Artistic space and time are an integral property of any work of art, including music, literature, theater, etc. Literary chronotopes have primarily plot significance and are the organizational centers of the main events described by the author. There is also no doubt about the pictorial significance of chronotopes, since plot events in them are concretized, and time and space acquire a sensually visual character. Genre and genre varieties are determined by chronotope. All temporal-spatial definitions in literature are inseparable from each other and are emotionally charged.
Artistic time is time that is reproduced and depicted in a literary work. Artistic time, in contrast to objectively given time, uses the diversity of subjective perception of time. A person's sense of time is subjective. It can “stretch”, “run”, “fly”, “stop”. Artistic time makes this subjective perception of time one of the forms of depicting reality. However, objective time is also used at the same time. Time in fiction is perceived through the connection of events - cause-and-effect or associative. Events in a plot precede and follow each other, are arranged in a complex series, and thanks to this, the reader is able to notice time in a work of art, even if nothing is said about time. Artistic time can be characterized as follows: static or dynamic; real - unreal; speed of time; prospective – retrospective – cyclical; past – present – future (in what time the characters and action are concentrated). In literature, the leading principle is time.
Art space is one of essential components works. Its role in the text is not limited to determining the place where the event takes place, the plot lines are connected, and the characters move. Artistic space, like time, is special language for the moral assessment of characters. The behavior of the characters is related to the space in which they are located. The space can be closed (limited) - open; real (recognizable, similar to reality) - unreal; his own (the hero was born and raised here, feels comfortable in it, adequate to the space) - strangers (the hero is an outside observer, abandoned in a foreign land, cannot find himself); empty (minimum objects) – filled. It can be dynamic, full of varied movement, and static, “motionless,” filled with things. When movement in space becomes directed, one of the most important spatial forms appears - the road, which can become a spatial dominant that organizes the entire text. The motive of the road is semantically ambiguous: the road can be a concrete reality of the depicted space, it can symbolize the path of the character’s internal development, his fate; Through the road motif, the idea of the path of a people or an entire country can be expressed. Space can be built horizontally or vertically (emphasis on objects stretching upward or objects spreading outwards). In addition, you should look at what is located in the center of this space and what is on the periphery, what geographical objects are listed in the story, what they are called (real names, fictitious names, proper names or common nouns as proper names).
Each writer interprets time and space in his own way, endowing them with his own characteristics that reflect the author’s worldview. As a result, the artistic space created by the writer is unlike any other artistic space and time, much less the real one.
Thus, in the works of I. A. Bunin (the “Dark Alleys” cycle), the lives of the heroes take place in two non-overlapping chronotopes. On the one hand, a space of everyday life, rain, corroding melancholy, in which time moves unbearably slowly, unfolds before the reader. Only a tiny part of the hero’s biography (one day, one night, a week, a month) takes place in a different space, bright, saturated with emotions, meaning, sun, light and, most importantly, love. In this case, the action takes place in the Caucasus or in a noble estate, under the romantic arches of “dark alleys”.
An important property of literary time and space is their discreteness, that is, discontinuity. In relation to time, this is especially important, since literature is capable of not reproducing the entire flow of time, but selecting the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps. Such temporal discreteness served as a powerful means of dynamization.
The nature of the conventions of time and space greatly depends on the type of literature. Conventionality is maximum in lyric poetry, since it is closer to the expressive arts. There may be no space here. At the same time, lyrics can reproduce the objective world in its spatial realities. With the predominance of the grammatical present in the lyrics, it is characterized by the interaction of the present and the past (elegy), past, present and future (to Chaadaev). The category of time itself can be the leitmotif of a poem. In drama, the conventions of time and space are established mainly on the theater. That is, all actions, speeches, and inner speech of the actors are closed in time and space. Against the backdrop of drama, the epic has broader possibilities. Transitions from one time to another, spatial movements occur thanks to the narrator. The narrator can compress or stretch time.
By features artistic convention time and space in literature can be divided into abstract and concrete. Abstract is a space that can be perceived as universal. The concrete not only ties the depicted world to certain topographical realities, but also actively influences the essence of what is depicted. There is no impassable border between concrete and abstract spaces. Abstract space draws details from reality. The concepts of abstract and concrete spaces can serve as guidelines for typology. The type of space is usually associated with the corresponding properties of time. Form of specification art. time are most often the linking of action to historical realities and the designation of cyclical time6 time of year, day. In most cases, the bad time is shorter than the real one. This reveals the law of “poetic economy.” However, there is an important exception related to the depiction of psychological processes and subjective time of the character or lyrical hero. Experiences and thoughts flow faster than the flow of speech, which forms the basis of literary imagery. In literature, complex relationships arise between the real and the thin. time. Real time In general it can be equal to zero, for example in descriptions. Such time is eventless. But event time is also heterogeneous. In one case, literature records events and actions that significantly change a person. This is plot or plot time. In another case, literature paints a picture of a stable existence that repeats itself day after day. This type of time is called chronicle-domestic time. The ratio of eventless, eventful and chronicle-everyday time creates a tempo organization of art. time of the work. Completeness and incompleteness are important for analysis. It is also worth saying about the types of organization of artistic time: chronicle, adventure, biographical, etc.
Bakhtin in his heresy identified chronotopes:
Meetings.
Roads. On the road (“high road”), the spatial and temporal paths of the most diverse people intersect at one temporal and spatial point - representatives of all classes, conditions, religions, nationalities, ages. This is the starting point and the place where events take place. The road is especially useful for depicting an event governed by chance (but not only for this). (remember Pugachev’s meeting with Grinev in “Kap. Daughter”). Common features of the chronotope in different types of novels: the road passes through one’s native country, and not in an exotic foreign world; the socio-historical diversity of this native country is revealed and shown (therefore, if we can talk about exoticism here, then only about “social exoticism” - “slums”, “scum”, thieves’ worlds). In the latter function, “road” was also used in journalistic travel of the 18th century (“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” by Radishchev). This feature of the “road” distinguishes the listed types of novels from the other line of the wandering novel represented by ancient novel travel, Greek sophistic novel, baroque novel of the 17th century. A “foreign world”, separated from its own country by sea and distance, has a similar function to the road in these novels.
Castle. By the end of the 18th century in England there was a new territory for the fulfillment of novel events - the “castle”. The castle is full of time from the historical past. The castle is the place of life of the rulers of the feudal era (and therefore historical figures of the past); traces of centuries and generations have been deposited in it in visible form in various parts of its structure, in furnishings, in weapons, in specific human relations of dynastic succession. This creates a specific plot of the castle, developed in Gothic novels.
Living room-salon. From the point of view of plot and composition, meetings take place here (not random), intrigues are created, denouements are often made, dialogues take place that acquire exceptional significance in the novel, the characters, “ideas” and “passions” of the heroes are revealed. Here is the interweaving of the historical and social-public with the private and even the purely private, alcove, the interweaving of private everyday intrigue with political and financial, state secrets with alcove secrets, the historical series with the everyday and biographical. Here the visually visible signs of both historical time and biographical and everyday time are condensed, condensed, and at the same time they are closely intertwined with each other, fused into single signs of the era. The era becomes visually visible and plot-visible.
Provincial town. It has several varieties, including a very important one - idyllic. Flaubert's version of the town is a place of cyclical domestic time. There are no events here, but only repeating “occurrences.” The same everyday actions, the same topics of conversation, the same words, etc. are repeated day after day. Time here is eventless and therefore seems almost stopped.
Threshold. This is a chronotope of crisis and life turning point. In Dostoevsky, for example, the threshold and the adjacent chronotopes of the staircase, hallway and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of the street and square that continue them, are the main places of action in his works, places where events of crises, falls, resurrections, renewals, insights, decisions take place that determine a person’s entire life. Time in this chronotope, in essence, is an instant, seemingly without duration and falling out of the normal flow of biographical time. These decisive moments are included in Dostoevsky’s large, comprehensive chronotopes of mystery and carnival time. These times coexist in a unique way, intersect and intertwine in Dostoevsky’s work, just as they coexisted for many centuries in the public squares of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (essentially the same, but in slightly different forms - in the ancient squares of Greece and Rome). In Dostoevsky, on the streets and in crowd scenes inside houses (mainly in living rooms), the ancient carnival-mystery square seems to come to life and shine through. This, of course, does not exhaust Dostoevsky’s chronotopes: they are complex and diverse, as are the traditions renewed in them.
Unlike Dostoevsky, in the works of L. N. Tolstoy the main chronotope is biographical time, flowing in the interior spaces of noble houses and estates. The renewal of Pierre Bezukhov was also long-term and gradual, quite biographical. The word “suddenly” is rare in Tolstoy and never introduces any significant event. After biographical time and space, the chronotope of nature, the family-idyllic chronotope, and even the chronotope of the labor idyll (when depicting peasant labor) are of significant importance in Tolstoy.
The chronotope, as the primary materialization of time in space, is the center of pictorial concretization, embodiment for the entire novel. All abstract elements of the novel - philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and consequences, etc. - gravitate towards the chronotope and through it are filled with flesh and blood, become part of artistic imagery. This is the pictorial meaning of the chronotope.
The chronotopes we have considered are of a genre-typical nature; they underlie certain varieties of the novel genre, which has developed and developed over the centuries.
The principle of chronotopic artistic literary image Lessing revealed it with all clarity for the first time in his Laocoon. It establishes the temporary nature of the artistic and literary image. Everything static-spatial should not be statically described, but should be involved in the time series of events depicted and the story-image itself. Thus, in the famous example of Lessing, the beauty of Helen is not described by Homer, but her effect on the Trojan elders is shown, and this effect is revealed in a number of movements and actions of the elders. Beauty is involved in the chain of events depicted and at the same time is not the subject of a static description, but the subject of a dynamic story.
There is a sharp and fundamental boundary between the real world depicted and the world depicted in the work. It is impossible to confuse, as was done and is still sometimes done, the depicted world with the depicting world (naive realism), the author - the creator of the work with the human author (naive biographism), recreating and updating the listener-reader of different (and many) eras with a passive listener-reader of his time (dogmatism of understanding and evaluation).
We can also say this: before us are two events - the event that is told in the work, and the event of the telling itself (in this latter we ourselves participate as listeners-readers); these events occur at different times (different in duration) and in different places, and at the same time they are inextricably united in a single, but complex event, which we can designate as a work in its eventful completeness, including here its external material given, and its text, and the world depicted in it, and the author-creator, and the listener-reader. At the same time, we perceive this completeness in its integrity and inseparability, but at the same time we understand all the differences in its constituent moments. The author-creator moves freely in his time; he can begin his story from the end, from the middle and from any moment of the events depicted, without destroying the objective passage of time in the depicted event. Here the difference between depicted and depicted time is clearly manifested.
10. Simple and detailed comparison (short and not essential).
COMPARISON A comparison is a figurative allegory that establishes similarities between two life phenomena. Comparison is an important figurative and expressive means of language. There are two images: the main one, which contains the main meaning of the statement and the auxiliary one, attached to the union “how” and others. Comparison is widely used in literary speech. Reveals similarities, parallels, and correspondences between initial phenomena. Comparison reinforces various associations that arise in the writer. Comparison performs figurative and expressive functions or combines both. A form of comparison is the connection of its two members using the conjunctions “as”, “as if”, “like”, “as if”, etc. There is also a non-union comparison (“The samovar in iron armor // Makes noise like a household general...” N.A. Zabolotsky).
11. The concept of the literary process (I have some kind of heresy, but in response to this question you can blab out everything: from the origin of literature from mythology to trends and modern genres)
The literary process is the totality of all works appearing at that time.
Factors that limit it:
The presentation of literature within the literary process is influenced by the time when a particular book is published.
The literary process does not exist outside of magazines, newspapers, and other printed publications. (“Young Guard”, “New World”, etc.)
The literary process is associated with criticism of published works. Oral criticism also has a significant impact on LP.
“Liberal terror” was the name given to criticism in the early 18th century. Literary associations are writers who consider themselves close on certain issues. They act as a certain group that conquers part of the literary process. Literature is, as it were, “divided” between them. They issue manifestos expressing the general sentiments of a particular group. Manifestos appear at the moment of formation literary group. For literature of the early 20th century. manifestos are uncharacteristic (the symbolists first created and then wrote manifestos). The manifesto allows you to look at the future activities of the group and immediately determine what makes it stand out. As a rule, the manifesto (in classic version- anticipating the activities of the group) turns out to be paler than the literary movement that it represents.
Literary process.
With the help of artistic speech in literary works, the speech activity of people is widely and specifically reproduced. A person in a verbal image acts as a “speaker”. This applies, first of all, to lyrical heroes, characters in dramatic works and narrators of epic works. Speech in fiction acts as the most important subject of depiction. Literature not only denotes life phenomena in words, but also reproduces speech activity itself. Using speech as the subject of the image, the writer overcomes the schematic nature of verbal pictures that are associated with their “immateriality.” Without speech, people's thinking cannot be fully realized. Therefore, literature is the only art that freely and widely masters human thought. Thinking processes are the focus of people's mental life, a form of intense action. In the ways and means of comprehending the emotional world, literature differs qualitatively from other forms of art. Literature uses a direct depiction of mental processes with the help of the author's characteristics and statements of the characters themselves. Literature as an art form has a kind of universality. With the help of speech, you can reproduce any aspect of reality; The visual possibilities of the verbal truly have no limits. Literature most fully embodies the cognitive beginning of artistic activity. Hegel called literature “ universal art" But the visual and educational possibilities of literature were realized especially widely in the 19th century, when the realistic method became leading in the art of Russia and Western European countries. Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy artistically reflected the life of their country and era with a degree of completeness that is inaccessible to any other form of art. Unique quality fiction is also its pronounced, open problematic nature. It is not surprising that it is in the sphere of literary creativity, the most intellectual and problematic, that trends in art are formed: classicism, sentimentalism, etc.
Artistic time and artistic space are the most important characteristics of an artistic image, providing a holistic perception of artistic reality and organizing the composition of the work. The art of words belongs to the group of dynamic, temporary arts (as opposed to plastic, spatial arts). But the literary and poetic image, formally unfolding in time (as a sequence of text), with its content reproduces the spatio-temporal picture of the world, moreover, in its symbolic-ideological, value aspect. Such traditional spatial landmarks as “house” (the image of a closed space), “open space” (the image of open space), “threshold”, “window”, “door” (the boundary between one and the other), have long been the point of application of meaningful forces in literary and artistic (and more broadly, cultural) models of the world (the symbolic richness of such spaces and images as the house of Gogol’s “old world landowners” or Raskolnikov’s coffin-like room in “Crime and Punishment”, 1866, F.M. Dostoevsky, like the steppe is obvious in “Taras Bulba”, 1835, by N.V. Gogol or in the story of the same name by A.P. Chekhov). The artistic chronology is also symbolic (the movement from spring and summer heyday to autumn sadness, characteristic of the world of Turgenev’s prose). In general, ancient types of value situations, realized in spatio-temporal images (chronotope, according to M.M. Bakhtin) - “idyllic time” in the father’s house, “adventurous time” of trials in a foreign land, “mysterious time” of descent into the underworld of disasters - so or otherwise stored in a reduced form classical literature New times and modern literature(“station” or “airport” as places of decisive meetings and clearances, choice of path, sudden recognition, etc. correspond to the ancient “crossroads” or roadside tavern; “hole” - the old “threshold” as a topos of ritual transition).
Due to the iconic, spiritual, symbolic nature of the art of words spatial and temporal coordinates of literary reality are not fully specified, discontinuous and conditional (the fundamental non-representability of spaces, images and quantities in mythological, grotesque and fantastic works; the uneven course of plot time, its delays at points of description, retreats, parallel flow in different plot lines). However, here the temporary nature of the literary image, noted by G.E. Lessing in “Laocoon” (1766), makes itself felt - the convention in the transfer of space is felt weaker and is realized only when trying to translate literary works into the language of other arts; Meanwhile, the conventions in the transmission of time, the dialectic of the discrepancy between the time of the narrative and the time of the events depicted, compositional time with the plot, are mastered by the literary process as an obvious and meaningful contradiction.
Archaic, oral and generally early literature is sensitive to the type of temporal timing, orientation in the collective or historical account of time (so in traditional system literary genres, lyricism is “the present”, and epic is “long past”, qualitatively separated from the life time of the performer and listeners). The time of myth for its keeper and storyteller is not a thing of the past; the mythological narrative ends with the correlation of events with the real structure of the world or its future destiny(the myth of Pandora's Box, of the chained Prometheus who will someday be freed). The time of a fairy tale is a deliberately conventional past, a fictitious time (and space) of non-existence; The ironic ending (“and I was there, drinking honey-beer”) often emphasizes that there is no way out of the time of the fairy tale at the time of its rendering (on this basis we can conclude that the fairy tale has a later origin compared to the myth).
With the collapse of archaic, ritual models of the world, marked by the features of naive realism (observance of the unities of time and place in ancient drama with its cult-mythological origins), in the spatio-temporal ideas that characterize literary consciousness, the measure of convention increases. In an epic or fairy tale, the pace of the narrative could not yet sharply advance the pace of the events depicted; an epic or fabulous action could not unfold simultaneously (“in the meantime”) on two or more sites; it was strictly linear and in this respect remained faithful to empiricism; the epic storyteller did not have a field of vision expanded in comparison with the ordinary human horizon; at each moment he was in one and only one point of the plot space. The “Copernican revolution” produced by the new European novel in spatiotemporal organization of narrative genres, was that the author, along with the right to unconventional and frank fiction, acquired the right to manage the novel’s time as its initiator and creator. When fiction removes the mask of a real event, and the writer openly breaks with the role of rhapsodist or chronicler, then there is no need for a naive-empirical concept of event time. The temporal scope can now be as wide as desired, the pace of the narrative can be as uneven as desired, parallel “theatres of action,” reversing time and exits into the future known to the narrator are acceptable and functionally important (for the purposes of analysis, explanation, or entertainment). The boundaries between the author’s condensed presentation of events, accelerating the passage of plot time, descriptions, stopping its progress for the sake of an overview of space, and dramatized episodes, the compositional time of which “keeps pace” with plot time, become much sharper and are realized. Accordingly, the difference between the unfixed (“omnipresent”) and spatially localized (“witness”) position of the narrator, characteristic mainly of “dramatic” episodes, is more acutely felt.
If in a short story of a novelistic type ( classic sample - « Queen of Spades", 1833, A.S. Pushkin) these moments of the new artistic time and artistic space are still brought to a balanced unity and are in complete subordination to the author-narrator, talking with the reader as if “on the other side” of the fictional space-time, then in In the “great” novel of the 19th century, such unity noticeably fluctuates under the influence of emerging centrifugal forces. These “forces” are the discovery of chronicle-everyday time and lived-in space (in the novels of O. Balzac, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov) in connection with the concept of the social environment that shapes human character, as well as the discovery of multi-subject narration and transferring the center of space-time coordinates to inner world heroes in connection with the development psychological analysis. When long-term organic processes come into the narrator’s field of view, the author risks facing the impossible task of reproducing life “from minute to minute.” The solution was to move the sum of everyday circumstances that repeatedly affect a person beyond the time of action (exposition in “Père Goriot”, 1834-35; “Oblomov’s dream” - a lengthy digression in Goncharov’s novel) or distribution throughout calendar plan works of episodes shrouded in the course of everyday life (in Turgenev’s novels, in the “peaceful” chapters of L.N. Tolstoy’s epic). Such imitation of the “river of life” itself with particular persistence requires the narrator to have a guiding supra-event presence. But, on the other hand, the essentially opposite process of “self-elimination” of the author-narrator is already beginning: the space of dramatic episodes is increasingly organized from the “observational position” of one of the characters, events are described synchronously, as they play out before the eyes of the participant. It is also important that chronicle-everyday time, unlike event time (in its origin - adventure time), does not have an unconditional beginning and an unconditional end (“life goes on”).
In an effort to resolve these contradictions, Chekhov, in accordance with his general idea of the course of life (the time of everyday life is the decisive tragic time of human existence), merged event time with everyday time to an indistinguishable unity: episodes that once happened are presented in the grammatical imperfect - as repeatedly repeated scenes of everyday life, filling a whole segment of everyday chronicle. (In this collapsing of a large “piece” of plot time into a single episode, which simultaneously serves as both a summary story about the past stage and an illustration to it, a “test” taken from everyday life, lies one of the main secrets of the famous Chekhov’s brevity.) From the crossroads classic novel of the mid-19th century, the path opposite to Chekhov’s was paved by Dostoevsky, who concentrated the plot within the boundaries of a turning point, crisis time of decisive trials, measured in a few days and hours. The chronicle gradualism here is actually devalued in the name of the decisive revelation of the heroes in their fateful moments. Dostoevsky’s intense turning point time corresponds to the space highlighted in the form of a stage, extremely involved in events, measured by the steps of the heroes - the “threshold” (doors, stairs, corridors, alleys, where you can’t miss each other), the “accidental shelter” (tavern, compartment), “ meeting hall” - corresponding to situations of crime (transgression), confession, public trial. At the same time, the spiritual coordinates of space and time embrace the human universe in his novels (ancient golden age, French revolution, “quadrillions” of cosmic years and versts), and these instantaneous mental snapshots of world existence prompt us to compare the world of Dostoevsky with the world of “The Divine Comedy” (1307-21) by Dante and “Faust” (1808-31) by I.V. Goethe.
In the spatio-temporal organization of a work of literature of the 20th century, the following trends and features can be noted:
- The symbolic plan of a realistic space-time panorama is emphasized, which, in particular, is reflected in the attraction to nameless or fictitious topography: the City, instead of Kyiv, in M.A. Bulgakov; Ioknapatawpha County in the southern United States, created by the imagination of W. Faulkner; the generalized “Latin American” country of Macondo in the national epic of the Colombian G. Garcia Marquez “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967). However, it is important that artistic time and artistic space in all these cases require real historical and geographical identification or at least rapprochement, without which the work is incomprehensible;
- The closed artistic time of a fairy tale or parable, excluded from the historical account, is often used, which often corresponds to the uncertainty of the place of action (“The Trial”, 1915, F. Kafka; “The Plague”, 1947, A. Camus; “Watt”, 1953, S. Beckett );
- A remarkable milestone of modern literary development- addressing the character’s memory as an internal space for the unfolding of events; the intermittent, reverse and other course of plot time is motivated not by the author’s initiative, but by the psychology of remembering (this occurs not only in M. Proust or W. Woolf, but also in writers of a more traditional realistic plan, for example, in G. Böll, and in modern Russian literature from V.V. Bykov, Yu.V. Trifonov). This formulation of the hero’s consciousness makes it possible to compress the actual time of action to a few days and hours, while the time and space of an entire human life can be projected onto the screen of recollection;
- Modern literature has not lost a hero moving in the objective earthly expanse, in the multifaceted epic space of collective historical destinies - what are the heroes of “The Quiet Don” (1928-40) by M.A. Sholokhov, “The Life of Klim Samgin”, 1927-36, M. Gorky.
- The “hero” of a monumental narrative can become historical time itself in its decisive “knots”, subordinating the destinies of the heroes as private moments in an avalanche of events (A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s epic “The Red Wheel”, 1969-90).
The events of any work of art unfold in a certain time and space.
The depicted space and time are the conditions that determine the nature of events and the logic of their succession to each other. The creation of a unified spatio-temporal structure of the hero’s world is aimed at embodying or transmitting a certain system of values. The categories of space and time differ in relation to the speech material of the work and in relation to the world depicted in the work with the help of this material.
Spatial models, most commonly used writers in works of fiction: real, fantastic, psychological, virtual.
- Real(objective, social and subjective reality).
- Fantastic(the subjects of the action can be fantastic characters or abstract persons; all physical characteristics changeable and unstable).
- Psychological(inner world, personal space of a person).
- Virtual(an artificially created environment into which one can penetrate and experience the feeling of real life is combined with the real or mythological).
The importance of artistic space in the development of the action of a work is determined by the following provisions:
a) the plot, which is a sequence of events set out by the author of the work within the framework of cause and effect, develops in conditions of space and time;
b) the initial representation of the plot-forming function of the category of space is the title of the work, which can serve as a spatial designation and can not only model the space of the artistic world, but also introduce the main symbol of the work, contain an emotional assessment that gives the reader an idea of the author’s concept of the work.
Artistic time
This is a phenomenon of the very artistic fabric of a literary work, subordinating both grammatical time and its philosophical understanding by the writer to its artistic tasks.
Any work of art unfolds in time, so time is important for its perception. The writer takes into account the natural, actual time of the work, but time is also depicted.
The author can depict a short or long period of time, can make time pass slowly or quickly, can depict it as flowing continuously or intermittently, sequentially or inconsistently (with going back, with “running forward”). He can depict the time of a work in close connection with historical time or in isolation from it - closed in on itself; can depict the past, present and future in various combinations.
A work of art makes the subjective perception of time one of the forms of depicting reality.
If the author plays a significant role in the work, if the author creates the image of a fictional author, the image of a storyteller or storyteller, then the image of the author’s time is added to the image of the plot’s time, the image of the performer’s time - in a variety of combinations.
In some cases, to these two “overlapping” depicted durations, the depicted time of the reader or listener can also be added.
Author's time may be motionless- concentrated at one point from which he leads his story, or can move independently, having his own storyline in the work. The author can portray himself as a contemporary of events, he can follow events “on the heels”, events can overtake him (as in a diary, in a novel, in letters). The author can portray himself as a participant in events who does not know at the beginning of the story how they will end, separate himself from the depicted time of action of the work by a large period of time, and can write about them as if from memories - his own or someone else's.
Time in fiction is perceived through the connection of events - cause-and-effect or psychological, associative. Time in a work of art is the correlation of events.
Where there are no events, there is no time: in descriptions of static phenomena, for example, in a landscape or portrait and characterization of a character, in the philosophical reflections of the author.
On the one hand, the time of the work can be " closed", closed in itself, taking place only within the limits of the plot, and on the other hand, the time of the work can be " open", included in the wider flow of time, developing against the backdrop of a precisely defined historical era. The “open” time of a work presupposes the presence of other events occurring simultaneously outside the work and its plot.
The character's crossing of the boundaries that separate parts or spheres of the depicted space and time is an artistic event.
A literary work, one way or another, reproduces the real world: nature, things, events, people in their external and internal existence. In this sphere, the natural forms of existence of the material and ideal are time and space.
If the artistic world in a work is conditional, since it is an image of reality, then time and space in it are also conditional.
In literature, the immateriality of images, discovered by Lessing, gives them, i.e. images, the right to move instantly from one space and time to another. In a work, the author can depict events occurring simultaneously both in different places and in different time, with one caveat: “Meanwhile.” or “And on the other side of town.” Homer used approximately this storytelling technique.
With development literary consciousness forms of mastering time and space were modified, representing an essential aspect of artistic imagery, and thus constituted at present one of the important theoretical questions about the interaction of time and space in fiction.
In Russia, the problems of formal “spatiality” in art, artistic time and artistic space and their monolithic nature in literature, as well as the forms of time and chronotope in the novel, individual images of space, the influence of rhythm on space and time, etc. were consistently dealt with by P. A. Florensky , M. M. Bakhtin, Yu. M. Lotman, V. N. Toporov, groups of scientists from Leningrad, Novosibirsk, etc.20
Artistic time and space, tightly connected with each other, have a number of properties. In relation to the time depicted in a literary work, researchers use the term “discreteness”, since literature is capable of not reproducing the entire flow of time, but selecting the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps with verbal formulas, such as “Spring has come again.”, or so, as it was done in one of the works of I. S. Turgenev: “Lavretsky spent the winter in Moscow, and in the spring of the next year the news reached him that Liza had cut her hair<.> ».
Temporal discreteness is the key to a dynamically developing plot, the psychologism of the image itself.
The fragmentation of the artistic space is manifested in the description of individual details that are most significant for the author. In I. I. Savin’s story “In the Dead House”, of the entire interior of the room prepared for the “unexpected guest”, only the dressing table, table and chair are described in detail -
symbols of the past, “calm and comfortable life,” since it is they who often attract the “tired to death” Khorov.
The nature of the conventions of time and space depends on the type of literature. Their maximum manifestation is found in lyric poetry, where the image of space can be completely absent (A. A. Akhmatova “You are my letter, dear, don’t crumple.”), manifested allegorically through other images (A. S. Pushkin “Prophet”, M. Yu Lermontov “Sail”), open up in specific spaces, realities surrounding the hero (for example, a typically Russian landscape in S. A. Yesenin’s poem “ White birch"), or is built in a certain way through oppositions that are significant not only for romantics: civilization and nature, “the crowd” and “I” (I. A. Brodsky “March is coming. I’m serving again”).
With the predominance of the grammatical present in the lyrics, which actively interacts with the future and the past (Akhmatova “The Devil did not give it away. I succeeded in everything”), the category of time can become the philosophical leitmotif of the poem (F. I. Tyutchev “Having rolled down the mountain, the stone lay down in the valley. "), is thought of as always existing (Tyutchev “Wave and Thought”) or momentary and instantaneous (I. F. Annensky “The Melancholy of Transience”) - have abstractness.
Conditional forms of existence real world- time and space -
strive to preserve some common properties in the drama. Explaining the functioning of these forms in this type of literature, V. E. Khalizev in his monograph on drama comes to the conclusion: “No matter how significant the role narrative fragments acquire in dramatic works, no matter how fragmented the depicted action is, no matter how subordinate the characters’ spoken statements are subordinated logic of their inner speech, drama is committed to being closed in space and
time in paintings".
In the epic genre of literature, the fragmentation of time and space, their transitions from one state to another, become possible thanks to the narrator - an intermediary between the life depicted and the readers. The narrator, like a personified person, can “compress”, “stretch” and “stop” time in numerous descriptions and reasoning. Something similar happens in the works of I. Goncharov, N. Gogol, G. Fielding. So, the latter in “The Story of Tom
Jones, a foundling,” the discreteness of artistic time is set by the very names of the “books” that make up this novel.
Based on the features described above, time and space are represented in literature by abstract or concrete forms of their manifestations.
Abstract is an artistic space that can be perceived as universal, without any pronounced specificity. This form of recreation of universal content, extended to the entire “human race”, manifests itself in the genres of parables, fables, fairy tales, as well as in works of utopian or fantastic perception of the world and special genre modifications - dystopias. Thus, it does not have a significant impact on the characters and behavior of the characters, on the essence of the conflict, is not subject to author’s comprehension, etc. space in ballads
V. Zhukovsky, F. Schiller, short stories by E. Poe, literature of modernism.
In a work, a specific artistic space actively influences the essence of what is depicted. In particular, Moscow in the comedy A.
S. Griboyedov’s “Woe from Wit”, Zamoskvorechye in the dramas of A. N. Ostrovsky and the novels of I. S. Shmelev, Paris in the works of O. de Balzac are artistic images, since they are not only toponyms and urban realities depicted in the works. Here they are a specific artistic space that develops a common psychological picture Moscow nobility; recreating the Christian world order; revealing different aspects of the life of ordinary people in European cities; a certain way of existence - a way of being.
Sensibly perceived (A. A. Potebnya) space as a “noble nest” is a sign of the style of I. Turgenev’s novels, generalized ideas about a provincial Russian city are poured into the prose of A. Chekhov. The symbolization of space, emphasized by a fictitious toponym, preserved the national and historical component in the prose of M. Saltykov-Shchedrin (“The History of a City”) and A. Platonov (“City of Grads”).
In the works of literary theorists, specific artistic time is understood as either linear-chronological or cyclical.
Linear-chronological historical time has precise dating; in a work it usually correlates with a specific event. For example, in the novels by V. Hugo “The Cathedral of Notre Dame”, Maxim Gorky “The Life of Klim Samgin”, K. Simonov “The Living and the Dead”, real historical events are directly included in the fabric of the narrative, and the time of action is determined with an accuracy of the day. In the works of B.
Nabokov’s time coordinates are vague, but according to indirect signs they correlate with the events of 1/3 of the 20th century, since they strive to reproduce the historical flavor of that bygone era, and thereby are also tied to a specific historical time.
In fiction, cyclical artistic time - the time of year, day - carries a certain symbolic meaning: day is a time of work, night is peace and pleasure, evening is calm and rest. From these initial meanings, stable poetic formulas emerged: “life is declining,” “the dawn of a new life,” etc.
The image of cyclical time initially accompanied the plot (of Homer’s poem), but already in mythology, some time periods had a certain emotional and symbolic meaning: night is the time of dominance of secret forces, and morning is deliverance from evil spells. Traces of the mystical ideas of the people are preserved in the works of V. Zhukovsky (“Svetlana”),
A. Pushkin (“Songs Western Slavs"), M. Lermontov (“Demon”, “Vadim”), N. Gogol (“Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Mirgorod”), M. Bulgakov (“The Master and Margarita”).
Works of fiction are capable of capturing the individualized, from the point of view of the lyrical hero or character, emotional and psychological meaning of the time of day. Thus, in Pushkin’s lyrics, night is an expressive time of deep thoughts of the subject of experience; in Akhmatova, the same period characterizes the anxious, restless mood of the heroine; in the poem by A. N. Apukhtin, the artistic image of the morning is shown through the elegiac mode of artistry.
In domestic literature, along with the traditional symbolism of the agricultural cycle (F. Tyutchev “Winter is angry for good reason.”, I. Shmelev “Summer of the Lord”, I. Bunin “ Antonov apples", etc.), there are also individual images seasons, filled, like the individual images of the day, with a psychological concept: the unloved spring in Pushkin and Bulgakov, the joyful and long-awaited spring in Chekhov.
Thus, when analyzing a work of fiction, it is important for an editor, publisher, philologist, or literature teacher to determine the filling of its time and space with forms, types, and meanings, since this indicator characterizes the style of the work, the artist’s writing style, and the author’s method of aesthetic modality.
However, the individual uniqueness of artistic time and artistic space does not exclude the existence in literature of typological models in which the cultural experience of mankind is “objectified.”
Motifs of a house, road, crossroads, bridge, up and down, open space, the appearance of a horse, types of organization of artistic time: chronicle, adventure, biographical and other models that testify to the accumulated experience of human existence represent meaningful forms of literature. Each writer, endowing them with his own meanings, uses these models as “ready-made”, preserving the general meaning inherent in them.
In literary theory, typological models of a spatiotemporal nature are called chronotopes. Exploring the features of the typology of these content forms, M. Bakhtin paid close attention to their literary and artistic embodiment and the cultural issues underlying them. By chronotope, Bakhtin understood the embodiment of various value systems and types of thinking about the world. In the monograph “Questions of Literature and Aesthetics,” the scientist wrote the following about the synthesis of space and time: “In the literary and artistic chronotope, there is a merging of spatial and temporal signs into a meaningful and concrete whole. Time here thickens, becomes denser, becomes artistically visible; space is intensified, drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Examples of time are revealed in space, and space is conceptualized and measured by time. This intersection of rows and fusions of signs characterizes the artistic chronotope.<...>Chronotope as a formal and meaningful category determines (to a large extent) the image of a person in literature; this image is always significant
chronotopic."
Researchers identify such ancient types of value situations and chronotopes in literature as “idyllic time” in the father’s house (the parable of the prodigal son, the life of Ilya Oblomov in Oblomovka, etc.); “adventurous time” of trials in a foreign land (the life of Ibrahim in Pushkin’s novel “Arap of Peter the Great”); “mysterious time” of the descent into the underworld of disasters (Dante’s “Divine Comedy”), which were partially preserved in a reduced form in the literature of modern times.
On culture and literature of the XX-XXI centuries. a noticeable influence was exerted by the natural science concepts of time and space associated with A. Einstein’s theory of relativity and its philosophical consequences. Science fiction has most fruitfully mastered these ideas about space and time. In the novels by R. Sheckley “Exchange of Minds”, D. Priestley “June 31”, A. Asimov “The End of Eternity”, deep moral and ideological problems of our time are actively developed.
On philosophical and scientific discoveries about time and space in a bright way Traditional literature also responded, in which the relativistic effects of demonstrating time and space were particularly reflected (M. Bulgakov “The Master and Margarita”: chapters “By Candlelight”, “Extraction of the Master”; V. Nabokov “Invitation to Execution”; T. Mann "Magic Mountain")
Time and space are imprinted in works of art in two ways: in the form of motifs and leitmotifs, acquiring a symbolic character and denoting a certain picture of the world; and also as a basis for plots.
§ 2. Plot, plot and composition in a literary work
Plot (from French sujet) is a chain of events depicted in a literary work, the life of characters in its spatio-temporal dimensions, in changing positions and circumstances.
The events recreated by the creator form the basis objective world works are an integral part of its form. As the organizing beginning of most epic and dramatic works, the plot can also be significant in the lyrical genre of literature.
The understanding of plot as a set of events recreated in a work dates back to Russian literary criticism of the 19th century. :A.
N. Veselovsky, in one of the sections of the monograph “Historical Poetics,” presented a holistic description of the problem of literary plots from the point of view
from the point of view of comparative historical analysis.
At the beginning of the 20th century, V. B. Shklovsky, B. V. Tomashevsky and other representatives of the formal school of literary criticism made an attempt to change the proposed terminology and connected the plot of the work with its plot (from the Latin fibula - legend, myth, fable). They proposed that by plot we understand an artistically constructed distribution of events, and by plot - a set of events in their mutual internal connection21.
The sources of the plots are mythology, historical legend, literature of past times. Traditional subjects, i.e. ancient, were widely used by classicist playwrights.
Numerous works are based on events of a historical nature, or events that took place in a reality close to the writer, his own life.
Thus, the tragic history of the Don Cossacks and the drama of the military intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century, life prototypes and other phenomena of reality were the subject of the author’s attention in the works of M. A. Sholokhov “Quiet Don”, M. A. Bulgakov “ White Guard", V.V. Nabokov's "Mashenka", Yu. N. Tynyanova's "The Death of Wazir-Mukhtar". In literature, there are also common plots that arose strictly as a figment of the artist’s imagination. This material was used to create the story “The Nose” by N.V. Gogol, the novels by A.R. Belyaev “Amphibian Man”, V.
Obruchev “Sannikov’s Land” and others.
It happens that the series of events in a work disappear into subtext, giving way to the recreation of the hero’s impressions, thoughts, experiences, and descriptions of nature. These are, in particular, the stories of I. A. Bunin “Chang’s Dreams”, L. E. Ulitskaya “Pearl Soup”, I. I. Savin.
The plot has a range of meaningful functions. Firstly, it captures the picture of the world: the writer’s vision of existence, which has a deep meaning, gives hope - a harmonious world order. In historical poetics, this type of artist’s views is defined as classical; it is characteristic of the subjects of literature of past centuries (the works of G. Heine, W. Thackeray, A. Maurois, N. Karamzin, I. Goncharov, A.
Chekhov, etc.). And on the contrary, a writer can present the world as a hopeless, deadly existence, conducive to spiritual darkness. The second way of seeing the world - non-classical - underlies many literary plots of the XX-XXI centuries. Literary heritage F. Kafka, A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre, B. Poplavsky and others are marked by general pessimism and disharmony in the general state of the characters.
Secondly, the series of events in the works are designed to detect and recreate life’s contradictions - conflicts in the fate of the heroes, who, as a rule, are excited, tense, and experience deep dissatisfaction with something. By its nature, plot is involved in what is meant by the term “drama.”
Thirdly, plots organize a field for characters active search, allow them to fully reveal themselves to the thinking reader in their actions, and evoke a number of emotional and mental responses to what is happening. The plot form is well suited for a detailed recreation of the volitional principle in a person and is characteristic of the literature of the detective genre.
Theorists, professional researchers, editors of literary and artistic publications distinguish the following types of literary plots: concentric, chronicle, and also, according to V. E. Khalizev, those that are in cause-and-effect relationships - supra-genre.
Plots in which one event situation comes to the fore (and the work is built on one storyline) are called concentric. Single-line event series were widespread in the literature of antiquity and classicism. It should be noted that the small epic and dramatic genres, which are characterized by unity of action, are also based on the indicated plot.
In literature, chronicles are stories in which events are dispersed and unfold separately from each other. According to B.
E. Khaliseva, in these plots the events do not have cause-and-effect relationships with each other and are correlated with each other only in time, as is the case in Homer’s epic “Odyssey”, Cervantes’ novel “Don Quixote”, Byron’s poem “Don Juan”.
The same scientist identifies multilinear stories as a type of chronicle, i.e. unfolding parallel to each other, somewhat independent; only occasionally contiguous plot schemes, such as, for example, in the novels by L. N. Tolstoy “Anna Karenina”, W. Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”, I. A. Goncharov’s “Precipice”.
Particularly deeply rooted in the history of world literature are plots where events are concentrated among themselves in cause-and-effect relationships and reveal a full-fledged conflict: from the beginning of the action to its denouement. A good example is the tragedies of W. Shakespeare, the dramas of A. S. Griboyedov and A. N. Ostrovsky, the novels of I. S. Turgenev.
These types of literary plots are well described and thoroughly studied in literary studies. V. Ya. Propp in the monograph “Morphology of a Fairy Tale”, using the concept of “function of the characters,” revealed the significance of the character’s action for the further course of events22.
In one of the branches of the science of literature, narratology (from the Latin narration - storytelling), a three-part plot outline, described by V. Propp: the initial “lack” associated with the hero’s desire to possess something - the confrontation between the hero and the anti-hero - a happy ending, for example, “accession to the throne” - is considered as a super-genre (as a characteristic of the plot) and is associated with the concept meditation, finding measure and mean.
Researchers of the structuralist orientation A. Greimas, K. Bremont believe that narrative meditation is based on a special way of thinking associated with a change in view of the essence of human activity, marked by signs of freedom and independence, responsibility and irreversibility.
Thus, in the structure of the plot of the work, the series of events consist of signs of human activity, for whom the immutability of the world and the possibility of change are the key to existence. According to these researchers, narrative meditation consists of “humanizing the world,” giving it a personal and eventual dimension. Greimas believed that the world is justified by the existence of man, and man himself
included in the world.
In classical plots, where actions move from beginning to end, vicissitudes play a big role - sudden shifts in the destinies of the characters: all sorts of turns from happiness to unhappiness, from success to failure or vice versa, etc. Unexpected incidents with the characters give the work a deep philosophical meaning. As a rule, plots with abundant twists and turns embody a special idea of the power of various accidents over a person’s fate.
The twists and turns add an important element of entertainment to the work. Eventual intricacies, which arouse increased interest in reading among the contemplative reader, are characteristic of both entertainment literature and serious, “top” literature.
In the literature, along with the considered plots (concentric, chronicle, those where there is a beginning, conflict, denouement), the series of events that are focused on the state of the human world in its complexity, versatility and persistent conflict are especially highlighted. Moreover, the hero here desires not so much to achieve some goal, but to relate himself to the surrounding disharmonious reality as its integral link. He is often focused on the tasks of understanding the world and his place in it, and is in a constant search for agreement with himself. The philosophically important “self-discoveries” of the heroes of F. Dostoevsky, N. Leskov, S. Aksakov, I. Goethe, Dante neutralize the external event dynamics of the narrative, and the twists and turns here turn out to be unnecessary.
The stable-conflict state of the world was actively mastered by literature: the works of M. de Cervantes “Don Quixote”, J. Milton “Paradise Lost”, “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum”, A. Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”, A. Chekhov “The Lady with the Dog”, the plays of G. Ibsen and others are deeply controversial, consistently reveal “layers of life” and are “doomed” to remain without resolution.
Composition (from Latin composition - composition) - the combination of parts, or components, into a whole; structure of literary artistic form.
Depending on what level, i.e. layer, the artistic form in question, distinguish between aspects of the composition.
Since a literary work appears before the reader as a verbal text, perceived in time, having a linear extension, researchers, editors, and publishers have a need to talk about the problems of textual composition: the sequence of words, sentences, the beginning and end of the text, the strong position of the text, etc.
In a work, behind the verbal material there is an image. Words are signs denoting objects that are collectively structured into the subject level of a work. In the figurative world of art, the spatial principle of composition is inevitable, which manifests itself in the correlation of characters as characters. In the literature of classicism and sentimentalism, the subject level of composition was revealed through the antithesis of vice and virtue: the works of J. B. Moliere “The Bourgeois in the Nobility”, D. I. Fonvizin “The Minor”, A. S. Griboyedov “Woe from Wit”, F. Schiller “Cunning and Love” revealed the balance between negative characters and positive ones.
In subsequent literature, the antithesis of characters is softened by a universal human motive, and the heroes, for example, in F. M. Dostoevsky, acquire a new quality - duality, combining pride and humility. All this reveals the unity of design and creative concept of the novels.
Cohesion by contrast - the grouping of persons along the course of the plot - is the sphere of the works of L. N. Tolstoy. In his novel “War and Peace,” the poetics of contrast extends to the family nests of the Rostovs, Bolkonskys, Kuragins, to groups distinguished by social, professional, age and other characteristics.
Because the plot of a literary work orders the world artistic images in its temporal extent, then among professional researchers the question inevitably arises about the sequence of events in plots and techniques that ensure the unity of perception of the artistic canvas.
The classic scheme of a single-line plot: beginning, development of action, climax, denouement. A chronicle plot is composed and framed by chains of episodes, sometimes including concentric microplots that are not externally related to the main action - inserted short stories, parables, fairy tales and other literary processed material. This method of connecting parts of a work deepens the internal semantic connection between the inserted and main plots.
The technique of plot framing in the presence of a narrator reveals deep meaning transmitted history, as, for example, reflected in Leo Tolstoy’s work “After the Ball”, or emphasizes the different attitude to many actions of both the hero-narrator himself and his random companions, in particular, in Nikolai Leskov’s story “The Enchanted Wanderer”.
The technique of editing (from the gr. montage - assembly, selection) came to literature from cinema. As a literary term, its meaning comes down to the discontinuity (discreteness) of the image, the breakdown of the narrative into many small episodes, the fragmentation of which also hides the unity artistic design. A montage image of the surrounding world is characteristic of the prose of A. I. Solzhenitsyn.
In a work, various silences, secrets, omissions most often act as plot inversions, preparing recognition, discovery, organizing vicissitudes that move the action itself to an interesting denouement.
Thus, under the composition in in a broad sense words should be understood as a set of techniques used by the author to “arrange” his work, creating a general “pattern”, “routine” of its individual parts and transitions between them.
Literary scholars, among the main types of composition, along with the named oratorical, also note narrative, descriptive and explanatory.
Professional analysis, analysis, and editing of a literary text requires the philologist, editor and proofreader to maximize their involvement in the “corpus of the literary body” - textual, subject and plot, focusing on the problem of the integrity of the perception of a work of art.
The arrangement of characters as characters should be distinguished from the arrangement of their images and the arrangement in the text of the details that make up these images. For example, clutches by contrast can be emphasized
method of comparative characteristics, alternate description of behavior
heroes, characters in the same situation, divided into chapters, sub-chapters, etc.
Opposing groups of heroes are introduced by the creator of the work through different storylines and are described by him using the “voices” of other characters. The parallels are not immediately noticeable to the reader in the fabric of the narrative and are revealed to him only upon repeated and subsequent readings.
As you know, the narrative does not always follow the chronology of events. For editors and philologists who study the sequence of events in works with several storylines, there may be a problem with the alternation of episodes in which certain characters are occupied.
Problems of textual composition may also be associated with the introduction of the hero’s past or past events into the main action of the work; familiarizing the reader with the circumstances preceding the plot; subsequent fates of the characters.
Smart dispersal literary material, auxiliary techniques - prologue, exposition, backstory, epilogue - expands the spatio-temporal framework of the narrative without compromising the depiction of the main action of the work, in which narration is combined with description, and scenic episodes are intertwined with psychological analysis.
The multidirectionality of the subject and textual composition is revealed by those works in which the plot, the series of events, do not have a denouement, and the conflict remains completely unresolved. In this case, the editor, text critic, literary critic deals with open ending works, since the plot is a category of the subject level in literature, and not textual.
A text, including an epic one, has a beginning: title, subtitle, epigraph (in narratology they are called the horizon of expectation), table of contents, dedication, preface, first line, first paragraph, and end. The specified parts of the text are frame components, i.e. frame. Any text is limited.
In drama, the text of a work is divided into acts (actions), scenes (pictures), phenomena, stage directions, main and secondary.
In lyric poetry, the parts of the text include verse, stanza, and strophoid. Here the function of frame components is performed by anacrusis (constant, variable, zero) and a clause, enriched with rhyme and especially noticeable as a verse boundary in case of transfer.
However, successful understanding of the overall composition of a work of art consists in tracing the interaction not only of the plot, plot, subject level of the work and components of the literary text, but also of the “point of view”.
§ 10. Time and space
Fiction is specific in its exploration of space and time. Along with music, pantomime, dance, and stage direction, it belongs to the arts, the images of which have a temporal extension - they are strictly organized in the time of perception. The uniqueness of its subject is connected with this) as Lessing wrote: in the center verbal work - actions, i.e. processes occurring in time, because speech has a temporal extension. Detailed descriptions of motionless objects located in space, Lessing argued, turn out to be tedious for the reader and therefore unfavorable for verbal art: “... the comparison of bodies in space here collides with the sequence of speech in time.”
At the same time, the literature invariably includes spatial concepts. Unlike what is inherent in sculpture and painting, here they do not have direct sensory authenticity, material density and clarity, they remain indirect and are perceived associatively.
However, Lessing, who considered literature to be designed to master reality primarily in its temporal extent, was largely right. The temporal principles of verbal imagery are more concrete than the spatial ones: in the composition of monologues and dialogues, the depicted time and the time of perception more or less coincide, and the scenes of dramatic works (as well as related episodes in narrative genres) capture time with direct, immediate authenticity.
Literary works are permeated with temporal and spatial ideas that are infinitely diverse and deeply significant. Here there are images of biographical time (childhood, youth, maturity, old age), historical (characteristics of the change of eras and generations, major events in the life of society), cosmic (the idea of eternity and universal history), calendar (change of seasons, everyday life and holidays) , daily (day and night, morning and evening), as well as ideas about movement and stillness, about the correlation of the past, present, future. According to D.S. Likhachev, from era to era, as ideas about the changeability of the world become wider and deeper, images of time acquire more and more significance in literature: writers realize more clearly and intensely, more and more fully capture the “diversity of forms of movement,” “taking possession of the world in its time dimensions."
The spatial pictures present in literature are no less diverse: images of closed and open space, earthly and cosmic, actually visible and imaginary, ideas about objectivity close and distant. Literary works have the ability to bring together, as if to merge together spaces of the most different kinds: “In Paris, from under the roof / Venus or Mars / They look at the poster / A new farce has been announced” (B.L. Pasternak. “In boundless spaces, continents are burning ...").
According to Yu.M. Lotman, “the language of spatial representations” in literary creativity “belongs to the primary and fundamental ones.” Turning to the works of N.V. Gogol, the scientist characterized the artistic significance of spatial boundaries, directed space, everyday and fantastic space, closed and open. Lotman argued that the basis of the imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy is the idea of up and down as the universal principles of the world order, against the background of which the movement of the main character takes place; that in the novel M.A. Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”, where the motif of the house is so important, “spatial language” is used to express “non-spatial concepts.
Temporal and spatial ideas captured in literature constitute a certain unity, which, following M.M. Bakhtin is usually called chronotope(from etc. - gr. chronos - time and topos - place, space). “The chronotope,” the scientist argued, “determines the artistic unity of a literary work in its relation to reality<…>Temporal-spatial definitions in art and literature<…>always emotionally and value-laden." Bakhtin considers idyllic, mystery, carnival chronotopes, as well as chronotopes of the road (path), threshold (sphere of crises and turning points), castle, living room, salon, provincial town (with its monotonous life). The scientist talks about chronotopic values, the plot-forming role of the chronotope and calls it a formal-substantive category. He emphasizes that artistic-semantic (actually meaningful) moments do not lend themselves to spatio-temporal definitions, but at the same time, “any entry into the sphere of meanings occurs only through the gates of chronotopes.” To what Bakhtin said, it is right to add that the chronotopic beginning of literary works is capable of giving them a philosophical character, “bringing” the verbal fabric to the image of being as a whole, to the picture of the world - even if the heroes and narrators are not inclined to philosophize.
Time and space are imprinted in literary works in two ways. Firstly, in the form of motifs and leitmotifs (mainly in lyrics), which often acquire a symbolic character and indicate a particular picture of the world. Secondly, they form the basis of the plots to which we will turn.
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From the book Russian literary diary XIX century. History and theory of the genre author Egorov Oleg GeorgievichChapter Two TIME AND SPACE IN THE DIARY 1. The role of the chronotope Unlike other genres, a diary entry begins with a date, and often with an indication of a place. And the genre name itself contains an indication of periodicity as the main feature of the diary.
From the book Spiritualized Earth. Book about Russian poetry author Probshtein Ian Emilievicha) local time - space A classic diary in most of its examples is a consistent series of daily entries that reflect current events in the life of the author, his relatives and acquaintances. The author strives to record in the diary the most
From the author's bookb) continuous time - space The fact that chronotope is an ideological and aesthetic category is most convincingly shown by those diaries in which time and space go beyond the framework of “here” and “now”. Their authors in daily entries strive to
From the author's bookV) psychological time– space Many authors chose the diary genre in order to mark the events of mental life. For them, everyday phenomena of reality were important to the extent that they were directly related to the facts of consciousness. IN
From the author's booka) historical time - space In addition to the three main forms of chronotope, the history of the diary genre has recorded several less productive varieties of time and space, which are reflected in the chronicles of the largest diarists. The appearance of such forms
From the author's bookFull of space and time: history, reality, time and space in the work of Mandelstam In the work of Osip Mandelstam, no less than in the poetry of Khlebnikov, although in a different way, one can feel the desire to go beyond the boundaries of time and space,