In the epic kind of literature (gr. epos - word, speech), the organizing beginning of the work is narration about the characters (characters), their destinies, actions, mindsets, about the events in their lives that make up the plot. This is a chain of verbal messages or, more simply, a story about what happened earlier. Narrative is characterized by a temporal distance between the conduct of speech and the subject of verbal designations. It is conducted from the side and, as a rule, has a grammatical form past tense. The narrator (telling) is characterized by the position of a person who recalls what happened earlier. The distance between the time of the depicted action and the time of the narration about him constitutes perhaps the most essential feature of the epic form.
Word "narrative" applied to the literature is used in different ways. In a narrow sense - this is a detailed designation in words of what happened once and had a temporal duration. In a broader sense the story also includes descriptions , i.e., the re-creation through words of something stable, stable or completely motionless (such are most of the landscapes, the characteristics of the everyday environment, the features of the appearance of the characters, their states of mind). Descriptions are also verbal images periodically repeating. In a similar way, the narrative fabric includes author's reasoning, playing a significant role in L.N. Tolstoy, A. Frans, T. Mann.
IN epic works the narrative connects to itself and, as it were, envelops the statements of the characters - their dialogues and monologues, including internal ones, actively interacting with them, explaining, supplementing and correcting them. AND artistic text turns out to be a kind of fusion of narrative speech and statements of characters, which are their actions (actions).
Artworks epic kind they make full use of the arsenal of artistic means available to literature, freely and freely master reality in time and space. However, they do not know the limitations in the amount of text. The epic as a kind of literature includes both short stories(medieval and renaissance short stories), as well as works designed for prolonged listening or reading, epics and novels that cover life with extraordinary breadth. Such are the ancient Greek "Iliad" and "Odyssey", "War and Peace" L.N. Tolstoy, "Gone with the Wind" M. Mitchell.
An epic work can “absorb” such a number of characters, circumstances, events, destinies, details that are inaccessible to either other types of literature or any other kind of art. At the same time, the narrative form contributes to the deepest penetration into the inner world of a person. Complex characters, possessing many features and properties, incomplete and contradictory, in motion, formation, development are quite accessible to her.
In epic works, it is deeply significant presence narrator . This is a very specific form of human artistic reproduction. The narrator is an intermediary between the depicted and the reader, often acting as a witness and interpreter of the persons and events shown.
The text of an epic work does not always contain information about the fate of the narrator, about his relationship with the characters, about when, where and under what circumstances he tells his story, about his thoughts and feelings. The spirit of the story, according to T. Mann, is often "weightless, incorporeal and omnipresent"; "for him there is no separation between 'here' and 'there'" 1 . And at the same time, the narrator's speech has not only figurativeness, but also expressive significance; it characterizes not only the object of the utterance, but also the speaker himself. In any epic work, the manner of perceiving reality is imprinted, inherent in the one who narrates, his vision of the world and his way of thinking. In this sense, it is legitimate to speak of character of a narrator. This concept has become firmly established in literary criticism thanks to B.M. Eikhenbaum, V.V. Vinogradov, M.M. Bakhtin (works of the 1920s). Summing up the opinions of these scientists, GA Gukovsky wrote in the 1940s: “Every image in art forms an idea not only about the depicted, but also<...>about the depicting, the carrier of the presentation<...>. The narrator is not only a more or less concrete image<...>, but also a certain figurative idea, principle and appearance of the speaker, or otherwise - certainly a certain point of view on what is being stated, a psychological, ideological and simply geographical point of view, since it is impossible to describe from anywhere and there can be no description without a descriptor" 1 .
The epic form, in other words, reproduces not only the narrated, but also the narrator; it artistically captures the manner of speaking and perceiving the world, and, ultimately, the mindset and feelings of the narrator. The image of the narrator is found not in his actions and not in direct outpourings of the soul, but in a kind of narrative monologue. The expressive beginnings of such a monologue, being its secondary function, are at the same time very important.
There can be no full perception folk tales without close attention to their narrative style, in which, behind the naivety and ingenuity of the one who leads the story, irony and cunning, life experience and wisdom are guessed. It is impossible to feel the charm of the heroic epics of antiquity without catching the sublime structure of thoughts and feelings of the rhapsodist and storyteller. And even more unthinkable is the understanding of the works of the AU. Pushkin and N.V. Gogol, L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky, N.S. Leskov and I.S. Turgenev, A.P. Chekhov and I.A. Bunin, M.A. Bulgakov and A.P. Platonov beyond understanding the "voice" of the narrator. Literature has different modes of storytelling. The most deeply rooted and represented in its history is the type of narration in which between the characters and the one who tells about them, there is, so to speak, an absolute distance. The narrator recounts events with unruffled calmness. Everything is clear to him, the gift of “omniscience” is inherent in him, and his image, the image of a creature that has ascended above the world, gives the work a flavor of maximum objectivity. Significantly, Homer was often likened to the celestial Olympians and called "divine".
The artistic possibilities of such a narrative are considered in the German classical aesthetics of the era of romanticism. In the epic, “a narrator is needed,” we read in Schelling, “who, by the equanimity of his story, would constantly distract us from too much great participation to the actors and directed the attention of listeners to net result. And further: “The narrator is alien to the actors<...>he not only surpasses the listeners with his balanced contemplation and tunes them in this way with his story, but, as it were, takes the place of necessity.
The literature of the last two or three centuries has almost been dominated by subjective narration. The narrator began to look on the world through the eyes of one of the characters, imbued with his thoughts and impressions. A striking example of this is detailed picture battles at Waterloo in Stendhal's Parma Monastery. This battle is by no means reproduced in a Homeric way: the narrator, as it were, reincarnates as a hero, young Fabrizio, and looks at what is happening through his eyes.
The distance between him and the character practically disappears, the points of view of both are combined. Tolstoy sometimes paid tribute to this way of depicting. The Battle of Borodino in one of the chapters of "War and Peace" is shown in the perception of Pierre Bezukhov, who was not experienced in military affairs; the military council in Fili is presented in the form of impressions of the girl Malasha. Combining the points of view of the narrator and characters in the literature of the XIX-XX centuries. caused by increased artistic interest to originality inner world people, and most importantly - an understanding of life as a set of attitudes to reality that are unlike one another, qualitatively different horizons and value orientations.
The most common form of epic storytelling is third person story . But the narrator may well appear in the work as a kind of “I”. It is natural to call such personified narrators speaking from their own, "first" person storytellers. The narrator is often at the same time a character in the work (Maxim Maksimych in the story "Bela" from Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time", Grinev in Pushkin's "The Captain's Daughter", Ivan Vasilyevich in L.N. Tolstoy's story "After the Ball", Arkady Dolgoruky in "Teenager »F.M. Dostoevsky).
genres of epic
The greatest productivity of the typological approach was found in the study of narrative genres, so it is advisable to start with their consideration. In the selection and classification of genres, the most effective was the appeal to meaningful features, thanks to which it was possible to determine the specifics of the two main genres of world literature - heroic epic And novel.
This principle was essentially applied and substantiated for the first time by Hegel, who proposed to focus on the type of situation and the principle of interaction between the hero and society in the study of genres. Virtually all subsequent researchers followed the path of comparing the ancient epic and the novel, including the contemporaries of Hegel - Schelling, Belinsky, and then Veselovsky and many scientists of the 20th century. As a result, it was found that historically the first type of narrative genres was heroic epic, which in itself is heterogeneous, for it includes works that are similar in type of situation, but different in “age” and type of characters.
Most early form The heroic epic can be considered some variants of the mythological epic, in which the main character is the so-called ancestor, a cultural hero who performs the functions of the organizer of the world: he produces fire, invents crafts, protects the family from demonic forces, fights monsters, establishes rituals and customs.
Another version of the heroic epic, called archaic, is distinguished by the fact that the hero combines the features of a cultural ancestor hero and a brave warrior, knight, hero, fighting for the territory and independence of the ethnic group. Such heroes include, for example, Väinemäinen, a character in the Karelian-Finnish epic Kalevala, or Manas, the hero of the Kirghiz epic of the same name.
The most mature forms of the heroic epic, called the classical one, include the Iliad, the Song of Side, the Song of Roland, Serbian youthful songs, and Russian epics. They were born at different times (the Iliad dates back to the 8th century BC, French songs about deeds - the 11th, and Russian epics and heroic stories - the 11th-15th centuries AD), received different names (epics, epics, thoughts, songs about deeds, sagas, runes, olonkho), differed in volume, type of plot-compositional and stylistic organization, but contained common typological qualities, giving reason to classify them as a heroic epic genre. Among the most important of these qualities: 1) the selection of one or two main characters; 2) emphasizing their strength, courage and boldness; 3) emphasizing the purpose and meaning of their actions aimed at the common good, whether it is the dispensation of the world or the fight against enemies. In other words, the hero was not the bearer of an individual-personal worldview that distinguished him from others, but the best expression of a common spirit, universally valid values, which Hegel called substantial.
Hegel associated the objective prerequisites for the emergence of genres of the heroic type with the “heroic state of the world”, that is, the period when the protection of fundamental, fateful interests is required, for example, the preservation of the integrity of the territory of one or another people. The dynastic struggle, according to the subtle remark of the philosopher, does not fall within the scope of heroic actions.
The study of the heroic epic, as mentioned, in the 50s and 60s in the XX century. were engaged in V.M. Zhirmunsky, E.M. Meletinsky, V.Ya. Propp, B.N. Putilov, P.A. Grinzer. The judgments of M.M. Bakhtin about the ancient epic attracted special attention, but in essence they demonstrated the same train of thought that had long been established in the science of genres. The epic is considered by him as the earliest type of narration and is characterized by three constitutive features: “1) the subject of the epic is the national epic past;
2) the source of the epic is national tradition (and not personal experience and the free fiction that grows on its basis);
3) the epic world is separated from the present, that is, from the time of the singer, by an absolute epic distance” (Bakhtin, 1975, 456). Describing this past, Bakhtin uses such concepts as "the world of the beginnings and heights of national history, the world of the first and best, fathers and ancestors." This means that time becomes a value category, and the position of the singer coincides with the position of the heroes, therefore, in the words of Hegel, there is little sense of subjectivity here, and according to Bakhtin's logic, there is no dialogism. Bakhtin insisted on attributing the epic to the distant past, denying it the right to exist in later eras, and of course, in the present. Meanwhile, the need to reproduce heroic situations in interaction with tragic and dramatic ones was preserved in the 19th and 20th centuries, as evidenced by works about the national liberation struggle, in particular about the struggle of Russians with Napoleon in 1812, as well as about the struggle different peoples of Europe with fascism in the 40s of the twentieth century.
Another genre, numbering about ten centuries of existence, is novel, the emergence of which most scientists associate with the spread of a type of attitude, called humanism and which was due to the conditions of the New Age, i.e. the time of activation of the individual in different areas life. in the west European literature 11th-12th centuries this was realized in the depiction of heroes, most often knights, who fought for their personal honor, performed feats to win the recognition of their beloved. At the same time, courage, courage, courage and audacity were demonstrated, but not in the name of defending the interests of society, but in the name of self-affirmation, primarily in the sphere of love relationships. And although such self-affirmation was associated primarily with the generally recognized courtly-knightly code of conduct, it already manifested a personal beginning. This was noted by almost all historians of foreign literature who studied the literature of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The type of novel that developed at that time was called adventurous-knightly, as an example and even a model of such a novel, experts call the novels of Chrétien de Troyes, although, of course, other authors are also known (Mikhailov, 1976; Andreev, 1993).
In the XVI-XVII centuries. the so-called adventurous picaresque novel was formed, presented by the nameless author of the work “The Life of Lazarillo from Tormes”, and then by P. Scarron, A. Furetier and other writers representing various European literatures. This line ends with the famous French novel "The Story of Gilles Blas from Santillana" (author A. Lesage). The name of his hero has become a household name, which, in particular, is evidenced by the fact that in Russian literature of the 10-30s of the XIX century. several “Gille Blas” appeared, including “Russian Gil Blaz, or the Adventures of Prince Gavrila Simonovich Chistyakov” by V.T. Narezhny (1814). This type of novel in Western European literature cultivated a free, independent, sometimes very smart, talented hero who achieves well-being and social status not by generosity, but by his own mind, ingenuity, cunning, and even roguery.
The next stage in the development of the novel coincides with the 18th century. and testifies to a new stage in its formation. The most significant works of this stage are the novels of A. Prevost, S. Richardson, J. - J. Rousseau, I.V. Goethe, although these names do not exhaust the romance of this period. Writers of that time were not interested in the adventures of heroes and the struggle for a place in life, but in their mental, moral, psychological life, the complexity of relations with society and with each other. Early 19th century was marked by the appearance of novels by D.G. Byron, W. Scott, R. Chateaubriand, E.E. Senancourt, A. Musset, V. Hugo, B. Constant, and in Russia - A.S. Pushkin and M.Yu. Lermontov.
In the 19th century the novel continued its development in European literature, occupying a particularly significant position in Russian literature, which was repeatedly noted by Western European artists different periods. “I treat Russia almost with a religious feeling. It came through reading Russian novels XIX V. and is associated primarily with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The literary circles of England are simply obsessed with them. Of course, there are also Lermontov, Turgenev… But these two are kings. I think they are the greatest novelists of all time. Greater than Dickens, than even Proust,” noted English writer Iris Murdoch in an interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta 02.12. 1992
Since the 30s of the XX century. the development of the genre in Western Europe and Russia proceeded differently. This was revealed in the active development of the European novel and the fading of the Soviet novel in connection with the switch of attention from the individual, who is searching, thinking, critical of society, to the heroic, preoccupied with the problems of the life of the state and prone to authoritarian thinking, characteristic of the Soviet society of that period. The place of the novel was taken by works often referred to as the heroic epic.
In the process of studying the novel, several concepts have developed that are largely in contact with each other and are guided by the Hegelian concept of genres (Kosikov, 1994). In the 1970s, M. Bakhtin's concept, which combined the features of tradition and innovation, was promulgated and aroused active interest. Tradition consisted in the comparison of the ancient epic and the novel, innovation - in the evaluation of the novel from the standpoint of dialogism. Based on the idea of dialogism, Bakhtin proposed an interpretation of the novel, which suggests that the prerequisites for the emergence of the novel were formed not in the Renaissance, but back in antiquity, when heteroglossia appeared and genres such as Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire arose. The subject of reproduction in them is modern reality, as something “fluid and transient”, perceived in a comical way. Thanks to this, the “epic distance” disappears, “the author finds himself in a new relationship with the depicted world: they are now in the same value-time dimensions, the depicting author’s word lies on the same plane with the depicted word of the hero and can enter into dialogic relations with him. ". As a result, the specific features of the novel as a genre are: “1) stylistic three-dimensionality associated with a multilingual consciousness; 2) a radical change in time coordinates literary image; 3) new zone image construction, it is the zone of maximum contact with the present (modernity) in its incompleteness... Through contact with the present, the object (image) is involved in the unfinished process of the formation of the world, and the seal of incompleteness is imposed on it” (Bakhtin, 1975, 454). Thus, the phenomenon of incompleteness, unpreparedness, inherent in reality, is transferred to the novel world and its hero, becoming the leading constitutive feature of the novel genre.
The idea of dialogism gave rise to the idea of the presence of two lines in the development of the novel, represented, on the one hand, by a sophistic, monolingual novel, and on the other, by a two-voiced, bilingual novel, which later transformed into monological and polyphonic types of the novel. The originality and superiority of the polyphonic novel lies in the fact that it depicts someone else's consciousness as someone else's, independent, and the hero is shown as free, independent of someone else's will and inaccessible to "completion" on the part of the author. In other words, the hero appears as “incomplete”, “unfinished”, who has not fully known himself and is not striving to know and acquire that life position, which can be recognized as undeniable, authoritative and at the same time not dogmatic. Any “internally convincing word” acquired by the hero (opinion, conviction) is not final, because “ the last word the world has not yet been spoken of. Thus, Bakhtin identifies authority with authoritarianism, indisputability with dogmatism, and completeness with the suppression of the personal principle.
The concepts that existed before this, as already mentioned, primarily associated the novel with an emphasis on the hero as a person and his difficult relationship with the world. The obvious flaw in these concepts was excessive generalization in understanding both the individual and society. Therefore, further clarification and identification of the specifics of the novel required a deeper substantiation of the concepts of society and personality. The current state of psychology, philosophy, ethics, culturology has made it possible to bring greater clarity to the understanding of personality, delimiting the concepts of "person", "individual", "personality" and emphasizing that personality is an individual with a certain level of consciousness and self-awareness. Sociologists' research has confirmed that the category "society" is also excessively broad and it is advisable to use the concepts of "macroenvironment", "environment", "microenvironment", "environment of the individual" when studying it, helping to more specifically explain the relationship between the individual and society.
Based on the achievements of related sciences and considering the novel as a kind of meaningful genre form, it can be argued that defining typological quality of the novel as a genre is the presence of a situation in the center of which is novel Microenvironment, represented, as a rule, by one, two or three personalities. The fate of such heroes unfolds against the background and in contact with environment, submitted different number characters. As a result, in the novel there is always a place character differentiation, affecting primarily in the promotion to the fore of the characters that make up the microenvironment, which is given to most of the space and time reproduced in the novel. Due to this novel plot, striving for breadth and scale, as a rule, is limited in space and time to that period of the life of the heroes that is necessary for the manifestation or formation of their worldview, for them to acquire the most intelligible, from the point of view of the hero and the author, life position. This period can be relatively short, as in the novels of Turgenev, longer, as in the novels of Constant, Pushkin, Lermontov, and very long, as in the novels of O. Balzac, L. Tolstoy, T. Mann, J. Galsworthy, etc. In a word , spatio-temporal organization, or the novel chronotope, is determined by the central link of the novel situation, i.e., by the fates of the characters that make up the so-called novel micro-environment.
Differentiation of characters, reflecting the relationship between the microenvironment and the environment, fixes conflict in the novel(“discord between the poetry of the heart and the prose of relations that opposes it,” as Hegel wrote). True, conflict can manifest itself in different ways. In some cases, it arises as a result of the struggle of heroes for their place in the sun, for their position in society, as was the case in adventurous picaresque novels, and partly in the novels of Stendhal (“Red and Black”) and Balzac (“Lost Illusions”). In most cases, conflict is found in the drama that colors the moods of the characters and their lives. There are a great many examples of this.
Close attention to the inner world of the individual gives rise to psychology, which can be direct (in dialogues, monologues and remarks), indirect (in actions, gestures, portraits), secret, as Turgenev said, and explicit, naked, “visual”, as Dostoevsky showed. It can manifest itself in psychologically colored actions, statements, psychologically rich portrait and other details.
The desire to analyze and evaluate the inner world of the characters inevitably gives rise to a desire to demonstrate and evaluate the significance of this world, the degree of its authority and truth. Most obviously, this quality is found in the climax of the plot and its denouement, as a reflection of the result of the life and spiritual path of the hero at that stage of his life, which is depicted in the novel. The feeling of finality is an indicator of the completeness of the novel situation, or monologism(Esalnek, 2004).
The idea of monologism and completeness, as already mentioned, was perceived polemically by Bakhtin and seemed inorganic for the novel. Probably, one of the incentives for such a perception was the atmosphere of modern life and Russian literature. Soviet period, which often cultivated a hero for whom the authoritarian word, that is, the idea of the need for self-denial, civic duty, giving oneself to a common cause, seemed quite convincing. Internally arguing with Bakhtin, the Hungarian scholar D. Kirai wrote: “The resolution of the novel situation cannot do without the resolution of the situation by the finality of fate ... completeness is saturated with moral conclusions for the characters themselves and for the reader, and this becomes main task completion” (Kirai, 1974).
Other researchers have also paid attention to Bakhtin's absolutization of the idea of the independence of the characters, the independence of their position from the author, and most importantly, the absence of a "persuasive word" in the novel. “In its very essence, the novel does not deal with a multitude of equivalent truths-worldviews, but with a single truth - the truth of the hero. Being a full-fledged bearer of the "novel" truth, the hero is inevitably in a privileged position" (Kosikov, 1976). Not finding in Soviet literature a novel depicting a free, independent person, not burdened by the authoritarian ideas of his era, Bakhtin was, of course, right. But attributing such qualities to any novel, he was hardly fair and "fell into exaggeration from passion." From this it can be concluded that and monologism is an organic quality of the novel, explicable by the novel situation.
A comparative study of the two main genres of world literature, which is characteristic of many works of a genological profile, is apparently not accidental, because the orientation towards these genres allows one to present the specifics of many other genres that are in contact with them. "Contact" gives different variations. First, it is well known that genre formations appear in the history of literature, generated by the combination of two genre trends, one of which turns out to be romantic, and the other is associated with works of a heroic orientation. Among them is the epic novel, to which Tolstoy's War and Peace and Quiet Don» Sholokhov. Another genre in which the novel is internally intertwined with the mythological is the novel-myth. An example is the novels of T. Mann (“Joseph and his brothers”), the Russian-Kyrgyz writer Ch. Aitmatov (“And the day lasts longer than a century”), etc.
In addition, under the name of the novel, works are often used that have not received a different designation, but still differ from the heroic and novel epic, since their main content is not the image of society at the time of its formation, as in the heroic epic, not the image of society in relationships with a personality that opposes him with his spiritual abilities, as in a novel, but the reproduction of the life and life of a particular social environment without its differentiation, with an emphasis on its stability, immutability and very often conservatism. This type of works traces its genealogy to ancient Roman literature, finds a place for itself in the literature of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and in subsequent eras.
In the 20-30s of the XIX century. In Russian criticism, the phrase "moral-descriptive novel" appeared. Modern scholars have used the concept moral description for the terminological designation of genre features of this type of works. This type of genre, also called ethological, is described in detail and thoroughly in the works of G.N. Pospelova (Problems of historical development of literature, 1972), L.V. Chernets (Literary genres, 1982) and a number of articles by other authors. In Russian literature, a similar genre type can be attributed to Nekrasov’s narrative called a poem “Who lives well in Rus'”, and in the 20th century. - many works of the so-called village prose, in which the inclination to reproduce the established way of life, shown in the aspect of different emotional tonality, prevails. Works of an ethological plan can be of different sizes: expanded, like the named poem by Nekrasov, of medium scale, which include the stories of V. Belov, V. Rasputin, V. Astafiev, and very small, which include numerous essays, appeared in Russian and Western European literatures in the 40s of the XIX century. and continued to live in the 20th century. (Mesterghazi, 2006).
Referring to the definition of the so-called middle genres, i.e. stories, it is impossible not to notice that the word "story" means narration, and in terms of content qualities (hence, in terms of plot and composition), stories can be different. For example, the stories of I.S. Turgenev ("Asya", "Spring Waters", "First Love", "Faust"), L.N. Tolstoy (“Death of Ivan Ilyich”), A.P. Chekhov (“Lady with a Dog”, “About Love”, “The Bride”, “House with a Mezzanine”), as well as many stories by I.A. Bunin,
A. Kuprina, L. Andreeva, Yu. Kazakova, Yu. Trifonova focus on the dramatic fate of a not quite ordinary personality, that is, they essentially contain a novelistic beginning. In numerous stories of various scales that arose in Russian literature back in the 11th-17th centuries, and then in the 20th century. ("Alpine Ballad", "Sotnikov", "Wolf Pack", "In the Fog"
V. Bykova, “The Dawns Here Are Quiet” by B. Vasiliev) a situation of a heroic plan, as a rule, complicated by tragedy, is seen.
As the creativity of the most different artists, the concept of a story often intersects with the concept of story, and both can and do replace each other. Concerning short stories then its roots and origins are in the Renaissance. At the same time, among the Spaniards, the term “novela” when it appeared meant works of any duration; among the French, the short story is very often a small novel, among the Italians it is something opposite to the old novel and close to the new one that took shape in the 17th-18th centuries. According to the most authoritative researcher of the novel E.M. Meletinsky, “in a number of cases, the boundary between the short story and the novel becomes extremely shaky, which is also reflected in the terminology ... of an approximate theoretical definition the short story does not exist, since it appears in the form of various options due to cultural and historical differences” (Meletinsky, 1990). In Russian literature, the term "short story" is not commonly used, but in essence this type of work often intersects with a story and a story. The short stories could be attributed to Belkin's Tales.
Recently, the designation of genres has often been dominated by individual author's nominations, which cannot be ignored (recall such designations as Astafiev's "punches", Bondarev's "moments", Solzhenitsyn's "little things"), but they for the most part imply not actually genre features and signs. As for the novel, the most bizarre names are found here: novel-museum, novel-wandering, novel-abstract, meta-novel, novel-fragment, chapters from a novel with a newspaper, unwritten novel, novel-version, novel-dissertation, etc. The same applies to the story: a story-essay, a Spanish suite, a fairy tale-tale for new adults, a narrative score, a road fantasy, and many others. The use of such designations testifies to the desire to emphasize individual stylistic tendencies in the work or becomes an example of a kind of play with the text, characteristic of postmodernism. Recognizing the openness and incompleteness of genre processes in modern literature, one should not ignore the existence of established genre structures, despite the fact that they exist in a variety of modifications.
genres of drama
Major dramatic genres also passed long haul development, preserving the basic genre-forming features and forming numerous specific historical variations. Therefore, the comprehension of their essence is also possible only when relying on the historical-typological principle of research.
The study of genres of the dramatic kind began almost simultaneously with the advent of the first dramatic works, and the ancestor of this process was Aristotle, who singled out tragedy And comedy and delimiting them according to the content and method of development of the action, i.e., according to the originality of the plot, meaning in this case by the plot the internal integrity and interconnection of the parts. At the same time, the greatest attention was paid to tragedy, in connection with reflections on which the concepts of the tragic guilt of the hero arose, catharsis caused by the emotional impact of what is happening on the stage and generating fear and compassion among the heroes themselves and the audience of the tragedy. Comedy is associated with the comic, with the ridicule of inconsistencies, disproportions of certain traits in the character and behavior of a person.
At present, the judgments expressed by Aristotle seem quite obvious and well-known, but for several centuries they remained the subject of reflection and discussion by both artists and drama researchers. One of the first to think about the same problems was the Roman poet Quintus Horace Flaccus, who expounded his views in the Epistle to the Pisons, or the Art of Poetry. An active debate, the subject of which was the features of the genres themselves and their interpretation in Aristotle's Poetics, went on in the Renaissance.
During the Baroque period, the concepts pastoral drama And tragicomedy. The 17th century in France and England brought forward outstanding playwrights and drama theorists, including D "Aubignac, author of The Practice of the Theater"; Chaplin - one of the authors of "Opinions of the French Academy on the tragicomedy" Sid ""; Dryden, author of "Experience about dramatic poetry "; Milton, who prefaced his drama "Samson the Fighter" with the preface "On the kind of dramatic poetry that is called tragedy." The playwrights Corneille, Molière and Racine also acted as theorists. The most famous dramatic genres turn out tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, pastoral as a form of tragicomedy heroic play as a kind of tragedy.
The 18th century is no less rich in dramatic works, among which there are works by Russian playwrights. Even richer is the theory, which feeds on the ideology of the Enlightenment and, according to experts, goes ahead of practice. The main theorists include D. Diderot (“On Dramatic Poetry”, “The Paradox about the Actor”, “Conversations about the Illegitimate Son”), G. Lessing (“Hamburg Dramaturgy”, etc.), as well as Voltaire and S. Johnson, who spoke O contemporary genres in connection with reflections on the work of Shakespeare.
The main feature of the genre theory of the XVIII century. - substantiation of a new type of genre, which was called then petty-bourgeois or domestic tragedy, That tearful comedy, and as a result became known as bourgeois drama, and then just drama. Thus, the third, medium, as they said then, genre of the dramatic kind was recognized only in the 18th century, although examples of this type of work most likely appeared earlier, including in Shakespeare.
A significant contribution to the theory of drama was made by Schelling and Hegel, especially the latter. For Hegel, the genre of tragedy was associated with tragic pathos, which revealed itself in a classical form in ancient tragedy. The works of the romantic period, in particular Schiller, he also called tragedies, while paying attention to their difference from ancient tragedies due to the predominance of subjectively significant goals and intentions in the actions of the characters. F. Schlegel and his older brother A. Schlegel discussed the drama in "Readings on dramatic art". Theoretical generalizations were based on the material of ancient tragedy and romantic drama, which, in his opinion, belonged to the works of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, as well as his contemporaries Goethe and Schiller. Among the new dramatic genres are family pictures And touching drama.
In France, the problems of drama in various aspects, including genre, were discussed in the works of Stendhal, Hugo, de Stael; in England - Byron, Shelley; in Russia - Griboedov, Pushkin, etc. In the 2nd half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. questions of the specifics of dramatic types of works arose in connection with the work of Wagner, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Shaw, and in Russia - Gogol, Ostrovsky, A. Tolstoy, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov. Writers themselves often acted as theorists. On the researchers of drama in Russian science in the 2nd half of the 20th century. said in the section dedicated to the problem childbirth. The theory and history of drama is very thoroughly considered in a series of works by A.A. Anixta (1967, 1972, 1980, 1983, 1988).
So, dramatic works created over many centuries evolved, filled with different specific content depending on the time and place of their creation, but retained a tendency to typological properties, the main of which were conflict and modality, sometimes very ambiguous, i.e. including different emotional tendencies. The terminology used to name dramatic works has been enriched in the 20th century. concepts that are very often neutral in relation to the actual genre features (plays, scenes, etc.), or testify to the author's ideas.
Genres of lyrical and lyrical genre
Many lyrical genres in European literature have been known since antiquity. This odes, hymns, satires, elegies, epigrams, epitaphs, epistles, madrigals, epitalams, eclogues and others. Titles were assigned to works of a certain content orientation. Later, during the Renaissance, there were sonnets, stanzas, ballads. Almost all of them functioned in the future, including in the 19th century, as evidenced by the work of Russian and Western European poets of that time. The most common became ode, elegy, satire.
Since in lyrics the main content load is borne by thought-experience, its nature depends on the object of thought and on the emotional perception of it by the lyrical hero. This is also related to genre designations. Oda always responds to material worthy of glorification and chanting. Such “material” can be individuals who have accomplished something significant and highly valued by society (“Ode on the Accession to the Throne of Elizabeth Petrovna” by M.V. Lomonosov), historical events of a national scale (“Ode on the Capture of Khotin” by the same author), even some qualities of people or features of their attitude - courage, courage, dignity, freedom, the desire to comply with the laws ("Liberty" by A.N. Radishchev and "Liberty" by A.S. Pushkin).
Satire, as its name shows, is born as a result of a critical reflection on certain aspects of life, resulting in emotional reflection on some specific shortcomings in the life of society or its individual members. Satires were written in the 18th century. A. Kantemir, A. Sumarokov, V. Kapnist and others.
The elegy is dominated by a dramatic tone, which appears during the emotional experience of some contradictions, disharmony, disorder in the life of the individual, in the state of society, in the relationship between man and the world, etc. Sometimes the poet directly calls his work an elegy, as, for example, A.S. Pushkin (“Crazy Years Faded Joy”) or N.A. Nekrasov (“Let the changeable fashion tell us”). But for the most part, the belonging of a poem to the genre of elegy, as well as to the genre of ode or satire, is realized when analyzing their content.
However, it is not always easy to establish boundaries between lyrical genres. Back in the 18th century, when such “boundaries” were considered quite firm, the then-famous Russian poet M. Khemnitser wrote poems in which not solemn, but sadly ironic tonality prevailed (“Wealth”, “Gold”, “Noble breed ”), but called them moral odes. In the 19th century, lyrical works especially often combined different types of moods, in the 20th century. this trend is intensifying. To the objective features, due to the mixing and interweaving of different emotional tendencies and orientation to different forms, is added the need to introduce the author's principle into the designation of the genre specificity of a lyrical work. From here, along with the traditional names of lyrical texts, we meet such as “Lullaby in an undertone” (Samoilov), “Lullaby of Cod cape” (Brodsky), “Lullaby for Lena Borisova” (Kibirov), “Dialogue” (Vinokurov), “My verse "(Vanshenkin), etc. (See: Abisheva, 2008). All this means that the definition of genre features when reading and even analyzing lyrical works is quite difficult, but it is possible if you focus on content features, that is, modality.
Long disputes about the essence and interaction of genre and generic principles in artistic creativity, which have not been completed to this day, have not become a serious obstacle to distinguishing and designating those types of works that exist under the name of lyrical epic. These primarily include poems. Poems differ in the degree of manifestation or presence of epic or lyrical beginnings, as well as in genre orientation. The epic beginning is determined in them by the fact that there are characters here, although not very numerous and not shown in great detail in action, but with external signs. They appear against the backdrop of nature or everyday life and take some part in the action, which is why in the poems sufficient attention is paid to the characters of the characters depicted, but much space is also given to descriptions of nature, terrain, and in addition, the author’s thoughts, which are traditionally called “lyrical retreats." In poems, they are very organic.
Poems gravitate towards two types: in one, the epic beginning is quite clearly and actively revealed; the other is lyrical. For example, it was not by chance that the author himself called The Bronze Horseman "Petersburg Tale" on the basis that the center is a story about the fate of Yevgeny, starting from the moment of the flood and ending with the death of the hero on the island, near the former house of his bride, about a year after his death. Parasha: the flood occurred in November 1824, the "fatal" meeting of Eugene with Peter the monument - in the early autumn of the following year ("Once he was sleeping // At the Neva pier. Days of summer // Leaning towards autumn ..."), shortly after he died. The story is accompanied by descriptions of different places in St. Petersburg, pictures of the flood, and most importantly, the author’s lyrical statements about the misfortune that befell Yevgeny and other citizens, and about the beauty and grandeur of St. Petersburg, as well as thoughts about the role of Peter, who founded the city at the mouth of the Neva, which periodically "rebelled" and threatened the city with destruction.
Lermontov's poem "Mtsyri" clearly gravitates towards the lyrical type. It includes 26 chapters, of which 25 are Mtsyri's monologue, during which he talks about three days spent in the wild after escaping from the monastery, but a significant part of his monologue is occupied by emotionally colored descriptions of nature, and most importantly, the experiences that he shares with monk before death. These experiences are full of bitterness, suffering from the feeling of a failed life. Such, in the highest degree the emotional monologue gives reason to call the poem lyrical epic, but with a predominance of the lyrical beginning, which is expressed in a free composition characteristic of lyrical works.
Among the poems of the lyrical plan can be attributed "Requiem" by Akhmatova. Its complex composition is explained both by the content and the conditions for creating the work, which was born over several years (from 1935 to 1940), while some parts of it were stored for a long time only in the memory of Akhmatova. The poem contains a prose introduction ("Instead of a preface"), explaining the appeal to this idea; dedication; introduction; then six small chapters continuing the introduction; seventh ("Sentence"); the eighth and ninth chapters ("Towards Death"), the tenth chapter ("The Crucifixion") and an epilogue in two parts.
A reminder of the facts that served as material for the poem (the arrest of all relatives, the death of a husband, loneliness, waiting for a sentence for a son, standing in lines in prison, meeting with women like themselves) is combined with tragic reflections about one's fate and the fate of the country, with thoughts about death , which sometimes seems easier than life, with prayers for all those killed and suffering in the conditions of the then situation in the country. All this motivates a complex composition. lyrical type and emotionally expressive type of speech.
As regards the actual genre features, then the term poem, on the one hand, it seems legitimate and capacious, on the other hand, it is not accurate enough, since under this name there are lyric-epic works of the heroic (“Vasily Terkin”), romantic (“Mtsyri”, “Gypsies”), moralistic (“Who in Rus' should live well ”) plan and, of course, different modality. Lyroepic genres include ballad if it more or less clearly shows the narrative beginning.
With all the relativity of the boundaries separating one poetic genus from another, with all the complex system of mutual transitions, each work of art always represents one or another poetic genus - epic, literature or drama.
“Taking into account the generic specifics of works of art when studying them at school will help schoolchildren understand literature as an art form and create the necessary setting for the perception of epic, lyrics, and drama. Each of these types of art differs both in the manner of reflecting reality, and in the way of expressing the author's creation, and in the nature of the impact on the reader. Therefore, with unity methodological principles in their study, the methods of working on the epic, lyrics and drama are different. The qualitative certainty of poetic genera, the specificity of the content of each of them, the very principle of the artistic implementation of vital material, accessible to the epic lyric and drama, is first of all discovered by the artist of the word. “The very idea already, as it were, carries within itself in embryo the artistic possibilities of the epic, lyric or drama. Therefore, it is natural that the comprehension of the laws of the poetic kind is necessary for the reader, especially for the language teacher, who seeks to penetrate into art world works".
2. Epos as a kind of literature.
a) features of the epic kind of literature.
Epos (Greek epos - word, narration, story) - literary gender excelled along with lyrics and drama. The epic, like the drama, reproduces the action unfolding in space and time, the course of events in the life of the characters. A specific feature of the epic is in the organizing role of the narrator: the speaker reports the events and their details as something that happened and is remembered, along the way resorting to descriptions of the situation of the action and the appearance of the characters, and sometimes to discrepancies.
Most precise definition the epic was given by VG Belinsky: “epic poetry is primarily objective external poetry, both in relation to itself, and to the poet and his reader. In epic poetry, the contemplation of the world and life is expressed as existing in themselves and in perfect balance with themselves and the poet or reader contemplating them.
From the objectivity of the epic narrative, I.A. Gulyaev also speaks: “In an epic work, external circumstances determine the behavior of the characters, their present and future.”
The narrative layer of the epic work interacts with the dialogues and monologues of the characters. The epic narration either becomes self-sufficing, temporarily suspending the statements of the characters, or imbued with their spirit in an improperly direct speech; either frames the characters' lines, or, on the contrary, is reduced to a minimum or temporarily disappears. But in general, it dominates the work, holding together everything depicted in it. Therefore, the features of the epic are largely determined by the properties of the narrative.
The epic narration is conducted on behalf of the narrator, a kind of intermediary between the depicted and the listeners, the witness and interpreter of what happened. Information about his fate, his relationship with the characters, about the circumstances of the "narrative" is usually absent. At the same time, the narrator can "condense" into specific person becoming a storyteller.
The epic is as free as possible in the development of space and time. The writer either creates scenic episodes, that is, pictures that capture one place and one moment in the life of the characters, or - in descriptive, overview, "panoramic" episodes - talks about long periods of time or what happened in different places. The epic uses the arsenal of literary and visual means in its entirety, which gives the images the illusion of plastic volume and visual-auditory authenticity. The epic does not insist on the conditionality of what is recreated. Here, conventionally, it is not so much the depicted itself, but rather the “depicting”, that is, the narrator, who often has absolute knowledge of what happened in its smallest details.
The epic form relies on a different type plot constructions. In some cases, the dynamics of events is revealed openly and extensively, in others, the image of the course of events is, as it were, drowning in descriptions, psychological characteristics, and reasoning. The volume of the text of an epic work, which can be both prose and poetry, is practically unlimited - from miniature stories to lengthy epics and novels. The epic can concentrate in itself such a number of characters and events that are not available to other types of literature and arts. At the same time, the narrative form is able to recreate complex, contradictory, multifaceted characters that are in the making. The word "epos" is associated with the idea of showing life in its entirety, of revealing the essence of an entire era and the scale of a creative act. The scope of epic genres is not limited to any types of experiences and attitudes. In the nature of the epic is the universally wide use of the cognitive and ideological possibilities of literature and art in general.
So, the main features of epic works are the reproduction of external phenomena of reality in relation to the author in the objective course of events, narrative and plot. When studying the epic as a kind of literature, it is necessary to acquaint students with these features. This is especially important when delimiting genres and genres of literature.
b) the originality of the epic genres.
Difficulties arising in the analysis of epic works arise already in determining the genre of the work. A serious mistake will be made by one who begins to consider a story or a story, making demands on them that only a novel can meet.
One of the methodological tasks of the teacher is to introduce students to genre originality epic works and teach how to apply this knowledge in the analysis of works. At the same time, it is important to take into account age features students and stages literary education At school. In grades V - VI, the study of the genres of literary works (fairy tale, legend, myth, chronicle, epic, fable, story, story, ballad, poem) serves to clarify the author's poetry. Work in grades VII - VIII is aimed at systematizing ideas about the genres and genres of literature, the circle of study includes such genres as: novel, biography, life, parable, sermon, confession, short story. Literary theory in high school helps to trace historical changes in the poetics of literary types and genres.
The genres of the epic are divided into large (epic, novel), medium (life, story) and small (fairy tale, fable, parable, short story, short story, essay, essay). Some forms of prose also belong to the lyric-epic genres.
The methodology for analyzing an epic work is largely based on the originality of the genus and genre. And the volume of the work plays an important role in choosing the path of analysis. This is due to the limited time and richness of the school curriculum. In this case, this is how he solves the problem of analyzing the works of M.A. Rybnikov: “Methodological techniques are dictated by the nature of the work ... A ballad can be disassembled using a plan, but it is hardly necessary to plan lyrical work. A short story is read and understood in its entirety. We choose separate, leading chapters from the novel and read one of them in class, another at home, carefully analyze the third and retell close to the text, analyze the fourth, fifth, sixth at a faster pace and retell briefly, excerpts from the seventh and eighth chapters are given in form fiction story individual students, the epilogue is told to the class by the teacher himself. The riddle is guessed and repeated by heart, the proverb is explained and accompanied by everyday examples, the fable is understood based on the awareness of the morality expressed in it.
epic- (from the Greek. epos - word, narration, story) - one of the three main types of literature, unlike lyrics and drama, highlighting an objective image of reality, the author's description of events unfolding in space and time, a story about various phenomena life, people, their destinies, characters, actions, etc. A special role in the works of epic genres is played by the carrier of the narration (author-narrator or narrator), who reports on events, their development, about characters, about their life, while separating himself from what is depicted. Depending on the temporal scope of events, there are major genres epic - epic, novel, epic poem, or epic poem; medium - story and small - story, short story, essay. The epic genre also includes some genres of oral folk art: a fairy tale, an epic, a fable.
Epic genres:
Novel- (from French roman - originally: a work written in one of the Romance (i.e., modern, living) languages, as opposed to written in Latin) - epic genre: a large epic work that comprehensively depicts the life of people in certain period time or for a whole human life. The characteristic properties of the novel are: the multilinear plot, covering the fate of a number of characters; the presence of a system of equivalent characters; coverage of a wide range of life phenomena, the formulation of socially significant problems; significant duration of action.
Story- small epic genre: a prose work of a small volume, in which, as a rule, one or more events of the hero's life are depicted. The circle of characters in the story is limited, the described action is short in time. Sometimes a storyteller may be present in a work of this genre. The masters of the story were A.P. Chekhov, V.V. Nabokov, A.P. Platonov, K.G. Paustovsky, O.P. Kazakov, V.M. Shukshin.
Tale- the average (between the story and the novel) epic genre, which presents a number of episodes from the life of the hero (heroes). In terms of volume, the story is larger than a story and more broadly depicts reality, drawing a chain of episodes that make up a certain period in the life of the main character, it has more events and characters, however, unlike the novel, as a rule, there is one storyline.
epic- the largest genre form of the epic. The epic is characterized by:
1. A wide coverage of the phenomena of reality, the image of the life of the people in a historically significant, crucial moment
2. Global problems of universal significance are raised
3. Nationality content
4. Multiple storylines
5. Very often - reliance on history and folklore
Journey- a literary genre based on a description of the hero's wanderings. This may be information about the countries and peoples seen by the traveler in the form of travel diaries, notes, essays, and so on.
epistolary genre- a genre of literary work, which is characterized by the form of personal letters.
Confession- a literary genre that can be epic or lyrical. one of the seven Christian sacraments, which also includes baptism, communion, chrismation, marriage, etc. Confession demanded from a person complete sincerity, the desire to get rid of sins, repentance. Penetrating into the art literature, confession acquired a didactic connotation, becoming a kind of act of public repentance (for example, in J. J. Rousseau, N. V. Gogol, L. N. Tolstoy). But at the same time, confession was also a means of moral self-affirmation of the individual. As a genre of lyric poetry, poetry was developed by the romantics. Confession is akin to a diary, but unlike it, it is not attached to a Ph.D. place and time.
Lyrics- one of the three main types of literature, highlighting the subjective image of reality: individual states, thoughts, feelings, impressions of the author caused by certain circumstances, impressions. In lyrics, life is reflected in the experiences of the poet (or lyrical hero): it is not narrated, but an image-experience is created. The most important property of lyrics is the ability to convey a single (feeling, state) as universal. Characteristic features of the lyrics: poetic form, rhythm, lack of plot, small size.
Lyric genres:
Elegy is a genre of lyrics: a poem of meditative (from Latin meditatio - in-depth reflection) or emotional content, conveying deeply personal, intimate experiences of a person, usually imbued with moods of sadness, light sadness. Most often written in the first person. The most common themes of the elegy are the contemplation of nature, accompanied by philosophical reflections, love, as a rule, unrequited, life and death, etc. This genre that arose in antiquity was most popular in the poetry of sentimentalism and romanticism, the elegies of V.A. Zhukovsky, K.N. Batyushkova, A.A. Pushkin, E.A. Baratynsky, N.M. Yazykov.
Message - a poetic genre: a poetic letter, a work written in the form of an appeal to someone and containing appeals, requests, wishes, etc. ("To Chaadaev", "Message to the Censor" by A.S. Pushkin; "Message to proletarian poets "V.V. Mayakovsky). There are lyrical, friendly, satirical, journalistic, etc.
There are lyric-epic genres that are at the intersection of lyrics and epic. From the lyrics they have a subjective beginning, a pronounced author's emotion, from the epic - the presence of a plot, a story about events. Lyroepic genres gravitate toward the poetic form. A larger lyrical epic genre is a poem, a smaller one is a ballad
A poem is a lyrical-epic genre: a large or medium-sized poetic work (poetic story, novel in verse), the main features of which are the presence of a plot (as in an epic) and the image of a lyrical hero (as in lyrics)
Ballad is a genre of lyrical-epic poetry: a narrative song or poem of relatively small volume, with a dynamic development of the plot, the basis of which is an extraordinary event. Often in the ballad there is an element of the mysterious, fantastic, inexplicable, unspoken, even tragically insoluble. By origin, ballads are connected with legends, folk legends, connect the features of the story and the song. Ballads are one of the main genres in the poetry of sentimentalism and romanticism. For example: ballads by V.A. Zhukovsky, M.Yu. Lermontov.
Drama- one of the three main types of literature, reflecting life in actions taking place in the present. These are works intended to be staged. The dramatic genre includes tragedies, comedies, dramas proper, melodramas and vaudevilles.
Drama genres:
Tragedy- (from Greek tragodia - goat song< греч. tragos - козел и ode - песнь) - один из основных жанров драмы: пьеса, в которой изображаются крайне острые, зачастую неразрешимые жизненные противоречия. В основе сюжета трагедии - непримиримый конфликт Героя, strong personality, with transpersonal forces (fate, state, elements, etc.) or with oneself. In this struggle, the hero, as a rule, dies, but wins a moral victory. The purpose of the tragedy is to cause shock in the viewer by what they see, which, in turn, gives rise to sorrow and compassion in their hearts: such a state of mind leads to catharsis - purification due to shock.
Comedy- (from the Greek from komos - a cheerful crowd, a procession at Dionysian festivities and odie - a song) - one of the leading genres of drama: a work based on the ridicule of social and human imperfections.
Drama- (in the narrow sense) one of the leading genres of dramaturgy; literary work, written in the form of a dialogue of actors. Designed to be performed on stage. Focused on spectacular expression. The relationship of people, the conflicts that arise between them are revealed through the actions of the characters and are embodied in a monologue-dialogical form. Unlike tragedy, drama does not end in catharsis.
About the meter
When working on any essay related to analysis poetic text, it is required to analyze poetic size. Why is it so important? Because in poetic work not only the content is important, but also the form - that is, the rhythm, sound, music of the poem, which, in fact, forms the poem itself.
The most important thing is not just to determine the size, but to say in your essay about what this size brings to the poem.
Yamb is an energetic, often solemn sound of verse, the trochee is melodious and gentle (all lullabies are written in trochee and, by the way, after Lermontov, all poems that contain a night landscape). Trisyllabic meters are more flexible intonation, close to colloquial speech (this is probably why Nekrasov preferred them).
Well, to the point. To easily determine the size, you must first remember what a foot is. A foot is a group of syllables, one of which is stressed. Only and everything.
Everyone knows, of course, that there are five meters in Russian versification: two two-syllable and three three-syllable. Two-syllable - this is when there are two syllables in the foot, three-syllable - when, respectively, three:
Chorey is a two-syllable meter with stress on the first syllable.
Yamb is a two-syllable meter with stress on the second syllable.
Let's introduce the following designations: ` - stressed syllable, _ - unstressed syllable.
Then the trochee will look like this: | ` _ |, and iambic - like this: | _ ` |.
Dactyl - like this: | ` _ _ |. It's easy to remember: dactyl - translated from Greek - "finger". True, it seems: three phalanges, on the first nail, - like three syllables, the first is marked with stress.
Anapaest ("inverted, reflected" - even sounds in Russian, like "wand (pestle) on the contrary") looks like this: | _ _ ` |.
Amphibrachium ("surrounded") - | _ ` _ |.
Now that we all know, the simplest and, oddly enough, the most difficult thing for the guys is ahead - mark each syllable of the poetic line with a dash. It is more convenient when all the dashes are the same, regardless of the length of the syllable. (Just in case: the number of syllables is equal to the number of vowels). Service words, as a rule, are not marked with stress, if they are not logically stressed when reading a poem.
Well, for example, let's take the first two lines of Akhmatova's poem "Native Land".
We do not carry in treasured amulets on the chest,
We do not compose verses sobbingly about her ...
It will turn out like this:
_ ` _ ` _ _ _ ` _ _ _ `
_ ` _ ` _ ` _ _ _ ` _
Now this should be divided into groups of syllables (feet) so that each has a stressed syllable inside ... "Something is wrong here," you say. Indeed, the two-syllable Russian verse is characterized by pyrrhic - the omission of stress. And this is very natural: in our country, not all words consist of two syllables! If there were no such gaps, the verses would look like a monotonous drumbeat.
By the way, I will offer a refinement for your essay: if you note that the sound of a word in a verse (verse is a poetic line) is emphasized, stands out due to pyrrhic, it will be great. Provided, of course, that your teacher knows what a pyrrhic is.
Let's return to our (i.e. Akhmatov's) poem:
| _ ` | _ ` | _ _ | _ ` | _ _ | _ ` |
| _ ` | _ ` | _ ` | _ _ | _ ` | _
Note that the "tail" (what is left outside the foot) is not taken into account when determining the size.
So, for the first stanza of her poem, Akhmatova turns to the solemn sound of iambic pentameter - you should have made such or a close conclusion to this when analyzing the size of this poem.
But the second stanza will surprise us. It is so different that even the size changes:
Yes, for us it is dirt on galoshes,
Yes, for us it is a crunch on the teeth ...
How the size has changed is up to you to decide. It is also important why he has changed so much, what reflects this change. I would like to draw your attention to this: the first word ("yes") the poetess emphasizes with extra-metric stress (that is, superfluous in verse). It is called a sponde and is quite rare. For example, in Pushkin's Poltava, the sponde conveys the rumbling, the confusion of battle:
Drum beat, clicks, rattle,
The thunder of cannons, clatter, neighing, groaning...
POETIC RHYTHM
2-SYMBOL AND THREE-SYMBOL VERSE MEASUREMENTS
In the textbook of literature for grade 6 there are topics “Two-syllable meters of verse”, “Tri-syllable meters of verse”, placed in different sections of the book. How do we work with them? First, we combine topics. Secondly, we use the following types of work for the full assimilation of the topic.
I. Linguistic experiment.
Compare two performances of a stanza from a poem by M.Yu. Lermontov
"Three Palms".
First reading:
But as soon as dusk fell to the ground,
The ax pounded on the elastic roots,
And pets of centuries fell without life.
Their clothes were torn off by small children,
Their bodies were destroyed afterwards,
And slowly burned them until the morning with fire.
What words sound unusual, so we usually do not pronounce them?
Second reading: (The student reads this stanza, observing the normative
stress: “at the roots”, “plucked”, “until the morning”).
What changed? The poem is spreading, its energy and rhythm are lost. Therefore, rhythm is the most important attribute of a poem. (We are not talking here about free verse, devoid of rhythm).
II. Comparison of the rhythms of the surrounding life and poetic rhythm
The surrounding life, the life of nature, people is built on rhythms. Day alternates with night, winter is replaced by spring ... Where else do we meet rhythmic alternations?
The answers of the children: “At school, lessons alternate with breaks, the clock is ticking, the heart is beating, inhalation and exhalation alternate. Rhythm is in music, in dancing.
Poems are also built on rhythm. As, for example, day alternates with night, forming a day, so a stressed syllable alternates with an unstressed one, forming a foot. The foot is repeated, forming a line. The lines alternate with each other, forming a poem.
III. Algorithm for determining the poetic size.
We try to read the poem expressively in order to convey its meaning to the listeners. But small children, having learned their first rhymes in their lives, read them in a singsong voice, chant (i.e. they read incorrectly, “protruding” stressed syllables), but at the same time convey to the listener a clear rhythm of the verse:
1. Our / Tanya / loudly / cries /
2. Uro / nile / into the river / ball /
3. Hush / Tanya / chka do not / cry
4. Not at / sinking / in the river / ball.
There are 4 feet in the line. Each foot (except for two incomplete in 3.4 lines) is an ordered alternation of two syllables (disyllabic foot); first shock - second unstressed |-- --|. The rhythmic pattern of the line is:
1. ta-ta / ta-ta / ta-ta / ta-ta /
Two-syllable poetic size with stress on the first syllable - trochee. It's easy to remember. If a keyword fits into the line several times - any two-syllable word with an accent on the first syllable (for example, COLD) - this is a trochee:
2. cold / cold / cold / ho /
hush / Tanya / chka do not / cry /
There are two disyllabic sizes, three three syllables. All other poetic sizes are also determined according to this algorithm:
Read the stanza expressively.
Scan it.
Give her a rhythmic pattern.
Complete the stanza with keywords.
Specify the size of the verse.
IV. Reference scheme
The keywords for each of the five meter sizes are contained in the following table:
REFERENCE DIAGRAM
COLD, strong, CHOREI
JANUARY sweeps, YMB
DASHENKA DACTYL
IN THE PHARMACY OF AMPHIBRACHY
PINEAPPLE takes ANAPEST
We will immediately make a reservation that pineapples are not sold in a pharmacy, but for the reference scheme, it is not lifelikeness that is important, but the convenience of remembering.
On literary courses learners are taught:
Anna Akhmatova - dactyl
Marina Tsvetaeva - amphibrach
Nikolai Gumilyov - anapaest
Such a support can also be adopted.
For students, the support scheme I propose is convenient in that keywords already suggest the name of the poetic size. This is easier than placing stresses, dividing the line into stops, especially since quite often the stress in the foot is not explicit, but hidden, additional | --- ---|, for example,
I do not regret, do not call, do not cry/
Everything goes / goes like / from white / apple tree / smoke /
U-vya/ tribute-i/ zo-lo/ tom o/ hva-chen/ ny/
I don't/ bu-du/ more-she/ mo-lo/ smoke/
Traditionally, the phenomenon of skipping a schematic stress is called pyrrhic (Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary M, 1987, p. 278). Gradually, the term "pyrrhic" comes out of their use.
According to a given situation with given rhymes, compose quatrains using all poetic meters (group work).
Situation: The boy Sanya brought a snake to school to scare the girls.
The girls were frightened, and then, united, they kicked the joker's ears.
Rhymes: Sanya - in your pocket
Passed out - stayed
Chorey: Sanya managed to go to school
Bring snake in your pocket.
A terrible scream suddenly rang out -
A little alive hero remained.
Yamb (sing): Sanya decided today
Carry snake in your pocket
Uzhonka real,
beautiful, shiny,
Such a cry was heard here -
Barely alive!
Dactyl: This Sanya is such a strange person:
He managed to have a snake in his pocket
Bring to class. A heart-rending cry rang out.
Almost our hero was left without ears.
Amphibrachius: Yesterday this Sanya made us laugh to tears:
He dragged the snake quietly in his pocket.
A frantic scream resounded throughout the school,
Almost our Sanya was left without hair.
Anapaest: Once I came to Sanya's school,
He brought the duck in his pocket.
Here such a heart-rending cry was heard -
A little stutterer Sanya did not remain.
CONCLUSION: The same content can be conveyed in different
poetic sizes.
Scope of application of the algorithm that determines the poetic size
According to the algorithm given above, the size of the lines written in the syllabic-tonic (syllable-stressed) system of versification is easily determined, including the size of the so-called “blank verse” (non-rhyming), for example, “Song of the Falcon” - iambic, “Song of Burevestnik" - trochee.
Naturally, it is impossible to determine the metric size (for lack of it) in A. Blok's poem “She Came from the Frost”, written in free verse (free verse without rhythm), in some poems by A. Fet, E. Vinokurov, V. Soloukhin and others.
It is interesting to follow the rhythmic pattern in the verses written by dolnik:
Girl / sang / in the church / choir Dashenka / cold / pharmacy / cold
About everyone / tired / in a foreign / land January / pharmacy / January / January
About all / ships / departed / at sea January / pineapple / pharmacy / cold
About everyone / forgot / joy / your January / pharmacy / cold / January
We see here a random alternation of three-syllable and two-syllable stops with the same number of stresses in each line. Strictly speaking, these are not stops, but strong places (stressed syllables). The alternation of strong places (icts) and weak places (inter-tict intervals) gives a share (measure, krat) and provides the poem with a tangible inner rhythm. (Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary, p. 87). The volume of inter-ict intervals is not constant, as in syllabo-tonic meters, but fluctuates in the range of 1-2 syllables (see the first line):
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
And here is the rhythmic pattern of another Blok poem. Do you recognize his first line?
Ta / ta-ta-ta / ta-ta / ta-ta-ta
Ho/ Dashenka/ January/ pharmacy/
Yes, this is the well-known “Night. Good girl. Flashlight. Pharmacy". Here, too, we are dealing with a dolnik. Let us also recall the great significance of pauses in such verses (another name for dolnik is pauznik).
Dolnik (previously the term pauznik was sometimes used) is a type of tonic verse, where only the number of stressed syllables matches in the lines, and the number of unstressed syllables between them ranges from 2 to 0.
"Days (0) bull (0) peg,
Slow (2) years (1) arba,
Our (0) god (0) running,
Heart (1) our (2) drum.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
General formula X Ú X Ú X Ú, etc. (Ú - stressed syllables, X - unstressed; the value of X is variable; X = 0, 1, 2). Depending on the number of stresses in a line, two-strike doler, three-shock, four-shock, etc. are distinguished. This type of verse is typical for languages with tonic versification and is very common in English, Russian, German poetry. One can distinguish a number of modifications of the dolnik, depending on the number of stresses in a line (some modifications of the dolnik do not retain an equal number of stresses, for example, many of Mayakovsky's poems), on the degree of variation in the number of unstressed syllables between stressed ones, etc.
If lines with an inter-stroke interval of 3 are allowed, they talk about a tactician, if 4 or more - about an accent verse.
In Russian poetry, dolnik is a very old verse form. In its structure, it undoubtedly goes back to folk verse, which - minus its musical side - basically fits the formula of a tactician, and many lines fit into the rhythm of the dolnik (it was from folk verse that he argued theoretically ("Experience on Russian versification", 1812) and practically (“Rivers”, translated from Confucius and others) of the East, who defended the introduction of dolnik into Russian poetry). In a certain sense, the three-syllable sizes of the syllabic-tonic versification are close to the dolnik, in which the scheme number of unstressed between the shocks was not respected in some cases, due to which they were a formation close to the dolnik (for example, Russian hexameter).
In Russian poetry, dolnik was cultivated by the Symbolists, then by the Futurists. It was especially widespread in the poetry of the early 20th century (see the chapters on dolnik in V. M. Zhirmunsky’s Introduction to Metrics, pp. XXX, 184 and following).
The term "dolnik" was introduced in the early 1920s by V. Ya. Bryusov and G. A. Shengeli, but in relation to what is now known as an accent verse. Initially, dolnik was called pauznik in Russian poetry (a term first noted by S.P. Bobrov), but starting from the works of V.M. Zhirmunsky, the terms “dolnik” and “pauznik” are used as equivalent.
Rhyme
Rhyme (from the Greek rhythmós - harmony, proportion), the consonance of poetic lines, which has a phonic, metrical and compositional meaning. R. emphasizes the boundary between the verses and links the verses into stanzas. In the poetry of most peoples, R. is located at the ends of verses, however, there are regular initial consonances (for example, initial assonances in Mongolian poetry). At different times and among different peoples, different requirements were made to R., therefore, there cannot be a single universal definition of R. in terms of sound composition: it depends both on literary tradition, and from the phonetic structure of the language. For example, in Russian poetry, the basis of R. is the consonance of stressed vowels; in Czech, on the other hand, in which the stress always falls on the initial syllable, the consonance of the last syllables may not depend on the place of stress.
According to the place of stress, R. are divided into men's- with stress on the last syllable (shores - rays), female- with stress on the penultimate syllable (Ruslan - novel), dactylic- with stress on the third syllable from the end (chained - enchanted) and very rare hyperdactylic(grunts - jumps up) with a large number of post-stressed syllables (see clause). The mutual arrangement of rhyming lines can be different. Basic ways of rhyming: adjacent- according to the scheme aa bb ... (The raven flies to the raven, / The raven shouts to the raven ... - Pushkin ); cross- abab (The ruddy dawn / The east was covered, / In the village across the river / The light went out ... - Pushkin); covering, or encircling, - abba(The hops are already drying up on the tyne. / Behind the farms, on the bacches, / In the cool sunshine / Bronze melons turn red ... - Bunin). These ways of rhyming can alternate and intertwine in different ways. Poems for one R. - monorims- rare in European poetry, but widespread in the poetry of the Near and Middle East (see Gazelle, Qasida, Rubaiyat). A certain, repeating arrangement of R. is one of the signs of a stanza.
In Russian poetry, R. comes from the syntactic parallelism common in folklore, due to which the same parts of speech in the same grammatical form appear at the ends of the verses, which gives rise to consonance: "Praise hay in a haystack, and a master in a coffin." In the old Russian poetry was dominated by the so-called grammatical (suffixal-inflectional) R .: byache - know, beats - drives away. From the 18th century heterogeneous R., formed by different parts of speech (night - away, etc.) begins to be appreciated. At the same time (as earlier in French poetry, etc.), the requirement for an exact R. is gradually established, that is, one in which the final stressed vowel and all the sounds following it (by you - by hand) coincide. If the so-called supporting consonants preceding the stressed vowel also coincide, R. is then called rich (rake - Zeves), if the consonance captures the pre-stressed syllable, it is deep (sick - could not). From the middle of the 19th century in Russian verse, so-called approximate R. are increasingly common, in which the stressed vowels do not coincide (air - rest). From the beginning of the 20th century poets often use inaccurate R. of different types: assonance - the consonance of vowels with a mismatch (usually partial) of consonants (cloud - about); truncated R., with truncation of the final consonant in one of the words (forest - cross, flame - memory); component R. (grow up to a hundred - old age); consonances in which stressed vowels are different (burrows - communards); unequal R., in which masculine or dactylic endings rhyme with feminine or hyperdactylic ones (papahi - smelling).
R. has and meaning: it "... returns you to the previous line ... makes all the lines that form one thought stick together" (V. V. Mayakovsky, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 12, 1959, p. 235). An aesthetic assessment of poetry (its accuracy or inaccuracy, novelty or traditionality, etc.) is impossible outside the context of the poem, without taking into account its composition and style.
Sonnet(Italian sonetto, from Provence sonet - song), solid verse form: poem of 14 lines divided by 2 quatrains (quatrain) And 2 three lines (tercet); in quatrains only 2 rhymes are repeated, in terzets - 2 or 3. The most common are 2 types of rhyme arrangement: 1) "Italian" - quatrains according to the scheme abab abab or abba abba, tercetes according to the scheme cdc dcd or cdc cde; 2) "French" - abba abba and ccd eed or ccd ede. Verse S. - 11-syllabic in Italian and Spanish poetry, 12-syllabic - in French, 5-foot iambic in English, 5- and 6-foot iambic - in German and Russian poetry. Various deviations from the classical scheme are possible: changing the order of rhymes (abab baab, "To the Poet" by A. S. Pushkin), introducing extra rhymes (abba cddc, etc.), introducing extra lines (C. with code, etc. ), free order of quatrains and tercetes, the use of non-traditional sizes, etc. Of these "free forms" only "English S." has been canonized to some extent. Shakespeare type (abab cdcd efef gg). A clear internal division of S. allows us to emphasize the dialectical development of the topic: already early theorists provided for "rules" not only for the form, but also for the content of S. (pauses, dots on the boundaries of stanzas; not a single meaningful word is repeated; the last word is the semantic key of everything poems, etc.) in modern times, the deployment of a theme in 4 stanzas of S. was more than once comprehended as a sequence "thesis - development of the thesis - antithesis - synthesis", "outset - development - climax - denouement", etc.
Of all the solid poetic forms of European poetry, only syllables have been widely and freely used in lyric poetry. S. arose in Italy in the first half of the 13th century. It received its classical form in Florence at the end of the 13th century. (Dante), won the widest popularity thanks to F. Petrarch (317 sonnets about Laura), dominated the lyrics of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, from the 16th century. passes to Spain, Portugal, France, England (L. de Vega, L. Camões, P. Ronsard, Du Bellay, W. Shakespeare, J. Donne, etc.), in the 17th century. reaches Germany, in the 18th century. - Russia (V.K. Trediakovsky, A.P. Sumarokov). Romanticism revives interest in S., which fell in the era of classicism and the Enlightenment; The center of S.'s culture is Germany (A. Schlegel, N. Lenau, A. Platen), England (W. Wordsworth, E. B. Browning, D. G. Rossetti), and partly Slavs. countries (J. Kollar, A. Mitskevich, in Russia - A. A. Delvig, A. A. Grigoriev) and France (Ch. Baudelaire, J. Heredia). S. cultivated the poetry of symbolism and modernism - P. Verlaine, P. Valery, G. D "Annunzio, S. George, R. M. Rilke, V. I. Ivanov, V. Ya. Bryusov, and others; from poets, overcome modernism, - I. Becher, but for none of them this form became
central to his work. In the owls I. Selvinsky, S. Kirsanov, and others experimented with the form of poetry in poetry.
Haiku
Haiku(otherwise - haiku), genre and form Japanese poetry; three-line, consisting of two encircling five-syllable verses and one seven-syllable in the middle. Genetically goes back to the first half-stroke tank(haiku literally - initial verses), from which it differs in the simplicity of the poetic language, the rejection of the previous canonical rules, the increased role of associativity, understatement, hint. X passed through several stages in its development. The poets Arakida Moritake (1465-1549) and Yamazaki Sokan (1465-1553) saw X as a purely comic genre. Credit for making X. the host lyrical genre belongs to Matsuo Basho (1644-94); the main content of X. was landscape lyrics. The name of Taniguchi Buson (1716-83) is associated with the expansion of the theme of X. In parallel, in the 18th century. Comic X is developing, which has become an independent satirical-humorous genre of senryu. At the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries. Kobayashi Issa introduces civic motives into X. At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. Masaoka Shiki applied to X. the method of "sketches from nature" (shasei) borrowed from painting, which contributed to the development of realism in the X genre.
What is haiku
HAIKU(otherwise - haiku, haikai) - a three-line (three-line) lyric, as a rule, a poem, which is the national Japanese form of "Dentossi" ("poetic tradition"). Haiku usually depicts nature and man in their eternal continuity. In each haiku, a certain measure of verses is observed - in the first and third verses, five syllables each, in the second verse, seven, and in total there are 17 syllables in haiku. Of course, this applies to haiku on Japanese, but in Russian it is customary to adhere to a certain rhythmic pattern when writing haiku.
Matsuo Basho- Recognized Master of Japanese Poetry. Hokku Basho are truly masterpieces among the haiku of other Japanese poets. Basho is the pseudonym of the great poet. At birth, Basho was named Kinzaku, upon reaching adulthood, Munefusa; Another name for Basho is Jinshichiro. Matsuo Basho is a great Japanese poet and verse theorist. Basho was born in 1644 in the small castle town of Ueno, Iga Province (Khons Island).
"Autumn has already arrived!"
The wind whispered in my ear
Creeping up to my pillow.
One hundred times more noble
Who does not say at the flash of lightning:
"This is our life!"
All the worries, all the sadness
Of my troubled heart
Give it to the flexible willow.
Tanka - Japanese verses - five lines
And with envy I look like a white wave
Runs back to the left edge.
Oh, if only in the world
You have never been
Cherry blossoms!
Probably, then in the spring
My heart was comforted.
rubaiyat(quatrain), a form of lyric poetry of the peoples of the Blissful and Middle East. Borrowed from the widespread oral folk art of the Persians and Tajiks (another name for R. in folklore is dubaiti or ramming). IN written literature, in which, unlike the syllabic folk meter, R. is built in the aruz meter, it appears already in the 9th-10th centuries. (Rudaki and others) and since then has invariably served to express lyrical theme dominated philosophical reflections. From Persian-language literature, R. passes into Arabic, many Turkic-language literatures, and Urdu literature. As a genre form, R. reaches its peak in the middle of the 11th century, but from the second half of the 12th century. noticeably gives way to the gazelle. R. consists of 4 half-lines (or two bayts), rhyming like aaba, less often like aaaa.
Omar Khayyam
Where did we come from? Where are we heading our way?
What is the meaning of our life? He is incomprehensible to us.
How much clean souls under the azure wheel
It burns to ashes, to dust, but where, tell me, is the smoke?
Gazelle
Abu Ali ibn Sina.
Gazelle b (ghazal) - lyric poem, in which two half-lines of the first bayt rhyme, and then the same rhyme is preserved in all the second half-lines of each subsequent bayt like “aa, ba, ca, da”, etc. In the last bay of a ghazal, the poetic name (tahallus) of the author is often called .
Beautifully pure wine, their spirit is exalted and rich,
With fragrance it eclipsed the aroma of roses
As in the teaching of the father, there is bitterness and grace in bliss,
A hypocrite finds lies in wine, and a wise man finds truths a generous treasure.
Wine is not harmful to the wise, it is the death of the ignorant,
It contains poison and honey, good and evil, shadow of sorrows and light of delights.
A ban is imposed on wine because of the ignorance of the ignorant,
Unbelief split the world into a bright paradise and a gloomy hell.
What is the guilt of the wine that the fool drinks it,
Having drunk, he is glad to talk empty talk and, whatever he says, out of place.
Drink wisely like Abu Ali, I swear by the truth:
Wine will show the right path to the country, true windfall.
There are ten signs of a noble soul,
Six humiliate her. Need to be free
She is from meanness, lies and low envy,
Neglect for loved ones, unfortunately and pain of the people.
If you are rich, then show your generosity to your friends,
Be their support and guiding star.
And if you fall into poverty - be both strong and proud,
Let the face turn yellow in hopeless longing.
A century is short, our every breath may be the last,
Do not worry about the world with fruitless care,
Death plays backgammon tirelessly: we are checkers
Epos (from the Greek epos - word, narration, story) is a kind of literature, which is characterized by the depiction of reality in an objectively narrative form. As a rule, the time of the depicted action and the time of the narration about it do not coincide - this is one of the most important differences from other types of literature.
Methods of presentation - narration, description, dialogue, monologue, author's digressions. The author's description of events unfolding in space and time, the narrative of various phenomena of life, people, their destinies, characters, actions, etc., is distinguished by a calmly contemplative, detached attitude to the depicted.
The epic text is similar to a kind of fusion of narrative speech and the statements of the characters. It has an unlimited volume (from a short story to multi-volume cycles (for example, "The Human Comedy" by Honore de Balzac combines 98 novels and short stories) - this allows you to "absorb" such a number of characters, circumstances, events, destinies, details that is inaccessible to anyone other kinds of literature, nor any other kind of art.
The epic, in comparison with other types of literature, has the richest arsenal of artistic means, which makes it possible to reveal the inner world of a person with the greatest depth, to show it in development.
A special role in epic works is played by the author-narrator or narrator. His speech (content and style) is the only but very effective means of creating the image of this character. Despite the fact that sometimes the narrator is ideologically close to the writer, they cannot be identified (for example, the narrator in the work of I.S. Shmelev "Summer of the Lord" and the author himself are not the same person).
epic genres
Large - epic, novel, epic poem (epic poem);
Middle - story,
Small - story, short story, essay.
The epic also includes folklore genres: a fairy tale, an epic, a historical song.
The meaning of the epic
An epic work has no limits in its scope. According to V. E. Khalizev, “Epos as a kind of literature includes both short stories (…) and works designed for long listening or reading: epics, novels (…)”.
A significant role for epic genres is played by the image of the narrator (narrator), who tells about the events themselves, about the characters, but at the same time delimits himself from what is happening. The epic, in turn, reproduces, imprints not only what is being told, but also the narrator (his manner of speaking, mentality).
An epic work can use almost any artistic means known to literature. The narrative form of the epic work "contributes to the deepest penetration into the inner world of man."
Until the 18th century, the leading genre of epic literature was the epic poem. The source of its plot is a folk legend, the images are idealized and generalized, the speech reflects a relatively monolithic folk consciousness, the form is poetic ("Iliad" by Homer). In the XVIII-XIX centuries. novel becomes the leading genre. Plots are borrowed mainly from the present, images are individualized, speech reflects a sharply differentiated multilingual public consciousness, the form is prosaic (L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky).
Other genres of epic - story, short story, short story. In an effort to fully reflect life, epic works tend to be combined into cycles. Based on the same trend, an epic novel is being formed (The Forsyte Saga by J. Galsworthy).
