Art is such a sphere of human activity, which is addressed to his emotional, aesthetic side of personality. Through auditory and visual images, through intense mental and spiritual work, there is a kind of communication with the creator and those for whom it was created: listener, reader, viewer.
Term meaning
A work of art is a concept associated primarily with literature. This term means not just any coherent text, but carrying a certain aesthetic load. It is this nuance that distinguishes such a work from, for example, scientific treatise or business document.
Artwork is imaginative. It does not matter whether this is a multi-volume novel or just a quatrain. Imagery is understood as the saturation of the text with expressive-pictorial. At the level of vocabulary, this is expressed in the use by the author of such tropes as epithets, metaphors, hyperboles, personifications, etc. At the level of syntax, a work of art can be saturated with inversions, rhetorical figures, syntactic repetitions or joints, etc.
It is characterized by a second, additional, deep meaning. The subtext is guessed by a number of signs. Such a phenomenon is not characteristic of business and scientific texts, the task of which is to provide any reliable information.
A work of art is associated with such concepts as the theme and idea, the position of the author. The topic is what the text is about: what events are described in it, what era is covered, what subject is being considered. So, the subject of the image in landscape lyrics is nature, its states, complex manifestations of life, reflection mental states man through the states of nature. Idea artwork- these are thoughts, ideals, views that are expressed in the work. So, the main idea of the famous Pushkin's "I remember a wonderful moment ..." is to show the unity of love and creativity, understanding love as the main driving, reviving and inspiring principle. And the position or point of view of the author is the attitude of the poet, writer to those ideas, heroes that are depicted in his creation. It may be controversial, it may not coincide with the main line of criticism, but it is precisely this that is the main criterion in evaluating the text, identifying its ideological and semantic side.
A work of art is a unity of form and content. Each text is built according to its own laws and must comply with them. So, the novel traditionally raises problems of a social nature, depicts the life of a class or social system, through which, as in a prism, the problems and spheres of life of society as a whole are reflected. In the lyrical poem, the intense life of the soul is reflected, emotional experiences are conveyed. According to the definition of critics, in a real work of art nothing can be added or subtracted: everything is in place, as it should be.
The aesthetic function is realized in literary text through the language of art. In this regard, such texts can serve as textbooks, since give examples of magnificent prose unsurpassed in beauty and charm. It is no coincidence that foreigners who want to learn the language of a foreign country as best as possible are advised to read, first of all, time-tested classics. For example, the prose of Turgenev and Bunin are wonderful examples of mastery of all the richness of the Russian word and the ability to convey its beauty.
Over the past few decades, as an independent linguistic discipline, our country has been actively developing genre studies , the origins of which were laid back in 1979 in the publication of M.M. Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech Genres. Over the past decade, several thematic collections of "Genres of Speech" have also been published. In their works, various researchers (V.V. Dementiev, K.F. Sedov, T.V. Shmeleva, etc.) give various options understanding of the issues speech genre , offer reasons for typologies of speech genres, are described as separate speech genres, and groups of genres of oral everyday communication.
Interest in the theory of speech genres arose not so long ago and is mainly due to the shift from the systematic study of language (F. de Saussure) to the linguistics of speech - linguopragmatics, the theory of speech activity, the theory of linguistic personality. We can say that genre studies border on all known disciplines of the communicative sphere: literary criticism, stylistics, text linguistics, discourse theory and many other disciplines.
AT literary criticism genres types of literary works. For example, the genre variety of a novel can be autobiographical, socio-psychological and other types of novels.
Linguistics studies the issue of using the term "genre" primarily from the standpoint of stylistics, then from the point of view of communication theory. In our time, genres are most studied in stylistics journalistic style, mainly newspaper journalism and oratory.
Paraphrasing Bakhtin's popular definition of speech genres, their definition is revealed, according to which, what speech genres- established and conditionally unchanged thematic, compositional and stylistic varieties of units of speech communication, the boundaries of which are determined by the replacement of some speech subjects with others.
Great importance was attached to the study of speech genres, since the speaker is given the opportunity to use not only the vocabulary, grammatical structure, forms of utterance, that is, speech genres as such; they are especially important for mutual understanding, as well as language forms. If we compare speech genres with language forms, we can conclude that the former are more subject to change, are flexible, but for a speaking person they carry a normative meaning, they are already initially given to a person, and not created by him.
Bakhtin was one of the first to define the concept primary and secondary speech genres. Simple, or primary, speech genres arise in conditions of direct speech communication. Complex ones appear in conditions of relatively highly developed and cultural speech communication, usually it is written. In the process of their formation, secondary genres take into their composition and process primary speech genres.
As part of our study, it will be relevant to analyze the problem literary genres , which are called groups of literary works, united by a complex of formal and meaningful features, and in particular - genres of fiction. Exactly at artistic speech the language of the nation is more clearly looming, the directions and possibilities of the language are clearly manifested in it.
Based on the above-mentioned genre classification of Bakhtin, it becomes clear that genres of speech have a close relationship with genres of literature(we are talking about the relationship between primary and secondary genres). The concept of sequence and transition between them can be traced by getting acquainted in detail with the work of almost any writer. We have the right to believe that this way of creating a text is very important for modern writers, including children's writers, because they must speak a living language, close to the national spirit of readers, a language more saturated with oral forms.
Literary genres are not elements of any previously given system: on the contrary, they appear as certain places of concentration of tension in one or another interval literary space in accordance with artistic tasks, which are set by a circle of authors, and are defined as thematically, compositionally and stylistically stable type of utterance .
Category of literary text analysis, allowing you to separate possible world text from the world of objective reality, manifests itself in different ways in texts of various types: this is the beginning and end of structured texts, a frame in painting, a ramp in the theater, etc.
Currently, it is customary to distinguish three main types of text:
· scientific text (reports, lectures, messages, science articles, dissertations, etc.) is characterized by the unambiguity of meaning and the certainty of the meaning of scientific terms;
· business , or practice text (business messages, documents, reports), the interpretation of which is determined by the communicative situation;
· artistic text - which is characterized by: 1) completeness, the impossibility of interfering with outside, 2) the variability of meaning, which occurs in conjunction with the variability of cultural and historical contexts, and also thanks to the dialogue with readers of different groups of perception and having different personal consciousness; reading a literary text, they are involved in the process of co-creation, give it additional meaning, 3) the creation of a message field as a special environment for artistic communication, 4) the subject discussed in the text does not exist outside this text, 5) the sphere of relations, based on which the interaction of the recipient with the literary text is born, does not exist before the process of perception of this text.
The hierarchy of any of the above types of text can be observed in the disintegration of the text system into subsystems. Usually these are phenomena of the borderline nature of a number of elements of its internal structure in subsystems of various types, such as chapters, verses, half-verses. Some of these elements, as a rule, are signals of some kind of boundary, while others are already several, coinciding in a common position in the text (for example, the end of a chapter is also the end of a book), and since the dominance of certain borders, we can trace the possibility of structural comparability of the role of demarcation signals. After all, it is known that the border of a novel hierarchically dominates the border of a chapter, the border of a poem - over the border of a quatrain, the border of a chapter - over the borders of a stanza, and so on. Considering all this, the fullness of the text with internal borders and the presence of external borders also create the basis for classification of text construction types(It is customary to call internal boundaries such phenomena as hyphenation, division into chapters, strophic structure, etc., there are only two external boundaries, but the degree of their markedness can be significantly reduced up to a mechanical break in the text).
genre form- the result of interaction in the literature of fiction and other genres. It follows from this that the genre form is primarily a form of non-artistic education, which the author focuses on, transforming the latter into a literary text.
Having general ideas about hierarchical levels of literary text, his genre form and having understood its stable set of features, it will not be difficult to differentiate it from artistic work. One of the main criteria for distinguishing a “text” from a “work” remains the correlation of the latter with a certain intention. That is why, from a textual point of view, work should be called a text that changes as a whole and is united by a single idea, including in content and form. It follows from this that a work is a kind of complex content that originates from the text and is based on it.
Journalistic genres are addressed to the general public, so the task of constructing their text is to influence readers or listeners with a subsequent transition to the side of the author's idea. Journalism text characterized by expressiveness, the use of interrogative, motivating and exclamatory sentences, a clear expression copyright to the problem. The main feature of the journalistic text is the open expression of the author's thoughts.
I would like to pay special attention to the fact that the text of any artistic and journalistic work is rich in content in a special way. Despite the fact that the text is inextricably linked with the subject-shaped layer, content, meaning and concept, it is also distinguishable from them. One of the manifestations of the difference between the text and these concepts is its existence as a complex system of speech units, including the lexical-phraseological level, allegory, intonational-syntactic, in some cases, rhythmic and phonetic aspects. Also, the text of the work includes subject imagery, which to the greatest extent expresses the position of the author, not to mention the word, the mirror of the author's individual attitude to reality, by which we can judge the author's perception of the surrounding world.
Based on this, we can conclude that the literary text itself does not openly express the author's thought. The literary text conveys the maximum content of concepts and value-oriented information, the physical being of socially significant artistic thought. If it is not used, then its existence cannot be considered complete, it begins to exist as a potential work.
Literary and artistic work is a work of art in the narrow sense of the word, that is, it is one of the forms of existence of the consciousness of society. A work of art is a manifestation of emotional and mental semantic fullness. If we use Bakhtin's terminology, then a work of art is a "word about the world" spoken by the author, an act of reaction of a talented person to the surrounding reality.
A literary text is transformed into a work only through social existence: the closed system opens and begins to function socially. The main difference between a work and a text is that it is a functioning expanded text that has artistic concept and subject matter. The text develops into a work with the beginning of its social significance, the acquisition of public opinion. A work is a variant of the social existence of art and one of the most complex phenomena in the world; it arises from reality perceived through the prism of culture.
Each artistic direction gives rise to its own type of work of art, which sought to convey a special worldview that expresses an artistic idea through variable semantic layers. Each of them contains one of the types of human interaction with the internal and external environment. That is why the work is considered more difficult than other cultural phenomena. Diversity and complexity is also explained by the fact that when getting acquainted with a literary text, it seems possible to trace the reality of the era that gave rise to it, and the relevance of the topic in relation to the recipient, and the personality of the author, and the meaning of somehow encrypted ideas and views hidden from direct understanding.
Another characteristic of the work is its historical variability. Gradually, it acquires new characteristics and semantic values, each new generation reads and perceives them differently. All this is due to the fact that the perception of a literary text proceeds according to the principle dialogue between author and reader .
As a result, the text and the work represent a process and a result. After all, in order to accurately understand the result (work), you need to directly refer to the production process (text). A work understandable and perceived by all the parameters of its symbolic nature is already a text.
In this regard, it can be argued that, having the unity of the author's intention, piece of art in its entirety can be called a text and be comprehended as a text. Despite the possible heterogeneity in the way of expression, methods of organization, construction, a work of art is a textual realization of the author's thought, which carries aesthetic information, which distinguishes it from all other types of text. In this way, piece of art how the text is a social phenomenon, cohesive unified intention in content and form, expressed author as the bearer of his culture.
What is a work of art
Before proceeding to the actual practice of analysis, it is necessary to understand several theoretical points.
First. On the one hand, any work of art is a complexly constructed statement, materially expressed (fixed) in a certain text. This statement is directed from the author to the reader; accordingly, it has two sides: the side of the author and the side of the reader. We use the term "reader" in the broadest sense of the word, that is, here we mean the spectator in the theater or on art exhibition, and the listener piece of music, and actually the reader of the literary text.
On the other hand, any work of art is a text that is built in a certain sign system, which is more conveniently called the “language of art”.
The language of art
There is one subtlety to understand here. We easily perceive the figurative, metaphorical meaning of the expressions "language of music" or "language of painting", but when it comes to the "language of literature", we often fall into vocabulary confusion, because literature is created, apparently, in ordinary human, "colloquial" language. In fact, here it is necessary to strictly differentiate the values. Ordinary human language acts as only one of the many elements of the "language of literature" as a sign system, moreover, it is also a transformed element, "recreated" by the creative efforts of a writer or poet.
Even on the “lowest floor” of a literary work, that is, in the speech of heroes, characters often speak in a way that real people never speak. The language seems to be the same, but in fact it is different. When analyzing, we should not forget for a minute that the words of the heroes of a work of art are just a “mirror” reflection of the real speeches of some real people, relatively speaking - prototypes.
The general rule is this: any word in a work of art is only “similar” to the same word in human (non-artistic) language. It is a "transformed" word - insofar as it got into the fabric of a work of art.
What do I want to say by such persistent emphasis on this idea? I want to draw attention to the fact that the sign system of a verbal (that is, literary) work is not limited to its language. Language, in fact, is just one of the elements of such a system. Moreover, the element is completely “artificial”, because it is “made” by the author (artist), and did not arise by itself.
In art, everything is artificial, because it is made, that is why it is art.
About signs
What is a sign? A sign is an external (visible, sensually perceived) manifestation of some essence, which I prefer to call sense.
Figuratively speaking, the sign itself is dead if it is not connected with the meaning.
As an example. Take a book in a language you don't know. She can be talented or mediocre - you will not be able to appreciate her, because she is not available to you. Not as a material body, but as a text, that is, a work created in a certain sign system.
Expanding the analogy, we will come to the conclusion that many texts remain inaccessible to one degree or another, since this sign system is not at all familiar to the reader or is not fully mastered by him.
When we further speak of, say, poetry, understandable a wide range readers (public, or "folk" poetry), then from a theoretical point of view, this means only that these poetic texts are created in sign systems that, for some reason, are accessible to the majority or a huge number of poetry readers. First of all, of course, thanks to school education.
By the way, the accessibility of the text does not characterize its artistic merit. That is, the degree of accessibility tells us nothing about the degree of talent or lack of talent of its author.
Thus, as a subtotal, literary education at school or outside it implies familiarizing potential readers with already existing sign systems, as well as with those systems that are in the process of emergence and formation, and on this basis, developing the ability to intuitively perceive the sign systems of the future, which this moment does not yet exist (or is in the process of formation).
Conventionally (but quite accurately) speaking, literary and artistic education is the maximum expansion of the artistic horizons of future readers. It is clear that such an expansion can occur not only within the framework of any educational institution, but also - even more often - by some other ways and means, including through self-education.
In passing, I note that this approach allows you to fairly strictly decide the question of the inclusion or non-inclusion of a particular writer in school curriculum on literature. Include in the program, therefore, in the first place, of course, those writers and poets who expand our horizons in the field of literary and artistic sign systems.
Why is the concept of text important?
So, any work of art is a text created in a certain sign system. As such, it can be separated from the author and "appropriated" by the reader.
Here, perhaps, the analogy with the sacrament of birth is appropriate. You gave birth to a child - that is, "separated" him from yourself. He is your child, your fruit, but at the same time, he is an entity separate from you, and your rights to him are limited by a number of rules and regulations.
It is the same with a work: by separating it from itself (in the form of an act of publication, promulgation), the author loses some rights to it, namely: the right to explain it. From this moment on, the work falls into the scope of the reader's rights, the main of which is the right to understand, to interpret this work. No one can deprive the reader of this right to interpretation as long as art exists, that is, creativity for the public, creativity addressed to the "other" and not to oneself.
I want to clarify here that the author, of course, also has the right to interpret his work, but not as an author, but as an ordinary (albeit qualified) reader. In rare cases, the author may even act as a critic of his works, but, firstly, in this case, he does not have any special prerogatives in relation to other readers, and secondly, such cases are quite rare, if not exceptional. .
Accordingly, the author's statements such as "in fact, I wanted to say such and such", of course, should not be ignored, but they should not be given excessive importance either. After all, the reader did not subscribe to understand the author thoroughly. If the text, and with it the author, remained incomprehensible, then this is also a special case, which should be dealt with specifically.
I will briefly say that the text may not be understood as a result of the following reasons: 1) the novelty of the author's sign system; 2) insufficient qualification of the reader; 3) insufficient talent of the author.
Text elements
Since the text is a complexly constructed statement, the following elements are necessarily present in it: theme, idea, form.
Theme is what the story is about.
An idea is what the author communicates to the reader.
The form is how the given statement is constructed.
The theme and idea are usually referred to as the content side of the work. I plan to speak about the dialectics of form and content in a work of art in another article. Here it will suffice to note the following. We are accustomed to the postulate that the form is meaningful and the content is formalized, but we rarely take this statement seriously enough. Meanwhile, one must always remember that in a work no content exists apart from the form, and the analysis of a work is essentially an analysis of its form.
One more fundamental remark concerning the content and form of the text. It is clear that a work of art is created for the sake of its idea, since the text is a statement. It is important for the author to say something, to communicate with his work, and for the reader it is important to “read” something, that is, to perceive. Less often - for the sake of form. This is when the form itself becomes the content. Probably, such cases are more common in experimental art, as well as in children's and adult folklore or its imitation. And, probably, extremely rarely - for the sake of the topic. I think that such cases, although they are related to cultural phenomena (for example, when a public taboo needs to be removed from a certain topic), they can hardly be rightfully attributed to art proper.
Message or statement?
AT English language the idea of a work is usually called the term "message" - a message, a message. So, they say: “What is the message of the story?” That is: what is the idea of the story? It seems to me that the English term is more accurate. That is why sometimes in my analyzes I call a literary text a message. It is important to note this point here. I contrast communication with communication. For communication is a two-way process: they told me - I answered; I said - they answered me. Unlike communication, communication is a one-way process: the writer said, the readers read. An exchange of opinions is certainly permissible, but it is OUTSIDE the actual artistic creative act.
Given the above, we can formulate the matter in this way: a literary text is a complexly constructed statement that carries a well-defined message. The task of analysis, therefore, is the most adequate reading (perception) this message(or text ideas). The analysis is carried out as an analysis of the form, or sign system, which the author has adopted for a given work.
2. The form and content of a literary work.
3. Ways of analyzing a literary work as an artistic whole.
Each literary work is an independent, complete, whole, multi-level artistic world, not reducible to the sum of its constituent elements and indecomposable into them without a trace.
The law of integrity presupposes subject-semantic exhaustion, internal completeness (completeness) of a work of art. With the help of the plot, plot, composition, image, style, genre of a literary work, a complete artistic whole is formed. Especially big role composition plays here: all parts of the work must be arranged so that they fully express the idea. If the plot, character, circumstances, genres, style are the original languages of art, then the work is a “statement” in one language or another.
A literary work that exists as a complete text created in the national language is the result of creative activity writer. As part of works of art, an “external material work” (M.M. Bakhtin, V.E. Khalizev), often called artifact, i.e. something consisting of colors and lines, sounds and words, and aesthetic object- the totality of what is the essence of the artistic impact on the viewer, listener, reader. A work of art is the unity of an aesthetic object and an artifact.
Artistic unity, consistency of the whole and parts in the work were discovered already in the time of Plato and Aristotle, who wrote: “The whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end”, “parts of events should be so composed that with a rearrangement or removal of one of parts would change and the whole would be upset. This rule is also recognized by modern literary criticism. The unity of a literary work lies in its existence as a separate text, strictly delimited from all other texts, having its own title, author, beginning and end, its own artistic time. A work of literature is indecomposable at any of its levels. Each image of the hero is also perceived as a whole, and not divided into separate details.
It is characteristic that already the initial author's intention is born, as a rule, in the form of an idea and a small integral image, which will subsequently grow. So, the impetus for the creation of the character of Hadji Murat was for Leo Tolstoy a bush that he saw half-crushed, but still clinging to the soil. This image already contained the main features of Hadji Murat, the protagonist of the future story - the integrity of nature, vitality.
There is also such an approach to a literary work, in which the reader has to determine how the author managed to reconcile the parts and the whole, to motivate this or that detail or detail. It is especially difficult to achieve the artistic integrity of a work when it has an extensive system of characters and several storylines, shifts of artistic time, a wide art space, complex composition. It is even more difficult to achieve integrity when a writer creates a literary cycle.
Literary cycle- combining a number of works on the basis of ideological and thematic similarity, common genre, place or time of action, characters, form of narration, style. Cyclization is found in folklore, it is also characteristic of all kinds of written literature: epic, lyrics, drama. Dilogy, trilogy, tetralogy include 2, 3, 4 works. Autobiographical stories by L.N. Tolstoy and M. Gorky form trilogies.
The lyrical cycle sometimes includes much more works. The lyrics of the poets of the Renaissance, Dante, Shakespeare form cycles dedicated to the beloved. In the literature of classicism, they are grouped into cycles of odes, among the romantics - poems and lyric poems(“southern poems” by A.S. Pushkin, “Caucasian poems” by M.Yu. Lermontov). Poetic cycles about love by N.A. Nekrasov and F.I. Tyutchev are a kind of lyrical and psychological novels, in the center of which are poetic images of heroines. The role of the lyrical cycle is especially great among the poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it is a new genre formation, standing between a thematic selection of poems and a lyrical plotless poem (A. Blok's cycle "Snow Mask").
The artistic meaning of the cycle is wider and richer than the totality of the meanings of the individual works that make it up. Whatever the reader deals with - with a separate work or a cycle, it is in the reader's mind that the artistic integrity of a literary work is realized in the unity of its content and form.
Form and content are essential external and internal aspects inherent in all phenomena of reality. In literary concepts of form and content, ideas about the external and internal sides of a literary work are generalized. These literary concepts are based on the general philosophical categories of form and content, which are manifested in literature in a special way. The specificity of the relationship between form and content in literature and art lies in organic correspondence, harmony of content and form, although content is the leading one in this pair of concepts.
The concept of the inseparability of the content and form of a work of art was fixed by Hegel at the turn of the 1810s and 20s. The German thinker emphasized the moment of interpenetration of content and form as a general pattern of a work of art. V. G. Belinsky found the unity of content and form only in truly artistic, brilliant works, and at the same time believed that “simple talent always relies either mainly on content, and then its works are short-lived from the side of form, or predominantly shines with form, and then his works are ephemeral in terms of content. Thus, Belinsky drew attention to possible cases of disharmony and contradictions of form and content.
The unity of content and form is usually violated in the works of mediocre authors and in imitations, where the old form is mechanically applied to the new content, in parodies, where the form of the parodied work is filled with a different content that does not correspond to it. When changing one literary direction to others, the form usually “lags behind” the content, that is, the new content destroys the old form, thereby creating the conditions for the emergence of a literary movement that is making its way.
In the history of European aesthetics, there are statements about the priority of form over content in art. Ascending to the ideas of I. Kant, they received further development F. Schiller. He wrote that in true beautiful work(such are the creations of ancient masters) “everything should depend on the form, and nothing on the content, because only the form acts on the whole person as a whole, while the content only affects individual forces. The real secret of the art of the master lies in the destruction of the content by the form.
These views have been developed in early work Russian formalists (V.B. Shklovsky), who generally replaced the concepts of "content" and "form" with others - "material" and "reception". In the content, the formalists saw an extra-artistic category and therefore evaluated the form as the only carrier of artistic specificity, considering a work of literature as a "sum" of its constituent "techniques". V. B. Shklovsky in his article “Art as a technique” declared the location and verbal expression of “material” to be the main tasks of the artist’s work.
At the same time, such attention to the formal side of literary works also gave its positive results. Formalists and literary critics close to this school devoted valuable research to stylistic forms of speech and language (V.V. Vinogradov), the formal aspects of verse (V.M. Zhirmunsky, Yu.N. Tynyanov, B.M. Eikhenbaum, B.V. Tomashevsky ), the plot (V.B. Shklovsky), the systematic description of a fairy tale (V.Ya. Propp). In the most pointed form, Schiller's ideas about the destruction of content by form are expressed by the outstanding Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, who was under the influence of formalists.
In his analysis of I.A. Bunin’s story “Easy Breathing,” Vygotsky compares the life material of the short story, which, in his opinion, is “worldly dregs” (the story of the moral fall and death of the high school student Olya Meshcherskaya), with the artistic form given to this material. Thanks to the art of composition, the selection of elegant artistic details, against which Olya informs the head of the gymnasium about her fall, the description of the murder of the heroine using neutral vocabulary, the true theme of the story is easy breath not history confused life provincial high school student. Therefore, the story of I. Bunin gives the impression of liberation, lightness, detachment and perfect transparency of life. Which cannot be deduced from the events themselves that underlie it. Vygotsky brilliantly revealed the secret of the artistry of one of the the best works Russian literature of the 20th century
However, there is a point of view that in this story, already in the very vital material processed by Bunin, in addition to the “worldly turbidity”, there is something else - the themes of harmony and beauty and the cruelty of the world towards them. It is these themes that Bunin singles out in the content of his work. The image of light breathing becomes a symbol of harmony and beauty in the story. Harmony and beauty existed in the world from eternity, and with the advent of Olya into the world, they were embodied in her, but after her death, "this light breath again dissipated in the world."
The generalized philosophical content of the story - reflections on harmony and beauty, their dramatic fate in the world - is also embodied in such a form component as genre. Descriptions of the cemetery and Olya's grave, as well as walks to the cemetery of the classy lady Olya Meshcherskaya, framing the plot of the story, thematically and lexically resemble cemetery elegies with their characteristic philosophical reflections about life and death and the pathos of sadness. So generalization philosophical content"Easy breathing" corresponds to the genre form of the story with features of elegy, which means that the form does not destroy the content here, but reveals its content.
In art history, there is also the concept of internal form, which, following the German philosopher W. Humboldt, was developed by Russian philologists A. A. Potebnya and G. O. Vinokur. In the understanding of Potebnya in a work of art, the area of internal form includes events, characters, images in the narrow sense of the term, indicating the content of the work. The fullness of the internal form gives a historical perspective for the development of the content, or the artistic idea of the work. The last one lives for centuries, giving rise to each generation of readers its own type of interpretation. An example is the reaction of representatives of different generations and ideological currents in Russian criticism to the images of the heroes of literary works. For example, for Belinsky, Tatyana Larina is a high artistic ideal, and for Pisarev, a muslin young lady. According to a critic, " pure art"A.V. Druzhinina, Oblomov is the bearer of the best properties of the Russian people, and in the perception of a supporter" real criticism” N.A. Dobrolyubov, who first of all saw in literature its social characteristic, this hero is another “extra person”.
Content and Form Components.
"Theme" - what is the basis of the work, the subject of comprehension, processing, embodiment in it of one or another side of reality, the conceptual content of images of people or events.
"Character" - Greek. imprint, sign, distinguishing feature. This is a combination of individual properties: social, historical, national, psychological.
The term "character" is already in Aristotle's Poetics. But the structure of character in literature depends on a particular stage in the development of culture. Ancient literature does not yet know the identity. Personality appears along with Christianity, when a person's internal responsibility for his actions also arises. But in the world a person occupies an insignificant place, his value is measured by the degree of strength of his religious faith and loyalty to the vassal.
In the Renaissance, man takes the place of God in the center of the picture of the world. The characters of the heroes of F. Rabelais, W. Shakespeare, M. de Cervantes carry a variety of human qualities - from extreme baseness to extreme nobility.
The classicists, unlike the writers of the Renaissance, represented the characters as less multifaceted, seeing the value of a person in serving society.
In romanticism, on the contrary, an idea is formed of the contradictions between the hero and society, which does not understand and expel him.
In realism, dependence on the social environment, historical circumstances and biological factors becomes a decisive prerequisite for the portrayal of character.
The refusal of modernist writers from determinism and the search for true reality, hidden from a superficial view of the world, entailed a fundamentally different "conditionality of the behavior of heroes driven by supersensible forces or rooted in the unconscious."
In the literature of the 20th century. characters are widely represented with different characters, peculiar and unusual. The heroes who fell out of the social environment in which they were formed, the characters of M. Gorky's prose and dramaturgy (Konovalov, Foma Gordeev, Klim Samgin), philosophers from the people from the works of A. Platonov, "freaks" V. Shukshin became a great artistic discovery.
The problem is highlighting some aspect of the content; question posed in a literary work.
An idea is a generalizing, emotional, figurative thought that forms the basis of a literary work and belongs to the sphere of the author's subjectivity. Artistic ideology differs from tendentiousness. The last word is used in two senses.
Tendentiousness is a passionate, emphasized expression of one's ideas by an artist who is deeply convinced of them. However, an idea devoid of imagery becomes a trend that is the sphere of journalism, not fiction.
The formal components of a literary work are style, genre, composition, artistic speech, rhythm; content-formal - plot and plot, conflict.
Supporters of the simultaneous analysis of the content and form of a literary work (V.V. Kozhinov) are convinced that the form of a work can be studied only as a completely meaningful form, and the content - only as an artistically formed content.
Basically, modern literary criticism is characterized by a fundamental departure from the classical division of a work into “content” and “form” and the study of a literary work in its integrity and internal unity.
Even at first glance, it is clear that a work of art consists of certain sides, elements, aspects, and so on. In other words, it has a complex internal composition. At the same time, the individual parts of the work are connected and united with each other so closely that this gives reason to metaphorically liken the work to a living organism. The composition of the work is characterized, therefore, not only by complexity, but also by order. A work of art is a complexly organized whole; from the realization of this obvious fact follows the need to know internal structure work, that is, to single out its individual components and to realize the connections between them. The rejection of such an attitude inevitably leads to empiricism and unsubstantiated judgments about the work, to complete arbitrariness in its consideration, and ultimately impoverishes our understanding of the artistic whole, leaving it at the level of the primary reader's perception.
In modern literary criticism, there are two main trends in establishing the structure of a work. The first proceeds from the selection in the product of a number of layers, or levels, just as in linguistics in separate statement one can distinguish the level of phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic. At the same time, different researchers unequally imagine both the set of levels and the nature of their relationships. So, M.M. Bakhtin sees in the work, first of all, two levels - “plot” and “plot”, the depicted world and the world of the image itself, the reality of the author and the reality of the hero*. MM. Hirshman proposes a more complex, mostly three-level structure: rhythm, plot, hero; in addition, the subject-object organization of the work permeates “vertically” these levels, which ultimately creates not a linear structure, but rather a grid that is superimposed on the work of art**. There are other models of a work of art, representing it in the form of a number of levels, slices.
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* Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979. S. 7–181.
** Girshman M.M. Style of a literary work // Theory of literary styles. Modern aspects of study. M., 1982. S. 257-300.
Obviously, the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the allocation of levels can be considered as a common drawback of these concepts. Moreover, no attempt has yet been made substantiate division into levels by some general considerations and principles. The second weakness follows from the first and consists in the fact that no division by levels covers the entire richness of the elements of the work, does not give an exhaustive idea even of its composition. Finally, the levels must be thought of as fundamentally equal, otherwise the very principle of structuring loses its meaning, and this easily leads to the loss of the notion of a certain core of a work of art, linking its elements into a real integrity; connections between levels and elements are weaker than they really are. Here we should also note the fact that the "level" approach very poorly takes into account the fundamental difference in quality of a number of components of the work: for example, it is clear that an artistic idea and an artistic detail are phenomena of a fundamentally different nature.
The second approach to the structure of a work of art takes such general categories as content and form as its primary division. In the most complete and reasoned form, this approach is presented in the works of G.N. Pospelova*. This methodological trend has far fewer drawbacks than the one discussed above, it is much more in line with the real structure of the work and is much more justified from the point of view of philosophy and methodology.
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* See e.g.: Pospelov G.N. Problems of literary style. M., 1970. S. 31–90.
We will begin with the philosophical substantiation of the allocation of content and form in the artistic whole. The categories of content and form, excellently developed back in Hegel's system, have become important categories of dialectics and have been repeatedly successfully used in the analysis of various complex objects. The use of these categories in aesthetics and literary criticism also forms a long and fruitful tradition. Nothing prevents us, therefore, from applying philosophical concepts that have proven themselves so well to the analysis of a literary work; moreover, from the point of view of methodology, this will only be logical and natural. But there are also special reasons to begin the division of a work of art with the allocation of content and form in it. A work of art is not a natural phenomenon, but a cultural one, which means that it is based on a spiritual principle, which, in order to exist and be perceived, must certainly acquire some material embodiment, a way of existing in a system of material signs. Hence the naturalness of defining the boundaries of form and content in a work: the spiritual principle is the content, and its material embodiment is the form.
We can define the content of a literary work as its essence, spiritual being, and the form as a way of existence of this content. The content, in other words, is the “statement” of the writer about the world, a certain emotional and mental reaction to certain phenomena of reality. Form is the system of means and methods in which this reaction finds expression, embodiment. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that content is what what the writer said with his work, and the form - how he did it.
The form of a work of art has two main functions. The first is carried out within the artistic whole, so it can be called internal: it is a function of expressing content. The second function is found in the impact of the work on the reader, so it can be called external (in relation to the work). It consists in the fact that the form has an aesthetic impact on the reader, because it is the form that acts as the bearer of the aesthetic qualities of a work of art. The content itself cannot be beautiful or ugly in a strict, aesthetic sense - these are properties that arise exclusively at the level of form.
From what has been said about the functions of form, it is clear that the question of conventionality, which is so important for a work of art, is solved differently in relation to content and form. If in the first section we said that a work of art in general is a convention in comparison with primary reality, then the measure of this convention is different for form and content. Within a work of art the content is unconditional, in relation to it it is impossible to raise the question “why does it exist?” Like the phenomena of primary reality, in the art world content exists without any conditions, as an immutable given. Nor can it be a conditionally fantasy, arbitrary sign, by which nothing is meant; in the strict sense, the content cannot be invented - it directly comes to the work from the primary reality (from the social being of people or from the consciousness of the author). On the contrary, the form can be arbitrarily fantastic and conditionally implausible, because something is meant by the conditionality of the form; it exists "for something" - to embody the content. Thus, Shchedrin’s city of Foolov is a creation of the author’s pure fantasy, it is conditional, since it never existed in reality, but autocratic Russia, which became the subject of the “History of a City” and embodied in the image of the city of Foolov, is not a convention or fiction.
Let us note to ourselves that the difference in the degree of conventionality between content and form gives clear criteria for attributing one or another specific element of a work to form or content - this remark will come in handy more than once.
Modern science proceeds from the primacy of content over form. With regard to a work of art, this is true both for the creative process (the writer looks for the appropriate form, albeit for a vague, but already existing content, but in no case vice versa - it does not first create a “ready-made form”, and then pours some content into it), and for the work as such (the features of the content determine and explain to us the specifics of the form, but not vice versa). However, in in a certain sense, namely, in relation to the perceiving consciousness, it is the form that is primary, and the content is secondary. Since sensory perception is always ahead of the emotional reaction and, moreover, the rational comprehension of the subject, moreover, it serves as the basis and basis for them, we perceive in the work first its form, and only then and only through it - the corresponding artistic content.
From this, by the way, it follows that the movement of the analysis of a work - from content to form or vice versa - is of no fundamental importance. Any approach has its justifications: the first is in the defining nature of the content in relation to the form, the second is in the patterns of the reader's perception. Well said about this A.S. Bushmin: “It is not at all necessary ... to start research from the content, guided only by the one thought that the content determines the form, and not having other, more specific reasons for this. Meanwhile, it was precisely this sequence of consideration of a work of art that turned into a forced, hackneyed, boring scheme for everyone, having become widespread in school teaching, and in textbooks, and in scientific literary works. The dogmatic transfer of the correct general proposition of literary theory to the methodology of the concrete study of works gives rise to a dull pattern. Let us add to this that, of course, the opposite pattern would not be any better - it is always mandatory to start the analysis from the form. Here everything depends on specific situation and specific tasks.
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* Bushmin A.S. The Science of Literature. M., 1980. S. 123–124.
From all that has been said, a clear conclusion suggests itself that both form and content are equally important in a work of art. The experience of the development of literature and literary criticism also proves this position. Belittling the meaning of content or completely ignoring it leads in literary criticism to formalism, to meaningless abstract constructions, leads to oblivion of the social nature of art, and in artistic practice, guided by this kind of concept, it turns into aestheticism and elitism. However, no less Negative consequences also has a neglect of the art form as something secondary and, in essence, optional. Such an approach actually destroys the work as a phenomenon of art, forces us to see in it only this or that ideological, and not ideological and aesthetic phenomenon. In creative practice, which does not want to reckon with the enormous importance of form in art, flat illustrativeness, primitiveness, the creation of “correct”, but emotionally unexperienced declarations about a “relevant”, but artistically unexplored topic, inevitably appear.
Highlighting the form and content in the work, we thereby liken it to any other complexly organized whole. However, the relationship between form and content in a work of art has its own specifics. Let's see what it consists of.
First of all, it is necessary to firmly understand that the relationship between content and form is not a spatial relationship, but a structural one. The form is not a shell that can be removed to open the nut kernel - the content. If we take a work of art, then we will be powerless to “point the finger”: here is the form, but the content. Spatially they are merged and indistinguishable; this unity can be felt and shown at any “point” of a literary text. Let's take, for example, that episode from Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, where Alyosha, when asked by Ivan what to do with the landowner who baited the child with dogs, answers: "Shoot!". What is this "shoot!" content or form? Of course, both are in unity, in fusion. On the one hand, it is part of the speech, verbal form of the work; Alyosha's remark occupies a certain place in the compositional form of the work. These are formal points. On the other hand, this "shoot" is a component of the hero's character, that is, the thematic basis of the work; the replica expresses one of the turns of the moral and philosophical searches of the characters and the author, and of course, it is an essential aspect of the ideological and emotional world of the work - these are meaningful moments. So in one word, fundamentally indivisible into spatial components, we saw content and form in their unity. The situation is similar with the work of art in its entirety.
The second thing to note is the special connection between form and content in the artistic whole. According to Yu.N. Tynyanov, relations are established between the artistic form and the artistic content, unlike the relations of “wine and glass” (glass as form, wine as content), that is, relations of free compatibility and equally free separation. In a work of art, the content is not indifferent to the specific form in which it is embodied, and vice versa. Wine will remain wine, whether we pour it into a glass, a cup, a plate, etc.; content is indifferent to form. In the same way, milk, water, kerosene can be poured into a glass where there was wine - the form is “indifferent” to the content that fills it. Not so in a work of art. There, the connection between formal and substantive principles reaches its highest degree. Perhaps best of all, this manifests itself in the following regularity: any change in form, even seemingly small and private, is inevitable and immediately leads to a change in content. Trying to find out, for example, the content of such a formal element as poetic meter, versifiers conducted an experiment: they “transformed” the first lines of the first chapter of “Eugene Onegin” from iambic to choreic. It turned out this:
uncle most honest rules,
He was not jokingly sick,
Made me respect myself
Couldn't think of a better one.
The semantic meaning, as we see, remained practically the same, the changes seemed to concern only the form. But it can be seen with the naked eye that one of the most important components of the content has changed - the emotional tone, the mood of the passage. From epic-narrative, it turned into playful-superficial. And if we imagine that the entire "Eugene Onegin" was written in chorea? But such a thing is impossible to imagine, because in this case the work is simply destroyed.
Of course, such an experiment on form is a unique case. However, in the study of a work, we often, completely unaware of this, perform similar "experiments" - without directly changing the structure of the form, but only without taking into account one or another of its features. So, studying in Gogol's " Dead souls"mainly Chichikov, landowners, and "individual representatives" of the bureaucracy and the peasantry, we study hardly a tenth of the "population" of the poem, ignoring the mass of those "secondary" heroes who are just not secondary in Gogol, but are interesting to him in themselves in to the same extent as Chichikov or Manilov. As a result of such an “experiment on form”, our understanding of the work, that is, its content, is significantly distorted: after all, Gogol was not interested in history individual people, but the way of national life, he created not a "gallery of images", but an image of the world, a "way of life".
Another example of the same kind. In the study of Chekhov's story "The Bride", a fairly strong tradition has developed to consider this story as unconditionally optimistic, even "spring and bravura"*. V.B. Kataev, analyzing this interpretation, notes that it is based on "reading not completely" - it is not taken into account last phrase story in its entirety: "Nadya ... cheerful, happy, left the city, as she believed, forever." “The interpretation of this “as I thought,” writes V.B. Kataev, - very clearly reveals the difference in research approaches to Chekhov's work. Some researchers prefer, interpreting the meaning of "The Bride", to consider this introductory sentence as if it does not exist"**.
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* Ermilov V.A. A.P. Chekhov. M., 1959. S. 395.
** Kataev V.B. Chekhov's prose: problems of interpretation. M, 1979. S. 310.
This is the “unconscious experiment” that was discussed above. “Slightly” the structure of the form is distorted – and the consequences in the field of content are not long in coming. There is a "concept of unconditional optimism," bravura "of Chekhov's work recent years when in reality it represents "a delicate balance between truly optimistic hopes and a restrained sobriety in regard to the impulses of the very people about whom Chekhov knew and told so many bitter truths."
In the relationship between content and form, in the structure of form and content in a work of art, a certain principle, a regularity, is revealed. O specific character We will discuss this regularity in detail in the section “Comprehensive consideration of a work of art”.
In the meantime, we note only one methodological rule: For an accurate and complete understanding of the content of the work, it is absolutely necessary to close attention to its form, down to its smallest features. In the form of a work of art there are no "little things" that are indifferent to the content; According to a well-known expression, “art begins where “a little bit” begins.
The specificity of the relationship between content and form in a work of art has given rise to special term, specially designed to reflect the continuity, the fusion of these sides of a single artistic whole - the term "meaningful form". At this concept there are at least two aspects. The ontological aspect affirms the impossibility of the existence of an empty form or unformed content; in logic such concepts are called correlative: we cannot think one of them without simultaneously thinking the other. A somewhat simplified analogy can be the relationship between the concepts of "right" and "left" - if there is one, then the other inevitably exists. However, for works of art, another, axiological (evaluative) aspect of the concept of “substantial form” seems to be more important: in this case, we mean the regular correspondence of the form to the content.
A very deep and in many ways fruitful concept of meaningful form was developed in the work of G.D. Gacheva and V.V. Kozhinov "Content literary forms". According to the authors, any art form there is<…>nothing but a hardened, objectified artistic content. Any property, any element of a literary work that we now perceive as "purely formal" was once directly meaningful." This richness of form never disappears, it is really perceived by the reader: “referring to the work, we somehow absorb into ourselves” the richness of formal elements, their, so to speak, “primary content”. “It is a matter of content, of a certain sense, and not at all about the senseless, meaningless objectivity of form. The most superficial properties of the form turn out to be nothing but a special kind of content that has turned into a form.
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* Gachev G.D., Kozhinov V.V. Content of literary forms // Theory of Literature. The main problems in historical coverage. M., 1964. Book. 2. P. 18–19.
However, no matter how meaningful this or that formal element is, no matter how close the connection between content and form, this connection does not turn into identity. Content and form are not the same, they are different, singled out in the process of abstraction and analysis of the sides of the artistic whole. They have different tasks, different functions, different, as we have seen, the degree of conventionality; there is a certain relationship between them. Therefore, it is unacceptable to use the concept of meaningful form, as well as the thesis of the unity of form and content, in order to mix and lump together formal and content elements. On the contrary, the true content of the form is revealed to us only when the fundamental differences between these two sides of a work of art are sufficiently realized, when, consequently, it becomes possible to establish certain relationships and regular interactions between them.
Speaking about the problem of form and content in a work of art, it is impossible not to touch, at least in general terms, on another concept that is actively existing in modern science about literature. It is about the concept of "inner form". This term really implies the presence "between" content and form of such elements of a work of art that are "form in relation to elements more high level(image as a form expressing ideological content), and content - in relation to the lower levels of the structure (the image as the content of the compositional and speech form)"*. Such an approach to the structure of the artistic whole looks doubtful, primarily because it violates the clarity and rigor of the original division into form and content as, respectively, the material and spiritual principles in the work. If some element of the artistic whole can be both meaningful and formal at the same time, then this deprives the very dichotomy of content and form of meaning and, which is important, creates significant difficulties in further analysis and comprehending the structural links between the elements of the artistic whole. One should undoubtedly listen to the objections of A.S. Bushmin against the category of "internal form"; “Form and content are extremely general correlative categories. Therefore, the introduction of two concepts of form would require, respectively, two concepts of content. The presence of two pairs of similar categories, in turn, would entail the need, according to the law of subordination of categories in materialistic dialectics, to establish a unifying, third, generic concept of form and content. In a word, terminological duplication in the designation of categories does not give anything but logical confusion. And general definitions external and inner, allowing the possibility of spatial differentiation of form, vulgarize the idea of the latter”**.
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* Sokolov A.N. style theory. M., 1968. S. 67.
** Bushmin A.S. The Science of Literature. S. 108.
So, fruitful, in our opinion, is a clear opposition of form and content in the structure of the artistic whole. Another thing is that it is immediately necessary to warn against the danger of dismembering these aspects mechanically, roughly. There are such artistic elements in which form and content seem to touch, and very subtle methods and very close observation are needed in order to understand both the fundamental non-identity and the closest relationship between formal and content principles. The analysis of such "points" in the artistic whole is undoubtedly the most difficult, but at the same time - and the greatest interest both in the aspect of theory and in the practical study of a particular work.
? TEST QUESTIONS:
1. Why is it necessary to know the structure of a work?
2. What is the form and content of a work of art (give definitions)?
3. How are content and form related?
4. “The relationship between content and form is not spatial, but structural” - how do you understand this?
5. What is the relationship between form and content? What is a "substantial form"?
