Akhmatova's poetic heritage. The main features of poetics

The idea of ​​the absurd developed in the 20th century. But the definition appeared thanks to the publication of the book by the English researcher M. Esslin "The Theater of the Absurd" (1961). At the heart of the literary phenomenon, which was called absurdism, the theater of the absurd or simply absurd, is the idea of ​​the meaninglessness of being. Such meaninglessness deprives any significance of any human existence, both in its totality and in each individual manifestation.

The term "absurd" (from Latin absurdus - absurd, discordant, stupid) means something illogical, absurd, stupid, out of the ordinary, contrary to common sense. An expression is also considered absurd if it is not outwardly contradictory, but from which a contradiction can nevertheless be derived. In the philosophy of existentialism, the concept of absurdity means that which does not have and cannot find a rational explanation. Absurdity is "a way of depicting reality, which is characterized by an underlined violation of cause-and-effect relationships, grotesqueness, dictated by the desire to demonstrate the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence."

In a certain sense, the drama of the absurd is based on the artistic discoveries of the new drama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily Chekhov, thanks to which the action was transformed into a predominantly internal one. At the heart of the world of the absurd is a conscious game with logic, common sense. Having moved from the external world into the space of the soul, it led to a mutual redistribution of the significance of its individual elements (decrease in the role of plot, dynamics, development of action, etc.). A new meaningful action is the main supporting structure of any absurdist work. The idea of ​​action as the unfolding of a picture determines the remaining features of the poetics of absurdism.

The principles of the poetics of the absurd stood out in the work of L.N. Andreeva. O. Vologina, M. Karjakina, L. Ken spoke about the absurdity in his dramaturgy. They argued that a person in the absurd world of Andreev's plays discovers a sense of the catastrophe of civilization, the finiteness of man and humanity, figurative roll calls, linguistic paradoxes, and alogisms.

The plays of L. Andreev are about the absurd, but not absurdist. The dramaturgy of L. Andreev is represented by plays of different aesthetic nature: modernist, expressionist, symbolist, romantic, realistic dramas. They are united by the fact that “the main aesthetic principle of L. Andreev's dramaturgy is the combination of the historical and the metaphysical,” writes A. Tatarinov. “In all of them, sometimes authentically reproducing the features of everyday or concrete historical reality, there is always a “super-real” background, that subtext (it can be called mythological) that contributes to the philosophical nature of the dramatic form, emphasizes its focus on the modern solution of eternal issues.”

As T. Zlotnikova notes, “absurdity has become the leading principle of the life perception of a Russian person in the last two centuries and a powerful source of artistic discoveries in which Russian art anticipated and then transformed Western European trends.” Instead of action - farcicalness, clowning, "personality", "puppetry", puppetry - the favorite qualities of the art of the absurd. In the playing spaces of plays, absurdity overturns eternal values ​​and habitual correlations: reason and madness, reality and sleep, “top” and “bottom”.

Artistic myth-making Andreev focused "on the poeticization and comprehension of Chaos as a universal and insurmountable form of human existence." The peculiarity of Andreev's artistic world is determined by rationalism and intuition as a method of knowing the truth, attention to the transcendent depths of being.

Andreev is an artist of existential attitude, discovering the irrationality and alogism of being. Andreev focuses on the existential problems of the meaning of life and death, the boundaries of the human will. Another source of the absurdity of life in Andreev is the unconscious of man, human nature, corresponding to chaos. The content of most of the works of L. Andreev is the tragedy of a lonely person in the face of absurdity.

Ways to reveal the absurdity can be seen in the example of the play "The Life of a Man", which opens the cycle of "conditional", "stylized" plays. In this work, the author's consciousness dominates in a conditionally generalized model of the device. The figurative equivalent of human life is the metaphor "theater of life", which can be called the "theater of the absurd".

Modern researchers (V. Chirva, L. Iezuitova, Yu. Babicheva, V. Tatarinov, V. Zamanskaya and others) come to the conclusion that “The Life of a Man” was prepared by previous works and determined the direction of L. Andreev’s further aesthetic searches. The drama opens a cycle of plays (“Tsar Hunger”, “Anatema”), in which L. Andreev’s aspirations for “conditional” theater, “synthesis of a new type”, “stylized works where the most general is taken, quintessence, where the details do not suppress the main where the general is not buried in particulars.

The researcher Chubrakova Z. in her work “The discovery of the absurdity in the dramas of L. Andreev “Life of a Man” and “Dog Waltz” notes that Andreev insists on theatrical conventions, formulates the principles of the acting technique of “distance”. The drama is dominated by vision “from the outside”: the completed event (the life of a person) is narrated in the Prologue by Someone in Gray, then the event is “represented” in the “pictures” played by the actors (and not in the traditional “action” for the drama). This is a technique of “alienation”, which later became fixed in the artistic system of expressionism in the effect of “looking”, visualization. The author exposes metaphysical problems, counts on the intellectual complicity of those who perceive.

The main method of incarnation is the formation of a playing space, and the artistic form is a mystery (an action that recreates the play of transcendental forces through the mystery of birth from death, but does not open the veil of mystical depth), always played out according to the same scenario. The means of expressing the absurd are alogism, grotesque, paradox, chance. Andreev uses the technique of "theater in the theater". The recurring series of births and deaths that takes place in earthly life is part of the universal cosmic action.

Andreev interprets the concept of "philosophy of life" in his own way. Man is doomed to loneliness and death, "thrown" into the chaos of an unreasonable and hostile world. The ideological and artistic constant of the drama is revealed by the opposition "life - non-life". Death is a manifestation of life: only that which dies lives. This idea is "served" in Andreev's play by a transparent allegory: the burning of a candle is the fulfillment of life through death. The fact that a person’s life is fleeting and “charged” with death is reported in the Prologue by Someone, the mysterious Old Women who are present in situations of birth and death of a person know about this.

The law of the realization of life through death is perceived by him as a tragedy of the human lot. The traceless disappearance of a person in non-existence deprives his existence of meaning. Andreev emphasizes the confrontation of these existential principles, makes Man understand the unreasonableness of the world order.

Human life is a necessary condition for the eternal mystery, the duel of existence and non-existence, light and darkness. Andreev considers the mystery of being from the standpoint of earthly human logic and the requirements of "living life", his play is against absurdity, which does not accept the human mind. The methods of generalization and universalization allow the writer to present an image of the world order, to reduce metaphysical problems to a formula (metaphysical absurdity).

The author's rejection of the revealed unreasonableness of being is manifested in the dramatic experience of the tragedy of human existence and determines the expressionistic poetics of the play: the poetics of contrasts and dissonances, the sharpening of the paradoxical unity of antinomies at all levels of the artistic structure.

The synthesis of the language of painting and theater is a meaningful technique for creating an image of an illogical world. The prologue, the appeal to the audience, the "framing" structure the space and create the effect of "theater within the theater", accentuate the conventionality and playful basis of what is depicted. The painting "The Misfortune of Man" (especially the prayers of mother and father) is presented as a tragedy. The painting “The Ball at the Man”, revealing the base passions, envy and deceit of the guests, is drawn by Andreev as a farce. The images of the musicians, each of whom looks like their own instrument, the guests - lifeless "wooden dolls" - are caricatured, painted with the sharpness and conciseness of an engraving. A new turn in the development of the absurdity of being appears in "Black Masks": the play gives options for the existence of a person in the universal chaos that penetrates the human soul.

Thus, Andreev turned out to be one of the founders of the literature of the absurd of the 20th century. Irony, paradox, grotesque played an ever greater structural and conceptual role in dramaturgy. In the work of L. Andreev, absurdity is the perception of life, the semantic and structural principle of his philosophical and aesthetic system. In The Life of Man, Andreev found meaning in the reality of human spiritual life confronting death, darkness and emptiness, the author gave the hero who rebelled against the absurd a conditional superiority over the invincible power of transcendental forces.

The starting point in the history of Russian symbolism is considered 1892

when the article by D.S. Merezhkovsky "On the Causes of the Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature", which noted that there were few good realistic texts, but new art was emerging on the basis of the culture of the 19th century

three features of the new literature

mystical content, M-sky explained the surge of mysticism by the fact that science cannot answer those questions that were previously the responsibility of religion.

expansion of artistic impressionability (impressionism)

symbols (as a multi-valued allegorization) Goethe quotes: “the more incommensurable and unattainable for the mind a given poetic work, the more beautiful it is”

In the same year, the publishing house of A. S. Suvorin published the second collection of poetry by D. S. Merezhkovsky with the name “Symbols. Songs and Poems” This collection played a role only due to its title, because the poems in it are quite classical in form, Merezhkovsky embodied only mystical content from his own program.

There can be a huge distance between the theoretical program and artistic practice.

Sources of symbolism

German romanticism

French symbolism

Ideas of Nietzsche and Wagner

Tyutchev and Fet

German romanticism The idea of ​​the mystical nature of poetry. Novalis(Fried von Hardenberg): “The feeling of poetry has much in common with the feeling of the mystical. It represents the unimaginable, sees the invisible, etc.” "A poet understands nature better than the mind of a scientist"

French symbolism. The roll call of names, the continuity that many symbolists realized, recognized and took credit for. But it should be noted that French symbolism was a purely artistic principle. The inner world of the hero was opposed to the inner world and artistic tastes of the townsfolk. The French needed a symbol because, unlike traditional tropes, it could adequately reflect the complex soul of the artist. At the heart of the symbolic art of France lies the idea that the whole world is permeated by a system of correspondences; Russian symbolists had correspondences on a different level.

On the connection with French symbolism.

At first, in France, there was an association of Parnassus; the works of the Parnassians were characterized by a sculptural, clear style. Then, according to the principle of repulsion, symbolism was formed with its musicality and vagueness of images. Russian poetry absorbed both of these directions at the same time, and in Russia there was no analogue to Parnassus from the very beginning, the poets of the late 19th century, who strove for antique completeness and rigor, went unnoticed. The Parnassian tradition was adopted in the era of post-symbolism.

For many Russian poets, these differences did not play a role; the French Symbolists and Parnassians, as it were, united into a single whole according to thematic principle. Or, for example, V. Bryusov separates two directions of French poetry, but continues them at the same time: symbolism in the collections "Russian Symbolists", and the Parnassian line in the cycle "Cryptomeria", in which the influence of Lecomte de Lille is very felt. In the collection "Chefs d'oeuvre" there is the author's subtitle "collection of non-symbolist poems", and in the collection "Me eum esse", respectively, "Collection of symbolist poems"

Nietzsche and Wagner. Symbolism was also in Germany, the idea of ​​musicality was further developed thanks to the ideas of R. Wagner and Fr. Nietzsche. Wagner, in his article "Art and Revolution", suggested that art in its highest form, that is, music, would become the basis of the final revolution. There will be a transformation of man and the world will begin to exist according to the laws of beauty. As a result, music began to be understood not just as the highest art, but as the fundamental principle of art in general and as the basis of the world.

They talked about Nietzsche at the last lecture, whoever missed it is to blame.

In Russia, poems by French symbolists, not German ones, were popular, but Wagner and Nietzsche were wildly popular.

Tyutchev and Fet. Poets of pure art, attention to spiritual life. The main idea that the symbolists adopted was the idea of ​​inexpressibility.

Tyutchev SILENTIUM!

Be silent, hide and hide

And your feelings and dreams -

Let in the depths of the soul

They get up and come in

Silently, like stars in the night,

Admire them - and be silent.

Like midges dawn,

Winged sounds crowd;

With my beloved dream

I don't want to break my heart.

But the color of inspiration

Sad among everyday thorns;

Former aspiration

Far away, like a reflection of the evening.

But the memory of the past

Everything creeps into the heart anxiously ...

Oh, if without a word

It was possible to say the soul!

Symbolism features:

Rozanov in order of criticism: "The silence of history, the ignorance of nature" (about the decadents)

It should be noted here that natural images still appear in the poems of Symbolist poets, but they do not differ in accuracy and imagery. Rather, it is a convention. In addition, nature in the poems of older symbolists - unlike the 19th century - is a sign of death, non-existence, dissolution in the world.

romantic cult of art Autonomy, intrinsic value of art, aesthetic creativity were equated with religious revelation and were placed above scientific knowledge

renewal of the art of the word: impressionism, musicality, experiments with the form of verse

A new understanding of beauty: pan-aestheticism: everything in the world was considered in aesthetic categories. (Schopenhauer) “The harmony of the spheres and the poetry of horror are the two poles of beauty (article by Balmont)

Demonism is the result of extreme subjectivity: if reality is the creation of my thought (the world as will and representation), then all moral norms are devoid of objective meaning.

I'm not ashamed of anyone or anything - I'm alone, hopelessly alone,

Evil of different levels was distinguished, global evil was preferable - a universal force that cleanses the world of everyday evil.

Demonism and loneliness led to pessimism, decadent moods, the theme of death, suicide motives. Decadence

Personality is an end in itself, and not an instrument of social struggle, pay attention to the person.

The main feature of symbolism was the installation of suggestiveness: that is, the expectation of a hidden meaning from the text.

Merezhkovsky: In the Acropolis ... a few traces of a bas-relief depicting the most ordinary and, apparently, insignificant scene have survived to this day: naked, slender young men lead young horses, and calmly and joyfully with muscular hands they tame them. All this is done with great realism, if you like, even naturalism - knowledge of the human body and nature. But after all, perhaps greater naturalism - in Egyptian frescoes. And yet they are quite otherwise act on the viewer. You look at them as a curious ethnographic document, just as you look at the page of a modern experimental novel. Something very different draws you to the Parthenon bas-relief. Do you feel the breeze in it? ideal human culture, symbol free Hellenic spirit. Man tames the beast. This is not only a scene from everyday life, but at the same time - a whole revelation of the divine side of our spirit. That is why there is such indestructible grandeur, such calmness and fullness of life in a crippled fragment of marble, over which millennia have flown.

In general, the poetics of allusive words was not something revolutionary new, but went back to the ancient doctrine of the artistic word.

But at the beginning of the 20th century, antiemphasis was added to traditional poetic tropes - the expansion of meaning, its blurring, hence the symbol as an extremely polysemantic word.

Poetics is the science of the system of means of expression in literary works, one of the oldest disciplines of literary criticism. In the extended sense of the word, poetics coincides with the theory of literature, in the narrowed sense, with one of the areas of theoretical poetics. As a field of literary theory, poetics studies the specifics of literary types and genres, currents and trends, styles and methods, explores the laws of internal connection and correlation of different levels of the artistic whole. Depending on which aspect (and scope of the concept) is put forward in the center of the study, one speaks, for example, of the poetics of romanticism, the poetics of the novel, the poetics of the work of a writer as a whole or of one work. Since all means of expression in literature ultimately come down to language, poetics can also be defined as the science of the artistic use of the means of language (see). The verbal (that is, linguistic) text of a work is the only material form of existence of its content; according to it, the consciousness of readers and researchers reconstructs the content of the work, seeking either to recreate its place in the culture of its time (“what was Hamlet for Shakespeare?”), or to fit it into the culture of changing eras (“what does Hamlet mean for us?”); but both approaches are ultimately based on the verbal text studied by poetics. Hence the importance of poetics in the system of branches of literary criticism.

The purpose of poetics is to highlight and systematize the elements of the text involved in the formation of the aesthetic impression of the work. Ultimately, all elements of artistic speech are involved in this, but to varying degrees: for example, in lyrical verse, plot elements play a small role and rhythm and phonics play a large role, and vice versa in narrative prose. Every culture has its own set of tools that distinguish literary works from the background of non-literary ones: restrictions are imposed on rhythm (verse), vocabulary and syntax (“poetic language”), themes (favorite types of characters and events). Against the background of this system of means, its violations are no less strong aesthetic stimulus: “prosaisms” in poetry, the introduction of new, non-traditional themes in prose, etc. A researcher who belongs to the same culture as the work under study feels these poetic interruptions better, and the background takes them for granted; the researcher of a foreign culture, on the contrary, first of all feels the general system of methods (mainly in its differences from what he is accustomed to) and less - the system of its violations. The study of the poetic system "from the inside" of a given culture leads to the construction of normative poetics (more conscious, as in the era of classicism, or less conscious, as in European literature of the 19th century), the study "from the outside" leads to the construction of descriptive poetics. Until the 19th century, while regional literatures were closed and traditionalistic, the normative type of poetics dominated; the formation of world literature (beginning with the era of romanticism) highlights the task of creating descriptive poetics. Generally, there is a distinction between general poetics (theoretical or systematic - "macropoetics"), private (or actually descriptive - "micropoetics") and historical.

General poetics

General poetics is divided into three areas who study the sound, verbal and figurative structure of the text, respectively; the goal of general poetics is to compile a complete systematized repertoire of devices (aesthetically effective elements) covering all these three areas. In the sound system of a work, phonics and rhythm are studied, and in relation to verse, metrics and strophics are also studied. Since the predominant material for study here is provided by poetic texts, this area is often called (too narrowly) poetry. In the verbal system, the features of the vocabulary, morphology and syntax of the work are studied; the corresponding area is called stylistics (to what extent stylistics as a literary and linguistic discipline coincide with each other, there is no consensus). Features of vocabulary (“selection of words”) and syntax (“combination of words”) have long been studied by poetics and rhetoric, where they were taken into account as stylistic figures and tropes; features of morphology ("poetry of grammar") have become a subject of consideration in poetics only very recently. In the figurative structure of the work, images (characters and objects), motives (actions and deeds), plots (connected sets of actions) are studied; this area is called "topics" (traditional name), "themes" (B.V. Tomashevsky) or "poetics" in the narrow sense of the word (B. Yarkho). If poetry and stylistics were developed into poetics from ancient times, then the topic, on the contrary, was developed little, since it seemed that the artistic world of the work was no different from the real world; therefore, even a generally accepted classification of the material has not yet been developed here.

Private poetics

Private poetics deals with the description of a literary work in all the aspects listed above, which allows you to create a "model" - an individual system of aesthetically effective properties of the work. The main problem of private poetics is composition, that is, the mutual correlation of all aesthetically significant elements of a work (phonic, metrical, stylistic, figurative and plot composition and general, uniting them) in their functional reciprocity with the artistic whole. Here the difference between a small and a large literary form is essential: in a small (for example, in a proverb), the number of connections between elements, although large, is not inexhaustible, and the role of each in the system of the whole can be shown comprehensively; this is impossible in a grand form, and, therefore, part of the internal connections remains unaccounted for as aesthetically imperceptible (for example, connections between phonics and plot). At the same time, it should be remembered that some links are relevant during the first reading of the text (when the reader's expectations are not yet oriented) and are discarded during rereading, while others are vice versa. The final concepts to which all means of expression can be raised during analysis are the “image of the world” (with its main characteristics, artistic time and artistic space) and the “image of the author”, the interaction of which gives a “point of view” that determines everything that is important in the structure. works. These three concepts have come to the fore in poetics on the basis of the experience of studying the literature of the 12th-20th centuries; before that, European poetics was content with a simplified distinction between three literary genres: drama (giving the image of the world), lyric (giving the image of the author) and the epic intermediate between them (as in Aristotle). The basis of private poetics (“micropoetics”) is the description of a single work, but more generalized descriptions of groups of works (one cycle, one author, genre, literary movement, historical era) are also possible. Such descriptions can be formalized to a list of initial elements of the model and a list of rules for their connection; as a result of the consistent application of these rules, the process of the gradual creation of a work from the thematic and ideological design to the final verbal design (the so-called generative poetics) is imitated.

Historical poetics

Historical poetics studies the evolution of individual poetic devices and their systems with the help of comparative historical literary criticism, revealing the common features of the poetic systems of different cultures and reducing them either (genetically) to a common source, or (typologically) to the universal patterns of human consciousness. The roots of literary literature go back to oral literature, which is the main material of historical poetics, which sometimes makes it possible to reconstruct the course of development of individual images, stylistic figures and poetic meters to deep (for example, common Indo-European) antiquity. The main problem of historical poetics is the genre in the broadest sense of the word, from fiction in general to such varieties as “European love elegy”, “classic tragedy”, “secular story”, “psychological novel”, etc. there is a historically formed set of poetic elements of various kinds, not derived from each other, but associated with each other as a result of a long coexistence. Both the boundaries separating literature from non-literature, and the boundaries separating genre from genre, are changeable, and the eras of relative stability of these poetic systems alternate with eras of decanonization and form creation; these changes are studied by historical poetics. There is a significant difference between close and historically (or geographically) distant poetic systems: the latter are usually presented as more canonical and impersonal, while the former are more diverse and peculiar, but usually this is an illusion. In traditional normative poetics, genres were considered by general poetics as a universally significant, naturally established system.

European poetics

With the accumulation of experience, almost every national literature (folklore) in the era of antiquity and the Middle Ages created its own poetics - a set of its traditional "rules" of poetry, a "catalog" of favorite images, metaphors, genres, poetic forms, ways of deploying a theme, etc. Such "poetics" (a kind of "memory" of national literature, fixing artistic experience, instruction to posterity) oriented the reader towards following stable poetic norms, consecrated by centuries of tradition - poetic canons. The beginning of the theoretical understanding of poetry in Europe dates back to the 5th-4th centuries BC. - in the teachings of the sophists, the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle, who first substantiated the division into literary genera: epic, lyrics, drama; ancient poetics was brought into a coherent system by the "grammars" of the Alexandrian time (3-1 centuries BC). Poetics as the art of "imitation" of reality (see) was clearly separated from rhetoric as the art of persuasion. The distinction between "what to imitate" and "how to imitate" led to a distinction between the concepts of content and form. Content was defined as "imitation of events, true or fictional"; in accordance with this, “history” (a story about real events, as in a historical poem), “myth” (the material of traditional legends, as in epic and tragedy) and “fiction” (original plots developed in comedy) were distinguished. Tragedy and comedy were classified as "purely imitative" types and genres; to "mixed" - epic and lyrics (elegy, iambic and song; later genres, satire and bucolic were sometimes mentioned); Only the didactic epic was considered “purely narrative”. The poetics of individual genera and genres has been described little; a classic example of such a description was given by Aristotle for tragedy (“On the Art of Poetry”, 4th century BC), highlighting in it “characters” and “tale” (i.e., a mythological plot), and in the latter - an outset, denouement and between them there is a "fracture" ("peripetia"), a special case of which is "recognition". Form was defined as "speech enclosed in meter". The study of "speech" was usually relegated to the purview of rhetoric; here the “selection of words”, “combination of words” and “decorations of words” (tropes and figures with a detailed classification) were distinguished, and various combinations of these techniques were first reduced to a system of styles (high, medium and low, or “strong”, “flowery” and “simple”), and then into a system of qualities (“stateliness”, “severity”, “brilliance”, “liveness”, “sweetness”, etc.). The study of "meters" (the structure of a syllable, foot, combination of feet, verse, stanza) constituted a special branch of poetics - a metric that fluctuated between purely linguistic and musical criteria of analysis. The ultimate goal of poetry was defined as "delight" (Epicureans), "teach" (Stoics), "delight and teach" (school eclecticism); accordingly, "fantasy" and "knowledge" of reality were valued in poetry and the poet.

On the whole, ancient poetics, unlike rhetoric, was not normative and taught not so much to predetermine how to create, but how to describe (at least at the school level) works of poetry. The situation changed in the Middle Ages, when the composition of Latin verse itself became the property of the school. Here, poetics takes the form of rules and includes separate points from rhetoric, for example, on the choice of material, on distribution and reduction, on descriptions and speeches (Matthew of Vandom, John of Harland, etc.). In this form, it reached the Renaissance and here it was enriched by the study of the surviving monuments of ancient poetics: (a) rhetoric (Cicero, Quintilian), (b) Horace's Science of Poetry, (c) Aristotle's Poetics and other works of Aristotle and Plato . The same problems were discussed as in antiquity, the goal was to consolidate and unify the disparate elements of the tradition; Yu.Ts.Scaliger came closest to this goal in his "Poetics" (1561). Finally, poetics took shape in a hierarchical system of rules and regulations in the era of classicism; the programmatic work of classicism - "Poetic Art" by N. Boileau (1674) - was not accidentally written in the form of a poem imitating Horace's "Science of Poetry", the most normative of ancient poetics.

Until the 18th century, poetics was mainly poetic, and, moreover, "high" genres. From the prose genres, the genres of solemn, oratorical speech were smoothly involved, for the study of which there was rhetoric, which had accumulated rich material for classifying and describing the phenomena of the literary language, but at the same time had a normative-dogmatic character. Attempts at a theoretical analysis of the nature of artistic and prose genres (for example, the novel) initially arise outside the field of special, "pure" poetics. Only the enlighteners (G.E. Lessing, D. Diderot) in the fight against classicism deal the first blow to the dogmatism of the old poetics.

Even more significant was the penetration into the poetics of historical ideas associated in the West with the names of J. Vico and I.G. spiritual culture. Herder, I.V. Goethe, and then the romantics included the study of folklore and prose genres in the field of poetics (see), laying the foundation for a broad understanding of poetics as a philosophical doctrine of the universal forms of development and evolution of poetry (literature), which, on the basis of idealistic dialectics, was systematized by Hegel in the 3rd volume of his Lectures on Aesthetics (1838).

The oldest surviving treatise on poetics, known in Ancient Russia, is "On the Images" by the Byzantine writer George Hirobosk (6-7 centuries) in the manuscript "Izbornik" by Svyatoslav (1073). In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a number of school "poeticians" appeared in Russia and Ukraine for teaching poetry and eloquence (for example, Feofan Prokopovich's De arte poetica, 1705, published in 1786 in Latin). A significant role in the development of scientific poetics in Russia was played by M.V. Lomonosov and V.K. Trediakovsky, and at the beginning of the 19th century. - A.Kh. Vostokov. Of great value for poetics are the judgments about literature by A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol, I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. .I. Nadezhdin, V. G. Belinsky (“Division of poetry into genera and types”, 1841), N. A. Dobrolyubov. They paved the way for the emergence of poetics in Russia in the second half of the 19th century as a special scientific discipline, represented by the works of A.A. Potebnya and the founder of historical poetics, A.N. Veeelovsky.

Veselovsky, who put forward the historical approach and the very program of historical poetics, opposed the speculative and a prioriism of classical aesthetics with "inductive" poetics, based solely on the facts of the historical movement of literary forms, which he made dependent on social, cultural-historical and other non-aesthetic factors (see) . At the same time, Veselovsky substantiates a proposition, very important for poetics, about the relative autonomy of poetic style from content, about its own laws of development of literary forms, no less stable than the formulas of ordinary language. The movement of literary forms is considered by him as the development of objective givens, outside the concrete consciousness.

In contrast to this approach, the psychological school considered art as a process that takes place in the mind of the creative and perceiving subject. The theory of the founder of the psychological school in Russia, Potebnya, was based on the idea of ​​V. Humboldt about language as an activity. The word (and works of art) not only reinforces a thought, does not “shape” an already known idea, but builds and shapes it. The merit of Potebnya was the opposition of prose and poetry as fundamentally different modes of expression, which (through the modification of this idea in the formal school) had a great influence on the modern theory of poetics. At the center of Potebnya's linguistic poetics is the concept of the inner form of the word, which is the source of figurativeness of the poetic language and the literary work as a whole, the structure of which is similar to the structure of a single word. The purpose of the scientific study of a literary text, according to Potebna, is not an explanation of the content (this is a matter of literary criticism), but an analysis of the image, unity, stable givenness of a work, with all the endless variability of the content that it evokes. Appealing to consciousness, Potebnya, however, sought to study the structural elements of the text itself. The followers of the scientist (A.G. Gornfeld, V.I. Khartsiev and others) did not go in this direction, they turned primarily to the “personal mental warehouse” of the poet, “psychological diagnosis” (D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky), expanding the Potebnian theory of the emergence and perception of the word to the unsteady limits of the “psychology of creativity”.

The anti-psychological (and more broadly, anti-philosophical) and specific pathos of the poetics of the 20th century is associated with trends in European art history (starting from the 1880s), which considered art as an independent isolated sphere of human activity, the study of which should be dealt with by a special discipline, delimited from aesthetics with its psychological, ethical, etc. categories (H. von Mare). “Art can only be known on its own paths” (K. Fiedler). One of the most important categories is the vision, which is different in each era, which explains the differences in the art of these eras. G. Wölfflin in the book "Basic Concepts of the History of Art" (1915) formulated the basic principles of the typological analysis of artistic styles, proposing a simple scheme of binary oppositions (contrasting the Renaissance and Baroque styles as artistically equal phenomena). The typological oppositions of Wölfflin (as well as G. Simmel) were transferred to literature by O. Walzel, who considered the history of literary forms in an impersonal way, suggesting "for the sake of creation, forget about the creator himself." On the contrary, the theories associated with the names of K. Vossler (who was influenced by B. Croce), L. Spitzer, in the historical movement of literature and the language itself assigned a decisive role to the individual initiative of the poet-legislator, then only fixed in the artistic and linguistic usage of the era.

The most active demand for considering a work of art as such, in its own specific patterns (separated from all non-literary factors) was put forward by the Russian formal school (the first speech was the book by V.B.

Already in the first speeches (partly under the influence of Potebnya and the aesthetics of futurism), the opposition of practical and poetic language was proclaimed, in which the communicative function is reduced to a minimum and “in the bright field of consciousness” there is a word with an orientation towards an expression, a “self-worth” word, where linguistic phenomena that are neutral in ordinary speech (phonetic elements, rhythm melodics, etc.). Hence the orientation of the school not towards philosophy and aesthetics, but towards linguistics. Later, the problems of the semantics of verse speech were also involved in the scope of research (Yu.N. Tynyanov. "The problem of poetic language", 1924); Tynyanov's idea of ​​the profound impact of verbal construction on meaning influenced subsequent research.

The central category of the “formal method” is the derivation of a phenomenon from the automatism of everyday perception, estrangement (Shklovsky). It is connected not only with the phenomena of poetic language; This position, common to all art, also manifests itself at the level of the plot. This is how the idea of ​​isomorphism of the levels of the artistic system was expressed. Rejecting the traditional understanding of form, the formalists introduced the category of material. Material is something that exists outside of a work of art and that can be described, without resorting to art, to tell “in your own words”. Form, on the other hand, is “the law of the construction of an object”, i.e. the real arrangement of the material in the works, its construction, composition. True, at the same time it was proclaimed that works of art "are not material, but the ratio of materials." The consistent development of this point of view leads to the conclusion about the insignificance of the material (“content”) in the work: “the opposition of the world to the world or a cat to a stone are equal to each other” (Shklovsky). As is known, in the later works of the school, there has already been an overcoming of this approach, which was most clearly manifested in the late Tynyanov (the relationship between social and literary series, the concept of function). In accordance with the theory of automation-deautomatization, the concept of the development of literature was built. In the understanding of the Formalists, it is not a traditional continuity, but above all a struggle, the driving force of which is the demand for constant novelty inherent in art. At the first stage of literary evolution, the erased, old principle is replaced by a new one, then it spreads, then it becomes automated, and the movement is repeated on a new turn (Tynyanov). Evolution proceeds not in the form of a "planned" development, but moves in explosions, jumps - either by putting forward a "junior line", or by fixing random deviations from the modern artistic norm (the concept arose not without the influence of biology with its trial and error method and fixing random mutations). Later, Tynyanov (“On Literary Evolution”, 1927) complicated this concept with the idea of ​​a system: any innovation, “loss” occurs only in the context of the system of all literature, i.e. primarily the system of literary genres.

Claiming to be universal, the theory of the formal school, based on the material of modern literature, however, is inapplicable to folklore and medieval art, just as some of Veselovsky’s general constructions, based, on the contrary, on the “impersonal” material of the archaic periods of art, are not justified in the latest literature. . The formal school existed in an atmosphere of continuous controversy; VV Vinogradov, BV Tomashevsky and VM Zhirmunsky, who at the same time held close positions on a number of issues, actively argued with her - mainly on questions of literary evolution. MM Bakhtin criticized the school from philosophical and general aesthetic positions. At the center of Bakhtin's own concept, his "aesthetics of verbal creativity" is the idea of ​​dialogue, understood in a very broad, philosophically universal sense (see Polyphony; in accordance with the general evaluative nature of the monological and dialogic types of world comprehension - which are hierarchical in Bakhtin's mind - the latter is recognized by him higher). All other topics of his scientific work are connected with it: the theory of the novel, the word in various literary and speech genres, the theory of the chronotope, carnivalization. A special position was occupied by G. A. Gukovsky, as well as A. P. Skaftymov, who, back in the 1920s, raised the question of the separation of the genetic (historical) and synchronous-holistic approach. The concept, which had a great influence on modern folklore, was created by V. L. Propp ( approach to the folklore text as a set of definite and quantifiable functions of a fairy-tale hero).

Vinogradov created his own direction in poetics, which he later called the science of the language of fiction. Focusing on Russian and European linguistics (not only on F. de Saussure, but also on Vossler, Spitzer), however, from the very beginning he emphasized the difference between the tasks and categories of linguistics and poetics (see). With a clear distinction between synchronic and diachronic approaches, it is characterized by their mutual adjustment and mutual continuity. The requirement of historicism (the main line of Vinogradov's criticism of the formal school), as well as the most complete consideration of poetic phenomena (including the critical and literary responses of his contemporaries) becomes the main one in Vinogradov's theory and his own research practice. According to Vinogradov, the "language of literary works" is broader than the concept of "poetic speech" and includes it. The central category in which the semantic, emotional and cultural-ideological intentions of a literary text intersect, Vinogradov considered the image of the author.

The creation of the theory of skaz and narration in general in the works of B.M. Eikhenbaum, Vinogradov, Bakhtin is connected with the works of Russian scientists of the 1920s. For the development of the poetics of recent years, the works of D.S. Likhachev, devoted to the poetics of ancient Russian literature, and Yu.M. Lotman, who uses structural-semiotic methods of analysis, are of great importance.

The word poetics comes from Greek poietike techne, which means creative art.

Poetics as the name of a discipline is still in Aristotle.

In Aristotle's Poetics:

• the task of describing the construction of a project
• the task of prescription (how to achieve the perfection of form, for example, not to depict absolutely worthy and absolutely unworthy people). The prescription criterion is the greatest impact on the reader.

After Aristotle, poetics becomes a school discipline, dependent on rhetoric (poetics is a secondary discipline).

The most famous normative poetics in Europe: N. Boileau. Considers all genres of poetry, style. Points to the ideal patterns in each. Genres. Criteria - moral benefit, didactics. The instructions are addressed directly to the poet. Clarity of style, lack of trifles, digressions ... vernacular ...

In the 2nd book he talks about different features of genres.

The features of Aristotle's poetics are preserved. Description - prescription (dominates).

Target: aesthetic effect, artistic.

At the end of the XVIII century. the era of normative poetics is coming to an end.

Romantics mix genres, styles... Destruction of poetics as a science.

In the 19th century literary criticism appears as a science (history of literature and folklore).

MM. Bakhtin "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics"

• the author and the position of the author in relation to the hero (heroes do not receive a negative assessment, a dialogue between the author and the hero);
• ideas of Dostoevsky (characters as heroes-ideologists);
• plot (form of construction, origins of plots);
• a word about Dostoevsky (types of verbal constructions).

Features of modern poetics:

• study of the creativity of a particular author;
• pr-tion is studied by levels;
• describing a certain genre and considering its origin;
• lack of prescription.

Poetics is interested in the structure of the text. Philosophy of the author (Dostoevsky: an Orthodox person, a monarchist, a conservative, an imperialist, etc., but Dostoevsky the writer is a completely different figure; the text says more than the author wanted to say).

Poetics - the internal principles of the author's artistic thinking (through the analysis of specific texts).

Poetics is the science of specific artistic means of expression in literature. Poetics? theory of literature (poetics is focused on texts).

Poetics is primarily interested in literary text.

Any project is multifunctional. The function of ancient texts is mnemonic, memorization Conspiracies or prayers must be memorized very accurately, therefore a poetic form arises. archaic folklore. The period of the Middle Ages is characterized by the fact that thin. functions give way to sacred, political ones, the religious cult is aestheticized, decorated. Functions may change depending on the situation.

didactic poem- a form of natural science knowledge and philosophy ("On the nature of things").

Hood. biography. Always documentary. XIX-XX centuries - Romanized biography. Composes a biography of a famous person, filling in some gaps in the biography with plausible material. Those. partly documentary text, partly fiction.

Memoirs - informative, journalistic and thin. functions.

Almost any text can be treated as thin. pr-tion.

Poetics studies not only thin. pr-tion (in terms of style ...). Poetics is not just a local discipline. Explores the construction of any text. Methods of poetics are also used in other humanities.

Discourse is a certain type of text (special differences). Poetics is a general theory of discourse.

How does text work?

There is never anything superfluous and random in the text. The text is perceived as a system of interconnected elements. You need to show the role of each element. Dominant - what unites the text into one whole. The essence of each systems are limitations on the whole range of possibilities. Vocabulary, metaphors, etc. are limited.

Each era has its own set of thin. funds.

• sizes (iambus, trochee ...) were created by the reform of the 18th century.
• rigid genre system: ode, tragedy, heroic poem (vocabulary: words that go back to Church Slavonic, and part of neutral words).
• rhythm. accent.

19th century - non-classical size.

20th century - Mayakovsky's rhyme.

Those. restrictions in formal techniques and in subject matter (ode and elegy have completely different themes). Gradually genres are mixed (novel).

Each era has its own system of thin. means, which is often not understood by writers and poets themselves. Poetics must restore these limitations, separate tradition from innovation. Historical poetics is close to the tasks of linguistics. Linguistics studies the history and evolution of language, at each stage language is a system (F. de Saussure - structural linguistics). At each stage, the language is a closed complete system. Speech is its realization. The task of linguistics is the study of language as a system (phonetics - phoneme, morphology - morpheme, vocabulary - lexeme, grammar - gramme; there are rules by which these units are combined). Each language has its own rules that change over time. This idea influenced poetics. The text began to be presented also as a system in which the elements are connected according to the rules.

The goal of general poetics is to restore these systems.

General poetics:

SOUND, WORD, IMAGE.

1. The sound and rhythmic side of an artistic text, mostly poetic (POETRY).

Sounds and their combinations, features of sounding specific to poetic speech. Rhyme - repetitions of sounds, consonance (exact - inaccurate, terminal, etc.). Assonance. Alliteration.

Speech is constructed in such a way that these repetitions, which perform a specific function, are noticeable.

rhythm

Learns different types of rhythms. Non-classical sizes, individual characteristics of poets. Rhythm in prose (sometimes the author deliberately writes in some kind of rhythm).

strophic

Rhyming order. A stanza is a formal unity (a meaningful unity).

Melodika

Intonation (in addition to the possibilities of speech, there are possibilities of intonation in the poem itself). Spoken and sung verse.

2. Word (STYLISTICS).

Vocabulary

Style. Obsolete words, archaisms, historicisms (may be associated with the Bible), the words of the Holy Books - Slavicisms - the effect of high style. Colloquialisms, vulgarisms, neologisms (a sign of individual style) - low style. Functions of words in art. text.

The change in the main meaning of the word is a metaphor: obsolete (erased), author's, individual. A sign of the style of a certain era or the individual style of the writer.

Rhetoric is a classification of tropes.

Rep. synth. figures (anaphora…), omissions, inversions.

Stylistics - between linguistics and literary criticism. A word in art is not equal to a word in a dictionary.

3. Image (THEMATIC, TOPIC).

Any literary text can be considered as a text or as a world. An analogy between reality and what is happening inside the pr-tion.

Space and time

Interconnected unity. In any project, there are boundaries of the depicted world. The artist in each era is limited by the knowledge and characteristics of the literary trends of the era. Each genre has its own idea of ​​the passage of time.

Objective world - landscape, interior.

What can be depicted and what cannot. Combination.

Action

The exception is essay, didactic and descriptive poetry. Motive is the elementary unit of action. Narratology is wherever there is a story.

Character

Any literary hero is a conscious construction of the author. Lit cannot exist without a character. pr-tion. Lit-ra is a way of knowing a person.

Poetics is the reconstruction of artistic means for all literature. Historical poetics is the representation of the literary process as a change of artistic systems.

In popular literature, there are strict genre-thematic canons, which are formal-meaningful models of prose works, which are built according to a given plot scheme and have a common theme, a well-established set of characters and types of characters. The canonical principle, aesthetic construction patterns underlie all genre-thematic varieties of mass literature (detective, thriller, action movie, melodrama, science fiction, fantasy, costume-historical novel, etc.), they form the reader's "genre expectation" and "seriality" publishing projects.

These works are characterized by ease of assimilation, which does not require a special literary and artistic taste and aesthetic perception, and accessibility to different ages and segments of the population, regardless of their education. Mass, as a rule, quickly loses its relevance, goes out of fashion, it is not intended for re-reading, storage in home libraries. It is no coincidence that already in the 19th century, detective stories, adventure novels and melodramas were called “carriage fiction”, “railway pulp fiction”. An important feature of mass literature is that any artistic idea is stereotyped, turns out to be trivial in its content and in the way of consumption, appeals to subconscious human instincts. Popular literature sees in art compensation for unsatisfied desires and complexes. The focus of this literature is not the problems of poetics, but the problems of representation of human relations, which are modeled in the form of ready-made rules of the game, numerous roles and situations. The diversity of mass culture is the diversity of social imagination, the very types of sociality and cultural, semantic means of their constitution. Since literature is "mass" one can treat it and its texts without much respect, as if they were no one's, as if without an author. The definition of "mass" does not require the author's desire to create a masterpiece. This premise implies non-uniqueness, non-originality of design and execution, replicability of techniques and designs.

In mass literature, as a rule, one can find essays on social customs, a picture of the life of the city. This is a modern analogue of folklore, urban epic and myth. This literature is addressed to the present, contains the most catchy, chronicle signs of the present day. The characters act in recognizable social situations and typical environments, facing problems that are close to the general reader. It is no coincidence that critics say that mass literature to some extent replenishes the general fund of artistic human studies. Yu. M. Lotman defines mass literature as a sociological concept, which "concerns not so much the structure of a particular text as its social functioning in the general system of texts that make up a given culture." Mass literature is emphatically social, life-like, life-affirming. The following fact is curious: the permanent hero of the detective stories of the modern popular author Ch. Abdullaev (“Three Colors of Blood”, “Death of a Scoundrel”, “Symbols of Decay”, etc.), the invincible detective Drongo, in one of the stories at a secular reception, meets with Yevgeny Primakov, who is very surprised to see Drongo. Primakov was sure that he had died in the previous book. The topicality in the thriller gets along with the implausibility of the plot, this is a kind of symbiosis. Practically created in the "live broadcast" mode, the realities of today are combined with the obvious fabulousness of the hero. T. Morozova ironically defines the originality of the typology of the hero of a modern thriller: “Blam is not so much a sound as an abbreviation. Blyals-heroes, heroes-nicknames. Raging gave birth to Fierce, Fierce - Fierce, Fierce - Tagged ... Blals-heroes - the emblem of the new time, the idols of our native glossy literature. Their tenacious trained hands hold a gun and the championship in one of the most popular genres of mass fiction - an action movie ... Blyazh-heroes have their own permanent Blzh-reader, or rather Blals-buy-patel. The construction of a positive hero follows the principle of creating a superman, an immortal, ethical model. Any feats are subject to such a hero, he can solve any crimes and punish any criminal. This is a hero-scheme, a hero-mask, as a rule, devoid of not only individual character traits, biography, but also a name.

The very technology of commercial literature makes it possible to reflect today. After all, by order of the publishing house, work on the text takes 4-5 months. Therefore, to some extent, mass literature can be compared with the mass media: detective stories, melodramas, fantasy, etc. are read and retold to each other, like a fresh newspaper or a glossy magazine. For example, in the new novel by Polina Dashkova "Airtime" the characters are easily recognizable. In the main character - a popular journalist - the features of Svetlana Sorokina are guessed. This novel includes a detective story, and adventure, and melodramatic, and historical. Against the backdrop of the search for the famous lost diamond "Pavel" tells about the life of an entire family clan during the 20th century, from the Silver Age to the present day. There is clearly a resemblance to Anastasia Verbitskaya's novel The Spirit of the Times, popular at the beginning of the 20th century. On the pages of domestic detectives, the characters visit recognizable, prestigious restaurants and shops, meet current politicians, discuss the same problems that have just stirred up the media, drink advertised drinks, dress in fashionable clothes. A. Marinina admitted in an interview that readers asked for some recipes from the kitchen of Nastya Kamenskaya. And in the novel "Requiem" the heroine Marinina reveals in detail the secrets of preparing an Italian salad. Modern "glossy writers" are so accustomed to appealing to the cinematic experience of readers that the portrait of the hero can be limited to the phrase "She was beautiful, like Sharon Stone" or "He was strong, like Bruce Willis." One should agree with A. Genis in his definition of the phenomenon of mass culture: “Mascult, enveloping the world with creative protoplasm, is both the body and the soul of the people. Here, still undivided into individuals, truly folk art, an anonymous and universal folklore element, is brewed. Only later geniuses are born in it, noble art crystallizes. The individual artist, this solitary craftsman, comes to everything ready. He is a parasite on the body of mass culture, from which the poet draws with might and main, without hesitation. Mass art certainly does not interfere with him. Mastering other people's forms, the artist, of course, destroys them, reshapes them, breaks them, but he cannot do without them. A form cannot be invented at all, it is born in the midst of people's life, as an archetype of national or even pre-national life, it exists forever.