Baroque is an artistic movement that developed in the early 17th century. Translated from Italian, the term means "bizarre", "strange". This direction touched different types of art and, above all, architecture. And what are the characteristics of baroque literature?
A bit of history
The leading position in the social and political life of Europe in the seventeenth century was occupied by the church. Evidence of this - outstanding monuments of architecture. It was necessary to strengthen church power with the help of artistic images. Something bright, pretentious, even somewhat intrusive was required. Thus, a new artistic direction was born, the birthplace of which was the then cultural center of Europe - Italy.
This direction began its development in painting and architecture, but later covered other types of art. Writers and poets did not stay away from new trends in culture. A new direction was born - baroque literature (emphasis on the second syllable).
Works in the Baroque style were designed to glorify the authorities and the church. In many countries, this trend was developed as a kind of court art. However, later varieties of Baroque were distinguished. There were also specific features of this style. The most active development of the Baroque was in Catholic countries.
Main features
The aspirations of the Catholic Church to strengthen its power were perfectly matched by art, the characteristic features of which were grace, pomposity, and sometimes exaggerated expressiveness. In literature, attention is paid to sensuality and, oddly enough, the bodily principle. A distinctive feature of Baroque art is the combination of the sublime and the earthly.
Varieties
Baroque literature is a collection that can be opposed to the classic. Moliere, Racine and Corneille created their creations in accordance with strict standards. In the works written by representatives of such a trend as baroque literature, there are metaphors, symbols, antitheses, and gradation. They are characterized by illusory nature, the use of various means of expression.
Baroque literature subsequently divided into several varieties:
- marineism;
- gongorism;
- conceptism;
- euphuism.
Trying to understand the features of each of these areas is not worth it. A few words should be said about what the stylistic features of baroque literature are, who are its main representatives.
Aesthetics of the Baroque
During the Renaissance, the idea of humanism began to appear in literature. The dark medieval worldview was replaced by an awareness of the value of the human person. In actively developed scientific, philosophical and social thought. But before there was such a direction as baroque literature. What is this? We can say that Baroque literature is a kind of transitional link. She replaced the Renaissance poetics, but did not become its negation.
Baroque aesthetics is based on the clash of two opposing views. The works of this artistic movement bizarrely combine faith in human capabilities and belief in the omnipotence of the natural world. They reflect both ideological and sensual needs. What is the main theme in the creations created within the framework of the “baroque literature” direction? Writers did not give preference to a particular point of view regarding the place of man in society and the world. Their ideas vacillated between hedonism and asceticism, earth and heaven, God and the devil. Another characteristic feature of baroque literature is the return of antique motifs.
Baroque literature, examples of which can be found not only in Italian, but also in Spanish, French, Polish and Russian cultures, is based on the principle of combining the incongruous. The authors combined different genres in their work. Their main task was to surprise, stun the reader. Strange paintings, unusual scenes, a heap of various images, a combination of secularism and religiosity - all these are features of Baroque literature.
outlook
The Baroque era does not abandon the humanistic ideas characteristic of the Renaissance. But these ideas take on a certain tragic connotation. The person is filled with conflicting thoughts. He is ready to fight with his passions and the forces of the social environment.
An important idea of the Baroque worldview is also the combination of real and fictional, ideal and earthly. Authors who created their works in this style often showed a tendency to disharmony, grotesqueness, and exaggeration.
The external feature of baroque art is a special understanding of beauty. Pretentiousness of forms, splendor, splendor are the characteristic features of this trend.
Heroes
A typical character of Baroque works is a person with a strong will, nobility, and the ability to think rationally. For example, the heroes of Calderon - a Spanish playwright, one of the brightest representatives of baroque literature - are seized with a thirst for knowledge, a desire for justice.
Europe
Representatives of Italian baroque literature are Jacopo Sannadzor, Tebeldeo, Tasso, Gvarini. In the works of these authors there is pretentiousness, ornamentalism, verbal play and attraction to mythological subjects.
The main representative of the Baroque is Luis de Gongora, after whom one of the varieties of this artistic movement is named.
Other representatives are Baltasar Gracian, Alonso de Ledesmo, Francisco de Quevedo. It should be said that, having originated in Italy, Baroque aesthetics subsequently received active development in Spain. Features of this literary trend are also present in prose. Suffice it to recall the famous Don Quixote. The hero of Cervantes lives partly in a world he has imagined. The misadventures of the Knight of the Sad Image are reminiscent of the journey of a Homeric character. But in the book of the Spanish writer there is grotesqueness and comedy.
Grimelshausen's Simplicissimus is a monument of Baroque literature. This novel, which to contemporaries may seem rather eccentric and not without comedy, reflects the tragic events in the history of Germany, namely the Thirty Years' War. In the center of the plot is a simple young man who is on an endless journey and experiences both sad and funny adventures.
Precise literature was predominantly popular in France during this period.
In Poland, baroque literature is represented by such names as Zbigniew Morsztyn, Vespasian Kochowski, Vaclav Potocki.
Russia
S. Polotsky and F. Prokopovich are representatives of Russian baroque literature. This trend has become somewhat official. Baroque literature in Russia found its expression primarily in court poetry, but it developed somewhat differently than in Western European countries. The fact is that, as you know, the Baroque replaced the Renaissance, which was almost unknown in Russia. The literary direction, which is discussed in this article, had little difference from the artistic direction inherent in the culture of the Renaissance.
Simeon Polotsky
This poet strove to reproduce in his poems various concepts and ideas. Polotsky gave logic to poetry and even brought it somewhat closer to science. Collections of his works resemble encyclopedic dictionaries. His works are mainly devoted to various social issues.
What poetic works does the modern reader perceive? Certainly more recent. What is dearer to a Russian person - baroque literature or the Silver Age? Most likely the second. Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Gumilyov... The creations that Polotsky created can hardly please the current lover of poetry. This author wrote a number of moralizing poems. It is quite difficult to perceive them today due to the abundance of obsolete grammatical forms and archaisms. “A man is a certain wine-drinker” - a phrase, a meaning that not every one of our contemporaries will understand.
Baroque literature, like other forms of art in this style, set the mood for freedom of choice of means of expression. The works were distinguished by the complexity of forms. And in them, as a rule, there was pessimism, caused by the belief in the impotence of a person against external forces. At the same time, awareness of the frailty of the world was combined with a desire to overcome the crisis. With the help, an attempt was made to know the higher mind, to comprehend the place of man in the expanses of the universe.
The Baroque style was the product of political and social upheavals. It is sometimes seen as an attempt to restore the medieval world view. However, this style occupies an important place in the history of literature, and above all because it became the basis for the development of later trends.
Writers and poets in the Baroque era perceived the real world as an illusion and a dream. Realistic descriptions were often combined with their allegorical depiction. Symbols, metaphors, theatrical techniques, graphic images (lines of poetry form a picture), saturation with rhetorical figures, antitheses, parallelisms, gradations, oxymorons are widely used. There is a burlesque-satirical attitude to reality. Baroque literature is characterized by the desire for diversity, for the summation of knowledge about the world, inclusiveness, encyclopedism, which sometimes turns into chaos and collecting curiosities, the desire to study being in its contrasts (spirit and flesh, darkness and light, time and eternity). Baroque ethics is marked by a craving for the symbolism of the night, the theme of frailty and impermanence, life.
The actions of the novels are often transferred to the fictional world of antiquity, to Greece, court cavaliers and ladies are depicted as shepherdesses and shepherdesses, which is called the pastoral (Honoré d'Yurfe, Astrea). Pretentiousness and the use of complex metaphors flourish in poetry. Such forms are common like a sonnet, rondo, concetti (a short poem expressing some witty thought), madrigals.
Baroque literature, like the whole movement, is characterized by a tendency towards complexity of forms and a desire for stateliness and pomp. In baroque literature, the disharmony of the world and man, their tragic confrontation, as well as internal struggles in the soul of an individual, are comprehended. Because of this, the vision of the world and man is most often pessimistic. At the same time, the baroque in general and its literature in particular are permeated by faith in the reality of the spiritual principle, the greatness of God. In this culture, and especially in literature, in addition to focusing on the problem of evil and the frailty of the world, there was also a desire to overcome the crisis, to comprehend the highest rationality, combining both good and evil principles. Thus, an attempt was made to remove contradictions, the place of man in the vast expanses of the universe was determined by the creative power of his thought and the possibility of a miracle. With such an approach, God appeared as the embodiment of the idea of justice, mercy and higher reason.
Baroque literature insisted on freedom of expression in creativity, it is characterized by an unbridled flight of fantasy. Baroque strove for excess in everything. Because of this, there is an accentuated, deliberate complexity of images and language, combined with the desire for beauty and affectation of feelings. The Baroque language is extremely complicated, unusual and even deliberate techniques are used, pretentiousness and even pomposity appear. Baroque literature constantly confronts the real and the imaginary, the desired and the real, the problem of "to be or to seem" becomes one of the most important. The intensity of passions led to the fact that feelings pressed the mind in culture and art. Finally, baroque is characterized by a mixture of very different feelings and the appearance of irony, "there is no phenomenon either so serious or so sad that it cannot turn into a joke." A pessimistic worldview gave rise not only to irony, but also to caustic sarcasm, grotesque and hyperbole.
The writers proclaimed the originality of the work as its most important advantage, and the necessary features - the difficulty for perception and the possibility of various interpretations. Baroque poets highly valued wit, which consisted in paradoxical judgments, in expressing thoughts in an unusual way, in juxtaposing opposite objects, in building works on the principle of contrast, in interest in the graphic form of verse. Paradoxical judgments are an integral component of baroque lyrics. A striking example are 2 Spanish poets: Luis de Gongora and Francesco de Quevedo. Luis de Gongora represents the aristocratic Baroque, Francesco de Quevedo the democratic.
There are 2 varieties of baroque in Spain. Cultism - L. de Gongora represented it. According to Gongora, art should serve only a select few. The deliberate complexity of his poems limited the circle of readers. Gongora's style is dark. This is a form of expression of rejection of ugly efficiency. He tries to rise above efficiency. His poems are full of complex metaphors that reflect the author's pessimistic view of the world. In support of this, consider the poem "While the fleece of your hair flows."
"While the fleece of your hair flows,
Like gold in radiant filigree,
And do not brighten the crystal in the break of the face,
Than a gentle neck swan takeoff ... "
F. de Quevedo was a staunch opponent of the dark style. Most of the manifestations are satirical. He reduces even high mythological themes. He has bold political satires, denounces social vices. One of the key themes is the omnipotence of money. The novel "The life story of a rogue named Don Pablos." This is blatant satire. Life, a classic example of a picaresque novel.
It stands apart in studies of the history of literature and art of the 16th-17th centuries. such a phenomenon as mannerism. Mannerism(from Italian maniera, manner) - Western European literary and artistic style of the 16th - first third of the 17th century. It is characterized by the loss of Renaissance harmony between the physical and spiritual, nature and man. Some researchers (especially literary critics) are not inclined to consider Mannerism as an independent style and see it as an early phase of the Baroque. There is also an extended interpretation of the concept of "mannerism" as an expression of the formative, "pretentious" beginning in art at different stages of cultural development - from antiquity to the present. This is one of the earliest evidence of the manifestation of the attitude of the new time and the adherence to baroque aesthetics. It originates in the depths of the Renaissance aesthetics, and is considered by many researchers precisely as a stylistic trend of the late Renaissance, even as evidence of its crisis.
It testifies to the search for expressiveness in the field of language at the "border" of cultural and aesthetic eras. It is distinguished by a complicated, sophisticated poetic manner (the term itself already emphasizes this aspect), which is the result of a fundamentally new attitude towards art itself. The individual creative initiative of the poet, the new principle of figurativeness, comes to the fore. Mannerism reflects the tragedy of the worldview of the "frontier" period (the ideas of relativity, the transience of everything that exists, predestination, skepticism and mysticism, etc.). It manifested itself primarily in the culture of the nobility (for example, in France). Thus, in general, it is a “borderline” phenomenon between the late Renaissance and the actual direction of the baroque of the 17th century. Mannerism is a systematizing general name for a number of art phenomena. In literature, one way or another, gongorism and conceptism (Spain), Marinism (Italy), euphuism (England), and precision literature (France) are associated with it.
1. High baroque - developed "high", that is, philosophical, universal problems, touched upon eternal questions. It manifested itself in drama, associated with the work of Calderon and Gryphius.
2. Low baroque - refers to modern, everyday, private material, most often relies on satire. Uses the "picaresque" tradition. Representatives - Charles Sorel, Paul Scarron.
Baroque (from Italian barosso, French baroque - strange, wrong) - a literary style in Europe at the end of the 16th, 17th and part of the 18th centuries. The term "baroque" passed into literary criticism through art history through the general similarity of the styles of fine arts and literature of that era. It is believed that Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to use the term "baroque" in relation to literature.
This artistic direction was common to the vast majority of European literatures. The Baroque replaced the Renaissance, but was not its negation. Departing from the ideas inherent in the Renaissance culture about the clear harmony and regularity of being and the unlimited possibilities of man, Baroque aesthetics was built on a collision between man and the outside world, between ideological and sensual needs, mind and natural forces, which now personified the elements hostile to man. For baroque as a style generated by the transitional era, the destruction of the anthropocentric ideas of the Renaissance, the dominance of the divine principle in its artistic system, is characteristic. In baroque art one can feel the painful experience of personal loneliness, the “abandonment” of a person, combined with the constant search for the “lost paradise”. In this quest, baroque artists constantly vacillate between asceticism and hedonism, heaven and earth, God and the devil. The characteristic features of this trend were also the revival of ancient culture and an attempt to combine it with the Christian religion.
One of the dominant principles of baroque aesthetics was illusory. The artist had to create an illusion with his works, the reader must literally stun, make him wonder by introducing strange pictures, unusual scenes, a heap of images, the eloquence of heroes to the composition. Baroque poetics is characterized by a combination of religion and secularism within one work, the presence of Christian and ancient characters, the continuation and rejection of the traditions of the Renaissance. One of the main features of baroque culture is also the synthesis of various types and genres of creativity. An important artistic device in Baroque literature is a metaphor, which is the basis for expressing all the phenomena of the world and contributes to its knowledge. In the text of a Baroque work, there is a gradual transition from decorations and details to emblems, from emblems to allegories, from allegories to a symbol. This process is combined with the vision of the world as a metamorphosis: the poet must penetrate the secrets of the continuous changes of life.
The hero of baroque works is basically a bright personality with a developed strong-willed and even more developed rational principle, artistically gifted and very often noble in his actions. The Baroque style absorbed philosophical and moral and ethical ideas about the world around and the place of the human person in it.
Among the most prominent writers of the European Baroque are the Spanish playwright P. Calderoy, the Italian poets Marino and Tasso, the English poet D. Donn, the French novelist O. d "Yurfe and some others. Baroque traditions were further developed in European literatures of the 19th-20th centuries. In the 20th century, the neo-baroque literary trend appeared, which is associated with the avant-garde literature of the early 20th century and the postmodern literature of the late 20th century.
Baroque (from Italian barosso, French baroque - strange, wrong) - a literary style in Europe at the end of the 16th, 17th and part of the 18th centuries. The term "baroque" was transferred to literary criticism from art history due to the general similarity in the styles of the visual arts and literature of that era. It is believed that Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to use the term "baroque" in relation to literature. This artistic direction was common to the vast majority of European literatures. The Baroque replaced the Renaissance, but was not its objection. Moving away from the notions inherent in the Renaissance culture about the clear harmony and regularity of being and the unlimited possibilities of man, Baroque aesthetics was built on a collision between man and the outside world, between ideological and sensitive needs, mind and natural forces, which now personified the elements hostile to man.
For baroque as a style born of transitional eras, the destruction of the anthropocentric ideas of the Renaissance, the dominance of the divine principle in its artistic system, is characteristic. In baroque art one can feel the painful experience of personal loneliness, the “abandonment” of a person in association with the constant search for the “lost paradise”. In this quest, baroque artists constantly vacillate between asceticism and hedonism, heaven and earth, God and the devil. The characteristic features of this trend were also the revival of ancient culture and an attempt to combine it with the Christian religion. One of the dominant principles of baroque aesthetics was illusory.
The artist had to create an illusion with his works, the reader must literally be stunned, made to be surprised by introducing strange pictures, unusual scenes, accumulation of images, eloquence of heroes into the work. Baroque poetics is characterized by the unification of religiosity and secularism within one work, the presence of Christian and ancient characters, the continuation and objection to the traditions of the Renaissance. One of the main features of baroque culture is also the synthesis of different types and genres of creativity.
An important artistic tool in Baroque literature is a metaphor, which is the basis for expressing all the phenomena of the world and contributes to its knowledge. In the text of a Baroque work, there is a gradual transition from decorations and details to emblems, from emblems to allegories, from allegories to symbols. This process is combined with the vision of the world as a metamorphosis: the poet must penetrate the secrets of the continuous changes of life. The hero of baroque works is for the most part a bright personality with a developed strong-willed and even more developed rational principle, artistically gifted and very often noble in his actions.
The Baroque style absorbed philosophical and moral and ethical ideas about the world around and the place of the human person in it. Among the most prominent writers of the European Baroque are the Spanish playwright P. Calderon, the Italian poets Marino and Tasso, the English poet D. Donne, the French novelist O. D'urfe and some others. Baroque traditions found further development in European literatures of the 19th-20th centuries. In the XX century. the neo-baroque literary movement appeared, which is associated with the avant-garde literature of the early 20th century. and postmodern at the end of the 20th century.
The emergence of the Baroque was determined by a new worldview, the crisis of the Renaissance worldview, the rejection of its great idea of a harmonious and grandiose universal personality. By virtue of this alone, the emergence of the Baroque could not be associated only with the forms of religion or the nature of power. At the heart of the new ideas that determined the essence of the Baroque, there was an understanding of the complexity of the world, its deep inconsistency, the drama of being and the destiny of man, to some extent these ideas were also influenced by the strengthening of the religious quest of the era. The features of the Baroque determined the differences in the attitude and artistic activity of a number of its representatives, and within the existing artistic system, artistic movements that were very little similar to each other coexisted.
Baroque literature, like the whole movement, is characterized by a tendency towards complexity of forms and a desire for stateliness and pomp. In baroque literature, the disharmony of the world and man, their tragic confrontation, as well as internal struggles in the soul of an individual, are comprehended. Because of this, the vision of the world and man is most often pessimistic. At the same time, the baroque in general and its literature in particular are permeated by faith in the reality of the spiritual principle, the greatness of God.
Doubt about the strength and steadfastness of the world led to its rethinking, and in the culture of the Baroque, the medieval doctrine of the frailty of the world and man was intricately combined with the achievements of the new science. The idea of the infinity of space has led to a radical change in the vision of the picture of the world, which is acquiring grandiose cosmic proportions. In the baroque, the world is understood as eternal and majestic nature, and man - an insignificant grain of sand - is simultaneously merged with it and opposes it. He seems to dissolve in the world and becomes a particle, subject to the laws of the world and society. At the same time, a person in the representation of the figures of the Baroque is subject to unbridled passions that lead him to evil.
Exaggerated affectation, extreme exaltation of feelings, the desire to know the beyond, elements of fantasy - all this is intricately intertwined in the worldview and artistic practice. The world, in the understanding of the artists of the era, is torn and disordered, a person is just a miserable toy in the hands of inaccessible forces, his life is a chain of accidents and, by virtue of this, is chaos. Therefore, the world is in a state of instability, an immanent state of change is inherent in it, and its laws are difficult to grasp, if at all comprehensible. Baroque, as it were, splits the world: in it, next to the heavenly, the earthly coexists, next to the sublime, the lowly. This dynamic, rapidly changing world is characterized not only by inconstancy and transience, but also by the extraordinary intensity of being and the intensity of disturbing passions, the combination of polar phenomena - the grandeur of evil and the greatness of good. Baroque was also characterized by another feature - it sought to identify and generalize the patterns of being. In addition to recognizing the tragedy and inconsistency of life, representatives of the Baroque believed that there was some higher divine intelligence and that there was a hidden meaning in everything. Therefore, we must come to terms with the world order.
In this culture, and especially in literature, in addition to focusing on the problem of evil and the frailty of the world, there was also a desire to overcome the crisis, to comprehend the highest rationality, combining both good and evil principles. Thus, an attempt was made to remove contradictions, the place of man in the vast expanses of the universe was determined by the creative power of his thought and the possibility of a miracle. With such an approach, God appeared as the embodiment of the idea of justice, mercy and higher reason.
These features were more clearly manifested in literature and fine arts. Artistic creativity gravitated towards monumentality, it strongly expresses not only the tragic beginning, but also religious motives, themes of death and doom. Many artists were characterized by doubts, a sense of the frailty of being and skepticism. Arguments are characteristic that the afterlife is preferable to suffering on sinful earth. These features of literature (and of the entire baroque culture) for a long time made it possible to interpret this phenomenon as a manifestation of the counter-reformation, to associate it with the feudal-Catholic reaction. Now this interpretation has been decisively rejected.
At the same time, in the Baroque, and above all in literature, various stylistic trends clearly manifested themselves, and individual trends diverged quite far. The rethinking of the nature of baroque literature (as well as baroque culture itself) in the latest literary criticism has led to the fact that two main stylistic lines stand out in it. First of all, an aristocratic baroque appears in literature, in which a tendency to elitism, to create works for the “chosen ones” manifested itself. There was another, democratic, so-called. "grassroots" baroque, which reflected the emotional shock of the broad masses of the population in the era under consideration. It is in the grassroots baroque that life is depicted in all its tragic contradictions, this trend is characterized by rudeness and often playing with base plots and motives, which often led to parody.
The idea of the variability of the world gave rise to an extraordinary expressiveness of artistic means. A characteristic feature of baroque literature is the mixing of genres. Internal inconsistency determined the nature of the image of the world: its contrasts were revealed, instead of the Renaissance harmony, asymmetry appeared. Emphasized attentiveness to the mental structure of a person revealed such a trait as exaltation of feelings, emphasized expressiveness, a display of the deepest suffering. Baroque art and literature are characterized by extreme emotional tension. Another important technique is the dynamics that followed from the understanding of the variability of the world. Baroque literature knows no peace and static, the world and all its elements are constantly changing. For her, the baroque becomes typical of a suffering hero, in a state of disharmony, a martyr of duty or honor, suffering turns out to be almost his main property, there is a feeling of the futility of earthly struggle and a sense of doom: a person becomes a toy in the hands of forces unknown and inaccessible to his understanding.
In literature, one can often find an expression of fear of fate and the unknown, an anxious expectation of death, a feeling of omnipotence of malice and cruelty. Characteristic is the expression of the idea of the existence of a divine universal law, and human arbitrariness is ultimately restrained by its establishment. Because of this, the dramatic conflict also changes in comparison with the literature of the Renaissance and Mannerism: it is not so much the struggle of the hero with the outside world as an attempt to comprehend divine plans in a collision with life. The hero turns out to be reflective, turned to his own inner world.
Irina Elfond.
Online Encyclopedia "Circumnavigation"
BAROQUE, LITERATURE - literature of the ideological and cultural movement, known as baroque, which affected various spheres of spiritual life and developed into a special artistic system.
The transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque was a long and ambiguous process, and many features of the Baroque were already maturing in Mannerism (the stylistic trend of the late Renaissance). The origin of the term is not entirely clear. Sometimes it is raised to the Portuguese term, which means "pearl of a bizarre shape", sometimes to a concept denoting one of the types of logical syllogism. There is no consensus on the content of this concept, the interpretation remains ambiguous: it is defined as a cultural era, but often limited to the concept of "artistic style". In domestic science, the interpretation of the baroque as a cultural trend, characterized by the presence of a certain worldview and artistic system, is affirmed.
The emergence of the Baroque was determined by a new worldview, the crisis of the Renaissance worldview, the rejection of its great idea of a harmonious and grandiose universal personality. By virtue of this alone, the emergence of the Baroque could not be associated only with the forms of religion or the nature of power. At the heart of the new ideas that determined the essence of the Baroque, there was an understanding of the complexity of the world, its deep inconsistency, the drama of being and the destiny of man, to some extent these ideas were also influenced by the strengthening of the religious quest of the era. The features of the Baroque determined the differences in the attitude and artistic activity of a number of its representatives, and within the existing artistic system, artistic movements that were very little similar to each other coexisted.
Baroque literature, like the whole movement, is characterized by a tendency towards complexity of forms and a desire for stateliness and pomp. In baroque literature, the disharmony of the world and man, their tragic confrontation, as well as internal struggles in the soul of an individual, are comprehended. Because of this, the vision of the world and man is most often pessimistic. At the same time, the baroque in general and its literature in particular are permeated by faith in the reality of the spiritual principle, the greatness of God.
Doubt about the strength and steadfastness of the world led to its rethinking, and in the culture of the Baroque, the medieval doctrine of the frailty of the world and man was intricately combined with the achievements of the new science. The idea of the infinity of space has led to a radical change in the vision of the picture of the world, which is acquiring grandiose cosmic proportions. In the baroque, the world is understood as eternal and majestic nature, and man - an insignificant grain of sand - is simultaneously merged with it and opposes it. He seems to dissolve in the world and becomes a particle, subject to the laws of the world and society. At the same time, a person in the representation of the figures of the Baroque is subject to unbridled passions that lead him to evil.
Exaggerated affectation, extreme exaltation of feelings, the desire to know the beyond, elements of fantasy - all this is intricately intertwined in the worldview and artistic practice. The world, in the understanding of the artists of the era, is torn and disordered, a person is just a miserable toy in the hands of inaccessible forces, his life is a chain of accidents and, by virtue of this, is chaos. Therefore, the world is in a state of instability, an immanent state of change is inherent in it, and its laws are difficult to grasp, if at all comprehensible. Baroque, as it were, splits the world: in it, next to the heavenly, the earthly coexists, next to the sublime, the lowly. This dynamic, rapidly changing world is characterized not only by inconstancy and transience, but also by the extraordinary intensity of being and the intensity of disturbing passions, the combination of polar phenomena - the grandeur of evil and the greatness of good. Baroque was also characterized by another feature - it sought to identify and generalize the patterns of being. In addition to recognizing the tragedy and inconsistency of life, representatives of the Baroque believed that there was some higher divine intelligence and that there was a hidden meaning in everything. Therefore, we must come to terms with the world order.
In this culture, and especially in literature, in addition to focusing on the problem of evil and the frailty of the world, there was also a desire to overcome the crisis, to comprehend the highest rationality, combining both good and evil principles. Thus, an attempt was made to remove contradictions, the place of man in the vast expanses of the universe was determined by the creative power of his thought and the possibility of a miracle. With such an approach, God appeared as the embodiment of the idea of justice, mercy and higher reason.
These features were more clearly manifested in literature and fine arts. Artistic creativity gravitated towards monumentality, it strongly expresses not only the tragic beginning, but also religious motives, themes of death and doom. Many artists were characterized by doubts, a sense of the frailty of being and skepticism. Arguments are characteristic that the afterlife is preferable to suffering on sinful earth. These features of literature (and of the entire baroque culture) for a long time made it possible to interpret this phenomenon as a manifestation of the counter-reformation, to associate it with the feudal-Catholic reaction. Now this interpretation has been decisively rejected.
At the same time, in the Baroque, and above all in literature, various stylistic trends clearly manifested themselves, and individual trends diverged quite far. The rethinking of the nature of baroque literature (as well as baroque culture itself) in the latest literary criticism has led to the fact that two main stylistic lines stand out in it. First of all, an aristocratic baroque appears in literature, in which a tendency to elitism, to create works for the “chosen ones” manifested itself. There was another, democratic, so-called. "grassroots" baroque, which reflected the emotional shock of the broad masses of the population in the era under consideration. It is in the grassroots baroque that life is depicted in all its tragic contradictions, this trend is characterized by rudeness and often playing with base plots and motives, which often led to parody.
Of particular importance is descriptiveness: the artists sought to depict and set forth in detail not only the contradictions of the world and man, but also the contradictory nature of human nature itself and even abstract ideas.
The idea of the variability of the world gave rise to an extraordinary expressiveness of artistic means. A characteristic feature of baroque literature is the mixing of genres. Internal inconsistency determined the nature of the image of the world: its contrasts were revealed, instead of the Renaissance harmony, asymmetry appeared. Emphasized attentiveness to the mental structure of a person revealed such a trait as exaltation of feelings, emphasized expressiveness, a display of the deepest suffering. Baroque art and literature are characterized by extreme emotional tension. Another important technique is the dynamics that followed from the understanding of the variability of the world. Baroque literature knows no peace and static, the world and all its elements are constantly changing. For her, the baroque becomes typical of a suffering hero, in a state of disharmony, a martyr of duty or honor, suffering turns out to be almost his main property, there is a feeling of the futility of earthly struggle and a sense of doom: a person becomes a toy in the hands of forces unknown and inaccessible to his understanding.
In literature, one can often find an expression of fear of fate and the unknown, an anxious expectation of death, a feeling of omnipotence of malice and cruelty. Characteristic is the expression of the idea of the existence of a divine universal law, and human arbitrariness is ultimately restrained by its establishment. Because of this, the dramatic conflict also changes in comparison with the literature of the Renaissance and Mannerism: it is not so much the struggle of the hero with the outside world as an attempt to comprehend divine plans in a collision with life. The hero turns out to be reflective, turned to his own inner world.
Baroque literature insisted on freedom of expression in creativity, it is characterized by an unbridled flight of fantasy. Baroque strove for excess in everything. Because of this, there is an accentuated, deliberate complexity of images and language, combined with the desire for beauty and affectation of feelings. The Baroque language is extremely complicated, unusual and even deliberate techniques are used, pretentiousness and even pomposity appear. The feeling of the illusory nature of life and the unreliability of knowledge led to the widespread use of symbols, complex metaphor, decorativeness and theatricality, and determined the appearance of allegories. Baroque literature constantly confronts the real and the imaginary, the desired and the real, the problem of "to be or to seem" becomes one of the most important. The intensity of passions led to the fact that feelings pressed the mind in culture and art. Finally, baroque is characterized by a mixture of very different feelings and the appearance of irony, "there is no phenomenon either so serious or so sad that it cannot turn into a joke." A pessimistic worldview gave rise not only to irony, but also to caustic sarcasm, grotesque and hyperbole.
The desire to generalize the world pushed the boundaries of artistic creativity: baroque literature, like fine art, gravitated towards grandiose ensembles, at the same time, one can notice a tendency towards the process of “cultivating” the natural principle in man and nature itself, subordinating it to the will of the artist.
The typological features of the Baroque also determined the genre system, which was characterized by mobility. Characteristic is the advancement, on the one hand, of the novel and dramaturgy (especially the genre of tragedy), on the other hand, the cultivation of poetry that is complex in concept and language. Pastoral, tragicomedy, novel (heroic, comic, philosophical) become predominant. A special genre is burlesque - a comedy parodying high genres, roughly grounding the images, conflict and plot moves of these plays. In general, a “mosaic” picture of the world was built in all genres, and imagination played a special role in this picture, and incompatible phenomena were often combined, metaphorical and allegory were used.
Baroque literature had its own national specifics. It largely determined the emergence of individual literary schools and trends - Marinism in Italy, Concepsionism and Cultism in Spain, the Metaphysical School in England, Preciosity, Libertinage in France.
First of all, baroque arose in those countries where the power of the Catholic Church increased most: Italy and Spain.
With regard to the literature of Italy, one can speak of the origin and development of Baroque literature. Italian baroque found its expression first of all in poetry. Its ancestor in Italy was Gianbatista Marino (1569–1625). A native of Naples, he lived a turbulent, adventurous life and gained European fame. His worldview was inherent in a fundamentally different vision of the world compared to the Renaissance: he was quite indifferent in matters of religion, he believed that the world consists of contradictions, which create unity. Man is born and doomed to suffering and death. Marino used the usual literary forms of the Renaissance, primarily the sonnet, but filled it with other content, at the same time he searched for new linguistic means in order to amaze and stun the reader. His poetry used unexpected metaphors, comparisons and images. A special technique - a combination of contradictory concepts such as "a learned ignoramus" or "a rich beggar", is inherent in Marino and such a feature of the Baroque as an understanding of the grandeur of the natural world, the desire to combine the cosmic principle with the human (Lear's collection). His largest works are the poem Adonis (1623) and the Massacre of the Innocents. Both mythological and biblical subjects were interpreted by the author in an emphatically dynamic way, were complicated by psychological collisions and were dramatic. As a baroque theorist, Marino promoted the idea of unity and consubstantiality of all arts. His poetry brought to life the school of Marinism and received a wide response beyond the Alps. Marino linked Italian and French cultures, and his influence on French literature was such that he was experienced not only by the followers of the Baroque in France, but even by one of the founders of French classicism, F. Malherbe.
Baroque acquires special significance in Spain, where baroque culture manifested itself in almost all areas of artistic creativity and touched all artists. Spain, in the 17th century. in decline, under the rule not so much of the king as of the church, gave a special mood to baroque literature: here the baroque acquired not only a religious, but also a fanatical character, the desire for the otherworldly, emphasized asceticism, was actively manifested. However, it is here that the influence of folk culture is felt.
The Spanish Baroque turned out to be an unusually powerful trend in Spanish culture due to the special artistic and cultural ties between Italy and Spain, specific internal conditions, and features of the historical path in the 16th–17th centuries. The golden age of Spanish culture was associated primarily with the Baroque, and it manifested itself to the maximum extent in literature, oriented towards the intellectual elite (see SPANISH LITERATURE). Some techniques were already used by artists of the late Renaissance. In Spanish literature, the Baroque found its expression in poetry, prose, and dramaturgy. Spanish poetry of the 17th century Baroque gave rise to two currents that fought among themselves - cultism and conceptualism. Proponents of the first opposed the disgusting and unacceptable real world to the perfect and beautiful world created by the human imagination, which is given to only a few to comprehend. Adherents of cultism turned to Italian, the so-called. The "dark style", which is characterized by complex metaphors and syntax, referred to the mythological system. The followers of conceptism used the same complex language, and complex thought was clothed in this form, hence the ambiguity of each word, hence the play on words and use of puns characteristic of conceptists. If Gongora belonged to the first, then Quevedo belonged to the second.
Baroque first manifested itself in the work of Luis de Gongora y Argote, whose works were published only after his death (Works in verse by the Spanish Homer, 1627) and brought him fame as the greatest poet of Spain. The largest master of the Spanish Baroque, he is the founder of "cultism" with its learned Latin words and the complexity of forms with very simple plots. Gongora's poetics was distinguished by the desire for polysemy, his style is replete with metaphors and hyperbole. He achieves exceptional virtuosity, and his themes are usually simple, but are revealed in an extremely complicated way, complexity, according to the poet, is an artistic means of enhancing the impact of poetry on the reader, not only on his feelings, but also on the intellect. In his works (The Tale of Polyphemus and Galatea, Loneliness) he created the Spanish baroque style. Gongora's poetry quickly acquired new supporters, although Lope de Vega was in opposition to it. No less significant for the development of the Spanish Baroque is the prose heritage of F. Quevedo (1580–1645), who left a large number of satirical works, which show a disgusting ugly world that acquires a distorted character due to the use of the grotesque. This world is in a state of motion, fantastic, unreal and miserable. Dramaturgy is of particular importance in the Spanish Baroque. Mostly Baroque masters worked in the genre of tragedy or drama. A significant contribution to the development of Spanish dramaturgy was made by Tirso de Molina (Frey Gabriel Telles). He created about 300 plays (86 have survived), mostly religious dramas (auto) and comedies of manners. A master of masterfully designed intrigue, Tirso de Molina became the first author to process the image of Don Juan in world literature. His Seville mischievous or stone guest is not only the first development of this plot, but also sustained in the spirit of baroque with the utmost naturalism in the last scene. The work of Tirso de Molina, as it were, threw a bridge from Mannerism to Baroque, in many ways he opened the path that the playwrights of the Calderon school went along, building their artistic system, the synthesis of Mannerism and Baroque.
Calderon became the classical master of baroque dramaturgy. In all his dramas, he used a logically coherent and well-thought-out composition to the smallest detail, maximally intensified the intensity of the action, concentrating it around one of the characters, an expressive language. His legacy is connected with baroque dramaturgy. In his work, the pessimistic beginning found its ultimate expression, primarily in religious and moral-philosophical writings. The pinnacle is the play Life is a dream, where the baroque worldview received the most complete expression. Calderon showed the tragic contradictions of human life, from which there is no way out, except for turning to God. Life is portrayed as a painful suffering, any earthly blessings are illusory, the boundaries of the real world and sleep are blurred. Human passions are transitory, and only the awareness of this transitoryness gives knowledge to a person.
The Spanish 17th century in literature was completely baroque, as in Italy. To a certain extent, it summarizes, enhances and emphasizes the experience of the whole Baroque Europe.
In the Netherlands, the baroque is asserted almost completely, but here there is almost no feature characteristic of Italy and Spain: aspiration to God, religious frenzy. The Flemish baroque is more bodily and rude, permeated with impressions of the surrounding everyday material world or is turned to the contradictory and complex spiritual world of man.
The baroque touched German culture and literature much more deeply. Artistic techniques, the Baroque attitude spread in Germany under the influence of two factors. 1) The atmosphere of the princely courts of the 17th century, in everything following the elite fashion of Italy. Baroque was conditioned by the tastes, needs and moods of the German nobility. 2) The tragic situation of the Thirty Years' War influenced the German Baroque. Because of this, an aristocratic baroque existed in Germany along with a folk baroque (the poets Logau and Gryphius, the prose writer Grimmelshausen). The greatest German poet was Martin Opitz (1597–1639), whose poetry is quite close to the poetic forms of the Baroque, and Andreas Griphius (1616–1664), whose work reflected both the tragic upheavals of the war and the theme of frailty and futility of all earthly things, typical of Baroque literature. joys. His poetry was ambiguous, used metaphors, it reflected the deep religiosity of the author. The largest German novel of the 17th century is associated with the Baroque. Simplicissimus of H. Grimmelshausen, where the suffering of the people during the war years was captured with tremendous force and tragedy. Baroque features are fully reflected in it. The world in the novel is not just a realm of evil, it is disorderly and changeable, and the changes only take place for the worse. The chaos of the world determines the destiny of man. The fate of man is tragic, man is the embodiment of the variability of the world and being. To an even greater extent, the Baroque attitude manifested itself in German dramaturgy, where the tragedy is bloody and depicts the wildest crimes. Life here is seen as a vale of sorrow and suffering, where any human undertakings are in vain.
Much less baroque was inherent in the literature of England, France, the Dutch Republic. In France, elements of the Baroque clearly manifested themselves in the first half of the 17th century, but after the Fronde, the Baroque was supplanted in French literature by classicism, and as a result, the so-called “grand style” was created. Baroque in France took such specific forms that there is still debate about whether it existed there at all. Its elements are already inherent in the work of Agrippa d'Aubigné, who in the Tragic Poems expressed horror and protest against the cruelty of the world around him and in the Adventures of Baron Fenest posed the problem of "to be or to seem." Later in the French Baroque, admiration is almost completely absent and even the image of cruelty and tragedy The baroque in France turned out to be connected, first of all, with such a common feature (inherited from Mannerism) as the desire for illusory nature. to the novel by O.d "Yurfe Astrea (1610). Precise literature arose, which demanded the maximum distraction from everything vile and rude in real life, was estranged from prosaic reality. The principles of the pastoral were affirmed in the precise novel, as well as the emphatically refined, complicated and flowery speech. The language of precision literature made extensive use of metaphors, hyperbole, antitheses, and paraphrases. This language was clearly formed under the influence of Marino, who visited the French court. Literary salons became the conductor of a precise, lofty language. The representatives of this trend include, first of all, M. de Scuderi, the author of the novels Artamen or the great Cyrus (1649) and Clelia. Baroque gets a different life during the Fronde, in the work of the so-called freethinking poets, in which the features of mannerism and baroque are intertwined (Cyrano de Bergerac, Theophile de Vio). The burlesque poem is widely spread, where there is a dissonance of style and content (exalted heroes under base, rude circumstances). Baroque tendencies manifested themselves in the dramaturgy of the first half of the 17th century, where pastorals and tragicomedies triumphed, which reflected ideas about the diversity and variability of being and an appeal to dramatic conflicts (A. Ardi).
In France, the baroque found its expression in the work of one of the greatest philosophers of the 17th century, the thinker and stylist B. Pascal. He expressed in France the whole tragedy of the Baroque worldview and its sublime pathos. Pascal - a brilliant natural scientist - in 1646 turned to Jansenism (a trend in Catholicism condemned by the church) and published a series of pamphlets, Letters of a Provincial. In 1670, his Thoughts were published, where he spoke of the dual nature of man, manifested both in glimpses of greatness and in insignificance, the blatant contradiction of his nature. The greatness of a man is created by his thought. Pascal's worldview is tragic, he speaks of the boundless spaces of the world, firmly believes in the expediency of the world order and contrasts the greatness of the world with the weakness of man. It is he who owns the famous baroque image - "Man is a reed, but this is a thinking reed."
In England, baroque tendencies were most clearly manifested in the theater after Shakespeare and in literature. A special variant has developed here, which combines elements of baroque and classicism literature. Baroque motifs and elements most affected poetry and dramaturgy. English theater 17th century did not give the world baroque playwrights who could be compared with Spanish ones, and even in England their work is incomparable in scale with the talents of the poet J. Donne or R. Burton. In dramaturgy, the Renaissance ideals were gradually combined with the ideas of mannerism, and the last playwrights of the pre-revolutionary era were closely connected with the aesthetics of the Baroque. Baroque features can be found in late dramaturgy, especially in Fr. Beaumont and J. Fletcher, J. Ford (Heartbreak, Perkin Warbeck), F. Massinger (Duke of Milan), in individual playwrights of the Restoration era, in particular in Saved Venice T .Otway, where the exaltation of passion is found, and the characters have the features of baroque martyrs. In the poetic heritage, under the influence of the Baroque, the so-called “metaphysical school” took shape. Its founder was one of the greatest poets of the era, J. Donn. He and his followers were characterized by a penchant for mysticism and subtly refined complex language. For greater expressiveness of paradoxical and pretentious images, not only metaphors were used, but also a specific technique of versification (the use of dissonances, etc.). Intellectual complexity, along with inner turmoil and dramatic feelings, determined the rejection of social problems and the elitism of this poetry. After the revolution in the era of the Restoration, both baroque and classicism coexist in English literature, and elements of both artistic systems are often combined in the work of individual authors. This is typical, for example, for the most important work of the greatest of the English poets of the 17th century. - Paradise Lost J. Milton. The epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) was distinguished by grandiosity unprecedented in the literature of the era both in time and space, and the image of Satan as a rebel against the established world order was characterized by gigantic passion, rebelliousness and pride. Emphasized drama, extraordinary emotional expressiveness, allegorism of the poem, dynamism, wide use of contrasts and oppositions - all these features of Paradise Lost brought the poem closer to the Baroque.
Baroque literature created its own aesthetic and literary theory, which summarized the already existing artistic experience. The most famous works of B. Grasian are Wit or the Art of a Sophisticated Mind (1642) and Aristotle's Spyglass by E. Tesauro (1655). In the latter, in particular, the exceptional role of metaphor, theatricality and brightness, symbolism, and the ability to combine polar phenomena are noted.
LITERATURE
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