In the process of philological analysis of the text, it is necessary to take into account its genre features (especially if the genre is canonical) and observe deviations from the genre "canon" and the interaction of elements of different genres, as well as over the "genre image" that may arise in the work. So, for example, in the story of I.A. Bunin's "Ballad", which is characterized by the form of "text in text", elements of three genres interact: folk legend, ballad, story itself. Quotations, allusions, reminiscences that permeate the text create a generalized image of the ballad, close to Zhukovsky's romantic ballads (see such images-topoi as blizzard, winter, road), and to folklore ballads (criminal passion, intervention of supernatural forces, etc.). The story of the wanderer Mashenka, which combines the features of a legend and a folklore ballad, is refracted in the perception of the narrator and correlates with the world of romantic culture. The synthesis of different genres claims eternal themes: love and death - and emphasizes the immutability moral laws.

Genre - historical category. “The genre is always the same and not the same, always old and new at the same time. The genre is revived and updated at each new stage in the development of literature and in each individual work of this genre, wrote M.M. Bakhtin. - Genre - a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. That is why the genre is able to provide unity and continuity(highlighted by M.M. Bakhtin. - N.N.) this development." An analysis of genres in their historical development makes it possible to identify the main directions in the evolution of the literary process. This is possible, since, while developing, genre formations retain “dominant ... techniques-features” (B.V. Tomashevsky), which are stable for a long time. Among these dominant features, certain methods of word usage and the use of grammatical forms and syntactic constructions play an important role. Their identification and description contribute to the construction of a consistent classification of genres. At the same time, the harmony of the classification is “hampered” by the constant development of the genre system, its transformation and renewal. The continuity of changing genres, reflecting the changing ways of cognition and reflection of reality, resists the logical scheme, the abstraction that classification requires. “... No logical and firm classification of genres can be made,” remarked B.V. Tomashevsky. - Their distinction is always historical, that is, it is valid only for a certain historical moment; in addition, their differentiation occurs immediately on many grounds, and the features of one genre may be of a completely different nature than the features of another genre, and logically not exclude each other ... ". This opinion, expressed in the 1920s, has not lost its relevance to this day. The existing traditional classification of genres retains its multi-attribute nature, “it is characterized by a certain hierarchy associated with the consideration of the gender factor (genres differ within literary genera). So, among the dramatic genres, tragedy, comedy, farce, vaudeville, etc. are distinguished; among the poetic (lyric) - ode, elegy, epigram, etc.; among the epic - a story, a short story, a story, a novel, an essay. This classification is complemented, as is known, by thematic: for example, adventurous, psychological, historical, science fiction novels, etc. are distinguished. The delimiting features of many genres are far from strictly defined, which causes conflicting definitions of the genre nature of many works often there is a lack of distinction between the novel and the story). The classification of genres is based on different grounds, while “hybrid” genre formations are not always taken into account, style features works, the form chosen by the author is not always realized. Hence - the terminological diversity, the broad use of the term "genre", covering, on the one hand, for example, such phenomena as a novel and a short story; on the other hand, an epistolary work, a journey, memoirs, a family chronicle, etc.

It should also be noted that in the literature of the New Age, the interaction of genres is intensifying, non-canonical genres are becoming more active, the very ratio of "genre - author" is changing significantly. "Genre ... self-determination of an artistic creation for the author now becomes not the starting point, but the result of a creative act ... The genre is more difficult to identify than before."

Artistic texts, primarily prose, develop on the basis of non-fiction, mixed or "semi-artistic" phenomena of writing (chronicles, memoirs, etc.) and have a certain genre form.

Genre form is the result of interaction in the literary process of artistic and non-artistic genres: thus, in the process of development of prose, the aesthetic transformation of the form of autobiography, letters, chronicles causes the appearance of epistolary novels and stories, autobiographical novels, stories and short stories, novel-chronicles. Thus, the genre form is, first of all, the form of a certain non-artistic genre formation (primary genre), which the author focuses on, transforming it in the process of creating a literary text. The distinction between primary genres (everyday writing, everyday story, etc.) and secondary genres (novel, drama, etc.), which, being formed in the conditions of complex historical and cultural communication, assimilate and process primary genres, is important for the philological analysis of the text.

The genre form, in our opinion, has the following features: 1) the presence of a certain "canon" that goes back to non-fiction works (genre "prototypes"); 2) orientation towards a complex of structural and semantic features characteristic of the "prototype" genre, with their subsequent artistic transformation; 3) the presence of one or another grouping of motives, which is determined by the goal setting of the author; 4) a certain type of narration; 5) the special nature of the spatio-temporal organization.

Just like genre, genre form is historically changeable. Its development reflects the evolution of styles and changes in the nature of the literary process. In each era, the genre form has "its own compositional laws of linking word series, its own norms of lexical fluctuations, its own tendencies in the internal dynamics of words, originality of semantics and syntactics" . To reveal them, “to clearly define the boundaries and fundamental divisions between different areas of speech of literary and artistic works ... to show mixed types and their linguistic justification in terms of literature and different contexts of“ social dialectics ”is one of the tasks of philological analysis, which has not yet lost its relevance.

“The struggle for the genre,” Yu.N. Tynyanov - is in essence a struggle for the direction of the poetic word, for its installation. With regard to the genre form, it is also a struggle for aesthetic transformation and artistic modification of the word genre - "prototype". The writer's appeal to a certain genre form is a two-way process: on the one hand, it is the conscious consideration of the "prototype" and the reproduction of the essential features of the primary genre; on the other hand, it is a mandatory transformation of its capabilities, due to the aesthetic intention of the author. The choice of genre form is based on a kind of antinomy norm (standard) - deviation from it.

Orientation to the primary (non-fiction) genre as a "prototype" genre and the transformation of its features is impossible without an idea of ​​a system of speech means that forms a "prototype", which has a significant abstracting and typifying power. So, for example, referring to the form of a diary implies the mandatory use of such speech signals as fixing the time of recording, “fractional” presentation of information, abbreviations, incomplete sentences, means of auto-communication, etc. See, for example, fragments of the text of L. Petrushevskaya’s story “Time is Night ", using the genre form of the diary:

December 30th. Tomorrow New Year. Barely passed the score. I cried in the seventh auditorium. Lenka is silent, says nothing. S. gave in first and left. And as usual, I'm late...

1st of January. Sensation. Lenka and S. were not in the transport workers! I came there at 10 pm like a fool in my grandmother's black dress, with a rose in her hair (Carmen with a fan, the woman gave me, the woman dressed me up) ...

Genre form and genre act as a kind of model, which can have a number of specific implementations (incarnations). It has the character of a relatively closed structure, which is a network of relations between speech means organized in a certain way. These means, performing a genre-forming function, are different character and can conditionally be combined into three groups based on the function they perform. They can participate:

1) in the formation of the content-thematic side of the text;

2) in the formation of the structure of the narrative and the modeling of a certain communicative situation;

3) in the design of the composition of the text.

The first group of means is represented, for example, by lexico-semantic groups (LSG) and, more broadly, by semantic fields that develop the main themes and motifs characteristic of a particular genre form (such semantic fields"life" and "time" in autobiographical prose, the semantic field "journey" in travel and travel records, LSG "vices/virtues" in confession, etc.).

The second group of means is, first of all, the means that mark the narrator's subject-speech plan and oppose it to other possible subject-speech plans, as well as the means that establish contact with the addressee (reader) and model his image.

The third group of means is represented by regular repetitions of various types that determine the coherence of the text, anaphoric substitutions, units that motivate the sequence of episodes and mark their change, as well as speech signals that are firmly attached to the compositional parts that form a whole, see, for example, dates and addresses. to the addressee in the works of epistolary form. So, in the story of A.N. Apukhtin's "Archive of Countess D.", which is a collection of letters from different characters to one addressee, it is the appeals that serve as compositional "seams" delimiting the main parts of the text, at the same time they are aesthetically significant: differences in the method of nominating a single addressee, who, at the same time, he himself is not the sender of any letter, they are expressive and determine the volume, “polyphony” of the depicted, cf .: Dear Countess Ekaterina Alexandrovna; Dear Kitty; my dear runaway; Your Excellency Mother Countess Ekaterina Alexandrovna and etc.

Speech means that serve as regular signals of the genre form are multifunctional. So, for example, nominative sentences in autobiographical texts indicate the narrator's position and at the same time are a means of highlighting each new block of memories, while linking it with the previous one: hum bells. The smell of censer. Crowd of people leaving the church(S. Kovalevskaya. Childhood memories); Alexander Garden, its dissimilarity with any Moscow squares. went into it- like a pond. Its shadyness, dampness, depth (A. Tsvetaeva. Memoirs).

Such a tool as repetition turns out to be especially multifunctional: repetition is a cohesive factor and at the same time performs an amplifying and distinguishing function in the text, the repetition of words forms the thematic grid of the work and is associated with its content; finally, the repetition of characterological means, if it is stable, highlights the point of view of the character or narrator.

Genre-forming speech signals are system: each of its elements is connected with the other, their relations are ordered and hierarchical. So, for example, the communicative dominant in texts written in the form of a diary is autocommunication, which implies the frequency of entries. This factor determines the nature of the means used in the diary. Thematically diverse entries form a certain sequence, which is discrete and is reflected in the change of dates. Each of the dates is associated with an event or a series of events, which are indicated by the forms of the name and verb forms in the perfect or aoristic meaning, interacting with the forms of the present actual. Writing for oneself is always associated with freedom of expression, hence the heavy use of incomplete sentences, ellipsis, abbreviations, implicit transmission of information. Keeping a diary involves the intersection of two spheres: the sphere of written speech and the sphere of inner speech, their interaction during the artistic transformation of the genre form of the diary leads to an increase in lyrical expression, the appearance of a detailed introspection; see, for example, "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" by I.S. Turgenev:

Yes, I'm scared. Half tilted, with greedy attention I examine everything around. Every object is doubly dear to me ... Saturate yourself for the last time, my eyes! Life is removed; she evenly and quietly runs away from me, like a shore from the eyes of a navigator. My nurse's old, yellow face, tied with a warm scarf, a hissing samovar on the table, a pot of geraniums in front of the window, and you, my poor dog Trezor, the pen with which I write these lines, my own hand, I see you now ... here you are, Here.

Different genre forms interact with each other, resulting in "hybrid" formations. So, for the mentioned "Diary of an Extra Person" it is typical to use, along with the form of a diary, elements of an autobiographical form (see the narrator's motivation: "... Reading is too lazy. Eh! I'll tell myself all my life"). The interaction of elements of various genre forms determines the combination of speech means of different types in the text of a particular work. Let us consider in more detail the genre-forming speech means and their functions on the material of one genre form - autobiographical (and "autopsychological") works.

While the process of “blurring” of genre boundaries is deepening in the literature of the New Age, the correlation of genres is becoming insignificant (Yu.N. Tynyanov), a number of genre forms that arose relatively late retain stable content and formal features. These include, for example, autobiographical works. The development of this genre form is associated with the development of self-knowledge of the individual, the discovery of the "I".

Autobiographical texts are built as a story about the main events of the author's life and are characterized by a retrospective attitude. Autobiographical works appeared in Russia only in the 18th century, they were preceded by autohagiographic works - the lives of Avvakum and Epiphanius, created at the end of the 17th century. Initially, the autobiographical text was built as a sequential biography, which is characterized by a strict chronology (it is no coincidence that in the first half of the 18th century the form of fixing the main events “by years” was used). In the future, the autobiography interacts with such a genre as memoirs, and is influenced by it. The autobiography is gradually being fictionalized, the text of the work includes memories of the past, emotional assessments and reflections of the author. I The narrator no longer acts only as a subject of speech, but also as an object of self-description and self-image. The object of autobiographical prose, as noted by M.M. Bakhtin, "not only the world of his past in the light of the present mature consciousness and understanding, enriched with a temporal perspective, but also his past consciousness and understanding of this world (childish, youthful, young). This past awareness is the same subject of the image as the objective world of the past. Both of these consciousnesses, separated by decades, looking at the same world, are not roughly divided ... they enliven this object, introduce into it a kind of dynamics, temporal movement, color the world with a living becoming humanity ... ". In the autobiographical text of the secondary genre, which transforms the structure of the original (primary), thus, two points of view are combined, one of which assumes "past awareness of oneself and the environment", the other - "the present mature awareness and understanding", and in the structure of the text as a result two time plans can be combined and interact: plan of the past And plan of the present narrator("now - then"), which can lead to simultaneous comparison in the text and different spatial positions. The development of this interaction will finally transform the original "prototype" genre.

The autobiographical text focuses primarily on first person narration, the signs of which are an attitude towards reliability, a special subjectivity based on the actualization of the identity of the system of assessments of the narrator and the author, a clear fixation of the spatio-temporal position of the narrator (narrator). In memoirs and autobiographical prose, these properties of first-person narration acquire a special character.

The narrator refers to memories, while a kind of “play” is observed in the text: on the one hand, the inconsistent, impulsive, often subconscious nature of the process of memories based on the flow of associations is emphasized; on the other hand, there is a strict selection of elements reflected and transformed by the word. The sequence of events in the autobiographical text (starting from the 2nd half of XIX c.) is often replaced by a sequence of memories.

Recall signals are regularly included in the narrator's speech in autobiographical prose: I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I see, as I see now etc., introducing a description of some reality, fact or situation in the past and testifying to the selective work of memory: I remember that the words “royal funeral” were often repeated around me(A. Fet. My memories); It was Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna. remember short, dense, black-haired, kind, gentle, compassionate(L. Tolstoy. My life). In autobiographical prose of the XX century. the same function is performed by nominative sentences and free prepositional-case forms. Thus, in V. Kataev's novel about childhood "A Broken Life, or Oberon's Magic Horn", descriptions of past situations are introduced through precisely these syntactic means; an apparently unmotivated sequence of nominatives that appears in the text strengthens the associative links of text fragments ( Song... Golden walnut... French wrestling... Skating rink... and etc.).

The desire for authenticity, which is characteristic of autobiographical prose as a whole, manifests itself in different ways in different authors and in different periods of the development of literature. So, in the literature of the XX century. autobiographical works are widely used, in the construction of which the installation of authenticity is manifested in the montage of disparate memories, in their associative juxtaposition: “Time is like a searchlight. It snatches out of the darkness of memory one piece, then another. That's how you should write. So more reliable” (A. Akhmatova); “I write abruptly, not because this is my style: jerky memories” (V. Shklovsky).

The narrator's speech, containing memories, includes his assessments, expresses his various emotions. The means of their expression are the evaluative characteristics of the realities and persons in question, emotionally colored appeals to them, interrogative constructions, exclamations: Oh, what pleasure I experienced in repeating sweet poems great poet!(A. Fet. My memories); So that, Ogarev, hand in hand we entered life with you! .. I reached ... not to the goal, but to the place where the road goes downhill, and involuntarily I look for your hand to walk together, to shake it and say, smiling sadly : "That's all!"(A. Herzen. Past and thoughts).

The subjective plan of the narrator in the past can be represented by various speech means. These can be lexical units characteristic of a certain time period, for example, “children's” words, evaluative characteristics in the text, etc. In this respect, an excerpt from N.V. Shelgunov’s “Memoirs” is interesting, in which the use of successive addresses reflects a contradictory the history of relations between the generations of "fathers" and "children" from the 40s to the 90s of the XIX century:

When I was little, we were taught to say: “dad”, “mother” and “you”, then they began to say “dad”, “mother” and also “you”; in the sixties, a sharp reaction subverted these soft forms, and the fathers themselves taught their children to say: "father", "mother", "you". Now they say "dad", "mom" and also "you".

Strengthening the direct "voice" of the narrator from the past is facilitated by the concentration of characterological means that create the effect of his insufficient knowledge about his surroundings, the incompleteness of the information that he possesses (speech means of expressing uncertainty, unreliability, questions, etc.): And here is somebody in a scarf and a cap, everything is as I have never seen, but I find out that this is the one who is always with me (nanny or aunt, I don't know), And this someone speaks in a rough voice(L. Tolstoy. My life); My God! What confusion of concepts has taken place in my childish head! Why does the sick old man suffer? what is the evil Mironych, what kind of power is it - Mikhailushka and grandmother ? (S. Aksakov. Childhood of Bagrov-grandson).

The synchronicity of the narrator's time position and the situation in the past recreated in the text is achieved with the help of temporal shifts, the use of present tense forms, and the intensive use of nominatives.

The ratio of the spheres of the narrator in the past and present in an autobiographical text can be of a different nature: either the narrator, recalling the past, comes to the fore, or his direct “voice” is transmitted in childhood and adolescence, and a dynamic balance of both interacting plans can be established in the structure of the text. The typological techniques typical for the organization of autobiographical works are combined with the individual author's methods of constructing the text, organizing its figurative structure.

The structure of the narrative in autobiographical prose is historically changeable: for example, in the literature of the 20th century. the role of means reflecting the subjectivity of the presentation is growing sharply, temporal displacements are becoming increasingly important, establishing the plan of a direct observer - eyewitness and participant in past events, the principle of associative chaining of episodes, scenes recreating the intermittent memories of the narrator is being affirmed. This is how, for example, the works of V. Kataev, Yu. Olesha and others are built.

So, the consideration of speech means assigned to a certain genre form makes it possible to reveal the essential features of the narrative and the spatio-temporal continuum of works, to reveal some patterns of the lexico-semantic organization of texts.

“Researcher,” remarks S.S. Averintsev, - the theory of literature did not bother to give a sufficiently clear network of coordinates for measuring the scope of the concept of "genre". One of the possible ways to clarify this concept is to take into account speech means, which, in the process of genre formation, are formed into a certain system of its signals and then, changing over time, serve as its distinctive signs. Their consideration helps to reveal the dynamics of stable - unstable, stable - mobile, standard (typical) - individual in literary work and contributes to the interpretation of the text. Thus, in the process of philological analysis of the text, it is necessary not only to determine the genre of the work or (more often) to show the interaction of different genres, but also to identify their various signals, consider the transformation of the original genre form and the associated aesthetic effects.

Let us consider in more detail the features of the genre form of autobiography and its transformation in a specific text - “Other Shores” by V. Nabokov.

"Other Shores" by V.V. Nabokov: Genre Originality of the Text

The book of memoirs by V.V. Nabokov "Other Shores", published in 1954, according to the author's definition, "is a systematically connected accumulation of personal memories, geographically stretching from St. Petersburg to St. Nazare and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940; with a few forays into later spatio-temporal points. In the preface to "Other Shores" by V.V. Nabokov himself defined the author's intentions - the "goal" of the work: "describe the past with the utmost accuracy and find in it full-fledged outlines, namely: the development and repetition of secret techs in a clear fate" . According to the author's assessment, this is an ambivalent "hybrid of autobiography and novel".

In Other Shores, the main features of Nabokov's style were especially clearly manifested: amazing lexical richness, the interaction of tropes of different types, which determines the complexity and multidimensionality of artistic images, the language game in which the reader is involved, the semantic density of the text. This work develops those new tendencies in the genre of autobiography that appeared in the prose of the 20th century: the interaction of the autobiography itself with memories, the discontinuity and non-linearity of which determines associativity narration, mosaic composition, combination of different spatial and temporal plans, semantic plurality of the narrator's "I", manifested in a kind of bifurcation, "stratification" of him into "I" in the past and "I" in the present.

Nabokov's Other Shores, perhaps, most vividly embodied the new methods of constructing the text of an autobiographical work, characteristic of the development of this genre in the 20th century. The “I” of the narrator is not only characterized here by semantic plurality, but is also subjected to a kind of alienation: the “double” of the narrator appears in the text, which emphasizes the temporal distance separating his past and present:

How did I get here? As if in a bad dream, the sleigh departed, leaving him standing on the terrible Russian snow. my twin in an American vicuña coat. There is no sleigh like no; their little bells are but the clatter of blood in my ears. Home - for the saving ocean! However doppelgänger is slow. Everything is quiet, everything is bewitched by a bright disk over the Russian desert of my past. Snow - real to the touch; and when I bend down to take a handful of it, half a century of life crumbles into frosty dust between my fingers.

The forms of the first person, as we see, are combined with the forms of the third person. Along with them, second-person forms are used that perform the same function and bring narratives closer to a dialogue of two different hypostases of the “I”, cf., for example:

After some such fights with the elements, the glossy beigner led you, - puffing, wet sniffing, shivering from the cold, - on a strip of sand rolled with ebbs, where an unforgettable barefoot old woman ... quickly removed from the rope and threw at you fleecy raincoat with a hood. In a pine-scented bathing cabin, I took you another attendant...

The alternation of face forms in the subjective organization of the text corresponds to the multiplicity of its addressees. Along with the external addressee - the reader, appeals to which are presented in the work, in "Other Shores" there is also an internal addressee, which is defined in chapter XIV of the text: “Oh, how they go out - across the steppe, across the steppe, moving away, years!” The years go out, my friend, and when they are completely gone, no one will know that you and I know. Starting from Chapter XIV, the text widely uses forms of addressing (addresses, forms of pronouns of the 2nd person), the character of the narrator's designation also changes: the author's "I" is supplemented by the form "we". Highlighting the internal addressee - the author's wife - enhances the lyrical expression of the text and its dialogue.

Nabokov's autobiographical narration preserves the "memory of the genre", however, "Other Shores" is characterized by the associative-free principle of constructing an autobiographical text, its compositional parts are uneven both in terms of the amount of information presented in them and in the coverage of time (thus, the detailed impressions of childhood and youth, spent in Russia corresponds to the compression of time, generalization and speeding up the pace of the narrative in the chapters on emigration).

At the heart of "Other Shores" is the interaction of two genres: autobiography and memoirs - and a game with their figurative formulas. The key word in the text of "Other Shores" is the word memory. According to researchers, it is used 41 times in this work. Word memory in Russian artistic speech is included in various figurative parallels: memory- storage, memory- a book, memory is a record, memory is a bird, memory is a body of water etc., cf.: And event after event stream of memory (P. Vyazemsky); O memory! Faithful you are faithful. / Is yours pond at the bottom waves banners, faces, names...(N. Krandievskaya); But in the memory book with thoughtful attention / We love to check pages about the past(P. Vyazemsky); Next, memory! wing, quiet windy,/ Bring me a different image ...(V. Soloviev); Again the heart at the broken trough / Contemptuously yearn, / Yves ashtray of memory rummage, / And carry cigarette butts from there!(V. Shershenevich); In the pantries of our memory an incalculable number of impressions(V. Domogatsky).

In the text of "Other Shores" the compatibility of the word memory takes into account these figurative parallels, but at the same time significantly expands; Genitive metaphors used by V. Nabokov are characterized by semantic complexity and include new units: screwed memory, glass memory cell, memory view. Traditional figurative parallels are complemented by comparisons: memory is a country, memory is a mechanism. As a result, the memory gets a multidimensional characteristic. It is interpreted as a space, a house, a receptacle, an optical device, and finally, as a being endowed with energy and creative power.

In "Other Shores" Nabokov refuses the chronologically accurate, sequential presentation of the facts and events of the past, which are traditionally characteristic of the autobiographical genre. The narrative is non-linear and is characterized by abrupt transitions from one time plane to another, regular switching from the external, event-driven world to the author's inner world, combining a story about the past with the exposure of the text generation process. The "game" of memories is supplemented by a metatextual game, see, for example: In a cold room, in the arms of a novelist, Mnemosyne dies; I have repeatedly noticed that as soon as I give a fictional character a living trifle from my childhood, it already begins to fade and erase in my memory ... Thus, interspersed in the beginning of Luzhin's Defense, the image of my French governess dies for me in a foreign environment, imposed by the writer. Here is an attempt to salvage what is left of this image.

The through image of the work is the image of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. It regularly appears during the transition from one compositional part to another and motivates the selection of the depicted and the violation of the linearity of the narrative. At the same time, memory is personified, the properties of an actively acting subject are attributed to it. Wed: Mnemosyne begins to be picky and quarrelsome only when you reach the heads of youth; With the help of Vasily Martynovich, Mnemosyne can continue to follow the personal margin of common history; ... I notice that Mnemosyne begins to stray and stops in confusion in the fog, where here and there, as on old maps, smoky, mysterious gaps can be seen: terra incognito...

Mnemosyne is not only the goddess of memory, but also the mother of the muses, this mythological image emphasizes the theme of the connection between memory and creativity, memories and art.

“I think that memory and imagination belong to the same, very mysterious world of human consciousness ... - said V.V. Nabokov. - It could be said that memory is a kind of image concentrated on a certain point ... ". Facts and pictures of the past not only "flood" the memory, but are also "deposited" in it "immediately whitewashed drafts." At the same time, emotional, visual, auditory, tactile, and smell memory are equally significant for the narrator. To recreate pictures of the past, synesthetic metaphors characteristic of Nabokov's style and complex epithets are regularly used, combining the designations of different sensory attributes, cf .:

On the outer path of the park, the lilacness of the lilac, in front of which I stood waiting for the hawks, turned into loose ashes as the day slowly faded, and the fog spread over the fields like milk, and the young moon of the color of Yu hung in the watercolor sky of the color B ... In gloomy nights, in late autumn, under freezing rain, I caught bats with bait, smearing the trunks in the garden with a fragrant mixture of molasses, beer and rum: in the wet black darkness, my lantern theatrically illuminated the sticky-shiny cracks in the oak bark, where ... fabulously beautiful catocals absorbed the drunken sweetness of the bark...

The text of "Other Shores" includes the "confession of a synesthete" - a kind of key for the reader of the text, cf., for example:

In the whitish group, the letters L, N, O, X, E represent ... a rather pale diet of vermicelli, Smolensk porridge, almond milk, dry bread and Swedish bread. A group of cloudy intermediate shades is formed by clysteric H, fluffy-gray W and the same, but with yellowness, W. Turning to the spectrum, we find: a red group with cherry-brick B (thicker than C), pink-flannel M, and pinkish-flesh... C; yellow group with orange Y, ocher E, fawn D, light fawn I, golden U and brass Y...

Thus, descriptions of the past, including a wealth of details, conveying various shades of smell, light, sounds and characterized by an extreme degree of depiction, have in “Other Shores” a special color range that is significant for the author and combines the brightness of the colors of the past with the freshness of perception of the “alphabetic rainbow” present.

For the development of memories in the text of Other Shores, visual images are especially important. The traditional flashback genre signal remember combined here with the verb I see denoting the process of both external and internal vision, and individual situations of the past, which the narrator tells about, are compared with pictures of a magic lantern replacing each other, cf .: I see, for example, such a picture: I am climbing like a frog along the wet, black seaside rocks ...; I see, as in a picture, his small, thin, neat figure, swarthy face, gray-green eyes with a rye sparkle ...; Now a magic lantern will be shown here, but first let me make a small digression.

The stable figurative formula of the genre of autobiography "remembrance - picture" is consistently implemented in the text of "Other Shores", however, it becomes more complicated and transformed: the memory is as close as possible to the imagination, the verb recall alternates with verbs in the text look (look) And "imagine)". The process of recollection is defined, on the one hand, as a look into the past, on the other hand, as the resurrection of the past by the power of poetic imagination and the comprehension of the recurring “secret themes” of fate in it, while the past is characterized through metaphors. draft And score, in which the meanings of "creative processing" and "new incarnation" are actualized, cf.:

I note with satisfaction the highest achievement of Mnemosyne: the skill with which she connects the disparate parts of the main melody, collecting and pulling together the lily-of-the-valley stems of notes hanging here and there throughout the draft score of the past. And I like to imagine, with the loud, jubilant resolution of the collected sounds, first some kind of sunspot, and then, in a clearing focus, a festive table set in the alley ...

Through a quivering prism, I distinguish the faces of households and relatives, silent lips move, carelessly pronouncing forgotten speeches. Steam dies over chocolate, tartlets with blueberry jam cast a blue sheen ... in the place where the next tutor sits, I see only a fluid, indistinct, variable image, pulsating along with the changing shadows of foliage.

Imagination, like memory, is personified in the text, and the word denoting it is included in a number of "theatrical" metaphors, generally characteristic of Nabokov's style. Memories of the past and imaginary scenes, like the world in general, are likened to a theater with frequent changes of scenery; compare:

My motley imagination, as if fawning over me and indulging the child (but in fact, somewhere behind the scenes, in a conspiratorial silence, carefully preparing the distribution of the events of my distant future), presented me with ghostly extracts in small print ... Meanwhile, the scenery changed . The frost tree and the cube snowdrift were removed with a silent prop.

The "reality" Nabokov recreates is refracted, by his own definition, through a series of prisms. “Prisma allows for the distortion of facts, their contemplation from a certain angle, the decomposition of the text into components as a result of the author’s consciousness being set on the“ other ”... Prism performs shift when translating fact into text. The image of the prism in the text of "Other Shores" plays no less important role than the image of Mnemosyne: the prism preserves the images of persons, objects or realities, but transforms them, the memory is supplemented by a figurative representation that gives objects and phenomena a new space-time dimension. Through the "quivering prism" the narrator sees the faces of loved ones, through the "habitual family prisms" he perceives the activities of his father, the glasses of the veranda are presented little hero"magic prism" Moreover, the genre of the work as a whole is defined as "stereoscopic extravaganza". As a result, in Nabokov's autobiographical narration, such a genre-forming feature as an orientation toward authenticity is replaced by an orientation towards the creative transformation of memories and real facts. Imagination is considered as the main way to comprehend the past. "Two worlds" (opposition of the real world and the world of imagination) as an "invariant poetic world» Nabokov is also clearly shown in Other Shores.

The combination of memories and ideas that arise in the present of the narrator determines the semantic complexity of Nabokov's metaphors and the multidimensionality of his images. Let's just focus on one example:

I'm trying to remember the name of the fox terrier again - and well, the spell works! From that far coast, from the smoothly shining evening sands of the past, where each footprint pressed by Friday's heel fills with water and sunset, comes, flies, echoing in the ringing air: Floss! Floss! Floss!

In the given context, lexical means, on the one hand, seem to act in a direct sense and serve as designations for specific realities, on the other hand, they underlie metaphors that go back to archetypal and literary images: so, fleeting time is likened to sand and water, and the narrator is likened to Robinson, intensely peering into the trace he discovered. The chain of verbal metaphors of movement recreates the dynamics of the process of recollection, and the word that comes to mind becomes a symbol of overcoming time. This is how the text resolves “a chain of equations in images, pairwise connecting the next unknown with the known” (B. Pasternak).

The interaction of the real and the imaginary, the blurring of their boundaries determine the originality of temporal relations in the text.

The combination of “patterns of time” determines the play of verb tenses, in Nabokov’s autobiographical narrative, the opposition “now - then” characteristic of this genre is partially removed: for the author there are no rigid boundaries between the past, present and future. The division of the time continuum is subjective and is associated with memories that replace each other in a certain sequence. Based on them, the narrator moves from "real existing things" to "real former things," stored in memory, but not losing their reality. The text is built on mutual transitions from the forms of the past tense to the forms of the present, while the meaning of the latter becomes more complicated, and the functions are enriched. Before us are not the usual forms of the present historical, enlivening the narrative and actualizing the message about individual situations of the past. Nabokov does not so much narrate about the past as he models the past: before us are quasi-memories that are born in the imagination and take on verbal form at the moment of creation. The forms of the present, which are used in such contexts, combine the features of the present actual (the starting point is the moment of text generation) and the present historical; cf., for example:

Summer twilight ("twilight" - what a languid lilac sound!). Time of action: a melting point in the middle of the first decade of our century ... The brother has already been laid down; mother, in the living room, reads me an English fairy tale before bed...

The implementation in the text of the figurative parallel “the past is a play for the theater” brings the forms of the present closer to the forms of the present stage, which are usually used in remarks dramatic works. Thus, the forms of the present acquire syncretism of semantics and multifunctionality. The text actualizes such “semantic overtones” (Yu.P. Knyazev) as the absence of clear temporal boundaries and incompleteness. In combination with lexical concretizers with the meaning of duration or constancy, the forms of the present acquire a timeless meaning and affirm the victory of memory over “devilish time”, cf.: Old trees rustle in the eternal Vyra wind, birds sing loudly, and from across the river comes the discordant and enthusiastic din of bathing village youth, like the wild sounds of growing applause.

Such use of present forms and regular switching of time plans create an aesthetic effect in the text. coexistence events and phenomena related to different temporal planes; as a result, their characteristics acquire fluidity, mobility, cyclicality and overlap each other.

The interaction and interpenetration of different time plans are also characteristic of the syntactic organization of the text. This is especially evident in the structure of polynomial complex sentences that combine elements of prospection and retrospection. Predicative parts describing situations of the past are freely combined with parts that abruptly move the action to another - later - period of time, while information is distributed taking into account not only two temporal plans, but also two worlds: the real world and the world of ideas, real and illusory ; cf., for example:

She [mother] slows down her reading, separating the words meaningfully, and before turning the page, mysteriously places on it a small white hand with a ring adorned with a diamond and a pink ruby, in the transparent facets of which, if I could see them more clearly then, I could distinguish a series of rooms, people, lights, rain, a square - a whole era of emigre life, which was to be lived on the money received for this ring.

The unreal plan usually contains a look into the future (in relation to the events described), it reveals rapprochements that reveal the secret "patterns" of fate. This is how, for example, a polynomial construction is constructed that describes the “levitation” of the father, which the narrator observes in childhood: the use of comparison in it, the transition from the past to the present “inner vision” and concentration in the last predicative parts of the lexical units of the “death” field shift the depicted to another the time plan, not directly reflected in the text, “predicts” the death of the father and expresses the sorrow of the narrator, which is not weakened by time. Within the framework of such a syntactic construction, lexical units acquire ambiguity (for example, ascended, invisible rockers, resting, mortal hands etc.), while the information contained in the sentence turns out to be “multi-layered”, multi-level (it can be divided into everyday level, the level of prospection and the metaphysical level).

The hierarchical organization of the semantically multifaceted syntactic structure also serves as a means of correlating personal time with historical time. "Other Shores" - memories, in the center of which is the private existence of an individual; information about historical events and “rhythms of the era” are usually given as a passing comment, see, for example, the description of impressions from the death of Leo Tolstoy, associatively, through a comparison pointing to future historical cataclysms: “Yes, what are you,” she exclaimed dejectedly and quietly.[mother], joining her hands, and then she added: "It's time to go home,"- as if Tolstoy's death was a harbinger of some kind of apocalyptic troubles.

The juxtaposition and interaction of different temporal and modal plans make the narrative in "Other Shores" extremely voluminous and enhance the multidimensionality of artistic images and the language play in the text. Historical facts turn out to be irrelevant for the narrative, and fiction, imagination defeat reality, the “plausibility” of memories is opposed to the “truth” of poetic imagination. The linearity of biographical time is replaced by a sequence of pictures of the past. Documentary autobiography is combined with fiction. Such principles of construction of the text and its temporal organization, transforming the original genre form, make “Other Shores” by V. V. Nabokov autobiographical work largely new type.

Questions and tasks

I. 1. Read the story of V.V. Nabokov "Admiralty needle".

2. Determine which genre form the author uses.

3. Name the signals of this genre form presented in the text-

4. What is the role of the addresser who sends a letter to the author of the "novel" he has read? What is the paradox of subject-object relations in the structure of the text? How do the textual “roles” of the characters relate to the history of their relationship reflected in the letter (“novel”)?

5. What, from your point of view, is the originality of the structure of the story? How is the original genre form transformed in it?

II. 1. S.N. Broitman remarked: “In lyricism, both proper lyrical genres and lyrical ones with lyrical epic ones can converge ... Pushkin's Anchar is a ballad and a parable.”

Read the poem by A.S. Pushkin "Anchar". Do you agree with the researcher's opinion? Justify your answer.

Levin Yu.I. Selected works. Poetics. Semiotics. - M., 1998. - S. 325.

Broitman S.N. Historical poetics. - M., 2001. - S. 367.

The belonging of a work to one or another genus leaves its mark on the very course of analysis, dictates certain methods, although it does not affect the general methodological principles. Differences between literary genres have almost no effect on the analysis of artistic content, but almost always affect the analysis of form to one degree or another.

Among the literary genres, the epic has the greatest pictorial possibilities and the richest and most developed form structure. Therefore, in the preceding chapters (especially in the section "The structure of a work of art and its analysis"), the exposition was carried out primarily in relation to the epic genre. Let us now see what changes will have to be made in the analysis, taking into account the specifics of drama, lyrics and lyrical epic.

Drama

The drama is in many ways similar to the epic, so the basic methods of analysis for it remain the same. But it should be borne in mind that in the drama, unlike the epic, there is no narrative speech, which deprives the drama of many of the artistic possibilities inherent in the epic. This is partly offset by the fact that the drama is mainly intended for staging on stage, and, entering into a synthesis with the art of the actor and director, acquires additional visual and expressive possibilities. In the actual literary text of the drama, the emphasis shifts to the actions of the characters and their speech; accordingly, the drama tends to such stylistic dominants as plot and heteroglossia. Compared with the epic, the drama is also characterized by a higher degree of artistic convention associated with theatrical action. The conventionality of the drama consists in such features as the illusion of the "fourth wall", replicas "to the side", the characters' monologues alone with themselves, as well as in the increased theatricality of speech and gesture-mimic behavior.

The construction of the depicted world is also specific in drama. We get all the information about him from the conversations of the characters and from the author's remarks. Accordingly, the drama requires from the reader more work of fantasy, the ability to imagine the appearance of the characters, the objective world, the landscape, etc., by mean hints. Over time, the playwrights make their remarks more and more detailed; there is also a tendency to introduce a subjective element into them (for example, in the remark to the third act of the play “At the Bottom”, Gorky introduces an emotionally evaluative word: “In the window near the ground - erysipelas. Bubnov”), there is an indication of the general emotional tone of the scene (the sad sound of a broken string in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard), sometimes the introductory remarks are expanded to a narrative monologue (plays by B. Shaw). The image of the character is drawn with more sparing than in the epic, but also with brighter, stronger means. Characterization of the hero comes to the fore through the plot, through actions, and the actions and words of the heroes are always psychologically saturated and thus characterological. Another leading technique for creating the image of a character is his speech characteristics, manner of speech. Auxiliary techniques are the portrait, self-characterization of the hero and his characterization in the speech of other characters. To express the author's assessment, the characteristic is mainly used through the plot and individual manner of speech.

Peculiar in drama and psychologism. It is devoid of such forms common in the epic as the author's psychological narration, internal monologue, the dialectic of the soul and the stream of consciousness. The internal monologue is brought outward, takes shape in external speech, and therefore the psychological world of the character itself turns out to be more simplified and rationalized in the drama than in the epic. In general, the drama gravitates mainly towards bright and catchy ways of expressing strong and vivid spiritual movements. The greatest difficulty in drama is the artistic development of complex emotional states, the transfer of the depth of the inner world, vague and fuzzy ideas and moods, the sphere of the subconscious, etc. Playwrights learned to cope with this difficulty only towards the end of the 19th century; The psychological plays by Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky and others are indicative here.

The main thing in the drama is the action, the development of the starting position, and the action develops due to the conflict, so it is advisable to start the analysis of a dramatic work with the definition of the conflict, tracing its movement in the future. The dramatic composition is subject to the development of the conflict. The conflict is embodied either in the plot or in the system of compositional oppositions. Depending on the form of embodiment of the conflict, dramatic works can be divided into action plays(Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Ostrovsky), mood plays(Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Chekhov) and discussion plays(Ibsen, Gorky, Shaw). Depending on the type of play, the specific analysis also moves.

So, in Ostrovsky's drama "Thunderstorm", the conflict is embodied in the system of action and events, that is, in the plot. The conflict of the two-plane play: on the one hand, these are the contradictions between the rulers (Wild, Kabanikha) and the subordinates (Katerina, Varvara, Boris, Kuligin, etc.) - this is an external conflict. On the other hand, the action moves thanks to Katerina's internal, psychological conflict: she passionately wants to live, love, be free, clearly realizing at the same time that all this is a sin leading to the death of the soul. The dramatic action develops through a chain of actions, vicissitudes, one way or another changing the initial situation: Tikhon leaves, Katerina decides to get in touch with Boris, publicly repents and, finally, rushes into the Volga. The dramatic tension and attention of the viewer is supported by the interest in the development of the plot: what will happen next, how the heroine will act. The plot elements are clearly visible: the plot (in the dialogue of Katerina and Kabanikh in the first act, an external conflict is detected, in the dialogue of Katerina and Varvara - an internal one), a series of climaxes (at the end of the second, third and fourth acts and, finally, in the last monologue of Katerina in the fifth act ) and the denouement (Katerina's suicide).

In the plot, the content of the work is also mainly realized. Sociocultural issues are revealed through action, and actions are dictated by the prevailing morals, attitudes, and ethical principles in the environment. The plot also expresses the tragic pathos of the play, Katerina's suicide emphasizes the impossibility of a successful resolution of the conflict.

Mood plays are constructed somewhat differently. In them, as a rule, the basis of the dramatic action is the conflict of the hero with a way of life hostile to him, turning into a psychological conflict, which is expressed in the internal disorder of the characters, in a feeling of spiritual discomfort. As a rule, this feeling is typical not for one, but for many characters, each of which develops its own conflict with life, so it is difficult to single out the main characters in mood plays. The movement of the stage action is concentrated not in the plot twists and turns, but in the change of emotional tone, the chain of events only enhances this or that mood. Such plays usually have psychologism as one of the stylistic dominants. The conflict develops not in plot, but in compositional oppositions. The reference points of the composition are not elements of the plot, but the culmination of psychological states, which, as a rule, occur at the end of each action. Instead of a plot - the discovery of some initial mood, a conflicting psychological state. Instead of a denouement, there is an emotional chord in the finale, which, as a rule, does not resolve contradictions.

So, in Chekhov's play "Three Sisters" there is practically no through series of events, but all scenes and episodes are connected with each other by a common mood - rather heavy and hopeless. And if in the first act the mood of bright hope still glimmers (Irina's monologue “When I woke up today…”), then in the further development of the stage action it is drowned out by anxiety, longing, and suffering. The stage action is based on the deepening of the characters' experiences, on the fact that each of them gradually gives up the dream of happiness. The external destinies of the three sisters, their brother Andrey, Vershinin, Tuzenbakh, Chebutykin, do not add up, the regiment leaves the city, vulgarity triumphs in the face of the “rough animal” Natasha in the Prozorovs’ house, and the three sisters will not be in the coveted Moscow ... All events that are not related to each other with a friend, have the goal of reinforcing the general impression of dysfunction, disorder of being.

Naturally, in mood plays, psychologism plays an important role in style, but psychologism is peculiar, subtextual. Chekhov himself wrote about this: “I wrote to Meyerhold and urged in the letter not to be sharp in the image nervous person. After all, the vast majority of people are nervous, the majority suffer, a minority feel acute pain, but where - on the streets and in houses - do you see people rushing about, jumping, grabbing their heads? Suffering must be expressed as it is expressed in life, that is, not with feet or hands, but with a tone, a look; not gesture, but grace. The subtle spiritual movements inherent in intelligent people, and externally must be expressed subtly. You will say: scene conditions. No conditions allow lies ”(Letter to O.L. Knipper dated January 2, 1900). In his plays and, in particular, in The Three Sisters, stage psychologism relies precisely on this principle. The depressed mood, melancholy, suffering of the characters are only partially expressed in their replicas and monologues, where the character "brings out" his experiences. An equally important method of psychologism is the discrepancy between the external and internal - mental discomfort is expressed in nothing meaningful phrases(“At Lukomorye there is a green oak” by Masha, “Balzac got married in Berdichev” by Chebutykin, etc.), in causeless laughter and tears, in silence, etc. An important role is played by the author's remarks, emphasizing the emotional tone of the phrase: ”, “nervously”, “tearfully”, “through tears”, etc.

The third type is a discussion play. The conflict here is deep, based on the difference in worldview attitudes, the problems, as a rule, are philosophical or ideological and moral. “In the new plays,” wrote B. Shaw, “the dramatic conflict is built not around the vulgar inclinations of a person, his greed or generosity, resentment and ambition, misunderstandings and accidents, and everything else, which in itself does not give rise to moral problems, but around the clash of various ideals." Dramatic action is expressed in the clash of points of view, in the compositional opposition of individual statements, therefore, the paramount attention in the analysis should be given to heteroglossia. A number of characters are often drawn into the conflict, each with his own position in life, therefore in this type of play it is difficult to single out the main and secondary characters, just as it is difficult to single out positive and bad guys. Let us refer again to Shaw: “The conflict “…” is not between the right and the guilty: the villain here can be just as conscientious as the hero, if not more. In fact, the problem that makes the play interesting "..." is to find out who is the hero here and who is the villain. Or, to put it another way, there are no villains or heroes here.” The chain of events serves mainly as a pretext for the characters' statements and provokes them.

On these principles, in particular, M. Gorky's play "At the Bottom" is built. The conflict here is in the clash of different points of view on the nature of man, on lies and truth; in general terms, this is a conflict of the sublime, but unreal, with the base real; philosophical problem. In the very first act, this conflict is tied up, although from the point of view of the plot it is nothing more than an exposition. Despite the fact that no important events does not occur in the first action, dramatic development has already begun, the rough truth and the sublime lie have already come into conflict. On the very first page, this key word “truth” sounds (Kvashnya’s remark “Ah! You can’t stand the truth!”). Here Satin contrasts the resounding "human words" with sonorous, but meaningless "organon", "sicambre", "macrobiotic", etc. Here Nastya reads " fatal love”, The actor recalls Shakespeare, the Baron is coffee in bed, and all this is in sharp contrast to the ordinary life of a rooming house. In the first act, one of the positions in relation to life and to the truth has already sufficiently manifested itself - what can be called, following the author of the play, "the truth of the fact." This position, cynical and inhumane in essence, is presented in the play by Bubnov, calmly stating something absolutely indisputable and just as cold (“Noise is not a hindrance to death”), chuckling skeptically at Pepel’s romantic phrases (“And the threads are rotten!”), expressing his position in the discussion of his life. In the very first act, the antipode of Bubnov, Luka, also appears, opposing the soulless, wolf life of the rooming house with his philosophy of love and compassion for one’s neighbor, whatever it may be (“In my opinion, not a single flea is bad: everyone is black, everyone jumps …”), comforting and encouraging people of the bottom. In the future, this conflict develops, drawing into the dramatic action more and more new points of view, arguments, reasoning, parables, etc., sometimes - at the reference points of the composition - pouring out into a direct dispute. The conflict culminates in the fourth act, which is an already open discussion about Luke and his philosophy, practically unrelated to the plot, turning into a dispute about law, truth, understanding of man. Let us pay attention to the fact that the last action takes place after the completion of the plot and the denouement of the external conflict (the murder of Kostylev), which is of an auxiliary nature in the play. The play's ending is also not a plot denouement. It is associated with a discussion about truth and man, and the Actor's suicide serves as one more cue in the dialogue of ideas. At the same time, the finale is open, it is not intended to resolve the philosophical dispute going on the stage, but, as it were, invites the reader and viewer to do it themselves, affirming only the idea of ​​the unbearability of life without an ideal.

Lyrics

Lyrics as a literary genre opposes epic and dramaturgy, therefore, when analyzing it, one should take into account the generic specificity to the highest degree. If the epic and drama reproduce human existence, the objective side of life, then the lyrics - the human consciousness and subconsciousness, the subjective moment. Epos and drama depict, lyric expresses. It can even be said that lyric poetry belongs to a completely different group of arts than epic and dramaturgy - not to the pictorial, but to the expressive. Therefore, many methods of analyzing epic and dramatic works are inapplicable to a lyric work, especially with regard to its form, and literary criticism has developed its own methods and approaches for the analysis of lyrics.

The foregoing concerns, first of all, the depicted world, which in the lyrics is built in a completely different way than in the epic and drama. The stylistic dominant, to which the lyrics gravitate, is psychologism, but psychologism is peculiar. In the epic and partly in the drama, we are dealing with the image of the inner world of the hero, as if from the outside, while in the lyrics, psychologism is expressive, the subject of the statement and the object of the psychological image coincide. As a result, lyrics explore the inner world of a person in a special perspective: it takes advantage of the sphere of experience, feelings, emotions and reveals it, as a rule, in static, but more deeply and vividly than is done in the epic. Subject to lyrics and the sphere of thinking; many lyrical works are built on the development of not an experience, but a reflection (though it is always colored by one or another feeling). Such lyrics (“Do I wander along the noisy streets ...” by Pushkin, “Duma” by Lermontov, “Wave and Thought” by Tyutchev, etc.) is called meditative. But in any case, the depicted world of a lyrical work is, first of all, a psychological world. This circumstance should be especially taken into account when analyzing individual pictorial (it would be more correct to call them “pseudo-pictorial”) details that can be found in lyrics. First of all, we note that a lyrical work can do without them at all - for example, in Pushkin's poem "I loved you ..." all psychological details without exception are completely absent. If object-pictorial details do appear, then they perform the same function of a psychological image: either indirectly creating emotional mood works, or becoming the impression of a lyrical hero, the object of his reflection, etc. Such, in particular, are the details of the landscape. For example, in A. Fet's poem "Evening" there does not seem to be a single psychological detail, but only a description of the landscape. But the function of the landscape here is to create a mood of peace, tranquility, silence with the help of the selection of details. The landscape in Lermontov's poem "When the yellowing field is agitated ..." is an object of reflection, given in the perception of the lyrical hero, the changing pictures of nature constitute the content of the lyrical reflection, ending with an emotional-figurative conclusion-generalization: "Then the anxiety of my soul is humbled ...". We note by the way that in Lermontov's landscape there is no accuracy required from the landscape in the epic: lily of the valley, plum and yellowing cornfield cannot coexist in nature, as they belong to different seasons, which shows that the landscape in the lyrics, in fact, is not a landscape as such, but only the impression of a lyrical hero.

The same can be said about the details of the portrait and the world of things found in lyrical works - they perform an exclusively psychological function in lyrics. So, “a red tulip, a tulip is in your buttonhole” in A. Akhmatova's poem “Confusion” becomes a vivid impression of the lyrical heroine, indirectly denoting the intensity of the lyrical experience; in her poem “The Song of the Last Meeting” a substantive detail (“I am on right hand put on the Glove on the left hand") serves as a form of indirect expression of the emotional state.

The greatest difficulty for analysis are those lyrical works in which we meet with some semblance of a plot and a system of characters. Here there is a temptation to transfer to the lyrics the principles and methods of analyzing the corresponding phenomena in the epic and drama, which is fundamentally wrong, because both the “pseudo-plot” and the “pseudo-characters” in the lyrics have a completely different nature and a different function - first of all, again, psychological. So, in Lermontov’s poem “The Beggar”, it would seem that an image of a character appears who has a certain social status, appearance, age, that is, signs of existential certainty, which is typical for epic and drama. However, in reality, the existence of this “hero” is dependent, illusory: the image turns out to be only part of a detailed comparison and, therefore, serves to more convincingly and expressively convey the emotional intensity of the work. The beggar as a fact of being is not here, there is only a rejected feeling, conveyed with the help of allegory.

In Pushkin's poem "Arion" something like a plot appears, some kind of dynamics of actions and events is outlined. But it would be senseless and even absurd to look for plot points, climaxes and denouements in this “plot”, to look for the conflict expressed in it, etc. The chain of events is Pushkin’s lyrical hero’s understanding of the events of the recent political past, given in allegorical form; in the foreground here are not actions and events, but the fact that this “plot” has a certain emotional coloring. Consequently, the plot in the lyrics does not exist as such, but acts only as a means of psychological expressiveness.

So, in a lyrical work, we do not analyze either the plot, or the characters, or the subject details outside of their psychological function, that is, we do not pay attention to what is fundamentally important in the epic. But in the lyrics, the analysis of the lyrical hero acquires fundamental significance. Lyric hero - this is the image of a person in lyrics, the bearer of experience in a lyrical work. Like any image, the lyrical hero carries not only unique and inimitable personality traits, but also a certain generalization, therefore his identification with the real author is unacceptable. Often the lyrical hero is very close to the author in terms of personality, the nature of experiences, but nevertheless, the difference between them is fundamental and remains in all cases, since in each specific work the author actualizes some part of his personality in the lyrical hero, typing and summarizing lyrical experiences. Thanks to this, the reader easily identifies himself with the lyrical hero. It can be said that the lyrical hero is not only the author, but also anyone who reads this work and experiences the same experiences and emotions as the lyrical hero. In a number of cases, the lyrical hero correlates only to a very weak extent with the real author, revealing a high degree of conventionality of this image. So, in Tvardovsky's poem "I was killed near Rzhev ..." the lyrical narration is conducted on behalf of a fallen soldier. In rare cases, the lyrical hero appears even as the antipode of the author (“ moral man» Nekrasov). Unlike the character of an epic or dramatic work, the lyrical hero, as a rule, does not have an existential certainty: he does not have a name, age, portrait features, sometimes it is not even clear whether he is male or female. female gender he belongs. The lyrical hero almost always exists outside of ordinary time and space: his experiences flow "everywhere" and "always".

The lyrics gravitate towards a small volume and, as a result, to a tense and complex composition. In lyrics, more often than in epic and drama, compositional techniques of repetition, opposition, amplification, and montage are used. Of exceptional importance in the composition of a lyrical work is the interaction of images, often creating a two-dimensional and multi-layered artistic meaning. So, in Yesenin's poem "I am the last poet of the village ..." the tension of the composition is created, firstly, by the contrast of color images:

On the trail blue fields
Iron guest coming soon.
Oatmeal, spilled at dawn,
Will collect it black a handful of.

Secondly, the technique of amplification attracts attention: the images associated with death are constantly repeated. Thirdly, the opposition of the lyrical hero to the “iron guest” is compositionally significant. Finally, the cross-cutting principle of the personification of nature links together individual landscape images. All this together creates a rather complex figurative and semantic structure in the work.

The main reference point of the composition of a lyrical work is in its finale, which is especially felt in works of small volume. For example, in Tyutchev's miniature "Russia cannot be understood with the mind ..." the entire text serves as a preparation for the last word, which contains the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe work. But even in more voluminous creations, this principle is often maintained - let's name as examples Pushkin's "Monument", Lermontov's "When the yellowing field is agitated ...", Blok's "On the Railway" - poems where the composition is a direct ascending development from the beginning to the last, percussion stanza.

The stylistic dominants of lyrics in the field of artistic speech are monologism, rhetoric and poetic form. In the overwhelming majority of cases, a lyrical work is built as a monologue of a lyrical hero, so we do not need to single out the narrator's speech in it (it is absent) or give speech characteristic characters (there are none). However, some lyrical works are built in the form of a dialogue " actors"(" Conversation of a bookseller with a poet "," Scene from "Faust" by Pushkin, "Journalist, reader and writer" by Lermontov). In this case, the “characters” entering into dialogue embody different facets of lyrical consciousness, therefore they do not have their own speech manner; the principle of monologism is maintained here as well. As a rule, the speech of a lyrical hero is characterized by literary correctness, so there is no need to analyze it from the point of view of a special speech manner.

Lyrical speech, as a rule, is speech with increased expressiveness of individual words and speech structures. In lyrics, there is a greater proportion of tropes and syntactic figures compared to epic and dramaturgy, but this pattern is visible only in the general array of all lyrical works. Separate lyrical poems, especially the XIX-XX centuries. may also differ in the absence of rhetoric, nominativity. There are poets whose style consistently eschews rhetoric and tends to be nominative - Pushkin, Bunin, Tvardovsky - but this is rather an exception to the rule. Such exceptions as the expression of the individual originality of the lyrical style are subject to mandatory analysis. In most cases, however, an analysis of both individual methods of speech expressivity and the general principle of organizing a speech system is required. So, for Blok, the general principle will be symbolization, for Yesenin - personifying metaphorism, for Mayakovsky - reification, etc. In any case, the lyrical word is very capacious, contains a "condensed" emotional meaning. For example, in Annensky's poem "Among the Worlds" the word "Star" has a meaning that is clearly superior to the dictionary one: it is not in vain that it is written with a capital letter. The star has a name and creates an ambiguous poetic image behind which you can see the fate of the poet, and the woman, and the mystical secret, and the emotional ideal, and, perhaps, a number of other meanings acquired by the word in the process of a free, albeit guided by the text, course of associations.

Due to the "condensedness" of poetic semantics, lyrics gravitate toward rhythmic organization, poetic embodiment, since the word in verse is more loaded with emotional meaning than in prose. “Poetry, in comparison with prose, has an increased capacity of all its constituent elements“...” The very movement of words in verse, their interaction and comparison in terms of rhythm and rhyme, a clear identification of the sound side of speech given by the poetic form, the relationship of rhythmic and syntactic structure and etc. - all this is fraught with inexhaustible semantic possibilities, which prose, in essence, is deprived of “...” words."

The case when the lyrics use not a poetic, but a prose form (the genre of the so-called poems in prose in the works of A. Bertrand, Turgenev, O. Wilde), is subject to mandatory study and analysis, since it indicates an individual artistic originality. "A poem in prose", not being rhythmically organized, retains such common features of the lyrics as "small volume, increased emotionality, usually plotless composition, a general attitude towards the expression of a subjective impression or experience."

The analysis of poetic features of lyrical speech is largely an analysis of its tempo and rhythmic organization, which is extremely important for a lyrical work, since tempo-rhythm has the ability to objectify certain moods and moods in itself. emotional states and with the need to call them in the reader. So, in the poem by A.K. Tolstoy “If you love, so without reason ...” the four-foot trochaic creates a cheerful and cheerful rhythm, which is also facilitated by adjacent rhyme, syntactic parallelism and through anaphora; the rhythm corresponds to the cheerful, cheerful, mischievous mood of the poem. In Nekrasov's poem "Reflections at the Front Door", the combination of three- and four-foot anapaest creates a slow, heavy, dull rhythm, in which the corresponding pathos of the work is embodied.

In Russian versification, only iambic tetrameter does not require special analysis - this is the most natural and frequently encountered size. Its specific content consists only in the fact that verse, in its tempo-rhythm, approaches prose, without, however, turning into it. All other poetic meters, not to mention the dolnik, declamatory-tonic and free verse, have their own specific emotional content. In general terms, the content of poetic meters and versification systems can be described as follows: short lines (2-4 feet) in two-syllable meters (especially in chorea) give energy to the verse, a vigorous, clearly defined rhythm, express, as a rule, a bright feeling, a joyful mood (“Svetlana” by Zhukovsky, “Winter is angry for a reason…” by Tyutchev, “Green Noise” by Nekrasov). Iambic lines elongated to five or more feet or more convey, as a rule, the process of reflection, the intonation is epic, calm and measured (“Pushkin’s Monument”, “I don’t like your irony ...” Nekrasov, “Oh friend, do not torment me with a cruel sentence ... » Feta). The presence of spondees and the absence of pyrrhias make the verse heavier and vice versa - a large number of pyrrhias contributes to the emergence of free intonation, close to colloquial, gives the verse lightness and euphony. The use of three-syllable sizes is associated with a clear, usually heavy rhythm (especially with an increase in the number of feet to 4–5), often expressing despondency, deep and difficult feelings, often pessimism, etc. mood (“Both boring and sad” Lermontov, “ Wave and thought "Tyutcheva," Whatever the year - the forces are decreasing ... "Nekrasova). Dolnik, as a rule, gives a nervous, ragged, whimsically capricious rhythm, expressing an uneven and anxious mood (“The girl sang in the church choir ...” Blok, “Confusion” by Akhmatova, “No one took away anything ...” Tsvetaeva). The use of the declamatory-tonic system creates a rhythm that is clear and at the same time free, the intonation is energetic, “offensive”, the mood is sharply defined and, as a rule, elevated (Mayakovsky, Aseev, Kirsanov). However, it should be remembered that the indicated correspondences of rhythm to poetic meaning exist only as tendencies and may not manifest themselves in individual works, here much depends on the individual-specific rhythmic originality of the poem.

The specificity of the lyrical gender also influences the meaningful analysis. When dealing with a lyrical poem, it is important first of all to comprehend its pathos, to catch and determine the leading emotional mood. In many cases, the correct definition of pathos makes it unnecessary to analyze the rest of the elements of artistic content, especially the idea, which often dissolves in pathos and does not have an independent existence: shone ... "- the pathos of romance, in Blok's poem "I am Hamlet; the blood grows cold ... ”- the pathos of tragedy. The formulation of the idea in these cases becomes unnecessary, and practically impossible (the emotional side noticeably prevails over the rational), and the definition of other aspects of the content (themes and problems in the first place) is optional and auxiliary.

Lyroepic

Lyro-epic works are, as the name implies, a synthesis of epic and lyrical principles. From the epic, the lyro-epic takes the presence of a narrative, plot (albeit weakened), a system of characters (less developed than in the epic), reproduction objective world. From lyrics - an expression of subjective experience, the presence of a lyrical hero (united with the narrator in one person), an attraction to a relatively small volume and poetic speech, often psychologism. In the analysis of lyric-epic works, special attention should be paid not to the distinction between epic and lyrical principles (this is the first, preliminary stage of the analysis), but to their synthesis within one artistic world. For this, the analysis of the image of the lyrical hero-narrator is of fundamental importance. So, in Yesenin's poem "Anna Snegina", lyrical and epic fragments are separated quite clearly: when reading, we easily distinguish plot and descriptive parts, on the one hand, and lyrical monologues saturated with psychologism ("The war has eaten my whole soul ...", "The moon laughed, like a clown…”, “Our meek homeland is poor…”, etc.). Narrative speech easily and inconspicuously turns into expressive-lyrical speech, the narrator and the lyrical hero are inseparable facets of the same image. Therefore - and this is very important - the narration of things, people, events is also imbued with lyricism, we feel the intonation of the lyrical hero in any text fragment of the poem. So, the epic transmission of the dialogue between the hero and the heroine ends with the lines: “The distance thickened, became foggy ... I don’t know why I touched her gloves and shawl”, here the epic beginning instantly and imperceptibly turns into a lyrical one. When describing what seems to be purely external, a lyrical intonation and a subjective-expressive epithet suddenly appear: “We have arrived. House with a mezzanine Slightly squatted on the facade. Excitingly smells of jasmine Its wicker palisade. And the intonation of subjective feeling slips in the epic narrative: “Toward evening they left. Where? I don’t know where,” or: “Severe, formidable years! But is it possible to describe everything?

Such penetration of lyrical subjectivity into the epic narrative is the most difficult to analyze, but at the same time the most interesting case of the synthesis of epic and lyrical beginnings. It is necessary to learn to see the lyrical intonation and the hidden lyrical hero in a text that is objectively epic at first glance. For example, in D. Kedrin's poem "Architects" there are no lyrical monologues as such, but the image of a lyrical hero can nevertheless be "reconstructed" - it manifests itself primarily in the lyrical excitement and solemnity of artistic speech, in a loving and sincere description of the church and its builders, in an emotionally rich final chord, redundant from the point of view of the plot, but necessary to create a lyrical experience. It can be said that the lyricism of the poem is manifested in the way a well-known historical story is told. There are also places in the text with special poetic tension, in these fragments the emotional intensity and the presence of the lyrical hero - the subject of the story - are especially clearly felt. For example:

And above all this shame
That church was
Like a bride!
And with his matting,
With a turquoise ring in my mouth
indecent girl
Stood at the Execution Ground
And wondering
Like a fairy tale
Looking at that beauty...

And then the sovereign
He ordered these architects to be blinded,
So that in his land
Church
There was one like this
So that in the Suzdal lands
And in the lands of Ryazan
And others
They didn't put up a better temple,
Than the Church of the Intercession!

Let us pay attention to the external ways of expressing lyrical intonation and subjective excitement - breaking the line into rhythmic segments, punctuation marks, etc. We also note that the poem is written in a rather rare size - a five-foot anapaest - giving solemnity and depth to intonation. As a result, we have a lyrical story about an epic event.

Literary genres

The category of genre in the analysis of a work of art is somewhat less important than the category of gender, but in some cases, knowledge of the genre nature of a work can help in the analysis, indicate which aspects should be paid attention to. In literary criticism, genres are groups of works within literary genres, united by common formal, meaningful or functional features. It should be said right away that not all works have a clear genre nature. So, Pushkin's poem "On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night ...", Lermontov's "The Prophet", plays by Chekhov and Gorky, "Vasily Terkin" by Tvardovsky and many other works are indefinable in the genre sense. But even in those cases where the genre can be defined quite unambiguously, such a definition does not always help the analysis, since genre structures are often identified by a secondary feature that does not create a special originality of content and form. This applies mainly to lyrical genres, such as elegy, ode, message, epigram, sonnet, etc. But still, sometimes the genre category matters, pointing to the content or formal dominant, some features of the problem, pathos, poetics.

In epic genres, it is primarily the opposition of genres in terms of their volume that matters. The established literary tradition here distinguishes the genres of a large (novel, epic) middle (story) and small (story) volume, however, in typology, the distinction between only two positions is real, since the story is not an independent genre, gravitating in practice either to the story (“Belkin’s Tale” by Pushkin) or to the novel (his own “ Captain's daughter"). But here the distinction between large and small volume seems essential, and above all for the analysis of a small genre - a story. Yu.N. Tynyanov rightly wrote: "The calculation for a large form is not the same as for a small one." The small volume of the story dictates the peculiar principles of poetics, specific artistic techniques. First of all, this is reflected in the properties of literary representation. The story is highly characteristic of the “economy mode”, it cannot have long descriptions, therefore it is characterized not by details-details, but by details-symbols, especially in the description of a landscape, portrait, interior. Such a detail acquires heightened expressiveness and, as a rule, refers to the creative imagination of the reader, suggests co-creation, conjecture. According to this principle, he built his descriptions, in particular, the master artistic detail Chekhov; let us recall, for example, his textbook depiction of a moonlit night: “In the descriptions of nature, one must grasp at small details, grouping them in such a way that after reading, when you close your eyes, a picture is given. For example, you will get a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled in a ball ”(Letter to Al. P. Chekhov dated May 10, 1886). Here the details of the landscape are guessed by the reader based on the impression of one or two dominant symbolic details. The same thing happens in the field of psychologism: for the writer, it is important not so much to reflect the mental process in its entirety, but to recreate the leading emotional tone, the atmosphere of the hero’s inner life at the moment. The masters of such a psychological story were Maupassant, Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Hemingway and others.

In the composition of the story, like any small form, the ending is very important, which is either in the nature of a plot denouement or an emotional ending. Noteworthy are those endings that do not resolve the conflict, but only demonstrate its insolubility; so-called "open" finals, as in Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog".

One of the genre varieties of the story is short story The short story is an action-packed narrative, the action in it develops quickly, dynamically, strives for a denouement, which contains the whole meaning of what is told: first of all, with its help, the author gives an understanding of the life situation, makes a “sentence” on the depicted characters. In short stories, the plot is compressed, the action is concentrated. A fast-paced plot is characterized by a very economical system of characters: there are usually just enough of them so that the action can continuously develop. Cameo characters are introduced (if they are introduced at all) only to kick-start the action of the story and disappear immediately afterwards. In the novel, as a rule, there are no side storylines, copyright digressions; only what is absolutely necessary for understanding the conflict and the plot is reported from the past of the characters. Descriptive elements that do not move the action forward are kept to a minimum and appear almost exclusively at the beginning: then, towards the end, they will interfere, slowing down the development of the action and distracting attention.

When all these tendencies are brought to their logical conclusion, the short story acquires a pronounced anecdote structure with all its main features: a very small volume, an unexpected, paradoxical "shock" ending, minimal psychological motivations for actions, the absence of descriptive moments, etc. used by Leskov, early Chekhov, Maupassant, O'Henry, D. London, Zoshchenko and many other novelists.

The novella, as a rule, is based on external conflicts in which contradictions collide (the plot), develop and, having reached the highest point in development and struggle (climax), are more or less rapidly resolved. Moreover, the most important thing is that the contradictions encountered must and can be resolved in the course of the development of the action. For this, the contradictions must be sufficiently definite and manifest, the characters must have some psychological activity in order to strive at all costs to resolve the conflict, and the conflict itself must, at least in principle, be amenable to immediate resolution.

Consider from this angle the story of V. Shukshin "The Hunt to Live". A young city guy comes into the hut to the forester Nikitich. It turns out that the guy escaped from prison. Suddenly, the district authorities come to Nikitich to hunt, Nikitich tells the guy to pretend to be asleep, puts the guests down and falls asleep himself, and waking up, he finds that "Kolya the Professor" has left, taking Nikitich's gun and his tobacco pouch with him. Nikitich rushes after him, overtakes the guy and takes his gun from him. But in general Nikitich likes the guy, he is sorry to let go of that one, in winter, unaccustomed to the taiga and without a gun. The old man leaves the guy a gun, so that when he reaches the village, he will hand it over to Nikitich's godfather. But when they have already gone each in their own direction, the guy shoots Nikitich in the back of the head, because “it will be better, father. More reliable."

The clash of characters in the conflict of this novel is very sharp and clear. The incompatibility, the opposite of Nikitich's moral principles - principles based on kindness and trust in people - and the moral standards of the "Koli-professor", who "wants to live" for himself, "better and more reliable" - also for himself - the incompatibility of these moral principles intensifies in the course of action and is embodied in a tragic, but inevitable denouement according to the logic of the characters. We note the special significance of the denouement: it not only formally completes the plot action, but exhausts the conflict. The author's assessment of the depicted characters, the author's understanding of the conflict are concentrated precisely in the denouement.

Major genres of epic - novel And epic - differ in their content, primarily in terms of problems. The content dominant in the epic is national, and in the novel - novelistic (adventurous or ideological and moral) problems. For the novel, accordingly, it is extremely important to determine which of the two types it belongs to. Depending on the genre content dominant, the poetics of the novel and the epic is also constructed. The epic tends to plot, the image of the hero in it is built as the quintessence of typical qualities inherent in the people, ethnic group, class, etc. In the adventure novel, the plot also clearly prevails, but the image of the hero is built in a different way: he is emphatically free from class, corporate and other connections with the environment that gave rise to it. In an ideological and moral novel, the stylistic dominants will almost always be psychologism and heteroglossia.

Over the past century and a half, a new genre of large volume has developed in the epic - the epic novel, which combines the properties of these two genres. This genre tradition includes such works as Tolstoy's War and Peace, Quiet Don» Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy's "Walking Through the Torments", Simonov's "The Living and the Dead", Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" and some others. The epic novel is characterized by a combination of national and ideological and moral issues, but not a simple summation of them, but such an integration in which the ideological and moral search for a person is correlated primarily with the people's truth. The problem of the epic novel becomes, in the words of Pushkin, "the fate of man and the fate of the people" in their unity and interdependence; events critical for the entire ethnic group give philosophical search the hero is especially acute and urgent, the hero is faced with the need to determine his position not just in the world, but in national history. In the field of poetics, the epic novel is characterized by a combination of psychologism with plot, a compositional combination of general, middle and close-ups, the presence of many storylines and their interweaving, author's digressions.

The fable genre is one of the few canonized genres that have retained their real historical existence in the 19th–20th centuries. Some features of the fable genre may suggest promising directions for analysis. This is, firstly, major degree conventions and even the direct fantasticness of the figurative system. The plot is conditional in the fable, therefore, although it can be analyzed by elements, such an analysis does not give anything interesting. figurative system the fable is built on the principle of allegory, its characters denote some abstract idea - power, justice, ignorance, etc. Therefore, the conflict in the fable should be sought not so much in the clash of real characters, but in the opposition of ideas: Lamb ”Krylov, the conflict is not between the Wolf and the Lamb, but between the ideas of strength and justice; the plot is driven not so much by the Wolf's desire to dine, but by his desire to give this case a "legitimate look and sense."

In the composition of a fable, two parts are usually clearly distinguished - the plot (often unfolding in the form of a dialogue of characters) and the so-called morality - the author's assessment and understanding of the depicted, which can be placed both at the beginning and at the end of the work, but never in the middle. There are fables without morals. The Russian poetic fable is written in multi-footed (free) iambic, which makes it possible to bring the intonational pattern of the fable closer to colloquial speech. According to the norms of the poetics of classicism, the fable belongs to the “low” genres (we note that among the classicists the word “low” in relation to the genre did not mean blasphemy, but only established the place of the genre in the aesthetic hierarchy and set the most important features of the classic canon), therefore, it is widely found heteroglossia and, in particular, vernacular, which brings even closer speech form fables to the spoken language. In fables, we usually meet with sociocultural issues, sometimes with philosophical ones (“The Philosopher”, “Two Doves” by Krylov) and very rarely with national ones (“The Wolf in the Kennel” by Krylov). The specificity of the idea world in a fable is such that its elements are expressed, as a rule, directly and do not cause difficulties in interpretation. However, it would be wrong to always look for an open expression of an idea in the morality of a fable - if this is true, for example, in relation to the fable "The Monkey and the Glasses", then in "The Wolf and the Lamb" the moral is formulated not the idea, but the theme ("The strong always blame the weak ").

The lyrical-epic genre of the ballad is also a canonized genre, but already from the aesthetic system of not classicism, but romanticism. It assumes the presence of a plot (usually simple, one-line) and, as a rule, its emotional comprehension by a lyrical hero. The form of organization of speech is poetic, the size is arbitrary. An essential formal feature of a ballad is the presence of a dialogue. In the ballad there is often a mystery, a mystery, which is associated with the emergence of conventionally fantastic imagery (Zhukovsky); often the motive of fate, fate (“The Song of the Prophetic Oleg” by Pushkin, “The Ballad of a Smoky Carriage” by A. Kochetkov). The pathos in the ballad is sublime (tragic, romantic, less often heroic).

In dramaturgy over the past hundred - one hundred and fifty years, genre boundaries have been blurred, and many plays have become indefinable in terms of genre (Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky, Shaw, etc.). However, along with genre-amorphous constructions, there are also more or less pure genres. tragedy And comedy. Both genres are defined by their leading pathos. For tragedy, therefore, the nature of the conflict is of paramount importance; in the analysis it is required to show its insolubility, despite the active attempts of the characters to do this. It should be taken into account that the conflict in tragedy is usually multifaceted, and if on the surface a tragic collision appears as a confrontation between characters, then at a deeper level it is almost always a psychological conflict, a tragic duality of the hero. So, in Pushkin's tragedy "Boris Godunov" the main stage action is built on external conflicts: Boris - the Pretender, Boris - Shuisky, etc. Deeper aspects of the conflict are manifested in folk scenes, and especially in the scene of Boris with the holy fool - this is a conflict between the tsar and the people. And finally, the deepest conflict is the contradictions in Boris's soul, his struggle with his own conscience. It is this last collision that makes the position and fate of Boris truly tragic. The means of revealing this deep conflict in tragedy is a kind of psychologism, which must be paid attention to; in selective analysis, it is necessary to focus on scenes with high psychological content and emotional intensity - for example, in Boris Godunov, such reference points of the composition will be Shuisky's story about the death of Dimitri , the scene with the holy fool, Boris' internal monologues.

In comedy, the pathos of satire or humor, less often irony, becomes the dominant content; problems can be very diverse, but most often socio-cultural. In the field of style, such properties as heteroglossia, plot, increased conventionality become important and subject to analysis. Basically, the analysis of the form should be aimed at clarifying why this or that character, episode, scene, replica is comical, funny; on the forms and techniques of achieving a comic effect. Thus, in Gogol's comedy The Inspector General, one should dwell in detail on those scenes where an inner, deep comedy is manifested, consisting in a contradiction between what should be and what is. Already the first act, which is essentially a detailed exposition, provides a huge amount of material for analysis, since in a frank conversation of officials it turns out the actual state of affairs in the city, which does not coincide with what should be: the judge takes bribes with greyhound puppies in the naive conviction that this is not a sin , government funds allocated for the church were stolen, and a report was presented to the authorities that the church “began to be built, but burned down”, “a tavern in the city, uncleanness”, etc. The comedy further intensifies as the action develops, moreover special attention should be paid to those scenes and episodes where all sorts of absurdities, inconsistencies, and alogism are manifested. Aesthetic analysis in the consideration of comedy should prevail over the problematic and semantic, in complete contrast to the traditional practice of teaching.

In some cases, it is difficult to analyze the author's genre subtitles, which do not quite coincide with modern ideas about a particular genre. In this case, for a correct understanding of the author's intention, it is necessary to find out how the given genre was perceived by the author and his contemporaries. For example, in the practice of teaching, the genre of Griboedov's play "Woe from Wit" is often puzzling. What kind of comedy is this, if the main conflict is dramatic, there is no special setting for laughter, when reading or watching, the impression is not comic at all, but the pathos of the protagonist and is generally close to tragedy? To understand the genre, one must turn to the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, in line with which Griboyedov worked and which did not know the genre of drama, but only tragedy or comedy. Comedy (or, in other words, "high comedy", as opposed to farce) did not imply a mandatory setting for laughter. In general, dramatic works belonged to this genre, giving a picture of the mores of society and revealing its vices, an accusatory and instructive emotional orientation was obligatory, but not necessarily comic; at the comedy it was not at all supposed to laugh at the top of its lungs, but it was supposed to reflect. Therefore, in Griboedov's comedy, one should not place a special emphasis on the pathos of satire, the corresponding methods of poetics, rather, one should look for invective as a leading emotional tone in it. This - serious - pathos does not contradict either the drama of the conflict or the character of the protagonist.

Another example is the author's genre designation " dead souls"- a poem. Under the poem, we are accustomed to understand a poetic lyrical-epic work, therefore, the solution to the Gogol genre is often sought in the author's digressions, which give the work subjectivity, lyricism. But this is not the point at all, Gogol simply perceived the very genre of the poem differently than we do. The poem for him was “a small kind of epic”, that is, not the features of the form, but the nature of the problematic were taken as a genre sign here. A poem, unlike a novel, is a work with national problems, in which we are talking not about the particular, but about the general, about the fate of not individuals, but the people, the motherland, the state. With this understanding of the genre, the features of poetics are also correlated. Gogol's work: an abundance of extra-plot elements, the inability to single out the main character, the epic slowness of the narrative, etc.

Another example is Ostrovsky's drama "Thunderstorm", which, by the nature of the conflict, its resolution and leading emotional pathos, is, of course, a tragedy. But the fact is that in the era of Ostrovsky, the dramaturgical genre of tragedy was determined not by the nature of the conflict and pathos, but by the problem-thematic feature. Tragedy could only be called a work depicting outstanding historical figures, often dedicated to the historical past, national-historical in its problems and sublime in terms of the object of the image. Works from the life of merchants, philistines, and townsfolk could only be called a drama given the tragic nature of the conflict.

These are the main features of the analysis of a work in connection with its genre and genre.

? CONTROL QUESTIONS:

1. What are the characteristics of drama as literary kind? What is the difference between action plays, mood plays and discussion plays?

2. What is the specificity of lyrics as a literary genre? What requirements does this specificity impose on the analysis of the work?

3. What should and should not be analyzed in the world of a lyrical work? What is a lyrical hero? What is the meaning of tempo in lyrics?

4. What is a lyric-epic work and what are the main principles of its analysis?

5. In what cases and in relation to what genres is it necessary to analyze the genre features of the work? What literary genres do you know that are essential for the content or form of a work?

Exercises

1. Compare the given works with each other and determine the specific function of remarks in each of them:

N.V. Gogol. Marriage,

A.N. Ostrovsky. Snow Maiden,

A. P. Chekhov. Uncle Ivan,

M. Gorky. Old man.

2. Correct errors in the play type definition (not necessarily all definitions are wrong):

A.S. Pushkin. Boris Godunov - mood play,

N.V. Gogol. The players are a play of action

ON THE. Ostrovsky. Dowry - a play-discussion,

ON THE. Ostrovsky. Mad money is a mood play

L.N. Tolstoy. The power of darkness is a play-debate,

A. P. Chekhov. Ivanov - a play of mood,

A.P. Chekhov. The seagull is an action play,

M. Gorky. The old man is an action play

M.A. Bulgakov. Days of the Turbins - a play-discussion,

A.V. Vampilov. Duck hunting is a mood play.

3. Briefly describe the image of the lyrical hero in the following works:

M.Yu. Lermontov. Prophet,

ON THE. Nekrasov. I don't like your irony...

A.A. Block. Oh spring without end and without edge ...,

A.T. Tvardovsky. In the case of a major utopia...

4. Determine the poetic size and the tempo it creates in the following works;

A.S. Pushkin. It's time, my friend, it's time! Rest the heart asks ...,

I.S. Turgenev. Foggy morning, gray morning...

ON THE. Nekrasov. Reflections at the front door

A.A. Block. stranger,

I.A. Bunin. Loneliness,

S.A. Yesenin. I am the last poet of the village...,

V.V. Mayakovsky. A conversation with the financial inspector about poetry,

M.A. Svetlov. Grenada.

Final task

In the works below, note the generic and genre features that are essential for analysis, and analyze them. At the same time, note those cases when the generic and genre affiliation of the work has practically no effect on the analysis.

Texts for analysis

A: A.S. Pushkin. Feast in Time of Plague,

M.Yu. Lermontov. Masquerade,

N.V. Gogol. auditor,

A.N. Ostrovsky. Wolves and sheep

L.N. Tolstoy. Living Dead,

A. P. Chekhov. Ivanov,

M. Gorky. Vassa Zheleznova,

L. Andreev. Human life.

B: K.N. Batyushkov. My genius

V.A. Zhukovsky. lark,

A.S. Pushkin. Elegy (Crazy years faded fun ...),

M.Yu. Lermontov. Sail,

F.I. Tyutchev. These poor villages...

I.F. Annensky. Wish,

A.A. Block. About valor, about exploits, about glory ...,

V. V. Mayakovsky. Sergei Yesenin,

N.S. Gumilev. Choice.

IN: V.A. Zhukovsky. willow cranes,

A.S. Pushkin. Groom,

ON THE. Nekrasov. Railway,

A.A. Block. Twelve,

S.A Yesenin. Black man.

Exploring the context

Context and its types

A literary work, on the one hand, is self-sufficient and closed in itself, and on the other hand, it comes into contact with extra-textual reality in different ways - context. The context in the broad sense of the word is understood as the whole set of phenomena associated with the text of a work of art, but at the same time outside it. There is a literary context - the inclusion of a work in the work of the writer, in the system literary trends and currents; historical - the socio-political situation in the era of the creation of the work; biographically-everyday - the facts of the writer's biography, the realities of the everyday way of life of the era, this also includes the circumstances of the writer's work on the work (history of the text) and his non-artistic statements.

The issue of involving contextual data in the analysis of a work of art is solved ambiguously. In some cases, out of context, it is generally impossible to understand a literary work (for example, Pushkin’s epigram “To Two Alexanders Pavlovichs” requires mandatory knowledge of the historical context - the activities of Alexander I, and the biographical - knowledge of the lyceum Alexander Pavlovich Zernov); in other cases, the involvement of contextual data is optional, and sometimes, as will be seen from the following, even undesirable. Usually the text itself contains direct or indirect indications of what context should be referred to for its correct understanding: for example, in Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, the realities of the “Moscow” chapters indicate the everyday context, the epigraph and the “evangelical” chapters determine literary context, etc.

Historical context

The study of the historical context is a more familiar operation for us. It has even turned into a kind of obligatory template, so that the schoolboy and student tend to start any conversation about the work by the way and inopportunely from the era of its creation. Meanwhile, the study of the historical context is not always necessary.

It should be noted that when perceiving a work of art, some kind of, even the most approximate and general historical context is almost always present - so, it is difficult to imagine a reader who would not know what Pushkin did in Russia in the era of the Decembrists, under the autocratic-feudal system, after the victory in the Patriotic War of 1812, etc., that is, he would not have even a vague idea of ​​the Pushkin era. The perception of almost any work thus, willy-nilly, takes place against a certain contextual background. The question, therefore, is whether it is necessary to expand and deepen this background knowledge of the context for an adequate understanding of the work. The solution to this question is prompted by the text itself, and above all by its content. In the case when we have a work with a pronounced eternal, timeless theme, the involvement of the historical context turns out to be useless and unnecessary, and sometimes harmful, because it distorts real connections. artistic creativity with the historical era. So, in particular, it would be directly wrong to explain (and this is sometimes done) the optimism of Pushkin's intimate lyrics by the fact that the poet lived in an era of social upsurge, and the pessimism of Lermontov's intimate lyrics - an era of crisis and reaction. In this case, the involvement of contextual data does not give anything for the analysis and understanding of the work. On the contrary, when specific historical aspects are essential in the subject matter of a work, it may be necessary to refer to the historical context.

Such an appeal, as a rule, is also useful for a better understanding of the writer's worldview, and thereby the problems and axiomatics of his works. So, in order to understand the worldview of the mature Chekhov, it is necessary to take into account the intensified in the second half of the 19th century. materialistic tendencies in philosophy and natural sciences, the teachings of Tolstoy and the controversy around him, the widespread use of the subjective-idealistic philosophy of Schopenhauer in Russian society, the crisis of the ideology and practice of populism, and a number of other socio-historical factors. Their study will help in a number of cases to better understand Chekhov's positive program in the field of morality and the principles of his aesthetics. But, on the other hand, the involvement of this kind of data is not strictly necessary: ​​after all, Chekhov's worldview is fully reflected in his artistic creations, and their thoughtful and careful reading provides almost everything necessary for understanding Chekhov's axiomatics and problems.

In any case, there are a number of dangers associated with using contextual historical data that you need to be aware of and be aware of.

First, the study of the literary work itself cannot be substituted for the study of its historical context. A work of art cannot be regarded as an illustration of historical processes, losing the idea of ​​its aesthetic specificity. Therefore, in practice, the involvement of the historical context should be extremely moderate and limited to the framework of a work that is absolutely necessary for understanding. Ideally, an appeal to historical information should occur only when one or another fragment of the text cannot be understood without such an appeal. For example, when reading "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin, one should obviously imagine in general terms the system of serfdom, the difference between corvée and dues, the position of the peasantry, etc.; when analyzing Gogol's "Dead Souls" you need to know about the order of submission of revision tales, when reading Mayakovsky's "Mystery-buff" - be able to decipher political hints, etc. In any case, it should be remembered that the involvement of historical context data does not replace analytical work on the text , but is an auxiliary technique.

Secondly, the historical context must be drawn on in sufficient detail, taking into account the complex and sometimes variegated structure of the historical process in each given period. So, when studying the era of the 30s of the XIX century. it is absolutely insufficient to indicate that this was the era of the Nikolaev reaction, crisis and stagnation in public life. In particular, it is necessary to take into account the fact that this was also the era of the ascending development of Russian culture, represented by the names of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Belinsky, Stankevich, Chaadaev and many others. The era of the 60s, which we habitually consider the heyday of revolutionary democratic culture, also carried other principles, manifested in the activities and works of Katkov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, A. Grigoriev and others. Examples of this kind could be multiplied .

And of course, we must resolutely reject the stereotype according to which all the great writers who lived under the autocratic serf system fought against autocracy and serfdom for the ideals of a brighter future.

Thirdly, in the general historical situation, one must see mainly those aspects of it that have a direct impact on literature as a form of public consciousness. This is primarily not a socio-economic basis and not a political superstructure, which is often the idea of ​​an era in the practice of teaching, but the state of culture and social thought. Thus, for understanding Dostoevsky’s work, it is important, first of all, not that his era fell on the second stage of the Russian liberation movement, not the crisis of the feudal system and the gradual transition to capitalist relations, not the form of monarchical government, but the controversy between Westerners and Slavophiles, aesthetic discussions, the struggle of Pushkin’s and Gogol trends, the position of religion in Russia and in the West, the state of philosophical and theological thought, etc.

Thus, the involvement of a historical context in the study of a work of art is an auxiliary and not always necessary methodological method of analysis, but by no means its methodological principle.

Biographical context

The same can be said, and even more justifiably, about the biographical context. Only in the rarest cases is it needed to understand the work (in lyrical genres with a pronounced functional orientation - epigrams, less often in messages). In other cases, the involvement of a biographical context is not only useless, but often harmful, since it reduces the artistic image to a specific fact and deprives it of a generalizing meaning. So, to analyze Pushkin's poem "I loved you ...", we absolutely do not need to know which particular woman this message is addressed to and what kind of relationship the real author had with her, since Pushkin's work is a generalized image light and uplifting feeling. The biographical context may not enrich, but impoverish the idea of ​​the writer's work: for example, the nationality of the same Pushkin cannot be explained by one biographical fact - the songs and tales of Arina Rodionovna - she was also born through direct observation folk life, the assimilation of its customs, traditions, moral and aesthetic norms, through the contemplation of Russian nature, through the experience of the Patriotic War of 1812, through familiarization with European culture etc. and was thus a very complex and profound phenomenon.

It is therefore optional, and often undesirable, to establish real life prototypes of literary characters, and even more so to reduce literary characters to their prototypes - this impoverishes the artistic image, deprives it of a generalizing content, simplifies the idea of ​​the creative process and does not at all testify to the realism of the writer, as long time was considered in our literary criticism. Although it should be noted that back in the 1920s, the outstanding Russian literary theorist A.P. Skaftymov warned of the danger of dissolving the aesthetic qualities of a work of art in a biographical context and clearly wrote: “It is even less necessary for the aesthetic understanding of a work to compare its internal images with the so-called “prototypes”, no matter how reliable the connection between one and the other. The properties of the prototype cannot in the least serve as a support in the internal interpretation of certain features projected by the author in the corresponding character.

The biographical context can also include what is called the "creative laboratory" of the artist, the study of work on the text: drafts, initial revisions, etc. The involvement of this kind of data is also not necessary for analysis (by the way, they may simply not be), but when methodologically inept use brings only harm. In most cases, the logic of teachers of literature turns everything upside down here: the fact of the final edition is replaced by the fact of a draft and, as such, is called upon to prove something. So, for many teachers, the original title of Griboedov's comedy "Woe to the Wit" seems more expressive. In the spirit of this title and interpreted ideological meaning works: smart Chatsky was hunted down by Famus Moscow. But logic when using facts creative history the work should be completely opposite: the original title was discarded, which means that it did not fit Griboyedov, it seemed unsuccessful. Why? - yes, obviously, precisely because of its straightforwardness, sharpness, which does not reflect the real dialectic of the relationship between Chatsky and Famus Society. It is this dialectic that is well conveyed in the final title: woe not to the mind, but to the bearer of the mind, who himself puts himself in a false and ridiculous position, the sword, as Pushkin puts it, beads before the Repetilovs, and so on. In general, the same Skaftymov spoke well about the relationship between the final text and the creative biographical context: “As for the study of draft materials, plans, successive editorial changes, etc., even this area of ​​study without theoretical analysis cannot lead to an aesthetic understanding of the final text. The facts of the draft are by no means equivalent to the facts of the final edition. The intentions of the author in one or another of his characters, for example, could change at different times of work, and the idea could not be presented in the same lines, and it would be incongruous to transfer the meaning of the draft fragments, even if they are full of clarity, to the final text "..." Only the very the work can speak for itself. The course of the analysis and all its conclusions must immanently grow out of the work itself. The author himself contains all the ends and beginnings. Any retreat into the area of ​​draft manuscripts, or into the area of biographical information would threaten to change and distort the qualitative and quantitative ratio of the ingredients of the work, and this would, as a result, respond to the clarification of the final intention "..." judgments based on drafts would be judgments about what the work wanted to be or could be, but not about what it is has become and is now in the final form consecrated by the author.

The literary scholar seems to be echoed by the poet; Here is what Tvardovsky writes on the subject of interest to us: “You can and should not know any “early” and other works, no “variants” - and write on the basis of the well-known and generally significant works of the writer the most important and most essential” (Letter to P. S. Vykhodtsev dated April 21, 1959).

In solving complex and controversial issues of interpretation, literary practitioners and especially teachers of literature are often inclined to resort to the author's own judgment about his work, and this argument is given unconditionally decisive importance ("The author himself said ..."). For example, in the interpretation of Turgenev's Bazarov, the phrase from Turgenev's letter becomes such an argument: "... if he is called a nihilist, then it must be read: revolutionary" (Letter to K.K. Sluchevsky dated April 14, 1862). Let us pay attention, however, to the fact that this definition does not sound in the text, and certainly not because of fear of censorship, but in essence: not a single character trait speaks of Bazarov as a revolutionary, that is, according to Mayakovsky , as about a person who "understanding or guessing the coming centuries, fights for them and leads humanity to them." And mere hatred of the aristocrats, disbelief in God and the denial of noble culture for a revolutionary is clearly not enough.

Another example is Gorky's interpretation of the image of Luka from the play "At the Bottom". Gorky wrote already in the Soviet era: “... There are still a very large number of comforters who console only so that they do not get bored with their complaints, do not disturb the usual peace of a cold soul that has endured everything. The most precious thing for them is this peace, this stable balance of their feelings and thoughts. Then their own knapsack, their own teapot and a cooking pot are very dear to them “…” Comforters of this kind are the most intelligent, knowledgeable and eloquent. That is why they are the most harmful. Luka was supposed to be such a comforter in the play "At the Bottom", but apparently I did not manage to make him like that.

It was on this statement that the former long years the prevailing understanding of the play as a denunciation of the "comforting lie" and discrediting the "harmful old man". But again, the objective meaning of the play resists such an interpretation: Gorky nowhere discredits the image of Luka artistic means - neither in the plot, nor in the statements of the characters he likes. On the contrary, only embittered cynics mock him maliciously - Bubnov, Baron, and partly Kleshch; does not accept either Luke or his philosophy Kostylev. Those who have preserved the “soul of life” - Nastya, Anna, the Actor, the Tatar - feel in him the truth they really need - the truth of participation and pity for the person. Even Satin, who supposedly should be the ideological antagonist of Luka, even he declares: “Dubye ... keep silent about the old man! The old man is not a charlatan. What is truth? Man is the truth! He understood this ... He is smart! .. He ... acted on me like acid on an old and dirty coin ... ”. And in the plot, Luka shows himself only from the best side: he speaks humanly with the dying Anna, tries to save the Actor and Ash, listens to Nastya, etc. The conclusion inevitably follows from the whole structure of the play: Luka is the carrier humane treatment to a man, and his lies sometimes people need than the humiliating truth.

Other examples of this kind of discrepancy can be cited. objective meaning text and its author's interpretation. So what, the authors do not know what they are doing? How can such discrepancies be explained? Many reasons.

First, the objective discrepancy between intent and execution, when the author, often without noticing it himself, does not say exactly what he was going to say. This happens as a result of a general and still not quite clear for us law of artistic creation: a work is always richer in meaning than the original idea. Obviously, Dobrolyubov came closest to understanding this law: “No, we do not impose anything on the author, we say in advance that we do not know for what purpose, due to what preliminary considerations he depicted the story that constitutes the content of the story “On the Eve”. It is not so important for us that wanted tell the author how much what affected them, even unintentionally, simply as a result of a faithful reproduction of the facts of life” (“When will the real day come?”).

Secondly, between the creation of a work and the statement about it, there may be a significant period of time during which the author's experience, worldview, likes and dislikes, creative and ethical principles, etc. change. This happened, in particular, with Gorky in the above case. , and even earlier with Gogol, who at the end of his life gave a moralistic interpretation of The Inspector General, which clearly did not coincide with its original objective meaning. Sometimes the writer can be strongly influenced literary criticism on his work (as happened, for example, with Turgenev after the release of "Fathers and Sons"), which can also cause a desire to retroactively "correct" your creation.

But the main reason for the discrepancy between the artistic meaning and the author's interpretation is the discrepancy between the artistic worldview and the writer's theoretical worldview, which often conflict and almost never coincide. The worldview is logically and conceptually ordered, while the worldview is based on the direct feeling of the artist, includes emotional, irrational, subconscious moments in which a person simply cannot be aware of. This spontaneous and largely uncontrolled concept of the world and man forms the basis of a work of art, while the basis of the author's extra-artistic statements is a rationally ordered worldview. This is where writers' "conscientious misconceptions" about their creations mainly come from.

Theoretical literary criticism realized quite a long time ago the danger of referring to the author's extra-artistic statements in order to understand the meaning of the work. Remembering Dobrolyubov's principle of "real criticism" quoted above, let us turn again to Skaftymov's article: "The third-party testimony of the author, which goes beyond the limits of the work, can only have a suggestive value and, for its recognition, requires verification by theoretical means of immanent analysis." The writers themselves are also often aware of the impossibility, uselessness or harmfulness of self-interpretations. So, Blok refused to comment on the author's intention of his poem "The Twelve". Tolstoy wrote: “If I wanted to say in words everything that I meant to express in a novel, then I would have to write the same novel that I wrote first” (Letter to N.N. Strakhov dated April 23 and 26, 1876 G.). Large contemporary writer U. Eco speaks even more sharply: “The author should not interpret his work. Or he should not have written a novel, which by definition is an interpretation machine “…” The author should have died after finishing the book. In order not to get in the way of the text.

In general, it must be said that often writers, in addition to their artistic heritage, leave behind philosophical, journalistic, literary-critical, epistolary works, and so on. To what extent does their study help in the analysis of a work of art? The answer to this question is ambiguous. Ideally, a literary critic is obliged to give a full-fledged analysis of a literary text, completely without resorting to extra-textual data, which in any case are auxiliary. However, in a number of cases, an appeal to the author's non-fictional statements can be useful, primarily in terms of studying poetics. In the literary-critical or epistolary heritage, aesthetic principles formulated by the writer himself can be found, the application of which to the analysis of a literary text can have a positive effect. Thus, the key to the complex unity of Tolstoy's novels is given to us by the following statement by Tolstoy: "In everything, almost in everything that I wrote, I was guided by the need for a collection of thoughts linked together to express myself, but each thought, expressed in words separately, loses its meaning is terribly lowered when one is taken from the clutch in which it is located. The linkage itself is composed not by a thought (I think), but by something else, and it is impossible to express the basis of this linkage directly in words, but only indirectly - in words describing images, actions, positions ”(Letter to N.N. Strakhov dated 23 and April 26, 1876). An understanding of Chekhov's principles of expressing the author's subjectivity is facilitated by a letter to Suvorin, in which one of the basic principles of Chekhov's poetics is formulated: "When I write, I fully rely on the reader, believing that he himself will add the subjective elements missing in the story" (Letter to A.S. Suvorin on April 1, 1890). To understand Mayakovsky's poetics, his theoretical and literary article "How to make poetry" gives a lot. Attracting such and similar materials of a general nature can bring nothing but benefit for analysis.

The situation is more complicated with attempts to clarify the content of a work of art by drawing on the non-artistic statements of the writer. Here we are always in danger, which was discussed above - as a rule, it is possible to reconstruct the worldview of the author from non-artistic statements, but not his artistic worldview. Their discrepancy takes place in all cases and can lead to a depleted and even distorted understanding of the literary text. Contextual analysis in this direction can be useful if the worldview and worldview of the writer in general terms coincide, and the creative person is distinguished by a kind of solidity, integrity (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov). When the consciousness of the writer is internally contradictory and his theoretical attitudes diverge from artistic practice (Gogol, Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, Gorky), the danger of replacing the worldview with a worldview and distorting the content of the work increases sharply. In any case, it should be remembered that any involvement of extra-textual data can be useful only when it complements immanent analysis, and does not replace it.

Literary context

As far as the literary context is concerned, bringing it into the analysis almost never does any harm. It is especially useful to compare the work under study with other works of the same author, since the mass reveals more clearly the patterns inherent in the work of the writer as a whole, his inclination to certain problems, the originality of style, etc. This path has the advantage that in the analysis of a separate work allows you to go from the general to the specific. Thus, the study of Pushkin's work in its entirety reveals a problem that is not immediately noticeable in individual works - the problem of "man's independence", his inner freedom, based on a sense of belonging to the eternal principles of being, national tradition and world culture. Thus, a comparison of the poetics of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" with "Demons" and "The Brothers Karamazov" makes it possible to identify a typical problem situation for Dostoevsky - "blood according to conscience". Sometimes the attraction of a literary context is even an indispensable condition for the correct comprehension of a single work of art, which can be illustrated by the example of the perception of Chekhov's work by lifetime criticism. The early stories of the writer, appearing one by one in the newspapers, did not attract close attention, did not seem to be something significant. Attitude towards Chekhov changes with the advent of collections his stories: put together, they turned out to be a significant fact in Russian literature, their original problematic content and artistic originality were more clearly revealed. The same can be said about lyrical works: they somehow “do not look” alone, their natural perception is in a collection, magazine selection, collection of works, when individual artistic creations are mutually illuminated and complement each other.

Involving a wider literary context, that is, the work of the predecessors and contemporaries of a given author, is also generally desirable and useful, although not so necessary. The involvement of this kind of information serves the purpose of comparison, comparison, which makes it possible to speak more convincingly about the originality of the content and style of this author. In this case, the most useful for analysis is the comparison of contrast art systems(Pushkin with Lermontov, Dostoevsky with Chekhov, Mayakovsky with Pasternak) or vice versa, similar, but differing in important nuances (Fonvizin - Griboyedov, Lafontaine - Krylov, Annensky - Blok). In addition, it should be noted that the literary context is natural and closest to a work of art.

Context changes over time

The greatest difficulty is the historical change in the context in the process of perceiving a literary work in subsequent eras, since the idea of ​​​​realities, customs, stable speech formulas that were quite ordinary for readers of the past era, but completely unfamiliar to the reader of subsequent generations, is lost, as a result of which involuntary impoverishment occurs, and even a distortion of the meaning of the work. The loss of context can thus significantly affect the interpretation, therefore, when analyzing the works of cultures distant from us, a so-called real commentary, sometimes very detailed, is needed. Here, for example, with what areas of life of the Pushkin era Yu.M. Lotman, the author of the commentary to "Eugene Onegin": "Economy and property status" ... "Education and service of the nobles" ... "Interests and occupations of a noble woman" ... "Noble dwelling and its surroundings in the city and estate" ... "Day of a secular person. Entertainment “…” Ball “…” Duel “…” Vehicles. Road". And this is not counting the most detailed commentary on individual lines, names, speech formulas, etc.

The general conclusion that can be drawn from what has been said is as follows. Contextual analysis is, at best, a private auxiliary device, in no way replacing immanent analysis; the need for a particular context for the correct perception of the work is indicated by the organization of the text itself.

? CONTROL QUESTIONS:

1. What is context?

2. What kinds of contexts do you know?

3. Why is it not always necessary to use contextual data, and sometimes even harmful for literary analysis?

4. What indicates to us the need to involve certain contextual data?

Exercise

With regard to the works below, establish the expediency of involving each type of context in their analysis, using the following rating scale: a) involvement is necessary, b) acceptable, c) inappropriate, d) harmful.

Texts for analysis:

A.S. Pushkin. Mozart and Salieri

M.Yu. Lermontov. Hero of our time,

N.V. Gogol. Taras Bulba, Dead Souls,

F.M. Dostoevsky. teen, demons,

A. P. Chekhov. Student,

M.A. Sholokhov. Quiet Don,

A.A. Akhmatova. She clenched her hands under a dark veil ..., Requiem,

A.T. Tvardovsky. Terkin in the other world.

Final task

In the texts below, determine the appropriateness of using contextual data of one kind or another and conduct a contextual analysis in accordance with this. Show how the use of context contributes to a fuller and deeper understanding of the text.

Texts for analysis

A.S. Pushkin. Arion,

M.Yu. Lermontov. Farewell, unwashed Russia...,

L.N. Tolstoy. Childhood,

F.M. Dostoevsky. poor people

N.S. Leskov. Warrior,

A. P. Chekhov. Chameleon,

Memories of A.T. Tvardovsky. M., 1978. S. 234.

Turgenev I.S. Sobr. cit.: V 12 t. M., 1958. T. 12. S. 339.

Gorky M. Sobr. cit.: V 30 t. M., 1953. T. 26. S. 425.

Dobrolyubov N.A. Sobr. cit.: V 3 t. M., 1952. T. 3. S. 29.

Skaftymov A.P. Decree. op. From 173–174.

Tolstoy L.N. Full coll. cit.: V 90 t. M., 1953. T. 62. S. 268.

Eco W. The name of the rose. M., 1989. S. 428–430.

Tolstoy L.N. Full coll. cit.: V 90 v. T. 62. S. 268.

Chekhov A.P. Full coll. op. and letters: In 30 tons. Letters. T. 4. S. 54.

Lotman Yu.M. Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". Comment: Teacher's guide. L, 1980. S. 416.

Methodology for the analysis of a literary work

When analyzing a work of art, one should distinguish between ideological content and artistic form.

A. Idea content includes:

1. subject matter works - socio-historical characters chosen by the writer in their interaction;

2. issues- the most significant aspects for the author and the properties of already reflected characters, singled out and strengthened by him in the artistic image;

3. pathos works - the ideological and emotional attitude of the writer to the depicted social characters (heroism, tragedy, drama, satire, humor, romance and sentimentality).

Pathos- the highest form of ideological and emotional assessment of the writer's life, revealed in his work. The statement of the greatness of the feat of an individual hero or a whole team is an expression heroic pathos, and the actions of the hero or the collective are characterized by free initiative, moreover, these actions are usually aimed at the implementation of high humanistic principles. The prerequisite for the heroic in fiction is the heroism of reality, the struggle against the forces of nature, for independence and national freedom, for the free labor of people, the struggle for peace.

When the author describes the deeds and feelings of people who are characterized by a deep and ineradicable contradiction between the desire for a lofty ideal and the fundamental impossibility of achieving it, then we have tragic pathos. The forms of tragic pathos are very diverse and historically changeable. Dramatic pathos is distinguished by the absence of a fundamental nature of a person's opposition to impersonal hostile circumstances. The tragic character is always marked by exceptional moral loftiness and significance. The differences in the characters of Katerina in The Thunderstorm and Larisa in Ostrovsky's The Dowry clearly demonstrate the difference in these types of pathos.

Great importance in the art of the XIX-XX centuries acquired romantic pathos, with the help of which the importance of the individual's striving for an emotionally anticipated universal ideal is affirmed. close to romantic sentimental pathos, although its range is limited by the family sphere of manifestation of the feelings of the characters and the author. All these types of pathos carry affirmative beginning and realize the sublime as the main and most general aesthetic category.

The general aesthetic category of negation of negative manifestations is the category of the comic. comic- this is a form of life that claims to be significant, but has historically outlived its positive content and therefore causes laughter. Comic contradictions as an objective source of laughter can be recognized satirically or humorously. An angry denial of socially dangerous comic phenomena determines the civic nature of the pathos of satire. A mockery of comic contradictions in the moral and domestic sphere of human relations causes a humorous attitude towards the depicted. Mocking can be both denying and affirming the contradiction depicted. Laughter in literature, as in life, is extremely diverse in its manifestations: smile, mockery, sarcasm, irony, sardonic grin, Homeric laughter.

B. Art form includes:

1. Details of subject figurativeness: portrait, actions of characters, their experiences and speech (monologues and dialogues), everyday environment, landscape, plot (sequence and interaction of external and internal actions of characters in time and space);

2. Composite details: order, method and motivation, narratives and descriptions of the depicted life, author's reasoning, digressions, inserted episodes, framing ( image composition- the ratio and location of subject details within a separate image);

3. Stylistic details: figurative and expressive details of the author's speech, intonational-syntactic and rhythmic-strophic features of poetic speech in general.

The scheme of analysis of a literary and artistic work

1. History of creation.

2. Subject.

3. Issues.

4. The ideological orientation of the work and its emotional pathos.

5. Genre originality.

6. The main artistic images in their system and internal connections.

7. Central characters.

8. The plot and features of the structure of the conflict.

9. Landscape, portrait, dialogues and monologues of characters, interior, setting of the action.

11. The composition of the plot and individual images, as well as the general architectonics of the work.

12. The place of the work in the work of the writer.

13. Place of the work in the history of Russian and world literature.

The general plan for answering the question about the significance of the writer's work

A. The place of the writer in the development of Russian literature.

B. The place of the writer in the development of European (world) literature.

1. The main problems of the era and the attitude of the writer to them.

2. Traditions and innovation of the writer in the field:

b) topics, problems;

V) creative method and style;

e) speech style.

B. Evaluation of the writer's work by the classics of literature, criticism.

An approximate plan for characterizing an artistic image-character

Introduction. The place of the character in the system of images of the work.

Main part. Characterization of a character as a certain social type.

1. Social and financial situation.

2. Appearance.

3. The originality of the worldview and worldview, the range of mental interests, inclinations and habits:

a) the nature of the activity and the main life aspirations;

b) impact on others (main area, types and types of impact).

4. Area of ​​feelings:

a) the type of relationship to others;

b) features of internal experiences.

6. What personality traits of the hero are revealed in the work:

c) through the characteristics of other actors;

d) with the help of background or biography;

e) through a chain of actions;

e) in speech characteristics;

g) through “neighborhood” with other characters;

h) through the environment.

Conclusion. What social problem led the author to create this image.

Plan for parsing a lyric poem

I. Date of writing.

II. Real-biographical and factual commentary.

III. Genre originality.

IV. Idea content:

1. Leading theme.

2. Main idea.

3. Emotional coloring of feelings expressed in a poem in their dynamics or statics.

4. External impression and internal reaction to it.

5. The predominance of public or private intonations.

V. The structure of the poem:

1. Comparison and development of the main verbal images:

a) by similarity;

b) in contrast;

c) by adjacency;

d) by association;

d) by inference.

2. The main figurative means of allegory used by the author: metaphor, metonymy, comparison, allegory, symbol, hyperbole, litote, irony (as a trope), sarcasm, paraphrase.

3. Speech features in terms of intonation-syntactic figures: epithet, repetition, antithesis, inversion, ellipse, parallelism, rhetorical question, appeal and exclamation.

4. The main features of rhythm:

a) tonic, syllabic, syllabo-tonic, dolnik, free verse;

b) iambic, trochee, pyrrhic, sponde, dactyl, amphibrach, anapaest.

5. Rhyme (masculine, feminine, dactylic, exact, inaccurate, rich; simple, compound) and rhyming methods (pair, cross, ring), rhyme game.

6. Strophic (double-line, three-line, five-line, quatrain, sextine, seventh, octave, sonnet, Onegin stanza).

7. Euphony (euphony) and sound recording (alliteration, assonance), other types of sound instrumentation.

How to Keep a Brief Record of the Books You Read

2. The exact title of the work. Dates of creation and appearance in print.

3. The time depicted in the work, and the place of the main events taking place. The social environment, the representatives of which are displayed by the author in the work (nobles, peasants, urban bourgeoisie, philistines, raznochintsy, intelligentsia, workers).

4. Epoch. Characteristics of the time in which the work was written (from the side of economic and socio-political interests and aspirations of contemporaries).

5. Brief outline of the content.

Literary genres are groups of works that are distinguished within the framework of genres of literature. Each of them has a certain set of stable properties. Many literary genres have their origins and roots in folklore. The genres that have reappeared in proper literary experience are the fruit of the combined activity of the initiators and successors. Genres are difficult to systematize and classify, stubbornly resist them.

First of all, because there are a lot of them: genres are specific in each artistic culture. In addition, the genres have a different historical scope. Some exist throughout the history of verbal art; others are related to certain eras. The picture is further complicated by the fact that the same word often designates profoundly different genre phenomena. Existing genre designations fix various aspects of works. Thus, the word "tragedy" states the involvement of this group of dramatic works in a certain emotional and semantic mood. The word "story" indicates that the works belong to the epic genre of literature and about the "average" volume of the text. It is not easy for literary theorists to orient themselves in the processes of genre evolution and the endless "discordance" of genre designations. However, the literary criticism of our century has repeatedly outlined, and to some extent carried out, the development of the concept of "literary genre" not only in the concrete, historical and literary aspect, but also in its own theoretical aspect. Experiences in the systematization of genres in the perspective of supra-epochal and world-wide were undertaken both in domestic and foreign literary criticism. In epic genres, it is primarily the opposition of genres in terms of their volume that matters. The established literary tradition distinguishes here the genres of large (novel, epic), medium (story) and small (story) volume, however, in typology, it is realistic to distinguish only two positions, since the story is not an independent genre, gravitating in practice either to a story or to novel. But here the distinction between large and small volume seems essential, and above all for the analysis of a small genre - a story. The major genres of the epic - the novel and the epic - are different in their content, primarily in terms of problems. The content dominant in the epic is the national, and in the novel - the novelistic problem The fable genre is one of the few canonized genres that have retained real historical existence in the 19th-20th centuries. The lyrical-epic genre of the ballad is a canonized genre, but already from the aesthetic system of not classicism, but romanticism.

The concept pair content/form is an age-old debate. Especially hot - 1/3 of the 20th century, the apogee of formalism in literary criticism. If there is no generalization in the work, it will not arouse the reader's empathy. This common sense content (idea, ideological content). The form is perceived directly. It has 3 sides: 1) objects - what is it about; 2) words - speech itself; 3) composition - the arrangement of objects and words. This is the scheme of the ancient "rhetoricians", which turns into "poetics": 1) inventio - invention 2) elocutio - verbal decoration, presentation 3) disposotio - arrangement, composition. M. V. Lomonosov "A Brief Guide to Eloquence" - division: "About the invention", "About decoration", "About location". Gives examples from fiction(Virgil, Ovid). 1/3 XX century - there is a sharp increase in interest in the composition and structure of the work, i.e., in theoretical poetics. 1925 - Tomashevsky: “Theory of Literature. Poetics". He generalizes literary phenomena, considers them as the result of applying the general laws of the construction of literary works. 1920-40s: Tomashevsky, Timofeev, Pospelov offer schemes for the structure of the work. Similarity with the rhetorical tradition in highlighting the main aspects of the work: themes and style - Tomashevsky (consider questions of composition); images-characters (“immediate content”), language, plot and composition (Timofeev), “subject figurativeness”, verbal structure, composition (Pospelov). Timofeev and Pospelov distinguish the figurative level, considering it as the completion of the artistic form. Timofeev delimits "images-characters" from the "ideological and thematic basis". Pospelov: subject representation is determined by the unity of the main levels of content - themes, problems, pathos. In the future, this concept of the "world of the work" (the legacy of antiquity - the allocation of inventio as the tasks of the poet) will be developed and substantiated by Likhachev, Faryno.

Tomashevsky does not use the concept of an image. He defines the topic in linguistic traditions - "a certain construction, united by the unity of thought or topic."

1910-20s: Formalism. Zhirmunsky, article "The Tasks of Poetics" (1919): rejection of the concept of "image" as a tool of analysis due to its uncertainty - "Art requires precision." Subjects of analysis: poetic phonetics, poetic syntax, themes (the totality of “verbal topics” is reduced to compiling a poetic dictionary; example: “Sentimentalist poets are characterized by such words as “sad”, “languid”, “twilight”, “tears”, "sorrow", "coffin urn", etc.). Bakhtin called the theoretical poetics of the Formalists "material aesthetics", pointing out the inadequacy of the approach.

OPOYAZ - "Society for the Study of Poetic Language" (Shklovsky, Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum, Yakubinsky) - achieved accuracy by bypassing the category of image. Paradoxical is the approach to the analysis of a character, which is traditionally regarded as an "image-character". According to Tomashevsky, the character appears in the work only as a means of revealing a certain motive (the function of the character is the bearer of the motive). Shklovsky - the idea of ​​"estrangement" - explained the appearance in literature of new techniques by "automating" our perception ("Kholstomer", "V. and M." Tolstoy). Shklovsky almost did not touch on the ideological tasks of the writer. He declared art to be a "reception". The conceptual pair "content/form" was replaced by "material/device" (material - verbal, plot - served as a motivation for the techniques). A literary work is a pure form, a “relationship of materials”. The titles of the articles: “How Don Quixote Is Made” (Shklovsky), “How The Overcoat Is Made” (Eichenbaum), etc. But not all formalists denied the content. The unity of “what” (content) and “how” (form) in the work was emphasized (Tynyanov, Zhirmunsky). Later - Lotman - proves the need for a "level" study of the structure of a poetic text: "The dualism of form and content must be replaced by the concept of an idea. A poem is a complexly constructed meaning. Level ladder: phonetics-grammar-vocabulary. Vocabulary: extra-textual connections - genre, general cultural, biographical contexts  enrichment. The category of content was introduced into philosophy and aesthetics by Hegel. It is connected with the dialectical concept of development as the unity and struggle of opposites. In a work of art, they are reconciled. The content of art is an ideal, the form is a figurative embodiment. The task of art is to combine them into one whole. In the future, Hegel foresaw the death of art, since it ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.

Question: why is it often believed that one thing prevails in the work of various poets - the form or the content? How is a work born? The idea is the core, the proforma, from which the whole work is subsequently derived (Arnaudov). Recklessness, spontaneity, integrity of the plan. Belinsky distinguished between content (creative concept) and plot (events). Dostoevsky: idea and implementation. An idea is the first part of creation. Compares the act of creating a work from an idea to cutting a diamond.

Form and content: the problem of lagging one behind the other. Sharp discussions about the lag of form from content - 1920s. Criticism of Fadeev's "Defeat" by Polonsky (he notes the features of Tolstoy in it). The biblical metaphor is "new wine in old wineskins". Severe critics - LEF ("Left Front of the Arts"). Fadeev was also accused of imitating Chekhov. Original forms: Mayakovsky's accent verse, tale, colored with characteristic phraseology (Vs. Ivanov, I. Babel, M. Zoshchenko). In the very possibility of "lag behind the form" its relative independence can be traced. She explains the reason for the return to the old forms: moralizing and pathos - the drama of the 19th century; iambic 4-foot plus digressions- "Onegin"; psychological analysis- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Features of the form have become signs of literary phenomena, elements of codes. In new artistic contexts, however, they can acquire new meaning.

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The category of genre in the analysis of a work of art is somewhat less important than the category of gender, but in some cases, knowledge of the genre nature of a work can help in the analysis, indicate which aspects should be paid attention to.

In literary criticism, genres are groups of works within literary genres, united by common formal, meaningful or functional features.

It should be said right away that not all works have a clear genre nature. Thus, Pushkin's poem "On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night ...", Lermontov's "The Prophet", plays by Chekhov and Gorky, "Vasily Terkin" by Tvardovsky and many other works are indefinable in the genre sense.

But even in those cases where the genre can be defined quite unambiguously, such a definition does not always help the analysis, since genre structures are often identified by a secondary feature that does not create a special originality of content and form. This applies mainly to lyrical genres, such as elegy, ode, epistle, epigram, sonnet, etc.

In epic genres, it is primarily the opposition of genres in terms of their volume that matters. The established literary tradition distinguishes here the genres of large (novel, epic), medium (story) and small (story) volume, however, in typology, it is realistic to distinguish between only two positions, since the story is not an independent genre, gravitating in practice or to the story (“Belkin’s Tales "Pushkin), or to the novel (his own "The Captain's Daughter").

But here the distinction between large and small volume seems essential, and above all for the analysis of a small genre - a story. Yu.N. Tynyanov rightly wrote: "The calculation for a large form is not the same as for a small one." The small volume of the story dictates the peculiar principles of poetics, specific artistic techniques. First of all, this is reflected in the properties of literary representation.

The story is highly characteristic of the “economy mode”, it cannot have long descriptions, therefore it is characterized not by details-details, but by details-symbols, especially in the description of a landscape, portrait, interior. Such a detail acquires heightened expressiveness and, as a rule, refers to the creative imagination of the reader, suggests co-creation, conjecture.

According to this principle, Chekhov built his descriptions, in particular, the master of artistic detail; let us recall, for example, his textbook depiction of a moonlit night: “In the descriptions of nature, one must grasp at small details, grouping them in such a way that after reading, when you close your eyes, a picture is given.

For example, you will get a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled in a ball ”(Letter to Al.P. Chekhov dated May 10, 1886). Here the details of the landscape are guessed by the reader based on the impression of one or two dominant symbolic details.

The same thing happens in the field of psychologism: for the writer, it is important not so much to reflect the mental process in its entirety, but to recreate the leading emotional tone, the atmosphere of the hero’s inner life at the moment. The masters of such a psychological story were Maupassant, Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Hemingway and others.

In the composition of the story, as in any short form, the ending is very important, which is either in the nature of a plot denouement or an emotional ending. Noteworthy are those endings that do not resolve the conflict, but only demonstrate its insolubility; so-called "open" finals, as in Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog".

One of the genre varieties of the story is the short story. The short story is an action-packed narrative, the action in it develops quickly, dynamically, strives for a denouement, which contains the whole meaning of what is told: first of all, with its help, the author gives an understanding of the life situation, makes a “sentence” on the depicted characters.

In short stories, the plot is compressed, the action is concentrated. A fast-paced plot is characterized by a very economical system of characters: there are usually just enough of them so that the action can continuously develop. Cameo characters are introduced (if they are introduced at all) only to kick-start the action of the story and disappear immediately afterwards.

In the short story, as a rule, there are no side storylines, author's digressions; only what is absolutely necessary for understanding the conflict and the plot is reported from the past of the characters. Descriptive elements that do not move the action forward are kept to a minimum and appear almost exclusively at the beginning: then, towards the end, they will interfere, slowing down the development of the action and distracting attention.

When all these tendencies are brought to their logical end, the short story acquires a pronounced anecdote structure with all its main features: a very small volume, an unexpected, paradoxical "shock" ending, minimal psychological motivations for actions, the absence of descriptive moments, etc. The anecdote story was widely used by Leskov, the early Chekhov, Maupassant, O'Henry, D. London, Zoshchenko and many other novelists.

The novella, as a rule, is based on external conflicts in which contradictions collide (the plot), develop and, having reached the highest point in development and struggle (climax), are more or less rapidly resolved. Moreover, the most important thing is that the contradictions encountered must and can be resolved in the course of the development of the action.

For this, the contradictions must be sufficiently definite and manifest, the characters must have some psychological activity in order to strive at all costs to resolve the conflict, and the conflict itself must, at least in principle, be amenable to immediate resolution.

Consider from this angle the story of V. Shukshin "The Hunt to Live". A young city guy comes into the hut to the forester Nikitich. It turns out that the guy escaped from prison.

Suddenly, the district authorities come to Nikitich to hunt, Nikitich tells the guy to pretend to be asleep, puts the guests down and falls asleep himself, and waking up, he finds that "Kolya the Professor" has left, taking Nikitich's gun and his tobacco pouch with him. Nikitich rushes after him, overtakes the guy and takes his gun from him. But in general Nikitich likes the guy, he is sorry to let go of that one, in winter, unaccustomed to the taiga and without a gun.

The old man leaves the guy a gun, so that when he reaches the village, he will hand it over to Nikitich's godfather. But when they have already gone each in their own direction, the guy shoots Nikitich in the back of the head, because “it will be better, father. More reliable."

The clash of characters in the conflict of this novel is very sharp and clear. The incompatibility, the opposite of Nikitich's moral principles - principles based on kindness and trust in people - and the moral standards of the "Koli-professor", who "wants to live" for himself, "better and more reliable" - also for himself - the incompatibility of these moral principles intensifies in the course of action and is embodied in a tragic, but inevitable denouement according to the logic of the characters.

We note the special significance of the denouement: it not only formally completes the plot action, but exhausts the conflict. The author's assessment of the depicted characters, the author's understanding of the conflict are concentrated precisely in the denouement.

The major genres of the epic - the novel and the epic - differ in their content, primarily in terms of problems. The content dominant in the epic is national, and in the novel - novelistic (adventurous or ideological and moral) problems.

For the novel, accordingly, it is extremely important to determine which of the two types it belongs to. Depending on the genre content dominant, the poetics of the novel and the epic is also constructed. The epic tends to plot, the image of the hero in it is built as the quintessence of typical qualities inherent in the people, ethnic group, class, etc.

In the adventure novel, the plot is also clearly dominant, but the image of the hero is built in a different way: he is emphatically free from class, corporate and other ties with the environment that gave birth to him. In an ideological and moral novel, the stylistic dominants will almost always be psychologism and heteroglossia.

Over the past century and a half, a new genre of large volume has developed in the epic - the epic novel, which combines the properties of these two genres. This genre tradition includes such works as Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Sholokhov's "Quiet Flows the Don", A. Tolstoy's "Walking Through the Torments", Simonov's "The Living and the Dead", Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" and some others.

The epic novel is characterized by a combination of national and ideological and moral issues, but not a simple summation of them, but such an integration in which the ideological and moral search for a person is correlated primarily with the people's truth.

The problem of the epic novel becomes, in the words of Pushkin, "the fate of man and the fate of the people" in their unity and interdependence; Critical events for the entire ethnos give the philosophical search for the hero a special urgency and relevance, the hero is faced with the need to determine his position not just in the world, but in national history.

In the field of poetics, the epic novel is characterized by a combination of psychologism with plot, a compositional combination of general, medium and close-up plans, the presence of many storylines and their interweaving, and author's digressions.

Esin A.B. Principles and methods of analysis of a literary work. - M., 1998