of its parts - the hub, spokes and rim, and not each moves separately, although all at once, but are in organic interaction and movements with their influence, some influence the movements of others: changes in economic life are reflected in politics, and in law, and in technology, and in customs and mores; political upheavals affect law, economic life, philosophy, art, literature, law, etc. etc." (Kareev N.I. Literary tradition in the West. Voronezh. 1886. P.73-74)

“The general course of literary evolution is the weakening of traditionalism through a) the development of creativity and c) the interaction of traditions due, firstly, to international influences, which increase * with the general development of life, and secondly, due to the large accumulation of literary material over time , giving a larger number of samples. The role of international influences is also played by cases of return to forgotten traditions of former times (for example, the influence of the classics on European literature from the Renaissance or medieval poetry on neo-romanticism of the 19th century" (Kareev N.I. Literary tradition in the West. Voronezh. 1886. P.333)

For literature of the 19th century. characterized by a wide appeal to oral folk art. A. S. Pushkin became the first poet of the 19th century who widely showed all the richness and beauty of Russian folk culture. Songs and sayings, legends and riddles - the entire heritage of the Russian people was included by the poet in his works. From this poem and story they did not lose their sublimity and sophistication; on the contrary, they gained a lot from such influence.

Pushkin creates the story “The Captain's Daughter”, in which he uses folk songs and proverbs (“Take care of your honor from a young age”) as epigraphs for chapters, emphasizing with them the ideological meaning of the work. He creates his wonderful fairy tales, which reveal a deep understanding of the social essence of folklore, in particular the satire of folk tales. Pushkin translated prose stories into poetry and created a lot of original things in this area, for example, a unique verse of the fairy tale about the priest and the worker Balda.

Lermontov wrote a poem about the merchant Kalashnikov, using a song about Kostryuk. Gogol achieves great success in creating a heroic, patriotic story using Ukrainian folklore (“Taras Bulba”). Songs were a new phenomenon A. V. Koltsova, who superbly synthesized the features of the form and style of folk song and the achievements of book poetry. The work of A.V. Koltsov continued the traditions of A.F. Merzlyakov, A.A. Delvig, N.G. Tsyganov and other poets who created at the beginning of the 19th century. folk songs. But he more organically assimilated folk poetics, and most importantly, the very spirit of folk poetry, as evidenced by such vivid images as the hero of the poem “Mower”.
Folklore is used in a deeply realistic way in creativity N. A. Nekrasova. The poet knew folk songs, fairy tales and legends from childhood. As a revolutionary democrat, he subordinated the use of folklore in his works to the idea of ​​a peasant revolution. The image of Savely, the Holy Russian hero, like other characters in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” show the poet’s excellent knowledge of folk life and creativity. Folklore helped the poet to truthfully show the plight of the masses, their spiritual world, and their high moral qualities. In his poem, Nekrasov created the image of a person who loves the people and their creativity, Pavlushi Veretennikov, in whom the features of the famous folklorist P. I. Yakushkin are recognizable:

He sang Russian songs smoothly / And loved to listen to them...

Nekrasov also owns such a beautiful song as “Troika” (“Why are you greedily looking at the road”), and legends (about Kudeyar). Using folk motifs, the poet creates images of Russian women - Matryona Timofeevna and Daria. He widely refers to various folk genres; songs, proverbs, riddles.

Creativity provides a striking example of the use of folklore works A. N. Ostrovsky. Setting himself the task of creating a national repertoire of Russian theater, Ostrovsky considered it necessary to write in the people's language. His plays often have proverbs as their titles: “We will be our own people,” “Truth is good, but happiness is better”; “Simplicity is enough for every wise man.” In a number of plays, for example “Poverty is not a vice,” he showed folk customs and rituals. The images and speech of many of his heroes and heroines are imbued with song intonations (Katerina in the play “The Thunderstorm”). In the wonderful fairy-tale play “The Snow Maiden,” Ostrovsky used a familiar folk plot and created a poetic image of the Snow Maiden.
The best achievements of the creativity of realist writers formed the basis of the progressive traditions of Russian literature. Writers of subsequent generations were formed under their influence. Song traditions were continued by poets, often not very talented and large, but close to folk art, which allowed them to create works loved by the people. This is I. Z. Surikov, the author of the song “Rowan” (“Why are you standing, swinging ...”), D. N. Sadovnikov, a famous collector of folklore, author of the song “Because of the island to the core.”
Each subsequent stage in the history of Russian literature provided a lot of new information in understanding the values ​​of folk art. A new stage in the development of realism at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. brought originality to the relationship between literature and folklore.
Thus, prose writers often used the form of a folk tale, and its satirical character became increasingly stronger. The most striking example is provided by "Fairy Tales" M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrin. The tales of S. M. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky took on a propaganda character (“The Tale of the Penny”). The tales of V. M. Garshin, L. N. Tolstoy, and N. S. Leskov were more moralizing. All these works were not intended for children, like the fairy tales of writers of the first half of the 19th century. (S.T. Aksakov, V.F. Odoevsky, etc.), but were subordinated to solving important social issues.
Writers also used the form of legend. N. S. Leskov wrote the legend “The Non-Lethal Golovan” - about a person who wields an object with magical powers. V. G. Korolenko, in the story “In Deserted Places,” elaborated on the legend of the invisible city of Kitezh.
Many prose writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. works of great ideological and artistic significance were created on the basis of folklore traditions, images and plots. You can name Leskov’s “Lefty” - an original work, full of caustic criticism of the tsarist arbitrariness and ruthless bureaucracy that ruined the talented Russian artisan. Using folk expressive means, Korolenko creates images of strong, brave people, such as Tyulin in the story “The River Is Playing.” Writers often depict the characters of people from the people using folk poetic means (Platov in “Lefty”, Platon Karataev and Tikhon Shcherbaty in “War and Peace”).
Writers who developed the essay form made widespread use of folklore. The essay began to be addressed in the sixties by V.A. Sleptsov, F.M. Reshetnikov, A.I. Levitov and others, but it reached its brilliance later in the work of G.I. Uspensky. Drawing pictures of folk life, these writers were forced to turn to folk art both as an element of folk life and as an arsenal of such artistic means that would help depict folk life.

At first XX century interest in “folk life, in Russian folk art, which characterized Russian culture at all stages of its development, has acquired special significance and relevance. The plots and images of Slavic mythology and folklore, folk popular print and theater, the song creativity of the people are being interpreted in a new way by artists, composers, poets of various social and creative orientations.

Yesenin was connected with Russian nature, with the village, with the people. He called himself "the poet of the golden log cabin." Therefore, it is natural that folk art influenced Yesenin’s work.

The very theme of Yesenin’s poems suggested this. Most often he wrote about rural nature, which always looked simple and uncomplicated to him. This happened because Yesenin found epithets, comparisons, metaphors in popular speech:

Behind the smooth surface the trembling sky

Leads the cloud out of the stall by the bridle.

Sparrows are playful,

Like lonely children.

Yesenin often used folklore expressions: “silk carpet”, “curly head”, “beautiful maiden”, etc. The plots of Yesenin’s poems are also similar to folk ones: unhappy love, fortune telling, religious rituals (“Easter Annunciation”, “Wake” ), historical events (“Marfa Posadnitsa”).

Just like the people, Yesenin is characterized by animating nature, attributing human feelings to it:

You are my fallen maple, icy maple,

Why are you standing, bent over, under a white snowstorm?

Or what did you see? Or what did you hear?

It’s as if you went out for a walk outside the village.

Many of Yesenin’s poems are similar to folklore in form. These are poem-songs: “Tanyusha was good”, “Play, play, little girl...”, etc. Such poems are characterized by repetition of the first and last lines. And the very structure of the line is taken from folklore:

It’s not like dawn in the streams of the lake they wove their pattern, Your scarf, decorated with sewing, flashed over the slope.

Sometimes a poem begins like a fairy tale:

On the edge of the village

Old hut

There in front of the icon

An old woman prays.

Yesenin often uses words with diminutive suffixes. He also uses old Russian words, fairy-tale names: howl, gamayun, svey, etc.

Yesenin's poetry is figurative. But his images are also simple: “Autumn is a red mare.” These images are again borrowed from folklore, for example, a lamb is the image of an innocent victim.

Yesenin’s color scheme is also interesting. He most often uses three colors: blue, gold and red. And these colors are also symbolic.

Blue - the desire for the sky, for the impossible, for the beautiful:

In the blue evening, in the moonlit evening

I was once handsome and young.

Gold is the original color from which everything appeared and in which everything disappears: “Ring, ring, golden Rus'.”

Red is the color of love, passion:

Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness!

The sun hasn't gone out yet.

Dawn with a red prayer book

Prophesies good news...

Thus, we can say that Yesenin used many features of folklore, which for the poet was a conscious artistic method.

Poetry Akhmatova represents an unusually complex and original fusion of traditions of Russian and world literature. Researchers saw in Akhmatova a successor of Russian classical poetry (Pushkin, Baratynsky, Tyutchev, Nekrasov) and a recipient of the experience of older contemporaries (Blok, Annensky), and put her lyrics in direct connection with the achievements of psychological prose of the 19th century (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Leskov)7. But there was another, no less important for Akhmatova, source of her poetic inspiration - Russian folk art. Akhmatova's early work is, first of all, the lyrics of love, often unrequited. The semantic accents that appear in Akhmatova’s interpretation of the love theme turn out to be in many ways close to the traditional lyrical song, in the center of which is the failed fate of a woman.

For example, in Akhmatova’s poem “My husband whipped me patterned...”, the general lyrical situation of the poem is typologically correlated with a folk song: both the bitter fate of a woman given to an unloved man, and the folklore image of a “prisoner” wife waiting at the window your betrothed.

My husband whipped me with a patterned one,
Double folded belt.
For you in the casement window
I sit with the fire all night.

It's dawning. And above the forge
Smoke rises.
Ah, with me, the sad prisoner,
You couldn't stay again.

For you I share a gloomy fate,
I took a lot of pain...

The folklore tradition - especially the song tradition - significantly influenced the poetic language and imagery of Akhmatov's lyrics. Folk poetic vocabulary and colloquial syntax, vernacular and folk sayings appear here as an organic element of the linguistic structure.

Grief strangles - it won’t strangle,
The free wind dries the tears,
And the fun will stroke you a little,
It will immediately deal with the poor heart.

From folklore, from popular beliefs and the image of flying cranes, carrying away the souls of the dead (“Garden”, “Ah! It’s you again...”, “So wounded crane...”). It often appears in Akhmatova’s works, carries an important semantic load and is associated either with the theme of passing love, or with the premonition of one’s own death:

So wounded crane
Others call: Kurly, Kurly!
And I, sick, hear the call,

The sound of golden wings...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"It's time to fly, it's time to fly
Over the field and the river.
Cause you can't sing anymore
And wipe the tears from your cheeks
With a weakened hand."

The nature of metaphorization in Akhmatova’s lyrics is associated with the poetic structure of folk songs.

Then like a snake, curled up in a ball,
He casts a spell right at the heart,
That's all day long like a dove
Coos on the white window.

I'll jump onto the alder tree like a gray squirrel.
I'll run like a timid weasel,
I will call you Swan,
So that the groom is not afraid
In the blue swirling snow
Wait for the dead bride26

Elements of ditty poetics are also characteristic of Akhmatova’s poetry:

I didn't cover the window
Look straight into the upper room.
That's why I'm having fun today,
That you can't leave.

Faulkner’s work refracted various impulses, literary, philosophical, aesthetic influences, which he assimilated and processed organically and originally. The sources that fed his artistic methodology were the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. Among his favorite books are “The Brothers Karamazov”: their author was especially close to Faulkner in philosophical and aesthetic terms; he was compared to him. The experience of Balzac, the creator of the huge fresco “The Human Comedy,” was also important for Faulkner. Faulkner created something similar using specific “southern” material in “The Saga of Yoknepatawf.”

Philosophical basis.

As a true American, Faulkner had no special interest in theoretical concepts. Nevertheless, in his works one can find either direct or hidden ideas of various philosophical schools. Bergson's intuitionism, perceived by Faulkner in the interpretation of William James, was reflected, in particular, in the story “The Bear”.

In Faulkner's work, the existentialist worldview also makes itself felt. The ideas of Sartre and Camus, Faulkner's propagandists in France, corresponded to the life philosophy of the author of The Sound and the Fury, who acutely felt the tragedy of the human lot, the loneliness of the individual in a chaotic world, his subordination to dark irrational passions. At the same time, Faulkner was closer to the psychologism and artistic methodology of Camus than to the coldish rationality of Sartre. However, it would be incorrect to unequivocally classify Faulkner as an existentialist writer. The main thing for Faulkner was a heartfelt sense of life, characters, and conflicts as a given, and not as illustrations of philosophical theories.

Faulkner is a complex and contradictory artist. Apparently, the debate between supporters of two points of view was unproductive: those who proclaim him a realist, and those for whom he is a modernist in its “pure form.” It is also difficult to prove the thesis that, having started as a modernist, Faulkner followed the “path to realism.” Faulkner created without thinking about literary definitions. His work combined the features of realism, modernism, naturalism, symbolism, and romanticism.

Poetics. The meaning of Faulkner's works cannot be understood without taking into account the peculiarities of his style. For her, it is usual to “coexist” everyday authenticity with increased romantic expressiveness, a departure from the usual life-likeness. Individual situations, episodes, images, plot “moves” acquire an allegorical, parable meaning. Therefore, Faulkner's works evoke a fairly wide range of critical points of view. In the USA, for example, a collection of critical works about the story “The Bear” was published, which presents more than ten different interpretations of the work.

Faulkner's characters are usually static. They do not develop, do not change during the course of action. The “genetic” qualities inherent in them are realized. These qualities are given in a concentrated, “condensed” form: heroes grow to the level of symbols. Thus, in the Snopes trilogy, Flem's daughter is the embodiment of blossoming female flesh; Flem himself - greed; poor Mink - blind bitterness, a product of poverty; Linda - sacrifice, fanatical devotion to an idea. Faulknerian details are also expressive: the hat, the tiny butterfly of Flem, who never stops chewing the “emptiness.” The characteristics of his heroes are often the technique of “biologizing” the characters, emphasizing the animal nature in them: Mink is compared to a poisonous snake, Flem is compared to a spider.

Reading Faulkner is not an easy task. The style of his novel is multifaceted and multilayered. Sometimes the thread of the narrative is not led by the author, but by one or even several narrators. The event appears from different points of view, in different psychological dimensions. There is a shift in time layers, as in the novel “The Sound and the Fury.”