Baroque (from Italian barosso, French baroque - strange, wrong) - a literary style in Europe at the end of the 16th, 17th and part of the 18th centuries. The term "baroque" was transferred to literary criticism from art history due to the general similarity in the styles of the visual arts and literature of that era. It is believed that Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to use the term "baroque" in relation to literature. This artistic direction was common to the vast majority of European literatures. The Baroque replaced the Renaissance, but was not its objection. Moving away from the notions inherent in the Renaissance culture about the clear harmony and regularity of being and the unlimited possibilities of man, Baroque aesthetics was built on a collision between man and the outside world, between ideological and sensitive needs, mind and natural forces, which now personified the elements hostile to man.
For baroque as a style born of transitional eras, the destruction of the anthropocentric ideas of the Renaissance, the dominance of the divine principle in its artistic system, is characteristic. In baroque art one can feel the painful experience of personal loneliness, the “abandonment” of a person in association with the constant search for the “lost paradise”. In this quest, baroque artists constantly vacillate between asceticism and hedonism, heaven and earth, God and the devil. The characteristic features of this trend were also the revival of ancient culture and an attempt to combine it with the Christian religion. One of the dominant principles of baroque aesthetics was illusory.
The artist had to create an illusion with his works, the reader must literally be stunned, made to be surprised by introducing strange pictures, unusual scenes, accumulation of images, eloquence of heroes into the work. Baroque poetics is characterized by the unification of religiosity and secularism within one work, the presence of Christian and ancient characters, the continuation and objection to the traditions of the Renaissance. One of the main features of baroque culture is also the synthesis of different types and genres of creativity.
An important artistic tool in Baroque literature is a metaphor, which is the basis for expressing all the phenomena of the world and contributes to its knowledge. In the text of a Baroque work, there is a gradual transition from decorations and details to emblems, from emblems to allegories, from allegories to symbols. This process is combined with the vision of the world as a metamorphosis: the poet must penetrate the secrets of the continuous changes of life. The hero of baroque works is for the most part a bright personality with a developed strong-willed and even more developed rational principle, artistically gifted and very often noble in his actions.
The Baroque style absorbed philosophical and moral and ethical ideas about the world around and the place of the human person in it. Among the most prominent writers of the European Baroque are the Spanish playwright P. Calderon, the Italian poets Marino and Tasso, the English poet D. Donne, the French novelist O. D'urfe and some others. Baroque traditions found further development in European literatures of the 19th-20th centuries. In the XX century. the neo-baroque literary movement appeared, which is associated with the avant-garde literature of the early 20th century. and postmodern at the end of the 20th century.
The emergence of the Baroque was determined by a new worldview, the crisis of the Renaissance worldview, the rejection of its great idea of a harmonious and grandiose universal personality. By virtue of this alone, the emergence of the Baroque could not be associated only with the forms of religion or the nature of power. At the heart of the new ideas that determined the essence of the Baroque, there was an understanding of the complexity of the world, its deep inconsistency, the drama of being and the destiny of man, to some extent these ideas were also influenced by the strengthening of the religious quest of the era. The features of the Baroque determined the differences in the attitude and artistic activity of a number of its representatives, and within the existing artistic system, artistic movements that were very little similar to each other coexisted.
Baroque literature, like the whole movement, is characterized by a tendency towards complexity of forms and a desire for stateliness and pomp. In baroque literature, the disharmony of the world and man, their tragic confrontation, as well as internal struggles in the soul of an individual, are comprehended. Because of this, the vision of the world and man is most often pessimistic. At the same time, the baroque in general and its literature in particular are permeated by faith in the reality of the spiritual principle, the greatness of God.
Doubt about the strength and steadfastness of the world led to its rethinking, and in the culture of the Baroque, the medieval doctrine of the frailty of the world and man was intricately combined with the achievements of the new science. The idea of the infinity of space has led to a radical change in the vision of the picture of the world, which is acquiring grandiose cosmic proportions. In the baroque, the world is understood as eternal and majestic nature, and man - an insignificant grain of sand - is simultaneously merged with it and opposes it. He seems to dissolve in the world and becomes a particle, subject to the laws of the world and society. At the same time, a person in the representation of the figures of the Baroque is subject to unbridled passions that lead him to evil.
Exaggerated affectation, extreme exaltation of feelings, the desire to know the beyond, elements of fantasy - all this is intricately intertwined in the worldview and artistic practice. The world, in the understanding of the artists of the era, is torn and disordered, a person is just a miserable toy in the hands of inaccessible forces, his life is a chain of accidents and, by virtue of this, is chaos. Therefore, the world is in a state of instability, an immanent state of change is inherent in it, and its laws are difficult to grasp, if at all comprehensible. Baroque, as it were, splits the world: in it, next to the heavenly, the earthly coexists, next to the sublime, the lowly. This dynamic, rapidly changing world is characterized not only by inconstancy and transience, but also by the extraordinary intensity of being and the intensity of disturbing passions, the combination of polar phenomena - the grandeur of evil and the greatness of good. Baroque was also characterized by another feature - it sought to identify and generalize the patterns of being. In addition to recognizing the tragedy and inconsistency of life, representatives of the Baroque believed that there was some higher divine intelligence and that there was a hidden meaning in everything. Therefore, we must come to terms with the world order.
In this culture, and especially in literature, in addition to focusing on the problem of evil and the frailty of the world, there was also a desire to overcome the crisis, to comprehend the highest rationality, combining both good and evil principles. Thus, an attempt was made to remove contradictions, the place of man in the vast expanses of the universe was determined by the creative power of his thought and the possibility of a miracle. With such an approach, God appeared as the embodiment of the idea of justice, mercy and higher reason.
These features were more clearly manifested in literature and fine arts. Artistic creativity gravitated towards monumentality, it strongly expresses not only the tragic beginning, but also religious motives, themes of death and doom. Many artists were characterized by doubts, a sense of the frailty of being and skepticism. Arguments are characteristic that the afterlife is preferable to suffering on sinful earth. These features of literature (and of the entire baroque culture) for a long time made it possible to interpret this phenomenon as a manifestation of the counter-reformation, to associate it with the feudal-Catholic reaction. Now this interpretation has been decisively rejected.
At the same time, in the Baroque, and above all in literature, various stylistic trends clearly manifested themselves, and individual trends diverged quite far. The rethinking of the nature of baroque literature (as well as baroque culture itself) in the latest literary criticism has led to the fact that two main stylistic lines stand out in it. First of all, an aristocratic baroque appears in literature, in which a tendency to elitism, to create works for the “chosen ones” manifested itself. There was another, democratic, so-called. "grassroots" baroque, which reflected the emotional shock of the broad masses of the population in the era under consideration. It is in the grassroots baroque that life is depicted in all its tragic contradictions, this trend is characterized by rudeness and often playing with base plots and motives, which often led to parody.
The idea of the variability of the world gave rise to an extraordinary expressiveness of artistic means. A characteristic feature of baroque literature is the mixing of genres. Internal inconsistency determined the nature of the image of the world: its contrasts were revealed, instead of the Renaissance harmony, asymmetry appeared. Emphasized attentiveness to the mental structure of a person revealed such a trait as exaltation of feelings, emphasized expressiveness, a display of the deepest suffering. Baroque art and literature are characterized by extreme emotional tension. Another important technique is the dynamics that followed from the understanding of the variability of the world. Baroque literature knows no peace and static, the world and all its elements are constantly changing. For her, the baroque becomes typical of a suffering hero, in a state of disharmony, a martyr of duty or honor, suffering turns out to be almost his main property, there is a feeling of the futility of earthly struggle and a sense of doom: a person becomes a toy in the hands of forces unknown and inaccessible to his understanding.
In literature, one can often find an expression of fear of fate and the unknown, an anxious expectation of death, a feeling of omnipotence of malice and cruelty. Characteristic is the expression of the idea of the existence of a divine universal law, and human arbitrariness is ultimately restrained by its establishment. Because of this, the dramatic conflict also changes in comparison with the literature of the Renaissance and Mannerism: it is not so much the struggle of the hero with the outside world as an attempt to comprehend divine plans in a collision with life. The hero turns out to be reflective, turned to his own inner world.
Baroque literature insisted on freedom of expression in creativity, it is characterized by an unbridled flight of fantasy. Baroque strove for excess in everything. Because of this, there is an accentuated, deliberate complexity of images and language, combined with the desire for beauty and affectation of feelings. The Baroque language is extremely complicated, unusual and even deliberate techniques are used, pretentiousness and even pomposity appear. The feeling of the illusory nature of life and the unreliability of knowledge led to the widespread use of symbols, complex metaphor, decorativeness and theatricality, and determined the appearance of allegories. Baroque literature constantly confronts the real and the imaginary, the desired and the real, the problem of "to be or to seem" becomes one of the most important. The intensity of passions led to the fact that feelings pressed the mind in culture and art. Finally, baroque is characterized by a mixture of very different feelings and the appearance of irony, "there is no phenomenon either so serious or so sad that it cannot turn into a joke." A pessimistic worldview gave rise not only to irony, but also to caustic sarcasm, grotesque and hyperbole.
The desire to generalize the world pushed the boundaries of artistic creativity: baroque literature, like fine art, gravitated towards grandiose ensembles, at the same time, one can notice a tendency towards the process of “cultivating” the natural principle in man and nature itself, subordinating it to the will of the artist.
The typological features of the Baroque also determined the genre system, which was characterized by mobility. Characteristic is the advancement, on the one hand, of the novel and dramaturgy (especially the genre of tragedy), on the other hand, the cultivation of poetry that is complex in concept and language. Pastoral, tragicomedy, novel (heroic, comic, philosophical) become predominant. A special genre is burlesque - a comedy parodying high genres, roughly grounding the images, conflict and plot moves of these plays. In general, a “mosaic” picture of the world was built in all genres, and imagination played a special role in this picture, and incompatible phenomena were often combined, metaphorical and allegory were used.
Russian baroque as a literary movement
Russian baroque can also be considered as one of the manifestations of the influence of a new type. Russian baroque is not only individual works translated from Polish or coming from Ukraine and Belarus. This is primarily a literary trend that emerged under the influence of the Polish-Ukrainian-Belarusian influence. These are new ideological trends, new themes, new genres, new mental interests and, of course, a new style.
Any more or less significant influence from the outside is carried out only when their own, internal needs arise, which form this influence and include it in the historical and literary process. Baroque also came to us as a result of its rather powerful needs. Baroque, which in other countries replaced the Renaissance and was its antithesis, turned out to be close to the Renaissance in Russia in its historical and literary role. It was of an educational nature, in many ways contributed to the liberation of the individual and was associated with the process of secularization, in contrast to the West, where in some cases in the initial stages of its development, the baroque marked just the opposite - a return to churchliness.
And yet Russian baroque is not a Renaissance. It cannot equal the Western European Renaissance either in scale or in significance. Nor is it accidental that it was limited in time and socially - mainly by the tops of society. This is explained by the fact that preparations for the Russian Renaissance, which resulted in baroque forms, went on for too long. Separate Renaissance features began to appear in literature even before they could merge into a specific cultural movement. The Renaissance partially “lost” “its features on the way to its realization.
Therefore, the significance of the Russian Baroque as a kind of Renaissance - the transition to the literature of the new time - is limited to the role of the "last push" that brought Russian literature closer to the type of literature of the new time. The personal principle in literature, which before the Baroque manifested itself sporadically and in different spheres, in the Baroque is formed into a certain system.
The secularization of literature (i.e., its acquisition of a purely secular1 character), which took place throughout the entire 16th and the first half of the 17th century. and manifested in different aspects of literary creativity, only in the baroque it becomes complete. The accumulation of new genres and the change in the meaning of old genres in the Baroque leads to the formation of a new system of genres - the system of the new time.
The emergence of a new system of genres is the main sign of the transition of Russian literature from the medieval type to the modern type.
Not all of the historians and art historians recognize the presence in Rus' of the Pre-Renaissance and subsequent separate Renaissance phenomena. This happens mainly because the Italian Renaissance is taken as the "ideal model" of any Renaissance. It is considered the one and only. But the fact is that the Renaissance as an epoch or Renaissance phenomena that stretched over a long period of time is a natural transition from the Middle Ages to the New Age, a transition that is traditionally considered the final phase of the Middle Ages. There is not only the Italian Renaissance, but also the Northern European, Czech and Polish Renaissance and many others. In addition, the Renaissance (or Renaissance - we use these terms in the same sense) is not an evaluative category. Rus' in the era of its classical Middle Ages - in the XI - early XIII centuries. (before the Mongol-Tatar conquest) - stood at the level of other European cultures, while in the era of the Pre-Renaissance and the subsequent "slow Renaissance", when individual
When we talk about "secularization", about the acquisition of a "secular character" by literature and culture in general, this does not mean that literature and culture as a whole become atheistic or even non-religious. It is only a matter of acquiring secular forms, secular, non-religious aesthetics, a secular way of thinking. Raphael or Leonardo continue to write on religious subjects, but their works are paintings, not iconography, although they can serve as images.
Baroque literature created its own aesthetic and literary theory, which summarized the already existing artistic experience. The most famous works of B. Grasian are Wit or the Art of a Sophisticated Mind (1642) and Aristotle's Spyglass by E. Tesauro (1655). In the latter, in particular, the exceptional role of metaphor, theatricality and brightness, symbolism, and the ability to combine polar phenomena are noted.
Bibliography
Art and literature. Irina Elfond,
Golenishchev-Kutuzov I.N. Spanish and Italian Literature of the Baroque. In the book: - Romance Literature. M., 1975
Stein A.L. Literature of the Spanish Baroque. M., 1983
Vipper Yu.B. Baroque in Western European literature of the 17th century. – In the book: Creative Fates and History. M., 1990
17th century in European literary development. St. Petersburg, 1996
Foreign Literature of the Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism. M., 1998
History of foreign literature in the 17th century. M., 1999
Silyunas V.Yu. Lifestyle and Art Styles (Spanish Mannerist and Baroque Theatre). St. Petersburg, 2000
Pakhsaryan N.T. History of foreign literature of the 17th–18th centuries. M., 2001
Baroque and classicism in the history of world culture. M., 2001
Chekalov K.A. Mannerism in French and Italian Literature. M., 2001
In the literature of the 17th century, in contrast to the literature of the Middle Ages, it is no longer possible to single out uniform style-forming principles. 17th century - this is the era of the birth, coexistence and struggle of different literary schools and trends, both growing on the soil of Russian traditions and based on Western European experience. From Europe - primarily from Poland through the Ukrainian-Belarusian mediation - Russia borrowed the baroque style, which was destined to become the style of Moscow court culture of the last third of the 17th century. What is the specificity of this style?
In Europe, the Baroque replaced the Renaissance. If in the system of Renaissance values man was in the first place, then the Baroque again returned to the medieval idea of God as the root cause and purpose of earthly existence. Baroque marked a bizarre synthesis of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This quirkiness, unnaturalness is fixed in the very term baroque - to whatever it is erected, whether it be to jewelry, where “baroque” was called a pearl of a bizarre shape (from the Italian perucca - a wart), or to logic, in which this word denoted one of the irregular figures of the syllogism.
Turning anew to the Middle Ages, Baroque art revived mysticism, "dances of death", themes of the Last Judgment, afterlife torment. At the same time, the Baroque (at least theoretically) did not break with the heritage of the Renaissance and did not abandon its achievements. Ancient gods and heroes remained the characters of baroque writers, and ancient poetry retained for them the significance of a lofty and inaccessible standard.
The "duality" of the European Baroque was of great importance in the assimilation of this style by Russia. On the one hand, medieval elements in Baroque aesthetics contributed to the fact that Russia, for which medieval culture was by no means a distant past, relatively easily adopted the first European style in its history. On the other hand, the Renaissance stream, which fertilized the Baroque, determined the special role of this style in the development of Russian culture: the Baroque in Russia performed the functions of the Renaissance. Russia owes the emergence of regular syllabic poetry and the first theater to the Baroque style.
Simeon Polotsky. The creator of regular syllabic poetry in Moscow was the Belarusian Samuil Emelyanovich Sitnianovich-Petrovsky (1629-1680), who became a monk at the age of twenty-seven with the name Simeon and who was nicknamed Polotsk in Moscow - after his hometown, where he was a teacher at the school of the local Orthodox “brotherhood ". In the summer and autumn of 1656, the young Polotsk "didaskal" (teacher) had the opportunity to attract the attention of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich: the tsar went to the troops stationed near Riga, stopped twice in Polotsk and listened to Simeon's greeting verses. In 1660, Simeon visited Moscow and again presented the tsar with poems. A year later, Polotsk was captured by the Poles. In 1664, Simeon left for Moscow - this time for good.
So, at the origins of the Baroque was an Orthodox Belarusian, who studied the "seven free arts" at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy and, perhaps, listened to a course of lectures at the Vilna Jesuit College. The origin and education of Simeon of Polotsk clearly show where and how the Baroque style penetrated into Russia.
In Moscow, Simeon Polotsky continued the activity of a “didaskal”, a teacher, begun in his homeland. He raised the sovereign's children (he taught one of them, the future Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich, to compose syllabic verses), opened a Latin school not far from the Kremlin, in the Zaikonospassky Monastery, where young clerks of the Order of Secret Affairs studied - Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich's own office. Simeon of Polotsk also occupied or, more precisely, established another position - the position of a court poet, hitherto unknown in Russia. Any event in the royal family - marriages, name days, births of children - gave Simeon of Polotsk a reason to compose poems "in case". By the end of his life, the poet collected these poems into a huge “Rhymologion, or Verse” (this collection came in a draft autograph and was published only in extracts).
The legacy of Simeon of Polotsk is very great. It is estimated that he left at least fifty thousand lines of poetry.
In addition to the Rhymologion, this is the Rhyming Psalter (a poetic transcription of the Psalter, printed in 1680) and the colossal collection Vertograd (garden) multicolored (1678) remaining in manuscripts - a kind of poetic encyclopedia in which poems are located in alphabetically. There are 1155 titles in Vertograd, and under one title a whole cycle is often placed - from two to twelve poems.
According to Sylvester Medvedev (1641-1691), a student and favorite of Simeon of Polotsk, we know how the latter worked. In the Zaikonospassky monastery, the teacher and the student lived in neighboring chambers, connected by a common hallway. Sylvester Medvedev, who was a constant “eye-witness” of Simeon’s creative work, recalled that he “had a pledge (used to) write at noon on a half-notebook every day, and his writing (handwriting) was very small and upish”, i.e. that every day he covered eight pages of the current notebook format in small handwriting. Such fertility reflected the main creative aim of Simeon Polotsky. As a person of European orientation, he did not place high regard for ancient Russian literature. He believed that his task was to create a new verbal culture in Russia.
It needed consumers who were able to appreciate and perceive it. Understanding well that such consumers have yet to be educated, Simeon of Polotsk sought to “saturate” the life of the royal court and the metropolitan aristocracy with syllabic verses. On holidays, his poems were publicly performed in the genres of "declamation" and "dialogue", with the author himself and specially trained "youths" acting as readers. "Greetings" - panegyrics - were also publicly performed. Judging by the composition of Rhymologion and by the author's notes in its margins, Simeon of Polotsk tried to use every more or less suitable occasion when it seemed appropriate to make a speech in verse. He composed such speeches both for himself and for others - by order or as a gift. They sounded at royal ceremonial dinners, in boyar mansions and in churches during temple holidays.
"Multicolor Vertograd" has a different character. This is really a poetic encyclopedia, in which Simeon of Polotsk wanted to give the reader the widest body of knowledge - primarily on history, ancient and medieval Western European. Here mythological plots and historical anecdotes about Caesar and Augustus, Alexander the Great, Diogenes, Justinian and Charlemagne coexist. Pliny the Elder's "Natural History" is used in many poems. "Vertograd" gives information about fictional and exotic animals - a phoenix bird, a crying crocodile, an ostrich, about precious stones, and so on. Here we will also find an exposition of cosmogonic views, excursions into the field of Christian symbolism. According to I. P. Eremin, the poems of Vertograd “make the impression of a kind of museum, on the windows of which are arranged in a certain order ... a wide variety of things, often rare and very ancient. All the main things that Simeon, a bibliophile and a reader, a lover of various “rarities” and “curiosities”, managed to collect during his life in his memory are put on display here.
This "museum of rarities" reflects several fundamental baroque motifs - first of all, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe "diversity" of the world, the variability of existence, as well as the craving for sensationalism inherent in baroque. However, the peculiarity of the "Museum of rarities" is that it is a museum of literature. The development of culture in the view of Simeon of Polotsk is something like a verbal procession, a parade of words. At first glance, things also participate in this procession. But the sphinx and the salamander, the phoenix and the siren, the pelican and the centaur, the magnet and the amber themselves are not of interest to Simeon of Polotsk. Only their intelligible essence is interesting, only the Word hidden in them, for the Word, according to the deep conviction of Simeon of Polotsk, is the main element of culture.
From his point of view, the poet is the “second god”: just as a god builds the world with the Word, the poet with his word extracts people, events, thoughts from non-existence. Simeon imagines the world in the form of a book or alphabet, and the elements of the world - as parts of a book, its sheets, lines, words, letters:
This world is embellished - the book is great,
hedgehog wrote all sorts of words lord.
Five very large sheets are found in it,
Even more wonderful writings contain in themselves.
The first leaf is the sky, on it the luminaries,
like a letter. God's fortress laid.
The second sheet is elemental fire under the sky high,
in it, like a scripture, let the eye see the power.
The third leaf is a very wide aer powerfully call,
on it rain, snow, clouds and birds read.
The fourth leaf - the host of water finds itself in it,
in that animal a lot of comfort reads.
The last leaf is the earth with woods, with herbs,
with krushtsy and with animals, as if with letters ...
The word was perceived as a tool for transforming the world, as a means of creating a new European culture. Therefore, the educational plans of Simeon of Polotsk were primarily the plans of a humanitarian. These plans were attempted in the 1980s. Sylvester Medvedev.
Sylvester Medvedev. A Kurian by birth, who served as a clerk in the Order of Secret Affairs, and then, on the urgent advice of Simeon, took the monastic vows, Sylvester Medvedev, after the death of his teacher, inherited his place - the place of a court poet. He inherited both Simeon's library and his ideas. The most important of these was the idea of establishing a university in Moscow. Its charter (“privilege” from the royal name) was drawn up, oriented towards the Kiev-Mohyla Academy and providing that the university would be granted the right to manage Moscow culture. In January 1685, handing over the project to Princess Sofya Alekseevna, Sylvester Medvedev wrote:
Wisdom, for you have given your name,
God named Sophia Wisdom,
You better start science,
as if they were wise to do.
However, hopes for Sophia's support failed. That Western orientation, which was represented by Sylvester Medvedev, caused sharp opposition from the church elite, headed by Patriarch Joachim himself. Sophia did not want to quarrel with the patriarch, and the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, opened in 1686, fell into his hands. There was no longer any question of any university autonomy: everything now depended on the patriarchal will. When the government of Princess Sophia fell in 1689, Sylvester Medvedev was condemned as a conspirator. “199 (1691) of the year, the month of February on the 11th day, the monk Sylvester Medvedev accepted the end of his life ... - his brother-in-law Karion Istomin wrote in his draft notebook. - His head was cut off ... on Red Square, opposite the Spassky Gates. His body was buried in a wretched house with strange (with vagabonds) in a pit. A strict ban was imposed on the writings of Sylvester Medvedev. All their lists were ordered to be burned under pain of heavy punishment. Apparently, it is for this reason that very few poems have come down from Sylvester Medvedev.
Karion Istomin. Karion Istomin (Zaulonsky) (mid-XVII century - after 1717) was born, like Sylvester Medvedev, in Kursk. Not later than 1679, having already taken monasticism, he moved to Moscow. Here he served as a director (editor) at the Printing Yard. The stormy year of 1689 had little effect on the career of Karion Istomin, and the last decade of the 17th century. was the time of his greatest success. Under Patriarch Adrian, he won a strong position and on March 4, 1698, received a very important position as head of the Printing House. Karion Istomin is a very prolific and, in fact, unexplored poet. He is known for his pedagogical writings (the engraved "Primer" of 1694 and the typesetting "Primer" of 1696). Meanwhile, he wrote panegyrics (beginning with the book of “greetings” offered to Princess Sophia in 1681), poems “for coats of arms”, epitaphs, friendly messages, and even tried himself in the genre of a heroic poem, trying to describe the second Crimean campaign of Prince V with thirteen-syllable verses. V. Golitsyna (1689). Istomin especially succeeded in meditative lyrics - poetic reflections on the vanity of earthly life, on the human soul, on death:
I look at the sky - the mind does not comprehend.
kako I won’t go, but God calls.
I look at the ground - the thought becomes dull,
every person is wallowing in that death.
Whether in breadth the mind will fly where -
the end and the edge will reach nowhere.
The whole creature is contained in Bose Mudra,
Yes, every soul will be surprised.
What holds the sky, who builds the earth,
what kind of good life will a person learn?
The type of professional writer that embodied in Simeon of Polotsk, Sylvester Medvedev and Karion Istomin was relegated to the background during the Petrine era. Peter did not need humanists: to reach the level of European civilization, according to Peter, it was necessary not to produce words, but to produce things. The attitude to the word as a way of transforming Russia seemed to the tsar-reformer the height of absurdity. Literature, he assigned the auxiliary role of a servant of the practical sciences; therefore, in the time of Peter the Great, there is a need not for poets or preachers, but for translators, for literary day laborers who work by order or by direct decree of the emperor.
The emergence of Russian theater. The Russian professional theater arose in 1672, the year of the birth of Peter I, and emerged as a court theater. Ever since the beginning of the 60s. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich made attempts to hire a troupe of actors in the German Lands and settle in Moscow, “masters of comedy” (the word “comedy” - “comedy” then meant any general dramatic work and theatrical performance). These attempts did not lead to success, and the establishment of the theater was eventually entrusted to Johann Gottfried Gregory, the pastor of the Lutheran church in the Moscow Nemetskaya Sloboda. According to the royal decree, he was instructed to "make a comedy, and on the comedy act from the Bible the Book of Esther."
While pastor Gregory was composing in German verse a play based on a biblical story about the humble beauty Esther, who attracted the gracious attention of the Persian king Artaxerxes, became his wife and saved her people; while the translators of the Posolsky Prikaz transcribed the play into Russian; while the foreign actors, students of Gregory's school, were learning roles in Russian, male and female, several months had passed. During this time, in the village of Preobrazhensky, a royal estate near Moscow, a "comedy temple" was erected. In it, on October 17, 1672, the first performance took place - "Artaxerxes Action". It was watched by the king, nobles in duma ranks, "near" people. Tsarina Natalya Kirillovna, together with the princes and princesses, watched the performance from a special room, separated from the hall by a lattice.
"Artaxerxes action" went on several times. In February 1673, a new play "Judith" ("The Action of Holofernes") was shown - again about the biblical heroine, from whose hand a pagan died. Holofernes, the leader of the army that besieged the native city of Judith. The repertoire of the court theater was constantly replenished (performances were given either in Preobrazhensky, then in the Kremlin, in a room above the palace pharmacy). Along with comedies on biblical and hagiographic themes, it included a historical drama about Tamerlane, who defeated Sultan Bayazet (“Temir-Aksakovo action”), as well as a play about Bacchus and Venus that did not reach us, and the ballet “Orpheus”, about which only the most general information. The performances were played not only by foreigners from the German settlement, but also by Russian "lads" - mainly from among the young clerks of the Ambassadorial order. The new sovereign "fun" was furnished with great pomp. Instrumental music sounded in the theater (the official culture of Ancient Rus' recognized only the art of singing, considering musical instruments to be buffoon attributes). They sang and danced on the stage. For each play, “frames of perspective writing” were written (picturesque scenery with a linear perspective, which was also a new phenomenon in Russian art). For props and costumes, the most expensive materials and fabrics were taken from the treasury or purposely purchased - Shemakhan silk, Hamburg cloth, Turkish satin.
The court theater was the favorite brainchild of Tsar Alexei and did not outlive its founder. After his sudden death on January 30, 1676, the performances ceased, and by the end of the year, the new sovereign Fyodor Alekseevich ordered "all kinds of comic supplies" to be kept under wraps.
All the plays of the first Russian theater were based on historical plots. But these were no longer stories about the past, so familiar to readers of Scripture, chronicles, chronographs, lives and stories. It was a display of the past, its visual image, its original resurrection. Artaxerxes, who, as it was said in the "comedy", "has been imprisoned in the tomb for more than two thousand years", in his first monologue uttered the word "now" three times. He, like other "prisoners in the coffin" characters, "now" lived on the stage, "now" spoke and moved, executed pardoned, grieved and rejoiced. For a modern viewer, there would be "nothing surprising" in the "revival" of the long-dead "potentate" (sovereign): this is an ordinary stage convention. But for Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and his nobles, who did not receive Western European theatrical education, "the resurrection of the past" in the "was a real revolution in their ideas about art. It turned out that one can not only talk about the past, narrate. The past can be shown, revived, portrayed as the present. The theater created an artistic illusion of reality, as if "disconnecting" the viewer from reality and transferring him to a special world - the world of art, the world of revived history.
According to a contemporary, the tsar watched the first performance for ten whole hours without getting up (other noble spectators, excluding members of the royal family, stood for the same “ten whole hours”, because it was not supposed to sit down in the presence of the monarch). From this evidence it is clear that the "Act of Artaxerxes" was played without intermissions, although the play was divided into seven "acts" (acts) and numerous "canopies" (pictures). Intermissions were not made because they could destroy the illusion of “resurrection of history”, return the viewer from the “real artistic” time to the present everyday, and it was for the sake of this illusion that the first Russian theater-goer built a “comedy temple” in the village of Preobrazhensky.
It was not easy to get used to stage conventions, to “master” it. This is evidenced by at least information about the costumes and props. Not theatrical tinsel, but expensive, "realistic" fabrics and materials were taken because at first it was difficult for the audience to understand the essence of acting, the essence of the "real artistic" time, it is difficult to see in Artaxerxes both a genuine "resurrected potentate" and a mummered German with Kukuya. The author of the play considered it necessary to say this in a preface addressed directly to the king:
“Your wretchedly sovereign word of that one is alive to us in the form of a youth ...”
The preface, written especially for the Russian audience, “pronounced a special character - Mamurza (“orator of the kings”). This Mamurza addresses the main spectator of the performance - Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich ... and explains to him the artistic essence of the new entertainment: the problem of the artistic present time - how the past becomes the present before the eyes of the tsar. Mamurza resorts to the concept of "glory", which has long been associated in Rus' with the idea of the immortality of the past. Mamurza thoroughly and pedagogically explains to Alexei Mikhailovich that his fame will also remain for centuries, just as the glory of many historical heroes has remained ... To make it easier for Alexei Mikhailovich to perceive the faces of the past as living, the author makes these very faces feel resurrected. Not only the spectators see historical figures in front of them... but these actors see the spectators, they are surprised by where they ended up, they admire Aleksey Mikhailovich and his kingdom... Briefly explaining the content of the play, Mamurza tries in every possible way to introduce the viewer into an environment that is unusual for him theater and emphasize the surprisingness of the repetition in the present of the events of the past.
So, the theater created an artistic illusion of life. But what kind of life appeared before the eyes of the Russian spectator, what kind of people did he see on stage? Although they were "resurrected" people of the past, they surprisingly resembled those who sat (or stood) in the "comedy temple". The heroes of the plays were in constant motion, they amazed with their activity and energy. . They called for "hurry up", "do not linger", "create soon", "do not waste time". They were not contemplatives, they "knew their own business" well, "raised their labors", despised the "indolent". Their lives were filled to overflowing. "Resurrected History" was portrayed as a kaleidoscope of events, as an endless chain of actions.
The "active man" of early Russian dramaturgy corresponded to the style of behavior that had developed on the eve and especially during the period of Peter's reforms. At this time, the ancient ideal of “beautifulness”, “splendor” and “deanery” was collapsing. If in the Middle Ages it was prescribed to act quietly and “inertly”, and not “with heavy and bestial zeal”, now energy has become a positive quality. It was in the second half of the 17th century. word rigidity acquired a negative connotation.
Tsar Alexei selected active employees for himself and demanded vigilant diligence from them: "Have strong salvation and Argus' eyes at all times, stay in caution and look at all four countries." Obeying the orders of the sovereign, his "neighbors" people, such as A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin or A. S. Matveev, worked "without delaying anywhere for anything for a little time."
The life itself, which was observed on the stage by visitors to the court theater, least of all disposed to calmness. It was a motley, changeable life, in which the transitions from grief to joy, from joy to tears, from hope to despair and vice versa were made quickly and suddenly. The heroes of the plays complained about “changeable”, “cursed”, “treacherous” happiness - about Fortune, the wheel of which elevates some and subverts others. The "resurrected world" consisted of contradictions and opposites.
The new sovereign's "fun" was not only entertainment ("the comedy of a person can amuse and turn all the sadness of a person into joy"), but also a school in which "many good teachings ... understand it well ... so that all evil deeds lag behind and stick to all good ". The theater was a "mirror" in which the viewer recognized and cognized himself.
This "mirror" reflected many ideas of European baroque and, above all, his favorite postulate: life is a stage, people are actors. In the "mirror" one could also see a kind of Europeanizing Russia, which, with extraordinary energy and on an equal footing, entered the concert of the great European powers. Confidence in the successes of Russia, in the greatness of its historical mission, was to a high degree inherent in the official culture of the second half of the 17th century. Therefore, Russian art of that time, turning to the experience of European Baroque, drew from the Baroque arsenal, first of all, bright, optimistic notes. The world of court poetry and court dramaturgy is a changeable world full of conflicts and contradictions. But in the end, goodness and justice triumph, broken harmony is restored, peoples and countries rejoice and prosper.
See general works on the Russian version of the European Baroque: Eremin I. P. The poetic style of Simeon of Polotsk. - "TODRL". M.-L., 1948, vol. VI, p. 125-163; Eremin I.P. Literature of Ancient Rus'. Sketches and characteristics. M.-L., 1966; Morozov A. A. The problem of the baroque of the 17th - early 18th centuries. (The state of the issue and the objectives of the study). - "Russian Literature", 1962, No. 3, p. 3-38; Likhachev D.S. The development of Russian literature of the X-XVII centuries. Epochs and styles. L., 1973, p. 165-214.
The biography of Simeon Polotsky is set out in the book: Tatarsky I. A. Simeon Polotsky (his life and work). M., 1886; Maikov L. N. Essays from the history of Russian literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. SPb., 1889.
The poetry of Simeon of Polotsk is most fully represented in the following publications: Virshi. Syllabic poetry of the 17th-18th centuries. Ed. P. N. Berkov, will enter, article by I. N. Rozanov. L., 1935; Simeon Polotsky and. Selected writings. Preparation of the text, article and commentary by I. P. Eremin. M.-L., 1953; Russian syllabic poetry of the 17th-18th centuries. Enter, article, preparation of the text and notes by A. M. Panchenko. L., 1970. The texts of Simeon Polotsky, as well as Sylvester Medvedev and Karion Istomin, published in these editions, are quoted without references.
Eremin I.P. The poetic style of Simeon Polotsky, p. 125.
Simeon Polotsky believed that a writer should not burden himself with a family, and saw the best way out in the monastic vow of celibacy: hustle."
About Sylvester Medvedev, see the book: Prozorovsky A. Sylvester Medvedev (His life and work). - CHOIDR, 1896, book. 2-4; Kozlovsky I. Sylvester Medvedev. Kyiv, 1895.
CHOIDR, 1896, book. 3, section IV, p. 373-374.
About Karion Istomin, see: Brailovsky S. N. One of the colorful XVII century. SPb., 1902.
An idea of the beginning of the Russian theater and its repertoire is given by the first two volumes of the series "Early Russian Drama (XVII - the first half of the XVIII century)": The first plays of the Russian theater. The publication was prepared by O. A. Derzhavina, A. S. Demin. E. K. Romodanovskaya. Ed. A. N. Robinson. M., 1972; Russian drama in the last quarter of the 17th and early 18th centuries. The publication was prepared by O. A. Derzhavina. A. S. Demin, V. P. Grebenyuk. Ed. O. A. Derzhavina. M., 1972. The texts of the plays are quoted from these editions.
See: Bogoyavlensky S. K. Moscow theater under Tsars Alexei and Peter. M., 1914, p. 8.
See: Likhachev D.S. Poetics of Old Russian Literature. Ed. 2nd, add. L., 1971, p. 321-330.
Likhachev D.S. Poetics of Old Russian Literature. Ed. 2nd, add. L., 1971, p. 324-326.
See: Demin A.S. Russian literature of the second half of the 17th - early 18th centuries. New artistic ideas about the world, nature, man. M., 1977.
See: Demin A.S. Russian literature of the second half of the 17th - early 18th centuries. New artistic ideas about the world, nature, man. M., 1977. p. 100.
LITERATURE
General works: Istrin V. M. Introduction to the history of Russian literature of the second half of the 17th century. Odessa, 1903; Likhachev D.S. Prerequisites for the emergence of the genre of the novel in Russian literature. - In the book: History of the Russian novel. In 2 volumes, vol. I. M.-L., 1962; Panchenko A.M. Czech-Russian Literary Relations of the 17th Century. L., 1969.
Texts. Kuzmina V.D. Knightly novel in Rus'. Bova, Peter the Golden Keys. M., 1964; Derzhavina O. A. "Facetia". Translated short story in Russian literature of the 17th century. M., 1962; Skripil M. O. "The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn" (texts). - "TODRL". M.-L., 1947, vol. V; Russian novels of the 17th century. Compiled by M. O. Skripil. M., 1954; Tale of the beginning of Moscow. Research and preparation of texts by M. A. Salmina. M.-L., 1964; Life of Archpriest Avvakum, written by himself, and. his other writings. Ed. N. K. Gudznya. Enter, article by V. E. Gusev. M., 1960; Pustozersky collection. Autographs of the writings of Avvakum and Epiphanius. The publication was prepared by N. S. Demkova, N. F. Drobenkova, L. I. Sazonova. L., 1975; Robinson A.N. Biography of Avvakum and Epiphanius. Studies and texts. M., 1963; Russian democratic satire of the 11th century. M.-L., 1954. 2nd ed. add. M., 1977; Adrianov-Peretz V.P. Essays on the history of Russian satirical literature of the 17th century. M.-L., 1937; Democratic poetry of the 17th century. Intro. article by V.P. Adrianov-Peretz and D.S. Likhachev. Preparation of the text and notes by V. P. Adrianova-Peretz. 2nd ed. M.-L., 1962; Vinogradov V.V. On the tasks of stylistics. Observations on the lifestyle of Archpriest Avvakum. Russian speech. Sat. articles ed. L. V. Shcherby, vol. I. Pg., 1923; Gusev V. E. On the question of the genre of the "Life" of Archpriest Avvakum. - "TODRL". M.-L., 1958, v. XV; Gusev V. E. Notes on the style of the “Life” of Archpriest Avvakum. - "TODRL". M.-L., 1957, v. XIII; Demkova N. S. The Life of Archpriest Avvakum (Creative History of the Work). L., 1974.
See also the section on the humor of Archpriest Avvakum in the book. D. S. Likhachev and A. M. Panchenko “The laughter world of Ancient Rus'” (L., 1976) and chapters on the writings of Avvakum in D. S. Likhachev’s books “Man in the Literature of Ancient Rus'” (L., 1970) and “ Great heritage ”(M., 1975).
Artarxerxes action. The first play of the Russian theater of the XVII century. Preparation of the text and commentary by I. M. Kudryavtsev. M., 1957; Early Russian dramaturgy of the 17th - first half of the 18th centuries. The first plays of the Russian theater. M., 1972; Russian syllabic poetry. Intro. article, preparation of the text and notes by A. M. Panchenko. 2nd ed., L., 1970; Simeon Polotsky. Fav. cit., preparation of the text, article and comments by I. P. Eremin. M.-L.; Eremin I.P. The poetic style of Simeon Polotsky. - In the book: Eremin I.P. Literature of Ancient Rus'. Sketches and characteristics. M.-L., 1966.
CONCLUSION
Let us sum up some results of literary development.
Like most other peoples of Europe, Rus' passed the slave-owning formation. Therefore, Rus' did not know the ancient stage in the development of its culture. The Eastern Slavs passed directly from the communal-patriarchal formation to feudalism. This transition took place unusually quickly on a vast territory inhabited by East Slavic tribes and various Finno-Ugric peoples.
The absence of one or another stage in historical development requires its own “compensation”, replenishment. Help usually comes from ideology, from culture, which, under these circumstances, draw their strength from the experience of neighboring peoples.
The appearance of literature, and, moreover, highly perfect literature for its time, could only be realized thanks to the cultural assistance of neighboring countries - Byzantium and Bulgaria. At the same time, it is necessary to emphasize the special significance of the cultural experience of Bulgaria. Regular writing and literature in Bulgaria appeared a century earlier under similar conditions: Bulgaria also did not know the slave system for the most part and learned the cultural experience of the same Byzantium. Bulgaria made the assimilation of Byzantine culture in circumstances close to those that were created a century later in Rus' when it assimilated Byzantine and Bulgarian culture: Rus' received Byzantine cultural experience not only in its direct state, but also in a form "adapted" by Bulgaria, adapted to the needs of the feudalizing society.
The need for an accelerated development of culture created in Rus' a high assimilation of the cultural phenomena of Byzantium and Bulgaria. The point is not only in needs, but also in the fact that ancient Russian culture in the 10th and 11th centuries. due to her flexible youth, she had a keen gift for learning from the experience of others. The absence of deep traditions of class culture, with the rapid development of class relations, forced Russian society to absorb and assimilate foreign elements of class culture and create its own. The assimilation of someone else's proceeded as intensively as the construction of one's own. The genre system of the literature of the Bulgarians in its translation from Greek and the original Bulgarian part was rebuilt in Rus'. This restructuring was carried out in two directions: in the direction of selecting those genres that were needed, and. towards the creation of new genres. The first was done already during the very transfer of literary works to Ancient Rus', the second required a long time and took several centuries.
The system of Byzantine genres was transferred to Rus' in a peculiarly "shortened" form. In Rus', only those genres were required that were directly connected with church life, and general worldview genres that corresponded to the new attitude of people to nature.
But, on the other hand, genres were required that did not exist in either Byzantine or Bulgarian literature.
The genres of medieval Russian literature were closely connected with their use in everyday life - secular and ecclesiastical. This is their difference from the genres of new literature.
In the middle of the century, all the arts, including literature, had an "applied" character. Divine service required certain genres, intended for certain moments of the church service. Some genres had their purpose in the complex monastic life. Even private reading (individual reading of monks) had a genre regulation. Hence, several types of lives, several types of church hymns, several types of books regulating worship, church and monastic life, etc. The genre system included even such non-repetitive genre works as gospels, psalms, apostolic epistles, etc.
Already from this cursory and extremely generalized enumeration of church genres, it is clear that some of them could develop new works in their depths (for example, the lives of saints, which were to be created in connection with new canonizations), and some of the genres were strictly limited to existing works, and creation of new works within them was impossible. However, both of them could not change: the formal features of genres were strictly determined by the peculiarities of their use and traditional features;
The secular genres that came to us from Byzantium and Bulgaria were somewhat less constrained by external formal and traditional requirements. These secular genres were not associated with a specific use in everyday life and therefore were freer in their external, formal features.
Serving the regulated and very ceremonial medieval life, the genre system of literature, transferred to Rus' from Byzantium and Bulgaria, did not, however, satisfy all the needs for the artistic word.
The literate upper classes of feudal society had both book and oral genres at their disposal. The illiterate masses of the people satisfied their needs for the artistic word with the help of the oral system of genres. Bookishness was only partly accessible to the masses through worship.
The literary and folklore genre system of the verbal art of the Russian Middle Ages was more rigid in some of its parts, less rigid in others, but if taken as a whole, it was very traditional, highly formalized, little changing, closely connected with ritual customs. The more rigid it was, the more urgently it was subjected to change in connection with changes in historical reality, in everyday life, in rituals and in the requirements of application. She had to respond to all changes in reality.
Early feudal states were very fragile. The unity of the state was constantly violated by the strife of the feudal lords, which reflected the centrifugal forces of society. To maintain unity, high social morality, a high sense of honor, loyalty, selflessness, a developed patriotic self-consciousness and a high level of verbal art were required - genres of political journalism, genres glorifying love for one's native country, lyrical-epic genres.
The unity of the state, with the insufficiency of economic and military ties, could not exist without the intensive development of personal patriotic qualities. We needed works that clearly testified "to the historical and political unity of the Russian people. We needed works that actively opposed the strife of the princes. A striking feature of ancient Russian literature of this period was the consciousness of the unity of the entire Russian land without any" tribal differences, the consciousness of unity Russian history and state.
These features of the political life of Rus' are different from the political life that existed in Byzantium and Bulgaria. The ideas of unity were different for the mere fact that they concerned the Russian land, and not the Bulgarian or Byzantine. Therefore, their own works and their own genres were needed.
That is why, despite the presence of two complementary systems of genres - literary and folklore, Russian literature of the XI-XIII centuries. was in the process of genre formation. In different ways, from different roots, works are constantly emerging that stand apart from the traditional systems of genres, destroy them or creatively combine them. As a result of the search for new genres in Russian literature and folklore, many works appear that are difficult to attribute to any of the well-established traditional genres. They stand outside genre traditions.
The breaking of traditional forms was generally quite common in Rus'. All more or less outstanding works of literature, based on deep inner needs, break out of the traditional forms.
In this atmosphere of intense genre formation, some works turned out to be singular in terms of genre (“Prayer” by Daniil Zatochnik, “Instruction”, “Autobiography” and “Letter to Oleg Svyatoslavich” by Vladimir Monomakh), others received a steady continuation (The Primary Chronicle - in Russian chronicle writing, “ The Tale of the Blinding of Vasilko Terebovlsky" - in subsequent stories about princely crimes), others had only separate attempts to continue them in terms of genre ("The Tale of Igor's Campaign" - in "Zadonshchina").
The absence of strict genre frameworks contributed to the emergence of many original and highly artistic works.
The processes of genre formation contributed to the intensive use of folklore experience during this period (in The Tale of Bygone Years and other chronicles, in The Tale of Igor's Campaign, in the Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land, in Daniil Zatochnik's Prayer and Lay, etc. d.). The process of genre formation, carried out in the 11th-13th centuries, resumed in the 16th century. and proceeded quite intensively in the XVII century.
The omission of the ancient stage in the development of culture raised the importance of literature and art in the development of the Eastern Slavs. Literature and other arts, as we have seen, fell to the most responsible role - to support the accelerated development of Russian society in the 11th - early 13th centuries. and weaken the negative sides of this accelerated development: the collapse of the Russian state and the discord of the princes. That is why the social role of all types of art was extremely great in the 11th-13th centuries. all Eastern Slavs.
A sense of history, a sense of historical unity, calls for political unity, exposure of abuses of power spread over a vast territory with a large and varied population of various tribes, with numerous semi-independent principalities.
The level of the arts corresponded to the level of social responsibility that fell to their lot. But these arts did not yet know their own ancient stage - only the responses of someone else through Byzantium. Therefore, when in Russia in the XIV and early XV centuries. socio-economic conditions were created for the emergence of the Pre-Renaissance, and this Pre-Renaissance really arose, it was immediately placed in historical and cultural terms in unique and unfavorable conditions. The role of "its antiquity" fell on pre-Mongolian Rus', Rus' of the period of its independence.
Literature of the late XIV - early XV century. refers to the monuments of the XI - early XIII century. Some works of this time mechanically imitate Metropolitan Hilarion's Tale of Law and Grace, The Tale of Bygone Years, The Tale of the Ruin of Ryazan, and, most importantly, The Tale of Igor's Campaign (in Zadonshchina). In architecture, a similar appeal to the monuments of the XI-XIII centuries is noticed. (in Novgorod, Tver, Vladimir), the same thing happens in painting, the same thing happens in political thought (the desire to revive the political traditions of Kiev and Vladimir Zalessky), the same thing happens in folk art (at this time there is a particularly intensive formation of the Kiev cycle of epics) . But all this turns out to be insufficient for the Pre-Renaissance, and therefore the strengthening of ties with countries that survived the ancient stage of culture is of particular importance. Rus' revives and strengthens its ties with Byzantium and with the countries of the Byzantine cultural area, primarily with the southern Slavs.
One of the most characteristic and essential features of the Pre-Renaissance, and then, to a greater extent, of the Renaissance, is the emergence of the historicity of consciousness. The static nature of the previous perception of the world is replaced in the consciousness of this time by dynamism. This historicism of consciousness is connected with all the main features of the Pre-Renaissance and the Renaissance.
First of all, historicism is organically connected with the discovery of the value of the individual human person and with a special interest in the historical past. The idea of the historical changeability of the world is associated with an interest in the spiritual life of a person, with the idea of the world as a movement, with the dynamism of style. Nothing is finished, and therefore inexpressible in words; the current time is elusive. It can only be reproduced to a certain extent by a flow of speech, a dynamic and verbose style, a heap of synonyms, overtones of meaning, associative series.
The pre-revival in Russian fine arts is reflected primarily in the work of Theophan the Greek and Andrei Rublev. These are two sharply different artists, but they are all the more characteristic of the Pre-Renaissance, when the role of the artist's personality comes into its own and individual differences become typical phenomena of the era. The Pre-Renaissance in literature is weaker. The Pre-Renaissance is characterized by the “philological” interests of scribes, the “weaving of words”, the emotionality of style, etc. When, starting from the middle of the 15th century. the main prerequisites for the formation of the Renaissance began to fall one after another, the Russian Pre-Renaissance did not turn into the Renaissance, since the commune cities (Novgorod and Pskov) perished, the fight against heresies turned out to be successful for the official church. The process of formation of a centralized state took away many spiritual forces. Ties with Byzantium and the Western world weakened due to the fall of Byzantium and the emergence of the Union of Florence, which exacerbated distrust in the countries of Catholicism.
Every great style and every world movement has its historical functions, its historical mission. The revival is associated with the liberation of the human personality from medieval corporatism. Without this liberation, a new time cannot come - in culture and, in particular, in literature.
The fact that the Pre-Renaissance in Russia did not turn into the Renaissance had serious consequences: the immature style began to formalize and solidify early, and a lively appeal to “its own antiquity”, a constant return to the experience of pre-Mongolian Russia, to the period of its independence soon acquired the features of a special conservatism, which played a negative role in the development of not only Russian literature, but also Russian culture of the 16th-17th centuries.
The Renaissance transition to the new time acquired a protracted, slow character. There was no Renaissance in Russia, but there were Renaissance phenomena during the 16th, 17th and partly 18th centuries.
The main difference between the Renaissance and the Pre-Renaissance (Pre-Renaissance) is its secular nature, the liberation from the all-pervading ecclesiasticism of the Middle Ages.
In the XVI century. gradually and cautiously the theological view of human society begins to recede into the past. The "divine laws" still retain their authority, but along with references to the Holy Scriptures, quite "Renaissance" references to the laws of nature appear. A number of writers of the 16th century refer to the natural order of things in nature as a model for people to follow in public and state life. Ermolai-Erasmus projects are based on the idea that. bread is the basis of economic, social and spiritual life. Ivan Peresvetov almost never uses theological arguments in his writings. The development of journalism in the XVI century. associated with faith in the power of conviction, in the power of the book word. They never argue so much in ancient Rus', as at the end of the 15th and in the 16th centuries. The development of journalism is on the crest of the public upsurge of faith in reason.
The development of journalistic thought caused the emergence of new forms of literature. The 16th century was marked by complex and versatile searches in the field of artistic form, in the field of genres. The stability of genres is broken. Business forms penetrate into literature, and elements of artistry penetrate into business writing. The themes of journalism are the themes of a living, concrete political struggle. Many of the topics, before penetrating into journalism, served as the content of business writing. That is why forms of business writing become forms of journalism. Diplomatic messages, resolutions of the cathedral, petitions, article lists become forms of literary works.
The use of business genres for literary purposes was at the same time the development of fiction, hitherto very limited in literary works, and the giving of this fiction the form of authenticity. The appearance of fiction in the annals of the XVI century. was associated with the internal needs of the development of literature in its self-separation from business functions and was caused by publicistic tasks that confronted the annals in the 16th century with particular acuteness. The chronicle was supposed to inspire readers with the conviction of the infallibility and holiness of state power, and not only register (albeit very biasedly) individual historical facts. Chronicle became a school of patriotism, a school of respect for state power.
Political legend invades history powerfully. Russian people increasingly thought about the issues of world importance for their country. In particular, the theory of the Pskov elder Philotheus about successive Romes, the third and last of which is Moscow, gained great fame.
The political legend was one of the manifestations of the strengthening of fiction in the literature. Old Russian literature of the previous time was afraid of the openly fantastic and imaginary, as a lie, untruth. She strove to write about what was, or about what was at least taken for the past. The fantastic could come from outside, in translations: “Alexandria”, “The Tale of the Indian Kingdom”, “Stephanit and Ikhnilat”, etc. At the same time, the fantastic was either taken for truth, or considered a parable, moralizing, genres that also existed in the Gospel.
The development of ancient Russian literature throughout all its centuries is a gradual struggle for the right to artistic "untruth". Artistic truth is gradually separated from everyday truth. Literary imagination is, as it were, legalized, becomes permissible from the point of view of a new attitude to literature and the world. But, coming into its own, fantasy for a long time disguises itself as the image of the former, really existing or existing. That is why in the 16th century the genre of the document as a form of a literary work enters literature simultaneously with fiction.
The movement of literature to document and document to literature is a natural process of gradual “blurring” of the boundaries between literature and business writing. This process in literature was associated with the business life of the Russian state, with the counter process of growth and formation of the genres of state office work and the emergence of archives. It was extremely necessary for the destruction of the old and the formation of a new system of genres, for the "emancipation" and secularization of literature.
All changes in literary styles are connected with the fate of the ideological and genre life of literature. The emotional style developed at the end of the 14th - beginning of the 15th century could not pass into the Renaissance style at the end of the 15th and in the 16th century. Therefore, the fate of this style, artificially inhibited in its development, was unfavorable. This style is strongly formalized, individual techniques become ossified, begin to be mechanically applied and repeated, literary etiquette becomes extremely complicated, and as a result of this complication, the clarity of its use disappears. Some "etiquette mannerism" appears. Everything is very lush, and everything is very dry and dead. This coincides with the growth of official literature. Etiquette and stylistic formulas, canons are used not because the content of the work requires it, as before, but depending on the official - state and church - attitude towards this or that phenomenon described in the work. The works and their individual parts grow, become large. Beauty is replaced by size. There is a craving for monumentality, which, unlike the pre-Mongolian period, has large dimensions and scales as its main feature. Authors seek to influence their readers by the magnitude of their works, by the length of their praises, by the many repetitions, by the complexity of style.
The 17th century is the century of preparation for radical changes in Russian literature. The restructuring of literature as a whole begins. The number of genres is enormously expanding due to the introduction into literature of forms of business writing, which are given purely literary functions, due to folklore, due to the experience of translated literature. The plot, entertainment, pictoriality, thematic coverage is increasing. And all this is accomplished mainly as a result of the enormous growth of the social experience of literature, the enrichment of social themes, and the expansion of the social circle of readers and writers.
Literature is expanding in all directions, weakening in its centripetal forces, which underlie its stability as a specific system. Centrifugal forces are developed in the literature. It becomes loose and convenient for restructuring and creating a new system - the system of modern literature.
Of particular importance in this restructuring of literature belongs to changes in reality. The events of the Time of Troubles in many ways shocked and changed the ideas of the Russian people about the course of historical events as supposedly controlled by the will of princes and sovereigns. At the end of the XVI century. the dynasty of Moscow sovereigns ceased to exist, the peasant war began, and with it the Polish-Swedish intervention. The intervention of the people in the historical destinies of the country was expressed during this period with extraordinary force. The people declared themselves not only by uprisings, but also by participating in the discussion of future contenders for the throne.
Historical writings devoted to the Troubles testify to a sharp increase in social experience in all classes of society. This new social experience is reflected in the secularization of historical literature. It was at this time that the theological point of view on human history, on state power and on man himself was finally forced out of political practice, although it still remained in the sphere of official declarations. Although the historical works devoted to the Time of Troubles speak of it as a punishment of people for their sins, but, firstly, these sins themselves are considered on a broad social plane (the main fault of the Russian people is “wordless silence” and public connivance with the crimes of the authorities), and secondly, there is a desire to find the real causes of events - mainly in the characters of historical figures. In the characteristics of the characters, a combination of good and evil traits, unusual for the previous period, appears, an idea arises of the character, its formation under the influence of external circumstances and its change. This kind of new attitude towards man is not only unconsciously reflected in literature, but also begins to be formulated in a certain way. The author of the Russian articles of the Chronograph of 1617 directly declares his new attitude towards the human personality as a complex combination of evil and good traits.
Another feature marks the novelty of the approach of the authors of the early 17th century to their themes: this is their subjectivity in interpreting events. These authors were for the most part themselves active figures in the Time of Troubles. Therefore, in their writings, they act partly as memoirists. They write about what they witnessed, they seek to justify their own position, which they took / at one time or another. Their writings already contain an interest in their own personality, which will be intensely reflected throughout the 17th century.
Undoubtedly, in this historical narrative of the first quarter of the 17th century. that “slow Renaissance” was in effect, which made itself felt already in the 16th century. However, not only the “slow Renaissance” affected Russian literature of the 17th century. There were relics of even earlier phenomena in it. And in the XVII century. the weak vein of the lyrical attitude to man continues to beat. From the 14th and 15th centuries, from the elements of the Pre-Renaissance “stuck” in Russian culture, this lyrical attitude, this style of peaceful psychologism passed into the 17th century, giving a new flash in The Tale of Martha and Mary, in The Life of Ulyaniya Osorgina, in "The Tale of the Tver Otroch Monastery". This is quite natural: being artificially inhibited, the line of psychological appeasement continued to affect for another three centuries, resisting the pressure of the sharp and “cold” feelings of the “second monumentalism”.
The social expansion of literature affected both its readers and its authors. From the middle of the XVII century. democratic literature emerges. This is the literature of the exploited class. Literature thus begins to differentiate.
The so-called "posada literature" is written by a democratic writer and read by a democratic reader, and it is devoted to topics close to the democratic environment. It is close to folklore, close to colloquial and business language. It is often anti-government and anti-church - it belongs to the "comic culture" of the people. It is in many ways similar to a folk book in the West. This is also a "slow Renaissance", but it carried a very strong explosive beginning that destroyed the medieval system of literature.
Democratic works of the 17th century. are important for the historical-literary process in yet another respect. The development of literature, even the slowest, is never uniform. Literature moves in impulses, and impulses are always associated with a certain expansion of the field of activity of literature.
The first such significant expansion took place as early as the 15th century, when the arrival of a cheaper writing material than parchment - paper - led to the emergence of mass forms of writing: collections designed for wide individual reading. The reader and the scribe often merge into one person: the scribe rewrites those works that he likes, composes collections for "unofficial", personal reading.
In the 17th century - a new impetus towards the mass character of literature - these are works of a democratic nature. They are so massive that literary historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. recognized them as unworthy of study - a kind of "fence literature". They are written in slovenly or business cursive, rarely intertwined immediately, remaining in notebooks and spreading among poor readers. This is the second "breakthrough to mass". The third will be in the 18th century, when literature gets on the printing press and journalism develops with its new, all-European genres.
The features typical of the democratic literature of the 17th century can be observed beyond its own limits. Much in common with it in the translated literature and, in particular, in the translated pseudo-knightly novel. Democratic literature does not stand apart in everything new that it has introduced into the historical-literary process.
The change of foreign influences that took place in Russian literature of the 17th century is also characteristic of this period of transition to the type of literature of the new time. It was usually noted that the initial focus of Russian literature on the literature of the Byzantine circle was replaced in the 17th century. Western European orientation. But it is not so much this focus on Western countries that is important, but the focus on certain types literature.
Russian literature, like any great literature, has always been closely connected with the literatures of other countries. This connection in ancient Rus' was no less significant than in the 18th and 19th centuries. It can even be considered that Russian literature until the 17th century. represented some, however, limited to certain, mainly ecclesiastical genres, unity with the South Slavic literatures. With the development of national principles in the life of all Slavic literatures by the 17th century. South Slavic and Byzantine-Slavic ties in Russian literature are weakening somewhat and more intense ties with West Slavic literatures are emerging, but the type of these ties is already different. These connections go not so much along the line of church relations, but along the line of "fiction" and literature intended for individual reading. Consequently, the type of those foreign monuments to which Russian literature refers is changing. Previously, she turned mainly to monuments of the medieval type, to genres already traditionally represented in Russian literature. Now there is an interest in the monuments characteristic of the new time - this is especially noticeable in the theater, in poetry. However, at first, it is not first-class works, not literary novelties that “influence” and are translated, but old and to some extent “provincial” monuments (in dramaturgy, for example). But the time is not far off when Russian literature will come into direct contact with literature of the highest rank, with first-class writers and their works. It will be in the 18th century.
But the point is not only in the types of literature to which Russian literature refers. The point is also that How she addresses them. We have seen that in the XI-XV centuries. works of literature from the Byzantine area are "transplanted" to Rus', "transplanted" here and continue to develop here. It cannot be said that this type of foreign influence disappeared in the 17th century, but now a new type of influence appears, which is characteristic of the literatures of modern times. In the 17th century it is not so much monuments that are transferred as style, literary devices, trends, aesthetic tastes and ideas.
Russian baroque can also be considered as one of the manifestations of the influence of a new type. Russian baroque is not only individual works translated from Polish or coming from Ukraine and Belarus. This is primarily a literary trend that emerged under the influence of the Polish-Ukrainian-Belarusian influence. These are new ideological trends, new themes, new genres, new mental interests and, of course, a new style.
Any more or less significant influence from the outside is carried out only when their own, internal needs arise, which form this influence and include it in the historical and literary process. Baroque also came to us as a result of its rather powerful needs. Baroque, which in other countries replaced the Renaissance and was its antithesis, turned out to be close to the Renaissance in Russia in its historical and literary role. It was of an educational nature, in many respects contributed to the liberation of the individual and was associated with the process of secularization, in contrast to the West, where in some cases, in the initial stages of its development, the baroque marked just the opposite - a return to churchliness.
And yet Russian baroque is not a Renaissance. It cannot equal the Western European Renaissance either in scale or in significance. Not accidental and its limited time and socially. This is explained by the fact that preparations for the Russian Renaissance, which resulted in baroque forms, went on for too long. Separate Renaissance features began to appear in literature even before they could merge into a specific cultural movement. The Renaissance partially "lost" its features on the way to its implementation.
Therefore, the significance of the Russian Baroque as a kind of Renaissance - the transition to the literature of the new time - is limited to the role of the "last push" that brought Russian literature closer to the type of literature of the new time. The personal principle in literature, which before the Baroque manifested itself sporadically and in different spheres, in the Baroque is formed into a certain system. The secularization of literature (i.e., its acquisition of a purely secular character), which took place throughout the entire 16th and first half of the 17th centuries. and manifested in different aspects of literary creativity, only in the baroque it becomes complete. The accumulation of new genres and the change in the meaning of old genres in the Baroque leads to the formation of a new system of genres - the system of the new time.
The emergence of a new system of genres is the main sign of the transition of Russian literature from the medieval type to the modern type.
Not all of the historians and art historians recognize the presence in Rus' of the Pre-Renaissance and subsequent separate Renaissance phenomena. This happens mainly because the Italian Renaissance is taken as the "ideal model" of any Renaissance. It is considered the one and only. But the fact is that the Renaissance as an epoch or Renaissance phenomena that stretched over a long period of time is a natural transition from the Middle Ages to the New Age, a transition that is traditionally considered the final phase of the Middle Ages. There is not only the Italian Renaissance, but also the Northern European, Czech and Polish Renaissance and many others. In addition, the Renaissance (or Renaissance - we use these terms in the same sense) is not an evaluative category. Rus' in the era of its classical Middle Ages - in the XI - early XIII centuries. (before the Mongol-Tatar conquest) - stood at the level of other European cultures, while in the era of the Pre-Renaissance and the subsequent "slow Renaissance", when certain revival elements were gradually introduced into Russian literature, preparing its transition to the new time, we can talk about its "lagging behind ". We use the concept of "lag" conditionally, since cultures are incomparable and each culture has its own enduring values.
In general, we should note the following: the entire historical and literary process of the 11th - early 18th centuries. there is a process of formation of literature as literature, but literature that exists not for itself, but for society.
Literature is an essential part of the country's history.
The originality of ancient Russian literature is not only in the nature of its individual works, but also in its special path of development - a path that is closely connected with Russian history, meeting the needs of Russian reality. Ancient Russian literature has always been preoccupied with the broad social problems of its time.
We are created from the same substance,
What are our dreams. And surrounded by sleep
All our little lives...
W. Shakespeare
Baroque in painting
Baroque(from Italian barocco - bizarre, strange; from Portuguese perola barocca - pearl of irregular shape) - the main style in the art and literature of Europe in the first half of the 17th century, which is characterized not by imitation of reality, but recreating a new reality in a more bizarre, sophisticated art form.
There is no exact definition of "baroque", however, writers who worked in this direction called this direction "a sickly child born from a freak-father and a beautiful mother", i.e. Baroque combined the features of the beautiful era of antiquity (resurrected during the Renaissance) and the dark Middle Ages.
For Baroque literature, the 17th century is a time not only of intensive formation, but also of flourishing. Baroque manifested itself especially brightly in the literature of those countries where the nobility prevailed over the bourgeoisie (Italy, Germany, Spain), i.e. nobility sought to surround itself with brilliance, glory and sing of its power and greatness with the help of literature, to convince the reader of its superiority and splendor, refinement and selectivity. That is why baroque literature is characterized by increased expressiveness and emotionality, and writers see it as their job to impress and stun the reader. This leads to the fact that earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, sea storms, storms and floods become common baroque motifs, i.e. nature is depicted in its chaotic, menacing guise.
In baroque culture the whole world is perceived as a work of art, therefore, such metaphors as "the world-book" and "the world-theater" become the most common. Representatives of the Baroque believed that the real world is just an illusion, a dream (Pedro Calderon's drama Life is a Dream), and its objects are symbols and allegories (allegory) that require interpretation.
In general, in baroque literature, the optimism of the people of the Renaissance is replaced by pessimism, and a heightened sense of the tragedy and inconsistency of the world becomes characteristic. Representatives of the Baroque are beginning to willingly turn to the theme of the inconstancy of happiness, the precariousness of life values, the omnipotence of fate and chance. The concept of dissonance became fundamental in baroque literature. Enthusiastic admiration for man and his capabilities, characteristic of the Renaissance, is replaced by an image of the depravity of man, the duality of his nature, the inconsistency of his actions. Also, writers, artists and sculptors are attracted nightmare and horror themes, and the image of God is often associated with this. This is explained by the fact that the skeptical attitude towards religion is replaced by religious frenzy and fanaticism (P. Calderon "Adoration of the Cross"). God becomes a gloomy, cruel and merciless force, and the theme of the insignificance of man in front of this force becomes central in the art of the Baroque.
The attitude of the representatives of the Baroque to the world as a book of polysemantic symbols determined the basic aesthetic principles of this trend and influenced the style of the created works. Writers gravitated toward lush imagery, and the images merged one with the other and were built mainly on the basis of complex metaphors. Much attention begins to be paid to the graphic form of the verse, "curly" poems are created, the lines of which form a pattern in the form of a heart or a star.
Writers are especially attracted reception of contrast. They mix the comic and the tragic, the sensual and the rational, the beautiful and the ugly. In poetry, the use of oxymorons (combining incompatible concepts) and paradoxical judgments is welcomed:
In the name of life - do not rush to be born.
Hurry to be born - hurry to die.
(Luis de Gongora)
Baroque existed until the middle of the 18th century and manifested itself in national literatures in different ways:
1. Gongorism (Spain) - Luis de Gongora y Argote and Pedro Calderon
2. Marinism (Italy) - Giambattista Marino and T. Tasso
3. Precise Literature (France) - Marquise de Rambouillet.
The term "baroque" was applied to literature already in XVIII century for a negative characterization of literary works. Literaturebaroque, like the whole movement, is characterized by a tendency to the complexity of forms and the desire for majesty and pomp. In baroque literature, the disharmony of the world and man, their tragic confrontation, as well as internal struggles in the soul of an individual, are comprehended. Because of this, the vision of the world and man is most often pessimistic. At the same time, the baroque in general and its literature in particular are permeated by faith in the reality of the spiritual principle, the greatness of God.
In literature, one can often find an expression of fear of fate and the unknown, an anxious expectation of death, a feeling of omnipotence of malice and cruelty. Characteristic is the expression of the idea of the existence of a divine universal law, and human arbitrariness is ultimately restrained by its establishment. Because of this, the dramatic conflict also changes in comparison with the literature of the Renaissance and Mannerism: it is not so much the struggle of the hero with the outside world as an attempt to comprehend divine plans in a collision with life. The hero turns out to be reflective, turned to his own inner world.
Baroque literature insisted on freedom of expression in creativity, it is characterized by an unbridled flight of fantasy. Baroque strove for excess in everything. Because of this, there is an accentuated, deliberate complexity of images and language, combined with the desire for beauty and affectation of feelings. The Baroque language is extremely complicated, unusual and even deliberate techniques are used, pretentiousness and even pomposity appear. The feeling of the illusory nature of life and the unreliability of knowledge led to a wide 
the use of symbols, complex metaphor, decorativeness and theatricality, determined the appearance of allegories. In the Baroque era, books-emblems were created - allegorical drawings, the hidden meaning of which was revealed in the accompanying sayings and poems. So, the heart floating on the waves meant the human soul in the sea of life, the image of a lamp with the inscription: “If you pour oil” symbolized the need for rewards for faithful service, etc. These allegorical images were often used in baroque literature. Baroque poets paid great attention to the graphic form of the verse, created "curly" poems, the lines of which formed a pattern of a heart, a star. Baroque literature constantly confronts the real and the imaginary, the desired and the real, the problem of "to be or to seem" becomes one of the most important. The intensity of passions led to the fact that feelings pressed the mind in culture and art. Finally, baroque is characterized by a mixture of very different feelings and the appearance of irony, "there is no phenomenon either so serious or so sad that it cannot turn into a joke." A pessimistic worldview gave rise not only to irony, but also to caustic sarcasm, grotesque and hyperbole.
The typological features of the Baroque also determined the genre system, which was characterized by mobility. It is characteristic that, on the one hand, the novel and dramaturgy (especially the tragedy genre) come to the fore, and, on the other hand, the cultivation of poetry that is complex in concept and language. Pastoral, tragicomedy, novel (heroic, comic, philosophical) become predominant. A special genre is burlesque - a comedy parodying high genres, roughly grounding the images, conflict and plot moves of these plays. In general, a “mosaic” picture of the world was built in all genres, and imagination played a special role in this picture, and incompatible phenomena were often combined, metaphorical and allegory were used.
The writers proclaimed the originality of the work to be its most important advantage, and the necessary features are the difficulty for perception and the possibility of various interpretations. The Spanish philosopher B. Gracian wrote: "The more difficult it is to know the truth, the more pleasant it is to comprehend it." Baroque artists highly valued wit, which consisted in paradoxical judgments, in expressing thoughts in an unusual way, in juxtaposing opposite objects, in building works on the principle of contrast, in interest in the graphic form of verse. Paradoxical judgments are an integral component of baroque lyrics. Here is an example of such a paradoxical judgment from the sonnet of the Spanish poet L. de Gongora:
In the name of life - do not rush to be born.
Hurry to be born - hurry to die.
(Translated by A. M. Rynchin)
Baroque literature had its own national specificity. It largely determined the emergence of individual literary schools and trends - Marinism in Italy, Concepsionism and Cultism in Spain, the Metaphysical School in England, Preciosity, Libertinage in France.
The most famous baroque writers were: in Spain - L. de Gongora and P. Calderon, in Italy - T. Tasso and J. Marino, in Germany - H. J. Grimmelshausen, in Russia - Simeon Polotsky. Some researchers note the influence of the Baroque style on the work of W. Shakespeare, J. Milton, M. V. Lomonosov, G. R. Derzhavin.
It is not difficult to guess that the Baroque influenced the further development of literature. I draw this conclusion on the basis of the influence of baroque on the work of M.V. Lomonosov. After all, he made a revolution in literature. His descendants certainly benefited from his work.
The content of the Baroque was different in different countries. In Russia, for example, the tragic vision of the world, characteristic of the Western European Baroque, did not spread. Baroque has formed a new type of hero in Russian literature - the catcher of Fortune, an inquisitive and enterprising person who knows how to withstand the blows of fate and enjoy the joys of life. These features in the time of Peter the Great will be embodied in the Russian nobleman Frol Skobeev, who lives according to the principle “I will be a colonel or a dead man”, in the Russian sailor Vasily Koriotsky, who managed to achieve wealth and power.
Baroque arose in Rus' at a time when the art of classicism was asserting its position in the West, so the border between these styles in Russian art was blurred, conditional. Russian baroque glorified reason, science and education. One of the first educators and baroque poets in Russia, Simeon Polotsky (1629-1680), gathered around him a circle of professional writers, together with his student Sylvester
Medvedev dreamed of establishing a university in Moscow. Another of his associates, Karion Istomin, headed the work of the Printed 
yard, where he published his "Primers".
With all the elitism, Baroque art was addressed to the people, served the purposes of their education and upbringing. The poetic collection of Simeon Polotsky "Multicolored Vertograd" contained more than a thousand titles, and under one title there could be a whole cycle of poems devoted to various topics: from the structure of the universe to the description of precious stones, and the collection itself looked like an encyclopedic dictionary, where the poems were arranged according to thematic headings , and inside them - in alphabetical order of names. The letter “C”, for example, was used for verses denouncing, often using historical examples, human shortcomings (“Foul language”, “Avarice”), interpreting moral concepts (“Glory”, “Conscience”), introducing biblical characters and plots ( "Solomon"), with exotic animals ("Scorpius") and natural elements (earth, air, water and fire). Different in genres, themes, and sources, the poems were connected by the author's intention to show the diversity of the world in its unity. Thus, the book began to resemble a museum of "rarities" and "curiosities" of nature, a collection of people of different classes and professions, with virtues and vices. Saturated with scientific and journalistic material, historical and geographical information, baroque poetry sought to go beyond the boundaries of literature.
Baroque rooted poetry in Russian literature, enriching it with new poetic forms. The poetry of Simeon Polotsky and his students is striking in its genre diversity. The range of forms is extremely wide: from greetings addressed to monarchs to epigrams, inscriptions to images and alphabets in verse. Baroque liberated the poet, freeing him from the rigid genre canons of medieval art, gave him great freedom in choosing the form of a work, and created conditions for a poetic experiment. However, in the process of development, the baroque form began to prevail over the content. The creation of unusual poems has become a word game. Baroque poets competed in composing curly verses in the form of a cross or a heart, brought into fashion "Leonin" verses with rhyming half-lines, which, for example, wrote the poem "The Body is Red" by Simeon of Polotsk:
The red body is fun to behold;
When corrupted, it will appear vilely ...
Do not love the body and be whole
The soul will certainly live forever.
When compared with the art of the Middle Ages and classicism, Russian baroque literature seems far from strict norms and canons, however, one can also find stable, recurring themes, motifs and images in it. Glorifying the enlightened monarch, the poets likened him to an eagle or the sun, and Russia to the sky. Simeon of Polotsk asserted: “All of us, like the sun, our king warms, observes, illuminates, like a father, nourishes.” Sylvester Medvedev, dreaming of finding in Princess Sophia the patron of science and education, played up the meaning hidden in the name of the ruler:
Wisdom, for you have given your name,
god Sophia called wisdom.
You are better at the beginning of science,
as if they were wise to do.
Later, these ideas, stylistic formulas and techniques will be adopted by the literature of Russian classicism, which, unlike the West, relied more on the artistic heritage of the Baroque than fought against it. Thus, there was no gap between the literature of Ancient Rus' and the literature of modern times. The relationship between them can be defined as an active and productive creative "dialogue". In the minds of Russian writers of modern times, medieval literature is “the moral stronghold and holy of holies of the future multi-million people” (D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak). The movement of domestic literature from XI to XVIII century convinces us that the Russian Middle Ages is the time of the formation of that spiritual potential, which, being realized, will later reveal the talents of Lomonosov and Derzhavin, Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Bunin and Bulgakov, will help Russian literature not only catch up with European ones, but also become the undisputed leader of the world process of artistic creation.
Baroque- this is an ideological and cultural movement in a number of European countries that has affected various areas of spiritual life, and in art has developed into a special artistic style, which, along with classicism, is one of the leading styles of the 17th century.
The term "baroque" was introduced by the classicists in the 18th century to denote the art of rough, tasteless, "barbaric" and was originally associated only with architecture, fine arts and music. In literary criticism, this term was used at the beginning of the 20th century by the German scientist G. Wölfflin, who defined baroque as a "pictorial style". The origin of the term is unclear: it is associated with the Italian barosso, literally - bizarre, strange, with the Portuguese perola barocca - an irregularly shaped pearl and, finally, with the Latin baroso - the designation of one of the incorrect syllogisms in scholastic logic.
Although the Baroque is primarily associated with the 17th century, its chronological framework is different depending on the characteristics of the historical development of different countries. In Italy, signs of the Baroque are found already from the middle of the 16th century and exist until the end of the 17th; from the end of the 16th century until the beginning of the 19th century, baroque in Spain was perceived as a national style; in Hungary and Slavic countries, including Russia, the baroque style emerged by the middle of the 17th century and survived until the second half of the 18th century.
Researchers associate the origins of Baroque with Mannerism, sometimes without even drawing a sharp line between these two styles.
Baroque, however, is not limited to the problem of style. It is considered possible to talk about a special Baroque worldview, about the "Baroque man", about the penetration of the Baroque into the sphere of science, philosophy, everyday life. In artistic and ideological terms, the Baroque also includes a variety of trends and trends. The Counter-Reformation cultivated the Baroque, building opulent, grandiose temples and developing stylistically sophisticated rhetorical preaching and allegorical school drama. But baroque was also widespread in Protestant (Germany, England, the Netherlands) and Orthodox countries. Along with the courtly aristocratic baroque and its variations (Spanish gongorism, Italian marinism, precision literature in France, "metaphysical school" in England, the work of Russian syllabic poets S. Polotsky and S. Medvedev), there was a burgher baroque that expressed the mood of the broad masses of the people (the novels of the German G. Grimmelshausen, the Frenchman C. Sorel, Spanish picaresque novels).
Baroque reflects the crisis state of the era. The religious wars in France in 1560-1590, the Thirty Years' War in Germany and other dramatic events that stirred up the whole of Europe had nothing in common with the expectations of the Renaissance humanists, with their ideal of a free and harmoniously developed person, capable of creating a harmonious society.
The world appears before baroque artists without stability, the world is in a state of constant change, and it is impossible to catch the pattern of these changes. Baroque works are characterized by the themes of the impermanence of happiness, the precariousness of life values, the omnipotence of fate and chance. Enthusiastic admiration for man and his capabilities, characteristic of the humanists of the Renaissance, is replaced by an emphasis on the duality, inconsistency and depravity of human nature. There is a glaring discrepancy between the appearance and the essence of things, hence the feeling of "disconnection" of being, the contradiction between the bodily and the spiritual, the acute awareness of the sensual beauty of the world and at the same time the transience of human life. "Memento mori" (remember death) is the leitmotif of the Baroque worldview.
The most important theoretical works of the Baroque are "Everyday Oracle, or the Art of Caution" (1647) by the Spaniard B. Gracian and "Aristotle's Spyglass" (1655) by the Italian E. Tesauro. In their treatises, they develop the doctrine of "quick mind" - creative intuition, capable of penetrating into the essence of the most distant objects and phenomena. The basis of "quick mind" is a metaphor that connects objects and ideas with the power of creative wit, as if incompatible, and thereby achieves the effect of surprise. The "quick mind" is likened by Tesauro to the creative ability of God. Like God, artists create images and worlds: “From the non-existent they create the existing, from the immaterial they exist, and now the lion becomes a man, the eagle becomes a city. and form a chimera, the hieroglyph for madness." But God himself, the "witty speaker", creates a world of metaphors, allegories and "concetto" (witty ideas), and only an initiate can comprehend the secrets of nature by deciphering these symbols and metaphors.
Baroque writers sought to liberate the reader's imagination, to amaze and stun him. Psychologically, this manifests itself in increased emotionality, bordering on exaltation, in expressiveness and pathos. At the level of the Baroque style, it gravitates towards lush figurativeness, decorativeness and metaphor, turning into allegory, allegory, emblematics. Baroque craving for dynamics and play with contrasts creates a mobile and picturesque world, a world where comic and tragic, abstract symbolism and naturalistic concreteness, calls for asceticism and unbridled hedonism are whimsically mixed.
With all the inclination towards mysticism, the baroque has a strongly rationalistic beginning. No matter how pretentious the language of the Baroque writer, the most refined and sophisticated metaphors are built according to rigid rationalistic schemes drawn from the realm of formal logic. The craving for mysticism also does not make the Baroque style irrational. Following the neo-Stoics, whose philosophy became widespread in the 17th century, baroque writers put forward the idea of the inner independence of the individual, recognize the mind as a force that can help a person resist fatal evil and, ultimately, rise above vicious passions.
Not a Christian solution
Say there is no way for us
Fix his ruthlessness.
There is a way; and wise over fate
Capable of winning...
(P. Calderon, "Life is a dream")
Trying to capture the paradoxical nature of life, Baroque artists strive to create complex, sometimes encrypted art forms. Thus, the largest representative of the Spanish Baroque, L. Gongora, believed that art should serve a select few. Gongora chose the "dark style" as a means of creating "learned poetry" - cultism(from lat. culture- cultivate, transform). According to Gongora, some vagueness of expressions encourages the reader to think, to actively cooperate with the poet. At the same time, in order to achieve success, the reader must have serious intellectual potential. And Gongora deliberately encrypts her poetic texts, resorting to artificially complicated syntax, using many neologisms, overloading her works with complex metaphors and paraphrases. In his "Tale of Polyphemus" the cave of Polyphemus is called "a terrifying yawn of the earth", the rock that closes the entrance to it is "gagged" at the cave, the giant Polyphemus says about his height: "When I sit, my strong hand does not forgive the high sweet palm fruit" (i.e., I am so tall that I can pick them while sitting).
Baroque literature is pictorial (it is no coincidence that baroque poetry is called "talking painting"). This style allows you to identify the most spectacular, albeit not the main, properties of the object, to see the unusual in the ordinary. P. Calderon calls the bird a "feathery flower", a "fluttering bouquet", a stream - a "silver snake", in the "beast with spotted fur" the poet first of all sees "a painted pattern, as a symbol of the stars, born with a brush" (Sikhismundo's monologue from the drama " Life is a dream." Gongora in the sonnet "While the fleece of your hair flows ...", extolling the beauty of a woman, compares her hair with gold, her neck with crystal, the "lip inflorescence" with a carnation and completes the sonnet with a typical baroque antithesis:
Hurry to taste the pleasure in power,
Hidden in the skin, in the curl, in the mouth,
While your bouquet of carnations and lilies
Not only did he not wither ingloriously,
But the years have not turned you
In the ashes and the earth, in the ashes, smoke and dust.
Baroque prose is represented in European literature primarily as a picaresque novel or a picaresque novel (from Spanish. picaro- rogue), which is located on the other, democratic pole of the baroque. In the center of the picaresque is a rogue hero who exists outside the estates. He moves freely in the geographical and social space, which made it possible for the writer to present life in its various social sections.
An example of a baroque novel is "The life story of a rogue named Pablos, an example of vagabonds and a mirror of swindlers" by F. Quevedo y Villegas (1625). The son of a swindler, a barber and a pimp, Pablos has no innate inclinations to vice, but from childhood he sees only trickery and deceit around him. Pablos is trying to avoid the fate of his parents, but unconsciously, imperceptibly for himself, he enters precisely on his father's path, having previously tried different paths to salvation. He meets different people and every time he is convinced that they are not who they say they are. The scars of a boastful warrior turn out not to be signs of exploits, but the result of a bad illness and a knife fight. The holy hermit turns into a card sharper, and the exquisite cloak of a well-born Castilian nobleman covers his naked body and pantaloons, which are held on by one lace.
Quevedo the novelist creates an illusory and ghostly world where everything is false and deceitful, everything is fake. The novel is dominated by sarcastic irony and grotesque, breaking the usual ideas, bringing together incompatible objects (the world is like a terrible grotesque dream).
Quevedo style - conceptualism(lat. conceptus- thought). If the goal of cultists is to create a beautiful and perfect world of art, opposed to imperfect reality, then conceptists consciously do not go beyond this reality, their style is a consequence of the emotional perception of a chaotic-mosaic, chaotic picture of life. The characteristic techniques of conceptists are a play on words and a pun, a parodic destruction of verbal clichés, etc. Quevedo's conceptism is most clearly revealed in the third chapter of his novel, in the description of the monk of Kabra, "the personification of extreme stinginess and beggary": "His eyes were pressed almost to the back of his head, so that he looked at you as if from a barrel, they were so deeply hidden and dark that they were fit for shops in the market stalls, his nose evoked memories partly of Rome, partly of France, he was eaten up with boils - more like from a cold than from vices, for the latter require costs. His cheeks were adorned with a beard, faded from fear of a nearby mouth, which seemed to threaten to eat her from great hunger, "etc.
The influence of the poetics of the baroque novel is fundamental for the development of modern European literature: its characters, and first of all its protagonist, picaro, are depicted in the process of formation under the influence of the environment. Recognition of the role of circumstances in the formation of character is perhaps the most important discovery of the literature of the 17th century.
Baroque discoveries in the field of poetry are no less significant: baroque metaphorism, expanding semantic ties, demonstrated new possibilities of the poetic word, unknown to the artists of the Renaissance, and thus paved the way for the further development of poetry of the 17th-19th centuries.
Baroque came to Russia from Poland through Ukrainian-Belarusian mediation. There was no Renaissance in Russia, and this put Russian baroque in a different relationship to the Middle Ages than in European countries: Russian baroque did not return, like European, to medieval traditions, but picked up these traditions (ornate and decorative style, love for formal tricks, passion for contrasts and fanciful comparisons, allegorism and emblematics, the idea of "vanity of vanities" of all that exists, a penchant for encyclopedism, etc.). The Baroque in Russia also assumed many of the functions of the Renaissance, accelerating the process of the formation of a "new" literature. The Baroque instilled in Russian literature genres and types of artistic creativity previously unknown to it - poetry (syllabic poetry) and dramaturgy (school drama).
Baroque in Russia acted as a Renaissance and therefore acquired a life-affirming and enlightening character; there was no longer any place for mystical and pessimistic moods in it. Moreover, it is within the framework of the Baroque that the process of secularization of Russian literature is taking place - its liberation from the tutelage of the church.
The largest representative of Russian baroque S. Polotsky. His books: "Good-voiced harp", "Russian Eagle", "Rhymologion", "Vertograd multicolored" - are "a whole verbal-architectural structure" (I. Eremin) and resemble encyclopedic dictionaries. The poet strives for inclusiveness: he is also interested in the most general topics - "merchants", law, love for subjects, labor, abstinence, etc. - and specific ones - various animals, fish, reptiles, birds, trees, precious stones, etc. In the verses of S. Polotsky historical figures and historical phenomena are interpreted, palaces and churches are described. Modern events serve as an occasion for the poet to talk about the events of world history (for example, when S. Polotsky wanted to glorify the wooden palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in Kolomenskoye, he did not fail to recall and tell in detail about the seven wonders of the world). According to D. Likhachev's definition, Polotsky's poetry communicates information and teaches morality: "This is 'pedagogical' poetry." Art only stylistically organizes the reported information. It turns poetry into an ornament, motley, cheerful and intricate.<...>The ornament curls over the surface, not so much expressing the essence of the object as decorating it.
Performing an educational function, as well as being associated in the person of its largest representatives (S. Polotsky, S. Medvedev, K. Istomin) with absolutism, Russian baroque was a "court" phenomenon, which is indicative of classicism. "Consequently, the Russian baroque also facilitated the transition from ancient to new literature in this respect, it had a" buffer "value" . This explains the absence of a clear boundary between Russian baroque and classicism, and even the coexistence of these two styles within the same artistic system (Lomonosov's court odes).
By the middle of the 18th century, baroque in its aristocratic-court version was transformed into a style rococo(French rococo, from rocaile- small pebbles, shells). This is the art of carefree epicureanism, where freethinking is combined with frivolity, wit and paradoxicality - with extreme refinement and brilliant artistry. Rococo is formed under the strongest influence of the aristocracy, from this art they demand, first of all, "pleasant". "To touch and please" (Abbé Dubos) becomes the main requirement for poetry and painting. And yet, one should not see in Rococo only frivolous hedonism. In his mocking skepticism, in his defiant rejection of academic traditions and all sorts of norms, the crisis of the era was reflected. The denial of pathos and heroics, which in European and, above all, in French art, had already degenerated into false formulas everywhere, contributed to the formation of a new art - chamber and intimate, addressed to the personality of a private person. Through Rococo, "art came closer to everyday life, its measure was no longer heroic exclusivity, but the usual human norm" .
In Rococo literature, which gravitates towards small genres, anacreontics, gallant lyrics, various types of "light poetry" (messages, impromptu, elegies) were developed. Among French writers, comedian P. Marivaux and lyricist E. Parny were prominent representatives of this style. In Russia, the features of Rococo are manifested in the anacreontics of M. Lomonosov and G. Derzhavin, in the poetic story "Darling" by I. Bogdanovich, they are noticeably noticeable in the poetics of K. Batyushkov, early A. Pushkin, although the principles of Rococo were not widely used in Russian poetry. .
- Such currents in the Baroque as Gongorism and Marinism are named after the founders of this style in Spain and Italy - the poets L. Gongora and J. Marino; precision literature (V. Voiture, G. de Balzac, M. de Scuderi, Menage) got its name from the French. preciousux Kantor A. M., Kozhina E. F., Livshits N. A. and others. Art of the 18th century. M., 1977. S. 84.
