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E. N. KOVTUN

Art

in literature

Tutorial

The textbook examines fantastic literature

context of the development of other types of artistic fiction

la, together constituting a single system of interconnection

known varieties of narration about the extraordinary. At the

to the extent of prose and dramaturgy of Russian, European and American

pre-literary structures - models of reality, characteristic of fantasy, utopia, parables, literary fairy tales and myths;

The features of fiction in satire are explored.

The manual is intended for undergraduate and graduate students studying in the direction and specialty of “Philology” - but it can be useful to anyone who is interested in the general patterns of development of literature or simply reads and loves science fiction.

CONTENTS Preface.................................................. Chapter One THE NATURE OF FICTION AND ITS ARTISTIC TASKS... Advantages of a comprehensive study of fiction. – Semantic levels of the concept “convention”. – Secondary convention and element of the extraordinary. – Origin and historical variability of fiction. – Difficulty in perceiving the extraordinary. – Principles of creating fictional worlds. – Types of narration about the neo-extraordinary. – Preliminary remarks on the functions of fiction.

Chapter Two FANTASY: “THE POTENTIALLY POSSIBLE” IN SF AND “TRUE REALITY” FANTASY ................... Fiction as a basic type of fiction. – Classifications of fiction. – Imperfect terminology. – Prehistory of modern science fiction. – Utopia and social fiction. – Rational fantastic model of reality in the novels “Wreck-It Ralph 124С41+”

H. Gernsbeck, “Plutonia” by V. Obruchev, “Aelita” by A. Tolstoy, “The Creator of the Stars” by O. Stapledon. – Specifics of the parcel. – The illusion of certainty. - The hero of a rational fiction work. – Artistic detail in rational fiction. – Tasks and functions of science fiction. – The difference between premises in rational science fiction and fantasy. – Varieties of fantasy. – The artistic world of the novels “Angel of the Western Window” by G. Meyrink, “Maiden Christina”

M. Eliade, “Running on the Waves” by A. Green. – Principles of narrative organization. – Criteria for evaluating a hero. – The meaning of “true reality.” – The functionality of the synthesis of two types of fiction in the “Space Trilogy” by C. S. Lewis.

Chapter Three LITERARY MAGIC TALE AND MYTH: COSMO LOGICAL MODEL OF EXISTENCE........................ Modern approaches to the study of myth and fairy tale. – Formation of the fairy tale genre in European literature XIX–XX centuries - For the disgusting attractiveness of a fairy tale. – Semantic core of the concepts “fairy tale” and “myth”. – Forms of manifestation of mythological and fairy tale conventions. – The fairy-tale-mythological model of the world in the epics of T. Mann “Joseph and His Brothers”, J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, in the stories of P. Travers, in the plays of E. Schwartz and M. Maeterlinck. – Space-time continuum: the relationship between the “historical” and the “eternal.” – Four aspects of the hero’s interpretation. – Archetypal. – “Magical” and “wonderful”

as forms of fiction in fairy tales and myths. – A special way of storytelling.

Chapter Four FICTION AS A MEANS OF SATIRICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ALLEGORATION................................ Content and scope of application of the concepts of “satirical condition” ity" and "philosophical convention". – Subordination of the extraordinary element to the task of comic re-creation of reality.

Fiction as a form of philosophical allegory. - The degree of unusualness. – A satirical rethinking of the canons of rational fiction in V. Mayakovsky’s plays “The Bedbug” and “Bathhouse”. – Comic mythology of A. France (“Penguin Island”). – “Invisible fiction” of the parable (“The Castle” by F. Kafka). – Formalization of the premise in G. Hesse’s novel “The Glass Bead Game.” – Functions of metaphorical imagery in J. P. Sartre’s drama “The Flies.” – Satirical and philosophical-metaphorical models of the world.

Chapter Five SYNTHESIS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF FICTION IN A WORK OF ART..................................... A unified semantic field of fiction. – Artistic possibilities for synthesizing various types of conventions. – Types of fiction and related layers of content in the novels “The War with the Lamanders” by K. Capek, “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, and the story “The Metamorphosis” by F. Kafka. – The mechanism of interaction between different types of narration about the extraordinary. – Multidimensionality of the image. – Overcoming schematism. – Increasing the associative potential of the text.

Chapter six EVOLUTION OF EASTERN EUROPEAN FICTION IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE XX CENTURY AND AT THE TURN OF THE XX-XXI centuries. Narration of the extraordinary in the second half of the twentieth century: evolution and problems of study. – Periodization of post-war Russian and Eastern European fantastic prose. Reasons for the dominance of the NF in the socialist era. – The fate of fantasy and the change in the ratio of different types of science fiction in the 1970s–1980s. – Role and tasks fantastic literature under socialism. – Changes in the literary situation in Russia and Eastern European countries in the first half of the 1990s. – The place of fantastic prose in new cultural paradigms. – Adventure schemes in fiction of rational premise. – Social and philosophical tradition in market conditions. – The rise of fantasy and attempts to create its national variants. – Ironic fantasy. – A fantastic element in “elite” literature. Science fiction and post-modernism. – Social functions and expressive possibilities of fiction of the second half of the 20th – early 21st centuries.

Conclusion................................................... Notes. ........................................... Recommended reading.. ................................ Preface This book is a textbook that partially reproduces the material from the monograph by the same author “Poetry The Story of the Extraordinary: Artistic Worlds of Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Utopia, Parable and Myth,” published in a small edition in 1999. Compared to the previous text, a large section on fantasy of the second half of the last century and the turn of the 20th–21st centuries has been added to the current one. Changes and additions were also made to other sections, a list of recommended literature was compiled, and other amendments were made that correspond to the genre of the educational publication.

However, the processing of the text, albeit quite serious, did not violate the original intention: to summarize the results of scientific research covering all options presented in fiction XX century a special type of work, which in this book we will call a narrative about the extraordinary. What are we talking about and what are the objectives of the manual?

The simplest definition of the object of study sounds like this: we are interested in works that contain an element of the extraordinary, that is, telling about something that “does not happen” in modern objective reality or “cannot exist at all.” We are not talking about the unusual as unique, that is, possible under a rare combination of circumstances, but rather about the extraordinary, the non-existent, although, of course, it is sometimes not at all easy to draw the line between the concepts of “impossible” and “incredible”1.

“The unprecedented” and “impossible” interest us regardless of the way it is manifested in the text. It can look like science fiction with its inherent attributes (aliens, robots, time travel), look like fairy tale(magicians, transformations, talking animals), mythological drama or novel (the author’s cosmogony disguised as “antiquity”), utopia (an ideal or terrible world of the future), etc. The unusual can be presented at any level of the artistic structure works - in the plot, in the system of characters, in the form of individual fantastic images and details.

Since the time of A.S. Pushkin, literature has often been likened to a “magic crystal” that transforms reality in accordance with the will of the author. But at the same time, they do not always remember that such a transformation can be carried out equally convincingly and vividly both with the help of artistic images, more or less habitually recreating the appearance of the world, and in forms that change it, giving reality an unrecognizable appearance. In the latter case, various versions of the narration of the extraordinary arise. We can say that this type of work represents the pinnacle verbal creativity: after all, under the artist’s pen, something appears that never existed in the world before.

Of course, extraordinary phenomena and images found in fiction cannot be considered something fundamentally new, unprecedented and unknown before the book was written.

The human brain is not able to create anything that does not have, albeit indirectly, a connection with reality. “There is no such fiction that would be an absolute product of “creative fantasy” and cannot exist. The most desperate science fiction writer and visionary does not “create” his images, but puts them together, combines them, synthesizes them from real data”2.

So, the creator of a narrative about the extraordinary creates only unusual combinations of familiar realities (we will talk about this in detail in Chapter 1). In addition, he always has the opportunity to rely on inaccurate information, superstitions and prejudices that live in the minds of even the most rationally thinking readers, on the most ancient (even archaic myth) ideas, traditions and legends, as well as on the centuries-old tradition of narrating about extraordinary things. – that is, the worlds and stories created by his predecessors. That is why most fantastic, fairy-tale, mythological, etc. images are so “recognizable”, and many of them turn into cliches over time.

Stories about the extraordinary and supernatural, impossible in principle or still inaccessible to human knowledge at all times, formed an important part of elegant literature, not to mention folklore genres. If you try to trace the history of a narrative of this type, then the list of works will have to start with Homer and Apuleius. A tradition stretching through centuries will cover the works of Ariosto and Dante, T. More and T. Campanella, D. Swift and F. Rabelais, F. Bacon and S. Cyrano de Bergerac, C. Maturin and H. Walpole, O. Balzac and E. Poe, as well as many other famous writers.

Despite the dominance of pragmatism and rationalism, the narrative of the extraordinary is clearly represented in the literature of the recent century. At the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. created epics by T. Mann and J. R. R. Tolkien, novels by A. France, G. Wells, O. Stapledon, K. Capek, A. Tolstoy, A. Conan Doyle, D. London, R. L. Stevenson , B. Stoker, G. Mayrinka, M. Eliade, A. Green, V. Bryusov, M. Bulgakov, utopias of O. Huxley, E. Zamyatin, D. Orwell, parables of G. Hesse, F. Kafka, K. S. Lewis, plays by G. Ibsen, B. Shaw, M. Maeterlinck, L. Andreev, fairy tales by O. Wilde, A. de Saint-Exupéry, Y. Olesha, E. Schwartz, P. Bazhov and many other works, containing an element of the extraordinary.

In the second half of the last century, the traditions of narrating the extraordinary were adopted and developed in the works of many writers belonging to the “elites” of national literatures (Ch. Aitmatov, A. Kim, R. Bach, H. L. Borges, P. Ackroyd, S. Geim). But no less significant is the merit of authors working in certain areas of popular literature, primarily in science fiction (A. Azimov, A. Clark, R. Bradbury, P. Boole, S. King, M. Moorcock, W. Le Guin, I Efremov, A. and B. Strugatsky, L. Soucek, P. Vezhinov, K. Borun, S. Lem). A surge of interest in the extraordinary occurred at the end of the twentieth century. and was associated both with the spread of the philosophy and aesthetics of postmodernism in fiction (D. Fowles, M. Pavic, G. Petrovich, V. Pelevin, M. Weller, V. Sorokin, D. Lipskerov, M. Urban, O. Tokarczuk ), and with a change in the structure of the narrative and the relationship between various types of fiction in the former socialist countries, with the arrival of a new generation of talents (A. Sapkovsky, G. L. Oldi, S. Loginov, E. Lukin, M. Uspensky, etc. .).

However, despite the vividness of the examples taken from the works of the classics, it is not always easy to identify and adequately interpret the element of the unusual in a work of art. The fact is that it can be presented both visually, embodied in extraordinary, magical, supernatural and similar images, and in a hidden form, turning into a kind of “fantastic beginning”, including a special plot premise, specific parameters of action, and sometimes - just a general author’s intention to create a situation that is obviously impossible in reality. The role of the extraordinary element in revealing the author’s intention can also be different – ​​from decisive to secondary.

In addition, the type of narrative under study has its own specifics in each of the literary genres and artistic movements. In the very in general terms turning to the extraordinary is a universal way of depicting the world in literature (and in other types of art and spheres of culture), equally accessible to artists of all eras and adherents of different aesthetic concepts. But the “extraordinary” in the interpretation of the romantics is not in all respects similar to the “magical” in folk tale and bears little resemblance to the “potentially possible” in the science fiction of realist writers. We can only say with some degree of certainty that there are literary movements that are more sensitive to the extraordinary than others - such as, for example, the above-mentioned romanticism and postmodernism.

In the aesthetics of many philosophical systems and artistic platforms of the twentieth century. (surrealism, absurdity, deconstructivism, etc.) the element of the extraordinary turns out to be subordinated to the logic of the basic principles of interpretation of existence, distorting reality and destroying the traditional structure of the narrative so much that it ceases to be perceived as incredible and impossible. This is a separate interesting area of ​​research, which, due to its specificity, we are forced to leave aside. Our book will examine literary works that contain a sufficiently expressed plot and system of images that reproduce reality at least in relative harmony and completeness. For the same reasons, we will limit ourselves to talking about prose and drama, because the extraordinary in poetry (especially lyrical) has a different - however, still practically unexplored - appearance.

The variety of forms and a special kind of “elusiveness”, the organic entry into poetics of a variety of literary movements, as well as the historical and national variability of fiction lead to the fact that the narrative of the extraordinary in the unity of all its variants is studied relatively little, because the commonality is obscured in the eyes researchers diversity.

That's why we see our main task as showing:

the most important laws for the creation of fictional worlds are the same, if not for verbal creativity in general, then at least for the artistic thinking of a certain historical era.

The first difficulty on the chosen path is the choice of basic terms with the help of which one can analyze various types of narration about the extraordinary. In Russian literary criticism (namely, in its semantic field, this research was carried out) there seems to be no shortage of definitions related to the sphere of the extraordinary.

However, we have to note with regret the absence of a unified conceptual system that allows us to mutually correlate the terms “fiction”, “conjecture”, “convention”, “fantasy”, “fantastic grotesque” (as well as metaphor, hyperbole, symbol, etc.) and their internal gradations. Moreover, there is no strict definition of the concepts “supernatural”, “wonderful”, “magical”, “magical”, “mystical” in relation to the poetics of a work of art. But there is also, say, “horrible” or “alternative historical” as a designation for the semantic core of some genre varieties of the modern fantasy novel. And it is clear that the terms and definitions “myth” and “mythological prose”, “fairy tale” and “fairy tale”, “science fiction” and “fantasy”, “utopia” and “dystopia” are directly related to the subject under study. “allegory”, “parable”, “novel of disasters”, “novel-warning”, “fan tasmagoria” - and many others. Each of them has unique shades of meaning, but in some area of ​​meaning contains a reference to the element of the extraordinary.

In other words, interpreting “extraordinary” in the system of traditional scientific categories is quite difficult. We believe that this can be done most adequately with the help of three concepts: fantasy, fiction, artistic convention. Unfortunately, none of these terms covers the entire phenomenon of interest to us.

The usual and seemingly most expressive term “fantasy” is, paradoxically, now the most limited in meaning. In the 20th century it turned out to be assigned primarily to a special area of ​​popular literature (and to an independent subculture that goes beyond literary boundaries), combining two types of fantastic storytelling: science fiction and fantasy. Multimillion-dollar blockbusters in cinema, virtual worlds of computer games and familiar colorful books telling about galactic empires or battles between werewolves and vampires have made us almost forget the broad literary interpretation of the terms “fantasy” and “fantastic”. It has been preserved only in special publications like the “Concise Literary Encyclopedia”: “Fiction is a specific method of depicting life, using an artistic form-image (object, situation, world), in which elements of reality are combined in a way that is not inherent in it in principle - incredibly , “wonderful”, supernatural”3. So today it is possible to talk about “fantastic” as extraordinary in a utopia, parable or literary fairy tale only with some stretch.

The concept of “fiction” also seems successful only at first glance, since it is devoid of unambiguity. Usually, when talking about fiction, they mean one of two or even three meanings of the term. In the first, most common case, fiction is interpreted very broadly: as the most essential, institutional feature of fiction - the subjective recreation of reality by the writer and a figurative form of knowledge of the world. In the "Concise Literary Encyclopedia"

we read: “Fiction is one of the main aspects of literary artistic creativity, which consists in the fact that the writer, based on real reality, creates new, artistic facts... The writer, using real private facts, usually combines them into a new “fictional” whole "4.

In this meaning, the term “fiction” characterizes the content of any work of art as a product of the author’s imagination. After all, in the end, even a realistic novel or essay contains a fair amount of fiction. All types of art rely on conscious invention, and this distinguishes them, on the one hand, from science, and on the other, from religious teachings. The famous Pushkin phrase: “I will shed tears over fiction” refers us precisely to this meaning of the term.

Variant of the first value or second independent meaning the concept of “fiction” can be considered the principle of construction of works traditionally classified as “mass” literature, deliberately condensing and sharpening the course of events characteristic of everyday reality - adventure-adventure, love-melodramatic, detective novels, etc.5 They do not impossible as such, but the incredible is present - at least in the form of coincidences, coincidences, concentration of vicissitudes of fate that befall the hero. In relation to such texts, the term “fiction”

means “fiction”, “fable”, “fantasy” (as opposed to fantasy as the basis of art).

As a synonym for the concepts “fantastic”, “extraordinary” and “wonderful”, the word “fiction” is used much less often. Although the same “Concise Literary Encyclopedia” admits:

“By creating a fact that could naturally happen, the writer is able to reveal to us the “possibilities” inherent in life, the hidden tendencies of its development. Sometimes this requires such fiction... which goes beyond the boundaries of “plausibility” and gives rise to fantastic artistic facts...”6.

The term “artistic convention” should apparently be recognized as the most “strict” of those discussed. Its codification domestic science I devoted several decades to literature. In the 1960s–1970s. a distinction was made between the primary conventions characterizing the figurative nature of art (similarly broad meaning term "fiction"), as well as a set expressive means, inherent in different types of art, and a secondary convention, denoting a deliberate deviation by the writer from literal verisimilitude.

True, the boundaries of such a retreat would not have been established. As a result, within the framework of the concept of “secondary convention” there were allegory and fairy tale, metaphor and grotesque, satirical point and fantastic premise, so different in “degree of improbability”. There was no more or less clear distinction between “any violation of the logic of reality” and “an element of extraordinary, obvious fiction, fantasy.” Thus, our understanding of secondary convention as an element of the extraordinary is somewhat more local than the generally accepted meaning of the term.

The concepts of “convention” and “secondary convention,” which, unfortunately, are not free from the ideological dogmas of the era that gave birth to them, have at least one undoubted advantage: they allow one to include in the scope of research the entire set of options for the narration of the extraordinary. This is why the term “convention” becomes basic for us. But, of course, we do not abandon the concepts of “fiction” and “fantastic”, using them in a narrow sense - as synonyms for the element of the extraordinary. We will explain all this in more detail in Chapter 1.

In domestic (and foreign, as far as we can judge) literary criticism of the twentieth century. Two factually independent traditions of studying the narrative of the extraordinary have emerged. The first is characterized by an interest in convention (its incomplete Western analogue can be considered the concept of fiction7) as a philosophical and aesthetic category, considered among the most general theoretical concepts (artistic image, reflection and re-creation of reality in a literary work, etc.). The second tradition is a set of works that explore the artistic specificity of the extraordinary as an integral part of the poetics of various genres and areas of literature: science fiction and fantasy, literary fairy tales and myths, as well as parables, utopias, satires.

Review critical literature We will present both the first and second types in the corresponding chapters of this book.

In our work, an attempt is made to combine these traditions and analyze the narrative of the extraordinary in the unity of its various manifestations in a literary text.

The second difficulty of the ongoing research is related to the need to resolve the issue of classifying the types of narration about the extraordinary. We consider it possible to identify six independent types of artistic conventions: rational (science) fiction and fantasy (fantasy), fairy tale, mythological, satirical and philosophical conventions, more or less associated with the genre structures of a literary fairy tale, utopia, parable, mythological , fantastic, satirical novel etc.8 The selection criteria and specifics of each type will be explained in detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.

However, our task is not only to identify substantive and artistic differences between personal options stories about the extraordinary. We intend to show that, along with quite numerous examples of relatively “pure” use by writers of one or another type of secondary convention, no less often one can find cases of combination and reinterpretation in a work of artistic principles and semantic associations characteristic of different types of fiction. Based on this, we consider it possible to talk about a unified system of interrelated types and forms artistic convention in relation to the literature of the twentieth century, which confirms the relationship of all types with each other.

The third difficulty lies in developing principles for analyzing various options stories about the extraordinary. It is easy to understand that it is impossible to finally and irrevocably separate, say, dystopia from science fiction or fantasy from a literary fairy tale. In some cases, one can interpret fiction in different ways and even argue about whether it is present at all (“The Castle” by F. Kafka, “The City of Great Fear” by J. Ray, “Lame Fate” by A. and B. Strugatsky). However, each type of convention that determines the appearance of the extraordinary for a particular group of works is easily recognized by both readers and critics.

Any person ignorant of the science of literature, even if he is indifferent or unkind to a story about the extraordinary, as a rule, is able to determine from the very first pages of an unfamiliar book what exactly is in front of him: fantasy, utopia, parable, fairy tale or myth .

How does such a distinction occur? It would be logical to assume that it is based on a unique set of artistic means that each type of fiction has at its disposal. However, this hypothesis is hardly true. After all, the same principles for re-creating reality, not to mention specific techniques, images and details, can be used with equal success by different types of narration about the extraordinary. For example, “wonderful” heroes can be found in fantasy, fairy tales, myth, satire, and even science fiction. However, in each of these genres and areas of literature they will acquire their own motivation and functions.

For example, a person with unusual abilities in science fiction will take the form of a scientist who discovered the effect of invisibility (“The Invisible Man” by H. Wells), the creator of a new weapon (“Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” by A. Tolstoy) or a victim of a scientific experiment (“The Invisible Man” by A. Tolstoy). amphibian” by A. Belyaev), and in fantasy he will become a sorcerer possessing secret knowledge (“A Wizard of Earthsea” by W. Le Guin), or a romantic soaring on the wings of a dream (“The Shining World” by A. Green). An unusual enemy or assistant, depending on the type of fiction, will turn out to be a robot (“Frankenstein” by M. Shelley), an alien (“Who are you?” by D. Campbell), a vampire (“Count Dracula”

B. Stoker), talking animals (The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis), an animate object (The Blue Bird by M. Maeterlin). The formula for controlling the elements will be embodied in the form of a mathematical equation, a magic spell, a child’s counting... Various types of narration about the extraordinary can freely exchange images and characters, rethinking the “supernatural” in the spirit of a rational-fantastic hypothesis, philosophical allegory, etc.

Consequently, the specificity of individual types of narration about the extraordinary can be revealed not at the level of individual techniques or even a set of visual means, but only by taking into account the unity of the substantive and formal aspects of the work. A conclusion about whether a text belongs to a certain type of narration about the extraordinary can be made only on the basis of an analysis that reveals the purpose and method of using fiction and the features of the picture of the world created by the writer. In other words, it is necessary to consider holistic models of reality generated by various types of convention. Only such an analysis is capable of showing what facts and signs of real life the author uses to depict the fictional world, how he reinterprets these facts, giving them an extraordinary appearance;

and most importantly - why this rethinking is happening, what topics it allows to touch upon, what questions to pose.

We will study the content and artistic specificity of each type of narration about the extraordinary in a certain sequence of aspects. First of all, we will pay attention to the features of the premise (the assumption that forms the plot that extraordinary events happened or could happen “in reality”), its motivation (how does the author justify the appearance of the extraordinary and is it justified at all), the forms of expression of the extraordinary (“ miraculous" in fantasy, "magical" in a fairy tale, "magical" in myth, "potentially possible" in rational fiction, etc.), features of the figurative system;

space-time continuum in which the action takes place (and its “material”

design with the help of extraordinary objects and details), and, finally, the tasks and functions of a specific type of fiction. We strive to ensure that our research leads to the creation of “ collective images", kind of " verbal portraits» fiction in various genres and areas of fiction.

The chosen principle—the analysis of models of reality created by various types of convention—determines the structure of the book. It consists of six chapters. In the first, we summarize the study of the problem of artistic convention in Russian literary criticism over the past half century and present the gradation of meanings of the term “convention” that we have developed. Here, issues related to the origin and historical variability of literary fiction are discussed, principles for creating extraordinary images and worlds are formulated, and there is a conversation about the differences between authors who actively use fiction and those who do not.

The second, third and fourth chapters are devoted to the consideration of individual types of convention, and the closest types, for which, in our opinion, similarities are more important than differences (rational fiction and fantasy, fairy tale and myth, satirical and philosophical convention), are combined within one chapter .

Our analysis is carried out mainly on the material of European literature of the first half of the twentieth century. We consider European literature as a single space in which, despite the undeniable national specificity, general trends in the development of narration about the extraordinary operate. We consider it possible to include the literature of the USA and Russia in the last century to this same space.

First half of the twentieth century. was chosen because it represents the era of the most vivid functioning of the system of interrelated types of convention that interests us. First of all, these years are the “golden age” of scientific (especially social-philosophical) fiction. K. Chapek, O. Stapledon, A. Tolstoy turn to it, and a generation of “classics of the genre” comes to American science fiction - A. Azimov, G. Kuttner, K. Simak, R. Heinlein, T. Sturgeon. At the same time, a new race is experiencing fantasy (H. Meyrink, H. Lovecraft, H. H. Evers, M. Eliade).

During this period, interest in fairy tales was also revived. Its artistic principles are used by representatives of a variety of movements - from O. Wilde, M. Maeterlinck and Russian symbolists to S. Lagerlöf, E. Schwartz, P. Travers.

The mythological novel is formed as an independent genre variety, connecting, on the one hand, with the tradition of “heroic” fantasy (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis), and on the other, with philosophical prose and parable (T. Mann).

Philosophical convention clearly manifests itself in drama (B. Shaw, B. Brecht, K. Chapek). A new type of utopia is emerging (E. Zamyatin, O. Huxley), in which the previous principle of a consistent author’s story about an ideal world is replaced by a dynamic narrative determined by a rational-fantastic premise. Thus, it was the first half of the twentieth century. becomes the era of the formation of artistic “canons” for many areas of modern literature related to fiction.

In principle, the proposed classification is correct for the literature of the 19th–20th centuries (and most fully for the 1890–1950s). But in the nineteenth century. The system we postulated was still in its infancy. In turn, the completion of its formation in the middle of our century in no way ensured its stability, and already the second half of the century introduced significant adjustments to our classification.

The most striking and memorable type of “explicit” fiction in literature of at least the last three centuries remains, undoubtedly, fantasy. That is why our book pays special attention to it. Chapter 2 describes the two main types of fantastic prose and drama of the twentieth century: science fiction and fantasy. Using these familiar definitions, we subject them to certain adjustments.

Firstly, we prefer the less common concept of “rational fiction” (RF) to the term “science fiction” (SF), which emphasizes the specificity of the premise and the special worldview inherent in this group of works (the logical motivation for the fantastic assumption in the text). On the history of origin, codification and semantic contradictions that arise when using the term “science fiction”

in relation to modern literature, we will discuss in detail in chapters 2 and 6.

Secondly, our understanding of fantasy is also somewhat different from the generally accepted one. In the second chapter we will explain that this term in our work describes works in which the motivation of the premise, as a rule, is removed outside the text and, based on the principles of mythological thinking, constructs a special model of the world, which we designate as “true reality” . In Russian literary criticism, due to the historical peculiarities of its development, a special term denoting this type of fiction never appeared. That's why, when last decades In the past century, a steady interest in this type of narration about the extraordinary arose in the Russian and Eastern European literary space; the corresponding definition (fantasy) was borrowed from the Anglo-American scientific tradition.

Over time, however, both in the West and in the East, the initial broad understanding of fantasy as "the literature of the magical, supernatural, magical and inexplicable"

narrowed in the mass consciousness to the designation of the genre of “commercial” stories and novels telling about local fictional worlds with a conditionally medieval magical “decor”. Huge number of the same type of works about modest but courageous heroes overcoming the obstacles of an imaginary universe in search of a magical artifact or the source of absolute Evil, has replaced the once equally numerous science fiction texts from the readers’ memory and for a new generation of science fiction fans has become almost the only option for a story about the extraordinary .

Such literature is now so widespread that the division of the sphere of the fantastic on the Russian (and Czech, Polish, etc.) book market in recent years looks not like “science fiction” and “fantasy”, but like “fantasy” and “fantasy” stick" (we will discuss the reasons in Chapter 6). However, the paradox is that “fantasy” today actually means only one of the variants of the original meaning of the term - the so-called “heroic fantasy”, or “fantasy of sword and sorcery” (we will talk about this in more detail in Chapter 2).

Russification of the English-language term has not yet been completed.

IN different sources the concept of “fantasy” is used both in the feminine and neuter gender, and even in different graphic versions (fantasy, fantasy, etc.). That's why we prefer to do without transliteration. Graphics have a terminological meaning for us. Where the spelling “fantasy” appears in this book, we are talking, in accordance with our concept, about a special type of convention that uses a fantastic (but not fairy-tale or mythological!) premise without logical motivation in the text. The spelling “fantasy” is preserved in quotes or when denoting current publishing realities.

The fifth chapter of the manual deals with the synthesis of different types of conventions in a literary text. We try to show that this synthesis gives rise to a special content and structural complexity of the works, which is their main advantage. Simultaneous use artistic principles fantasy, fairy tales, parables, etc. leads to the mutual imposition of corresponding models of reality and to the multiplication of associations, which, in turn, gives rise to an endless play of meanings and creates the possibility of ever new interpretations of the author’s concept.

In the final sixth chapter, we return to the conversation about science fiction – but in the chronological coordinates of the second half of the twentieth century and the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Such a return is due to the desire to trace the evolution of the system of interconnected types and forms of secondary convention that we postulate beyond the boundaries of the historical era within which it was formed. It is advisable to start a conversation about evolution with the most obvious changes, and they occurred in the second half of the last century precisely in the sphere of science fiction and the fantastic.

In this chapter we will find out under what conditions and under the influence of what ideological concepts the post-war science fiction of the USSR and other socialist countries developed, gaining increasing popularity, but at the same time losing the novelty of the problematic and the diversity of artistic structure. We are trying to trace in what directions the most gifted authors sought a way out of the crisis that engulfed narrowly interpreted science fiction literature. Let us explain how the fantasy tradition was latently born in the space described. Finally, we will show how, under the influence of political, economic and cultural changes in the post-socialist literary space of Russia and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. a new reader demand is being formed and the patterns of creation and functioning are being built differently literary texts. Science fiction becomes a mirror of these processes, accumulating the most striking, and therefore often controversial and dramatic features of the era. We will talk about the commercialization of fantastic prose, the not always favorable influence of Western book products, and the laws of the market, which imposes strict requirements on the content and poetics of fantastic works.

Considerable difficulties in the study of fiction are caused by the selection of texts that demonstrate the characteristics of certain types of narration about the extraordinary. Of course, it is impossible not only to consider, but even to simply mention all the works created in the twentieth century and containing an element of the extraordinary.

That is why we will rely mainly on the best examples of world prose and drama, in which convention becomes the main means of realizing the author’s intention. However, in addition to this, the book will also mention works that do not belong to the number of indisputable masterpieces, but clearly characterize one or another type of fiction. At the same time (with the exception of Chapter 6, in which such a conversation becomes inevitable due to the specifics of the modern literary situation), we deliberately avoid dividing the studied corpus of texts into “serious” literature and “mass” genres, leaving aside the problems of fiction being in the declared by many researchers of the literary-critical “ghetto”. Our task is to prove: there are no “massive” types of fiction unworthy of the attention of serious researchers. The semantic and aesthetic level of a literary text containing “obvious” fiction, like all others, depends only on the talent and goals of the writer.

This manual is intended for students, undergraduates and graduate students studying in the direction and specialty “Philology”, as well as, taking into account the “interdisciplinary” nature of the sphere of manifestation of the extraordinary in modern culture, and for other specialists in the field of the humanities and non-humanities. The material presented in the manual can be used when teaching courses on the history of domestic and foreign literature, as well as theoretical literary disciplines.

Finally, this book will be of interest to everyone who reads and loves science fiction, who, regardless of age and type of occupation, maintains an interest in the fairy-tale and mythological interpretation of existence, has a penchant for thought experiments in the spaces of non-existent worlds and never tires of asking themselves questions about the meaning of human existence in an endless and continuously changing world.

We hope that reading this book will help:

– understand the important role that “explicit” fiction (narrative of the extraordinary) plays in the literature of the twentieth century, as well as previous eras;

– to understand the terminological disputes that have been going on for many decades by representatives of scientific schools and traditions involved in the study of various types of narration about the extraordinary and related genres;

– to navigate the diverse and colorful world of the fantastic subculture that is so popular and rapidly expanding today;

– take a fresh look at the literary process in Russia, Europe and America from spheres traditionally considered marginal (fiction, fairy-tale prose, etc.), but nevertheless revealing the evolution of artistic structures no less (and sometimes more vividly) , rather than leading genres and main trends;

– expand theoretical and literary knowledge and horizons by becoming familiar with fantasy studies as a special branch of the science of literature, as well as with a detailed interpretation of its basic terms “fiction”, “artistic convention”, “artistic image” and the principles of depicting reality in a work of art.

We are fully aware of the difficulty of the tasks we have undertaken, the breadth of the problem, and the substantive and structural heterogeneity of the material chosen for analysis. However, without claiming to have exhaustive answers, we are still convinced: the proposed concept, and most importantly, the interpretation of the narrative of the extraordinary as a single aesthetic phenomenon, can bring us closer to understanding the nature of artistic fiction - a unique phenomenon that constitutes the essence and main decoration of verbal creativity.

Chapter One THE NATURE OF FICTION AND ITS ARTISTIC TASKS Advantages of a comprehensive study of fiction.

Semantic levels of the concept “convention”.

Secondary convention and the element of the extraordinary.

The origin and historical variability of fiction.

Difficulty in perceiving the extraordinary.

Principles for creating fictional worlds.

Types of narration about the extraordinary.

Preliminary remarks on the functions of fiction.

The artist is a lucky man. He is able to give those around him the world as he sees it himself. A science fiction artist is doubly lucky. His mind's eye sees what is inaccessible to anyone in the world, sees it as so real and material that it can show everyone. His fantasy opens up extraordinary worlds - bright and menacing, scary and joyful, inaccessible, but already conquered by the human imagination.

A. and B. Strugatsky Advantages of a comprehensive study of fiction. Interest in problems and discussions related to the concepts of “fiction” and “artistic convention” once began for us with the question: why do many readers not like science fiction? The author of these lines more than once had to face bewilderment, condescending disdain, and, finally, conscious rejection of fantastic works as “boring,” “childish,” “primitive,” and “low-artistic.” Let us make a reservation right away: we are far from the idea of ​​defending the aesthetic value of all fantastic texts.

Like any literature, science fiction can be good and bad.

This book will focus primarily on the second.

Studying the reasons for likes and dislikes for science fiction led us to the understanding that the problem is by no means limited to it alone. We are talking about the peculiarities of perception by different groups of people of any literary texts, the plots and images of which are distinguished by a certain unusualness, or rather, non-ordinaryness. What do you mean? These images and plots in the minds of readers are correlated not with real or “potentially real”, i.e., in principle, facts that can be discovered and events that can happen, but only with some generalized ideas about the sphere of the possible or impossible - and also with the fact that has already been invented and told or described by someone.

Extraordinary characters and plots can have very different appearances. They can rely on the ancient archetypes existing in the human consciousness and trace their origins to archaic myth (doubles, the living dead, nightmarish monsters and personified fears in the short stories of E. Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, F. Kafka or the novels of S. King), but are also capable of becoming, like the images of science fiction, a product of modernity (travel to the stars in the books of A. Asimov, A. Clark or S. Lem, communist utopia in the novels of I. Efremov, etc.). The “degree of unusualness” can also be different. Fiction and literary fairy tales “know” undoubted miracles. But a parable or a utopia of the classical type is difficult to convict of “obvious extraordinaryness”, however, in the minds of readers they somehow correlate, if not with the concept of “fantasy”, then with the sphere of the “hypothetical”

or “impossible in reality.”

Nevertheless, the patterns of perception of such texts and opinions about them among different people are approximately the same. They were expressed in the clearest form by one of the author’s casual interlocutors, who said with sincere bewilderment: “I don’t understand how you can read about something that doesn’t actually happen?”

The question is clear and logical: why waste time thinking about something that will never, under any circumstances, be encountered in life? The answer is not so simple. It usually takes considerable effort to explain that works that tell about the extraordinary also introduce the reader to reality, but they do so in a special form. This is how M. Arnaudov reveals this paradox: “We... discover in... a fictional world psychological realism, capable of reconciling us with phantasmagoria... If we come to terms with conventions from the very beginning, then we will only have to wonder how in this world of the strange and incredible the principles of humanity are preserved and how everything happens due to the same fundamental laws that observation reveals reality"9.

We will return to explaining the possibilities and advantages of such a narrative about the extraordinary later.

So, the problem lies in the peculiarities of different people’s perception of the “impossible” and “unreal”, i.e. “deliberately invented”, “fantasized”, “obviously fictional” in its most diverse manifestations in a work of art. But what is it? How to define and interpret such phenomena in more or less generally accepted scientific categories?

The concepts of fiction and fantasy are so common and familiar that it would seem that it would not be difficult to explain the processes behind them. However, the explanation is unlikely to be comprehensive and accurate: these words have too many “everyday” shades of meaning. And these shades are not always positive. Almost more often than with the awareness of the power of the imagination, which stimulates a person’s creative activity, they turn out to be associated with ideas about aimless pastime, empty and unnecessary dreams, “fantasizing,” deception, etc. Thus, although the concept of “fiction” and “fantasy” can be used in a conversation on a topic that interests us, relying on them without providing clarifications (“obvious” thought, fantasy as the creation of the extraordinary) and operating only with them is hardly advisable.

That is why, from our point of view, it is obvious that there is a need to choose and justify a special term, free from “ordinary” connotations, to denote the writer’s clear departure in the text of the work beyond the limits of what is possible in reality. The need to pose a general problem of the formation and functioning of fiction as an element of the unusual is also obvious.

The latter is necessary first of all and mainly for the study of areas of literature and genre structures related to fiction, such as science fiction (SF and fantasy) and satire (more precisely, that part of it where the grotesque clearly goes beyond what is acceptable in life), utopia, parable , as well as fairy tales and myths in their modern literary forms.

Traditionally, fiction is studied mainly in its particular manifestations in certain areas of literature and genres or in the works of certain writers10. Number of comparative studies on search general principles the creation of fictional images and plots in various areas of literature, unfortunately, is small11. At the same time, the idea of ​​the structural commonality of all varieties of fiction is latently present even in works devoted to their most decisive demarcation.

Tangible and sometimes insurmountable difficulties arise when trying to distinguish science fiction into a special “type of literature” (we will dwell on this in detail in Chapter 2), when distinguishing between such genre structures as a fantastic (related to fantasy) story and a fairy tale, as well as fairy tale and myth, utopia and dystopia in their modern versions and a science fiction novel. Most often, interesting and significant results of research in the field of individual genre structures associated with fiction serve as an argument in favor of the genetic kinship and artistic unity of all varieties of literary fiction with an infinite variety of its specific embodiments in works - and therefore, confirmation of the need for a comprehensive, systemic its consideration.

Another clear proof of this was the publication of the first volume of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995).

Its editor Vl. Gakov explains in the preface the principle of selection of material: “The abbreviation NF adopted in the Encyclopedia, which irritates many critics, means... simply that wide and polysemantic layer of modern literature - together with all its historical roots and intersections with other branches of the literary “tree”, which without long words, understandable primarily to its readers... The last thing I would like to do is create an “encyclopedia for fans” who can, without hesitation, list all twenty to forty novels of some SF series, but have not even heard of the fiction of Kafka, Golding or Borges..."12 (our italics - E.K.). Thus, the book entitled “Encyclopedia of Fantasy” with a declared appeal to SF (science fiction) included Kafka, Borges, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky. Is this not evidence of an understanding of the kinship of numerous varieties of narration about the extraordinary?

Of course, it would be incorrect to say that the fact of such a relationship has so far completely eluded the attention of researchers. In parallel with the study of certain types of fiction, from about the end of the 1950s. In Russian literary criticism, attempts are regularly made to analyze the role of fantasy and imagination in art, to reveal the mechanism of their action and to show the variety of artistic forms they create. Over the years, representatives of many other fields of science bordering on literary studies have also been involved in work in this direction: philosophy and history, aesthetics and art history, cultural studies and theater studies, folkloristics and classical philology.

As we stated in the preface to this book, it seems to us that the most functional - primarily in terms of combining a whole range of meanings, from the broadest (the artist’s fantasy) to the narrowest (a fantastic premise of a certain type) - is the one that has been polished in the course of many years of discussions. and the term artistic convention, codified in the main areas of use. What does this term mean and what shades of meaning does it combine?

Semantic levels of the concept “convention”. The choice of term was made on the basis of the generally accepted meanings of the concepts “convention” and “conditional”. In the “Russian Language Dictionary” we read:

“Conventional –... not existing in reality, imaginary, assumed mentally;

giving artistic image techniques adopted in this type of art...” Of course, the problem of a specific subjective reflection of reality in art, which allows the artist sometimes not to take into account literal verisimilitude, has been discussed for a long time, almost since antiquity. In the past, judgments that preceded the current concepts of artistic conventions were expressed more than once.

Thus, S. T. Coleridge in Chapter XIII of “Literary Biography”

speaks of “primary” and “secondary” imagination. A. de Vigny, in the preface to the novel “Saint-Mars,” reflects on the differences between “truth of fact” and “truth of art.” “Art,” he writes, “can only be considered in its connection with the ideal of beauty... The truth of life is secondary here, moreover, art embellishes itself with fiction... Art could do without it, because that truth, with which it must be imbued, lies in the accuracy of observations of human nature, and not in the authenticity of facts...” 14. Finally, V. Belinsky in the article “On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol (“Arabesques” and “The World City” )" talks about two types of poetry: "Poetry, so to speak, in two ways embraces and reproduces the phenomena of life.

These methods are opposite to one another, although they lead to the same goal. The poet either recreates life according to his own ideal, depending on the image of his views on things, on his relationship to the world, to the age and people in which he lives, or he reproduces it in all its completeness and truth, remaining faithful to all the details, colors and shades... Therefore, poetry can be divided into two, so to speak, sections - ideal and real”15.

And yet, the most significant attempts to determine the content of the term “conventionality” and, accordingly, to build a typology of conventional forms were made in the 1960–1970s.

In the late 1950s and 1960s. in the Soviet periodical press a number of discussions were held, on the one hand, about the problems of “documentary fiction prose” (“Problems of Literature”, “Foreign Literature”, 1966), on the other hand, about conventions in art (“ Soviet culture", 1958–59;

"Te atr", 1959;

"Art", 1961;

"Questions of Aesthetics", 1962;

"Ok October", 1963). As a result, the conceptual paradigms “fact – speculation – invention” and “primary – secondary artistic convention” were built, albeit not quite clearly.

Initially, the recognition of the importance of fiction for realistic art was perceived as a very bold statement. In order to bring the positions of his opponents and supporters closer together, a compromise was developed over time. The participants in the discussions agreed that “in contrast to the aesthetic conventions, the conventions of the formalist theater (later this thesis was extended to other types of art. - E.K.), modernist, decadent and, thus, anti-national theater exists and should there is a realistic convention... a progressive and folk convention,” and it is “this convention that is organically included in the broad understanding of realism”16.

The distinction between “realistic” and “modernist” conventions - without a strict definition of both concepts, but with clearly defined evaluative accents - existed in Russian literary criticism almost until the beginning of the 1980s. And only gradually the now seemingly obvious idea was formed that the functionality of conventional forms is determined not by their immanent belonging to “progressive” or “reactionary”, but by the author’s intention and, indirectly, the type of art and the time of creation of the work.

The deliberate distinction between “realistic” and “modernist” conventions became possible also because convention was for a long time considered an attribute (or prerogative) of aesthetics of only a few literary movements, for example romanticism, modernism or avant-garde. It took a lot of time to figure out: for all the “tendency” of the aesthetic concepts of these movements to interpret reality in specific, sometimes bizarre and even fantastic forms, artistic fiction cannot be considered the property of any one “ creative method”, since it is equally accessible to everyone.

Having confirmed the legitimacy of the use of conventional forms in art, including realistic art, literary scholars finally had the opportunity to move on to the essence of the matter - to defining the meaning of the term “conventionality”.

Philosophers and art historians took the initiative at this stage of research. In the works of F. Martynov, G. Apresyan, T. Askarov, B. Beilin17 and others, the connection of convention as an aesthetic phenomenon with the basic laws of human thinking was clarified (albeit with inevitable reliance on the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism).

In particular, it was shown that fiction owes its existence mainly to two aspects of the cognitive process. On the one hand, there is the inevitable inaccuracy, subjectivity and generality of the ideas about objective reality. On the other hand, the ability of the human brain to arbitrarily combine the elements of these ideas, creating combinations unusual for reality.

In the 1970s Attempts to differentiate the semantic shades of the concept of “convention”, which is truly polysemantic and differently interpreted by researchers, continued. “In our theoretical literature,” noted A. Mikhailova, “it can be found in the following meanings: as a synonym for untruth, schematism in art;

as a synonym for dead, outdated, but widespread techniques in art (stamps);

as a characteristic of the non-identity of the image with the subject of reflection;

as a definition of a special method of artistic generalization”18.

It was logical to begin delimiting the meanings of the term by posing the most ambitious problem - about convention as a specificity of the artistic image and the figurative type of thinking that underlies art. At this stage of research, to denote the figurative nature of art, which always requires the author’s subjective-emotional rethinking of reality, a clarifying concept of primary convention appeared.

With fiction in the narrower sense of the word (refusal to directly follow in the narrative real forms and the logic of events) the concept of secondary convention was correlated. According to the Concise Literary Encyclopedia, a secondary convention is “an image that differs from life-likeness, a way of creating such images;

the principle of artistic representation is a conscious, demonstrative retreat from life’s dissimilarity”19.

Such a basic distinction between two fundamentally different, but nevertheless genetically related meanings of the term “convention” is preserved in Russian literary studies to this day. Over time, however, it became clear that between them - as well as outside them - there is a whole series of important shades of meaning.

These shades are very important for the concept of unity and interconnection of various types of narration about the extraordinary that we are developing. However, we were never able to find works in which the term “convention” would be considered with sufficient completeness in the totality of its constituent meanings.

That is why we were forced to build our own hierarchy of meanings of the concept of “conventionality,” reflecting the modern level of understanding of this issue.

HIERARCHY OF MEANINGS OF THE CONCEPT “CONVENTIONALITY”

(P – primary, B – secondary artistic convention) 1. The artist as a representative of the species homo P (0). The relativity of sapiens, like every person, is a way of creating a specific idea in his consciousness of the represented historical era about objective reality, which already has an objective reality that gives a certain degree of conventionality.

(subjectivity).

2. The artist as a historical person who shares, albeit unconsciously, the philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and other attitudes of his era, which can be perceived as conventional from the point of view of other eras.

3. Artist as creative personality, creating an individual concept of existence, which, when perceiving a work of art, is correlated by the reader (viewer, listener) with his own and generally accepted concept.

Subjective concentrated emotion P (1). Figurative formal reproduction of reality in the production of cognition of the world, which lies under the control;

the interaction of the typical and indie is at the heart of art, including the visual, “real” and “invented in the artistic form” in the artistic image, due to this literature.

possessing an undoubted convention.

For literature - the word, for music - sound, P (2). Specific to the theater is a combination of speech, action, a musical system of means of expression, language, dance, etc. The limited means of expressiveness make the expression of reality in a work of art very conditional for each type.

arts (not everything can be depicted on stage, drawn, or conveyed in words).

1. The set of philosophical and aesthetic norms P (3). The normativity of this type of literature (ancient, middle (sustainable, specific age-old, etc.), formed as a result of the visual interaction of the needs of the era and literary means) of the literary tradition. National, regional trends, styles, naya, etc. specificity of literature.

practical principles and 2. Norms of literary direction, type, ways of reflecting the genre.

ality in art 3. Separate artistic techniques (retro work.

specialization, montage, “stream of consciousness”, impersonal direct speech, “mask”, various forms of allusions, intertextuality, etc.).

4. Hyperbole, exaggeration, metaphor, symbol, grotesque (non-fantastic) and other ways of creating artistic images that shift real proportions and change the usual appearance of phenomena, but do not cross the boundaries of obvious fiction.

1. For models of reality created from V. Using the principle of “obvious” fiction, all the previous levels that are legally impossible in number are true (in reality situations, the ric convention in such texts as “obvious” fiction (else superimposed on the primary one) .

extraordinary ment).

2. Secondary convention is largely determined by its own literary tradition(for example, fiction in a fairy tale).

3. Secondary convention is a product of a special author’s concept that interprets the world in fantastic forms that do not have direct equivalents in reality.

Let's comment on the table. If we try to identify the common basis of all currently existing definitions of artistic convention, then such a basis will be a statement of the relative, incomplete (intentionally inadequate) correspondence to reality of certain forms of its reflection in art. This meaning, apparently, should be considered basic for the concept of “convention” in literary and art criticism. But given value is by no means limited to the sphere of art. It is no less true for other areas of human activity (norms and cliches in science, religious dogmas, conventions in relationships, behavior, and everyday life).

In other words, the conventionality - or relativity - of human ideas about the world must be taken into account even before posing the question of the general specificity of art. Accordingly, the epithet “artistic” when applied to the concept of “convention” at this level of interpretation does not seem entirely correct, and in our table this level has an index of “0”. Writers, sculptors, artists are, first of all, people, intelligent beings capable of perceiving and understanding the world;

this awareness in itself is conditional due to the limitations of human thinking.

Growing up and developing, human consciousness goes through many stages, at each of which ideas about the world can differ significantly from the previous ones. In the social practice of mankind, various eras are distinguished with their characteristic economic structures, forms of life, morality, religion, etc. Being a contemporary of a specific historical era, the artist, albeit unconsciously, cannot help but be influenced by its attitudes, and therefore and reflects her inherent views in her work. The degree of conventionality, relativity, and non-identity of his creations with objective reality thereby increases significantly.

Being a creative person, and therefore more capable than others of independent analysis and original interpretation of facts, the artist, as a rule, creates and embodies in his works a uniquely individual concept of existence. The more original (and the more clearly expressed) this concept, the higher ultimately our assessment of the author’s talent, the more powerful the charm of his view of the world affects us. “When a critic talks about realism,” notes A. Maurois, “it seems that he is convinced of the existence of absolute reality. It is enough to explore this reality - and the world will be drawn in its entirety. In reality, everything is completely different. Tolstoy’s reality differs from Dostoevsky’s reality, Balzac’s reality differs from Proust’s reality”20. “The most important thing,” M. Guyot also emphasizes, “is a personal point of view, the angle from which it appears to us visible world... To be an artist means to see from a certain perspective and, therefore, to have a center of inner and original perspective”21.

“Under the conditions of human practice,” F. Asmus sums up what was said above, ““fixing a fact” does not at all mean “presenting this fact as it is.” Being a concrete practical action, any “fixation of a fact” presupposes not only the bare presence of what is happening, the bare givenness, but also a certain perspective, scale, point of view for selecting what is being recorded and for delimiting it from all adjacent things and processes with which what is being fixed dialectically connected"22.

But, recognizing the artist’s right to a personal interpretation of existence, we, willy-nilly, must recognize a similar right for the reader (listener, viewer). Accordingly, in the process of perceiving a work of art, there is interaction, and sometimes mutual rejection of such concepts. A discrepancy between the worldviews of the author and the reader is possible, for example, when reading works created in the distant past. The author’s interpretation of certain features of reality can be perceived as a convention, a tribute to the era, a reflection on obvious and simplified, from the current point of view, ideas about the universe, etc.

But not only is the writer’s view of the world subjective, i.e.

conditional, it is also expressed using artistic means, that is, in figurative form (level one in the table). This is what is designated by the term “primary convention.” The author's fiction is invariably present even in the so-called “documentary prose.” As A. Agranovsky notes about himself and his fellow documentary filmmakers, “in the end, we always “invent” our heroes. Even with the most honest and scrupulous adherence to the facts. Because, in addition to the facts, there is an understanding of them, there is a selection, there is a tendency, there is the author’s point of view”23.

The concept of primary convention is practically identical in meaning to the broadest interpretation of the term “fiction”.

It is this kind of fiction, which forms the foundation of fiction, that the heroes of the “Space Trilogy” talk about.

C. S. Lewis. A resident of Venus asks a guest from Earth: “Why think about what is not and will not be? “We are always busy with this,” he explains. “We put words together to write down what is not there—beautiful words, and we put them together well, and then we tell each other. Is it called poetry or literature... It’s entertaining, pleasant, and wise...”24.

A similar example is from D. Fowles’ novel “The Magus”: “I’m speaking seriously. Roman died. He died like alchemy... I understood this even before the war. And do you know what I did then? I burned all the novels I found in my library. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoevsky. Flaubert. Great and small... Since then I have been healthy and happy. Why wade through hundreds of pages of fiction in search of small homegrown truths? - For fun? - Pleasure! – he mimicked. – Words are needed to tell the truth.

Reflect facts, not fantasies."25.

The following (second level) meaning of the term “convention”

reflects a specific system of means of expression inherent in a particular type of art. There is no need to explain that, say, for music it is sound, for painting it is image, and for ballet it is dance. The limited possibilities of means of expression significantly constrain the artist’s freedom: not everything can be depicted on stage, drawn, or expressed in wood or stone. When writing a theatrical play or libretto, the author’s imagination is already introduced in advance into the strict framework of artistic guidelines and standards accepted for this type of art.

From this point of view, verbal art has a number of advantages, since with the help of words it is easier to convey impressions of events and shades of experiences. And one more significant point: the reader himself comes to the author’s aid. A.P. Chekhov admitted: “When I write, I fully count on the reader, believing that he himself will add the missing elements in the story” 26.

The famous film director M. Forman agrees with the Russian classic: “Literature deals with the kingdom of words, where every phrase can evoke new world. The flow of words perfectly reflects the movement of thought and serves as an ideal means for conveying the stream of consciousness. The film usually shows the world from the outside, from a more objective vantage point.

Pictures are concrete, they have more impact, they are universal and convincing, but they are much more difficult to show the inner life.”27

That is why, of all the arts, it is literature that has the best opportunities for embodying “obvious” fiction. A literary work contains more or less detailed description extraordinary, giving the reader the opportunity to independently give the described one or another final, convincing for him (the reader) appearance. It is curious that J. R. R. Tolkien, the creator of one of the most striking fantasy worlds in European literature of the twentieth century, objected not only to the production on stage of “magical stories” like his “Silmarillion”, “The Hobbit”, “The Lord of the Rings”, but even to illustrations for them, pointing out that, acquiring clarity, his “wonderful” characters lose their polysemy, deprived of shades of individual perception “The fundamental difference between any types of art,” explains Tolkien, “that offer a visible representation of Fantasy, from literature, is that they impose on the viewer only one single visible image. And literature creates images that are much more universal and exciting... Drama, by its nature, is hostile to Fantasy. Even the simplest of Fantasies can hardly be successfully embodied in Drama, if the latter appears before the spectator in flesh, in sound and in color, as it should be. Fantastic realities cannot be faked. People dressed as talking animals will produce buffo nada or parody, but not Fantasia.”28 Let us note, by the way, that the writer captures an important feature of those created with the help of imagination. artistic models reality – their polyvariance, which significantly activates the reader’s perception.

At the next level (numbered three in the table), the concept of “convention” is synonymous with the concepts of “literary tradition” and “norm”. This is noticeable, for example, when it comes to the totality of aesthetic attitudes of individual literary movements and styles. The world seen through the eyes of a classicist will seem conventional to a romantic, that is, distorted in the spirit of certain philosophical concepts, and vice versa. When eras change, belonging to the norms of the passing time is recognized as a cliche and an anachronism. Hence the frequent calls for “renewal of art”, “liberation of it from conventions”, etc.

Conventionality should also be included at this level as a specific feature of the reflection of reality in various literary genres and genres, each of which (for example, melodrama, adventure story, detective story) has its own expressive capabilities and limitations, as well as the conventional nature of various artistic techniques (retrospection, inversion, montage, internal monologue, etc.).

Secondary convention and the element of the extraordinary. All the above shades of meaning of the concept of “convention” do not give rise to literary disputes. But moving to the next row of the table, we enter into a controversial area. In fact, where exactly is the boundary between “primary” and “secondary” convention? If the secondary convention is “a deliberate deviation from plausibility,” then the deviation to what extent and in what form? Is the difference between the “formal” (hyperbole, metaphor, symbol) taken into account?

spatio-temporal uncertainty and “givenness” of the situation in the parable) and “actual” (fantastic imagery, depiction of the extraordinary, supernatural, etc.) violation of the boundaries of the possible? In other words, does the distortion of the usual appearance of reality in a work of art always lead to the appearance of an element of the extraordinary in it?

Where is the line beyond which the selection, rethinking and sharpening of the depicted phenomena, immanently inherent in artistic creativity, turn into “explicit” fiction, into a narration of the extraordinary?

There is no unity in the opinions of researchers here. A number of scientists, like A. Mikhailova or N. Elansky, classify hyperbole, sharpening and symbol as secondary conventions, putting them on a par with experiments in the field of artistic form, characteristic, for example, of surrealism or the theater of the absurd. Thus, as examples of secondary conventions, A. Mikhailova’s book includes: V. Mukhina’s sculpture “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”, a rocket in front of the Space Pavilion at VDNKh (now the All-Russian Exhibition Center) and the poems of E. Mezhelaitis - “the poetry of bold generalizations”29. N. Elansky equally classifies as secondary convention “internal monologue and improperly direct speech in the form of a stream of consciousness, the principle of montage and retrospection, spatial and temporal displacements, fantastic and grotesque images...”30. As we see, in in this case An unjustified confusion of clearly different-level concepts prevails.

Other researchers, in particular V. Dmitriev, realizing the insufficiency of the criteria, state the impossibility of an unambiguous and final distinction between “conventional” and “life-unlike” forms in art31. N. Vladimirova speaks about the peculiar “fluidity” of this kind of boundaries: “Myth and mythological, more broadly, literary allusions, play and the beginning of the game, mask and mask imagery, having gone through a significant historical and literary path by the twentieth century and having modified their nature, create a wide variety of style models within the framework of a conventional type of artistic generalization. Acting in the past as forms of primary artistic convention, correlated with the means genetically inherent in art, they can acquire signs of secondary character in modern literature”32.

All this is undoubtedly true. However, for our, and any other study of a specific set of literary texts, in this issue at least “working” clarity is needed.

What artistic phenomena should be classified as primary convention, and which ones as secondary?

In our book, we adhere to the thesis that the aesthetic norms and artistic techniques discussed above (retrospection and montage, alogism, metaphor and symbol, non-fantastic grotesque, etc.) should still be “listed by department” primary convention. For this purpose, we introduced the third semantic level of the concept “artistic convention”. At the third level, there is still no fiction as an unusual element - such as in fantasy or a fairy tale.

After all, the technique of retrospection, say, in M. Proust or chronological inversion in “A Hero of Our Time” by M. Lermontov cannot be confused with the fantastic hypothesis of time travel from the novel by H. Wells. Likewise, for all the hyperbolicity and caricature of the images of landowners in “ Dead souls ah” by N. Gogol or the officers and officials of the Austrian army in the novel “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik” by J. Hasek, we still will not call these images “fantastic” - as opposed to no less hyperbolic and caricatured, ironically-other-wise, but precisely the extraordinary images of the devil from “Evening on a farm near Dikanka” or the salamanders of K. Capek.

Of course, satirical sharpening and fantastic grotesque, the symbolism of the monument “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” and the symbolism of I. Bosch’s paintings are ultimately related to each other.

But they are related only insofar as all these concepts are associated with artistic images, which by their nature are polysemantic and metaphorical, that is, open to various interpretations, “speculation” and rethinking when they are perceived by the reader or viewer.

The same, apparently, is the case with the methods of depicting reality in works that, generally speaking, are classified as non-realistic artistic movements in literature. In principle, being a poetic device, i.e.

category of form, fiction as an element of the extraordinary is equally accessible to everyone literary trends and artistic systems. Another thing is to what extent it is acceptable for each of these systems. Nevertheless, fantastic and non-fantastic works can be found among the Symbolists, the Expressionists, and other artistic movements.

Based on the study of many literary texts containing fiction, we have formed, perhaps, a subjective opinion that the element of the extraordinary is less characteristic of works with the original author’s focus on stylistic convention, a kind of “normative deformation” of reality in the spirit of certain philosophical and aesthetic principles .

This is understandable. The attributes of such artistic systems obscure the fiction and make it difficult for the reader to perceive it. In the initially bizarrely fractured world of such works, science fiction looks like a tautology, an unjustified complication of the form. Moreover, the functionality of fiction is destroyed, its inherent task of activating the cognitive abilities of the perceiver and distracting the reader from everyday routine is not fulfilled. Finally, the illusion of the authenticity of what is happening, so necessary for the adequate perception of almost all types of fiction, is destroyed. But, according to the second, this is only an assumption and requires additional study.

Of course, another approach to defining the boundaries of the concept of “secondary artistic convention” is possible (and still dominates). It can also be understood as any violation by the author of the logic of reality, as any deformation of its objects.

For example, we can refer to the above-cited monograph by V. Dmitriev “Realism and artistic convention” or to the work of A. Volkov “Karel Capek and the problem of realistic convention in the drama of the twentieth century.” V. Dmitriev, among the conventional forms, considers, without additional reservations, “the conventionality of the grotesque, caricature, satire, fantasy and other methods of image creation”33;

A. Volkov, within the framework of the stated topic, turns, among other things, to the analysis of color and sound effects when staging Chapek’s plays34.

Emphasis: YOU'RE AN ARTISTIC THOUGHT

ARTISTIC FICTION - an act of artistic thinking; everything that is created by the writer’s imagination, his fantasy. V. x. - a means of creating artistic images. It is based on the writer's life experiences.

The poet speaks “not about what actually happened, but about what could happen, therefore, about what is possible by probability or by necessity” (Aristotle, “Poetics”). Fiction, the creative fantasy of the artist, does not oppose reality, but is a special form of reflection of life, its knowledge and generalization, inherent only in art.

If the events of a single human life are more or less random in nature, then the artist, grouping these facts in his own way, enlarging some, leaving others in the shadows, creates, as it were, his own figurative “reality”, revealing with great force the objective truth of life. “The truth of life can be conveyed in a work of art only with the help of creative imagination,” says K. Fedin. He admitted in one of his letters: “Now, after finishing a huge duology, a total of sixty printed sheets, I estimate the ratio of fiction and “fact” to be ninety-eight to two.”

Even in works based on documentary material, V. x. must be present. Thus, N. Ostrovsky asked not to consider his novel “How the Steel Was Tempered” as autobiographical, emphasizing that he used the right to V. x. It exists, as Furmanov admits, in his “Chapaev”. V. x. It also exists to varying degrees in lyric poems, where the poet seems to speak on his own behalf about his feelings. A. Blok, for example, ended one of the poems with the lines:

You confessed your love to me passionately, And I... fell at your feet...

noted later: “Nothing like that happened.”

Thanks to V. x. the writer gets so accustomed to his characters that he imagines and feels them as if they existed in life. “Until he (the hero - Ed.) becomes a good acquaintance for me, until I see him and hear his voice, I do not start writing” (L. Tolstoy).

As writers with a strong imagination admit, the creative process sometimes borders on hallucination. Turgenev cried, recreating the last minutes of his Bazarov’s life. “When I described the poisoning of Emma Bovary,” Flaubert recalls, “I had a real taste of arsenic in my mouth, I myself was... poisoned.”

The power of imagination and a rich knowledge of life help the writer to imagine how the character he created would act in each specific situation. The image begins to live an “independent” life according to the laws of artistic logic, performing actions that are “unexpected” for the writer himself. Pushkin’s words are well known: “Imagine what a joke Tatyana played on me! She got married. I never expected this from her.” I. Turgenev made a similar confession: “Bazarov suddenly came to life under my pen and began to act on his own saltyk.” A. Tolstoy, summarizing his rich experience of working on a historical novel, concludes: “It is impossible to write without fiction...” He admits the possibility of V. x. even on reliable historical material: “You ask, is it possible to “invent” a biography of a historical person? It should be. But do it in such a way that it is probable, make it so that it (composed), if it did not exist, should have happened. .. there are random dates that have no significance in the development of historical events. They can be treated as the artist wishes.”

However, works are known in which V. x. does not seem to have such of great importance. Balzac says about “Eugene Grande”: “...Any of them (facts. - Ed.) are taken from life - even the most romantic ones..." Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is a story by an old Cuban fisherman Miguel Ramirez (aka prototype of the Old Man). V. Kaverin wrote his “Two Captains” without deviating from the facts known to him.

Measure V. x. in the work is different. It varies depending on the personality of the writer, his creative principles, intent and many other factors. But always V. x. as a means of typification (see Typical) is present in the writer’s work. For “to invent means to extract from the sum of the real from the given its main meaning and translate it into an image - this is how we get realism” (M. Gorky).

Lit.: Aristotle, On the art of poetry, M., 1957; Russian writers about literary work, vol. 1 - 4, L., 1954 - 56; Dobin E., Life material and artistic plot, 2nd ed., expanded. and modified, L., 1958; Tseitlin A.G., The Work of a Writer. Questions of the psychology of creativity, culture and technology of writing, M., 1968.

E. Aksenova.

Sources:

1. Dictionary of literary terms. Ed. From 48 comp.: L. I. Timofeev and S. V. Turaev. M., "Enlightenment", 1974. 509 p.

Artistic fiction.

Conventionality and life-likeness

Fiction in the early stages of the development of art, as a rule, was not realized: the archaic consciousness did not distinguish between historical and artistic truth. But already in folk tales, which never present themselves as a mirror of reality, conscious fiction is quite clearly expressed. We find judgments about artistic fiction in Aristotle’s “Poetics” (chapter 9—the historian talks about what happened, the poet talks about the possible, about what could happen), as well as in the works of philosophers of the Hellenistic era.

For a number of centuries, fiction has appeared in literary works as a common property, as inherited by writers from their predecessors. Most often, these were traditional characters and plots, which were somehow transformed each time (this was the case, in particular, in the drama of the Renaissance and classicism, which widely used ancient and medieval plots).

Much more than was the case before, fiction manifested itself as the individual property of the author in the era of romanticism, when imagination and fantasy were recognized as the most important facet of human existence. "Fantasy<…>- wrote Jean-Paul, - there is something higher, it is the world soul and the elemental spirit of the main forces (such as wit, insight, etc. - V.Kh.)<…>Fantasy is hieroglyphic alphabet nature." The cult of imagination characteristic of early XIX century, marked the emancipation of the individual, and in this sense constituted a positively significant fact of culture, but at the same time it also had negative consequences (artistic evidence of this is the appearance of Gogol’s Manilov, the fate of the hero of Dostoevsky’s “White Nights”).

In the post-romantic era, fiction somewhat narrowed its scope. Flights of imagination of writers of the 19th century. often preferred direct observation of life: characters and plots were close to their prototypes. According to N.S. Leskova, real writer- this is a “note-taker”, not an inventor: “Where a writer ceases to be a note-taker and becomes an inventor, all connection between him and society disappears.” Let us also recall Dostoevsky’s well-known judgment that a close eye is capable of detecting in the most ordinary fact “a depth that is not found in Shakespeare.” Russian classical literature was more a literature of conjecture than of fiction as such. At the beginning of the 20th century. fiction was sometimes regarded as something outdated and rejected in the name of recreating a real fact that was documented. This extreme has been disputed. The literature of our century - as before - relies widely on both fiction and non-fictional events and persons. At the same time, the rejection of fiction in the name of following the truth of the fact, in some cases justified and fruitful, can hardly become the main line of artistic creativity: without relying on fictional images, art and, in particular, literature are unrepresentable.

Through fiction, the author summarizes the facts of reality, embodies his view of the world, and demonstrates his creative energy. Z. Freud argued that artistic fiction is associated with unsatisfied drives and suppressed desires of the creator of the work and involuntarily expresses them.

The concept of artistic fiction clarifies the boundaries (sometimes very vague) between works that claim to be art and documentary information. If documentary texts (verbal and visual) exclude the possibility of fiction from the outset, then works with the intention of perceiving them as fiction readily allow it (even in cases where the authors limit themselves to recreating actual facts, events, and persons). Messages in literary texts are, as it were, on the other side of truth and lies. At the same time, the phenomenon of artistry can also arise when perceiving a text created with a documentary mindset: “... for this it is enough to say that we are not interested in the truth of this story, that we read it “as if it were the fruit<…>writing."

Forms of “primary” reality (which is again absent in “pure” documentary) are reproduced by the writer (and artist in general) selectively and in one way or another transformed, resulting in a phenomenon that D.S. Likhachev named internal the world of the work: “Every work of art reflects the world of reality in its creative perspectives<…>. The world of a work of art reproduces reality in a certain “abbreviated”, conditional version<…>. Literature takes only some phenomena of reality and then conventionally reduces or expands them.”

There are two trends artistic imagery, which are denoted by the terms convention(the author’s emphasis on non-identity, or even opposition, between what is depicted and the forms of reality) and lifelikeness(leveling such differences, creating the illusion of the identity of art and life). The distinction between conventionality and life-likeness is already present in the statements of Goethe (article “On truth and verisimilitude in art”) and Pushkin (notes on drama and its improbability). But the relationship between them was especially intensely discussed at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. L.N. carefully rejected everything implausible and exaggerated. Tolstoy in his article “On Shakespeare and His Drama.” For K.S. Stanislavsky's expression “conventionality” was almost synonymous with the words “falsehood” and “false pathos.” Such ideas are associated with an orientation towards the experience of the Russian realistic literature XIX century, the imagery of which was more life-like than conventional. On the other hand, many artists of the early 20th century. (for example, V.E. Meyerhold) preferred conventional forms, sometimes absolutizing their significance and rejecting life-likeness as something routine. Thus, in the article P.O. Jacobson's “On Artistic Realism” (1921) emphasizes conventional, deforming, and difficult techniques for the reader (“to make it more difficult to guess”) and denies verisimilitude, which is identified with realism as the beginning of the inert and epigonic. Subsequently, in the 1930s - 1950s, on the contrary, life-like forms were canonized. They were considered the only acceptable ones for the literature of socialist realism, and convention was suspected of being related to odious formalism (rejected as bourgeois aesthetics). In the l960s, the rights of artistic convention were again recognized. Nowadays, the view has become firmly established that life-likeness and conventionality are equal and fruitfully interacting tendencies of artistic imagery: “like two wings on which creative imagination rests in an indefatigable thirst to find out the truth of life.”

At the early historical stages in art, forms of representation prevailed, which are now perceived as conventional. This is, firstly, generated by a public and solemn ritual idealizing hyperbole traditional high genres(epic, tragedy), the heroes of which manifested themselves in pathetic, theatrically effective words, poses, gestures and had exceptional appearance features that embodied their strength and power, beauty and charm. (Remember the epic heroes or Gogol’s Taras Bulba). And secondly, this grotesque, which was formed and strengthened as part of carnival celebrations, acting as a parody, laughter “double” of the solemn-pathetic one, and later acquired programmatic significance for the romantics. It is customary to call the artistic transformation of life forms, leading to some kind of ugly incongruity, to the combination of incompatible things, grotesque. Grotesque in art is akin to paradox in logic. MM. Bakhtin, who studied traditional grotesque imagery, considered it the embodiment of a festive and cheerful free thought: “The grotesque frees us from all forms of inhuman necessity that permeate the prevailing ideas about the world<…>debunks this necessity as relative and limited; grotesque form helps liberation<…>from walking truths, allows you to look at the world in a new way, feel<…>the possibility of a completely different world order.” In the art of the last two centuries, the grotesque, however, often loses its cheerfulness and expresses a total rejection of the world as chaotic, frightening, hostile (Goya and Hoffmann, Kafka and the theater of the absurd, to a large extent Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin).

Art initially contains life-like principles, which made themselves felt in the Bible, classical epics of antiquity, and Plato’s dialogues. In the art of modern times, life-likeness almost dominates (the most striking evidence of this is the realistic narrative prose of the 19th century, especially by L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov). It is essential for authors who show man in his diversity, and most importantly, who strive to bring what is depicted closer to the reader, to minimize the distance between the characters and the perceiving consciousness. However, in art of the 19th century–XX centuries conditional forms were activated (and at the same time updated). Nowadays this is not only traditional hyperbole and grotesque, but also all kinds of fantastic assumptions (“Kholstomer” by L.N. Tolstoy, “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East” by G. Hesse), demonstrative schematization of the depicted (B. Brecht’s plays), exposure of the technique (“ Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin), effects of montage composition (unmotivated changes in place and time of action, sharp chronological “breaks”, etc.).

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Art. Rassadin, B. Sarnov

Does he do what he wants?

Two writers can take the same historical hero, even one about whom we know exactly what he really was, and portray him in completely different ways. One will portray him as noble and brave, while the other will portray him as nasty and funny. The writer has the right to this, because the main thing for him is to express himself, his thoughts and feelings in his work.
But what happens then? So the writer does what he wants? It turns out that the writer is not interested in truth at all?
This is one of the most complex issues artistic creativity. People have argued about this for centuries, expressing very different, very opposing views.
There were artists who directly said:
- Yes, we are not interested in the truth. We are not interested in reality. The goal of creativity is the free flight of imagination. Unfettered, unrestricted fiction.
Not only in ancient times, but also in our time, many writers and poets openly and even proudly expressed similar views.
“I take a piece of life, rough and poor, and create a sweet legend from it, for I am a poet...” - one said.
Another stated even more frankly:

I don't care if a person is good or bad,
I don't care if he's telling the truth or a lie...

And the third explained why “it doesn’t matter”:

Perhaps everything in life is just a means
For brightly melodious verses,
And you from a carefree childhood
Look for combinations of words.

Literature, poetry, art, it turns out, do not exist at all to express the truth of life. It turns out that it’s quite the opposite: life itself is just a “vehicle for brightly melodious poetry.” And the only goal of creativity is to look for combinations of words, sounds, images...
And all this was asserted not by some weak poets who left no trace in literature, but by talented people, even unusually talented ones.
They were sharply objected to by supporters of the so-called “literature of fact”:
“No,” they said. – We are not interested in fiction! We are categorically against free flight of fancy. Not novels and poems, but essays about real people, about non-fictional facts - that’s what we need!
Some of them even believed that art should die out altogether.
You remember, of course, how N.A. Nekrasov dreamed of the time when the Russian peasant “would carry Belinsky and Gogol from the market...” So, there were people to whom this Nekrasov dream seemed simply a whim:
“It’s not Belinsky and Gogol that the peasant should carry from the market, but a popular manual on grass sowing. It’s not theater studios that need to be opened in the village, but cattle breeding studios...”
So, on the one hand: “Everything in life is just a means for brightly melodious poetry.”
On the other hand: "Guide to Grass Sowing" instead of "Dead Souls" and "The Inspector General".
It would seem that even on purpose you cannot come up with two views that would be so irreconcilably hostile to each other.
In fact, they are not that different.
In essence, both of these views stem from the belief that truth and fiction are completely mutually exclusive. Or the truth - and no fiction. Or a fiction - and then there can be no question of the truth.
Both of these points of view - so different - proceed from the fact that the concept of “truth” is entirely reduced to the formula: “This is how it really happened.”
Meanwhile, truth in general, and artistic truth in particular, is an immeasurably more complex concept.

So which one is real?

So which Napoleon is the real one? In other words, who wrote the truth: Lermontov or Tolstoy?
It would seem that there is not even anything to argue about. It is known for sure from history that Napoleon was a man of bright and extraordinary talent: a great commander, a powerful statesman. Even Napoleon's enemies could not deny this.
But Tolstoy is an insignificant, vain, empty little man. Vulgarity personified. Zero.
Everything seems to be clear. Lermontov wrote the truth, Tolstoy wrote a lie.
And yet, the first thing I want to say when reading the pages about Napoleon in “War and Peace” is: what a truth!
Maybe it's all about Tolstoy's enormous artistic gift? Perhaps the charm of his talent helped him make even untruths credible and convincing, downright indistinguishable from the truth?
No. Even Tolstoy would not have been able to do this.
However, why “even Tolstoy”? It was Tolstoy who could not pass off lies as truth. Because the bigger the artist, the more difficult it is for him to be at odds with the truth.
One Russian poet said this very accurately:
– The inability to find and tell the truth is a shortcoming that cannot be covered by any ability to tell a lie.
By portraying Napoleon, Tolstoy sought to express the truth that was hidden from view, lying deep under the surface of well-known facts.
Tolstoy shows courtiers, marshals, chamberlains, servilely groveling before the emperor:
“One gesture from him - and everyone tiptoed out, leaving the great man to himself and his feelings.”
Next to the description of Napoleon's insignificant, petty, ostentatious feelings, the words " great man“They sound, of course, ironically. Even mockingly.
Tolstoy peers into the behavior of Napoleon's servants, analyzes and studies the nature of this creepiness. He clearly understands that all these titled lackeys look at their master with humiliation and servility only because he is their master. It no longer matters whether he is great or insignificant, talented or untalented.
Reading these Tolstoy pages, we understand: even if Napoleon were a complete nonentity, everything would be exactly the same. Marshals and footmen would look at their master in the same obsequious way. They would also sincerely consider him a great man.
This is the truth Tolstoy wanted to express and expressed. And this truth has the most direct relation to Napoleon and his entourage, to the nature of individual despotic power. And because Tolstoy deliberately exaggerated the colors, drawing an evil caricature of him instead of the real Napoleon, this truth only became more obvious.
By the way, Tolstoy’s truth does not at all contradict the picture that Lermontov created in the poem “Airship”.
More than that. Since both are true, they cannot resist each other. They are even united in some ways.
Lermontov portrayed Napoleon defeated and lonely. He sympathizes with him because this Napoleon has ceased to be a powerful ruler. And a ruler who has lost power is not afraid of anyone and is of no use to anyone: He is buried without honors by his enemies in shifting sand...
And those same marshals, about whose servility Tolstoy wrote with contempt, remained true to themselves: they serve the new rulers with the same servility. They do not hear and do not want to hear the call of their former idol:

And the marshals do not hear the call:
Others died in battle.
Others cheated on him
And they sold their sword.

So, both Napoleons are “real”, although different.
This is what usually happens in art. Two photographs of the same person, taken by different photographers, will certainly be similar to each other. And two of his portraits, painted by different artists, can be very, very different from each other, at the same time without losing their resemblance to the original.
Why, by different artists! Even the same artist, depicting the same person, can paint two completely different portraits.
This is the essence of art.
Everyone remembers Pushkin’s “Poltava”:

Peter comes out. His eyes
They shine. His face is terrible.
The movements are fast. He's beautiful
He's like God's thunderstorm.

Peter in “Poltava” is not only majestic and humanly beautiful. He is the embodiment of courage, nobility, justice. He gives honor even to defeated enemies: “And he raises a healthy cup for his teachers.”
But here is another poem by the same Pushkin - " Bronze Horseman". Once again Peter is before us. However, how little similar this “idol on a bronze horse” is to the hero of “Poltava”. He did not flinch before enemy bullets and cannonballs - this one sees danger for himself even in Evgeniy’s timid and inarticulate threat. He generously drank to the health of his recent enemies - this one vindictively pursues a pathetic, unfortunate, powerless person.
Is there a difference between these two Peters?
What else!
Does this mean that only one of them is "real"?
No way!
When we say that we want to know the truth about a historical figure, we mean not only his personal qualities. We want to understand and appreciate his work, to see the result of his efforts, their historical meaning.
Both in "Poltava" and in "The Bronze Horseman" Pushkin depicts the case of Peter. But in one case, Peter is in battle, in work, in burning, in creation. In another case, we already see the result of battle and work, which is why it is not Peter himself who is acting here, but his bronze monument, a symbol of his era and his cause. And so it turned out that among the results of the life of the great king there was the victoriously completed construction of a mighty empire and, on the other hand, an oppressed and oppressed little man.
So soberly and wisely Pushkin saw the complex inconsistency of Peter’s case.
When a person climbs a mountain peak, he can no longer see in detail what remains below, but the entire terrain is in front of him in full view.
The more time passes since the time of Peter, Napoleon or any other historical figure, the more their features become clouded. But the meaning of everything they did, good and bad, becomes clearer. And the more fully the truth emerges.

Ivan the Terrible and Ivan Vasilievich

In Poltava, Pushkin spoke about what really happened. The Bronze Horseman talks about events that not only did not happen in reality, but could not have happened. As you know, bronze horsemen do not gallop along the pavements, but calmly stand in place.
We have already said that the artist invents things in order to better understand and express the truth.
But is it really necessary to invent something that did not exist? And even more so, inventing something that could not have happened?
Let's say Pushkin could not express his complex thought any other way. But “The Bronze Horseman” is not an ordinary work. Still, it does not depict a living Peter. But much more often in works of art it is not symbols that act, but living people.
But it turns out that a living, real, completely concrete person can be placed by a writer in invented and even the most implausible circumstances.
The writer Mikhail Bulgakov has a comedy "Ivan Vasilyevich".
Its hero, engineer Timofeev, invented a time machine, with the help of which he found himself in the era of Ivan the Terrible. A small accident happened, and Timofeev, together with Tsar Ivan, found himself in modern Moscow, in a communal apartment.
"John. Oh my God, Lord Almighty!
Timofeev. Shhh... hush, hush! Just don't scream, I beg you! We will cause terrible trouble and, in any case, a scandal. I'm going crazy myself, but I'm trying to control myself.
John. Oh, it's hard for me! Tell me again, are you not a demon?
Timofeev. Oh, have mercy, I explained to you that I am not a demon.
John. Oh, don't lie! You are lying to the king! Not by human will, but by God's will, I am a king!
Timofeev. Very good. I understand that you are a king, but I ask you to forget about it for a while. I will not call you Tsar, but simply Ivan Vasilyevich. Believe me, it's for your own good.
John. Alas for me, Ivan Vasilyevich, alas!..”
How unlike this timid, frightened old man is from the mighty and imperious Tsar depicted in Lermontov’s “Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov”...
Remember how he doomed Stepan Kalashnikov to execution: It’s good for you, child, A daring fighter, a merchant’s son, That you answered according to your conscience. I will reward your young wife and your orphans from my treasury, I command your brothers from this very day throughout the wide Russian kingdom to trade freely, duty-free. And you yourself, little child, go to the high place of the forehead, lay down your wild little head...
This Ivan is cruel and terrible, he uses his right to send an innocent person to death with voluptuous pleasure, and at the same time he is majestic in his own way and, in any case, is not devoid of a piercing mind and a kind of dark irony.
The king does not want to tolerate a man who dared to speak boldly and directly in front of him, accustomed to servile obedience, without bowing his head, and executes him. But in him - in the way the poet intended to portray him - the consciousness is still alive that the deed he is doing is not very noble. And so he wants to drown out his conscience, generously giving gifts to his wife and Kalashnikov’s brothers, he wants to amaze those around him with the greatness of his royal mercy.
In the final lines of the monologue, all this merged together: cruelty, irony, muffled conscience, and, as we would now say, “playing for the audience”:

I order the ax to be sharpened and sharpened,
I'll order the executioner to dress up,
I'll order you to ring the big bell,
So that all the people of Moscow know,
That you too are not abandoned by my mercy...

Such is the terrible mercy of the king.
Yes, Lermontov’s Ivan the Terrible is cruel, treacherous, even vile. But it is impossible to imagine circumstances in which he would look pathetic and funny.
Impossible?
But Mikhail Bulgakov created precisely such circumstances.
In his comedy, engineer Timofeev talks to the tsar as an elder talks to a younger one. Would someone try to talk like that with Lermontov’s Grozny!..
And events happen to this Bulgakovsky, Ivan Vasilyevich, that paint him in the most pitiful light. Then he will be scared to death by the voice coming from the telephone receiver and ask in horror: “Where are you sitting?” Then he will be mistaken for an artist in the makeup and costume of Tsar Ivan. His very attempt to show royal favor, so terribly majestic in Lermontov, here turns out to be absurd, pathetic and funny.
Here Ivan, with a broad gesture, gives one of the characters in the play a hryvnia:
- Take it, slave, and glorify the Tsar and Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich!..
And he disdainfully refuses the royal gift, and is even offended by the word “serf”:
– For such things you can get into a people’s court. I don’t need your coin, it’s not real.
It may seem that all this was invented by the writer solely for the sake of laughter. That the character of Ivan Vasilyevich, the character of Bulgakov’s comedy, has nothing in common with the character of Tsar Ivan, who was not called the Terrible for nothing.
But no. Not only for fun did Bulgakov transfer the formidable tsar to ours modern life and made him tremble in front of the telephone set so familiar to us.
Why is Ivan the Terrible so majestic in Lermontov’s song? Why is even the gesture with which he sends Kalashnikov to the chopping block not without a certain eerie charm?
Because Ivan is surrounded by fear and admiration, because his every desire is law and every act, even the most vile, is met with flattery and enthusiasm. It may seem that this is the charm of the powerful personality of the king. In fact, this charm does not belong to a person, but to the Monomakh’s cap, a symbol of royal power.
Having placed Ivan the Terrible in unusual, alien conditions, depriving him of all the benefits associated with the royal title, the writer immediately exposed his human essence, exposed the truth hidden under the luxurious royal vestments.
This always happens in real art.
No matter how a writer fantasizes, no matter how far he flies on the wings of his imagination, no matter how bizarre and even implausible his invention may seem, he always has one goal: to tell people the truth.

Drawings by N. Dobrokhotova.

§ 3. Typical and characteristic

3. Subjects of art § 1. Meanings of the term “theme”

§2. Eternal themes

§ 3. Cultural and historical aspect of the topic

§ 4. Art as self-knowledge of the author

§ 5. Artistic theme as a whole

4. The author and his presence in the work § 1. The meaning of the term “author”. Historical destinies of authorship

§ 2. The ideological and semantic side of art

§ 3. Unintentional in art

§ 4. Expression of the author’s creative energy. Inspiration

§ 5. Art and play

§ 6. Author's subjectivity in a work and the author as a real person

§ 7. The concept of the death of the author

5. Types of author's emotionality

§ 1. Heroic

§ 2. Grateful acceptance of the world and heartfelt contrition

§ 3. Idyllic, sentimentality, romance

§ 4. Tragic

§ 5. Laughter. Comic, irony

6. Purpose of art

§ 1. Art in the light of axiology. Catharsis

§ 2. Artistry

§ 3. Art in relation to other forms of culture

§ 4. Dispute about art and its calling in the 20th century. Art crisis concept

Chapter II. Literature as an art form

1. Division of art into types. Fine and Expressive Arts

2. Artistic image. Image and sign

3. Fiction. Conventionality and life-likeness

4. The immateriality of images in literature. Verbal plasticity

5. Literature as the art of words. Speech as a subject of image

B. Literature and Synthetic Arts

7. The place of artistic literature among the arts. Literature and Mass Communications

Chapter III. Functioning of literature

1. Hermeneutics

§ 1. Understanding. Interpretation. Meaning

§ 2. Dialogicality as a concept of hermeneutics

§ 3. Non-traditional hermeneutics

2. Perception of literature. Reader

§ 1. Reader and author

§ 2. The presence of the reader in the work. Receptive aesthetics

§ 3. Real reader. Historical and functional study of literature

§ 4. Literary criticism

§ 5. Mass reader

3. Literary hierarchies and reputations

§ 1. “High Literature.” Literary classics

§ 2. Mass literature3

§ 3. Fiction

§ 4. Fluctuations of literary reputations. Unknown and forgotten authors and works

§ 5. Elite and anti-elite concepts of art and literature

Chapter IV. Literary work

1. Basic concepts and terms of theoretical poetics § 1. Poetics: meaning of the term

§ 2. Work. Cycle. Fragment

§ 3. Composition of a literary work. Its form and content

2. The world of the work § 1. Meaning of the term

§ 2. Character and his value orientation

§ 3. Character and writer (hero and author)

§ 4. Consciousness and self-awareness of the character. Psychologism4

§ 5. Portrait

§ 6. Forms of behavior2

§ 7. Speaking man. Dialogue and monologue3

§ 8. Thing

§9. Nature. Scenery

§ 10. Time and space

§ 11. Plot and its functions

§ 12. Plot and conflict

3. Artistic speech. (stylistics)

§ 1. Artistic speech in its connections with other forms of speech activity

§ 2. Composition of artistic speech

§ 3. Literature and auditory perception of speech

§ 4. Specifics of artistic speech

§ 5. Poetry and prose

4. Text

§ 1. Text as a concept of philology

§ 2. Text as a concept of semiotics and cultural studies

§ 3. Text in postmodern concepts

5. Non-author's word. Literature in literature § 1. Heterogeneity and someone else's word

§ 2. Stylization. Parody. Tale

§ 3. Reminiscence

§ 4. Intertextuality

6. Composition § 1. Meaning of the term

§ 2. Repetitions and variations

§ 3. Motive

§ 4. Detailed image and summative notation. Defaults

§ 5. Subject organization; "point of view"

§ 6. Co- and oppositions

§ 7. Installation

§ 8. Temporal organization of the text

§ 9. Content of the composition

7. Principles for considering a literary work

§ 1. Description and analysis

§ 2. Literary interpretations

§ 3. Contextual learning

Chapter V. Literary genres and genres

1.Kinds of literature § 1.Division of literature into genera

§ 2. Origin of literary genera

§3. Epic

§4.Drama

§ 5.Lyrics

§ 6. Intergeneric and extrageneric forms

2. Genres § 1. About the concept of “genre”

§ 2. The concept of “meaningful form” as applied to genres

§ 3. Novel: genre essence

§ 4. Genre structures and canons

§ 5. Genre systems. Canonization of genres

§ 6. Genre confrontations and traditions

§ 7. Literary genres in relation to extra-artistic reality

Chapter VI. Patterns of literature development

1. Genesis of literary creativity § 1. Meanings of the term

§ 2. On the history of the study of the genesis of literary creativity

§ 3. Cultural tradition in its significance for literature

2. Literary process

§ 1. Dynamics and stability in the composition of world literature

§ 2. Stages of literary development

§ 3. Literary communities (art systems) XIX – XX centuries.

§ 4. Regional and national specificity of literature

§ 5. International literary connections

§ 6. Basic concepts and terms of the theory of the literary process

3. Fiction. Conventionality and life-likeness

Fiction in the early stages of the development of art, as a rule, was not realized: the archaic consciousness did not distinguish between historical and artistic truth. But already in folk tales, which never present themselves as a mirror of reality, conscious fiction is quite clearly expressed. We find judgments about artistic fiction in Aristotle’s “Poetics” (chapter 9—the historian talks about what happened, the poet talks about the possible, about what could happen), as well as in the works of philosophers of the Hellenistic era.

For a number of centuries, fiction has appeared in literary works as a common property, as inherited by writers from their predecessors. Most often, these were traditional characters and plots, which were somehow transformed each time (this was the case (92), in particular, in the drama of the Renaissance and classicism, which widely used ancient and medieval plots).

Much more than was the case before, fiction manifested itself as the individual property of the author in the era of romanticism, when imagination and fantasy were recognized as the most important facet of human existence. "Fantasy<...>- wrote Jean-Paul, - there is something higher, it is the world soul and the elemental spirit of the main forces (such as wit, insight, etc. - V.Kh.)<...>Fantasy is hieroglyphic alphabet nature" 1 . The cult of imagination, characteristic of the beginning of the 19th century, marked the emancipation of the individual, and in this sense constituted a positively significant fact of culture, but at the same time it also had negative consequences (artistic evidence of this is the appearance of Gogol’s Manilov, the fate of the hero of Dostoevsky’s White Nights) .

In the post-romantic era, fiction somewhat narrowed its scope. Flights of imagination of writers of the 19th century. often preferred direct observation of life: characters and plots were close to their prototypes. According to N.S. Leskova, a real writer is a “note-taker,” and not an inventor: “Where a writer ceases to be a note-taker and becomes an inventor, all connection between him and society disappears” 2. Let us also recall Dostoevsky’s well-known judgment that a close eye is capable of detecting in the most ordinary fact “a depth that is not found in Shakespeare” 3 . Russian classical literature was more a literature of conjecture than of fiction as such 4 . At the beginning of the 20th century. fiction was sometimes regarded as something outdated and rejected in the name of recreating a real fact that was documented. This extreme has been disputed 5 . The literature of our century - as before - relies widely on both fiction and non-fictional events and persons. At the same time, the rejection of fiction in the name of following the truth of the fact, in some cases justified and fruitful 6, can hardly become the main line of artistic creativity: without relying on fictional images, art and, in particular, literature are unrepresentable.

Through fiction, the author summarizes the facts of reality, embodies his view of the world, and demonstrates his creative energy. S. Freud argued that artistic fiction is associated with the unsatisfied drives and suppressed desires of the creator of the work and involuntarily expresses them 7 .

The concept of artistic fiction clarifies the boundaries (sometimes very vague) between works that claim to be art and documentary information. If documentary texts (verbal and visual) exclude the possibility of fiction from the outset, then works with the intention of perceiving them as fiction readily allow it (even in cases where the authors limit themselves to recreating actual facts, events, and persons). Messages in literary texts are, as it were, on the other side of truth and lies. At the same time, the phenomenon of artistry can also arise when perceiving a text created with a documentary mindset: “... for this it is enough to say that we are not interested in the truth of this story, that we read it “as if it were the fruit<...>writing" 1.

Forms of “primary” reality (which is again absent in “pure” documentary) are reproduced by the writer (and artist in general) selectively and in one way or another transformed, resulting in a phenomenon that D.S. Likhachev named internal the world of the work: “Every work of art reflects the world of reality in its creative perspectives<...>. The world of a work of art reproduces reality in a certain “abbreviated”, conditional version<...>. Literature takes only some phenomena of reality and then conventionally reduces or expands them” 2.

In this case, there are two trends in artistic imagery, which are designated by the terms convention(the author’s emphasis on non-identity, or even opposition, between what is depicted and the forms of reality) and lifelikeness(leveling such differences, creating the illusion of the identity of art and life). The distinction between convention and life-likeness is already present in the statements of Goethe (article “On truth and verisimilitude in art”) and Pushkin (notes on drama and its improbability). But the relationship between them was especially intensely discussed at the turn of the 19th – (94) 20th centuries. L.N. carefully rejected everything implausible and exaggerated. Tolstoy in his article “On Shakespeare and His Drama.” For K.S. Stanislavsky's expression “conventionality” was almost synonymous with the words “falsehood” and “false pathos.” Such ideas are associated with an orientation towards the experience of Russian realistic literature of the 19th century, the imagery of which was more life-like than conventional. On the other hand, many artists of the early 20th century. (for example, V.E. Meyerhold) preferred conventional forms, sometimes absolutizing their significance and rejecting life-likeness as something routine. Thus, in the article P.O. Jacobson's “On Artistic Realism” (1921) emphasizes conventional, deforming, and difficult techniques for the reader (“to make it more difficult to guess”) and denies verisimilitude, which is identified with realism as the beginning of the inert and epigonic 3 . Subsequently, in the 1930s – 1950s, on the contrary, life-like forms were canonized. They were considered the only acceptable ones for the literature of socialist realism, and convention was suspected of being related to odious formalism (rejected as bourgeois aesthetics). In the l960s, the rights of artistic convention were again recognized. Nowadays, the view has been strengthened that life-likeness and conventionality are equal and fruitfully interacting tendencies of artistic imagery: “like two wings on which creative imagination rests in an indefatigable thirst to find out the truth of life” 4.

At the early historical stages in art, forms of representation prevailed, which are now perceived as conventional. This is, firstly, generated by a public and solemn ritual idealizing hyperbole traditional high genres (epic, tragedy), the heroes of which manifested themselves in pathetic, theatrically effective words, poses, gestures and had exceptional appearance features that embodied their strength and power, beauty and charm. (Remember the epic heroes or Gogol’s Taras Bulba). And secondly, this grotesque, which was formed and strengthened as part of carnival celebrations, acting as a parody, laughter “double” of the solemn-pathetic one, and later acquired programmatic significance for the romantics 1 . It is customary to call the artistic transformation of life forms, leading to some kind of ugly incongruity, to the combination of incompatible things, grotesque. Grotesque in art is akin to paradox in (95) logic. MM. Bakhtin, who studied traditional grotesque imagery, considered it the embodiment of a festive and cheerful free thought: “The grotesque frees us from all forms of inhuman necessity that permeate the prevailing ideas about the world<...>debunks this necessity as relative and limited; grotesque form helps liberation<...>from walking truths, allows you to look at the world in a new way, feel<...>the possibility of a completely different world order” 2. In the art of the last two centuries, the grotesque, however, often loses its cheerfulness and expresses a total rejection of the world as chaotic, frightening, hostile (Goya and Hoffmann, Kafka and the theater of the absurd, to a large extent Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin).

Art initially contains life-like principles, which made themselves felt in the Bible, classical epics of antiquity, and Plato’s dialogues. In the art of modern times, life-likeness almost dominates (the most striking evidence of this is the realistic narrative prose of the 19th century, especially L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov). It is essential for authors who show man in his diversity, and most importantly, who strive to bring what is depicted closer to the reader, to minimize the distance between the characters and the perceiving consciousness. At the same time, in the art of the 19th – 20th centuries. conditional forms were activated (and at the same time updated). Nowadays this is not only traditional hyperbole and grotesque, but also all kinds of fantastic assumptions (“Kholstomer” by L.N. Tolstoy, “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East” by G. Hesse), demonstrative schematization of the depicted (B. Brecht’s plays), exposure of the technique (“ Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin), effects of montage composition (unmotivated changes in place and time of action, sharp chronological “breaks”, etc.).