In ancient times, when the myth was a way of explanation and knowledge surrounding reality, special ideas about time and space were formed, which subsequently had a noticeable impact on literature and art. Peace in the mind ancient man divided primarily into two parts - ordinary and sacred. They were endowed with different properties: the first was considered ordinary, everyday, and the second - unpredictably wonderful. Since the actions of mythical heroes consisted in their movement from one type of space-time to another, from the ordinary to the wonderful and vice versa, insofar as they happened to them in their travels incredible adventure because miracles can happen in an unusual world.
G. Dore's illustration for " Divine Comedy» Dante A.
Illustration by G. Kalinovsky for L. Carroll's book "Alice in Wonderland".
Drawing by A. de Saint-Exupery for the fairy tale "The Little Prince".
“It was - it wasn’t; a long time ago; in some kingdom; went on the road; long, short; soon a fairy tale is told, not soon the deed is done; I was there, I drank honey-beer; that's the end of the fairy tale "- try to fill in the gaps with the actions of any heroes, and, most likely, you will get a finished literary work, the genre of which is already determined by the use of these words themselves - a fairy tale. Obvious inconsistencies and incredible events will not confuse anyone: it should be so in a fairy tale. But if you look closely, it turns out that the fabulous "arbitrariness" has its own strict laws. They are defined like everyone else. fabulous wonders, unusual properties of space and time in which the fairy tale unfolds. First of all, the time of a fairy tale is limited by the plot. “The plot ends - the time also ends,” writes Academician D.S. Likhachev. For a fairy tale, the real passage of time turns out to be unimportant. The formula "how long, how short" indicates that one of the main characteristics of fabulous time is, after all, its uncertainty. As, in fact, the uncertainty of the fairy-tale space: "go there, I don't know where." All the events that happen to the hero are stretched along his path in search of "that, I don't know what."
The events of a fairy tale can be stretched out (“I sat in my seat for thirty years and three years”), or they can accelerate to an instant (“I threw a comb - a dense forest grew”). The speeding up of action takes place, as a rule, outside real space, in fantastic space, where the hero has magical helpers or miraculous means to help him cope with this fantastic space and the wonderful time merged with it.
Unlike fairy tale and myth fiction new time, as a rule, deals with history, describes a certain, specific era - the past or the present. But even here there are their own space-time laws. Literature selects only the most essential of reality, shows the development of events in time. The determining factor for an epic work is the vital logic of the narrative, but nevertheless, the writer is not obliged to consistently and mechanically record the life of his hero even in such a progressive genre as the chronicle novel. Years can pass between the lines of the work, the reader, at the behest of the author, within one phrase is able to move to another part of the world. We all remember Pushkin's line from The Bronze Horseman: "A hundred years have passed ..." - but we hardly pay attention to the fact that a whole century flashed here in one moment of our reading. The same time flows differently for the hero of a work of art, for the author-narrator and for the reader. With amazing simplicity, A. S. Pushkin writes in "Dubrovsky": "Some time passed without any remarkable event." Here, as in the annals, time is eventful, it is counted from event to event. If nothing necessary for the development of the plot happens, then the writer “turns off” the time, just as a chess player who has made a move turns off his clock. And sometimes he can use hourglass, reversing the events and making them move from the denouement to the beginning. The originality of a novel, story, short story is largely determined by the ratio of two times: the time of telling and the time of the action. The time of storytelling is the time in which the narrator himself lives, in which he leads his story; the time of the action is the time of the heroes. And all this we, the readers, perceive from our real, calendar, today. The works of Russian classics usually tell about events that took place in the recent past. And in what particular past - it is not entirely clear. We can only speak with certain certainty about this time distance when we are dealing with a historical novel in which N. V. Gogol writes about Taras Bulba, A. S. Pushkin - about Pugachev, and Yu. N. Tynyanov - about Pushkin. A gullible reader sometimes identifies the author and the narrator, who pretends to be an eyewitness, witness, or even participant in the events. The narrator is a kind of starting point. A significant time distance can separate him from the author (Pushkin - Grinev); it can also be located at different distances from the described one, and depending on this, the reader's field of vision expands or narrows.
The events of the epic novel unfold over a long period of time over a vast area; the story and short story are, as a rule, more compact. One of the most common settings for the works of N. V. Gogol, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, A. P. Chekhov, A. M. Gorky is a small provincial town or village with an established way of life, with minor events that repeat from day to day, and then sleepy time seems to move in a circle on a limited patch.
In Soviet literature, the artistic space of works is distinguished by considerable diversity. In accordance with the individual experience and preferences of certain writers, there is attachment to a particular place of action. So, among the representatives of the stylistic movement, called village prose(V. I. Belov, V. P. Astafiev, V. G. Rasputin, B. A. Mozhaev, V. N. Krupin, etc.), the action of novels, short stories, stories takes place mainly in countryside. For such writers as Yu. V. Trifonov, D. A. Granin, G. V. Semenov, R. T. Kireev, V. S. Makanin, A. A. Prokhanov and others, the characteristic scene of action is the city, and therefore the works of these writers are often called a city story, which determines the characters, situations, and the mode of action, thoughts, experiences of their characters. Sometimes it is important for writers to emphasize the concrete definiteness of the space of their works. Following M. A. Sholokhov, V. A. Zakrutkin, A. V. Kalinin and other writers from Rostovites showed their commitment to the “Don” problems in their works. For S. P. Zalygin, V. G. Rasputin, G. M. Markov, V. P. Astafiev, S. V. Sartakov, A. V. Vampilov and a number of Siberian writers, it is fundamentally important that the action of many of their works takes place in Siberia; for V. V. Bykov, I. P. Melezh, I. P. Shamyakin, A. M. Adamovich, I. G. Chigrinov, the artistic space is mainly Belarus, as for N. V. Dumbadze - Georgia, and for Y Avizhius - Lithuania ... At the same time, for example, for Ch. Aitmatov there are no such spatial restrictions in artistic creativity: the action of his works is transferred from Kyrgyzstan to Chukotka, then to Russia and Kazakhstan, to America and into space, even to the fictional planet Lesnaya Grud; this gives the artist's generalizations a universal, planetary, universal character. On the contrary, the moods that permeate the lyrics of N. M. Rubtsov, A. Ya. Yashin, O. A. Fokina could arise and be natural in the northern Russian, more precisely, the Vologda village, which allows the authors to poeticize their own " small homeland” with its way of life, primordial traditions, customs, folklore images and folk peasant language.
A distinctive feature, noticed by many researchers of the work of F. M. Dostoevsky, is the unusual speed of action in his novels. Each phrase in Dostoevsky's writings seems to begin with the word "suddenly", every moment can become a turning point, change everything, end in disaster. In Crime and Punishment, time rushes by like a hurricane, a broad picture of the life of Russia is shown, while in fact the events of two weeks take place in several St.
The spatial and temporal characteristics of a work of art, as a rule, differ significantly from those familiar qualities that we encounter in everyday life or get acquainted with in physics lessons. The space of a work of art can be curved and closed in on itself, it can be limited, have an end, and the individual parts of which it consists have, as we have already seen, different properties. Three dimensions - length, width and depth - are broken and confused in such a way that they combine the incompatible in the real world. Sometimes space can be upside down in relation to reality or constantly change its properties - it stretches, shrinks, distorts proportions separate parts and so on.
The properties of special, as literary theorists call it, artistic time are also unpredictable; sometimes it may seem that it, as in L. Carroll's fairy tale "Alice in Wonderland", "has gone crazy." A story or story without any difficulty can take us back to the time of Vladimir the Red Sun, and to the 21st century. Together with the heroes of an adventure novel, we can travel around the world or, by the will of a science fiction writer, visit the mysterious Solaris.
Drama has the most stringent laws: within one stage episode, the time needed to depict the action is equal to the time that is depicted. No wonder the rules of the theoreticians of classicism touched, first of all, dramaturgy. The desire to give the stage work more credibility and integrity gave rise to the famous law of three unities: the duration of the play should not exceed one day, the space was limited to a single place of action, and the action itself was concentrated around one hero. In modern drama, the movement of heroes in space and time is not limited, and only from the change of scenery (the viewer), the author's remarks (the reader), from the replicas of the heroes do we learn about the changes that have occurred between acts.
The freest travel in time and space is the privilege of lyrics. “The worlds are flying. Years fly by” (A. A. Blok), “Centuries flow in moments” (A. Bely); “And time away, and space away” (A. A. Akhmatova), and the poet is free, looking out the window, to ask: “What, dear, do we have a millennium in the yard?” (B. L. Pasternak). Epochs and worlds fit in a capacious poetic image. With one phrase, the poet is able to reshape space and time as he sees fit.
In other cases, artistic time requires greater certainty and concreteness ( historical novel, biographical narrative, memoirs, artistic and journalistic essay). One of the significant phenomena of modern Soviet literature is the so-called military prose(works by Yu. V. Bondarev, V. V. Bykov, G. Ya. Baklanov, N. D. Kondratiev, V. O. Bogomolov, I. F. Stadnyuk, V. V. Karpov, etc.), in many respects autobiographical, refers to the time of the Great Patriotic War in order to recreate the feat Soviet people, who defeated fascism, to put universal human moral, social, psychological, philosophical problems that are important for us today on the material that excites the modern reader. Therefore, even the limitation of artistic time (as well as space) makes it possible to expand the possibilities of art in the knowledge and understanding of life.
The categories of time and space are the determining factor in the existence of the world: through the awareness of space-time coordinates, a person determines his place in it. The same principle is transferred to the artistic space of literature - writers, voluntarily or involuntarily, place their heroes in a reality created in a certain way. Literary critics, in turn, seek to understand how the categories of space and time are revealed in works.
Bakhtin: chronotope
Until the 20th century, the spatio-temporal organization of a work was not perceived as a problem in literary criticism. But already in the first half of the century, the most important studies in this area were written. They are associated with the name of the Russian scientist M. M. Bakhtin.
In the work "The Author and the Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (1924, published in 1979), the researcher introduces the concept of the hero's spatial form, speaking of the need to study spatial values, which are transgredient to the consciousness of the hero and his world, his cognitive and ethical attitude in the world and complete him from the outside, from the consciousness of another about him, the author-contemplator.
In the work “Forms of time and chronotope in the novel. Essays on historical poetics (1937-1938, publication 1975) Bakhtin makes a revolutionary discovery in the artistic understanding of the categories of time and space: the scientist develops a theory chronotope. The researcher borrowed the term from A. Einstein's theory of relativity. M. M. Bakhtin gives the concept the following definition: “We will call the essential interconnection of temporal and spatial relations artistically mastered in literature a chronotope (which means, literally, “time-space”).”
For a scientist, the idea of the inseparable connection between space and time is important. Chronotop Bakhtin understands it as a "formally-substantial category of literature". Time and space are correlated into a single concept of the chronotope and enter into relationships of interconnection and interdependence: "The signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time."
Time and space are correlated into a single concept of the chronotope and enter into relationships of interconnection and interdependence
The chronotope underlies the definition of the aesthetic unity of a work of art in relation to primary reality.
Researcher notes and connection genre forms of a work of art with a chronotope: the genre is, as it were, determined by the chronotope. The scientist presents the characteristics of various novel chronotopes.
Art, according to Bakhtin, is permeated chronotopic values. The following types of chronotope are distinguished in the work (in relation to the genre of the novel):
- Chronotop meetings , in which the "temporal shade" prevails and which "is distinguished by a high degree of emotional and value intensity"
- Chronotop roads , which has "a wider volume, but somewhat less emotional and value intensity"; the chronotope of the road connects the ranks of lives and destinies, concretizing social distancing, which are overcome within the chronotope of the road. The road becomes a metaphor for the passage of time
- Chronotop " Castle" , “which is saturated with time, moreover, in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past. The castle is the place of life of the rulers of the feudal era (hence, the historical figures of the past), traces of centuries and generations were deposited in it in a visible form.
- Chronotop " living room» , where “meetings take place (no longer having the former specifically random nature of meetings on the“ road ”or in the“ foreign world ”), plots of intrigue are created, denouements are often made, here, finally, and most importantly, dialogues take place that acquire exceptional significance in novel, the characters, "ideas" and "passions" of the characters are revealed.
- Chronotop " provincial town» , which is the "place of cyclic household time". With such a chronotope, there are no events, “but there are only repeated “occurrences”. Time is deprived here of a progressive historical course, it moves in narrow circles: the circle of the day, the circle of the week, the month, the circle of all life.<…>
Time here is eventless and therefore seems to have almost stopped. There is no "meeting" or "parting". It's thick, sticky, space-crawling time."
- Chronotop threshold filled with chronotope crisis and life fracture. Chronotop threshold always "metaphorical and symbolic<…>Time in this chronotope, in essence, is an instant, as if having no duration and falling out of the normal flow of biographical time.
M. M. Bakhtin notes that each type of chronotope can include an unlimited number of small chronotopes. Key meanings of the considered chronotopes: plot("They are the organizational centers of the main plot events of the novel") and pictorial(“The chronotope provides an essential basis for showing and depicting events”).
Bakhtin's concept has become a key one in understanding spatio-temporal connections and relationships. However, until now, its comprehension does not always find a proper solution among researchers: often the “chronotope” is simply replaced by the concept of space-time relations in the text, without implying either the interdependence of the components of time and space, or the belonging of the analyzed text to the genre of the novel. The use of the designated term in the understanding of Bakhtin is incorrect in relation to non-novel genres.
Likhachev: organization of the action of the work
Sections on space and time appear in the work of D. S. Likhachev (chapters "Poetics of Artistic Time" and "Poetics of Artistic Space" in the study "Poetics of Old Russian Literature", 1987). In the chapter "The Poetics of Artistic Time" Likhachev examines artistic time verbal work, noting the significance of the category of time in the perception of the structure of the world.
It is the author who decides whether to slow down or speed up time in his work, whether to stop it, “turn it off” from the work.
In the understanding of the researcher, artistic time is "a phenomenon of the very artistic fabric of a literary work, subordinating both grammatical time and its philosophical understanding by the writer to its artistic tasks."
Paying attention to the subjectivity of human perception of time, the scientist notes that a work of art makes subjectivity one of the forms of depicting reality, at the same time using objective time: unity, emphasizing differences, leading the story primarily in the subjective aspect of time. The scientist notices that to these two forms (subjective and objective) of time a third one can be added: the depicted time of the reader.
A significant role in the work is played by the author's time, which can be either motionless, “as if concentrated at one point”, or mobile, striving to move independently, to develop its own storyline.
Time in a work of art is perceived through a causal or psychological, associative relationship.
Likhachev considers the question of “the unity of the temporal flow in a work with several storylines” to be the most difficult issue in the study of artistic time.
The researcher notes that time can be “open”, included in a “wider flow of time” and “closed”, closed in itself, “occurring only within the plot, not connected with events occurring outside the work, with historical time”. It is the author who decides whether to slow down or speed up time in his work, whether to stop it, “turn it off” from the work. The scientist sees a close connection between the problem of time and the problem of the timeless and "eternal".
The ideas of slowing down and speeding up time are already in many respects correlated with the theory of the modeling structure of the world put forward later. Analyzing the poetics of artistic space, Likhachev notes that the world of a work of art is not autonomous and depends on reality, artistically transformed. The writer, being the creator of his work, creates a certain space, which can be both large and narrow, both real and unreal, imaginary. Whatever the space, it has certain properties and organizes the action of the work. This property of the organization of action is “especially important for literature and folklore”: it is this property that determines the connection with artistic time.
Lotman: an artistic model of the world
Yu. M. Lotman emphasizes the conventionality of the space of art. In a number of works (" art space in Gogol's prose", "The plot space of the Russian novel XIX centuries"), the scientist notes that the language of "spatial relations" refers to the primary ones.
Artistic space is a model of the author's world, which is expressed through the language of spatial representations
Lotman sees a clear relationship between space and genre: “switching to another genre changes the “platform” of artistic space.” The space in a work of art largely determines the connections of the picture of the world (temporal, ethical, social, etc.): art model"space" of the world sometimes metaphorically assumes the expression of completely non-spatial relations in the modeling structure of the world. Thus, the scientist concludes that artistic space is a model of the author's world, which is expressed through the language of spatial representations, and “artistic space is not a passive receptacle for characters and plot episodes. Correlating it with the actors and the general model of the world created by the literary text convinces us that the language of artistic space is not a hollow vessel, but one of the components common language spoken by the work of art.
This is how the comprehension of the most important categories - time and space - in literary criticism developed. Their study allows you to discover new meanings in the works and find solutions to the problem. genre definition. Through studies of space and time, scholars can take a different look at the history of literature.
Therefore, the analysis of the work through consideration of the spatio-temporal level of the artistic whole can be found in a number of works by modern researchers. Works on time and space can be found in V.G. Shchukin (“On the Philological Image of the World”), Y. Karyakin (“Dostoevsky and the Eve of the 21st Century”), N.K. H. Torop, I. P. Nikitina (“Artistic space as a subject of philosophical and aesthetic analysis”) and many, many others. ■
Evgenia Guruleva
Any literary work in one way or another reproduces the real world - both material and ideal. The natural forms of existence of this world are time and space. However, the world of the work is always to some extent conditional, and, of course, time and space are also conditional.
A significant relationship between temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, M.M. Bakhtin suggested calling it a chronotope. The chronotope determines the artistic unity of a literary work in its relation to reality. All temporal-spatial definitions in art and literature are inseparable from each other and are always emotionally-value-based. Abstract thinking can, of course, think of time and space in their separateness and be distracted from their emotional and valuable moment. But living artistic contemplation (which, of course, is also full of thought, but not abstract) does not separate anything and is not distracted from anything. It captures the chronotope in all its integrity and completeness.
Compared with other arts, literature deals with time and space most freely (only cinema can compete with it). The "immateriality of images" gives literature the ability to instantly move from one space and time to another. For example, events can be depicted that take place simultaneously in different places (for example, Homer's Odyssey describes the travels of the protagonist and events in Ithaca). With regard to time switching, the most simple form- the hero's memory of the past (for example, the famous "Oblomov's Dream").
Another property of literary time and space is their discreteness (i.e. discontinuity). So, literature can not reproduce the entire time stream, but choose the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps (for example, the introduction to Pushkin's poem " Bronze Horseman": "On the shore desert waves He stood, full of great thoughts, And looked into the distance.<…>A hundred years have passed, and the young city ... From the darkness of the forests, from the swamp of blat, Ascended magnificently, proudly. The discreteness of space is manifested in the fact that it is usually not described in detail, but only indicated with the help of individual details that are most significant for the author (for example, in "Grammar of Love" Bunin does not fully describe the hall in Khvoshchinsky's house, but only mentions its large size, windows , facing west and north, “clumsy” furniture, “beautiful slides” in the piers, dry bees on the floor, but most importantly - a “deity without glasses”, where there was an image “in a silver riza” and on it “wedding candles in pale -green bows). When we learn that the wedding candles were bought by Khvoshchinsky after Lusha's death, this emphasis becomes clear. There may also be a change in spatial and temporal coordinates at the same time (in Goncharov's novel The Cliff, the transfer of action from St. Petersburg to Malinovka, to the Volga, makes the description of the road unnecessary).
The nature of the conventionality of time and space depends to a great extent on the type of literature. The maximum conventionality in the lyrics, because. it is distinguished by the greatest expression and is focused on the inner world of the lyrical subject. The conditionality of time and space in drama is connected with the possibilities of staging (hence the famous rule of 3 unities). In the epic, the fragmentation of time and space, transitions from one time to another, spatial movements are carried out easily and freely thanks to the figure of the narrator - an intermediary between the depicted life and the reader (for example, an intermediary can “suspend” time during reasoning, descriptions - see the above example about the hall in Khvoshchinsky's house; of course, describing the room, Bunin somewhat "slowed down" the passage of time).
By features artistic convention time and space in literature can be divided into abstract (one that can be understood as "everywhere"/"always") and concrete. Thus, the space of Naples in The Gentleman from San Francisco is abstract (it has no characteristic features important for the narrative, and is not comprehended, and therefore, despite the abundance of toponyms, it can be understood as "everywhere"). The concrete space actively influences the essence of what is depicted (for example, in Goncharov's "Cliff" the image of Malinovka was created, which is described up to the smallest details, and the latter, of course, not only influence what is happening, but also symbolize psychological condition heroes: for example, the cliff itself points to the "fall" of Vera, and before her - grandmother, to Raisky's feverish passion for Vera, etc.). The corresponding properties of time are usually associated with the type of space: a specific space is combined with a specific time (for example, in Woe from Wit, Moscow, with its realities, could not belong to any other time except the beginning of the 19th century) and vice versa. The forms of concretization of artistic time are most often the "binding" of the action to historical landmarks, realities and the designation of cyclic time: the season, the day.
In literature, space and time are not given to us in pure form. We judge space by the objects that fill it, and we judge time by the processes taking place in it. To analyze a work, it is important to at least approximately determine the fullness, saturation of space and time, because this indicator often characterizes the style of the work. For example, Gogol's space is usually filled to the maximum with some objects (for example, a textbook description of the interior in Sobakevich's house). The intensity of artistic time is expressed in its saturation with events. Cervantes had an extremely busy time in Don Quixote. The increased saturation of artistic space, as a rule, is combined with a reduced intensity of time and vice versa (cf. the examples given above: "Dead Souls" and "Don Quixote").
The depicted time and the time of the image (i.e. real (plot) and artistic time) rarely coincide. Usually artistic time is shorter than “real” time (see the above example about the omission of the description of the road from St. Petersburg to Malinovka in Goncharov’s “Cliff”), however, there is an important exception related to the depiction of psychological processes and the subjective time of the character. Experiences and thoughts flow faster than the speech stream moves, therefore, the time of the image is almost always longer than the subjective time (for example, the textbook episode from War and Peace with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who looked at the high, endless sky and comprehended the secrets of life). "Real time" can generally be equal to zero (for example, with all kinds of lengthy descriptions), such time can be called eventless. Event time is divided into plot time (describes ongoing events) and chronicle everyday time (a picture of stable life, repetitive actions and deeds is drawn (one of the most striking examples is the description of Oblomov's life at the beginning of Goncharov's novel of the same name)). The ratio of eventless, chronicle-everyday and event types of time determines the tempo organization of the artistic time of the work, which determines the nature of aesthetic perception, forms subjective reader time (“Dead Souls” gives the impression of a slow pace, and “Crime and Punishment” - fast, and therefore the novel is read Dostoevsky is often "in the same breath").
Completion and incompleteness of artistic time is of great importance. Often writers create in their works a closed time, which has an absolute beginning and end, which until the 19th century. considered a sign of art. However, the monotonous endings (return to the father's house, wedding or death) already seemed boring to Pushkin, therefore, from the 19th century. there is a struggle with them, but if in the novel it is quite simple to use the other end (as in the already mentioned “Cliff” many times), then the situation is more complicated with the drama. Only Chekhov managed to "get rid" of these ends ("The Cherry Orchard").
The historical development of spatio-temporal organization reveals a tendency towards complication and individualization. But the complexity, individual originality of artistic time and space does not exclude the existence of general, typological models - substantive forms that writers use as "ready-made". Such are the motifs of a house, a road, a horse, a crossroads, up and down, open space, and so on. This also includes the types of organization of artistic time: chronicle, adventurous, biographical, etc. It is for such spatio-temporal typological models that M.M. Bakhtin introduced the term chronotope.
MM. Bakhtin singles out, for example, the chronotope of the meeting; this chronotope is dominated by a temporal shade, and it is distinguished by a high degree of emotional and value intensity. The chronotope of the road associated with it has a wider volume, but somewhat less emotional and value intensity. Encounters in the novel usually take place on the "road". "Road" is the predominant place of chance meetings. On the road (“big road”), spatial and temporal paths intersect at one temporal and spatial point various people- representatives of all classes, states, religions, nationalities, ages. Here, those who are normally separated by social hierarchy and spatial distance can accidentally meet, any contrasts can arise here, various destinies can collide and intertwine. Here, spatial and temporal series are peculiarly combined. human destinies and lives, becoming more complicated and concretized by the social distances that are overcome here. This is the point of tying and the place where events take place. Here, time seems to flow into space and flows through it (forming roads).
TO late XVIII centuries in England, a new territory for the accomplishment of novel events is formed and consolidated in the so-called "Gothic" or "black" novel - "zbmok" (for the first time in this meaning in Horace Walpole - "Castle of Otranto"). The castle is full of time, moreover, the time of the historical past. The castle is the place of life of historical figures of the past; traces of centuries and generations were deposited in it in a visible form. Finally, legends and traditions enliven all corners of the castle and its environs with memories of past events. This creates a specific plot of the castle, deployed in Gothic novels.
In the novels of Stendhal and Balzac, an essentially new locality of the events of the novel appears - "living room-salon" (in the broad sense). Of course, it does not appear for the first time with them, but only with them does it acquire the fullness of its meaning as a place of intersection of the spatial and temporal series of the novel. From the point of view of the plot and composition, meetings take place here (no longer having the former specifically random nature of meetings on the “road” or in the “foreign world”), plots of intrigue are created, denouements are often made, here, finally, and most importantly, dialogues take place, acquiring exceptional significance in the novel, the characters, “ideas” and “passions” of the characters are revealed (cf. Salon Scherer in “War and Peace” - A.S.).
In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the setting is a "provincial town". A provincial philistine town with its musty way of life is an extremely common place for the accomplishment of novel events in the 19th century. This town has several varieties, including a very important one - idyllic (among the regionalists). We will touch only on the Flaubert variety (created, however, not by Flaubert). Such a town is a place of cyclic household time. There are no events here, but only repeated "occurrences". Time is deprived here of a progressive historical course, it moves in narrow circles: the circle of the day, the circle of the week, the month, the circle of all life. A day is never a day, a year is never a year, life is not life. Day after day, the same everyday actions, the same topics of conversation, the same words, etc. are repeated. This is an ordinary everyday cyclical household time. It is familiar to us in different variations, both according to Gogol, and according to Turgenev, according to Shchedrin, Chekhov. Time here is eventless and therefore seems to have almost stopped. There is no "meeting" or "parting". This is a thick, sticky, creeping time in space. Therefore, it cannot be the main tense of the novel. It is used by novelists as a side time, intertwined with or interrupted by other non-cyclical time series, and often serves as a contrasting backdrop for eventful and energetic time series.
Let us also call here such a chronotope imbued with high emotional and value intensity as a threshold; it can also be combined with the motive of the meeting, but its most significant completion is the chronotope of the crisis and the turning point in life. In literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic, sometimes in an open, but more often in an implicit form. For Dostoevsky, for example, the threshold and the adjacent chronotopes of stairs, front and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of streets and squares that continue them, are the main places of action in his works, places where events of crises, falls, resurrections, renewals, insights, decisions take place. that determine the whole life of a person (for example, in "Crime and Punishment" - A.S.). Time in this chronotope, in essence, is an instant, as if having no duration and falling out of the normal flow of biographical time.
Unlike Dostoevsky, in the work of L. N. Tolstoy, the main chronotope is biographical time, flowing in the inner spaces noble houses and estates. Of course, in the works of Tolstoy there are crises, and falls, and renewals, and resurrections, but they are not instantaneous and do not fall out of the flow of biographical time, but are firmly soldered into it. For example, the renewal of Pierre Bezukhov was long and gradual, quite biographical. Tolstoy did not value the moment, did not seek to fill it with something significant and decisive, the word "suddenly" is rare in him and never introduces any significant event.
In the nature of chronotopes M.M. Bakhtin saw the embodiment of various value systems, as well as types of thinking about the world. So, since ancient times, two main concepts of time have been reflected in literature: cyclic and linear. The first was earlier and relied on natural cyclical processes in nature. Such a cyclic concept is reflected, for example, in Russian folklore. Christianity of the Middle Ages had its own temporal concept: linear-finalistic. It was based on the movement in time of human existence from birth to death, while death was considered as a result, a transition to some kind of stable existence: to salvation or death. Since the Renaissance, culture has been dominated by a linear concept of time associated with the concept of progress. Also, works periodically appear in literature that reflect the atemporal concept of time. These are various kinds of pastorals, idylls, utopias, etc. The world in these works does not need changes, and therefore does not need time (the far-fetchedness, the implausibility of such a flow of time is shown in his anti-utopia “We” by E. Zamyatin). On the culture and literature of the 20th century. the natural science concepts of time and space associated with the theory of relativity had a significant impact. Most fruitfully mastered new ideas about time and space Science fiction, which at that time enters the sphere of "high" literature, putting deep philosophical and moral issues(for example, "It's hard to be a god" by the Strugatskys).
Artistic time and art space the most important characteristics artistic image, providing a holistic perception artistic reality and organizing the composition of the work. The art of the word belongs to the group of dynamic, temporal arts (in contrast to the plastic, spatial arts). But the literary and poetic image, formally unfolding in time (as a sequence of text), with its content reproduces the spatio-temporal picture of the world, moreover, in its symbolic-ideological, value aspect. Such traditional spatial landmarks as “house” (an image of a closed space), “space” (an image of an open space), “threshold”, “window”, “door” (the border between one and the other) have long been the point of application of comprehending forces in literary and artistic (and more broadly cultural) models of the world (the symbolic richness of such spaces, images is obvious, such as the house of Gogol's "old-world landowners" or Raskolnikov's coffin-like room in Crime and Punishment, 1866, F.M. Dostoevsky, like a steppe in "Taras Bulba", 1835, N.V. Gogol or in the story of the same name by A.P. Chekhov). symbolic and artistic chronology(movement from spring and summer heyday to autumn sadness, characteristic of the world of Turgenev's prose). In general, the ancient types of value situations, realized in space-time images (chronotope, according to M.M. Bakhtin), are “idyllic time” in the father’s house, “adventurous time” of trials in a foreign land, “mystery time” of descent into the underworld of disasters - so or otherwise stored in a reduced form classical literature new time and modern literature(“station” or “airport” as places of decisive meetings and clearings, choice of path, sudden recognition, etc. correspond to the old “crossroads” or roadside tavern; “laz” - to the former “threshold” as a ritual crossing topos).
In view of the iconic, spiritual, symbolic nature of the art of the word spatial and temporal coordinates of literary reality are not fully concretized, discontinuous and conditional (the fundamental unrepresentability of spaces, images and quantities in mythological, grotesque and fantastic works; uneven course of plot time, its delays at the points of descriptions, retreats, parallel flow in different storylines). However, here the temporary nature makes itself felt. literary image, noted by G.E. Lessing in "Laocoon" (1766), - the convention in the transfer of space is felt weaker and is realized only when trying to translate literary works into the language of other arts; meanwhile, conventionality in the transfer of time, the dialectics of the discrepancy between the time of the narration and the time of the events depicted, compositional time with the plot are being mastered literary process as an obvious and meaningful contradiction.
Archaic, oral and generally early literature is sensitive to the type of temporal confinement, orientation in the collective or historical account of time (as in the traditional system literary genera lyric is “present”, and epic is “long gone”, qualitatively separated from the life time of the performer and listeners). The age of myth for its keeper and narrator is not a thing of the past; the mythological narrative ends with the correlation of events with the present composition of the world or its future fate (the myth of Pandora's box, of the chained Prometheus, who will someday be released). The time of a fairy tale is a deliberately conditional past, a fictitious time (and space) of unheard-of things; ironic ending (“and I was there, drinking honey-beer”) often emphasizes that there is no way out of the time of a fairy tale during its rendering (on this basis, one can conclude that more late origin fairy tales versus myths).
As the archaic, ritual models of the world, marked by features of naive realism (observance of the unities of time and place in ancient drama with its cult and mythological origins) disintegrate, a degree of conventionality grows in the space-time representations that characterize literary consciousness. In an epic or fairy tale, the tempo of the narration could not yet sharply outstrip the tempo of the events depicted; an epic or fairy-tale action could not unfold simultaneously (“in the meantime”) on two or more sites; it was strictly linear and, in this respect, remained faithful to empiricism; the epic narrator did not have a field of vision expanded in comparison with the usual human horizon; at each moment he was in one and only one point of the plot space. "Copernican coup" produced by the modern European novel in spatio-temporal organization of narrative genres, consisted in the fact that the author, along with the right to unconventional and frank fiction, acquired the right to dispose of novel time as its initiator and creator. When fiction removes the mask of a real event, and the writer openly breaks with the role of a rhapsodist or chronicler, then there is no need for a naive-empirical concept of event time. Temporal coverage can now be arbitrarily wide, the pace of narration can be arbitrarily uneven, parallel “theatres of action”, reversal of time and exits to the future known to the narrator are acceptable and functionally important (for purposes of analysis, explanation or entertainment). The boundaries between the compressed author's presentation of events, which speeds up the flow of plot time, the description, which stops its course for the sake of an overview of space, and dramatized episodes, become much sharper and are realized. compositional time which "keeps up" with the plot time. Accordingly, the difference between the unfixed (“omnipresent”) and the spatially localized (“witness”) position of the narrator, which is characteristic mainly of “dramatic” episodes, is felt more sharply.
If in a short story of a novelistic type (a classic example is “ Queen of Spades”, 1833, A.S. Pushkin) these moments of the new artistic time and artistic space are still brought to a balanced unity and are in complete submission to the author-narrator, who talks with the reader, as it were, “on the other side” of the fictional space-time, then in In the "big" novel of the 19th century, such unity fluctuates noticeably under the influence of emerging centrifugal forces. These “forces” are the discovery of everyday time and habitable space (in the novels of O. Balzac, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov) in connection with the concept of the social environment that forms the human character, as well as the discovery of a multi-subject narrative and transferring the center of space-time coordinates to the inner world of the characters in connection with the development psychological analysis. When long-term organic processes come into the narrator's field of vision, the author runs the risk of facing the impossible task of reproducing life "from minute to minute." The way out was to transfer the sum of everyday circumstances that repeatedly affect a person beyond the time of action (exposition in Father Goriot, 1834-35; Oblomov’s dream is a lengthy digression in Goncharov’s novel) or distribution throughout calendar plan works of episodes shrouded in the course of everyday life (in the novels of Turgenev, in the "peaceful" chapters of the epic of L.N. Tolstoy). Such an imitation of the “river of life” itself with particular persistence requires the narrator to have a guiding supra-event presence. But, on the other hand, the opposite, in essence, process of “self-elimination” of the author-narrator is already beginning: the space of dramatic episodes is increasingly organized from the “observation position” of one of the characters, events are described synchronously, as they are played out before the eyes of the participant. It is also significant that chronicle-everyday time, in contrast to the event-based (in the source - adventure) does not have an unconditional beginning and an unconditional end ("life goes on").
In an effort to resolve these contradictions, Chekhov, in accordance with his general idea of the course of life (the time of everyday life is the decisive tragic time of human existence), merged eventful time with everyday time to an indistinguishable unity: episodes that happened once are presented in a grammatical imperfect - as repeatedly repeated everyday scenes that fill a whole segment of everyday life. (This folding of a large “piece” of plot time into a single episode, which simultaneously serves as both a summary story about the past stage and an illustration to it, a “test” taken from everyday life, is one of the main secrets of Chekhov’s famous brevity.) From the crossroads In the classic novel of the mid-19th century, the path opposite to Chekhov's was paved by Dostoevsky, who concentrated the plot within the boundaries of a critical, crisis time of decisive trials, measured in a few days and hours. The chronicle gradualness here is actually depreciated in the name of the decisive disclosure of the characters in their fateful moments. In Dostoevsky’s intense turning point corresponds to the space illuminated in the form of a stage, extremely involved in events, measured by the steps of the characters - the “threshold” (doors, stairs, corridors, lanes, where you can’t miss each other), “accidental shelter” (tavern, compartment), “ hall for a gathering, ”corresponding to situations of crime (crossing), confession, public trial. At the same time, the spiritual coordinates of space and time embrace the human universe in his novels (the ancient golden age, French revolution, "quadrillions" of cosmic years and versts), and these instantaneous mental slices of world existence prompt us to compare the world of Dostoevsky with the world of the "Divine Comedy" (1307-21) of Dante and "Faust" (1808-31) of I.V. Goethe.
In the spatio-temporal organization of a work of literature of the 20th century, the following trends and features can be noted:
- The symbolic plane of the realistic spatio-temporal panorama is accentuated, which, in particular, is reflected in the inclination towards nameless or fictitious topography: City, instead of Kyiv, by M.A. Bulgakov; Yoknapatofa County in the south of the USA, created by the imagination of W. Faulkner; the generalized "Latin American" country of Macondo in the national epic of the Colombian G. Garcia Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967). However, it is important that artistic time and artistic space in all these cases require real historical and geographical identification, or at least convergence, without which the work is incomprehensible;
- The closed artistic time of a fairy tale or parable is often used, which is excluded from the historical account, which often corresponds to the uncertainty of the scene (“The Trial”, 1915, F. Kafka; “The Plague”, 1947, A. Camus; “Watt”, 1953, S. Beckett );
- A remarkable milestone in modern literary development is the appeal to the memory of a character as an internal space for the unfolding of events; the intermittent, reverse and other course of plot time is motivated not by the author's initiative, but by the psychology of recall (this takes place not only in M. Proust or W. Wolf, but also in writers of a more traditional realistic plan, for example, in H. Böll, but in modern Russian literature by V.V. Bykov, Yu.V. Trifonov). Such a setting of the hero's consciousness makes it possible to compress the actual time of action to a few days and hours, while the time and space of an entire human life can be projected onto the screen of recollection;
- Modern literature has not lost a hero moving in an objective earthly expanse, in a multifaceted epic space of collective historical destinies - what are the heroes " Quiet Don"(1928-40) M.A. Sholokhov," Life of Klim Samgin ", 1927-36, M. Gorky.
- The “hero” of a monumental narrative can become the very historical time in its decisive "nodes", subordinating the fate of the heroes as private moments in an avalanche of events (A.I. Solzhenitsyn's epic "The Red Wheel", 1969-90).
Time and space (chronotope) serve as constructive principles for the organization of a literary work. Since the artistic world in a work is conditional, to the extent that time and space in it are also conditional . In literature, the immateriality of images, discovered by Lessing, gives them, i.e. images, the right to move instantly from one space and time to another. In the work, the author can depict events that occur simultaneously both in different places and in different time, with one caveat: "In the meantime ..." or "And on the other side of the city ...".
In Russia, the problems of formal "spatiality" in art, artistic time and artistic space and their solidity in literature, as well as the forms of time, chronotope in the novel, individual images space, the influence of rhythm on space and time, etc. were consistently dealt with by P.A. Florensky, M.M. Bakhtin, Yu.M. Lotman, V.N. Toporov, a group of scientists from Leningrad, Novosibirsk, etc.
Time in a work of art - the duration, sequence and correlation of its events, based on their causal, linear or associative relationship. The time in the text has clearly defined or rather blurred boundaries, which may or, on the contrary, not be indicated in the work in relation to the historical time or the time set conditionally by the author.
A comparison of real time and artistic time reveals their differences. The topological properties of real time in the macrocosm are one-dimensionality, continuity, irreversibility, orderliness. In artistic time, all these properties are transformed. It may be multidimensional. Two axes can appear in the text - the axis of storytelling and the axis of the events described. This makes temporal shifts possible. Not characteristic of artistic time is also one-pointedness, irreversibility: the text often violates the real sequence of events. Therefore, artistic time multidirectional And reversible . One of the techniques is retrospection, an appeal to the events of the past. In relation to the time depicted in a literary work, researchers use the term discreteness , since literature is able not to reproduce the entire flow of time, but to select the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps with verbal formulas, such as “Spring has come again ...”, or as it is done in one of the works of I.S. Turgenev: “Lavretsky spent the winter in Moscow, and in the spring of the following year the news reached him that Liza had cut her hair.<…>". The selection of episodes is determined by the aesthetic intentions of the author, hence the possibility of compressing or expanding plot time.
The nature of the conventionality of time and space depends from the type of literature.
Their maximum manifestation is found in lyrics
, where the image of space may be completely absent (A.A. Akhmatova “You are my letter, dear, do not crumple ...”), manifest allegorically through other images (A.S. Pushkin “The Prophet”,
M.Yu. Lermontov "Sail"), open up in specific spaces, realities surrounding the hero (for example, a typically Russian landscape in S.A. Yesenin's poem "White Birch"), or in a certain way is built through oppositions that are significant for not only romance: civilization and nature, “crowd” and “I” (I.A. Brodsky “March is coming. I serve again ...”). With the predominance of the grammatical present in the lyrics, which actively interacts with the future and the past (A.A. Akhmatova “The Devil did not betray. I managed everything ...”), the category of tense can become philosophical leitmotif poems (F.I. Tyutchev “Rolling down the mountain, the stone lay down in the valley ...”), is thought of as always existing (F.I. Tyutchev “Wave and Thought”) or momentary and instantaneous (I.F. Annensky “The Longing of Transience” ) - possess abstractness
.
Conditional forms of existence real world– time and space – seek to preserve some general properties in drama
. Explaining the functioning of these forms in this kind of literature, V.E. Khalizev in a monograph on drama comes to the conclusion: “Whatever significant role in dramatic works no matter how fragmented the depicted action is, no matter how the aloud statements of the characters obey the logic of their inner speech, the drama is committed to pictures closed in space and time ”(Khalizev, V.E. Drama as a kind of literature / V.E. Khalizev. - M., 1986. - S. 46.). IN epic
kind of literature fragmentation of time and space, their transitions from one state to another become possible thanks to the narrator - the mediator between the depicted life and readers. The narrator and storytellers can "compress", "stretch" and "stop" time in numerous descriptions and reasoning. Something similar happens in the works of I. Goncharov, N. Gogol,
G. Fielding.
In a work of art are related different aspects artistic time: story time and plot time, author's time and subjective time of the characters. It presents different manifestations (forms) of time - everyday and historical time, personal time and social time. The focus of the writer's attention can be the image of time itself, associated with the motive of movement, development, becoming, with the opposition of the passing and the eternal.
Literary works are permeated with temporal and spatial representations, infinitely diverse and deeply meaningful. Here are images of time biographical (childhood, youth, maturity, old age), historical (major events in the life of society), space (the idea of eternity and universal history), calendar (change of seasons, weekdays and holidays), daily (day and night, morning and evening), as well as the idea of movement and stillness, of the correlation of the past, present and future.
IN artistic text time is not only eventful, but also conceptual: the time stream as a whole and its individual segments are divided, evaluated, comprehended by the author, narrator or characters.
The conceptualization of time manifests itself:
1) in the assessments and comments of the narrator or character;
2) in the use of paths that characterize different signs time;
3) in the subjective perception and division of the temporal flow in accordance with the reference point adopted in the narrative;
4) in contrasting different time plans and aspects of time in the structure of the text.
art space text is the spatial organization of its events, a system of spatial images inextricably linked with the temporal organization of the work.
The space modeled in the text can be open And closed . For example, the opposition of these two types of space in the poem by A.S. Pushkin "The Prisoner". Space can be represented in text as expanding or tapering in relation to the character.
According to the degree of generalization spatial characteristics distinguish concrete space and space abstract (not linked to specific local indicators). An abstract is such an artistic space that can be perceived as universal, without a pronounced characteristic. This is a form of recreating the universal content, extended to the entire "human race", manifested in the genres of parables, fables, fairy tales, as well as in works of utopian or fantastic perception of the world and special genre modifications- dystopias. So, it does not have a significant impact on the characters and behavior of the characters, on the essence of the conflict, the space in the ballads of V. Zhukovsky, F. Schiller, short stories by E. Poe, and literature of modernism is not subject to the author's understanding.
The specific artistic space in the work actively influences the essence of what is depicted. In particular, Moscow in the comedy by A.S. Griboyedov "Woe from Wit", Zamoskvorechye in the dramas of A.N. Ostrovsky and novels by I.S. Shmeleva, Paris in the works of O. de Balzac are artistic images, since they are not only toponyms and urban realities depicted in the works. Here they are a specific artistic space that develops in the works a common psychological picture Moscow nobility; recreating christian world order; revealing different sides life inhabitants of European cities; definite way of life existence is a way of being. Sensually perceived (A.A. Potebnya) space acts as "noble nests" sign of style novels by I. Turgenev, generalized ideas about a provincial Russian city are developed in the prose of A. Chekhov. Symbolization space, underlined by a fictitious toponym, retained the national and historical component in prose
M. Saltykov-Shchedrin (“History of one city”), A. Platonov (“City of Gradov”).
The analysis of spatial relations in a work of art involves:
2) identifying the nature of these positions (dynamic - static) in their connection from a temporal point of view;
3) determination of the main spatial characteristics of the work (the scene and its change, the movement of the character, the type of space, etc.);
4) consideration of the main spatial images of the work;
5) characteristics of speech means expressing spatial relationships.
Awareness of the relationship of space-time made it possible to single out the category of chronotope (M. Bakhtin), reflecting their unity. In the monograph Questions of Literature and Aesthetics, M. Bakhtin wrote the following about the synthesis of space and time: “In the literary and artistic chronotope, there is a fusion of spatial and temporal signs in a meaningful and concrete whole. Time here thickens, condenses, becomes artistically visible; space is intensified, drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Examples of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time. This intersection of rows and mergers will characterize the artistic chronotope.<…>The chronotope as a formally meaningful category determines (to a large extent) the image of a person in literature; this image is always essentially chronotopic.
Let us consider the ways of expressing spatial relations in I. Bunin's story "Easy breathing" (the experience of consideration by N.A. Nikolina).
In the structure of the narrative, three main spatial points of view are distinguished - the narrator, Olya Meshcherskaya and cool lady. All points of view in the text are brought closer to each other by the repetition of lexemes. cold, fresh and derivatives from them. Their correlation creates an oxymoron way of life-death. The alternation of heterogeneous time periods is reflected in a change in spatial characteristics and a change in the scene of action.
Cemetery - gymnasium garden - cathedral street– boss’s office – station – garden – glass porch – cathedral street - cemetery - gymnasium garden . Repetitions organize the beginning and end of the work, form a ring composition of the plot. At the same time, the elements of this series enter into antonymic relations. First of all, open space and closed space are opposed. Spatial images are also opposed to each other: the grave, the cross on it, the cemetery (they develop the motive of death) - the spring wind (an image traditionally associated with the motives of will, life, open space).
Bunin uses the technique of comparing narrowing and expanding spaces. Tragic events in the life of the heroine are connected with the space narrowing around her (see, for example: ... a Cossack officer, ugly and of a plebeian appearance ... shot her on the platform of the station, among a large crowd of people ...). The through images of the story, which dominate in the text - images of the wind and light breathing - are associated with the expanding (to infinity in the finale) space ( now this easy breath scattered again in the world, in this cloudy world, in this cold spring wind).
