5 genres of literature. Genre in ancient literature. Lyrics as a type of literature

Instructions

Study the epic genre of literature. It includes the following: - story: a relatively small prose work (from 1 to 20 pages) describing an incident, a small incident or an acute dramatic situation in which the hero finds himself. The action of the story usually takes no more than one or two days in duration. The location of the action may not change throughout the story;
- story: a sufficient work (on average 100 pages), where from 1 to 10 characters are considered. The location may change. The validity period can cover a significant period, from one month to a year or more. The story in the story unfolds vividly in time and space. Significant changes may occur in the lives of the characters - moves, and meetings;
- novel: large epic form from 200 pages. A novel can trace the lives of the characters from beginning to end. Includes an extensive system of storylines. Time can touch past eras and carry far into the future;
- an epic novel can examine the life of several generations.

Familiarize yourself with the lyrical genre of literature. It includes the following genres:
- ode: a poetic form whose theme is the glorification of a person or event;
- satire: a poetic form that aims to ridicule any vice, situation or person worthy of ridicule
- sonnet: a poetic form that has a strict compositional structure. For example, the English model of a sonnet, which at its end has two obligatory stanzas containing some kind of aphorism;
- the following are also known poetic genres- elegy, epigram, free verse, haiku, etc.

TO dramatic kind Literature includes the following genres: - tragedy: a dramatic work in the finale of which there is the death of the hero. Such a ending for a tragedy is the only possible resolution of a dramatic situation;
-: a dramatic work in which the main meaning and essence is laughter. It may be satirical or kinder, but every incident makes the viewer/reader laugh;
- drama: a dramatic work in the center of which is the inner world of a person, the problem of choice, the search for truth. Drama is the most common genre nowadays.

Please note

In some cases, genres may be mixed. This is especially common in drama. You've probably heard such definitions of film genres as comedy melodrama, action comedy, satirical drama, etc. The same processes are possible in the literature.

Useful advice

Read the works of Aristotle “Poetics”, M.M. Bakhtin “Aesthetics and Theory of Literature” and other works devoted to the problem of genders and genres in literature.

In modern literature there are many different genres, each of which is unique and original. But if tragedy or comedy is quite easy to identify, then it is not always possible to give an exact definition of the genre of drama. So what is dramatic work and how not to confuse it with something else?

Unlike, the drama shows life experiences and various intricacies of fate. Of course, people's lives, their morals and characters can be quite vivid in comedic works, but drama is not so inherent in ridiculing vices and comically exposing any of the characters' actions. Here the hero’s life itself, his thoughts and feelings are at stake. Dramatic works are very realistic because they show a person exactly as he is without allegories, grotesqueries and embellishments. That is why drama is considered the most complex and, at the same time, one of the most interesting literature. Sometimes drama is very reminiscent of tragedy, because here sharp corners are exposed and light is shed on many unpleasant details of the lives of the heroes. Often the drama becomes so intense and heavy that it is almost impossible to distinguish it. But tragic works are no longer so popular now and never have a chance of a happy ending. But the drama can end well, despite all the intricacies of the plot and difficult fates heroes. In our language, the word “drama” itself has firmly become associated with a tragic plot or the life drama of characters, while historically the meaning of this word does not have such a meaning at all. Any dramatic the work, regardless of its content, shows real life ordinary people, their sorrows, joys, experiences and bright moments. It is not at all necessary that the reader will have fun during the plot, but the drama should not intimidate or make him cry. It is just a part of life, no more terrible or unsightly than reality. It is interesting that the very concept of drama, as in works of art, dates back to the 18th century. She was very much among the enlightened pundits, politicians and philosophers. Initially, dramatic works were strongly associated with tragedies, tragicomedies, farces and even costumed performances in masks. But centuries later, drama became part of artistic reproduction and received its own, separate from others. genres, place. Dramatic works amaze with their realism and genuine plot. There are few places where you can meet a destiny that is not fictional, but similar to your own, like two peas in a pod. In dramas, of course, there are also, but such dramas are also necessary, because they teach us goodness and faith in the best and brightest. Love drama because it is based on life.

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Sources:

• drama as a genre

To identify a person by laughter, it is not at all necessary to be a professional psychologist. The power of laughter, its intensity, and the actions that accompany it can all tell a lot about a person.

Instructions

Laughter from the heart speaks of a cheerful disposition and flexible character e. Laughter until you wheeze, until you cry, relieves any nervous tension.

People with a weak will have a quiet, soft laugh.

A quiet, short laugh is evidence of strength, great intelligence, and will. Such people are often excellent storytellers. They can easily handle heavy loads.

Silent laughter is a sign of secrecy, caution, prudence and cunning.

They usually have a jerky laugh nervous people with troubled character ohm

Rough laughter is a sign of authority, selfishness, and animal nature. Often these people laugh alone with themselves.

Laughter ending in a sigh indicates a tendency to hysteria, susceptibility to sudden mood swings, and weak will.

A person who laughs openly and loudly is confident in himself and knows how to enjoy life. True, sometimes these people show rudeness and sarcasm. They love to laugh at others.

If a person laughs quietly, tilting his head slightly, he is not too confident in himself. People with such laughter try to adapt to the situation and please others.

A person who squints his eyelids is balanced and confident. He is stubborn and persistent, always achieves his goal.

If your interlocutor wrinkles his nose while laughing, it means that he is prone to frequent changes of views. Such people are emotional, capricious, and act depending on their mood.

A person covering his mouth with his hand is shy and timid. He doesn't like being the center of attention. People with such a laugh are quite repressed and cannot open up to a stranger.

Laughter accompanied by touching the face character depicts its owner as a dreamer and visionary. Such a person is emotional, sometimes even excessively. He has difficulty navigating real world.

If a person often holds back his laughter, he is reliable and self-confident. Such people are balanced, do not waste time on trifles, and firmly move towards their goals.

Your interlocutor does not smile, but grins, his mouth tilted to the right. Be careful! Here is a rude, thick-skinned and unreliable person, prone to deception and cruelty.

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Until now, people who are far from literary criticism as a science believe that “novel” and “romantic” are close concepts, which means that novels are about love. Of course, this is far from true. The novel is an ancient, complex and controversial literary genre, which includes Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Palahniuk's Fight Club, and Apuleius's The Golden Ass. But these are, of course, very, very different novels.

But the emergence of the novel as a genre dates back to antiquity. For example, these are the works “Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass” by Apuleius, “Daphnis and Chloe” by Long, “Satyricon” by Petronius.

The novel received its rebirth in the Middle Ages, it is either a chivalric novel. These include, for example, about King Arthur, Tristan and Isolde, etc.

What can be called a novel

The novel is a very complex and controversial genre, the study of which is still difficult for literary scholars. According to researcher M.M. Bakhtin, this happens because all others, except the novel, have already been established, have their own specific canons and distinctive ones, while the novel is still a very mobile, constantly changing genre, which has been in its infancy for many hundreds of years.

Distinctive Features the novel can be distinguished only very roughly. As a rule, this is an epic work of large form, in the center of which is an individual person. Most often, this person is depicted at a turning point, a crisis moment in his life. Depending on literary movement, to which the novel belongs, a personality can develop (for example, the famous technique of “dialectics of the soul” by L.N. Tolstoy), find himself in non-standard situations and experience adventures (in an adventure or adventure novel), experience love vicissitudes (in love story).

The novel must be built on conflict - interpersonal, intrapersonal, social, etc.

A unified classification of types of novels does not exist to this day, but there are different types of them. For example, according to content, they most often distinguish:

Social,
- moral, descriptive
- cultural and historical,
- psychological,
- a novel of ideas,
- adventure.

IN lately More and more new types of novels are appearing, for example the novel-. Many of the novels combine features of both.

Some literary works, which are essentially novels, are classified by the authors as a story, and stories and stories are often written into novels.

Literary genres- groups of literary works united by a set of formal and substantive properties (in contrast to literary forms, the identification of which is based only on formal characteristics).

If at the folklore stage the genre was determined from an extra-literary (cult) situation, then in literature the genre receives a description of its essence from its own literary norms, codified by rhetoric. The entire nomenclature of ancient genres that had developed before this turn was then energetically rethought under its influence.

Since the time of Aristotle, who gave the first systematization of literary genres in his “Poetics,” the idea has become stronger that literary genres represent a natural, once and for all fixed system, and the author’s task is simply to achieve the most complete compliance of his work with the essential properties of the chosen genre. This understanding of the genre - as a ready-made structure presented to the author - led to the emergence of a whole series of normative poetics containing instructions for authors regarding exactly how an ode or tragedy should be written; The pinnacle of this type of writing is Boileau’s treatise “The Poetic Art” (1674). This does not mean, of course, that the system of genres as a whole and the characteristics of individual genres really remained unchanged for two thousand years - however, changes (and very significant ones) were either not noticed by theorists, or were interpreted by them as damage, a deviation from the necessary models. And only towards the end of the 18th century the decomposition of traditional genre system, associated, in accordance with general principles literary evolution, both with intraliterary processes and with the influence of completely new social and cultural circumstances, went so far that normative poetics could no longer describe and curb literary reality.

Under these conditions, some traditional genres began to rapidly die out or become marginalized, while others, on the contrary, moved from the literary periphery to the very center literary process. And if, for example, the rise of the ballad at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, associated in Russia with the name of Zhukovsky, turned out to be quite short-lived (although in Russian poetry it then gave an unexpected new surge in the first half of the 20th century - for example, in Bagritsky and Nikolai Tikhonov) , then the hegemony of the novel - a genre that normative poets for centuries did not want to notice as something low and insignificant - lasted in European literature for at least a century. Works of a hybrid or undefined genre nature began to develop especially actively: plays about which it is difficult to say whether they are a comedy or a tragedy, poems for which it is impossible to give any genre definition, except that it is a lyric poem. The decline of clear genre identifications was also manifested in deliberate authorial gestures aimed at destroying genre expectations: from Laurence Sterne’s novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” which ends mid-sentence, to N. V. Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” where the subtitle is paradoxical for a prose text the poem can hardly fully prepare the reader for the fact that he will now and then be knocked out of the fairly familiar rut of a picaresque novel by lyrical (and sometimes epic) digressions.

In the 20th century, literary genres were particularly strongly influenced by the separation of mass literature from literature focused on artistic exploration. Mass literature has once again felt an urgent need for clear genre prescriptions that significantly increase the predictability of the text for the reader, making it easy to navigate through it. Of course, the previous genres were not suitable for mass literature, and it quite quickly formed a new system, which was based on the genre of the novel, which was very flexible and had accumulated a lot of varied experience. At the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th, the detective and police novels, science fiction and the ladies' (“pink”) novel took shape. It is not surprising that contemporary literature, aimed at artistic search, sought to deviate as far as possible from the mass literature and therefore moved away from genre definition as far as possible. But since extremes converge, the desire to be further from genre predetermination sometimes led to new genre formation: for example, the French anti-novel did not want to be a novel so much that the main works of this literary movement, represented by such original authors as Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute, clearly have signs of a new genre. Thus, modern literary genres (and we already encounter such an assumption in the thoughts of M. M. Bakhtin) are not elements of any predetermined system: on the contrary, they arise as points of concentration of tension in one place or another of the literary space, in accordance with artistic tasks posed here and now by this circle of authors. Special study of such new genres remains a matter for tomorrow.

List of literary genres:

• By shape
  • Visions
  • Novella
  • Tale
  • Story
  • joke
  • novel
  • epic
  • play
  • sketch
• by content
  • comedy
    • farce
    • vaudeville
    • interlude
    • sketch
    • parody
    • sitcom
    • character comedy
  • tragedy
  • Drama
• By birth
  • Epic
    • Fable
    • Bylina
    • Ballad
    • Novella
    • Tale
    • Story
    • Novel
    • Epic novel
    • Fairy tale
    • Fantasy
    • Epic
  • Lyrical
    • Ode
    • Message
    • Stanzas
    • Elegy
    • Epigram
  • Lyric-epic
    • Ballad
    • Poem
  • Dramatic
    • Drama
    • Comedy
    • Tragedy

Poem- (Greek póiema), a large poetic work with a narrative or lyrical plot. A poem is also called an ancient and medieval epic (see also Epic), nameless and authored, which was composed either through the cyclization of lyric-epic songs and tales (the point of view of A. N. Veselovsky), or through the “swelling” (A. Heusler) of one or several folk legends, or with the help of complex modifications of ancient plots in the process of the historical existence of folklore (A. Lord, M. Parry). The poem developed from an epic depicting an event of national historical significance (“Iliad”, “Mahabharata”, “Song of Roland”, “Elder Edda”, etc.).

There are many genre varieties of the poem: heroic, didactic, satirical, burlesque, including heroic-comic, poem with a romantic plot, lyrical-dramatic. The leading branch of the genre has long been considered a poem on a national historical or world historical (religious) theme (“The Aeneid” by Virgil, “The Divine Comedy” by Dante, “The Lusiads” by L. di Camoens, “Jerusalem Liberated” by T. Tasso, “Paradise Lost” "J. Milton, "Henriad" by Voltaire, "Messiad" by F. G. Klopstock, "Rossiyad" by M. M. Kheraskov, etc.). At the same time, a very influential branch in the history of the genre was the poem with romantic plot features (“The Knight in the Leopard’s Skin” by Shota Rustaveli, “Shahname” by Ferdowsi, to a certain extent, “Furious Roland” by L. Ariosto), connected to one degree or another with the tradition of the medieval , predominantly a chivalric novel. Gradually, in the poems, personal, moral and philosophical issues come to the fore, the lyrical and dramatic elements are strengthened, the folklore tradition- features already characteristic of pre-romantic poems (“Faust” by J. W. Goethe, poems by J. Macpherson, W. Scott). The genre flourished in the era of romanticism, when the greatest poets of various countries turned to creating poems. The “peak” works in the evolution of the romantic poem genre acquire a socio-philosophical or symbolic-philosophical character (“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by J. Byron, “ Bronze Horseman"A. S. Pushkin, "Dzyady" by A. Mickiewicz, "Demon" by M. Yu. Lermontov, "Germany, winter's tale"G. Heine).

In the 2nd half of the 19th century. the decline of the genre is obvious, which does not exclude the appearance of individual outstanding works (“The Song of Hiawatha” by G. Longfellow). In the poems of N. A. Nekrasov (“Frost, Red Nose”, “Who Lives Well in Rus'”), genre tendencies characteristic of the development of the poem in realistic literature(synthesis of moral descriptive and heroic principles).

In a poem of the 20th century. the most intimate experiences are correlated with great historical upheavals, imbued with them as if from within (“Cloud in Pants” by V. V. Mayakovsky, “The Twelve (poem)” by A. A. Blok, “First Date” by A. Bely).

In Soviet poetry there are various genre varieties poems: reviving the heroic principle (“Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” and “Good!” by Mayakovsky, “Nine Hundred and Fifth” by B. L. Pasternak, “Vasily Terkin” by A. T. Tvardovsky); lyrical-psychological poems (“About this” by V.V. Mayakovsky, “Anna Snegina” by S.A. Yesenin), philosophical (N.A. Zabolotsky, E. Mezhelaitis), historical (“Tobolsk Chronicler” by L. Martynov) or combining moral and socio-historical issues (“Mid-Century” by V. Lugovsky).

The poem as a synthetic, lyric-epic and monumental genre that allows you to combine the epic of the heart and “music”, the “element” of world upheavals, innermost feelings and historical concept, remains a productive genre of world poetry: “Breaking the Wall” and “Into the Storm” by R. Frost, “ Landmarks" by Saint-John Perse, "The Hollow People" by T. Eliot, "The General Song" by P. Neruda, "Niobe" by K. I. Galczynski, "Continuous Poetry" by P. Eluard, "Zoe" by Nazim Hikmet.

Epic(Ancient Greek έπος - “word”, “narration”) - a set of works, mainly of an epic kind, united by a common theme, era, nationality, etc. For example, Homeric epic, medieval epic, animal epic.

The emergence of the epic is gradual in nature, but is conditioned by historical circumstances.

The birth of the epic is usually accompanied by the composition of panegyrics and laments, close to the heroic worldview. The great deeds immortalized in them often turn out to be the material that heroic poets base their narratives on. Panegyrics and laments are usually composed in the same style and meter as the heroic epic: in Russian and Turkic literature, both types have almost the same manner of expression and lexical composition. Lamentations and panegyrics are preserved as part of epic poems as decoration.

The epic claims not only objectivity, but also the truthfulness of its story, and its claims, as a rule, are accepted by listeners. In his Prologue to The Earthly Circle, Snorri Sturluson explained that among his sources were “ancient poems and songs that were sung for people’s amusement,” and added: “Although we ourselves do not know whether these stories are true, we know for sure that that the wise men of old believed them to be true.”

Novel- a literary genre, usually prose, which involves a detailed narrative about the life and development of the personality of the main character (heroes) during a crisis/non-standard period of his life.

The name “Roman” arose in the middle of the 12th century along with the genre of chivalric romance (Old French. romanz from late Latin dialect romanice"in the (vernacular) Romance language"), as opposed to historiography in Latin. Contrary to popular belief, from the very beginning this name did not refer to any work in the vernacular (heroic songs or troubadour lyrics were never called novels), but to one that could be contrasted with a Latin model, even if very distant: historiography, fable ( "The Romance of Renard"), vision ("The Romance of the Rose"). However, in XII-XIII centuries, if not later, words roman And estoire(the latter also means “image”, “illustration”) are interchangeable. In reverse translation into Latin, the novel was called (liber) romanticus, from where to European languages and the adjective “romantic” was born, which until the end of the 18th century meant “inherent in novels,” “the same as in novels,” and only later the meaning, on the one hand, was simplified to “love,” but on the other hand, it gave rise to the name of romanticism as a literary movement .

The name “novel” was preserved even when, in the 13th century, the performed poetic novel was replaced by prose novel for reading (with full preservation of the knightly topic and plot), and for all subsequent transformations of the knightly romance, right up to the works of Ariosto and Edmund Spenser, which we call poems, and contemporaries considered novels. It persists even later, in the 17th-18th centuries, when the “adventurous” novel is replaced by the “realistic” and “psychological” novel (which in itself problematizes the supposed gap in continuity).

However, in England the name of the genre is also changing: the “old” novels retain the name romance, and the name “new” novels from the middle of the 17th century was assigned novel(from Italian novella - “short story”). Dichotomy novel/romance means a lot for English-language criticism, but adds additional uncertainty to their actual historical relationships rather than clarifies them. Generally romance is considered rather a kind of structural-plot variety of the genre novel.

In Spain, on the contrary, all varieties of the novel are called novela, and what happened from the same romanice word romance from the very beginning belonged to the poetic genre, which was also destined long history, - to romance.

Bishop Yue at the end of the 17th century, in search of the predecessors of the novel, first applied this term to a number of phenomena of ancient narrative prose, which have since also come to be called novels.

Visions

Fabliau dou dieu d'Amour"(The Tale of the God of Love), " Venus la déesse d'amors

Visions- narrative and didactic genre.

The plot is told on behalf of the person to whom it was allegedly revealed in a dream, hallucination or lethargic sleep. The core for the most part consists of actual dreams or hallucinations, but already in ancient times fictional stories appear, clothed in the form of visions (Plato, Plutarch, Cicero). The genre received special development in the Middle Ages and reached its apogee in " Divine Comedy"Dante, representing in form the most detailed vision. The authoritative sanction and the strongest impetus for the development of the genre were given by the “Dialogues of Miracles” of Pope Gregory the Great (VI century), after which visions began to appear en masse in church literature in all European countries.

Until the 12th century, all visions (except the Scandinavian ones) were written in Latin, from the 12th century translations appeared, and from the 13th century, original visions in vernacular languages. The most complete form of visions is presented in the Latin poetry of the clergy: this genre, in its origins, is closely related to canonical and apocryphal religious literature and is close to church sermons.

The editors of the visions (they are always from among the clergy and they must be distinguished from the “clairvoyant” himself) took the opportunity on behalf of the “higher power” that sent the vision to promote their political views or attack personal enemies. Purely fictitious visions also appear - topical pamphlets (for example, the vision of Charlemagne, Charles III, etc.).

However, since the 10th century, the form and content of the visions have caused protest, often coming from the declassed layers of the clergy themselves (poor clergy and goliard scholars). This protest results in parodic visions. On the other hand, courtly knightly poetry in folk languages ​​takes over the form of visions: visions here acquire new content, becoming the frame of a love-didactic allegory, such as, for example, “ Fabliau dou dieu d'Amour"(The Tale of the God of Love), " Venus la déesse d'amors"(Venus is the goddess of love) and finally - the encyclopedia of courtly love - the famous "Roman de la Rose" (Romance of the Rose) by Guillaume de Lorris.

The “third estate” puts new content into the form of visions. Thus, the successor to the unfinished novel by Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, turns the exquisite allegory of his predecessor into a ponderous combination of didactics and satire, the edge of which is directed against the lack of “equality”, against the unfair privileges of the aristocracy and against the “robber” royal power). The same is true of Jean Molyneux’s “The Hopes of the Common People.” The sentiments of the “third estate” are no less clearly expressed in Langland’s famous “Vision of Peter the Plowman,” which played a propaganda role in the English peasant revolution of the 14th century. But unlike Jean de Meun, a representative of the urban part of the “third estate,” Langland, the ideologist of the peasantry, turns his gaze to the idealized past, dreaming of the destruction of capitalist usurers.

As a complete independent genre, visions are characteristic of medieval literature. But as a motif, the form of visions continues to exist in the literature of modern times, being especially favorable for the introduction of satire and didactics, on the one hand, and fantasy, on the other (for example, Byron’s “Darkness”).

Novella

The sources of the novella are primarily Latin example, as well as fabliaux, stories interspersed in the “Dialogue about Pope Gregory”, apologists from the “Lives of the Church Fathers”, fables, folk tales. In the 13th century Occitan language, the word appeared to denote a story created on some newly processed traditional material nova.Hence - Italian novella(in the most popular collection of the late 13th century, Novellino, also known as One Hundred Ancient Novels), which, starting in the 15th century, spread throughout Europe.

The genre became established after the book appeared. Giovanni Boccaccio“The Decameron” (c. 1353), the plot of which was that several people, fleeing the plague outside the city, tell each other short stories. Boccaccio in his book created the classic type of Italian short story, which was developed by his many followers in Italy itself and in other countries. In France, under the influence of the translation of the Decameron, a collection of One Hundred New Novels appeared around 1462 (however, the material owed more to the facets of Poggio Bracciolini), and Margarita Navarskaya, based on the Decameron, wrote the book Heptameron (1559).

In the era of romanticism, under the influence of Hoffmann, Novalis, Edgar Allan Poe, short stories with elements of mysticism, fantasy, and fabulousness spread. Later, in the works of Prosper Mérimée and Guy de Maupassant, this term began to be used to refer to realistic stories.

For American literature, starting with Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe, novella, or short story (eng. short story), has special significance as one of the most characteristic genres.

In the second half of the 19th-20th centuries, the traditions of the short story were continued by such different writers as Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gilbert Chesterton, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Karel Capek, Jorge Luis Borges.

The novella is characterized by several important features: extreme brevity, a sharp, even paradoxical plot, a neutral style of presentation, lack of psychologism and descriptiveness, and an unexpected denouement. The novella takes place in modern author world. The plot structure of a novella is similar to a dramatic one, but usually simpler.

Goethe spoke about the action-packed nature of the novella, giving it the following definition: “an unheard-of event that has happened.”

The short story emphasizes the significance of the denouement, which contains an unexpected turn (pointe, “falcon turn”). According to the French researcher, “ultimately, one can even say that the entire novel is conceived as a denouement.” Viktor Shklovsky wrote that the description of a happy mutual love does not create a novella; a novella requires love with obstacles: “A loves B, B does not love A; when B fell in love with A, then A no longer loves B.” He identified a special type of ending, which he called a “false ending”: usually it is made from a description of nature or weather.

Among Boccaccio's predecessors, the novella had a moralizing attitude. Boccaccio retained this motif, but for him the morality flowed from the story not logically, but psychologically, and was often only a pretext and device. The later novella convinces the reader of the relativity of moral criteria.

Tale

Story

Joke(fr. anecdote- fable, fable; from Greek τὸ ἀνέκδοτоν - unpublished, lit. “not issued”) - genre of folklore - short funny story. Most often, a joke has an unexpected semantic resolution at the very end, which gives rise to laughter. This could be a play on words, different meanings of words, modern associations that require additional knowledge: social, literary, historical, geographical, etc. Anecdotes cover almost all areas of human activity. There are jokes about family life, politics, sex, etc. In most cases, the authors of the jokes are unknown.

In Russia XVIII-XIX centuries. (and in most languages ​​of the world to this day) the word “anecdote” had a slightly different meaning - it could simply be entertaining story about some famous person, not necessarily with the goal of ridiculing him (cf. Pushkin: “Anecdotes of days gone by”). Such “anecdotes” about Potemkin became classics of that time.

Ode

Epic

Play(French pièce) - a dramatic work, usually classic style, created for staging any action in the theater. This is a general specific name for works of drama intended for performance on stage.

The structure of the play includes the text of the characters (dialogues and monologues) and functional author's remarks (notes containing the designation of the location of the action, interior features, appearance of the characters, their manner of behavior, etc.). As a rule, the play is preceded by a list of characters, sometimes indicating their age, profession, titles, family ties, etc.

A separate complete semantic part of a play is called an act or action, which may include smaller components - phenomena, episodes, pictures.

The very concept of a play is purely formal; it does not include any emotional or stylistic meaning. Therefore, in most cases, the play is accompanied by a subtitle that defines its genre - classic, main (comedy, tragedy, drama), or author's (for example: My poor Marat, dialogues in three parts - A. Arbuzov; We'll wait and see, a pleasant play in four acts - B.Shaw; kind man from Szechwan, parabola play - B. Brecht, etc.). The genre designation of the play does not simply serve as a “hint” to the director and actors when stage interpretation plays, but helps to enter into the author's style, the figurative structure of drama.

Essay(from fr. essai“attempt, trial, sketch”, from Lat. exagium“weighing”) is a literary genre of prose composition of small volume and free composition. The essay expresses the author’s individual impressions and considerations on a specific occasion or subject and does not pretend to be an exhaustive or definitive interpretation of the topic (in the parodic Russian tradition of “a look and something”). In terms of volume and function, it borders, on the one hand, with scientific article and a literary essay (with which an essay is often confused), on the other, with a philosophical treatise. The essayistic style is characterized by imagery, fluidity of associations, aphoristic, often antithetical thinking, an emphasis on intimate frankness and conversational intonation. Some theorists consider it as the fourth, along with epic, lyric and drama, type of fiction.

Michel Montaigne introduced it as a special genre form, based on the experience of his predecessors, in his “Essays” (1580). Francis Bacon published his works in book form in 1597, 1612 and 1625 for the first time English literature gave the name to English. essays. The English poet and playwright Ben Jonson first used the word essayist. essayist) in 1609.

In the 18th-19th centuries, the essay was one of the leading genres of English and French journalism. The development of essayism was promoted in England by J. Addison, Richard Steele, and Henry Fielding, in France by Diderot and Voltaire, and in Germany by Lessing and Herder. The essay was the main form of philosophical and aesthetic polemic among the romantics and romantic philosophers (G. Heine, R. W. Emerson, G. D. Thoreau)..

The essay genre is deeply rooted in English literature: T. Carlyle, W. Hazlitt, M. Arnold (19th century); M. Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton (XX century). In the 20th century, essayism experienced its heyday: major philosophers, prose writers, and poets turned to the essay genre (R. Rolland, B. Shaw, G. Wells, J. Orwell, T. Mann, A. Maurois, J. P. Sartre).

In Lithuanian criticism, the term essay (lit. esė) was first used by Balis Sruoga in 1923. Characteristic features of essays are noted in the books “Smiles of God” (lit. “Dievo šypsenos”, 1929) by Juozapas Albinas Gerbachiauskas and “Gods and Smutkyalis” (lit. “Dievai”) ir smūtkeliai", 1935) by Jonas Kossu-Alexandravičius. Examples of essays include “poetic anti-commentaries” “Lyrical Etudes” (lit. “Lyriniai etiudai”, 1964) and “Antakalnios Baroque” (lit. “Antakalnio barokas”, 1971) by Eduardas Meželaitis, “Diary without dates” (lit. “Dienoraštis be datų", 1981) by Justinas Marcinkevičius, "Poetry and the Word" (lit. "Poezija ir žodis", 1977) and Papyri from the graves of the dead (lit. "Papirusai iš mirusiųjų kapų", 1991) by Marcelius Martinaitis. An anti-conformist moral position, conceptuality, precision and polemic characterizes the essay by Tomas Venclova

The essay genre was not typical for Russian literature. Examples of the essayistic style are found in A. S. Pushkin (“Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg”), A. I. Herzen (“From the Other Shore”), F. M. Dostoevsky (“A Writer’s Diary”). At the beginning of the 20th century, V. I. Ivanov, D. S. Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, Lev Shestov, V. V. Rozanov turned to the essay genre, and later - Ilya Erenburg, Yuri Olesha, Viktor Shklovsky, Konstantin Paustovsky. Literary critical assessments of modern critics, as a rule, are embodied in a variation of the essay genre.

IN musical art The term piece is usually used as a specific name for works of instrumental music.

Sketch(English) sketch, literally - sketch, draft, sketch), in the 19th - early 20th centuries. a short play with two, rarely three characters. The sketch became most widespread on the stage.

In the UK, television sketch shows are very popular. Similar programs have recently begun to appear on Russian television (“Our Russia”, “Six Frames”, “Give Youth!”, “Dear Program”, “Gentleman Show”, “Town”, etc.) A striking example The sketch show is the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

A famous sketch creator was A.P. Chekhov.

Comedy(Greek κωliμωδία, from Greek κῶμος, kỗmos, “festival in honor of Dionysus” and Greek. ἀοιδή/Greek. ᾠδή, aoidḗ / ōidḗ, “song”) is a genre of fiction characterized by a humorous or satirical approach, as well as a type of drama in which the moment of effective conflict or struggle between antagonistic characters is specifically resolved.

Aristotle defined comedy as "imitation the worst people, but not in all their depravity, but in a funny way” (“Poetics”, Chapter V).

Types of comedy include genres such as farce, vaudeville, sideshow, sketch, operetta, and parody. Nowadays, examples of such primitiveness are many comedy films, built solely on external comedy, the comedy of situations in which the characters find themselves in the process of developing the action.

Distinguish sitcom And comedy of characters.

Sitcom (situation comedy, situational comedy) is a comedy in which the source of humor is events and circumstances.

Comedy of characters (comedy of manners) - a comedy in which the source of the funny is inner essence characters (morals), funny and ugly one-sidedness, exaggerated trait or passion (vice, flaw). Very often, a comedy of manners is a satirical comedy that makes fun of all these human qualities.

Tragedy(Greek τραγωδία, tragōdía, literally - goat song, from trаgos - goat and öde - song), dramatic genre, based on the development of events, which, as a rule, is inevitable and necessarily leads to a catastrophic outcome for the characters, often filled with pathos; a type of drama that is the opposite of comedy.

The tragedy is marked by stern seriousness, depicts reality in the most pointed way, as a clot of internal contradictions, reveals the deepest conflicts of reality in an extremely intense and rich form that takes on meaning artistic symbol; It is no coincidence that most tragedies are written in verse.

Drama(Greek Δρα´μα) - one of the types of literature (along with lyric poetry, epic, and lyric epic). It differs from other types of literature in the way it conveys the plot - not through narration or monologue, but through character dialogues. Drama in one way or another refers to any literary work constructed in a dialogical form, including comedy, tragedy, drama (as a genre), farce, vaudeville, etc.

Since ancient times, it has existed in folklore or literary form among various peoples; The ancient Greeks, ancient Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and American Indians created their own dramatic traditions independently of each other.

In Greek, the word drama depicts a sad, unpleasant event or situation of one specific person.

Fable- a poetic or prose literary work of a moralizing, satirical nature. At the end of the fable there is a short moralizing conclusion - the so-called morality. The characters are usually animals, plants, things. The fable ridicules the vices of people.

Fable is one of the oldest literary genres. IN Ancient Greece Aesop was famous (VI-V centuries BC), who wrote fables in prose. In Rome - Phaedrus (1st century AD). In India, the collection of fables “Panchatantra” dates back to the 3rd century. The most prominent fabulist of modern times was the French poet J. Lafontaine (17th century).

In Russia, the development of the fable genre dates back to the mid-18th - early 19th centuries and is associated with the names of A.P. Sumarokov, I.I. Khemnitser, A.E. Izmailov, I.I. Dmitriev, although the first experiments in poetic fables were back in the 17th century with Simeon of Polotsk and in the 1st half. XVIII century by A.D. Kantemir, V.K. Trediakovsky. In Russian poetry, fable free verse is developed, conveying the intonations of a relaxed and crafty tale.

Fables by I. A. Krylov with their realistic liveliness, sensible humor and excellent language marked the heyday of this genre in Russia. IN Soviet era The fables of Demyan Bedny, S. Mikhalkov and others gained popularity.

There are two concepts of the origin of the fable. The first is represented by the German school of Otto Crusius, A. Hausrath and others, the second by the American scientist B. E. Perry. According to the first concept, in a fable the narrative is primary, and the moral is secondary; The fable comes from an animal tale, and the animal tale comes from a myth. According to the second concept, morality is primary in the fable; the fable is close to comparisons, proverbs and sayings; like them, the fable arises as an auxiliary means of argumentation. The first point of view goes back to the romantic theory of Jacob Grimm, the second revives the rationalistic concept of Lessing.

Philologists of the 19th century were long occupied with the debate about the priority of Greek or Indian fable. It can now be considered almost certain that the common source of the material of the Greek and Indian fables was the Sumerian-Babylonian fable.

Epics- Russian folk epic songs about the exploits of heroes. The basis of the plot of the epic is some heroic event, or a remarkable episode of Russian history (hence popular name epics - " old man", "old lady", implying that the action in question took place in the past).

Epics are usually written in tonic verse with two to four stresses.

The term “epics” was first introduced by Ivan Sakharov in the collection “Songs of the Russian People” in 1839; he proposed it based on the expression “according to epics” in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” which meant “according to the facts.”

Ballad

Myth(ancient Greek μῦθος) in literature - a legend that conveys people’s ideas about the world, man’s place in it, the origin of all things, about gods and heroes; a certain idea of ​​the world.

The specificity of myths appears most clearly in primitive culture, where myths are the equivalent of science, an integral system in terms of which the whole world is perceived and described. Later, when such forms of social consciousness as art, literature, science, religion, political ideology, etc. are isolated from mythology, they retain a number of mythological models, which are peculiarly rethought when included in new structures; the myth is experiencing its second life. Of particular interest is their transformation in literary creativity.

Since mythology masters reality in the forms of figurative storytelling, it is close in essence to fiction; historically, it anticipated many of the possibilities of literature and had a comprehensive influence on its early development. Naturally, literature does not part with mythological foundations even later, which applies not only to works with mythological basis of the plot, but also to realistic and naturalistic everyday life writing of the 19th and 20th centuries (it is enough to name “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens, “Nana” by E. Zola, “The Magic Mountain” by T. Mann).

Novella(Italian novella - news) is a narrative prose genre characterized by brevity, a sharp plot, a neutral style of presentation, lack of psychologism, and an unexpected ending. Sometimes used as a synonym for story, sometimes called a type of story.

Tale- a prose genre of unstable volume (mostly intermediate between a novel and a story), gravitating towards a chronicle plot that reproduces the natural course of life. The plot, devoid of intrigue, is centered around the main character, whose identity and fate are revealed within a few events.

The story is an epic prose genre. The plot of the story tends more towards epic and chronicle plot and composition. Possible verse form. The story depicts a series of events. It is amorphous, events are often simply added to each other, and extra-plot elements play a large independent role. Does not have a complex, intense and complete plot point.

Story- a small form of epic prose, correlated with the story as a more developed form of storytelling. Goes back to folklore genres(fairy tale, parable); how the genre became isolated in written literature; often indistinguishable from a short story, and since the 18th century. - and an essay. Sometimes a short story and an essay are considered as polar varieties of a story.

A story is a work of small volume, containing a small number of characters, and also, most often, having one storyline.

Fairy tale: 1) a type of narrative, mostly prosaic folklore ( fairy tale prose), which includes works of different genres, the content of which, from the point of view of folklore bearers, lacks strict authenticity. Fairy-tale folklore is opposed to the “strictly reliable” folklore narrative ( non-fairy prose) (see myth, epic, historical song, spiritual poems, legend, demonological stories, tale, blasphemy, legend, epic).

2) genre of literary storytelling. A literary fairy tale either imitates a folklore one ( literary fairy tale written in folk poetic style), or creates a didactic work (see didactic literature) based on non-folklore stories. Folklore tale historically precedes literary.

Word " fairy tale"attested in written sources no earlier than the 16th century. From the word " say" What mattered was: a list, a list, an exact description. Modern meaning acquired from the 17th-19th centuries. Previously, the word fable was used, until the 11th century - blasphemy.

The word “fairy tale” suggests that they will learn about it, “what it is” and find out “what” it, a fairy tale, is needed for. The purpose of a fairy tale is to subconsciously or consciously teach a child in the family the rules and purpose of life, the need to protect one’s “area” and a worthy attitude towards other communities. It is noteworthy that both the saga and the fairy tale carry a colossal information component, passed on from generation to generation, the belief in which is based on respect for one’s ancestors.

There are different types fairy tales

Fantasy(from English fantasy- “fantasy”) is a type of fantastic literature based on the use of mythological and fairy-tale motifs. IN modern form formed at the beginning of the 20th century.

Fantasy works most often resemble a historical adventure novel, the action of which takes place in a fictional world close to the real Middle Ages, the heroes of which encounter supernatural phenomena and creatures. Fantasy is often built on archetypal plots.

Unlike science fiction, fantasy does not seek to explain the world in which the work takes place from a scientific point of view. This world itself exists in the form of a certain assumption (most often its location relative to our reality is not specified at all: is it parallel world, or another planet), and its physical laws may differ from the realities of our world. In such a world, the existence of gods, witchcraft, mythical creatures (dragons, gnomes, trolls), ghosts and any other fantastic entities may be real. At the same time, the fundamental difference between the “miracles” of fantasy and their fairy-tale counterparts is that they are the norm of the described world and act systematically, like the laws of nature.

Nowadays, fantasy is also a genre in cinema, painting, computer and board games. Such genre versatility especially distinguishes Chinese fantasy with elements of martial arts.

Epic(from epic and Greek poieo - I create)

1. An extensive narrative in verse or prose about outstanding national historical events(“Iliad”, “Mahabharata”). The roots of the epic are in mythology and folklore. In the 19th century an epic novel arises (“War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy)
2. A complex, long history of something, including a number of major events.

Ode- a poetic, as well as musical and poetic work, distinguished by solemnity and sublimity.

Initially in Ancient Greece, any form of poetic lyric intended to accompany music was called an ode, including choral singing. Since the time of Pindar, an ode has been a choral song-epinic in honor of the winner in the sports competitions of sacred games with a three-part composition and emphasized solemnity and grandiloquence.

In Roman literature, the most famous are the odes of Horace, who used the dimensions of Aeolian lyric poetry, primarily the Alcaean stanza, adapting them to the Latin language; a collection of these works in Latin is called Carmina - songs; they were later called odes.

Since the Renaissance and in the Baroque era (XVI-XVII centuries), odes began to be called lyrical works in a pathetically high style, focusing on ancient examples; in classicism, ode became the canonical genre of high lyricism.

Elegy(Greek ελεγεια) - genre of lyric poetry; in early ancient poetry - a poem written in elegiac distich, regardless of content; later (Callimachus, Ovid) - a poem of sad content. In modern European poetry, elegy retains stable features: intimacy, motives of disappointment, unhappy love, loneliness, the frailty of earthly existence, determines rhetoric in the depiction of emotions; the classic genre of sentimentalism and romanticism (“Confession” by E. Baratynsky).

A poem with the character of thoughtful sadness. In this sense, we can say that most of Russian poetry is in an elegiac mood, at least up to the poetry of modern times. This, of course, does not deny that in Russian poetry there are excellent poems of a different, non-elegiac mood. Initially, in ancient Greek poetry, E. denoted a poem written in a stanza of a certain size, namely a couplet - hexameter-pentameter. Having general character lyrical reflection, E. among the ancient Greeks was very diverse in content, for example, sad and accusatory in Archilochus and Simonides, philosophical in Solon or Theognis, warlike in Callinus and Tyrtaeus, political in Mimnermus. One of the best Greek authors E. is Callimachus. Among the Romans, E. became more defined in character, but also freer in form. The importance of love letters has greatly increased. Famous Roman authors of love stories include Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Catullus (they were translated by Fet, Batyushkov, etc.). Subsequently there was, perhaps, only one period in development European literature, when the word E. began to mean poems with a more or less stable form. And it began under the influence of the famous elegy of the English poet Thomas Gray, written in 1750 and causing numerous imitations and translations in almost all European languages. The revolution brought about by this era is defined as the onset of a period of sentimentalism in literature, which replaced false classicism. In essence, this was the decline of poetry from rational mastery in once established forms to the true sources of internal artistic experiences. In Russian poetry, Zhukovsky's translation of Gray's elegy (" Rural cemetery"; 1802) definitely marked the beginning of a new era, one that finally moved beyond rhetoric and turned to sincerity, intimacy and depth. This internal change was also reflected in the new methods of versification introduced by Zhukovsky, who is thus the founder of new Russian sentimental poetry and one of its great representatives. In the general spirit and form of Gray's elegy, i.e. in the form of large poems filled with mournful reflection, such poems by Zhukovsky were written, which he himself called elegies, such as “Evening”, “Slavyanka”, “On the death of Cor. Wirtembergskaya". His “Theon and Aeschylus” is also considered an elegy (more precisely, it is an elegy-ballad). Zhukovsky called his poem “The Sea” an elegy. In the first half of the 19th century. It was common to give your poems the title of elegies; Batyushkov, Boratynsky, Yazykov and others especially often called their works elegies; subsequently, however, it went out of fashion. Nevertheless, many poems by Russian poets are imbued with an elegiac tone. And in world poetry there is hardly an author who does not have elegiac poems. Goethe's Roman Elegies are famous in German poetry. Elegies are Schiller’s poems: “Ideals” (in Zhukovsky’s translation of “Dreams”), “Resignation”, “Walk”. Much of the elegies belong to Matisson (Batyushkov translated it “On the ruins of castles in Sweden”), Heine, Lenau, Herwegh, Platen, Freiligrath, Schlegel and many others. etc. The French wrote elegies: Millvois, Debord-Valmore, Kaz. Delavigne, A. Chenier (M. Chenier, the brother of the previous one, translated Gray's elegy), Lamartine, A. Musset, Hugo, etc. In English poetry, besides Gray, there are Spencer, Jung, Sidney, and later Shelley and Byron. In Italy, the main representatives of elegiac poetry are Alamanni, Castaldi, Filicana, Guarini, Pindemonte. In Spain: Boscan Almogaver, Gars de le Vega. In Portugal - Camoes, Ferreira, Rodrigue Lobo, de Miranda.

Attempts to write elegies in Russia before Zhukovsky were made by such authors as Pavel Fonvizin, the author of “Darling” Bogdanovich, Ablesimov, Naryshkin, Nartov and others.

Epigram(Greek επίγραμμα “inscription”) - a small satirical poem ridiculing a person or social phenomenon.

Ballad- a lyric epic work, that is, a story told in poetic form, of a historical, mythical or heroic nature. The plot of a ballad is usually borrowed from folklore. Ballads are often set to music.

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One of the founders of Russian literary criticism was V.G. Belinsky. And although serious steps were taken in developing the concept back in antiquity literary kind(Aristotle), it was Belinsky who owned the scientifically based theory of three literary families, which you can get acquainted with in detail by reading Belinsky’s article “The Division of Poetry into Genus and Species.”

There are three types of fiction: epic(from Greek Epos, narrative), lyrical(it was called a lyre musical instrument, accompanied by chanting poems) and dramatic(from Greek Drama, action).

When presenting this or that subject to the reader (meaning the subject of conversation), the author chooses different approaches to it:

First approach: in detail tell about the object, about the events associated with it, about the circumstances of the existence of this object, etc.; in this case, the author’s position will be more or less detached, the author will act as a kind of chronicler, narrator, or choose one of the characters as the narrator; the main thing in such a work will be the story, the narration about the subject, the leading type of speech will be precisely narration; this kind of literature is called epic;

The second approach: you can tell not so much about the events, but about the impressed, which they produced on the author, about those feelings which they called; image inner world, experiences, impressions and will relate to the lyrical genre of literature; exactly experience becomes the main event of the lyrics;

Third approach: you can portray item in action, show him on stage; introduce to the reader and viewer of it surrounded by other phenomena; this kind of literature is dramatic; In a drama, the author's voice will be heard least often - in stage directions, that is, the author's explanations of the actions and remarks of the characters.

Look at the table and try to remember its contents:

Types of fiction

EPOS	DRAMA	LYRICS
(Greek - narrative) story about events, the fate of the heroes, their actions and adventures, a depiction of the external side of what is happening (even feelings are shown from their external manifestation). The author can directly express his attitude to what is happening.	(Greek - action) image events and relationships between characters on stage(a special way of writing text). The direct expression of the author's point of view in the text is contained in the stage directions.	(from the name of the musical instrument) experience events; depiction of feelings, inner world, emotional state; the feeling becomes the main event.

Each type of literature in turn includes a number of genres.

GENRE is a historically established group of works united by common features of content and form. Such groups include novels, stories, poems, elegies, short stories, feuilletons, comedies, etc. In literary studies, the concept of literary type is often introduced; this is a broader concept than genre. In this case, the novel will be considered a type of fiction, and genres will be various types of novels, for example, adventure, detective, psychological, parable novel, dystopian novel, etc.

Examples of genus-species relationships in the literature:

• Genus: dramatic; view: comedy; genre: sitcom.
• Genus: epic; view: story; genre: fantastic story etc.

Genres being categories historical, appear, develop and eventually “leave” from the “active stock” of artists depending on historical era: ancient lyricists did not know the sonnet; in our time, the ode, born in antiquity and popular in the 17th-18th centuries, has become an archaic genre; Romanticism of the 19th century gave rise to detective literature, etc.

Consider the following table, which presents the types and genres related to the various types of word art:

Genera, types and genres of artistic literature

EPOS		DRAMA		LYRICS
People's	Author's	Folk	Author's	Folk	Author's
Myth Poem (epic): Heroic Strogovoinskaya Fabulous- legendary Historical... Fairy tale Bylina Thought Legend Tradition Ballad Parable Small genres: proverbs sayings riddles nursery rhymes...	EpicNovel: Historical Fantastic. Adventurous Psychological R.-parable Utopian Social... Small genres: Tale Story Novella Fable Parable Ballad Lit. fairy tale...	Game Ritual Folk drama Raek Nativity scene...	Tragedy Comedy: provisions, characters, masks... Drama: philosophical social historical social-philosophical Vaudeville Farce Tragifarce...	Song	Ode Hymn Elegy Sonnet Message Madrigal Romance Rondo Epigram...

Modern literary criticism also highlights fourth, a related genre of literature that combines the features of the epic and lyrical genres: lyric-epic, which refers to poem. And indeed, by telling the reader a story, the poem manifests itself as an epic; Revealing to the reader the depth of feelings, the inner world of the person telling this story, the poem manifests itself as lyricism.

In the table you came across the expression “small genres”. Epic and lyrical works are divided into large and small genres in to a greater extent by volume. Large ones include an epic, a novel, a poem, and small ones include a story, story, fable, song, sonnet, etc.

Read V. Belinsky’s statement about the genre of the story:

If a story, according to Belinsky, is “a leaf from the book of life,” then, using his metaphor, one can figuratively define a novel from a genre point of view as “a chapter from the book of life,” and a story as “a line from the book of life.”

Small epic genres to which the story relates is "intense" in terms of content prose: the writer, due to the small volume, does not have the opportunity to “spread his thoughts along the tree”, get carried away detailed descriptions, enumerations, reproduce a large number of events in detail, but the reader often needs to tell a lot.

The story is characterized by the following features:

• small volume;
• The plot is most often based on one event, the rest are only plotted by the author;
• a small number of characters: usually one or two central characters;
• the author is interested in a specific topic;
• one main issue is being resolved, the remaining issues are “derived” from the main one.

So,
STORY is a short prose work with one or two main characters, dedicated to depicting a single event. Somewhat more voluminous story, but the difference between a story and a story is not always possible to catch: some people call A. Chekhov’s work “Duel” a short story, and some - a big story. The following is important: as the critic E. Anichkov wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, " it is the person’s personality that is at the center of the stories, not a whole group of people."

The heyday of Russian short prose begins in the 20s of the 19th century, which gave excellent examples of short epic prose, including the absolute masterpieces of Pushkin (“Belkin’s Tales”, “ Queen of Spades") and Gogol ("Evenings on a farm near Dikanka", St. Petersburg stories), romantic short stories by A. Pogorelsky, A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, V. Odoevsky and others. In the second half of the 19th century, small epic works F. Dostoevsky ("The Dream of a Funny Man", "Notes from Underground"), N. Leskova ("Lefty", "The Stupid Artist", "Lady Macbeth" Mtsensk district"), I. Turgenev ("Hamlet of Shchigrovsky District", "King of the Steppes Lear", "Ghosts", "Notes of a Hunter"), L. Tolstoy (" Caucasian prisoner", "Hadji Murat", "Cossacks", Sevastopol stories), A. Chekhov as the greatest master of the short story, works by V. Garshin, D. Grigorovich, G. Uspensky and many others.

The twentieth century also did not remain in debt - and stories by I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, M. Zoshchenko, Teffi, A. Averchenko, M. Bulgakov appear... Even such recognized lyricists as A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, M. Tsvetaeva “they stooped to despicable prose,” in the words of Pushkin. It can be argued that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the small epic genre took over leading position in Russian literature.

And for this reason alone, one should not think that the story raises some minor problems and touches on shallow topics. Form story concise, and the plot is sometimes uncomplicated and concerns, at first glance, simple, as L. Tolstoy said, “natural” relationships: there is simply nowhere for the complex chain of events in the story to unfold. But this is precisely the task of the writer, to enclose a serious and often inexhaustible subject of conversation in a small space of text.

If the plot of the miniature I. Bunin "Muravsky Way", consisting of only 64 words, captures only a few moments of the conversation between the traveler and the coachman in the middle of the endless steppe, then the plot of the story A. Chekhov "Ionych" enough for a whole novel: artistic time The story spans almost a decade and a half. But it doesn’t matter to the author what happened to the hero at each stage of this time: it is enough for him to “snatch” from the hero’s life chain several “links” - episodes, similar to each other, like drops of water, and the whole life of Doctor Startsev becomes extremely clear to the author, and to the reader. “As you live one day of your life, you will live your whole life,” Chekhov seems to be saying. At the same time, the writer, reproducing the situation in the house of the most “cultured” family in the provincial town of S., can focus all his attention on the knocking of knives from the kitchen and the smell of fried onions ( artistic details! ), but to talk about several years of a person’s life as if they never happened at all, or as if it was a “passing”, uninteresting time: “Four years have passed”, “Several more years have passed”, as if it is not worth wasting time and paper for the image of such a trifle...

Image everyday life a person devoid of external storms and shocks, but in a routine that forces a person to forever wait for happiness that never comes, became the cross-cutting theme of A. Chekhov’s stories, which determined the further development of Russian short prose.

Historical upheavals, of course, dictate other themes and subjects to the artist. M. Sholokhov in the cycle of Don stories he talks about terrible and wonderful human destinies during the time of revolutionary upheaval. But the point here is not so much in the revolution itself, but in eternal problem the struggle of a person with himself, in the eternal tragedy of the collapse of the old familiar world, which humanity has experienced many times. And therefore Sholokhov turns to plots that have long been rooted in world literature, depicting private human life as if in the context of legendary world history. Yes, in the story "Mole" Sholokhov uses a plot as ancient as the world about a duel between father and son, not recognized by each other, which we encounter in Russian epics, in the epics of ancient Persia and medieval Germany... But if ancient epic explains the tragedy of a father who killed his son in battle by the laws of fate, which is not subject to man’s control, then Sholokhov talks about the problem of a person’s choice of his life path, a choice that determines everything further events and in the end makes one a beast in human form, and the other an equal to the greatest heroes of the past.

When studying topic 5, you should read those works of fiction that can be considered within the framework of this topic, namely:

• A. Pushkin. The stories "Dubrovsky", "Blizzard"
• N. Gogol. The stories "The Night Before Christmas", "Taras Bulba", "The Overcoat", "Nevsky Prospekt".
• I.S. Turgenev. Tale " Noble nest"; "Notes of a Hunter" (2-3 stories of your choice); story "Asya"
• N.S. Leskov. Stories "Lefty", "Stupid Artist"
• L.N. Tolstoy. Stories "After the Ball", "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"
• M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Tales" The wise minnow", "Bogatyr", "Bear in the Voivodeship"
• A.P. Chekhov. Stories “Jumping”, “Ionych”, “Gooseberry”, “About Love”, “Lady with a Dog”, “Ward Number Six”, “In the Ravine”; other stories of your choice
• I.A.Bunin. Stories and stories "Mr. from San Francisco", "Sukhodol", "Easy Breathing", " Antonov apples", "Dark alleys"A.I. Kuprin. The story "Olesya", the story "Garnet Bracelet"
• M. Gorky. Stories “Old Woman Izergil”, “Makar Chudra”, “Chelkash”; collection "Untimely Thoughts"
• A.N. Tolstoy. The story "Viper"
• M. Sholokhov. Stories "Mole", "Alien Blood", "The Fate of Man";
• M. Zoshchenko. Stories "Aristocrat", "Monkey Language", "Love" and others of your choice
• A.I. Solzhenitsyn. The story "Matrenin's yard"
• V. Shukshin. Stories “I Believe!”, “Boots”, “Space” nervous system and a lot of fat", "Pardon me, madam!", "Stalled"

Before completing task 6, refer to the dictionary and establish exact value concept with which you have to work.

Recommended literature for work 4:

• Grechnev V.Ya. Russian story of the end XIX - early XX century. - L., 1979.
• Zhuk A.A. Russian prose of the second half of the 19th century. - M.: Education, 1981.
• Literary encyclopedic dictionary. - M., 1987.
• Literary criticism: Reference materials. - M., 1988.
• Russian story of the 19th century: History and problems of the genre. - L., 1973.

At school, in literature classes, they study stories, novels, essays, and elegies. Cinemas show a variety of films - action films, comedies, melodramas. How can all these phenomena be combined into one term? For this purpose, the concept of “genre” was invented.

Let's figure out what a genre in literature is, what types exist, and how to determine which direction a particular work belongs to.

The division of works into genders has been known since antiquity. What is genre in ancient literature? This:

• tragedy;
• comedy.

Fiction was practically inseparable from the theater, and therefore the range was limited to what could be realized on stage.

In the Middle Ages, the list expanded: it now included a short story, a novel and a story. The emergence of romantic poems, epic novels, and ballads dates back to the New Age.

The 20th century, with its enormous changes that continually took place in the life of society and the individual, gave birth to new literary forms:

• thriller;
• action movie;
• fiction;
• fantasy.

What is a genre in literature

The set of some features of groups of literary forms (the features can be both formal and substantive) is the genres of literature.

According to Wikipedia they are divided into three large groups:

• by content;
• by form;
• by birth.

Wikipedia names at least 30 different directions. These include (the most famous):

• story;
• story;
• novel;
• elegy,

and others.

There are also less commonly used ones:

• sketch;
• opus;
• stanzas.

How to determine genre

How to determine the genre of a work? If we are talking about a novel or an ode, then we will not get confused, but something more complex - a sketch or stanzas - can cause difficulties.

So, before us is an open book. We can immediately correctly name well-known literary forms, the definition of which we do not even need. For example, we see a voluminous creation that describes a large period of time in which many characters appear.

There are several storylines - one main one and an unlimited number (at the author's discretion) of secondary ones. If all these requirements are met, then every high school student will say with confidence that this is a novel.

If this is a short narrative, limited to a description of an event, while the author’s attitude to what he is talking about is clearly visible, then it is a story.

It’s more difficult, for example, with an opus.

The interpretation of the concept is ambiguous: most often it means something that causes ridicule, that is, an essay, story or story, the merits of which are questionable.

In principle, many literary works can be classified as “opus” if they are not distinguished by clarity of style, richness of thought, or, in other words, mediocre.

What are stanzas? This is a kind of poem-memory, a poem-reflection. Remember, for example, Pushkin’s “Stanzas,” which he wrote on a long winter road.

Important! To correctly classify a particular literary form, be sure to take into account both external features and content.

Let's try to bring literary genres together, and to do this we will collect the types of works known to us in a table. Of course, we will not be able to cover everything - literary trends are most fully represented in serious philological works. But a small list can be compiled.

The table will look like this:

Definition of genre (in the generally accepted sense)	Characteristic signs
Story	An accurate plot, a description of one striking event
Essay	A type of story, the task of the essay is to reveal spiritual world heroes
Tale	A description of not so much an event as its consequences for the mental world of the characters. The story reveals the inner world of the characters
Sketch	A short play (most often consisting of one act). Characters minimum quantity. Designed for stage performance
Essay	A short story in which considerable space is given to the author’s personal impressions
Ode	A ceremonial poem dedicated to a person or event

Types of genres by content

Previously, we touched upon the question of the form of writing and divided the types of literature precisely on this basis. However, directions can be interpreted more broadly. The content and meaning of what is written is very important. In this case, the terms in both lists may overlap or intersect.

Let's say a story falls into two groups at once: stories can be distinguished by external features (short, with a clearly expressed attitude of the author), and by content (one bright event).

Among the areas divided by content, we note:

• comedies;
• tragedy;
• horror;
• dramas.

Comedy is perhaps one of the most ancient movements. The definition of comedy is multifaceted: it can be a sitcom, a comedy of characters. There are also comedies:

• household;
• romantic;
• heroic.

Tragedies were also known to the ancient world. The definition of this genre of literature is a work whose outcome will certainly be sad and hopeless.

Genres of Literature and Their Definitions

A list of literary genres can be found in any textbook for philology students. For whom is it important to know in what directions literary forms are distinguished?

The following specialists need this information:

• writers;
• journalists;
• teachers;
• philologists.

When creating a work of art, the author subordinates his creation to certain canons, and their framework - conventional boundaries - allows him to classify what he has created into the group of “novels”, “essays” or “ode”.

This concept relates not only to works of literature, but also to other forms of art. Wikipedia explains: this term can also be used to refer to:

• painting;
• photos;
• movie;
• oratory;
• music.

Important! Even the game of chess is subject to its own genre standards.

However, these are very large separate topics. We are now interested in what genres there are in literature.

Examples

Any concept should be considered with examples, and types of literary forms are no exception. Let's look at examples in practice.

Let's start with the simplest thing - with a story. Surely everyone remembers from school Chekhov's work“I want to sleep.”

This scary story, written in a deliberately simple, everyday style, it is based on a crime committed by a thirteen-year-old girl in a state of passion, when her consciousness was clouded from fatigue and hopelessness.

We see that Chekhov complied with all the laws of the genre:

• the description practically does not go beyond one event;
• the author is “present”, we feel his attitude to what is happening;
• the story has one main character;
• The essay is short in length and can be read in a few minutes.

As an example of a story, we can take “Spring Waters” by Turgenev. The author here argues more, as if helping the reader to draw conclusions, unobtrusively pushing him to these conclusions. In the story, an important place is given to issues of morality, ethics, and the inner world of the characters - all these problems come to the fore.

– is also a fairly specific thing. This is a kind of sketch where the author expresses his own thoughts on a specific issue.

The essay is characterized by vivid imagery, originality, and frankness. If you have ever read Andre Maurois and Bernard Shaw, you will understand what we are talking about.

Novels and their characteristic features- the length of events over time, multiple storylines, a chronological chain, periodic deviations of the author from a given topic - do not allow the genre to be confused with any other.

In the novel, the author touches on many problems: from personal to acute social ones. When thinking about novels, “War and Peace” by L. Tolstoy, “Fathers and Sons”, “Gone with the Wind” by M. Mitchell, “Wuthering Heights” by E. Bronte immediately come to mind.

Species and groups

In addition to grouping by content and form, we can take advantage of the proposal of philologists and divide everything created by writers, poets and playwrights by gender. How to determine the genre of a work - what type of work can it belong to?

You can create the following list of varieties:

• epic;
• lyrical;
• dramatic.

The first ones are distinguished by a calm narrative and descriptiveness. A novel, essay, or poem can be epic. The second is everything connected with the personal experiences of the heroes, as well as with solemn events. These include ode, elegy, epigram.

Dramatic - comedy, tragedy, drama. For the most part, the theater expresses the “right” to them.

To summarize what has been said, we can apply the following classification: in literature there are three major directions, covering everything that has ever been created by prose writers, playwrights and poets. Works are divided by:

• form;
• content;
• to the birth of what is written.

Within one direction there can be many completely diverse essays. So, if we take the division by form, then here we will include stories, novels, essays, odes, sketches, and novellas.

We determine belonging to any direction by the “external structure” of the work: its size, the number of plot lines, the author’s attitude to what is happening.

The division by gender is lyrical, dramatic and epic works. A novel, a story, an essay can be lyrical. The epic category includes poems, fairy tales, and epics. Dramatic plays are plays: comedies, tragicomedies, tragedies.

Important! New time makes adjustments to the system literary trends. IN last decades The detective genre, which originated in the 19th century, developed. In contrast to the utopian novel that emerged during the late Middle Ages, dystopia arose.

Useful video

Let's sum it up

Literature continues to evolve these days. The world is changing at enormous speed, and therefore the forms of expression of thoughts, feelings, and the speed of perception are undergoing changes. Perhaps in the future new genres will be formed - so unusual that for now it is difficult for us to imagine them.

It is possible that they will be at the intersection of several types of art at once, for example, cinema, music and literature. But this is in the future, but for now our task is to learn to understand the literary heritage that we already have.

There are quite a large number of literary genres. Each of them is distinguished by a set of formal and substantive properties unique to it. Also Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century BC. presented their first systematization. According to it, literary genres represented a specific system that was fixed once and for all. The author’s task was only to find a correspondence between his work and the properties of his chosen genre. And over the next two millennia, any changes in the classification created by Aristotle were perceived as deviations from the standards. It was only at the end of the 18th century that literary evolution and the associated decomposition of the established genre system, as well as the influence of completely new cultural and social circumstances, negated the influence of normative poetics and allowed literary thought develop, move forward and expand. The prevailing conditions were the reason why some genres simply sank into oblivion, others found themselves in the center of the literary process, and some began to appear. We can see the results of this process (certainly not final) today - many literary genres, differing in type (epic, lyrical, dramatic), in content (comedy, tragedy, drama) and other criteria. In this article we will talk about what genres there are in form.

Literary genres by form

In form, literary genres are as follows: essay, epic, epic, sketch, novel, story (short story), play, story, essay, opus, ode and visions. Below is a detailed description of each of them.

Essay

An essay is a prose composition characterized by a small volume and free composition. It is recognized to reflect the author’s personal impressions or thoughts on any matter, but is not required to provide an exhaustive answer to the question posed or fully disclose the topic. The style of the essay is characterized by associativity, aphorism, imagery and maximum proximity to the reader. Some researchers classify essays as a type of fiction. In the 18th-19th centuries, the essay as a genre dominated French and English journalism. And in the 20th century, the essay was recognized and actively used by the world's largest philosophers, prose writers and poets.

Epic

The epic is a heroic narrative about the events of the past, reflecting the life of the people and representing the epic reality of heroic heroes. Usually, an epic tells about a person, about the events in which he took part, about how he behaved and what he felt, and also talks about his attitude towards the world around him and the phenomena in it. The ancestors of the epic are considered to be ancient Greek folk poems and songs.

Epic

Epic refers to large works of an epic nature and similar ones. An epic is generally expressed in two forms: it can either be a narrative of significant historical events in prose or verse, or a long history of something in which descriptions of various events are included. The epic owes its emergence as a literary genre to epic songs composed in honor of the exploits of various heroes. It is worth noting that a special type of epic also stands out - the so-called “moral-descriptive epic”, distinguished by its prosaic orientation and description of the comic state of any national society.

Sketch

A sketch is a short play whose main characters are two (sometimes three) characters. IN to the greatest extent Sketch is common on the stage in the form of sketch shows, which are several comedy miniatures (“sketches”) lasting up to 10 minutes each. Sketch shows are most popular on television, especially in the US and UK. However, a small number of such humorous television programs are also aired in Russia (“Our Russia”, “Give You Youth!” and others).

Novel

A novel is a special literary genre, characterized by a detailed narrative about the life and development of the main characters (or one character) in the most unusual and crisis periods of their lives. The variety of novels is so great that there are many independent branches of this genre. Novels can be psychological, moral, chivalric, Chinese classic, French, Spanish, American, English, German, Russian and others.

Story

A short story (also known as a short story) is the main genre in short narrative prose and is smaller in length than a novel or story. The roots of the novel go back to folklore genres (oral retellings, tales and parables). A story is characterized by having a small number of characters and one plot line. Often the stories of one author form a cycle of stories. The authors themselves are often called short story writers, and the collection of stories - short stories.

Play

The play is the title dramatic works, which are intended for stage performance, as well as radio and television plays. Usually the structure of the play includes monologues and dialogues of the characters and various author's notes indicating the places where the events take place, and sometimes describing the interiors of the premises, the appearance of the characters, their characters, manners, etc. In most cases, the play is preceded by a list of characters and their characteristics. The play consists of several acts, including smaller parts - pictures, episodes, actions.

Tale

A story is a literary genre of a prosaic nature. It does not have any specific volume, but is located between a novel and a short story (short story), which it was considered to be until the 19th century. The plot of the story is most often chronological - it reflects the natural course of life, has no intrigue, and is focused on the main character and the peculiarities of his nature. Moreover, storyline just one. In foreign literature, the term “story” itself is synonymous with the term “short novel”.

Essay

An essay is considered to be a small artistic description of the totality of any phenomena of reality, comprehended by the author. The basis of the essay is almost always the author’s direct study of the object of his observation. Therefore, the main feature is “writing from life.” It is important to say that while in other literary genres fiction may play a leading role, in the essay it is practically absent. There are several types of essays: portrait (about the personality of the hero and his inner world), problem (about a specific problem), travel (about travel and wanderings) and historical (about historical events).

Opus

An opus in its broad sense is any musical piece (instrumental, folk), characterized by internal completeness, motivation of the whole, individualization of form and content, in which the personality of the author is clearly visible. In the literary sense, an opus is any literary work or scientific work any author.

Ode

Ode is a lyrical genre expressed in the form of a solemn poem dedicated to a specific hero or event, or separate work the same direction. Initially (in Ancient Greece) ode was the name given to any poetic lyric (even choral singing) that accompanied music. But since the Renaissance, pompous lyrical works, in which examples of antiquity serve as a guide, began to be called odes.

Visions

Visions belong to the genre of medieval (Hebrew, Gnostic, Muslim, Old Russian, etc.) literature. At the center of the narrative is usually a “clairvoyant,” and the content is imbued with otherworldly, afterlife visual images that appear to the clairvoyant. The plot is narrated by a visionary - a person to whom it was revealed in hallucinations or dreams. Some authors refer to visions as journalism and narrative didactics, because in the Middle Ages, human interaction with the world of the unknown was precisely the way to convey some didactic content.

These are the main types of literary genres, differing in form. Their diversity tells us that literary creativity has always been deeply appreciated by people, but the process of formation of these genres has always been long and complex. Each of the genres as such bears the imprint of a certain era and individual consciousness, each expressed in its ideas about the world and its manifestations, people and the characteristics of their personality. It is precisely due to the fact that there are so many genres and they are all different, any creative person had and has the opportunity to express himself in the form that more accurately reflects his mental organization.