Allegory is, first of all, a tool, a means that is designed to convey the author’s idea as clearly and accurately as possible. It helps to convey an idea more expressively in writing. The author's talent lies in the brilliant mastery and wide use of all elements of allegorical language.
The meaning of the concept “allegory”
There are many explanations that decipher what an allegory is. They all mean the same thing. First of all, allegory is a literary device used to express an abstract concept in a specific artistic image. It always carries a hidden meaning, a hint.
Types of allegories
What is allegory: examples in literature
Allegory can be considered a feature of literature as an art form. Entire works are built on this principle. Russians folk tales, Aesop's fables, Garshin's stories, Maeterlinck's plays, Wilde's fairy tales were created through this special language. It is examples from literature that will help reveal the meaning of the concept of allegory. In Shchedrin's fairy tale "The Horse" there is allegorical images horses as representatives of different classes. IN folk songs married couple likened to a pair of birds: pigeons, peacocks or falcons.
IN lyrical works This feature of literature is found even more than in prose. The poet Gennady Aiga has allegory in every word. His poems are like a code that not every person is able to decipher. The author, whose lines are even more allegorical than those of Gennady Aiga, is Vladimir Kazakov. There is no integrity in his works, but there is an endless repetition of words and images. For example, “mirror”, “clock”, “tea” are found very often in his creations, often changing their meaning.
Allegory is most clearly manifested in fantasy. The authors of such works convey real life phenomena through fiction. The use of numerous allegory techniques allows you to visually and figuratively convey what happened thousands of years ago or will happen in the future.
Functions of allegory in other spheres of human life and society
Allegory is used as a means of describing objects in the surrounding world that are difficult to name. It helps to master non-physical objects and phenomena. Allegory develops analytical thinking, the way of comprehending the world is through division.
The purpose of art in human life is to achieve perfection. To convey certain phenomena of life, it is necessary to create vivid symbols and emphasize their properties and differences. That's why poetic language always diverse and deciphered depending on understanding specific person. Every a true master words understands what allegory, metaphor, personification, epithet, symbol are and knows how to correctly use them in his works.
A beautiful word “allegory”, its meaning is not clear to everyone. An experiment was carried out on one of the television channels. While on the street, the correspondent asked questions to random passers-by: “Do you know what allegory is in literature?” To his surprise (and our surprise) of the many people interviewed, only one answered correctly. Or rather, he didn’t even give precise definition, and even “accidentally” uttered the right word for himself - “allegory”. Wikipedia can quickly help those who wish to define “allegory”.
What is allegory
In fact, there are several formulations and explanations of the meaning of the allegory. But there is a thought that unites them into a single whole. Each definition speaks of allegory as a method of speech capable of expressing something (a phenomenon, an object, a living being) through other phenomena, objects, creatures or images. In other words, this allegorical way of denoting an object, a means of some kind of “disguise”, indirectness of thought. Allegory is one of the tropes in literature and art. Linguists call a word or a combination of words that enhance the expressiveness of speech, create new image.
The question arises: why and who needs to replace one with the other and express it allegorically? We will try to find answers to this question in this article.
Miracles of camouflage
The most a shining example The allegorical nature of the narrative is such a phenomenon in literature as. Aesop was a slave, but not a simple one, but an observant and talented one. He wanted to describe and ridicule the shortcomings and vices of his masters, but to do this openly was tantamount to suicide. He found a way to do this by inventing his own way (language), consisting entirely of allegories, hints and secret symbols. This was a brilliant “disguise” in literature.
Thus, he depicted his masters in the form of animals, endowing them with appropriate features, characters, and habits. Aesop is just that applied the method of allegories in art, and other lexical forms in their stories. After him, it became common to call the allegorical style of narration “Aesopian language.”
Aesop's tradition
The use of allegories is firmly established in literary creativity: in prose and poetry. Many followers of Aesop created their own works of art according to this principle. The allegory especially caught on in poetry and fabulists. One of the main elements of allegory is among satirists, as it allows you to create an incredible number of images and associative connections. Let us give examples of allegory in the literature of authors who used Aesopian language.
Don't miss: interpretation of such a literary device as, examples of exaggeration.
Allegories in literature
It is necessary to talk in more detail about allegories in literature. In fables, satirical stories the allegories are quite simplified, reduced to a simplified perception. Due to this, censorship often perceived these works as fairy tales or fantasy. The images of animals in Krylov's fables are people who live and perform certain actions, and in the end are subject to moralization - to some correct conclusion.
Many quotes from fables became " catchphrases» . This means that they were taken out of the context of the entire work and used in speech as a single semantic block. For example, “but things are still there...” means that the job was never done, although there were attempts. It is interesting that they are quoted even by those who have not read the fable at all.
The Russian classic Chernyshevsky wrote his novel “What to Do” while in captivity. And he needed disguise the author's idea so that the book leaves the prison and sees the light of day. At its core, the classic wrote a manual in art - instructions for building a communist society, a revolutionary novel. The images of the heroes were allegorical in it: Rakhmetov is a revolutionary. Activities of the heroes: the workshop created by Verochka Lopukhina was the prototype of the commune.
Once again about Saltykov-Shchedrin, the allegories in his works were monumental, being, in essence, global ciphers social reality and even morals and ethics. What is the price of just one dialogue between a pig and the truth! The pig asks the truth about various things while lying in the dirty slurry. She wonders if there really are any suns? And why has she, the pig, never seen these suns? Truth answers that she didn’t see it because she never raised her head...
The art of allegory is multifaceted. The classics of literature created allegories that were epic, monumental, and historically accurate. Russian fairy tales are simpler in this sense.
Allegories in fairy tales and folk epics
Short definition allegories in fairy tales: the word is its veiled meaning (the subject is its fairy-tale properties). Animals work well as heroes in fairy tales.
- The fox is cunning, the wolf is malice, the bear is innocence and strength, the hare is cowardice, the donkey is stupidity and stubbornness. This is how they behave in fairy tales! And therefore, the metaphors “cunning fox”, “donkey stubbornness”, “clicking your teeth” (from hunger) have disappeared into the human world.
- Images of nature mean phenomena from life. For example, the approaching storm in M. Gorky’s “Petrel” means the imminent onset of revolution. And the “stupid penguin” hiding his fat body in a cliff is the cowardly masses of people who do not want to create revolutionary changes and are afraid of them.
- Seasons and days have become a familiar allegory in art for periods of human life and humanity. Let us give the following examples: “at sunset”, “autumn is the evening of life”, “dawn of youth” and so on.
Allegories in life
In many areas and areas of art and life we We encounter allegories. For example, symbols are often encrypted in sculpture or historical meanings. Examples:
In general, any art is largely allegorical. This is his peculiarity - to use allegory and symbolism to enhance the effect, emotionality, general aesthetic perception and fundamentality of creation!
Allegory is one of artistic techniques, which is widespread in literary creativity. Literally, this word means the expression of any idea or concept through a certain artistic image, monologue, dialogue.
In other words, real phenomenon or the event is described using an abstract concept in such a way as to emphasize its features even more expressively. This technique is used not only in literature, but also in painting, performing arts and film genre.
It is worth noting that an allegorical image, which is based on the similarity of life events and phenomena, can occupy a significant, and sometimes the central place in literary or theatrical work.
The described or depicted object is not named directly, but is characterized with the help of another object. In other words, allegory is a detailed likening of one object or phenomenon to another through a whole system of allusions. However, the meaning is not only not lost, but also becomes more obvious, vivid and extremely understandable.
Most allegorical images reflect concepts such as good and evil, justice and inequality, love and hatred. Many moral values It is much easier to describe it in allegorical language than to speak directly, calling things by their proper names.
The beauty and grandeur of literary images
Allegory has a lot in common with symbolism, but the concept itself is much broader. Symbolic images reflect life nature and inspired by song traditions. Symbolic images evoke emotional analogies with human life. Allegory is distinguished by bias and deliberateness, when in the described object or life phenomenon the reader immediately draws the necessary parallel with the real object or phenomenon.
The most striking example of allegory is Krylov’s fables, where human vices are clearly shown through the characters of animals:
- fox - cunning;
- donkey - stubborn;
- wolf - evil;
- the bear is stupidly imposing;
- ram - stupid;
- the hare is cowardly.
Legendary ancient Greek poet Aesop, who also wrote fables, pursued the goal of establishing public morality. The use of allegory helped him to ridicule the bad qualities of people, putting them on display and showing all the wretchedness of bad traits and inclinations.
There is even the term “Aesopian language,” meaning a kind of literary secret writing that deliberately disguises the author’s thought. This is a kind of “system of deceptive means” that the slave Aesop was forced to use, because he could not directly expose his masters.
Literature and censorship: tricks of Russian classics
Russian writers used allegory to circumvent censorship. You can especially often find this technique in the works of Saltykov-Shchedrin, who interacted with his reader, hiding the true meaning from the censors. Fairy tale " The wise minnow"is very rich from the artistic side - it reveals not only the desire to deceive censorship, but also to reveal the essence of some life phenomena.
Drawing the image of a “small fish,” pitiful and cowardly, the writer perfectly reflected the essence of another man in the street. The apt characterization hits the mark, illustrating the breed of petty and worthless citizen through the minnow.
Empowering the fish human qualities , Saltykov-Shchedrin in his work touches on philosophical problem searching for the meaning of life and human purpose.
Another example of allegory is the poem “ Dead Souls", where there is a hidden meaning even in the names of the characters - Sobakevich, Plyushkin. In this work there is a whole allusive world, showing the whole of Russia in cross-section, along with its vices and shortcomings.
Lifestyle the time in which Gogol lived is described very figuratively - what is the allegorical world of peasants who died or escaped from their masters worth! This world seems to be contrasted with the world of the living, thereby emphasizing the poverty of the morals of the main characters.
IN foreign literature There are also many works in which allegory is used. For example, Dante depicted in his “ Divine Comedy» human passions in the form of animals:
- panther - sensuality;
- Leo - pride and ambition;
- she-wolf - greed.
Medieval oriental poetry is also full of allegories - Alisher Navoi in “Seven Planets” talks about love and at the same time, in an allegorical form, denounces the rulers of that time. Sultan Hussein-Merza and his courtiers are subject to veiled criticism - the author exposes with allegorical literary means tyranny, greed, ignorance and cruelty.
Thus , allegory is a way to add brightness to a work, originality, expressiveness and originality. Through a hidden hint, you can express the idea more clearly and the image more colorful, which is not always possible when using conventional storytelling.
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Allegory - an expression containing a hidden meaning; used as a literary device; the use of words other than their meaning, used in literature to influence the reader. There are several types of allegory.
Personification is one of the techniques of artistic depiction, which consists in the fact that animals, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena are endowed with human abilities and properties: the gift of speech, feelings and thoughts. Personification is one of the constant depiction techniques in fairy tales, fables, and folk conspiracies. Personification as an artistic trope is a turnover consisting of transferring human properties to inanimate objects and abstract concepts, often used in poetic speech.
Allegory - artistic comparison ideas (concepts) through a specific artistic image or dialogue. As a trope, allegory is used in poetry, parables, and morality. It arose on the basis of mythology, was reflected in folklore and was developed in the fine arts. The main way to depict an allegory is to generalize human concepts; representations are revealed in the images and behavior of animals, plants, mythological and fairy-tale characters, and inanimate objects that receive figurative meaning. Allegory is the artistic isolation of foreign concepts with the help of specific ideas. Religion, love, soul, justice, discord, glory, war, peace, spring, summer, autumn, winter, death, etc. are depicted and presented as living beings. The qualities and appearance attached to these living beings are borrowed from the actions and consequences of what corresponds to the isolation contained in these concepts.
A symbol is an object or word that conventionally expresses the essence of a phenomenon. The symbol contains a figurative meaning, in this way it is close to a metaphor. The symbol contains a certain secret, a hint that allows one to only guess what is meant, what the poet wanted to say.
Grotesque - view artistic imagery, comically or tragicomically generalizing and sharpening life relationships through a bizarre and contrasting combination of the real and the fantastic, verisimilitude and caricature, hyperbole and alogism.
17. Lexical resources of the language
Lexical resources of a language are words and stable combinations of words that are used to describe objects, concepts, as well as actions and relationships between them, allowing the writer to express the subtlest shades of thoughts and feelings.
Historicisms are words that have fallen out of use because the objects and phenomena that they denoted have disappeared from life. Historicisms do not have synonyms, since this is the only designation of a disappeared concept and the object or phenomenon behind it. Historicisms represent quite diverse thematic groups of words.
Archaisms are words denoting concepts, objects, phenomena that currently exist; for various reasons, archaisms were forced out of active use by other words. Archaisms have synonyms in modern language. Depending on whether the entire word, the meaning of the word, the phonetic design of the word, or a separate word-forming morpheme becomes obsolete, archaisms are divided into several groups.
Dialectisms are words belonging to a dialect or dialects that are used in the language of fiction to create local color and speech characteristics of characters; Sometimes dialectisms also include phonetic, morphological, syntactic and other features inherent in individual dialects and interspersed into the literary language.
Neologism is a word, the meaning of a word, or a phrase that has recently appeared in a language. This term is used in the history of language to characterize the enrichment of vocabulary in certain historical periods.
Definition
Allegory, according to the Bolshoi Encyclopedic Dictionary, - This literary device, expression with hidden meaning. IN strict meaning allegory is a synonym. In a more expanded interpretation, this is a statement in which the “letter” and “spirit” do not coincide, and may even be opposite. That is why in stories containing allegories, the meaning is not always “in the palm of your hand” - it needs to be seen, you need to correctly understand the idea that you wanted to convey to the reader. The same BES classifies irony and Aesopian language as allegories. On the other hand, feelings or other concepts that do not have a visible form, thanks to the use of allegories, become accessible and recognizable. Embodied in images, they help to express an abstract concept as accurately as possible.
Types of allegories
1. Personification (otherwise known as personification) – endowing inanimate objects with the traits of a living being: “revival” (“queen-night”, “sorceress-winter”) or the use of , applied to living beings, in figurative meaning towards inanimate objects(the music starts playing, the birch trees are whispering).
2. Indirect satire - works that show, ridicule, condemn the shortcomings of their time under the guise of transference of actions (, future tense or fictional worlds and persons. This may include, for example, “The Wise Minnow”).
3. – depiction of ideas, concepts in a certain image, the connection with which is established by analogy through certain . Many allegorical expressions have a mythological or folklore basis. Examples of allegories: lion - a sign of strength, hare - cowardice, justice - Themis with a sword and scales.
4. Euphemism - or expressions that replace words that are synonymous in meaning. Euphemism is characterized by softness and collectiveness. They are used in situations where other designations are undesirable (impolite, too harsh). Examples: face gay- gay, African American - black and others.
Application
Allegories are used very often in prose to add brightness and color to images, as a way to avoid banalities. However, trying to make your work memorable by using this technique, novice authors run the risk of encountering the opposite effect, since many of the most frequently used personifications and allegories have already become hackneyed. At the other end of the extreme - abundance and interweaving various types allegories, making the work extremely difficult to read and understand. It is important to find " golden mean", which in most cases is achieved through training and increasing creative experience.
