In this article we will consider such a literary concept as psychological parallelism. Often this term causes some problems with the interpretation of its meaning and functions. In this article, we will try to explain as clearly as possible what this concept is, how to apply it in the artistic analysis of the text, and what should be paid special attention to.

Definition

Psychological parallelism in literature is one of the stylistic devices. Its essence lies in the fact that the plot of the work is based on a consistent comparison of motives, pictures of nature, relationships, situations, actions. Commonly used in poetic folk texts.

As a rule, it consists of 2 parts. The first depicts a picture of nature, conditional and metaphorical, creating an emotional and psychological background. And in the second, the image of the hero already appears, whose state is compared with the natural. For example: a falcon is a good fellow, a swan is a bride, a cuckoo is a yearning woman or a widow.

Story

However, it is necessary to delve a little into the past in order to fully understand what psychological parallelism is. The definition in the literature, by the way, usually begins with a little historical background.

So, if this technique came to literature from folklore, then it has rather deep roots. Why did it occur to people to compare themselves with animals, plants or natural phenomena? This phenomenon is based on naive syncretic ideas that the surrounding world has its own will. This is confirmed by pagan beliefs, which endowed all life phenomena with consciousness. For example, the sun is an eye, that is, the sun appears as an active living being.

These parallels are:

• A complex similarity of characteristic features with life or action.
• Correlations of these features with our understanding of reality, the laws of the surrounding world.
• The adjacency of various objects that could be similar in terms of identified features.
• The vital value and completeness of the described object or phenomenon in relation to humanity.

That is, initially psychological parallelism was built on the subjective idea of ​​a person about the world.

Kinds

We continue to study psychological parallelism. We have already given the definition, now let's talk about its types. There are several different approaches to the study of this stylistic phenomenon and, accordingly, several classifications. We present here the most popular of them - the authorship of A. N. Veselovsky. According to her, psychological parallelism happens:

• binomial;
• formal;
• polynomial;
• monomial;
• negative.

Parallelism binomial

It is characterized by the following construction method. First, there is an image of a picture of nature, then a description of a similar episode from a person's life. These two episodes seem to echo each other, although they differ in object content. It is possible to understand that they have something in common, according to certain consonances, motives. This feature is a distinguishing feature of psychological parallels from mere repetitions.

For example: “When they want to pick roses, they have to wait until spring, when they want to love girls, they need to be sixteen years old” (Spanish folk song).

However, it is worth noting that folklore parallelism, which most often happens to be binomial, is built mainly on the category of action. If it is removed, then all other elements of the stylistic figure will lose their significance. The stability of this design is provided by 2 factors:

• In addition to the basic similarity, bright similar details of the category of action are added, which are not recounted to him.
• The comparison was liked by native speakers, became part of the cult and remained in it for a long time.

If both of these points are observed, then parallelism will turn into a symbol and become a household word. However, far from all two-term parallelisms, even those built according to all the rules, await such a fate.

Formal parallelism

There are cases when psychological parallelism is not immediately clear, and in order to comprehend it, it is necessary to hear the entire text. For example: one of the folk songs begins with the line “The river is flowing, it will not stir”, then there is a description of the bride, to whom many guests came to the wedding, but no one can bless her, since she is an orphan; thus, there is a similarity - the river does not stir, and the bride sits sad, silent.

Here we can talk about default, and not about the lack of similarity. The stylistic device becomes more complicated, the understanding of the work itself becomes more difficult, but the structure becomes more beautiful and poetic.

Polynomial parallelism

The concept of "psychological parallelism", despite the apparent complexity, is quite simple. Another thing is when we talk about varieties of this stylistic device. Although with respect to polynomial parallelism, there are usually no problems with its detection.

This subspecies is characterized by one-sided accumulation of several parallels that come from several objects simultaneously. That is, one character is taken and compared immediately with a number of images. For example: “Do not caress, dove, with a dove, do not twist, grass, with a blade of grass, do not get used to, well done, with a girl.” That is, there are already three objects for comparison in front of the reader.

Such a one-sided increase in images suggests that parallelism gradually evolved, which gave the poet greater freedom of writing and the opportunity to show his analytical abilities.

That is why polynomial parallelism is called a relatively late phenomenon of folk poetic style.

One-Term Parallelism

One-term psychological parallelism is aimed at developing figurativeness and strengthening its role in the work. This approach looks like this: Imagine the usual two-term construction, where the first part speaks of the stars and the moon, and in the second they are compared with the bride and groom. Now let's remove the second part, leaving only the images of the stars and the month. According to the content of the work, the reader will guess that we are talking about a girl and a young man, but there will be no mention of them in the text itself.

This reticence is similar to formal parallelism, but unlike it, no mention will be made here of the human characters that are meant. Therefore, here we can talk about the appearance of a symbol. Over the centuries, well-established allegorical images have appeared in folklore, which are identified with only one meaning. Such and such images are used in one-term parallelism.

For example, a falcon is identified with a young man, a groom. And often the works describe how a falcon fights with another bird, how he is kidnapped, how he leads a falcon down the aisle. There is no mention of people here, but we understand that we are talking about human relations between a boy and a girl.

Concurrency is negative

Let's proceed to the description of the last type, which can be psychological parallelism (examples are given in the article). The negative constructions of our stylistic device are usually used to create riddles. For example: "Roars, not a bull, strong, not a rock."

Such a construction is constructed as follows. First, an ordinary two-term or polynomial parallelism is created, and then the characterized image is removed from it and negation is added. For example, instead of "roars like a bull" - "roars, not a bull."

In Slavic folklore, this technique was especially popular and loved. Therefore, it can be found not only in riddles, but also in songs, fairy tales, etc. Later, it also migrated to author's literature, being used mainly in fairy tales and stylistic attempts to recreate folk poetry.

From a conceptual point of view, negative parallelism, as it were, distorts the very formula of parallelism, which was created to bring images closer together, and not to separate them.

From folklore to author's literature

When did psychological parallelism migrate from folk poetry to classical literature?

It happened at the time of the vagants, itinerant musicians. Unlike their predecessors, they graduated from classical music and poetry schools, so they mastered the basic literary techniques of depicting a person, which were characterized by great abstractness. They had little specificity and connection with reality. At the same time, like all itinerant musicians, they were quite familiar with folklore. Therefore, they began to introduce its elements into their poetry. Comparisons with natural phenomena of the character's character appeared, for example, winter and autumn - with sadness, and summer and spring - with fun. Of course, their experiments were rather primitive and far from perfect, but they laid the foundation for a new style, which later migrated to medieval literature.

So, in the 12th century, folk song techniques gradually began to intertwine with the classical tradition.

What is the function of comparisons, epithets and metaphors of psychological parallelism?

To begin with, it is worth saying that without metaphors and epithets there would be no parallelism itself, since this technique relies entirely on them.

Both of these paths serve to transfer the sign of one object to another. Actually, already in this function it is clear that without them it is impossible to compare nature with man. Metaphorical language is the writer's main tool in creating parallelisms. And if we are talking about the function of these tropes, then it just consists in the transfer of signs.

Basic concepts (psychological parallelism) are associated with descriptions, so it is not surprising that metaphors and epithets occupy the main place among them. For example, let's take the epithet "the sun has set" and make a parallelism out of it. We will succeed: as the sun went down, so did the life of the clear falcon. That is, the fading of the sun is compared with the fading of the life of a young man.

Psychological Parallelism in The Tale of Igor's Campaign

An excellent example of folk stylistic devices is the "Word", since it is itself a part of folklore. For example, let's take the main character Yaroslavna, since her image is associated with nature and is often compared with her. Take the episode of the heroine's crying. One day, she “calls with a lonely tap dance at dawn” - a parallelism between Yaroslavna and a bird.

Then you can remember the image of the narrator himself. His fingers on the strings are compared to ten falcons attacking doves.

And one more example: the retreat of the Galichs to the Don is described as "not a storm, the falcons are brought across the wide fields." Here we see a pattern of negative parallelism.

lovers, and we ourselves suggest, updating it, the ancient idea that the trees continue, out of sympathy, to feel and love, as those resting under them. So in the Lusatian song, the lovers bequeathed: “Bury both of us there under the linden tree, plant two vines. The vines have grown, brought many berries; they loved each other, entwined together." In Lithuanian lamentations, the idea of ​​identity remained fresh, not without hesitation: “My daughter, my bride; what kind of leaves are you turn green what colors will you bloom? Alas, I planted strawberries on your grave!” Or: “Oh, if you grew up, were planted with a tree!” Let us recall the custom indicated in the Babylonian Talmud: to plant a cedar tree at the birth of a son, and a pine tree at the birth of a daughter.

The legend of Abelard and Eloise 13 already dispenses with this symbolism: when they lowered the body of Eloise to the body of Abelard, who had previously died, his skeleton took her into his arms in order to unite with her forever. The image of intertwining trees - flowers disappeared. He and others like him had to fade or fade with the weakening of the idea of ​​parallelism, identity, with the development of human self-consciousness, with the isolation of man from that cosmic connection in which he himself disappeared as part of an immense, unknown whole. The more he knew himself, the more the line between him and the surrounding nature became clear, and the idea of ​​identity gave way to the idea of ​​singularity. Ancient syncretism was removed before the dismembering feats of knowledge: the equation lightning - bird, man - tree were replaced comparisons: lightning is like a bird, a person is like a tree, etc.; mors, mare etc., as crushing, destroying, etc., expressed a similar action, as anima<лат. - душа>-ἄ ve μ o ς <гр. - ветер>etc., but as the understanding of objects included new features that did not lie in their primary sound definition, words were differentiated and generalized, gradually moving towards that stage of development when they became something like algebraic signs, figurative whose element has long been obscured for us by the new content that we suggest to them.

Further development of imagery took place in other ways.

The isolation of the personality, the consciousness of its spiritual essence (in connection with the cult of the ancestors) should have led to the fact that the vital forces of nature were isolated in fantasy as something separate, life-like, personal; it is they who act, desire, influence in the waters, forests and phenomena of the sky; each tree has its own hamadryad 14 , her life is connected with it, she feels pain when a tree is cut down, she dies with it. So with the Greeks;<...>the same view<...>exists in India, Annam, etc.

At the center of each complex of parallels that gave content to the ancient myth, there was a special power, deity: the concept of life is transferred to it,

features of the myth were attracted to him, some characterize his activity, others become his symbols. Coming out of direct identity with nature, a person considers the deity, developing its content to the level with his moral and aesthetic growth: religion seizes it, delaying this development in the stable conditions of the cult. But both the cult's arresting moments and the anthropomorphic understanding of the deity are not capacious enough, or too definite, to respond to the progress of thought and the demands of growing self-observation, longing for consonances in the secrets of the macrocosm 15, and not only scientific revelations, but also sympathies. And there are consonances, because in nature there will always be answers to our demands for suggestiveness. These requirements are inherent in our consciousness, it lives in the sphere of convergence and parallels, figuratively assimilating the phenomena of the surrounding world, pouring its content into them and perceiving them humanized again. The language of poetry continues the psychological process that began on prehistoric paths: it already uses the images of language and myth, their metaphors and symbols, but creates new ones in their likeness. The connection of myth, language and poetry 16 is not so much in the unity of legend, but in the unity of a psychological device, in arte renovata forma dicendi <искусстве updated expression forms (<Квинтилиан 17 >, ix,

To achieve the brightness of the impression and enhance the emotional impact in fiction, various techniques are used - phonetic, lexical, syntactic. One of these means is syntactic parallelism - an artistic technique in which the elements of speech that carry a single idea follow in a certain sequence and create a single image.

This way of expression uses the principle of repetition and symmetry. Thus, the phenomenon of generality, homogeneity of syntactic constructions and their arrangement in a compositional connection is syntactic parallelism.

There are several types of arrangement of speech elements. If the syntactic constructions are completely identical, it is full parallelism, if the analogy is partial - incomplete.When structures are adjacent, we can talk about contact parallelism if they are separated by others - o distant.

Parallelism as an expressive means of language has been known since ancient times. It is enough to recall biblical texts, ancient epics, thoughts and tales, folk songs, as well as prayers, spells, conspiracies. This technique can be traced in riddles, sayings, proverbs. It is obvious that this phenomenon is typical for oral folk art, as well as for literary works stylized in antiquity.

Sang, sang the little bird and calmed down;

The heart knew joy and forgot.

In this case, there is a comparison of one, the main action with another, secondary, which is a characteristic feature of folklore.

Types of parallelism

In the Russian language, especially in fiction, different types of syntactic parallelism are used:

• binomial;
• polynomial;
• monomial;
• formal;
• negative;
• reverse (chiasm).

The most commonly used is two-term parallelism. Usually such a technique depicts natural phenomena, then describes some kind of life situation.

The reeds rustled over the backwater.

The girl-princess is crying by the river.

When using the polynomial variant, the actor is compared with several images:

We are two trunks lit by a thunderstorm,

Two flames of the midnight forest

We are two meteors flying in the night,

One fate two-stinged bee.

In Russian literature, in particular, in folk art, one-term parallelism is also encountered. At the same time, human characters appear only in the images of plants, animals, birds, however, it is clear that the image of the “clear falcon” implies a young man - a groom, a lover. A girl, a bride, usually appears in the form of a “swan”, “peahen”, or birch, mountain ash, etc.

In some way, the formal version of this technique is similar to the single-term one. However, it is not immediately noticeable, since there is no obvious logical connection between the elements. To understand its meaning, you need to represent the entire work as a whole or a certain period.

Syntactic parallelism is sometimes combined with other forms of this expressive means, for example, with phonetic, which is characterized by the use of the same words at the beginning of a line or the same ending of lines. This combination enhances the expressiveness of the text, gives it a special sound:

Your name is a bird in your hand

Your name is ice on the tongue

Widely used in oral folk art and works of fiction is negative parallelism. This method of expression is found in folk tales, songs, riddles, and authors also use it.

Not the wind blowing from above

Sheets touched on a moonlit night -

You touched my soul...

Speaking about this syntactic means of expression, one cannot fail to mention such a vivid expressive device as its reverse form, chiasmus. Its essence is that the sequence of elements changes crosswise or mirror. An example of the so-called "purely syntactic" chiasm is the saying: "Not the people for the power, but the power for the people."

In an effort to achieve the effect, sharpness, and persuasiveness of their public speeches, chiasm has been used by orators since ancient times. This expressive means is found in the works of Russian writers and poets of the “golden” and “silver” centuries, and modern authors cannot do without it.

Folklore and fiction are a reflection of reality, they are closely connected with the history of society, reveal the essence of phenomena and the inner world of a person with the help of numerous expressive techniques. Being a way to enhance the emotional impact, syntactic parallelism often contains various types of artistic expressiveness.

A.N. Veselovsky Psychological parallelism and its forms in the reflection of the poetic style

Man assimilates the images of the external world in the forms of his self-consciousness; all the more so for primitive man, who has not yet developed the habit of abstract, non-imaginative thinking, although the latter cannot do without a certain imagery that accompanies it. We involuntarily transfer to nature our self-perception of life, which is expressed in movement, in the manifestation of force directed by the will; in those phenomena or objects in which movement was noticed, signs of energy, will, and life were once suspected. We call this world outlook animistic; in application to poetic style, and not to it alone, it would be more correct to speak of parallelism. It is not a matter of identifying human life with natural life and not of comparison, which presupposes the awareness of the separateness of the compared objects, but of comparison on the basis of action (125), movement: a tree heals, a girl bows, as in the Little Russian song. The representation of movement, action underlies the one-sided definitions of our word: the same roots correspond to the idea of ​​intense movement, the penetration of an arrow, sound and light; the concepts of struggle, torment, destruction were expressed in such words as mors, mare<…>, German mahlen.

So, parallelism rests on the comparison of the subject and the object according to the category of movement, action, as a sign of volitional activity. The objects, naturally, were animals; they were most reminiscent of a person: here are the distant psychological foundations of the animal apologist; but the plants also pointed to the same similarity: they were born and withered, turned green and bowed from the force of the wind. The sun also seemed to be moving, rising, setting; the wind drove the clouds, the lightning rushed, the fire embraced, devoured the branches, etc. The inorganic, motionless world was involuntarily drawn into this string of parallelisms: it also lived.

The next step in development consisted of a series of transfers, attached to the main feature - movement. The sun moves and looks at the earth: the Hindus have the sun, the moon is the eye<…>; the earth sprouts with grass, the forest with hair<…>; when the wind-driven Agni (fire) spreads through the forest, it mows the hair of the earth; the earth is the bride of Odin, sang the skald Hallfredr<…>, the forest is her hair, she is the young, broad-faced, wooded daughter of Onar.<…>A tree has skin - bark (ind.), a mountain - a ridge (ind.) ... a tree drinks with a foot - a root (ind.), its branches - hands, paws<…>.

Such definitions, reflecting a naive, syncretic representation of nature, enslaved by language and belief, are based on the transfer of a feature characteristic of one member of the parallel to another. These are the metaphors of language; our vocabulary abounds with them, but we wield many of them already unconsciously, without feeling their once fresh imagery; when "the sun sets" we do not visualize the act itself separately, undoubtedly alive in the fantasy of ancient man (126): we need to renew it in order to feel it in relief. The language of poetry achieves this by definitions or by a partial characterization of the general act, and here in application to a person and his psyche. “The sun moves, rolls along the mountain” does not evoke an image in us; otherwise in a Serbian song by Karadzic:

What is the sun on the edge of the mountain steal.

The following pictures of nature belong to the usual, once figurative, but impressing us with abstract formulas: the landscape spreads in the plains, sometimes suddenly rising into a steep; a rainbow spread across the clearing; lightning rushes, a mountain range stretches away; the village sprawled out in the valley; the hills are reaching for the sky. To rush, to race, to strive - all this is figurative, in the sense of applying a conscious act to an inanimate object, and all this has become for us an experience that poetic language will revive, emphasizing the element of humanity, illuminating it in the main parallel (127).<…>

Man considered himself very young on earth because he was helpless. Where did he come from? This question was posed quite naturally, and the answers to it were obtained on the basis of those comparisons, the main motive of which was the transfer of the principle of vitality to the external world (129).<…>And he imagined that his forefathers grew from stones (Greek myth), came from animals (beliefs common in Central Asia, among North American tribes, in Australia), originated from trees and plants.

It is interesting to trace the expression and degeneration of this idea: it accompanies us from the depths of centuries to the modern folk-poetic belief, deposited in the experiences of our poetic style. I will focus on people - trees - plants.

The tribes of Sioux, Damarov, Levi-Lenanov, Yurkasov, Bazutov consider the tree to be their forefather; Amazulu tells that the first man came out of the reed<…>A partial expression of this idea is a substantiated language (seed-embryo), a motif familiar from myths and fairy tales about the fertilizing power of a plant, flower, fruit (bread grain, apple, berry, pea, nut, rose, etc.), replacing the human seed .

On the contrary: the plant comes from a living being, especially from man. Hence a number of identifications: people have names borrowed from trees, flowers; they turn into trees, continuing their former life in new forms, lamenting, remembering (130)<…>. On the way of such identifications, the idea of ​​​​the close connection of one or another tree, plant with human life could appear.<…>. So dies, in the last embrace, strangling Isolde, the wounded Tristan; a rose and a vine grow out of their graves, intertwined with each other (Eilhard von Oberge), or a green thorn branch came out of the tomb of Tristan and spread through the chapel to the tomb of Iseult (French novel in prose); later they began to say that these plants were planted by King Mark. The difference between these retellings is interesting: at the beginning, and closer to the ancient idea of ​​the identity of human and natural life, trees - flowers grew out of corpses; these are the same people living with the same passions; when the consciousness of identity weakened, the image remained, but flower trees are already planted on the graves of lovers, and we ourselves suggest, updating its ancient idea, that the trees continue to feel and love out of sympathy, as those resting under them (131).

The legend of Abelard and Heloise already dispenses with this symbolism: when they lowered the body of Heloise to the body of Abelard, who had previously died, his skeleton took her into his arms in order to unite with her forever. The image of intertwining trees - flowers disappeared. He and others like him had to fade or fade with the weakening of the idea of ​​parallelism, identity, with the development of human self-consciousness, with the isolation of man from that cosmic connection in which he himself disappeared as part of an immense, unknown whole. The more he knew himself, the more the line between him and the surrounding nature became clear, and the idea of ​​identity gave way to the idea of ​​singularity. Ancient syncretism was removed before the dismembering feats of knowledge: the equation lightning - bird, man - tree was replaced by comparisons: lightning, like a bird, man, like a tree, etc., mors, mare, etc.<…>Further development of imagery took place in other ways.

The isolation of the personality, the consciousness of its spiritual essence (in connection with the cult of the ancestors) should have led to the fact that the vital forces of nature were also isolated in fantasy, as something separate, life-like, personal; it is they who act, desire, influence in the waters, forests and phenomena of the sky; each tree has its own hamadryad, her life is connected with it, she feels pain when a tree is cut down, she dies with it. So with the Greeks; Bastian met the same idea with the Oschibwas; it exists in India, Annam, etc.

At the center of each complex of parallels that gave content to the ancient myth, there was a special power, a deity: the concept of life was transferred to him, the features of the myth were attracted to him, some characterize his activity, others become his (132) symbols. Coming out of direct identity with nature, man considers the deity, developing its content to the level of his moral and aesthetic growth: religion takes possession of him, delaying this development in the stable conditions of the cult. But both the arresting moments of the cult and the anthropomorphic understanding of the deity are not capacious enough or too definite to respond to the progress of thought and the demands of growing self-observation, longing for consonances in the mysteries of the macrocosm, and not only scientific revelations, but also sympathies. And there are consonances, because in nature there will always be answers to our demands for suggestiveness.

These requirements are inherent in our consciousness, it lives in the sphere of convergence and parallels, figuratively assimilating the phenomena of the surrounding world, pouring its content into them and again perceiving them humanized. The language of poetry continues the psychological process that began on prehistoric paths: it already uses the images of language and myth, their metaphors and symbols, but creates new ones in their likeness. The connection of myth, language and poetry is not so much in the unity of legend, but in the unity of a psychological device.<…>ancient juxtaposition: sun = eye and bridegroom = falcon of a folk song - all this appeared in different stages of the same parallelism.

I will review some of his poetic formulas.

I'll start with the simplest, folk-poetic, with<…>binomial parallelism. Its general type is as follows: a picture of nature, next to it is the same from human life; they echo each other with a difference in objective content, there are consonances between them, clarifying what they have in common. This sharply separates the psychological parallel from the repetitions explained by the mechanism of song performance (choric or amoeba), and those tautological formulas where the verse repeats in other words the content of the previous or previous ones.<…>To an exclusively musical rhythmic impression descended, to a certain degree of decomposition, the formulas of psychological parallelism, examples of which I give:

a Healing cherry

View from the top to the root,

b Bow to Marusya

through steel to my friend.

but Don’t be sick, yavironka, you’re green,

b Do not scoff, little Cossack, you are young (134).

We are heading towards formal parallelism. Consider its precedents.

One of them is the default in one of the members of the parallel of a feature that logically follows from its content in accordance with some feature of the second member. I'm talking about default - not about distortion: the default was prompted at first by itself, until it was forgotten.<…>

The internal logical development corresponds to the external, sometimes embracing both members of the parallel, with a formal, meaningless correspondence of the parts.<…>

Ay behind the threshing floor,

Ah mother-in-law prasila son-in-law.

The last parallel is not sustained, as if caused by assonance, the desire to preserve the cadence, the coincidence of stresses, not images.<…>Meaningful parallelism turns into rhythmic, the musical moment prevails with the weakening of intelligible relationships between the details of the parallels. It turns out not an alternation of internally connected images, but a series of rhythmic lines without meaningful correspondence (152).

<…>I will touch only in passing on the phenomenon<…>polynomial parallelism, developed from a two-term one-sided accumulation of parallels, obtained, moreover, not from one object, but from several, similar ones. In the binomial formula, there is only one explanation: the tree leans towards the tree, the good fellow clings to the sweet one, this formula can vary in variations of the same (175) song: “The sun did not roll out red (or rather: rolled up) - My husband got sick”; instead of: “Like an oak staggers in a field, how my dear one overcomes”; or: “Like a blue combustible stone flares up, And my dear friend unwinds.” The polynomial formula brings these parallels in a row, multiplies the explanations and together the materials of analysis, as if opening up the possibility of choice:

Do not twist grass with a blade of grass,

Do not caress a dove with a dove,

Don't get used to the girl, well done.

Not two, but three kinds of images, united by the concept of twisting, rapprochement.<…>Such a one-sided multiplication of objects in one part of the parallel indicates greater freedom of movement in its composition: parallelism became a stylistic and analytical device, and this should have led to a decrease in its imagery, to confusions and transfers of all kinds. In the following Serbian example, the rapprochement: cherry - oak: girl - yunak, - the third one joins: silk-bumbak, eliminating the images of cherry and oak at the end of the song.

If our explanation is correct, then polynomial parallelism belongs to the late phenomena of folk poetic stylistics; it gives choice, efficiency gives way to analysis; it is as much a sign as the accumulation of epithets or similes in the Homeric poems, as any pleonasm that dwells on the particulars of a situation. Only a calming feeling analyzes itself in this way; but here is the source (176) of song and artistic loci comunes. In one North Russian lament, the wife of a recruit wants to go to the forest and mountains and to the blue sea in order to get rid of the turmoil; pictures of the forest and mountains and the sea surround her, but everything is colored by her sadness: the turmoil cannot be overcome, and the affect expands in the descriptions:

And I'd better go from the great twist

I am in the dark woods, goryusha, and dense ...

And in sadness I, grief-stricken, in annoyance,

And already here my torment does not go away ...

And I should go from grief to the blue sea,

And me to the blue one, to the glorious Onegushka...

And on the blue sea, let the water sway,

And the water became cloudy with yellow sand,

And now the wave beats cool and exorbitant,

And she beats cool into this steep bank,

And the wave crumbles over the pebbles,

And here my twist does not go away.

This is the epic Natureingang, the polynomial formula of parallelism, developed into a lament: the widow is sad, the tree is leaning, the sun is clouded, the widow is vexed, the waves parted, and the torment also parted.

We said that polynomial parallelism leads to the destruction of imagery;<…>monomial singles out and develops it, which determines its role in the isolation of certain stylistic formations. The simplest kind of monomial is the case when one of the terms of the parallel is silent, and the other is its indicator; it is pars pro toto; since in the parallel an essential interest is given to an action from human life, which is illustrated by an approach to some natural act, the last member of the parallel stands for the whole.

A complete binary parallel is represented by the following Little Russian song: dawn (star) - month = girl - well done (bride - groom):

a Sent the dawn until the month:

Oh, mysyatse, comrade, (177)

Do not come in earlier than me,

Let's go both together

Light up heaven and earth...

b Slala Marya to Ivanka:

Oh, Ivanka, my constrictions,

Don't give me a landing,

Early in the landing, etc.

Let us discard the second part of the song (b), and the habit of well-known comparisons will prompt instead of a month and a star - the bride and groom. So<…>in latvian song<…>linden (leans) to oak (like a young man to a girl):

Decorate, mother, linden,

Which is in the middle of your yard;

I have seen strangers

Painted oak.

In the Estonian wedding song, dedicated to the moment when the bride is hidden from the groom, and he is looking for her, it is sung about a bird, a duck, gone into the bushes; but this duck "shod her shoes."

Either: the sun has set: the husband has died; sl. Olonets lament:

Great desire rolled away

It is in the water, desire, in the deep,

In the wild dark forests, but in the dense,

For the mountains it is desire, for the pusher.

<…>All these are fragments of abbreviated parallel formulas.

It was pointed out above in what ways, from the approximations on which two-term parallelism is built, those which we call symbols are chosen and strengthened; their closest source was short one-term formulas in which the linden strives for the oak, the falcon led the falcon with him, etc. They taught them to constant identification, brought up in the age-old song tradition; this element of tradition is what distinguishes a symbol from an artificially selected allegorical image: the latter can be precise, but not stretchable for a new suggestiveness, because it does not rest on the soil of those consonances of nature and man on which folk-poetic parallelism is built. When these consonances appear, or when the allegorical formula passes into the circulation of folk tradition, it can approach the life of a symbol: the history of Christian symbolism offers examples.

A symbol is extensible, just as a word is extensible for new revelations of thought. The falcon rushes at the bird and kidnaps it, but from another, silent member of the parallel, rays of human relations fall on the animal image, and the falcon leads the falcon to the wedding; in the Russian song, the falcon is clear - the groom flies to the bride, sits on the window, "on the oak prichelinka"; in Moravian, he flew under the girl's window, wounded, chopped: this is her dear. The young falcon is cared for, removed, and parallelism is reflected in its fantastic decoration: in the Little Russian Duma, the young falcon fell into captivity; they entangled him there in silver fetters, and hung expensive pearls near his eyes. The old falcon found out about this, “having poured on the city - the Tsar-city”, “poorly squealing and spitting”. The falcon twirled, the Turks took off his fetters and pearls to disperse his longing, and the old falcon took him on wings, raised him to a height: it’s better for us to fly across the field than to live in captivity. Falcon - Cossack, Turkish captivity; correspondence is not expressed, but it is implied; the falcon was fettered; they are silver, but you can't fly with them. A similar image is expressed in the two-term parallelism of one wedding song from the Pinsk region: “Why are you flying low, falcon? “My wings are hemmed with silk, my legs are lined with gold. - Why did you, Yasya, come late? “Father is rude, he equipped the squad late” (179).

<…>The shutdown riddle brings us to another type of parallelism that remains to be dealt with: negative parallelism. “Strong is not a rock, roars is not a bull,” says the Vedas; this can serve as an example of the same construction of parallelism, especially popular in Slavic folk poetry. The principle is this: a binomial or polynomial formula is posited, but one or one of them is eliminated in order to allow attention to dwell on the one to which the negation has not extended. The formula begins with a negative or with a provision, which is often introduced with a question mark.

Not a birch tree is staggering,

Not curly twisted,

How it wobbles, twists,

Your young wife. (185)

Negative parallelism is found in Lithuanian, modern Greek, less often in German songs; in Little Russian it is less developed than in Great Russian. I distinguish from it those formulas where the negation falls not on the object or action, but on the quantitative or qualitative definitions accompanying them (187): not so much, not so, etc.

<…>One can imagine the reduction of a two- or polynomial negative formula into a one-term one, although the negation should have made it difficult to suggest the silent term of the parallel: there would be no winds, but they would blow (there would be no boyars, but they would come in large numbers); or in "The Tale of Igor's Campaign": not a storm brought the falcons through the wide fields (pebble herds run to the Great Don). We have seen examples of a negative one-term formula in riddles.

The popularity of this stylistic device in Slavic folk poetry gave rise to some generalizations, which will have to be, if not eliminated, then limited. In negative parallelism, they saw something folk or racial, Slavic, in which a special, elegiac warehouse of Slavic lyricism was typically expressed. The appearance of this formula in other folk lyric poetry brings this explanation into its proper limits; one can only speak of a large distribution of the formula on the basis of the Slavic song, with which the question is raised about the reasons for this favoriteness. Psychologically, a negative formula can be viewed as a way out of parallelism, the positive scheme of which it presupposes that has taken shape. It brings actions and images closer, limiting their pairing or accumulating comparisons: either the tree is healed, or the good fellow is sad; the negative formula emphasizes one of two possibilities: it is not the tree that heals, but the well done; it asserts by denying, it eliminates duality by singling out the individual. This is, as it were, a feat of consciousness emerging from the vagueness of converging impressions to the affirmation of the individual; what previously burst into him as proportionate, contiguous, is singled out, and if it attracts again, then as a reminder that does not presuppose unity, as a comparison. The process took place in the following sequence of formulas: a man is a tree; not a tree, but a person; man is like a tree. On the basis of negative parallelism, the last selection has not yet taken place completely: the adjacent image still hovers somewhere nearby, apparently eliminated, but still causing harmonies. It is clear that the elegiac feeling has found in the negative formula an appropriate means of expression: you are amazed at something (188), unexpectedly, sadly, you do not believe your eyes: this is not what it seems to you, but something else, you are ready to comfort yourself with the illusion of similarity, but reality hits the eye, self-delusion only intensified the blow, and you eliminate it with pain: now it’s not a birch tree that twists, then your young wife twists and twists!

I do not claim that the negative formula was developed in the sphere of such sentiments, but it could be brought up and generalized in it. The alternation of positive parallelism, with its transparent duality, and negative, with its vacillating, eliminating affirmation, gives folk lyricism a special, vague coloration. The comparison is not so suggestive, but it is positive.

On value<…>comparisons in the development of psychological parallelism were indicated above. This is already a prosaic act of consciousness dismembering nature; comparison - the same metaphor, but with the addition (particles of comparison?), says Aristotle (Rhet. Ill, 10); it is more developed (detailed) and therefore less liked; does not say: this = this, and therefore the mind does not seek this either. An example from the 6th chapter can serve as an explanation: the lion (= Achilles) rushed - and Achilles rushed like a lion; in the latter case there is no equation (this = so-and-so) and the image of a lion (so-and-so) does not stop attention, does not make fantasy work. In the Homeric epic, the gods have already emerged from nature to the bright Olympus, and parallelism appears in the forms of comparison. Whether it is possible to see a chronological moment in the last phenomenon, I do not dare to say.

Comparison has not only mastered the stock of approximations and symbols developed by the previous history of parallelism, but is also developing along the paths indicated by it; the old material has merged into a new form, other parallels fit into the comparison, and vice versa, there are also transitional types. In a song about cherries, for example, to the parallel: cherry and oak = girl - well done, the third rapprochement is already attached as a comparison (Kat se graft] a - And twisted to bumbak) (189).

<…>Metaphor, comparison gave content to some groups of epithets; with them we bypassed the whole circle of development of psychological parallelism, insofar as it determined the material of our poetic vocabulary and its images. Not everything, once alive, young, has been preserved in its former brightness, our poetic language often gives the impression of detritus, turns and epithets have shed, as the word fades, the imagery of which is lost with an abstract understanding of its objective content. As long as the renewal of imagery, coloring remains among the pia desideria, the old forms still serve the poet, who seeks self-determination in the consonances, or contradictions of nature; and the fuller his inner world, the finer the echo, the more old forms tremble with life.

Goethe's "Mountain Peaks" are written in the forms of a folk binomial parallel.<…>

Other examples can be found in Heine, Lermontov (194), Verlaine and others; Lermontov's "song" is a cleavage from the folk song, an imitation of its naive style:

Yellow leaf beats against the stem

Before the storm

The poor heart flutters

Before misfortune;

if the wind blows away my lonely leaf, will the siraj branch regret it? If fate judged a young man to fade away in a foreign land, will the fair maiden regret him?<…>

Such images, secluded in the forms of extrahuman life, human feeling, are well known to artistic poetry. In this direction, it can sometimes achieve the concreteness of myth.

(Sk. Fofanov, “Small Poems”: “Clouds float like thoughts, Thoughts rush in clouds”). This is almost an anthropomorphism of the "Pigeon Book": "our thoughts are from the clouds of heaven", but with the content of personal consciousness. The day breaks the veils of the night: a bird of prey tears the veil with its claws; in Wolfram von Eschenbach, all this merged into a picture of clouds and a day that pierced their darkness with its claws: Sine klawen durch die wolken sint geslagen. An image resembling a mythical bird - lightning, carrying down heavenly fire; only the moment of belief is missing.

Sun - Helios belongs to his anthropomorphic pore; poetry knows him in a new light. In Shakespeare (sonnet 48), the sun is the king, the ruler; at sunrise, he proudly sends his greetings to the mountain heights, but when the low clouds distort his face, he darkens, averts his eyes from the lost world and hurries to sunset, wrapped in shame.<…>Let me also remind you of the image of the sun - the king in Korolenko's excellent description of the sunrise ("The Dream of Makar") (196).

Somewhere in the distance, the naive cantilena of our verse about the Pigeon Book is heard: “Our bones are strong from stone, our blood-ore from the black sea, the sun is red from the face of God, our thoughts are from the clouds of heaven.”

So: metaphorical new formations and - age-old metaphors, developed anew. The vitality of the latter or their renewal in the circulation of poetry depends on their capacity in relation to the new demands of feeling, directed by broad educational and social trends. The era of romanticism was marked, as is known, by the same archaistic renovations that we are seeing now. “Nature is filled with parables and myths,” Remi says of modern symbolists; the fairies returned; they seemed to have died, but they only hid, and now they appeared again” (197).

AT<…>the search for consonance, the search for man in nature, there is something passionate, pathetic that characterizes the poet, characterized, in various forms of expression, and entire strips of social and poetic development (199).

In this article we will consider such a literary concept as psychological parallelism. Often this term causes some problems with the interpretation of its meaning and functions. In this article, we will try to explain as clearly as possible what this concept is, how to apply it in the artistic analysis of the text, and what should be paid special attention to.

Definition

Psychological parallelism in literature is one of its essence lies in the fact that the plot of the work is based on a consistent comparison of motives, pictures of nature, relationships, situations, actions. Commonly used in poetic folk texts.

As a rule, it consists of 2 parts. The first depicts a picture of nature, conditional and metaphorical, creating an emotional and psychological background. And in the second, the image of the hero already appears, whose state is compared with the natural. For example: a falcon is a good fellow, a swan is a bride, a cuckoo is a yearning woman or a widow.

Story

However, it is necessary to delve a little into the past in order to fully understand what psychological parallelism is. The definition in the literature, by the way, usually begins with a little historical background.

So, if this technique came to literature from folklore, then it has rather deep roots. Why did it occur to people to compare themselves with animals, plants or natural phenomena? This phenomenon is based on naive syncretic ideas that the surrounding world has its own will. This is confirmed by pagan beliefs, which endowed all life phenomena with consciousness. For example, the sun is an eye, that is, the sun appears as an active living being.

These parallels are:

• A complex similarity of characteristic features with life or action.
• Correlations of these features with our understanding of reality, the laws of the surrounding world.
• The adjacency of various objects that could be similar in terms of identified features.
• The vital value and completeness of the described object or phenomenon in relation to humanity.

That is, initially psychological parallelism was built on the subjective idea of ​​a person about the world.

Kinds

We continue to study psychological parallelism. We have already given the definition, now let's talk about its types. There are several different approaches to the study of this stylistic phenomenon and, accordingly, several classifications. We present here the most popular of them - the authorship of A. N. Veselovsky. According to her, psychological parallelism happens:

• binomial;
• formal;
• polynomial;
• monomial;
• negative.

Parallelism binomial

It is characterized by the following construction method. First, there is an image of a picture of nature, then a description of a similar episode from a person's life. These two episodes seem to echo each other, although they differ in object content. It is possible to understand that they have something in common, according to certain consonances, motives. This feature is a distinguishing feature of psychological parallels from mere repetitions.

For example: “When they want to pick roses, they have to wait until spring, when they want to love girls, they need to be sixteen years old” (Spanish folk song).

However, it is worth noting that folklore parallelism, which most often happens to be binomial, is built mainly on the category of action. If it is removed, then all other elements will lose their value. The stability of this design is provided by 2 factors:

• In addition to the basic similarity, bright similar details of the category of action are added, which are not recounted to him.
• The comparison was liked by native speakers, became part of the cult and remained in it for a long time.

If both of these points are observed, then parallelism will turn into a symbol and become a household word. However, far from all two-term parallelisms, even those built according to all the rules, await such a fate.

Formal parallelism

There are cases when psychological parallelism is not immediately clear, and in order to comprehend it, it is necessary to hear the entire text. For example: one of the folk songs begins with the line “The river is flowing, it will not stir”, then there is a description of the bride, to whom many guests came to the wedding, but no one can bless her, since she is an orphan; thus, there is a similarity - the river does not stir, and the bride sits sad, silent.

Here we can talk about default, and not about the lack of similarity. The stylistic device becomes more complicated, the understanding of the work itself becomes more difficult, but the structure becomes more beautiful and poetic.

Polynomial parallelism

The concept of "psychological parallelism", despite the apparent complexity, is quite simple. Another thing is when we talk about varieties of this stylistic device. Although with respect to polynomial parallelism, there are usually no problems with its detection.

This subspecies is characterized by one-sided accumulation of several parallels that come from several objects simultaneously. That is, one character is taken and compared immediately with a number of images. For example: “Do not caress, dove, with a dove, do not twist, grass, with a blade of grass, do not get used to, well done, with a girl.” That is, there are already three objects for comparison in front of the reader.

Such a one-sided increase in images suggests that parallelism gradually evolved, which gave the poet greater freedom of writing and the opportunity to show his analytical abilities.

That is why polynomial parallelism is called a relatively late phenomenon of folk poetic style.

One-Term Parallelism

One-term psychological parallelism is aimed at developing figurativeness and strengthening its role in the work. This approach looks like this: Imagine the usual two-term construction, where the first part speaks of the stars and the moon, and in the second they are compared with the bride and groom. Now let's remove the second part, leaving only the images of the stars and the month. According to the content of the work, the reader will guess that we are talking about a girl and a young man, but there will be no mention of them in the text itself.

This reticence is similar to formal parallelism, but unlike it, no mention will be made here of the human characters that are meant. Therefore, here we can talk about the appearance of a symbol. Over the centuries, well-established allegorical images have appeared in folklore, which are identified with only one meaning. Such and such images are used in one-term parallelism.

For example, a falcon is identified with a young man, a groom. And often the works describe how a falcon fights with another bird, how he is kidnapped, how he leads a falcon down the aisle. There is no mention of people here, but we understand that we are talking about human relations between a boy and a girl.

Concurrency is negative

Let's proceed to the description of the last type, which can be psychological (given in the article). The negative constructions of our stylistic device are usually used to create riddles. For example: "Roars, not a bull, strong, not a rock."

Such a construction is constructed as follows. First, an ordinary two-term or polynomial parallelism is created, and then the characterized image is removed from it and negation is added. For example, instead of "roars like a bull" - "roars, not a bull."

In Slavic folklore, this technique was especially popular and loved. Therefore, it can be found not only in riddles, but also in songs, fairy tales, etc. Later, it also migrated to author's literature, being used mainly in fairy tales and stylistic attempts to recreate folk poetry.

From a conceptual point of view, negative parallelism, as it were, distorts the very formula of parallelism, which was created to bring images closer together, and not to separate them.

From folklore to author's literature

When did psychological parallelism migrate from folk poetry to classical literature?

It happened at the time of the vagants, itinerant musicians. Unlike their predecessors, they graduated from classical music and poetry schools, so they mastered the main images of a person, which were characterized by great abstractness. They had little specificity and connection with reality. At the same time, like all itinerant musicians, they were quite familiar with folklore. Therefore, they began to introduce its elements into their poetry. Comparisons with natural phenomena of the character's character appeared, for example, winter and autumn - with sadness, and summer and spring - with fun. Of course, their experiments were rather primitive and far from perfect, but they laid the foundation for a new style, which later migrated to medieval literature.

So, in the 12th century, folk song techniques gradually began to intertwine with the classical tradition.

What is the function of comparisons, epithets and metaphors of psychological parallelism?

To begin with, it is worth saying that without metaphors and epithets there would be no parallelism itself, since this technique relies entirely on them.

Both of these paths serve to transfer the sign of one object to another. Actually, already in this function it is clear that without them it is impossible to compare nature with man. Metaphorical language is the writer's main tool in creating parallelisms. And if we are talking about the function of these tropes, then it just consists in the transfer of signs.

Basic concepts (psychological parallelism) are associated with descriptions, so it is not surprising that metaphors and epithets occupy the main place among them. For example, let's take the epithet "the sun has set" and make a parallelism out of it. We will succeed: as the sun went down, so did the life of the clear falcon. That is, the fading of the sun is compared with the fading of the life of a young man.

Psychological Parallelism in The Tale of Igor's Campaign

An excellent example of folk stylistic devices is the "Word", since it is itself a part of folklore. For example, let's take the main character Yaroslavna, since her image is associated with nature and is often compared with her. Take the episode of the heroine's crying. One day, she “calls with a lonely tap dance at dawn” - a parallelism between Yaroslavna and a bird.

Then you can remember the image of the narrator himself. His fingers on the strings are compared to ten falcons attacking doves.

And one more example: the retreat of the Galichs to the Don is described as "not a storm, the falcons are brought across the wide fields." Here we see a pattern of negative parallelism.