The moral pathos of the romantics was associated, first of all, with the affirmation of the value of the individual, which was embodied in the images of romantic heroes. The first, most striking type is the loner hero, the outcast hero, who is usually called the Byronic hero. The opposition of the poet to the crowd, the hero to the mob, the individual to a society that does not understand and persecutes him is a characteristic feature of romantic literature.
About such a hero E. Kozhina wrote: “A man of the romantic generation, a witness to bloodshed, cruelty, the tragic destinies of people and entire nations, striving for the bright and heroic, but paralyzed in advance by the pitiful reality, out of hatred for the bourgeoisie, elevating the knights of the Middle Ages to a pedestal and even more acutely aware in front of their monolithic figures is his own duality, inferiority and instability, a man who is proud of his “I”, because only it sets him apart from the philistines, and at the same time is burdened by him, a man who combines protest, and powerlessness, and naive illusions, and pessimism, and unspent energy, and passionate lyricism - this man is present in all the romantic paintings of the 1820s.”
The dizzying change of events inspired, gave rise to hopes for change, awakened dreams, but sometimes led to despair. The slogans of Freedom, Equality and Fraternity proclaimed by the revolution opened up scope for the human spirit. However, it soon became clear that these principles were not feasible. Having generated unprecedented hopes, the revolution did not live up to them. It was discovered early that the resulting freedom was not only good. It also manifested itself in cruel and predatory individualism. The post-revolutionary order was less like the kingdom of reason that the thinkers and writers of the Enlightenment dreamed of. The cataclysms of the era influenced the mindset of the entire romantic generation. The mood of romantics constantly fluctuates between delight and despair, inspiration and disappointment, fiery enthusiasm and truly world-wide sorrow. The feeling of absolute and boundless personal freedom is adjacent to the awareness of its tragic insecurity.
S. Frank wrote that “the 19th century opens with a feeling of “world sorrow.” In the worldview of Byron, Leopardi, Alfred Musset - here in Russia in Lermontov, Baratynsky, Tyutchev - in the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, in the tragic music of Beethoven, in the terrible fantasy of Hoffmann, in the sad irony of Heine - a new consciousness of the orphanhood of man in the world, of tragic impossibility is heard his hopes, the hopeless contradiction between the intimate needs and hopes of the human heart and the cosmic and social conditions of human existence.”
Indeed, doesn’t Schopenhauer himself speak about the pessimism of his views, whose teaching is painted in gloomy tones, and who constantly says that the world is filled with evil, meaninglessness, misfortune, that life is suffering: “If the immediate and immediate goal of our life is not there is suffering, then our existence represents the most stupid and inexpedient phenomenon. For it is absurd to admit that the endless suffering flowing from the essential needs of life, with which the world is filled, was aimless and purely accidental. Although each individual misfortune seems to be an exception, misfortune in general is the rule.”
The life of the human spirit among the romantics is contrasted with the baseness of material existence. From the feeling of his ill-being, the cult of a unique individual personality was born. She was perceived as the only support and as the only point of reference for life values. Human individuality was thought of as an absolutely valuable principle, torn out from the surrounding world and in many ways opposed to it.
The hero of romantic literature becomes a person who has broken away from old ties, asserting his absolute dissimilarity from all others. For this reason alone, she is exceptional. Romantic artists, as a rule, avoided depicting ordinary and ordinary people. The main characters in their artistic work are lonely dreamers, brilliant artists, prophets, individuals endowed with deep passions and titanic power of feelings. They may be villains, but never mediocre. Most often they are endowed with a rebellious consciousness.
The gradations of disagreement with the world order among such heroes can be different: from the rebellious restlessness of Rene in Chateaubriand’s novel of the same name to the total disappointment in people, reason and the world order, characteristic of many of Byron’s heroes. The romantic hero is always in a state of some kind of spiritual limit. His senses are heightened. The contours of the personality are determined by the passion of nature, the insatiable desires and aspirations. The romantic personality is exceptional due to its original nature and is therefore completely individual.
The exclusive intrinsic value of individuality did not even allow the thought of its dependence on surrounding circumstances. The starting point of a romantic conflict is the individual’s desire for complete independence, the assertion of the primacy of free will over necessity. The discovery of the intrinsic value of the individual was an artistic achievement of romanticism. But it led to the aestheticization of individuality. The very originality of the individual was already becoming a subject of aesthetic admiration. Breaking free from his surroundings, the romantic hero could sometimes manifest himself in violating prohibitions, in individualism and selfishness, or even simply in crimes (Manfred, Corsair or Cain in Byron). The ethical and aesthetic in assessing a person might not coincide. In this, the romantics differed greatly from the enlighteners, who, on the contrary, completely merged the ethical and aesthetic principles in their assessment of the hero.
The enlighteners of the 18th century created many positive heroes who were carriers of high moral values and, in their opinion, embodied reason and natural norms. Thus, D. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver became the symbols of the new, “natural,” rational hero. Of course, the true hero of the Enlightenment is Goethe's Faust.
A romantic hero is not just a positive hero, he is not even always positive; a romantic hero is a hero who reflects the poet’s longing for an ideal. After all, the question of whether Lermontov’s Demon or Conrad in Byron’s “Corsair” is positive or negative does not arise at all - they are majestic, containing in their appearance, in their deeds, indomitable strength of spirit. A romantic hero, as V. G. Belinsky wrote, is “a person who relies on himself,” a person who opposes himself to the entire world around him.
An example of a romantic hero is Julien Sorel from Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black. The personal fate of Julien Sorel was closely dependent on this change in historical weather. From the past he borrows his internal code of honor, the present condemns him to dishonor. According to his inclinations as a “man of 1993”, a fan of revolutionaries and Napoleon, he was “too late to be born”. The time has passed when positions were won through personal valor, courage, and intelligence. Nowadays, for the “hunt for happiness,” the plebeian is offered the only help that is in use among the children of timelessness: calculating and hypocritical piety. The color of luck has changed, as when turning a roulette wheel: today, in order to win, you need to bet not on red, but on black. And the young man, obsessed with the dream of fame, is faced with a choice: either to perish in obscurity, or to try to assert himself by adapting to his age, putting on the “uniform of the times” - a cassock. He turns away from his friends and serves those whom he despises in his soul; an atheist, he pretends to be a saint; a fan of the Jacobins - trying to penetrate the circle of aristocrats; being endowed with a sharp mind, he agrees with fools. Realizing that “everyone is for himself in this desert of selfishness called life,” he rushed into battle in the hope of winning with the weapons forced upon him.
And yet, Sorel, having taken the path of adaptation, did not completely become an opportunist; Having chosen the methods of winning happiness accepted by everyone around him, he did not fully share their morality. And the point here is not simply that a gifted young man is immeasurably smarter than the mediocrities in whose service he is. His hypocrisy itself is not humiliated submission, but a kind of challenge to society, accompanied by a refusal to recognize the right of the “masters of life” to respect and their claims to set moral principles for their subordinates. The top are the enemy, vile, insidious, vindictive. Taking advantage of their favor, Sorel, however, does not know that he owes his conscience to them, since, even while treating a capable young man kindly, they see him not as a person, but as an efficient servant.
An ardent heart, energy, sincerity, courage and strength of character, a morally healthy attitude towards the world and people, a constant need for action, for work, for the fruitful work of the intellect, humane responsiveness to people, respect for ordinary workers, love for nature, beauty in life and art, all this distinguished Julien’s nature, and he had to suppress all this in himself, trying to adapt to the animal laws of the world around him. This attempt was unsuccessful: “Julien retreated before the judgment of his conscience, he could not overcome his craving for justice.”
Prometheus became one of the favorite symbols of romanticism, embodying courage, heroism, self-sacrifice, unbending will and intransigence. An example of a work based on the myth of Prometheus is the poem by P.B. Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound", which is one of the poet's most significant works. Shelley changed the outcome of the mythological plot, in which, as is known, Prometheus nevertheless reconciled with Zeus. The poet himself wrote: “I was against such a pitiful outcome as the reconciliation of a fighter for humanity with his oppressor.” Shelley creates from the image of Prometheus an ideal hero, punished by the gods for violating their will and helping people. In Shelley's poem, the torment of Prometheus is rewarded with the triumph of his liberation. The fantastic creature Demogorgon, appearing in the third part of the poem, overthrows Zeus, proclaiming: “There is no return for the tyranny of heaven, and there is no successor for you.”
Female images of romanticism are also contradictory, but extraordinary. Many authors of the Romantic era returned to the story of Medea. The Austrian writer of the era of romanticism F. Grillparzer wrote the trilogy “The Golden Fleece”, which reflected the “tragedy of fate” characteristic of German romanticism. “The Golden Fleece” is often called the most complete dramatic version of the “biography” of the ancient Greek heroine. In the first part - the one-act drama "The Guest" we see Medea as a very young girl, forced to endure her tyrant father. She prevents the murder of Phrixus, their guest, who fled to Colchis on a golden ram. It was he who sacrificed the golden fleece ram to Zeus in gratitude for saving him from death and hung the golden fleece in the sacred grove of Ares. The seekers of the Golden Fleece appear before us in the four-act play “The Argonauts.” In it, Medea desperately but unsuccessfully tries to fight her feelings for Jason, against her will, becoming his accomplice. In the third part, the five-act tragedy “Medea,” the story reaches its climax. Medea, brought by Jason to Corinth, appears to others as a stranger from barbarian lands, a sorceress and sorceress. In the works of romantics, it is quite common to see the phenomenon that foreignness lies at the heart of many insoluble conflicts. Returning to his homeland in Corinth, Jason is ashamed of his girlfriend, but still refuses to fulfill Creon’s demand and drive her away. And only having fallen in love with his daughter, Jason himself began to hate Medea.
The main tragic theme of Grillparzer's Medea is her loneliness, because even her own children are ashamed and avoid her. Medea is not destined to get rid of this punishment even in Delphi, where she fled after the murder of Creusa and her sons. Grillparzer did not at all seek to justify his heroine, but it was important for him to discover the motives for her actions. Grillparzer's Medea, the daughter of a distant barbarian country, has not accepted the fate prepared for her, she rebels against someone else's way of life, and this greatly attracted romantics.
The image of Medea, striking in its inconsistency, is seen by many in a transformed form in the heroines of Stendhal and Barbet d'Aurevilly. Both writers portray the deadly Medea in different ideological contexts, but invariably endow her with a sense of alienation, which turns out to be detrimental to the integrity of the individual and, therefore, entails itself death.
Many literary scholars correlate the image of Medea with the image of the heroine of the novel “Bewitched” by Barbet d’Aurevilly, Jeanne-Madeleine de Feardan, as well as with the image of the famous heroine of Stendhal’s novel “The Red and the Black” Matilda. Here we see three main components of the famous myth: unexpected, stormy the birth of passion, magical actions with either good or harmful intentions, the revenge of an abandoned witch - a rejected woman.
These are just some examples of romantic heroes and heroines.
The revolution proclaimed individual freedom, opening up “unexplored new roads” before it, but this same revolution gave birth to the bourgeois order, the spirit of acquisition and selfishness. These two sides of personality (the pathos of freedom and individualism) manifest themselves very complexly in the romantic concept of the world and man. V. G. Belinsky found a wonderful formula when speaking about Byron (and his hero): “this is a human personality, indignant against the general and, in his proud rebellion, leaning on himself.”
However, in the depths of romanticism, another type of personality is formed. This is, first of all, the personality of an artist - a poet, musician, painter, also elevated above the crowd of ordinary people, officials, property owners, and secular loafers. Here we are no longer talking about the claims of an exceptional individual, but about the rights of a true artist to judge the world and people.
The romantic image of the artist (for example, among German writers) is not always adequate to Byron’s hero. Moreover, Byron's individualist hero is contrasted with a universal personality that strives for the highest harmony (as if absorbing all the diversity of the world). The universality of such a personality is the antithesis of any limitation of a person, whether associated with narrow mercantile interests, or with a thirst for profit that destroys personality, etc.
Romantics did not always correctly assess the social consequences of revolutions. But they were acutely aware of the anti-aesthetic nature of society, which threatens the very existence of art, in which “heartless purity” reigns. The romantic artist, unlike some writers of the second half of the 19th century, did not at all seek to hide from the world in an “ivory tower.” But he felt tragically lonely, suffocating from this loneliness.
Thus, in romanticism two antagonistic concepts of personality can be distinguished: individualistic and universalistic. Their fate in the subsequent development of world culture was ambiguous. The rebellion of Byron's individualist hero was beautiful and captivated his contemporaries, but at the same time its futility was quickly revealed. History has harshly condemned the claims of an individual to create his own court. On the other hand, the idea of universality reflected the longing for the ideal of a comprehensively developed person, free from the limitations of bourgeois society.
The concept of "romanticism" is often used as a synonym for the concept of "romance". This means a tendency to look at the world through rose-colored glasses and an active life position. Or they associate this concept with love and any actions for the sake of their loved one. But romanticism has several meanings. The article will discuss the narrower understanding that is used for the literary term, and the main character traits of the romantic hero.
Characteristic features of the style
Romanticism is a movement in literature that arose in Russia at the end of the 18th - first half of the 19th century. This style proclaims the cult of nature and natural human feelings. New characteristic features of romantic literature are freedom of expression, the value of individualism and the original character traits of the main character. Representatives of the movement abandoned rationalism and the primacy of the mind, which were characteristic of the Enlightenment, and put the emotional and spiritual aspects of man at the forefront.
In their works, the authors depict not the real world, which was too vulgar and base for them, but the inner universe of the character. And through the prism of his feelings and emotions, the outlines of the real world are visible, the laws and thoughts of which he refuses to obey.
Main conflict
The central conflict of all works written in the era of romanticism is the conflict between the individual and society as a whole. Here the main character goes against the established rules in his environment. Moreover, the motives for such behavior can be different - actions can either be for the benefit of society or have a selfish plan. In this case, as a rule, the hero loses this fight, and the work ends with his death.
A romantic is a special and in most cases very mysterious person who tries to resist the power of nature or society. At the same time, the conflict develops into an internal struggle of contradictions that occurs in the soul of the main character. In other words, the central character is built on antitheses.
Although in this literary genre the individuality of the main character is valued, literary scholars have identified which features of romantic heroes are the main ones. But, even despite the similarities, each character is unique in its own way, since they are only general criteria for identifying a style.
Ideals of society
The main feature of a romantic hero is that he does not accept the generally known ideals of society. The main character has his own ideas about the values of life, which he tries to defend. He seems to challenge the entire world around him, and not an individual person or group of people. Here we are talking about the ideological confrontation of one person against the whole world.
Moreover, in his rebellion, the main character chooses one of two extremes. Or these are unattainable, highly spiritual goals, and the character is trying to become equal to the Creator himself. In another case, the hero indulges in all sorts of sins, without feeling the extent of his moral fall into the abyss.
Bright personality
If one person is able to withstand the whole world, then it is as large-scale and complex as the whole world. The main character of romantic literature always stands out in society both externally and internally. In the soul of the character there is a constant conflict between the stereotypes already laid down by society and his own views and ideas.
Loneliness
One of the saddest traits of a romantic hero is his tragic loneliness. Since the character is opposed to the whole world, he remains completely alone. There is no person who would understand him. Therefore, he either himself flees from the society he hates, or he himself becomes an exile. Otherwise, the romantic hero would no longer be like that. Therefore, romantic writers focus all their attention on the psychological portrait of the central character.
Either the past or the future
The traits of a romantic hero do not allow him to live in the present. The character is trying to find his ideals in the past, when religious feeling was strong in the hearts of people. Or he consoles himself with happy utopias that supposedly await him in the future. But in any case, the main character is not satisfied with the era of dull bourgeois reality.
Individualism
As already mentioned, the hallmark of the romantic hero is his individualism. But it’s not easy to be “different from others.” This is a fundamental difference from all the people who surround the main character. Moreover, if a character chooses a sinful path, then he realizes that he is different from others. And this difference is taken to the extreme - the cult of personality of the protagonist, where all actions have an exclusively selfish motive.
The era of romanticism in Russia
The founder of Russian romanticism is considered to be the poet Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky. He creates several ballads and poems (“Ondine”, “The Sleeping Princess” and so on), in which there is a deep philosophical meaning and a desire for moral ideals. His works are imbued with his own experiences and reflections.
Then Zhukovsky was replaced by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov. They leave the imprint of an ideological crisis on the public consciousness, which is impressed by the failure of the Decembrist uprising. For this reason, the creativity of these people is described as disappointment in real life and an attempt to escape into their fictional world, filled with beauty and harmony. The main characters of their works lose interest in earthly life and come into conflict with the outside world.
One of the features of romanticism is its appeal to the history of the people and their folklore. This is most clearly seen in the work “Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, the young guardsman and the daring merchant Kalashnikov” and a cycle of poems and poems dedicated to the Caucasus. Lermontov perceived it as the homeland of free and proud people. They opposed a slave country that was under the rule of Nicholas I.
The early works of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin are also imbued with the idea of romanticism. An example would be “Eugene Onegin” or “The Queen of Spades”.
ROMANTICISM
In modern literary science, romanticism is viewed mainly from two points of view: as a certain artistic method, based on the creative transformation of reality in art, and how literary direction, historically natural and limited in time. A more general concept is romantic method. We will stop there.
As we have already said, the artistic method presupposes a certain way of comprehending the world in art, that is, the basic principles of selection, depiction and evaluation of the phenomena of reality. The originality of the romantic method as a whole can be defined as artistic maximalism, which, being the basis of the romantic worldview, is found at all levels of the work - from the problematic and system of images to style.
In the romantic picture of the world, the material is always subordinate to the spiritual. The struggle of these opposites can take on different guises: divine and devilish, sublime and base, true and false, free and dependent, natural and random, etc.
Romantic ideal, in contrast to the ideal of the classicists, concrete and accessible for implementation, absolute and therefore already in eternal contradiction with transient reality. The artistic worldview of the romantic is thus built on the contrast, collision and fusion of mutually exclusive concepts. The world is perfect as a plan - the world is imperfect as an embodiment. Is it possible to reconcile the irreconcilable?
This is how it arises two worlds, a conventional model of a romantic world in which reality is far from ideal and the dream seems impossible. Often the connecting link between these worlds becomes the inner world of a romantic, in which lives the desire from the dull “HERE” to the beautiful “THERE”. When their conflict is insoluble, the motive of escape sounds: escape from imperfect reality into another existence is thought of as salvation. This is exactly what happens, for example, in the finale of K. Aksakov’s story “Walter Eisenberg”: the hero, by the miraculous power of his art, finds himself in a dream world created by his brush; thus, the death of the artist is perceived not as a departure, but as a transition to another reality. When it is possible to connect reality with the ideal, the idea of transformation appears: spiritualization of the material world through imagination, creativity or struggle. The belief in the possibility of a miracle still lives on in the 20th century: in A. Green’s story “Scarlet Sails”, in A. de Saint-Exupery’s philosophical fairy tale “The Little Prince”.
Romantic duality as a principle operates not only at the level of the macrocosm, but also at the level of the microcosm - the human personality as an integral part of the Universe and as the point of intersection of the ideal and the everyday. Motives of duality, tragic fragmentation of consciousness, images of doubles very common in romantic literature: “The Amazing Story of Peter Schlemil” by A. Chamisso, “The Elixir of Satan” by Hoffmann, “The Double” by Dostoevsky.
In connection with dual worlds, fantasy occupies a special position as a worldview and aesthetic category, and its understanding should not always be reduced to the modern understanding of fantasy as “incredible” or “impossible.” Actually, romantic fiction often means not the violation of the laws of the universe, but their discovery and, ultimately, fulfillment. It’s just that these laws are of a spiritual nature, and reality in the romantic world is not limited by materiality. It is fantasy in many works that becomes a universal way of comprehending reality in art through the transformation of its external forms with the help of images and situations that have no analogues in the material world and are endowed with symbolic meaning.
Fantasy, or miracle, in romantic works (and not only) can perform various functions. In addition to knowledge of the spiritual foundations of existence, the so-called philosophical fiction, with the help of a miracle, reveals the inner world of the hero (psychological fiction), recreates the people's worldview (folklore fiction), predicts the future (utopia and dystopia), and plays with the reader (entertaining fiction). Separately, we should dwell on the satirical exposure of the vicious sides of reality - an exposure in which fiction often plays an important role, presenting real social and human shortcomings in an allegorical light.
Romantic satire is born from the rejection of lack of spirituality. Reality is assessed by a romantic person from the standpoint of the ideal, and the stronger the contrast between what exists and what should be, the more active is the confrontation between man and the world, which has lost its connection with a higher principle. The objects of romantic satire are varied: from social injustice and the bourgeois value system to specific human vices: love and friendship turn out to be corrupt, faith is lost, compassion is superfluous.
In particular, secular society is a parody of normal human relationships; Hypocrisy, envy, and malice reign in it. In the romantic consciousness, the concept of “light” (aristocratic society) often turns into its opposite - darkness, mob, secular - which means unspiritual. It is generally not typical for romantics to use Aesopian language; he does not seek to hide or muffle his caustic laughter. Satire in romantic works often appears as an invective(the object of satire turns out to be so dangerous for the existence of the ideal, and its activity is so dramatic and even tragic in its consequences that its interpretation no longer causes laughter; in this case, the connection between satire and the comic is broken, so a denying pathos arises that is not associated with ridicule), directly expressing the author's position:“This is a nest of heartfelt depravity, ignorance, dementia, baseness! Arrogance kneels there before an insolent occasion, kissing the dusty hem of his clothes, and crushes his modest dignity with his heel... Petty ambition is the subject of morning concern and night vigil, unscrupulous flattery rules words, vile self-interest rules actions. Not a single lofty thought will sparkle in this suffocating darkness, not a single warm feeling will warm up this icy mountain" (Pogodin. "Adele").
Romantic irony just like satire, directly associated with two worlds. Romantic consciousness strives for a beautiful world, and existence is determined by the laws of the real world. Life without faith in a dream is meaningless for a romantic hero, but a dream is unrealizable in the conditions of earthly reality, and therefore faith in a dream is also meaningless. Awareness of this tragic contradiction results in the romanticist’s bitter smile not only at the imperfections of the world, but also at himself. This grin can be heard in the works of the German romantic Hoffmann, where the sublime hero often finds himself in comical situations, and a happy ending - victory over evil and the acquisition of an ideal - can turn into completely earthly, bourgeois well-being. For example, in the fairy tale “Little Tsakhes”, romantic lovers, after a happy reunion, receive as a gift a wonderful estate where “excellent cabbage” grows, where food in pots never burns and porcelain dishes do not break. And in the fairy tale “The Golden Pot” (Hoffmann), the very name ironically brings down the famous romantic symbol of an unattainable dream - the “blue flower” from Novalis’s novel.
Events that make up romantic plot, as a rule, bright and unusual; they are a kind of peaks on which the narrative is built (entertainment in the era of romanticism becomes one of the most important artistic criteria). At the event level, the author’s absolute freedom in constructing the plot is clearly visible, and this construction can cause in the reader a feeling of incompleteness, fragmentation, and an invitation to independently fill in the “blank spots.” The external motivation for the extraordinary nature of what happens in romantic works can be special places and times of action (exotic countries, the distant past or future), folk superstitions and legends. The depiction of “exceptional circumstances” is aimed primarily at revealing the “exceptional personality” acting in these circumstances. Character as the engine of the plot and the plot as a way of realizing character are closely connected, therefore each eventful moment is a kind of external expression of the struggle between good and evil taking place in the soul of the romantic hero.
One of the achievements of romanticism was the discovery of the value and inexhaustible complexity of the human personality. Man is perceived by the romantics in a tragic contradiction - as the crown of creation, “the proud ruler of fate” and as a weak-willed toy in the hands of forces unknown to him, and sometimes of his own passions. Individual freedom presupposes responsibility: having made the wrong choice, you need to be prepared for the inevitable consequences.
The image of the hero is often inseparable from the lyrical element of the author’s “I”, turning out to be either consonant with him or alien. Anyway author-narrator takes an active position in a romantic work; narration tends towards subjectivity, which can also manifest itself at the compositional level - in the use of the “story within a story” technique. The exceptionality of the romantic hero is assessed from a moral standpoint. And this exclusivity can be both evidence of his greatness and a sign of his inferiority.
"Weirdness" of the character is emphasized by the author, first of all, with the help portrait: spiritual beauty, sickly pallor, expressive gaze - these signs have long become stable. Very often, when describing the hero’s appearance, the author uses comparisons and reminiscences, as if citing already known examples. Here is a typical example of such an associative portrait (N. Polevoy “The Bliss of Madness”): “I don’t know how to describe Adelheid: she was likened to Beethoven’s wild symphony and the Valkyrie maidens about whom the Scandinavian skalds sang... her face... was thoughtfully charming, like a face Madonnas of Albrecht Durer... Adelheide seemed to be the spirit of that poetry that inspired Schiller when he described his Thecla, and Goethe when he depicted his Mignon.”
Behavior of a romantic hero also evidence of his exclusivity (and sometimes exclusion from society); often it does not fit into generally accepted norms and violates the conventional rules of the game by which all other characters live.
Antithesis- a favorite structural device of romanticism, which is especially obvious in the confrontation between the hero and the crowd (and more broadly, the hero and the world). This external conflict can take different forms, depending on the type of romantic personality created by the author.
TYPES OF ROMANTIC HEROES
The hero is a naive eccentric, believing in the possibility of realizing ideals is often comical and absurd in the eyes of sane people. However, he differs from them in his moral integrity, childish desire for truth, ability to love and inability to adapt, that is, to lie. Such, for example, is the student Anselm from Hoffmann’s fairy tale “The Golden Pot” - it was he, childishly funny and awkward, who was given the gift of not only discovering the existence of an ideal world, but also living in it and being happy. The heroine of A. Green’s story “Scarlet Sails” Assol, who knew how to believe in a miracle and wait for its appearance, despite bullying and ridicule, was also awarded the happiness of a dream come true.
The hero is a tragic loner and a dreamer, rejected by society and aware of his alienness to the world, is capable of open conflict with others. They seem to him limited and vulgar, living exclusively by material interests and therefore personifying some kind of world evil, powerful and destructive to the spiritual aspirations of the romantic. Often this type of hero is combined with the theme of “high madness” associated with the motive of chosenness (Rybarenko from “The Ghoul” by A. Tolstoy, The Dreamer from “White Nights” by Dostoevsky). The opposition “individual – society” acquires its most acute character in the romantic image of a tramp hero or robber, taking revenge on the world for his desecrated ideals (“Les Miserables” by Hugo, “The Corsair” by Byron).
The hero is a disappointed, “superfluous” person, who did not have the opportunity and no longer wanted to realize his talents for the benefit of society, lost his previous dreams and faith in people. He turned into an observer and analyst, passing judgment on an imperfect reality, but without trying to change it or change himself (Lermontov's Pechorin). The thin line between pride and egoism, awareness of one’s own exclusivity and disdain for people can explain why so often in romanticism the cult of the lonely hero is combined with his debunking: Aleko in Pushkin’s poem “Gypsies”, Lara in Gorky’s story “Old Woman Izergil” are punished with loneliness precisely for your inhuman pride.
The hero is a demonic personality, challenging not only society, but also the Creator, is doomed to a tragic discord with reality and oneself. His protest and despair are organically connected, since the Beauty, Goodness and Truth that he rejects have power over his soul. A hero who is inclined to choose demonism as a moral position thereby abandons the idea of good, since evil does not give birth to good, but only evil. But this is “high evil”, since it is dictated by a thirst for good. The rebellion and cruelty of the nature of such a hero become a source of suffering for those around him and do not bring joy to him. Acting as the “vicar” of the devil, the tempter and the punisher, he himself is sometimes humanly vulnerable, because he is passionate. It is no coincidence that it became widespread in romantic literature motif of the “devil in love.” Echoes of this motif are heard in Lermontov’s “Demon”.
Hero - patriot and citizen, ready to give his life for the good of the Fatherland, most often does not meet with the understanding and approval of his contemporaries. In this image, traditional pride for the romantics is paradoxically combined with the ideal of selflessness - the voluntary atonement of collective sin by a lone hero. The theme of sacrifice as a feat is especially characteristic of the “civil romanticism” of the Decembrists (the character in Ryleev’s poem “Nalivaiko” consciously chooses his path of suffering):
I know that death awaits
The one who rises first
On the oppressors of the people.
Fate has already doomed me,
But where, tell me, when was it
Freedom redeemed without sacrifice?
We find something similar in Ryleev’s Duma “Ivan Susanin”, and so is Gorky’s Danko. This type is also common in Lermontov’s works.
Another common type of hero can be called autobiographical, since he represents understanding the tragic fate of a man of art, who is forced to live, as it were, on the border of two worlds: the sublime world of creativity and the everyday world. The German romantic Hoffmann built his novel “The worldly views of the cat Moore, coupled with fragments of the biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, which accidentally survived in waste paper sheets,” precisely on the principle of combining opposites. The depiction of the philistine consciousness in this novel is intended to highlight the greatness of the inner world of the romantic composer Johann Kreisler. In E. Poe’s short story “The Oval Portrait,” the painter, with the miraculous power of his art, takes away the life of the woman whose portrait he is painting—takes it away in order to give an eternal one in return.
In other words, art for romantics is not imitation and reflection, but an approach to the true reality that lies beyond the visible. In this sense, it opposes the rational way of knowing the world.
In romantic works, the landscape carries a large semantic load. Storm and thunderstorm set in motion romantic landscape, emphasizing the internal conflict of the universe. This corresponds to the passionate nature of the romantic hero:
...Oh, I'm like a brother
I would be glad to embrace the storm!
I watched with the eyes of a cloud,
I caught lightning with my hand... (“Mtsyri”)
Romanticism opposes the classicist cult of reason, believing that “there is much in the world, friend Horatio, that our sages never dreamed of.” Feelings (sentimentalism) are replaced by passion - not so much human as superhuman, uncontrollable and spontaneous. It elevates the hero above the ordinary and connects him with the universe; it reveals to the reader the motives of his actions, and often becomes a justification for his crimes:
No one is made entirely of evil,
And a good passion lived in Conrad...
However, if Byron’s Corsair is capable of deep feeling despite the criminality of his nature, then Claude Frollo from “Notre Dame Cathedral” by V. Hugo becomes a criminal because of an insane passion that destroys the hero. Such an ambivalent understanding of passion - in a secular (strong feeling) and spiritual (suffering, torment) context is characteristic of romanticism, and if the first meaning presupposes the cult of love as the discovery of the Divine in man, then the second is directly related to the devilish temptation and spiritual fall. For example, the main character of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s story “Terrible Fortune-Telling,” with the help of a wonderful dream-warning, is given the opportunity to realize the crime and fatality of his passion for a married woman: “This fortune-telling opened my eyes, blinded by passion; a deceived husband, a seduced wife, a torn, disgraced marriage and, who knows, maybe bloody revenge on me or from me - these are the consequences of my crazy love!!!”
Romantic psychologism based on the desire to show the internal pattern of the hero’s words and deeds, which at first glance are inexplicable and strange. Their conditioning is revealed not so much through the social conditions of character formation (as it will be in realism), but through the clash of the forces of good and evil, the battlefield of which is the human heart. Romantics see in the human soul a combination of two poles - “angel” and “beast”.
Thus, in the romantic concept of the world, man is included in the “vertical context” of existence as the most important and integral part. His position in this world depends on his personal choice. Hence the greatest responsibility of the individual not only for actions, but also for words and thoughts. The theme of crime and punishment in the romantic version has acquired particular urgency: “Nothing in the world is forgotten or disappears”; Descendants will pay for the sins of their ancestors, and unredeemed guilt will become a family curse for them, which will determine the tragic fate of the heroes (“Terrible Revenge” by Gogol, “The Ghoul” by Tolstoy).
Thus, we have outlined some essential typological features of romanticism as an artistic method.
Who is a romantic hero and what is he like?
This is an individualist. A superman who lived through two stages: before colliding with reality; he lives in a “pink” state, he is possessed by the desire for achievement, to change the world. After a collision with reality; he continues to consider this world both vulgar and boring, but he becomes a skeptic, a pessimist. With a clear understanding that nothing can be changed, the desire for heroism degenerates into a desire for danger.
Every culture has its own romantic hero, but Byron gave the typical representation of the romantic hero in his work Childe Harold. He put on the mask of his hero (suggests that there is no distance between the hero and the author) and managed to correspond to the romantic canon.
All romantic works. The characteristic features are:
Firstly, in every romantic work there is no distance between the hero and the author.
Secondly, the author does not judge the hero, but even if something bad is said about him, the plot is structured in such a way that the hero is not to blame. The plot in a romantic work is usually romantic. Romantics also build a special relationship with nature; they like storms, thunderstorms, and disasters.
In Russia, romanticism arose seven years later than in Europe, since in the 19th century Russia was in some cultural isolation. We can talk about Russian imitation of European romanticism. This was a special manifestation of romanticism; in Russian culture there was no opposition of man to the world and God. The version of Byron's romanticism was lived and felt in his work first by Pushkin, then by Lermontov. Pushkin had the gift of attention to people; the most romantic of his romantic poems is “The Bakhchisarai Fountain”. Pushkin felt and identified the most vulnerable place of a person’s romantic position: he wants everything only for himself.
Lermontov's poem "Mtsyri" also does not fully reflect the characteristic features of romanticism.
There are two romantic heroes in this poem, therefore, if this is a romantic poem, then it is very unique: firstly, the second hero is conveyed by the author through an epigraph; secondly, the author does not connect with Mtsyri, the hero solves the problem of self-will in his own way, and Lermontov throughout the entire poem only thinks about solving this problem. He does not judge his hero, but he does not justify him either, but he takes a certain position - understanding. It turns out that romanticism in Russian culture is transformed into reflection. It turns out romanticism from the point of view of realism.
We can say that Pushkin and Lermontov failed to become romantics (however, Lermontov once managed to comply with romantic laws - in the drama “Masquerade”). With their experiments, the poets showed that in England the position of an individualist could be fruitful, but in Russia it was not. Although Pushkin and Lermontov failed to become romantics, they opened the way for the development of realism. In 1825, the first realistic work was published: “Boris Godunov”, then “The Captain’s Daughter”, “Eugene Onegin”, “Hero of Our Time” and many others.
Despite the complexity of the ideological content of romanticism, its aesthetics as a whole opposed the aesthetics of classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Romantics broke the centuries-old literary canons of classicism with its spirit of discipline and frozen greatness. In the struggle for the liberation of art from petty regulation, the romantics defended the unrestricted freedom of the artist’s creative imagination.
Rejecting the constraining rules of classicism, they insisted on mixing genres, justifying their demand by the fact that it corresponds to the true life of nature, where beauty and ugliness, the tragic and the comic are mixed. Glorifying the natural movements of the human heart, the romantics, in contrast to the rationalistic demands of classicism, put forward a cult of feeling; the logically generalized characters of classicism were opposed by their extreme individualization.
The hero of romantic literature, with his exclusivity, with his heightened emotionality, was generated by the desire of the romantics to contrast prosaic reality with a bright, free personality. But if progressive romantics created images of strong people with unbridled energy, with violent passions, people rebelling against the dilapidated laws of an unjust society, then conservative romantics cultivated the image of a “superfluous person”, coldly withdrawn in his loneliness, completely immersed in his experiences.
The desire to reveal the inner world of man, interest in the life of peoples, in their historical and national identity - all these strengths of romanticism foreshadowed the transition to realism. However, the achievements of the Romantics are inseparable from the limitations inherent in their method.
The laws of bourgeois society, misunderstood by the romantics, appeared in their minds in the form of irresistible forces playing with man, surrounding him with an atmosphere of mystery and fate. For many romantics, human psychology was shrouded in mysticism; it was dominated by moments of the irrational, unclear, and mysterious. The subjective-idealistic idea of the world, of a lonely, self-contained personality opposed to this world, was the basis for a one-sided, non-specific image of a person.
Along with the actual ability to convey the complex life of feelings and souls, we often find among romantics the desire to transform the diversity of human characters into abstract schemes of good and evil. Pathetic elation of intonation, a tendency toward exaggeration and dramatic effects sometimes led to stiltedness, which also made the art of the romantics conventional and abstract. These weaknesses, to one degree or another, were characteristic of everyone, even the largest representatives of romanticism.
The painful discord between the ideal and social reality is the basis of the romantic worldview and art. The affirmation of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the depiction of strong passions, spiritualized and healing nature among many romantics - the heroics of protest or national liberation, including revolutionary struggle, are adjacent to the motives of “world sorrow”, “world evil”, the night side of the soul, clothed in the forms of irony, grotesque, poetics of dual worlds.
Interest in the national past (often its idealization), traditions of folklore and culture of one’s own and other peoples, the desire to create a universal picture of the world (primarily history and literature), the idea of art synthesis found expression in the ideology and practice of romanticism.
Romanticism in music developed in the 20s of the 19th century under the influence of the literature of romanticism and developed in close connection with it, with literature in general (appeal to synthetic genres, primarily opera, song, instrumental miniatures and musical programming). The appeal to the inner world of man, characteristic of romanticism, was expressed in the cult of the subjective, the craving for emotional intensity, which determined the primacy of music and lyrics in romanticism.
Musical romanticism manifested itself in many different branches associated with different national cultures and with different social movements. So, for example, there is a significant difference between the intimate, lyrical style of the German romantics and the “oratorical” civic pathos characteristic of the work of French composers. In turn, representatives of new national schools that emerged on the basis of a broad national liberation movement (Chopin, Moniuszko, Dvorak, Smetana, Grieg), as well as representatives of the Italian opera school, closely associated with the Risorgimento movement (Verdi, Bellini), in many ways differ from their contemporaries in Germany, Austria or France, in particular, in their tendency to preserve classical traditions.
And yet, they are all marked by some common artistic principles that allow us to talk about a single romantic system of thought.
By the beginning of the 19th century, fundamental studies of folklore, history, and ancient literature appeared; medieval legends, Gothic art, and Renaissance culture were resurrected. It was at this time that many national schools of a special type emerged in the compositional work of Europe, which were destined to significantly expand the boundaries of pan-European culture. Russian, which soon took, if not the first, then one of the first places in world cultural creativity (Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, the “Kuchkists”, Tchaikovsky), Polish (Chopin, Moniuszko), Czech (Smetana, Dvorak), Hungarian (Liszt), then Norwegian (Grieg), Spanish (Pedrel), Finnish (Sibelius), English (Elgar) - all of them, joining the general mainstream of European compositional creativity, in no way opposed themselves to the established ancient traditions. A new circle of images emerged, expressing the unique national features of the national culture to which the composer belonged. The intonation structure of a work allows you to instantly recognize by ear whether you belong to a particular national school.
Beginning with Schubert and Weber, composers have involved into the pan-European musical language the intonation patterns of the ancient, predominantly peasant folklore of their countries. Schubert, as it were, cleared the German folk song of the varnish of the Austro-German opera, Weber introduced into the cosmopolitan intonation structure of the Singspiel of the 18th century the song turns of folk genres, in particular, the famous chorus of hunters in The Magic Shooter. Chopin's music, for all its salon elegance and strict adherence to the traditions of professional instrumental writing, including sonata-symphonic writing, is based on the unique modal coloring and rhythmic structure of Polish folklore. Mendelssohn widely relies on everyday German song, Grieg - on the original forms of Norwegian music-making, Mussorgsky - on the ancient modality of ancient Russian peasant modes.
The most striking phenomenon in the music of romanticism, especially clearly perceived when compared with the figurative sphere of classicism, is the dominance of the lyrical-psychological principle. Of course, a distinctive feature of musical art in general is the refraction of any phenomenon through the sphere of feelings. Music of all eras is subject to this pattern. But the romantics surpassed all their predecessors in the importance of the lyrical principle in their music, in the strength and perfection in conveying the depths of a person’s inner world, the subtlest shades of mood.
The theme of love occupies a dominant place in it, for it is this state of mind that most comprehensively and fully reflects all the depths and nuances of the human psyche. But it is highly characteristic that this theme is not limited to the motives of love in the literal sense of the word, but is identified with the widest range of phenomena. The purely lyrical experiences of the characters are revealed against the backdrop of a broad historical panorama (for example, in Musset). A person’s love for his home, for his fatherland, for his people runs like a through thread through the work of all romantic composers.
A huge place is given to the image of nature in musical works of small and large forms, which is closely and inextricably intertwined with the theme of lyrical confession. Like images of love, the image of nature personifies the hero’s state of mind, so often colored by a feeling of disharmony with reality.
The theme of fantasy often competes with images of nature, which is probably generated by the desire to escape from the captivity of real life. Typical of the romantics was the search for a wonderful world sparkling with a wealth of colors, opposed to gray everyday life. It was during these years that literature was enriched with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tales of Andersen, and the ballads of Schiller and Mickiewicz. For composers of the romantic school, fairy-tale, fantastic images acquire a unique national coloring. Chopin's ballads are inspired by Mickiewicz's ballads, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz create works of a fantastic grotesque plan, symbolizing, as it were, the reverse side of faith, striving to reverse the ideas of fear of the forces of evil.
In the fine arts, romanticism manifested itself most clearly in painting and graphics, less expressively in sculpture and architecture. Prominent representatives of romanticism in the fine arts were E. Delacroix, T. Gericault, K. Friedrich. Eugene Delacroix is considered the head of the French romantic painters. In his paintings, he expressed the spirit of love of freedom, active action (“Freedom Leading the People”), and passionately and temperamentally called for the manifestation of humanism. Gericault's everyday paintings are distinguished by their relevance, psychologism, and unprecedented expression. Friedrich's spiritual, melancholic landscapes (“Two Contemplating the Moon”) are again the same attempt of the romantics to penetrate into the human world, to show how a person lives and dreams in the sublunary world.
In Russia, romanticism first began to appear in portraiture. In the first third of the 19th century, it largely lost contact with the dignitary aristocracy. Portraits of poets, artists, art patrons, and images of ordinary peasants began to occupy a significant place. This tendency was especially pronounced in the works of O.A. Kiprensky (1782 - 1836) and V.A. Tropinin (1776 - 1857).
Vasily Andreevich Tropinin strove for a lively, relaxed characterization of a person, expressed through his portrait. Portrait of a Son (1818), “A.S. Pushkin” (1827), “Self-Portrait” (1846) amaze not with their portrait resemblance to the originals, but with their unusually subtle insight into the inner world of a person. It was Tropinin who was the founder of the genre, somewhat idealized portrait of a man from the people (“The Lacemaker”, 1823).
At the beginning of the 19th century, Tver was a significant cultural center of Russia. All prominent people of Moscow attended literary evenings here. Here young Orest Kiprensky met A.S. Pushkin, whose portrait, painted later, became the pearl of world portrait art, and A.S. Pushkin dedicated poems to him, calling him “the favorite of light-winged fashion.” The portrait of Pushkin by O. Kiprensky is a living personification of the poetic genius. In the decisive turn of the head, in the energetically crossed arms on the chest, in the poet’s entire appearance, a feeling of independence and freedom is reflected. It was about him that Pushkin said: “I see myself as in a mirror, but this mirror flatters me.” A distinctive feature of Kiprensky’s portraits is that they show the spiritual charm and inner nobility of a person. The portrait of Davydov (1809) is also full of romantic mood.
Many portraits were painted by Kiprensky in Tver. Moreover, when he painted Ivan Petrovich Wulf, the Tver landowner, he looked with emotion at the girl standing in front of him, his granddaughter, the future Anna Petrovna Kern, to whom one of the most captivating lyrical works was dedicated - the poem by A.S. Pushkin “I remember a wonderful moment...” Such associations of poets, artists, musicians became a manifestation of a new direction in art - romanticism.
The luminaries of Russian painting of this era were K.P. Bryullov (1799 -1852) and A.A. Ivanov (1806 - 1858).
Russian painter and draftsman K.P. Bryullov, while still a student at the Academy of Arts, mastered the incomparable skill of drawing. Sent to Italy, where his brother lived, to improve his art, Bryullov soon amazed St. Petersburg patrons and philanthropists with his paintings. The large canvas “The Last Day of Pompeii” was a huge success in Italy and then in Russia. The artist created in it an allegorical picture of the death of the ancient world and the onset of a new era. The birth of a new life on the ruins of an old world crumbling into dust is the main idea of Bryullov’s painting. The artist depicted a mass scene, the heroes of which are not individual people, but the people themselves.
Bryullov's best portraits constitute one of the most remarkable pages in the history of Russian and world art. His “Self-Portrait”, as well as portraits of A.N. Strugovshchikova, N.I. Kukolnik, I.A. Krylova, Ya.F. Yanenko, M Lanci are distinguished by their variety and richness of characteristics, the plastic power of the design, the variety and brilliance of the technique.
K.P. Bryullov introduced a stream of romanticism and vitality into the painting of Russian classicism. His “Bathsheba” (1832) is illuminated by inner beauty and sensuality. Even Bryullov’s ceremonial portrait (“Horsewoman”) breathes with living human feelings, subtle psychologism and realistic tendencies, which is what distinguishes the movement in art called romanticism.
“Poets of the Silver Age” - Mayakovsky entered the school of painting, sculpture and architecture. V. Ya. Bryusov (1873 – 1924). D. D. Burliuk. Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev was born on April 15, 1886. Acmeists. O. E. Mandelstam. From 1900-1907 Mandelstam studied at the Tenishevsky Commercial School. O. E. Mandelstam (1891 – 1938). Acmeism. V. V. Mayakovsky.
“About front-line poets” - From the first days of the war, Kulchitsky was in the army. Simonov gained fame even before the war as a poet and playwright. Sergei Sergeevich Orlov (1921-1977). In 1944, Jalil was executed by Moabit executioners. Surkov’s poem “fire beats in a cramped stove” was written in 1941. Simonov’s poem “Wait for Me,” written during the war, became widely known.
“On Poetry” - Indian Summer has arrived - Days of farewell warmth. Your wonderful sunshine plays with our river. And at dawn the cherry glue hardens in the form of a clot. And all around were azure flowers, spreading spicy waves... A journey along a poetic path. The idea ended badly - An old rope broke... The face of a birch tree is under a wedding veil and transparent.
“Romanticism in literature” - Lesson - lecture. Lermontov Mikhail Yurievich 1814-1841. Romanticism in Russian literature, late 18th and early 19th centuries. The theme is "humiliated and insulted." Philosophical tale. The romantic personality is a passionate personality. Historical novel; "Mtsyri". Passion. Walter Scott 1771-1832. The reasons for the emergence of romanticism.
“On Romanticism” - Larra. A.S. Pushkin. The Eternal Jew. Sacrifice yourself to save others. "The Legend of the Eternal Jew." Compositional features of stories. "The Legend of Moses". M. Gorky. Which of the heroes is close to Old Woman Izergil: Danko or Larra? If you do nothing, nothing will happen to you. The basis of the romanticism style is the depiction of the inner world of man.
“Poets about nature” - Alexander Yesenin (father) and Tatyana Titova (mother). BLOK Alexander Alexandrovich (1880, St. Petersburg - 1921, Petrograd) - poet. A.A. Block. Russian writers of the 20th century about their native nature. Creative work. Landscape lyrics. Artistic and expressive means. S.A. Yesenin. The boy's grandmother knew many songs, fairy tales and ditties.
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