literary genre, distinguished along with lyricism and drama; represented by such genres as fairy tale, epic, epic poem, story, short story, short story, novel, and some types of essay. An epic, like a drama, reproduces an action unfolding in space and time - the course of events in the lives of the characters (see Plot).

A specific feature of the epic

The specific feature of the epic is the organizing role of the narrative.: the speaker reports events and their details as something past and remembered, simultaneously resorting to descriptions of the setting of the action and the appearance of the characters, and sometimes to reasoning. The narrative layer of speech in an epic work easily interacts with the dialogues and monologues of the characters (including their internal monologues). The epic narrative either becomes self-sufficient, temporarily suspending the statements of the heroes, or is imbued with their spirit in improperly direct speech; Sometimes it frames the characters’ remarks, sometimes, on the contrary, it is reduced to a minimum or temporarily disappears. But overall it dominates the work, holding together everything depicted in it. Therefore, the features of the epic are largely determined by the properties of the narrative. Speech here acts mainly in the function of reporting what happened earlier.

There is a temporary distance between the conduct of speech and the depicted action in the epic.: the epic poet talks “about an event as something separate from himself” (Aristotle. On the art of poetry). The epic narration is told from a person called the narrator, a kind of intermediary between the person depicted and the listeners (readers), a witness and interpreter of what happened. Information about his fate, his relationships with the characters, and the circumstances of the “story” are usually missing. The “spirit of storytelling” is often “weightless, ethereal and omnipresent” (T. Mann. Collected Works). At the same time, the narrator can “condense” into a specific person, becoming a storyteller (Grinev in “The Captain’s Daughter”, 1836, A.S. Pushkin, Ivan Vasilyevich in the story “After the Ball”, 1903, L.N. Tolstoy). Narrative speech characterizes not only the subject of the statement, but also the speaker himself; the epic form captures the manner of speaking and perceiving the world, the originality of the narrator’s consciousness. The reader's vivid perception is associated with close attention to the expressive beginnings of the narrative, i.e. the subject of the story, or the “image of the narrator” (the concept of V.V. Vinogradov, M.M. Bakhtin, G.A. Gukovskosh).

The epic is as free as possible in the exploration of space and time(cm. Artistic time and art space). The writer either creates stage episodes, i.e. paintings that record one place and one moment in the life of the heroes (an evening with A.P. Scherer in the first chapters of “War and Peace”, 1863-69, Tolstoy), or - in descriptive, overview, “panoramic” episodes - speaks of long periods of time or what happened in different places (Tolstoy’s description of Moscow, empty before the arrival of the French). In the careful reconstruction of processes occurring in a wide space and over significant periods of time, only cinema and television can compete with the epic. The arsenal of literary and visual means is used in the epic in its entirety (actions, portraits, direct characteristics, dialogues and monologues, landscapes, interiors, gestures, facial expressions), which gives the images the illusion of plastic volume and visual and auditory authenticity. What is depicted can be an exact correspondence to the “forms of life itself” and, on the contrary, a sharp re-creation of them. Epic, unlike drama, does not insist on the conventions of what is being recreated. Here it is conditionally not so much what is depicted itself, but rather the “depicting” one, i.e. a narrator who often has absolute knowledge of what happened in its smallest details. In this sense, the structure of the epic narrative, which usually differs from non-fictional messages (reportage, historical chronicle), seems to “give out” the fictitious, artistic-illusory nature of what is depicted.

Plot constructions of the epic

The epic form is based on various types of plot structures. In some cases, the dynamics of events are revealed openly and in detail (novels by F.M. Dostoevsky), in others, the depiction of the course of events seems to drown in descriptions, psychological characteristics, reasoning (prose of A.P. Chekhov of the 1890s, M. Proust, T .Manna); in W. Faulkner’s novels, event tension is achieved by carefully detailing not so much the “turning moments” themselves, but rather their everyday and, most importantly, psychological background ( detailed characteristics, thoughts and experiences of the characters). According to I.V. Goethe and F. Schiller, retarding motives are an essential feature of the epic genre of literature as a whole. The volume of text of an epic work, which can be both prose and poetic, is practically unlimited - from miniature stories (early Chekhov, O. Henry) to lengthy epics and novels (Mahabharata and Iliad, War and Peace by Tolstoy , “Quiet Don” by M.A. Sholokhov). An epic can concentrate in itself such a number of characters and events that are inaccessible to other types of literature and types of art. At the same time, the narrative form is able to recreate complex, contradictory, multifaceted characters that are in the making. Although the possibilities of epic display are not used in all works, the word “Epic” is associated with the idea of ​​​​showing life in its integrity, revealing the essence of an entire era and the scale of the creative act. The scope of the epic genre is not limited to any type of experience or worldview. The nature of the epic is the universal, wide use of the cognitive and visual capabilities of literature and art in general. “Localizing” characteristics of the content of an epic work (for example, the definition of epic in the 19th century as a reproduction of the domination of an event over a person or the modern judgment about the “magnanimous” attitude of the epic towards a person) do not absorb the entire history of epic genres.

Ways to form an epic

The epic was formed in different ways. Lyric-epic, and on their basis, epic songs themselves, like drama and lyrics, arose from ritual syncretic performances, the basis of which were myths. The narrative art form also developed independently of public ritual: the oral prose tradition led from myth (mostly non-ritualized) to fairy tale. Early epic creativity and the further development of artistic narration were also influenced by oral, and then recorded in writing historical legend. In ancient and medieval literature, folklore was very influential. heroic epic. Its formation marked the full and widespread use of epic capabilities. Carefully detailed, maximally attentive to everything visible and full of plasticity, the narrative overcame the naive-archaic poetics of short messages, characteristic of myth, parable and early fairy tale. The traditional epic (understood as a genre, not a type of literature) is characterized (unlike the novel) by active reliance on national-historical tradition and its poeticization, the separation of the artistic world from modernity and its absolute completeness: “No incompleteness, unresolvedness, or problematic nature.” there is no place in the epic world" (Bakhtin, 459), as well as the "absolutization" of the distance between the characters and the one who narrates; The narrator has the gift of imperturbable calm and “all-seeing” (it was not for nothing that Homer was likened to the Olympian gods in modern times), and his image gives the work the flavor of maximum objectivity. “The narrator is alien to the characters, he not only surpasses the listeners with his balanced contemplation and sets them in this mood with his story, but, as it were, takes the place of necessity” (F. Schelling. Philosophy of Art). But already in ancient prose the distance between the narrator and the characters ceases to be absolutized: in the novels “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius and “Satyricon” by Petronius, the characters themselves talk about what they saw and experienced.

In the literature of the last three centuries, marked by the predominance of romantic genres (see Novel), “personal”, demonstrative-subjective narration dominates. On the one hand, the narrator’s “omniscience” extends to the thoughts and feelings of the characters that are not expressed in their behavior, on the other hand, the narrator often stops contemplating what is depicted from the outside, as if from above, and looks at the world through the eyes of one of the characters, imbued with his state of mind. Thus, the battle of Waterloo in “The Parma Monastery” (1839) by Stendhal is not reproduced in the Homeric way: the author, as it were, reincarnated as young Fabrizio, the distance between them practically disappeared, the points of view of both were combined (the method of narration inherent in L. Tolstoy. F. M. Dostoevsky, Chekhov, G. Flaubert, T. Mann, Faulkner). This combination is caused by increased interest in the uniqueness of the inner world of the heroes, which is sparingly and incompletely manifested in their behavior. In connection with this, a method of narration also arose in which the story of what happened is at the same time a monologue of the hero (“The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death”, 1828, V. Hugo; “The Meek”, 1876, by Dostoevsky; “The Fall”, 1956, A. Camus ). Internal monologue as a narrative form is absolutized in the literature of “stream of consciousness” (J. Joyce, partly Proust). Narrative methods often alternate; events are sometimes told different heroes, and each in his own manner (“Hero of Our Time”, 1839-40, M.Yu. Lermontov; “To Have and Have Not”, 1937, E. Hemingway; “Mansion”, 1959, Faulkner; “Lotga in Weimar”, 1939, T. Mann). In monumental examples of the 20th century epic (“Jean Christophe,” 1904-12, R. Rolland; “Joseph and His Brothers,” 1933-43, T. Mann; “The Life of Klim Samgin,” 1927-36, M. Gorkosh; “ Quiet Don", 1929-40, Sholokhov) synthesizes the long-standing principle of “omniscience” of the narrator and personal forms of depiction, full of psychologism.

In novel prose of the 19th-20th centuries. emotional and semantic connections between the statements of the narrator and the characters are important. Their interaction gives artistic speech an internal dialogic quality; the text of the work captures a set of different-quality and conflicting consciousnesses, which was not typical for the canonical genres of ancient eras, where the voice of the narrator reigned supreme, and the characters spoke in the same tone. The “voices” of different persons can either be reproduced alternately, or combined in one statement - a “two-voice word” (M.M. Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics). Thanks to the internal dialogicity and polyphony of speech, widely represented in the literature of the two last centuries, the verbal thinking of people and spiritual communication between them are artistically mastered (see Polyphony).

The word epic comes from Greek epos, which means word, narration, story

The epic method of creating works of art is the most ancient, the first to appear on Earth, and is the most natural way of presenting material. He talks about events and the actions of the characters either in chronological order (that is, the way they happened), or in the sequence that the author needs to realize his plan (then this is called a broken, reverse, ring composition). For example, in the novel by M.Yu. Lermontov, we first learn about modern events, and then we are transported back five years, as this is necessary for the author to fully reveal the character of the main character - Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin.

Epic works - epic, fable, story, story, novel, ballad, poem, essay, etc.

The first of the genres of epic works should be the epic. Epic appears in the era of the early formation of nationalities and peoples from heroic folk songs, telling about the most significant and glorious events in the history of the people. Thanks to the cyclization of these songs, an epic emerges, the most striking example of which is Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

The classical epic could only be born and exist at a certain stage human history, since its content is inextricably linked with the mythological ideas of people who lived during the “childhood of mankind” period, and is determined public relations that existed then.

Subject of the epic - an event of the recent past that is important for the life of all people. This work represented the heroic nature of the actions performed in a purified form, the scope of the image of the glorified subject was extremely wide, it reflected all aspects of the life of the people. The epic included in its framework big number actors.

Fable- the oldest type of epic poetry, a small poetic allegorical story pursuing moralizing purposes (fables by I.A. Krylov).

Story- a small form of epic work, characterized as a work that most often has one storyline, shows one or several individual episodes from the life of the heroes, and depicts a small number of characters.

Tale- found only in Slavic literature, associated with the traditions of Old Russian literature. Sometimes it's the same thing piece of art is called alternately a story or a novel (" Captain's daughter"A.S. Pushkin)

Novel- a modern large epic form, which is characterized by a complex branched plot, covers a significant period of the heroes’ lives and has a large number of characters (“War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy).

Poem - big plot work lyric-epic character, combining the display of the emotional experiences and actions of the heroes, may include the image of the lyrical hero along with the images of the characters in the story ("Mtsyri" by M.Yu. Lermontov).

Ballad - a small plot-based poetic work of historical, heroic, fantastic or everyday content, having the features of a lyric-epic work, in which the author not only conveys his feelings and thoughts, but also depicts what caused these experiences ("Svetlana" by V.A. Zhukovsky) .

Feature article - small epic work, which tells about a real event, fact of life or face.

The most ancient of these types of artistic creativity is epic. Early forms of the epic arose even in the conditions of the primitive communal system and are associated with human labor, with the conquest of nature, with tribal clashes (for example, the tales of the North American Indians about Hiowata). In its development, the epic experienced great changes, prosperity and decline; its plots, heroes, genres and style changed; strata of various historical eras were deposited in it.

The main feature of the epic is that it reproduces reality external to the author, usually without the intervention of the author, whose identity is largely hidden from readers. Only in autobiographical genres and in the literature of the 20th century is this rule violated.

The narration in the epic is conducted on behalf of a real or fictitious narrator, witness, participant in events and, less often, the hero of events. The epic uses a variety of methods of presentation (narration, description, dialogue, monologue, author's digressions), the author's speech and the speech of the characters, in contrast to drama, where one method of presentation (dialogue) and one form of speech (the speech of the characters) are used. The epic presents great opportunities for a multifaceted depiction of reality and depiction of a person in the development of his character, circumstances, motivation of events and behavior of characters. The narration in the epic is usually conducted in the past tense, as about events that have already happened, and only in new literature The epic includes both the present tense and a combination of past, present and future tenses. The language of the epic is largely figurative and plastic, in contrast to the lyrics, where emotionally expressive speech dominates.

The specific types of epic are epic, epic, fairy tale, novel, story, poem, short story, essay, fable, anecdote.

Epic is the largest and most monumental form of epic literature. The ancient heroic epic and the modern epic differ significantly from each other.

Ancient epics are rooted in folklore, mythology, and the legendary memory of prehistoric times. The most important feature of ancient epics is that in them everything wonderful and incredible becomes an object of immediate faith and the only possible form of exploration of the world. The ancient epic inevitably dies out along with the end of the “childhood of human society.” It is artistically necessary only as long as mythological consciousness lives and determines human perception of the world.

The basis of the epic of modern times is either a realistic (as, for example, in “War and Peace”, in “The Brothers Karamazov”, “Quiet Flows the Flow”) or a romantic awareness of the world (as, for example, in Proust’s epic “In Search of Lost Time” ). The main feature of modern epic is that it embodies the destinies of peoples, the historical process itself.

When classifying species forms in the epic great importance differences in the volume of works play a role.

There is a small form (story), a medium form (story) and a large epic form - the novel. Unlike a story and a novel, a story is not characterized by a developed system of characters; it does not have a complex evolution of characters and their detailed individualization.

A story with a dynamic plot, unexpected, sharp plot twists and denouement is usually called a short story.

A descriptive-narrative story is called an essay. The plot in the essay plays a smaller role than the dialogue, author's digressions, and description of the situation. A characteristic feature of the essay is documentary. Often essays are combined into cycles.

Leading epic view is a novel. The word “novel” itself initially meant, in medieval Europe, narrative works in Romance languages.

In the history of the European novel we can distinguish several stages of its development.

Antique novel(“Ethiopian” by Heliodorus and others). Such a novel was built according to a certain pattern: the unexpected separation of lovers, their misadventures and a happy union at the end of the work.

A chivalric romance - it also combined love and adventure elements. The knight was portrayed as an ideal lover, ready to endure any challenge for the sake of his lady.

By the 18th century, the picaresque novel took shape. Its theme is the ascent of an enterprising person from the lower classes up the social ladder. The picaresque novel widely reflects the elements of life and is interesting in its concrete recreation of ordinary everyday situations.

The true heyday of the novel occurred in the 19th century. In Russian literature, the novel received its own specific coloring. Russian word artists in their manifestations depict the discord between the individual’s aspirations for the ideal and the impossibility of achieving it. A so-called gallery of “extra” people appears.

In the 20th century, a decadent novel appeared - depicting a conflict between the individual and the environment, often this conflict is insoluble. An example of such a novel is Kafka's The Castle.

So, we found out that the types of epic are novel, story, short story, essay, etc. But types are not yet the final forms of literary works. Always keeping the same birth characteristics and structural features of the type, each literary work also contains unique features dictated by the characteristics of the material and the characteristics of the writer’s talent, that is, it has a unique “genre” form.

For example, novel genres are philosophical novel(for example, “The Plague” by A. Camus), a novel of foresight (E. Zamyatin “We”), a novel of warning (“The Block” by Ch. Aitmatov), ​​a war novel (“Star” by E. Kazakevich), a fantasy novel (“ Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin" by A. Tolstoy), autobiographical novel ("The Life of Arsenyev" by I. Bunin), psychological novel(“Crime and Punishment” by F. Dostoevsky), etc.

The story has the same genres as the novel. The same goes for the story. The stories are on philosophical issues, on the military, science fiction writers create fantastic stories, satirical writers create satirical and humorous stories. An example of a humorous story is “The Aristocrat” by M. Zoshchenko.

Question # 1. The concept of myth. The evolution of mythological ideas as a movement from chaos to space. Olympic mythology.

Definitions of myth (from the workshop):

oral (in motion-variability) form expressing a person’s attitude to something

exploration of the world at the initial stage of history

The culture of a people begins with a myth according to the archeology of consciousness, since every nation goes through a stage of mythological consciousness, the features of which are:

Weak isolation of a person from the surrounding world

Poor development of abstract concept => antinomy

! A characteristic feature of myths is metamorphosis(transformation of living into non-living and vice versa).

Ancient Greek mythology, main features:

Chthonism (early stage) - a person thinks of himself as consisting of the earth and its products. Fetishism (living in an object, was in no way separated from the object itself, and was worshiped)

Animism (mixanthropy - a combination of human and animal traits)

Olympic (heroic) - localization (Olympus), more faith in one’s strength, stability, wealth, harmony, beauty (space), orderliness (from HS to KSMS), Zeus’ desire to establish order, power is shared together

early heroism (the transition to patriarchy, heroes who deal with monsters, saving people from dangerous creatures (Ch.’s victory over nature))

late heroism (influence of literary processing, fear of the gods is lost)

The mythology of the Greeks was preserved abundantly due to conversion ancient culture to it, for example, the insertion of myths in the works of Homer.

Movements from chaos to space

The evolution of mythological ideas played an important role in the development of civilization. The movement towards space was the first stage of the transition to scientific knowledge peace. Space is a non-mythological world in which natural processes exist, independent of people and Gods. It is worth paying attention to the later theo-cosmogonic myths, in which social, communal, tribal, consanguineous relationships between people are transferred to natural processes. The question of the origin of the world was interpreted from the standpoint of the origin of the community, clan, tribe, people, ideas about the change of generations within the clan, and about family and everyday relations in it. And the images of gods, heroes, and other personifications generalized certain aspects of the life of the tribal community (first matrilineal, and then patrilineal). The content of theocosmogonic myths were pictures of the origin of the gods, the change of generations of gods and their struggle among themselves, their naturally determined connections and relationships with mortal people, etc. Theocosmogonic myths are the highest form of myth-making, which already contains the rudiments of a scientific reflection of the world. These myths rationalized mythology through its historicization (improving concepts that reproduce the history of the world) and systematization.

Thus, the historical merit of the ancient Greek theocosmogonic mythologies was the development of a general idea of ​​the Cosmos, which served as an important prerequisite for the emergence of scientific knowledge of the world.

Olympic mythology

The myths of this cycle tell about the life of the Olympian gods (pantheon of gods).

The composition of the pantheon has changed over the centuries, so there are more than 12 gods.

List: Hades, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, Hermes, Hestia, Hephaestus, Demeter, Dionysus, Zeus, Poseidon. All myths about these gods belong to the cycle of Olympic mythology.

Ticket #2. Poetry of Catullus. Poems to Lesbia.

Poetry of Catullus

Guy Valery Catullus (born in the 80s of the 1st century, died around 54) was from Verona. That part of “Cisalpine Gaul” to which Verona belonged was not yet part of Italy and was considered a “province,” but Catullus’s father was a wealthy man with connections in Rome, and his son received access to noble Roman society. At first, the young “provincial” was completely indifferent to political issues, spending his time among dissolute youth and communicating with representatives of literary circles.

He was one of the Neoterics. The Neoterics performed a literary program repeating the principles of Callimachus (Ancient Greek poet who lived around this time: 310-240 BC. He wrote mainly hymns, elegies, epigrams). They abandoned large forms, epic and drama, and developed small genres - epillium, epigram, elegy. Claiming to be “learned,” they, following the Alexandrians, chose rare myths, little-known variants, and imbued their works with dark hints, hidden quotes and borrowings from other authors; such quotes were considered as a literary compliment, as recognition of the stylistic skill of the quoted writer, but only a very sophisticated reader, well acquainted with both literatures - Greek and Roman, could understand and appreciate all this. Neotericists often expressed confidence that their works would “survive centuries”; in fact, this fate befell only one of them, who was recognized by his contemporaries as the most talented representative of the school. This is Guy Valery Catullus.

Catullus's literary heritage consists of three parts. These are, on the one hand, large works in the “scholarly” style, on the other - small poems, “jokes”, which, in turn, fall into two categories, similar in content, but different in style and metrical form - into poems composed in elegiac distiche (epigrams, elegies), and the so-called “polymeters”, i.e. poems of such a metric structure that does not allow the verse to be divided into similar feet or meters. The predominant place among the “polymeters” is occupied by the “eleven syllable” (verse of 11 syllables) or “phalekian verse”:

Let's live and love, my friend!

In the collection that has come down to us, Catullus’s poems are arranged in such a way that the beginning is “polymeters” and the end is epigrams; Large poems are placed in the center. The author, of course, attached great importance to his “learned” works, but his subsequent fame was based mainly on poems of small form.

Catullus's "Polymeters" are distinguished by a sharply expressed subjective coloring: the poet is not interested in the external world in itself, but only as a causative agent of subjective emotions. A lyric poem is most often presented as a dynamic reaction to a small, even the smallest event of an everyday or biographical order, real or fictitious, but allegedly experienced by the author. A friend returned to his homeland: amazement from surprise, joy, anticipation of the meeting, jubilation. The drinking buddy stole the cloak: selective abuse, demand for return, death threats. The main thing is the noisy vibration of feelings, the physical joy of life. In accordance with the ancient lyrical tradition, Catullus’s “polymeters” are almost always addressed to someone: to friends or enemies, to a loved one, to an inanimate object, and finally, to the author himself.

Small poems in elegiac meter, epigrams and short elegies, are designed in calmer tones. In the depiction of subjective feelings, there is a noticeable difference from the “polymeters”: instant reactions in their immediate formation predominated there, while in epigrams the center of gravity is transferred to long-term mental states, which the poet passively states and about which he can already reflect.

Poems to Lesbia

A significant event in Catullus’s personal life was his love for a woman, which was accompanied by difficult experiences, who appears in his poems under the fictitious name “Lesbia.” One of the most important themes of the lyrics is love; These are, first of all, poems about love for Lesbia. In the surviving collection they are placed interspersed with other poems and in no particular order, but they could form a complete cycle. The pseudonym chosen by Catullus for his beloved should remind of Sappho. Indeed, the cycle opens with a translation of Sappho’s famous poem in antiquity, which depicts the symptoms of love madness. Catullus transfers the feelings that Sappho experienced at the sight of her beloved friend getting married to his experiences at the sight of Lesbia. There is no reliable information about her except what can be found in the poems of Catullus. The image of Lesbia is given only in separate strokes that do not form a complete picture: the poet is mainly occupied with himself and his feelings. The poems demonstrate the widest range of feelings that the poet experiences for his beloved: from tender love through sadness and disappointment to bitter sarcasm. The most famous poem of Catullus dedicated to Lesbia is “I Hate and Love” (“Odi et amo”):

I hate and love. You may ask why I do this.

I don’t know, but I feel that this is happening, and I leave in torment.

Question #3. THE CONCEPT OF AN EPIC. ACHILUS AND HECTOR AS EPIC HEROES.

1.Epic (Old Greekἔπος - “word”, “narration”) - a heroic narrative about the past, containing a holistic picture of people’s life and representing in harmonious unity a certain epic world and heroic heroes

The essence of the epic style. The most important thing in the whole problem of the epic style is the relationship between the general and the individual. The epic style is an artistic style that depicts to us the life of this or that human collective, subordinating absolutely every personal life with its laws, and therefore any individual personal life will receive interest for us only in connection with the general life of its collective. Every personal life in the epic receives its meaning and its natural development only from the group to which it belongs. This personal life can be full of the deepest, most burning feelings. But these feelings, if we are talking about the epic, are caused by the life tasks of the collective and receive their satisfaction only in connection with the life of this collective. Non-collectivist feelings and behavior are something secondary and tertiary for the epic subject and do not play any role in his life. decisive role, although they can contribute very diverse content to it.

The middle position of the epic.

a) Between primitive savagery and civilization. Socio-historical place of epic style.

Strictly speaking, all art of the communal-tribal formation has an epic style, since it is a primitive, spontaneously undifferentiated collectivism in which each individual person drowns. On the other hand, we can talk about epic in a narrower sense of the word, meaning heroic songs and other related genres.

b) Rising patriarchy .

The true place of the epic is the ascending patriarchy, when a person so masters the forces of nature that he can heroically fight with them and heroically subjugate them to himself. In this era, the clan community became sedentary and here, rationally using natural resources, it begins to realize itself as a single whole, begins to remember its history and those great heroes who created and organized it, who protected it and moved it forward. This is where the epic hero appears, who no longer dissolves entirely in the clan community, but is already aware of his strength and his organizing power, although realizing himself, he still remains in complete unity with his clan community and continues to live only in it and just for her.

2. The objectivity of the epic.

a) Characteristics .

The first principle arising from the essence of the epic style is its objectivity . In fact, the epic is the primacy of the general over the individual. The epic artist does not seem to use his imagination at all. Gods, even demons, even any miracles and incredible events - all this is considered in the epic to really exist, and not at all the result of the creative imagination or idle invention of the poet.

b) Narration . What we now call the objectivity of the epic is usually called narration.

The narrative type of poetry is characterized by the basic position of the poet, due to which he directs his attention to the depiction of facts and events as if the poet himself had nothing to do with it and as if his own inner life was completely uninteresting to him. Of course, the exclusion of the poet’s own interests is fictitious, since objectivity and narration are also a certain position of the creative personality and, therefore, to one degree or another express his subjective mood. Homer was neither indifferent nor apolitical, and he did not always maintain his epic objectivity as an artistic method.

c) The emergence of subjectivism . Of course, this applies primarily to the strict epic style. And there are any number of such objectively depicted events in Homer. It is they who primarily fill Homer's poetry. But Homer is not only a strict epic. He not only depicts to us certain events related to the Trojan War, which was thought of in a very real historical way. Homer, undoubtedly, brings a lot from himself, creates various kinds of decorating details and often creates simply based on his own imagination. In the future we will find plenty of examples of this non-epic style.

Now we will point out only one technique in Homer, usually ignored in the characteristics of his style. This technique lies in the fact that Homer not only gives an objective picture of life, but very often comments on it from himself, expressing various kinds of explanations, feelings, rhetorical questions, etc.

3. Picturesqueness and plasticity of the epic. This endless loving examination of external things also led to the fact that in these things everything that was bright for sensation and everything sharp and expressive for ordinary sensory perception was always recorded.

a) Light and sun . Homer's world is full Sveta , and the events in it are played out for the most part in bright sunlight. The sun and its rays are true joy for the Homeric Greek. When Zeus began to help the Trojans and cast darkness on the battlefield, Ajax prays to Zeus to disperse the darkness, and if they are to die, then so that they die in the light of day (Il., XVII.644-647). Achilles, of course, is compared with the sun (Il., XXII.134 ff.); Hera's headband is also compared to the sun (Il., XIV.184 ff.); the wonderful horses of Res are also compared to the sun (Ill., X.547). It is clear that the sun and light in Homer are some kind of universal criterion for life and beauty.

Often this lighting is given in contrast with darkening elements. Hector (Ill., XV.604-610) is compared to a forest fire in the mountains; his eyes also glow with angry fire. Foam bubbles from his mouth, a terrible, also sparkling helmet swings above his head, and Hector himself flies through the battle like a storm. From the shield of Achilles, a wondrous light also spreads everywhere, like a beacon for those who die in the waves (Ill., XIX.375-381). Fires, flashes of lightning, the shine of weapons - these are common images in Homer.

b) Colors and paints . But not only everything is full of light in Homer. Everything is complete too paints . The “rose-fingered” Dawn has a “saffron” peplos. Aphrodite has a “golden” robe. Apollo has “golden blond” hair. Demeter has a “dark blue” veil. Latona has “golden” curls. Iris is also “golden-winged”. Thetis - “silver-footed”. Zeus has “dark steel” eyebrows and Poseidon has the same hair. The gods drink red nectar.

Let us give another example, but not from Homeric poems, but from Homeric hymns, many of which go back to Homeric antiquity. In the VII Homeric hymn, the god Dionysus, with his “dark steel” or “dark blue” eyes and the same hair in a “purple” cloak, sits among the “wine-colored” sea, on a ship. And Homer’s ships are “black” (Il., I.300), and with a “dark blue” bow (Il., XXIII.878), and “purple-cheeked” (Od., XI.124), and “carmine-cheeked "(Ill., II.637), the sails are “white” (Od., II.425, XV.291). In all such images, undoubtedly, the childhood of mankind is reflected, since children, as we know, love bright colors, diversity and shine of objects. Likewise, the Homeric Greeks found exceptionally bright, variegated and brilliant colors in the nature and life around them.

c) Plastic . From this picturesqueness let us move on to plasticity. Both Homer and the Greeks in general have always been praised for the plastic nature of the artistic images they created. However, this plasticity was very rarely understood specifically, and for the most part it was understood too broadly, expanding it into something generally beautiful and generally expressive.

5. Periods of plastic worldview in Homer. Even the closest analysis reveals that in Homer everything is not plastic, as most critics think. The problem of plasticity in Homer turns out to be extremely complex. Apparently, here, as well as in Homer in general, we must find a reflection of the centuries-old evolution of human thinking and perception, starting from the complete inability to depict three-dimensional space and ending with the very real plasticity and sculpture of the image.

a) The law of chronological incompatibility or the law of planar image . If we raise the question of the most ancient method of presenting an image in Homer, then it will probably be what F. F. Zelinsky called the law of chronological incompatibility in his article “The Law of Chronological Incompatibility and the Composition of the Iliad.” 4) Zelinsky himself draws conclusions from this law only for the composition of the Iliad. However, this may be of even greater significance for the analysis of the image of time and space in Homer.

2 .Both Hector and Achilles are the best of the best among the participants Trojan War. Both are strong, courageous, hardy, true warriors, and are fluent in all types of weapons of that time. It is no coincidence that Homer alternately calls them “equal to God.” But the main difference is the extreme humanity and decency of Hector and the excessive anger and cruelty of Achilles.

Researchers of the ancient Greek epic have long noticed that the name of Hector is not associated with any other events of the Trojan War, except for those depicted in the Iliad. Hector's tomb was shown not in Troas, but in Thebes (Paus. IX 18, 5); this makes it possible to assume that Hector is a Boeotian hero by origin, and his battle with Achilles originally took place on Greek soil. Only relatively late was the image of Hector included in the circle of tales about the Trojan War, in which Hector, more than any other hero, personifies the idea of ​​patriotic duty. This is probably why the image of Hector enjoys great sympathy from the author of the Iliad. Hector is depicted with particular warmth in the famous scene of farewell to his wife Andromache (VI 370-502).

Question #4. "Epistle to the Piso" or "The Science of Poetry" by Horace. Horace's views on poetry and creativity.

The book of "Messages" is a significant step forward in the sense of the art of depicting the inner life of an individual; Horace himself was hardly aware of the full significance of his collection, which he did not even classify as poetry.

We find the most complete explanation of Horace’s theoretical views on literature and the principles that he followed in his poetic practice in the third letter, in the “Epistle to the Pisos,” which later, back in ancient times, received the name “Science of Poetry.” Horace's poetic message does not represent a theoretical study, as Aristotle's Poetics was in its time, and does not rest on any deep philosophical foundations. Horace's work belongs to the type of “normative” poetics, containing dogmatic “prescriptions” from the standpoint of a certain literary movement.

According to the ancient commentator, Horace's theoretical source was the treatise of Neoptolemus from Parion, which he follows in the arrangement of material and in basic aesthetic ideas. Poetry in general, a poetic work, a poet - this course of Neopthelemus’s presentation is preserved by Horace. But the Roman poet does not set out to give an exhaustive treatise. The free form of the “message” allows him to dwell only on some issues, more or less relevant, from the point of view of the struggle of literary trends in Rome. “The Science of Poetry” is, as it were, a theoretical manifesto of Roman classicism of the time of Augustus.

The aesthetics of “The Science of Poetry” is classicistic. The work should be simple, holistic and harmonious. Asymmetry, digressions, descriptive digressions, mannerisms - all these are violations of the canon of beauty. Without naming names and directions, Horace simultaneously turns his polemic against the neotericists (with this name Cicero designated a group of young Roman poets of the 1st century BC who, breaking with the traditions of the great historical epic (Ennia and Lucilius), took the Hellenistic as a model poetry, professing the poetic principles of Callimachus.), and against the Asian-declamatory style emerging in Roman poetry, and against the archaizing Atticists. For the normative poetics of European classicism, the Epistle to the Piso had no less canonical significance than Aristotle's Poetics. Code of Classicism, “Poetic Art” (L"art poetique, 1674) Boileau reproduces not only the traditional title of the Horatian message, but also the entire course of presentation, with the same arrangement of material and with numerous borrowings of details, which are often given almost in a literal translation. Horace very soon he was recognized as a “classic”; as he himself foresaw (Epistle I, 20), his works became the subject of reading and commentary in the Roman school.

Question # 5. Features of Homeric style.

Epic style: early (strict) and later (free). In Homer's poems there are both signs of the first and second.

The uniqueness of Homeric style lies in:

Objectivity. Homer gives an objective picture of the world, without chasing details and details of the image. All that matters is that the event actually happened; everything else is only of secondary importance. Even everything wonderful and fantastic (gods and demons) is depicted by Homer as if it really existed.

A “material” depiction of life. Homer focuses on the external side of the events he depicts. Visual, auditory and motor sensations, as a result of which one can often only guess about the psychology of the characters.

Traditions. Homer depicts everything that is constant, stable, age-old, obvious to everyone and recognized by everyone in the past, and obligatory for everyone in the present.

monumentality, those. sublimity, solemnity. An epic work always awakens high, noble feelings, fosters a heroic will, and does not tolerate anything base.

Comparison method to which Homer resorts, wanting to explain something less understandable with something more understandable (for example, the Iliad, in which almost all pictures from the military field are compared with worldly life).

Images of heroes, which are not limited to epic “heroes”. In almost each of the main characters one can see the emergence of an individual characteristic. The basis of the originality of the appearance of an epic hero is gradation, the degree of one or another quality. So, for example, Agamemnon surpasses everyone in the powers of the power entrusted to him, Paris - in his love of women, Odysseus - in his wit, etc. We can say that none of the heroes is deprived, standing out in one quality and inferior in other properties.

Images of gods which play an important role. The development of events takes place in 2 parallel plans: on Olympus and on earth. The first plane is the highest, since the course of events that then unfold on earth is often predetermined there . Originality Homeric gods is that they endowed with many human characteristics and weaknesses : they quarrel, scold, plot each other, etc. Homer often depicts them in reduced, humorous situations (for example, Ares and Aphrodite overtaken during a date and covered by Hephaestus’s net).

Anti-war pathos. With pain and amazement, Homer conveys the process of destruction and destruction of human bodies, the melancholy of the soul flying off to Hades. Neither of the warring parties receives moral elevation over the other in Homer. The author is dear the idea of ​​the commonality of human lot , difficult and sad, depending on higher powers.

Multiple epic genres available . The Iliad and the Odyssey are generally heroic poems. But Homer’s epic also contains the beginnings of other epic genres, for example:

Elements of a fairy tale. The fairy tale is quite skeptical about what is depicted, viewing it as the subject of a funny and entertaining story. "Odyssey" - the story of the transformation of the sea god Proteus into various animals and how Menelaus caught him at the moment when Proteus was a man and forced him to tell the future

Elements of a novel : the story about Telemachus’s search for his father in the Odyssey contains elements of an adventure novel, and the entire second part of the same poem, starting with Canto XIII, contains elements of a family novel.

Lyric Elements : “The Iliad” is the scene of Hector’s farewell to his wife Andromache before the battle.

Elements of both tragedy and comedy with all the dramatic conflicts inherent in them. Almost all the main characters of both poems are tragic. Achilles is tragic. doomed to death in his youth, and he knows about this doom of his. The death of Patroclus is tragic. The fate of all the Trojan leaders is also tragic, whose death is also predetermined from above.

Comic elements - a fight between Odysseus and the beggar Ir on the threshold of the palace where the suitors are feasting. This comedy reaches the level of burlesque, when the sublime is depicted as base. The Olympic scenes are almost always presented by Homer in burlesque style. A well-known example of this is the song of the Iliad, which depicts Hera’s marital jealousy. Zeus wants to beat his wife, and the bow-legged freak Hephaestus is trying to make the gods laugh with jokes.

Elements of humor . Aphrodite is presented humorously when she enters battle and is wounded by the mortal hero Diomedes, about which she is ridiculed by the gods on Olympus.

Elements of irony very noticeable in Homer's poems. Agamemnon in the Iliad orders his army to go home, but in fact this army again has to take up arms and fight.

Elements of satire. The Cyclops are depicted as a caricature and satire of people living without any laws. Fersit, depicted as a freak, is a parody of the citizen, soldier and aristocrat. There are many satirical features in Agamemnon, who surprises with his greed, despotism, cowardice and many other vices

Question #6. The Theme of Dido and Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid

The legend of Dido and Aeneas was first described by Naevius in the 3rd-2nd century BC. Virgil later included it in his epic "Aeneid" (written approximately 29 BC). Virgil's work was so popular that the inhabitants of Pompeii decorated their homes with quotes from it. Russian authors often addressed this topic (A. Akhmatova “Don’t be scared - I’m still similar”; Brodsky “ great person looked out the window...")

After a terrible storm, the ship of Aeneas (a widower who lost his wife in burning Troy) lands on the shores of Africa (the storm and the direction of the ship are arranged by the gods), where Dido rules (who also lost her spouse and has not known family happiness, but constantly refuses wooing suitors). Aeneas talks about war, adventures and travels, and Dido falls in love with a brave man and loves his son from his first wife with maternal love. She found female happiness and partly even forgot about the state she founded. Aeneas's reciprocal love is not so strongly expressed, and the artistic expressiveness of Dido's image is such that in the fourth book she, as a character, practically outshines the main character. In this book there is a temporary stop on Aeneas’s path, a “defection” that he overcomes (Jupiter’s messenger predicts his fate: he will have a kingdom and a third wife) and he, having somehow explained himself to his beloved, continues on his way, but at the cost of the latter’s life , who could not survive the separation and committed suicide, which leaves pain in the hero’s soul (as evidenced by their meeting in the kingdom of the dead).

Dido entered the circle of world female images embodying the heroism and sacrifice of love, and the love story with Aeneas in the history of culture acquired a certain intrinsic value (for example, Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”, Marlowe’s “The Tragedy of Dido”)

The theme of Dido and Aeneas is the theme of sacrificial love, the search for female happiness and bitter disappointment (the death of the first husband, the escape of the second), the theme of the confrontation between desire, dreams, what you WANT (Dido) and fate, what you NEED (Aeneas). This is the most dramatically intense part of the poem, and artistically the most powerful. From the point of view of the ideological background of the epic, it is also important: in the tragic breakup of Aeneas and Dido, the Romans saw a prototype of the mortal enmity of Rome and Carthage, which ended in three Punic Wars and the destruction of the latter.

P. S.: Correlate the character and actions of Aeneas with question 12: Aeneas as a man of destiny.

The following genres belonged to declamatory lyrics:

1. epigram,

1 .The main genre was considered elegy . This is a poem

medium length, moral and political, later love content, without

distinct composition. The oldest type of elegy is considered

military-heroic , which is very close to the epic. The hero of this elegy

performs feats consciously, not for the good of the family, but for the state (Kallin, Tyrtey). Another kind of elegy - elegy of personal destiny . These elegies represent reflections on oneself, on man’s place in the world, on moral standards (Archilochus). The third type of elegy is philosophical and political elegy. It represents the expression of political thoughts in semi-mythological form. This type of elegy is dominated by reflections the author about the state structure of the polis, about the interaction of various forces in the state.

2.Epigram – a short poem of any content,

dating back to ancient inscriptions. The epigrams were written in elegiac distich and were distinguished by their brevity and accuracy.

3.Gnome – This is a short poetic statement with instructive and philosophical content. Dwarves formulate generally accepted propositions and are close to aphorisms. The dwarf was also noted for his brevity and precision. Dwarven thought concerns the basic issues of human life. This type of poetry was very popular among the ancient Greeks.

4.Iambic - a genre of ancient Greek poetry predominantly accusatory

character. A feature of iambic poetry is laughter, as well as

a certain size and foot with stress on the second syllable. The Greeks believed in

the cleansing power of laughter, so everything was ridiculed.

There were two types of iambic:

personal ridicule;

ridicule of social relations.

Yambs were distinguished by extraordinary freedom; there were no restrictions for them.

Iambics of Archilochus.

Iambic poetry is not the invention of Archilochus, as many thought: it arose much earlier - probably in connection with the cult of Demeter (the maid of the Eleusinian king named Iamba decided to make the grieving Demeter laugh with obscene jokes), i.e., it goes back to folklore roots. As the Homeric hymn says, the maidservant of the Eleusinian king Kelei, named Yamba, made the grieving Demeter laugh with obscene jokes. Iambics were also used at certain moments of the festive procession from Athens to Edeusis, when custom required expressions of a mocking and playful nature.

The word “iamb” among the Greeks, generally speaking, was associated with the idea of ​​the comic nature of the work, while in new literature iambic is an exclusively metrical concept. Iambic is a combination of a short syllable and a long one. Archilochus (Ar.) most openly expressed the individualistic trends of the era: the individual, having thrown off the tight bonds of ancient tribal morality, here clearly opposes himself to the collective as a self-sufficient free person, not subject to anyone’s opinions and any laws. Ar. lived at the beginning of the 7th century, became famous for his iambics. In his iambics he told us how, as a mercenary, he threw down his shield in a battle with the Thracian barbarians. His affair with Neobula, daughter of Lycambus, who opposed this marriage, is known. Ar. took revenge on him in iambics and drove him to suicide (!). In his iambics Ar. also expressed his love for Neobula, there are also iambics dedicated to friends discussing Ar's philosophy of life. (philosophy of optimism). In iambic Ar. we find a morality devoid of all boredom, a clear, calm trust in the flow of life, starting from Ares, the god of war, and ending with the muses, the goddesses of art; starting with humor about his own betrayal and ending with a formidable curse on a traitorous friend. Ar.-warrior, wine lover, woman lover and misogynist, poet, “idle reveler,” morally unstable and passionate lover of life, even a philosopher, reminding us of the transience of life, but also comforting us with the teaching of its eternal return.

Question # 8. The comedy art of Plautus.

Titus Maccus, nicknamed Plautus (“flat-footed”), was the most prominent Roman comedian (mid-3rd century - 184 BC). About 130 comedies were attributed to Plautus, but 21 were considered genuine, including “The Treasure,” “The Tricks of the Parasite,” “The Boastful Warrior,” and “The Trickster Slave.” Plautus worked in the field of palliata, comedy with a Greek plot, adapting Greek plays for the Roman stage.

Plautus mostly portrays in his comedies young merchants, often trading in overseas lands, showing conflicts between children with their fathers that interfere with their personal lives, conflicts with pimps from whose hands they need to snatch their beloved girls, and with moneylenders from whom they have to borrow money. In comedies, Plautus’s hatred of moneylenders and pimps is everywhere felt. The most striking images are smart, dexterous, energetic slaves. They help their young owners arrange their personal lives. Language close to the audience. The main characters are grotesque, their features are hyperbolic. The colloquial iambic hexameter is replaced by a seven-foot trochee or an eight-foot anapest. There is no chorus, as in neo-Attic comedy.

Plautus knew Greek literature and Greek drama very well, and he used the plots of the Neo-Attic domestic comedy, since in the conditions of his time, when the aristocratic senate was at the head of the state, the poet could not help but give stories from Italian life and satirically depict his contemporaries directly.

Plautus used the plots of the Neo-Attic comedy of Diphilus, Demophilus, Philemon and Menander, but not the plots of Aristophanes, because Aristophanes' comedies were too politically acute, and the problems posed in them were not relevant for Rome. Plautus successfully used the plots of everyday Neo-Attic comedy and, by revealing them, was able to resolve issues that interested his contemporaries. One of the sharpest comedies - “The Boastful Warrior”

The novelization of Greek stories is that Plautus often introduces into his comedies features of the Roman way of life, Roman culture, Roman courts, and Roman self-government. So, he talks a lot about the praetors, and these are the officials of Rome, about the Senate. Entering the names of Roman cities and depicting nationalities. customs He took plots from Greek comedies that were in tune with Roman life and in them resolved problems that were relevant to his society.

Plautus's favorite figure, the slave, represents the most dynamic mask of comedy, the least constrained in his actions, words and gestures by the demands of sedateness and decency imposed on the free. The slave is not only the bearer of intrigue, but also the focus of the buffoon element. He amuses the audience with buffoonery and a parody of high style, with “philosophizing” and worship, running around the stage and frantic body movements, and finally, with the fact that beatings are showered on him or can be rained down every minute. From the height of more stringent aesthetic requirements, later Roman criticism (for example, Horace) reproached Plautus for caricature and lack of consistency in his images. Plautus' goal is to continuously excite laughter with every scene, phrase, and gesture.

Ticket # 9. Makarova Ekaterina.

The origin of lyrics and its types. Sappho as a representative of monodic lyricism.

Lyrics – a type of literature where the voice of the poet is clearly heard, conveying his feelings and thoughts in short poems. It comes from the Greek word "lyricos", which means "performed on the lyre" or "singing to the lyre." The Greeks used this word not to call poetry at all, but to songs that were sung to the lyre.

The appearance of works of the lyrical genre dates back to the 7th-6th centuries. BC. and are determined, first of all, by significant changes that have occurred in the life of most Greek communities.

Greek lyrics are usually divided into three genres:elegy, iambic and melica (song lyrics). Not all of these genres were performed to the sounds of the lyre: for elegy and iambs, musical accompaniment was not necessary; sometimes iambics were accompanied by the sounds of a flute, and melic works could be performed to the sounds of both a lyre and a flute.

The lyrics are based primarily on cult and ritual folklore songs. Each type of lyric poetry, as well as every genre of Greek poetry, was assigned a certain poetic meter; only melic poets could use different meters even within the same verse.

The main feature of the lyrical genre , meliks, is its connection with musical accompaniment, which was more clearly visible than in elegy and iambics. But gradually melika lost its organic connection with music and became a purely literary genre. Its main difference from iambs and elegy, where verses or couplets of the same size alternated, is that melic poems were built mainly on alternating stanzas, complex and varied in size.

Melic poetry in Ancient Greece is usually divided into solo (monodic) and choral.

Solo lyricism received particular development on the island of Lesvos, the birthplace of two major poets - Alcaeus and Sappho.

Sappho(end of the 7th - first half of the 6th century BC) belonged to the family aristocracy, lived for a long time in exile (on the island of Sicily), but at the end of her life she returned to her homeland, where she died, throwing herself, according to legend, from a cliff at sea because of unrequited love for the young man Phaon. This legend reflects the nature of Sappho's lyrics, the main theme of which was love.

Most of Sappho's poems are dedicated to her friends, many of whom, as we know, also wrote poetry. This would be impossible if they lived, for example, in Athens, where the woman was a recluse, and her pursuit of literature would only cause condemnation.

Sappho peered intently into the world of the human soul. She came up with three ways talk about him. The first is to convey mental confusion through the depiction of bodily states, psychology through physiology.

Another technique is more complex and subtle. Sappho describes the deity who sends love - Eros(Erota). But it is interesting that she chooses such epithets that can be applied to a person, or rather, to the state in which he finds himself when he falls in love. He is both pleased and sad at the same time, he is in confusion, like trees under a gust of wind: “Eros is tormenting me again, weary - / Bitterly sweet...”; “like the wind flying from the mountain to the oak trees, / The Eros of the soul shook us...”

Sappho has third way to tell about your feeling. Her confusion in the “Hymn to Aphrodite” she is seen with the eyes and described by the lips of the goddess who appeared to her.

There are many ritual songs in Sappho's work. This increases the value of her heritage, since Greek folklore “in its pure form” has not reached us, and we can judge it only by the poems of those poets who, wittingly or unwittingly, imitated folk art.

Ticket #10. Roman novel.

Depends on Greek, but differs from it both in technique and structure, and in its everyday-descriptive character; (Petronia and Apuleia have historically accurate background details and characters.)

Lucius Apuleius (c. 125 AD - after 170 AD) - ancient Roman writer, Platonist philosopher, rhetorician, author famous novel"Golden Donkey"

The style of “ZO” is emphatically ironic, eccentric, replete with puns, and piles of epithets

The novel is a veiled esoteric treatise: the first 10 books are full of feelings. pleasures and temptations of life, leading to degradation and transition to a “bestial” state, and the latter demonstrates the elevation of man through familiarization with the divine secrets.

The novel “encrypts” the life of Apuleius himself, the cat. was initiated into various mystical teachings and was tried on charges of witchcraft.

The work is a satire on all features of life in late Rome, including religion. The ironic notes in the description of the initiation rites that Lucius goes through speak of Apuleius’ religious skepticism.

We are always talking about transformations - including spiritual ones

The hero of the novel, Lucius (coincidence with the author’s name!) travels through Thessaly. - was famous as the birthplace of magical art, Lucius is convinced of this from his own sad experience.

In a thirst to join the mysterious magic, Lukiy enters into a relationship with a maid who is involved in the mistress’s worship, but she mistakenly turns him into a donkey instead of a bird. A person preserves his mind and his tastes. He knows a way to free himself from enchantment: it is enough to chew roses. But the reverse transformation is delayed for a long time. “Donkey” is kidnapped by robbers that same night, he experiences various adventures, goes from one owner to another, suffers beatings everywhere and repeatedly finds himself on the verge of death. When a strange animal attracts attention, it is destined for a shameful public display. All this constitutes the content of the first ten books of the novel.

IN last moment Lukiy manages to escape to Coast, and in the final 11th book he makes a plea to the goddess Isis. The goddess appears to him in a dream, promises salvation, but so that he future life was dedicated to serving her. Indeed, the next day the donkey meets the sacred procession of Isis, chews roses from the wreath of her priest and becomes a man. The revived Lucius now acquires the features of Apuleius himself: he turns out to be a native of Madaura, accepts initiation into the mysteries of Isis and, by divine inspiration, goes to Rome, where he is awarded the highest degrees of initiation

11 books, a picaresque novel, “ZO” - given the name by Augustine.

transformation of man into animal internationally

a series of inserted short stories, unrelated to the plot and introduced as stories about what was seen and heard before and after the transformation

The endings are also different: the intervention of Isis, the religious and solemn ending

A.'s goals are to entertain and moralize.

insert (4.5 books) – fairy tale “Cupid and Psyche”

Book 11 – strange, religious, some believe that it does not belong to A.. Invention:

donkey moves > sees new things all the time

with him everyone says everything, they are not “embarrassed” by unexpected, folk, neologisms, made-up words, and many Greek borrowings.

The high assessment of the book by Augustine the Blessed is known. also reports its second name - “The Golden Donkey” - the epithet “golden” indicated the admiration of the readers.

A possible source is the satirical story “Luky, or Donkey - perhaps an imitation. This is the story of a young man, cat. Because of his passionate desire to learn the secrets of magic, he mistakenly turned into a donkey instead of a bird.

Nowadays it is considered most likely that the Metamorphoses of Lucius of Patras served as a general model for the work of Pseudo-Lucian and for the novel of Apuleius. One of the indirect evidence of the direct connection between Apuleius and Lucius is also seen in the fact that the work of Apuleius bears the same name as the work of Lucius from Patras.

Question #11. The structure of the Greek theater and theatrical performances.

During the heyday of Greek society, theatrical performances were part of the cult of Dionysus and took place exclusively during festivals dedicated to this god.

The order established around 501 - 500. for The Great Dionysius, provided for three authors in a tragic competition, each of whom represented three tragedies and a drama of satyrs. At comedy competitions, poets were required to submit one play each. The poet composed not only the text, but also the musical and ballet parts of the drama; he was also a director, choreographer and often, especially in earlier times, an actor. The poet’s admission to the competition depended on the archon (member of the government) who was in charge of the festival; ideological control over the plays was also exercised in this way. The state assigned the costs of staging the dramas of each poet to some wealthy citizen, who was appointed choreg(choir director). The choreg recruited a choir of 12, and later 15 people for tragedy, 24 for comedy, paid for the choir members, the room in which the choir prepared, rehearsals, costumes, etc. The splendor of the production depended on the generosity of the choreg. The expenses of the choreographers were very significant, and victories in the competition were awarded jointly to the choreographer and the director-poet. With the increase in the number of actors and the separation of the actor from the poet, the third, independent participant in the competition became the main actor (“protagonist”), who selected assistants for himself: one for the second, the other for the third roles (“deuteragonist” and “tritagonist”). The appointment of his poet to the choregus and his chief actor to the poet took place by lot in the people's assembly presided over by the archon. In the 4th century, when the choir lost its importance in drama and the center of gravity shifted to acting, this order was considered inconvenient, since it made the success of the choreographer and poet excessively dependent on the performance of the actor assigned to them and the success of the actor on the quality of the play and production . Then it was established that each protagonist should appear for each poet in one of his tragedies. The Athenian state entrusted the care of the premises for spectators and performers, first with the construction of temporary wooden structures, and subsequently with the maintenance and repair of the permanent theater, to private entrepreneurs, renting out the premises. Therefore, entrance to the theater was paid. However, in order to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their financial status, have the opportunity to attend the theater, democracy since the time of Pericles has provided every interested citizen with a subsidy equal to the entrance fee for one day, and in the 4th century. and for all three days of theatrical performances.

One of the most important differences between Greek theater and modern theater was that the play took place in the open air, in daylight. The absence of a roof and the use of natural light were associated, among other things, with the enormous size of Greek theaters, significantly exceeding even the largest modern theaters. Given the rarity of theatrical performances, ancient theater premises had to be built with the masses of citizens celebrating the holiday in mind.

Due to the choral origins of Attic drama, one of the main parts of the theater is orchestra(“dancing platform”), where both dramatic and lyrical choirs performed. The oldest orchestra of the Athenian theater was a round compacted parade ground, 24 meters in diameter, with two side entrances; the audience passed through them, and then the choir entered. In the middle of the orchestra was altar of Dionysus. With the introduction of an actor who performed in different roles, a changing room was needed. This room is the so-called skena (“stage”, i.e. tent), was temporary in nature and was initially in those fields of view of the public; soon they began to build it behind the orchestra and artistically design it as a decorative background for the game. The skene now depicted the facade of a building, most often a palace or a temple, in front of whose walls the action unfolds (in Greek drama the action never takes place inside a house). was erected in front of her colonnade(proskenium); Painted boards were placed between the columns, serving as a kind of conventional decoration: they depicted something reminiscent of the setting of the play. With this structure of the theater, one very important question for the theatrical business remains unclear: where did the actors play? Accurate information about this is available only for late antiquity; the actors performed then on the stage, rising high above the orchestra, and were thus separated from the choir. The third component of the theater, in addition to the orchestra and skene, was seats for spectators. In the 5th century these were wooden benches, which were later replaced by stone seats. Mechanical devices in the theater of the 5th century. there was very little. When it was necessary to show the viewer what was happening inside the house, a platform on wooden wheels rolled out of the doors of the screen (ekkyclema), along with the actors or dolls that were placed on it, and then was taken back. To lift the characters (for example, gods) into the air, a so-called “machine” was used, something like a crane.

The participants of the game performed wearing masks. Greek theater classical period fully preserved this heritage of ritual drama, although magical meaning it no longer had. The mask corresponded to the focus of Greek art on presenting generalized images, not ordinary ones, but heroic ones, rising above the everyday level, or grotesque-comic ones. With a sudden change state of mind The actor wore different masks in his different parishes. Thanks to the mask, the actor could easily perform in several roles during one play. In the minds of the Greeks, mythical heroes exceeded ordinary people in height and shoulder width. That's why tragic actors wore buskins(shoes with high stilt-shaped soles), a high headdress from which long curls descended, and pillows were placed under the suit. They performed in solemn long clothes, the ancient vestments of kings, which only the priests continued to wear.

Question # 12. “Aeneid” by Virgil. Aeneas as a man of destiny (Toporov)

The Aeneid is Virgil's unfinished patriotic epic, consisting of 12 books written between 29-19. After Virgil's death, the Aeneid was published by his friends Varius and Plotius without any changes, but with some abbreviations.

Virgil took up this subject at the request of Augustus in order to arouse national pride in the Romans with tales of the great destinies of their ancestors and, on the other hand, to protect the dynastic interests of Augustus, supposedly a descendant of Aeneas through his son Yulus, or Ascanius. Virgil in the Aeneid closely aligns himself with Homer; in the Iliad, Aeneas is the hero of the future. The poem begins with the last part of Aeneas’s wanderings, his stay in Carthage, and then episodically tells the previous events, the destruction of Ilion (II paragraph), Aeneas’s wanderings after that (III paragraph), arrival in Carthage (I and IV paragraphs), travel through Sicily (V p.) to Italy (VI p.), where a new series of adventures of a romantic and warlike nature begins. The very execution of the plot suffers from a common shortcoming of Virgil's works - the lack of original creativity and strong characters. The hero, “pious Aeneas,” is especially unsuccessful, deprived of any initiative, controlled by fate and the decisions of the gods, who patronize him as the founder of a noble family and the executor of the divine mission - moving Lar to a new homeland. In addition, the Aeneid bears the imprint of artificiality; in contrast to the Homeric epic, which came out of the people, the Aeneid was created in the mind of the poet, without connections with folk life and beliefs; Greek elements are confused with Italic ones, mythical tales with history, and the reader constantly feels that the mythical world serves only as a poetic expression of the national idea. But Virgil used all the power of his verse to decorate psychological and purely poetic episodes, which constitute the immortal glory of the epic.

“Aeneas as a man of destiny” According to Toporov(Vladimir Nikolaevich Toporov (July 5, 1928, Moscow - December 5, 2005, ibid.) - Russian philologist) : “The significance of Aeneas’s life feat is all the higher because he created himself and prepared his future with an eye, of course, on all those signs that fate sent him and which only such a person as Aeneas could have noticed and understood their meaning, and only in such circumstances as befell him. In Virgil, Aeneas is taken mainly in the middle of his path, in the most uncertain and most unstable period of his life, among wanderings that resemble chaotic throwing rather than a path, although a distant and at first completely unclear goal is still present, but its reality itself is not yet completely accepted by consciousness. Aeneas is vitally connected with his past, but in reality this past no longer exists, and he can only touch it in memory. The memory of Troy is both consolation and bitter sadness. It is painful and has a destructive effect, if you see Troy as a real support, and in your personal Trojan experience as a kind of closed, self-sufficient, complete and, therefore, exhausted space after its death. But this memory is also creative if this experience is comprehended to the level of an idea and in it one sees the resource that is taken along with oneself on the journey and, in a certain sense, controls this path. But the past, be that as it may, entered into memory and enriched Aeneas with experience. It’s even worse with the future: he doesn’t have it (or, more accurately, in his circumstances there is no possibility of either seeing this future or even reflecting on it), it cannot become part of the integral experience and a vital resource. There is only the present, which threatens death, and it is, in essence, not life. Locked by both the past and the present in the space of destruction, Aeneas, at least only theoretically, can expect salvation only from the future, which, fortunately for Aeneas, reveals itself to him, notifying him of itself with various signs, and even in the circumstances he experiences there is a certain last reserve within himself that allows him to notice these signs and respond to them, in other words, to enter into saving contact with the future - and precisely with his future. Memory of the past and attention to signs of the future, a guarantee of hope - these are the two gifts that determine Aeneas’ path to the future and at the same time control it.

Without going into particulars, on this path Aeneas has to deal with three series of factors on which the success of the path and, consequently, a positive solution to the problem depends, putting Aeneas on par with his fate. These three circles of factors - chance, the will of the gods and fate - are by their nature external to man. Their role in developing Aeneas’ behavioral strategy is different, just as the very nature of these factors is different. The case is indeed “random,” and this is important in the sense that it practically coincides with its own sign, both in time and materially, materially. It follows from this that the sign aspect of the case plays a minimal role, since the “victim” of the case deals with the case itself as such and only; the sign of the case before the case discovers itself, as a rule, is not fixed, and therefore it is practically useless for changing behavior in order to prepare for the case itself. For the same reasons, the search for the cause of a case is meaningless, or rather, devoid of practical expediency: cause and effect seem to coincide with each other in the unity of the case itself, just as the signifier and the signified coincide in it. Finally, most often the case does not have a very significant “disturbing” force: rather, it is like a step that causes stumbling and procrastination, disruption of the rhythm and deviation, but not the cancellation of the path chosen by the traveler. But in a bad moment, the escalation of “incidents” on the previous segment of the journey can produce a depressing effect, cause a contrite reaction, despondency even in Aeneas, who tightly controls his emotions and is not inclined to relax.

Fate in this triple series appears in the Aeneid as a macrofactor. as the highest and final court of the “impersonal” about a person. Here she does not depend on a person, and his behavior cannot change her last word, although the person himself, like Mohammed to the mountain, can go towards fate. Since fate reveals itself obviously only in its last word about a person, and (in Virgil, at least) it does not accumulate its decision, does not develop gradually, consistently, summatively - it is motionless and also reveals itself at once and entirely, in a single point chronotope. In this sense, fate turns out to be, in essence, independent of cause-and-effect dependence (in another version, the situation resembles what is described by Bohr’s third postulate), but at the same time, fate is a person’s tester, and how he withstands this test determines It is not the word of fate itself that depends, but a person’s readiness to meet it. In the extreme case (and the example of Aeneas from this category), such readiness makes a person congenial to his fate, allows him to come into contact with it and creates a fundamentally new situation: the last word of fate about a person is no longer a sentence, not an act of rigid determination, subordination, essentially violence or - more carefully - not only a sentence, but giving a person the right and opportunity to freely choose his destiny.”

Question #13. Aeschylus as "father of tragedy." Aeschylus's contribution to the development of drama.

Aeschylus, the poet of the era of the formation of the Athenian state and the Greco-Persian wars, is the founder of ancient tragedy in its established forms. Aeschylus, who introduced the second actor, was recognized as the “father of tragedy.” The playwright, who stood at the origins of the genre, managed to create works that have survived centuries. Ancient scholars counted 90 dramatic works (tragedies and satyr dramas) in the literary heritage of Aeschylus; Only seven tragedies have been preserved in their entirety, including one complete trilogy. In addition, 72 plays are known to us by their titles, from which it is usually clear what mythological material was developed in the play; their fragments, however, are few in number and small in size. In Aeschylus, elements of the traditional worldview are closely intertwined with attitudes generated by democratic statehood. He believes in the real existence of divine forces that influence man and often insidiously lay snares for him. Aeschylus adheres to the ancient idea of hereditary ancestral responsibility: the guilt of the ancestor falls on the descendants, entangles them with its fatal consequences and leads to inevitable death. On the other hand, the gods of Aeschylus become guardians of the legal foundations of the new state structure, and he vigorously puts forward moment of personal responsibility for his freely chosen behavior. In this regard, traditional religious ideas are being modernized. Developing thoughts already outlined by Solon, Aeschylus depicts how divine retribution is introduced into the natural course of things. Relationship between divine influence and the conscious behavior of people, the meaning of the ways and goals of this influence, the question of its justice and goodness constitute the main problematic of Aeschylus, which he deploys in the depiction of human fate and human suffering. By his own admission, heroic tales (for example, Homer) serve as material for Aeschylus. The fate of the hero or heroic family of Aeschylus most often depicted in three successive tragedies, making up a plot-wise and ideologically integral trilogy; it is followed by a satyr drama based on a plot from the same mythological cycle to which the trilogy belonged. However, borrowing plots from the epic, Aeschylus not only dramatizes the legends, but also reinterprets them and imbues them with his own problems. In the light of this problematic, the direction of Aeschylus’s dramatic innovations becomes clear. Aristotle, in the already quoted 4th chapter of the Poetics, summarizes them as follows: “Aeschylus was the first to increase the number of actors from one to two, reduce the chorus parts and give primacy to the dialogue.” In other words, tragedy ceased to be a cantata, one of the branches of mimetic choral lyricism, and began to turn into drama. In the pre-Aeschylean tragedy, the story of the only actor about what was happening behind the stage and his dialogue with the luminary served only as a pretext for the lyrical outpourings of the chorus. Thanks to the introduction of a second actor, it became possible to enhance the dramatic action, opposing competing forces to each other, and characterize one actor by his reaction to the messages or actions of another. However, Aeschylus came to the widespread use of these possibilities only in later period your creativity; in his early works the choir parts still prevail over the dialogue actors.

Full of dramatic movement and vivid images, the Oresteia is also extremely rich in ideological content. This trilogy is extremely important for understanding the worldview of Aeschylus. A poet of the era of the growth of Athenian democracy, Aeschylus is convinced of the meaningfulness and goodness of the world order. Through the mouth of the chorus in “Agamemnon,” he polemicizes against the idea that happiness and unhappiness mechanically alternate in people’s lives and proclaims the inviolability of the law of fair retribution. Suffering seems to him to be one of the tools for the just management of the world: “knowledge is acquired through suffering.” The political views of Aeschylus are also clearly expressed in the Oresteia. He exalts the Areopagus, an ancient aristocratic institution, around whose functions political struggle unfolded in these years, and considers “anarchy” no less dangerous than despotism. Aeschylus thus occupies conservative position towards democratic reforms, carried out by the group of Pericles, but its conservatism is also directed against those sides of Athenian democracy that are its reverse side. The power of money, inhumane treatment of slaves, wars of conquest - all this meets with unconditional condemnation from the artist, whose harsh worldview is based on deep sympathy for human suffering. The surviving tragedies allow us to outline three stages in the work of Aeschylus, which at the same time are stages in the formation of tragedy as dramatic genre. The early plays (“Suppliants”, “Persians”) are characterized by a predominance of choral parts, little use of a second actor, poor development of dialogue, and abstract images. The middle period includes such works as “Seven Against Thebes” and “Prometheus Bound”. Here a central image of the hero appears, characterized by several main features; the dialogue gets more developed, prologues are created; The images of episodic figures (“Prometheus”) also become clearer. The third stage is represented by the Oresteia, with its more complex composition, increasing drama, numerous secondary characters and the use of three actors.

Many of Aeschylus’s techniques, even soon after his death, seemed archaic and undramatic; These include, for example, silent grief, prolonged silence of the characters. Thus, Prometheus is silent when he is chained; Cassandra is also silent for a long time in “Agamemnon”, despite the speeches addressed to her: as the most striking example, ancient sources cite the tragedy “Niobe”, the heroine of which remained motionless and silent at the grave of her children for a significant part of the action. The art of conducting dramatic dialogue is still in the process of formation in Aeschylus, developing from drama to drama, and lyricism remains one of the most important means of artistic influence. The chorus that predominated in “The Suppliants” and “The Persians” plays a big role in later tragedies, as a bearer of mood(“Agamemnon”, “Choephori”), and sometimes as a character (“Eumenides”).

The emotional power of Aeschylus’s tragedy is also supported by the powerful pathos of his language; it is characterized by a certain solemnity and majesty, especially in the lyrical parts, which, coupled with low dynamism, already at the end of the 5th century. seemed somewhat archaic. Late antiquity turned to Aeschylus less often than to Sophocles and Euripides; Aeschylus was read less and quoted less. The same thing happened in the 16th - 18th centuries. Aeschylus's influence on world literature was much greater to a greater extent indirect, through the ancient successors of Aeschylus, than direct. Of the images created by Aeschylus, Prometheus was the most important, but not all authors who developed the myth of Prometheus turned to Aeschylus. The power and greatness of Aeschylus' tragedies received due appreciation only from the end of the 18th century; however, bourgeois researchers still distort the image of the founder of tragedy, emphasizing the exclusively conservative, religious and mythological side of his work and ignoring his deeply progressive essence.

Question #14. “Idyll” by Theocritus and “Bucolics” by Virgil.

The creator of the idyll was a poet Theocritus (Theocritus) poet of the 3rd century. BC e. The term idyll means, according to one interpretation, “picture”, and according to another, more plausible, “song”. This was the name in ancient times for small poems that did not fit into any of the usual genres.

He wrote bucolic idylls - shepherd songs. The bucolic genre had its basis in Greek folklore. Ancient sources report the songs of shepherds playing the flute, their ritual competitions during the “cleansing” of herds and paddocks, as well as at the festivals of the “mistress of beasts” Artemis. The competition in the shepherd's songs ("bucoliasm"), as presented in the poems of Theocritus, has a typical structure that closely resembles the "contest" scenes in ancient Attic comedy. Two shepherds meet and start a quarrel, which ends in a challenge to a singing competition; A judge is chosen, he determines the order of the competition and pronounces his verdict at the end. The competition itself consists of the competitors either sequentially performing a large, coherent song, or exchanging short songs, which should be close in theme and identical in size.

Theocritus against urban civilization. Brings you closer to the natural. His idylls are scenes with bootes who compete in songs (usually love songs). Theocritus treats them with irony - he is a resident of the city, not poor, and plays a game with the reader. Interspersed with the sentimental style, often within the same poem, is an ironic style, sometimes even parodic, with sketches of everyday traits and superstitions.

IDYLL I Thyrsis

"Tyrsis" is a typical example of a rural pastoral idyll, in which

a beautiful shepherd's song about the death of the mythical shepherd Daphnis is inserted. Here is an example of the literary design of a folk shepherd's song as a genre. A shepherd with a goatherd. The shepherd Thyrsis tells the goatherd that he sings well. The goatherd says that he has a very beautiful cup and asks him to sing. He gives away a cup for a song.

A touching landscape appears that has a great influence on all subsequent literature. Theocritus always has wonderful weather. The longing of lonely love is an area in which Theocritus is a master in depicting.

IDYLL XV Syracusans, or women at the festival of Adonis

Before us is a vivid, real-life scene; Theocritus shows great skill in this genre. The scene is Alexandria, in Egypt; The characters are two talkative town gossips. Two provincial (from Sicily) women came to the holiday, surrounded by crowds of onlookers, soldiers, and cavalry. They make their way to the palace where the singer is performing. After an exquisitely solemn hymn to King Ptolemy, there is an everyday ending: one of the friends remembers that her grumpy husband has not yet had breakfast and it is time to return home.

IDYLL XI Cyclops

Eroticism runs like a red thread through all of Theocritus’s work. Love is a disease; the best cure for it is to pour out your passion in song. In this idyll, Theocritus, in accordance with the main genre of his poetry, puts such a love song into the mouth of the mythical shepherd Cyclops Polyphemus. This one-eyed giant shepherd is extremely comical, pouring out his love for the nymph Galatea,

inviting her to singe him if he seems too shaggy to her, and ready to give even his only eye for the sake of his beloved.

Publius Virgil Maro (70 – 19 ) essentially writes all three of his poems by order of Augustus. “Bucolics” are shepherd’s poems, “Georgics” are agricultural ones. The Aeneid is a heroic epic. What unites them all is an idea that is different from the Greek one - Virgil renounced the past and called for rebirth in the future.

"Bucolics"

1. shepherd's poetry

2. includes 10 poems - eclogues

3. the past is always happy, the present is sad

4. sources – idyllic poetry of Theocritus, almost a retelling

Differences from Theocritus:

1. The heroes wear conventional masks of shepherds, but in fact they are educated poets. Theocritus emphasized the external roughness and a certain primitiveness spiritual world his heroes and enthusiastically described the everyday details of rural life. Virgil creates in his “Bucolics” an ideal world inhabited by morally pure and at the same time sensitive and poetically gifted people, wearing, in essence, only the masks of shepherds.

2. The natural world is not just a background, it is full of mysterious life

3. The images are ambiguous, as in Hellenistic poetry

4. Discordant composition - eclogues echo in pairs

“Bucolics”, compiled during one of the most acute moments of the civil war, marked an escape from reality into an ideal world.

Question # 15. Didactic epic of Hesiod.

The clan community was quickly disintegrating, and if Homer was the eve of class society, then Hesiod already reflects the orientation of man within the boundaries of class society.

Hesiod - writer of the 8th-7th centuries BC. The didacticism of his works was caused by the needs of the time, the end of the epic era, when heroic ideals dried up in their bright spontaneity and turned into teaching, instruction, and morality. In a class society, people were united by one or another attitude towards work. People thought about their ideals, but... While purely commercial and industrial relations had not yet matured and the old family relations had not yet died, the consciousness of people turned the latter into morality, a system of teachings and instructions. Class society divided people into haves and have-nots. Hesiod is the singer of a ruined population that does not profit from the collapse of the ancient community. Hence the abundance of dark colors.

“Works and Days” was written as an instruction to brother Persian, who, through unrighteous judges, took the land that belonged to him from Hesiod, but later went bankrupt. The poem is an example of a didactic epic and develops several themes. First topic built on preaching the truth, with inserted episodes about Prometheus and the myth of the five centuries. The second is dedicated field work, agricultural implements, livestock, clothing, food and other household attributes. The poem is peppered with various instructions that paint the image of a peasant who knows how and when he can arrange his affairs profitably, who is shrewd, far-sighted and prudent. Hesiod also wants to be rich, because... “The eyes of the rich are bold.” Hesiod's morality always comes down to divine authorities and does not go beyond the organization of economic affairs. Hesiod is very conservative and very narrow in his mental horizon. Hesiod's style is the opposite of the luxury, verbosity and breadth of the Homeric epic. It is striking in its dryness and brevity. In general, the style is epic with all its distinctive features (hexameter, standard expressions, Ionian dialect). But the epic is not heroic, but didactic, the smooth epic narrative is interrupted by the drama of mythological episodes unknown to Homer, and the language is replete with common expressions, traditional formulas of oracles and quite prosaic morality. The moralism is so strong and intense that it produces a very boring and monotonous impression. But Hesiod is observant and sometimes draws very vivid pictures of ancient life. He also has the features of some poetry, but poetry is filled with moral and economic instructions.

Using the example of his work, one can observe social shifts and contradictions. Hesiod's poems amaze with the abundance of various kinds of contradictions, which, however, do not prevent us from perceiving his epic as an organic whole. After the advent of the slave system, Hesiod, on the one hand, is a poor man, on the other hand, his ideals are associated with enrichment, either in the old or in the new sense. His assessment of life is full of pessimism, but at the same time, work optimism, hopes that thanks to constant activity a happy life will come. Nature for him is primarily a source of benefits, but Hesiod is a great lover of its beauties. In general, Hesiod was the first historically real poet of ancient Greece, reflecting the turbulent era of the collapse of the tribal community.

Question # 16. Fables of Phaedrus. Aesop and Phaedrus.

Aside from the literary trends of the elite, the activities of the fabulist Phaedrus, a slave and then a freedman of Emperor Augustus, took place. A native of the province of Macedonia, half-Greek, Phaedrus came into contact with Roman culture and the Latin language from childhood. Since the 20s. I century, he publishes five collections of Aesop's Fables. As an independent genre, the fable had not been represented in Roman literature until that time, although writers (especially satirists) sometimes introduced fable plots into their presentation (the works of the poet Horace, the historian Plutarch, and the already familiar “master of the colloquial genre” Dion Chrysostom, the satirist, are replete with fables Lucian, Josephus, Appian and Aelian, Achille Tatius). The term “fable” should not, however, be understood in too narrow a sense; Phaedrus includes in his collections not only “fables,” but also entertaining anecdotal stories.

Greek fables appeared under the name “Aesop” (the language in which the fables of Aesop’s collection were written is the usual spoken language of the Greeks of the 1st-2nd centuries AD), but the compiler did not care about literary skill: he thought only about simplicity, clarity , and public accessibility), who at the same time was the hero of numerous jokes; Phaedrus puts this material into Latin verse. At first limiting himself to borrowed plots, he later tries to move on to original creativity. The title “Aesop’s Fables,” according to the author’s explanation, serves in later books only as a genre characteristic, and not as an indication that the plots belong to Aesop. The verse form of Phaedrus's fables is the old iambic meter of republican drama, somewhat deviating from the Greek type and already out of use in “high” literature, but familiar to the mass visitor to the Roman theater.

Phaedrus is a plebeian poet. Choosing the “Aesops” genre, he is aware of its “grassroots” character. The fable, Phaedrus believes, was created by slaves who did not dare to freely express their feelings, and found for them an allegorical form of playful invention. The element of social satire is especially noticeable in the first two collections, in which the traditional type of animal fable predominates. The choice of plots (albeit traditional ones), the nature of their treatment, the formulation of the moral teaching - everything indicates the direction of Phaedrus’s fable against the “strong”.

The first book opens with "The Wolf and the Lamb." Cooperation with the “strong” is impossible (“Cow, goat, sheep and lion”). Disagreements between the “strong” bring new suffering to the “low” (“Frogs frightened by the bullfight”). The only consolation is that power and wealth often lead to dangers than poverty (“Two Mules and Robbers”). Phaedrus does not believe in improving the situation of the poor; when government leaders change, “the poor do not change anything except the name of the master” (“Donkey to the old shepherd”). This is already a fable with political overtones. Phaedrus also gives a political interpretation to the fable of “Frogs asking for the king”; it refers, it is true, to the tyranny of Peisistratus in Athens, but is composed in terms that are much more applicable to the loss of republican freedom in Rome. The fable ends with a call to humility: “citizens, endure this evil so that worse does not happen.” In some poems, contemporaries could probably discern topical allusions, although the poet assures that his satire is not directed against individuals. For example: Helios (Sun) wants to get married; the frogs scream: “He’s already drying up all the swamps, what will happen when he gives birth to children?”

After the publication of the first two collections, the author suffered for his courage: he became a victim of persecution by Sejanus, a temporary servant of Emperor Tiberius, and found himself in a difficult situation. In his next books he seeks the patronage of influential freedmen. Satire becomes much more innocent. “To make a squeal in public is a crime for a plebeian,” Phaedrus quotes Ennius. Increasingly, fables of an abstract type appear, anecdotes - historical stories from modern life, everyday short stories, such as the plot of the “inconsolable widow” (“The Matron of Ephesus” by Petronius), aretalogies, even fableless poems of descriptive or instructive content, and the author shows a great tendency to popular-philosophical moralizing.

Phaedrus takes credit for “brevity.” His narration does not dwell on details and is accompanied only by laconic explanations of a moral and psychological nature. The characters are expressed in concise and clear formulas. The language is simple and clean. The result is still some dryness, and sometimes insufficient specificity of the presentation. The moral does not always follow from the story. Already contemporaries reproached the fabulist for “excessive brevity and darkness”; the touchy author sharply polemicizes with these “envious people” and inclined to highly regard his literary merits as the creator of a new genre of Roman poetry.

The “glory” that Phaedrus expected did not come soon. The elite literature ignored him. Seneca in the 40s he also calls the fable “a genre untested by Roman talents”; He either doesn’t know Phaedra or doesn’t recognize him. In late antiquity, the fables of Phaedrus, presented in prose, were included in the collection of fables (the so-called “Romulus”), which for many centuries served for schooling and was one of the most important sources for medieval fables. The real Phaedrus became widely known only from the end of the 16th century. Both the original and the revised Phaedrus was an intermediate link between the Greek “Aesop” and the modern European fable. Such well-known plots as “The Wolf and the Lamb”, “Frogs Asking for the Tsar”, “The Crow and the Fox”, “The Wolf and the Crane”, “The Frog and the Ox”, “The Rooster and the Grain of Pearls” and many others found in Russian literature a classic poetic expression from Krylov, borrowed by him from the French fabulist La Fontaine, who directly used the collection of Phaedrus.

Note: In Greek literature, the authorship of several fables is already attributed to Hesiod (ca. 800 BC) and Stesachor (6th century BC), but the most famous fabulist is Aesop, a Phrygian by origin; his fables (all told in prose) are distinguished by their extraordinary clarity, clarity, simplicity, calmness and wit, so it is not surprising that they very early spread widely throughout the then civilized world, were reworked for many centuries until our times and are now in alterations and translations constitute the property of every, even if very little developed, literature.

Examples of fables (I think this will be useful):

Aesop (here http://lib.ru/POEEAST/EZOP/aesop.txt - more).

Weasel and Aphrodite

Weasel fell in love with a handsome young man and prayed to Aphrodite to turn her into a woman. The goddess took pity on her suffering and transformed her into a beautiful girl. And the young man fell in love with her so much at one glance that he immediately brought her to his house. And so, when they were in the bedchamber, Aphrodite wanted to know whether the caress, along with her body, had changed her disposition, and she let a mouse into the middle of their room. Then the weasel, forgetting where she was and who she was, rushed straight out of bed at the mouse to devour it. The goddess got angry with her and again returned her to her previous appearance.

Likewise, people who are bad by nature, no matter how they change their appearance, cannot change their character.

A man with gray hair and his mistresses.

The man with the gray hair had two mistresses, one young, the other old.

The elderly woman was ashamed to live with a man younger than her, and therefore every time

he came to her, she pulled out his black hair. And the young woman wanted

to hide that her lover was an old man, and tore out his gray hair. This is how they plucked

he was one after another, and in the end he was left bald.

Thus, inequality is harmful everywhere.

Phaedrus (more here: http://grigam.narod.ru/verseth/vers1/vers19.htm)

Prologue

Aesop chose the subject for the fables, and I polished it with hexameter verses. The book has a double benefit: it arouses laughter and teaches one to live with sensible advice. And if they reproach me for the fact that here Not only animals, but also trees are talking, Let them remember: this is all a funny fantasy.

The concepts of “genus”, type”, “genre”

A literary genus is a series of literary works that are similar in the type of their speech organization and cognitive focus on an object or subject, or the act of artistic expression itself.

The division of literature into genera is based on the distinction of the functions of the word: the word either depicts the objective world, or expresses the state of the speaker, or reproduces the process verbal communication.

Traditionally, three literary types are distinguished, each of which corresponds to a specific function of the word:
epic (visual function);
lyrics (expressive function);
drama (communicative function).

Target:
The portrayal of the human personality is objective, in interaction with other people and events.
Item:
External world in its plastic volume, spatio-temporal extent and event intensity: characters, circumstances, social and natural environment in which the characters interact.
Content:
The objective content of reality in its material and spiritual aspects, presented in characters and circumstances artistically typified by the author.
The text has a predominantly descriptive-narrative structure; a special role is played by the system of object-visual details.

Target:
Expression of thoughts and feelings of the author-poet.
Item:
The inner world of the individual in its impulsiveness and spontaneity, the formation and change of impressions, dreams, moods, associations, meditations, reflections caused by interaction with the outside world.
Content:
The subjective inner world of the poet and the spiritual life of humanity.
Features of the art organization speeches:
The text is characterized by increased expressiveness; a special role is played by the figurative capabilities of the language, its rhythmic and sound organization.

Target:
A depiction of the human personality in action, in conflict with other people.
Item:
The external world, presented through the characters and purposeful actions of the characters, and the internal world of the heroes.
Content:
The objective content of reality, presented in characters and circumstances artistically typified by the author and presupposing stage embodiment.
Features of the art organization speeches:
The text has a predominantly dialogic structure, which includes monologues of the characters.
Literary type - stable type poetic structure within the literary genre.

Genre is a group of works within a literary type, united by common formal, content or functional characteristics. Each literary era and movement has its own specific system of genres.

Epic: types and genres

Large forms:
Epic;
Novel (Novel genres: Family-domestic, Social-psychological, Philosophical, Historical, Fantastic, Utopian novel, Educational novel, Romance novel, Adventure novel, Travel novel, Lyric-epic (novel in verse))
Epic novel;
Epic poem.

Medium forms:
Tale (story genres: Family-household, Socio-psychological, Philosophical, Historical, Fantastic, Fairy-tale, Adventure, Tale in verse);
Poem (poem genres: Epic, Heroic, Lyrical, Lyric-epic, Dramatic, Ironic-comic, Didactic, Satirical, Burlesque, Lyric-dramatic (romantic));

Small forms:
Story (story genres: Essay (descriptive-narrative, “moral-descriptive”), Novellistic (conflict-narrative);
Novella;
Fairy tale (fairy tale genres: Magical, Social, Satirical, Socio-political, Lyrical, Fantastic, Animalistic, Scientific and educational);
Fable;
Essay (essay genres: Fiction, Journalistic, Documentary).

An epic is a monumental in form epic work of national issues.

A novel is a large form of epic, a work with a detailed plot, in which the narrative is focused on the destinies of several individuals in the process of their formation, development and interaction, unfolded in an artistic space and time sufficient to convey the “organization” of the world and analyze its historical essence. As an epic of private life, the novel represents individual and social life as relatively independent elements, not exhaustive and not absorbing each other. The story of individual fate in the novel takes on a general, substantial meaning.

A story is the middle form of an epic, a work with a chronicle plot, as a rule, in which the narrative is focused on the fate of an individual in the process of its formation and development.

Poem - a large or medium-sized poetic work with a narrative or lyrical plot; in different genre modifications reveals its synthetic nature, combining moral descriptive and heroic principles, intimate experiences and great historical upheavals, lyrical-epic and monumental tendencies.

A short story is a small epic form of fiction, small in terms of the volume of life phenomena depicted, and hence in terms of the volume of text, a prose work.

A short story is a small prose genre comparable in volume to a short story, but differs from it in its sharp centripetal plot, often paradoxical, lack of descriptiveness and compositional rigor.

A literary fairy tale is an author’s artistic prose or poetic work, based either on folklore sources, or purely original; The work is predominantly fantastic, magical, depicting the wonderful adventures of fictional or traditional fairy-tale characters, in which magic, miracle plays the role of a plot-forming factor, and serves as the main starting point for characterization.

Fable is a small form of epic of a didactic nature, short story in verse or prose with a directly formulated moral conclusion, giving the story an allegorical meaning. The existence of the fable is universal: it is applicable to different occasions. Art world fables include a traditional range of images and motifs (animals, plants, schematic figures of people, instructive plots), often colored in tones of comedy and social criticism.

An essay is a type of small form of epic literature, different from a short story and a short story in the absence of a single, quickly resolved conflict and the greater development of a descriptive image. The essay touches not so much on the problems of developing the character of an individual in its conflicts with the established social environment, but rather on the problems of the civil and moral state of the “environment” and has great cognitive diversity.

Lyrics: thematic groups and genres

Thematic groups:
Meditative lyrics
Intimate lyrics
(friendly and love lyrics)
Landscape lyrics
Civil (socio-political) lyrics
Philosophical lyrics

Genres:
Oh yeah
Hymn
Elegy
Idyll
Sonnet
Song
Romance
Dithyramb
Madrigal
Thought
Message
Epigram
Ballad

Ode is the leading genre of high style, characteristic primarily of the poetry of classicism. The ode is distinguished by canonical themes (glorification of God, fatherland, life wisdom, etc.), techniques (“quiet” or “swift” attack, the presence of digressions, permitted “lyrical disorder”) and types (spiritual odes, solemn odes - “Pindaric”, moralizing - “Horatian”, love - “Anacreontic”).

The anthem is a solemn song based on programmatic verses.

Elegy is a genre of lyric poetry, a poem of medium length, meditative or emotional content (usually sad), most often in the first person, without a distinct composition.”

Idyll is a genre of lyric poetry, a small work that depicts an eternally beautiful nature, sometimes in contrast with a restless and vicious person, a peaceful, virtuous life in the lap of nature, etc.

A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines forming 2 quatrains and 2 tercets or 3 quatrains and 1 couplet. The following types of sonnets are known:
“French” sonnet - abba abba ccd eed (or ccd ede);
“Italian” sonnet - abab abab cdc dcd (or cde cde);
“English sonnet” - abab cdcd efef gg.

The Wreath of Sonnets is a cycle of 14 sonnets, in which the first verse of each repeats the last verse of the previous one (forming a “garland”), and together these first verses form the 15th, “main” sonnet (forming a glossa).

Romance is a short poem written for solo singing with instrumental accompaniment, the text of which is characterized by melodious melody, syntactic simplicity and harmony, completeness of the sentence within the boundaries of the stanza.

Dithyramb is a genre of ancient lyric poetry that arose as a choral song, a hymn in honor of the god Dionysus, or Bacchus, and later in honor of other gods and heroes.

Madrigal is a short poem of predominantly loving and complimentary (less often abstract and meditative) content, usually with a paradoxical sharpening at the end.

Duma is a lyric-epic song, the style of which is characterized by symbolic pictures, negative parallelisms, retardation, tautological phrases, and unity of command.

An epistle is a genre of lyricism, a poetic letter, the formal sign of which is the presence of an appeal to a specific addressee and, accordingly, such motives as requests, wishes, exhortation, etc. The content of the message according to tradition (from Horace) is mainly moral, philosophical and didactic, but there were numerous messages: narrative, panegyric, satirical, love, etc.

An epigram is a short satirical poem, usually with a sharp point at the end.

A ballad is a poem with a dramatic development of the plot, which is based on an extraordinary story that reflects the essential moments of interactions between a person and society or interpersonal relationships. Character traits ballads - small volume, intense plot, usually full of tragedy and mystery, abrupt narration, dramatic dialogue, melodiousness and musicality.

Synthesis of lyrics with other types of literature

Lyric-epic genres (types) - literary and artistic works that combine the features of epic and lyric poetry; the plot narration of events is combined in them with emotional and meditative statements of the narrator, creating an image of the lyrical “I”. The connection between the two principles can act as the unity of the theme, as the narrator’s self-reflection, as the psychological and everyday motivation of the story, as the author’s direct participation in the unfolding plot, as the author’s exposure of his own techniques, becoming an element of the artistic concept. Compositionally, this connection is often formalized in the form of lyrical digressions.

Prose poem - lyrical work in prose form, possessing such characteristics of a lyric poem as a small volume, increased emotionality, usually a plotless composition, and a general focus on expressing a subjective impression or experience.

Lyrical hero- the image of a poet in lyrics, one of the ways to reveal the author's consciousness. A lyrical hero is an artistic “double” of the author-poet, growing out of the text of lyrical compositions (a cycle, a book of poems, a lyric poem, the entire body of lyrics) as a clearly defined figure or life role, as a person endowed with the certainty of individual destiny, the psychological clarity of the inner world, and sometimes with features of plastic appearance.

Forms of lyrical expression:
monologue in the first person (A.S. Pushkin - “I loved you...”);
role-playing lyrics - a monologue on behalf of the character introduced into the text (A.A. Blok - “I am Hamlet, / The blood runs cold...”);
expression of the author’s feelings and thoughts through an object image (A.A. Fet - “The lake fell asleep...”);
expression of the author’s feelings and thoughts through reflections in which objective images play a subordinate role or are fundamentally conditional (A.S. Pushkin - “Echo”);
expression of the author’s feelings and thoughts through the dialogue of conventional heroes (F. Villon - “The dispute between Villon and his soul”);
addressing an unidentified person (F.I. Tyutchev - “Silentium”);
plot (M.Yu. Lermontov - “Three Palms”).

Tragedy - “Tragedy of Rock”, “High Tragedy”;
Comedy - Comedy of characters, Comedy of everyday life (morals), Comedy of situations, Comedy of masks (commedia del’arte), Comedy of intrigue, Comedy-slapstick, Lyrical comedy, Satirical comedy, Social comedy, “High comedy”;
Drama (type) - “Pittish Drama”, Psychological Drama, Lyrical Drama, Narrative (Epic) Drama;
Tragicomedy;
Mystery;
Melodrama;
Vaudeville;
Farce.

Tragedy is a type of drama based on the insoluble conflict of heroic characters with the world and its tragic outcome. The tragedy is marked by stern seriousness, depicts reality in the most pointed way, as a clot of internal contradictions, reveals the deepest conflicts of reality in an extremely intense and rich form that takes on meaning artistic symbol.

Comedy is a type of drama in which characters, situations and action are presented in funny forms or imbued with the comic. Comedy is aimed primarily at ridiculing the ugly (contrary to a social ideal or norm): the heroes of the comedy are internally bankrupt, incongruous, do not correspond to their position, purpose, and thus are sacrificed to laughter, which debunks them, thereby fulfilling its “ideal” mission.

Drama (type) is one of the main types of drama as a literary genre, along with tragedy and comedy. Like comedy, it mainly reproduces the private life of people, but its main goal is not to ridicule morals, but to depict the individual in his dramatic relationship with society. Like tragedy, drama tends to recreate acute contradictions; at the same time, its conflicts are not so intense and inescapable and, in principle, allow for the possibility of a successful resolution, and the characters are not so exceptional.

Tragicomedy is a type of drama that has characteristics of both tragedy and comedy. The tragicomic attitude that underlies tragicomedy is associated with a sense of the relativity of existing life criteria and the rejection of the moral absolute of comedy and tragedy. Tragicomedy does not recognize the absolute at all; the subjective here can be seen as objective and vice versa; a sense of relativity can lead to complete relativism; overestimation of moral principles may come down to uncertainty in their omnipotence or to the final rejection of solid morality; an unclear understanding of reality can cause burning interest in it or complete indifference; it can result in less certainty in displaying the laws of existence or indifference to them and even their denial - up to the recognition of the illogicality of the world.

Mystery is a genre of Western European theater of the late Middle Ages, the content of which was biblical stories; religious scenes alternated with interludes, mysticism was combined with realism, piety with blasphemy.

Melodrama is a type of drama, a play with acute intrigue, exaggerated emotionality, a sharp contrast between good and evil, and a moral and instructive tendency.

Vaudeville is a type of drama, a light play with entertaining intrigue, with couplet songs and dances.

Farce - view folk theater and literature of Western European countries of the 14th-16th centuries, primarily France, which was distinguished by a comic, often satirical orientation, realistic concreteness, freethinking and was full of buffoonery.