The world of the work. Literary theory Likhachev the inner world of a work of art read

Ticket. Specifics of fiction as an art form. Word and image.

Two aspects can be distinguished in the composition of works of art. This is an “external material work” (M.M. Bakhtin), often called an artifact (material object), i.e. something made up of colors and lines, or sounds and words (spoken, written, or stored in someone's memory). And an aesthetic object is the totality of what is materially fixed and has the potential of artistic influence on the viewer, the reader. In a number of its qualities, an external material work is neutral to the aesthetic object. But the artifact partially enters into the aesthetic object and becomes an active factor in the artistic impression.

The world of artistic creativity is not continuous: it is discontinuous and discrete. Art, according to M.M. Bakhtin, necessarily breaks down “into separate, self-sufficient, individual wholes - works,” each of which “occupies an independent position in relation to reality.”

The most important form of blurring the boundaries between literary works is their cyclization. The poet’s combination of his poems into cycles (widely practiced in the 19th-20th centuries) often turns out to be the creation of a new work that combines what was created earlier. In other words, cycles of poems become, as it were, independent works (Blok - “poems about a beautiful lady”, in prose - “Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev.)

Works of art (in particular, literary works) are created on the basis of a single creative concept (individual or collective) and appeal to their comprehension as a certain unity (semantic and aesthetic), and therefore have completeness. They are a kind of final given: they are not subject to any “post-author’s” transformations, additions or alterations. But the author can again and again refer to an already published text, refine and rework it.

In theoretical literary criticism, with the identification of two fundamental aspects of a work (a dichotomous approach, where form and content are distinguished), other logical constructions are also widely used. So, A.A. Potebnya and his followers characterized three aspects of works of art as: external form, internal form, content (in application to literature: word, image, idea).

An important principle of artistic activity: the focus on the unity of content and form in the works created. The fully realized unity of form and content makes the work organically integral, and not rationally (mechanically) constructed.

In a work of art, formal-substantive and actual substantive principles are distinguishable. The form that carries the content traditionally has three sides.

1. subject (subject-visual) beginning", all those individual phenomena and facts that are indicated with the help of words and in their totality make up the world of a work of art

2. the actual verbal fabric of the work: artistic speech, often captured by the terms “poetic language”, “stylistics”, “text”.

3. correlation and location in the work of units of the objective and verbal “series”, i.e. composition = structure (the relationship between the elements of a complexly organized object).

A special place in a literary work belongs to the content layer itself. It can be rightfully described not as another (fourth) side of the work, but as its substance. Artistic content represents the unity of objective and subjective principles. This is the totality of what came to the author from the outside and is known to him, and what is expressed by him and comes from his views, intuition, personality traits

ticket. The inner world of a literary work.

The world of literary work- this is the objectivity recreated in it through speech and with the participation of fiction. It includes not only material data, but also the psyche, consciousness of a person, and most importantly, himself as a mental-physical unity. The world of the work constitutes both “material” and “personal” reality. In literary works, these two principles are unequal: in the center is not “dead nature”, but living, human, personal reality

The world of a work constitutes an integral facet of its form (content). It is located between the actual content (meaning) and the verbal fabric (text).

The most important properties of the world of a work are its non-identity with primary reality, the participation of fiction in its creation, the use by writers of not only life-like, but also conventional forms of representation. In a literary work, special, strictly artistic laws reign.

The world of a work is an artistically mastered and transformed reality. He is multifaceted. The largest units of the verbal and artistic world are the characters that make up the system, and the events that make up the plots. The world includes, further, what can rightfully be called components of figurativeness (artistic objectivity): acts of behavior of characters, features of their appearance (portraits), mental phenomena, as well as facts of life surrounding people (things presented within interiors; pictures of nature - landscapes). A small and indivisible element of artistic objectivity is the individual details (details) of what is depicted, sometimes clearly and actively highlighted by writers and acquiring relatively independent significance.

1.Character - either the fruit of the writer’s pure fiction (Gulliver and the Lilliputians by J. Swift; Major Kovalev, who lost his nose, by N.V. Gogol),” the result of conjecturing the appearance of a really existing person (whether they are historical figures or people biographically close to the writer, or even he himself); the result of processing and completing already known literary heroes (Faust, Don Quixote). He is the subject of the depicted action, the stimulus for the unfolding of events that make up the plot and, at the same time, has an independent significance in the composition of the work, independent of the plot (event series): he acts as a bearer of stable and sustainable properties, traits, qualities.

There are several types of characters:

1. adventurous-heroic supertype (heroic epic) - tend to actively participate in changing situations in life, fight, achieve, win, a kind of chosen one or impostor, whose energy and strength are realized in the desire to achieve some external goals. (Aeneas)

2. hagiographical-idyllic (medieval hagiographies) - not involved in any struggle for success. They reside in a reality free from the polarization of successes and failures, victories and defeats, and in times of testing they are able to show perseverance, avoiding temptations and dead ends of despair. (Peter and Fevronia, Prince Myshkin).

3. negative supertype - and embodiments of unconditionally negative traits or the focus of trampled, suppressed, failed humanity.

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 situation in literature is the situation of essential equality between the writer and the character (“Eugene Onegin”).

3. Portrait - this is a description of appearance: physical, natural and, in particular, age properties (facial features and figures, hair color), as well as everything in a person’s appearance that is formed by the social environment, cultural tradition, individual initiative (clothing and jewelry, hairstyle and cosmetics). A portrait can also capture body movements and postures characteristic of a character, gestures and facial expressions, facial and eye expressions. The portrait, thus, creates a stable, stable set of features of the “outer man”.

The portrait of the hero is localized in one place of the work. More often it is given at the time of the character's first appearance, i.e. expositionally. But literature also knows another way of introducing portrait characteristics into the text. It can be called leitmotif.

4. Forms of behavior- a set of movements and postures, gestures and facial expressions, spoken words with their intonations. They are dynamic in nature and undergo endless changes depending on the situations of the moment. At the same time, these fluid forms are based on a stable, stable reality, which can rightfully be called a behavioral attitude or orientation.

They constitute one of the necessary conditions for interpersonal communication. They are very heterogeneous. In some cases, behavior is predetermined by tradition, custom, ritual, in others, on the contrary, it clearly reveals the features of this particular person and his free initiative in the field of intonation and gestures.

Forms of behavior of characters are able to acquire a semiotic character. They often appear as conventional signs, the semantic content of which depends on the agreement of people belonging to a particular socio-cultural community.

The inner world of a work of verbal art (literary or folklore) has a certain artistic integrity. The individual elements of reflected reality are connected to each other in this inner world in a certain system, artistic unity.

When studying the reflection of the world of reality in the world of a work of art, literary scholars limit themselves for the most part to paying attention to whether individual phenomena of reality are correctly or incorrectly depicted in the work. Literary scholars enlist the help of historians to determine the accuracy of the depiction of historical events, psychologists and even psychiatrists to determine the accuracy of the depiction of the mental life of the characters. When studying ancient Russian literature, in addition to historians, we often turn to the help of geographers, zoologists, astronomers, etc. And all this, of course, is quite correct, but, alas, not enough. Usually the inner world of a work of art is studied as a whole, limited to the search for “prototypes”: prototypes of a particular character, character, landscape, even “prototypes”, events and prototypes of the types themselves. Everything is “retail”, everything is in parts! The world of a work of art appears scattered, and its relationship to reality is fragmented and lacks integrity.

At the same time, the mistake of literary critics who note various “faithfulness” or “incorrectness” in the artist’s depiction of reality lies in the fact that, dividing the integral reality and the integral world of a work of art, they make both incommensurable: they measure the apartment area in light years.

True, it has become standard to point out the difference between a real fact and an artistic fact. Such statements are found when studying “War and Peace” or Russian epics and historical songs. The difference between the world of reality and the world of a work of art is already realized with sufficient acuteness. But the point is not to “be aware” of something, but also to define this “something” as an object of study.

In fact, it is necessary not only to state the very fact of differences, but also to study what these differences consist of, what causes them and how they organize the inner world of the work. We should not simply establish differences between reality and the world of a work of art and see only in these differences the specificity of a work of art. The specificity of a work of art by individual authors or literary movements can sometimes consist in just the opposite, that is, in the fact that there will be too few of these differences in individual parts of the inner world, and too much imitation and accurate reproduction of reality

In historical source studies, the study of a historical source was once limited to the question: true or false? After A. Shakhmatov’s works on the history of chronicle writing, such a study of the source was considered insufficient. A. Shakhmatov studied the historical source as an integral monument from the point of view of how this monument transforms reality: the purposefulness of the source, the worldview and political views of the author. Thanks to this, it became possible to use even a distorted, transformed image of reality as historical evidence. This transformation itself has become important evidence in the history of ideology and social thought. The historical concepts of the chronicler, no matter how they distort reality (and there are no concepts in the chronicle that do not distort reality), are always interesting for the historian, testifying to the historical ideas of the chronicler, his ideas and views on the world. The concept of the chronicler itself became historical evidence. A. Shakhmatov made all the sources more or less important and interesting for the modern historian, and we have no right to reject any source. It is only important to understand about what time the source being studied can give its testimony: whether about the time when it was compiled, or about the time about which it writes.

The situation is similar in literary criticism. Each work of art (if it is only artistic!) reflects the world of reality from its own creative perspective. And these angles are subject to comprehensive study in connection with the specifics of the work of art and, above all, in their artistic whole. When studying the reflection of reality in a work of art, we should not limit ourselves to the question: “true or false” - and admire only fidelity, accuracy, correctness. The inner world of a work of art also has its own interconnected patterns, its own dimensions and its own meaning, like a system.

Of course, and this is very important, the inner world of a work of art does not exist on its own and not for itself. It is not autonomous. It depends on reality, “reflects” the world of reality, but the transformation of this world that a work of art allows is holistic and purposeful. The transformation of reality is connected with the idea of the work, with the tasks that the artist sets for himself. The world of a work of art is the result of both a correct reflection and an active transformation of reality. In his work, the writer creates a certain space in which the action takes place. This space can be large, cover a number of countries, or even go beyond the terrestrial planet (in fantasy and romantic novels), but it can also narrow down to the tight confines of a single room. The space created by the author in his work may have peculiar “geographical” properties, be real (as in a chronicle or historical novel) or imaginary, as in a fairy tale. The writer in his work also creates the time in which the action of the work takes place. The work may cover centuries or just hours. Time in a work can move quickly or slowly, intermittently or continuously, be intensely filled with events or flow lazily and remain “empty,” rarely “populated” with events.

Quite a lot of works are devoted to the issue of artistic time in literature, although their authors often replace the study of the artistic time of a work with the study of the author’s views on the problem of time and compile simple collections of statements by writers about time, without noticing or not attaching importance to the fact that these statements may be in conflict with the artistic time that the writer himself creates in his work.

Works may also have their own psychological world, not the psychology of individual characters, but general laws of psychology that subordinate all characters, creating a “psychological environment” in which the plot unfolds. These laws may be different from the laws of psychology that exist in reality, and it is useless to look for exact correspondences in psychology textbooks or psychiatry textbooks. Thus, fairy tale heroes have their own psychology: people and animals, as well as fantastic creatures. They are characterized by a special type of reaction to external events, special argumentation and special responses to the arguments of antagonists. One psychology is characteristic of the heroes of Goncharov, another - of the characters of Proust, another - of Kafka, a very special one - of the characters of the chronicle or the lives of saints. The psychology of Karamzin's historical characters or Lermontov's romantic heroes is also special. All these psychological worlds must be studied as a whole.

The same should be said about the social structure of the world of artistic works, and this social structure of the artistic world of the work should be distinguished from the author’s views on social issues and not confuse the study of this world with scattered comparisons of it with the world of reality. The world of social relations in a work of art also requires study in its integrity and independence.

You can also study the world of history in some literary works: in chronicles, in the tragedy of classicism, in historical novels of realistic directions, etc. And in this area, not only accurate or inaccurate reproductions of the events of real history will be revealed, but also its own laws according to which historical events take place, its own system of causality or “causelessness” of events - in a word, its own inner world of history. The task of studying this world of the history of a work is as different from studying a writer’s views on history as the study of artistic time is different from studying an artist’s views on time. You can study Tolstoy's historical views, as they are expressed in the famous historical digressions of his novel War and Peace, but you can also study how events unfold in War and Peace. These are two different tasks, although interrelated. However, I think that the last task is more important, and the first serves only as an aid (by no means a primary one) for the second. If Leo Tolstoy had been a historian and not a novelist, perhaps these two tasks would have changed places in terms of their significance. By the way, there is a curious pattern that emerges when studying the difference between writers’ views on history and its artistic depiction. As a historian (in his discussions on historical topics), the writer very often emphasizes the regularity of the historical process, but in his artistic practice he involuntarily highlights the role of chance in the fate of the historical and simple characters of his work.

The moral side of the world of a work of art is also very important and, like everything else in this world, has a direct “constructive” meaning. So, for example, the world of medieval works knows absolute good, but evil in it is relative. Therefore, a saint cannot not only become a villain, but even commit a bad act. If he had done this, then he would not have been a saint from a medieval point of view, then he would only have been pretending, being a hypocrite, biding his time, etc., etc. But any villain in the world of medieval works can change dramatically and become a saint. Hence a kind of asymmetry and “one direction” in the moral world of artistic works of the Middle Ages. This determines the originality of the action, the construction of plots (in particular, the lives of saints), the interested expectation of the reader of medieval works, etc. (the psychology of reader interest - the reader's "expectation" of a continuation).

The moral world of works of art is constantly changing with the development of literature. Attempts to justify evil, to find objective reasons for it, to consider evil as a social or religious protest are characteristic of the works of the romantic movement (Byron, Njegos, Lermontov, etc.). In classicism, evil and good seem to stand above the world and acquire a unique historical coloring. In realism, moral problems permeate everyday life and appear in thousands of aspects, among which social aspects steadily increase as realism develops.

The building materials for constructing the inner world of a work of art are taken from the reality surrounding the artist, but he creates his own world in accordance with his ideas about what this world was, is or should be.

The world of a work of art reflects reality both indirectly and directly: indirectly - through the artist’s vision, through his artistic representations, and directly, directly in those cases when the artist unconsciously, without attaching artistic significance to this, transfers phenomena of reality or ideas and concepts into the world he creates. of his era.

The world of a work of art reproduces reality in a kind of “abbreviated”, conditional version. An artist, building his world, cannot, of course, reproduce reality with the same degree of complexity inherent in reality. In the world of a literary work there is not much that exists in the real world. This is a limited world in its own way. Literature takes only some phenomena of reality and then conventionally shortens or expands them, makes them more colorful or more faded, organizes them stylistically, but at the same time, as already said, creates its own system, an internally closed system and having its own laws.

Literature “replays” reality. This “replaying” occurs in connection with those “style-forming” trends that characterize the work of this or that author, this or that literary movement or “style of the era.” These style-forming tendencies make the world of a work of art in some respects more diverse and richer than the world of reality, despite all its conventional abbreviation.

artistic poem Akhmatova plot

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Postmodernism

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I take this opportunity to sincerely thank the friend of my youth, Galina Aleksandrovna Shabelskaya. Without her generous help this book would not have been possible.

I. L. Almi

The internal structure of a literary work

1

The concept of “internal structure of a work” does not have the status of a generally recognized term. As far as I know, it is used only by G.S. Pomerants, thus denoting - to some extent metaphorically - that ideal model of Dostoevsky's novel, which was never fully embodied by the writer, but existed in his mind as a source of real creations 1
Pomerants G. S. Openness to the abyss. Meetings with Dostoevsky. M., 1990. pp. 106–136.

The content of the proposed concept that we propose is more terminological, and therefore requires a special definition. It is natural to begin with a distinction from related concepts. Among them, today the most accepted (even included in school practice) expression is “the world of the work.” Introduced by D. S. Likhachev 2
Likhachev D.S. The inner world of a work of art // Questions of literature. 1968. No. 8. pp. 74–87.

It has expanded exponentially over the past decades. Nowadays people talk more often about the world of the writer’s creativity in general. 3
Chudakov A. Chekhov's World. M., 1966. S. 3–4, 11–12.

About literature as artistic worlds, taken in their combination or historical change 4
Bocharov S. G. About artistic worlds. M., 1985. S. 3–4.

Without in any way rejecting this firmly established literary concept (its considerable advantage is its semantic capacity), we nevertheless insist on the justification of that “key word” (expression by A.

Mikhailova) 5
Mikhailov A.V. On some problems of modern literary theory // News of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Series of literature and language. 1994. T. 53. No. 1. P. 21.

Which is included in the title of this study.

The term “internal structure of a work” is needed, if only because it marks a certain (in practice widely accepted) aspect of analysis, resulting in a certain type of literary interpretation.

If the expression “the world of the work” (“artistically mastered and transformed reality” 6
Khalizev V. E. Theory of Literature. M., 1999. P. 158.

) emphasizes the illusion of perception that the creator is counting on, the illusion of the immanent existence of the presented picture of life, then the word “structure” emphasizes the hand-made nature of the work. The world presupposes the possibility of entering its boundaries, dissolving in it; structure – the need for analysis. The world answers the question “what?” (and the answer in this case seems to precede the question); structure - to consciously ask “how?”. The writer’s sense of the world characterizes, as a rule, the first, “naive” stage of perception; the idea of the system is created as a result of targeted research.

Accordingly, when speaking about the world of a work, we strive - in accordance with the will of the artist - to hide the face of the creator who created it behind the picture of life. The term “structure of the work” retains a clear memory of this person, of the author’s plan and, therefore, contains the seed of the question about the nature and means of its implementation. In view of all that has been said, the proposed term is absolutely incompatible with the concept of the death of the author (R. Barth) and the arbitrary multiplicity of interpretations of the text resulting from it. The reader’s perception is directed (and therefore limited) primarily by the “construction” of the work - this is the visible embodiment of the author’s creative thought.

The word “building” is used here quite deliberately. Not only because of its linguistic relatedness to the concept of “system”. The figurative tangibility of a metaphor preserves the sense of the actual existence of what is depicted. It is no coincidence that even Leo Tolstoy spoke about the “construction” of a novel. 7
See his comments about the novel “Anna Karenina”: “The connection between the building is made not on the plot and not on the relationships (acquaintance) of persons, but on an internal connection” (Tolstoy L.N. Pol. collected works: In 90 vol. M ., 1928 – 1964. T. 62. P. 377).

– perhaps the most powerful of the creators of artistic objectivity. Tolstoy's “construction,” however, is extremely far from “construction.”

The thesis of the constructiveness of art in the history of our science is connected, as is known, with the activities of ONOYAZ. This is not the place to talk about the essence of Opoyazov’s theories. Moreover, they were repeatedly interpreted by their followers and opponents.

I will only note a moment that stands on the semantic periphery of the phenomenon. It’s as if it’s not even very significant, but still indicative.

The invasion of OPOYAZ into the existence of academic literary criticism was emphasized loudly. The intonations of shocking, almost cheerful challenge (especially characteristic of V. Shklovsky, for the early articles of B. Eikhenbaum) testified to the young talent of theorists playing with lawless concepts. Modern followers of the Opoyazovites are quite serious, and therefore are certainly (without a trace) mechanistic and flat. They demonstrate examples of “generative poetics” - a certain scale of “expressive techniques” that guarantees the user the utmost accuracy of analysis. For “a decomposition can only be correct into such components from which it could then be assembled according to some general rules” 8
Zholkovsky A.K. Shcheglov Yu.K. Works on the poetics of expressiveness. M., 1996. P. 51.

The impossibility and unnecessaryness of such “correctness” hardly requires proof: the idea of the deep irrationality of the primary element of art - the symbol 9
Averintsev S.S. Symbol: Brief literary encyclopedia. M. (1971. T. 6. Stlb. 826–831.

– today among the axioms.

The principle of text analysis, which is very authoritative for our time - deconstruction - does not challenge it (or perhaps simply does not notice). Its temptation lies in the promise not of “correctness,” but of limitless possibilities of analysis, allowing for any shift in the artistic system. The freedom of deconstruction, however, is essentially an imaginary freedom. As a result, the method produces a result hostile to the very spirit of creativity—destruction. The result is logical: the price of deconstruction is the rejection of the idea that underlies any living aesthetic concept - the perception of the work as an indestructible integrity.

So, we tried to “defend” the proposed term apophatically - through a chain of restrictions accompanying it. Is it possible, however, to have a direct positive description of its volume? I think it's possible. Especially if you start it with a conversation about epic works: the building is revealed almost visibly in them. Although here (as usual in the field of art), the tangible comes from a certain generative plasma - a semantic substance that resists definition. In our case, it could be conditionally called the status of a hero. This is the writer’s idea of the essence of the human personality and the main ways of its artistic embodiment - those internal boundaries that outline the space of Pushkin’s hero, Dostoevsky’s facial features or the appearance of Tolstoy’s man.

The central layer of the artistic system is the composition of the work, or, more precisely, the whole complex of techniques that gravitate towards this rather broad concept. This includes, first of all, what was once designated by the word architectonics - the most stable, as if initially given, elements of the structure of a work: the author’s division of artistic material, the system of characters, the composition of the prevailing motives.

Another area of composition is the beginning, which S. M. Eisenstein closely examines in his theoretical studies and to denote which he proposes a metaphor term - “the course of the structure of a thing” 10
Eisenstein S. M. Caring nature // Eisenstein S. M. Izbr. works: V b t. M, 1964. T. III. P. 46.

The art critic obviously has in mind the general dynamics of the work, which forms, in particular, the composition of the plot. Moreover, the plot is taken here both in a narrow and in a broad sense - as the development of events and as a sequence of changes in significant moments of content. The latter, however, takes us into the realm of another category - into the problems of storytelling methods. Here the description of the structure of the work becomes very difficult without a specific analysis of the text. In general, the problem of the intersection of the named categories (the structure of the work and storytelling techniques) still requires special research; Let's deal with the more obvious aspects of the issue for now.

2

The internal structure of a work is significantly determined by its type and genre. To an even greater extent it depends on the speech form in which the work is presented.

Hence, first of all, the specific ways of literary analysis, which are, in principle, different if it takes place in the spheres of poetry or prose.

The quintessence of poetry is undoubtedly lyricism. A special type of literary work is an article devoted to one poem. In our science there already exist classics of this genre, as well as first-class masters: D. E. Maksimov, E. G. Etkind, M. L. Gasparov, V. A. Grekhnev, S. N. Broitman and others. It is planned (although , as far as I know, has not yet been recorded by anyone) and a unique scale of tasks arising in the process of such research. The first of them is the consideration of the poem as an immanently existing, closed whole 11
The specific features of such integrity are revealed by T. Silman (see: T. Silman. Notes on Lyrics. Leningrad, 1977); The historical evolution of lyrical forms in Russian literature is studied by L. Ginzburg (see: L. Ginzburg. About the lyrics. Publishing house II. Leningrad, 1974).

Above this first level of analysis grows a second one, which corresponds to a specific super-task: to find out from the material of the revealed features of a broader community - what is called the author's handwriting, a unique poetic face. In the process of solving this super-task, it is very important to record those paths - each great poet’s own - on which the inevitable crampedness of the real volume of a thing in lyricism is overcome, those means and techniques with the help of which the transition is made from the local specificity of images to the infinity of potentially present lyrical worlds. For the sake of visibility, let’s look at a few examples. We will try to present the most concise analysis of a number of lyrical works written by purely dissimilar artists - Tyutchev, Pushkin, Nekrasov.

Tyutchev’s poem “Like an ocean envelops the globe…” best responds to the task of analysis of this kind. In relation to it, there is no need at all to talk about the fact of the transition from locality to the aura of the universal. The work directly reproduces the “landscape of the universe”; The components are romantic images-symbols: “ocean”, “dreams”, “night”, “waves”, “magic boat”. The string is crowned by a moment that gives rise to a feeling close to catharsis:

The vault of heaven, burning with the glory of the stars,
Looks mysteriously from the depths, -
And we float, a burning abyss
Surrounded on all sides 12
Tyutchev F. Poems. M.; L., 1969. P. 136.

“The last four verses,” Nekrasov wrote, “are amazing: reading them, you feel an involuntary thrill.” 13
Nekrasov N. A. Poli. collection Op. and letters: In 12 volumes. M., 1950. T. 9. P. 212.

When perceiving this poem, the reader’s imagination has to conjure up not a picture of the cosmos (it was recreated by the poet himself), but the real support of the lyrical plot. Apparently, this is sailing on a boat on the surface of the water, reflecting the starry sky. The poetic face of Tyutchev - “the most nocturnal soul in Russian poetry” 14
Block A. Collection cit.: In 8 vols. M.;L., 1962. T. 5. P. 25.

- appears in this poem with almost direct immediacy.

Otherwise, the path to lyrical immensity is made in the space of Pushkin’s poem “Only roses fade...”. This miniature has not yet been truly appreciated. Meanwhile, turning to it allows you to feel the semantic fullness of Pushkin’s “pure beauty”, the internal weight of Pushkin’s lightness. Like Tyutchev, Pushkin builds his work on traditional symbols. Or, more precisely, on images that concentrate traditional myths - “fading rose”, “Elysium”, “Lethe”, “waves of sleep”. But as the poem unfolds, the traditional is transformed, a landscape of immortality arises - an image of eternity granted to every human soul thirsting for this eternity 15
For more details, see my article “On A. S. Pushkin’s poem “Only roses fade…”” (Almi I. L. About poetry and prose. St. Petersburg, 2002. pp. 103–111).

Nekrasov’s muse is, as you know, a resident of a completely different world, a purely prosaic one. The situation on which the poem “Funeral” is based could provide material for a typical essay on folk life. And yet, before us is genuine, high poetry in a new way. Overcoming “prose” is accomplished here by extremely unusual means. One of them is a vaguely flickering autobiographical beginning; it imparts unexpected warmth to the image of the lyrical character. This “stranger”, who brought “terrible misfortune” through suicide to a village forgotten by God, acquires strangely familiar features as the plot develops. Not just generic signs of the master of an extra person, a wanderer, homeless in his own country. Something more individual is also recognized: the deceased was a hunter, he had a relationship similar to friendship with the residents of a poor village - he loved “the kids” (“You caressed them, sewed a gift for them / You didn’t get bored answering the demand”), generously lent gunpowder to the peasants -hunters. Enriched with details that seem to emerge in the memory of the nameless narrator, the story of the “free death” of the “poor gunslinger” begins to be perceived as one of the projections of the fate of the lyrical hero. The picture of a people's funeral - this mystery of farewell and forgiveness - fits into the general frame of unspoken reflections on the abyss that separates the man of culture and the people of the earth. The work is illuminated by the sad and joyful utopia of overcoming this abyss. Its embodiment is a folklore funeral lament, transformed by the fact that it is dedicated to a person who has never before acted as its hero.

A conversation about the scale that arises in the process of analyzing a lyric work leads to a natural boundary of the topic. It leads naturally, in accordance with those dynamic potentialities that correspond to the nature of the lyrical genre. The most important among them is the potential to expand local lyrical space. This expansion is usually carried out in two ways. Or through the form of a lyrical cycle (from the mid-19th century - books of poetry). Or - in the creation of a new genre formation, intermediate between a poem and a poem. The first of these forms, quite traditional, has long been understood theoretically. The second - also having a fairly long period of existence (albeit incommensurable with the historical existence of the cycle) - has not yet been described, not even named. So I'll start with it.

The time of its emergence in Russian literature is the 10s of the 19th century, the period when the process of restructuring the system of lyrical genres was completed. By this chronological milestone, a canon of new lyrics is emerging. His identifying mark is the small volume of the work. This apparently external sign reflects the “core of the semantic structure of the lyrics” - the moment of personal comprehension of the truth, the accompanying “state of lyrical concentration”. 16
Silman T. Notes on lyrics. L., 1977. P. 6.

Against the background of the lyrical canon, works arise in which this defining property is violated - “Autumn” by Pushkin or “Autumn” by Baratynsky, “Valerik” by Lermontov, “A Knight for an Hour”, “Railway”, “About the Weather” by Nekrasov, “Mills” ", "City", "High Disease" by Pasternak, etc. The poets themselves felt the distinctiveness of this formation, hence the non-canonical subtitles, and sometimes the names - "Excerpt" (Pushkin), "Satires" (Nekrasov), "Epic Motifs" ( Parsnip). In search of a general name, I decide to propose a somewhat cumbersome, but quite accurate definition for poems of this type - large lyrical form.

When analyzing works of this kind, the problem of their internal structure is particularly relevant. The rejection of laconicism indicates a new relationship between the subjective and objective principles - the pictures of external and internal life. In this capacity, the large lyrical form demonstrates the growth of realistic tendencies in poetry. It is no coincidence that it is especially widely represented in Nekrasov’s works. Although it is precisely for him that the semantic appearance of a work of this type may differ from the indicated one. Thus, the expanded volume of “A Knight for an Hour” is filled not so much with pictures of external life, but with a reflection of the mental process. The state of lyrical concentration is not concentrated here at one culminating point, but covers a whole string of emotional peaks. The internal structure of the work reflects the continuous growth of emotional tension; the lyrical substance remains in its generic purity.

More often, however, the very fact of the existence of a large lyrical form reveals the potential for a rapprochement between lyricism and epic, moreover, between poetry and prose, with the undoubted expansion of the latter. The second of the forms of enlargement of lyricism that we have named, the cycle - in contrast to the large lyric form - preserves the fundamental qualities of the lyricism intact. The expansion, or more precisely, the increase in meaning, that arises in the context of the cycle does not violate the autonomy of the poems included in it. Nor does it extinguish their inherent separate meaning. Thus, in Baratynsky’s “Twilight” there is a complex overlap between the works of the beginning and the end of the book – “The Last Poet” and “Rhyme”. Moreover, “Rhyme,” which contains the idea of the salutary effect of poetry, does not cancel the tragic conclusions of “The Last Poet.” In turn, “Achilles” - with its hope for the spiritual support of “living faith” - does not remove the hopelessness of the poem “What are you for, days! The vale world of phenomena..." 17
For more details, see my article “Evgeny Baratynsky. The nature of personal and creative evolution" (Nast, ed., p. 77)

The structure of the “suite” in the cycle (I.M. Toibin’s expression) is created in deep accordance with the nature of the lyrics as such. Its generic property is intermittency, “dottedness”. This unique quality of the lyrical kind has been studied very little so far. And yet it is more than significant. In particular, it is through him that the path in the field of large genres is visible. First of all, to Pushkin’s novel in verse.

3

The nature of the narrative, composition, and plot of “Eugene Onegin” have repeatedly become the object of scientific research in the last decade. Without setting myself the grandiose task of describing the internal product system as a whole, I will limit myself to a much more modest goal - the study of individual components of this system. Such research, as we know, has a direct bearing on understanding the character of the whole. Moreover, it presupposes as a precondition the existence of an intuitive idea of the nature of the whole and ultimately corrects this idea (the so-called hermeneutic circle). In our case, this idea can be illustrated by an analysis of a seemingly “passing” episode of Pushkin’s novel – “Songs of Girls”. The research impulse in this case arises primarily from contact with the fact of repetition of a poetic device: a song focused on folklore exoticism is a common component of a Byronic poem 18
Zhirmunsky V. M. Byron and Pushkin. M. g 1978. P. 91–92.

It is natural to make an assumption prior to the analysis: the special structure of the novel in verse should have had a significant impact on the role of this component.

This feature is quite clearly revealed from a comparison of “Onegin” with the chronologically closest to it “Gypsies”. In a poem where the development of the plot is predetermined by the dynamics of “fatal passions,” Zemfira’s song, concentrating such passion, is perceived as a signal of an approaching catastrophe. It lies on the highway of action: exposing its spring, it provokes a tragic explosion. In “Onegin” - with its characteristic “dotted” connection of episodes (“Onegin” is an airy mass”) - the role of the song is fundamentally different. Here the episode of singing is, first of all, a piece of the background opposing the heroine’s mental life. At this moment in the action, this confrontation declares itself with emphasized acuteness. Tatiana, while waiting for Onegin, experiences moments of extreme excitement. Singing “according to the master’s orders” provides a vivid contrast to her condition. The song, therefore, is intended to outline and fill a pause in the plot; the heroine is completely indifferent to its meaning at this moment: she listens without hearing. The reader, however, should notice what Tatiana listens to “with carelessness.” It is known that Pushkin went through variants of the song text. The latter arranged it for some reason. You can try to reveal them (of course, with a large degree of approximation), placing “The Song of the Girls” in the context of the novel’s whole.

The point is that the episode, traditional in its folklore flavor, contains the most important life lesson addressed to the heroine. He demonstrates an example of primordially feminine behavior - coquetry, but not artificial, secular, but natural. The action of the novel - at its last stage - will absorb this seemingly casually thrown touch. He will respond in how Tatyana, the legislator of the room, builds her relationship with Onegin, who is in love with her. For all her sincerity (or, more precisely, high authenticity), the heroine plays a kind of game with him:

She doesn't notice him
No matter how he fights, even if he dies 19
Pushkin A. S. Poli. collection Op. M., 1937. T. 6. P. 179.

The sheer lack of attention to Onegin, who is changing before our eyes, even evokes a semblance of the author’s reproach, typically addressed to the entire female sex.

Onegin begins to turn pale:
She either doesn’t see it or isn’t sorry;
Onegin dries<…>
<……………….>And Tatyana
And there is no case (their gender is)<…>20
Pushkin A.S. Ibid. P. 179.

Constantly emphasizing the human exclusivity of his heroine, Pushkin nevertheless does not stop before introducing this exclusivity into the context of everyday life. Thus, an outwardly insignificant fragment of a novel in verse, but highlighted by the author, turns out to be internally correlated with its plot line 21
The interpretation we propose is absent in the comments to the novel. V. Nabokov draws attention to the fact that Pushkin hesitated how to define Tatiana’s attitude to the song - as attention or inattention to her (Nabokov V. Commentary on the novel by A. S. Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”. Translation from English. St. Petersburg, 1998 431). Yu. M. Lotman, noting the general contrast of the “Girls’ Song” both in relation to the heroine’s feelings and in comparison with the nanny’s story, argues that it is focused on wedding lyrics with its inherent symbolism of the groom – “cherry” and the bride – “berry” (Lotman Yu. M. Roman A. S. Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”. Commentary. L., 1980. P. 232).

4

The study of the peculiarities of the internal structure of a novel in verse makes it natural to transfer attention to a prose novel. Although, according to Pushkin, they are separated by a “devilish difference.” However, this difference is felt to the greatest extent if we bear in mind European prose of the 18th – early 19th centuries. In the center of our attention is a much later form, devoid of the correctness of the classical canon - the novel by Dostoevsky. We will talk about certain aspects of its study.

In general practice, attention not to a separate episode, but to a specially highlighted aspect of the artistic whole, usually results in the study of some aspects of the composition. It can proceed as a description of the most obvious, static elements (architectonics) or as attention to that side of it, which we, following Eisenstein, call the course of the structure of a thing. Of course, in the process of specific analysis these paths cannot be strictly separated. Let us try, however, for the sake of an example, to present them in the greatest isolation. Architectonics - on the space of "Crime and Punishment", plot dynamics - on the material of the novel "Idiot".

Let's limit ourselves to the most obvious first. The basis of hermeneutic analysis is slow reading, which primarily records the sequence of arrangement of artistic material. In relation to Crime and Punishment, it gives an important result: one of the most difficult aspects of interpreting the novel becomes clearer - the correlation of the polar motives of the crime 22
For more details, see my article “On the plot and compositional structure of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”” (Almi I. L. About poetry and prose. St. Petersburg, 2002. pp. 312–326).