The system of genders and genres in ancient literature

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the theoretical and literary thought of Antiquity was the generic and genre classification of literary works. It took shape in the course of the centuries-old creative practice of the masters of the word and was first systematically comprehended in the work of Aristotle "Poetics" ("On the Art of Poetry"), which for almost two and a half thousand years of its existence has been almost constantly in the field of view of philologists to this day. has not lost its meaning. It was Aristotle who singled out the three largest groups of literary works, which we now call literary genera. Aristotle defined the differences between them, based on the concept of art created by him (following Plato) as an imitation of nature, or mimesis. In each kind of literature, according to the scientist, imitation of nature is achieved in different ways: “... it is possible to imitate the same thing in one and the same thing by telling about an event as something separate from oneself (1), as Homer does, or so that the imitator remains himself, without changing his face (2), or representing all the depicted persons as acting and active (3) ”24. There is no doubt that (1) is typical for epic, (2) for lyrics, and (3) for drama.

Subsequently, literary scholars put forward other ideas about the fundamental differences between literary genres 25 . At the same time, all of them in one way or another have something in common with the concept of Aristotle, and all of them are fair in their own way. Without rejecting them, we can offer one more consideration in this regard.

"Imitate nature", that is, reflect in works of art the world, the artist can only be guided by certain ideas about this world and man's place in it, or, in other words, a certain concept of the world and man. Each type of literature has its own.

The epic perceives the world as an infinite multifaceted objective being, where various events are constantly taking place, while a person acts as a part of this world whole and an active figure who, participating in events, realizes himself. The eventful world is external in relation to man; something happens in it objectively, that is, regardless of human will, and something is the result of human activity. Identification of the causes and consequences of events, their interconnection, the role of specific people and even entire nations in the movement of life, the diverse relationships of people with the world and among themselves (which are also realized in various events) - this is the main object of interest in the works of epic literature and the subject of narration in them.

In the history of verbal art, the epic appears, as a rule, first, ahead of lyrics and drama. This is understandable: after all, the first conscious interest of people was precisely the interest in the outside world, nature, everything that happens around. IN Ancient Greece The development of epic poetry begins in the 8th century. BC, in Rome - in the III century. BC.

In lyrics, a person acts as a subject of experiences and spiritual activity. Accordingly, the outside world for her is not an objective reality (as for an epic), but subjective impressions, associations, experience, emotions of a particular person that have arisen under the influence of external circumstances. In the narrative, this world of internal states and spiritual movements of a person, unlike the epic event world, cannot be fully revealed (it is not for nothing that they say that you cannot tell about feelings).

Therefore, the lyrics do not tell anything, but reproduce human thoughts, feelings and moods, in which the outside world is reflected subjectively, individually. The personality of a person engaged in a variety of spiritual activities, the lyrics embody in the image of a lyrical hero. Usually it is denoted by the pronoun of the first person, but it is wrong to think that this “I” belongs only to the author of the work. In the spiritual life of the lyrical hero, the author's own, individual experiences and experience are typified, acquire a universal meaning.

As a result, the “I” - the hero of the lyrical work acts as a completely independent person, spiritually close not only to the author, but also to the reader.

In ancient Greece, the formation of lyrics takes place in the 7th century. BC, that is, when the human individuality begins to realize itself not as an integral part of the collective, but as an intrinsically valuable and self-sufficient unit. Greek lyrics, especially at the beginning of its historical path, were very closely connected with music, sung (melic) or read in a singsong voice with musical accompaniment (declamatory). This explains the origin of the term "lyric" (lyre in Ancient Greece - string musical instrument used for accompaniment).

In Rome, the lyric in the full sense of the word takes shape in the 1st century. BC. She was much less connected with music and singing. The Romans more often intended their lyrical poems for reading. In the dramatic kind of literature (from the Greek. drama - action), the world is presented as a struggle of opposite principles, the development of conflicts, and a person - as a participant in this struggle; it requires the maximum exertion of all forces for making vital decisions, for self-affirmation, and achieving the goal. Dramaturgy arises later than the epic and lyrics, when the consciousness of the individual reaches true maturity and a person realizes himself as an indispensable participant in the eternal struggle between Good and Evil on a global scale, and shows significant social activity. In ancient Greece, dramaturgy was formed at the end of the 6th - beginning of the 5th centuries. BC, in Rome - in the III century. BC. The drama draws on the traditions of epic and lyrical literature. Like an epic, it depicts a person in activity, from the point of view of an external observer, like a lyric, it represents him as a subject of experiences. Dramaturgy is closely connected with the theater - a special syncretic art. Initially, dramatic works were not intended for reading, but specifically for stage performance, which provided them with additional visual and expressive possibilities and a special power of influencing the audience.

In addition to the generic, another, more detailed classification of literary works is also possible. In accordance with it, each type of literature has its own group of genres - “historically emerging types of literary works”, characterized by a whole set of specific features (V.V. Kozhinov, LES. - P.106-107). Each genre, as it were, concretizes, localizes the general concept of man and the world, characteristic of the kind of literature to which it belongs. According to S.S. Averintsev, it is already quite significant that Aristotle for the first time “consciously describes the genre as an intra-literary phenomenon, recognizable by intra-literary criteria” 26, and not by external circumstances associated with etiquette and various conditions for the ritual design of life.

Epic genres in ancient literature

Epic (epos as a genre) - (from the Greek. epos - word, narration and poieo - I create), "an epic work of national problems, monumental in form" (G.N. Pospelov, LES. - P.513). One should distinguish between an epic of folklore origin and a purely literary epic. The first of these varieties existed in archaic Greece in the form of a folk-heroic epic (the Iliad and the Odyssey attributed to Homer, as well as the so-called kyklic poems created in the oral collective tradition of the Aedi folk singers). After a long folklore existence, some texts were written down and thus saved from oblivion. So they moved into the realm of literature. Literary epics were immediately created by individual authors in the form of fixed texts. Several of their genre varieties were formed: didactic (“Works and Days” by Hesiod, “Georgics” by Virgil), mythological (“Theogony” by Hesiod, “Metamorphoses” by Ovid), historical (“Annals” by Ennius) and historical-mythological (“Aeneid” by Virgil). ) epics.

Despite the different ways of creating, the main genre features of the folk-heroic and literary epics are similar. The world is presented in them as a single universe, depicted in accordance with the mythological worldview of antiquity comprehensively, as an idealized and exaggerated world of the past, where grandiose events took place (and ended), the fate of peoples was decided. That is, the picture of the world in the epic gravitates towards maximum generalization; details, particulars are either omitted or enlarged and also acquire a monumental character (the shield of Achilles in the Iliad).

The images of people are just as widely generalized. The heroes of the folk-heroic epic are heroes, understood as an integral part of the people and at the same time (due to some individual features) - the face of the people. In literary epics, the hero can be interpreted as an ideal, omniscient sage (the author-narrator in a didactic epic), an ideal citizen (Aeneas in Virgil) and even as a completely ordinary person, immersed in personal life (characters of Ovid's Metamorphoses), but always in epicly wide - nationwide and all-human - context. Therefore the characters epic heroes, as a rule, are solid, hyperbolized, monumental.

It is these people who are able to participate in fateful events, to accomplish great deeds. The experiences of heroes in the early forms of the epic (folk-heroic epic) were also depicted as actions, through their external manifestations. In later examples, especially those of Virgil and Ovid, the skill of psychological analysis increases significantly.

The epic glorifies the heroic past of the people, the heroes-ancestors, affirms the eternal universal ideals, sings of the unity of man with the people and the world. For this, a sublimely poetic, monumental style and poetic speech are used.

The hexameter verse, characteristic of ancient epics, arose in Greece as early as Homer's time. Later it was mastered by the Romans.

The heroic epics of Homer and Hesiod's didactic poem Works and Days were perceived as indisputable role models in Antiquity. The role of the classic model of the epic for the literature of subsequent eras, starting from the Middle Ages, was played by Virgil's Aeneid for a long time.

A special place among the epics of Antiquity is occupied by the anonymous comic poem "The War of the Frogs and Mice" (late 6th - early 5th centuries BC). This parody of Homer's Iliad may have become the response of the people to the official, state recognition of the "exemplary" nature of Homer's poems. It could also reflect the criticism of the mythological worldview, begun by the first Greek philosophers. The parodic beginning is also inherent in Ovid's early poems "The Science of Love" and "The Cure for Love". In them, the author is defiantly indifferent to "high", significant phenomena, heroic deeds. With a sly smile, he delves into the world of love experiences - after all, they also have a universal meaning.

Epillium is a small epic poetic genre that has established itself in Greek literature of the Hellenistic era. The meaning of the name (“small epic”) is justified not only by the small amount of text, but also by a special approach to the selection of artistic material, as well as an elegant “jewelry” treatment of the artistic form. Epillius tells, as a rule, about certain private events, individual moments, one way or another in contact with great epic deeds. These events have no independent heroic significance. They are attractive for their psychological pattern, emotional content. Like great epics, epilliae were composed in hexameters. A classic example of this genre in ancient literature was Callimachus' Hecale. Subsequently, epillium came into Roman poetry ("The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis" by Catullus).

A fable is “a short story in prose or verse with a directly formulated moral conclusion, giving” it an “allegorical meaning”. The allegorical characters are "animals, plants, sketchy figures of people"; plots of the type “how someone wanted to make himself better, but only made worse” are widely used. Often in the fable there is comedy and motives of social criticism. It originated in folklore, "... acquired a stable genre form ... acquired in Greek literature (VI century BC - the time of the semi-legendary Aesop)" (M. L. Gasparov, LES. - P. 46-47). The creator of the first samples of the Latin literary fable is Phaedrus (1st century AD). The first Greek literary fables are created by Valery Babriy (2nd century AD). The former writes his fables mainly for the sake of morality, while for the latter the fable is a rhetorical exercise, and he focuses his attention on the elegance of a detailed story.

“Biography (from Greek bios – life and grapho – I write), biography. ... Based on factual material, it gives a picture of a person's life, the development of his personality in connection with social circumstances. The history of the biographical genre dates back to antiquity (" Comparative biographies"Plutarch," Life of Agricola "by Tacitus," Lives of the Twelve Caesars "by Suetonius)". (LES. - P.54). The author of a biography can subordinate his work to various tasks: words of praise, moral instruction, entertainment, psychological observations, and so on.

“A novel ... an epic work in which the narrative is focused on the fate of an individual in the process of its formation and development, deployed in an artistic space and time sufficient to convey the “organization” of the individual. Being an epic of private life, ... the novel presents individual and social life as relatively independent, not exhaustive and not absorbing each other elements, and this is the defining feature of its genre content.

From the definition given here by V.A. Bogdanov (LES. - P.329-330) it is clear that, unlike another, more ancient epic genre - the epic - the novel depicts the world not as a single monolithic whole, but as a complex multi-component system. Moreover, he focuses his main attention only on one sphere of being - the sphere of people's private life. All other aspects of the surrounding reality are depicted in the novel through the prism of this private life. The novel world is not a well-known, illustrious for centuries, completed, static past (as in an epic), but a current, unfinished modernity, where the outcome of events is not known in advance and therefore is of particular interest. In general, the main goal of the novelist is not to glorify the private life of ordinary people, but to present it as something bright and interesting.

For this, especially at the dawn of the genre, including in Antiquity, entertaining adventurous stories, fantasy, and exoticism were widely used.

Novel heroes, unlike epic ones, are treated not as an integral part of the people and humanity, but as independent individuals, separate from these communities, entering into complex, contradictory relationships with each other, as well as with society and the world. Consequently, their characters cannot (and should not) be as solid and monumental as those of epic heroes. They do not need hyperbolization either, but often (although not necessarily) they are depicted in dynamics, in the process of personality development, which is not characteristic of the heroes of epics.

Thus, in the novel, a new, different from the epic, concept of the world and man found its artistic realization.

In the minds of the people of Antiquity, it was formed gradually. “The development of the personal principle necessary for a novelist hero,” continues V.A. Bogdanov, “occurs in the historical process of the individual’s isolation from the whole: gaining freedom in informal, everyday family life; rejection of religious, moral and other principles of a closed corporation; the emergence of an individual ideological and moral world and, finally, the consciousness of its intrinsic value and the desire to oppose one’s unique “I”, its spiritual and moral freedom to the environment, natural and social “necessity” (LES. - P. 330). Novel thinking is finally established at the end of the era, in the conditions of the deepening crisis of the slave-owning society and the entire ancient civilization. The time of intensive development of the novel in Greek and Roman literature - II - III centuries. AD True, at that time it did not yet have its current name. The term "novel" will be established in Europe only in the Middle Ages. In ancient Greece, literary works of this type were called "stories" or "dramas" (that is, "actions").

The texts of five Greek novels have completely survived: “Charei and Kalliroya” by Khariton, “The Tale of Gabrokom and Antia” by Xenophon of Ephesus, “Leucippus and Cleitophon” by Achilles Tatia, “The Shepherd's Story of Daphnis and Chloe” by Long, “Ethiopica” by Heliodorus. In the retellings, Iamblichus' Babylonica and Anthony Diogenes' Amazing Adventures Beyond Fula are also known. Finally, there is a Latin translation of the novel "The Tale of Apollonius of Tyre", the Greek original of which has not been preserved.

Roman romance is represented by fragments of the work of Gaius Petronius "Satyricon" and full text Apuleius' Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass.

Lyric genres in ancient literature

Hymn (Greek hymnos - praise) in ancient Greece - "a cult song in honor of a deity", usually performed by a choir. Thus, the paean hymns addressed Apollo, the parthenias addressed Athena, the dithyrambs addressed Dionysus. There were also hymns in honor of solemn events: epithalamy (wedding), epinicia (in honor of Olympionists). The hymns of Callimachus (III century BC) no longer have a cult purpose and are designed not for choral singing, but for reading. “Under the name of the hymns, works of an epic narrative nature are known - the so-called Homeric hymns (they were attributed to Homer in ancient times).” In general, “the rudiments of the epic, lyrics and drama are seen in the hymns” (LES. - P. 77-78).

Elegy (from the Greek elegos - plaintive song), “a lyrical genre, a poem of medium length, meditative or emotional content ..., most often in the first person, without a distinct composition. ... The form of the ancient elegy is the elegiac distich. It may have developed in Ionian Asia Minor from lamentations over the dead. The elegy originated in Greece in the 7th century. BC. (Callinus, Tyrtaeus, Theognidus), initially had a moral and political content, then, in Hellenistic and Roman poetry (Tibull, Propertius, Ovid), love themes become predominant ”(M.L. Gasparov, LES. - P. 508). “The Lida of Antimachus (a combination of myths about unhappy love) was considered a model” (SA. - P. 650-651).

“Yambs, a genre of poems, mostly accusatory, less often elegiac, with alternating written iambs [poems. size] of long and short lines in a stanza ”(M.L. Gasparov, LES. - P. 528). “The prototypes of the iambic as a literary genre were ritual reproach, which served as a magical means of averting evil at fertility festivals; their metric base was iambic. The form of this ritual poetry was used by the Greek poet Archilochus (7th century BC), who is considered the founder of the iambic. Hipponact (the end of the 6th century BC) invented the “lame iambic” (holiyamb) - an iambic verse with a break in rhythm at the end of each line - and applied it to his witty, rude, daring poems. In the era of Hellenism, Kallimachus, Herod turned to the iamb. "Iambic poetry entered Roman literature thanks to Lucilius." His undertaking was continued by neoteriki and Horace ("Epodes"). "The last significant iambographers of antiquity were Persius, Petronius and Martial" in Rome (SA. - p.675).

“Ode (from the Greek ode - song), a genre of lyric poetry. In antiquity, the word “ode” at first did not have a terminological meaning, then it began to denote a lyrical choral song of a solemn, upbeat, moralizing nature written mainly in stanzas ... ”(M.L. Gasparov, LES. - P. 258). “The themes of odic poetry were varied: mythology, human life, love, state, glory, etc. The largest odic poets of antiquity are Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar, Horace ”(SA. - P. 390). Epigram (Greek epigramma - inscription), in ancient poetry - originally "a short lyric poem of arbitrary content" (LES. - P.511). Developed in Ancient Greece from dedicatory inscriptions on monuments, sacrifices. It appeared in Greek poetry in the 7th - 6th centuries. BC, reached its peak in the III - I centuries. BC. A distinctive feature of the epigram is the accuracy of expressions. Often created in the form of elegiac distichs. Latin literary epigram developed under the influence of Alexandrian poetry. Impromptu epigrams were popular in educated circles. “At the same time, they increasingly contained mocking satirical features and witticisms. This direction of development began under Catullus and culminated in the witty, original epigrams of Martial, which have remained a model right up to the present ”(SA. - P. 659).

Satire is a lyrical poem of accusatory orientation, often having the character of an oratorical speech of a lyrical hero, a critical review of social life and the customs of people, in which satire is widely used as one of the types of comic along with other types (sarcasm, irony, humor, etc.). This literary genre arose and developed in Ancient Rome. Satura served as the basis for it. The name goes back to lat. lanx satura - a dish filled with all sorts of fruits, which was brought to the temple of the goddess Ceres; in a figurative sense - a mixture, all sorts of things. Satura is “a genre of early Roman literature: a collection of short poetic and prose works of deliberately varied content (parables, invectives, moral sketches, popular philosophical reasoning, etc.). Appeared at the beginning of the II century. BC. in Ennius as an imitation of Hellenistic literature. ... Already at the end of the II century. BC. in Lucilius Gaius, satura becomes entirely a poetic genre, acquires an accusatory connotation and degenerates into satire in Horace, Persius Flaccus and Juvenal, and the more archaic satura (“mixture”) dies off ”(M.L. Gasparov, LES. - P. 371).

Dramatic genres in ancient literature

“Satyr dramas were originally local merry stage performances in the Peloponnese. Their main characters were satyrs from the retinue of Dionysus. ... These characters were characterized by immoderate gluttony, drunkenness and sensuality. When the danger arose that, with the flourishing of tragedy and comedy, S.d. will be ousted, Pratinus of Phliunt contrasted the action of his S.d. with their own tragedy. At the same time, the heroes of the tragedies (especially Hercules) fell into comic situations. With this, Pratin managed to achieve that S.d. firmly entered the theatrical performances as the fourth drama after the trilogy ”(SA. - P. 510). Only the text of Euripides' satyr drama Cyclops has come down to us in full. This genre is not represented in Roman dramaturgy.

“Tragedy, a dramatic genre based on the tragic collision of heroic characters, its tragic outcome and filled with pathos ...” (A.V. Mikhailov, LES. - P. 491). The etymology (Greek tragodna, Latin tragoedia - song of the goats) indicates the origin of this dramatic genre from ritual games in honor of the god Dionysus. Already in Antiquity, the dithyramb was considered the forerunner of tragedy. “Thanks to Arion, the dithyramb in the Peloponnese became a work of choral lyrics, which was performed by the choir,” the participants of which were disguised as satyrs. “Starting from the second half of the 6th c. BC e. dithyrambs are sung at the Great Dionysia. Thespis was the first to use, along with the choir, one actor-reciter, who gave explanations during the performance, thus creating a prerequisite for dialogue. Later, Aeschylus introduced the second, and Sophocles the third actor-reciter, so it became possible dramatic action, independent of the choir. ... In Athens, annually on holidays in honor of Dionysus, competitions of poets were held, during which tragedies were performed. Every day a tetralogy of one author was performed, consisting of three tragedies and one satyr drama. ... Starting with Sophocles, the plot unity of the tetralogy ceases to be a necessary condition. (SA. - S.583). In ancient tragedies, mainly mythological motifs were developed. Events of history or modernity were used extremely rarely for tragic plots, which is explained as ritual origin tragedy, and its genre features.

Like any dramatic genre, tragedy comes from the idea of ​​the world as a struggle, the development of conflicts in which people inevitably participate. However, tragedy concretizes this general dramatic conception of being with a special tragic worldview. Its essence is approximately as follows: in a person’s life, unresolvable conflicts often lie in wait, deadlocks that cannot be evaded, unworthy, but it is also impossible to emerge from them as a winner. However, even in such a hopeless situation, a person can and should remain a person. In order not to become a victim of circumstances, to remain true to himself and defend his dignity, he acts even without hope of success, suffering from this hopelessness.

So, the most important genre feature of tragedy is the presence of an insoluble, in other words, tragic conflict, that is, such a confrontation where there are neither winners nor losers. Her second distinguishing feature- a special type of hero.

The personality of the tragic hero is characterized by scale, strength of passion, will and intellect; he is active, free, responsible and purposeful. Moreover, his goals are always noble and disinterested, but - in conditions of hopeless circumstances - they are not realized. Moreover: the results of the tragic hero's activity are often opposite to the intentions (strives for good, but does evil). The reason for this discrepancy is usually a tragic mistake. Allowed out of ignorance, it leads to irreversible consequences. The situation of a tragic mistake shows that the tragic hero does evil not intentionally and, therefore, deserves indulgence. However, he himself, as a truly noble, responsible person, takes upon himself the fullness of the tragic guilt. It is impossible to get rid of it, since nothing can be corrected, therefore the destiny of a tragic hero is suffering, and sometimes death.

As you can see, the tragic heroes in their personal data clearly rise above the average level of ordinary people (in the words of Aristotle, these are people “better than us”). Their activities also go beyond private, everyday life. Tragic heroes find themselves in conflict with the world, at odds with themselves, in the midst of important events, in the face of universally significant problems (Good and Evil, moral choice, the struggle for justice, freedom, etc.). Thus, the tragedy focuses on the depiction and study of serious, high spheres of life and sublime natures. That is why the works of this genre are full of noble heroic pathos and are created in a sublimely poetic style. The purpose of the tragedy is to glorify the greatness of man and at the same time arouse compassion for him, to warn of the misfortunes and catastrophes that lie in wait in everyone's life. The sympathy of the audience with the heroes of the tragedy is often aggravated due to the use of the effect of tragic irony by the author. It occurs when the viewer is better informed than the tragic hero and foresees in advance a misfortune that the hero himself is not yet aware of. Awakening in people the most noble feelings (admiration, compassion), tragedy, according to Aristotle, contributes to their spiritual purification (catharsis).

Tragedy flourished in ancient Greece in the 5th century BC. BC. in the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as their predecessors (Heril, Pratinus, Phrynichus, Thespis) and younger contemporaries (Agafon, Ion of Chios); from the 4th century BC. gradually began to lose its significance. In ancient Rome, the first tragedies - free adaptations of Greek ones - were staged in the 3rd century BC. BC. Livy Andronicus. At the end of the same century, Gnaeus Nevius developed a new type of tragedy - the pretext, or pretextatus (on the plots of Roman mythology and history), followed by Ennius, Pacuvius, Actius (II century BC). From the 1st century BC. tragedies are staged less and less in the Roman theatre, but they continue to compose for readers (Cicero, Caesar, Augustus, Ovid). Vivid examples of tragedies for reading have been preserved in literary heritage Seneca (I century AD). In the literature of modern times, this tradition will be continued.

Comedy, a dramatic genre, “in which characters, situations and action are presented in funny forms or imbued with comic” (LES. - P. 161). Here it means that this genre corrects the general dramatic concept of the world and man with a special comic worldview, according to which the vast majority of life conflicts are not tragic dead ends, but inconsistencies, deviations from the norm and can be overcome, corrected. In Antiquity, the notion of the comic was established as ugly, ugly, but not bringing much harm.

There are many different inconsistencies in reality (between what should be and what is, between appearance and essence, etc.). Being depicted in a work of art, these life inconsistencies give rise to a special comic effect. In an effort to achieve it, the artist can purposefully modify, rethink what is depicted, deliberately exaggerate the absurdities in it. “All the elements of a funny image are taken from life, from a real object (face), but their ratios, location, scales and accents (“composition” of the object) are transformed by creative imagination; and one of the sources of pleasure from the comic is our “recognition” of an object under a mask transformed to the point of being unrecognizable (for example, in a cartoon, caricature): co-creation of spectators and listeners, ”says L.E. Pinsky (LES. - P. 162) . The comic effect in a literary work is created both by the speech of the characters (play on words, paradoxes, parodies, etc.), and their appearance(for example, the actors of the ancient Attic comedy deliberately deformed their figure, dressed in a buffoonish manner), and behavior. However, the main sources of comedy are unusual, ridiculous situations and characters. Depending on which of these sources prevails in comedy, there are two main types of comedy - situation comedy, intrigue and character comedy. Both types are already present in ancient literature.

The comic worldview opens up inexhaustible possibilities for the artist. Guided by him, the comedian a) delves into the study of the patterns of life, its contradictions and paradoxes; b) discovers various negative manifestations in the way of life, as well as in the behavior and characters of people, and, discrediting them, affirms ideals, genuine spiritual values; c) expresses an optimistic attitude, maintains the moral health of people, promotes their spiritual emancipation; d) educates, teaches people moral lessons; d) amuse.

As you can see, the goals of comedy are varied and cannot be reduced to “ridicule of vices”. Comic should not be equated with funny either. In a work of art, a comic effect can cause not only laughter, but also anger, indignation, disgust, sadness, regret, sympathy, tenderness. Therefore, the pathos of comedies is very diverse: from public buffoonery to romantic heroics. At the same time, comedy, even when it affirms and glorifies, does not glorify what is depicted. Her sphere is the sphere of unofficial, everyday life; her style is the style of live everyday communication of people. Comic heroes are treated as individuals, not free from shortcomings and even vices. According to Aristotle, these are people “like us”, or “worse than we are”. In all this, comedy is the opposite of tragedy, but close to the novel. Indeed, the successes of comedy - the new Attic and Roman - paved the way for ancient romance.

Like tragedy, comedy grew out of a complex of religious and ritual actions of ancient Greek farmers, which is also indicated by the etymology of the name of this genre: lat. comedia, Greek komodna, from komos - a merry procession and ode - a song). “Attic comedy arose from various forms of folk entertainment (processions of choirs with dances and comic songs, squabbles and performances of mummers) and was part of the Dionysian festivities as a free ritual game” (SA. - P. 280). Comedy finally acquired its genre appearance by the middle of the 5th century. BC. in the works of Epicharmus, Eupolis and Cratinus. The first recognized classic of this genre in Greece was Aristophanes (end of the 5th century BC). Antiphanes, Alexis, Menander, Diphilus, Philemon (4th-3rd centuries BC) contributed to the further development of Attic comedy. Their works served as a model for the first Roman comedians (Livy Andronicus, Gnaeus Nevius) and such recognized classics of the genre as Plautus and Terence (III-II centuries BC). From the 1st century BC. and then, in the Roman Empire, the ancient comedy gradually loses its importance and is supplanted by atellana and mime. “Atellana, a genre of ancient Roman folk comedy; appeared in Rome in the III century. BC. in the Oscan language. Initially improvised; at the beginning of the 1st century BC. atellana received a poetic arrangement in Latin (fragments have been preserved).

Atellani - comical short scenes from the life of the common people, often with political attacks; the actors performed in masks” (M.L.Gasparov, LES. - P.41). In the form of 4 masks (stable primitive character-characters) the characters of atellana are also represented. Subsequently replaced by a mime.

“Mime (from the Greek mimos - actor; imitation), a small comic genre ancient drama, one of the forms of folk theater. At first, these were short scenes with some characteristic figure in the center ... - an impromptu imitation on a funny or obscene theme from Everyday life. The mime receives its first literary processing in the work of the Sicilian poet Sophron (5th century BC) and his son Xenarchus. From the 3rd century BC. mime spread throughout the Greek world, gradually crowding out other dramatic genres. From the 1st century BC. appears in Rome (mimes D. Laberia and Publius Syrah).

In comparison with large literary forms, the mime allowed unusual freedom in verbal, rhythmic, stylistic design, as well as in choosing themes and heroes from different social strata ... ”(T.V. Popova, LES. - P. 221).

Not all of the literary genres described above became the subject of study in Aristotle's Poetics. And the point is not only that the text of the treatise, as we have already shown, most likely has not been completely preserved. Some genres turned out to be simply younger than Poetics. So, historically later, atellana and satire were formed (besides, purely Italian phenomena), as well as biography, epillium, and even more so - a novel. The same can be said about bucolic and its varieties.

“Bukolika (Greek bukolikб, from bukolikos - shepherd), a genre of ancient poetry of the Hellenistic and Roman times (III century BC - V century AD): small hexameter poems in narrative or dialogic form with a description peaceful life shepherds ..., their simple life, tender love and flute songs (often using folklore motifs). The poems of bucolic poetry were indifferently called idylls (lit. - picture) or eclogues (lit. - selection) ... The initiator and classic of Greek bucolic poetry was Theocritus, Roman - Virgil ”(M.L. Gasparov, LES. - P.59).

One more circumstance should be taken into account. The Poetics clearly expresses the idea of ​​the genre as a stable phenomenon, having a number of features inherent only to it. True, Aristotle understood that genres go through the stage of emergence and formation, but this path ends with stabilization - the establishment of a genre canon. Literary forms that have reached their canonical completeness were first described in Poetics. However, not all genres of ancient literature developed such a canon. This applies, in particular, to genres that actively used folklore material (bucolica) or are closely related to the sphere of oral communication, such as dialogue, which is even difficult to attribute to any particular type of literature.

Dialogue is a literary genre, predominantly philosophical and publicistic, in which the author's thought is developed in the form of an interview, a dispute between two or more persons. He relied on the tradition of oral intellectual communication in Ancient Greece; at the origins of tradition is the activity of Socrates ”(LES. - P. 96). As a special genre, dialogue took shape in the 4th century. BC. in the prose of Plato, who popularized his philosophical doctrine with the help of this literary form. Plutarch used dialogue for moralistic writings. Lucian created several cycles of comic dialogues. Cicero, relying on the experience of Plato and Aristotle, used dialogue to present his philosophical reflections (“Tusculan Conversations”).

The novel also showed itself to be a genre hostile to all canons, already within the boundaries of ancient literature. Such unstable, easily changing genre formations did not fit into the framework of the artistic consciousness of reflective traditionalism and therefore were not reflected either in Aristotle's Poetics or among his later successors.

Notes

24. Aristotle. Poetics. Rhetoric. - St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000. - S.25-26.

25. For an overview of these concepts, see, for example: Khalizev V.E. The ancestry of the work. // Introduction to literary criticism. Literary work: basic concepts and terms. - M., 1999. -S. 328–336.)

26. Relationship and interaction of genres in the development of ancient literature. - M., 1989. - P.12.

Types of Literature

§ 1. Division of literature into genera

It has long been customary to combine verbal and artistic works into three large groups, called literary genera. This is epic, drama and lyrics. Although not everything created by writers (especially in the 20th century) fits into this triad, it still retains its significance and authority in the composition of literary criticism.

Socrates discusses the types of poetry in the third book of Plato's treatise The State. The poet, it is said here, can, firstly, directly speak on his own behalf, which takes place “mainly in dithyrambs” (in fact, this is the most important property of the lyrics); secondly, to build a work in the form of an “exchange of speeches” of heroes, to which the words of the poet are not mixed, which is typical for tragedies and comedies (such is drama as a kind of poetry); thirdly, to connect their words with the words of strangers belonging to the characters (which is inherent in the epic): “And when he (the poet-V. X.) cites other people's speeches, and when he speaks on his own behalf in the intervals between them, it will be narration." The selection by Socrates and Plato of the third, epic kind of poetry (as mixed) is based on the distinction between the story of what happened without involving speech actors(other - gr. diegesis) and imitation through deeds, actions, spoken words (other - gr. mimesis).

Similar judgments about the types of poetry are expressed in the third chapter of Aristotle's Poetics. Three ways of imitation in poetry (verbal art), which are the characteristics of epic, lyricism and drama, are briefly described here: as Homer does, or in such a way that the imitator remains himself, without changing his face, or representing all the depicted persons as active and active.

In the same spirit - as the types of relation of the speaker ("speech carrier") to the artistic whole - the types of literature were repeatedly considered later, up to our time. However, in the 19th century (originally - in the aesthetics of romanticism), a different understanding of the epic, lyrics and drama was strengthened: not as verbal and artistic forms, but as some intelligible entities fixed by philosophical categories: literary genera began to be thought of as types of artistic content. Thus, their consideration turned out to be torn away from poetics (the teachings specifically about verbal art). So, Schelling correlated the lyrics with infinity and the spirit of freedom, the epic - with pure necessity, but in the drama he saw a kind of synthesis of both: the struggle of freedom and necessity. And Hegel (following Jean-Paul) characterized the epic, lyrics and drama with the help of the categories "object" and "subject": epic poetry is objective, lyrical poetry is subjective, while dramatic poetry combines these two principles. Thanks to V.G. Belinsky as the author of the article "The division of poetry into genera and types" (1841), the Hegelian concept (and the terminology corresponding to it) took root in Russian literary criticism.

In the XX century. the types of literature were repeatedly correlated with various phenomena of psychology (recollection, representation, tension), linguistics (first, second, third grammatical person), as well as with the category of time (past, present, future).

However, the tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle has not exhausted itself, it continues to live. The genres of literature as types of speech organization of literary works are an undeniable supra-epochal reality worthy of close attention.

The theory of speech developed in the 1930s by the German psychologist and linguist K. Buhler, who argued that statements (speech acts) have three aspects, sheds light on the nature of the epic, lyrics and drama. They include, firstly, a message about the subject of speech (representation); secondly, expression (expression of the speaker's emotions); thirdly, the appeal (the speaker's address to someone, which makes the statement actually an action). These three aspects of speech activity are interconnected and manifest themselves in different types of statements (including artistic ones) in different ways. In a lyrical work, speech expression becomes the organizing principle and dominant. Drama emphasizes the appellative, actually effective side of speech, and the word appears as a kind of act performed at a certain moment in the unfolding of events. The epic also widely relies on the appellative beginnings of speech (since the composition of the works includes the statements of the characters that signify their actions). But messages about something external to the speaker dominate in this literary genre.

With these properties of the speech tissue of lyrics, drama and epic, other properties of the genres of literature are organically connected (and precisely by them are predetermined): ways of spatio-temporal organization of works; the originality of the manifestation of a person in them; forms of presence of the author; the nature of the appeal of the text to the reader. Each of the genres of literature, in other words, has a special complex of properties inherent only to it.

The division of literature into genera does not coincide with its division into poetry and prose (see pp. 236-240). In everyday speech, lyrical works are often identified with poetry, and epic works with prose. This usage is inaccurate. Each of the literary genera includes both poetic (poetic) and prose (non-poetic) works. The epic in the early stages of art was most often poetic (epics of antiquity, French songs about exploits, Russian epics and historical songs, etc.). Epic works written in verse are not uncommon in the literature of the New Age (“Don Juan” by J. N. G. Byron, “Eugene Onegin” by A. S. Pushkin, “Who Lives Well in Rus'” by N.A. Nekrasov). In the dramatic kind of literature, both poetry and prose are also used, sometimes combined in the same work (many plays by W. Shakespeare). Yes, and lyrics, mostly poetic, sometimes prose (recall Turgenev's "Poems in Prose").

There are also more serious terminological problems in the theory of literary genders. The words “epic” (“epic”), “dramatic” (“dramaticism”), “lyrical” (“lyricism”) denote not only the generic features of the works in question, but also their other properties. Epic is called majestically calm, unhurried contemplation of life in its complexity and diversity, the breadth of the view of the world and its acceptance as a kind of integrity. In this regard, they often talk about the "epic worldview", artistically embodied in Homer's poems and a number of later works ("War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy). Epicness as an ideological and emotional mood can take place in all literary genres - not only in epic (narrative) works, but also in drama (“Boris Godunov” by A.S. Pushkin) and lyrics (“On the Kulikov Field” by A.A. . Block). It is customary to call dramatism a state of mind associated with a tense experience of some contradictions, with excitement and anxiety. And finally, lyricism is a sublime emotionality expressed in the speech of the author, narrator, characters. Drama and lyricism can also be present in all literary genres. So, the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "Anna Karenina", a poem by M.I. Tsvetaeva "Longing for the Motherland" Lyricism is imbued with the novel by I.S. Turgenev " Noble Nest”, plays by A.P. Chekhov's "Three Sisters" and " The Cherry Orchard”, stories and novels by I. A. Bunin. Epos, lyrics and drama, thus, are free from unambiguously rigid attachment to epic, lyricism and drama as types of emotional and semantic "sound" of works.

The original experience of distinguishing between these two series of concepts (epos - epic, etc.) was undertaken in the middle of our century by the German scientist E. Steiger. In his work "Basic Concepts of Poetics", he characterized the epic, lyrical, dramatic as phenomena of style (tonality types - Tonart), linking them (respectively) with such concepts as representation, memory, tension. And he argued that every literary work (regardless of whether it has the external form of an epic, lyric or drama) combines these three principles: "I will not understand the lyrical and dramatic if I associate them with lyrics and drama."

§ 2. Origin of literary genres

Epos, lyrics and drama were formed at the earliest stages of the existence of society, in primitive syncretic creativity. The first of the three chapters of his "Historical Poetics" A.N. Veselovsky, one of the greatest Russian historians and literary theorists of the 19th century. The scientist argued that literary genera arose from the ritual choir of primitive peoples, whose actions were ritual dance games, where imitative body movements were accompanied by singing - exclamations of joy or sadness. Epos, lyrics and drama were interpreted by Veselovsky as having developed from the “protoplasm” of ritual “choir actions”.

From the exclamations of the most active members of the choir (singers, luminaries), lyric-epic songs (cantilenas) grew up, which eventually separated from the rite: “Songs of a lyrical-epic nature seem to be the first natural separation from the connection between the choir and the rite.” the original form of poetry proper was, therefore, the lyric-epic song. On the basis of such songs, epic narratives subsequently formed. And from the exclamations of the choir as such, lyricism grew (originally group, collective), which, over time, also separated from the rite. The epic and lyrics are thus interpreted by Veselovsky as "a consequence of the decay of the ancient ritual choir." The drama, the scientist claims, arose from the exchange of remarks of the choir and the singers. And she (unlike the epic and lyrics), having gained independence, at the same time "preserved all the syncretism" of the ritual choir and was a kind of its likeness.

The theory of the origin of literary genera, put forward by Veselovsky, is confirmed by many facts about the life of primitive peoples known to modern science. So, the origin of the drama from ritual performances is undoubted: dance and pantomime were gradually more and more actively accompanied by the words of the participants in the ritual action. At the same time, Veselovsky's theory does not take into account that epic and lyric poetry could be formed independently of ritual actions. Thus, mythological tales, on the basis of which prose legends (sagas) and fairy tales subsequently became firmly established, arose outside the choir. They were not sung by the participants in the mass ritual, but were told by one of the representatives of the tribe (and, probably, such a story was far from being addressed to a large number of people in all cases). Lyrics could also be formed outside the rite. Lyrical self-expression arose in the production (labor) and domestic relations of primitive peoples. Thus, there were different ways of forming literary genera. And the ritual choir was one of them.

In the epic kind of literature (other - Gr. epos - word, speech), the organizing beginning of the work is the story of the characters (characters), their destinies, actions, mindsets, about the events in their lives that make up the plot. This is a chain of verbal messages, or, more simply, a story about what happened earlier. Narrative is characterized by a temporal distance between the conduct of speech and the subject of verbal designations. It (remember Aristotle: the poet tells “about the event as something separate from himself”) is conducted from the side and, as a rule, has the grammatical form of the past tense. The narrator (telling) is characterized by the position of a person who recalls what happened earlier. The distance between the time of the depicted action and the time of the narration about it is perhaps the most essential feature of the epic form.

The word "narrative" is used in a variety of ways when applied to literature. In a narrow sense, this is a detailed designation in words of what happened once and had a temporal duration. In a broader sense, the narrative also includes descriptions, that is, the recreation through words of something stable, stable or completely motionless (such are most of the landscapes, the characteristics of the everyday environment, the features of the appearance of the characters, their states of mind). Descriptions are also verbal images of the periodically repeating. “He used to be still in bed: / They carry notes to him,” says, for example, about Onegin in the first chapter of Pushkin's novel. In a similar way, the narrative fabric includes the author's reasoning, which plays a significant role in L. N. Tolstoy, A. Frans, T. Mann.

In epic works, the narrative connects to itself and, as it were, envelops the statements of the characters - their dialogues and monologues, including internal ones, actively interacting with them, explaining, supplementing and correcting them. And the literary text turns out to be an alloy of narrative speech and statements of characters.

Works of the epic kind make full use of the arsenal artistic means available to literature, easily and freely master reality in time and space. However, they do not know the limitations in the amount of text. The epic as a kind of literature includes both short stories(medieval and renaissance short stories; humorous O'Henry and early A.P. Chekhov), as well as works designed for long listening or reading: epics and novels that cover life with extraordinary breadth. Such are the Indian "Mahabharata", the ancient Greek "Iliad" and "Odyssey" by Homer, "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy, "The Forsyte Saga" by J. Galsworthy, "Gone with the Wind" by M. Mitchell.

An epic work can “absorb” such a number of characters, circumstances, events, destinies, details that are inaccessible to either other types of literature or any other kind of art. At the same time, the narrative form contributes to the deepest penetration into the inner world of a person. Complex characters, possessing many features and properties, incomplete and contradictory, in motion, formation, development are quite accessible to her.

These possibilities of the epic kind of literature are not used in all works. But the idea of ​​the artistic reproduction of life in its entirety, the disclosure of the essence of the era, the scale and monumentality of the creative act is firmly connected with the word "epos". There is no (neither in the sphere of verbal art, nor beyond) groups of works of art that would so freely penetrate both into the depths of human consciousness and into the breadth of people's being, as stories, novels, epics do.

In epic works, the presence of the narrator is deeply significant. This is very specific shape artistic reproduction of a person. The narrator is an intermediary between the depicted and the reader, often acting as a witness and interpreter of the persons and events shown.

The text of an epic work usually does not contain information about the fate of the narrator, about his relationship with the characters, about when, where and under what circumstances he tells his story, about his thoughts and feelings. The spirit of the story, according to T. Mann, is often "weightless, incorporeal and omnipresent"; and "for him there is no separation between 'here' and 'there'." And at the same time, the narrator's speech has not only figurativeness, but also expressive significance; it characterizes not only the object of the utterance, but also the speaker himself. In any epic work, the manner of perceiving reality is imprinted, inherent in the one who narrates, his vision of the world and his way of thinking. In this sense, it is legitimate to talk about the image of the narrator. This concept has become firmly established in literary criticism thanks to B. M. Eikhenbaum, V.V. Vinogradov, M.M. Bakhtin (works of the 1920s). Summing up the judgments of these scientists, G.A. Gukovsky wrote in the 1940s: “Each image in art forms an idea not only of the depicted, but also of the depicter, the carrier of the presentation. The narrator is not only a more or less concrete image, but also a certain figurative idea, principle and appearance of the speaker, or otherwise, there is certainly a certain point of view on what is being stated, a psychological, ideological and simply geographical point of view, since it is impossible to describe from anywhere and there can be no description without a descriptor.

The epic form, in other words, reproduces not only the narrated, but also the narrator; it artistically captures the manner of speaking and perceiving the world, and, ultimately, the mindset and feelings of the narrator. The image of the narrator is found not in actions and not in direct outpourings of the soul, but in a kind of narrative monologue. The expressive beginnings of such a monologue, being its secondary function, are at the same time very important.

There can be no full perception folk tales without close attention to their narrative manner, in which behind the naivety and ingenuity of the one who tells the story, gaiety and cunning, life experience and wisdom are guessed. It is impossible to feel the charm of the heroic epics of antiquity without catching the sublime structure of thoughts and feelings of the rhapsodist and storyteller. And even more unthinkable is the understanding of the works of A. S. Pushkin and N. V. Gogol, L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, N. S. Leskov and I. S. Turgenev, A. P. Chekhov and I. A. Bunin, M. A. Bulgakov and A. P. Platonov outside the comprehension of the “voice” of the narrator. A lively perception of an epic work is always associated with close attention to the manner in which the story is told. A reader sensitive to verbal art sees in a story, story or novel not only a message about the life of the characters with its details, but also an expressively significant monologue of the narrator.

Literature has different modes of storytelling. The most deeply rooted and presented is the type of narration in which there is, so to speak, an absolute distance between the characters and the one who reports on them. The narrator recounts events with unruffled calmness. Everything is clear to him, the gift of "omniscience" is inherent. And his image, the image of a creature that has ascended above the world, gives the work a flavor of maximum objectivity. Significantly, Homer was often likened to the celestial Olympians and called "divine".

The artistic possibilities of such a narrative are considered in the German classical aesthetics of the era of romanticism. In the epic "we need a narrator," we read in Schelling, "who, by the equanimity of his story, would constantly distract us from too much participation in the actors and direct the attention of listeners to a pure result." And further: “The narrator is alien to the actors; he not only surpasses the listeners with his balanced contemplation and sets his story in this way, but, as it were, takes the place of “necessity”.”

Based on such forms of storytelling, dating back to Homer, the classical aesthetics of the 19th century. argued that the epic kind of literature is the artistic embodiment of a special, "epic" worldview, which is marked by the maximum breadth of the outlook on life and its calm, joyful acceptance.

Similar thoughts about the nature of narration were expressed by T. Mann in the article “The Art of the Novel”: “Perhaps the element of narration is the eternal Homeric beginning, this prophetic spirit of the past, which is infinite like the world, and to which the whole world is known, most fully and worthy embodies the element of poetry." The writer sees in the narrative form the embodiment of the spirit of irony, which is not a coldly indifferent mockery, but full of cordiality and love: “... this is greatness, nourishing tenderness for the small”, “a view from the height of freedom, peace and objectivity, not overshadowed by any moralizing”.

Such ideas about the substantive foundations of the epic form (despite the fact that they are based on centuries of artistic experience) are incomplete and largely one-sided. The distance between the narrator and the characters is not always updated. Antique prose already testifies to this: in the novels "Metamorphoses" ("The Golden Ass") by Apuleius and "Satyricon" by Petronius, the characters themselves talk about what they saw and experienced. Such works express a view of the world that has nothing to do with the so-called "epic worldview".

In the literature of the last two or three centuries, subjective narration almost prevailed. The narrator began to look at the world through the eyes of one of the characters, imbued with his thoughts and impressions. A striking example of this is detailed picture battles at Waterloo in Stendhal's Parma Monastery. This battle is by no means reproduced in a Homeric way: the narrator, as it were, reincarnates as a hero, young Fabrizio, and looks at what is happening through his eyes. The distance between him and the character practically disappears, the points of view of both are combined. Tolstoy sometimes paid tribute to this way of depicting. The Battle of Borodino in one of the chapters of "War and Peace" is shown in the perception of Pierre Bezukhov, who was not experienced in military affairs; the military council in Fili is presented in the form of impressions of the girl Malasha. In Anna Karenina, the races in which Vronsky takes part are reproduced twice: once experienced by himself, the other - seen through Anna's eyes. Something similar is characteristic of the works of F.M. Dostoevsky and A.P. Chekhov, G. Flaubert and T. Mann. The hero approached by the narrator is depicted as if from within. “You need to transfer yourself to the character,” Flaubert remarked. When the narrator approaches one of the characters, indirect speech is widely used, so that the voices of the narrator and the character merge into one. Combining the points of view of the narrator and characters in the literature of the 19th–20th centuries. caused by the increased artistic interest in the originality of the inner world of people, and most importantly - the understanding of life as a set of dissimilar attitudes to reality, qualitatively different horizons and value orientations.

The most common form of epic narrative is the third person narrative. But the narrator may well appear in the work as a kind of “I”. It is natural to call such personified narrators, who speak from their own, “first” person, narrators. The narrator is often at the same time a character in the work (Maxim Maksimych in the story "Bela" from "The Hero of Our Time" by M.Yu. Lermontov, Grinev in "The Captain's Daughter" by A. S. Pushkin, Ivan Vasilyevich in L. N. Tolstoy's story "After ball”, Arkady Dolgoruky in “The Teenager” by F. M. Dostoevsky).

By the facts of their lives and mindsets, many of the narrators-characters are close (although not identical) to the writers. This takes place in autobiographical works (the early trilogy of L.N. Tolstoy, "The Summer of the Lord" and "Praying Man" by I.S. Shmelev). But more often, the fate, life positions, experiences of the hero who has become a narrator differ markedly from what is inherent in the author (“Robinson Crusoe” by D. Defoe, “My Life” by A.P. Chekhov). At the same time, in a number of works (epistolary, memoir, skaz forms), the narrators express themselves in a manner that is not identical to the author's and sometimes differs quite sharply from it (on someone else's word, see pp. 248–249). The modes of narration used in epic works seem to be very diverse.

§ 4. Drama

Dramatic works (other - Gr. drama - action), like epic ones, recreate the series of events, the actions of people and their relationships. Like the author of an epic work, the playwright is subject to the "law of developing action." But there is no detailed narrative-descriptive image in the drama. Actually, the author's speech here is auxiliary and episodic. Such are the lists of actors, sometimes accompanied by brief characteristics, designation of time and place of action; descriptions of the stage situation at the beginning of acts and episodes, as well as comments on individual replicas of the characters and indications of their movements, gestures, facial expressions, intonations (remarks). All this constitutes a side text of a dramatic work. Its main text is a chain of characters' statements, their replicas and monologues.

Hence some limited artistic possibilities of the drama. The writer-playwright uses only a part of the visual means that are available to the creator of a novel or epic, short story or short story. And the characters of the characters are revealed in the drama with less freedom and fullness than in the epic. “I perceive the drama,” noted T. Mann, “as the art of the silhouette, and I feel only the told person as a voluminous, integral, real and plastic image.” At the same time, playwrights, unlike the authors of epic works, are forced to limit themselves to the amount of verbal text that meets the requirements of theatrical art. The time of the action depicted in the drama must fit into the strict framework of the stage time. And the performance in the forms familiar to the new European theater lasts, as you know, no more than three or four hours. And this requires an appropriate size of the dramatic text.

At the same time, the author of a play has significant advantages over the creators of short stories and novels. One moment depicted in the drama closely adjoins another, neighboring one. The time of the events reproduced by the playwright during the “stage episode is not compressed or stretched; the characters of the drama exchange remarks without any noticeable time intervals, and their statements, as K.S. Stanislavsky noted, form a continuous, continuous line. is captured as something past, then the chain of dialogues and monologues in the drama creates the illusion of the present time. Life here speaks as if from its own face: between what is depicted and the reader there is no intermediary narrator. The action is recreated in the drama with maximum immediacy. It flows as if before the eyes of the reader. "All narrative forms," ​​wrote F. Schiller, "carry the present into the past; all dramatic forms make the past present."

Drama is stage oriented. Theater is a public, mass art. The performance directly affects many people, as if merging into one in response to what is happening before them. The purpose of the drama, according to Pushkin, is to act on the multitude, to occupy its curiosity "and for this to capture the" truth of passions ":" The drama was born on the square and constituted the amusement of the people. The people, like children, require entertainment, action. The drama presents him with extraordinary, strange occurrences. The people demand strong sensations<..>Laughter, pity and horror are the three strings of our imagination, shaken by dramatic art. The dramatic genre of literature is especially closely connected with the sphere of laughter, for the theater was consolidated and developed in close connection with mass festivities, in an atmosphere of play and fun. “The comic genre is universal for antiquity,” O. M. Freidenberg noted. The same is true to say about the theater and drama of other countries and eras. T. Mann was right when he called the "comedian instinct" "the fundamental principle of any dramatic skill."

It is not surprising that drama gravitates towards an outwardly spectacular presentation of what is depicted. Her imagery turns out to be hyperbolic, catchy, theatrical and bright. “The theater requires exaggerated broad lines both in voice, recitation, and in gestures,” N. Boileau wrote. And this property of stage art invariably leaves its mark on the behavior of the heroes of dramatic works. “How he acted out in the theater,” Bubnov (At the Bottom by Gorky) comments on the frenzied tirade of the desperate Klesch, who, by an unexpected intrusion into the general conversation, gave it theatrical effect. Significant (as a characteristic of the dramatic kind of literature) are Tolstoy's reproaches against W. Shakespeare for the abundance of hyperbole, because of which, as it were, "the possibility of an artistic impression is violated." “From the very first words,” he wrote about the tragedy “King Lear,” one can see an exaggeration: an exaggeration of events, an exaggeration of feelings and an exaggeration of expressions. L. Tolstoy was wrong in assessing Shakespeare's work, but the idea of ​​the great English playwright's commitment to theatrical hyperbole is completely justified. What has been said about "King Lear" with no less reason can be attributed to ancient comedies and tragedies, dramatic works of classicism, to the plays of F. Schiller and V. Hugo, etc.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, when the desire for worldly authenticity prevailed in literature, the conventions inherent in the drama became less obvious, often they were reduced to a minimum. At the origins of this phenomenon is the so-called "petty-bourgeois drama" of the 18th century, the creators and theorists of which were D. Diderot and G.E. Lessing. Works of the largest Russian playwrights of the XIX century. and the beginning of the 20th century - A.N. Ostrovsky, A.P. Chekhov and M. Gorky - are distinguished by the reliability of the recreated life forms. But even when the playwrights set their sights on plausibility, plot, psychological, and actually verbal hyperbole persisted. Theatrical conventions made themselves felt even in Chekhov's dramaturgy, which was the maximum limit of "life-likeness". Let's take a look at the final scene of The Three Sisters. One young woman broke up with a loved one ten or fifteen minutes ago, probably forever. Another five minutes ago found out about the death of her fiancé. And now they, together with the eldest, third sister, sum up the moral and philosophical results of the past, thinking to the sounds of a military march about the fate of their generation, about the future of mankind. It is hardly possible to imagine this happening in reality. But we do not notice the implausibility of the ending of The Three Sisters, because we are used to the fact that the drama significantly changes the forms of people's life.

The foregoing convinces of the justice of A. S. Pushkin’s judgment (from his already cited article) that “the very essence of dramatic art excludes plausibility”; “Reading a poem, a novel, we can often forget ourselves and believe that the incident described is not fiction, but the truth. In an ode, in an elegy, we can think that the poet portrayed his real feelings, in real circumstances. But where is the credibility in a building divided into two parts, of which one is filled with spectators who have agreed etc.

The most important role in dramatic works belongs to the conventions of speech self-disclosure of the characters, whose dialogues and monologues, often saturated with aphorisms and maxims, turn out to be much more extensive and effective than those remarks that could be uttered in a similar life situation. Replicas “aside” are conventional, which, as it were, do not exist for other characters on the stage, but are clearly audible to the audience, as well as monologues uttered by the characters alone, alone with themselves, which are a purely stage technique for bringing out inner speech (there are many such monologues as in ancient tragedies, and in the dramaturgy of modern times). The playwright, setting up a kind of experiment, shows how a person would express himself if he expressed his moods with maximum fullness and brightness in the spoken words. And speech in a dramatic work often takes on a resemblance to artistic lyrical or oratorical speech: the characters here tend to express themselves as improvisers-poets or masters of public speaking. Therefore, Hegel was partly right, considering the drama as a synthesis of the epic beginning (eventfulness) and the lyrical (speech expression).

Drama has, as it were, two lives in art: theatrical and literary. Constituting the dramatic basis of the performances, existing in their composition, the dramatic work is also perceived by the reading public.

But this was not always the case. The emancipation of the drama from the stage was carried out gradually - over a number of centuries and ended relatively recently: in the 18th-19th centuries. The world-famous examples of drama (from antiquity to the 17th century) at the time of their creation were practically not recognized as literary works: they existed only as part of the performing arts. Neither W. Shakespeare nor J. B. Molière were perceived by their contemporaries as writers. A decisive role in strengthening the idea of ​​drama as a work intended not only for stage production, but also for reading, was played by the “discovery” in the second half of the 18th century of Shakespeare as a great dramatic poet. From now on, dramas began to be read intensively. Thanks to numerous printed publications in the XIX-XX centuries. dramatic works proved to be an important variety fiction.

In the 19th century (especially in its first half) the literary merits of the drama were often placed above the scenic ones. So, Goethe believed that "Shakespeare's works are not for bodily eyes", and Griboyedov called his desire to hear the verses of "Woe from Wit" from the stage "childish". The so-called Lesedrama (drama for reading), created with the focus primarily on perception in reading, has become widespread. Such are Goethe's Faust, Byron's dramatic works, Pushkin's small tragedies, Turgenev's dramas, about which the author remarked: "My plays, unsatisfactory on stage, may be of some interest in reading."

There are no fundamental differences between the Lesedrama and the play, which the author is oriented towards stage production. Dramas created for reading are often potentially stage dramas. And the theater (including the modern one) stubbornly seeks and sometimes finds the keys to them, evidence of which is the successful productions of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" (first of all, this is the famous pre-revolutionary performance Art Theater) and numerous (although far from always successful) stage readings of Pushkin's little tragedies in the 20th century.

The old truth remains in force: the most important, the main purpose of the drama is the stage. “Only when performed on stage,” A. N. Ostrovsky noted, “does the author’s dramatic fiction take on a completely finished form and produce exactly the moral action that the author set himself as a goal to achieve.”

The creation of a performance based on a dramatic work is associated with its creative completion: the actors create intonation-plastic drawings roles performed, the artist designs the stage space, the director develops the mise-en-scenes. In this regard, the concept of the play changes somewhat (more attention is paid to some of its sides, less attention to others), it is often concretized and enriched: the stage production introduces new semantic shades into the drama. At the same time, the principle of faithful reading of literature is of paramount importance for the theater. The director and actors are called upon to convey the staged work to the audience with the maximum possible completeness. The fidelity of stage reading takes place where the director and actors deeply comprehend the dramatic work in its main content, genre, and style features. Stage productions(as well as film adaptations) are legitimate only in cases where there is agreement (albeit relative) of the director and actors with the range of ideas of the writer-playwright, when the stage figures are carefully attentive to the meaning of the staged work, to the features of its genre, the features of its style and to the text itself .

In the classical aesthetics of the 18th–19th centuries, in particular by Hegel and Belinsky, drama (primarily the genre of tragedy) was considered as the highest form of literary creativity: as the “crown of poetry”. Whole line artistic epochs and indeed proved himself par excellence in the dramatic arts. Aeschylus and Sophocles in the heyday of ancient culture, Moliere, Racine and Corneille in the time of classicism had no equal among the authors of epic works. Significant in this respect is the work of Goethe. All literary genres were available to the great German writer, but he crowned his life in art with the creation of a dramatic work - the immortal Faust.

In past centuries (up to the 18th century), drama not only successfully competed with the epic, but often became the leading form of artistic reproduction of life in space and time. This is due to a number of reasons. First, the theatrical art played a huge role, accessible (unlike handwritten and printed books) to the widest strata of society. Secondly, the properties of dramatic works (the depiction of characters with pronounced features, the reproduction of human passions, the attraction to pathos and the grotesque) in the "pre-realist" era fully corresponded to general literary and general artistic trends.

And although in the XIX-XX centuries. the socio-psychological novel, a genre of epic literature, moved to the forefront of literature; dramatic works still have a place of honor.

§ 5. Lyrics

In lyrics (other - Gr. lyra - a musical instrument, to the sounds of which poetry was performed) in the foreground are individual states of human consciousness: emotionally colored reflections, strong-willed impulses, impressions, non-rational sensations and aspirations. If any series of events is indicated in a lyrical work (which is far from always the case), then it is very sparingly, without any careful detailing (remember Pushkin's "I remember a wonderful moment ..."). “The lyric,” wrote F. Schlegel, “always depicts only a certain state in itself, for example, a burst of surprise, a flash of anger, pain, joy, etc., a certain whole that is not actually a whole. Here unity of feeling is necessary. This view of the subject of lyric poetry has been inherited by modern science.

The lyrical experience appears as belonging to the speaker (the speaker). It is not so much indicated by words (this is a particular case), but expressed with maximum energy. In lyric poetry (and only in it) the system of artistic means is entirely subordinated to the disclosure of the integral movement of the human soul.

A lyrically imprinted experience differs significantly from directly life emotions, where amorphousness, indistinctness, and randomness take place, and often prevail. Lyrical emotion is a kind of clot, the quintessence of a person's spiritual experience. “The most subjective kind of literature,” L. Ya. Ginzburg wrote about the lyrics, “it, like no other, strives for the general, for the image mental life as universal." The experience underlying the lyrical work is a kind of spiritual insight. It is the result of creative completion and artistic transformation of what is experienced (or can be experienced) by a person into real life. “Even in those days,” N.V. Gogol wrote about Pushkin, “when he himself rushed into the passions, poetry was sacred to him, like some kind of temple. He did not enter there untidy and untidy; he brought in nothing thoughtless, reckless from his own life; disheveled reality did not enter there naked. The reader heard only the fragrance, but what substances burned out in the poet’s chest in order to emit this fragrance, no one can hear.

Lyricism is by no means confined to the sphere of the inner life of people, their psychology as such. She is always attracted states of mind, signifying a person's focus on external reality. Therefore, lyric poetry turns out to be an artistic mastery of states not only of consciousness (which, as G. N. Pospelov insistently says, is primary, main, dominant in it), but also of being. Such are philosophical, landscape and civil poems. Lyrical poetry is capable of capturing spatio-temporal ideas easily and widely, connecting expressed feelings with the facts of everyday life and nature, history and modernity, with planetary life, the universe, the universe. At the same time, lyrical creativity, one of the forerunners of which in European literature are the biblical "Psalms", can acquire in their most vivid samples religious character. It turns out (remember M.Yu. Lermontov's poem "Prayer") "congenial to prayer" captures the thoughts of poets about the higher power of being (ode of G.R. Derzhavin "God") and his communication with God ("Prophet" by A.S. Pushkin ). Religious motifs are very persistent in the lyrics of our century: V.F. Khodasevich, N.S. Gumilyov, A.A. Akhmatova, B. L. Pasternak, from among contemporary poets- at O.A Sedakova.

The range of lyrically embodied concepts, ideas, emotions is unusually wide. At the same time, lyrics, to a greater extent than other types of literature, tend to capture everything that is positively significant and of value. It is not capable of fruitfulness, locking itself in the realm of total skepticism and world-rejection. Let us turn once again to the book by L.Ya. Ginzburg: “At its very essence, lyricism is a conversation about significant, high, beautiful (sometimes in a contradictory, ironic refraction); a kind of exposition of ideals and life values person. But also anti-values ​​- in the grotesque, in denunciation and satire; but it is not here that the high road of lyric poetry passes.

Lyric finds itself mainly in a small form. Although there is a genre lyric poem recreating experiences in their symphonic diversity (“About this” by V.V. Mayakovsky, “Poem of the mountain” and “Poem of the end” by M.I. Tsvetaeva, “Poem without a hero” by A.A. Akhmatova), the length of the poem. The principle of the lyrical kind of literature is "as short as possible and as full as possible." Aspiring to the ultimate compactness, the most "compressed" lyrical texts are sometimes like proverbial formulas, aphorisms, maxims, which are often in contact and compete with.

The states of human consciousness are embodied in the lyrics in different ways: either directly and openly, in sincere confessions, confessional monologues filled with reflection (recall S.A. Yesenin’s masterpiece “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry ...”), or mostly indirectly, indirectly) in the form of an image of external reality (descriptive lyrics, primarily landscape) or a compact story about some event (narrative lyrics). But almost in any lyrical work there is a meditative beginning. Meditation (Latin meditatio - reflection, reflection) is called an excited and psychologically intense meditation on something: descriptiveness has a meditative "subtext". Lyrics, to put it another way, are incompatible with the neutrality and impartiality of tone widely used in epic narratives. The speech of the lyrical work is full of expression, which here becomes the organizing and dominant principle. Lyrical expression makes itself felt in the choice of words, and in syntactic constructions, and in allegories, and, most importantly, in the phonetic-rhythmic construction of the text. "Semantic-phonetic effects" come to the fore in the lyrics in their inextricable connection with the rhythm, as a rule, tense and dynamic. At the same time, the lyrical work in the vast majority of cases has a poetic form, while the epic and drama (especially in eras close to us) turn mainly to prose.

Speech expression in the lyrical kind of poetry is often brought, as it were, to the maximum limit. Such a number of bold and unexpected allegories, such a flexible and rich combination of intonations and rhythms, such heartfelt and impressive sound repetitions and similarities that lyric poets willingly resort to (especially in our century), neither "ordinary" speech, nor the statements of heroes know. in epic and drama, neither in narrative prose, nor even in verse epic.

In the full expression of lyrical speech, the usual logical ordering of statements is often pushed to the periphery, or even eliminated altogether, which is especially characteristic of the poetry of the 20th century, which was largely preceded by the work of the French symbolists of the second century. half of XIX century (P. Verlaine, St. Mallarme). Here are the lines of L.N. Martynov devoted to the art of this kind:

And the speech is self-willed, The order in the scale breaks, And the notes go upside down To wake up the voice.

The “lyrical disorder”, familiar to verbal art before, but prevailing only in the poetry of our century, is an expression of artistic interest in the hidden depths of human consciousness, in the origins of experiences, in complex, logically indefinable movements of the soul. Turning to speech, which allows itself to be "self-willed", poets get the opportunity to talk about everything at the same time, swiftly, at once, "excitedly": "The world here appears as if taken by surprise by a sudden feeling." Let us recall the beginning of B.L. Pasternak "Waves", opening the book "Rebirth":

The expressiveness of speech makes lyrical creativity related to music. P. Verlaine's poem "The Art of Poetry" is about this, containing an appeal addressed to the poet to be imbued with the spirit of music:

It's just a matter of music. So, don't measure the way. Prefer almost incorporeality Everything that is too flesh and body<…> So music again and again! Let in your verse with overclocking Shine in the distance transformed Another sky and love.

At the early stages of the development of art, lyrical works were sung, the verbal text was accompanied by a melody, enriched with it and interacted with it. Numerous songs and romances still testify that lyrics are close to music in their essence. According to M.S. Kagan, lyricism is "music in literature", "literature that has assumed the laws of music".

There is, however, a fundamental difference between lyrics and music. The latter (like dance), while comprehending the spheres of human consciousness that are inaccessible to other types of art, at the same time is limited to what conveys the general nature of the experience. Human consciousness is revealed here outside of its direct connection with some specific phenomena of being. Listening, for example, to Chopin's famous Etude in C minor (op. 10 No. 12), we perceive all the impetuous activity and loftiness of feeling, reaching the intensity of passion, but we do not associate this with any particular life situation or any certain picture. The listener is free to imagine a sea storm, or a revolution, or the rebelliousness of a love feeling, or simply surrender to the elements of sounds and perceive the emotions embodied in them without any subject associations. Music is able to immerse us in such depths of the spirit that are no longer associated with the idea of ​​some single phenomena.

Not so in lyric poetry. Feelings and volitional impulses are given here in their conditionality by something and in a direct direction to specific phenomena. Recall, for example, Pushkin's poem "The daylight went out ...". The rebellious, romantic and at the same time sad feeling of the poet is revealed through his impression of the environment (the "gloomy ocean" surging under him, "the distant shore, the lands of midday magic lands") and through memories of what happened (about the deep wounds of love and youth faded in storms). ). The poet conveys the connections of consciousness with being, otherwise it cannot be in verbal art. This or that feeling always appears as a reaction of consciousness to some phenomena of reality. However vague and elusive the imprinted artistic word emotional movements (let us recall the poems of V.A. Zhukovsky, A.A. Fet or the early A.A. Blok), the reader will find out what caused them, or at least what impressions they are associated with.

The bearer of an experience expressed in lyrics is usually called a lyrical hero. This term, introduced by Yu.N. Tynyanov in the 1921 article “Blok”, is rooted in literary criticism and criticism (along with the synonymous phrases “lyrical self”, “lyrical subject”). They talk about the lyrical hero as “I-created” (M.M. Prishvin), meaning not only individual poems, but also their cycles, as well as the work of the poet as a whole. This is a very specific image of a person, fundamentally different from the images of narrators-storytellers, about whose inner world we, as a rule, know nothing, and the characters of epic and dramatic works, which are invariably distanced from the writer.

The lyrical hero is not only bound by close ties with the author, with his worldview, spiritual and biographical experience, mental attitude, manner of speech behavior, but turns out (almost in most cases) to be indistinguishable from him. The lyrics in its main "array" are autopsychological.

At the same time, the lyrical experience is not identical to what the poet experienced as a biographical personality. The lyrics do not just reproduce the author's feelings, they transform, enrich, recreate, elevate and ennoble them. This is exactly what A. S. Pushkin’s poem “The Poet” is about (“.. only a divine verb / Touches the sensitive ear, / The poet’s soul will start up, / Like an awakened eagle”).

At the same time, the author in the process of creativity often creates those psychological situations with the power of imagination that did not exist at all in reality. Literary critics have repeatedly been convinced that the motives and themes of A. S. Pushkin's lyrical poems do not always agree with the facts of his personal fate. The inscription made by A.A. Block on the margins of the manuscript of one of his poems: "There was nothing like that." In his poems, the poet captured his personality either in the image of a young monk, an admirer of the mystically mysterious Beautiful Lady, or in the “mask” of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or as a frequenter of St. Petersburg restaurants.

Lyrically expressed experiences can belong both to the poet himself and to other persons who are not like him. The ability to “feel someone else’s instantly as your own” is, according to A.A. Feta, one of the facets of poetic talent. Lyrics in which the experiences of a person who is noticeably different from the author are expressed are called role-playing (as opposed to autopsychological). These are the poems “There is no name for you, my distant ...” A.A. Blok - a spiritual outpouring of a girl living in a vague expectation of love, or "I was killed near Rzhev" by A.T. Tvardovsky, or "Odyssey to Telemaku" by I.A. Brodsky. It even happens (although this rarely happens) that the subject of a lyrical utterance is exposed by the author. Such is " moral person» in a poem by N.A. Nekrasov of the same name, who caused many sorrows and troubles to those around him, but stubbornly repeated the phrase: "Living in accordance with strict morality, I did no harm to anyone in my life." Aristotle's earlier definition of lyric (the poet "remains himself without changing his face") is thus inaccurate: the lyric poet may well change his face and reproduce an experience that belongs to someone else.

But the mainstay of lyrical creativity is not role-playing poetry, but autopsychological poetry: poems that are an act of direct self-expression of the poet. The human authenticity of the lyrical experience, the direct presence in the poem, according to V.F. Khodasevich, "the living soul of the poet": "The personality of the author, not hidden by stylization, becomes closer to us"; the dignity of the poet lies "in the fact that he writes in obedience to the real need to express his feelings."

Lyricism in its dominant branch is characterized by the charming immediacy of the author's self-disclosure, the "openness" of his inner world. So, delving into the poems of A.S. Pushkin and M.Yu. Lermontova, S.A. Yesenin and B.L. Pasternak, A.A. Akhmatova and M.I. Tsvetaeva, we get a very vivid and multifaceted idea of ​​their spiritual and biographical experience, range of mindset, personal fate.

The relationship between the lyrical hero and the author (poet) is perceived by literary critics in different ways. The opinions of a number of scientists of the 20th century, in particular M.M. Bakhtin, who saw in the lyrics a complex system of relations between the author and the hero, “I” and “the other”, and also spoke about the invariable presence of the choral principle in it. This idea was developed by S.N. Broitman. He argues that lyric poetry (especially the eras close to us) is characterized not by “monosubjectivity”, but by “intersubjectivity”, i.e., the imprinting of interacting consciousnesses.

These scientific innovations, however, do not shake the usual idea of ​​the openness of the author's presence in a lyrical work as its most important property, which is traditionally denoted by the term "subjectivity". “He (a lyrical poet. - V.Kh.), - Hegel wrote, - can seek inspiration for creativity and content within himself, dwelling on internal situations, states, experiences and passions of his heart and spirit. Here man himself in his subjective inner life becomes artwork, while the epic poet is served by a hero different from himself, his exploits and incidents that happen to him.

It is the completeness of the expression of the author's subjectivity that determines the originality of the perception of the lyrics by the reader, who is actively involved in the emotional atmosphere of the work. Lyrical creativity (and this again makes it related to music, as well as to choreography) has the maximum inspiring, contagious power (suggestivity). Getting acquainted with a short story, novel or drama, we perceive what is depicted from a certain psychological distance, to a certain extent detached. By the will of the authors (and sometimes of our own) we accept or, on the contrary, do not share their mindset, approve or disapprove of their actions, mock them or sympathize with them. The lyric is another matter. To fully perceive a lyrical work means to be imbued with the mindset of the poet, to feel and once again experience them as something of one's own, personal, sincere. With the help of condensed poetic formulas of a lyrical work between the author and the reader, according to the exact words of L.Ya. Ginzburg, "lightning and unmistakable contact is established." The poet's feelings become at the same time our feelings. The author and his reader form a single, inseparable "we". And this is the special charm of the lyrics.

§ 6. Intergeneric and extrageneric forms

The genres of literature are not separated from each other by an impenetrable wall. Along with works that unconditionally and completely belong to one of the literary genres, there are also those that combine the properties of any two generic forms - “two-generic formations” (B.O. Korman’s expression). On works and their groups belonging to two types of literature during the 19th–20th centuries. has been said repeatedly. Thus, Schelling characterized the novel as "a combination of the epic with the drama." The presence of the epic beginning in the dramaturgy of A. N. Ostrovsky was noted. B. Brecht characterized his plays as epic. The works of M. Maeterlinck and A. Blok were given the term "lyrical dramas". It is deeply rooted in the verbal art of lyro-epic, which includes lyro-epic poems (established in literature since the era of romanticism), ballads (having folk roots), the so-called lyrical prose (usually autobiographical), works where the narrative lyrical digressions are “connected” to the events, as, for example, in Byron’s Don Juan and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

In literary criticism of the XX century. Repeated attempts have been made to supplement the traditional "triad" (epos, lyrics, drama) and to substantiate the concept of a fourth (or even fifth, etc.) kind of literature. Next to the three "former" novels were placed (V.D. Dneprov), and satire (Y.E. Elsberg, Yu.B. Borev), and the script (a number of film theorists). There is a lot of controversy in such judgments, but literature really knows groups of works that do not fully possess the properties of an epic, lyric or drama, or even lack them altogether. They can rightfully be called extra-generic forms.

First, these are essays. Here the attention of the authors is focused on external reality, which gives literary critics some reason to put them in a number of epic genres. However, in the essays, the series of events and the narrative itself do not play an organizing role: descriptions dominate, often accompanied by reasoning. These are “Khor and Kalinich” from Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter”, some works by G.I. Uspensky and M.M. Prishvin.

Secondly, this is the so-called “stream of consciousness” literature, where not the narrative presentation of events prevails, but endless chains of impressions, memories, and mental movements of the speaker. Here, consciousness, which most often appears disordered, chaotic, seems to appropriate and absorb the world: reality turns out to be “veiled” with the chaos of its contemplations, the world is placed in consciousness. The works of M. Proust, J. Joyce, Andrei Bely have similar properties. Later, representatives of the "new novel" in France (M. Butor, N. Sarrot) turned to this form.

And finally, essay writing, which has now become a very influential area of ​​literary creativity, definitely does not fit into the traditional triad. At the origins of essays are the world-famous "Experiments" ("Essays") by M. Montaigne. The essay form is a casually free combination of summarizing reports about single facts, descriptions of reality and (which is especially important) reflections on it. Thoughts expressed in essay form, as a rule, do not claim to be an exhaustive interpretation of the subject, they allow the possibility of completely different judgments. Essayistics gravitates towards syncretism: the beginnings of art proper here are easily combined with journalistic and philosophical ones.

Essayistics almost dominates in the work of V.V. Rozanova ("Solitary", "Fallen Leaves"). She made herself felt in the prose of A.M. Remizov ("Salting"), in a number of works by M.M. Prishvin (first of all, "Eyes of the Earth" are remembered). The essayistic principle is present in the prose of G. Fielding and L. Stern, in Byron's poems, in Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" (free conversations with the reader, thoughts about a secular person, about friendship and relatives, etc.), "Nevsky Prospekt" N .IN. Gogol (the beginning and the end of the story), in the prose of T. Mann, G. Hesse, R. Musil, where the narration is abundantly accompanied by the thoughts of the writers.

According to M.N. Epstein, the basis of essayism is a special concept of a person - as a carrier not of knowledge, but of opinions. Its vocation is not to proclaim ready-made truths, but to split the inveterate, false integrity, to defend free thought, moving away from the centralization of meaning: here there is a "coexistence of the personality with the emerging word." The author attaches a very high status to the relativistically understood essayism: it is “the internal engine of the culture of the new time”, the focus of the possibilities of “super-artistic generalization”. Note, however, that essayism has by no means eliminated traditional generic forms and, moreover, it is able to embody a world attitude that opposes relativism. A vivid example of this is the work of M.M. Prishvin.

So, actually generic forms are distinguishable, traditional and undividedly dominating in literary creativity for many centuries, and forms "non-generic", non-traditional, rooted in "post-romantic" art. The first interact with the second very actively, complementing each other. Today, the Platonic-Aristotelian-Hegelian triad (epos, lyrics, drama), apparently, is largely shaken and needs to be corrected. At the same time, there is no reason to declare the three types of literature habitually distinguished as obsolete, as is sometimes done with the light hand of the Italian philosopher and art theorist B. Croce. Among Russian literary critics, A. I. Beletsky spoke in a similar spirit: “For ancient literatures, the terms epic, lyric, drama were not yet abstract. They denoted special, external ways of transmitting a work to a listening audience. Going into the book, poetry abandoned these modes of transmission, and gradually types (meaning the genres of literature. - V.Kh.) became more and more fiction. Is it necessary to continue the scientific existence of these fictions? Disagreeing with this, we note: literary works of all eras (including modern ones) have a certain generic specificity (epic, dramatic, lyrical form or forms of essay, “stream of consciousness”, essay, which are not uncommon in the 20th century). Generic affiliation (or, on the contrary, the involvement of one of the "non-generic" forms) largely determines the organization of the work, its formal, structural features. Therefore, the concept of "kind of literature" in the composition of theoretical poetics is inalienable and essential.

§ 1. On the concept of "genre"

Literary genres are groups of works that are distinguished within the framework of the 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. Such, for example, is the lyric-epic poem that was formed in the era of romanticism. Not only J. Byron, A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov, but also their much less authoritative and influential contemporaries. According to V.M. Zhirmunsky, who explored this genre, “creative impulses come from great poets”, which are later transformed into a literary tradition by other, secondary ones: “Individual signs of a great work turn into genre signs”. Genres, as you can see, are supra-individual. They can be called cultural-historical individualities.

Genres are difficult to systematize and classify (unlike the genres of literature), stubbornly resist them. First of all, because there are a lot of them: in each artistic culture, genres are specific (haiku, tanka, gazelle in the literatures of the countries of the East). In addition, the genres have a different historical scope. Some exist throughout the history of verbal art (such as the ever-living fable from Aesop to S.V. Mikhalkov); others are correlated with certain epochs (such, for example, is the liturgical drama in the European Middle Ages). In other words, genres are either universal or historically local.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that the same word often designates profoundly different genre phenomena. So, the ancient Greeks conceived an elegy as a work written in a strictly defined poetic size - an elegiac distich (a combination of hexameter with a pentameter) and performed by a recitative to the accompaniment of a flute. This elegy (its ancestor - the poet Kallin) VII BC. BC) was characterized by a very wide range of topics and motives (glorification of valiant warriors, philosophical reflections, love, moralizing). Later (among the Roman poets Catullus, Propertius, Ovid), elegy became a genre focused primarily on love theme. And in modern times (mostly - the second half of the XVIII - early XIX c.) the elegiac genre, thanks to T. Gray and VA Zhukovsky, began to be determined by the mood of sadness and melancholy, regret and melancholy. At the same time, the elegiac tradition, dating back to antiquity, continued to live at that time. So, in the Roman Elegies written in elegiac distich, I.V. Goethe is sung about the joys of love, carnal pleasures, epicurean gaiety. The same atmosphere is in the elegies of Guys, which influenced K.N. Batyushkov and young Pushkin. The word "elegy", apparently, denotes several genre formations. The elegies of early eras and cultures have different features. What is an elegy as such and what is its supra-epochal uniqueness, it is impossible to say in principle. The only correct definition is the definition of elegy "in general" as a "genre of lyrical poetry" (the Brief Literary Encyclopedia limited itself to this little-speaking definition, not without reason).

Many other genre designations (poem, novel, satire, etc.) have a similar character. Yu.N. Tynyanov rightly argued that "the very features of the genre evolve." He, in particular, noted: "... what was called an ode in the 20s of the 19th century, or, finally, Fet, was called an ode not according to the signs that during the time of Lomonosov."

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 (pathos); the word “tale” speaks of the belonging of works to the epic kind of literature and of the “average” volume of the text (smaller than that of novels, and greater than that of short stories and short stories); the sonnet is a lyrical genre, which is characterized primarily by a strictly defined volume (14 verses) and a specific system of rhymes; the word "fairy tale" indicates, firstly, the narrative and, secondly, the activity of fiction and the presence of fantasy. And so on. B.V. Tomashevsky reasonably noted that, being "many different", genre features "do not give the possibility of a logical classification of genres on some one basis." In addition, authors often designate the genre of their works arbitrarily, out of line with the usual word usage. So, N.V. Gogol called " Dead Souls» poem; "House by the road" A.T. Tvardovsky has the subtitle "lyrical chronicle", "Vasily Terkin" - "a book about a fighter."

Naturally, it is not easy for literary theorists to navigate the processes of genre evolution and the endless “discordance” of genre designations. According to Yu.V. Stennik, "the establishment of systems of genre typologies will always retain the danger of subjectivism and randomness." It is impossible not to heed such warnings. 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 specific, historical and literary aspect (studies of individual genre formations), 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.

§ 2. The concept of "substantial form" as applied to genres

Consideration of genres is unimaginable without referring to the organization, structure, form of literary works. The theorists of the formal school insisted on this. So, B.V. Tomashevsky called genres specific "groupings of techniques" that are compatible with each other, have stability and depend "on the environment for the emergence, purpose and conditions for the perception of works, on imitation of old works and the resulting literary tradition." The scientist characterizes the features of the genre as dominant in the work and determining its organization.

Inheriting the traditions of the formal school, and at the same time revising some of its provisions, scientists have paid close attention to the semantic aspect of genres, using the terms "genre essence" and "genre content". The palm here belongs to M.M. Bakhtin, who said that the genre form is inextricably linked with the themes of the works and the features of the worldview of their authors: “In the genres, over the centuries of their life, forms of vision and understanding of certain aspects of the world accumulate.” Genre constitutes a significant construction: "The artist of the word must learn to see reality through the eyes of the genre." And one more thing: “Each genre is a complex system of means and methods of understanding mastery” of reality. Emphasizing that the genre properties of works constitute an indissoluble unity, Bakhtin at the same time distinguished between the formal (structural) and content aspects of the genre proper. He noted that such genre names rooted in antiquity as epic, tragedy, idyll, which characterized the structure of works, later, when applied to the literature of the New Age, “are used as a designation of genre essence.

Bakhtin’s works do not directly mention what constitutes a genre essence, but from the totality of his judgments about the novel (which will be discussed below), it becomes clear that these are the artistic principles of mastering a person and his connections with the environment. This deep aspect of genres in the XIX century. considered by Hegel, who characterized the epic, satire and comedy, as well as the novel, involving the concepts of "substantial" and "subjective" (individual, ghostly). At the same time, genres were associated with a certain kind of understanding of the “general state of the world” and conflicts (“collisions”). In a similar way, A.N. Veselovsky.

In the same vein (and, in our opinion, closer to Veselovsky than to Hegel) is the concept of literary genres by G.N. Pospelov, who in the 1940s undertook an original attempt to systematize genre phenomena. He distinguished between genre forms "external" ("a closed compositional-stylistic whole") and "internal" ("genre-specific content" as the principle of "figurative thinking" and "cognitive interpretation of characters"). Having regarded the external (compositional-stylistic) genre forms as content-neutral (in this, Pospel's concept of genres, which has been repeatedly noted, is one-sided and vulnerable), the scientist focused on the inner side of genres. He singled out and characterized three supra-epochal genre groups, using the sociological principle as the basis for their differentiation: the type of relationship between an artistically comprehended person and society, the social environment in a broad sense. “If works of national historical genre content (meaning epics, epics, odes. - V.Kh.), - wrote G.N. Pospelov - they learn life in the aspect of the formation of national societies, if the works of romance comprehend the formation of individual characters in private relations, then the works of "ethological" genre content reveal the state of the national society or some part of it. (Ethological, or moralistic, genres are works such as A.N. Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”, N.A. Nekrasov’s “Who Lives Well in Rus'”, as well as satires, idylls, utopias and dystopias). Along with the three named genre groups, the scientist singled out another one: mythological, containing "folk figurative and fantastic explanations of the origin of certain natural and cultural phenomena." He attributed these genres only to the “pre-art” of historically early, “pagan” societies, believing that “the mythological group of genres, during the transition of peoples to higher levels of social life, did not receive its further development.”

Characteristics of genre groups, which is given by G.N. Pospelov, has the advantage of a clear system. However, it is incomplete. Now, when the ban on the discussion of the religious and philosophical problems of art has been lifted from domestic literary criticism, it is not difficult for scientists to add to what has been said that there is and is a deeply significant group of literary and artistic (and not just archaic and mythological) genres, where a person is correlated not so much with the life of society how much with cosmic principles, universal laws of the world order and higher powers being.

This is a parable that dates back to the eras of the Old and New Testaments and "from the content side is distinguished by its attraction to the deep "wisdom" of a religious or moralistic order." Such is life, which has become almost the leading genre in the Christian Middle Ages; here the hero is attached to the ideal of righteousness and holiness, or at least aspires to it. Let's also name the mystery, which was also formed in the Middle Ages, as well as the religious and philosophical lyrics, at the origins of which are the biblical Psalms. According to Vyach. Ivanov about the poetry of F.I. Tyutcheva, A.A. Feta, Vl. S. Solovyov (“The Roman Diary of 1944”, October), “... there are three of them, / In the earthly sight of the unearthly / And foretelling us the way.” These genres, which do not fit into any sociological constructions, can be legitimately defined as ontological (using the term of philosophy: ontology is the doctrine of being). This group of genres also includes works of a carnival-comic nature, in particular comedies: in them, as shown by M.M. Bakhtin, the hero and the reality surrounding him are correlated with existential universals. The origins of the genres that we have called ontological are mythological archaic, and above all, myths about the creation of the world, called etiological (or cosmological).

The ontological aspect of genres comes to the fore in a number of foreign theories of the 20th century. Genres are considered, first of all, as describing being as a whole in a certain way. In the words of the American scientist C. Burke, these are systems of acceptance or rejection of the world. In this series of theories, the concept of N.G. Fry, stated in his book Anatomy of Criticism (1957). The genre form, it says, is generated by myths about the seasons and their corresponding rituals: “Spring represents the dawn and birth, giving rise to myths<..->about awakening and resurrection, - sets out I.P. Ilyin the thoughts of a Canadian scientist - about the creation of light and the death of darkness, as well as the archetypes of dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry. Summer symbolizes the zenith, marriage, triumph, giving rise to myths about apotheosis, a sacred wedding, a visit to paradise and the archetypes of comedy, idyll, chivalric romance. Autumn, as a symbol of sunset and death, gives rise to the myths of the withering of vital energy, the dying god, violent death and sacrifice, and the archetypes of tragedy and elegy. Winter, personifying darkness and hopelessness, gives rise to the myth of the victory of dark forces and the flood, the return of chaos, the death of the hero and gods, as well as the archetypes of satire.

§ 3. Novel: genre essence

The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, attracts close attention of literary scholars and critics. It also becomes the subject of reflection of the writers themselves. However, this genre still remains a mystery. A variety of, sometimes opposing opinions are expressed about the historical fate of the novel and its future. “His,” T. Mann wrote in 1936, “prose qualities, consciousness and criticism, as well as the wealth of his means, his ability to freely and quickly dispose of display and research, music and knowledge, myth and science, his human breadth, his objectivity and irony make the novel what it is today: a monumental and dominant form of fiction. O.E. Mandelstam, on the other hand, spoke of the decline of the novel and its exhaustion (article "The End of the Novel", 1922). In the psychologization of the novel and the weakening of the external-event principle in it (which took place already in the 19th century), the poet saw a symptom of the decline and the threshold of the death of the genre, which has now become, in his words, “old-fashioned”.

In modern concepts of the novel, one way or another, statements about it made in the last century are taken into account. If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre (“The hero, in whom everything is small, is only suitable for a novel”; “Inconsistencies with the novel are inseparable”), then in the era of romanticism he rose to the shield as a reproduction of “ordinary reality” and at the same time - “ a mirror of the world and its age”, the fruit of “a fully mature spirit”; as a "romantic book", where, unlike the traditional epic, there is a place for a laid-back expression of the mood of the author and heroes, and humor and playful lightness. “Every novel must shelter within itself the spirit of the universal,” wrote Jean-Paul. Thinkers of the turn of the 18th–19th centuries developed their theories of the novel. substantiated by the experience of modern writers, first of all, I.V. Goethe as the author of books about Wilhelm Meister.

The comparison of the novel with the traditional epic, outlined by the aesthetics and criticism of romanticism, was expanded by Hegel: “Here again (as in the epic. - V.Kh.) the richness and versatility of interests, states, characters, living conditions, a wide background of an integral world , as well as an epic depiction of events." On the other hand, the novel lacks the “originally poetic state of the world” inherent in the epic, there is a “prosaically ordered reality” and “a conflict between the poetry of the heart and the prose of everyday relations that oppose it.” This conflict, Hegel notes, "is resolved tragically or comically" and often ends with the fact that the heroes come to terms with the "usual order of the world", recognizing in it "a true and substantial beginning." Similar thoughts were expressed by V. G. Belinsky, who called the novel an epic of private life: the subject of this genre is “the fate of a private person”, ordinary, “everyday life”. In the second half of the 1840s, a critic argued that the novel and its sister story "have now become at the head of all other genres of poetry."

Much in common with Hegel and Belinsky (at the same time supplementing them), M.M. Bakhtin in works on the novel, written mainly in the 1930s and awaiting publication in the 1970s. Based on the judgments of the writers of the XVIII century. G. Fielding and K.M. Wieland, a scientist in the article "Epos and the Novel (On the Methodology of the Study of the Novel)" (1941) argued that the hero of the novel is shown "not as ready-made and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, brought up by life"; this person "should not be" heroic "neither in the epic nor in the tragic sense of the word, the romantic hero combines both positive and negative traits both low and high, both funny and serious. At the same time, the novel captures the “living contact” of a person “with the unfinished, becoming modernity (the unfinished present)”. And it "more deeply, essentially, sensitively and quickly" than any other genre, "reflects the formation of reality itself" (451). Most importantly, the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of discovering in a person not only properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized opportunities, a certain personal potential: “One of the main internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the inadequacy of the hero of his fate and to be "either greater than one's destiny, or less than one's humanity" (479).

The above judgments of Hegel, Belinsky and Bakhtin can rightly be considered as axioms of the theory of the novel, which explores the life of a person (primarily private, individually biographical) in dynamics, formation, evolution and in situations of complex, as a rule, conflict relations between the hero and others. The novel is invariably present and almost dominates - as a kind of "super-theme" - artistic comprehension (to use the well-known words of A.S. Pushkin) "man's independence", which constitutes (let us add the poet) and "the guarantee of his greatness", and the source of woeful falls, life's dead ends and catastrophes. The ground for the formation and strengthening of the novel, in other words, arises where there is interest in a person who has at least relative independence from the establishment of the social environment with its imperatives, rites, rituals, which is not characterized by "herd" inclusion in society.

In the novels, situations of the hero's alienation from the environment are widely depicted, his lack of roots in reality, homelessness, worldly wandering and spiritual wandering are emphasized. Such are Apuleius' Golden Ass, chivalric novels of the Middle Ages, A.R. Lesage. Let us also recall Julien Sorel (“Red and Black” by Stendhal), Eugene Onegin (“Alien to everything, not bound by anything,” the Pushkin hero complains about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Herzen Beltov, Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov in F.M. Dostoevsky. This kind of novel characters (and they are innumerable) "rely only on themselves."

The alienation of a person from society and the world order was interpreted by M.M. Bakhtin as necessarily dominant in the novel. The scientist argued that here not only the hero, but also the author himself appear unrooted in the world, remote from the principles of stability and stability, alien to legend. The novel, in his opinion, captures "the disintegration of the epic (and tragic) integrity of man" and carries out "a ludicrous familiarization of the world and man" (481). “The novel,” Bakhtin wrote, “has a new, specific problematic; it is characterized by eternal rethinking - reappraisal" (473). In this genre, reality "becomes a world where the first word (the ideal beginning) is not there, and the last has not yet been said" (472-473). Thus, the novel is seen as an expression of a skeptical and relativistic worldview, which is conceived as a crisis and at the same time having a perspective. The novel, Bakhtin argues, prepares for a new, more complex integrity of man "on a higher stage of development" (480).

There are many similarities with the Bakhtinian theory of the novel in the judgments of the famous Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic D. Lukacs, who called this genre the epic of the godless world, and the psychology of the novel hero - demonic. He considered the subject of the novel to be the history of the human soul, manifesting itself and knowing itself in all sorts of adventures (adventures), and its predominant tone was irony, which he defined as the negative mysticism of eras that broke with God. Considering the novel as a mirror of growing up, the maturity of society and the antithesis of the epic that captured the "normal childhood" of mankind, D. Lukacs spoke about the re-creation of the human soul by this genre, lost in an empty and imaginary reality.

However, the novel does not completely plunge into the atmosphere of demonism and irony, the disintegration of human integrity, the alienation of people from the world, but it is opposed to it. The hero's reliance on himself in the classical novels of the 19th century. (both Western European and domestic) appeared most often in a dual coverage: on the one hand, as a worthy human "independence", sublime, attractive, bewitching, on the other - as a source of delusions and defeats in life. “How wrong I was, how punished!” - Onegin exclaims woefully, summing up his solitary free way. Pechorin complains that he did not guess his own “high purpose” and did not find a worthy application for the “immense forces” of his soul. Ivan Karamazov at the end of the novel, tormented by his conscience, falls ill with delirium tremens. “And God help the homeless wanderers,” Rudin’s fate is said at the end of Turgenev’s novel.

At the same time, many novel characters strive to overcome their solitude and alienation, they yearn for “a connection with the world to be established in their destinies” (A. Blok). Let us recall once again the eighth chapter of "Eugene Onegin", where the hero imagines Tatiana sitting at the window of a rural house; as well as Turgenev's Lavretsky, Goncharov's Raisky, Tolstoy's Andrey Volkonsky, or even Ivan Karamazov, who in his best moments aspires to Alyosha. This kind of novel situations was characterized by G.K. Kosikov: “The “heart” of the hero and the “heart” of the world are drawn to each other, and the problem of the novel lies in the fact that they are never allowed to unite, and the hero’s fault for this sometimes turns out to be no less than the fault of the world.

Something else is also important: in novels, heroes play a significant role, whose self-reliance has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, relying only on themselves. Among the novel characters, we find those who, using the words of M.M. Prishvin about himself, it is legitimate to call "figures of communication and communication." Such is the “overflowing with life” Natasha Rostova, who, in the words of S.G. Bocharova, invariably "renews, liberates" people, "determines their behavior." This heroine L.N. Tolstoy naively and at the same time convincingly demands "immediately, now open, direct, humanly simple relations between people." Such are Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoevsky. In a number of novels (especially persistently - in the works of Charles Dickens and Russian literature of the 19th century), spiritual contacts of a person with a reality close to him, and, in particular, family ties ("The Captain's Daughter" by A.S. Pushkin); "Cathedrals" and "The Seedy Family" by N. S. Leskov; "Nest of Nobles" by I. S. Turgenev; "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" by L. N. Tolstoy). The heroes of such works (remember the Rostovs or Konstantin Levin) perceive and think of the surrounding reality not so much as alien and hostile to themselves, but as friendly and akin. They are characterized by the fact that M.M. Prishvin called "kind attention to the world."

The theme of the House (in the high sense of the word - as an irremovable existential principle and indisputable value) persistently (most often in intensely dramatic tones) sounds in the novels of our century: in J. Galsworthy ("The Forsyte Saga" and subsequent works), R. Marten du Gard ("The Thibault Family"), W. Faulkner ("The Sound and the Fury"), M.A. Bulgakov (" white guard”), M.A. Sholokhov (" Quiet Don”), B.L. Pasternak ("Doctor Zhivago"), V, G. Rasputin ("Live and Remember", "Deadline").

The novels of the eras close to us, apparently, are to a large extent focused on idyllic values ​​(although they are not inclined to bring situations of harmony between a person and a reality close to him to the forefront). Even Jean-Paul (meaning, probably, such works as "Julia, or New Eloise" by J.J. Rousseau and "Weckfield Priest" by O. Goldsmith) noted that the idyll is "a genre related to the novel." And according to M.M. Bakhtin, "the significance of the idyll for the development of the novel was enormous."

The novel absorbs the experience not only of the idyll, but also of a number of other genres; in this sense it is like a sponge. This genre is able to include epic features in its sphere, capturing not only the private life of people, but also events of a national historical scale (Stendhal's Parma Monastery, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, M. Mitchell's Gone with the Wind) . Novels are able to embody the meanings characteristic of the parable. According to O.A. Sedakova, "in the depths of the" Russian novel "usually lies something like a parable."

The involvement of the novel and the traditions of hagiography is undoubted. The principle of life is very clearly expressed in the work of Dostoevsky. Leskovsky's "Cathedrals" can rightly be described as a novel-life. Novels often acquire the features of a satirical moral description, such as, for example, the works of O. de Balzac, W.M. Thackeray, "Resurrection" L.N. Tolstoy. As shown by M.M. Bakhtin, is far from being alien to the novel (especially the adventurous and picaresque) and the familiar-laughing, carnival element, which was originally rooted in comedy-farcical genres. Vyach. Ivanov, not without reason, characterized the works of F.M. Dostoevsky as "tragedy novels". "Master and Margarita" M.A. Bulgakov is a kind of novel-myth, and "A Man without Qualities" by R. Musil is a novel-essay. T. Mann, in his report on it, called his tetralogy "Joseph and his brothers" a "mythological novel", and its first part ("Jacob's Past") - "a fantastic essay". The work of T. Mann, according to the German scientist, marks the most serious transformation of the novel: its immersion in the depths of mythological.

The novel, as can be seen, has a dual content: firstly, it is specific for him (the “independence” and evolution of the hero, revealed in his private life), and secondly, which came to him from other genres. Legal conclusion; the genre essence of the novel is synthetic. This genre is able, with unconstrained freedom and unprecedented breadth, to combine the content principles of many genres, both comic and serious. Apparently, there is no genre principle from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.

The novel, as a genre prone to synthesizing, is sharply different from others that preceded it, which were “specialized” and acted on certain local “areas” of artistic comprehension of the world. He (like no other) was able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, inconsistency and richness. Romanesque freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras use this freedom in a variety of ways.

The diversity of the novel creates serious difficulties for literary theorists. Almost everyone who tries to characterize the novel as such, in its general and necessary properties, is tempted to a kind of synecdoche: the replacement of the whole by its part. So, O.E. Mandelstam judged the nature of this genre from the "career novels" of the 19th century, whose heroes were carried away by the unprecedented success of Napoleon. In the novels, which emphasized not the strong-willed aspiration of a self-affirming person, but the complexity of his psychology and inner action, the poet saw a symptom of the decline of the genre and even its end. T. Mann, in his judgments about the novel as filled with mild and benevolent irony, relied on his own artistic experience and, to a large extent, on the novels of I. W. Goethe's upbringing.

Bakhtin's theory has a different orientation, but also a local one (first of all, towards the experience of Dostoevsky). At the same time, the writer's novels are interpreted by scientists in a very peculiar way. The heroes of Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, are primarily the bearers of ideas (ideologies); their voices are equal, as is the voice of the author in relation to each of them. This is seen as polyphony, which is the highest point of novelistic creativity and an expression of the writer's non-dogmatic thinking, his understanding that a single and complete truth "is fundamentally incompatible within the limits of one consciousness." Dostoevsky's novelism is considered by Bakhtin as an inheritance of the ancient "menippean satire". The menippea is a genre "free from legend", committed to "unbridled fantasy", recreating "the adventures of an idea or truth in the world: on earth, and in the underworld, and on Olympus." She, Bakhtin argues, is a genre of “last questions”, carrying out “moral and psychological experimentation”, and recreates “a split personality”, “unusual dreams, passions bordering on insanity.

Other varieties of the novel, not involved in polyphony, where the interest of writers in people rooted in a reality close to them prevails, and the author's "voice" dominates the voices of the characters, Bakhtin assessed them less highly and even spoke of them ironically: he wrote about "monologic" one-sidedness and the narrowness of “manor-home-room-apartment-family novels”, as if they had forgotten about the person’s being “on the threshold” of eternal and insoluble questions. At the same time, they were called L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov.

In the centuries-old history of the novel, two types of it are clearly visible, more or less corresponding to two stages of literary development. These are, firstly, works that are sharply eventful, based on external action, the characters of which strive to achieve some local goals. Such are adventurous novels, in particular picaresque, chivalric, "career novels", as well as adventure and detective novels. Their plots are numerous chains of event knots (intrigues, adventures, etc.), as is the case, for example, in Byron's Don Juan or A. Dumas.

Secondly, these are novels that have prevailed in the literature of the last two or three centuries, when one of the central problems of social thought, artistic creativity and culture as a whole has become the spiritual self-sufficiency of man. Here, the internal action successfully competes with the external action: the eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the hero’s consciousness in its diversity and complexity, with its endless dynamics and psychological nuances, comes to the fore (on psychologism in the literature, see pp. 173–180). The characters of such novels are depicted not only striving for some particular goals, but also comprehending their place in the world, clarifying and realizing their value orientation. It was in this type of novels that the specificity of the genre, which was discussed, affected with maximum completeness. Reality close to man (“everyday life”) is mastered here not as a deliberately “low prose”, but as part of true humanity, the trends of this time, universal principles of being, and most importantly, as an arena of the most serious conflicts. Russian novelists of the 19th century. they knew well and persistently showed that "amazing events are a lesser test for human relations) than everyday life with petty displeasures."

One of the most important features of the novel and its sister story (especially in the 19th-20th centuries) is the authors' close attention to the microenvironment surrounding the characters, the influence of which they experience and influence in one way or another. Outside of recreating the microenvironment, it is very difficult for a novelist to show the inner world of a person. At the origins of the now established novel form is the dilogy of I.V. Goethe about Wilhelm Meister (T. Mann called these works “in-depth into the inner life, sublimated adventure novels”), as well as “Confession” by J.J. Rousseau, "Adolf" B. Constant, "Eugene Onegin", which conveys the "poetry of reality" inherent in the works of A. S. Pushkin. Since that time, novels, focused on the connections of a person with a reality close to him and, as a rule, giving preference to internal action, have become a kind of center of literature. They most seriously influenced all other genres, even transformed them. According to M.M. Bakhtin, there was a romanization of verbal art: when the novel comes into "great literature", other genres change dramatically, "are 'romanized' to a greater or lesser extent." At the same time, the structural properties of genres are also transformed: their formal organization becomes less strict, more relaxed and free. It is to this (formal-structural) side of genres that we turn.

§ 4. Genre structures and canons

Literary genres (in addition to content, essential qualities) have structural, formal properties that have a different measure of certainty. At earlier stages (up to and including the era of classicism), it was the formal aspects of genres that came to the fore and were recognized as dominant. The genre-forming beginnings were both meter and strophic organization (“solid forms”, as they are often called), and orientation to certain speech constructions, and principles of construction. Complexes of artistic means were strictly assigned to each genre. Strict regulations regarding the subject of the image, the construction of the work and its speech tissue were pushed to the periphery and even leveled the individual author's initiative. The laws of the genre dominated the creative will of the writers. “Old Russian genres,” writes D.S. Likhachev, are much more connected with certain types of style than the genres of modern times. Therefore, the expressions “hagiographic style”, “chronographic style”, “chronographic style” will not surprise us, although, of course, individual deviations can be noted within each genre. ". Medieval art, according to the scientist, “strives to express a collective attitude towards the depicted. Hence, much in it depends not on the creator of the work, but on the genre to which this work belongs. Each genre has its own strictly developed traditional image of the author, writer, "performer".

Traditional genres, being strictly formalized, exist separately from each other, separately. The boundaries between them are clear and distinct, each "works" on its own "bridgehead". Genre formations of this kind are. They follow certain norms and rules that are developed by tradition and are obligatory for authors. The canon of a genre is "a certain system of stable and solid (italics mine. - V.Kh.) genre features."

The word "canon" (from other - gr. kanon - rule, prescription) was the name of the treatise of the ancient Greek sculptor Polikleitos (V century BC). Here the canon was perceived as a perfect model, fully realizing a certain norm. The canonicity of art (including verbal) is conceived in this terminological tradition as the strict adherence of artists to the rules, allowing them to approach perfect models.

Genre norms and rules (canons) were originally formed spontaneously, on the basis of rituals with their rituals and traditions. folk culture. "In both traditional folklore and archaic literature, genre structures are inseparable from non-literary situations, genre laws merge directly with the rules of ritual and everyday decency."

Later, as reflection became stronger in artistic activity, some genre canons took on the appearance of clearly formulated provisions (postulates). Regulatory instructions to poets, imperative attitudes almost dominated the teachings on poetry by Aristotle and Horace, Yu.Ts. Scaliger and N. Boileau. In normative theories of this kind, genres, already possessing certainty, acquired the maximum orderliness. The regulation of genres, carried out by aesthetic thought, reached its highest point in the era of classicism. So, N. Boileau, in the third chapter of his poetic treatise "Poetic Art", formulated very strict rules for the main groups of literary works. He, in particular, proclaimed the principle of three unities (place, time, action) as necessary in dramatic works. Sharply distinguishing between tragedy and comedy, Boileau wrote:

Despondency and tears funny eternal enemy. The tragic tone is incompatible with him, But humiliating comedy is serious To amuse the crowd with the sharpness of the obscene. You can't joke around in comedy You can not confuse the thread of living intrigue, It is impossible to be embarrassingly distracted from the idea And the thought in the void all the time to spread.

Most importantly, normative aesthetics (from Aristotle to Boileau and Sumarokov) insisted that poets follow indisputable genre patterns, which are, first of all, the epics of Homer, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In the era of normative poetics (from antiquity to the 17th–18th centuries), along with the genres that were recommended and regulated by theorists (“de jure genres”, in the words of S.S. Averintsev), there were also “de facto genres”, for a number of centuries, which did not receive theoretical justification, but also possessed stable structural properties and had certain substantive “predilections”. Such are fairy tales, fables, short stories and similar comic stage works, as well as many traditional lyrical genres (including folklore).

Genre structures have changed (and quite dramatically) in the literature of the last two or three centuries, especially in the post-romantic era. They have become malleable and flexible, have lost their canonical rigor, and therefore have opened up wide open spaces for the manifestation of individual author's initiative. The rigidity of the distinction between genres has exhausted itself and, one might say, has sunk into oblivion along with the classic aesthetics, which was resolutely rejected in the era of romanticism. “We see,” V. Hugo wrote in his programmatic preface to the drama “Cromwell,” “how quickly the arbitrary division of genres collapses before the arguments of reason and taste.”

The “decanonization” of genre structures made itself felt already in the 18th century. Evidence of this is the works of Zh.Zh. Russo and L. Stern. The romanization of literature of the last two centuries marked its "exit" beyond the genre canons and, at the same time, the erasure of former boundaries between genres. In the XIX-XX centuries. "genre categories lose their clear outlines, genre models for the most part fall apart." As a rule, these are no longer phenomena isolated from each other with a pronounced set of properties, but groups of works in which one or another formal and substantive preferences and accents are seen with greater or lesser clarity.

The literature of the last two centuries (especially of the 20th century) encourages us to speak about the presence in its composition of works devoid of genre definition, such as many dramatic works with a neutral subtitle "play", artistic prose of an essayistic nature, as well as numerous lyric poems that do not fit into the scope of any genre classifications. V.D. Skvoznikov noted) that in the lyric poetry of the 19th century, starting with V. Hugo, G. Heine, M.Yu. Lermontov, "the former genre definition disappears": "... lyrical thought reveals a tendency to more and more synthetic expression", "genre atrophy in lyrics" occurs. “No matter how you expand the concept of elegiacity,” M.Yu. Lermontov's "January 1st" - all the same, one cannot get away from the obvious circumstance that the lyrical masterpiece is in front of us, and its genre nature is completely indefinite. Or rather, it does not exist at all, because it is not limited by anything.

At the same time, genre structures that have stability have not lost their significance either at the time of romanticism or in subsequent eras. Traditional, centuries-old genres with their formal (compositional and speech) features (ode, fable, fairy tale) continued and continue to exist. The “voices” of long-existing genres and the voice of the writer as a creative individual each time somehow merge together in a new way in the works of A.S. Pushkin. In epicurean-sounding poems (Anacreontic poetry), the author is like Anacreon, Guys, early K.N. Batyushkov, and at the same time very clearly manifests itself (remember “Play, Adele, do not know sadness ...” or “Leila’s evening from me ...”). As the creator of the solemn ode “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands ...”, the poet, likening himself to Horace and G.R. Derzhavin, paying tribute to their artistic style, at the same time expresses his own credo, completely unique. Pushkin's fairy tales, original and inimitable, are at the same time organically involved in the traditions of this genre, both folklore and literary. It is unlikely that a person who first gets acquainted with these creations will be able to feel that they belong to one author: in each of the poetic genres, the great poet manifests himself in a completely new way, turning out to be not like himself. This is not only Pushkin. The lyrical epic poems of M.Yu. Lermontov in the tradition of romanticism ("Mtsyri", "Demon") with his folk - poetic "Song about the merchant Kalashnikov". This kind of “proteic” self-disclosure of authors in various genres is seen by modern scholars in the Western European literatures of modern times: “Aretino, Boccaccio, Margaret of Navarre, Erasmus of Rotterdam, even Cervantes and Shakespeare in different genres appear as if they are different individuals.”

Structural stability is also possessed by the newly emerged in the 19th–20th centuries. genre education. Thus, there is no doubt the presence of a certain formal-content complex in the lyrical poetry of the Symbolists (the attraction to universals and a special kind of vocabulary, the semantic complexity of speech, the apotheosis of mystery, etc.). The presence of a structural and conceptual commonality in the novels of French writers of the 1960s–1970s (M. Bugor, A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarrot, and others) is indisputable.

Summarizing what has been said, we note that literature knows two kinds of genre structures. These are, firstly, ready-made, complete, solid forms (canonical genres), invariably equal to themselves (a vivid example of such a genre formation is the sonnet, which is still alive today), and, secondly, non-canonical genre forms: flexible, open to all kinds of transformations. , perestroika, updates, what, for example, are elegies or short stories in the literature of the New Age. These free genre forms in the epochs close to us come into contact and coexist with non-genre formations, but genres cannot exist without some minimum of stable structural properties.

§ 5. Genre systems. Canonization of genres

In each historical period, genres correlate with each other in different ways. They, according to D.S. Likhachev, "interact, support each other's existence and at the same time compete with each other"; therefore, it is necessary to study not only individual genres and their history, but also "the system of genres of each given era."

At the same time, genres are evaluated in a certain way by the reading public, critics, creators of "poetics" and manifestos, writers and scientists. They are interpreted as worthy or, on the contrary, not worthy of the attention of artistically enlightened people; both high and low; as truly modern or outdated, exhausted; as backbone or marginal (peripheral). These assessments and interpretations create hierarchies of genres that change over time. Some of the genres, some kind of favorites, happy chosen ones, receive the highest possible assessment from any authoritative instances - an assessment that becomes generally recognized or at least acquires literary and social weight. Genres of this kind, relying on the terminology of the formal school, are called canonized. (Note that this word has a different meaning than the term “canonical”, which characterizes the genre structure.) According to V. B. Shklovsky, a certain part of the literary era “represents its canonized crest”, while its other links exist “deafly”, on periphery, without becoming authoritative and without attracting attention. Canonized (again after Shklovsky) is also called (see pp. 125-126, 135) that part of the literature of the past, which is recognized as the best, top, exemplary, that is, classics. At the origins of this terminological tradition is the idea of ​​sacred texts that have received official church sanction (canonized) as indisputably true.

The canonization of literary genres was carried out by normative poetics from Aristotle and Horace to Boileau, Lomonosov and Sumarokov. The Aristotelian treatise gave the highest status to tragedy and epic (epopee). The aesthetics of classicism also canonized "high comedy", sharply separating it from folk-farcical comedy as a low and inferior genre.

The hierarchy of genres also took place in the minds of the so-called mass reader (see pp. 120–123). So, Russian peasants at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. gave unconditional preference to "divine books" and those works of secular literature that echoed with them. The lives of the saints (most often reaching the people in the form of books written illiterately, in “barbaric language”) were listened to and read “with reverence, with rapturous love, with wide-open eyes and with the same wide-open soul.” Works of an entertaining nature, called "fairy tales", were regarded as a low genre. They were very widespread, but they aroused a dismissive attitude towards themselves and were awarded unflattering epithets (“fables”, “fables”, “nonsense”, etc.).

The canonization of genres also takes place in the "upper" layer of literature. Thus, at the time of romanticism, which was marked by a radical restructuring of genres, a fragment, a fairy tale, and also a novel (in the spirit and manner of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister) were elevated to the top of literature. Literary life of the XIX century. (especially in Russia) is marked by the canonization of socio-psychological novels and short stories, prone to lifelikeness, psychologism, and everyday authenticity. In the XX century. attempts were made (successful to varying degrees) to canonize mystery dramaturgy (the concept of symbolism), parody (formal school), epic novel (aesthetics of socialist realism of the 1930s–1940s), as well as novels by F.M. Dostoevsky as polyphonic (1960-1970s); in Western European literary life- novel "stream of consciousness" and absurdist dramaturgy of tragicomic sound. The authority of the mythological principle in the composition of novel prose is now very high.

If in the era of normative aesthetics high genres were canonized, then in times close to us, those genre principles that were previously outside the framework of “strict” literature rise hierarchically. As noted by V.B. Shklovsky, there is a canonization of new themes and genres that were hitherto secondary, marginal, low: “Blok canonizes the themes and tempos of the “gypsy romance”, and Chekhov introduces the “Alarm Clock” into Russian literature. Dostoevsky elevates the techniques of the tabloid novel into a literary norm. At the same time, traditional high genres evoke an alienated critical attitude towards themselves, they are thought of as exhausted. “In the change of genres, the constant displacement of high genres by low ones is curious,” noted B.V. Tomashevsky, stating the process of "canonization of low genres" in literary modernity. According to the scientist, followers of high genres usually become epigones. In the same vein, M.M. Bakhtin. Traditional high genres, according to him, are prone to "stilted glorification", they are characterized by conventionality, "unchanging poetry", "monotonity and abstractness".

In the 20th century, apparently, new (or fundamentally updated) genres rise hierarchically, as opposed to those that were authoritative in the previous era. At the same time, the places of leaders are occupied by genre formations with free, open structures: paradoxically, non-canonical genres turn out to be the subject of canonization, preference is given to everything in literature that is not involved in ready-made, established, stable forms.

§ 6. Genre confrontations and traditions

In the epochs close to us, marked by the increased dynamism and diversity of artistic life, genres are inevitably involved in the struggle of literary groups, schools, and trends. At the same time, genre systems are undergoing more intense and rapid changes than in past centuries. Yu.N. Tynyanov, who argued that “there are no ready-made genres” and that each of them, changing from epoch to epoch, acquires either greater significance, moving to the center, or, on the contrary, relegating to the background or even ceasing to exist: “In the era of decomposition of what of any genre, it moves from the center to the periphery, and in its place from the trifles of literature, from its backyards and lowlands, a new phenomenon emerges into the center. So, in the 1920s, the focus of the literary and near-literary environment shifted from the socio-psychological novel and traditionally high lyrics to parody and satirical genres, as well as adventurous prose, which Tynyanov spoke about in the article "The Interval".

Emphasizing and, in our opinion, absolutizing the rapid dynamics of the existence of genres, Yu.N. Tynyanov made a very sharp conclusion, rejecting the significance of inter-epochal genre phenomena and connections: “The study of isolated genres outside the signs of the genre system with which they correlate is impossible. Tolstoy's historical novel is not correlated with Zagoskin's historical novel, but is correlated with his contemporary prose. This kind of emphasis on intraepochal genre confrontations needs some adjustment. So, “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy (we note, supplementing Tynyanov) it is legitimate to correlate not only with the literary situation of the 1860s, but also - as links in one chain - with the novel by M.N. Zagoskin "Roslavlev, or Russians in 1812" (there are many roll calls, far from accidental), and with a poem by M.Yu. Lermontov "Borodino" (Tolstoy himself spoke about the influence of this poem on him), and with a number of stories of ancient Russian literature full of national heroism.

The relationship between dynamism and stability in the existence of genres from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch needs an unbiased and cautious discussion, free from "directive" extremes. Along with genre confrontations, genre traditions are fundamentally important in literary life: continuity in this area (for continuity and tradition, see pp. 352–356)

Genres constitute the most important link between writers of different eras, without which the development of literature is unimaginable. According to S.S. Averintsev, "the background against which the silhouette of a writer can be viewed is always two-part: any writer is a contemporary of his contemporaries, comrades in the era, but also a successor to his predecessors, comrades in the genre." Literary critics have repeatedly spoken about the “memory of the genre” (M.M. Bakhtin), about the “burden of conservatism” weighing on the concept of the genre (Yu.V. Stennik), about “genre inertia” (S.S. Averintsev).

Arguing with literary critics, who associated the existence of genres primarily with intra-epochal confrontations, the struggle of trends and schools, with "the superficial variegation and hype of the literary process", M.M. Bakhtin wrote: “The literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable, “eternal” tendencies in the development of literature. The genre always retains undying archaic elements. True, this one. the archaic is preserved in it only thanks to its constant renewal, so to speak, modernizing The genre is revived and updated at each new stage in the development of literature and in each individual work of this genre. Therefore, the archaic that remains in the genre is not dead, but eternally alive, that is, capable of being updated Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. That is why the genre is able to ensure the unity and continuity of this development. And further: "The higher and more complex the genre has developed, the better and more fully it remembers its past."

These judgments (basic in Bakhtin's conception of the genre) need to be critically corrected. Not all genres date back to the archaic. Many of them are of later origin, such as, for example, lives or novels. But in the main, Bakhtin is right: genres exist in a large historical time, they are destined to live a long life. These are epic phenomena.

Genres thus carry out the beginning of continuity and stability in literary development. At the same time, in the process of the evolution of literature, already existing genre formations are inevitably updated, as well as new ones arise and become stronger; relationships between genres and the nature of interaction between them change.

§ 7. Literary genres in relation to non-artistic reality

The genres of literature are connected with non-artistic reality by very close and diverse ties. The genre essence of works is generated by world-wide significant phenomena of cultural and historical life. Thus, the main features of the long-standing heroic epic were predetermined by the peculiarities of the era of the formation of ethnic groups and states (for the origins of heroism, see p. 70). And the activation of the novel element in the literatures of the New Age is due to the fact that it was at this time that the spiritual self-sufficiency of a person became one of the most important phenomena of primary reality.

The evolution of genre forms (we recall: always meaningful in content) also largely depends on shifts in the social sphere itself, which is shown by G. V. Plekhanov on the material of French dramaturgy of the 17th–18th centuries, which made its way from the tragedies of classicism to the “petty-bourgeois drama” of the Enlightenment .

Genre structures as such (like generic ones) are the refraction of forms of non-artistic being, both socio-cultural and natural. The principles of the composition of works, fixed by the genre tradition, reflect the structure of life phenomena. I will refer to the judgment of the graphic artist: “Sometimes you can hear the argument whether there is a composition in nature? Eat! Because this composition was found by the artist and elevated by the artist.” The organization of artistic speech in a particular genre also invariably depends on the forms of non-artistic statements (oratory and colloquial, familiar-public and intimate, etc.). The German philosopher of the first half of the 19th century spoke about this. F. Schleiermacher. He noted that the drama, at its inception, took from life the conversations that are everywhere, that the chorus of tragedies and comedies of the ancient Greeks has its primary source in the meeting of an individual with the people, and the vital prototype of the artistic form of the epic is a story.

Forms of speech that affect literary genres, as shown by M.M. Bakhtin are very diverse: “All our statements have certain and relatively stable typical forms of constructing the whole. We have a rich repertoire of oral (and written) speech genres.” The scientist distinguished between primary speech genres, formed "under the conditions of direct speech communication" (oral conversation, dialogue), and secondary, ideological ones (oratory, journalism, scientific and philosophical texts). Artistic and speech genres, according to the scientist, are among the secondary; for the most part, they consist "of various transformed primary genres (replicas of dialogue, everyday stories, letters, protocols, etc.)".

Genre structures in literature (both those possessing canonical rigor and those free from it), apparently, have life analogues, which determine their appearance and consolidation. This is the sphere of the genesis (origin) of literary genres.

Another, receptive (see p. 115) side of the connections between verbal and artistic genres and primary reality is also significant. The fact is that a work of one genre or another (let us turn once again to M.M. Bakhtin) is focused on certain conditions of perception: “... each literary genre is characterized by its own special concepts of the addressee literary work, a special feeling and understanding of its reader, listener, public, people.

The specificity of the functioning of genres is most evident in the early stages of the existence of verbal art. Here's what D.S. says Likhachev about Old Russian literature: “Genres are determined by their use: in worship (in its various parts), in legal and diplomatic practice (lists of articles, annals, stories about princely crimes), in the atmosphere of princely life (solemn words, glory, etc. .)". Similarly, the classic ode of the XVII-XVIII centuries. was part of the solemn palace ritual.

Inevitably associated with a certain environment of perception and folklore genres. Comedies of a farcical nature originally formed part of the mass festival and were part of it. The tale was performed during leisure hours and addressed to a small number of people. A relatively recent ditty appeared - the genre of a city or village street.

Having gone into the book, verbal art has weakened the ties with the life forms of its development: reading fiction is successfully carried out in any environment. But here, too, the perception of a work depends on its genre-generic properties. Drama in reading evokes associations with a stage performance, narration in a fairy tale form awakens in the reader's imagination a situation of lively and relaxed conversation. Family and everyday novels and short stories, landscape essays, friendly and love lyrics with a sincere tone inherent in these genres can evoke in the reader the feeling that the author is addressing him as an individual: an atmosphere of trusting, intimate contact arises. Reading traditionally epic, heroic works gives the reader a feeling of spiritual fusion with a certain very broad and capacious “we”. Genre, as you can see, is one of the bridges connecting the writer and the reader, an intermediary between them.

The concept of "literary genre" in the XX century. repeatedly rejected. “It is useless to be interested in literary genres,” argued the French literary critic P. van Tiegem, following the Italian philosopher B. Croce, “which were followed by the great writers of the past; they took the most ancient forms - the epic, the tragedy, the sonnet, the novel - is it all the same? The main thing is that they succeeded. Is it worth it to study the boots that Napoleon was wearing on the morning of Austerlitz?

At the other extreme of understanding genres is M.M. Bakhtin as the "leading heroes" of the literary process. The foregoing encourages us to join the second view, however, making a corrective clarification: if in the "pre-romantic" era the face of literature was really determined primarily by the laws of the genre, its norms, rules, canons, then in the 19th-20th centuries. truly the central figure of the literary process was the author with his widely and freely carried out creative initiative. From now on, the genre turned out to be “the second person”, but by no means lost its significance.

The genres of literature are large associations of verbal and artistic works according to the type of relationship of the speaker ("carrier of speech") to the artistic whole. There are three types: drama, epic, lyrics.

This division is traced back to Aristotle's Poetics.

Since ancient times, works of a verbal and artistic nature have been combined into 3 large groups: epic, lyrics, drama. In the 20th century in connection with the development in the literature of individual, author's methods, not everything can fit into this triad. Already Plato in his treatise "The State" talked about poetry, conscience, that the poet in his creation and can directly speak on his own behalf, without adding something else, that this works in dithyrambs, this is the most important means of lyrics. The poet can also build works as an exchange of speeches of characters without using his own words. This is the nature of drama. The poet can combine his own words with the words of others, which belong to the characters. This is epic. This mixed, final kind of poetry he also calls narration. Aristotle expresses similar judgments in his Poetics, but emphasizes that these are 3 different ways of imitating reality. This kind of view, when the division of literature into 3 large groups was considered according to the type of relationship of the speaker to the artistic whole, persisted until the 19th century, until the aesthetics of romanticism began to be developed, which was based on philosophical categories. In particular, F. Schelling in his "Philosophy of Art" points out that the type of artistic content is important in this division: lyrics are infinity and spiritual freedom; epic is pure necessity; drama combines freedom and necessity. Hegel develops his ideas, saying that the lyrics are subjective, the epic is objective, the drama combines both. These ideas are developed by Belinsky. It turns out that in the aesthetics of romanticism there was a gap between the content and form of the work, poetics, that is, the speech activity present in a literary work, was ignored. In the 20th century With the development of strict linguistics, the speech organization of the work began to pay more attention. The German scientist Bülar said that speech acts have 3 aspects:

1. Representation - some kind of message about the subject.

2. Expression of some expression of the speaker's emotions.

3. Appeal - the speaker's appeal to someone, which becomes decisive.

According to Bular, one or another aspect is dominant in the genres of literature. Expression prevails in a lyrical work, an effective side works in a dramatic work, and an epic work combines 3 beginnings. The division of literature into genera does not coincide with its division into prose and poetry, as in the everyday idea of ​​them. Each of these groups can include both poetic and non-poetic works. In the 20th century increasingly inclined to the point of view of the German writer Novalis, who back in the 19th century. said that a pure division is very difficult, that the epic is actually where the epic principle prevails more, the drama - the dramatic, etc. Therefore, when the term lyrical, dramatic, epic is used in literary theory, we are talking about not only about generic properties, but also about some specific tonality of a literary work. It is customary to associate a certain versatility of the picture of the world with the epic (Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov. Turgenev's novels are quite lyrical, The Brothers Karamazov is called a tragedy novel, since drama is associated with the tension of what is happening). In any case, further balance is maintained between content and form.

Plato writes about the genera of poetry in The State: a poet can speak directly on his own behalf (lyrics), there can be an exchange of speeches of heroes without the words of a poet (drama), he can combine his words with the words of characters (epos). Similar in "Poetics" of Aristotle: as three ways of imitation. Since the 19th century - not as verbal and artistic forms, but as intelligible entities, fixed by philosophical categories, that is, the gender is equal to the type of artistic content.

Schelling: lyricism is the endless spirit of freedom, epic is pure necessity, drama is a synthesis of the struggle between freedom and necessity.

Hegel (following Jean Paul): the epic is objective, the lyric is subjective, the drama is 2 of these beginnings.

Belinsky's article "The division of poetry into genera and types" (1841) in " Domestic notes”- coincides with the Hegelian concept, but refers not to Homer, but to contemporary literature (Pushkin, Gogol, etc.). At the beginning - Hegel's scheme, at the end - confusion, violation of the scheme. (But Hegel did not appreciate the lyrics very highly, since the objective, reasonable, substantial was more important to him, for Belinsky poetry is the highest kind of art - everything is subject to it). Poetry realizes the meaning of the idea, everything internally goes deep into the external.

1. Epic poetry is a certain closed reality, the poet is not visible, the world is plastically defined and develops by itself, the poet is only a narrator.

2. Lyric poetry - penetration into the inner sphere, the realm of subjectivity, the world in itself, not going outside.

3. Dramatic poetry - 1 + 2, the inner ideal is subjective, and the outer real is objective.

20th century - synthesis of literary genres: novel, lyrical-epic poems, plays with epic elements, lyrical drama (Blok's Puppet show).

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One of the founders of Russian literary criticism was V. G. Belinsky. And although serious steps were taken in antiquity in the development of the concept literary kind(Aristotle), it is Belinsky who owns the scientifically based theory of three literary genera, which you can get acquainted with in detail by reading Belinsky's article "Division of poetry into genera and types."

There are three kinds of fiction: epic (from the Greek. Epos, narration), lyrical (a lyre was a musical instrument, accompanied by sung verses) and dramatic (from the Greek. Drama, action).

Presenting a particular subject to the reader (meaning the subject of conversation), the author chooses different approaches to it:

The first approach: you can tell in detail about the subject, about the events associated with it, about the circumstances of the existence of this subject, etc.; at the same time, the position of the author will be more or less detached, the author will act as a kind of chronicler, narrator, or choose one of the characters as the narrator; the main thing in such a work will be precisely the story, the narration about the subject, the leading type of speech will be just the narration; this kind of literature is called epic;

The second approach: you can tell not so much about the events, but about the impression that they made on the author, about the feelings that they caused; the image of the inner world, experiences, impressions and will refer to the lyrical kind of literature; it is the experience that becomes the main event of the lyrics;

The third approach: you can depict the subject in action, show it on the stage; present to the reader and the viewer surrounded by other phenomena; this kind of literature is dramatic; in the drama itself, the voice of the author will be the least likely to sound - in remarks, that is, the author's explanations for the action and replicas of the characters.

Types of fiction EPOS (Greek - narration)

a story about events, the fate of the heroes, their actions and adventures, an image of the external side of what is happening (even feelings are shown from the side of their external manifestation). The author can directly express his attitude to what is happening. DRAMA (Greek - action) depiction of events and relationships between characters on stage (a special way of writing text). The direct expression of the author's point of view in the text is contained in the remarks. LYRICS (from the name of a musical instrument) experience of events; depiction of feelings, inner world, emotional state; feeling becomes the main event.

Each type of literature in turn includes a number of genres.

GENRE is a historically established group of works, united by common features of content and form. These groups include novels, stories, poems, elegies, short stories, feuilletons, comedies, etc. In literary criticism, the concept of a literary type is often introduced; this is a broader concept than a genre. In this case, the novel will be considered a type of fiction, and genres - various varieties of the novel, for example, adventure, detective, psychological, parable novel, dystopian novel, etc.

Examples of genus-species relations in the literature:

Genus: dramatic; type: comedy; Genre: sitcom.

Genus: epic; type: story; genre: fantasy story, etc.

Genres, being historical categories, appear, develop, and eventually "leave" from the "active reserve" of artists, depending on the historical epoch: the ancient lyric poets did not know the sonnet; in our time, an ode born in antiquity and popular in the 17th-18th centuries has become an archaic genre; nineteenth-century romanticism gave rise to detective literature, and so on.

Consider the following table, which lists the types and genres related to the different kinds of word art:

Genera, types and genres of artistic literature EPOS Folk Myth

Poem (epos): Heroic Strogovoinskaya Fairytale-legendary Historical... Fairy tale Epic Duma Legend Tradition Ballad Parable Small genres: proverbs sayings riddles nursery rhymes... Author's epicRoman: Historical. Fantastic Adventurous Psychological. R.-parable Utopian Social... Small genres: Short story Short story Fable Parable Ballad Lit. fairy tale... DRAMA Folk Game

positions, characters, masks ... Drama: philosophical social historical socio-philosophical. Vaudeville Farce Tragifarce... LYRICS Folk Song Author's Ode Anthem Elegy Sonnet Message Madrigal Romance Rondo Epigram...

Modern literary criticism also distinguishes a fourth, related kind of literature, which combines the features of the epic and lyrical genres: lyrical-epic, to which the poem belongs. Indeed, by telling the reader a story, the poem manifests itself as an epic; revealing to the reader the depth of feelings, the inner world of the person who tells this story, the poem manifests itself as a lyric.

Epic and lyrical works are divided into large and small genres to a greater extent in terms of volume. The large ones include an epic, a novel, a poem, and a small story - a story, a story, a fable, a song, a sonnet, etc.

Read V. Belinsky's statement about the genre of the story:

"Our life, modern, is too diverse, polysyllabic, fractional (...) There are events, there are cases that, so to speak, would not be enough for a drama, would not be enough for a novel, but which are deep, which in one moment focus so much life, no matter how much you can get rid of it even for centuries: the story catches them and puts them in its narrow framework.(…) Short and fast, light and deep together, it flies from subject to subject, crushes life into trifles and tears out the leaves from the great book of this life " .

If the story, according to Belinsky, is "a leaf from the book of life", then, using his metaphor, one can figuratively define the novel from the genre point of view as "a chapter from the book of life", and the story as "a line from the book of life".

The small epic genres to which the story belongs are prose that is "intense" in content: due to its small volume, the writer does not have the opportunity to "spread his thoughts along the tree", get carried away with detailed descriptions, enumerations, reproduce a large number of events in detail, and the reader often needs to be told very a lot of.

The story is characterized by the following features:

small volume;

the plot is most often based on one event, the rest are only outlined by the author;

a small number of characters: usually one or two central characters;

some one main issue is being solved, the rest of the issues are "derivatives" of the main one.

A STORY is a small prose work with one or two main characters, dedicated to the depiction of a single event. The story is somewhat more voluminous, but the difference between the story and the story is not always possible to catch: the work of A. Chekhov "Duel" is called by some a small story, and some - a big story. The following is important: as the critic E. Anichkov wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, "it is the personality of a person, and not a whole group of people, that is at the center of the stories."

Rise of the Russian short prose begins in the 20s of the XIX century, which gave excellent examples of small epic prose, among which are the absolute masterpieces of Pushkin ("Tales of Belkin", "The Queen of Spades") and Gogol ("Evenings on a farm near Dikanka", St. Petersburg stories), romantic short stories A. Pogorelsky, A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, V. Odoevsky and others. In the second half of the 19th century, small epic works were created by F. Dostoevsky ("The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", "Notes from the Underground"), N. Leskov ("Lefty", "Dumb Artist", "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District"), I. Turgenev ("Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky district", "The Steppe King Lear", "Ghosts", "Notes of a hunter"), L. Tolstoy ("Prisoner of the Caucasus", "Hadji Murat", "Cossacks", Sevastopol stories), A. Chekhov as the largest masters of a short story, works by V. Garshin, D. Grigorovich, G. Uspensky and many others.

The twentieth century also did not remain in debt - and the stories of I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, M. Zoshchenko, Teffi, A. Averchenko, M. Bulgakov appear ... Even such recognized lyrics as A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, M. Tsvetaeva "descended to despicable prose," in the words of Pushkin. It can be argued that at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, the small epic genre occupied a leading position in Russian literature.

And for this reason alone, one should not think that the story raises some minor problems and touches on shallow topics. The form of the story is laconic, and the plot is sometimes uncomplicated and concerns, at first glance, simple, as L. Tolstoy said, "natural" relations: there is simply nowhere for a complex chain of events in the story to unfold. But this is precisely the task of the writer, in order to conclude a serious and often inexhaustible subject of conversation in a small space of text.

If the plot of I. Bunin's miniature "Muravsky Way", consisting of only 64 words, captures only a few moments of a conversation between a traveler and a coachman in the middle of an endless steppe, then the plot of A. Chekhov's story "Ionych" would be enough for a whole novel: the artistic time of the story covers almost a decade and a half. But it doesn’t matter to the author what happened to the hero at each stage of this time: it is enough for him to “grab” several “links” - episodes from the hero’s life chain, similar to each other, like drops of water, and the whole life of Dr. Startsev becomes extremely clear to the author, and the reader. “As you live one day of your life, so you will live your whole life,” Chekhov seems to say. At the same time, the writer, reproducing the situation in the house of the most “cultured” family of the provincial city of S., can focus all his attention on the clatter of knives from the kitchen and the smell of fried onions (artistic details!), but to speak about several years of a person’s life as if they and it didn’t exist at all, or it was a “passing”, uninteresting time: “Four years have passed”, “Several more years have passed”, as if it’s not worth wasting time and paper on the image of such a trifle ...

The image of a person's everyday life, devoid of external storms and upheavals, but in a routine that makes a person wait forever for happiness that never comes, became a cross-cutting theme of A. Chekhov's stories, which determined the further development of Russian short fiction.

Historical upheavals, of course, dictate other themes and plots to the artist. M. Sholokhov in the cycle of Don stories speaks of terrible and beautiful human destinies in a time of revolutionary upheavals. But the point here is not so much in the revolution itself, but in the eternal problem of man's struggle with himself, in the eternal tragedy of the collapse of the old familiar world, which mankind has experienced many times. And that is why Sholokhov turns to plots that have long been rooted in world literature, depicting private human life, as it were, in the context of world legendary history. So, in the story "The Mole" Sholokhov uses an ancient story, like the world, about the duel of father and son, not recognized by each other, which we meet in Russian epics, in the epics of ancient Persia and medieval Germany ... But if the ancient epic is the tragedy of the father who killed son in battle, explains the laws of fate, not subject to man, then Sholokhov talks about the problem of a person’s choice of his life path, a choice that determines all future events and in the end makes one a beast in human form, and the other an equal to the greatest heroes of the past.

Criteria for delimiting literary genres. Generic properties of a literary work. Literary gender system.

Attempts to classify literature by gender were made already in antiquity, for example, by Plato. The organization of the narrative was taken as the basis: from the “I” of the author (this partly correlates with modern lyrics); from heroes (drama); mixed way (modern eyes - epic). Somewhat with other accents, but also from the narrative, Aristotle tried to solve the problem of childbirth. In his opinion, one can narrate about something separate from oneself (epos), directly from oneself (lyrics) or give the right to narration to the heroes (drama).
Even in relation to ancient literature, such a methodology was not flexible enough, and the subsequent development of literature casts doubt on it altogether. So, V. V. Kozhinov rightly noted that Dante’s famous “Divine Comedy” according to this classification would have to be called lyrics (it was written from I), but this is undoubtedly an epic work.

In the 19th century, the classical scheme for dividing literature into genera was proposed by G. Hegel. Simplifying somewhat Hegelian terminology, we can say that epic is based on objectivity, that is, interest in the world itself, in events external to the author. At the heart of the lyrics –interest in inner world individual(primarily the author), that is, subjectivity. Drama, on the other hand, Hegel considered a synthesis of lyrics and epic, here there is both an objective disclosure and an interest in the inner world of the individual. More often drama is based on conflict- the clash of individual aspirations. But this conflict itself is revealed as an event. To clarify this thesis, we can say that, for example, in Griboedov's Woe from Wit, the conflict of individuals (Chatsky and representatives of the Famus society) is objectively shown.
Such is the logic of Hegel, which greatly influenced the development of theoretical thought. However, we note right away that in relation to the drama, Hegel's ideas raise many questions. Before we get into the details, this will be discussed later when we talk about drama.
Hegel's theory determined the view of the generic division of literature for a long time. It was adapted to the conditions of Russian literature by V. G. Belinsky in the article “The division of poetry into genera and types”, where the philosophical and aesthetic principles of Hegel were reformulated into more familiar terminology for a literary critic and critic. In Russian literary criticism of the 19th century and in Soviet science, it was the Hegelian approach (in the interpretation of Belinsky) that was, of course, dominant.

Schelling's Philosophy of Art. The most important category of romanticism is freedom. It is the demarcation of literary genres. The epic is an image of a situation of necessity. Lyrics - freedom. Drama is a combination of elements of poetry and epic.
Necessity is opposed to freedom. There is a problem of choice here. The hero does it on his own, but then everything develops under the sign of necessity.

Hegel said: "The hero in a dramatic work reaps the fruits of his own deed."

Genus(psychol.) - a poetic expression of a poetic state: lyrics - feelings, epic - thoughts, drama - pain.
Based on these categories:
1) faces: 1 l. - lyrics, 2 sheets. - drama, 3 l. - epic.
2) Time: lyrics - the present, epic - the past, drama - the future.
3) correlates of language or speech hierarchy.

generic properties(Kozhinov).
- on the surface of the text.
the core of the text.

generic levels:
1) The surface layer is the subject-speech organization (the system of intratext statements).
2) Objective world. The diversity of being in its integrity. The hero in the work has many qualities. “Anger is an individual property” (Iliad).
3) Deep level. The nature of the deployment of the action “the type of contradictions underlying the deployment of the action.

Hegel:
The action of an epic work is based on a situation.
The action of a dramatic work is based on collision (“collision”), and the situation is outside the main circle of the artistic image.

Drama is not interested in diversity. Retardation - slowing down the action.

Literary gender system: relies on the poetic expression of a psychological state.
Lyrics are a poetic expression of feeling.
Drama is the poetic expression of will.
Epos is a poetic expression of being and thought.