Work: Artistic image as an aesthetic category. Introduction to the concept of "image"
Artistic image as an aesthetic category
Introduction to the concept of "image"
What should be understood by the definition of image?
This definition is used in 2 meanings: narrow and broad.
In a narrow sense, an image is an expression that gives color and concreteness to speech; from this point of view in lines
The forest is like a painted tower, lilac, gold, crimson
It stands like a cheerful, motley wall over a bright clearing.
there is already an image, i.e. an expression through which our idea of the forest becomes more concrete, as it describes autumn forest, it is compared to a tower.
In a broad sense, an image is a type of reflection of life by an artist. In this understanding, the image covers not only language, but whole line parties literary creativity. The concept of image in a broad sense means general properties literature and art in general.
Let's consider several definitions of an image from different sources: Literary- encyclopedic Dictionary terms, Aesthetics - dictionary, Philosophical encyclopedic dictionary and monograph “Horizons of the artistic image” Khrapchenko M.B.
So, how does the term “image” explain Literary encyclopedic dictionary of terms?
Image– a universal category of artistic creativity; the inherent form of art in reproducing, interpreting and mastering life through the creation of aesthetically affecting objects. An image is often understood as an element or part of an artistic whole, usually a fragment that has, as it were, independent life and content (directional character in literature, symbolic images, like Lermontov’s “Sail”).
But in a general sense, the image is the very way of existence of a work, taken from the side of its expressiveness, impressive energy and significance. Among other aesthetic categories, this is the most comparatively late in origin, although the beginnings of the theory of image can be found in Aristotle’s teaching about “mimesia” - about the artist’s free imitation of life in its ability to produce integral, internally arranged objects and the aesthetic pleasure associated with this. In the aesthetic aspect, the image appears to be a purposeful, life-like organism, in which there is nothing superfluous, random, or mechanically useful, and which produces the impression of beauty precisely because of the perfect unity and ultimate meaningfulness of its parts. The internal form of the image is personal, it bears an indelible trace of the author’s ideology, its isolating and implementing initiative, thanks to which the image appears as an assessed human reality, a cultural value among other values, an expression of historically relative trends and ideals.
In another source dictionary " Aesthetics“This is how this concept is interpreted. An artistic image is a form of reflection of reality and expression of the artist’s thoughts and feelings specific to art. The image is born in the artist’s imagination, embodied in the work he creates in one material form or another (plastic, sound, gesture, verbal) and is recreated by the imagination of the viewer, reader, listener who perceives art. Other types of image: photographic documents, abstract geometric. In contrast, an artistic image reflects certain phenomena of reality, and at the same time carries within itself a holistic spiritual content, in which the artist’s emotional and intellectual attitude to the world is organically merged. An artistic image has a special structure, on the one hand, determined by the characteristics of the spiritual content expressed in it, on the other hand, by the nature of the material in which this content is embodied. The artistic image in architecture is static, in literature it is dynamic, in painting it is figurative, in music it is intonational. In some genres, the image appears in the image of a person, in others - as an image of nature, in others - as a thing, in others - it combines the representation of human action and the environment in which it unfolds. But in all cases, the way to perceive an artistic image is not only contemplation, but experience. Finally, sometimes the artist’s work is viewed as a single mega-image of the world and man in the world. Such images can be found in the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. The multi-scale meaning of an artistic image is one of the indications that everything in art has an artistic and figurative character.
How is this concept interpreted in Philosophical Dictionary?
Artistic image– a universal category of artistic creativity, a means and form of mastering life through art. An image is often understood as an element or part of a work that has, as it were, independent existence and meaning (in literature - the image of a character, in painting- image subject). In a general sense, an artistic image is the very way of being of a work of art, taken from the aspect of its expressiveness, impressive energy and meaningfulness. Among other aesthetic categories, art. the image is of relatively late origin.
In the ontological aspect, x.o. - a fact of ideal existence, “built-in” into its material basis, but not coinciding with it (marble is not the flesh it depicts, the plane of the canvas is not three-dimensional space, the story of an event is not the event itself).
In the semiotic aspect, H.o. – sign, i.e. a means of semantic communication within a given culture or related cultures.
In the epistemological aspect, Kh.o. - a fiction akin to this type of cognitive thought as an assumption.
In the aesthetic aspect, H.o. - an organism in which there is nothing random or mechanically useful and which is beautiful thanks to the perfect unity and ultimate meaningfulness of its parts.
At M.B. Khrapchenko in his monograph “Horizons of the Artistic Image” gives the following definition: “ Artistic image - one of the most important internal principles of art, active, dynamic principles. The aesthetic assimilation of reality is inseparable from the development of figurative creativity, the history of which reveals its amazing richness and diversity, its unlimited possibilities. The artistic image is sometimes brought closer or even confused with the image as a direct reflection objective world, life processes in human consciousness. However, H.o. often expresses illusions, social prejudices, and misconceptions. The imaginative mastery of reality is a special and very important area of human spiritual activity, which is characterized by amazing diversity. What is the essence of an artistic image, what is its social and aesthetic function?
We can distinguish 4 “elements” of chemical activity, spheres of its disclosure:
reflection and generalization of essential properties, features of reality, human ideas about the world, revealing the complexity of people’s spiritual life.
Expression emotional attitude to everything that serves as an object of creativity.
The embodiment of the ideal, the perfect, the beauty of life, nature, the creation of an aesthetically significant objective world.
Internal attitude towards the perception of the reader, viewer, listener, inherent in figurative creativity and associated with this attitude potential strength aesthetic impact, which a particular image and art as a whole have always had and are having on its consumers.
The horizons of the artistic image, the sphere of its action are the modern life of mankind in all its boundless diversity, this is history with its conquests and dramas, this is the future society into which the human gaze penetrates, this is the world of violent resistance to the new, and the ardent aspirations of people to transform the social order and themselves, to build a just social system. Horizons of H.o. – vast expanses of living life, creativity, creation.
Thus, based on the above-mentioned sources, let us define the artistic image.
Let us find something common in all interpretations of this concept.
All sources say that image - a universal category of artistic creativity, a reflection of reality and an expression of the artist’s thoughts and feelings. Also, great importance is attributed to the aesthetic aspect; we note that the way of perceiving an artistic image is not only contemplation, but also experience.
So, Artistic image- a generalized, artistic reflection of reality, clothed in the form of a specific, individual phenomenon.
An artistic image is an expression of the content in a literary work. Based on this position, we can consider the structure of the artistic image:
– H.o. - a product of the writer’s thoughts, and then this is a broad picture of life presented to the reader’s gaze;
– H.o. – the bearer of an aesthetic idea, and then this is a thought, or super-meaning, embedded in a specific image.
Means of creating an artistic image: trope, hero’s speech, author's narration or description, artistic detail, composition of a sentence, paragraph, chapter, rhythm and melody of the work, etc.
And now, taking into account the above, let us define the image.
An image is a specific and at the same time generalized picture. human life, created using fiction and having aesthetic significance.
An image is a way of reflecting reality.
What should be understood by the definition of a literary image?
Literary image - a verbal image, framed in words, that unique form of reflection of life that is inherent in art.
So, imagery is the central concept of literary theory; it answers its most basic question: what is the essence of literary creativity?
An image is a generalized reflection of reality in the form of a single, individual - this is a common definition of this concept. The most basic features are emphasized in this definition - generality and individuality. Indeed, both of these features are significant and important. They are present in any literary work.
For example, the image of Pechorin shows common features younger generation the time in which M.Yu lived. Lermontov, and at the same time it is obvious that Pechorin is an individual depicted by Lermontov with the utmost life-like concreteness. And not only this. To understand the image, it is necessary, first of all, to find out: what interests the artist in reality, what does he focus on among life phenomena?
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“An artistic image,” according to Gorky, “is almost always wider and deeper than an idea; it takes a person with all his diversity of his spiritual life, with all the contradictions of his feelings and thoughts.”
So, the image is a picture of human life. Reflecting life with the help of images means drawing pictures of people’s human lives, i.e. actions and experiences of people characteristic of a given area of life, allowing one to judge it.
When we say that an image is a picture of human life, we mean precisely that it reflects it synthetically, holistically, i.e. “personally”, and not just any one aspect of it.
A work of art is only complete when it makes the reader or viewer believe in itself as a phenomenon of human life, either external or spiritual.
Without a concrete picture of life there is no art. But concreteness itself is not the end in itself of artistic representation. It necessarily follows from its very subject, from the task that art faces: the depiction of human life in its integrity.
So, let's add to the definition of the image.
An image is a specific picture of human life, i.e. her individual image.
Let's look further. The writer studies reality on the basis of a certain worldview; in the course of his life experience, he accumulates observations and conclusions; he comes to certain generalizations that reflect reality and at the same time express his views. He shows these generalizations to the reader in living, concrete facts, in the destinies and experiences of people. Thus, we add to the definition of “image”: Image is a specific and at the same time generalized picture of human life.
But even now our definition is not yet complete.
Fiction plays a very important role in the image. Without the artist’s creative imagination there would be no unity of the individual and the general, without which there is no image. Based on his knowledge and understanding of life, the artist imagines such life facts by which one could better judge the life he depicts. This is the meaning of artistic invention. At the same time, the artist’s imagination is not arbitrary, it is suggested to him by his life experience. Only under this condition will the artist be able to find real colors to depict the world into which he wants to introduce the reader. Fiction is a means for the writer to select what is most characteristic of life, i.e. is a generalization of the life material collected by the writer. It should be noted that fiction does not oppose reality, but is a special form of reflection of life, a unique form of its generalization. Now we must again supplement our definition.
So, an image is a specific and at the same time generalized picture of human life, created with the help of fiction. But that's not all.
A work of art evokes in us a feeling of immediate excitement, sympathy for the characters or indignation. We treat it as something that personally affects us, that relates directly to us.
So here it is. This is an aesthetic feeling. The purpose of art is to aesthetically comprehend reality in order to evoke an aesthetic feeling in a person. The aesthetic feeling is associated with the idea of the ideal. It is this perception of the ideal embodied in life, the perception of beauty that evokes aesthetic feelings in us: excitement, joy, pleasure. This means that the meaning of art is that it should evoke in a person an aesthetic attitude towards life. Thus, we have come to the conclusion that the essential aspect of the image is its aesthetic meaning.
Now we can give a definition of an image that incorporates the features that we talked about.
So, summing up what has been said, we get:
IMAGE IS A SPECIFIC AND AT THE SAME TIME GENERALIZED PICTURE OF HUMAN LIFE, CREATED WITH THE HELP OF FICTION AND HAVING AESTHETIC SIGNIFICANCE.
The structure of the artistic image
Structure of Ch.o. represents the dialectical unity of a whole complex of opposing principles:
– knowledge and assessment,
– objective and subjective,
– rational and emotional,
– images and expressions,
– real and fictional,
– life-likeness and conventions,
– specificity and generality.
So what is included in the content of the image itself?
The objective content of a work of art. This is a historical reality that determines the life situation in which the artist himself finds himself and which he reflects in his work, no matter how he himself relates to it.
Subjective content. This is the assessment in the light that the writer himself gives in the phenomenon of life he depicts.
The immediate, specific content of a work is the history of these characters and events that it tells about.
The aesthetic meaning of the image is the concrete embodiment of human ideals.
So, any piece of art- first of all, the writer’s expression of his attitude to reality. And the writer expresses his attitude by showing the manifestations of life that interest him figuratively, that is, in pictures of human life, with all its inherent properties, preserving the internal logic of the relationships he depicts.
The concept of image also refers to the character of a person, although the concept of image is much broader than character. For example, the image of Pechorin, the image of Pyotr Grinev. IN this concept talk about the characters of these characters in the depiction of the world around them.
What are the main characteristics of an artistic image?
Let's give 1 example
“The Image of Bazarov (based on Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”)
Time to create a novel.
Written in crucial moment historical development In Russia, the novel “Fathers and Sons” showed the acute problems of our time, which, after the appearance of this work, worried Russian society. The novel was a reflection social conflict 60s of the 19th century, which is illustrated by the example of the eternal conflict between fathers and children. The novel shows typical representative commoners, for whom, despite all their differences in socio-political views, democracy was characteristic. The main conflict rests on the opposition between democracy and aristocracy, fathers and sons.
Main characters, image as a characteristic of characters, relationships different heroes as a necessary condition for the disclosure of an artistic image.
Bazarov is a commoner democrat. These people worked their way into life and did not recognize the class division of society. Striving for knowledge, they valued a person not by wealth, but by his deeds, his benefit to the people around him.
Democratism is inherent not only in Bazarov’s beliefs, but also in his appearance. The appearance of the hero of the novel among the nobility in a robe is in itself a challenge to convention, a deliberate disregard for it. We pay attention to his red hand, accustomed to physical labor. It is too different from the hand of the nobleman Pavel Petrovich (Kirsanov’s hands are aristocratic, well-groomed, and he really leads an idle lifestyle). Even to the village where Bazarov came to rest, he took work with him: a microscope for conducting experiments. Thus, by this the author contrasts the era of aristocrats with their idle life with the era of commoners with their closeness to the people.
The image of Evgeny Bazarov is more fully revealed in comparison with Pavel Petrovich.
Throughout the novel, this opposition is always preserved: in the description of the characters’ clothes, their belongings, and actions. The writer calls Bazarov’s clothes a dude, since they don’t represent anything; on the contrary, he describes Pavel Petrovich’s clothes in detail, since they are his face: a dark English suit, a fashionable low tie and patent leather ankle boots.
Behind Bazarov's carelessness lies his nihilism, and behind Kirsanov's refined appearance lies his principles.
In general, in Bazarov’s appearance, Turgenev emphasizes his intellectual beginning: intelligence and self-respect.
We see that the life of an idle aristocratic society passes in idleness, which cannot be said about Bazarov. His continuous work is the content of his life. He continues his natural science studies in Maryino.
The contrast is also characterized by the age of the heroes. And every age has its own fashion, its own views. All fathers and children are different from each other. The time in which this or that generation began to live makes differences in everything: in clothes, in habits, in character, in behavior. And all this taken together affects a person’s worldview. And there is something that brings different generations together. Bazarov denies what exists, because at this time in which he lives, it is useful to deny everything. Pavel Petrovich does not want to change anything in life, because he has already lived for a long time at this time and is accustomed to his leisurely, measured life, but still he agrees with some of Bazarov’s views. The main thing is that he admits that in modern society not everything is fine.
When the argument turned to the people, they seemed to see eye to eye. Bazarov agrees with Pavel Petrovich that the people “sacredly honor traditions, they are patriarchal, they cannot live without faith.” But if Kirsanov is convinced of the value of these qualities, then Bazarov is ready to devote his whole life to ensuring that this is not so. Main character the novel, it would seem, speaks disparagingly about men. But he speaks not against them themselves, but against affection for their backwardness, superstition, and ignorance.
Continuation
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What is most important for these people?
For Bazarov - to correct society, i.e. the same thing that the revolutionaries sought.
The existing system, according to Bazarov, must be destroyed. Kirsanov says that it is necessary not only to destroy, but also to build, and this is very difficult.
Kirsanov demonstrates his admiration for the beauty of art, classical literature.
But Bazarov prefers not to talk about it. Thus, he mocks Pushkin and denies painting and poetry. Sometimes Bazarov’s position, which regards everything from a critical point of view, is distinguished by its extremeness. This can also be said about his egoistic views.
He does not notice the beauty of nature, although he loves it in his own way, believing that it contains enormous resources that can be used for the benefit of man.
What is the attitude of other people in the novel towards him?
Nikolai Petrovich - kind, soft man, therefore, he treats Bazarov somewhat aloof, with misunderstanding, fear: “He was afraid of the young nihilist and doubted the benefit of his influence on Arkady.”
Pavel Petrovich’s feelings are stronger and more definite:
“He hated Bazarov, considered him proud, impudent, cynic, plebeian.”
The clash between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich, as representatives not only of different generations, but also of different beliefs, was inevitable. Pavel Petrovich was only waiting for an excuse to attack the enemy. Bazarov considered the verbal battle useless, but could not avoid it. Scary words Bazarov speaks with inexpressible calm about the fact that he denies everything. His words sound confident that he is right.
The image of Evgeny Bazarov is more fully revealed precisely in comparison with Pavel Petrovich. There is a sense of aristocracy in the latter’s words. He constantly uses expressions that emphasize the good manners of a true aristocrat (I am deeply obliged to you, I have the honor). The abundance of foreign expressions in the speech of this hero irritates Bazarov: “Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles... just think, how many foreign and useless words! Russian people don’t need them for nothing.”
Bazarov’s own speech is distinguished by wit, resourcefulness, and excellent knowledge native language and the ability to own it. Bazarov’s speech reveals his characteristic mentality - sober, sound, clear.
In the frequent disputes of these different people Almost all the main issues on which common democrats and liberals disagreed were touched upon: about the ways of further development of the country, about materialism and idealism, about knowledge of science, understanding of art and about attitude towards the people. All of Pavel Petrovich’s principles boil down to protecting the old order, and Bazarov’s views boil down to denouncing this order.
Bazarov is alone in his views. The novel does not show a single follower of Bazarov. There are only imaginary disciples. This is the little liberal gentleman Arkady. However, his passion for Bazarov is a tribute to his youth, but he is the best of Bazarov’s students depicted in the novel. His other "followers" are depicted satirically.
Sitnikov and Kukshina see in nihilism the negation of all old moral norms and enthusiastically follow this fashion.
The novel shows one more representative of the old generation, Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov. In it, the author simultaneously embodied the traits of sons and fathers. This hero recalls how his mother once did not understand him either, how he told her that they belonged to different generations. And then he said to Pavel Petrovich: “Now it’s our turn.” These words reflect the essence of the conflict between fathers and children.
After all, if something is denied, then something else must be offered in return, and fathers will be in some ways wiser than children until the children themselves become fathers.
3) Summing up, assessing the hero’s positions through the eyes of the author himself.
At the end of the novel, Bazarov dies, which confirms the author’s inferiority of his positions.
Arkady marries and begins to run the household in a new way. Using his example, the author showed the reader that only such people can take the best that their fathers had, and, taking into account their mistakes, build their own new one.
Turgenev himself admitted that his hero Bazarov was still standing on the threshold of the future; he wanted to make a tragic face out of him... He dreamed of a gloomy, wild figure, half grown out of the soil, strong, evil, honest and yet doomed to destruction. And Turgenev created just such an image, thanks to which readers were able to make main conclusion: you can’t deny everything, and if you deny it, then in return you need to create something new, and you need to learn from the mistakes of the older generation, but at the same time listen to your elders, since they are wiser.
Conclusion
The image as an aesthetic category includes the content of the reality about which the author writes, the author’s assessment of the actions that his hero performs, the relationship of the main character with other characters of this work, assessment of the behavior of other characters and the aesthetic pleasure received by the reader when reading this work.
Thus, we see that the concept of an artistic image as an aesthetic category has many faces, includes many different aspects, and there are no clear boundaries for this concept. After all, this is an image of heroes, and an image of nature, and an image of life itself, which the writer shows us with the goal of bringing joy and pleasure from what we read. The writer makes us feel for the fate of his hero, teaches us, using his example, what the reader should do in a similar situation, what can be learned from him and what is unacceptable for the reader. The author teaches the reader through an artistic image to see what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is possible and what is not, what one must be in order to live to the fullest. right life, do not repeat the mistakes of his heroes from the work. And although in any work there is fiction, there are also true sides of the depicted life, which the writer shows us with the goal of introducing us to the world in which his heroes live and act.
A literary work is the form of existence of literature as the art of words. What makes it artistic?
Reading room of the Russian State Library.
We always feel the special vital concreteness of a literary work. It is always connected with reality and at the same time is not identical to it, it is its image, transformation, artistic reflection. But a reflection “in the form of life,” a reflection that does not just talk about life, but itself appears as a special life.
“Art is a reproduction of reality, a repeated, as if newly created world,” wrote V. G. Belinsky. The dynamics of the content of a work of art are perfectly captured here. In order to “repeat” a world that is unique in its development and constant self-renewal, it must be “as if created again,” to reproduce an individual phenomenon that, while not being identical to reality, at the same time will fully express its deep essence and the value of life.
Life is not only material reality, but also the life of the human spirit, it is not only what is, what was realized in reality, but also what was and will be, and what is “possible due to probability or necessity” (Aristotle ). “To master the whole world and find expression for it” - this is the artist’s ultimate task, according to the excellent definition of J. V. Goethe. Therefore, reflections on the nature of a work of art are inextricably linked with the deepest philosophical question about what “the whole world” is, whether it represents unity and integrity, and whether it is possible to “find expression for it,” to recreate it in a specific individual phenomenon.
In order for a work to really exist, it must be created by the author and perceived by the reader. And again, these are not just different, externally justified, isolated, internally interconnected processes. In a truly artistic work, “the perceiver merges with the artist to such an extent that it seems to him that the object he perceives was made not by someone else, but by himself” (L.N. Tolstoy). The author appears here, as M. M. Prishvin wrote, in the role of “a persuader who makes both the sea and the moon look with their own with my personal eye, which is why everyone, being a unique personality, appearing in the world only once, would bring something from himself into the world repository of human consciousness, into culture.” The life of a work is realized only on the basis of the harmony of the author and the reader - such a harmony that directly convinces that “every person can feel equal to everyone else and everyone else” (M. Gorky).
The work represents an internal, interpenetrating unity of content and form. “Living poems speak themselves. And they are not talking about something, but something,” wrote S. Ya. Marshak. Indeed, it is very important to be aware of this difference and not to reduce the content of a literary work to what it talks about. Content is the organic unity of display, comprehension and assessment of reality, and thoughts and assessments in works of art do not exist separately, but permeate the depicted events, experiences, actions and live only in artistic expression- the only possible form of embodiment of this life content.
The subject of reality, its comprehension and evaluation are transformed into the content of a literary work, only being internally united and embodied in artistic form. Also any word, any speech device It turns out to be artistically significant only when it ceases to be just information, when life phenomena external to it become its internal content, when the word about life is transformed into life, captured in a literary work as a verbal and artistic whole.
From what has been said it is clear that art form a literary work is not just a “technique”. "What does it mean to trim lyric poem... to bring the form to its possible elegance? - wrote Ya. I. Polonsky. - Believe me, this is nothing more than finishing and bringing it to the point of possible human nature one’s own grace, this or that feeling... Working on a poem for a poet is the same as working on one’s soul.” Work on understanding the surrounding life and one’s own life, on “one’s soul,” and work on constructing a literary work are for a real writer not three different types of activity, but a single creative process.
L. N. Tolstoy praised the poems of A. A. Fet for the fact that they were “born”. And V.V. Mayakovsky called his article “How to make poetry?” We understand both the opposite and the partial validity of these characteristics. Even if works of art are “born,” it is still not exactly the same as a person is born. And from the article by V.V. Mayakovsky, even with all its polemical exaggerations, it is still quite clear that poetry is “made” in a completely different way from how things are made on a conveyor belt, continuous production. In a literary work there is always this contradiction between organization (“made”) and organic (“born”), and the highest artistic achievements characterized by its particularly harmonic resolution. Let us recall, for example, the poem by A. S. Pushkin “I loved you: love is still, perhaps...”, the clear construction of which becomes a completely natural expression of a high human feeling - selfless love.
An artificially created verbal and artistic statement is transformed into an organically vital whole, each element of which is necessary, irreplaceable and vitally significant. And to understand that we have before us a work of art means, first of all, to understand and feel that it can only be as it is: both as a whole and in each of its particles.
The life contained within the work, like a small universe, reflects and manifests in itself the universe, the fullness of human life, the entire integrity of being. And the meeting of the author and the reader in the artistic world of a literary work therefore becomes an irreplaceable form of familiarization with this big world, the education of true humanity, the formation of a holistic, comprehensively developed personality.
Genres are historically established types of works of art.
The genre definition can be given by the author (“novel in verse”, “MD - poem”), or implied. Genre designations are well known to the reader; he knows the characteristics of works of a particular literary genre. Genres of literature include, for example, poem, fable, novel, short story - epic, i.e. narrative genres; ode, elegy - lyrical; tragedy, comedy - dramatic.
The concept of genre is always a historical concept. The connection between elements of content and elements of composition, language and verse, which we find in one genre or another, represents a typical traditional unity that has developed historically, under certain conditions.
When choosing a genre, a writer proceeds from a certain genre system, from the classification of works (here you can recall the author’s subtitles to works. They “present” the work to the reader, partly hinting to him how this work should be understood.) According to Bakhtin, “genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development.”
The genre is intended to give a holistic idea of the work. Genre is defined through a complex of characteristics. Genre characteristics are a variable value in the literary process, which is reflected in successive genre theories. Thus, not all tragedies, even from the era of classicism, correspond to the genre canon presented in the “poetics” of this movement. In the history of all genres, it is possible to distinguish variable and stable features, and it is the latter that provide continuity, make it possible to recognize and identify the genre throughout its centuries-old history. Along with the specific historical description of genres, genre constants took an important place, ensuring genre continuity.
Thus, tragedy is characterized by two main features: belonging to the dramatic family, tragic content, which gives rise to a special style.
(B. Croce generally declared the genre a “prejudice”, a “ghost”, since this concept contains a high degree of abstraction; works, according to Croce, are expressions of a single and indivisible intuition. However, in general, Western literary criticism of the 20th - 21st centuries, after dedicated to genres International Congress in Lyon in 1939, shows great interest in the theory of genres, especially in their typological study.
In the 1960s in Russian literary criticism the view was popular, according to which in the literature of the 19th - 20th centuries. There is an atrophy of genres, a blurring of genre boundaries: strictly regulated structures are used less and less by writers, they are perceived as an anachronism, and the main representatives of epic, lyricism and drama are the flexible “synthetic forms” of the novel, poem, play: it is difficult to attribute them to any specific genre. (Kozhinov “Novel of Modern Times”, Kurginyan “Drama”)).
Literature is One of the main types of art is the art of words. The term “literature” also refers to any works of human thought, enshrined in the written word and possessing social significance; literature is distinguished between technical, scientific, journalistic, reference, epistolary, etc. However, in the usual and more strict sense, literature refers to works of artistic writing.
The term literature
The term "literature"(or, as they used to say, " belles lettres») arose relatively recently and began to be widely used only in the 18th century (displacing the terms “poetry” and “poetic art”, which now denote poetic works).
It was brought to life by printing, which, having appeared in the middle of the 15th century, relatively quickly made the “literary” (i.e., intended for reading) form of existence of the art of words the main and dominant one; used to be art words existed primarily for hearing, for public performance and were understood as the skillful implementation of a “poetic” action by means of a special “poetic language” (“Poetics” of Aristotle, ancient and medieval aesthetic treatises of the West and East).
Literature (the art of words) arose on the basis of oral folk literature in ancient times - during the period of the formation of the state, which necessarily gave rise to a developed form of writing. However, literature is not initially distinguished from writing in the broad sense of the word. In the most ancient monuments (the Bible, the Mahabharata or the Tale of Bygone Years), elements verbal art exist in inseparable unity with elements of mythology, religion, the beginnings of natural and historical sciences, various kinds of information, moral and practical instructions.
The syncretic nature of early literary monuments (see) does not deprive them aesthetic value, because The religious-mythological form of consciousness reflected in them was close in structure to the artistic one. The literary heritage of ancient civilizations - Egypt, China, Judea, India, Greece, Rome, etc. - forms a kind of foundation of world literature.
History of literature
Although the history of literature goes back several thousand years, it is, in the proper sense, like written form art of words - is formed and realizes itself with the birth of “civil”, bourgeois society. Verbal and artistic creations of past times also acquire a specifically literary existence in this era, experiencing a significant transformation in a new - not oral, but readerly perception. At the same time, the destruction of the normative “poetic language” occurs - literature absorbs all the elements of national speech, its verbal “material” becomes universal.
Gradually in aesthetics (in the 19th century, starting with Hegel), the purely meaningful, spiritual originality of literature comes to the fore, and it is recognized primarily among other (scientific, philosophical, journalistic) types of writing, and not other types of art. By the middle of the 20th century, however, a synthetic understanding of literature was established as one of the forms of artistic exploration of the world, as creative activity which belongs to art, but at the same time is a type of artistic creativity that occupies a special place in the system of arts; this distinctive position of literature is captured in the commonly used formula “literature and art.”
Unlike other types of art (painting, sculpture, music, dance), which have a directly objective-sensual form, created from any material object (paint, stone) or from action (body movement, sound of a string), literature creates its form from words, from language, which, having a material embodiment (in sounds and indirectly in letters), is truly comprehended not in sensory perception, but in intellectual understanding.
Form of literature
Thus, the form of literature includes an objective-sensory side - certain complexes of sounds, the rhythm of verse and prose (and these moments are also perceived when reading “to oneself”); but this directly sensual side literary form acquires real value only in its interaction with the actual intellectual, spiritual layers of artistic speech.
Even the most elementary components of form (epithet or metaphor, narrative or dialogue) are acquired only through the process of understanding (and not direct perception). Spirituality, which permeates literature, allows it to develop its universal, in comparison with other types of art, possibilities.
The subject of art is human world, diverse human attitudes to reality, reality from a human point of view. However, it is precisely in the art of the word (and this constitutes its specific sphere, in which theater and cinema adjoin literature) that man, as a bearer of spirituality, becomes the direct object of reproduction and comprehension, the main point of application of artistic forces. The qualitative originality of the subject of literature was noticed by Aristotle, who believed that the plots of poetic works are connected with the thoughts, characters and actions of people.
But only in the 19th century, i.e. in the predominantly “literary” era of artistic development, this specificity of the subject was fully realized. “The object corresponding to poetry is the infinite realm of the spirit. For the word, this most malleable material, directly belonging to the spirit and most capable of expressing its interests and motives in their inner vitality - the word should be used primarily for such expression as it is most suitable, just as in other arts this happens with stone, paint , sound.
From this side, the main task of poetry will be to promote awareness of the forces of spiritual life and, in general, of everything that is raging in human passions and feelings or calmly passes before the contemplating gaze - the all-encompassing kingdom of human actions, deeds, destinies, ideas, all the vanity of this world and the entire divine world order" (Hegel G. Aesthetics).
Every work of art is an act of spiritual and emotional communication between people and at the same time new item, a new phenomenon created by man and containing some kind of artistic discovery. These functions - communication, creation and cognition - are equally inherent in all forms artistic activity, but different types of art are characterized by the predominance of one or another function. Due to the fact that the word, language is the reality of thought, in the formation of verbal art, in promoting literature to a special place, and in the 19-20 centuries even to central place Among the ancient arts, the main historical trend in the development of artistic activity was most fully expressed - the transition from sensory-practical creation to meaning-creation.
Place of literature
The flourishing of literature is in a certain connection with the rise of the cognitive-critical spirit characteristic of the New Age. Literature stands, as it were, on the verge of art and mental and spiritual activity; That is why certain literary phenomena can be directly compared with philosophy, history, and psychology. It is often called “artistic research” or “human studies” (M. Gorky) for its problematic, analytical, pathos of self-knowledge of a person to the innermost depths of his soul. In literature, more than in the plastic arts and music, the artistically recreated world appears as a meaningful world and raised to a high level of generalization. Therefore it is the most ideological of all the arts.
Literary, images
Literary, the images of which are not directly tangible, but arise in the human imagination, is inferior to other arts in terms of the power of feelings and impact, but wins from the point of view of an all-encompassing penetration into the “essence of things.” At the same time, the writer, strictly speaking, does not talk or reflect on life, as, for example, a memoirist and philosopher do; he creates, creates the artistic world in the same way as a representative of any art. The process of creating a literary work, its architectonics and individual phrases is associated with almost physical stress and in this sense is akin to the activities of artists working with the stubborn matter of stone, sound, human body(in dance, pantomime).
This bodily-emotional tension does not disappear in the finished work: it is transmitted to the reader. Literature appeals to the maximum extent to the work of aesthetic imagination, to the effort of reader co-creation, for the artistic being represented by a literary work can only be revealed if the reader, starting from a sequence of verbal-figurative statements, himself begins to restore, re-create this being (see . ). L.N. Tolstoy wrote in his diary that when perceiving genuine art, “the illusion of what I do not perceive, but create” arises (“On Literature”). These words emphasize most important aspect creative function of literature: nurturing the artist in the reader himself.
The verbal form of literature is not speech in the proper sense: a writer, creating a work, does not “speak” (or “write”), but “acts out” speech, just as an actor on stage does not act in literally words, but acts out an action. Artistic speech creates consistency verbal images"gestures"; it itself becomes action, “being.” So, the minted verse " Bronze Horseman“seems to be erecting Pushkin’s unique Petersburg, and F.M. Dostoevsky’s intense, breathless style and rhythm of narration make the spiritual tossing of his heroes seem tangible. Eventually literary works put the reader face to face with artistic reality, which can not only be comprehended, but... and experience, “live” in it.
Body of literary works created on specific language or within certain state boundaries, amounts to this or that national literature; the commonality of the time of creation and the resulting artistic properties allows us to talk about the literature of a given era; taken together, in their increasing mutual influence, national literatures form a global one, or world literature. Fiction of any era has enormous diversity.
First of all, literature is divided into two main types (forms) - poetry and prose, and also into three types - epic, lyric and drama. Despite the fact that the boundaries between genera cannot be drawn with absolute accuracy and there are many transitional forms, the main features of each genus are sufficiently defined. At the same time, in works of various kinds there is community and unity. In any work of literature, images of people appear - characters (or heroes) in certain circumstances, although in lyric poetry these categories, like a number of others, have a fundamental originality.
A specific set of characters and circumstances appearing in a work is called a theme, and the semantic result of the work, growing from the juxtaposition and interaction of images, is called an artistic idea. Unlike the logical idea, artistic idea is not formulated by the author’s statement, but is depicted, imprinted on all the details of the artistic whole. When analyzing an artistic idea, two sides are often distinguished: understanding the life depicted and evaluating it. The evaluative (value) aspect, or “ideological-emotional orientation,” is called a tendency.
Literary work
A literary work is a complex interweaving of specific “figurative” statements- the smallest and simplest verbal images. Each of them puts before the reader’s imagination a separate action, movement, which together represent the life process in its emergence, development and resolution. The dynamic nature of verbal art, as opposed to the static nature visual arts, first illuminated by G.E. Lessing (“Laocoon, or On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry,” 1766).
The individual elementary actions and movements that make up the work have a different character: these are external, objective movements of people and things, and internal, spiritual movements, and “speech movements” - replicas of the heroes and the author. The chain of these interconnected movements represents the plot of the work. Perceiving the plot as you read, the reader gradually comprehends the content - action, conflict, plot and motivation, theme and idea. The plot itself is a content-formal category, or (as they sometimes say) the “internal form” of the work. The “internal form” refers to the composition.
The form of the work in the proper sense is artistic speech, sequence of phrases, which the reader perceives (reads or hears) directly and directly. This does not mean that artistic speech is a purely formal phenomenon; it is entirely meaningful, because it is in it that the plot and thereby the entire content of the work (characters, circumstances, conflict, theme, idea) are objectified.
When considering the structure of a work, its various “layers” and elements, it is necessary to realize that these elements can only be identified through abstraction: in reality, each work is an indivisible living whole. An analysis of a work, based on a system of abstractions, separately exploring various aspects and details, should ultimately lead to the knowledge of this integrity, its unified content-formal nature (see).
Depending on the originality of the content and form, the work is classified as one genre or another (for example, epic genres: epic, story, novel, short story, short story, essay, fable, etc.). In each era, diverse genre forms develop, although the most appropriate ones come to the fore general character given time.
Finally, in the literature there are various creative methods and styles. A certain method and style are characteristic of literature an entire era or directions; on the other hand, everyone great artist creates his own individual method and style within the framework of a creative direction close to him.
Literature is studied by various branches of literary criticism. Current literary process constitutes the main subject of literary criticism
The word literature comes from Latin litteratura - written and from littera, which translated means - letter.
The idea and its implementation
The writer's goal is to understand and reproduce reality in its intense conflicts. The idea is the prototype of the future work; it contains the origins of the main elements of content, conflict, and structure of the image.
Preserving the letter of reality for a writer, unlike a person talking about the fact of his biography, is not a prerequisite. The birth of an idea is one of the mysteries of the writing craft. Some writers find the themes of their works in newspaper columns, others - in famous literary subjects, others turn to their own everyday experience.
The impulse to create a work can be a feeling, an experience, an insignificant fact of reality, a story heard by chance (A.F. Koni told L.N. Tolstoy about the fate of the prostitute Rosalia, and this story formed the basis of the novel “Resurrection”), which are in the process of being written works grow to the point of generalization. An idea (for example, in A.P. Chekhov) can remain in a state of flux for a long time. notebook as a humble observation.
The random and unexpected, becoming the property of literature, acquires artistic existence in generalized images. The idea carries elements of synthesis. The individual, the particular, observed by the author in life, in a book, passing through comparison, analysis, abstraction, synthesis, becomes a generalization of reality. In the Preface to The Human Comedy, O. de Balzac wrote: “... I needed to learn the basics... social phenomena, to grasp the hidden meaning of a huge collection of types, passions and events.”
In the process of creating a work from conception to its final implementation, both the subjective discovery of meanings and the creation of a picture of reality are carried out, in which there is generally valid information about the actual reality of each person, organized in accordance with the author’s concept.
The movement from concept to artistic embodiment includes the pangs of creativity, doubt and contradiction. Many word artists have left eloquent testimonies about the secrets of creativity. If we generalize the heterogeneous writer's confessions and the experience of literary analysis, we can determine the stages of objectification - the process of embodying heterogeneous life material in a work. The sequence of implementation of the plan, for example, by A. S. Pushkin is as follows:
1) a sketch of individual elements (images, lines, rhymes), general scheme poems;
2) draft;
3) revision of the draft version.
In I. S. Turgenev’s work on works, three stages can be distinguished:
1) recording of individual scenes, touches on the biography of the characters;
2) writing a draft in the form of a short story;
3) the development of major conflicts.
E. Zola worked according to the following scheme:
1) characters, characteristics of heroes;
2) general comments about the novel, sketches;
3) analytical plan of the novel;
4) specification of the characters and the scene;
5) writing the full text.
U various artists artistic process proceeds differently. J. Sand and L.N. Tolstoy wrote without a precisely developed plan. E. Zola and F. M. Dostoevsky, on the contrary, began with a detailed plan for their works. Some writers understood creativity as a rationalistic act, others trusted intuition more. I. S. Turgenev, N. V. Gogol, F. Stendhal, A. France spoke about the inclination of their imagination to “reproducing” creativity. The works of D. Swift, O. Wilde, M. Proust, D. Joyce are evidence of the associative activity of the imagination. Rich factual material that sheds light on the creative process is presented by K. Paustovsky in “The Golden Rose”.
It is difficult to build a conventional scheme for creating a literary work, since each writer is unique, but in this case, indicative trends are revealed. At the beginning of the work, the writer faces the problem of choosing the form of the work, decides whether to write in the first person, that is, prefer a subjective manner of presentation, or in the third, maintaining the illusion of objectivity and letting the facts speak for themselves. The writer can turn to the present, to the past or the future. The forms of understanding conflicts are varied - satire, philosophical understanding, pathos, description.
Then there is the problem of organizing the material. Literary tradition offers many options: you can follow the natural (plot) course of events in presenting the facts; sometimes it is advisable to start from the ending, with the death of the main character, and study his life until his birth.
The author is faced with the need to determine the optimal boundaries of aesthetic and philosophical proportionality, entertainment and persuasiveness, which cannot be crossed in the interpretation of events, so as not to destroy the illusion of “reality” art world. L.N. Tolstoy stated: “Everyone knows the feeling of mistrust and rebuff that is caused by the apparent intentionality of the author. If the narrator says ahead: get ready to cry or laugh, and you probably won’t cry or laugh.”
Then the problem of choosing a genre, style, repertoire is revealed artistic means. One must seek, as Guy de Maupassant demanded, “that one word that can breathe life into dead facts, that single verb that alone can describe them.”
Many writers have discussed the pains of translating an idea into a completed text. The school of life is not a sufficient condition for creating a book; a period of literary apprenticeship is necessary in order to acquire a sufficient amount of knowledge and experience, to find your own themes and plots. The writer's age financial situation, life circumstances, unreflective experiences are important for understanding creative practice. D. N. G. Byron admitted: “In order to write a tragedy, you need to have not only talent, but also experience a lot in the past and calm down. When a person is under the influence of passions, he can only feel, but cannot describe his feelings. But when everything has already passed, then, trusting the memory, you can create something significant.”
Among the reasons that complicate the creative process is the feeling of the limits of one’s capabilities, the awareness of the limitlessness of a topic that seemed solvable at the initial stage. The idea of Balzac's "Human Comedy" was never fully realized; Zola's Rougon-Macquarts are also not completed; part of “Lucien Leuven” by F. Stendhal, “Bouvard and Pécuchet” by G. Flaubert remained in drafts.
Creativity is both a feeling of limitless possibilities and crisis moments of helplessness in front of the text, when the author experiences embarrassment, confusion, powerlessness in the face of the enormity of the tasks; this is also the inspiration of the desire to set the only correct philosophical accents. This cannot be done without serious and painstaking work. L.N. Tolstoy rewrote the scene of Levin’s conversation with the priest four times, “so that it would not be clear which side the author was on.”
A special aspect of creative activity is its goals. There are many motives that writers used to explain their work. Considerations of the need to understand the world, the declarative canonization of the ideal are as common as ideological, utilitarian motives or messianic goals. A.P. Chekhov saw the writer’s task not in the search for radical recommendations, but in the “correct formulation” of questions: “In “Anna Karenina” and “Onegin” not a single question is resolved, but they are completely satisfying, only because all the questions placed in them correctly. The court is obliged to pose the right questions, and let the jury decide, each to their own taste.”
The completed text is an impulse to the next stage of the work’s existence, when, in the process of perception, the book is objectified in the reader’s experience.
When a book becomes available to readers, it begins new destiny writer and works. It is not always benign, because the public, Maupassant sadly ironizes, “shouts to us: “Comfort me. Amuse me. Touch me. Make me laugh. Make me shudder. Make me think.” And only a few chosen minds ask the artist: “Create for us something beautiful in the form that is most characteristic of your temperament.”
The perception of a work depends on the reader’s outlook, interests, vagueness of the criteria of artistry, and on various social, ideological, and aesthetic reasons. Disputes grow around style, artistic merits, the general concept of the work; controversy can also arise over the author’s erroneous ideas about the relationship between reality and artistic ideal. The writer is not free from accusations that the phenomenon he depicts is atypical; he is reproached for the aestheticization of evil, for the unreasonable exaggeration of the dark aspects of life, for an attack on truth and virtue. The writer, in the words of N.V. Gogol, “cannot gather popular applause... he cannot, finally, avoid a modern trial, which will relegate him to a despicable corner among writers who insult humanity, giving him the qualities of the heroes he depicted.”
Sincere movement towards truth is often misinterpreted. The reason for this, according to F. M. Dostoevsky, is the reader’s habit of seeing “the author’s face” in a work. P. Merimee wrote about this: “People are always inclined to assume that the author thinks what his heroes say.”
The writer explores phenomena from the angle of the most stringent ethical criteria, helping the reader to reveal virtues and vices real people and society. The task of literature is to deepen the understanding of life, in other words, to, by observing and studying life, learn its essence, its hidden principles and bring this knowledge to the reader.
One way or another, a literary work expresses the author’s attitude to reality, which becomes, to a certain extent, the initial assessment for the reader, the “plan” for subsequent life and artistic creativity.
The author's position reveals a critical attitude towards the environment, activating people's desire for an ideal, which, like absolute truth, unattainable, but which must be approached. “It is in vain that others think,” reflects I. S. Turgenev, “that in order to enjoy art, one innate sense of beauty is enough; without understanding there is no complete pleasure; and the sense of beauty itself is also capable of gradually becoming clearer and ripening under the influence of preliminary work, reflection and study of great examples.”
The creative process differs from ordinary experiences not only in depth, but mainly in its effectiveness. The movement from an idea to a completed work is the endowment of the random with the characteristics of a “recognizable reality.” After all, the purpose of the book, in addition to the artistic interpretation of subjective ideas about the world, is to influence the world. The book becomes the property of the individual and society. Its task is to evoke empathy, help, entertain, enlighten, and educate.
Along with the terms “theme” and “problem,” the concept of an artistic idea represents one of the facets of the content of a work of art.
The word “idea” (from ancient Greek - that which is visible, representation, hereafter - concept) came to the science of literature from philosophy and means “the form of comprehension in thought of the phenomena of objective reality”, the “essence” of an object. The concept of idea was put forward in antiquity.
For Plato, ideas were entities that were beyond reality and constituted the ideal world, the true, in Plato’s understanding, reality. For Hegel, the idea is objective truth, the coincidence of subject and object, the highest point of development. I. Kant introduced the concept “ aesthetic idea", associated with the concept of beauty, which, according to Kant, is subjective.
In literary criticism, the term “idea” was used to designate the author’s thoughts and feelings figuratively expressed in a work of art—this is the emotionally charged content center of a work of art.
In this regard, along with the word “idea”, the concepts “concept of a work” and “author’s concept” were used. In modern literary criticism, in addition to these terms, the concept of “creative concept of a work” also functions. The semantic content of these terms is generally synonymous.
An artistic idea is not an abstract concept, unlike scientific and philosophical categories. It cannot be expressed in a specific verbal formula, as happens, for example, in scientific texts.
This is due, firstly, to the figurative specificity of art and, secondly, to its subjective authorial orientation. An artistic idea finds the depth of its expression in the unity of the content and form of the work. It is only possible to verbally indicate the author's idea underlying the content.
For example, in the interpretation of N. N. Strakhov, “the mysterious depth of life is the thought of War and Peace.” This is just one of the critic’s formulations, which are certainly fair, but do not exhaust the ideological and semantic depth of L. N. Tolstoy’s epic. In N. N. Strakhov’s generalization, it is not the artistic idea itself that is presented, but, as we see, only a schematic transfer of a figurative idea, which is always deeper than such a verbal “periphrase.”
Introduction to literary criticism (N.L. Vershinina, E.V. Volkova, A.A. Ilyushin, etc.) / Ed. L.M. Krupchanov. - M, 2005
