General properties fiction

Fiction has a whole series features that distinguish it from all other types of art and creative activity.

First of all, this is the use of language, or verbal language means. No other art in the world is based entirely on language, is not created using it alone. expressive means.

The second feature of fiction is that the main subject of its depiction has always been and remains a person, his personality in all its manifestations.

The third feature of fiction should be recognized that it is entirely built on the figurative form of reflecting reality, that is, it strives, with the help of living, concrete, individual and unique forms, to convey the general typical patterns of the development of society.

A work of art as a whole

A literary work of art as a single whole reproduces either a complete picture of life or a complete picture of experiences, but at the same time it represents a separate completed work. The holistic character of a work is given by the unity of the problem posed in it, the unity of the problem revealed in it ideas. Main idea of ​​a work or its ideological meaning - this is the idea that the author wants to convey to the reader, the reason for which the entire work was created. At the same time, in the history of literature there have been cases when the author's intention did not coincide with the final idea of ​​the work (N.V. Gogol " Dead souls"), or a whole group of works was created, united by a common idea (I.S. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons", N.G. Chernyshevsky "What to do").

The main idea of ​​the work is inextricably linked with its topic, that is, the life material that was taken by the author for depiction in this work. Understanding the topic can only be achieved by careful analysis of the literary work as a whole.

Topic, idea belongs to the category content works. Go to category forms works include such elements as composition, consisting of a system of images and plot, genre, style and language of the work. Both of these categories are closely related, which gave the opportunity to the famous literary scholar G.N. Pospelov put forward a thesis about the substantive form and formal content of a literary work of art.

All elements of the form of a work are associated with the definition conflict, that is, the main contradiction that is depicted in the work. Moreover, this can be a clearly expressed conflict between the heroes of a work of art or between an individual hero and an entire social group, between two social groups(A.S. Griboedov “Woe from Wit”). Or it may be that it is not possible to find a really expressed conflict in a work of art, because it exists between the facts of reality depicted by the author of the work and his ideas about how events should develop (N.V. Gogol “The Inspector General”) . Related to this is also such a particular problem as the presence or absence positive hero in the work. foreign literature syntax poetry

The conflict becomes the basis for constructing the plot in the work, since through plot, that is, the system of events in the work, reveals the author’s attitude towards the depicted conflict. As a rule, the plots of works have a deep socio-historical meaning, revealing the causes, nature and development paths of the depicted conflict.

Composition A work of art consists of a plot and a system of images of the work. It is during the development of the plot that characters and circumstances appear in development, and the system of images is revealed in the plot movement.

Image system in the work includes everyone characters, which can be divided into:

• - main and secondary (Onegin - mother of Tatyana Larina),
• - positive and negative (Chatsky - Molchalin),
• - typical (that is, their behavior and actions reflect modern social trends - Pechorin).

National originality of plots and the theory of “wandering” plots. There are so-called "wandering" stories, that is, plots whose conflicts are repeated in different countries and in different eras (the story of Cinderella, the story of the stingy money lender). At the same time, recurring plots take on the coloring of the country where they are currently being embodied in connection with the peculiarities of national development ("The Misanthrope" by Moliere and "Woe from Wit" by A.S. Griboyedov).

Plot elements: prologue, exposition, plot, development of action, climax, denouement, epilogue. Not all of them must be present in a work of art. A plot is impossible only without a plot, a development of action, a climax. All other elements of the plot and their appearance in a work of art depend on the author’s intentions and the specifics of the depicted object.

As a rule, they do not have a plot, that is, a system of events, landscape lyrical works. Sometimes researchers talk about the presence of an internal plot, an internal world of movement of thoughts and feelings.

Prologue- introduction to the main plot of the work.

Exposition- depiction of the conditions for the formation of the characters that existed before the conflict and the character traits that developed under these conditions. The purpose of the exposition is to motivate the subsequent behavior of the characters. The exposition is not always placed at the beginning of the work, it may be absent altogether, it may be located in different places of the work or even at its end, but it always performs the same role - to introduce the environment in which the action will take place.

The beginning- depiction of emerging contradictions, determination of the conflict of characters or the problem posed by the author. Without this element, a work of art cannot exist.

Development of action- detection and reproduction artistic means connections and contradictions between people, the events that occur during the development of the action reveal the characters of the characters and give an idea of ​​​​possible ways to resolve the conflict. Sometimes the development of an action includes entire paths life's quest, characters in their development. This is also a mandatory element for any work of art.

Climax represents the moment highest voltage in the development of action. It is an essential element of the plot and usually leads to an immediate outcome.

Denouement resolves the depicted conflict or leads to an understanding of the possibilities of its solution if the author does not yet have this solution. Quite often in literature there are works with an “open” ending, that is, without a denouement. This is especially common when the author wants the reader to think about the conflict depicted and try to imagine what will happen in the finale.

Epilogue - This is usually the information about the heroes and their fate that the author wants to convey to the reader after the denouement. This is also an optional element of a work of fiction, which the author uses when he believes that the denouement has not sufficiently explained the depiction of the final consequences.

In addition to the above plot elements, there are a number of special additional elements of composition that can be used by the author to convey his thoughts to readers.

The special elements of the composition are considered lyrical digressions. They are found only in epic works and represent digressions, that is, a depiction of feelings, thoughts, experiences, reflections, facts of the biography of the author or his characters, not directly related to the plot line of the work.

Additional elements are considered to be: introductory episodes not directly related to the plot of the narrative, but used to expand and deepen the content of the work.

Artistic framing And artistic preview are also considered additional elements of composition, used to enhance the impact, clarify the meaning of the work, and precede it with episodes of future events that are similar in concept.

Can play a fairly significant compositional role in a work of art. scenery. In a number of works, it not only plays the role of the immediate background against which the action takes place, but also creates a certain psychological atmosphere, serves to internally reveal the character of the character or ideological plan works.

A significant role in the compositional structure of the work is played by interior(that is, a description of the setting in which the action takes place), since it is sometimes the key to understanding and revealing the characters’ characters.

Nowadays, anyone who would like to understand the nature of art comes across many categories; their number is growing. This is the plot, plot, circumstances, character, style, genre, etc. The question arises: is there a category that would unite all the others - without losing their special meaning? It’s enough to put it there to immediately answer: of course it is, it’s a work of art.

Any review of the problems of theory inevitably returns to it. A work of art brings them together into one; from it, in fact, - from contemplation, reading, acquaintance with it - all the questions that a theorist or a person simply interested in art can ask arise, but to it - resolved or unresolved - these questions return, connecting their distant content revealed by analysis with the same general, albeit now enriched, impression.

In a work of art, all these categories are lost in each other - for the sake of something new and always more meaningful than themselves. In other words, the more there are and the more complex they are, the more urgent and important the question becomes of how an artistic whole, complete in itself, but endlessly expanded into the world, is formed and lives with their help.

It is separated from everything that the categories denote on a fairly simple basis: “complete in itself” remains, although old, but perhaps the most precise definition for this distinction. The fact is that the plot, character, circumstances, genres, styles, etc. -

these are still just “languages” of art, the image itself is also a “language”; a work is a statement. It uses and creates these “languages” only to the extent and in those qualities that are necessary for the completeness of its thought. A work cannot be repeated, just as its elements are repeated. They are only historically changing means, a meaningful form; a work is a formalized content that cannot be changed. In it, any means are balanced and disappear, because they are compiled here as proof of something new, which could not be expressed in any other way. When this new thing takes and recreates exactly as many “elements” as are needed to justify it, then a work will be born. It will grow on various sides of the image and, using it in action main principle; here art will begin and the finite, isolated existence of different means, which is so beneficial and convenient for theoretical analysis, will cease.

We must agree that in answering the question about the whole, the theory itself will have to make some switches. That is, since a work of art is, first of all, unique, it will have to generalize, yielding to art, in a manner unusual for itself, within one whole. To talk about a work in general, as one talks, for example, about the structure of an image, would mean moving away from its special theme and place among theoretical problems into something else, for example, into studying the relationships of different aspects of this “general” figurative structure with each other. The work is unique in its purpose; In order to understand this task and its role among other categories of art, it is obvious that one needs to take one among all works.

What to choose? There are thousands of works - perfect and artistic - and most of them are even unknown to any individual reader. Each of them, like a person, carries within itself a root relationship with all the others, an original knowledge that the machine does not possess and which is “programmed” by the entire self-developing nature. Therefore, we can confidently take anything and recognize in it this unique unity, which only gradually reveals itself in the repetition of scientific, provable quantities.

Let us try to consider for this purpose L. Tolstoy’s story “Hadji Murad”. This choice is, of course, arbitrary; however, several arguments can be given in its defense.

Firstly, we are dealing here with undeniable artistry. Tolstoy is known as an artist first of all, possessing incomparable material-figurative-physical power, that is, the ability to capture any detail of the “spirit” in the external movement of nature (compare, for example, Dostoevsky, who is more inclined, as one critic well said, to "hurricane of ideas").

Secondly, this artistry is the most modern; it just managed... to become a classic and is not as distant from us as the systems of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Aeschylus or Homer.

Thirdly, this story was written at the end of the path and, as often happens, carries within itself its condensed conclusion, the result, with a simultaneous exit into future art. Tolstoy did not want to publish it, among other things, because, as he said, “there must be something left after my death.” It was prepared (as an “artistic testament” and turned out to be unusually compact, containing, as if in a drop, all the grandiose discoveries of Tolstoy’s “past”; this is a concise epic, a “digest” prepared by the writer himself, a circumstance very beneficial for the theory.

Finally, it happened that in a short introduction, at the entrance to his own building, Tolstoy, as if on purpose, scattered several stones - the material from which it was indestructibly moved. It’s strange to say, but here all the beginnings of art really lie, and the reader can freely survey them: please, the secret is revealed, perhaps in order to see how great it really is. But still they are named and shown: the emerging idea, and the first small image that is to grow, and the way of thought according to which it will develop; and all three main sources of nutrition, supply, from which it will gain strength - in a word, everything that will begin to move towards the unity of the work.

Here they are, these beginnings.

“I was returning home through the fields. Was the very middle

for the summer. The meadows had been cleared and they were just about to mow the rye.”

These are the first three sentences; Pushkin could have written them - simplicity, rhythm, harmony - and this is no longer accidental. This is really the idea of ​​beauty that comes from Pushkin in Russian literature (in Tolstoy, of course, it arises spontaneously and only as the beginning of his idea); here she will undergo a terrible test. “There is a lovely selection of flowers this time of year,” Tolstoy continues, “red, white, pink, fragrant, fluffy porridge,” etc. A fascinating description of the flowers follows - and suddenly: the image of a black “dead field”, rising steam - all this must perish . “What a destructive, cruel creature man is, how many different living beings and plants he destroyed to sustain his life.” This is no longer Pushkin - “And let the young life play at the entrance to the grave” - no. Tolstoy but he agrees. like Dostoevsky with his “single tear of a child,” like Belinsky, who returned to Yegor Fedorovich Hegel his “philosophical cap,” he does not want to buy progress at the cost of the destruction and death of the beautiful. He believes that a person cannot come to terms with this and is called upon to overcome it at all costs. Here begins his own idea-problem, which sounds in “Resurrection”: “No matter how hard people tried...” and in “The Living Corpse”: “Three people live...”

And now this idea meets with something that seems ready to confirm it. Looking at the black field, the writer notices a plant that nevertheless withstood man - read: the destructive forces of civilization; This is a “Tatar” bush near the road. “What, however, is the energy and strength of life,” and in the diary: “I want to write. Defends life to the last" 1 . At this moment, the “general” idea becomes a special, new, individual idea for the future work.

II. In the process of its origin, it is, therefore, immediately artistic, that is, it appears in the form

1 Tolstoy L.I. Complete. collection soch., vol. 35. M., Goslitizdat, 1928 - 1964. p. 585. In the future, all references are given to this publication, indicating the volume and page.

original image. This image is a comparison of the fate of Hadji Murad, known to Tolstoy, with a “Tatar” bush. From here the idea receives a social direction and is ready, with the passion characteristic of the late Tolstoy, to attack the entire dominant apparatus of human oppression. She takes as her main artistic problem the most acute of all possible situations of her time - the fate of an integral personality in the struggle of systems alienated from her, in other words, that problem that, in a variety of changes, then passed through the literature of the 20th century in its highest examples. However, here it is still only a problem in its infancy; The work will help her become complete and convincing. In addition, in order to develop into art, and not into a logical thesis, it needs various other “substances” - which ones?

III. “And I remembered one old Caucasian story, part of which I saw, part of which I heard from eyewitnesses, and part of which I imagined. This story, the way it developed in my memory and imagination, is what it is.”

So, they are highlighted, and you only need to put signs to delimit these separate sources of art: a) life, reality, fact - what Tolstoy calls “heard from eyewitnesses,” that is, this includes, of course, documents, preserved objects, the books and letters he reread and revised; b) the material of consciousness - “memory” - which is already united according to its internal personal principle, and not according to some disciplines - military, diplomatic, etc.; c) “imagination” - a way of thought that will lead accumulated values ​​to new, still unknown ones.

We can only take one last look at these origins and say goodbye to them, because we will not see them again. The next line - and the first chapter - begins the work itself, where there are no traces of a separate memory, or references to an eyewitness, or imagination - “it seems to me that it could have been like this,” but just a man riding on a horse on a cold November evening , with whom we have to meet, who does not suspect that we are following him and what he reveals to us with his behavior

great problems of human existence. And the author, who appeared at the beginning, also disappeared, even - paradoxically - the work that we picked up was gone: what remained was a window into life, opened by the single effort of idea, fact and imagination.

Having crossed the threshold of the work, we thus find ourselves inside a wholeness that is so hostile to dismemberment that even the very fact of reasoning about it contains a contradiction: in order to explain such unity, it seems more correct to simply rewrite the work, rather than reason and investigate what only again brings us back to the scattered, although aimed at pairing, “elements”.

True, there is one natural way out.

After all, the integrity of a work is not some kind of absolute point, devoid of dimensions; a work has its length, its own artistic time, order in the alternation and transition from one “language” to another (plot, character, circumstances, etc.), and more often - in the change of those special life-like positions that these “languages” combine. The mutual arrangement and connection within the work, of course, pave and trace many natural roads to its unity; the analyst can also go through them. They are, in addition; as a general phenomenon, has long been examined and is called composition.

Composition is a disciplinary force and organizer of a work. She is entrusted with ensuring that nothing breaks out to the side, into its own law, but that it is combined into a whole and turns to complement its thoughts: she controls artistry in all joints and the general plan. Therefore, it usually does not accept either logical derivation and subordination, or simple life sequence, although it is very similar to it; its goal is to arrange all the pieces so that they close into a complete expression of the idea.

The construction of “Hadji Murad” grew out of Tolstoy’s many years of observations of his own and others’ works, although the writer himself strongly opposed this work, which was far from moral self-improvement. Painstakingly and slowly, he turned over and rearranged the chapters of his “burdock”, trying to find a solution

the perfect frame of the work. “I will do it on my own little by little,” he said in a letter to M. L. Obolenskaya, having previously said that he was “on the edge of the coffin” (vol. 35, p. 620) and that therefore he was ashamed to deal with such trifles. In the end, he managed to achieve rare orderliness and harmony in the vast scheme of this story.

Thanks to his originality, Tolstoy was for a long time incomparable with the great realists of the West. He alone walked the path of entire generations from the epic scope of the Russian “Iliad” to a new high-conflict novel and a compact story. As a result, if you look at his works in the general flow of realistic literature, then, for example, the novel “War and Peace,” which stands out as one of the highest achievements of the 19th century, may seem like an anachronism in terms of purely literary technique. In this work, Tolstoy, according to B. Eikhenbaum, who exaggerates somewhat, but on the whole is right here, treats “with complete contempt for harmonious architectonics” 1. The classics of Western realism, Turgenev and other writers in Russia had already managed to create a special dramatized novel with one central character and a clearly limited composition.

Balzac's programmatic remarks about “The Monastery of Parma” - a work very beloved by Tolstoy - make one feel the difference between a professional writer and such apparently “spontaneous” artists as Stendhal or Tolstoy of the first half of his creative career. Balzac criticizes the looseness and disintegration of the composition. In his opinion, the events in Parma and the story of Fabrizio are developed into two independent themes of the novel. Abbot Blanes falls out of action. Balzac objects to this: “The dominant law is the unity of composition; There may be unity in a common idea or plan, but without it confusion will reign” 2 . One must think that if War and Peace had been in front of him, the head of the French realists, expressing admiration perhaps no less than for Stendhal’s novel, would not have failed to make similar reservations.

1 Eikhenbaum B. Young Tolstoy, 1922, p. 40.

2 Balzac on art. M. - L., “Iskusstvo”, 1941, p. 66.

It is known, however, that towards the end of his life Balzac begins to retreat from his rigid principles. A good example is his book “The Peasants,” which loses its proportionality due to psychological and other digressions. A researcher of his work writes: “Psychology, as a kind of commentary on action, shifting attention from the event to its cause, undermines the powerful structure of Balzac’s novel” 1. It is also known that in the future, critical realists of the West gradually decomposed the clear forms of the novel, filling them with sophisticated psychologism (Flaubert, later Maupassant), subordinating documentary materials to the action of biological laws (Zola), etc. Meanwhile, Tolstoy, as Rosa Luxemburg so well said , “walking indifferently against the flow” 2, strengthened and purified his art.

Therefore, for now - as a general law - the works of Western novelists late XIX- the beginning of the 20th century are moving further and further away from the harmonious plot, blurring into fractional psychological details, Tolstoy, on the contrary, rids his “dialectics of the soul” of uncontrolled generosity in shades and reduces the former multi-subjectness to a single plot. At the same time, he dramatizes the action of his large works, chooses a conflict that explodes more and more each time, and does this at the same depths of psychology as before.

Great general changes occur in the formal structure of his creations.

The dramatic change of paintings is grouped around an ever smaller number of main images; family and love couples, of which there are so many in War and Peace, are reduced first to two lines of Anna - Vronsky, Kitty - Levin, then to one: Nekhlyudov - Katyusha and, finally, in Hadji Murat they disappear completely, so Nekrasov’s well-known reproach to “Anna Karenina” for excessive attention to adultery, and in itself unfair, could no longer be addressed to this thoroughly social story. This epic drama centers on one man, one big...

1 Reizov B. G. The work of Balzac. L., Goslitizdat, 1939, p. 376.

2 About Tolstoy. Collection. Ed. V. M. Fritsche. M. - L., GIZ, 1928, p. 124.

an event that unites everything else around itself (this is the pattern of the path from “War and Peace” to “Anna Karenina”, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, “The Living Corpse” and “Hadji Murat”). At the same time, the scale of the problems raised does not fall and the volume of life captured in artistic scenes is not diminished - due to the fact that the significance of each person is increased, and the fact that the internal connection of their relations to each other as units of common thought is more emphasized.

Our theoretical literature has already spoken about how the polarities of Russian life in the 19th century influenced artistic consciousness, putting forward a new type of artistic development of contradictions and enriching forms of thinking in general 1 . Here we must add that the very principle of polarity innovatively expanded the forms of composition in Tolstoy towards the end of his career. It can be said that thanks to him, in “Resurrection”, “Hadji Murad” and other later works of Tolstoy, the general laws of distribution of the image within the work were more clearly revealed and sharpened. The quantities reflected in each other lost their intermediary links, moved away from each other to enormous distances - but each of them began to serve here as a semantic center for all the others.

You can take any of them - the smallest event in the story - and immediately we will see that it deepens and becomes clearer as we get acquainted with every detail that is distant from it; at the same time, each such detail receives a new meaning and evaluation through this event.

For example, the death of Avdeev - a soldier was killed in a random shootout. What his death means for various human psychology, laws and social institutions and what they all mean for him, a peasant son, is laid out in a fan of details that flashed just as “accidentally” as his death.

“I just started loading, I heard a click... I looked, and he released the gun,” repeats the soldier who was paired with Avdeev, obviously shocked by the ordinariness of what could happen to him.

1 See: Gachev G. D. Development of imaginative consciousness in literature. - Theory of literature. Main problems in historical coverage, vol. 1. M., Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962, p. 259 - 279.

“Here you go,” Poltoratsky (company commander) clicked his tongue. P.P.). - Well, does it hurt, Avdeev?..” (To the sergeant major. - P.P.):“Well, okay, you give the orders,” he added and, “swinging his whip, he rode at a fast trot towards Vorontsov.”

Jurying Poltoratsky for the shootout (it was provoked in order to present Baron Frese, demoted for a duel, to the order), Prince Vorontsov casually inquires about the event:

“I heard that a soldier was wounded?

Yes, it's a shame. The soldier is good.

It seems hard - in the stomach.

And I, do you know where I’m going?”

And the conversation turns to a more important subject: Vorontsov is going to meet Hadji Murad.

“Who is prescribed what,” say the patients in the hospital where Petrukha was brought.

Immediately, “the doctor spent a long time poking around in the stomach with a probe and felt the bullet, but could not get it out. Having bandaged the wound and sealed it with an adhesive plaster, the doctor left.”

The military clerk informs his relatives about Avdeev’s death in the wording that he writes according to tradition, hardly thinking about its content: he was killed “defending the tsar, the fatherland and the Orthodox faith.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in a remote Russian village, these relatives, although they try to forget him (“the soldier was a cut-off piece”), still remember him, and the old woman, his mother, even decided to somehow send him a ruble with a letter: “ And also, my dear child, my little dove Petrushenka, I cried my little eyes out...” The old man, her husband, who was delivering the letter to the city, “ordered the janitor to read the letter to himself and listened to him attentively and approvingly.”

But, having received news of death, the old woman “howled as long as there was time, and then got to work.”

And Avdeev’s wife, Aksinya, who mourned in public “Peter Mikhailovich’s light brown curls,” “deep down in her soul... was glad of Peter’s death. She was again made pregnant by the clerk with whom she lived.”

The impression is completed by an excellent military report, where Avdeev’s death turns into some kind of clerical myth:

“On November 23, two companies of the Kurinsky regiment set out from the fortress to cut down forest. In the middle of the day, a significant crowd of mountaineers suddenly attacked the hewers. The chain began to retreat, and at this time the second company struck with bayonets and overthrew the highlanders. In the case, two privates were slightly wounded and one was killed. The mountaineers lost about a hundred people killed and wounded.”

These amazing little things are scattered in different places in the work and each stands in the natural continuation of its own, different event, but, as we see, they were composed by Tolstoy in such a way that between them one or another whole is closed - we took only one!

Another example is a raid on a village.

Cheerful, having just escaped from St. Petersburg, Butler eagerly absorbs new impressions from the proximity of the highlanders and danger: “It’s either business or business, huntsmen, huntsmen!” - his songwriters sang. His horse walked with a cheerful step to this music. The company's shaggy, gray Trezorka, like a boss, twirled his tail and ran in front of Butler's company with a worried look. My soul was cheerful, calm and cheerful.”

His boss, the drunken and good-natured Major Petrov, views this expedition as a familiar, everyday matter.

“So that’s how it is, father,” said the major during the interval of the song. - Not like you have in St. Petersburg: alignment to the right, alignment to the left. But we worked hard and went home.”

What they “worked on” can be seen from the next chapter, which tells about the victims of the raid.

The old man, who rejoiced when Hadji Murad ate his honey, has now just “returned from his beekeeping. The two stacks of hay that were there were burned... all the hives with bees were burned.”

His grandson, “that handsome boy with sparkling eyes who looked enthusiastically at Hadji Murad (when Hadji Murad visited their house. - P.P.), was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a cloak. He was pierced with a bayonet in the back...” etc., etc.

Again the whole event was restored, but through what a contradiction! Where is the truth, who is to blame, and if so, then how much, for example, the thoughtless campaigner Petrov, who cannot be different, and young Butler, and the Chechens.

Isn't Butler a man and his songwriters? Questions arise here by themselves - in the direction of the idea, but none of them finds a frontal, one-sided answer, bumping into another. Even in one “local” unity the complexity artistic thought makes everything dependent on each other, but at the same time, as it were, accelerates and kindles the need to embrace, understand, and balance this complexity in the whole truth. Feeling this incompleteness, all “local” unities move towards the whole that the work represents.

They intersect in all directions at thousands of points, form unexpected combinations and tend to express one idea - without losing their “self.”

All large categories of the image, for example, characters, behave this way. They, of course, also participate in this intersection, and the main compositional principle penetrates into their own core. This principle consists in placing, unexpectedly for logic, any uniqueness and opposition on some axis passing through the center of the image. The external logic of one sequence breaks down when it collides with another. Between them, in their struggle, artistic truth gains strength. The fact that Tolstoy took special care of this is shown by the entries in his diaries.

For example, on March 21, 1898: “There is such an English toy peepshow - under the glass one thing or another is shown. This is how you need to show a person H(adzhi)-M(urat): husband, fanatic, etc.”

Or: May 7, 1901: “I saw in a dream the type of old man who I anticipated in Chekhov. The old man was especially good because he was almost a saint, and yet a drinker and a curser. For the first time, I clearly understood the power that types acquire from boldly applied shadows. I will do this on Kh(adzhi)-M(urat) and M(arya) D(mitrievna)” (vol. 54, p. 97).

Polarity, that is, the destruction of external consistency for the sake of internal unity, led the characters of the late Tolstoy to a sharp artistic “reduction,” that is, the removal of various intermediate links, according to which in another case there should have been

go reader's thought; this reinforced the impression of extraordinary courage and truth. For example, comrade prosecutor Brevet (in “Resurrection”) graduated from high school with a gold medal, received a prize at the university for an essay on easements, is successful with the ladies and “as a result of this is extremely stupid.” The Georgian prince at Vorontsov’s dinner is “very stupid,” but has a “gift”: he is “an unusually subtle and skillful flatterer and courtier.”

In the versions of the story there is the following remark about one of Hadji Murad’s murids, Kurban; “Despite his obscurity and not a brilliant position, he was consumed by ambition and dreamed of overthrowing Shamil and taking his place” (vol. 35, p. 484). In the same way, by the way, one “bailiff with a large package was mentioned, in which there was a project about a new method of conquering the Caucasus,” etc.

Any of these particular unities was noticed and distinguished by Tolstoy from outwardly incompatible ones assigned to different series of characteristics. The image, expanding its space, breaks and breaks open these rows one after another; polarities become larger; the idea receives new evidence and confirmation.

It becomes clear that all its so-called contrasts are, on the contrary, the most natural continuation and steps towards the unity of artistic thought, its logic. They are “contrasts” only if we assume that they are supposedly “shown”; but they are not shown, but proven, and in this artistic proof they not only do not contradict each other, but are simply impossible and meaningless without the other.

Only for this they continually reveal themselves and move the story towards a tragic end. They are especially felt in places of transition from one chapter or scene to another. For example, Poltoratsky, who returns in an enthusiastic mood from the charming Marya Vasilievna after small talk and says to his Vavila: “Why did you decide to lock it up?! Blockhead!. Here I will show you...” - there is the most convincing logic of the movement of this general thought, as well as the transition from the wretched hut of the Avdeevs to the Vorontsov palace, where “the head waiter solemnly poured steaming soup from a silver bowl,” or from the end of the story of Hadji Murad Loris- Melikov: “I am tied, and the end of the rope is with Shamil in

hand” - to Vorontsov’s exquisitely cunning letter: “I didn’t write to you with my last post, dear prince...”, etc.

From the compositional subtleties, it is curious that these contrasting pictures, in addition to the general idea of ​​the story - the story of the “burr”, also have special transitions formed within them that transfer the action, without breaking it, to the next episode. So, we are introduced to the emperor’s palace by a letter from Vorontsov to Chernyshev with a request about the fate of Hadji Murad, which, that is, fate, depends entirely on the will of those to whom this letter was sent. And the transition from the palace to the chapter about the raid directly follows from Nicholas’s decision to burn and ravage the villages. The transition to Hadji Murat's family was prepared by his conversations with Butler and the fact that the news from the mountains was bad, etc. In addition, spies, couriers, and messengers rush from picture to picture. It turns out that the next chapter necessarily continues the previous one precisely because of the contrast. And thanks to the same thing, the idea of ​​the story, while developing, remains not abstract scientific, but humanly alive.

In the end, the range of the story becomes extremely large, because its grandiose initial idea: civilization - man - the indestructibility of life - requires the exhaustion of all “earthly spheres”. The idea “calms down” and reaches its culmination only when the entire plan corresponding to itself passes through: from the royal palace to the Avdeev court, through ministers, courtiers, governors, officers, translators, soldiers, across both hemispheres of despotism from Nicholas to Petrukha Avdeev, from Shamil to Gamzalo and Chechens prancing and singing “La ilakha il alla.” Only then does it become a work. Here it achieves general harmony and proportionality in complementing each other with different sizes.

In two key places of the story, that is, at the beginning and at the end, the movement of the composition slows down, although the speed of the action, on the contrary, increases; The writer here plunges into the most difficult and complex work of starting and untying events. The unusual fascination with details is also explained by the importance of these supporting paintings for the work.

The first eight chapters cover only what happens during one day during the release of Had-

Zhi-Murat to the Russians. In these chapters, a method of opposition is revealed: Hadji Murat in Sado’s hut (I) - soldiers in the open air (II) - Semyon Mikhailovich and Marya Vasilievna Vorontsov behind heavy curtains at the card table and with champagne (III) - Hadji Murat with nukers in the forest (IV) - Poltoratsky's company in the wood cutting, Avdeev's wound, Hadji Murat's exit (V) - Hadji Murat visiting Marya Vasilyevna (VI) - Avdeev in the Vozdvizhensky hospital (VII) - Avdeev's peasant yard (VIII). The connecting threads between these contrasting scenes are: envoys from Naib Vorontsov, a notice from a military clerk, a letter from an old woman, etc. The action fluctuates, then running several hours ahead (the Vorontsovs go to bed at three o’clock, and the next chapter begins late in the evening), then going back.

The story thus has its own artistic time, but its connection with external, given time is also not lost: to give a convincing impression that the action takes place on the same night, Tolstoy, barely noticeable to the reader, “looks” several times at the starry sky. The soldiers have a secret: “ Bright stars, which seemed to be running along the tops of the trees while the soldiers were walking through the forest, now stopped, shining brightly between the bare branches of the trees.” After a while they said: “Everything was quiet again, only the wind moved the branches of the trees, now opening and now closing the stars.” Two hours later: “Yes, the stars have already begun to go out,” said Avdeev.”

That same night (IV) Hadji Murat leaves the village of Mekhet: “There was no month, but the stars shone brightly in the black sky.” After he galloped into the forest: “... in the sky, although faintly, the stars were shining.” And finally, there, at dawn: “... while the weapons were being cleaned... the stars dimmed.” The most precise unity is maintained in other ways: the soldiers secretly hear the very howl of the jackals that woke up Hadji Murad.

For the external connection of the last paintings, the action of which takes place in the vicinity of Nukha, Tolstoy chooses nightingales, young grass, etc., which are depicted in the same detail. But we will find this “natural” unity only in the framing chapters. Transitions between chapters and stories are carried out in completely different ways.

talking about Vorontsov, Nikolai, Shamil. But they also do not violate the harmonic proportions; It’s not for nothing that Tolstoy shortened the chapter about Nicholas, throwing out many impressive details (for example, the fact that his favorite musical instrument was the drum, or the story about his childhood and the beginning of his reign) in order to leave only those features that most accurately correlate in their inner essence with the other pole of absolutism, Shamil.

By creating a holistic idea of ​​the work, the composition brings into unity not only the large definitions of the image, but also, of course, coordinates the speech style and syllable with them.

In “Hadji Murad” this affected the writer’s choice, after much hesitation, of which form of narration would be best for the story: on behalf of Leo Tolstoy or the conventional narrator - an officer who served at that time in the Caucasus. The artist’s diary preserved these doubts: “H(adzhi)-M(urata) thought a lot and prepared materials. I can’t find the tone” (November 20, 1897). The initial version of “Burmock” is presented in such a way that although it does not contain a direct first-person story, the narrator’s invisibly presence is preserved, as in “ Caucasian prisoner"; in the style of speech one senses an outside observer who does not pretend to psychological subtleties and large generalizations.

“In 1852, a military commander, Ivan Matveevich Kanatchikov, lived with his wife Marya Dmitrievna in one of the Caucasian fortresses. They had no children...” (vol. 35, p. 286) - and further in the same spirit: “As Marya Dmitrievna planned, so she did everything” (vol. 35, p. 289); about Hadji Murad: “He was tormented by terrible melancholy, and the weather was suitable for his mood” (vol. 35, p. 297). About halfway through the work on the story, Tolstoy simply introduces an officer-witness who reinforces this style with meager information about his biography.

But the plan grows, new people big and small are involved in the matter, new scenes appear, and the officer becomes helpless. The huge influx of paintings is cramped in this limited field of vision, and Tolstoy parted with it, but not without pity: “Before,

The message was written as if it were an autobiography, but now it is written objectively. Both have their advantages” (vol. 35, p. 599).

Why, after all, did the writer lean towards the advantages of the “objective”?

The decisive factor here was - this is obvious - the development of the artistic idea, which required “divine omniscience.” The modest officer could not cover all the causes and consequences of Hadji Murad's exit to the Russians and his death. This big world Only the world, knowledge and imagination of Tolstoy himself could match.

When the composition of the story was freed from the “with the officer” plan, the structure of individual episodes within the work also shifted. Everywhere the conventional narrator began to disappear and the author began to take his place. Thus, the scene of the death of Hadji Murat, which in the fifth edition was conveyed through the mouth of Kamenev, was peppered with his words and interrupted by exclamations of Ivan Matveyevich and Marya Dmitrievna. In the last version, Tolstoy discarded this form, leaving only: “And Kamenev told,” and with the next sentence, deciding not to trust this story to Kamenev, he preceded Chapter XXV with the words: “This is how it happened.”

Having become a “small” world, the style of the story freely accepted and expressed the polarity with the help of which the “big” world developed, that is, a work with its many sources and variegated material. Tolstoy's soldiers, nukers, ministers, and peasants began to speak on their own, without regard to external communication. It is interesting that in such a construction it turned out to be possible - as it is always possible in a truly artistic creation - to direct towards unity that which by its nature is designed to isolate, separate, and consider in an abstract connection.

For example, Tolstoy's own rationalism. The word “analysis”, so often uttered near Tolstoy, is, of course, not accidental. Taking a closer look at how his people feel, one can notice that these feelings are conveyed through ordinary dissection, so to speak, translation into the realm of thought. From this it is easy to conclude that Tolstoy was the father and forerunner of modern intellectual literature; but this is of course

far from the truth. The point is not which form of thought lies on the surface; an outwardly impressionistic, scattered style can be essentially abstract and logical, as was the case with the Expressionists; on the contrary, Tolstoy’s strict rationalistic style turns out to be not strict at all and reveals in every phrase an abyss of incompatibilities that are compatible and consistent only in the idea of ​​the whole. This is the style of Hadji Murad. For example: “The eyes of these two people, having met, told each other many things that could not be expressed in words, and certainly not at all what the translator said. They directly, without words, expressed the whole truth about each other: Vorontsov’s eyes said that he did not believe a single word of everything that Hadji Murat said, that he knew that he was an enemy of everything Russian, and would always remain so even now submits only because he is forced to do so. And Hadji Murat understood this and still assured of his devotion. Hadji Murad’s eyes said that this old man should have thought about death, and not about war, but that, although he was old, he was cunning, and one must be careful with him.”

It is clear that rationalism here is purely external. Tolstoy doesn’t even care about the obvious contradiction: first he claims that the eyes said “the unspeakable in words,” then immediately begins to report what exactly they “said.” But still he is right, because he himself really speaks not in words, but in statements; his thought comes in flashes of those collisions that are formed from the incompatibility of words and thoughts, feelings and behavior of the translator, Vorontsov and Hadji Murad.

The thesis and thought may stand at the beginning - Tolstoy loves them very much - but the real thought, the artistic one, will somehow become clear in the end, through everything that has happened, and the first thought will turn out to be only a sharpened moment of unity in it.

Actually, we observed this principle already in the beginning of the story. This short exposition, like the prologue in a Greek tragedy, foreshadows what will happen to the hero. There is a tradition that Euripides explained such an introduction by saying that he considered it unworthy for the author to intrigue the viewer with an unexpected twist.

gate of action. Tolstoy also neglects this. His lyrical page about the burdock anticipates the fate of Hadji Murat, although in many cases the conflict moved not after the “ploughed field”, but right from the moment of the quarrel between Hadji Murad and Shamil. This same “introduction” is repeated in small exhibitions of some scenes and images. For example, before the end of the story, Tolstoy again resorts to the “Greek chorus” technique, notifying the reader once again that Hadji Murat was killed: Kamenev brings his head in a bag. And in the construction of secondary characters the same bold tendency is revealed. Tolstoy, without fear of losing attention, immediately declares: this man is stupid, or cruel, or “who does not understand life without power and without obedience,” as is said about Vorontsov Sr. But this statement becomes undeniable for the reader only after several completely opposite (for example, this person’s opinion of himself) scene-pictures.

In the same way as rationalism and “thesis” introductions, numerous documentary information entered into the unity of the story. They did not need to be specially hidden and processed, because the sequence and connection of thoughts were not maintained by them.

Meanwhile, the history of the creation of “Hadji Murad,” if traced through variants and materials, as A.P. Sergeenko did 1, really resembled the history of a scientific discovery. Dozens of people worked in different parts of Russia, searching for new data; the writer himself re-read piles of material for seven years.

In the development of the whole, Tolstoy moved “in leaps and bounds”, from the accumulated material to a new chapter, with the exception of the scene in the Avdeevs’ courtyard, which he, as an expert on peasant life, wrote immediately and did not redo. The remaining chapters required a wide variety of “inlays”.

A few examples. The article by A.P. Sergeenko cites a letter from Tolstoy to the mother of Karganov (one of the characters in Hadji Murat), where he asks that “dear Anna Avesealomovna” tell him something

1 Sergeenko A.P. “Hadji Murat.” History of Scripture (Afterword) - Tolstoy L.N. Complete. collection cit., vol. 35.

Some facts about Hadji Murad, and in particular... “Whose horses were he wanted to run on. His own or given to him. And were these horses good, and what color?” The text of the story convinces us that these requests stemmed from an indomitable desire to convey all the diversity and diversity required by the plan through accuracy. So, during Hadji Murad’s exit to the Russians, “Poltoratsky was given his little Karak Kabardian,” “Vorontsov rode on his English, blood-red red stallion,” and Hadji Murad “on a white-maned horse”; another time, when meeting with Butler, under Hadji Murad there was already a “handsome red-and-mauve horse with a small head, beautiful eyes,” etc. Another example. In 1897, Tolstoy wrote, while reading “A Collection of Information about the Caucasian Highlanders”: “They climb onto the roof to see the procession.” And in the chapter about Shamil we read: “All the people of the large village of Vedeno stood on the street and on the roofs, meeting their master.”

Precision in the story is found everywhere: ethnographic, geographical, etc., even medical. For example, when Hadji Murad’s head was cut off, Tolstoy noted with unchanging calm: “Scarlet blood gushed from the arteries of the neck and black from the head.”

But it is precisely this precision - the last example is especially expressive - that is taken in the story, as it turns out, in order to push the polarities further and further, to isolate, to remove every little thing, to show that each of them is in its own, as if tightly closed from others, a box that has a name, and with it a profession, a specialty for the people engaged in it, while in fact its true and highest meaning is not there at all, but in the meaning of life - at least for the person who stands in the center of them. The blood is scarlet and black, but these signs are especially meaningless in front of the question: why was it shed? And - wasn’t the man right who defended his life to the last?

Scientificity and precision, therefore, also serve artistic unity; moreover, in it, in this whole, they become channels for spreading the thought of unity outward, to all spheres of life, including to ourselves. A specific, historical, limited fact, document becomes unlimitedly close

for everyone. The boundaries between art defined in time and place and life itself in a broad sense are collapsing.

In fact, few people think when reading that “Hadji Murat” is a historical story, that Nikolai, Shamil, Vorontsov and others are people who lived without a story, on their own. No one is looking for a historical fact - whether it happened or not, what was confirmed - because the stories about these people are many times more interesting than could be extracted from the documents that history has left behind. At the same time, as stated, the story does not contradict any of these documents. He simply looks through them or guesses them in such a way that extinct life is restored between them - it runs like a stream along a dry riverbed. Some facts, external, known, entail others, imaginary and deeper, which even when they happened could neither be verified nor left for posterity - they seemed to be irretrievably gone in their precious single content. Here they are restored, returned from oblivion, and become part of the reader’s contemporary life - thanks to the life-giving activity of the image.

And - a wonderful thing! - when it happens that these new facts can somehow be verified from the wreckage of the past, they are confirmed. Unity, it turns out, has reached them too. One of the miracles of art is happening (miracles, of course, only from the point of view of logical calculation, which does not know this internal relationship with the whole world and believes that unknown fact you can only get there by following the law) - from the transparent emptiness the noise and cries of a bygone life are suddenly heard, as in that scene in Rabelais, when the battle “frozen” in ancient times thawed.

Here is a small (at first extraneous) example: Nekrasov’s sketch of Pushkin. It’s as if a landscape sketch is not a portrait, but rather a fleeting representation, in the verses “About the Weather.”

The old delivery man tells Nekrasov about his ordeals:

I’ve been babysitting Sovremennik for a long time:

I took it to Alexander Sergeich.

And now it’s the thirteenth year

I carry everything to Nikolai Alekseich, -

Gene lives on Lee...

He visited, according to him, many writers: Bulgarin, Voeikov, Zhukovsky...

I went to Vasily Andreich,

I haven’t seen a penny from him,

No match for Alexander Sergeich -

He often gave me vodka.

But he reproached everything with censorship:

If the Reds meet crosses,

So he will send proofs at you:

Get out, you say!

Watching a man die

Once I said: “It will do just like that!”

This is blood, he says, being shed, -

My blood - you are a fool!..

It's hard to convey why this small excerpt This is how Pushkin’s personality suddenly illuminates us; brighter than a dozen historical novels about him, including very smart and learned ones. In a nutshell, of course, we can say: because he is highly artistic, that is, he captures, according to the facts known to us, something important from Pushkin’s soul - temperament, passion, the loneliness of his genius in the literary and bureaucratic fraternity (not to mention the world) , hot temper and simplicity, suddenly breaking into bitter mockery. However, still listing these qualities does not mean explaining and unraveling this image; it was created by artistic, integral thought, which restored the life-like trifle, the detail of Pushkin’s behavior. But what? Having examined it, then we can suddenly come across a fact saved in Pushkin’s correspondence - from a completely different time and a different situation, from his youth - where the expressions and spirit of speech completely coincide with Nekrasov’s portrait! Letter to P. A. Vyazemsky dated February 19, 1825: “Tell Mukhanov from me that it is a sin for him to joke magazine jokes with me. Without asking, he took the beginning of the Gypsies from me and spread it around the world. Barbarian! because this is my blood, because this is money! Now I have to print out the Tsyganov, and not the time at all” 1 .

In Hadji Murat this principle of artistic “resurrection” was expressed, perhaps, more fully than anywhere else in Tolstoy. This work is in the most precise sense - a reproduction. His realism recreates what has already happened, repeats the flow of life in moments that give the focus of everything that happened in something personal, free, individual: you look - this fictitious past turns out to be a fact.

Here is Nikolai, who is taken from documentary data and accelerated, so to speak, from there into such self-propulsion that a new document is restored in him, one that was not initially “embedded” in him. We can check this through the same Pushkin.

Tolstoy has one of the persistent external leitmotifs - Nikolai “frowns”. This happens to him in moments of impatience and anger, when he dares to be disturbed by something that he has decisively condemned: irrevocably, long ago and therefore has no right to exist. An artistic find in the spirit of this personality.

“What's your last name? - Nikolai asked.

Brzezowski.

“Polish origin and Catholic,” answered Chernyshev.

Nikolai frowned."

Or: “Seeing the uniform of the school, which he did not like for its free-thinking, Nikolai Pavlovich frowned, but his tall stature and diligent stretching and saluting with the student’s emphatically protruding elbow softened his displeasure.

What's your last name? - he asked.

Polosatov! Your Imperial Majesty.

Well done!"

Now let's look at Pushkin's random testimony, which has nothing to do with the story of Hadji Murad. Nikolai was “photographed” wearing it in 1833, that is, twenty years before the time that Tolstoy described, and without the slightest desire to “go deeper” into the image.

“Here’s the thing,” Pushkin writes to M.P. Pogodin, “by our agreement, for a long time I was planning to seize the time,

to ask the sovereign to hire you as an employee. Yes, everything somehow didn’t work out. Finally, at Maslenitsa, the Tsar once spoke to me about Peter I, and I immediately told him that it was impossible for me to work alone on the archives and that I needed the help of an enlightened, intelligent and active scientist. The Emperor asked who I needed, and at your name he frowned (he confuses you with Polevoy; excuse me generously; he is not a very solid writer, although he is a fine fellow and a glorious king). I somehow managed to recommend you, and D.N. Bludov corrected everything and explained that the only thing in common between you and Polevoy is the first syllable of your last names. Added to this was Benckendorf’s favorable review. Thus the matter is coordinated; and the archives are open to you (except for the secret ones)” 1.

Before us, of course, is a coincidence, but what is the correctness of repetition - in what is unique, in the little things of life! Nikolai came across something familiar - immediate anger (“frowned”), now it’s difficult for him to explain anything (“I somehow,” writes Pushkin, “managed to recommend you...”); then some deviation from the expected still “mitigates his displeasure.” Perhaps in life there was no such repetition, but in art - from a similar position - it was resurrected and from an insignificant stroke became an important moment of artistic thought. It is especially pleasant that this “movement” into the image occurred with the help, albeit without the knowledge, of two geniuses of our literature. We observe in undeniable examples the process of spontaneous generation of an image in the primary conjugating detail and at the same time the power of art, capable of restoring a fact.

And one more thing: Pushkin and Tolstoy, as one can guess here, are united in the most general artistic approach to the subject; art as a whole, as can be understood even from such a small example, rests on one foundation, has a single principle - despite all the contrast and difference in styles, manners, and historically established trends.

As for Nicholas I, Russian literature had a special regard for him. Still not written yet

1 Pushkin A. S. Complete. collection cit., vol. X, p. 428.

although fragmentarily known, the history of this person’s relations with Russian writers, journalists, publishers and poets. Nicholas dispersed most of them, gave them up as soldiers or killed them, and pestered the rest with police tutelage and fantastic advice.

The well-known Herzen list in this sense is far from complete. It lists only the dead, but does not contain many facts about the systematic strangulation of the living - about how Pushkin’s best creations were put on the table, distorted by the highest hand, how Benckendorff was set even against such an innocent, in Tyutchev’s words, “dove” as Zhukovsky, and Turgenev was put under arrest for his sympathetic response to the death of Gogol, etc., etc.

Leo Tolstoy repaid Nikolai for everyone with his “Hadji Murad”. It was, therefore, not only artistic, but also historical revenge. However, in order for it to be accomplished so brilliantly, it still had to be artistic. It was art that was needed to revive Nicholas for a public trial. This was done by satire - another of the unifying means of this artistic whole.

The fact is that Nikolai in “Hadji Murad” is not just one of the polarities of the work, he is an actual pole, an ice cap that freezes life. Somewhere at the other end there should be its opposite, but, as the plan of the work reveals, there is the same hat - Shamil. From this ideological and compositional discovery in the story, a completely new, apparently unique in world literature, type of realistic satire is born - a cross-cutting parallel exposure. Due to their mutual similarity, Nikolai and Shamil destroy each other.

Even the simplicity of these creatures turns out to be deceitful.

“In general, the imam did not have anything shiny, gold or silver, and his tall... figure... gave the same impression of greatness,

“... returned to his room and lay down on the narrow, hard bed, of which he was proud, and covered himself with his cloak, which he considered (and so said)

which he desired and knew how to produce among the people.”

ril) as famous as Napoleon's hat..."

Both of them are aware of their insignificance and therefore hide it even more carefully.

“...despite the public recognition of his campaign as a victory, he knew that his campaign was unsuccessful.”

“...although he was proud of his strategic abilities, deep down he was aware that he did not have them.”

The majestic influx, which, according to despots, should shock their subordinates and instill in them the idea of ​​​​communication between the ruler and the supreme being, was noticed by Tolstoy even in Napoleon (trembling legs is a “great sign”). Here it rises to a new point.

“When the advisers talked about this, Shamil closed his eyes and fell silent.

The advisers knew that this meant that he was now listening to the voice of the prophet speaking to him.”

“Wait a little,” he said and, closing his eyes, lowered his head. Chernyshev knew, having heard this more than once from Nikolai, that when he needed to solve any important issue, he only needed to concentrate for a few moments, and then an inspiration came to him...”

A rare ferocity characterizes decisions made through such inspirations, but even this is sanctimoniously presented as mercy.

“Shamil fell silent and looked at Yusuf for a long time.

Write that I took pity on you and will not kill you, but gouge out your eyes, as I do to all traitors. Go."

“Deserves the death penalty. But thank God death penalty we don't have. And it’s not for me to introduce it. Pass 12 times through a thousand people.”

Both of them use religion only to strengthen power, without caring at all about the meaning of commandments and prayers.

“First of all, it was necessary to perform the midday prayer, for which he now did not have the slightest inclination.”

“...he read the usual prayers spoken since childhood: “Virgin Mary,” “I Believe,” “Our Father,” without attributing any meaning to the spoken words.”

They correlate in many other details: the empress “with a shaking head and a frozen smile” plays under Nicholas essentially the same role as the “sharp-nosed, black, unpleasant-faced and unloved, but senior wife” will come under Shamil; one is present at dinner, the other brings it, such are their functions; therefore, Nikolai’s entertainment with the girls Koperwein and Nelidova only formally differs from Shamil’s legalized polygamy.

All sorts of courtiers got mixed up, merged into one person, imitating the emperor and the highest ranks, Nikolai is proud of his cloak - Chernyshev is proud of the fact that he did not know galoshes, although without them his feet would be cold. Chernyshev has the same sleigh as the emperor, the aide-de-camp on duty is the same as the emperor, combing his temples to his eyes; Prince Vasily Dolgorukov’s “dull face” is decorated with imperial sideburns, mustaches and the same temples. Old man Vorontsov, just like Nikolai, says “you” to young officers. On the other hand

On the other hand, Chernyshev flatters Nikolai in connection with the case of Hadji Murad (“He realized that they can no longer hold on”) in exactly the same way as Manana Orbelyani and other guests - Vorontsov (“They feel that they now (this now meant: with Vorontsov) can’t stand it”). Finally, Vorontsov himself even somewhat resembles the imam: “...his face smiled pleasantly and his eyes squinted...”

" - Where? - Vorontsov asked, squinting his eyes” (squinting eyes were always a sign of secrecy for Tolstoy, let us remember, for example, what Dolly thought about why Anna was squinting), etc., etc.

What does this similarity mean? Shamil and Nikolai (and with them the “half-frozen” courtiers) prove by this that they, unlike other diverse and “polar” people on earth, do not complement each other, but duplicate, like things; they are absolutely repeatable and therefore, in essence, do not live, although they stand at the official pinnacles of life. This special kind compositional unity and balance in the work thereby means the most profound development of its idea: “minus for minus gives a plus.”

The character of Hadji Murad, irreconcilably hostile to both poles, ultimately embodying the idea of ​​people's resistance to all forms of the inhuman world order, remained Tolstoy's last word and his testament to the literature of the 20th century.

“Hadji Murad” belongs to those books that should be reviewed, and not literary works written about them. That is, they need to be treated as if they had just left. Only conditional critical inertia does not yet allow us to do this, although each edition of these books and each encounter with them by the reader is an incomparably stronger intrusion into the central questions of life than - alas - sometimes happens with contemporaries catching up with each other.

“...Perhaps,” Dostoevsky once wrote, “we will say unheard-of, shameless insolence, but let them not be embarrassed by our words; we are only talking about one assumption: ...come on, if the Iliad is more useful than the works of Marko Vovchka, and not only

before, and even now, with modern questions: is it more useful as a way to achieve the known goals of these same questions, to resolve desktop problems?” 1

In fact, why don’t our editors, at least for the sake of the smallest, harmless project, try - at the moment of an unsuccessful search for a strong literary response - to publish a forgotten story, story or even an article (these are just begging to be asked) of a real profound writer on some similar modern issue? from the past?

This kind of thing probably justified itself. As for the literary analysis of classical books, he, in turn, can try to keep these books alive. To do this, it is necessary that the analysis of various categories return from time to time to the whole, to the work of art. Because only through a work, and not through categories, can art act on a person with the quality with which only it can act - and nothing else.

1 Russian writers about literature, vol. II. L., “Soviet Writer”, 1939, p. 171.

The features of a work of fiction are taken into account in the editorial analysis.

A work of fiction, an artistic object, can be viewed from two points of view - from the point of view of its meaning (as an aesthetic object) and from the point of view of its form (as an external work).

The meaning of an artistic object, enclosed in a certain form, is aimed at reflecting the artist’s understanding of the surrounding reality. And the editor, when evaluating an essay, must proceed from an analysis of the “plane of meaning” and the “plane of fact” of the work (M.M. Bakhtin). Let's try to figure out what stands behind the concepts of “plane of meaning” and “plane of fact” of a work.

The plan of meaning of an artistic object fixes the value, emotional aspects of artistic creativity, conveys the author’s assessment of the characters, phenomena and processes that he describes.

It is clear that one of the main aspects of the editorial analysis of a work is the analysis of its meaning. We are talking about such evaluation criteria as relevance and topicality, originality and novelty, completeness of implementation, and, in addition, skill in implementing the author's plan. The latter focuses the editor's attention on the level of fact of the work.

The subject of a literary work, as already mentioned, is the connections and relationships of a person with the world around him, assessed, meaningful, felt by the artist and fixed by him in a certain artistic form. We can say that in an artistic object the ethical, moral attitude to the world is expressed in aesthetic form. This form is external work, drawing up a plan for the editor of the fact of art. For his attitude to reality, the writer seeks a certain form, which is determined by his skill.

An artistic object is a point of interaction between the meaning and the fact of art. An artistic object demonstrates the world around us, conveying it in aesthetic form and revealing the ethical side of the world.

For editorial analysis, this approach to the consideration of a work of art is productive, in which literary work is examined in its connection with the reader. It is the influence of a work on a person that should be the starting point in evaluating an artistic object.

Really, artistic process presupposes a dialogic relationship between the writer and the reader, and the impact of the work on the reader can be considered as the final product of artistic activity. Therefore, the editor needs to understand exactly which aspects and aspects of a literary work need to be considered in order for the analysis to be effective and consistent essential characteristics works of art.

When discussing the meaning of a work, one must keep in mind that we are not talking about the everyday understanding of the meaning in the common meaning of the content of the work. We are talking about the meaning of an artistic object in more general view. The meaning of a work is revealed in the process of perceiving art. Let's look at this in more detail.

An artistic object includes three stages: the stage of creation of the work, the stage of its alienation from the master and independent existence, the stage of perception of the work.

The adequacy of the editorial analysis is ensured by understanding the specifics of each stage.

So, the main thing is what a work of literature is created for - the meaning that the artist puts into the content of the work, for the implementation of which he seeks a certain form.

As the starting point of the unifying principle of a work of artistic process in editorial analysis, it is necessary to consider the concept of the work. It is the concept that brings together all the stages of an artistic object. This is evidenced by the attention of the artist, musician, and writer to the selection of appropriate means of expression when creating works that are aimed at expressing the master’s intention.

Some confessions and reflections on the creative process of the writers themselves also show that the artistic process is connected with the idea.

But the concept of design not only characterizes the main meaning of the work. The intention is the main component of the impact of a work of art at the moment of its perception. L.N. Tolstoy wrote that when creating a work of fiction, the main thing is to present a wide variety of people and present everyone with the need to solve a vital issue that has not yet been resolved by people and force them to act, to consider, to find out how the issue will be resolved. These words reflect the most important characteristic of the content of art - its ethical basis, which is the main component of the plan, since the plan is born in the “feeling soul of the artist” by the feeling of “cracks in the world” (Heine) and the need to tell about one’s experiences to another person. Moreover, the writer not only expresses his experiences. He selects such means that should evoke in the reader the same assessment of character and action that the writer himself makes.

Thus, the subject of art is not only a person, his connections and relationships with the world. The subject area of ​​the work also includes the personality of the book’s author, who evaluates the surrounding reality. Therefore, when analyzing a work, the editor first of all identifies and evaluates the artist’s intention - the plan of meaning of the work.

The main qualities that determine the specifics of art are the properties of the artistic image, since it is the artistic image that distinguishes art into an independent sphere of activity. In art, an artistic image is a means of understanding the surrounding reality, a means of mastering the world, and also a means of recreating reality in a work of art - in an artistic object.

Consequently, when analyzing the plan of the fact of a work, the editor primarily considers the artistic image. Let's look at this in more detail.

A literary work appears before the editor as a result of artistic creativity, enshrined in a literary text.

Taking into account in the work of the editor the specifics of the perception of a literary and artistic work and its influence on the individual

An artistic image as an expression of a certain figurative thought or idea should be distinguished from a scientific concept that captures the result of an abstract thought and conveys logical unambiguous judgments and conclusions. The artistic image is characterized by sensual concreteness, organic inclusion of the author’s personality, integrity, associativity and ambiguity. As a result of the interaction of these properties, a “presence effect” is created, when the illusion of living, direct perception evokes in the reader a feeling of empathy, a sense of one’s own participation in events. This is the power of art’s influence on human personality, his thoughts and imagination.

The editor needs to deeply understand all the properties of the artistic image, since they largely predetermine his approach to analyzing and evaluating the work.

The sensual concreteness of the image gives the depicted phenomenon clarity through the recreation of visible signs. When describing external or internal sides phenomena using words that evoke visual ideas, the reader seems to “see” the painted picture in detail. M. Gorky said that what is depicted should evoke a desire to “touch it with your hand.” Sensory concreteness is also achieved in the case when there is no visual equivalent of the phenomenon, but “intonation clarity” is used, which creates in the reader a feeling of extension in space, movement in time - slowed down or, conversely, accelerated, shows the dynamics of a person’s thoughts and experiences.

The organic involvement of the author’s personality is manifested in the fact that the artistic image carries information simultaneously about both the subject and the object of knowledge. The reader feels or understands the author’s attitude towards a given character or event, as if he himself is present in the place described, he himself “sees” what is happening. The significance of this property of the artistic image is so great that it is in it that many researchers see the so-called “phenomenon of artistry” - the distinctive quality of art. This is precisely what makes emotional and evaluative moments an integral part of the processes of creating and perceiving an artistic image. It involves empathy and is addressed not only to the mind, but also to the feelings. Moreover, an aesthetic emotion can be caused by both the image created by the image (landscape, face, action) and the verbal image itself as an aesthetic value (rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, etc.).

The ambiguity and associativity of an artistic image lies in its ability to excite the reader’s imagination, to mobilize many previously received impressions and ideas stored in the personal, individual consciousness of a person, providing ample opportunities for subjective concretization of what is perceived. The direct idea of ​​an object or phenomenon is enriched by the worldview and life experience of the author and reader. An artistic image is supplemented by associations and memories, awakens the imagination, makes one “experience” the past event again and again, focusing on the internal attitude towards it. It is known that in a figurative context the same words have their own meaning for each reader. This largely depends on a person’s worldview, childhood memories, upbringing, education, and life experience.

All these properties of an artistic image appear not separately, but together and simultaneously, which allows us to speak of its integrity and synthetic nature.

The properties that make up the essence, the nature of the artistic image, largely determine the specificity of evaluation criteria, methodology, and methods of editorial analysis, in other words, the main features of the editor’s work on the text.

The term “literary work” is central to the science of literature (from the Latin Shvga - written in letters). There are many theoretical points of view that reveal its meaning, but the following conclusion can serve as a defining one for this paragraph: a literary work is a product of non-mechanical human activity; an object created with the participation of creative effort (V.

E. Khalizev).

A literary work is a statement recorded as a sequence of linguistic signs, or text (from the Latin 1вхы$ - fabric, plexus). Revealing the meaning of the terminological apparatus, we note that the symbolic supports “text” and “work” are not identical to each other.

In literary theory, text is understood as a material carrier of images. It turns into a work when the reader shows a characteristic interest in the text. Within the framework of the dialogical concept of art, this addressee of the work is the invisible personality of the writer’s creative process. As an important interpreter of the created creation, the reader is valuable for his personal, different perspective in the perception of the entire work.

Reading is a co-creative step of literary mastery. V. F. Asmus comes to the same conclusion in his work “Reading as Work and Creativity”: “Perception of a work also requires the work of imagination, memory, connection, thanks to which what is read does not crumble in the mind into a bunch of separate independent, immediately forgotten frames and impressions , But

firmly welded into an organic and holistic picture of life.”

The core of any work of art is formed by an artifact (from the Latin aNv/akSht - artificially made) and an aesthetic object. An artifact is an external material work consisting of colors and lines, or sounds and words. An aesthetic object is the totality of what is the essence of an artistic creation, is fixed materially and has the potential of artistic influence on the viewer, listener, reader.

External material work and depths spiritual search, cemented into unity, act as an artistic whole. The integrity of a work is a category of aesthetics that characterizes the ontological problematics of the art of words. If the Universe, the universe and nature have a certain integrity, then the model of any world order, in this case - the work and the artistic reality contained in it - also have the required integrity. To the description of the indivisibility of an artistic creation, let us add an important statement in literary thought by M. M. Girshman about a literary work as an integrity: “The category of integrity refers not only to the whole aesthetic organism, but also to each of its significant particles. The work is not simply divided into separate interconnected parts, layers or levels, but in it each - both macro- and micro- - element bears a special imprint of that holistic art world, of which he is a particle.”12.

The consistency of the whole and parts in a work was discovered in ancient times. Plato and Aristotle associated the concept of beauty with integrity. Having put their understanding into the formula of “single completeness of the whole,” they clarified the harmonious consistency of all parts of a work of art, since “completeness” may turn out to be excessive, “overflowing,” and then the “whole” ceases to be “one” in itself and loses its integrity.

In the theoretical and literary field of knowledge, in addition to the ontological approach to the unity of a literary work, there is also axiological approach, well known among critics, editors, and philologists. Here the reader determines to what extent the author managed to coordinate the parts and the whole, to motivate this or that detail in the work; and also whether the picture of life created by the artist is accurate - aesthetic reality, and the imaginative world, and whether it maintains the illusion of authenticity; whether the frame of the work is expressive or inexpressive: the title complex, the author's notes, the afterword, the internal titles that make up the table of contents, the designation of the place and time of creation of the work, stage directions, etc., which creates in the reader an attitude toward the aesthetic perception of the work; does the chosen genre correspond to the style of presentation, and other questions.

The world of artistic creativity is not continuous (not continuous and not general), but discrete (discontinuous). According to M. M. Bakhtin, art breaks down into separate, “self-sufficient individual wholes” - works, each of which “occupies an independent position in relation to reality.”

Forming the point of view of a literature teacher, critic, editor, philologist, cultural scientist on a work is complicated by the fact that not only the boundaries between works of art are blurred, but the works themselves have an extensive system of characters, several storylines, complex composition.

The integrity of a work is even more difficult to assess when a writer creates a literary cycle (from the Latin kyklos - circle, wheel) or fragment.

A literary cycle is usually understood as a group of works compiled and united by the author himself on the basis of ideological and thematic similarity, common genre, place or time of action, characters, narrative form, style, representing an artistic whole. The literary cycle is widespread in folklore and in all types of literary and artistic creativity: in lyric poetry (“Thracian Elegies” by V. Teplyakov, “Tsgy i OgY” by V. Bryusov), in epic (“Notes of a Hunter” by I. Turgenev, “Smoke of the Fatherland” I. Savin), in drama (“Three Plays for the Puritans” by B. Shaw, “Theater of the Revolution” by R. Rolland).

Historically, the literary cycle is one of the main forms of artistic cyclization, that is, the combination of works, along with its other forms: collection, anthology, book of poems, stories, etc. blocks. In particular, the autobiographical stories of L. Tolstoy “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth” and M. Gorky “Childhood”, “In People”, “My Universities” form trilogies; A historical plays W. Shakespeare in literary criticism is usually considered as two tetralogies: “Henry VI (parts 1, 2, 3) and “Richard III”, as well as “Richard II”, “Henry IV (parts 1, 2) and “Henry V”.

If in a single work the subordination of the part to the whole is important for the researcher, then in a cycle the connection of the parts and their sequence, as well as the birth of a new qualitative meaning, comes to the fore. Let us turn to the apt conclusion of S. M. Eisenstein about the internal organization of the cycle, which he understands as a montage composition. In his scientific writings, he pointed out that any two pieces, placed side by side, inevitably combine into a new idea, arising from this comparison as a new quality. The juxtaposition of two montage pieces, according to the theorist, “is more like a product rather than a sum of them.”

Thus, the structure of the cycle should resemble a montage composition. The value of the cycle always tends to exceed the sum of the values ​​of the groups of the work combined into an artistic whole.

The multitude of individual lyrical works in the cycle has the meaning not of folding, but of unification. Lyrical cycles became widespread in the works of the ancient Roman poets Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, who gave the world wonderful elegies.

During the Renaissance, sonnet cycles gained noticeable popularity.

Since literary development in the 18th century required strict adherence to genres, then the main units of the poetry books that appeared were genre-thematic: odes, songs, messages, etc. Accordingly, each type of poetry collection of the 18th century had its own compositional principles, and the poetic material within the volumes was not located in chronological order, and in accordance with the scheme: God - the king - man - himself. In books of that time, the most prominent parts were the beginning and the end.

At the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries. In connection with the individualization of artistic consciousness, the aesthetics of the accidental and intentional was formed. The development of artistic thinking of the era depended on the initiative of the creative personality and her desire to embody all the richness of human individuality, her soulful biography. The first Russian lyrical cycle in this capacity, according to scientists, was A. S. Pushkin’s cycle “Imitation of the Koran,” in which the artist’s single poetic personality was revealed in various facets. The internal logic of the development of the writer’s creative thought, as well as the unity of the form and content of the work, connected all the imitations into an integral poetic ensemble.

A special study by M. N. Darwin and V. I. Tyupa13 sheds light on the peculiarities of literary thinking of the era, as well as on the problem of studying cyclization in Pushkin’s works.

Literary experiments XIX century in many ways anticipated the heyday of the Russian cycle at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. in the works of symbolist poets

V. Bryusov, A. Bely, A. Blok, Vyach. Ivanova.

As for the first point, which states that a work of art is a product of human activity, then from this view

a) it was concluded that this activity, as the conscious production of some external object, can be comprehended and demonstrated so that others can learn and imitate it. What one does, it seems, could be done by another, and if everyone were familiar with the rules of artistic activity, then everyone, if desired, could do this work and create works of art. This is how those theories containing rules and their calculations arose. practical application the instructions we talked about above.

By following such rules and instructions, one can create only something formally correct and mechanical. For only the mechanical wears such external character, that in order to assimilate it into our understanding and practical implementation, only meaningless volitional activity and dexterity are needed and nothing concrete is required, nothing that could not be taught general rules. This is most clearly revealed in cases where such prescriptions are not limited to purely external and mechanical phenomena, but extend to the meaningful spiritual artistic activity. In this area, the rules give only vague general instructions, such as, for example, that the topic should be interesting, that in a work of art everyone should speak in a language appropriate to his class, age, gender, position. To serve their purpose, these prescriptions must be so definite that they can be carried out as they are formulated without recourse to independent spiritual activity. But such rules are abstract in their content and inappropriate in their claim to fill the artist’s consciousness, because artistic creativity is not a formal activity according to given rules. As a spiritual activity, it must draw from its own richness and bring before the spiritual gaze richer contents and more multifaceted individual creations than can be provided for by the rules. At best, these rules, since they contain something definite and practically useful, can find application in completely external aspects of artistic creativity.

b) As a result, this point of view was completely abandoned, but at the same time they went to the opposite extreme. Having ceased to consider a work of art as a product of activity common to all people, they began to see in it the creation of a uniquely gifted mind, which should allow only its special talent to act as a specific force of nature and refuse both following generally valid laws and the intervention of conscious reflection in its instinctive creativity . Moreover, they even believed that he should beware of such interference, so as not to spoil or distort his creations.

Based on this, they began to recognize works of art as a product of talent and genius and to emphasize those aspects that talent and genius possess by nature. In part, this was absolutely correct. For talent is a specific, and genius a universal ability, which a person cannot acquire only through self-conscious activity; We will have to talk about this in more detail later.

Here we must only pay attention to the false view contained in this view, that in artistic creativity any consciousness of one’s own activity is not only unnecessary, but even harmful. With this understanding, talent and genius turn out to be a certain state, and, moreover, a state of inspiration. They argued that such a state is caused in a genius by some object, and partly he can bring himself into this state at will, and they did not even forget to point out a bottle of champagne, which can serve a good purpose in this case.

In Germany this opinion arose and gained predominance during the so-called period of geniuses, which began with the first poetic works of Goethe; the influence exerted by Goethe was strengthened by the works of Schiller. In their first works, these poets discarded all the then fabricated rules, deliberately breaking them, and began to create as if there had been no poetry before them. Other poets who came after them surpassed them even further in this regard.

I do not want to consider here in more detail the confused views that prevailed then regarding the concepts of genius and inspiration and the prevailing idea in our time that inspiration alone can achieve everything. It is only important for us to establish that, although the talent and genius of the artist have in themselves an element of natural talent, the latter requires for its development a culture of thought, reflection on the method of its implementation, as well as exercise and acquisition of skills. For one of the main aspects of artistic creativity is external work, since in a work of art there is a purely technical side, reaching even to craftsmanship; most of it is in architecture and sculpture, less in painting and music, and least of all in poetry. No amount of inspiration will achieve this skill, but only reflection, diligence and exercise. And the artist needs such skill in order to master the external material and overcome its intractability.

The higher the artist stands, the more thoroughly he must depict in his works the depths of the soul and spirit, which are unknown to him directly, and he can comprehend them only by directing his mental gaze to the inner and outside world. And here only through study does the artist become aware of this content and acquire material for his plans.

True, some arts need awareness and knowledge of this content more than others. Music, for example, deals only with internal spiritual movements of an indefinite nature, as if with the sound of emotions that have not passed into thought, and it has little or no need for the presence of spiritual material. Therefore, musical talent for the most part manifests itself in early youth, when the head is still empty and the soul has experienced little; sometimes it can even reach significant heights before the artist has acquired any spiritual and life experience. For the same reason we often find considerable virtuosity in musical composition and performance side by side with great poverty of spiritual content and character.

The situation is different in poetry. What is important in it is a meaningful, thought-rich image of a person, his deepest interests and driving forces. Therefore, the mind and feeling of a genius must themselves be enriched and deepened by spiritual experiences, experience and reflection before he is able to create a mature, rich in content and complete work. The first works of Goethe and Schiller are terribly immature and even, one might say, rude and barbaric. The fact that in most of these early poetic experiments thoroughly prosaic, partly cold and banal elements predominate, most of all refutes the usual opinion that inspiration is associated with youthful ardor and age. Only in adulthood did these two geniuses, who, one might say, were the first to give our people truly poetic works, only in adulthood did these national poets of ours give us profound and perfect in form works, generated by true inspiration. And in the same way, only the old man Homer was inspired and created his eternally immortal poems.

c) The third view, associated with the idea of ​​a work of art as a product of human activity, concerns the relationship of the work of art to external natural phenomena. Here ordinary consciousness easily came to the idea that the work human art stands below the product of nature. For a work of art does not have feeling in itself and is not a living being; considered as an external object, it is dead. And we usually place the living above the dead.

That a work of art does not have movement and life in itself - one cannot but agree with this. Living products of nature are both internally and externally purposefully arranged organisms, while works of art achieve the appearance of life only on their surface, and inside they are ordinary stone, wood, canvas or, as in poetry, a representation manifested in speech and letters .

But it is not this side of external existence that makes a work a product of art. It is a work of art only to the extent that it is generated human spirit and belongs to him, received his baptism and depicts only what is in tune with the spirit. Human interests, the spiritual value possessed by a certain event, an individual character, an action in its vicissitudes and outcome, are depicted and highlighted in a work of art more purely and transparently than is possible in everyday non-artistic reality. Thanks to this, a work of art stands above any product of nature that has not undergone this processing by the spirit. So, for example, thanks to the feeling and understanding, in the atmosphere of which a landscape is created in painting, this work of the spirit occupies more high position than pure natural landscape. For everything spiritual is better than any product of nature, not to mention the fact that no creation of nature depicts divine ideals, as art does.

To everything that the spirit extracts from its depths and puts into works of art, it imparts a long duration even from the side of external existence. Individual living products of nature are transient, their external appearance is changeable, while a work of art is persistently preserved, although not the duration of its existence, but the clarity of the spiritual life imprinted in someone constitutes its true advantage over natural reality.

This higher position of the work of art is also contested on the basis of another representation of ordinary consciousness. They say: nature and its products are the creation of God, created by his goodness and wisdom; the product of art is only a work of man, made by human hands according to human understanding. This opposition of the products of nature as the result of the divine creativity of human activity as something finite is based on the misunderstanding that God does not act in man and through man, but limits the circle of his activity only to the realm of nature.

This false opinion must be rejected if we wish to achieve the true concept of art. Moreover, we must contrast it with the opposite view, according to which God is glorified more by what the spirit creates than by the products and creatures of nature. For the divine principle is not only present in man, but also acts in him in a different form, more corresponding to the essence of God, than in nature. God is spirit, and the medium through which the divine passes takes the form of a conscious, actively self-generating spirit only in man. In nature, this environment is the unconscious, sensory and external, which is far inferior in value to consciousness. In artistic creativity, God is just as active as in natural phenomena, but in works of art the divine, being generated by the spirit, acquired for its existence a form of manifestation corresponding to its nature, which is not its existence in the unconscious sensuality of nature.

d) In order to draw a deeper conclusion from the previous arguments, it is necessary to pose the following question. If a work of art, as a product of the spirit, is the creation of man, then what need prompts people to create works of art? On the one hand, artistic creativity can be considered as simple game chance, as something dictated by whim, so that engaging in it appears as something without special significance, for there are others and even the best means to realize the goals that art sets for itself, and man carries within himself more important and higher interests than art. But, on the other hand, art has as its source more sublime drives and needs, and at times it satisfies the highest and absolute needs, being associated with the most general problems of worldview and with the religious interests of entire eras and peoples. We cannot yet fully answer the question of what this not accidental, but absolute need for art consists of, since the question is more specific than the answer we could give here. We must therefore be content with the following remarks.

The universal and absolute need from which art flows (from its formal side) lies in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, that is, that he creates from himself and for himself what he is and what generally exists. Things that are products of nature exist only directly and once, but man as a spirit doubles himself: existing as an object of nature, he also exists for himself, he contemplates himself, imagines himself, thinks, and only through this active for-himself being he is spirit.

A person achieves this consciousness of himself in two ways: first, theoretically, since in his inner life he must become aware of himself, aware of everything that moves and worries in the human chest. And in general, he must contemplate himself, imagine himself, fix for himself what thought reveals as essence, and both in what he generates from himself and in what he perceives from the outside, cognize only himself. Secondly, a person achieves such consciousness of himself through practical activities. He has an inherent desire to generate himself in what is immediately given to him and exists for him as something external, and to recognize himself also in this given from the outside. He achieves this goal by changing external objects, imprinting his inner life in them and again finding in them his own definitions. Man does this in order to, as a free subject, deprive the external world of its intractable alienness and, in objective form, enjoy only the external reality of himself.

Already the child's first instinct contains a practical change in external objects. The boy throws stones into the river and admires the diverging circles in the water, contemplating his own creation in this. This need passes through the most diverse phenomena, right up to that form of self-production in external things that we see in works of art. And man does this not only with external things, but also with himself, with his natural form, which he does not leave as he finds it, but deliberately changes it. This is the reason for all decorations and fashions, no matter how barbaric, tasteless, ugly or even harmful they may be, such as, for example, the legs of Chinese women or the custom of piercing ears and lips. For only among educated people, changes in figure, way of holding oneself and other external manifestations have their source in high spiritual culture.

The universal need for art stems from man’s rational desire to spiritually understand the inner and outer world, presenting it as an object in which he recognizes his own “I”. He satisfies this need for spiritual freedom, on the one hand, by the fact that he internally realizes for himself what exists, and on the other hand, by the fact that he outwardly embodies this being-for-himself and, doubling himself, makes it visible and knowable for himself and for others that which exists within him. This is the free rationality of man, from which flows both art and all action and knowledge. Below we will see how the specific need for art lies in contrast to the need for political and moral action, religious ideas and scientific knowledge.