History, fiction and human time. Fiction and history

Are you here: Fairy-tale heroes

Moretti Franco

Keywords

bourgeoisie / middle class / capitalism / culture / ideology / MODERN WESTERN EUROPEAN ART LITERATURE / SOCIAL STRUCTURE / SOCIO-ECONOMIC HISTORY

annotation scientific article on history and historical sciences, author of scientific work - Moretti Franco

F. Moretti's book “Bourgeois. Between History and Literature” is devoted to the history of the bourgeoisie as a class in Western society. Its author is Professor of the Humanities. Daniel and Laura Louise Bell of Stanford University and founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab. The subject of the book is the bourgeois, viewed through the prism of literature. Turning to works Western European literature, F. Moretti is trying to understand the causes of the emergence and flourishing of bourgeois culture, as well as to identify the factors that led to its subsequent attenuation and disappearance. By focusing not on real relations between social groups, but on legitimate cultural forms, Moretti demonstrates the distinctive features of the bourgeoisie and the markers of the lines that delimit it from the working and ruling classes. The author of the book, in addition, tries to clarify the question why the concept of "bourgeoisie" eventually replaced the concept of the middle class, and also why the bourgeoisie could not meet the political and cultural needs of modern Western society. Magazine " economic sociology"publishes "Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions" ("Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions") to the book by F. Moretti "Bourgeois. Between history and literature. In it, the author poses the problem of his research, defines the main concepts and explains the methodology, demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of a formal analysis of literary prose for understanding social history. In the "Introduction" Moretti also describes the structure of the book and points out the remaining gaps in the topic under study, the solution of which requires additional research.

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (an excerpt)

The book “The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature” written by Franco Moretti, the professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and the founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab, is devoted to the history of the bourgeois as a social class of the modern Western society. The bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature, is the subject of “The Bourgeois”. Addressing to some pieces of the Western literature, the author tries to scrutinize the reasons of the bourgeois culture’s golden age and to reveal the causes of its further fall. Moretti focuses not on real relationships between social groups but on legitimate cultural forms, which demonstrate peculiarities of the bourgeois and demarcate it from working and ruling classes. In addition, the author seeks an answer to the questions why the notion of bourgeois was being replaced with the concept of the middle class and why the bourgeois failed to resist the political and cultural challenges of the modern Western society. The journal of Economic Sociology publishes “Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions” from “The Bourgeois”. In the Introduction, Moretti formulates the problem of the study, defines key concepts and explains the applied methodology, demonstrating weaknesses and strengths of the formal analysis of literary prose for understanding the social history. In the Introduction, Moretti describes the book's structure and sheds lights on the dark corners, which require additional research.

The text of the scientific work on the topic "Bourgeois. Between History and Literature"

NEW TRANSLATIONS

F. Moretti

Bourgeois. Between history and literature1

Moretti Franco (Moretti, Franco) -

Professor of the Humanities. Danieli and Laura Louise Bellov, Department of English, Stanford University. Address: USA, 943052087, California, Stanford, st. Serra Mall, 450.

Email: [email protected] edu

Transl. from English. Inna Kushnareva.

Published with the permission of the Publishing House of the Institute. E. Gaidar.

F. Moretti's book “Bourgeois. Between History and Literature” is dedicated to the history of the bourgeoisie as a class in Western society. Its author is a professor of the humanities. Daniel and Laura Louise Bell of Stanford University and founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab. The subject of the book is the bourgeois, viewed through the prism of literature. Turning to the works of Western European literature, F. Moretti tries to understand the causes of the emergence and flourishing of bourgeois culture, as well as to identify the factors that led to its subsequent attenuation and disappearance. By focusing not on real relations between social groups, but on legitimate cultural forms, Moretti demonstrates the distinctive features of the bourgeoisie and the markers of the lines that delimit it from the working and ruling classes. The author of the book, in addition, tries to clarify the question why the concept of "bourgeoisie" eventually replaced the concept of the middle class, and also why the bourgeoisie could not meet the political and cultural needs of modern Western society.

The journal Economic Sociology publishes Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions to F. Moretti's book Bourgeois. Between history and literature. In it, the author poses the problem of his research, defines the main concepts and explains the methodology, demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of a formal analysis of literary prose for understanding social history. In the "Introduction" Moretti also describes the structure of the book and points out the remaining gaps in the topic under study, the solution of which requires additional research.

Keywords: bourgeoisie; middle class; capitalism; culture; ideology; modern Western European fiction; social structure; socio-economic history.

Introduction: concepts and contradictions

1. "I am a representative of the bourgeois class"

Bourgeois... Just recently this concept seemed indispensable for social analysis, but now for many years you can never hear it. Capitalism is as strong as ever, but the people who were its

Source: Moretti F. 2014 (forthcoming). Bourgeois. Between history and literature. Moscow: Gaidar Institute. Transl. from English: Moretti F. 2013. The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. London: Verso Books.

fertilization seems to have disappeared. “I am a representative of the bourgeois class, I feel like one and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,” wrote Max Weber in 1895. Who today can repeat these words? Bourgeois "opinions and ideals" - what is it?

This changed atmosphere is reflected in academic writings. Simmel and Weber, Sombart and Schumpeter, they all saw capitalism and the bourgeoisie - economics and anthropology - as two sides of the same coin. “I do not know of any serious historical interpretation of the modern world in which we live,” wrote Emmanuel Wallerstein a quarter of a century ago, “in which the concept of the bourgeoisie ... would be absent. And it is no coincidence. It's hard to tell a story without its main character." And yet today, even those historians who most emphasize the role of "opinions and ideals" in the birth of capitalism (Ellen Meiksins Wood, de Vries, Appleby, Mokyr) have little or no interest in the figure of the bourgeois. “There was capitalism in England,” writes Mackins Wood in The Primordial Culture of Capitalism, “but it was not the bourgeoisie who gave birth to it. France had a (more or less) triumphant bourgeoisie, but its revolutionary project had nothing to do with capitalism.” And finally: "It is not necessary to identify the bourgeois ... with the capitalist."

That's right, it is not necessary to identify, but that's not the point. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber wrote that "the emergence of the Western bourgeoisie in all its idiosyncrasies" is a process that "is closely related to the emergence of the capitalist organization of labor, but cannot be considered completely identical to it" 2. In close connection , but cannot be considered completely identical - this is the idea behind "Bourgeois": to look at the bourgeois and its culture (bourgeois in history, for the most part, was definitely masculine) as part of the power structure with which these structures, however , do not match entirely. But to speak of the bourgeois in the singular is doubtful in itself. “The big bourgeoisie could not formally separate itself from people of lower status,” Hobsbawm wrote in The Age of Empire, “its structure had to remain open to new arrivals - such was the nature of its being.” This permeability, adds Perry Anderson, distinguishes the bourgeoisie from the nobility above it and from the working class below it, for despite all the important differences within each of these opposing classes, they are structurally more homogeneous. : the aristocracy is usually defined by legal status combined with civil titles and legal privileges, while the working class is characterized mainly by manual labor. The bourgeoisie as a social group has no such internal unity.

Permeable borders and weak internal unity - do not these features devalue the very idea of the bourgeoisie as a class? According to its greatest living historian, Jurgen Koka, not at all, if we distinguish between what we might call the core of this concept, and its outer periphery. This latter indeed varied greatly both socially and historically: until the 18th century, the outer periphery consisted mainly of "self-employed small entrepreneurs (artisans, retailers, innkeepers and small proprietors)" of early urban Europe. ; a hundred years later, a completely different population belonged to it - "medium and small clerks of civil servants." However, during the 19th century, throughout Western Europe a syncretic figure of the "properties educated bourgeoisie" appears, which provides a center of gravity for the class as a whole and reinforces in the bourgeoisie the traits of a possible new ruling class: this convergence found expression in the German conceptual pair Besitzs- and Bildungsbürgertum (property bourgeoisie and cultural bourgeoisie), or, more prosaically, in

Cit. Quoted from: Weber M. 2013. Selected: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. M.; St. Petersburg: Center for Humanitarian Initiatives; 13. - Note. ed.

that the British system of taxation dispassionately brings profits (from capital) and fees (for professional services) "under one item".

Property meets culture: Koki's ideal type will be my ideal type, but with one important difference. As a literary historian, I will not be interested in the real relations between individual social groups - bankers and high-ranking civil servants, industrialists and doctors and so on - but rather how cultural forms "fit" for the new reality of classes; for example, the way the word "comfort" outlines the contours of legitimate bourgeois consumption; or how the pacing of the narrative adjusts to a new measured existence. Bourgeois through the prism of literature - this is the subject of the book "Bourgeois".

2. Dissonances

Bourgeois culture: is it united or not? “The multi-coloured banner ... can serve as [a symbol] for the class that I had under the microscope,” writes Peter Gay, completing the five volumes of his work The Bourgeois Experience (The Experience of the Bourgeoisie). “Economic selfishness, the religious agenda, intellectual convictions, social competition, the proper place of women have become political issues over which some bourgeois have fought with others,” he adds in a later review, and explains that strong differences even lead to “the temptation to doubt in that the bourgeoisie in general could be defined as an entity. For Gay, all these "striking differences" are the result of the acceleration of social change in the 19th century and are therefore typical of the history of the bourgeoisie. Victorian era. But the antimonies of bourgeois culture can be looked at from a more distant perspective. Abi Warburg, in an essay on the Sassetti Chapel in the Church of Santa Trinita, drawing on Machiavelli, who described Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent in his History of Florence, as a man who at the same time led a life both frivolous and full of business and cares (la vita leggera e la grave), combining two different natures in the most unthinkable way (quasi con impossibile congiunzione congiunte)3, he notes that a resident of Florence during the Medici times combined completely different characters of an idealist (whether a Christian of the Middle Ages, a romantically inclined knight or a classical Neoplatonist) and a layman, a practical Etruscan merchant -pagan. Natural, but harmonious in its vitality, this mysterious being responded with joy to every psychic impulse as an extension of its mental horizon, which can be developed and used at your pleasure 4.

A mysterious being, idealistic and mundane. Turning to another golden age of the bourgeoisie, midway between the Medici and the Victorians, Simon Schama reflects on the unusual coexistence that allowed secular and ecclesiastical rulers to live with a value system that might otherwise seem extremely contradictory, about the centuries-old struggle between acquisitiveness and asceticism . The incorrigible habit of self-indulgence and the encouragement of risky ventures rooted in the Dutch commercial economy evoked warning murmurs and solemn condemnations from the inveterate custodians of the old orthodoxy. The unusual coexistence of outwardly opposing value systems gave them room for maneuver between the holy and the profane, depending on the requirements of need or conscience, without confronting a cruel choice between poverty and eternal torment.

See: Machiavelli N. 1987. History of Florence. M.: Nauka; 351. Transl. N. Ya. Rykova. - Note. ed.

A similar combination of the incongruous appears on the pages devoted to Warburg's portrait of the patron in Flemish Art and the Early Florentine Renaissance (1902): on the alert, directed towards the earthly.

Indulgence in material desires and the old orthodoxy: "The people of Delft" (original title "The Burgomaster of Delft and his daughter") by Jan Steen look at us from the cover of Schama's book (see fig. 1). This is a sitting overweight man in black, on one hand of which is a daughter in clothes with gold and silver embroidery, and on the other - a beggar woman in faded rags. Everywhere, from Florence to Amsterdam, the open animation on the faces depicted in Santa Trinita has disappeared. The joyless burgher sits in his chair, as if discouraged because he is doomed to "be the subject of moral prodding, pulling him in different directions" (again Shama); he is next to his daughter, but does not look at her, turned towards the woman, but not towards her, he looks down, his eyes are scattered. What to do?

Different natures, combined in the most unthinkable way, Machiavelli, Warburg's "mysterious creature", Shama's "centuries-old struggle": in comparison with these early contradictions of bourgeois culture, the essence of the Victorian era is revealed - a time of compromise to a much greater extent than contrast. Compromise is not uniformity, of course, and Victorians can still be considered "multicolored"; however, these colors are remnants of the past, and they are losing their brightness. A gray, not multi-colored, banner - that's what flutters over the bourgeois age.

3. Bourgeoisie, middle class

“I find it difficult to understand why the bourgeoisie does not like being called that,” writes Grothuisen in his seminal study The Origin of the Bourgeois Spirit in France. - Kings were called kings, priests - priests, knights - knights; but the bourgeoisie preferred to remain incognito. Garder l "incognito - keep incognito. This ubiquitous and indefinite label is inevitably recalled - "middle class." Reinhart Koselleck writes that each concept "sets a special horizon of potential experience and possible theory", and choosing "middle class" instead of "bourgeoisie" , the English language certainly defined a very clear horizon of social perception. But why did he do it? The bourgeois arose "somewhere in the middle"; yes, he "was not a peasant or a serf, but he was also not noble", as Wallerstein put it 5 , however, this middleness was what he, in fact, wanted to overcome: born in the "middle class" of early modern England, Robinson Crusoe rejects his father's idea that this is "the best estate in the world", and devotes his whole life to to go beyond it. Why then dwell on a definition that returns this class to its indistinguishable origins, instead of acknowledging its success? then "bourgeois"?

The word "bourgeois" first appeared in French in the 11th century as burgeis - to refer to those inhabitants of medieval cities (bourgs) who enjoyed the right of "freedom and independence from feudal jurisdiction" (explanatory dictionary of the French language "Le Grand Robert"). To the legal meaning of this term, from which the typically bourgeois idea of freedom as "freedom from something" came, at about the end of the 17th century, an economic meaning was added, referring through the already familiar series of negations to "one who belonged neither to the clergy nor to nobility, did not work with his hands and owned independent means” (“Le Grand Robert”). From this moment, although chro-

Behind Wallerstein's double negation lies a more distant past, which Emile Benveniste highlights in the chapter "The Craft Without a Name: Trade" in his Dictionary of Indo-European Social Terms. In short, Benveniste's thesis is that trade is one of the earliest forms of "bourgeois" activity and, "at least in antiquity, trade was not among those activities that were consecrated by tradition", therefore, this kind activity could only be defined in negative terms, such as Greek askholia and Latin negotium (nec-otium, "negation of leisure"), or general terms, such as Greek pragma, French affaires ("the result of the substantiation of the expression à faire"), or English busy (which “gave the abstract noun business - “occupation, business”) (quoted from: Benveniste E. 1995. Dictionary of Indo-European social terms. M .: Progress; Univers; 108-109. - Note ed.).

Rice. 1. Jan Steen. Residents of Delft (Mayor of Delft and his daughter). 1655 (Courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library)

The nology and semantics could be different in different countries6, the word appears in all Western European languages, from Italian borghese to Spanish burgués, Portuguese burguês, German Burger and Dutch burger. Against the background of this group, the English word bourgeois stands out as the only example of a word not assimilated into the morphology of the national language, but remaining as an unmistakably recognizable borrowing from French. Indeed, "(French) citizen or free citizen" is the first definition of bourgeois as a noun in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED); "pertaining to the French middle class" is an adjectival definition, immediately reinforced by a series of quotations referring to France, Italy and Germany. The feminine noun bourgeoise is “a Frenchwoman belonging to the middle class”, while bourgeoisie (the first three entries mention France, continental Europe and Germany) in accordance with everything that has been said is “the set of free citizens of a French city; French middle class; also extends to the middle class in other countries” (also OED).

Bourgeois is labeled as non-English. In Dinah Craik's bestseller John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), a fictional biography of a textile manufacturer, the word appears only three times, always in italics to indicate that it is foreign, and used only pejoratively ("I mean the lower class , bourgeoisie"), to express contempt ("What? Bourgeois - a shopkeeper?"). As for the other novelists of Mrs. Craik's time, they remain completely silent. In the database of the publishing company Chadwyck Healey (Cambridge), in which 250 novels make up a kind of extended canon of the 19th century, the word bourgeois comes across in 1850-1860. only once, while rich (rich) occurs 4600 times, wealthy (wealthy) - 613 times, and

The trajectory of the German Bürger - "from (Stadt-)Bürger (burgher) around 1700 through (Staats-)Bürger (citizen) around 1800 to Bürger (bourgeois) as 'non-proletarian' around 1900" - is particularly striking. Cm.: .

prosperous (prosperous) - 449. And if we include in our study the entire century, approaching it in terms of the area of use, and not the frequency of the term, the 3500 novels of the Stanford Literary Laboratory (The Stanford Literary Lab) will give the following results: the adjective rich is combined with 1060 different nouns, wealthy - with 215, prosperous - with 156, and bourgeois - with 8, including "family", "doctor", "virtues", "view", "pretense", "theater" and for some reason "heraldic shield"

Where does such reluctance come from? In general, Coca writes, bourgeois groups separate themselves from the old power, privileged hereditary nobility and absolute monarchy. The opposite follows from this line of reasoning: to the extent that these dividing lines are absent or obliterated, talk of Bürgertum (burghers), both large in scope and severely limited, loses its real essence. This explains international differences: where the tradition of the aristocracy was weak or non-existent (as in Switzerland and the United States), where the early defeudalization and commercialization of agriculture gradually blurred the distinction between nobility and bourgeoisie, and even between town and country (as in England and Sweden). ), we find powerful factors preventing the formation of a well-recognized Bürgertum and discourse about it.

The absence of a clear "dividing line" for the discourse about Bürgertum is what has made the English language so indifferent to the word "bourgeois". Conversely, the expression "middle class" received support for the simple reason that many of those who observed early industrial Britain wanted to have a class in the middle. Industrial areas, wrote the Scottish historian James Mill (1773-1836) in an essay on state government(1824), "suffered especially from the great shortage of the middle class, because there the population almost entirely consisted of rich manufacturers and poor workers" .

Poor and rich: “There is no other city in the world,” noted Canon Parkinson in his famous description of Manchester, which was echoed by many of his contemporaries, “where the distance between the poor and the rich was so significant or the barriers between them so difficult to overcome.” As industrial growth led to the polarization of English society (the Communist Manifesto clearly stated that society should split into two classes: property owners and dispossessed workers), the need for mediation grew, and the class in the middle seemed the only one capable of " sympathize" with "the unfortunate lot of poor workers" (Mill again) and at the same time "guide" them with "his advice" and "set a good example to follow." He was "the link between the upper and lower classes," added Lord Brougham, who described the class in an 1832 reform speech entitled "The Intelligence of the Middle Class" as "the true bearers of sober, rational, reasonable and honest English feeling".

If the economy has created a broad historical need for a class in the middle, politicians have added a decisive tactical twist. In case Google service Books "middle class", "middle classes" and "bourgeois" appear with more or less the same frequency in 1800-1825; but in the years immediately preceding the Reform Bill of 1832, when the relationship between social structure and political representation came to the fore public life, the expressions "middle class" and "middle classes" suddenly began to be used two to three times more often than the word "bourgeois". Perhaps because the idea of a "middle class" was a way of ignoring the bourgeoisie as an independent group and instead looking down on it, entrusting it with the task of political containment.

7 "The vital thing in 1830-1832, according to Whig ministers, was to break the alliance of the Radicals by driving a wedge between the middle class and the workers," writes F. M. L. Thompson. Attempts

Then, after the “baptism” (baptism) that took place and the adoption of the new term, all kinds of consequences (and inversions) began: although the “middle class” and “bourgeois” pointed to exactly the same social reality, they, for example, created completely different associations , and, being "in the middle", the bourgeoisie could seem like a group that is itself subordinate and is not able to bear responsibility for what is happening in the world. In addition, "lower", "middle" and "higher" formed a continuum within which mobility was much easier to imagine than in the case of disparate categories - "classes" - such as the peasantry, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie or the nobility. And thus the symbolic horizon created by the expression "middle class" ultimately worked exceptionally well for the English (and American) bourgeoisie: the initial defeat of 1832, which made "independent representation of the bourgeoisie" impossible, further protected it from direct criticism. , maintaining a euphemistic version of the social hierarchy. Grothuisen was right: the incognito tactic worked.

4. Between history and literature

The bourgeois between history and literature: in this book I will limit myself to only a handful of possible examples. And I will start with the bourgeois before the prise de pouvoir (coming to power) (see chapter 1 of this book "A Working Master" - "A Working Master"), with a dialogue between Defoe and Weber about a man who finds himself on a desert island, cut off from the rest of humanity , who, however, begins to see patterns in his experience and find the right words to express them. In Chapter 2 ("The Serious Century"), the island becomes half a continent: the bourgeois have spread throughout Western Europe and expanded their influence in many directions. This is the most "aesthetic" moment in this story: the invention of narrative devices, the unity of style, the masterpieces - great bourgeois literature, if there was such a thing. Chapter 3 ("Fog" - "Fog") is dedicated to Victorian England and tells a different story: after decades incredible success the bourgeois can no longer just be "himself"; his power over the rest of society—his "hegemony"—was called into question; and it is at this moment that the bourgeois suddenly becomes ashamed of himself; he won power, but lost the clarity of vision - his "style". This is the turning point of the story, and also the moment of truth: it turns out that the bourgeois are much better at ruling in the economic sphere than they are at strengthening their political presence and formulating a common culture. Then the sun of the century of the bourgeois begins to decline: in the southern and eastern regions, described in chapter 4 ("National Malformations"), one great figure after another collapses and becomes a universal laughing stock due to the persistence of the old regime; at the same time, from a tragic no-man's-land (which is, of course, wider than Norway), a radical self-criticism of bourgeois existence resounds in Ibsen's drama cycle (chapter 5, "Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism").

Let's interrupt this retelling. However, let me add a few words about the relationship between the study of literature and the study of history as such. What kind of history - what kind of evidence - do literary works contain? Obviously, they are never direct: the industrialist Thornton in North and South (1855) or the entrepreneur Vokulsky in The Doll (1890) say nothing about the bourgeoisie of Manchester or Warsaw. This kind of evidence belongs to a parallel historical series - to a kind of double helix, in which the convulsions of capitalist modernization correspond to the literary form-creation that transforms them. “Every form

the divisions of the middle class with the lower strata of society were complemented by promises of alliance with the higher strata: "It is a matter of paramount importance," said Lord Grey, "to make sure that the middle classes are connected with the upper strata of society." As Dror Warman, who reconstructed the middle-class debate with exceptional clarity, points out, Bruem's famous praise also emphasized "political responsibility ... rather than intransigence, loyalty to the crown rather than the rights of the people, values as a bulwark against revolution rather than not on an attempt on freedom" (Fabman 1995: 308-309).

ma is the resolution of the dissonances of being,” wrote the young Lukács in Theory of the Novel. we continue to read even when the dissonances themselves have gradually disappeared from sight: the fewer traces of them left, the more successful their resolution turned out to be.

There is something ghostly about this story, in which the questions disappear, but the answers remain. But if we accept the idea of literary form as the remains of what was once a living and problematic present, and move backwards through "reverse engineering", we will understand the problem that this form was designed to solve. And if we do this, formal analysis can reveal - in principle, although not always in practice - a dimension of the past that would otherwise remain hidden. This is a possible contribution to historical knowledge: having understood the opaque Ibsenian allusions to the past or the evasive semantics of Victorian verbs, even the role of the gerund is at first glance not a very fun task! - in "Robinson Crusoe", we will enter the realm of shadows, where the past regains its voice and continues to speak to us9.

5. Abstract hero

But time speaks to us only through form as a medium. Stories and styles: that's where I find the bourgeois. Especially in styles, which is surprising in itself, especially considering how often narratives are spoken of as the basis of social identity10 and the bourgeoisie is identified with unrest and change; it suffices to recall some of the most famous examples from the Phenomenology of the Spirit, or "everything class and stagnant disappears"11 in the Communist Manifesto, and Schumpeter's creative destruction. I expected, therefore, that bourgeois literature would be characterized by new and unpredictable plots: "leaps into the dark," as Elster wrote of capitalist innovation. Instead, as I argue in The Serious Age, the opposite is happening: not dis-

Cit. by: Lukacs G. 1994. Theory of the novel. New Literary Review. 9:30. - Note. ed.

Aesthetic forms are structured responses to social contradictions: given the relationship between literary history and social history, I suggested that the essay "The Serious Age", although originally written for a literary collection, would fit well in this book (after all, its the working title for a long time was "On Bourgeois Seriousness"). But when I reread this essay, I immediately felt (by this word I mean an irrational and irresistible feeling) that I would have to part with a significant part of the original text and rewrite the rest. After editing, I realized that this concerned mainly three sections (all of which were titled in the original version "The Roads Divided"), which outlined a broader morphological landscape, within which forms of bourgeois seriousness took shape. In other words, I felt the need to remove the spectrum of formal variation that was given historically and leave the result of the selection that took place in the 19th century. In a book on bourgeois culture, this appears to be a compelling choice, but it also highlights the difference between literary history as the history of literature, in which pluralism and the randomness of formal options is a key element of the picture, and literary history as (part of) the history of society, where the connection between specific form and social function.

A recent example from a book on the French bourgeoisie: “Here I put forward the thesis that the existence of social groups, although rooted in the material world, is determined by language, or rather by narrative: in order for a group to claim the role of an actor in society and political order, it must have a story or stories about itself.

AT English translation Literally: "All that is solid melts into air" ("All that is solid melts into air"). - Note. per.

Schumpeter “praised capitalism not for its efficiency and rationality, but for its dynamic character... Instead of stifling the creative and unpredictable aspects of innovation, he makes it the cornerstone of his theory. Innovation is essentially a phenomenon of imbalance, a leap into the dark.

balance, and order was the chief narrative invention of bourgeois Europe. Anything solid hardens even more.

Why? The main reason, apparently, lies in the bourgeois himself. In the course of the 19th century, once the shameful stigma of "new wealth" was washed away, this figure acquired several characteristic features: energy above all; self-restraint; clear mind; honesty in doing business; purposefulness. These are all “good” traits, but they are not good enough to fit the type of narrative hero that Western literature has relied on for centuries—the warrior, the knight, the conqueror, the adventurer. “The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail,” Shumpeter wrote mockingly, and business life “in an office among columns with figures” is doomed to be “unheroic in essence”14. The point is a huge gap between the old and new ruling classes: if the aristocracy shamelessly idealized itself, creating a whole gallery of knights without fear and reproach, the bourgeoisie did not create such a myth about itself. The great mechanism of adventure was gradually destroyed by bourgeois civilization, and without adventure the heroes lost the imprint of the uniqueness that comes from encountering the unknown. Compared to the knight, the bourgeois seems inconspicuous and elusive, like any other bourgeois. At the beginning of North and South, the heroine describes the mother of a Manchester industrialist:

"- O! I barely know him,” said Margaret...

and not beautiful, nothing remarkable. not quite a gentleman, as one would expect.

Barely. near. not quite. nothing... Margaret's judgment, usually very sharp, is lost in a whirlpool of reservations. The point is that the bourgeois is abstract as a type: in its extreme form, it is simply “personified capital” or even “a machine for converting ... surplus value into additional capital”, to quote a few passages from Capital. 17 In Marx, as later in Weber , the methodical suppression of all sensual traits makes it difficult to imagine how such a character can serve as the center of an interesting story at all, unless, of course, this is the story of his self-repression, as in Mann's portrait of Thomas Buddenbrook (which made a deep impression on Weber himself)18. Otherwise, the situation is more early period or on the periphery of capitalist Europe, where the weakness of capitalism as a system leaves more freedom to invent such powerful individual figures as Robinson Crusoe, Gesualdo Motta

13 The same bourgeois resistance to narrative emerges from Richard Helgerson's exploration of the golden age of Dutch realism, a visual culture in which "women, children, servants, peasants, artisans, and rake operate" while "upper-class male masters . . . exist" and which finds its favorite form in the portrait genre.

14 In the same vein, Weber recalls Carlyle’s definition of Cromwell’s age as “the last of our heroism [the last flash of our heroism]” (cited in: Weber M. 2013. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In: Weber M. Selected Moscow, St. Petersburg: Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 20. - Note ed.).

15 For the relationship between the adventurer's mentality and the spirit of capitalism, see: ; see also the first two sections of Chapter 1 of this book.

16 Transl. from English. V. Grigorieva, E. Pervushina. Cit. Quoted from: Gaskell E. 2011. North and South. In 2 vols. M.: Azbuka-Atticus. URL: http://apropospage.ru/lib/gasckeU/gasckeU7.html - Note. ed.

17 Op. by: Marx K. 1960. Capital. In ed.: Marx K., Engels F. Works: In 50 vols. T. 23. M .: State publishing house of political literature; 695, 609. - Note. ed.

18 About Mann and the bourgeoisie, except numerous works Lukacs, see:. If there was any specific moment when the idea of a book about the bourgeois came to my mind, it was more than 40 years ago when I read Alberto Azora Rosa, and I started writing the book in 1999-2000, at which time I was in Berlin, where he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg).

or Stanislav Vokulsky. But where capitalist structures harden, narratives and stylistic mechanisms push individuals out of the center of the text. This is another way of looking at the structure of this book: two chapters on bourgeois heroes and two on bourgeois language.

6. Prose and keywords: preliminary remarks

A little higher, I wrote that the bourgeois is more clearly manifested in style than in plots, and style, in turn, manifests itself mainly in prose and is reflected in keywords. The rhetoric of prose will gradually move into the focus of our attention, aspect by aspect (continuity, precision, productivity, neutrality...). In the first two chapters of the book, I trace genealogies through the 18th and 19th centuries. Bourgeois prose was a great achievement and laborious in the highest degree. The absence in her world of any concept of "inspiration" - that gift of the gods, in which idea and results magically merge together in a unique moment of creation - shows how impossible it was to imagine prose without immediately thinking about labor. About linguistic labor, of course, but of a kind that embodies some of the typical features of bourgeois activity. If the book "Bourgeois" has a main character, then this, of course, is labor-intensive prose.

The prose I have just outlined is an ideal type never fully realized in any particular text. Key words are another matter; these are real words used by real writers that can be easily tracked in a particular book. In this case, the conceptual framework was laid down decades ago by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society and Key Words, and by Reinhart Koselleck in his work on the history of concepts (Begriffgeschichte). For Koselleck, who studies the political language of modern Europe, “a concept not only indicates the relations it embraces; the concept is also a factor operating within them. More precisely, it is a factor that establishes a "tension" between language and reality and is often "deliberately used as a weapon". Although this method is important for intellectual history, it may not be suitable for a social being who, as Grotuhuizen puts it, "acts but speaks little" and, when he speaks, prefers simple and mundane expressions to intellectual clarity of concepts. “Weapon” is, of course, the wrong term for pragmatic and constructive keywords like useful (useful), efficiency (efficiency), serious (serious), not to mention such great mediators as comfort (comfort) or influence (influence), which are much closer to Benveniste's idea of language as "an instrument for adapting the world and society"19 than to Koselleck's "tension". I think it is no coincidence that many of my keywords turned out to be adjectives: central position in the semantic system of culture, like nouns, adjectives are unsystematic and indeed "adapt"; or, as Humpty Dumpty says contemptuously, "adjectives, you can do whatever you want with them."

Prose and keywords: two parallel currents that will surface the argument at different levels - paragraphs, sentences or single words. Through them, features of bourgeois culture will be revealed that are in a hidden and sometimes deeply buried dimension of language: a "mentality" formed by unconscious grammatical patterns and semantic associations, and not by clear and precise ideas. The original plan of the book was different, and sometimes I myself am confused by the fact that the pages devoted to the Victorian adjective may be the conceptual center of "Bourgeois". But while the ideas of the bourgeoisie have received a great deal of attention, his mentality, apart from a few isolated attempts like Grouthuisen's essay almost a century ago, still remains little explored; then minutiae

(small details) of language reveal the secrets of great ideas: friction between new aspirations and old habits, false starts, hesitation, compromises; in a word, the slow pace of cultural history. For a book that treats bourgeois history as an unfinished project, this seems to be the right methodological choice.

7. "The burgher will disappear..."

Benjamin Guggenheim, younger brother Solomon Guggenheim, on April 14, 1912, was on board the Titanic and, when the ship began to sink, was one of those who helped put women and children on lifeboats, despite the excitement, and sometimes rudeness, from other male passengers . And then, when the steward was asked to take a seat at the oars in one of the boats, Guggenheim let him go and asked him to tell his wife that "not a single woman remained on board due to the fact that Ben Guggenheim chickened out." And it really was. Perhaps he did not utter such pathetic words, but it really does not matter; he did the right thing, a very difficult thing to do. When a researcher preparing Cameron's Titanic (1997) unearthed the story, he immediately showed it to the writers: what a scene! But his idea was immediately rejected: too unrealistic. The rich don't die for abstract principles like cowardice and the like. And in the film, a character vaguely reminiscent of Guggenheim breaks through to the boat, brandishing a gun.

"The burgher will perish," Thomas Mann wrote in his 1932 essay "Goethe as a representative of the burgher era." Two episodes related to the "Titanic" and occurred at the beginning and end of the 20th century confirm this. It will not disappear because capitalism is leaving: it is stronger than ever (although mostly, like the Golem, it is strong in destruction). Gone is the sense of legitimacy of the bourgeois, gone is the idea of a ruling class that not only rules but deserves to do so. It was this belief that was behind Guggenheim's words on the Titanic: what was at stake was the "prestige (and therefore credibility)" of his class, to use Gramsci's words about hegemony. Retreat meant losing the right to power.

It is about power justified by values. But just at the moment when the question of the political rule of the bourgeoisie arose,20 rapidly replacing each other, three important innovations appeared and forever changed the picture. First there was a political collapse. When the Belle Epoque (Belle Epoque) was coming to its vulgar end, like an operetta, in which she loved to look like a mirror, the bourgeoisie, united with the old elite, drew Europe into a bloody massacre, after which they hid with their interests behind the backs of the brown- and Blackshirts, paving the way for more carnage. When the old regime was in decline, the new people were unable to act as a true ruling class: in 1942 Schumpeter wrote with cold contempt that "the bourgeois class ... needs a master," and then there was no need to explain what he had in mind.

A second transformation, almost opposite in character, began after the Second World War as democratic regimes were increasingly established. “A feature of the historical approval received from the masses within modern capitalist formations,” writes Perry Anderson, “is the conviction of the masses that they exercise ultimate self-determination within the existing social order ... in the belief in the democratic equality of all citizens in governing the country - in other words, in disbelief in the existence of any ruling class.

20 By becoming "the first class in history to achieve economic superiority without seeking political power," writes Hannah Arendt, the bourgeoisie achieved "political emancipation" during the "period of imperialism (1886-1914)" .

Once hidden behind rows of uniformed men, the bourgeoisie now escaped justice by exploiting the political myth that demanded that they disappear as a class. This act of disguise has been greatly simplified by the ubiquitous "middle class" discourse. And finally, the final touch. When capitalism brought relative prosperity to the broad working masses in the West, commodities became the new principle of legitimation: consensus was built on things, not people, much less principles. This was the dawn of the present era: the triumph of capitalism and the death of bourgeois culture.

There is a lot missing in this book. I had already written about something in other works and felt that I could not add anything new: this is the case with Dickens's Balzac parvenu or middle class, in W. Congreve's comedy “The Way of the World”. the World”), and this is important for me in the Atlas of the European Novel21. American authors of the late 19th century - Noris, Howells, Dreiser - seemed to me to have little to add to the overall picture; in addition, "Bourgeois" is a biased essay, devoid of encyclopedic ambitions. However, there is one topic that I would really like to include here, if it did not threaten to grow into a book in itself: the parallel between Victorian Britain and the United States after 1945, revealing the paradox of these two hegemonic capitalist cultures (before still the only one of its kind), based mainly on anti-bourgeois values22. I am referring, of course, to the ubiquity of religious sentiment in public discourse, which is on the rise, sharply reversing earlier secularization tendencies. The same thing happens with the great technological advances of the 19th century and the second half of the 20th century: instead of supporting a rationalistic mentality, the industrial revolution and then the digital revolution created a mixture of incredible scientific illiteracy and religious prejudice - now even worse than then. In this respect, today's United States is radicalizing the central thesis of the Victorian chapter: the defeat of Weber's Entzauberung (disenchantment of the world) at the core of the capitalist system and its replacement with a new sentimental charm that obscures social relations. In both cases radical infantilization became a key component. national culture(the sanctimonious idea of "family reading" that led to the censorship of obscenities in Victorian literature, and its saccharine counterpart, the family smiling from the TV screen that put the American entertainment industry to sleep)23. And the parallel can be extended in almost every direction, from the anti-intellectualism of “useful” knowledge and much of education policy (starting with the obsession with sports) to the ubiquity of words like earnest (serious) before and fun (fun) now, in with a barely disguised contempt for intellectual and emotional seriousness.

"The American way of life" is the counterpart of today's Victorianism: as seductive as this idea was, I was only too well aware of my ignorance of modern issues and therefore

21 See: Moretti F. 199S. Atlas of the European Novel: 1800-1900. London; New York: Verso. - Note. per.

22 In everyday usage, the term "hegemony" covers two historically and logically distinct areas: the hegemony of a capitalist state over other capitalist states, and the hegemony of one social class over other social classes, or, to put it briefly, international and national hegemony. Britain and the United States have so far been the only examples of international hegemony, but of course there are many examples of national bourgeois classes exercising their hegemony at home. My thesis in this paragraph and in the Fog chapter refers to the specific values I associate with British and American national hegemony. How these values relate to those that became the basis of international hegemony is a very interesting question, but it is not dealt with here.

23 Significantly, the most representative storytellers in the two cultures, Dickens and Spielberg, specialize in addressing children and adults alike.

I decided not to include it here. It was a correct but difficult decision, because it was tantamount to admitting that "Bourgeois" is an exclusively historical study, in essence, not connected with the present. Professors of history, Dr. Cornelius reflects in Disorders and Early Woe, do not like history as soon as it is done, but gravitate towards the one that has already happened ... Their hearts belong to a coherent and tamed historical past ... the past is unshakable through the ages, which means it is dead.”24 Like Cornelius, I am also a professor of history, but I like to think that tamed lifelessness is not all I can do. In this respect, the dedication of "Bourgeois" to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores Arcais is not just a sign of my friendship and admiration for them, it is an expression of the hope that one day I will learn from them to use the mind of the past to criticize the present. This book failed to live up to my expectations. But maybe the next one will.

Literature

Anderson P. 1976. The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review. I(100)(November-December): 5-78.

Anderson P. 1992a (1976). The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution. In: Anderson P. English Questions. London: Verso; 105-120.

Anderson P. 1992b (1987). The Figures of Descent. In: Anderson P. English Questions. London: Verso; 121192.

Arendt H. 1994 (1948). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Penguin Books.

Asor Rosa A. 1968. Thomas Mann o dell "ambiguita Borghese. Contropiano. 2: 319-376; 3: 527-576.

Benveniste E. 1971 (1966). Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory. In: Benveniste E. Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press; 65-75.

Benveniste E. 1973 (1969). Indo-European Language and Society. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press. See Russian transl.: Benveniste E. 1995. Dictionary of Indo-European social terms. Moscow: Progress; Univers.

Brougham H. 1837. Opinions of Lord Brougham on Politics, Theology, Law, Science, Education, Literature, &c. &c., as Exhibited in His Parliamentary and Legal Speeches, and Miscellaneous Writings. London: H. Colburn.

Carroll L. 1998 (1872). Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Harmondsworth: Puffin.

Davis J. H. 1988. The Guggenheims, 1848-1988: An American Epic. New York: Shapolsky Publishers.

Elster J. 1983. Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gaskell E. 2005 (1855). North and South. New York; London: Norton; see also rus. trans.: Gaskell E. 2011. North and South: In 2 vols. M.: ABC-Atticus.

24 Op. by: Mann T. 1960. Complete collection. cit.: In 10 vols. T. 8. M.: GIHL; 137. - Note. ed.

Gay P. 1984. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. I. Education of the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gay P. 1999 (1998). The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. V Pleasure Wars. New York: Norton.

Gay P. 2002. Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914. New York: Norton.

Gramsci A. 1975. Quaderni del carcere. Torino: Giulio Einaudi.

Groethuysen B. 1927. Origines de l "esprit bourgeois en France. I: L" Eglise et la Bourgeoisie. Paris: Gallimard.

Helgerson R. 1997. Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650-1672. representations. 58:49-87.

Hobsbawm E. 1989 (1987). The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. New York: vintage.

Kocka J. 1999. Middle Class and Authoritarian State: Toward a History of the German Bürgertum in the Nineteenth Century. In: Kocka J. Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books; 192-207.

Koselleck R. 2004 (1979). Begriffgeschichte and Social History. In: Koselleck R. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press; 75-92.

Luckacs G. 1974 (1914-1915). The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. See also rus. transl.: Lukacs G. 1994. Theory of the novel. New Literary Review. 9:19-78.

Mann Th. 1936. Stories of Three Decades. New York: Knopf. See also rus. transl.: Mann T. 1960. Troubles and early grief. Complete collection. cit.: In 10 vols. T. 8. M.: GIHL; 128-167.

Marx K. 1990 (1867). capital. Vol. 1 Harmondsworth: Penguin. See also rus. transl.: Marx K. 1960. Capital. In ed.: Marx K., Engels F. Works. T. 23. M.: State publishing house of political literature.

Maza S. 2003. The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Meiksins Wood E. 1992. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso.

Meiksins Wood E. 2002 (1999). The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso.

Mill J. 1937 (1824). An Essay on Government (ed. E. Baker). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nerlich M. 1987 (1977). The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100-1750. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parkinson R. 1841. On the present Condition of the Laboring Poor in Manchester; with Hints for Improving It. London; Manchester: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.

Schama S. 1988. The Embarrassment of Riches. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schumpeter J. A. 1975 (1942). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper.

Thompson F. M. L. 1988. The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830-1900. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press.

Wahrman D. 1995. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 17801840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein I. 1988. The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality. New Left Review. I (167) (January-February): 91-106.

Warburg A. 1999 (1902). The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie. In: Warburg A. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities; 435-450.

Weber M. 1958 (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. See also Russian translation: Weber M. 2013. Selected: Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. M .; St. Petersburg: Center for Humanitarian Initiatives.

Weber M. 1971. Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik. In: Weber M. Gesammelte politische Schriften. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr; 1-25.

NEW TRANSLATIONS

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

MORETTI, Franco-

the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Department of English, Stanford University. Address: Building 460, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-2087, USA.

The book "The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature" written by Franco Moretti, the professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and the founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab, is devoted to the history of the bourgeois as a social class of the modern Western society. The bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature, is the subject of "The Bourgeois". Addressing to some pieces of the Western literature, the author tries to scrutinize the reasons of the bourgeois culture's golden age and to reveal the causes of its further fall. Moretti focuses not on real relationships between social groups but on legitimate cultural forms, which demonstrate peculiarities of the bourgeois and demarcate it from working and ruling classes. the modern Western society.

Email: [email protected]

The journal of Economic Sociology publishes "Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions" from "The Bourgeois". In the Introduction, Moretti formulates the problem of the study, defines key concepts and explains the applied methodology, demonstrating weaknesses and strengths of the formal analysis of literary prose for understanding the social history. In the Introduction, Moretti describes the book's structure and sheds lights on the dark corners, which require additional research.

Key words: bourgeois; middle class; capitalism; culture; ideology; modern European literature; social structure; social and economic history.

Anderson P. (1976) The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review, vol. I, no 100 (November-December), pp. 5-78.

Anderson P. (1992a ) The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution. English Questions, London: Verso, pp. 105120.

Anderson P. (1992b ) The Figures of Descent. English Questions, London: Verso, pp. 121-192.

Arendt H. (1994) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Penguin Books.

Asor Rosa A. (1968) Thomas Mann o dell "ambiguità Borghese. Contropiano, vol. 2, pp. 319-376; vol. 3, pp. 527-576.

Benveniste E. (1971 ) Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory. Problems in General Linguistics, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, pp. 65-75.

Benveniste E. (1973) Indo-European Language and Society. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press.

Brougham H. (1837) Opinions of Lord Brougham on Politics, Theology, Law, Science, Education, Literature, &c. &c.: As Exhibited in His Parliamentary and Legal Speeches, and Miscellaneous Writings, London: H. Colburn.

Carroll L. (1998) Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Harmondsworth: Puffin.

Davis J. H. (1988) The Guggenheims, 1848-1988: An American Epic, New York: Shapolsky Publishers.

Elster J. (1983) Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gaskell E. (2005) North and South, New York; London: Norton.

Gay P. (1984) The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. I. Education of the Senses, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gay P. (1999) The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. V. Pleasure Wars, New York: Norton.

Gay P. (2002) Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914, New York: Norton.

Gramsci A. (1975) Quaderni del carcere, Torino: Giulio Einaudi (in Italian).

Groethuysen B. (1927) Origines de l "esprit bourgeois en France. I: L" Eglise et la Bourgeoisie, Paris: Gallimard (in French).

Helgerson R. (1997) Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls: The Politics of Dutch Domestic Realism, 1650-1672. Representations, vol. 58, pp. 49-87.

Hobsbawm E. (1989) The Age of Empire: 1875-1914, New York: Vintage.

Kocka J. (1999) Middle Class and Authoritarian State: Toward a History of the German Bürgertum in the Nineteenth Century. Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany, New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books; pp. 192-207.

Koselleck R. (2004) Begriffgeschichte and Social History. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 75-92.

Luckacs G. (1974) The Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mann Th. (1936) Stories of Three Decades, New York: Knopf.

Marx K. (1990) Capital. Vol. 1 Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Maza S. (2003) The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Meiksins Wood E. (1992) The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States, London: Verso.

Meiksins Wood E. (2002) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso.

Mill J. (1937) An Essay on Government (ed. E. Baker), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nerlich M. (1987) The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100-1750, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parkinson R. (1841) On the Present Condition of the Laboring Poor in Manchester; with Hints for Improving It, London; Manchester: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.

Schama S. (1988) The Embarrassment of Riches, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schumpeter J. A. (1975) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper.

Thompson F. M. L. (1988) The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830-1900, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wahrman D. (1995) Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 17801840, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein I. (1988) The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality. New Left Review, vol. I, no 167, (January-February), pp. 91-106.

Warburg A. (1999) The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie. In: Warburg A. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, pp. 435-450.

Weber M. (1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Weber M. (1971) Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Gesammelte politische Schriften, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, pp. 1-25 (in German).

In this lesson, we will talk about the inextricable link between literature and history. Let's name the stages of development of both world and Russian literary process. Let's talk about the term "historicism" and discuss its place in literature.

The literary process is the historical existence, functioning and evolution of literature both in a certain era and throughout the history of a nation.

Stages of the world literary process

The oldest literature (until the 8th century BC)
The era of Antiquity (VIII century BC - V century AD)
Literature of the Middle Ages (V-XV centuries)
Renaissance (XV-XVI centuries)
Classicism (XVII century)
Age of Enlightenment (XVIII century)
Modern Literature (XIX century)
Modern Literature (XX century)

Russian literature developed approximately on the same principle, but had its own characteristics. Periods of development of Russian literature:

Pre-literary. Until the 10th century, that is, before the adoption of Christianity, there was no written literature in Russia. The works were transmitted orally.
Old Russian literature developed from the 11th to the 17th century. These are historical and religious texts of Kievan and Moscow Rus. There is a formation of written literature.
Literature of the 18th century. This era is called the "Russian Enlightenment". The basis of Russian classical literature was laid by Lomonosov, Fonvizin, Derzhavin, Karamzin.
19th century literature - "Golden Age" Russian literature, the period of Russian literature entering the world stage thanks to the geniuses - Pushkin, Griboyedov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov - and many other great writers.
The Silver Age is the period from 1892 to 1921, the time of a new flowering of Russian poetry, associated with the names of Blok, Bryusov, Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Gorky's prose, Andreev, Bunin, Kuprin and other writers of the early 20th century.
Russian literature Soviet period(1922-1991) - the time of the fragmented existence of Russian literature, which developed both at home and in the West, where Russian writers emigrated after the revolution.
Contemporary Russian Literature (late 20th century - present day)

For a long time literature and history were inseparable from each other. It is enough to recall the ancient chronicles, for example, The Tale of Bygone Years. It is a monument of both literature and history. Already in the 18th century, history separated from literature as an independent science, but the connection between literature and history remained. In the literature, there are a large number of works on historical theme: novels, stories, poems, dramas, ballads, in the plot of which we read about the events of the past. A striking example of this is the work of A.S. Pushkin, who proclaimed: "The history of the people belongs to the poet!". Many of his works reflect the events of the distant past, the legends of antiquity. Remember his ballad "The Song of the Prophetic Oleg", the tragedy "Boris Godunov", the poems "Ruslan and Lyudmila", "Poltava", " Bronze Horseman and his famous fairy tales. This year we will continue our study of Pushkin and learn about his interest in the period peasant war and the image of Emelyan Pugachev.

This is just one example. It should be noted that many Russian writers created works on historical themes. First of all, such an interest in history is explained by love for one's country, people, the desire to preserve history and bring it to the next generations. Also, writers turned to history in order to find answers to the questions that the present era asked there, in the distant past.

The French poet wrote about the inseparable connection of historical eras and 19th writer century Victor Marie Hugo. (Fig. 2.)

Story
In the fate of human tribes, in their incessant change
There are secret reefs, as in the abyss of dark waters.
He is hopelessly blind, who is on the run of generations
Only saw the storms and the waves of the cycle.

A mighty breath reigns over the storms,
In the stormy darkness, a celestial ray burns.
And in celebratory cliques and in a mortal shudder
Mysterious speech does not speak in vain.

And different centuries, that the brothers are giants,
Differing in fate, but close in intentions,
On different paths they go to a single meta,
And their beacons burn with one flame.

Rice. 2. Victor Hugo ()

Reading works written by authors in different eras, we are convinced that the world around is changing, but the person essentially remains the same. Like thousands of years ago, people dream of happiness and freedom, power and money. Like a thousand years ago, a person rushes about in search of the meaning of life. Mankind forms its own socio-philosophical system of values.

For a long time, one rule worked in literature: a work must necessarily be written on a historical theme. An example is the work of Shakespeare. This Renaissance author wrote all his works on historical topics. However, his contemporary Cervantes, in his novel about Don Quixote, described his contemporary Spain. Thus, already at the beginning of the 17th century, works addressed to the present appeared more and more often in literature. But even if the work is not written on a historical theme, this work is necessarily inherent in historicism.

Historicism is a true reflection in a work of art of concrete historical, characteristic features of the reality depicted in it. Historicism in a work of art finds its deepest expression in the characters - in the experiences, actions and speech of the characters, in their life collisions, as well as in the details of life, environment, etc.

Thus, in a broader sense of the word, we have the right to speak of historicism as a reproduction of the truth of the time. It turns out that the better the author understands his era and understands the social, public and political, spiritual, philosophical issues of his time, the brighter his work will express historicism. So, for example, historical time was truly and accurately reflected in the novel by A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin", which Belinsky called "an encyclopedia of Russian life in the first half of the 19th century." Historicism clearly manifested itself in Gogol's poem "Dead Souls" and in many other works of Russian writers.

Even intimate lyrics are deeply historical. We read the poems of Pushkin and Lermontov, Yesenin and Blok and present a lyrical image that bears the features of a particular historical era. When we read a work, we remember that artistic historicism differs from scientific one.

The task of the artist is not to accurately formulate the patterns of historical development in a particular era, but to capture the subtlest reflections of the general course of history in the behavior and consciousness of people. Pushkin wrote: “In our time, by the word novel we mean historical era developed in a fictional narrative."

Thus, fiction and artistic generalization are inherent in a literary work.

Fiction is one of the main characteristics of literary and artistic creativity, which consists in the fact that the writer, based on reality, creates new artistic facts.

As Aristotle already stated, the poet speaks "... not about what actually happened, but about what could happen, therefore, about the possible by probability or necessity."

Artistic generalization is a way of reflecting reality in art, revealing the most significant and characteristic aspects of what is depicted in an individually unique figurative art form.

Such a generalization is carried out according to the principle of typing.

Typification is the creation of an image by selecting a truly typical character or phenomenon, or by creating an image by collecting, generalizing features, signs scattered in many people.

Bibliography

Korovina V.Ya. Literature, 8th grade. Tutorial in two parts. - 2009.
N. Prutskov. Old Russian literature. Literature of the 18th century. // History of Russian literature in 4 volumes. - 1980.
Alpatov M.A. Russian historical thought and Western Europe (XVII - the first quarter of the XVIII century). - M., 1976.

Magazines.russ.ru ().
Socionauki.ru ().
Litdic.ru ().

Homework

Answer the questions.

1. In what year did historical science become a separate branch?

2. What important historical events have been reproduced by writers in the literary works you have read? Name these works.

Write a detailed answer to the question: why will history and literature forever remain inextricably linked?
Remember what outstanding figures of Russian history you met in works of art studied at school or read on your own.

What can historical writings and works of fiction have in common? Is it only that both exist in the form of written texts, which have their own authors and readers. The fundamental difference is in the tasks that the historian and the author of a work of art face. The task of the historian is to create an objective picture of the past. He is forced to confine himself to the surviving documentary sources. The most important thing for the author of a work of art is to successfully realize his creative idea and interest his reader in it. To do this, he does not have to follow in everything what is considered true or real.

This view of the relationship between history and literature is commonplace. It can suit anyone who is accustomed to thinking that since the advent of written culture, mankind has had approximately the same ideas about how reality differs from fiction and, accordingly, how the tasks of historical description differ from the tasks of artistic presentation. However, this was not always the case. The conventional view that we have cited corresponds only to that relatively short period in the development of scientific and humanitarian knowledge, which dates back to the second half of the 19th century. It was then that the idea of history as a science that reconstructs past events was established. The adherents of this science did not want to have anything to do with literature, or, at best, recommended that historians write their works in a clear and understandable language for everyone.

At the beginning of the XX century. there have been changes in the understanding of the nature of historical knowledge. The idea that in the reconstruction of the past one cannot rely in everything on documentary sources alone sounded more and more clearly. Their material is often not enough to present complete picture era that interests the historian. So in many ways he has to act at his own peril and risk, relying solely on his intuition. In addition, after what happened in humanitarian thought structuralist revolution (60s of the XX century) came the realization that the written text is the alpha and omega of historical research. This means that the study of the past begins with the interpretation of written texts. historical sources. The end product of such an interpretation is also a written text - a historical article or monograph. Creating it, the researcher, like a writer, is forced to use the set of artistic means and rhetorical devices that are available to contemporary literary culture. From this point of view, a historical work can be regarded as a literary work of a special kind, the specific purpose of which is to convince its readers of the actual nature of the events presented in it.

Thus the relationship between history and literature much tighter than it might seem. The author of any prose work (especially a historical novel or a realistic short story) should not neglect the knowledge of historical details. The historian, in turn, will not be able to give any holistic view of the past if he fails to use contemporary literary techniques.

Since antiquity, it has been recognized that the pursuit of history requires serious literary skills. However, neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans had the concept of fiction in its modern meaning. It was believed that all types of verbal creativity (oral or written, poetic or prose) are different types mimesis(gr. mimesis- imitation). Therefore, the main difference between the historian and the poet was not that the former was obliged to tell the truth, while the latter was allowed to embellish this truth. From the very beginning, they had to deal with different role models. As Aristotle said in Poetics, “The historian and the poet differ not in that one writes in verse, but in the other in prose (after all, Herodotus can be put into verse, but his writing will still remain history), no, they differ in that one speaks of what was, and the other of what might have been... For poetry speaks more of the general, history of the particular. something... And the singular is, for example, what Alcibiades did or suffered.

Ancient historians paid great attention to the collection and verification of single facts, believing that history is the custodian of examples collected to provide moral and practical assistance to readers. However, the tasks of history were not limited to this. The occupation of history was recognized as part of the rhetorical art. The collection and verification of facts constituted only a preliminary stage in the work of the historian, but his art was tested by how he knows how to use these facts. Lucian, in The Way History Should Be Written, said that the main concern of the historian should be to give expression to the material. The historian must think not about what to say, but how to say it: his task is to correctly distribute events and present them graphically.

In antiquity, there were no visible contradictions between the attitudes towards a truthful description of the facts of the past and their coherent and visual presentation in the text of a historical work. When they nevertheless arose, they were decided in favor of visibility. An example of this is Cicero, who believed that the first law of history is not to experience lies under any circumstances, then in no case to be afraid of the truth, and also not to allow addiction and malice. However, when his friend, the historian Lucceus, wished to write a history of his consulate, Cicero, anxious to create an expressive story, advised him to "neglect the laws of history."

Until the end of the XVIII century. history remained part of the rhetorical art. When Voltaire, the eminent historian of the Enlightenment, in one of his letters outlined the idea of his work on the reign of Louis XIV, one might think that he followed the recommendations of Lucian: aiming to create a great picture of events and keep the reader's attention, he, on the one hand, saw history as a tragedy that requires exposition, climax and denouement, and on the other hand, left room for entertaining anecdotes on its wide canvases.

With the beginning of the XIX century. history, like literary creativity in general, was no longer considered part of rhetoric. However, she did not lose her artistic qualities. One pictorial technique was replaced by others. The historian no longer tried to take a privileged external position in relation to the subject of his work and readers, he refrained from a moral assessment of the characters. Moreover, he strove to imagine himself as a participant in the events. Small details and insignificant facts, which the historians of the Enlightenment put up with as a "necessary evil", became the primary objects of description in the works of historians of the era of romanticism. In The Reality Effect, the French philosopher and literary critic of the second half of the 20th century. Roland Barthes gave an analysis of the visual means used by the historians of the Romantic school and realist writers of the 19th century, and proved the fact of the interpenetration and mutual enrichment of historical and literary creativity.

The close connection between these types of creativity was preserved in subsequent times. It is hard not to notice the stylistic similarity between the multi-volume works of positivist historians and epic novels in the spirit of O. de Balzac or L. Tolstoy. In the first half of the XX century. According to M. Blok, the historians of the "Annals school" instead of "aging and vegetating in the embryonic form of narration" positivist historiography proposed their own project of a multi-layered analytical and structural history. Approximately at the same time, modernist writers J. Joyce, F. Kafka, R. Musil create a novel of a new type, the compositional features of which do not allow the reader to discover a single storyline in it. These novels do not have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end and "live" only in the process of endless re-reading. But already in the second half of the XX century. The problem of interaction between history and literature received its theoretical understanding in the works of "new intellectual historians".

In this book, the outstanding Italian literary critic Franco Moretti examines in detail the figure of the bourgeois in modern European literature. The proposed Moretti Gallery of individual portraits is intertwined with an analysis of keywords - "useful" and "serious", "efficiency", "influence", "comfort", "roba [good, property]" and formal mutations of prose. Starting with "The Laboring Master" in the first chapter, through the seriousness of 19th century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the "national deformations" of the southern and eastern periphery, and the radical self-criticism of Ibsen's plays, this book describes the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, examining the reasons for its historical weakness and gradual fading into the past. . The book is of interest to philologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers.

Publisher: "Publishing house of the Gaidar Institute" (2014)

ISBN: 978-5-93255-394-7

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Theory should not be limited or intimidated by common sense. If at the beginning of the modern age scientists had not challenged Aristotelian physics and astronomy based on common sense, the scientific revolution would never have taken place. But by our time - perhaps influenced by this inspiring example - the idea that common sense eo ipso should be questioned and treated with skepticism, has become in many disciplines, especially in the humanities, a sign of scientific respectability. It is obvious, however, that this commendable position, if taken to extremes, can overturn common sense in general, and, having experienced the pleasure of the shock it has produced, will itself end in complete collapse.

Consider the difference between history and fiction. From the point of view of the genre division, they are usually considered mutually exclusive: history tells about events that really happened in the past, and fiction depicts fictional events, that is, those that never happened at all. However, this criterion has recently been challenged by some literary theorists and philosophers of history. Why it began to lose its distinctness will become clear if we look at works that are considered artistic. Recently, some writers (eg, E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime) have begun to attribute fictitious actions to real historical characters. But even in fairly traditional fiction, the fictional events of novels (as well as plays and films) often take place against the backdrop of real places and real historical events. Thus, many works that are considered fiction, in fact, contain elements of history. This is an irrefutable fact, and few people, including fiction writers, will argue with him.

However, much more controversial is the converse assertion that history inevitably contains elements of artistry. Most historians will disagree with this. Is such an attack on common sense justified or not? Here is the question I would like to answer below. If the above statement is true, it might lead to the conclusion that the distinction between history and fiction should be abolished, which, in my opinion, would be a mistake. By examining this statement within the appropriate context, I will try to show that, although it looks logical, it is based on a number of misconceptions and is ultimately untenable.

i. WithIs there a difference between history and fiction?

The point of view I would like to consider is usually associated with French post-structuralism and its skepticism about the possibilities of language to signify anything in the real world. However, the most significant judgments about history and fiction come from the recent work of Hayden White (who is not French) and Paul Ricœur (who is not a post-structuralist). Their origins can be traced back to the ideas of some theorists of the 1960s who discovered or rediscovered the fact that history is literary genre.

In his essay “Historical Discourse”, Roland Barthes, one of the founders of post-structuralism, critically reviewed the traditional opposition of artistic and historical narratives and asked the question: “Is there really any specific difference between factual and fictional narratives, any linguistic sign, according to which we can distinguish, on the one hand, the type of narration corresponding to the story of historical events,<...>and, on the other hand, the type of narrative corresponding to the epic, novel or drama? He came to a negative answer to this question and concluded that "historical discourse, taken only in the aspect of its structure, without regard to content, is essentially a product of ideology or, more precisely, of the imagination."

Louis O. Mink, Barthou's contemporary American theorist whose work influenced both Hayden White and Paul Ricœur, came to a similar conclusion: “The narrative form, both in history and in fiction, is an artificial device, the product of an individual imagination." As such, it "cannot substantiate its claims to truth by conventional procedure of argumentation or identification." Hayden White, in researching The Significance of Narrative Structure in the Representation of Reality, concluded that its significance "is based on the desire to make real events fit into a coherent, integral, complete and closed picture of life, which can only be fictional."

Paul Ricoeur, in his work "Time and Story", although he does not try to erase the difference between history and fiction, speaks of their "crossing" ( entrecroisement) in the sense that they both "use" ( se sert) methods of each other. Talking about "fictionalization ( fictionalization) history", he says that history uses the means of fiction to "rebuild" ( refigure) or "restructure" ( restructure) time by introducing narrative contours into the non-narrative time of nature. It is an act of imagination sefigurer que...) “fits lived time (time with the present) into purely sequential time (time without the present)”. Using the "mediating role of the imagination", the narrative opens up to us the "realm as if". This is the element of artistry in history.

In addition to fiction, two other important concepts in the quoted passages are narrative and imagination. If we want to evaluate these views on the relationship between history and fiction, it is necessary to analyze these concepts and their combinations in the theories we are considering. It is clear that in some way they are rooted in the awareness of what we can call in the broadest sense the "literary" aspects of historical discourse.

However, before we can appreciate their significance, let's look at what preceded these discussions in the philosophy of history. The authors cited by us in their writings expressed their reaction to the positivist conception of history that arose in the 19th century. and successfully preserved, despite numerous attacks, in the 20th century. Up until the late Enlightenment, history was generally thought of as a literary genre, valued more for the moral and practical lessons it could draw from past events than for the accuracy of depicting those events. Only in the 19th century, first in Germany, did history acquire the reputation and attributes of an academic discipline, or Wissenschaft, equipped with a whole range of critical methods for evaluating sources and verifying their information. The great Leopold von Ranke openly renounced the old slogan historia magistra vitae("history is the teacher of life") and stated that the task of history is simply to describe the past wie es eigentlich gewesen- as it really was.

Ever since its establishment as an academic science, history has tried to maintain the respectable guise of a "scientific" discipline (at least in the German sense). Wissenschaft) and minimize literary features of his discourse. With the rise of the 20th century of the so-called social sciences (sociology, anthropology, economics, political science), many historians have sought to take their place among them, borrowing quantitative research methods from these sciences and applying them to the events of the past. The first step in this direction was in the early 1930s. made by the French Annales school. Meanwhile, in philosophy, neo-positivism, as a movement for the "unity of science", attempted to incorporate history into the composition of science, arguing that its modes of explanation are comparable or, more precisely, can and therefore should be likened to the methods of explanation of the natural sciences.

But these attempts to turn history into science have never been particularly convincing. History has never in practice reached that level of "objectivity" and unity of opinion, which the humanists attribute to the natural sciences and which they envy. Nor was it entirely absorbed in the social sciences, which, in one way or another, never fully lived up to their own scientific pretensions. Those who oppose attempts to integrate history into the realm of science note three interrelated hallmarks of historical discourse that constitute its specificity: first, history deals with individual events and sequences of events simply for their own sake, and not in order to deduce of these, general laws (that is, it has an ideographic rather than a nomothetic character); secondly, explaining historical events often means understanding the subjective thoughts, feelings and intentions of individuals participating in these events, rather than explaining external events by external causes (“understanding” instead of “explanation”); thirdly, to tell about the sequence of events in this way, with reference to the intentions of the actors, means to unfold them in a narrative form, or, in other words, to tell stories ( stories) about them.

From the point of view of the positivists, these are precisely the traits that history must try to suppress or overcome in itself in order to become a truly scientific discipline. Historians of the Annales school and their successors have attempted to some extent to cope with this task: by shifting the focus of research from individuals and their actions to deep structure economic factors and long-term processes of social change, they have created a type of discourse that seems very different from traditional historical discourse. However, narrative history never disappeared, and those who opposed the positivist view argued that even if social and economic history could be rid of the traditional form of "storytelling", it would still need to be supplemented by narrative reporting by conscious agents. Rejecting the claim that history should be assimilated by the social (or even natural) sciences, many of the opponents of positivism argued that the narrative discourse of history is a completely independent form of knowledge and that its type of explanation best suits our understanding of the human past. Indeed, beginning with Dilthey and the neo-Kantians in the late nineteenth century, a powerful anti-positivist current has refused to accept the natural and even social sciences as models for disciplines dealing with events and actions in the human world, insisting on the autonomy and respectability of knowledge based on the understanding of actions. conscious human agents, which presents its results in the form of a narrative.

How do Bart, Mink, White and Ricoeur fit into this picture? They appear on the scene at a time when the narrative form in general, and its role in history in particular, has been actively debated. It was this feature of history (narrativity) that attracted their most attention, and at least White and Ricoeur argued that history is always essentially narrative, even when it tries to free itself from its "narrative" features. At the same time, they continued to think of history as something that asserts its ability to "represent" the past "as it really was," that is, endow the results of their research with a "scientific" status. From their point of view, these claims are untenable in light of the narrative nature of historical discourse. Why?

The above quotes show that for their authors, narrative, being an act of storytelling, is not suitable for transmission. real events. The story binds human action and experience into a single entity that has (according to Aristotle) a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The criteria for storytelling are aesthetic, not scientific. It is an artistic act of creation, not a representation of something given. It follows that the narrative really feels comfortable in fiction, which does not pretend to depict the real world. When narrative is used in a discipline whose purpose is to depict the real world, it falls under suspicion. And if, like history, he deals with a reality that is no longer accessible to direct observation - that is, with the past - he becomes doubly suspicious. For there always remain doubts that he represents things not as they really were, but as they should have been in order to meet the requirements of a good story.

Worse, history can be subject not only to aesthetic, but also to political and ideological norms. We all know how authoritarian regimes use history. In our society, history, even if it still speaks traditional narrative language, often dresses in the prestigious garb of an academic discipline that claims to tell the truth about the past—that is, not fiction, but facts. However, being a narrative, according to the authors cited above, it can no longer claim it. History should, at most, be regarded as a mixture of fiction and fact, or perhaps it is worth questioning the existence of a distinction between fiction and non-fiction. (non-fiction) literature.

II. Answer

We have briefly outlined the critique of the distinction between history and fiction. Now it's time to answer it.

The first thing to note is that this critique places its adherents, apparently unintentionally, on a par with the positivists. Barth, Mink, and others emphasize those features of historical discourse that distinguish it from scientific explanation, but instead of defending history as a legitimate type of cognitive activity, they question its cognitive claims. For positivists, history can only become a respectable form of knowledge if it sheds its "literary" dress and replaces storytelling with causal explanation. Similarly, for the authors we are considering, it is precisely the literary form of history that is the main obstacle to its claims to knowledge.

Unity of opinion with the positivists is not necessarily a bad thing, and a theory cannot be blamed solely on the strength of associations. In fact, however, this unity originates in a whole series of tacit assumptions that the newer theories share (and again inadvertently) with positivists, assumptions that are dubious at best. They concern three basic concepts that are found in various combinations in the critique of the distinction between history and fiction, namely - narrative, imagination and actually fiction. They can also be presented as assumptions about what reality, knowledge, and fiction are.

The first assumption concerns the apparent contrast between the narrative and the reality it is supposed to represent. In the stories, events are depicted as built into a frame structure with a beginning, middle, and end, plot structure, intentions and unintended consequences, twists of fortune, happy and unhappy endings, the general coherence of the text, in which each element has its place. The reality, we are told, is quite different. In the real world, events simply happen one after the other in a sequence that may seem random to us, but is in fact strictly determined by causal laws. Of course, such a reality bears no resemblance to the narrative form, and, consequently, the narrative seems completely unsuitable for its description. It turns out that storytelling imposes on reality a form that is absolutely alien to it. Understood in this way, solely in terms of its structure, the narrative appears to inevitably distort reality.

The second implicit assumption of this point of view, it seems to me, establishes a strict opposition between knowledge and imagination. Knowledge is a passive mirror image of reality. Imagination, on the contrary, is something active and creative, and if it begins to participate in the process of cognition and actively creates something in the course of this process, then the result of such cognition can no longer be qualified as knowledge.

The third assumption is that there really is no difference between fiction and a false statement or falsification. History and other humanities are guilty of consciously or unconsciously presenting us with a false rather than a true picture of the world. That is why they are called fiction disciplines and are considered to contain artistic elements.

Now I propose to consider these three assumptions in reverse order.

1. Fiction and the False Claim

First of all, it must be said that the use of the term "fiction" to designate a false statement gives rise to a conceptual confusion, which should be cleared up before we proceed to further reasoning. A false statement can be a conscious statement of untruth - that is, a lie - or be simply a mistake. Literature, as we usually understand it, is neither a lie nor a mistake, since it does not pretend to represent reality. Novels, plays and films mostly depict people who never existed and events that never happened. Moreover, this is realized by both the authors and their audience. It is truly amazing that, despite having this knowledge, we emotionally empathize with the lives of fictional characters. However, no untruth is asserted in fiction, at least not in the sense that one is mistaken, deceived, or deceived. In a certain sense, within the framework of literature, the question of truth or falsehood simply does not arise.

Of course, the question of truth in fiction can arise on other levels: literature can more or less resemble life, that is, be true or plausible. If literature is true in this sense, we say that it portrays things as what they could be even if we know (or assume) that they were not. At a higher level, literature can be truthful in the sense that it conveys - perhaps indirectly - the truth about the conditions of human existence in general. Moreover, literature can be both true in both these senses and false. But truth and falsehood in these senses have nothing to do with the reality of the people and events depicted.

Can we say that statements in fiction are not literally false?

Some sayings inside artistic narrative, as already noted, they certainly are not (for example: “It is usually foggy in London in late autumn”). But even a clearly artistic statement, such as: "On a Friday afternoon in the late autumn of 1887, a tall man, deeply immersed in his thoughts, crossed London Bridge" - may, by coincidence, turn out to be true. Nevertheless, within this context, it will still remain artistic. Why? How do we distinguish between artistic and non-artistic? John Searle, analyzing The Logical Status of Fiction Discourse, comparing the genres of journalistic reporting and the novel, came to the conclusion that "there is no property of the text, syntactic or semantic, which would allow identifying a text as a work of art." On the contrary, the criterion for identifying a text "necessarily must lie in the author's illocutionary intentions", that is, in what exactly the author was trying to achieve with this text. These intentions are usually fixed outside the text itself, for example by assigning to it the genre definition of "novel" as opposed to, say, memoirs, autobiographies, or stories. These definitions indicate to the reader how the statements made in the text should be perceived and whether it is worth raising the question of their truth or falsity. Compare Searle's point of view with the above quotation from Barth. When Barthes asks if there is any "linguistic" feature by which we can distinguish historical from artistic discourse, he is referring to what Searle calls a "syntactic or semantic" property. Searle agrees with Bart that no such sign exists. However, Barthes, in a typically structuralist manner, ignores such extratextual factors as the author's intentions and the general conventional arrangement of the text, which for Searle is the main difference.

Thus, the criterion for distinguishing between a literary and non-fictional text is not that the former consists predominantly of untrue statements, but rather that these statements were conceived by the author as untrue, should not perceived as true and are not actually perceived by the audience as true. If any character in a novel resembles a real person, or even if he is depicted doing the same things as a real person, we can say that this novel is "based on a true story" or even that this similarity is the result of an amazing coincidence.

But we will not translate this novel into the category of non-fiction. Let's take a reverse example. Sterling Seagrave, in her recent historical study of the Chinese Empress Ci Xi, speaks of previous studies on this topic as so perverted and erroneous that their authors even attributed the actions of a completely different person to the Empress, so that we have to conclude that it is not at all existed a person who has done what is written there. But will we put these books on the shelf of fiction? Of course not: they remain history, even if it is a very bad history.

When it is claimed that history contains elements of artistry, or even when the very existence of a boundary between historical and fiction is questioned, this certainly does not mean that the historical text contains statements that historians and their audiences know that they refer to events that never happened, or statements whose truth or falsity play no role. The intention of the historian is, of course, to talk about real people and events and tell us the truth about them. If the first assumption makes any sense, it is that historians, consciously or unconsciously, do something similar to what writers do - that is, rather imagine things as what they could be than represent them as they really were, and that, as a result, the truth of what they report is in some way doubtful. And this means not only that the results of their research are not true (and that this can be verified on a case-by-case basis), but that they doomed be untrue or that it is in principle impossible to establish their truth or falsity due to the fact that the historian has something in common with the novelist.

2. Knowledge and imagination

What do they have in common? Apparently, the ability to imagine. Thus, if our interpretation of the first assumption is correct, then it only makes sense if the second assumption is true. Imagination is opposed to knowledge, as if they were mutually exclusive. Knowledge, understood as "representation", is thought of as a passive reflection of the real world, simply registering reality or reporting what is in it. But this is a naive and simplistic conception of knowledge that ignores some of the most outstanding achievements modern philosophy. Since the time of Kant, we have recognized that knowledge is by no means passive, its result is not just a copy of external reality. Rather, knowledge is an activity that brings into play many other "faculties" of a person, such as his common sense, judgment, reason, and, most importantly, the ability to imagine things are not as they really are. One might think that the object imagination must be fictional i.e. non-existent. But this is only part of what we understand by imagination. In its broadest sense, imagination is best defined as the ability to see what is not available to direct perception. In this sense, we are able to imagine things that were, or who will, or exist somewhere else as well as things that don't exist at all.

Is fiction a product of the imagination? Of course, yes. But one could just as well say that both physics and history are products of the imagination, although neither is a product of the imagination. only imagination. If the historian uses imagination, it is only to talk about how and what It was, not to create something imaginary. The difference between knowledge and fiction is not that fiction uses the imagination and knowledge does not. Rather, it consists in the fact that in one case the imagination, in combination with other abilities, is used to develop judgments, theories, forecasts and in some cases narratives that tell what the real world is, has been or will be, and in In another case, it is used to create stories about characters, events, actions, and even whole worlds that never existed.

Thus, the second assumption, like the first, turns out to be untenable upon closer examination. Historians use their imagination - of course, along with their other faculties, such as common sense, judgment, reason - not to make up fiction, but to make statements about the real world, in particular, to create narrative texts about what actually happened. So what is there in these texts that makes them “fictitious” (in the sense of untrue), that is, what prevents them from being recognized as genuine knowledge? Here we come to the third assumption, which is that the narrative never cannot give us an account of what actually happened, because "what happens in reality" does not fit into the framework of the narrative form at all.

3. Narrative and reality

This point of view, in my opinion, is one of the most profound assumptions that our authors share with the positivists. This is the idea that the world, in order to merit the title of "real", must be completely devoid of those intentional, meaningful, and narrative properties that we attribute to it when we tell stories about it. Reality must be a meaningless sequence of external events, and time must be nothing more than a chain of "now" and everything else we attribute to them is at best a fantasy or wishful thinking, and at worst a scam or distortion. truth. At the same time, they somehow forget that history deals not with the physical, but with the human world. In other words, it talks mainly about people (or groups of people) and their actions. And in order to understand the latter, they must be considered in connection with the intentions, hopes, fears, expectations, plans, successes and failures of the actors.

It can be said (and I have spoken at length about this elsewhere) that the human world reveals, in the very structure of action as such, a certain version of the narrative form. The action structure, which involves the use of a means-end scheme, is the prototype of the beginning-middle-end structure of the narrative, and it can be said that people live their lives by formulating and acting out stories that they implicitly tell themselves and others. In this human world, time itself has a human character, and people give it a narrative form, living their lives not from moment to moment, but by remembering what was and projecting what will be. And although it is undoubtedly built into the physical world and accessible to measurements, human time is not identical to the numerical series (11, 12, etc.) or even the concepts of "before" and "after", "earlier" and "later" - it is primarily there is the time of the past and the future, felt and experienced by conscious, intentional agents from the point of view of their present.

And if so, the narrative form is inherent not only in the process of telling stories, but also in what they are told. Those who disagree with this thesis often point out that life is often so chaotic and disorganized that there is no "coherence, integrity, completeness and closure" (Hayden White) of fictional stories: things go awry and awry, they are invaded by his majesty is chance, actions have unforeseen consequences, etc. But these critics do not notice two things: firstly, the best fictional stories tell about reality, and only the worst detective stories or romance novels have the property of a sadly predictable "isolation", which White means. Secondly, life can be chaotic and disorganized, because we live according to our plans, projects and "stories" that often do not come true, that is, because it generally has a narrative and temporal structure of the type that I have tried to describe.

However, the real opposition to the view I have outlined stems from the belief that the only true "reality" is physical reality. On this conviction rests, as I have already said, the whole edifice of positivist metaphysics, but it also contains one of the most profound prejudices of our time. One way or another, but the world of physical objects located in space and time, the world of what can be observed from the outside, described and explained in terms of mechanical interactions, and also predicted using general laws - only this world is recognized as a reality in the proper sense of the word . Everything else - human experience, social relations, cultural and aesthetic entities - is secondary, epiphenomenal and "simply subjective", and the only true way to explain this other is to link it to the world of physical objects.

Today, perhaps, there is convincing metaphysical evidence for the primacy of physical reality or even a physical explanation, although I have not seen either. But these proofs would still have no force in relation to what I am trying to prove. When conscious people operate in the world, their intentions, intentions, cultural structures, and values (not only our own, but those of others) are as real as anything else of which we have knowledge. They are real in a sense that can never be the subject of metaphysical speculation: they significant. Even the physical world fits into this picture, but not simply as a sphere of the objective. It provides a permanent backdrop and stage in which human action takes place and stands out for the people and communities that live in it, loaded with economic, cultural and aesthetic values. This is not nature “in itself”, but nature experienced, felt, inhabited, cultivated, explored and used by people and communities.

Whether it is real or unreal, more or less real in some abstract metaphysical sense, but it is this humanly real the world about which history and other forms of truth-oriented or "non-fiction" narrative (such as biography and autobiography) speak. Narrative fits this world because narrative structures are rooted in human reality itself. The historian does not have to “write” lived time into natural time by means of an act of narration, as Ricœur says; the lived time is "inscribed" there even before the historian starts work. Telling stories about the human past does not mean imposing some kind of alien structure on it, but means continuing the very activity that forms the human past.

I do not mean to say that any historical narrative is true, or that all narratives are the same and there are no good or bad among them. I just don't agree that narratives can't be true only by force its narration. In the same way, when we spoke about the role of the imagination, we did not claim that its use by historians is justified every time, but only emphasized that not everything created by the imagination is necessarily pure fiction. I do not want to go into the question of how we evaluate narrative historical texts and how we distinguish between good and bad among them. Suffice it to say that this may mean something more than just checking the sources.

III.Example

Now perhaps it is time to check some of what we have said and consider an example of historical discourse. I quite consciously chose for this purpose a passage that some historians may consider an extreme case. In his recently published Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama describes how Sir Walter Raleigh plans a Guianan expedition at London's Durham House: into the water the oars of the royal barge from Greenwich to Sheen, the crowded masts of longboats and galleons bobbing at their moorings, the fast broad-sterned Dutch ships bouncing on the waves, the boats with passengers bound for the theaters of Southwark, all the hustle and bustle of the black river. But through the muddy, rubbish-laden water that splashed against its walls, Raleigh could see the waters of the Orinoco, as alluringly pearly as the pearl he wore in his ear.

There are a few things we should note about this passage: First, it is certainly not artistic in any conventional sense of the word. He is represented how part of a historical narrative that is clearly marked as historical by all conventional means. For us, this means that the author is trying to depict in this passage something that really took place, and not some fictional scene.

Secondly, there are some key features in this passage that can certainly be supported by historical evidence: the presence of Raleigh at London's Durham House when he planned his expedition, the panorama of the Thames from there, the description of the ships that could be seen on Thames at the time, even a pearl in Raleigh's ear. (I have no idea, exist whether there is actually evidence for or against these facts, it is simply possible to find evidence for them in the sources.)

Thirdly, the author's imagination is clearly at work here, but it does not create a fictional scene, but brings together different elements in order to depict something real. Shama doesn't even say that Raleigh saw, but only that he could see "all the hustle and bustle of the black river" that opened from his vantage point. Of course, as a sailor, Raleigh could hardly ignore the river. Shama goes further, however, when he says that the intense scene before Raleigh's eyes was "the progress of the empire." This tells us at least that this scene symbolized the progress of the empire, whether Raleigh saw it that way or not.

Of course, Shama assumes that he saw her just like that; and further, at the climax of the fragment, that Raleigh not only could, but actually saw"through the muddy, scum-laden water" of the Thames in front of him the waters of the Orinoco. What is Shama doing here? He describes Raleigh's way of looking at things, his state of mind as what they could be at a certain point in time. Above we have described "believable" fiction as depicting events in such a way that what they could be. Doesn't Shama do something like that? Perhaps so, but again, the intention of Shama as a historian is to depict the real, and even more, this entire passage as a whole can be considered as arguing in favor of Raleigh actually seeing things that way. Of course, these arguments are not conclusive, but they give us reason to accept the descriptions of Shama as corresponding to reality. They are the type of evidence - other than citations, if you will, but evidence nonetheless - that helps to believe his story.

Of course, the persuasive power of this fragment comes from another source, namely the larger narrative of which it is a part. By itself, this passage only describes what Raleigh did at Durhamhouse. And he was engaged in planning the expedition, and therefore it is clear that his thoughts should have been directed precisely towards this goal. Here Raleigh is depicted as a man in the human world. The elements of the physical world surrounding him do not just affect him in a causal way; they matter to him, and that meaning comes from their relationship to the long-term project he was working on. In this sense, they are part of the plot that Raleigh mentally builds and which he will then try to bring to life. It is this primary narrative that shapes Raleigh's past, present, and future human time. This is the first-order narrative that is the subject of the second-order narrative created by Shama.

IV. Conclusion

I hope that the above considerations lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between fiction and history in its generally accepted form is quite legitimate and should be preserved. I have tried to show that current attempts to eliminate this distinction are based on a number of misconceptions and untenable tacit assumptions about the nature of fiction, the role of the imagination in knowledge, and the relationship between narrative and historical reality. These misconceptions and assumptions stem, as we have seen, from the recognition of the "literary" character of historical discourse and from certain dubious metaphysical doctrines, ultimately deriving from or having much in common with positivism, regarding views on the nature of reality.

Of course, history is a literary genre and as such has many similarities with fiction, especially its narrative form. In addition, historians, like writers, use the imagination. However, it does not follow from this that historical literature merges with fiction or that literary elements eo ipso introduce lies into historical knowledge or make it impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood. Historians use these elements just to tell the truth about events that happened to people in the past. How well they succeed in each individual case is another question, and to answer it one must turn to sources, criteria of coherence, psychological understanding or theory, and many other things. But their potential for success cannot be negated simply because their research uses the imagination and the narrative form. These things are not a hindrance on the path to historical truth, on the contrary, they are suitable means to achieve it. The basis of this, as I have tried to prove here, is that they have their origin in the very structure of historical reality and the nature of human life.

See: Carr, D. Time, Narrative and History. - Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 (especially parts I-III).

Schama, S. Landscape and Memory. - New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. - P. 311. I first noticed this passage through a review by Keith Thomas (Thomas, K. The Big Cake // New York Review of Books. - 1995. - Num. 42 (14), Sept. 21.-P. 8).

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