The role of the author in a work of art. In a literary work

Moscow 2008

The problem of the author has become, as many modern researchers recognize, central in literary criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. This is also connected with the development of literature itself, which (especially starting from the era of romanticism) increasingly emphasizes the personal, individual nature of creativity, and many different forms of “behavior” of the author in a work appear. This is also connected with the development of literary science, which seeks to consider a literary work as a special world, the result creative activity the creator who created it, and as a certain statement, a dialogue between the author and the reader. Depending on what the scientist’s attention is focused on, they talk about image of the author V literary work, O author's voice in relation to characters' voices. The terminology associated with the whole range of problems arising around the author has not yet become orderly and generally accepted. Therefore, first of all, we need to define the basic concepts, and then see how in practice, i.e. in a specific analysis (in each specific case), these terms “work”.

Of course, the author’s problem did not arise in the twentieth century, but much earlier. A modern scientist cites the statements of many writers of the past, which surprisingly turn out to be in tune - despite the complete dissimilarity of the same authors in many other respects. These are the sayings:

N.M. Karamzin: “The Creator is always depicted in creation and often against his will.”

M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin: “Every work of fiction, no worse than any scientific treatise, betrays its author with all his inner world.”

F.M. Dostoevsky: “In mirror reflection one cannot see how the mirror looks at the object, or, better to say, one can see that it does not look at all, but reflects passively, mechanically. A true artist cannot do this: whether in a painting, a story, or a piece of music, there will certainly be something different; he will reflect involuntarily, even against his will, he will express himself with all his views, with his character, with the degree of his development.”

The most detailed reflection on the author was left by L.N. Tolstoy. In the “Preface to the Works of Guy de Maupassant” he argues as follows: “People who are little sensitive to art often think that a work of art is one whole because the same persons act in it, because everything is built on the same premise.” or describes the life of one person. It's not fair. This is only how it seems to a superficial observer: the cement that binds every work of art into one whole and therefore produces the illusion of a reflection of life is not the unity of persons and positions, but the unity of the original moral attitude of the author to the subject. ...In essence, when we read or contemplate a work of art by a new author, the main question that arises in our soul is always this: “Well, what kind of person are you? And how are you different from all the people I know, and what can you tell me new about how we should look at our lives?” Whatever the artist depicts: saints, robbers, kings, lackeys - we look for and see only the soul of the artist himself" 1 .

Here we need to focus on two points that are especially important for us now. First: the unity and integrity of a literary work are directly related to the figure (image) of the author, Furthermore: it is he, the author, who is the main guarantee of this unity (even, as we see, according to Tolstoy’s thought, to a greater extent than the heroes of the work and what happens to them, i.e. the events that make up the plot of the work). And second. We have the right to ask ourselves the question: but to what extent is it legitimate to tell us about the author as a person (“come on, what kind of person are you?..”)? Looking ahead, let's say: probably to the same extent to which we sometimes talk about the human properties of the hero - which, of course, is assumed (since we are dealing with a literary work as a special kind of reality), and at the same time we perfectly “remember” that this reality is of a special kind and that a person in life is not at all the same as an artistic image, even if it is the same person. It is in this sense that we can only imagine the author as a person, and more precisely, we are dealing here with the image of the author, the image created by the entire work as a whole and arising in the mind of the reader as a result of a “response” creative act - reading.

“The word “author” is used in literary studies in several meanings. First of all, it means a writer - a real person. In other cases, it denotes a certain concept, a certain view of reality, the expression of which is the entire work. Finally, this word is used to designate certain phenomena characteristic of certain genres and genders” 2.

Noted B.O. Corman's triple use of the term can be supplemented and commented on. Most scientists distinguish between the author in the first meaning (also called the “real” or “biographical” author) and the author in the second meaning. This, to use another terminology, is the author as an aesthetic category, or the image of the author. Sometimes they talk here about the “voice” of the author, considering such a definition more legitimate and definite than the “image of the author.” For now, let us accept all these terms as synonyms in order to definitely and confidently distinguish the real, biographical author from that artistic reality, which is revealed to us in the work. As for the term “author” in the third meaning, the scientist here means that sometimes the narrator is called the author, the storyteller (in epic works) or the lyrical hero (in lyric poetry): this should be considered incorrect, and sometimes even completely incorrect.

To see this, you need to think about how the work is organized from a narrative point of view. Remembering that the author’s “presence” is not concentrated at one point in the work (the hero closest to the author, serving as a “mouthpiece” of his ideas, a kind of alter ego of the author; direct author’s assessments of the depicted, etc.), but is manifested in all levels artistic structure(from the plot to the smallest “cells” - tropes), - with this in mind, let’s see how the author’s principle (the author) manifests itself in the subjective organization of the work, i.e. in the way it is constructed from a narrative perspective. (It is clear that in this way we will be talking primarily about epic works. The forms of manifestation of the author in lyric poetry and drama will be discussed later.)

There are third-person narration (Erform, or, what is the same, Er-Erzählung) and 1st-person narration (Icherzählung). The one who narrates in the 3rd person, does not name himself (is not personified), we will agree to denote by the term narrator. The person who tells the story in the first person is called the narrator. (This use of terms has not yet become universal, but, perhaps, occurs among most researchers.) Let us consider these types in more detail.

Erform (“erform”), or “objective” narrative, includes three varieties, depending on how noticeable the “presence” of the author or characters is in them.

1. 
   Actually author's narration.

“The year after the birth of Christ 1918 was a great and terrible year, the second from the beginning of the revolution. It was full of sun in summer and snow in winter, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherd star - evening Venus and red, trembling Mars.

We immediately understand both the accuracy and some convention of the definition of “objective” narrative. On the one hand, the narrator does not name himself (“I”), he seems to be dissolved in the text and is not manifested as a person (not personified). This property of epic works is the objectivity of what is depicted, when, according to Aristotle, “the work, as it were, sings itself.” On the other hand, already in the very structure of phrases, inversion emphasizes and intonationally highlights evaluative words: “great”, “terrible”. In the context of the entire novel, it becomes clear that the mention of the Nativity of Christ, and of the “shepherd’s” Venus (the star that led the shepherds to the birthplace of Christ), and of the sky (with all the possible associations that this motif entails, for example, with “War”) and the world” by L. Tolstoy) – all this is connected with the author’s assessment of the events depicted in the novel, with the author’s concept of the world. And we understand the conventionality of the definition of “objective” narrative: it was unconditional for Aristotle, but even for Hegel and Belinsky, although they built the system literary families no longer in antiquity, like Aristotle, but in the 19th century, but based on the material precisely ancient art. Meanwhile, the experience of the novel (namely, the novel is understood as an epic of modern and contemporary times) suggests that the author’s subjectivity, the personal principle, also manifest themselves in epic works.

So, in the narrator’s speech we clearly hear the author’s voice, the author’s assessment of what is being depicted. Why don’t we have the right to identify the narrator with the author? This would be incorrect. The fact is that the narrator is the most important (in epic works), but not the only form of authorial consciousness. The author manifests himself not only in the narration, but also in many other aspects of the work: in the plot and composition, in the organization of time and space, in many other things, right down to the choice of means of small imagery... Although, first of all, of course, in the narration itself. The narrator owns all those sections of the text that cannot be attributed to any of the characters.

But it is important to distinguish between the subject of speech (the speaker) and the subject of consciousness (the one whose consciousness is expressed). It's not always the same thing. We can see in the narrative a certain “diffusion” of the voices of the author and the characters.

1. 
   Not the author's own narration.

“Alexey, Elena, Talberg, and Anyuta, who grew up in Turbina’s house, and Nikolka, stunned by death, with a cowlick hanging over his right eyebrow, stood at the feet of the old brown Saint Nicholas. Nikolka’s blue eyes, set on the sides of a long bird’s nose, looked confused, murdered. From time to time he led them to the iconostasis, to the arch of the altar, drowning in twilight, where the sad and mysterious old god ascended and blinked. Why such an insult? Injustice? Why was it necessary to take away my mother when everyone moved in, when relief came?

God, flying away into the black, cracked sky, did not give an answer, and Nikolka himself did not yet know that everything that happens is always as it should be, and only for the better.

They performed the funeral service, went out onto the echoing slabs of the porch and escorted the mother through the entire huge city to the cemetery, where the father had long been lying under a black marble cross. And they buried mom. Eh... eh...”

Here, in the scene when the Turbins bury their mother, the voice of the author and the voice of the hero are combined - despite the fact (it is worth emphasizing this again) that formally this entire fragment of text belongs to the narrator. “A cowlick hanging over his right eyebrow,” “blue heads planted on the sides of a long bird’s nose...” - this is how the hero himself cannot see himself: this is the author’s view of him. And at the same time, “a sad and mysterious old god” is clearly the perception of seventeen-year-old Nikolka, as well as the words: “Why such an insult? Injustice? Why was it necessary to take away my mother...”, etc. This is how the voice of the author and the voice of the hero are combined in the narrator’s speech, up to the case when this combination occurs within one sentence: “The god flying into the black, cracked sky did not give an answer...” (zone of the hero’s voice) - “... and Nikolka himself didn’t know yet...” (author’s voice zone).

This type of narration is called non-authorial. We can say that here two subjects of consciousness are combined (the author and the hero) - despite the fact that there is only one subject of speech: the narrator.

Now M.M.’s position should become clear. Bakhtin about “authorial excess”, expressed by him in his 1919 work “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Bakhtin separates, as we would now say, the biographical, real author and the author as an aesthetic category, an author dissolved in the text, and writes: “The author must be on the border of the world he creates as an active creator of it... The author is necessary and authoritative for the reader , who treats him not as a person, not as another person, not as a hero... but as a principle which must be followed (only a biographical consideration of the author turns him into... a person defined in existence who can be contemplated). Inside the work for the reader, the author is a set of creative principles that must be implemented (i.e. in the mind of the reader who follows the author in the reading process - E.O.)... His individuation as a person (i.e. the idea of ​​the author as a person, a real person - E.O.) is already a secondary creative act of the reader, critic, historian, independent of the author as the active principle of vision... The author knows and sees more not only in the direction in which the hero looks and sees, but in another, fundamentally inaccessible to the hero himself.. The author not only knows and sees everything that each hero individually and all the heroes together knows and sees, but also more than them, and he sees and knows something that is fundamentally inaccessible to them, and in this is always certain and stable excess the author’s vision and knowledge in relation to each character and all the moments of completion of the whole... work are found” 3.

In other words, the hero is limited in his horizons 4 by a special position in time and space, character traits, age and many other circumstances. This is how he differs from the author, who is, in principle, omniscient and omnipresent, although the degree of his “manifestation” in the text of the work may be different, including in the organization of the work from the point of view of narrative. The author manifests himself in every element of a work of art, and at the same time he cannot be identified with any of the characters or with any one side of the work.

Thus, it becomes clear that the narrator is only one of the forms of the author’s consciousness, and it is impossible to completely identify him with the author.

1. 
   Improperly direct speech.

“Anfisa showed neither surprise nor sympathy. She didn't like these boyish antics of her husband. They are waiting for him at home, they are dying, they can’t find a place for themselves, but he rode and rode, but Sinelga came to his mind - and he galloped off. It’s as if this same Sinelga will fall through the ground if you leave there a day later.” (F. Abramov. Crossroads)

“Yesterday I drank a lot. Not exactly “in shreds”, but firmly. Yesterday, the day before yesterday and the third day. All because of that bastard Banin and his dearest sister. Well, they split you into your labor rubles! ...After demobilization, I moved with a friend to Novorossiysk. A year later he was taken away. Some bastard stole spare parts from the garage" (V. Aksenov. Halfway to the Moon) /

As you can see, with all the differences between the characters here, F. Abramov and V. Aksenov have a similar principle in the relationship between the voices of the author and the character. In the first case, it seems that only the first two sentences can be “attributed” to the author. Then his point of view is deliberately combined with Anfisa's point of view (or "disappears" in order to give a close-up of the heroine herself). In the second example, it is generally impossible to isolate the author’s voice: the entire narrative is colored by the hero’s voice, his speech characteristics. The case is especially difficult and interesting, because... the intelligentsia vernacular characteristic of the character is not alien to the author, as anyone who reads Aksenov’s entire story can be convinced of. In general, such a desire to merge the voices of the author and the hero, as a rule, occurs when they are close and speaks of the desire of writers to position themselves not as a detached judge, but as a “son and brother” of their heroes. M. Zoshchenko called himself the “son and brother” of his characters in “Sentimental Stories”; “Your son and brother” was the title of V. Shukshin’s story, and although these words belong to the hero of the story, in many ways Shukshin’s author’s position is generally characterized by the narrator’s desire to get as close as possible to the characters. In studies of linguistic stylistics of the second half of the twentieth century. this tendency (going back to Chekhov) is noted as characteristic of Russian prose of the 1960s - 1970s. The confessions of the writers themselves are consistent with this. “...One of my favorite techniques - it has even become, perhaps, repeated too often - is the author’s voice, which seems to be woven into the hero’s internal monologue,” admitted Yu. Trifonov. Even earlier, V. Belov thought about similar phenomena: “...I think that there is some thin, elusively shaky and rightful line of contact between the author’s language and the language of the depicted character. A deep, very specific separation of these two categories is just as unpleasant as their complete merging” 5.

Non-authorial narration and non-authorial direct speech are two varieties of Erform that are close to each other. If it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them sharply (and researchers themselves admit this difficulty), then we can distinguish not three, but two varieties of Erform and talk about what predominates in the text: “the author’s plan” or “the character’s plan” ( according to the terminology of N.A. Kozhevnikova), that is, in the division we have adopted, the author’s own narrative or two other varieties of Erform. But it is necessary to distinguish at least these two types of authorial activity, especially since, as we see, this problem worries the writers themselves.

Icherzä hlung – first person narration– no less common in the literature. And here one can observe no less expressive possibilities for the writer. Let's consider this form - Icherzählung (according to the terminology accepted in world literary studies; in Russian sound - “icherzählung”).

“What a pleasure it is for a third-person narrator to switch to the first! It’s like having small and inconvenient thimble glasses and suddenly giving up, thinking and drinking cold raw water straight from the tap” (O. Mandelstam. Egyptian Brand. L., 1928, p. 67).

To the researcher... this succinct and powerful remark says a lot. Firstly, it strongly recalls the special essence of verbal art (compared to other types of speech activity)... Secondly, it testifies to the depth of aesthetic awareness choice one or another leading form of narration in relation to the task that the writer has set for himself. Thirdly, it indicates the necessity (or possibility) and artistic fruitfulness transition from one narrative form to another. And finally, fourthly, it contains recognition famous family inconveniences that any deviation from the uncorrected explication of the author’s “I” is fraught with and which, nevertheless, fiction for some reason neglects” 6.

“Uncorrected explication of the author’s “I”” in the terminology of a modern linguist is a free, unrestrained direct author’s word, which O. Mandelstam probably had in mind in this particular case - in the book “Egyptian Brand”. But first-person narration does not necessarily presuppose precisely and only such a word. And here at least three varieties can be distinguished. Let us agree to call the one who is the bearer of such a narrative storyteller(unlike the narrator in Erform). True, in the specialized literature there is no unity regarding the terminology associated with the narrator, and one can find word usage that is the opposite of what we proposed. But here it is important not to bring all researchers to a mandatory consensus, but to agree on terms. In the end, it is not a matter of terms, but of the essence of the problem.

So, three important types of first-person narration - Icherzählung , distinguished depending on who the narrator is: author-narrator; a narrator who is not a hero; hero-storyteller.

1. Author-narrator. Probably, it was precisely this form of narration that O. Mandelstam had in mind: it gave him, a poet writing prose, the most convenient and familiar, and, moreover, of course, in accordance with the specific artistic assignment the opportunity to speak as openly and directly as possible in the first person. (Although one should not exaggerate the autobiographical nature of such a narrative: even in lyric poetry, with its maximum subjectivity compared to drama and epic, the lyrical “I” is not only not identical to the biographical author, but is not the only opportunity for poetic self-expression.) The brightest and a well-known example of such a narrative is “Eugene Onegin”: the figure of the author-narrator organizes the entire novel, which is structured as a conversation between the author and the reader, a story about how the novel is written (was written), which thanks to this seems to be created before the eyes of the reader. The author here also organizes relationships with the characters. Moreover, we understand the complexity of these relationships with each of the characters largely thanks to the author’s peculiar speech “behavior.” The author's word is capable of absorbing the voices of the characters (in this case, the words hero And character are used as synonyms). With each of them, the author enters into a relationship of either dialogue, polemic, or complete sympathy and complicity. (Let’s not forget that Onegin is the author’s “good... friend”; at a certain time they became friends, they were going to go on a trip together, i.e. the author-narrator takes some part in the plot. But we must also remember about the conventions of such a game, for example: “Tatiana’s letter is before me, / I cherish it sacredly.” On the other hand, one should not identify the author as a literary image and with the real - biographical - author, no matter how tempting it may be (a hint of a southern exile and some other autobiographical features).

Bakhtin apparently first spoke about this verbal behavior of the author, about the dialogical relationship between the author and the characters, in the articles “The Word in the Novel” and “From the Prehistory of the Novel Word.” Here he showed that the image of a speaking person, his words, is a characteristic feature of the novel as a genre and that heteroglossia, the “artistic image of language” 7 , even the many languages ​​of the characters and the author’s dialogical relationship with them are actually the subject of the image in the novel.

1. 
   Hero-storyteller. This is the one who takes part in events and narrates them; thus, the apparently “absent” author in the narrative creates the illusion of authenticity of everything that happens. It is no coincidence that the figure of the hero-storyteller appears especially often in Russian prose starting from the second half of the 30s of the 19th century: this may also be explained by the increased attention of writers to the inner world of a person (the confession of the hero, his story about himself). And at the same time, already at the end of the 30s, when realistic prose, the hero - an eyewitness and participant in the events - was called upon to postulate the “plausibility” of what was depicted. In this case, in any case, the reader finds himself very close to the hero, sees him as if in close-up, without an intermediary in the person of the omniscient author. This is perhaps the largest group of works written in the Icherzählung manner (if anyone wanted to make such a calculation). And this category includes works where the relationship between the author and the narrator can be very different: the closeness of the author and the narrator (as, for example, in “Notes of a Hunter” by Turgenev); complete “independence” of the narrator (one or more) from the author (as in “A Hero of Our Time,” where the author himself only has a preface, which, strictly speaking, is not included in the text of the novel: it did not exist in the first edition). You can name in this series “The Captain’s Daughter” by Pushkin and many other works. According to V.V. Vinogradov, “the narrator is the speech creation of the writer, and the image of the narrator (who pretends to be the “author”) is a form of literary “acting” of the writer” 8. It is no coincidence that the forms of narration in particular and the problem of the author in general are of interest not only to literary scholars, but also to linguists, such as V.V. Vinogradov and many others.

The concept of point of view remains to be clarified, but now it is important to pay attention to two more points: the “absence” of the author in the work and the fact that all of it constructed as a story by a hero who is extremely distant from the author. In this sense, the absent author’s word, distinguished by its literary nature, appears as an invisible (but assumed) opposite pole in relation to the hero’s word – the characteristic word. One of bright examples A fairytale work can be called Dostoevsky’s novel “Poor People,” built in the form of letters from the poor official Makar Devushkin and his beloved Varenka. Later about this first novel of his, which brought him literary fame, but also caused reproaches from critics, the writer noted: “They don’t understand how you can write in such a style. They are accustomed to seeing the writer’s face in everything; I didn't show mine. And they have no idea that Devushkin is speaking, not me, and that Devushkin cannot say otherwise.” As we see, this half-joking admission should convince us that the choice of the form of narration occurs consciously, as a special artistic task. In a certain sense, the tale is the opposite of the first form of Icherzählung we named, in which the author-storyteller reigns with full rights and about which O. Mandelstam wrote. The author, it is worth emphasizing this again, works in the tale with someone else’s word - the word of the hero, voluntarily renouncing his traditional “privilege” of an omniscient author. In this sense, V.V. was right. Vinogradov, who wrote: “A tale is artistic construction squared..." 10.

A narrator who cannot be called a hero can also speak on behalf of “I”: he does not take part in events, but only narrates about them. Narrator who is not a hero, appears, however, as part of the artistic world: he, too, like the characters, is the subject of the image. As a rule, he is endowed with a name, a biography, and most importantly, his story characterizes not only the characters and events about which he narrates, but also himself. Such, for example, is Rudy Panko in Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” - a figure no less colorful than the characters participating in the action. And his very manner of narration can perfectly clarify the above-mentioned position about the event of narration: for the reader this is truly an aesthetic experience, perhaps no less powerful than the events themselves that he is talking about and that happen to the heroes. There is no doubt that for the author, creating the image of Rudy Panka was a special artistic task. (From Mandelstam’s statement above, it is clear that in general the choice of a narrative form is never accidental; another thing is that it is not always possible to obtain the author’s interpretation of a particular case, but it is necessary to think about it every time.) This is how Gogol’s tale sounds:

“Yes, that was it, and I forgot the most important thing: when you, gentlemen, come to me, then take the straight path along the main road to Dikanka. I put it on the first page on purpose so that they could get to our farm faster. I think you’ve heard enough about Dikanka. And that’s to say that the house there is cleaner than some pasichnikov’s kuren. And there’s nothing to say about the garden: you probably won’t find anything like this in your St. Petersburg. Having arrived in Dikanka, just ask the first boy you come across, herding geese in a soiled shirt: “Where does the beekeeper Rudy Panko live?” - “And there!” - he will say, pointing his finger and, if you want, he will take you to the very farm. However, I ask you not to put your hands back too much and, as they say, to feint, because the roads through our farmsteads are not as smooth as in front of your mansions.”
The figure of the narrator provides the opportunity for a complex author’s “game”, and not only in fairy tale narration, for example, in M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”, where the author plays with the “faces” of the narrator: he emphasizes his omniscience, possession full knowledge about the heroes and everything that happened in Moscow (“Follow me, reader, and only me!”), then he puts on a mask of ignorance, bringing him closer to any of the passing characters (they say, we didn’t see this, and what we didn’t see , we don’t know that). As he wrote in the 1920s. V.V. Vinogradov: “In a literary masquerade, a writer can freely change stylistic masks throughout one work of art” 11.
As a result, we present the definition of skaz given by modern scientists and taking into account, it seems, all the most important observations about skaz made by predecessors: “... a skaz is a two-voice narrative that correlates the author and the narrator, stylized as an orally pronounced, theatrically improvised monologue of a person, implying a sympathetic audience, directly related to the democratic environment or oriented towards this environment” 12.

So, we can say that in a literary work, no matter how it is constructed from the point of view of narrative, we always find the author’s “presence”, but it is found in a greater or to a lesser extent and in different forms: in a 3rd person narration the narrator is closest to the author, in a tale the narrator is most distant from him. “The narrator in a tale is not only the subject of speech, but also the object of speech. In general, we can say that the stronger the narrator’s personality is revealed in the text, the more he is not only the subject of speech, but also its object” 13. (And vice versa: the more inconspicuous the narrator’s speech, the less specific it is, the closer the narrator is to the author.)

To better distinguish between the subject of speech (the speaker) and the object of speech (what is being depicted), it is useful to distinguish between the concepts subject of speech And subject of consciousness. Moreover, not only the appearance of the hero, an event (action), etc. can be depicted, but also - which is especially important for the genre of the novel and in general for all narrative prose - the speech and consciousness of the hero. Moreover, the hero’s speech can be depicted not only as direct, but also in refraction - in the speech of the narrator (be it the author, narrator or storyteller), and therefore in his assessment. So, the subject of speech is the speaker himself. The subject of consciousness is the one whose consciousness is expressed (transmitted) in the speech of the subject. It's not always the same thing.

1. 
   The subject of speech and the subject of consciousness coincide. This includes all cases of the author’s direct word (the author’s narration itself). We also include here fairly simple cases when there are two subjects of speech and two subjects of consciousness in the text.

I will not tolerate the corrupter

Fire and sighs and praises

He tempted the young heart;

So that the despicable, poisonous worm

Sharpened a lily stalk;

To the two-morning flower

Withered still half-open.”

All this meant, friends:

I'm shooting with a friend.

1. 
   A more complicated case. There is one subject of speech, but two consciousnesses are expressed (the consciousness of two): in this example, the author and the hero.

And his song was clear,

Like the thoughts of a simple-minded maiden,

Like a baby's dream, like the moon

In the deserts of the serene sky,

Goddess of secrets and tender sighs.

He sang separation and sadness,

AND something, And foggy distance,

And romantic roses...
Please note that here, in the last three verses, the author is clearly ironic about Lensky’s poetry: the words in italics are thus separated from the author as alien, and in them one can also see an allusion to two literary sources. (Allusion is a hidden hint of an implied, but not directly indicated literary source. The reader must guess which one.) “Fog in the distance” is one of the common romantic formulas, but it is possible that Pushkin also had in mind the article by V.K. Kuchelbecker 1824 “On the direction of our poetry, especially lyrical, in the last decade.” In it, the author complained that the romantic elegy had replaced the heroic ode, and wrote: “The pictures are the same everywhere: moon, which - of course - sad And pale, rocks and oak groves where they have never been, a forest behind which a hundred times one imagines the setting sun, the evening dawn, occasionally long shadows and ghosts, something invisible, something unknown, vulgar allegories, pale, tasteless personifications... in features - fog: fogs over the waters, fogs over the forest, fogs over the fields, fog in the writer’s head.” Another word highlighted by Pushkin - “something” - indicates abstraction romantic images, and maybe even on “Woe from Wit”, in which Ippolit Markelych Udushev produces a “scientific treatise” called “A Look and Something” - a meaningless, empty work.

Everything that has been said should lead us to an understanding of the complex, polemical relationship between the author and Lensky; In particular, this polemic relates not so much to the personality of the youngest poet, unconditionally beloved by the author, but to romanticism, to which the author himself had recently “paid tribute,” but with which he has now decisively parted ways.

Another more difficult question is: who owns Lensky’s poems? Formally – to the author (they are given in the author’s speech). Essentially, as M.M. writes. Bakhtin in the article “From the Prehistory of the Novel Word”, “poetic images... depicting Lensky’s “song” do not at all have a direct poetic meaning here. They cannot be understood as direct poetic images of Pushkin himself (although the formal characterization is given by the author). Here Lensky’s “song” characterizes itself, in its own language, in its own poetic manner. Pushkin’s direct characterization of Lensky’s “song” - it is in the novel - sounds completely different:

So he wrote dark And sluggishly...

In the above four lines, the song of Lensky himself sounds, his voice, his poetic style, but they are permeated here with the parodic and ironic accents of the author; Therefore, they are not isolated from the author’s speech either compositionally or grammatically. Before us really image Lensky's songs, but not poetic in in the narrow sense, but typical novelistic image: this is an image of a foreign language, in this case an image of a foreign poetic style... The poetic metaphors of these lines (“like a baby’s dream, like the moon”, etc.) are not here at all primary means of image(what they would be like in a direct, serious song by Lensky himself); they themselves become here subject of the image, namely, a parody-stylizing image. This novel image someone else's style... in the system of direct author's speech... taken in intonation quotes, namely, parodic and ironic" 14 .

The situation is more complicated with another example from Eugene Onegin, which is also given by Bakhtin (and after him by many modern authors):

Do not despise people in your heart;

Whoever felt it is worried

Ghost of irrevocable days:

There's no charm for that

That serpent of memories

He is gnawing at remorse.

One might think that we have before us the direct poetic maxim of the author himself. But already the following lines:

All this often gives

Great charm to the conversation, -

(the conventional author with Onegin) cast a slight objective shadow on this maxim (i.e. we can and even should think that Onegin’s consciousness is depicted here - serves as an object - E.O.). Although it is included in the author’s speech, it is built in the area of ​​action of Onegin’s voice, in Onegin’s style. Before us again is a novelistic image of someone else's style. But it was built a little differently. All the images in this passage are the subject of the image: they are depicted as Onegin’s style, as Onegin’s worldview. In this respect, they are similar to the images of Lensky's song. But, unlike this latter, the images of the given maxim, being the subject of the image, themselves depict, or rather, express the author’s thought, for the author largely agrees with it, although he sees the limitations and incompleteness of the Onegin-Byronic worldview and style. Thus, the author... is much closer to Onegin’s “language” than to Lensky’s “language”... he not only depicts this “language”, but to a certain extent he himself speaks this “language”. The hero is in the zone of possible conversation with him, in the zone dialogical contact. The author sees the limitations and incompleteness of the still fashionable Onegin language-worldview, sees his funny, isolated and artificial face (“Muscovite in Harold’s cloak”, “Fashionable Words” complete lexicon”, “Isn’t he a parody?”), but at the same time, he can express a whole series of significant thoughts and observations only with the help of this “language”... the author really talks with Onegin..." 15.

3. The subjects of speech are different, but one consciousness is expressed. Thus, in Fonvizin’s comedy “The Minor,” Pravdin, Starodum, and Sofia essentially express the author’s consciousness. It is already difficult to find such examples in literature since the era of romanticism (and this example is taken from the lecture of N.D. Tamarchenko). Speeches of the characters in the story by N.M. Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” also often reflects one thing – the author’s – consciousness.

The subject of speech (the speaker, the narrator) manifests himself both in the position he occupies in space and time, and in the way he names what is depicted. Various researchers distinguish, for example, spatial, temporal and ideological-emotional points of view (B. O. Korman); spatio-temporal, evaluative, phraseological and psychological (B.A. Uspensky). Here is B. Corman’s definition: “a point of view is a single (one-time, point-by-point) relationship of a subject to an object.” Simply put, the narrator (author) looks at what is depicted, taking a certain position in time and space and evaluating the subject of the image. Actually, an assessment of the world and man is the most important thing that the reader is looking for in a work. This is the same “original moral attitude to the subject” of the author that Tolstoy thought about. Therefore, summarizing the various teachings about points of view, let us first name the possible relationships in spatiotemporally. According to B.A. Uspensky, this is 1) the case when the spatial position of the narrator and the character coincide. In some cases, “the narrator is there, i.e. at the same point in space where a certain character is located - he is, as it were, “attached” to him (for a while or throughout the entire narrative). ...But in other cases the author should behind the character, but does not transform into him... Sometimes the place of the narrator can be determined only relatively” 2). The spatial position of the author may not coincide with the position of the character. Here the following are possible: sequential review - changing points of view; another case is “the author’s point of view is completely independent and independent in its movement; "moving position"; and finally, “the overall (overarching) point of view: the bird’s eye view.” You can also characterize the narrator’s position in time. “At the same time, the actual countdown of time (the chronology of events) can be carried out by the author from the position of some character or from his own position.” At the same time, the narrator can change his position, combine different time plans: he can, as it were, look from the future, run ahead (unlike the hero), he can remain in the hero’s time, or he can “look into the past” 16.

Phraseological point of view. Here the question of name: in the way this or that person is named, the namer himself is revealed most of all, because “the acceptance of this or that point of view... is directly determined by the attitude towards the person.” B.A. Ouspensky gives examples of how the Parisian newspapers referred to Napoleon Bonaparte as he approached Paris during his “Hundred Days.” The first message read: " Corsican monster landed in Juan Bay." The second news reported: " Ogre goes to Grasse." Third message: " Usurper entered Grenoble." Fourth: " Bonaparte occupied Lyon." Fifth: " Napoleon approaching Fontainebleau." And finally, sixth: “ His Imperial Majesty expected today in his faithful Paris."

And the way the hero is called also reveals his assessment by the author or other characters. “...very often in fiction the same person is called different names(or generally called in various ways), and often these different names collide in one phrase or directly close in the text.

Here are some examples:
"Despite the enormous wealth Count Bezukhov, since Pierre received it and received it, he felt much less rich than when he received his 10 thousand from the late count "...
“At the end of the meeting, the great master, with hostility and irony, made Bezukhov a remark about his ardor and that it was not only the love of virtue, but also the passion for struggle that guided him in the dispute. Pierre didn’t answer him..."
It is quite obvious that in all these cases the test uses several points of view, i.e. the author uses different positions when referring to the same person. in particular, the author can use the positions of certain characters(of the same work), which are in various relationships to the named person.

If we know what other characters are called this person(and this is not difficult to establish by analyzing the corresponding dialogues in the work), then it becomes possible to formally determine whose point of view is used by the author at one point or another in the narrative” 17.

In relation to lyric poetry, they talk about various forms of manifestation in it of the author's, subjective, personal principle, which reaches its utmost concentration in lyric poetry (compared to epic and drama, which are traditionally considered - and rightfully so - to be more “objective” types of literature). The term “lyrical hero” remains the central and most frequently used term, although it has its own certain boundaries and is not the only form of manifestation of authorial activity in lyric poetry. Various researchers talk about the author-narrator, the author himself, the lyrical hero and the hero of role-playing lyrics (B.O. Korman), about the lyrical “I” and in general about the “lyrical subject” (S.N. Broitman). A unified and final classification of terms that would fully cover the entire variety of lyrical forms and suit all researchers without exception does not yet exist. And in lyric poetry, “the author and the hero are not absolute values, but two “limits” towards which other subjective forms gravitate and between which are located: narrator(closer to the author’s plan, but not entirely coinciding with it) and narrator(endowed with authorial features, but gravitating towards the “heroic” plan)” 18.

In the variety of lyrics, autopsychological, descriptive, narrative, and role principles are distinguished. It is clear that in descriptive lyricism (this is predominantly landscape lyricism) and narrative we are more likely dealing with a narrator who is not subjectively expressed and is to a large extent close to the author himself, who again should not be identified with a biographical poet, but who, undoubtedly, connected with him in the same way as the narrator is connected with the author himself in an epic work. This is a connection, not an identity. This is a relationship of inseparability - non-fusion (as S.N. Broitman writes), or, in other words, the narrator and the author are related as part and whole, as a creation and a creator, who always manifests himself in each of his creations, even in the smallest particle of it, but is never equal (not equal in size) to this particle, or even to the whole creation.

So, in narrative and landscape lyrics, the one through whose eyes the landscape or event is seen may not be named or personified. Such a non-personalized narrator is one of the forms of authorial consciousness in lyrics. Here, in the words of S. Broitman, “the author himself dissolves in his creation, like God in creation” 19.

The situation is more complicated with role-playing (also called character) lyrics. Here the entire poem is written from the point of view of a character (“other” in relation to the author). The relationship between the author and the character can be different. In Nekrasov’s poem “The Moral Man,” the satirical character is not only extremely far from the author, but also serves as the subject of exposure and satirical negation. And, say, the Assyrian king Assargadon “comes to life” and talks about himself in the poem “Assargadon” by V. Bryusov. But it is clear that it would not occur to us to identify the poet himself with the hero of the role-playing lyrics. It is also clear, however, that this poem is an important characteristic artistic world of the poet. The relationship between role-playing and auto-psychological lyrics in the poetry of M. Tsvetaeva and A. Akhmatova is even more peculiar. In Tsvetaeva, along with the lyrical heroine, recognizable and possessing (like Akhmatova) even the features of a self-portrait (a new feature in poetry, characteristic of the beginning of the twentieth century), there is, for example, the image of a street singer (the poem “Rain is knocking on my window...” .” from the series “Poems to Sonechka”). In Akhmatova’s poems of the early 1910s, other heroes appear simultaneously with the lyrical heroine: Candrillona - Cinderella (“And to meet you on the steps...”), a rope dancer (“He left me on the new moon...”), who has no name. , but a personified hero (“I came up. I didn’t show my excitement...” 20). And this despite the fact that it was Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine who was “recognizable” (largely due to the fact that many contemporary artists created her portraits, graphic, painting and sculptural) - in such a poem, for example:

There is a row of small rosary on the neck,

I hide my hands in a wide muff,

Eyes look carefully

And they never cry again.
And the face seems paler

From lilac silk,

Almost reaches the eyebrows

My uncurled bangs.

This gait is slow,

It's like a raft under your feet,

Not squares of parquet.

Unevenly difficult breathing

And they tremble on my chest

Flowers of an unforgettable date.

For the first time, the very concept of “lyrical hero” was apparently formulated by Yu.N. Tynyanov in his 1921 article “Blok,” written shortly after the poet’s death. Speaking about the fact that all of Russia mourns Blok, Tynyanov writes: “... about a human are sad.

And yet, who knew this man?..

Few people knew Blok. As a person, he remained a mystery to the wider literary Petrograd, not to mention the whole of Russia.

But throughout Russia know Blok as a person, they firmly believe in the certainty of his image, and if anyone happens to see his portrait at least once, they already feel that they know him thoroughly.

Where does this knowledge come from?

Blok is Blok’s biggest lyrical theme. This theme attracts as the theme of a novel of a still new, unborn (or unconscious) formation. About it lyrical hero and they are talking now.

He was necessary, a legend already surrounded him, and not only now - it surrounded him from the very beginning, it even seemed that his poetry only developed and complemented the postulated image.

All of Blok’s art is personified in this image; when they talk about his poetry, they almost always involuntarily substitute poetry human face - and everyone fell in love face, but not art» 21.

It is necessary to hear here from Tynyanov the intonation of dissatisfaction with this situation, when the poet himself was identified with his lyrical hero (there is another definition that can be found as a synonym for the term “lyrical hero”: “literary personality.” It, however, has not become commonly used). And the condemnation of such a naive, simple-minded identification is understandable. But it is also clear that in the case of Blok this was, perhaps to a certain extent, inevitable (“Blok is Blok’s greatest lyrical theme,” writes Tynyanov), although undesirable. Just as we can judge the human qualities of a literary hero (while remembering, of course, that this is an artistic reality created by the author), so to a certain extent we imagine the lyrical hero as a person (but precisely to a certain extent, as a “literary personality”, an artistic image): his character, his view of the world are especially clearly expressed in the lyrics, where, in fact, the main thing is assessment, attitude, in other words, the axiological principle.

But why does Tynyanov talk about necessity the appearance of a lyrical hero? Here, perhaps, the idea arises that it was Blok’s lyrical hero who was destined to become the most striking manifestation of the traits of a hero of his time, and the poet himself was destined to become in the eyes of his contemporaries a “man of the era,” as A. Akhmatova called him (cf. in her poem about Blok: “tragic tenor of the era”). This means that we can say that the image of the lyrical hero expresses not only the world of the author himself: this image carries within itself the features of a man of his era. The lyrical hero appears both as a hero of his time, as a portrait of a generation.

This Tynyanov position, contained in his article as if in a compressed form, was later developed by L.Ya. Ginzburg in the book “On Lyrics”. She wrote about the image of a lyrical hero: “... a lyrical poet can create it only because the generalized prototype of a contemporary already exists in the public consciousness, is already recognized by the reader. So the generation of the 1830s. recognized the demonic hero Lermontov, the generation of the 1860s - Nekrasov’s commoner intellectual” 22. And perhaps this is precisely because, L. Ginzburg believes, that lyrics always speak about the universal, and the lyrical hero is one of the possibilities.

This means that it can be argued that the lyrical hero is a literary image that reflects the personality traits of the author himself, but who at the same time appears as a kind of portrait of a generation, a hero of the time; in the lyrical hero there is also a certain universal, all-human principle, traits characteristic of people at all times. He thus appears as the “son of man” (in the words of A. Blok) and thanks to this quality he becomes necessary not only to his contemporaries, but also to the widest reader.

I must say, Yu.N. Tynyanov was not the only one who thought about the same range of problems in the first third of the twentieth century. For example, B.M. Eikhenbaum, in the same 1921, called his review of A. Akhmatova’s book of poems “The Plantain” a “lyric novel,” speaking of the book of poems as a kind of modern novel, and this unity was largely given to the book by the image of the lyrical heroine. Even earlier, in the 1910s, V. Bryusov and Vas wrote about the same property of Akhmatova’s poetry. Gippius. So Tynianov’s article was not the beginning, but a continuation of the observations of scientists and critics on the characteristics of the lyrical hero, as Tynianov first called him. Andrei Bely wrote about the “interindividuality” of poetry (that is, the ability of poetry to convey multiplicity through the “I”). And in the preface to the second edition of his poetry collection “Ashes” he spoke about his lyrical hero like this:

“I ask readers not to confuse me with him: the lyrical “I” is the “we” of the sketched consciousnesses, and not at all the “I” of B.N. Bugaev (Andrey Bely), in 1908 not running through the fields, but studied the problems of logic and poetry" 23.

This is how the poet separated the real person Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, who took the pseudonym “Andrei Bely”, and the image of the lyrical hero.

Actually, many poets expressed this idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe non-identity of the author and the hero in lyric poetry. An example is a poem by A. Blok with an epigraph in Latin from Virgil: “Muse, remind me of the reasons!”

Publius Virgilius Maro
I remember the evening. We walked separately.

I trusted you with my heart,

There is a cloud in the hot sky - menacing

It was breathing on us; the wind subsided.

With the first thunderclap

You confessed your love to me hotly,

And I... fell at your feet...

Features of the drama literary kind also determined the specificity of the expression of the author’s principle in it. Actually, the author owns only the stage directions or other remarks “accompanying” the play (for example, “Characters and costumes. Notes for gentlemen actors” in “The Inspector General” by N.V. Gogol). The title of the play, a possible epigraph, are also the so-called “strong places” in the drama, where you can see the author’s attitude towards what is depicted. But in drama there is no narration; as a rule, there is no place for the author’s direct word: these are the general properties of dramatic works. Many episodes in the history of drama are connected with this, when, for example, for a stage production it was necessary to transform, in relation to drama, an epic work. So, M.A. Bulgakov, reworking for the intended production in the 30s. Gogol’s “Dead Souls” introduced into the text of the play the figure of the Author, who followed his characters from Rome. The production never came to fruition - for various reasons, including due to the unusual nature of Bulgakov's plan.

Still, of course, drama also has its own opportunities for the manifestation of authorial activity. These can be heroes who serve as a mouthpiece for the author’s ideas, his alter ego (second self). Sometimes, even through a satirical character, the author can directly address the reader – the viewer. So, in “The Inspector General” the mayor throws a remark into the audience: “Why are you laughing? You laugh at yourself. Eh, you!..” But in general, in the drama the author manifests himself in the most hidden form. B.O. Corman identifies two main ways to express the author's consciousness: through the construction of the plot and composition of the play and through the speeches of the characters. He classifies the plays “Woe from Wit” by Griboedov and “The Thunderstorm” by Ostrovsky into the first type, and Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov” into the second type. For example, in “Boris Godunov” “in the monologues of the heroes, a lot of space is occupied by the epic text, which goes beyond the immediate stage action and unusually expands the scope of what is depicted... In other cases, the epic text allows you to learn about what happened between two moments of the stage action.. Finally, the hero can talk about events in the future tense... Epic stories, included in the monologues of the heroes... contain a detailed, coherent and extensive biography of the heroes... In dialogues, as well as in monologues, heroes in a number of cases talk about what their interlocutors already know, and, therefore, do not address their words as much to each other as directly to the reader... The author chooses heroes at different distances from the central scene of action. ... Behind the statements attributed to the characters, a single authorial principle is clearly and directly perceptible. In some cases... the subject of speech plays a purely service role: he does not have a proper dramatic function, and is needed only to communicate something. ...The entire poetic text of the tragedy is united by a super-personal, directly authorial style. ... By the will of the author, the heroes of the tragedy widely turn to means of poetic expression that are not determined by their characters. ...Sometimes poetic image, used by one hero, is picked up and developed by his interlocutor... The epic type of thinking and the epic manner of writing determine the nature of the author's remarks. For example, the “Forest” scene opens with the following note: “In the distance lies a dying horse.” This is clearly not intended for stage implementation” 25. (However, in the twentieth century, the so-called “epic theater” of B. Brecht became possible, which only confirms the scientist’s correctness.)

A change of points of view is also important in the play: a close-up or long shot, a look at what is happening through the eyes of one or another character. In other cases, the author's attitude towards characters and events is manifested in the construction of the plot and in the composition of the drama. “...the selection of material, its arrangement, and especially the development of action are important means of expressing the author’s thoughts in Woe from Wit. It is with their help that the irreconcilability of Chatsky’s conflict with Famusovsky society, and its originality, which lies in the fact that this irreconcilability is first realized by society and only then – slowly and difficultly – by Chatsky” 26. If we ignore what was said only about “Woe from Wit,” then the above judgments about the plot and composition of the play as manifestations of the author’s will can be attributed to dramatic works in general.

* * *

As a final result, we can cite the definition of V.V. Vinogradov, although made by a linguist, was accepted, it seems, by both philological sciences - linguistics and literary criticism (although the problems associated with the image of the author continue to remain the subject of controversy: and this only proves their importance for modern philology). “The image of the author is not a simple subject of speech; most often it is not even named in the structure of the work of art. This is a concentrated embodiment of the essence of the work, uniting the entire system of speech structures of the characters in their relationship with the narrator, storyteller or storytellers and through them being the ideological and stylistic focus, the focus of the whole” 27.

The problem of the author continues to remain in our time the central problem of literary criticism 28 . Simultaneously with Russian philologists and independently of them in the second half of the twentieth century (more precisely, in the 60s, just when the attention of Russian scientists to the problem of the author and especially to the subjective organization of the work intensified), the French researcher R. Barthes put forward the then famous thesis about the “death of the author.” According to Barth, the author as a personal category is being replaced by the “scriptor” (writer). Now, with the passage of time, in this situation one can see a polemic with traditional literary criticism (more precisely, its vulgar application), when naively and flatly, the biography of the author and his work were directly connected. (In a broader, philosophical sense, this was a kind of reaction to the crisis of religious consciousness, when two world wars and numerous tragedies of the twentieth century gave rise to the collapse of many theological views. This crisis, due to its scale, can be called almost a global phenomenon.) So, the comer to replace the author, the scriptor was declared an impersonal category - thus, the personal principle did not play any role in the creation of the work, authorial responsibility and involvement in the created text was denied. In the dialogue between the author and the reader (this is how M. Bakhtin understood the literary work, and Barthes apparently relied on his concept), now, after the “death” of the author, the main role was assigned to the reader, but again an impersonal reader. “..the text is woven from quotes referring to thousands of cultural sources. A writer... can only eternally imitate what has been written before and was not written for the first time; in his power only to mix different types of writing, to pit them against each other, without relying entirely on any of them... To assign an Author to a text means, as it were, to stop the text, to endow it with final knowledge, to close the letter... writing constantly generates meaning, but it immediately disappears...” The main role, as was said, is now given to the reader, who is free to “create” his own countless meanings. Thus, what we are faced with is no longer a dialogue between the author and the reader, but also not the creative process of reading. The reader, as faceless (impersonal) as the scriptor, becomes the point of application of the “letter” (a term proposed instead of “work” or “text”). “The reader is the space where every single quotation that makes up the letter is imprinted; the text finds unity not in its origin, but in its purpose, only the purpose is not a personal address; the reader is a person without history, without biography, without psychology, he is just someone, bringing together all the strokes that make up a written text. ...the birth of the reader has to be paid for by the death of the Author” 29.

The most productive in this concept turned out to be, as it becomes clear with the passage of time, the idea of ​​“interaction” between texts: new and previous ones; they are conceived as a kind of unified cultural field, and the reader’s task is to grasp the whole cultural context, into which the “letter” falls or in which it is created (by itself?..) as if independently of the consciousness of the author. In fact, the cultural field exists, and every writer, whether he is aware of it or not, relies on the experience of his predecessors.

In modern foreign literary criticism, a direction has emerged - narratology, which studies a work as a system of subjects of speech - storytellers (narrator, English - narrator, French - narrateur, German - Erzähler). And in this tradition, they distinguish (although there is no complete unity in concepts among foreign scientists) between a personal or impersonal narrator, although we will not find the concept of “narrator” here. And - regardless of the Russian tradition and without familiarity with the works of, for example, B. O. Corman and the scientists of his school - here it is customary to contrast the storyteller-narrator (narrator) and the “real” (“specific”, in our terminology - biographical) author. In order to “separate” the real author from the image of the author, the concepts of “implicit” and “abstract” author are used (analogous to our concept of the author in the second meaning) 30 .

The creator of a literary work is its author. In literary criticism, this word is used in several related, but at the same time relatively independent meanings. First of all, it is necessary to draw a line between the real-biographical author and the author as a category of literary analysis. In the second meaning, we understand the author of the medium ideological concept a work of art. He connected with the real author, but not identical to him, because in work of art It is not the entirety of the author’s personality that is embodied, but only some of its facets (albeit often the most important ones). Moreover, the author of a work of fiction, in terms of the impression made on the reader, can be strikingly different from the author of a real one. Thus, brightness, festivity and a romantic impulse towards the ideal characterize the author in the works of A. Green, and A.S. himself. Grinevsky was, according to contemporaries, a completely different person, rather gloomy and gloomy. It is known that not all humor writers are cheerful people in life. It should also be warned that the author should not be confused with the narrator of an epic work and the lyrical hero in lyric poetry.

The author as a real biographical person and the author as the bearer of the concept of the work should not be confused with author's image, which is created in some works of verbal art. The image of the author is a special aesthetic category that arises when the image of the creator is created inside the work of this work. This can be the image of “oneself” (“Eugene Onegin” by Pushkin, “What is to be done?” by Chernyshevsky), or the image of a fictitious, fictitious author (Kozma Prutkov, Ivan Petrovich Belkin by Pushkin). The image of the author reveals with great clarity artistic convention, the non-identity of literature and life - for example, in “Eugene Onegin” the author can talk with the created hero - a situation that is impossible in reality. The image of the author appears infrequently in literature; it is a specific artistic device, and therefore requires indispensable analysis, since it reveals the artistic originality of a given work.

Author (from Latin au(c)tor - culprit, founder, founder, writer) is one of key concepts literary science, defining the subject of verbal and artistic expression. In modern literary criticism there is a clear distinction between: 1) biographical author- a creative personality existing in extra-artistic, primary-empirical reality, and 2) the author in his intratextual, artistic embodiment.

Author in the first meaning - writer with his own biography(the literary genre of the scientific biography of a writer is known, for example, the four-volume work of S.A. Makashin, dedicated to the biography of M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin 1, etc.), creating, composing another reality - verbal and artistic statements of any kind and genre, claiming ownership of the text he created.

IN broad meaning the author acts as organizer , embodiment and exponent of emotional and semantic integrity , the unity of a given artistic text as an author-creator. In the sacred sense, it is customary to talk about the living presence of the author in the creation itself (cf. in Pushkin’s poem “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands...”: “...The soul in the treasured lyre/My ashes will survive and flee decay...”). The author who created the text objectively loses power over it; he is no longer free to influence the fate of his work, its real life in the reading world. Notable in this regard are the last lines of the first chapter of “Eugene Onegin”: Go to the banks of the Neva, Newborn creation, And earn me a tribute of glory: Crooked talk, noise and abuse!

The author - the “culprit” of another, artificial reality - is external to it. But constant and ubiquitous traces of his creative personality are preserved by the work as art world, arranged by him, organized by him, like some poetic structure with its special phonographic implementation.

The relationship between the author outside the text and the author captured in the text, are reflected in ideas about the subjective and omniscient that are difficult to exhaustively describe author's role, the author's plan, the author's concept (idea, will), found in every “cell” of the narrative, in every plot-compositional unit of the work, in every component of the text and in the artistic whole of the work.

At the same time, there are known confessions of many authors related to the fact that literary heroes in the process of their creation, they begin to live as if independently, according to the unwritten laws of their own organics, acquire a certain internal sovereignty and act contrary to the original author’s expectations and assumptions. L.N. Tolstoy recalled (this example has long since become a textbook example) that Pushkin once confessed to one of his friends: “Imagine what kind of thing Tatyana ran away with me! She got married. I never expected this from her.” And he continued: “I can say the same about Anna Karenina. In general, my heroes and heroines sometimes do things that I would not want: they do what they should do in real life and as happens in real life, and not what I want...” 1

More specific “personified” authorial intratextual manifestations provide compelling reasons for literary scholars to carefully examine author's image in fiction, discover various shapes presence of the author in the text. These forms depend on tribal affiliation works from him genre, but there is also general trends. As a rule, the author's subjectivity is clearly manifested in frame components of the text: title, epigraph, beginning And ending main text. Some works also contain dedications, author's notes(as in “Eugene Onegin”), preface, afterword, together forming a unique meta text, integral with the main text. This same range of issues includes the use pseudonyms with expressive lexical meaning: Sasha Cherny, Andrey Bely, Demyan Bedny, Maxim Gorky. This is also a way of building the image of the author and purposefully influencing the reader 2 .

With varying degrees of completeness, the author's lyrical self can be entrusted to different heroes or characters (the so-called role-playing lyrics), expressed in dialogue heroes, etc. A special, playful variety of the author’s manifestation in lyrics - acrostic, a poetic structure known since ancient times, the initial letters of which form the name of the author, addressee, etc.

The author's intonations are clearly distinguishable in author's digressions(most often - lyrical, literary-critical, historical-philosophical, journalistic), which organically fit into the structure epic at the core of the works. IN drama the author finds himself more in the shadow of his heroes. But even here his presence is seen in title, epigraph(if he is), list of actors in various kinds stage directions, advance notices(for example, in “The Inspector General” by N.V. Gogol - “Characters and Costumes. Notes for Gentlemen Actors”, etc.), in the system of remarks and any other stage directions, in remarks aside. The author's mouthpiece can be the characters themselves: heroes -reasoners(cf. Starodum’s monologues in D.I. Fonvizin’s comedy “The Minor”), choir(from the ancient Greek theater to the theater of Bertolt Brecht), etc.

The extreme expression of this position is that the author’s text becomes only a pretext for subsequent active reader receptions, literary adaptations, willful translations into the languages ​​of other arts, etc. Consciously or unintentionally, the reader’s arrogant categorism and peremptory judgments are justified. In the practice of school, and sometimes special philological education, confidence in the limitless power of the reader over a literary text is born, and the hard-won M.I. Tsvetaeva’s formula “My Pushkin,” and involuntarily another one comes to light, going back to Gogol’s Khlestakov: “On friendly terms with Pushkin.” The author’s problem continues to be one of the most hotly debated in literary criticism of the late 20th century.

Author as subject of artistic activity, the creative process present in his creation. He presents and illuminates reality, comprehends and evaluates it, like a speaker of speech inside a work of art.

Narrator. He can be close to the author, or he can be distanced from him.

The narrator is an indirect form of the author’s presence, and performs a mediating function between the fictional world and the recipient. According to Tamarchenko, its specificity is as follows:

1) a comprehensive outlook (the narrator knows the ending and therefore places emphasis, can get ahead of himself, advise on what to focus on).

2) the speech is addressed to the reader, he always takes into account how he will be perceived. - arise different types readers - an astute reader, a censor, a lady.

In folklore, authorship was predominantly collective, and its “individual component” remained, as a rule, anonymous. But already in the art of Dr. Greece appeared individually - the author's beginning, as evidenced by the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.

Until the 17th – 18th centuries, the creative initiative of writers was limited by the requirements of already established genres and styles. Literary consciousness was guided by already existing artistic examples.

Author's self-awareness reaches its apogee in the heyday romantic art. The author in his intratextual being, in turn, is considered in a broad and more specific, particular meaning.

Strongest of all author declares itself Vlyrics, where the statement belongs to one lyrical subject, where his experiences are depicted, his attitude towards the “inexpressible” (V.A. Zhukovsky), towards the outside world and the world of his soul in the infinity of their transitions into each other.

The author's intonations are clearly distinguishable in author's digressions(most often - lyrical, literary-critical, historical-philosophical, journalistic), which organically fit into the structure epic at the core of the works.

INdrama author finds himself in the shadow of his heroes. Here his presence is seen in title, epigraph, list of actors in various kinds instructions, V remarks aside. The author's mouthpiece can be the characters themselves: heroes -reasoners, choir(like the ancient Greek theater), etc.

In dramatizations of classical works, characters “from the author” often appear (in films based on literary works, a voice-over “author’s” voice is introduced).

With a greater degree of involvement in the event, the work looks author inepic. In epic works, the author's beginning appears in different ways: as the author's point of view on the recreated poetic reality, as the author's commentary on the course of the plot, as a direct, indirect or improperly direct characterization of the heroes, as the author's description of the natural and material world, etc.

Most often author acts as narrator , leading story from third party in an extra-subjective, impersonal form. The figure has been known since the time of Homer omniscient author, knowing everything and everyone about his heroes, freely moving from one time plane to another, from one space to another. In modern literature, this method of narration, the most conventional (the narrator’s omniscience is not motivated), is usually combined with subjective forms, with the introduction storytellers, with transmission in speech formally belonging to the narrator, points of view this or that hero (for example, in “War and Peace” the reader sees the Battle of Borodino “through the eyes” of Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov).

A fundamentally new concept of the author as a participant in an artistic event belongs to M.M. Bakhtin. Emphasizing the deep value role of dialogue in our being , Bakhtin believed that the author in his text “must be on the border of the world he creates as its active creator, for his intrusion into this world destroys its aesthetic stability.”

Rental block

The word “author” is used in literary studies in several meanings. First of all, it means a real person. In other cases, it denotes a certain view of reality, the expression of which is the entire work (the image of the author). Finally, this word is used to refer to some. phenomena characteristic of certain genres and types (the author is the narrator, narrator (in epic works) or lyrical hero (in lyric poetry))” (B.O. Korman). Biogr. the author can choose one of three forms of narration FROM THE AUTHOR (objective form of narration, from the 3rd person): apparent absence in the work. any subject of the story. ON BEHALF OF THE NARRATOR, BUT NOT THE HERO. The narrator manifests himself in emotional statements about the characters, their actions, relationships, and experiences. “Belkin's Tales” by Pushkin IN THE PERSON OF THE HERO. The author conveys the narrative to the hero when he wants to reveal his hero more deeply or in the case of depicting the hero’s position. Example: “ Captain's daughter"Pushkin, where the narration is told on behalf of Grinev. Forms of the author's presence in the work (lyrical digressions) The direct expression by the author of an epic work of his thoughts and feelings is revealed in lyrical digressions. Remarks - author's comments about the behavior or character of characters. HERO - the main or one of the main characters in a prose or dramatic work; G.l. may be "major" or "minor". To create appearance the hero is “worked” by his portrait, profession, age, history (or past), name. Famous literary characters live independently of their creators, completely independent life not only in literary texts. Methods and forms of author's presence in a literary work: Forms of author's presence depend on the type of literature. -Epic is a story. On a grammatical basis, 3 forms of narration are distinguished: - from the 1st person - from the 3rd person - improperly direct speech - the speech of the hero, not enclosed in quotation marks. Such speech is formally a narrative, but in content it is similar to the character’s speech. 1st person narration is a personal narration, 3rd person narration is impersonal. Very often, in a personal narration, the narrator is personified; in an impersonal narration, the narrator is non-personalized or the narrator. -Drama - there are no forms of the author’s presence, there are only his “traces”, because form of verbal expression in drama - dialogue or polylogue - there is no author, there are only heroes. The clearest presence of the author is in the lyrics. Korman's classification: 1. The author himself is close to the narrator in the epic, this is manifested in those works where the subject of the image is objects of the world. The world in the lyrics is always psychologized (the inner world of the hero is expanded). The degree of secrecy of the author in the text: -3rd person -1st person (plural). “We” is a generalized carrier of consciousness. In such texts the form is observation or reflection. 2. Author-narrator - manifests itself in those texts that talk about the fate of a person. IN modern classification these 2 forms combine and speak of a lyrical narrator. 3. The lyrical hero is the subject of speech through whom the biographical and emotional-psychological traits of the author are expressed. The lyrical hero is a monologue form of the author's expression in the text. 4. Role hero - the indirect expression of the author in the text through the sociocultural type of the past or present. Role-playing hero is a dialogical form. 5. Poetic world- the author’s subjectivity is expressed in the world or in the depicted. 6. Interpersonal subject - the form implements different points view of the world.

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The birth of rhythym, its flourishing and degradation

Sound recording in verse. Melodica

The word "author" (from the Latin author - subject of action, founder, organizer, teacher and, in particular, creator of a work) has several meanings in the field of art criticism. This is, firstly, the creator of a work of art as real face with a certain destiny, biography, complex of individual traits. Secondly, this is the image of the author, localized in literary text, i.e. depiction by a writer, painter, sculptor, director of himself. And finally, thirdly (which is especially important for us now), this is the artist-creator, present in his creation as a whole, immanent in the work. Author (in this meaning of the word) in a certain way presents and illuminates reality (being and its phenomena), comprehends and evaluates them, manifesting itself as a subject of artistic activity.

The author's subjectivity organizes the work and, one might say, generates its artistic integrity. It constitutes an integral, universal, most important facet of art (along with its own aesthetic and cognitive principles). The “spirit of authorship” is not only present, but dominates in any form of artistic activity: both when a work has an individual creator, and in situations of group, collective creativity, and in those cases (now prevailing) when the author is named and when his name is hidden ( anonymity, pseudonym, hoax).

At different stages of culture, artistic subjectivity appears in different guises. In folklore and historically early writing (as in other forms of art), authorship was predominantly collective, and its “individual component” remained, as a rule, anonymous. If the work was correlated with the name of its creator (biblical parables of Solomon and the Psalms of David, Aesop’s fables, Homer’s hymns), then here the name “expresses not the idea of ​​authorship, but the idea of ​​authority.” It is not associated with the idea of ​​any proactively chosen manner (style), and even less so with the individually acquired position of the creator: “The work is more likely to be perceived as the fruit of the life of a group than as the creation of an individual”1.

But already in the art of Ancient Greece, the individual (54) authorial principle made itself felt, as evidenced by the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Individual and openly declared authorship in subsequent eras manifested itself more and more actively and in modern times prevailed over collectivity and anonymity.

At the same time, for a number of centuries (until the 17th - 18th centuries, when the normative aesthetics of classicism was influential), the creative initiative of writers (as well as other artists) was limited and largely constrained by the requirements (norms, canons) of already established genres and styles. Literary consciousness was traditionalist. It was guided by rhetoric and normative poetics, by the “ready” word destined for the writer and already existing artistic examples.

Over the past two centuries, the nature of authorship has changed noticeably. Decisive role the aesthetics of sentimentalism and especially romanticism played a role in this shift, which greatly supplanted and, one might say, pushed into the past the principle of traditionalism: “The central “character” of the literary process was not the work, subordinate to the canon, but its creator, the central category of poetics was not style or genre, and the author"2.

If earlier (before the 19th century) the author represented more on behalf of an authoritative tradition (genre and style), now he persistently and boldly demonstrates his creative freedom. At the same time, the author's subjectivity is activated and receives a new quality. She becomes individually proactive, personal and, as never before, rich and multifaceted. Artistic creativity is now understood primarily as the embodiment of the “spirit of authorship” (a phrase very characteristic of romantic aesthetics).

So, the author's subjectivity is invariably present in the fruits of artistic creativity, although it is not always updated and attracts attention. The forms of the author's presence in a work are very diverse. We will turn to them.

2. IDEAL AND MEANING SIDE OF ART

The author makes himself known primarily as the bearer of one or another idea of ​​reality. And this determines the fundamental importance in the composition of art of its ideological and semantic side, something that throughout the 19th-20th centuries. often called “idea” (from the ancient Greek idea-concept, representation).

This word has been rooted in philosophy for a long time, since antiquity. It has two meanings. Firstly, the idea is called the intelligible (55) essence of objects, which is beyond the boundaries of material existence, the prototype of a thing (Plato and his successor medieval thought), the synthesis of concept and object (Hegel). Secondly, over the past three centuries, thinkers have begun to associate ideas with the sphere of subjective experience, with the knowledge of being. Thus, the English philosopher of the turn of the XVII-XVIII centuries. J. Locke in "Essay on human mind"distinguished between clear and vague ideas, real and fantastic, adequate to their prototypes and inadequate, consistent and inconsistent with reality. Here the idea is understood as the property not of objective existence, but human consciousness.

When applied to art and literature, the word "idea" is used in both meanings. In Hegelian aesthetics and the theories that follow it, the artistic idea coincides with what is traditionally called the theme (see pp. 40-42). This is the existential essence comprehended and captured by the creator of the work. But more often and more persistently the idea in art was spoken of (both in the 19th and 20th centuries) as the sphere of the author’s subjectivity, as a complex of thoughts and feelings expressed in a work that belong to its creator.

The subjective orientation of artistic works attracted attention in the 18th century. "The thesis about the primacy of ideas, thoughts in works of art<...>characterizes the aesthetics of the rationalistic Enlightenment."1 The creator of works of art at this time, and even more so at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, was perceived not simply as a master (“imitator” of nature) and not as a passive contemplator of certain intelligible entities, but as an exponent some circle of feelings and thoughts. According to F. Schiller, in art “emptiness or meaningfulness depend more on the subject than on the object”; the power of poetry lies in the fact that “the subject is put here in connection with the idea”2. The author (artist) appeared in the theories of the turn of the 18th-19th centuries as an exponent of a certain position, point of view. Following Kant, who introduced the term “aesthetic idea”, the sphere of artistic subjectivity began to be designated by the term idea. The expressions “poetic spirit” were used in the same meaning and "conception". According to Goethe, "in every work of art<...>it all comes down to the concept."3.

The artistic idea (author’s concept) present in the works includes both the author’s directed interpretation and assessment of certain life phenomena (which was emphasized by educators from Diderot and Lessing to Belinsky and Chernyshevsky), and the waxing of a philosophical view of the world in its integrity , which is associated with the spiritual self-disclosure of the author (theorists of romanticism persistently spoke about this).

The thought expressed in a work is always emotionally charged. An artistic idea is a kind of fusion of generalizations and feelings, which, following Hegel, V.G. Belinsky, in his fifth article about Pushkin, called pathos (“pathos is always a passion that kindles an idea in a person’s soul”4). This is what distinguishes art from impartial science and brings it closer to journalism, essays, memoirs, as well as to everyday comprehension of life, which is also thoroughly evaluative. The specificity of artistic ideas themselves lies not in their emotionality, but in their focus on the world in its aesthetic appearance, on sensory forms of life.

Artistic ideas (concepts) differ from scientific, philosophical, journalistic generalizations also in their place and role in the spiritual life of humanity. Generalizations by artists, writers, and poets often precede a later understanding of the world. "Science is only hastening after what has already turned out to be accessible to art", asserted Schelling5. Al. Grigoriev spoke even more persistently and sharply in the same spirit: "Everything new is brought into life only by art: it embodies in its creations what is invisibly present in the air of the era<...>senses the approaching future in advance."6 This idea, going back to romantic aesthetics, was substantiated by M.M. Bakhtin. "Literature<...>often anticipated philosophical and ethical ideologies<...>The artist has a sensitive ear for those who are born and become<...>problems." At the moment of birth, "he sometimes hears them better than the more cautious "man of science", philosopher or practitioner. The formation of thought, ethical will and feeling, their wanderings, their not yet formalized groping for reality, their dull fermentation in the depths of the so-called “social psychology” - all this not yet dissected stream of emerging ideology is reflected and refracted in the content of literary works.”7 Such a role artist - as a harbinger and prophet was realized, in particular, the socio-historical concepts of "Boris Godunov" by A. S. Pushkin and "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy, in the stories and stories (57) of F. Kafka, who spoke about the horrors of totalitarianism even before it became established, and in many other works.

At the same time, in art (primarily verbal) ideas, concepts, truths that have already (and sometimes for a very long time) been established in social experience are widely imprinted. At the same time, the artist acts as a mouthpiece of tradition; his art additionally confirms the well-known, reviving it, giving it poignancy, immediacy and new persuasiveness. A work of such meaningful content soulfully and excitingly reminds people of what, being familiar and taken for granted, turned out to be half-forgotten, erased from consciousness. Art in this side of it resurrects old truths, gives them new life. Here is the image of the folk theater in A. Blok’s poem “Balagan” (1906): “Drag along, mourning nags, / Actors, master the craft, / So that the walking truth / Makes everyone feel pain and light” (my italics. - V.Kh.) .

As you can see, art (let us use the judgment of V.M. Zhirmunsky) shows a keen interest in what “the new era has brought with it,” and in everything that has long been rooted, in “established mentalities”1.

3. UNINTENTIONAL IN ART

Artistic subjectivity is far from being reduced to rational development, to the actual comprehension of reality. The author, according to A. Camus, “inevitably says more than he intended”2. P. Valery spoke with extreme harshness on this matter: “If the bird knew what it was singing about, why it was singing and what was singing in it, then it would not have sung.”3

Works of art invariably contain something beyond the views and creative intentions of their creators. According to D.S. Likhachev, in the composition of the author’s subjectivity two of its most important components are distinguishable: the layer of “active influence on the reader” (listener, viewer), i.e., the sphere of conscious and directed statements (thoughts and feelings associated with them) - and the “passive” layer (he defined by the scientist as a “worldview background”), which “comes” to the work from ideas rooted in society involuntarily, as if bypassing the author’s consciousness4. These two forms of author's subjectivity can be rightfully correlated with what the famous (58) Spanish philosopher of the first half of our century X. Ortega y Gasset designated as ideas ("fruits of intellectual activity", generated by doubts and associated with problems, discussions, disputes) and beliefs (the sphere of spiritual stability, worldview axioms: “the framework of our life”, “that solid ground” on which we live and work, “the ideas that we are”)5. Types of artistic subjectivity about which we're talking about, can be designated as reflective and non-reflective. This distinction between two spheres of the author’s consciousness was outlined by N.A. Dobrolyubov in the article " Dark Kingdom", where it was said that for the writer’s work, the most significant thing is not his theoretical views, rational and systematized, but a direct evaluative attitude to life, called worldview. Following Dobrolyubov, G.N. Pospelov considered direct ideological knowledge of life6 as a source artistic creativity.

Unreflective, unintentional, predominantly impersonal subjectivity is multifaceted. These are, first of all, those “axiomatic” ideas (including beliefs), in the world of which the creator of the work lives as a person rooted in a certain cultural tradition. This is also "psychoideology" public group, to which the writer belongs and to which was given decisive importance. the significance of literary sociologists of the 1910-1920s, led by V.F.; Pereverzev. These are, further, painful complexes repressed from the artist’s consciousness, including sexual ones, which were studied by S. Freud1. And finally, this supra-epochal “collective unconscious”, dating back to the historical archaic, can constitute the “mytho-poetic subtext” of works of art, as K.G. Jung. According to this scientist, the source of a work of art is in unconscious mythology, the images of which are the general property of mankind; the creative process consists of the unconscious spiritualization of the archetype"; the work has "symbolism that goes into indiscernible depths and is inaccessible to the consciousness of modernity"2.

In art and literary criticism of our century, the non-conscious and impersonal aspects of the author's subjectivity are often brought to the fore and at the same time absolutized. The creative will, conscious intentions, and spiritual activity of the artist are passed over in silence, underestimated or ignored in essence. By limiting themselves to considering the symptoms of the author's spiritual life in his works, scientists often find themselves in the ethically unimpeachable position of a kind of spy - people spying on what the artist either does not realize or wants to hide from the witnesses. Not without reason, N. Sarraute characterized our humanitarian modernity as an era of suspicion. N.A. was right. Berdyaev, noting that at the beginning of the 20th century. (referring to supporters of the psychoanalytic approach to art: 3. Freud and his followers) “great revelations were made about man, the subconscious in him was discovered.” Scientists, the philosopher argued, “greatly exaggerated” their discovery and “recognized almost as a law that in his thoughts and in his creativity a person always hides himself and that one must think about him the opposite of that, what he says about himself."3 J. Mukarzhovsky, a famous Czech philologist-structuralist, in contrast to supporters of the psychoanalytic approach to art, argued that the main factor in the impression caused by a work of art is the author's intentionality, that it is this that connects together individual part of the work and gives meaning to what was created.4 And it’s hard to disagree with this.

Artistic subjectivity includes (in addition to the comprehension of life and spontaneous “intrusions” of mental symptoms) also the experience of the authors’ own creative energy, which has long been called inspiration.

The fact is that the author sets himself and solves problems that are actually creative. They are associated both with the work of the imagination (the creation of fictional images) and with what is called compositional and stylistic tasks (V.M. Zhirmunsky).

The solution of creative problems is in one way or another accompanied by the author’s intense concentration on them, complete immersion in them, associated both with the “torments of creativity”, and, most importantly, with a joyful sense of one’s own capabilities, abilities, talents, and with the special kind of spiritual elation that he speaks of Socrates in Plato's dialogue "Ion": poets "compose their beautiful poems (60)<...>only in a state of inspiration and obsession"; the "frenzy" of the creator, who is "possessed by harmony and rhythm", is a "divine power", without which the artist’s goal cannot be achieved5.

It’s as if Pushkin is creating for Socrates,” describing the minutes and hours of creativity in the poem “Autumn”:

And I forget the world - and in sweet silence

I'm sweetly lulled to sleep by my imagination,

And poetry awakens in me:

The soul is embarrassed by lyrical excitement,

It trembles and sounds and searches, as in a dream,

To finally pour out with free manifestation...

Inspiration and the experience of one’s own creative freedom take on the artist the form of close looking, feeling, listening, which is often accompanied by a feeling of one’s subordination to something external, powerful, inevitable and truly good. This idea is expressed in the poem by A.K. Tolstoy “It’s in vain, artist, you imagine that you are the creator of your creations...”

Great poets often have the idea of ​​themselves as writing from dictation, recording the only necessary words that came from somewhere outside, from some deep life principle, be it love, conscience, duty or something else, no less powerful. IN " Divine Comedy"("Purgatory". Chapter XXIV. Lines 52-58) it is said that the feathers of Dante and the poets close to him "obediently apply<...>the meaning of suggestions":

When I breathe love

Then I am attentive; she just needs

Give me some words, and I write.

But the lines of A.A. Akhmatova on how poetic languor ends:

Then I begin to understand

And just dictated lines

They go into a snow-white notebook.

("Creativity" from the series "Secret Crafts")

It is in listening and submitting to someone's voice that the poet exercises his creative freedom. One of the poems in the “Iambic” cycle by A.A. is about this. Block:

Yes. This is what inspiration dictates:

My free dream

Everything clings to where the humiliation is,

Where there is dirt, and darkness, and poverty.

The free creative aspiration of poets, as can be seen, paradoxically takes the form of an imperative, spontaneous and mysterious. According to the undeniably convincing words of R.M. Rilke, “a work of art is good when it is created out of inner necessity”1.

The stamp of creative tension invariably falls on the created work, in which, according to T.S. Eliot, sounds “the voice of a poet talking to himself,”2 or, we add, the voice of inspiration itself. About this implicit but inalienable important facet artistic subjectivity in the 20th century. wrote repeatedly. Art, in the exact words of G. G. Shpet, “includes<...>an intimate cult of creative forces"3. Representatives of German aesthetics of the era of romanticism believed that artists imitate nature primarily in its creative power. B. L. Pasternak spoke in a similar spirit in " Safe-conduct certificate"According to him, the basis of art is the voice of power, its presence4. And this actually creative aspect artistic content turns out to be important for perceivers. P. Valery wrote: “In works of art, I always look for traces of the creative effort from which they arose and which interests me primarily”5.

This facet of artistic subjectivity (non-semantic, creative, energetic) is also sometimes absolutized to the detriment of all others. Thus, in the 1919 article “The Morning of Acmeism” O.E. Mandelstam argued that an artist is a person “overwhelmed by the spirit of construction,” for whom this or that worldview is just “a tool and a means, like a hammer in the hands of a mason”1.

The creative impulse of the artist is reflected in his works in different ways. The author often demonstrates the intensity of his creative effort (remember the atmosphere of Beethoven's late sonatas or the deliberately ponderous phrases in the novels of L.N. Tolstoy). Bearing in mind this type of artistic creativity, T. Mann wrote: “Everything that dares to be called art testifies to the will to the utmost effort, the determination to go to the limit of possibilities”2.

At the same time, many high artistic creations have (62)

the color of unconstrained lightness, artistry, gaiety, “Mozartianism,” as they sometimes say, is a color so characteristic of Pushkin’s poetry. Here art discovers its connections with play.

5. ART AND PLAY

A game is an activity free from utilitarian-practical goals and, moreover, unproductive, without results, containing a goal in itself. It expresses an excess of strength and cheerfulness of spirit. The game is characterized by an atmosphere of lightness, carelessness, and carelessness. In his famous work “Homo ludens. Experience in studying the play element in culture,” the Dutch philosopher I. Huizinga wrote: “The mood of the game is detachment and delight - sacred or simply festive<...>. The action itself is accompanied by feelings of elation and tension and brings with it joy and release."3

Thinkers of the 19th-20th centuries. have repeatedly noted the enormous importance of the play principle in human life. We have already spoken about the playful nature of Kant’s aesthetics (see pp. 23-24). In “Letters on Aesthetic Education” (letter 15), F. Schiller argued that a person only becomes fully himself when he plays. According to J. Huizinga, human culture came from a game. Writers and scientists (L. Tolstoy, T. Mann, V.F. Pereverzev) said that art is a play activity in its essence, that it is a unique type of game. F. Nietzsche and his followers, advocating for the maximum introduction of playful lightness into art, rejected the intense seriousness and spiritual “burdensomeness” of artistic activity. “Art cannot bear the burden of our life,” wrote X. Ortega y Gasset. “In trying to do this, it crashes, losing the graceful lightness it so needs.”<...>. If, instead of ponderous hopes for art, we take it as it is - as entertainment, play, pleasure - the creation of art will again regain its enchanting trepidation."4 In the same spirit - and with even greater harshness - representatives of modern post-structuralism speak out , for whom verbal art is a game of rhetorical figures, a “dance of the pen.” R. Barthes, the world-famous French philologist, representative of structuralism and post-structuralism, understood writing activity and reader perception as a game with language, in which the main thing is pleasure, (63 ) obtained from the text, because in art “fragrant richness” is more important than knowledge and wisdom5.

This kind of absolutization of the playful principle of artistic activity is vulnerable, because it dogmatically narrows the sphere of art. A.A. Ukhtomsky, who was not only a world-famous scientist-physiologist, but also a remarkable humanist, had sufficient grounds for a sharp polemic against the understanding of art as an entertaining and pleasing game: “Art, which has become only a matter of “pleasure and relaxation,” is already harmful - it holy and endless only as long as it judges, burns, makes you burn<...>Beethoven did not create for human “pleasure,” but because he suffered for humanity and woke people up with endless sounds.”1

The game (like all other forms of culture) has certain boundaries and boundaries. The principle of play in one way or another colors the creative (including artistic) activity of a person, stimulates and accompanies it. But play as such is fundamentally different from art: if play activity is unproductive, then artistic creativity aimed at the result - the creation of a work as value. At the same time, the playful coloring of the artistic and creative process and the creation of art itself may not be so pronounced, or even completely absent. There is a playful element in truly artistic works, mainly as a “shell” of the author’s seriousness. One of the clearest evidence of this is Pushkin’s poetry, in particular the novel “Eugene Onegin”.

The facets of artistic subjectivity described above, which are very heterogeneous - especially in the art of the 19th-20th centuries - constitute the image of the author as a whole person, as an individual2. In the words of N.V. Stankevich, poet and romantic philosopher, the eternal and undying energy in art is the energy of the author’s personality, “whole, individual life”3. Also significant are the definition(64) of works of art as “human documents” (T. Mann)4 and the words of M.M. Bakhtin that it is important for the perceiver of a work of art to “get, go deeper into the creative core of the personality” of its creator5.

Supporters attached decisive importance to the connections between the writer’s work and his personality and fate. biographical method, first used by the French critic S.O. Sainte-Beuve, author of the monumental work “Literary-Critical Portraits” (1836-1839)6.

The activity of a writer who in one way or another “objectifies” his consciousness in a work is naturally stimulated and directed by biographical experience and life behavior. According to G.O. Vinokur, “the stylistic forms of poetry are at the same time the stylistic forms of the personal life” of the poet himself7. Writers and poets have repeatedly expressed similar thoughts. “Life and poetry are one,” asserted V.A. Zhukovsky. This formula, however, needs clarification. The author present in the work is not identical to the appearance of the real author. For example, A.A. Fet in his poems embodied other facets of his individuality than those that made themselves felt in his daily activities as a landowner. There are often very serious discrepancies and radical inconsistencies between artistic subjectivity and the life actions and everyday behavior of the writer. So, the “real” K.N. Batyushkov, sickly and unsure of himself, was strikingly different from the epicurean and passionate lover that he often portrayed himself as in poetry.

At the same time, the image of the author in the work and the appearance of the real author are inevitably connected with each other. In the article “On the Problems of Understanding Pushkin” (1937), the famous Russian philosopher S.L. Frank wrote: "For all the difference between the empirical life of the poet and his poetic creativity, his spiritual personality remains one, and his creations are just as born from the depths of this personality, as are his personal life and his views as a person. The basis of artistic creativity is, however, not personal empirical experience, but still its spiritual experience."1 V.F. Khodasevich and A.A. Akhmatova were aware of artistic creativity in a similar way (in their works about Push(65)kin)2, as well as B.L. Pasternak, who believed that the essence of genius “rests in the experience of real biography<...>its roots lie in the raw spontaneity of the moral sense."3

This is, apparently, the most worthy, optimal option for the attitude of a real author to his artistic activity. Here it is appropriate to recall the term responsibility, rooted in the modern humanitarian sphere. The artist's responsibility is twofold: firstly, to art, and secondly, to life. This responsibility is not a rational-moral obligation, but a clear and unshakable sense of the urgency of these very creative concepts: artistic themes and meanings, structures, words, sounds...

The author is necessarily involved in extra-artistic reality and participates in it with his works. To him, according to M.M. Bakhtin, you need an object (a found, but not a fictional character), it is important to feel “another consciousness”, to have “artistic kindness”: a literary work is carried out in a “value context”. The author’s involvement in a “life event,” the scientist argues, constitutes the scope of his responsibility4.

In the 20th century There is also another point of view on authorship, opposite to the one outlined and justified above. According to it, artistic activity is isolated from the spiritual and biographical experience of the creator of the work. Here is one of the judgments of X. Ortega y Gasset:

"The poet begins where man ends. The fate of one is to follow his own “human” path; the mission of the other is to create the non-existent<...>Life is one thing. Poetry is something else.”5 The work from which these words are taken is called “The Dehumanization of Art” (1925).

In recent decades, the idea of ​​dehumanizing art has given rise to the concept of the death of the author. According to R. Barth, now “the myth of the writer as a bearer of values ​​has disappeared.” Using a metaphor, the scientist calls the author the Father of the text, characterizing him as despotic and autocratic. And he claims that there is no record of paternity in the text and the personality of the writer is deprived of power over the work, that the will of the author should not be taken into account, it should be forgotten. By declaring that the Father is “dead by definition,” Barth sharply contrasts the author with a living (66) text. Now, he believes, the Author has been replaced by a Scriptor (i.e., a writer), who “carries within himself not passions, moods, feelings or impressions, but only such an immense vocabulary from which he draws his writing, which knows no stop”6 . Barthes believes that the author is a kind of semi-imaginary: he does not exist either before the text is written or after the text is completed; Only the reader has complete power over what is written.

At the heart of Barthes’s concept is the idea of ​​the reader’s activity having no boundaries, his complete independence from the creator of the work. This idea is far from new. In Russia it goes back to the works of A.A. Potebnya (see p. 113). But it was R. Barth who took it to the extreme and pitted the reader and the author against each other as incapable of communication, pitted them against each other, polarized them, and spoke about their irreducible alienation and hostility to each other. At the same time, he interpreted the freedom and initiative of the reader as essayistic arbitrariness. In all this we find a connection between Barthes's concept and what is called postmodern sensitivity (see p. 260).

The concept of the death of the author, which undoubtedly has prerequisites and incentives in the artistic and near-artistic practice of our time, is legitimate, in our opinion, to be regarded as one of the manifestations of the crisis of culture and, in particular, humanitarian thought.

The concept of the death of the author has been subject to serious critical analysis over the past few years. Thus, M. Freise (Germany) notes that the “anti-author” tendencies of modern literary criticism go back to the concept formal school, which considered the author only as a producer of the text, “wielding techniques,” a master with certain skills. And he comes to the following conclusion: with the help of the term “responsibility” it is necessary to restore the author as the center around which artistic meaning crystallizes1. According to V.N. Toporov, without the “image of the author” (no matter how deeply it is hidden), the text becomes “thoroughly mechanical” or is reduced to a “game of chance,” which is inherently alien to art2.

Let us conclude our conversation about artistic subjectivity with two quotes that would also serve as an epigraph to this chapter. N.M. Karamzin: “The Creator is always depicted in creation and often against his will”3. V.V. Veidle: “Without the desire to tell and say<...>there is no such thing as artistic creativity"4.

In the art of recent centuries (especially the 19th and 20th centuries), the author’s emotionality is uniquely individual. But it also invariably contains certain naturally recurring principles. In works of art, in other words, there are stable “alloys” of generalizations and emotions, certain types of illumination of life. These are heroism, tragedy, irony, sentimentality and a number of related phenomena. This series of concepts and terms are widely used in art criticism and literary criticism, but their theoretical status causes controversy. The corresponding phenomena in ancient Indian aesthetics were designated by the term “race”5. Modern scientists (depending on their methodological positions) call heroism, tragedy, romance, etc. either aesthetic categories (most Russian philosophers), or metaphysical categories (R. Ingarden), or types of pathos (G.N. Pospelov)6, or “modes of artistry” that embody the author’s concept of personality and characterize the work as a whole (V. I. Tyupa)7. Using the term of scientific psychology, these phenomena of human consciousness and existence can be called worldview (or worldview-significant) emotions that are present in art as the “property” of either the authors or the characters (depicted persons). Such emotions are associated with value orientations individuals and their groups. They are generated by these orientations and embody them. (68)

1. HEROIC

Heroics constitute the predominant emotional and semantic principle of historically early high genres, primarily epics (traditional folk epic). Here the actions of people are raised up and poeticized, testifying to their fearlessness and ability for majestic achievements, their readiness to overcome the instinct of self-preservation, to take risks, hardships, dangers, and to face death with dignity. The heroic mood is associated with strong-willed composure, uncompromisingness and a spirit of inflexibility. A heroic deed in its traditional sense (regardless of the victory or death of its performer) is a person’s sure path to posthumous glory. Heroic individuality (a hero in the original strict sense of the word) evokes admiration and worship, and is depicted to the general consciousness as being on a kind of pedestal, in an aura of high exclusivity. According to S.S. Averintsev, they do not spare the heroes: they are admired, they are sung.

Heroic deeds are often self-directed demonstrations of energy and strength. These are legendary feats Hercules, carried out not so much for the sake of the cowardly Eurystheus, but for their own sake. “In the world of heroic ethics,” notes Averintsev, “it is not the goal that sanctifies the means, but only the means—a feat that can sanctify any goal”1. Something like this is the antics of the mischievous Vaska Buslaev, and to some extent the actions of Taras Bulba, who cannot restrain himself in his warlike revelry. From the self-motivated heroism of the early historical eras threads stretch to the individualistic self-affirmation of the man of the New Age, the “peak” of which is the Nietzschean idea of ​​the heroic path of the “superman”, embodied in the book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and quite reasonably contested subsequently.