Character. in literary works images of people are invariably present and, as a rule, fall into the spotlight of readers' attention

Everyone knows what a bicycle looks like, everyone has seen it a million times, but they can’t draw it. The brain is lazy, it will not strain itself too much and thinks through everything only to some level acceptable to it, when it seems to it that this is enough. A bicycle has two wheels, a handlebar, a saddle and pedals, and how they connect is a detail.

It turns out that we do not always have a good idea of ​​even the most familiar objects. Take a pen and draw a grasshopper. When you try to describe your brilliant idea to someone, they look as helpless as your grasshopper.

When I try to write down my next brilliant idea, sometimes it seems to me that I don’t have a single brilliant idea at all.

If you have good idea, test it for strength, write it down. Don't trust your brain, it tells you that everything is fine, I've thought of everything. But in reality this good thought may not exist. And only by recording the thought in the text, you can check whether it really exists and whether it is as valuable as it seems.

The ability to formulate your thoughts is one of the most necessary skills For modern man, which receives very little attention. In the post-industrial world main value- these are not hands, not land, not production and not capital, but the head. But even if you have absolute knowledge in your head about the connection of everything with everything, without the ability to get it out of there it is worth nothing.

Twitter teaches you better how to express your thoughts than literature lessons. It teaches a person to squeeze his thought into 140 characters, and writing briefly is much more difficult.

At school there is a subject, literature, in which, through familiarity with the classics, they learn to express their thoughts on paper. Schoolchildren are forced to memorize other people's opinions about literary works and then reproduce it all on paper in the form of an essay. A completely pointless activity, it has nothing to do with writing or literature.

Essays at school given topic non-literary works were considered a second-rate genre. It’s as if the student didn’t master “ Captain's daughter” and writes about how he spent the summer. But it seems to me that such essays, on the contrary, best develop writing skills, because the student has to formulate his own thoughts, and not those of others.

In How to Write Books, Stephen King wrote: “If you want to be a writer, you first need to do two things: read a lot and write a lot. There is no way around this either in a straight or crooked way - at least I don’t know such a way.”

Of course, everyone doesn’t have to be a writer, but this rule also works for those who just want to learn how to formulate and get their thoughts out of their heads. Start a blog, write texts in it. It is very important that other people read it; you write differently when you know that someone else will read the text besides you.

If you cannot explain to your colleagues why they are all wrong, and why you should do as you say, try writing them a letter. At least you will have the advantage: you have already formulated your thoughts.

In communication and understanding between people important role plays the ability to correctly formulate and the ability to convey thoughts to others. Even simple conversations with friends require certain skills. How to learn to express your thoughts competently, so that communication brings new impetus, gives a reason to develop relationships or raise your career ladder? First of all, you need to understand what exactly the problem is. To do this, you need to take a short test and answer simple questions:

Do you easily express your thoughts when communicating with relatives and friends?
Do you have buddies or friends?
Can you express your thoughts in writing?
Don't you meet people often?
Do you rarely open a book?
One-on-one with your interlocutor, do you speak more often rather than remain silent?
Do you quickly decide what to say if the pause is too long?

If there are more “yes” answers, then the reason lies in the difficulties of the thinking process. If “no” outweighs, then the reason is psychological characteristics. In any case, the problem is fixable. WITH psychological problems It’s worth contacting a specialist. If this is not possible, correct the situation yourself.

The reasons for problems with may vary. The most common:

Fear of speaking due to peculiarities of upbringing. Some parents in childhood “discourage” their child from telling anything.
Lack of communication. Being often alone, a person has no idea what topics to touch upon when meeting.
Diction defects, voice features. Complexes give rise to fear, and fear makes a person silent.

Fight your fears, overcome them on your own or with the help of a psychologist.

What to think about before expressing thoughts?

Back in the 17th century. literary critic France Boileau N. said: “Whoever thinks clearly, also expresses them.” The ability to think competently and convey the essence is important both in a regular meeting and during an interview. Especially if you are applying for a position where negotiation skills are required.

Before expressing a thought, you need to think it through to the end. You must clearly know what the next sentence or phrase will be about, and how it will end. Often the inability to express a thought in words indicates that it has not yet been formulated in the head.

Another mistake is being carried away by details. The famous expression of Chekhov A.P. “Brevity is the sister of talent” is still true today. Verbosity clogs and makes it difficult to understand what is heard.

Do not be distracted during the conversation, focus on the interlocutor so as not to lose the thread of the conversation. To express a thought correctly, it is important to concentrate. You cannot speak in fragments of sentences or jump from one subject of conversation to another. The interlocutor should not guess what we want to say.

How to acquire the skill of expressing thoughts?

Logic will teach you to express your thoughts correctly, with the help of which you can draw conclusions based on reasoning and get a correct idea of ​​the element of reflection. To convey your idea correctly, build a logical chain of sentences and the narrator will understand the essence.

It is impossible to express thoughts competently without absence. As an example: a person expresses a thought briefly, to the point, without deviating into other topics. At the same time, it is impossible to listen to him, since the speech is uninteresting. The fact is that there are often not enough words to correctly and beautifully describe the situation.

Statistics say that modern, educated person uses about 10,000 words. Pushkin A.S. operated with a vocabulary of 21,000 words, which he actively used in his works.

Use a dictionary of synonyms and introduce new words into your speech. This attracts attention and makes statements interesting and memorable.

The influence of memory on the ability to express literate thoughts

Perhaps you have ever found yourself in a situation where, during a conversation, thoughts completely disappear from your memory. You don't know what to answer or how to keep the conversation going. Only after a while do whole phrases come to mind that could have been said. Memory is negatively affected by lack of oxygen and physical passivity. Try to ventilate the room more often if you have to work in an office. Do exercises or periodically get up and move to get blood flowing to the brain.

Memory is affected by sleep duration. It is improved by products containing protein: fish, eggs, cottage cheese, meat. If you have intense mental work, include nuts, cheese and other foods containing phosphorus and calcium in your diet.

You can use special exercises. Train your memory by adding numbers in your memory, memorizing phone numbers, poems, birthdays or other dates.

Simple exercises for the ability to formulate thoughts

Way to increase lexicon. Get a dictionary and read the words. Open it to a random page and try to independently select synonyms for the words you read. Read classic literature and memorize expressions.
A way to learn to express thoughts in an orderly manner. Choose a story from a movie or book. The main thing is that he is familiar to you. Choose a listener (a reflection in a mirror, a pet, a friend, or a close relative) and retell it with expression. Before pronouncing a sentence, think about its construction and only then say it out loud.
A way to develop eloquence. Compose a text from 7 sentences to free topic. Write it down on a piece of paper and read it several times to remember it. Take a voice recorder and recite the text from memory. Listen to the recording and correct if you think that thoughts are not expressed correctly. Practice until you are completely satisfied with the finished speech.

After all, the ability to correctly formulate thoughts quickly fades if you don’t have to strain yourself in a conversation. A person who communicates with people who need a few words in a conversation loses the skill of expressing thoughts correctly. Read books and think about the text. After all, until you begin to organize sentences in your mind, you will not learn to express them beautifully.

Have you ever had to sit and literally force yourself to collect your thoughts? To then say something very important and necessary? For example, to defend your rights or convey your thoughts to your boss, husband/wife, children... Were you able to correctly and clearly express them out loud? If yes, I sincerely envy you. Because I have never been able to express my thoughts clearly and competently. Ideally formed in the head, they do not always fly out of the mouth in a way that is clear to others. How to learn to express your thoughts correctly is a question that has always bothered me. And this question led me to an amazing answer.

Why are some people unable to express themselves clearly and clearly?
How to learn to express your thoughts correctly?

Since childhood, I feel like an idiot when I can’t say what I feel, think, understand. This happens to me all the time - I don’t know how to express my thoughts. At meetings and meetings, in disputes and scandals, in general, at all important moments for me, when I need to say something significant and necessary, some kind of literal revolution takes place in me. Thoughts were forming normally in my head, but I opened my mouth and spoke some nonsense. Often at such moments I say something and it is literally clear from the eyes of the interlocutor that he does not catch the thread of my conversation. Moreover, I often catch myself saying the wrong thing. Chatting, saying everything that I thought up during the conversation, I myself get confused, and I understand that what comes out is, well, not at all as convincing as it was... there in my thoughts.

It has always been strange to me why the thoughts in my head are so harmonious and light. Everything just fits together without a hitch. Moreover, it is in my head, in my imagination, that I can not only correctly express my thoughts, I can correctly place emphasis in them, accurately vary meanings with words and intonation. But the moment I start speaking, expressing my thoughts, something goes wrong. And it’s impossible to say them as beautifully and harmoniously, as clearly and correctly as it was in my head.

There are two options for the development of events. Or thoughts seem to crumple up, speech becomes crumpled. What I wanted to put into 2 compelling, beautiful sentences, for some reason turns into some sticky, unnecessary phrases. There are too many of them - 10, 20 or more. They are vague and not convincing. The collected thoughts seem to scatter and lose their meaning. I literally drown in my own speech, like in a burden. And the main thing is that I understand this no worse than my listeners, but I can’t do anything.

Everything happens differently. When I prepared a big important speech in my head, full of bright arguments and convictions. But when directly expressing these thoughts out loud, I begin to rush and shorten them as I go. It seems to me that I am delaying people, that it will be too tiring for them to listen to me. I feel bad that I'm distracting them with my chatter. I'm trying to save words, not waste time. Therefore, the speech turns out to be crumpled and incomprehensible. What really needed to be spent 10 minutes to explain everything in detail, I cram into 3 short phrases. And again, from the eyes of my interlocutors, I understand that I failed to express my thoughts correctly and intelligibly.

Why can't I express myself clearly?

I used to think that my inability to express my own thoughts was the problem of others. It’s just easy to make up a lot of thoughts in your own head and come to logical conclusion your own reasoning, but in a conversation with people this cannot happen - the interlocutor can insert a word, start arguing, and give counterarguments. It is he, the one with whom I am speaking, who knocks me out of my thoughts, and I can no longer fully express it.

Then, when I began to speak at conferences, I noticed an amazing thing - it very often happens that the interlocutor does not say anything at all in response. He just listens to me carefully. Very carefully. Without his participation, I will definitely go astray. And at the end of the conversation, I definitely understand that I would not have understood myself, I would not have been able to convey the meaning of my thoughts to myself. So why blame your interlocutors? The reason is only me.

I was terribly angry with myself for this. Especially when it came to important things. For example, when I finally wanted to ask the director to raise my salary. Or when I wanted to say a beautiful toast to my mom and dad on their wedding anniversaries. Or when I wanted my neighbors to finally turn off the loud music and stop yelling in drunken voices at 3 am. In each of these cases, it was very difficult for me to express my thoughts, although there were a lot of them in my head. And in each of them they did not understand me. This is the most offensive and unpleasant thing.

After all, when you say a thought, you consider it very important and necessary. That's why the ability to express one's thoughts is so valuable. How to learn this? How to find a way to clearly, clearly, correctly, harmoniously express your thoughts?

The ability to express one's thoughts is a great talent.

Today I understand that the issue, of course, is not the interlocutors. It's about me. Not in the sense that I am bad or wrong. No, absolutely not. It's about my sound vector. Soundman great importance gives the word, and it is he who is potentially best able to express his thoughts, play with words, translate words and meanings from one language to another. When the sound vector is under stress, if for some reason he had to endure a trauma, the ability to express his thoughts becomes a problem. Sometimes the ability to think is also problematic, people say “there is emptiness in my head.”

I know that I am not alone at all. There are approximately 5% of people like me who have a sound vector. We are all distinguished by one feature - we are looking for the meaning of life, or it seems to us that we have already found it. From idea to idea, we go and seem to be drowning in our own thoughts. All sound people, and only sound people, have a constant, very interesting thought process. In transport and on a walk, while eating or in the bathroom, however, at any moment when we are alone with ourselves and no one is distracting us with conversations, we are always literally drowning in our own thoughts. And this is not surprising - after all, this is our species role, the goal of life - to create correct, new thought forms. And, of course, it is very important for us to express these thoughts correctly.

In general, by and large, a sound person is subconsciously interested in questions of a not very worldly nature. Why do we all live? Why is everything in the world arranged this way and not otherwise? Why do we die, and what happens after death? These are the questions that are truly important for a sound engineer. But answers to such questions cannot be obtained just like that; they are very difficult to formulate in words, to express your thoughts in words.

Despite the fact that the sound artist is interested in questions of the universe, he also lives (or tries to live) ordinary life. He also needs to eat and drink, have a roof over his head, and have something to wear. He has to communicate with other people, sometimes even go to work. Often, he does this only when he is fired up with an idea, otherwise they begin depressive states and the constant question in my head “who needs my mortal life?”

In the course of life, a sound person, like any other person, encounters many situations in which it is necessary to defend their point of view, express their opinion, and achieve their goals. This is why language was given to man - we must correctly and clearly express our thoughts. And this works for everyone except the sound engineers. Simply because, unlike others who simply express their thoughts in words, a sound person begins to get bogged down in his own thoughts and withdraw into himself.

In his own consciousness, he can form and develop thoughts that are already in their roots incomprehensible to other people. Full of his egocentrism, self-absorbed, he thinks too detached from real world. All thoughts of a sound person, as a rule, are associated with the idea of ​​the universe, because this is what initially interests him. But others, interlocutors without a sound vector, actually don’t care.

It is not surprising that trying to express such a thought, complete on the one hand with many important meanings, on the other hand, divorced from reality, the sound engineer often fails to do this. In addition, the reason for the crumpledness and incomprehensibility of his speech is also the fact that in his head he often scrolls through his own thoughts too many times and in the end, he seems to get confused about what he said and what he just thought. So it turns out that he said one word, thought two, then said another word - who can understand such speech? Another reason for misunderstanding on the part of others is that the sound person has a unique abstract mind; he often bases his arguments on abstract examples, which confuses other people.

So it turns out that in the end, having sucked and scrolled his thought a hundred times in his head, the sound artist cannot do the most basic thing - clearly express his thought, convey it to those around him. Remaining misunderstood, he suffers greatly - because his desires do not come true. Even if these desires are truly ideal.

How to correctly express your thoughts?

In order to live in harmony with yourself, you need to understand yourself. Understand and evaluate yourself, your actions and desires not through the ideas and attitudes of other people, but as they really are. Only in this case is it possible to take a step towards your own subconscious.

It is very important for a sound artist to understand what exactly is in the thoughts - its implementation. Learning to clearly express your thoughts and convey them to your interlocutor, especially on everyday topics, is quite simple. To do this, you just need to understand with whom you are talking, feel the person by

In literary works, images of people are invariably present and, as a rule, fall into the center of attention of readers, and in in some cases– their likenesses: humanized animals, plants and things (a fairytale hut on chicken legs). Exist different shapes human presence in literary works. This is the narrator-storyteller, lyrical hero And character, capable of revealing a person with the utmost fullness and breadth. This term is taken from French and is of Latin origin. The word “persona” was used by the ancient Romans to denote the mask worn by the actor, and later to the one depicted in work of art face. The phrases “literary hero” and “character” are now used as synonyms for this term. However, these expressions also carry additional meanings: the word “hero” emphasizes the positive role, brightness, unusualness, and exclusivity of the person portrayed, and the phrase “character” refers to the fact that the character manifests himself primarily in the performance of actions.

A character is either the fruit of the writer’s pure invention (Gulliver and the Lilliputians by J. Swift; Major Kovalev, who lost his nose, by N.V. Gogol) or the result of conjecture on the appearance of a real person (whether historical figures or people biographically close to the writer, or even himself); or, finally, the result of processing and completing already known literary heroes, such as, say, Don Juan or Faust. Along with literary heroes as human individuals, sometimes group, collective characters turn out to be very significant (the crowd in the square in several scenes of “Boris Godunov” by A. S. Pushkin, testifying to and expressing the people’s opinion).

The character seems to have a dual nature. Firstly, he is the subject of the depicted action, the stimulus for the unfolding of events that make up the plot. Secondly, and this is perhaps the main thing, the character has an independent significance in the composition of the work, independent of the plot (event series): he acts as a bearer of stable and stable (sometimes, however, undergoing changes) properties, traits, qualities.

Characters are characterized by the actions they perform (almost primarily), as well as by forms of behavior and communication (for it is not only the What a person does, but also that How he behaves at the same time), features of appearance and close surroundings (in particular, things belonging to the hero), thoughts, feelings, intentions. And all these manifestations of man in a literary work have a certain resultant - a kind of center, which M.M. Bakhtin called core personality, A.A. Ukhtomsky – dominant, determined starting intuitions person. The phrase is widely used to denote the stable core of people’s consciousness and behavior value orientation. Value orientations (they can also be called life positions) are very heterogeneous and multifaceted. The consciousness and behavior of people can be directed towards religious and moral, strictly moral, cognitive, and aesthetic values. They are also associated with the sphere of instincts, with bodily life and the satisfaction of physical needs, with the desire for fame, authority, and power.

Heroes of literature different countries and eras are infinitely diverse. At the same time, in the character sphere there is a clear repetition associated with the genre of the work and, more importantly, with value orientations characters. There are a kind of literary "supertypes"– supra-epochal and international. There are few such supertypes (adventurous-heroic, hagiographic-idyllic). Literary characters can appear not only as “carriers” value orientations, but also incarnations of course negative traits or the focus of trampled, suppressed, failed humanity (antihero).

Author invariably expresses (of course, in the language artistic images, and not by direct conclusions) your attitude to the position, attitudes, and value orientation of your character. At the same time, the image of the character appears as the embodiment of the writer’s concept, idea, i.e. as something whole within the framework of another, broader, actually artistic integrity(works). He depends on this integrity; one might say, he serves it at the will of the author. With any serious mastery of the character sphere of the work, the reader inevitably penetrates into spiritual world author: in the images of heroes he sees the creative will of the writer. The correlation between the value orientations of the author and the hero constitutes a kind of fundamental basis of literary works, their implicit core, the key to their understanding, which is sometimes very difficult to obtain. “The author’s attitude towards the hero can be predominantly either alienated or related, but not neutral. Writers have repeatedly spoken about the closeness or alienness of their characters. In literary works, one way or another there is a distance between the character and the author. It occurs even in the autobiographical genre, where the writer, from a certain temporary distance, comprehends his own life experience. The author can look at his hero as if from the bottom up (the lives of the saints), or, on the contrary, from the top down (works of an accusatory and satirical nature). But the most deeply rooted in literature (especially of recent centuries) is the situation of essential equality between writer and character (but not identity).

Theory of literature Khalizev Valentin Evgenievich

§ 3. Character and writer (hero and author)

The author invariably expresses (of course, in the language of artistic images, and not by direct conclusions) his attitude towards the position, attitudes, and value orientation of his character (hero - in the terminology of M.M. Bakhtin). At the same time, the image of the character (like all other links of the verbal and artistic form) appears as the embodiment of the writer’s concept, idea, i.e., as something whole within the framework of another, broader, artistic integrity (the work as such). He depends on this integrity; one might say, he serves it at the will of the author. With any serious mastery of the character sphere of the work, the reader inevitably penetrates into the spiritual world of the author: in the images of the heroes he sees (primarily by direct feeling) the creative will of the writer. The correlation between the value orientations of the author and the hero constitutes a kind of fundamental basis of literary works, their implicit core, the key to their understanding, which is sometimes very difficult to obtain. “Perceiving heroes as people,” wrote G.A. Gukovsky, we comprehend them at the same time as a certain “ ideological essence”: each reader should feel and realize “not only my attitude towards this character, but also the author’s attitude towards him, and, perhaps most importantly, my attitude towards the author’s attitude.”

The author's attitude towards the hero can be predominantly either alienated or related, but not neutral. Writers have repeatedly spoken about the closeness or alienness of their characters. “I,” Cervantes wrote in the prologue to Don Quixote, “only am considered the father of Don Quixote, - in fact, I am his stepfather, and I am not going to follow the beaten path and, as others do, almost with tears in my eyes, beg you , dear reader, forgive my brainchild its shortcomings or turn a blind eye to them.”

In literary works, one way or another there is a distance between the character and the author. It occurs even in the autobiographical genre, where the writer, from a certain temporary distance, comprehends his own life experience. The author can look at his hero as if from the bottom up (the lives of the saints), or, on the contrary, from the top down (works of an accusatory and satirical nature). But the most deeply rooted in literature (especially of recent centuries) is the situation of the essential equality of the writer and the character (which, of course, does not signify their identity). Pushkin persistently made it clear to the reader of Eugene Onegin that his hero belongs to the same circle as himself (“my good friend”). According to V.G. Rasputin, it is important “that the author does not feel superior to his heroes and does not make himself more experienced than them”: “Only equality during work in the most miraculous way gives rise to living heroes, and not doll figurines.”

With such internal equality, a kind of dialogical relationship of the writer to the fictional person and the person he portrays can arise. M.M. drew attention to this. Bakhtin: “The unity of Dostoevsky’s world cannot be reduced to an individual emotional-volitional accented unity.” And he argued that “monologue one world author's consciousness<…>in Dostoevsky’s novel it becomes a part, an element of the whole.” The author’s dialogical position, according to the scientist, “affirms the independence, inner freedom, incompleteness and uncertainty of the hero,” whose consciousness is “equal” to his own. At the same time, Bakhtin recognized that “in every literary work” there is “the final semantic authority of the creator,” that is, the creative will of the author includes the world of characters she created. According to the scientist, “the hero is not the expresser, but the expressed,” he is “passive in interaction with the author.” And further: " the most important facet works" is the author's "unified reaction" to whole hero."

Literary characters, however, are able to separate themselves from the works in which they were born and live in the minds of the public independent life, not subject to the author's will. Heroes become symbols of a certain kind of attitude and behavior, while at the same time maintaining their uniqueness. Such are Hamlet, Don Quixote, Tariof, Faust, Peer Gynt as part of pan-European culture; for the Russian consciousness - Tatyana Larina (largely thanks to Dostoevsky’s interpretation of her image), Chatsky and Molchalin, Nozdrev and Manilov, Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova. In particular, famous characters A.S. Griboyedov and N.V. Gogol in the 1870–1880s “moved” into the works of M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and lived there new life. “If there can be novels and dramas from life historical figures) - noted F. Sologub, - then there could be novels and dramas about Raskolnikov, about Eugene Onegin<…>which are so close to us that we can sometimes tell about them details that their creator did not have in mind.”

At the beginning of the 20th century. Stavrogin, Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov attracted the close attention of critics, publicists, philosophers and became reasons for discussing the most pressing problems of our time. A considerable number of works were dedicated to Ivan Karamazov and the poem he composed “The Grand Inquisitor. The relevance of the figures of Stavrogin and Alyosha Karamazov at this time is clearly evidenced by Vyach’s article. Ivanov "Living Tradition". Here are her final phrases: “We, who recognized in Orthodoxy our free homeland and the homeland of our freedom, we, who believe in Holy Rus', as in universal Rus', we are the former “Russian boys” of Dostoevsky, peers of Alyosha Karamazov, who chose him as their own in a children’s game Ivan Tsarevich. Alyosha is a symbolic collective type, which is in vain considered unclear and about which it is worth talking about another time, - the type of people of the new Russian consciousness, prophesied by Dostoevsky and generated by him. And therefore, if we define the representatives of the mentality that dictated these lines, then we would call them “Aleshinites”? Berdyaev does not want to be with the Aleshinites; his “Ivan Tsarevich” - almost Nikolai Stavrogin - is not the same, of course, as he turned out to be in the depiction of his own creator and, one must think, according to Berdyaev, a distorter) but substantially the same, only corrected and updated.

Sometimes literary characters, perceived without regard to the creativity of writers and without taking into account their will, become reasons for biased and journalistic judgments. This took place in pre-revolutionary Russia, when writers, nihilistically disposed towards their country, attempted to give meaning to the symbols of domestic existence literary heroes far from positive. Thus, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov was considered by M. Gorky as artistic embodiment“Russian soul”, “shapeless and motley”, “cowardly and daring”, “morbidly evil soul of Ivan the Terrible”. On the pages of Gorky’s journal “Letopis,” Gogol’s Podkolesin was seen as “the basic structure of the Russian soul,” and Goncharov’s Oblomov was regarded as the embodiment everyone classes of the Russian people; fanatics who sadistically kill dogs (I.A. Bunin’s story “The Last Day”) were interpreted as a product of Russian soil, which was ironically called Asian.

Famous literary characters live a completely independent life independent of their creators, not only in literary texts(artistic and journalistic), but also in works of other types of art: music, painting, graphics, sculpture. There are a great many monuments to literary heroes (for example, in Madrid - Don Quixote and Sancho Panse). The characters of literary works have repeatedly found a second life outside the context of those works of which they originally appeared.