What genres belong to the epic genre of literature. Epic means "narrative"

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 a national tradition (and not personal experience and the free fiction that grows out of it);

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 beginnings and peaks 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 has been noted by almost all historians. 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 intelligent, talented hero who strives for 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. Literary circles England are just 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. genre development in Western Europe and Russia went differently. This was revealed in the active development of the European novel and the fading Soviet novel in connection with the shift of attention from a person who is searching, thinking, critical of society, to a heroized person, concerned about the problems of the life of the state and prone to authoritarian thinking, characteristic of 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 the temporal coordinates of the 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 that there are two lines in the development of the novel, represented, on the one hand, by a sophistical, monolingual novel, and on the other, by a two-voiced, bilingual novel, which later transformed into a monologue and polyphonic types 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” (opinion, conviction) acquired by the hero is not final, because “the last word about the world has not yet been said.” 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. Current state psychology, philosophy, ethics, cultural studies made it possible to bring greater clarity to the understanding of personality, distinguishing between 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 life and spiritual path 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 of the Soviet period, which often cultivated a hero for whom an authoritarian word, that is, the idea of ​​the need for self-denial, civic duty, self-giving 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, of course, was 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 an epic novel, to which Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and Sholokhov's "Quiet Flows the Don" are legitimately ranked. 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 heroic epic, not a depiction of society in relations with a person who opposes him with his spiritual capabilities, as in a novel, but a 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 XIX years V. In Russian criticism, the phrase "moral-descriptive novel" appeared. Modern scholars have used the concept moral description for terminology genre features this type of work. 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 rural prose, in which the tendency 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; the French have a short story - very often little romance, the Italians have something that is 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 ... there is no approximate theoretical definition of the short story, 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.

In terms of genres Lately individual author's nominations often prevail, which cannot be ignored (let us recall such designations as Astafiev's “punches”, Bondarev's “moments”, Solzhenitsyn's “little things”), but for the most part they do not imply proper genre features and features. 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 contemporary literature, one should not ignore the existence of existing genre structures, despite the fact that they exist in a variety of modifications.

genres of drama

Main 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. mentioned in the section on 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 on 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 laws (“Liberty” by A.N. Radishchev and “Liberty” 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 draw 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 objective features due to the mixing and interweaving of different emotional tendencies and orientation to different forms, the need is added 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 in reading and even analysis lyrical works rather difficult, but possible, if you focus on content features, i.e. 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 portrayed, but much space is also given to descriptions of nature, terrain, and in addition, the thoughts of the author, which are traditionally called " digressions". 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, " Bronze Horseman"It was not by chance that the author himself called the "Petersburg Tale" based on the fact 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 the death of Parasha: the flood occurred in November 1824, Yevgeny's "fatal" meeting with Peter the monument - in the early autumn of the next year ("Once he slept // At the Neva pier. Days of summer // Leaning towards autumn ..."), shortly after which 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 lyrical plan can be attributed to "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 complex composition lyrical type and emotionally expressive type of speech.

As for the genre features proper, 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.