Essay on the topic: What does it mean to be a talented reader. Who read the statement by S.Ya. Marshak “About the Talented Reader” help you make up your own reasoning about the talented Literature also needs talented readers

19.01.2021

About the talented reader

Let's talk about the reader. They talk about him rarely and little. Meanwhile, the reader is an irreplaceable person. Without it, not only our books, but all the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin are just a dumb and dead pile of paper.

Individual readers may sometimes make erroneous judgments about books, but the Reader, in the larger, collective sense of the word - and, moreover, over a more or less long period of time - always has the last word in assessing a literary work.

True, the assessment of a book, established for a certain period of time, changes very often. Some booth located nearby can obscure a tower standing in the distance. But sooner or later we realize this optical illusion and begin to imagine literary quantities on a more correct scale.

Time passes, one generation replaces another, and each of them evaluates the literary heritage that has reached it in its own way. And if a prose writer or poet retains their significance and weight over the centuries, this is not explained by the fact that they were once included in the ranks of geniuses and classics or immortalized by monuments erected in their honor, but by the fact that new generations recognize them as valuable and necessary for life.

And there are times when a book, lying peacefully on our shelf, gradually and imperceptibly loses its charm. She seems to be destroyed, merging with others similar to her.

The fate of the book is decided by a living person, the reader.

We must not forget about this when we talk about language, about the poet’s vocabulary.

Remember how Lermontov brought Heine’s poems closer to the heart of the Russian reader by translating German words into the following Russian:

And dozes, swaying, and snow falls
She is dressed like a robe.

Tyutchev's translation of the same poem by Heine, very close to the original, did not, however, evoke such a deep response in us and therefore did not enter Russian poetry on a par with the original poems.

Words and combinations of words are connected in our minds with many, many of the most complex associations and are capable of raising from the bottom of our soul a whole world of memories, feelings, images, and ideas.

And the point here is not only in the subtle and thorough knowledge of the language, which linguists have.

In search of the most expressive, unique, irreplaceable word, a poet or prose writer turns not only to memory, like a doctor recalling the Latin names of drugs.

Words are arranged in our minds differently than in dictionaries, not separately, not alphabetically or according to grammatical categories. They are closely related to our diverse feelings and sensations. An angry, sharp, apt word will not come to mind until we are truly angry. We will not find warm, tender, affectionate words until we are imbued with genuine tenderness. That is why Mayakovsky speaks of extracting a precious word “from the artesian depths of humanity.”

This does not mean that the poet needs some unusual, sophisticated, pretentious words to express feelings.

Finding the simplest and at the same time the most apt word is sometimes much more difficult.

Remember the description of a winter evening in Chekhov's story "The Seizure".

“Recently, the first snow fell, and everything in nature was under the power of this young snow. The air smelled of snow, snow crunched softly underfoot, the ground, roofs, trees, benches on the boulevards - everything was soft, white, young, and from this house looked different than yesterday, the lanterns burned brighter, the air was more transparent, the carriages knocked more dullly, and a feeling similar to white, young, fluffy snow begged into the soul along with the fresh, light frosty air ... "

These are the ordinary words known to everyone that Chekhov gives us the feeling of the first snow. Where are the verbal “artesian depths” mentioned above?

In lyrical concentration, in the sparse and strict selection of the finest details, in the rhythm that takes us into the atmosphere of a winter evening city.

In fact, the simplest words have the greatest power if the reader perceives them with that fresh spontaneity that is characteristic of poets and children.

Chekhov half-jokingly countered all the fanciful descriptions of the sea with its simplest definition:

And in the folk epic "Kalevala" the hare, who brings the news of Aino's death, tells her family that the girl

Fell into the wet sea.

“Big sea”, “wet sea” - this is how any child could express himself, perceiving the world for the first time - large, strong and simple.

An adult can find more complex epithets to describe the sea. But happy is the one who manages to combine mature experience with such a fresh and direct vision of the world.

In folk epic, in ancient Greek poetry, in Latin prose, in inscriptions on ancient monuments, simple verbs are full of movement and force:

I came, I saw, I conquered.

And what strength and weight is there in the line of Lermontov’s poem “Two Giants” - in the verb “fell”, placed at the end of the verse, as if over a steep cliff:

The daring one gasped and fell!

The poet, as it were, returns to the words their original freshness, energy, fullness - virtues that they did not possess, resting in inaction on the pages of dictionaries.

The verb "to laugh" contains peals of loud laughter - "ho-ho-tat".

We have long been accustomed to this laughing word and, pronouncing it quickly, we crumple it and hide unstressed vowels.

And how clearly and powerfully each of his syllables sounded in Pushkin’s poems:

He keeps walking, he walks around,
Talks loudly to himself -
And suddenly, hitting him on the forehead with his hand,
Laughed...

It seems that for the first time this word has been given the space necessary for its full sound. Poetic meter forces us to pronounce all vowels clearly and clearly. The inevitable pause after the previous verse creates that silence, after which the laughter contained in the word “laughed” rolls like thunder.

Our hasty, sometimes careless colloquial speech, which we use in everyday life for utilitarian purposes, often discolors and “dumbs down” words, turning them into service terms, into some kind of conventional code.

The writer uses the same generally accepted words (although his vocabulary should be much wider and richer than the colloquial vocabulary), but, a master of his craft, he knows how to place a word among others so that it plays with all its colors, sounds unexpected, weighty and new.

And he succeeds only if he himself treats words with care and unusualness, if he not only understands their meaning, but also imagines everything that was put into them by the “linguist” - the people.

Not afraid to break the rules of stylistics, Chekhov, in his description of the first snow, repeats the word “snow” more than once, which in itself - without epithets - can tell the reader a lot. The poet believes in the power of this simple word, just as an adult or child, inexperienced in the art of words, believes in it, for whom words are as tangible and significant as the objects themselves. But, of course, the power and charm of Chekhov’s lines does not lie in the word “snow” alone. They contain the smell of young snow, and the soft crunch of it underfoot, and the sound of carriages muffled by the snow, and the whiteness of the snow, and the transparency of the winter air, from which the lanterns burn brighter than usual.

Together with Chekhov, the reader not only sees this first “young” snow, but also hears its creaking, and inhales the fresh winter air that smells of snow, and, it seems, even feels the chill of a melting snowflake in the palm of his hand.

All five of our senses respond to those simple and at the same time magical words that Chekhov so carefully uses in this passage.

His winter evening landscape awakens in readers so many subtle, dear feelings that they themselves begin to remember something of their own - something that Chekhov did not name.

The reader ceases to be just a reader. He becomes a participant in everything that the poet has experienced and felt.

And, on the contrary, he remains indifferent if the author has done all the work for him and has chewed up his idea, theme, images so much that he has left no room for his imagination. The reader also needs and wants to work. He is also an artist - otherwise we could not talk to him in the language of images and colors.

Literature needs talented readers as well as talented writers. It is on them, on these talented, sensitive readers with a creative imagination, that the author counts when he strains all his mental strength in search of the right image, the right turn of action, the right word.

But not every book forces the reader, even the most talented one, to work - to think, feel, guess, imagine.

In life, for some reason, we are captivated by distant sounds that seem especially poetic to us - the distant crow of a rooster, the distant barking of dogs, by which we recognize that there is a village somewhere ahead, distant human talk on the road, or a snatch of a song coming to us from afar. We are interested in seeing unknown people in the forest around a fire, the flames of which snatch out their individual features from the semi-darkness. Walking down the street, we sometimes cannot resist the temptation to look into a lighted window, behind which goes some kind of life unknown to us.

We are interested in everything that awakens our poetic imagination, which is able to recreate the whole picture from a few details.

We re-read “Taman” countless times, written in such a laconic, simple and strict way, as only poets write in prose. But something in this story always remains mysterious, unseen, unheard for us.

I do not mean some sly omissions or purely subtle hints, which are often used by pretentious writers who want to impart, in some twilight, a mysterious significance to something that in bright light would seem primitive and even flat.

No, we are talking about the complexity and depth of an image, thought, feeling in which getting to the bottom is not so easy.

What, it would seem, is tricky about the portrait of Katyusha Maslova, written by the hand of Leo Tolstoy? But we endlessly re-read the pages dedicated to her in order to understand, to discern what it was in this image of a young girl with such happy, slightly slanted, “black as wet currant” eyes, and then a female prisoner with a pale, swollen face that was so striking and thrilled us for life. We are only guessing and therefore trying to read between the lines of Tolstoy’s novel what is happening in her soul after a difficult and painful turning point, how and when her first love, so cruelly trampled, awoke in her, whether she will accept Nekhlyudov’s atoning sacrifice or find some kind of love for herself. another path, more difficult and higher. All these questions do not cease to worry us until the last pages of the book. And even after we read it to the end, there is still a lot of work left for our imagination and thought.

And because the author makes us feel, think and imagine so much throughout the novel, we do not miss a single word in the text, we greedily catch every movement of the characters, trying to predict the turns of their destinies.

According to complex, internally logical, but at the same time laws that cannot be predicted by calculation, the destinies of the heroes develop in Chekhov’s stories “Duel”, “The Story of an Unknown Man”, “Three Years”.

Try to guess in advance how and where M. Gorky will take you in “The Hermit” or in “The Story of Unrequited Love.”

And in our modern art one can find many stories, poems, and films that give the reader and viewer the opportunity to be full participants in the reality that the artist creates.

The path of Grigory Melekhov is complex and contradictory. It is difficult to predetermine - despite all their regularity - the turns of fate of the heroes of "Walking Through Torment". Throughout the entire poetic story, from the first line to the last, Nikita Morgunok is looking for the “country of Ant,” and the reader wanders with him along “a thousand paths and roads,” sharing thoughts and anxieties with the hero of the poem.

However, even now, in our fiction and poetry, “route” cars have not yet disappeared, which take the reader not only to a predetermined goal, but also along a predetermined route that does not promise anything new, unexpected and unforeseen.

The reader and his imagination have nothing to do on such a well-trodden road.

And the author himself, in the process of such writing, can hardly find or discover anything valuable and significant for himself, for life, for art. In essence, such easy roads pass by life and art.

The reader receives only the capital that the author invested in the work. If during the work no real thoughts, no genuine feelings, no stock of living and accurate observations were expended, the reader’s imagination will not work. He will remain indifferent, and if he gets excited for one day, then tomorrow he will forget his short-term hobby.

When the curtain rises in a theater or a book opens, the viewer or reader is sincerely disposed to believe the author and actor. After all, that’s why he came to the theater or opened a book, to believe. And it is not his fault if he loses confidence in a play or a book, but sometimes, through the fault of a play and a book, in theater and literature.

The viewer is ready to indulge in skepticism, and may lose confidence in the glued-on beards and painted forests, if in a matter of minutes of the performance he is not internally engaged, does not follow the development of the plot, the resolution of a life problem, if he is not excited and interested. Following the relationships between the characters, the viewer forgets that they are composed and fictitious. He cries over the tragic fate of his beloved heroes, he rejoices at the victory of goodness and justice. But the falseness, banality or inexpressiveness of what is happening on stage immediately makes him wary, turns the actors into pitiful comedians, and exposes all the cheap props of the stage environment.

Samuel Marshak(1887 - 1964) - author of famous children's books and equally famous translations. His first teacher was archivist and art historian Vladimir Stasov, to whom Marshak addressed “Dear Grandfather” in his early letters. The young poet was patronized by and, and he himself helped children from a young age: he participated in organizing assistance to young orphans and refugees - victims of the First World War; in 1917 he organized and headed the “Children's Town” - a complex of children's institutions (library, school and creative workshops), which included one of the first Soviet theaters for young spectators.

Marshak was not only a practitioner, but also a theorist. He spoke a lot about the importance of poetry, the theory of translation and his own observations of the literary process. He combined most of his articles and notes on literature into the collection “Education with Words,” published in 1961.

We selected 10 quotes from it:

As a spectator who has not seen the first act, Children are lost in conjecture. And yet they manage somehow Understand what is going on in the world.
Of all the arts, poetry is the most popular, widespread, one might say, free material. Music needs instruments - from an organ to a simple pipe, painting is unthinkable without paints, and poetic art deals with words - with those ordinary, familiar words that serve us for everyday conversation.
Literature needs talented readers as well as talented writers. It is on them, on these talented, sensitive readers with a creative imagination, that the author counts when he strains all his mental strength in search of the right image, the right turn of action, the right word.
We can say with complete confidence that in his fairy tales Andersen told more and more truthfully about the real world than many novelists who claim to be writers of everyday life.
The shortest epigram - just like a large epic poem - can pass from generation to generation, conquering space and time.
A writer must feel the age of every word. He can freely use words and phrases that have recently and briefly entered our oral speech, if he knows how to distinguish this small bargaining chip from the words and figures of speech included in the main - golden - fund of the language.
Literature without criticism is like a street without streetlights.
The dictionary reflects all the changes taking place in the world. He captured the experience and wisdom of centuries and, keeping pace, accompanies life, the development of technology, science, and art.
Leaders of literary circles usually consider musicality, imagery, and other easily measurable properties to be the formal merits of poetry. They count the number of metaphors, comparisons, images, evaluate the richness of rhyme and in this way very easily decide which poems are better and which are worse. It's a seductively easy approach to poetry, but is it sustainable? Indeed, given such criteria, Balmont will certainly turn out to be “more poetic” than Pushkin, and Severyanin, of course, will defeat Lermontov.
Time is precious. There is a lot and little time. A long time is not the time If it has passed.

Literature also needs talented readers, as well as talented writers. It is on them, on these talented, sensitive readers with a creative imagination, that the author counts when he strains all his mental strength in search of the right image, the right turn of action, the right word. The artist-author takes on only part of the work. The artist-reader must fill in the rest with his imagination. But not every book forces the reader, even the most talented one, to work - to think, feel, guess, imagine. A good reader: he always reads, every day and cannot do without it, reads various books (popular science, history, fiction and others) knows how to look for the book he needs, understands and understands what he read. A real reader loves a book not as a thing (sometimes quite expensive) and values it not only for the information that can be gleaned from it. For a real reader, a book is a living being with whom you can communicate and to whom you can turn at any moment. A real reader knows how to use in life what he read about in books. It is necessary to read and understand, because the chosen literature gives the joy of discovery, helps us experience high feelings, makes us smarter, kinder, better. Not only the writer must be talented, but also the reader. Education with words About skill About a talented reader Let's talk about the reader. They talk about him rarely and little. Meanwhile, the reader is an irreplaceable person. Without it, not only our books, but all the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin are just a dumb and dead pile of paper. Individual readers may sometimes make erroneous judgments about books, but the Reader, in the larger, collective sense of the word - and, moreover, over a more or less long period of time - always has the last word in assessing a literary work. True, the assessment of a book, established for a certain period of time, changes very often. Some booth located nearby can obscure a tower standing in the distance. But sooner or later we realize this optical illusion and begin to imagine literary quantities on a more correct scale. Time passes, one generation replaces another, and each of them evaluates the literary heritage that has reached it in its own way. And if a prose writer or poet retains their significance and weight over the centuries, this is not explained by the fact that they were once included in the ranks of geniuses and classics or immortalized by monuments erected in their honor, but by the fact that new generations recognize them as valuable and necessary for life. And there are times when a book, lying peacefully on our shelf, gradually and imperceptibly loses its charm. She seems to be destroyed, merging with others similar to her. The fate of the book is decided by a living person, the reader. All the strings that the author has are in the hearts of the readers. The author has no other strings. And depending on the quality of playing on these strings, they resonate in the souls of people, now dull, now loud, now loud, now quiet. We must not forget about this when we talk about language, about the poet’s vocabulary. Remember how Lermontov brought Heine’s poems closer to the heart of the Russian reader by translating the German words into these Russian words: And she dozes, swaying, and is dressed in loose snow like a robe1. Tyutchev's translation of the same poem by Heine, very close to the original, did not, however, evoke such a deep response in us and therefore did not enter Russian poetry on a par with the original poems2. Words and combinations of words are connected in our minds with many, many of the most complex associations and are capable of raising from the bottom of our soul a whole world of memories, feelings, images, and ideas. And this depends on what is in the author’s heart and soul and how much he masters that powerful verbal keyboard that sets the strings of the reader’s hearts in motion. And that's it

What are the mistakes of the first reading?

However, these errors apply not only to the first, but often to subsequent readings as well.

To better understand this, let's think - what is the role of a work of art?, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a book or a painting or a sculpture.

A good example is given by S.I. Povarnina – analogy with music.

The composer created a great piece of music.

But music requires two artists - a composer and a musician. If the musician is a virtuoso, he will be able to convey all the subtleties of the work, but if this work is performed by a weak musician, then we will only hear some kind of strumming.

Also when reading - it is required reader-artist , capable penetrate deeply to the essence of a work of art. Otherwise, it will resemble strumming on one string, sometimes on three chords, but it will never come to melismas (musical decorations).

« Literature also needs talented readers, just like talented writers. » . S.Ya. Marshak.

Superficial reading only leads to disappointment for the reader. An ordinary plot, like many in other books, nothing special. Indeed, the number of stories is limited, and if you only follow the storyline, then all the works are the same.

« The Little Prince - I didn’t like it - there’s nothing new“- another reader will say so.

Like Pushkin:
“There is boredom, there is deception or delirium,
There is no conscience in that, there is no meaning in that...”(Eugene Onegin).

Sometimes the reader approaches a book only as a source of information - to learn about previous events, about different aspects of life. " From this book I learned about the life of doctors" - this is the reading option.

There is no point in viewing a work of art so narrowly. It’s easier to find information in a reference book or a short article on the Internet and not waste time reading a thick book only to find out what happened then.

But the purpose of a work of art is not only to sound beautiful or to inform. Impact on the reader's personality- This is the main task of a work of art.

And this impact brings not only aesthetic pleasure. It provides an emotional experience that a person cannot always acquire, even after living his whole life. Experience beyond personal experience. Personally enriching experiences. Experience that helps you better understand yourself and others.

Jean Honore Fragonard. " Reading girl"(1776).

But to gain this experience you need to learn abstract thinking.

Beyond the first stage of perception - “ stage of delight", followed by the second - " stage of true pleasure"(according to Belinsky) or about from living contemplation to abstract thinking.

Abstraction (from Latin abstractio - distraction) - abstraction from some aspects of a phenomenon or object in order to highlight other significant, natural features.

The reader, abstracting from the plot line, reflects on the reasons behind the behavior of certain characters, sees manifestations of human passions, the internal conflict of the characters, their choices.

And finally, third stage – the influence of a work of art on the reader’s personality. A person changes under the influence of what he reads and his thoughts.

For these conditional stages to come true, the reader must be able to figuratively recreate events and be able to empathize with the characters.

And if we recreate it figuratively - the reader is capable of this in most cases, then further depends on the development of other abilities of the reader, namely:

- to understand the metaphorical nature of statements - depends on the linguistic baggage.
- understanding people’s behavior depends on communication experience and knowledge of psychology.
- to understand the ideological content of the work - depends on the level of personal development, the ability to think abstractly, and the presence of special knowledge.

But this is often not enough; what is more important is the general intellectual abilities that allow one to analyze and evaluate a work.

I will dwell on one more point. A good book also shapes artistic taste. Those. the ability to perceive and appreciate the truly artistic values that art brings with it. Hence the further selection of books to read.

These are the theoretical guidelines necessary for the process of understanding a work of art.

What other mistakes of the first reading can you name?

When reading business literature, the first reading is viewing, to get a general idea of the book.

For fiction, the first reading cannot be a skimming one, quickly skimming through the pages to find out what the plot is. This is not the purpose of reading.

Reading a work of fiction " ...requires, at least for the first time, passive reading. Only after this comes reading with elaboration " S.I. writes about this. Povarnin in the book “How to Read Books.”

Analysis, criticism during the first reading - affects the quality of perception of the work. We experience a work of fiction best only when we read it. passively . Only then can you realize in your imagination and experience what the author experienced.

Hence the rule - first reading "passive"(without analysis). Although if an assessment or discussion arises during breaks between reading, there is nothing wrong with that, the main thing is not to cause them consciously.

On first reading, second rule - use your imagination to the fullest. Use your visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory imagination. Then events and people will literally come to life.

"A work of art,- Belinsky notes, - rarely strikes the reader's soul with a strong impression the first time: more often it requires that it be gradually peered into and pondered; it does not open suddenly, so the more you reread it, the further you delve into its organization, you catch new, previously unnoticed features, you discover new beauties and the more you enjoy them.”. (Levidov A.M. “Author - image - reader.”)

Your first reading experience

So, you have the experience of reading the work of A.S. for the first time. Griboyedov "Woe from Wit".

What rules were “broken”?

From my experience, I can say that if you do something while making mistakes, the process goes much faster than trying to do it perfectly the first time. There is no limit to perfection - so don’t be afraid to make mistakes. It would be nice, of course, to know in advance where they are, but this is not always possible.

Have you read how the retelling turned out?

You can compare your own retelling with other people's retelling. The Internet allows you to do this. To do this, type in the search engine - retelling Woe from Wit video.
You can listen to the option such

After listening to several retellings, you will notice that this is only a retelling of the plot. But it's worth asking a question - what is this work about? and many will be confused - well, I just told you. But still, what is the work about?

In general terms, this is a story about what happened in one Moscow house during one day.

But at the same time, the story contained the entire life of the noble society of that time.

This was achieved through a whole gallery of portraits, which together constitute the image of society with all its inherent morality, which is built on groveling before the strong and humiliation of the weak.

But Griboedov also tried to solve the problem of creating a positive hero - in the person of Chatsky. Showed the struggle between the new and the old.

If we talk about what the play is about, this is one of the possible options. Perhaps someone will only see a story about the protagonist’s love aspirations that ended in failure.