Finally, the last element included in the ideological world of the work is pathos, which can be defined as the leading emotional tone of the work, its emotional mood.
A synonym for the term “pathos” is the expression “emotional-value orientation.” To analyze pathos in a work of art means to establish its typological variety, the type of emotional-value orientation, attitude towards the world and man in the world. We now turn to a consideration of these typological varieties of pathos.
Epic-dramatic pathos represents a deep and undoubted acceptance of the world as a whole and oneself in it, which is the essence of the epic worldview. At the same time, this is not a thoughtless acceptance of a cloudlessly harmonious world: being is recognized in its original and unconditional conflict (drama), but this conflict itself is perceived as a necessary and fair side of the world, because conflicts arise and are resolved, they ensure the very existence and dialectical development of being .
Epico-dramatic pathos is the maximum trust in the objective world in all its real versatility and inconsistency. Let us note that this type of pathos is rarely presented in literature, and even less often it appears in its pure form.
Examples of works based generally on epic-dramatic pathos include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Rabelais’s novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Pushkin’s poem “Do I wander along the noisy streets...” Tolstoy's epic novel "War and Peace", Tvardovsky's poem "Vasily Terkin".
The objective basis of the pathos of heroism is the struggle of individuals or groups for the implementation and defense of ideals, which are necessarily perceived as sublime.
At the same time, people's actions are certainly associated with personal risk, personal danger, and are associated with the real possibility of a person losing some significant values - even life itself. Another condition for the manifestation of the heroic in reality is the free will and initiative of man: forced actions, as Hegel pointed out, cannot be heroic.
The writer’s ideological and emotional awareness of the objectively heroic leads to the emergence of heroic pathos. "Heroic pathos in literature<...>affirms the greatness of the feat of an individual or an entire team, its value and necessity for the development of a nation, people, and humanity.” The desire to remake the world, the structure of which seems unjust, or the desire to defend an ideal world (as well as one close to the ideal and seemingly so) - this is the emotional basis of heroism.
In literature it is not difficult to find works entirely or mainly built on heroic pathos, and specific situations, as well as the sublime ideals of heroism, can be very different. We encounter heroism in “The Song of Roland” and in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, in Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” and in Voynich’s “Gadfly”, in Gorky’s novel “Mother”, in Sholokhov’s stories and many other works.
With heroism as pathos based on the sublime, other types of pathos that have a sublime character come into contact - first of all, tragedy and romance. Romance is related to heroism by the desire for a sublime ideal.
But if heroism is a sphere of active action, then romance is a region of emotional experience and aspiration that does not turn into action. The objective basis of romance is such situations in personal and public life, when the realization of a sublime ideal is either impossible in principle or impracticable at a given historical moment.
However, on such an objective basis, not only the pathos of romance can, in principle, arise, but also tragedy, irony, and satire, so that the decisive factor in romance is still the subjective moment, the moment of experiencing an irreparable gap between dream and reality.
One of the special (and very common) cases of romance is the dream of the heroic, an orientation towards the heroic ideal in the absence of the opportunity to translate it into reality.
This kind of romance is characteristic, for example, of young people in “quiet” periods of history: young men and girls often feel that they were “too late to be born” in order to participate in revolutions and wars - an example of this type of romance is early work V. Vysotsky: “...And in the basements and semi-basements // The kids wanted to run under the tanks // They didn’t even get a bullet...”
However, the scope of romance is broader than this craving for heroism. This emotional-value orientation places all values in the realm of the fundamentally unattainable.
The natural world of romance is a dream, a fantasy, a daydream, therefore romantic works so often they are turned either to the past (“Borodino” and “Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov” by Lermontov, “Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich” by A.K. Tolstoy, “Shulamith” by Kuprin), or to outright exoticism (the southern poems of Pushkin, “Mtsyri” by Lermontov, “Giraffe” by Gumilyov), or to something fundamentally non-existent (“Double” by A. Pogorelsky, “Demon” by Lermontov, “Aelita” by A.N. Tolstoy).
In the history of literature, many works are marked by the pathos of romance. Romance should not be confused with romanticism as a literary movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries; it is found in a variety of historical eras, as Belinsky also pointed out.
Obviously, romantic pathos originated in ancient lyrics; Among the works that are closer to us, we point out “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” by Gogol, “Mtsyri” by Lermontov, “First Love” by Turgenev, “Old Woman Izergil” by Gorky, the early works of Blok and Mayakovsky.
The pathos of romance can appear in literature in combination with other types of pathos, in particular, with irony (Blok), heroism (“Good!” Mayakovsky), satire (Nekrasov).
The pathos of tragedy is the awareness of the loss, and the irreparable loss, of some important life values - human life, social, national or personal freedom, the possibility of personal happiness, cultural values, etc.
Literary scholars and aestheticians have long considered the insoluble nature of a particular life conflict to be the objective basis of tragedy. In principle, this is true, but not entirely accurate, because the insolubility of a conflict is, strictly speaking, a conditional thing and not necessarily tragic.
The first condition of the tragic is the regularity of this conflict, a situation where its unresolved nature cannot be tolerated. Secondly, by the intractability of a conflict we mean the impossibility of its successful resolution - it is certainly associated with victims, with the death of certain indisputable humanistic values. This is, for example, the nature of the conflict in Pushkin’s “Little Tragedies,” Ostrovsky’s “The Thunderstorm,” Bulgakov’s “White Guard,” Tvardovsky’s poems “I was killed near Rzhev...”, “I know, it’s not my fault...”, etc. p.
A tragic situation in life can also arise by chance, as a result of an unfavorable combination of circumstances, but such situations are not of much interest to literature. She is more interested in the tragic natural, arising from the essence of characters and positions.
The most fruitful thing for art is this tragic conflict, when insoluble contradictions are in the soul of the hero, when the hero is in a situation of free choice between two equally necessary, but mutually exclusive values.
In this case, the tragic acquires maximum depth; Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, Lermontov’s “Hero of Our Time”, Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, “ Quiet Don" Sholokhov, "The Fall" by Camus, "The Defiler of the Ashes" by Faulkner and many other works.
In sentimentality - another type of pathos - we, as in romance, observe the predominance of the subjective over the objective. Sentimentality literally translated from French means sensitivity; it represents one of the first manifestations of humanism, but a very peculiar one.
In certain situations, almost every person happens to show sentimentality - for example, most normal people cannot pass indifferently past the suffering of a child, a helpless person or even an animal.
Sentimentality as the ability to “pity” very often combines subject and object (a person feels sorry for himself; this feeling is apparently familiar to everyone from childhood and has found its ideal artistic embodiment in Tolstoy's Childhood).
But even if sentimental pity is directed at the phenomena of the surrounding world, the person reacting to it always remains in the center - touched, compassionate. At the same time, sympathy for another in sentimentality is fundamentally ineffective; it acts as a kind of psychological substitute real help(such, for example, is the artistically expressed sympathy for the peasant in the works of Radishchev and Nekrasov).
In its developed form, sentimentality appeared in literature in the middle of the 18th century, giving its name literary direction sentimentalism. The pathos of sentimentality often played a dominant role in the works of Richardson, Rousseau, Karamzin, Radishchev, and partly Goethe and Stern.
IN further development In literature we also encounter, although infrequently, the pathos of sentimentality, for example, in “Old World Landowners” and “The Overcoat” by Gogol, some stories from Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter” (“Singers”, “Bezhin Meadow”), and in his story “ Mumu”, in the works of Dickens, Dostoevsky (“Humiliated and Insulted”, “Poor People”), Nekrasov.
Moving on to consider the following typological varieties of pathos - humor and satire - we note that they are based on the general basis of the comic. Literary and aesthetic scholars have dealt extremely heavily with the problem of defining the comic and its essence, noting mainly that the comic is based on the internal contradictions of an object or phenomenon.
The essence of the comic conflict was perhaps most accurately defined by N.G. Chernyshevsky: “internal emptiness and insignificance, hiding behind an appearance that has a claim to content and real meaning.”
More broadly, the objective basis of the comic can be defined as the contradiction between ideal and reality, norm and reality. It should only be noted that the subjective understanding of such a contradiction will not always and not necessarily occur in a comic way.
A satirical image appears in a work when the object of satire is recognized by the author as irreconcilably opposed to his ideal, being in an antagonistic relationship with him. F. Schiller wrote that “in satire, reality, as a kind of imperfection, is opposed to the ideal as the highest reality.”
Satire is aimed at those phenomena that actively interfere with the establishment or existence of the ideal, and sometimes are directly dangerous for its existence. Satirical pathos has been known in literature since ancient times (for example, ridiculing the enemy in folk tales and songs, satirical tales etc.), however, in its developed form, satire is brought to life primarily by social struggle, which is why we find widespread satirical pathos in the literature of antiquity. Renaissance and Enlightenment; such is the satire of Russian revolutionary democrats, the satire of Russian literature XX century
Sometimes the object of satire turns out to be so dangerous for the existence of the ideal, and its activities are so dramatic and even tragic in their consequences, that understanding it no longer causes laughter - this situation develops, for example, in the novel by Saltykov-Shchedrin “The Golovlevs.”
At the same time, the connection between satire and the comic is broken, therefore such denying pathos, not associated with ridicule, should obviously be considered a special, independent type of ideological and emotional attitude to life, denoting this type with the term “invective.”
We find such a solution, in particular, in the Literary encyclopedic dictionary: “there is, however, not a comic satire, inspired by indignation alone (see Invective).” Such a prominent specialist in this field as E.Ya. also spoke about the need to especially highlight a non-satirical, but denying attitude towards reality. Elsberg.
For example, Lermontov’s poem “Farewell, unwashed Russia...” has the pathos of invective. It expresses a sharply negative attitude towards the autocratic police state, but there is no ridicule, comedy, or expectation of laughter. The work does not use a single element of satirical poetics intended to create comic effect: there is no hyperbolism, no grotesque, no absurd, illogical situations and speech structures.
In form and content, this is a short lyrical monologue, expressing the poet’s very serious feeling - a feeling of hatred for “the country of slaves, the country of masters.” Pathos of the same type is also characteristic of Lermontov’s poem “On the Death of a Poet” (or rather, its second part), many of Horace’s “satires”, journalistic denunciations in Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”, A. Platonov’s story “The Inanimate Enemy”, Simonov’s poem “If your home is dear to you...” (which, by the way, in the first edition in 1942 was called “Kill him!”) and many other works.
Esin A.B. Principles and techniques of analysis literary work. - M., 1998
Literature 8th grade. Textbook-reader for schools with in-depth study of literature Team of authors
What is the pathos of a literary work?
Reading various works, you have probably already noticed that some of them arouse a joyful feeling in you, others make you sad, others cause indignation, others cause laughter, etc. Why does this happen? The point here is such an important property of a work of art as pathos. Pathos– this is the main emotional mood of the work, its emotional richness. Depending on the type of pathos inherent in the work, we experience certain emotions.
The concept of pathos is used in literary criticism to characterize the ideological world of a work and its originality. artistic ideas. The great Russian critic V. G. Belinsky wrote: “Every poetic work is the fruit of a powerful thought that has taken possession of the poet. If we admitted that this thought is only the result of the activity of his mind, we would thereby kill not only art, but also the very possibility of art... Art does not allow abstract philosophical, much less rational ideas: it allows only poetic ideas; and a poetic idea is not a syllogism, not a dogma, not a rule, it is a living passion, it is pathos.”
Pathos, therefore, organically merges the rational and the emotional, the writer’s thought and his experience. It is precisely when embodied in pathos that an idea becomes personal, deeply felt by the writer. Only pathos, and not abstract ideas, has the ability to evoke a reciprocal experience in the reader, forcing him to vividly perceive the emotional and ideological charge of the entire work, and the fate of individual characters, and the lyrical statements of the author.
Pathos is one of the main criteria for the artistic perfection of a work. All great works of the past and present are invariably distinguished by their depth of pathos. It is thanks to pathos that a work is capable of longevity. historical life. Pathos, for example, heroism, tragedy or drama is understandable to a person of any era, no matter what specific circumstances it was caused at one time. For a century now, readers have been laughing at A.P. Chekhov’s story “The Death of an Official,” although the types depicted in it have long since disappeared from our lives.
Please note that the term “pathos” is often associated with a special system artistic speech- with its solemnity, sublimity, and focus on oratorical intonations. Hence the expression “speaking with pathos,” which sometimes takes on an ironic connotation - in those cases when theatricality and rhetoric in expressing feelings seem inappropriate to us. The fact is that pathos, that is, an idea emotionally experienced by the artist, is not always and does not necessarily have to be embodied in the forms of rhetorical, sublime, “ornamented” speech. In the history of the development of literature, we observe that the expression of pathos is becoming more and more simple and natural. The principles of hidden, implicit expression of pathos have reached highest point at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in the works of A.P. Chekhov, to whom the following statement belongs: “When you portray the unfortunate and untalented and want to pity the reader, then try to be colder - this gives someone else’s grief a kind of background against which it appears more clearly ... You can cry and moan over stories, you can suffer along with your heroes, but, I believe, this must be done in such a way that the reader does not notice. The more objective, the stronger the impression.”
Many masters subsequently followed the path paved by A.P. Chekhov artistic word, whose work you will become acquainted with later. Now, using the example of some famous work, try to see how the principles of creating pathos were reflected in artistic practice.
And in the 20th century, access to literature is not closed to solemnly elevated, sublime speech. Look, for example, at how the ways of expressing pathos are combined in A. T. Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin,” which you have yet to become familiar with. When the need was felt, the author did not hesitate to express high pathos in high words:
He goes, holy and sinful,
Russian miracle man...
Mortal combat is not for glory,
For the sake of life on earth...
Compare these passages with another example from the same work:
The heroic pathos is unchanged - we are talking about the same defender of “life on earth” - but it is expressed by different lexical means: colloquialism, sometimes even rude.
Pathos works of art extremely diverse in its manifestations. You are already familiar with some of them. So, in Russian folk epics meet with heroic pathos, in ballads - with romantic or tragic. In the future, you will enrich your understanding of known species pathos and get to know others - sentimentality, drama, humor, satire etc. Please note that division of pathos into types is based on the fact that pathos expresses the writer’s personal, biased and interested attitude towards what he writes about. Consequently, the pathos of a work is always of an evaluative nature, expressing approval or disapproval, admiration, delight, contempt, ridicule, etc. Therefore, to understand the pathos of a work means in many ways to understand the author’s concept of the world and man, the author’s value system, that is, the most important thing , which is contained in the content of a work of art.
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IN everyday speech We often hear the word “pathos” and various expressions with this word. It’s possible to intuitively understand what this means, but let’s still figure out what pathos is.
Modern definition of the word "pathos"
Pathos is a way of behavior that is characterized by feigned pomposity, playing to the public. This definition is used by most young people when describing a pretentious person.
In fact, this word has a broader and deeper meaning. For example, what is pathos in literature?
Pathos in literature
Pathos (translated from Greek - passion, inspiration) is a rhetorical category that was developed by Aristotle. It is designed to convey sublime emotions, passionate, passionate and inspired. Pathos can easily be called the “soul of the work,” because it permeates it and accompanies it throughout the entire story. It influences the reader’s consciousness and shapes his attitude towards the main characters, forcing him to sympathize.
Types of pathos in literature
Works in literature are revealed differently due to different types of pathos:
- Heroic pathos affirms the majesty of the main character or an entire team, whose actions are aimed at achieving humanistic goals. Most often this is a struggle for the independence of one’s people, for their rights, for peace. We meet in such works as “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “Taras Bulba” by N. Gogol. Tragic pathos depicts the deep and contradictory experiences of the heroes, the desire for a high ideal and the impossibility of achieving it (A. Blok’s poem “The Twelve”).
- Dramatic pathos is distinguished by the absence of a person’s fundamental opposition to external circumstances; the characters’ experiences are individual and hidden within themselves (“Red and Black” by Stendhal, “Père Goriot” by Balzac).
- Romantic pathos affirms man's desire for an emotionally universal ideal. For example, “Borodino” by Lermontov or “Aelita” by Tolstoy.
- Sentimental pathos is close to romantic, but is limited to the family and everyday sphere of manifestation of the characters’ feelings (“The Sorrows of Young Werther” by Goethe, “Mu-mu” by Turgenev).
- Let us separately highlight what humanistic pathos is: it is the affirmation of the humanistic ideals of humanity, their elevation. We can meet it in such works as “The Iliad” by Homer, “The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin” by Rustaveli, “The Overcoat” by Gogol and many others. etc.
“The speaker spoke with great pathos. The pathos that sounded in the speaker’s words was transmitted to the listeners.” Who among us has not encountered similar phrases in newspaper articles, radio and television programs, books and on the Internet?
We will talk about what pathos is and in what cases this word is used in this article.
Pathos is a Greek word that means emotional speech or written text that is full of sublime feelings, which should evoke a strong response from those who listen or read it.
Pathos is a well-known and long-used technique in poetry; it is no less widely used in propaganda and agitation. Another word that has approximately the same meaning and comes from the same Greek source is “pathetics”.
Examples of pathos:
"I will love you forever"
“Our business will survive centuries”
"Not an inch native land enemies."
In the speech of our contemporaries, pathos often looks unnatural and false, and people who use it in everyday life- pompous and funny. Today, the definitions “pathos, pretentious” are usually used to designate people or phenomena that strive to give themselves significance, although they do not possess it at all.
However, in moments that evoke a strong emotional response, pathos is quite appropriate and sometimes even necessary. Pathetic phrases can often be found today in the speeches of politicians, especially during the election campaign or during significant periods. historical moments in the life of the state. They are often found in literature, especially in poems dedicated to important historical events or expressing strong emotions author.
In addition, Paphos is an ancient and beautiful city, a Greek resort on the island of Cyprus.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who developed the foundations of rhetoric, is considered the founder of pathos in literature. Pathos is used to express strong, sublime emotions, inspiration, passion, and emotional distress. 
This is a powerful technique, which is often called upon to develop sympathy for the characters of a literary work, empathy for them and their actions.
Literary scholars distinguish the following types of pathos poets and writers:
Heroic pathos is used to demonstrate the emotional elation of the main character or team, whose actions are aimed at achieving humanistic goals: the struggle for the independence of their people or rights social group, striving for high ideals of spirituality. Often, heroic pathos is associated with the tragic experiences of heroes, torn apart by deep conflicting feelings: the desire for the common good and the impossibility of achieving personal happiness.
Dramatic pathos is the individual experiences of the characters associated with their inner world. Distinctive feature serves as the absence of a fundamental contradiction with external circumstances; the characters’ experiences have a psychological rather than a social background.
Romantic pathos is the desire of the main characters for a universal ideal; the conflict of the work lies in the unattainability of the ideal and in its contradiction with harsh reality.
Sentimental pathos also reflects the heroes’ desire for an ideal, but limits the scope of their emotions to family and everyday themes.
Humanistic pathos is the desire of the main characters for high humanistic ideals, their elevation and affirmation in spite of circumstances and the opposition of others.
Lyrical pathos - literary category, which reflects the leading emotional mood of the work, the totality of it lyrical digressions(if the work is narrative in nature) or the main theme (if it is a lyrical work). 
The main task of lyrical pathos is to find an emotional response in the reader, to make him empathize with the characters. Sincere lyrical pathos creates the feelings necessary for the author, reinforcing the thoughts expressed in it.
Not everything in the content of a literary work is determined by themes and ideas. The author expresses ideologically emotional attitude to the subject using images. And, although the author's emotionality is individual, some elements are naturally repeated. IN different works similar emotions and similar types of illumination of life appear. The types of this emotional orientation include tragedy, heroism, romance, drama, sentimentality, as well as the comic with its varieties (humor, irony, grotesque, sarcasm, satire).
The theoretical status of these concepts is subject to much debate. Some modern scientists, continuing the traditions of V.G. Belinsky, call them “types of pathos” (G. Pospelov). Others call them “modes of artistry” (V. Tyupa) and add that these are embodiments of the author’s concept of personality. Still others (V. Khalizev) call them “worldview emotions.”
At the heart of the events and actions depicted in many works is conflict, confrontation, the struggle of someone with someone, something with something.
At the same time, contradictions can be not only different strengths, but also of different content and character. A kind of answer that the reader often wants to find can be considered the author’s emotional attitude to the characters of the characters portrayed and to the type of their behavior, to conflicts. Indeed, a writer can sometimes reveal his likes and dislikes for a particular type of personality, while not always clearly assessing it. So, F.M. Dostoevsky, while condemning what Raskolnikov came up with, at the same time sympathizes with him. I.S. Turgenev examines Bazarov through the lips of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, but at the same time appreciates him, emphasizing his intelligence, knowledge, and will: “Bazarov is smart and knowledgeable,” Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov says with conviction.
It is on the essence and content of the contradictions exposed in a work of art that its emotional tone depends. And the word pathos is now perceived much more broadly than a poetic idea; it is the emotional and value orientation of the work and characters.
So, different types pathos.
A tragic tone is present where there is a violent conflict that cannot be tolerated and cannot be safely resolved. This may be a contradiction between man and non-human forces (fate, God, the elements). This could be a confrontation between groups of people (war of nations), and finally, internal conflict, that is, the collision of opposite principles in the minds of one hero. This is an awareness of an irreparable loss: human life, freedom, happiness, love.
The understanding of the tragic goes back to the works of Aristotle. The theoretical development of the concept relates to the aesthetics of romanticism and Hegel. Central character- this is a tragic hero, a person who finds himself in a situation of discord with life. This is a strong personality, not bent by circumstances, and therefore doomed to suffering and death.
Such conflicts include contradictions between personal impulses and supra-personal restrictions - caste, class, moral. Such contradictions gave rise to the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, who loved each other, but belonged to different clans of Italian society of their time; Katerina Kabanova, who fell in love with Boris and understood the sinfulness of her love for him; Anna Karenina, tormented by the awareness of the gap between her, society and her son.
A tragic situation can also arise if there is a contradiction between the desire for happiness, freedom and the hero’s awareness of his weakness and powerlessness in achieving them, which entails motives of skepticism and doom. For example, such motives are heard in the speech of Mtsyri, pouring out his soul to the old monk and trying to explain to him how he dreamed of living in his aul, but was forced to spend his entire life, except for three days, in a monastery. The tragic fate of Elena Stakhova from the novel by I.S. Turgenev “On the Eve”, who lost her husband immediately after the wedding and went with his coffin to a foreign country.
The height of tragic pathos is that it instills faith in a person who has courage, remaining true to himself even before death. Since antiquity tragic hero you have to experience a moment of guilt. According to Hegel, this guilt lies in the fact that a person violates the established order. Therefore, works of tragic pathos are characterized by the concept of tragic guilt. It is in both the tragedy “Oedipus the King” and the tragedy “Boris Godunov”. The mood in works of this type is sorrow, compassion. Since the second half of the 19th century, the tragic has been understood more and more widely. It includes everything that causes fear and horror in human life. After the spread of the philosophical doctrines of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the existentialists gave universal meaning to the tragic. In accordance with such views, the main property of human existence is catastrophicity. Life is meaningless due to the death of individual beings. In this aspect, the tragic is reduced to a feeling of hopelessness, and those qualities that were characteristic of a strong personality (affirmation of courage, perseverance) are leveled out and not taken into account.
In a literary work, both tragic and dramatic principles can be combined with heroic ones. Heroism arises and is felt there and then when people take or perform active actions for the benefit of others, in the name of protecting the interests of a tribe, clan, state, or simply a group of people in need of help. People are ready to take risks and face death with dignity in the name of realizing lofty ideals. Most often, such situations occur during periods of national liberation wars or movements. Moments of heroism are reflected in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in Prince Igor’s decision to enter into the fight against the Polovtsians. At the same time, heroic-tragic situations can also occur in peacetime, in moments of natural disasters that arise due to the “fault” of nature (floods, earthquakes) or man himself. Accordingly, they appear in the literature. Events in folk epic, legends, epics. The hero in them is an exceptional figure, his actions are a socially significant feat. Hercules, Prometheus, Vasily Buslaev. Sacrificial heroism in the novel “War and Peace”, the poem “Vasily Terkin”. In the 1930s and 1940s, heroism was required under duress. From Gorky’s works the idea was instilled: there should be a feat in everyone’s life. In the 20th century, the literature of struggle contains heroics of resistance to lawlessness, heroics of defending the right to freedom (stories by V. Shalamov, novel by V. Maksimov “The Star of Admiral Kolchak”).
L.N. Gumilyov believed that the truly heroic could only exist at the origins of the life of the people. Any process of nation formation begins with heroic deeds small groups of people. He called these people passionaries. But crisis situations that require heroic and sacrificial achievements from people always arise. Therefore, the heroic in literature will always be significant, lofty and inescapable. An important condition Heroic, Hegel believed, is free will. A forced feat (the case of a gladiator), in his opinion, cannot be heroic.
Heroics can also be combined with romance. Romance is an enthusiastic state of personality caused by the desire for something high, beautiful, and morally significant. The sources of romance are the ability to feel the beauty of nature, to feel part of the world, the need to respond to someone else's pain and someone else's joy. Natasha Rostova’s behavior often gives reason to perceive it as romantic, because of all the heroes of the novel “War and Peace”, she alone has a lively nature, a positive emotional charge, and dissimilarity from secular young ladies, which the rational Andrei Bolkonsky immediately noticed.
Romance for the most part manifests itself in the sphere of personal life, revealing itself in moments of anticipation or the onset of happiness. Since happiness in people’s minds is primarily associated with love, the romantic attitude most likely makes itself felt at the moment of the approach of love or hope for it. We find images of romantically minded heroes in the works of I.S. Turgenev, for example, in his story “Asya”, where the heroes (Asya and Mr. N.), close to each other in spirit and culture, experience joy, emotional uplift, which is expressed in their enthusiastic perception of nature, art and themselves, in joy communication with each other. And yet, most often, the pathos of romance is associated with an emotional experience that does not turn into action. Achieving a sublime ideal is impossible in principle. Thus, in Vysotsky’s poems, it seems to young men that they were born too late to participate in wars:
And in basements and semi-basements
The kids wanted to see the tanks,
They didn’t even get a bullet...
The world of romance - dream, fantasy, romantic ideas are often correlated with the past, exoticism: “Borodino” by Lermontov, “Shulamith” by Kuprin, “Mtsyri” by Lermontov, “Giraffe” by Gumilyov.
The pathos of romance can appear together with other types of pathos: irony in Blok, heroism in Mayakovsky, satire in Nekrasov.
The combination of heroism and romance is possible in cases where the hero accomplishes or wants to accomplish a feat, and this is perceived by him as something sublime. Such an interweaving of heroism and romance is observed in “War and Peace” in the behavior of Petya Rostov, who was obsessed with the desire to personally take part in the fight against the French, which led to his death.
The predominant tone in the content of the vast majority of works of art is undoubtedly dramatic. Trouble, disorder, dissatisfaction of a person in the mental sphere, in personal relationships, in social status - these are the real signs of drama in life and literature. The failed love of Tatyana Larina, Princess Mary, Katerina Kabanova and other heroines famous works testifies to the dramatic moments of their lives.
Moral and intellectual dissatisfaction and unrealized personal potential of Chatsky, Onegin, Bazarov, Bolkonsky and others; social humiliation of Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin from the story by N.V. Gogol's "The Overcoat", as well as the Marmeladov family from the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, many heroines from the poem by N.A. Nekrasov’s “Who Lives Well in Rus'”, almost all the characters in M. Gorky’s play “At the Lower Depths” - all this serves as a source and indicator of dramatic contradictions.
Emphasizing romantic, dramatic, tragic and, of course, heroic moments in the lives of heroes and their moods in most cases becomes a form of expressing sympathy for the heroes, a way of supporting and protecting them by the author. There is no doubt that V. Shakespeare worries together with Romeo and Juliet about the circumstances that impede their love, A.S. Pushkin takes pity on Tatyana, who is not understood by Onegin, F.M. Dostoevsky mourns the fate of girls like Dunya and Sonya, A.P. Chekhov sympathizes with the suffering of Gurov and Anna Sergeevna, who fell in love with each other very deeply and seriously, but they have no hope of uniting their destinies.
However, it happens that the depiction of romantic moods becomes a way of debunking the hero, sometimes even condemning him. So, for example, Lensky's vague poems evoke slight irony A. S. Pushkin. F. M. Dostoevsky's depiction of Raskolnikov's dramatic experiences is in many ways a form of condemnation of the hero, who conceived a monstrous option for correcting his life and became confused in his thoughts and feelings.
Sentimentality is a type of pathos with a predominance of subjectivity and sensitivity. In mid. In the 18th century, it was dominant in the works of Richardson, Stern, and Karamzin. He is in “The Overcoat” and “Old World Landowners”, in the early Dostoevsky, in “Mu-mu”, Nekrasov’s poetry.
Much more often, humor and satire play a discrediting role. Under humor and satire in in this case another variant of emotional orientation is implied. Both in life and in art, humor and satire are generated by such characters and situations that are called comic. The essence of the comic is to discover and identify the discrepancy between the real capabilities of people (and, accordingly, characters) and their claims, or the discrepancy between their essence and appearance. The pathos of satire is destructive, satire reveals socially significant vices, exposes deviations from the norm, and ridicules. The pathos of humor is affirming, because the subject of the humorous sensation sees not only the shortcomings of others, but also his own. Awareness of one's own shortcomings gives hope of healing (Zoshchenko, Dovlatov). Humor is an expression of optimism (“Vasily Terkin”, “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik” by Hasek).
A mocking and evaluative attitude towards comic characters and situations is called irony. Unlike the previous ones, it carries skepticism. She does not agree with the assessment of life, situation or character. In Voltaire’s story “Candide, or Optimism,” the hero with his fate refutes his own attitude: “Everything that is done is for the better.” But the opposite opinion “everything is for the worse” is not accepted. Voltaire's pathos lies in his mocking skepticism towards extreme principles. Irony can be light and non-malicious, but it can also become unkind and judgmental. Deep irony, which causes not a smile and laughter in the usual sense of the word, but a bitter experience, is called sarcasm. The reproduction of comic characters and situations, accompanied by an ironic assessment, leads to the appearance of humorous or satirical works of art: Moreover, not only works of verbal art (parodies, anecdotes, fables, stories, short stories, plays), but also drawings and sculptural images can be humorous and satirical , facial performances.
In the story by A.P. Chekhov's “The Death of an Official”, the comic is manifested in the absurd behavior of Ivan Dmitrievich Chervyakov, who, while in the theater, accidentally sneezed on the general’s bald head and was so frightened that he began to pester him with his apologies and pursued him until he aroused the general’s real anger that and led the official to death. The absurdity lies in the discrepancy between the act committed (he sneezed) and the reaction it caused (repeated attempts to explain to the general that he, Chervyakov, did not want to offend him). In this story, the funny is mixed with the sad, since such fear of a high-ranking person is a sign of the dramatic position of a small official in the system of official relations. Fear can give rise to unnaturalness in human behavior. This situation was reproduced by N.V. Gogol in the comedy "The Inspector General". The identification of serious contradictions in the behavior of heroes, giving rise to a clearly negative attitude towards them, becomes a hallmark of satire. Classic designs satire comes from the creativity of M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (“How a man fed two generals”) Esalnek A. Ya. S. 13-22..
Grotesque (French grotesque, literally - bizarre; comical; Italian grottesco - bizarre, Italian grotta - grotto, cave) - one of the varieties of the comic, combines in a fantastic form the terrible and funny, the ugly and the sublime, and also brings together the distant, combines incompatible, interweaves the unreal with the real, the present with the future, reveals the contradictions of reality. As a form of the comic, the grotesque differs from humor and irony in that in it the funny and amusing are inseparable from the terrible and sinister; As a rule, images of the grotesque carry a tragic meaning. In the grotesque, behind the external improbability and fantasticness, lies a deep artistic generalization important phenomena life. The term “grotesque” became widespread in the fifteenth century, when excavations of underground chambers (grottoes) revealed wall paintings with intricate patterns that used motifs from plant and animal life. Therefore, distorted images were originally called grotesque. How artistic image The grotesque is distinguished by its two-dimensionality and contrast. Grotesque is always a deviation from the norm, a convention, an exaggeration, an intentional caricature, therefore it is widely used for satirical purposes. Examples literary grotesque may serve as N.V. Gogol's story "The Nose" or "Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober" by E.T.A. Hoffmann, fairy tales and stories by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin.
To define pathos means to establish the type of attitude towards the world and man in the world.