Historical poetics is a section of poetics that studies the genesis and development of meaningful artistic forms. Historical poetics is connected with the theoretical poetics by relations of complementarity. If theoretical poetics develops a system of literary categories and provides their conceptual and logical analysis, through which the system of the subject itself (fiction) is revealed, then historical poetics studies the origin and development of this system. "poetics" denotes both the art of poetry and the science of literature. Both of these meanings, without mixing, are present in literary criticism, emphasizing the unity in it of the poles of the subject and method. But in theoretical poetics, the emphasis is on the second (methodological) meaning of the term, and in historical poetics - on the first (subjective). Therefore, it studies not only the genesis and development of the system of categories, but above all the art of the word itself, approaching the history of literature in this, but not merging with it and remaining a theoretical discipline. This preference for the subject over the method is also manifested in the methodology.
Historical poetics as a science
Historical poetics as a science developed in the second half of the 19th century in the works of A.N. Veselovsky (his predecessors were German scientists, primarily W. Scherer). Its methodology is based on the rejection of any a priori definitions offered by normative and philosophical aesthetics. According to Veselovsky, the method of historical poetics is historical and comparative (“the development of the historical, the same historical method, only accelerated, repeated in parallel rows in the form of achieving a possibly complete generalization” (Veselovsky). An example of one-sided and non-historical generalizations was Hegel’s aesthetics for Veselovsky , including his theory of literary genera, built only on the basis of the facts of ancient Greek literature, which were taken as “the ideal norm of literary development in general.” Only a comparative historical analysis of all world literature allows, according to Veselovsky, to avoid the arbitrariness of theoretical constructions and to deduce from the material itself, the laws of the origin and development of the phenomenon under study, as well as to identify large stages of the literary process, “repeating, under the same conditions, in different peoples". The founder of historical poetics, in the very formulation of the method, was given the complementarity of two aspects - historical and typological. After Veselovsky, the understanding of the correlation of these aspects will change, they will begin to be considered more differentiated, the emphasis will shift either to genesis and typology (O.M. Freidenberg, V.Ya. Propp), or to evolution (in modern works), but the complementarity of the historical and typological approaches will remain a defining feature of the new science. After Veselovsky, new impulses for the development of historical poetics were given by the works of Freidenberg, M. M. Bakhtin and Propp. A special role belongs to Bakhtin, who theoretically and historically explicated the most important concepts emerging science - "big time" and " great dialogue”, or “dialogue in big time”, aesthetic object, architectonic form, genre, etc.
Tasks
One of the first tasks of historical poetics- allocation of large stages or historical types artistic integrity, taking into account the "great time", in which the slow formation and development of an aesthetic object and its forms takes place. Veselovsky singled out two such stages, calling them the eras of "syncretism" and "personal creativity." On slightly different grounds, Yu.M. Lotman singles out two stages, calling them "aesthetics of identity" and "aesthetics of opposition". However, after the works of E.R. Curtius, the majority of scientists adopted a three-part periodization. The first stage in the development of poetics, referred to by researchers in different ways (the era of syncretism, pre-reflexive traditionalism, archaic, mythopoetic), covers hard-to-calculate time boundaries from the emergence of pre-art to classical antiquity: The second stage (the era of reflective traditionalism, traditionalist, rhetorical, eidetic poetics) begins in 7th-6th centuries BC in Greece and in the first centuries AD. in the East. The third (non-traditionalist, individually creative, poetics of artistic modality) begins to take shape from the middle of the 18th century in Europe and from the beginning of the 20th century in the East and continues to this day. Taking into account the peculiarity of these great stages of artistic development, historical poetics studies the genesis and evolution of the subjective structure (author, hero, listener-reader relations), verbal artistic image and style, gender and genre, plot, euphony in the broadest sense of the word (rhythm, metrics and sound organizations). Historical poetics is still a young, emerging science, which has not received any completed status. Until now, there is no rigorous and systematic presentation of its foundations and no formulation of the central categories.
Academician Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky is the founder of the comparative historical method.
Among the problems developed by Veselovsky, his historical poetics was of the greatest importance for the formation of a new method. The basics of the method are set out in the program lecture delivered by A.N. Veselovsky upon taking up the post of professor at St. Petersburg University, “On the Method and Tasks of the History of Literature as a Science” (1870). In a lecture by A.N. Veselovsky declares his commitment to the cultural-historical school. He sees the history of literature "as the history of social thought in figurative and poetic forms."
Recognizing the principle of historicism as the basis of the method, he notes that the cultural-historical school passes by the repetition of phenomena, thereby excluding the consideration of further series of culture. A.N. Veselovsky draws attention to the synchronous study of different, and not necessarily adjacent, cultural series.
Since the beginning of the 80s, the theme of "historical poetics" has been taking shape. In the titles of the works “From the history of the novel and story” (1886), “Epic repetitions as a chronological moment” (1897), “Psychological parallelism and its forms in the reflections of poetic style” (1899), one can also trace the idea of the artistic word as a special sphere of the spirit , and the idea of the need to find patterns in the literature, "parallels" not only historical. Based on the material of Greek antiquity, the scientist notes that for all the historical sequence in the development of literature, "the similarity of mythical, epic, and finally fairy-tale schemes does not necessarily indicate a genetic connection." And in principle, without denying the genetic connection, A.N. Veselovsky finds similarities in plots in different literatures.
In the section "The Language of Poetry and the Language of Prose" (three chapters from historical poetics, 1898), the researcher considers the mechanism of the emergence of the simplest poetic formulas, comparisons, symbols, motives, "standing outside the circle of mutual influences." These ancient figurative elements "...could have originated independently, caused by the same mental processes and the same phenomena of rhythm." The genesis of poetic thinking and style goes back to "psychological parallelism, ordered by rhythmic parallelism." Although "similarity of conditions led to similarity of expression", the selection of images in the literatures of remote regions differed significantly. This is easily explained by the discrepancy between everyday forms, fauna and flora. The brilliant discovery of A.N. Veselovsky consists in pointing out the similarity of the “quality of relations” between these images. The very bases of comparison, categories and signs (movement, volitional activity, etc.) are approaching. Speaking in a different terminological language, in ancient literatures remote from each other, two links corresponded to each other: “collective author” and “reality”. Having set himself the task of classifying the plots of world literature, the researcher sees, however, that it is incorrect to compare works, having clarified related plots. The most similar plots have their own moves, due to the national and historical specifics of the work, and the scientific approximation of A.N. Veselovsky, a supporter of positivist philosophy, an admirer of Taine, was deeply alien. This is how the idea is born to find a motive as “an indivisible unit of the plot”, for “the similarity is explained not by the genesis of one motive from another, but by the assumption of common motives, which are just as indispensable for human creativity as the scheme of language for the expression of thought; creativity is limited by the combination of these schemes. In this sense, a fairy tale can be as much a reflection of a myth as it is the sediment of an epic song or a folk book.
At the same time, it is the basis for typological correspondences. Most of all, A.N. Veselovsky is concerned with the question of the relationship between "tradition", tradition and personal "initiative", individual creativity. If we project the main communicative scheme onto the "Historical Poetics", it will become obvious that it is by no means the work that occupies the central place here. The main link in the "literature" system is "formulas, images, plots", self-generating or migrating. The "literature" system takes next view:
Tradition in this case is the main work here, the fruit of the development of literature and culture. The author and the reader are predominately occupied with communion with a "tradition" that places limits on their romanticism and impressionism. This position goes back not only to the positivist views of the academician, but at the same time to the basic concepts of the Russian cultural world. So, in the work "From an introduction to historical poetics" (1893), personal intonation is guessed. A.N. Veselovsky warns his contemporaries against experiencing the world "apart", which leads to the loss of synthesis with their own time. However, great poets need a "general consciousness of life synthesis." In other words, a genius becomes such only under the condition of a stable, multiple feedback in the chain author ↔ work ↔ reader.
“The task of historical poetics, as it seems to me, is to determine the role and boundaries of tradition in the process of personal creativity. This legend, as far as it concerns the elements of style and rhythm, imagery and schematism of the simplest poetic forms, once served as a natural expression of the collective psyche and the living conditions corresponding to it at the beginning of human society.
Arrangement of stresses: HISTORICAL POETICS
POETICS HISTORICAL. The task of creating P. and. as a scientific discipline was put forward by one of the largest pre-revolutionary Russian literary critics - acad. A. N. Veselovsky (1838 - 1906). Extensively studying the folklore of different peoples, Russian, Slavic, Byzantine, Western European literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Veselovsky became interested in questions about the patterns of development of world literature. Using the long-standing concept of poetics, coming from Aristotle, as a theoretical doctrine of poetry, Veselovsky invested in this concept a new content that meets the tasks of constructing a scientific theory of literature. Veselovsky was deeply dissatisfied with traditional poetics, which was largely based on the idealistic philosophy and aesthetics of Hegel and was of an a priori, speculative nature. Realizing that without resolving general theoretical issues, the science of literature will not become a true science, Veselovsky puts forward the task of creating scientific poetics as a generalizing theoretical discipline. This enormous task became Veselovsky's life's work.
Characterizing the methodological principles of the new theoretical discipline, Veselovsky, in contrast to the a priori, speculative theory of literature, puts forward the idea of inductive poetics based on historical and literary facts. In contrast to a theory that one-sidedly generalizes the facts of classical literature, it requires comparative poetics, which draws phenomena of world literature into theoretical generalization. Denying the anti-historicism of the former literary theory, the researcher promotes P. and., Establishing categories artistic literature and its laws on the basis of its historical development.
"The evolution of poetic consciousness and its forms" - so understood the subject of P. and. Veselovsky. Poetic forms, to which the works of Veselovsky are devoted, are literary genera and types, poetic style, plot. Veselovsky sought to paint a picture of the development of these forms as an expression of the evolution of poetic consciousness and the underlying social historical process.
Referring to the patterns of development of poetic genera and types, Veselovsky substantiates the doctrine of the syncretism of primitive poetry, which not only did not know the dismembered existence of poetic genera, but also did not stand apart from other arts (song, dance). Veselovsky notes the choric, collective nature of syncretic poetry, which has developed "in the unconscious cooperation of the masses." The content of this poetry is closely connected with life, with the way of life of the social collective. As a result of a long process, the type of songs of the lyrical-epic, and then epic character. Further development leads to the formation of cycles of songs, united by a name or event. The selection of lyrics is a later process associated with the development of the individual psyche. Tracing the development of drama, Veselovsky comes to the conclusion that, contrary to the Hegelian concept, drama is not a synthesis of epic and lyric poetry, but "the evolution of the most ancient syncretic scheme", which was the result of social and poetic development.
Turning to the history of poetic style, Veselovsky sought to trace how a more or less stable poetic style is formed from various song images and turns through gradual selection, in which the renewing content of poetry finds expression.
In a similar way, Veselovsky outlined the task of studying more complex poetic formulas, motifs and plots, the natural development of which reflects the successive stages of socio-historical development.
Veselovsky did not have time to fully implement his plan. However, in articles written by him in the 90s. 19th century, basic principles and provisions of P. and. found their expression: "From an introduction to historical poetics" (1894); "From the history of the epithet" (1895); "Epic repetitions as a chronological moment" (1897); "Psychological parallelism and its forms in the reflection of poetic style" (1898); "Three chapters from historical poetics" (1899).
Sharing the philosophical views of positivism, Veselovsky was unable to give a consistent materialistic explanation of the laws governing the historical development of literature. Attaching great importance to tradition in the development of literature, Veselovsky sometimes exaggerates the role and independence of the artistic form to the detriment of the content. Veselovsky did not always reveal the socio-historical conditions of artistic evolution, confining himself to its immanent study. In some works, Veselovsky paid tribute to comparativism (see), highlighting literary influences and borrowings. Nevertheless, in the history of Russian and world science about literature P. and. Veselovsky was an outstanding phenomenon, and the principle of historicism in literary theory retains its significance to our time.
Lit .: Veselovsky A., Historical poetics, ed., entry. Art. and approx. V. M. Zhirmunsky. L., 1940; his own, Unpublished chapter from "Historical Poetics", "Russian Literature", 1959, No. 2 - 3; In memory of Academician Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death (1906 - 1916), P., 1921; Engelhardt B., Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky, P., 1924; "Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Department of Societies, Sciences", 1938, No. 4 (Art. V. F. Shishmarev, V. M. Zhirmunsky, V. A. Desnitsky, M. K. Azadovsky, M. P. Alekseev) ; Gudziy N., On the Russian literary heritage, Vestn. MSU. Historical-philological. Ser. 1957, no. 1.
A. Sokolov.
Sources:
- Dictionary of literary terms. Ed. From 48 comp.: L. I. Timofeev and S. V. Turaev. M., "Enlightenment", 1974. 509 p.
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Sukhikh S.I.
HISTORICAL
POETICS
A.N. VESELOVSKY
FROM LECTURES
ON THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN LITERARY STUDIES
Nizhny Novgorod
Sukhikh S.I. Historical poetics of A.N. Veselovsky. From lectures on the history of Russian literary criticism. Nizhny Novgorod: KiTizdat Publishing House, 2001, 120 pp.
This book grew out of a course of lectures on the history and methodology of philology, which the author read for masters of the philological faculty of Nizhny Novgorod State University for a number of years. N.I. Lobachevsky. It attempts to systematically present and analyze the theoretical concept of the creator of "historical poetics", one of the great Russian philologists - Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky. The book is intended for young researchers-philologists: students, masters, graduate students, teachers of literature.
5 - 88022 - 080 - X © S.I. Sukhikh ISBN
§ 1. FORMATION OF METHODOLOGY
COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL DIRECTION
1. Historical and scientific prerequisites for the formation of the comparative historical method in literary criticism. 2. Varieties of comparative historical literary criticism. 3. Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky: basic biographical information, the question of Veselovsky's school. 4. Philosophical and aesthetic foundations of the comparative historical methodology of A.N. Veselovsky. A.N. Veselovsky and the cultural-historical school. 5. A.N. Veselovsky and the science of his time. 6. Theoretical substantiation of the principles of the comparative-historical method of studying literature.
1. Historical and scientific prerequisites for the formation of the comparative historical method in literary criticism Comparative historical school in literary criticism of the 19th century.
formed during the period rapid development capitalist relations that destroyed what historians called "feudal fragmentation." Integration processes intensified in the world, and not only in the economy and politics, but also in the spiritual field. The interaction of cultures developed, the process of formation of a single world culture became more and more obvious.
In the science of literature, by that time, various methods for analyzing literary facts had already been developed, and there were a number of global scientific hypotheses that claimed to explain the genesis, essence, and evolution of poetry.
The mythological school sharply posed the problem of literary genesis. Its "Grimm" wing, represented by the German founders of the Brothers Grimm and their Russian followers (F.I. Buslaev, A.N. Afanasiev, etc.), put forward the theory of a common prehistoric primary source of poetry in the ancient pra-myths. The theory of borrowings (migration theory) by T. Benfey proved the existence of interliterary ties between peoples throughout subsequent history and explained the similarities in the folklore and literary plots of different peoples by their "wanderings" around the world. Anthropological theory (“the theory of spontaneous generation”, ethnographic school”) by E. Taylor substantiated the idea of the unity of the laws of spiritual creativity and the commonality of types and forms of artistic figurative thinking all peoples, and, consequently, the possibility of independent (spontaneous) origin of similar myths and plots among different peoples, regardless of whether they originated from one or different prehistoric ancestors, and also regardless of the presence or absence of their mutual communication and influence on each other. friend.
The cultural-historical school (I. Ten and his followers in different countries), in addition to the genetic approach of all three varieties of the mythological trend, substantiated and emphasized the primary role of the historical principle of analyzing literary phenomena. She put forward the thesis about the inseparable connection between the development of literature and the development of society, introduced the principles of systemicity and determinism into the study of literature, substantiated the concept of literary evolution as an objective, natural-historical process. On this basis, a large-scale study of the history of national literatures and the creation of the first fundamental "Histories" of many literatures of European countries began, including the four-volume "History of Russian Literature" by A.N. Pypin.
In the second half of the 19th century in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, departments of general literature were created at the largest universities.
There was a growing need for scientific understanding of the processes of formation of a unified world literature and the laws of its development. Compared with the study of the history of individual national literatures, this was a completely new scale of tasks. And these tasks were very serious: comparing many literatures, studying the history of their connections, explaining their similarities, i.e. "typological similarities"
(or "literary parallels", as they said then), which arose regardless of the source of origin, from connections and interactions, and finally, the identification of national differences in the literatures of the peoples of different countries.
Neither the aesthetic method with its general deductive judgments about poetry as an expression of the eternal ideal of beauty, nor the methods of genetic research of mythologists could reliably provide the solution to these problems. To achieve such goals, the methods of the cultural-historical school, which concentrated its efforts on studying the history of literature as a reflection of the history of social thought, did not have sufficient explanatory power either (as a result of such a one-sided approach to the object of study, the clear outlines of the subject of the history of literature were lost and it was dissolved in the general history of culture) .
To solve new problems, it was necessary to develop new, specialized methods for studying verbal art, its own forms and laws, and a clear theoretical justification for the principles of the history of literature as a special science. The very logic of development scientific ideas demanded a new level of research and generalizations. These are in in general terms– prerequisites for the formation in the second half of the 19th century. a new scientific direction, called "comparative" or "comparative historical literary criticism." The methodology of this scientific school was formed not on the path of rejection, rejection of previous ideas and hypotheses, but on the basis of their assimilation, critical rethinking and synthesis of the previously achieved results of comparative studies of mythology, folklore and literature.
2. Varieties of comparative historical literary criticism
The methodology of comparative historical research, originally developed in the field of linguistics and some other sciences, has been penetrating more and more deeply into literary criticism since the beginning of the 19th century.
Generally speaking, both the mythological theory of Grimms - Buslaev - Afanasyev, and the theory of borrowings by T. Benfey, and the anthropological theory of "spontaneous generation" by E. Taylor, and the cultural-historical method (to a lesser extent) are varieties of the comparative method of studying the phenomena of literature and folklore (with varying degrees, measure, depth of the historical beginning in their general theory and methods of concrete analysis of facts). But as a special methodology and as a special, independent scientific concept of the theory and history of literature, the comparative historical trend was finally formed in the second half of the 19th century, and above all in Russia. In the teachings of A.N. Veselovsky, this method and this direction of literary criticism acquired the most perfect, classical form and achieved the highest results for the world science of that time.
In comparative historical literary criticism (as well as in literary criticism in general), it is necessary to distinguish between two always existing and always opposing positions, which in principle are connected with the opposition of historical and aesthetic approaches to the study of material:
1) a view of art as a "reflection of reality" and, accordingly, the recognition of the connection of literature with the historical conditions of the life of peoples, the dependence of its development on changes in these conditions;
2) a view of art as an independent phenomenon, independent of everything that is outside of it. This line of literary criticism, including comparative history, is based on a methodology with distinct features of formalism (comparative studies proper, so to speak).
Formalism, by the way, is not limited to the study of form as such.
This is, first of all, the severing of the ties between literature and non-literature, the closing of research in the actual literary series, even if it consisted in studying not the form, but the content of literary works.
Such a distinction between the methodological and theoretical base of literary studies must always be carried out, because for science it is of paramount importance, the whole system of theoretical concepts of a scientific direction or school depends on the orientation towards one or another of these approaches.
From the point of view of such differentiation, for example, the anthropological theory of E. Taylor and the cultural-historical school (I. Ten, A. N. Pypin, etc.) tend to the first type of research, and the borrowing theory (or "migration" theory) of T. Benfey and the evolutionary method (F. Brunetier, N.I. Kareeva), as well as, to a large extent, Grimm's concept of "pramiths" - to the second.
Within the framework of the comparative historical trend itself (or “comparativeism”), which developed in the second half of the 19th century. in Russia, this confrontation between the two tendencies was expressed - sharply, vividly, clearly - in the scientific activities of the two largest and most famous scientists, and (which is especially curious) - two brothers - Alexander and Alexei Veselovsky.
Research of Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky, professor of St. Petersburg University, - classic example the first variety of the comparative historical method (although the main subject of his work was the study of literary forms in their historical development); research by Alexei Nikolaevich Veselovsky, a professor at Moscow University, is an example of his second variety - completely formalistic “comparative studies” (although he studied mainly the “content” of literary works, and was rather indifferent to questions of poetics).
So the scientific concepts of the two Veselovsky brothers were in a state of struggle and confrontation. There are no other internal connections between their theoretical positions (and the personal relations between the brothers were very strained). Due to the incomparability of the scale of talent and the achieved research results of the two brothers (despite the fact that Alexei Nikolayevich enjoyed much greater fame and popularity among the public than his brilliant brother Alexander Nikolayevich), the scientific heritage of his older brother, Academician Alexander Nikolayevich Veselovsky, is of paramount importance for the history of literary criticism. .
3. Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky.
Basic biographical information.
Question about Veselovsky's "school" AN Veselovsky was born in 1838 in Moscow into an intelligent family. His father was a military instructor educational institution. As a child, Alexander Nikolaevich perfectly mastered German, French, and English. Then he studied more than 30 languages - ancient and new, and became a real polyglot. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow University. In his student years on him big influence provided by two professors: P.I. Kudryavtsev interested him in the history of the Italian Renaissance, and F.I. Buslaev carried away the mythological teachings of the Grimms.
Veselovsky, already in his student years, taught the theory of literature in cadet corps, and after graduating from the university he entered as a tutor in the family of the Russian ambassador in Spain, went with her to Madrid, also visited Italy, France, and England.
In 1862, he received a scholarship from the university and a business trip abroad "to prepare for a professorship." He lived and worked in Berlin, in Prague (where he met A.A. Potebnya for the only time in his life). In 1863 he went to Italy "on his own money", where he lived mainly in Florence. Participated in the meetings of the circle of the Russian intelligentsia in Italy in the house of the artist N.N.Ge. Met with A.I. Herzen.
Thanks to his correspondence from Italy, published in European and Russian press, A.N. Veselovsky already then received European fame. While in Italy, he wrote a dissertation (in Italian), but when he returned to Moscow in the autumn of 1868, he was asked to take an exam and submit a dissertation in Russian. Veselovsky remade the text of his Italian work into a book (three volumes) "Villa Alberti" and defended it as a master's thesis. In the same year, St. Petersburg University offered him the leadership of the department. While working at St. Petersburg University, A.N. Veselovsky created the first Romano-Germanic department in Russia. In 10 years as a university teacher, he went from full-time associate professor to academician. In addition to the university, he also taught at the Higher Women's Courses. From 1902 to 1906, A.N. Veselovsky was the Chairman of the Department of the Russian Language and Literature of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences.
Died in 1906.
A.N. Veselovsky was an exceptionally and many-sided gifted person. He possessed colossal erudition, not least because he was a real polyglot and spoke several dozen European and Eastern, new and ancient languages.
He knew in detail the literature and folklore of many countries and peoples, and was also aware of all the latest achievements row related sciences. He was the world's most famous representative of Russian academic literary criticism.
Among other scientists and scientific schools, A.N. Veselovsky, with his comparative historical studies, stands apart. Much of his heritage is not understood, not realized, not used, not studied, not even published. According to I.K. Gorsky, “not all of his works were published in tsarist Russia and were not republished too quickly: none of the editions of his collected works that were undertaken were completed”1. A significant part of his works remained in pre-revolutionary publications and in archival funds. Veselovsky's archive, from which much has not yet been published, is stored in the IRLI (Pushkin House), and, "according to V.M. Zhirmunsky, M.P. Alekseev, G.S. Vinogradov, K.I. Rovda and other specialists, examined him, is of great value not only for getting acquainted with the life and work of the scientist himself, but also for the history of Russian and world science.
Despite the fact that Veselovsky had a very great influence on the development of world literary criticism, his teaching as a whole remained largely inaccessible to his contemporaries and descendants. Why?
Firstly, many, especially specific works of Veselovsky, were difficult to perceive due to ignorance of that gigantic actual material with which he operated. Secondly, due to non-Gorsky I.K. Alexander Veselovsky and modernity. M., 1975. S. 8. The XV1th volume of the last Collected Works, begun back in 1913, was published in 1938, and at this it was interrupted again. At the same time, before the war, “Selected Articles” (1939) and “Historical Poetics” (1940) were also published - a selection compiled by V.M. Zhirmunsky theoretical works Veselovsky. Only in 1989 was it republished; Veselovsky's book about V.A. Zhukovsky has also recently been republished.
Ibid, p. 10-11; See also: Vinogradov G.S. Archive of A.N. Veselovsky. Short review// Bulletins of the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the USSR Academy of Sciences: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1947, No. 1.
knowledge of many old and new European and Oriental languages which he knew and whose data he used. Thirdly, because of the unusual boldness of thought, the scale of generalizations, which were unusual for empirical literary criticism of that time (and for literary criticism of other times as well).
Therefore, separate thoughts and positions were readily isolated from Veselovsky's works, but his scientific concept as a whole remained a mystery for most of his contemporaries, was not understood and appreciated by them.
In addition, A.N. Veselovsky did not leave the school in the narrow sense of the word, which means a certain specific team of direct students and followers of a great scientist. (For example, A.A. Potebnya had such a school of students and followers, although she not only continued and developed, but crushed the ideas of her teacher). By the way, A.N. Pypin did not have a “school” in this sense either, since he taught at the university for only one year, and then, having left the university in protest against the surrender of students to the soldiers, all his life he was engaged only in scientific and journal activity. Nevertheless, in a broad sense, Pypin, of course, had a “school”, his ideas were easily perceived, picked up and developed by other scientists, it was not for nothing that the cultural and historical direction of literary criticism in Russia was also called “Pypinianism”. A.N. Veselovsky taught at St. Petersburg University all his life, and yet even his direct students, including the best and closest ones, such as I.N. Zhdanov and E.V. Anichkov, could not continue the main undertakings of their teachers.
Exceptional personal talent, scale of talent, incredible capacity for work and a huge amount of knowledge, including knowledge of many languages, raised scientific level his research to such a height, to reach which, let alone to overcome it, was, apparently, a utopia both in those days and later.
A.N. Veselovsky followed all the significant works published in Russia and abroad: on philology, history, ethnography, psychology, aesthetics, and other branches of knowledge. As for literature, according to Academician M.P. Alekseev, the range of materials that he used was such that “it seems that not a single corner in the world is left out of his field of vision - the very enumeration of languages, literatures, areas of knowledge that Veselovsky knew or was interested in would take up too much space.
The scale of A.N. Veselovsky's talent is comparable to such authorities in the field of other sciences as Sechenov in physiology, Mendeleev in chemistry, Einstein in physics, Lobachevsky in mathematics. And in philology, perhaps, only A.A. Potebnya can be considered the only equal rival to him.
Academician V.M. Istrin wrote: “Such broad talents as A.N. Veselovsky was born for centuries and usually do not have immediate successors. But their thoughts and method ... are imperceptibly made available to a wide range of workers, both those who work directly in the field of their teacher, and those whose work is only more or less in contact with them.
Academician V.F. Shishmarev said that “we often operate with ready-made thoughts and positions, sometimes without even realizing it or forgetting that they lead to Veselovsky”3.
A typical example is V.Ya. Propp with his famous work "The Morphology of a Fairy Tale", which was first published in 1928 and is now making a triumphal procession around the world in more and more new editions in different languages.
Being in line with the ideas of the formal school, he begins his book with a fundamental rejection of the theory of plot and motive, put forward and substantiated in his time by A.N. Veselovsky and offers a completely different research methodology, singling out as the main structural element for the analysis of fairy tale plots, not a motive, like Veselovsky, but a function fairy tale character in the plot. As a result, V. Propp achieves an impressive result: he describes the structure of any fairy tale as a combination of only 31 elements, i.e. creates a universal model for the analysis of fairy tale plot.
And in the conclusion of his book, he admits that, in the final analysis, the result he achieved is only a strictly logical, almost mathematical proof of that idea, that conclusion that was intuitively formulated in his time by A.N. Veselovsky: “Our positions, although they seem new, intuitively foreseen by no one Alekseev M.P. A.N. Veselovsky and Western literary criticism // Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1938, No. 4. P.122.
Istrin V.M. Methodological significance of the works of A.N. Veselovsky // In memory of academician Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky. Pg., 1921. S. 16.
Shishmarev V.F. Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky // Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Dep.
societies. Nauk, 1938, No. 4. P. 39 other than Veselovsky, and with his words we will finish the work” 1 (and below is a quotation from A.N. Veselovsky’s “Poetics of Plots”).
4. Philosophical and aesthetic foundations of the comparative historical methodology of A.N. Veselovsky.
AN Veselovsky and the cultural-historical school What are the general philosophical foundations of AN Veselovsky's views on literature? How were they formed?
Already the first entries in the diary of a young scientist, made in the year of graduation from the university (1859) in a notebook called “From the diary of a man looking for a way”, quite clearly testify to his philosophical orientation:
“Society gives birth to a poet, not a poet to society. Historical conditions provide the content of artistic activity; solitary development is unthinkable, at least artistic. "Every work of art bears the stamp of its time, its society." “All art and poetry reflect life to the highest degree”2.
So initially Veselovsky solved for himself the problems of the relationship between literature and life, literature and society. It is obvious that these provisions are quite consistent with the methodological ideas of the cultural-historical school and even with the principles of "real criticism"
Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky.
The same goes for his understanding of the paramount role of the historical principle in the study of literature. In 1859, in one of his first published works - a review of the book by the German scientist G. Flotto about Dante - Veselovsky, raising the question of the reasons for the indestructibility of interest in the eras of great people and their scientific or artistic achievements, stated that a scientist who does not idly , but is professionally interested in such subjects, should always look at them from two sides: “They contain the charm of a double task for the researcher: to reveal the inner life of society from great creatures, to trace the conditions of these creatures in the life of society”3. In this formulation, one can see a clear expression of the main requirement of the cultural-historical method of research.
Propp V. Morphology of a fairy tale. L., 1928. P.127
See about this: Gorsky I.K. Alexander Veselovsky and modernity. M., 1975. S. 122; He also:
Alexander Veselovsky // Academic schools in Russian literary criticism. M., 1975. P. 210 Veselovsky A.N. Sobr. soch., vol. Sh. St. Petersburg, 1908. P.1.
And 10 years later, in his famous introductory lecture “On the Method and Tasks of the History of Literature as a Science” (1870), Veselovsky sharply criticized the theory of “heroes and the crowd”, which represents “leaders and doers of mankind”, including great artists, “chosen ones heaven, occasionally descending to earth: lonely figures, they stand on high; they don’t need surroundings and perspective.” “But modern science,” Veselovsky continued, “allowed itself to look into those masses who until then stood behind them, deprived of their voice; she noticed life in them, a movement imperceptible to the simple eye, like everything that takes place in too vast dimensions of space and time; the secret springs of the historical process were to be found here... The center of gravity was transferred to the life of the people.
Great personalities now appeared as reflections of this or that movement, prepared in mass, more or less bright, depending on the degree of consciousness with which they reacted to it, or according to the degree of energy with which they helped it to express itself.
The similarity of these premises with the guidelines of the cultural-historical method is quite tangible, and the teachings of A.N. Veselovsky really emerge from the bowels of this scientific school. But at the same time, it is important to emphasize something else: from the very beginning, Veselovsky dissociated himself from the cultural-historical school (primarily from the Western European one, from consistent “tanism”) in at least two fundamental points.
First, he abandoned the positivist extrapolation of the laws of nature to the phenomena of spiritual life, to art and literature in particular, and, consequently, from the orientation to the corresponding methods of the natural sciences, in particular, to Darwin's evolutionary theory. "System public laws”, from his point of view, is in many ways “the opposite of the laws of physiological life”. The laws of nature, according to Veselovsky, constitute only a “lining” of the laws of social and spiritual activity, but at the same time so distant that the development of these spheres is by no means carried out according to the laws of nature, and not by analogy with them, but according to their own rules and customs, then is according to its own, specific laws of social and spiritual development.
Secondly, he also refused to absolutize the principle of evolutionism. After all, the cultural-historical school considered history, including the history of art, only as a gradual, evolutionary process, excluding any "leaps" and revolution Veselovsky A.N. Historical poetics. L. 1940, p. 43-44. Further references to this edition are given in the text with page numbers in square brackets after the quote.
cataclysms. Veselovsky does not deny that the laws of evolution operate in history, but, in his opinion, not only them: he recognizes the Hegelian idea that history is “the resolution of contradictions” (Vermittelung der Gegenstze), “because all history consists in a struggle and moves forward with the help of such unexpected shocks, which the necessity does not lie in the consistent, isolated development of the organism.
So, what are the "support points" that underlay Veselovsky's aesthetic views during the formation of the foundations of his teaching?
The main one is the idea of art as a reflection of the historically changing conditions of social life. Hence Veselovsky's special interest in cultural and historical issues and in the ideas of I. Ten and his followers.
However, rejecting the assimilation of the laws of development of the history of art to the laws of nature and society, and, consequently, the study of literature, literary development using the methods of other sciences, Veselovsky considered priority development of a special philological method for studying the products of verbal creativity.
It was from this point of view that he perceived all the most important achievements of Russian and Western European science of his time.
That is why he was able to critically evaluate them, rework, rethink and synthesize the fruitful ideas contained in them in his theoretical concept of the history of the formation and development of the art of the word.
5. A.N. Veselovsky and the science of his time
The need for such a synthesis, which would combine the correct and productive ideas contained in the various scientific theories and hypotheses that existed by that time, has already become an urgent need. The facts accumulated by different scientific schools were so heterogeneous that it became more and more difficult to explain them within the framework of only one of the opposing theoretical concepts. A new, more general and deeper methodological basis was needed, which could become the basis for combining these different hypotheses.
Veselovsky developed his system on the basis of assimilation of all the scientific data that existed at that time, very critically approaching their theoretical explanations within the framework of the existing scientific approaches and schools. He was skeptical not only about the a priori ideas of philosophical aesthetics, but also about the constructions of "mythologists", about the "evolutionism" of F. Brunetier with his literary "Darwinism", about a number of the most important theses of the cultural-historical school, although he himself, as a researcher, came out of the bowels of this the same scientific direction.
Veselovsky considered the construction of a scientific history of literature to be the main task of the science of literature. However, the history of literature, from his point of view, cannot be purely empirical and must be based on theoretical concepts about what literature is, what elements it consists of, and according to what laws it develops. In turn, these theoretical concepts cannot be a priori and must be developed not by deductive logical constructions, but on the basis of the study of facts - if possible, all and in the entire observable geographical and historical space, i.e. by constructing historical poetics. Historical poetics, in his opinion, is historical reconstruction genesis, formation and development of poetic forms throughout the centuries-old process of their development. Such a reconstruction itself will lead to theoretical generalizations, but not speculative generalizations, but based on concrete and irrefutable facts.
“The history of the poetic family is the best verification of his theory”1 – such is the main scientific principle of Veselovsky. Hence the main condition and the main task, the solution of which should ensure the construction of a scientific history of literature - "to collect material for inductive poetics, which would eliminate its speculative constructions."
The collection and systematization of such inductive material, according to the scientist, will create an objective basis for "clarifying the essence of poetry - from its history." Of course, the history of literature, and its theory, and historical poetics are components of a single science of literature, but at the same time these are stages in the process of its development, the initial link and foundation of which should be historical poetics.
However, in order to carry out such work, even in order to simply begin its implementation, it was necessary to decide on the already existing global scientific hypotheses and theories regarding the problem of the origin and history of poetry, that is, for that time, regarding the mythological the concepts of the Brothers Grimm, the borrowing theory of T. Benfey and the anthropological theory of E. Taylor. The criterion for evaluating their scientific effect is Veselovsky A.N. From the history of the novel and story, issue 1. SPb., 1886. P. 26 effectiveness for Veselovsky was to test the explanatory power of these theories and the methods of analysis developed on their basis in practice, in specific historical and literary studies of various material.
The development of his concept of the history of literature and historical poetics A.N. Veselovsky began within the framework of the cultural-historical direction, which he preferred from the very beginning to the mythological one. It was from the cultural-historical school that Veselovsky, in his own words, "leaked" his first major work - his master's thesis "Villa Alberti".
That is, the first stage in the formation of Veselovsky's scientific concept was associated with the study of very specific material from the history of the Italian Renaissance. It was the work of a certain circle of well-known figures of Italian culture with a well-known chronology of their life and work. The cultural-historical method here could be a relatively reliable tool for analysis and explanation.
But then Veselovsky turned to the study of folk poetry and anonymous literature of the Middle Ages. And this was a completely different material than the one with which he dealt with, doing the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, in folklore and in anonymous medieval literature, the authorship and time of the creation of monuments were unknown, and the methods of the cultural-historical school, associated primarily with the analysis of the factors of the "environment", were difficult to apply to this material: what historical, social and geographical "environment" could they be oriented? It was here that Veselovsky faced directly the need to apply and reevaluate the methods of mythologists of different directions. For example, the mythologists of the Grimm school believed that both in the folklore and in the literature of the Middle Ages, and not only in anonymous, but also in the author's, and even in latest literature- the result of the creativity of specific individual artists - we are dealing with variations of the so-called prehistoric material, i.e. with the material of pra-Aryan mythology, which, from their point of view, should have been reconstructed, freed from later figurative “clothes” and layers.
Such an ahistorical approach to everything, to any facts of verbal creativity did not suit Veselovsky from the very beginning, and therefore he turned his attention to Benfey's theory, which helped to restore the specific history of the distribution of verbal monuments, provided ways to prove the facts of their interaction, mutual influence and related these modifications of their forms.
Veselovsky's doctoral dissertation "Slavic legends about Solomon and Kitovras and Western legends about Morolf and Merlin" became the first major and thorough study of this type.
(1877). The experience of working on this and many other studies of this kind on folklore and literature of the Middle Ages (they represent the search, selection and systematization of a huge amount of very heterogeneous and colorful empirical material and its interpretation from the point of view of the problems of genesis and further historical fate) convinced A.N. .Veselovsky in that the then opposing hypotheses of the mythologists of the Grimm, Benfey and Taylor directions, each separately, are unsuitable for a consistent explanation of the origin and subsequent history large mass works of literature and folklore.
The mythological concept of Grimms-Buslaev-Afanasiev, who explained everything by prehistoric mythology, could not clarify a lot in medieval, and even more so in modern and recent literature - in this sense it is anti-historical, because it contradicts the very idea of development. Therefore, A.N. Veselovsky assessed the turn to the Benfey school, with its appeal to the “historical view”, as a “return to realism”: “We have been hovering in the romantic fog of pre-Aryan myths and beliefs for so long that we descend to the earth with pleasure” 1, he wrote.
However, the borrowing theory (i.e., Benfey's migration theory) has, in Veselovsky's opinion, two very significant shortcomings. It is, firstly, formalistic, since it explains everything exclusively by internal literary factors, i.e. borrowings and the influence of some literary monuments on others. And secondly, in its fundamental opposition to the mythological concept of the Grimms, it ignores its rational grain, associated with the reconstruction of premyths, which nevertheless existed and from which the transformation began, if not all, then at least some folklore, and then literary motifs and plots.
Veselovsky's conclusion: these directions do not exclude, but presuppose each other, must be combined, go hand in hand, and the scientific and methodological sequence of applying these hypotheses should be as follows: first, you need to explain the history of the monuments, based on the Benfey theory of borrowings, and then show (to what extent it is possible) their origin, genesis, using the theory and methods of the mythological concept of the Grimms and the studies based on it by Buslaev and representatives of the “school of Veselovsky A.N. Collected works, vol. USh. Pg., 1921. S. 2.
comparative mythology”: “An attempt at mythological exegesis [explanations - S.S.] should begin when all accounts with history are already over”1.
At the same time, the reconstruction of the wanderings and mutual influence of literary monuments (according to the Benfey method) and the clarification of their primary source in pramyths (by the methods of the Grimms and the school of comparative mythology, in particular, A.N. school of E. Taylor: “The similarity of two stories, eastern and western, in itself is not proof of the need for a historical connection between them: it could start far beyond history, as the mythological school likes to prove; it may be the product of uniform mental development, which led here and there to the expression in the same forms of the same content. And this means that, within certain limits, the theory of spontaneous generation is also legitimate in explaining the genesis and history of literary facts. By the way, it is precisely this point that represents the point of connection between the methodology of the mythological school and the methodology of the cultural-historical direction, since represents only a special case, a concretization in relation to the problem of the genesis of the myth of a more general fundamental position of the cultural-historical school that literature is a reflection of life and part of the spiritual culture of society as a whole. So the genetic approach of mythologists was quite compatible (of course, within certain limits) with the historical and sociological methods of analysis and interpretation of literary facts developed by the cultural-historical school.
So, all three global concepts (even 4, including the cultural-historical one), which then fought with each other, taken separately, are not able to explain everything, the entire set of literary facts. Each of them is limited and each, in its one-sidedness, leads to a dead end. For the historical principle of study, a combination of all three premises, all three hypotheses and their methods, as well as fruitful ideas of the cultural-historical trend, which must be combined, synthesized in a more general comparative historical methodology for studying literature, is necessary.
Moreover, these are not only private methods, but also the stages of applying the comparative historical principle to the analysis of literary facts: the explanation of literary monuments must first be based on Veselovsky A.N. Sobr. op., v.USH. Pg., 1921. P. 1 Veselovsky A.N. Sobr. op., vol. USh. Pg., 1921. S. 3-4.
on the principles historical analysis borrowings and influences, then to the search for their genetic source either in one prehistoric root, or in the general conditions for the existence and development of peoples and the uniform laws of figurative thinking, and then to the study of the relationship between the development of literature and the spiritual history of society.
This is the basic principle, the general approach.
And what should be the methodology, the technique of analysis, and above all, how to restore the history of all the elements that make up literature?
6. Theoretical substantiation of the principles of the comparative historical method of research They were most clearly stated by A.N. Veselovsky in his introductory lecture “On the Method and Tasks of the History of Literature as a Science” (1870), although they were also formulated by him in earlier works.
How to build a scientific generalization?
SYNCHRONICALLY:
“You are studying, for example, some epoch; if you want to develop your own independent view of it, you need to get acquainted not only with its major phenomena, but also with that everyday trifle that caused them.
How to do it? – “You will try to trace between them the connection of causes and effects; for the convenience of work, you will begin to approach the subject in parts, from one side: each time you come to some conclusion or a series of particular conclusions.
Thus, each series, each group of facts, each side of the subject is examined carefully and comprehensively. What's next?
"You have repeated this operation several times in the application to different groups facts; you have already drawn up several series of conclusions, and at the same time the opportunity has arisen for their mutual verification, the opportunity to work on them, as you have hitherto worked on bare facts, raising to broader principles that which they met in common, related, in other words, reaching on the basis of logic, but with constant factual verification, the second series of generalizations.
In memory of Academician Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky. Pg., 1921, pp. 44–45.
IN THE DIACRONIC PLAN:
“Studying a series of facts, we notice their succession, the relationship between the subsequent and the previous; if this relation is repeated, we begin to suspect a certain legitimacy in it; if it is repeated often, we stop talking about the previous and the next, replacing them with an expression of cause and effect” [i.e. we separate the simply chronologically consistent from the causal and, revealing the relationship between the one and the other, we find a historical pattern - S.S.].Further, writes Veselovsky, we take a “parallel series of facts” for verification and find out whether the relation of the previous to the next is repeated here and whether it can be understood as a cause and effect (i.e., a multilateral and multilevel approach, process, sequence of analysis is also applied here ). The more such parallel constructions, the more accurately their similarities and differences are clarified, the more likely it is that the resulting generalization will “fit the accuracy of the law” that determines causes and effects in the process of literary development.
Thus, here A.N. Veselovsky very accurately describes the methods of the INDUCTION method of research. Its main principle is the movement not from a speculative premise or a pre-constructed “model” to its verification, but, on the contrary, the construction of a theoretical generalization (“model”) based on the analysis of specific and repeatedly verified factual material. Such scientific induction is based on the operations of observation, analysis, and comparison.
Therefore, the scientific method of A.N. Veselovsky is, firstly, an INDUCTIVE method. And in this capacity, he opposes the speculative constructions of philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic criticism, based on logical operations with concepts that are derived from one another.
Secondly, this is a HISTORICAL method: on the one hand, what is repeated (and repeated steadily) against the background of a variable in historical development on different phases, the researcher establishes and has the right to qualify as natural. And on the other hand, against the background of what is repeated, he has the ability to reliably identify and describe what is changing.
Thirdly, it is a COMPARATIVE method. In the process of such a study, facts are compared, series of facts, parallel series of generalizations obtained on the basis of a comparison of series of facts; in addition, parallel series are studied on the material of different literatures of one era or several eras. The comparison turns out to be multi-layered and multi-level, and the comparative nature of the study significantly increases the degree of completeness and objectivity of the conclusions obtained;
it excludes random conclusions based on a limited number of facts, especially any one literature.
A.N. Pypin wrote about the nature of the work of A.N. Veselovsky:
“In the field of modern science there are few people who would have mastered its material to such an extent. Dwelling on this or that question, Veselovsky draws to the comparison huge literature, Eastern and Western, ancient and medieval and modern folklore, differing from his Western counterparts in that he also has at his disposal little or completely unknown material in the West, Old Slavonic, New Slavonic and Russian and, finally, Byzantine (in those manuscripts of our libraries that remained unpublished and unknown to Western scholars).
The comparisons made by him are striking in their diversity and vastness of the surveyed horizon and often by surprise. Stopping on the Russian legendary legend, on one or another detail of the epic, Veselovsky furnishes them with many comparisons and analogies, borrowed [from Pypin here is not a very good, from a modern point of view, word, it would be better to say - "taken" or "extracted" - S.S.] from everywhere; he will be served by an ancient Byzantine life or church canons, a Western Latin legend, a Scandinavian saga, a German and French medieval poem, a West Slavic tradition, a Romanian or modern Greek song, legends Eastern peoples, the legends of Russian semi-wild foreigners - in a word, a huge material scattered on vast space geographical and chronological, and where, however, common threads of folk myth and poetry are found.
These are the three main methodological pillars of the comparative historical method of literary criticism. It is not built on the basis of one hypothesis, for example, Grimm's, or Benfeev's, or Taylor's, or Taine's, but uses, synthesizes in itself all these hypotheses about the origin of the phenomenon, about its genesis and historical movement in space and time, and therefore, about its development. “In the works of Veselovsky, who used all three [perhaps not even three, but at least four - S.
With] the possibility, the comparative historical method has turned into the finest tool of brilliant inductive constructions, striking in its scale and accuracy, caution in generalizations ”2, as well as in the gigantic volume of oh Pypin A.N. History of Russian ethnography, vol. P, St. Petersburg, 1891. P. 258 Academic schools in Russian literary criticism. M., 1975. S. 229 vata facts in the context of many national literatures. It became such a tool due to the rigor of the methods and techniques of analysis, the possibility of verifying the generalizations achieved. Checks, for example, by repeating the entire algorithm of the performed logical operations, as in mathematics. Of course, in addition to the objective merits of the method developed by Veselovsky, in its scientific concept and in case studies there is a lot of attraction on the other, subjective side: the impeccable aesthetic taste of a scientist, historical flair, and finally, amazing, encyclopedic erudition, rare even in the 19th century, not to mention the highly specialized science of the 20th century.
§ 2. THEORETICAL JUSTIFICATION
BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE
AS A SPECIAL SCIENCE
1. Statement of the problem. 2. The task of constructing a general history of literature. 3. Substantiation of the concepts of "literature", "history of literature", the objectives of its study. 4. General laws of the evolution of verbal art. 5. The problem of content and form: the methodological setting of Veselovsky 6. Traditional and personal (individual) in poetic creativity. Principles of studying individual creativity.
1. Statement of the problem
The creation of the history of literature is the ultimate task of the science of literature as a whole and, as an ideal, the final stage in the development of the system of one or another scientific school. From the point of view of Veselovsky, it should be preceded by the creation of historical poetics and, on its basis, the development of theoretical concepts about all the elements that make up literature. But the idea of what the history of literature should be like, that is, what it should be conceptually, its theoretical, hypothetical presentation as a project that should be implemented in a specific historical material, the founders of scientific schools have (should have) already at the beginning, as a plan, as a goal, as a project, as a theoretical framework future history, as an idea of the foundations on which it will be built. A.N. Veselovsky had such a project, and in the course of all his further concrete historical and historical-theoretical research and development, it was refined, acquiring more and more harmonious and clear outlines.
What should be the history of literature? What is the object of study of this science? What is the essence of this object as a subject of special study of special science?
In general, the mythological school did not look for an answer to this question, dealing in fact only with the problem of the genesis of poetry. And the cultural-historical school, although it was looking for, but in the end did not give; moreover, it clouded even more, confused, in fact, removed it, dissolving the history of literature in the history of culture, the history of social thought, history in general.
Veselovsky, on the other hand, not only clearly posed the question, but also offered his own scientifically substantiated and definite answer. However, the path to the answer, his search was not easy. What are Veselovsky's fundamental general theoretical and methodological principles in this matter?
2. The task of constructing a universal history of literature First of all, from his point of view, the history of literature should be the history of GENERAL literature, i. cannot be isolated within the framework of individual national literatures; its ultimate goal is to deduce the laws of development of literature as such, literature as a whole, in the entire scope of this concept.
To do this, it is necessary to identify what is common in all national literatures, in which they converge with each other. However, it is impossible to find common ground until the national literatures are studied separately. Such a separate study will reveal not only the general, but also all fundamental differences between literatures, what relates to the originality, specificity of each of them.
In the combination of these two tasks - a separate study of different literatures and the determination of the general laws of their existence and development - there are a lot of difficulties. First of all, practical ones: you can simply drown in the material, you can not see the forest for the trees, you can pass off the particular as the general, or vice versa - there are many dangers.
But this is not the only thing - there are also difficulties of a theoretical nature. First of all, in defining the basic concepts and what should be included in the scope of the study of the history of literature.
3. Substantiation of the concepts of "literature", "history of literature", the goals of its study
From the point of view of Veselovsky, one of the main theoretical difficulties was the vagueness of the very concept of the history of literature, even the concept of "literature". What is its volume, its composition? How to correlate the concepts of "literature", "literature", "writing"?
If literature is understood only as written monuments, then a huge array of oral folk art, folklore and ancient mythology is excluded from the history of literature, since it was also an oral form of fixing mythical ideas in the world.
If literature is the same as literature, then, according to Veselovsky, one way or another, not only poetry (folk, anonymous and individual) gets into the history of literature, but also many other things that are enshrined in the word, including “history science, poetry, theological questions, economic systems and philosophical constructions.
What to do? Limit the scope of the concept of "literature" and, accordingly, the subject of the history of literature only to fiction, or, as was said before, to "fine" literature?
This approach is outwardly very attractive. As a rule, all adherents of aesthetic methods “peck” at it, as well as “formalists”, “structuralists”, “postmodernists”, etc. - and everyone runs into an insurmountable obstacle: the impossibility of accurately and generally validly determining what there is “poetic”, “artistic”, so that everyone is forced to invent their own, as a rule, speculative definitions of these concepts (and here everyone diverges in all directions).
And as for Veselovsky, he sharply opposed such a “current definition of the history of literature, which limits it to one circle of elegant works, poetry in the broadest sense. The definition is narrow, in whatever broad sense one understands poetry, he wrote. - Why is the area of fine art assigned to the history of literature and to what extent? I do not think that anyone in our time dwells primarily on aesthetic questions, on the development of poetic ideas. The times of rhetoric and piitik are gone forever. Even those gentlemen who would like to turn the history of literature into the history of poetry [A.N. Veselovsky refers primarily to S.P. Shevyrev, the author of The History of Russian Literature, Mostly Ancient (1846-1860) - S.S.] In defense of themselves, it is not at all a poetic justification taken from another camp: poetry is the flower of people's life, that neutral environment where the character of the people, its goals and sincere aspirations, its original personality, endlessly and completely expressed itself. Justification destroys itself and leads directly from poetry to life.
Thus, the reduction of literature only to “belles-lettres”, and its theory only to the problem of “gracefulness”, according to Veselovsky, is unacceptable, and for various reasons. For example, because it would mean tearing poetry away from reality, from life, which nourishes it and therefore enters into its content in a transformed form. From the point of view of Veselovsky, for example, when studying Dante’s Divine Comedy, we should limit ourselves to its “poetic side”, giving other specialists the right to understand its philosophical and historical problems, specific allusions, theological issues raised in the debates of the inhabitants of paradise, etc. etc., would mean sharply narrowing the object of interest of the literary critic, making his view of the subject inevitably one-sided and fraught with errors.
In addition, according to Veselovsky, such an approach not only does not clarify the specifics of literature, but, on the contrary, obscures it, making historical and literary research only a taste "aesthetic digression" . “Graceful” in form, style and language may not be artistic at all, but, say, scientific, philosophical, or historical, or political writings and speeches, for example, by Plato, or Thucydides, or Plutarch, not to mention Cicero, whom I. Ilyin aptly called "the cold master of fiery words"1.
But there is one more, moreover, the most important for Veselovsky and indeed a very significant point. From his point of view, the aesthetic historically arises from the non-aesthetic, the poetic from the non-poetic. Therefore, it is impossible to proceed from abstract deductive definitions of the beautiful, the aesthetic: these concepts are relative and historically changeable; for beauty itself has changed;
both the content and the scope of what was included in the category of the beautiful, as well as in the wider sphere of the aesthetic, changed. After all, not only beauty is aesthetic. Veselovsky shared Chernyshevsky's position that the content of art is not limited to the beautiful and that it includes the "general interest" in life.
Here, by the way, we touch on one of the main, most important ideas of Veselovsky: he suggested, and then in specific sections of his historical poetics he tried to show that the study of the very moment of transformation, the transition of the formerly non-aesthetic into the aesthetic, hitherto non-artistic into the artistic, can most accurately reveal the secret, the essence of the poetic.
From here, from all these doubts and considerations, Veselovsky's decisive conclusion followed: "The science of finesse must undergo a radical change."
And the first definition of the history of literature, to which Veselovsky came, was as follows: "The history of literature in the broadest sense of the word is the history of social thought, insofar as it is expressed in a philosophical, religious and poetic movement and is fixed by the word."
What's this? Setting up a cultural-historical school? After all, this is so similar to her main postulate!
No, because Veselovsky clarifies his thought as follows: “The history of literature in the sense that I understand it, vozIlyin I.A. Sobr. cit.: in 10 vols. T. 1. M., 1994. P. 192, only a special one is possible, and its object, from his point of view, is a “special bundle” of “the history of social thought” and the “poetic word”, which expresses and consolidates it.
"Special Link" - i.e. special aspect research. Here lies the most important difference between his attitudes and the attitudes of the cultural-historical school, which involves an ever larger circle of objects in the field of study, including them in the "history of literature", instead of investigating not these objects themselves, but their relation to literature, that connects them with literature: on the one hand, their influence on literature, on its language and forms, and on the other hand, their transformation by literature when they are part of works of art.
Thus, if we “translate” these arguments into the language of the terms of the modern theory of literature, the problem of the FORM and CONTENT of literature, their very CONNECTION, comes to the fore.
And the task of the SPECIAL history of literature is formulated by Veselovsky as follows: “Trace how the new content of life, this element of freedom, which is infused with each new generation, penetrates the old images, these forms of necessity, into which any previous development was inevitably molded.”
Commenting on this formula, I.K. Gorsky writes: “This is how the line was established that separated the new, comparative-historical direction from the cultural-historical one, this line ran along the line of bringing to the fore the task of changing the laws of artistic form”1. But - let's add - with the participation and under the influence of changing content. Those. the main object of research is the “link” itself, the very interaction of the “element of freedom” (content) with the “element of necessity” (form).
Consequently, the history of literature is the study, reconstruction of the patterns of movement, change, development of the content and form of works of art, this very relationship.
All problems are viewed through the prism of relations between literature and non-literature, poetic and non-poetic, including literature and history, the history of literature and the history of society.
– – –
As a result of a comparative historical study of the literatures and a generalization of its results, a long chain of causal bound friend with other phenomena of art.
Academic schools in Russian literary criticism. M., 1975. S. 224 A chain of complex plot and genre schemes and stylistic formulas that grew out of each other.
But what determines the evolution of verbal art, what underlies the development and complication of these schemes and formulas, their change, their transformations in the course of historical development?
Veselovsky did not recognize immanent explanations for such an evolution. The driving force of all this development, from his point of view, is a change in the views and feelings of mankind.
Each new generation finds already established formulas and methods of verbal expression of spiritual experience, accumulated by previous generations. In order to express a NEW spiritual experience, these formulas have to be adapted to it, subjected to changes, included in a new context, in new connections and combinations, borrowed from new sources (from other literatures or from the non-literary sphere).
Thus, the arsenal of techniques and formulas of verbal art is modified and enriched under the influence of the new content of life and its reflection in the spiritual experience of successive generations.
Thus, in general methodological terms, Veselovsky solves the problem of the new and the traditional, and in the philological aspect:
as the problem of the interaction of form (the beginning of a more traditional, more stable) and content (the beginning of a more mobile and new at each new historical turn). Hence the fundamental theoretical position of Veselovsky in relation to the problem of content and form in the general aesthetic aspect.
5. The problem of content and form:
methodological setting of A.N. Veselovsky
In 1870, in his famous introductory lecture, A.N. Veselovsky formulated this position in the form of a “hypothetical question”, which caused an avalanche of discussions and objections, right up to the 20th century. Veselovsky's "hypothetical question" was as follows:
“Does not each new poetic epoch work on images long since bequeathed, necessarily revolving within their boundaries, allowing itself only new combinations of old ones, and only filling them with that new understanding of life, which actually constitutes its progress before the past?” .
And the answer to it was a concise and clear formula:
“The new form is in order to express the new content”1.
This is a statement of the question in a general way - in relation to the evolution of literature as a whole (the form is more stable, the content is more changeable). And in relation to individual creativity, to the creation individual works Veselovsky formulates this problem more concretely.
6. Traditional and personal, individual in poetic creativity already existing in the past in the literary form and its individual elements (i.e., “general”), and a personal, individual beginning, or, as Veselovsky said, “initiation” (i.e., what depends on the individuality of the poet, on the peculiarity of his talent) is only another aspect of the same problem of tradition and innovation that arises when studying the development of literature in general.
In addressing this issue, Veselovsky sharply clashed with the aesthetics of subjective idealism and with Kantian agnosticism in relation to the phenomenon of art.
Kant stated: “Genius is a talent (natural talent) that gives the rule to art.” And since genius is independent of any laws (“rules”), then a categorical conclusion followed from this already regarding the possibilities of knowing what art is: “The way in which a genius creates his product cannot even be described or indicated in a scientific way” 2.
This, in essence, meant a refusal to solve the very problem of the scientific study of art and the laws of artistic creation.
Veselovsky solves this problem differently: genius, talent works in the conditions of existence, influence, pressure on his consciousness of already existing forms created by the previous development of art, actively functioning in it. He can give them new content, create new combinations of them, modify and enrich the arsenal of art form elements that already existed before him. Do not "give a rule", but do not obey the already existing Formal school in the 20s of the twentieth century. gave a directly opposite answer to the question about the sources and essence of the mechanism for the development of art. Wed V. Shklovsky's "formula", directly opposed to Veselovsky's formula: "The new form appears not in order to express new content, but in order to replace the old form that has lost its artistry."
Kant I. Criticism of the ability of judgment // Kant I. Works, vol. There is not a single creation of any genius that does not contain elements of the poetic form that existed before the genius appeared and began to create his great work.
Based on this position, Veselovsky determined his fundamental approach to the problem of studying the poetic individuality of the artist. But it was here, in this area, that the main difficulty emerged: how to discover and show in a concrete analysis how the traditional and innovative, inherited, perceived from the “common piggy bank” formed by centuries of development of forms are combined in an individual creative act. poetic language, artistic techniques, and personal, individual.
How to overcome this difficulty, how to solve the problem by speaking modern language, "traditions and innovations" in relation to individual creativity? In his course of lectures at the university, Veselovsky formulated the way to solve this problem as follows: “I by no means dream of lifting the veil that hides from us the secrets of personal creativity, which are wielded by aesthetics and which are more likely to be conducted by psychologists. But we can achieve other negative results, which, up to to some extent, will indicate the boundaries of personal initiative. It is clear that the poet is bound by the material that he inherited from the previous time;
his point of departure is already given by what has been done before him. Every poet, Shakespeare or anyone else, enters the realm of the finished poetic word, he is bound by interest in well-known plots, enters the track of poetic fashion, and finally, he appears at a time when one or another poetic type is developed. In order to determine the degree of his personal initiative, we must trace in advance the history of what he operates in his work, and, therefore, our study must break up into the history of poetic language, style, literary plots and end with the question of the historical sequence of poetic genera, its legitimacy and connections with socio-historical development”1.
In other words, the sequence of solving the problem of knowing the secrets of individual creativity should be as follows: restoring the history of the poetic genre in which the artist creates, then describing the poetic plots that existed in it, elements of style, poetic language (i.e., a ready-made arsenal of poetic forms that are not invented , are not created, but are located by the artist in the literary tradition that existed before him), and already on this basis, the identification of that new, individual in the products of the poet's personal creativity, which he brings to the arsenal of art. Those.
again, the key to understanding the secret of poetic individuality In memory of Academician Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky. Pg., 1921. Application. pp. 29-30 should be given by historical poetics through research and description of what precedes "personal initiative". And in relation to the very field of research on individual creativity, Veselovsky puts forward two important methodological guidelines.
FIRST. When studying an individual poet, it is necessary to find out the dependence of his worldview (including artistic, i.e. his own understanding of the essence of art) from the views of the relevant social and national environment: people, class, immediate environment, attitudes of the literary movement, direction, school to which owned (if owned) by a writer, etc. Those. before identifying the individual in the artist, you first need to determine the typical features in him.
According to Veselovsky's logic, the fulfillment of this research task is quite possible on the basis of the application and use of the research arsenal of the methodology of the cultural-historical school.
But the SECOND methodological setting already goes beyond the limits of the cultural-historical method. It concerns the study of the form of literary works individual writers.
With the help of the comparative historical method, it is necessary to single out traditional genre components, plot schemes, images, poetic forms in them - in a word, those elements that, being inherited from previous literature, indicate the limits, the boundaries of the poet's "personal initiative". And only after that it will be possible to describe what constitutes a “personal initiative”, its results, i.e.
the writer's own, individual contribution to changing art forms.
Consequently, the specific subject of research and the content of the special history of literature is the problem of the interaction of elements of content and elements of form in the process of the historical development of the spiritual life of society and the development of a system of artistic means of expressing this content. The focus of the researcher is the traditional and the new in each new phase of the development of literature, as well as the general (i.e., inherited, traditional) and individual (the product of a personal "initiative") in the work of an individual artist.
But no matter how one approaches the development of historical or theoretical problems literary criticism, the task of that special philological science that Veselovsky created - historical poetics, from his point of view, was invariably brought to the fore as a key one.
Only on its basis, he believed, it was possible: a) to create not a speculative, but an inductive theory of literature based on the generalization of specific facts as a system of concepts about the main elements of a work of art, the types of these works and the laws of their development; b) reveal the secret of poetic individuality by separating in the creations of an individual artist the traditional, taken from the general arsenal of art, and the new, created by him, invented; c) and eventually create a scientific history of literature as an objective description of the evolution of its content and form throughout the centuries-old path of development and on a global scale.
Veselovsky's development of the comparative historical method, the history and theory of literature and historical poetics as a special science in the system of literary criticism was carried out simultaneously in all directions: a) within the framework of concrete historical research; b) within the framework of historical and theoretical research; including in the field of developing the problems of historical poetics proper - in the study of the origin, evolution, transformation of the elements of literary form that make up the general arsenal of art.
The main task of historical poetics is a strict scientific description first of all, the sphere of the traditional in the field of literary form - in its historical development from the emergence of the first elements of the poetic language in the darkness of the past centuries to their present state.
Therefore, in the following paragraphs, we will note the main discoveries of Veselovsky in the field of concrete historical research in the history of literature and folklore, then we will consider the “project”
"historical poetics" of Veselovsky, his idea, the general outlines, the main parts conceived in its composition, the stages of their development and its ultimate goal, and then we will characterize what Veselovsky managed to realize from this plan, and, finally, we will try to sum up the results of his titanic work .
§ 3. THE MOST IMPORTANT SPECIFIC INVESTIGATIONS
A.N. VESELOVSKII IN THE FIELD OF HISTORY
LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE
1. The circle of historical and literary interests of Veselovsky. 2. Development of problems of originality of ancient Russian literature. 3. Works on literary relationships. The theory of "counter currents". 4. Discovery of Byzantium. 5. Solving the problem of "dual faith" (mixing of pagan and Christian elements in folklore and ancient literature). 6. Studies in Western Literature. "The Dante Question". 7. Veselovsky's works on new Russian literature.
In the works of A.N. Veselovsky on specific problems of the history of literature and folklore, practical test, both theoretical principles and the specific methodology of the comparative historical method, as well as methods for analyzing literary facts, were improved. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that from the very beginning Veselovsky was aimed at creating the history of world literature.
As academician A.I. Sobolevsky said, “Veselovsky was our first recognized specialist in the so-called history of universal literature”1.
1. The circle of historical and literary interests of Veselovsky
Almost all branches, all main sections of literary criticism of that time were in the field of view of A.N. Veselovsky: folklore of different peoples, ancient classics, European medieval literature, the Asian Middle Ages, the Renaissance, ancient and new Russian literature, new and modern Western European national literatures, Slavic studies , romance, germanism, etc.
As a historian of literature, Veselovsky showed particular interest in research in the field of oral folk art, anonymous writing of the Middle Ages, and from his youth he was passionately interested in the history of the Italian Renaissance.
This, so to speak, is the subject, the range of objects of his scientific interests and research. As for the problems of these studies, i.e.
In memory of Academician Alexander Ivanovich Veselovsky. Pg., 1921. P.1.
the specifics of the scientific problems he solved on this material, then it was also very wide and large-scale1.
The range of the main problems developed by Veselovsky was as follows:
The evolution of people's consciousness and the forms of its reflection in the literature and folklore of different peoples and humanity as a whole;
International Literary Relations; specific ways of disseminating literary plots;
Reflection in folklore and written monuments of the struggle, interaction and crossing of pagan and Christian elements;
heresy different kind in their struggle with official religious dogma and the reflection of all this in the written sources of antiquity and the Middle Ages;
Folk legends and books; their interaction and mutual influence;
Essence and history of the Renaissance; especially Dante and his role in world literature; the work of Boccaccio and Petrarch;
History of the novel, short story and story;
Creativity of V.A. Zhukovsky, A.S. Pushkin and other Russian writers in their individual originality, etc.
The largest works of A.N. Veselovsky in this particular historical and literary field were his doctoral dissertation, the multi-volume "Experiments on the history of the development of the Christian legend" (1875 - 1877), "Investigations in the field of Russian spiritual poetry"
(1879 - 1891), "South Russian epics" (1st volume - 1881, 2nd - 1884), "Small notes about epics" (1885 - 1886), "From the history of the novel and story" (1st volume - 1886, 2nd - 1888), monographs on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Zhukovsky and others.
2. Development of the problem of originality of ancient Russian literature
A.N. Veselovsky gave his own solution to the problem of the national identity of ancient Russian literature in the context of its interethnic relations. Before him, two scientific concepts, two main ideas, existed and were being developed in this area.
One of them boiled down to the fact that ancient Russian literature is quite poor due to its isolation, isolation from European sources, primarily due to the division of Christianity into the western and eastern wings and, as a result, the break with Catholic Europe, with the corresponding culture.
See about this: Academic Schools in Russian Literary Studies.., pp. 265–278.
Another idea was developed by mythologists. From their point of view, ancient Russian literature has no special national identity, no special specificity, because everything in it genetically comes from the ancient Aryan pre-myths common to all Aryan peoples.
To resolve this dispute, it was necessary to revise the entire known and hitherto unknown composition of ancient Russian written monuments, to separate in them, on the one hand, “our own”, Russian, from “foreign”, and on the other, pagan from Christian.
This work, gigantic in terms of volume and laboriousness, was undertaken and carried out by Veselovsky. His position was completely different from both previous ones: Veselovsky refuted the ideas and arguments of those scientists who in ancient Russian literature reduced everything to the reflection of the events of Russian history proper in the monuments of ancient Russian literature (for example, in the image of Vaska Buslaev - Ivan the Terrible); he also rejected the idee fixe of those mythologists (especially the “younger” ones from the school of comparative mythology) who reduced everything to primitive mythology (for example, he saw the mythological image of the red sun in Prince Vladimir, the god of thunder in Ilya Muromets, etc. etc. .) and to the mythologization of natural phenomena.
METHODOLOGICALLY, Veselovsky's position and his own understanding of this problem were connected with his fundamental position that each literary monument must be studied from two sides: a) from the side of its relationship to reality, historical and everyday; b) in terms of its relationship to other folklore or literary works that could be known to the author of this monument, i.e. from the point of view of internal literary tradition.
These two requirements mean that Veselovsky raised the very question of studying the content and form of poetic works and the composition of their constituent elements in a new way. He believed that in history practically (for the rarest exceptions) there were no nations or tribes completely, absolutely isolated from others. Therefore, if it is not known for sure whether there are elements from other (foreign) sources in the composition of any work, then we have no right either to reduce them directly to the events of real history, or to elevate them to primitive mythology. After all, what appears to be primordial and integral, may actually turn out to be composed of elements of different origin (in terms of the place and time of occurrence of these elements).
How to solve the problem in this case? The sequence and method of resolving the issue, according to Veselovsky, should be as follows.
1) First, the researcher must make sure that it is not possible to satisfactorily explain the monument from history or specific household sources. To do this, you need to analyze the monument from the side of its relationship to reality.
2) Then raise the question of the relation of this monument to other folklore and literary works that could be known to the author (or authors).
Thus, a work of art must be examined from both these sides. But the main of these aspects is the second, i.e. the study of the work in the conditions of the actual literary, poetic environment. This is what should distinguish the literary historian from historians of other subjects.
3) Only then should one go in search of a source deep into the centuries and look for "archetypes". This is the difference between Veselovsky's methodology and that of some contemporary semiotic mythologists, who seek to start immediately by isolating "archetypes" from a work of art and finish with this, as the mythologists of the Grimm school once did.
As we can see, in the history of literature, Veselovsky considered the literary environment to be the closest factor influencing it. what I. Ten in his theory of factors attributed rather not to the “environment”, but to the “moment”.
As for the evidence of his own idea of ancient Russian literature, Veselovsky, through multilateral comparisons, discovered: a) a lot of facts about the connections of ancient Slavic literature with the era of Dante and with the ancient world; b) and even more facts of its connections with Byzantine and European medieval literature. Consequently, as a result of this work, the accusation of isolationism and exclusivity was removed from ancient Slavic, including Russian literature, it turned out to be a certain link in the development of general international (general literary, universal) artistic development.
But this study had another, no less important result: against the background of the general, the features of national identity, wealth and significance of ancient Russian literature were more clearly manifested.
Thus, in the interpretation of Veselovsky, ancient Russian literature appeared both in a pan-European, global context, and in its national specifics.
This is the general, fundamental result of Veselovsky's study of the named problem; as for his countless specific factual discoveries, proofs and arguments, they are recorded in his literary facts and comparisons of relevant works that are simply overflowing with specifics.
– – –
The problem of literary relationships, plot migration, etc.
devoted to his doctoral dissertation "Slavic legends about Solomon and Kitovras and Western legends about Morolf and Merlin", a large number of works about other subjects, individual legends, lives, etc. On the basis of a comparative historical study of many European, Asian, Slavic, and Russian sources, Veselovsky reconstructed the ways in which the most diverse and most ancient motifs and plots spread, identified the distant and nearest sources of literary monuments, and explained their transformation on Russian soil and in different historical epochs1.
Let's try to show this with two examples.
STUDY OF THE LEGENDS OF SOLOMON AND KITOVRAS
Veselovsky reconstructs the original version of the original source of this plot according to the Mongolian version (tales about Arji-Borji), although he considers the ancient Indian legend about Vakramaditya to be the source of the legend about Solomon and Kitovras. It was it that originally penetrated into Mongolia (giving the basis for the legends about Arji-Borji) and Iran, from there it got into the Jewish Talmud, then from the Talmud into the Muslim world, and from it, already complicated and supplemented by Muslim motifs, it enters Europe ( transforming in the Western Latin tradition into fables, anecdotes and then getting into the cycle of novels of the Round Table).
According to Veselovsky, this legend comes to the Slavic world from Byzantium and in the Slavic tradition gives rise to a book story, Russian epic, Russian and Serbian fairy tales.
For several centuries, these two lines (Western Latin and Byzantine-Slavic), according to Veselovsky, developed separately.
But approximately in the XVII and XVII centuries. Western stories about Solomon in their folk processing penetrate into Russia. Here they are combined with the old legend that came from Byzantium, layered over it, and as a result, due to the fact that they are acquired in the Russian version, see: Academic schools in Russian literary criticism .., pp. 268 - 269 are humorous in nature, they turn out to be very far separated in form and content from "the serious content of their distant renounced source"1.
This is the general scheme of migration and the history of the plot about Solomon and Kitovras, reconstructed by Veselovsky in his doctoral dissertation.
How does the theoretical content of this scheme differ from the methodology for studying “borrowings” in the concept of Theodore Benfey?
Firstly, it is much more complicated than Benfey's much simpler, elementary constructions and is distinguished by a significantly greater depth of historical coverage and argumentation. Benfey considered the simple geographical proximity of two peoples (for example, Mongolian and Russian) to be sufficient to draw a conclusion about the possibility of Mongolian influence on Russian folklore, i.e. talk about the direct borrowing of the Mongolian legend by the Russians. Veselovsky, on the other hand, opened the link, showing the mediating role of Byzantium. From his point of view, the Mongolian culture in those ancient times was inferior to the Russian one in its level, therefore it could not have a direct influence on it, while the Byzantine culture - higher - could and did. “In general, according to Veselovsky, influence can be effective only as long as the culture of some peoples is able to enrich or supplement the culture of others. When the East had nothing to give to the West, the legends that came from there, enriched in the West, began to come back, reaching the Chinese wall. According to Veselovsky, the original variants are best preserved not in the immediate geographical vicinity of the centers of their origin, but in other areas where they exist, as it were, in a more “conserved” form (for this reason, say, Russian epics are best preserved not in the South, and in the North).
Another major difference between Veselovsky's scheme and approach and the Benfeist methodology is that the Benfeists approached the comparison of plots and the conclusions about their borrowing or migration in a purely formal way. Only one external similarity was enough for them to draw far-reaching conclusions. Veselovsky, on the other hand, always tried to understand and reveal the reasons driving forces distribution of certain plots and ways of their movement. Why, for example, did the Slavs get the legend of Solomon and Kitovras not from Veselovsky A.N. Slavic collections about Solomon and Kitovras and Western legends about Morolf and Merlin. From the history of literary communication between East and West. // Veselovsky A.N. Sobr.
cit., vol. USh, issue 1. Pg., 1921. P.6 Gorsky I.K. A. Veselovsky.// Academician. schools in Russian literary criticism…, p. 269 of Europe, not from the Talmud and not from Mongolia, but from Byzantium? The source of such a movement, its driving force, in his opinion, was the heretical movement of the Bogomils (one of the Gnostic medieval sects);
all the numerous sects and movements of the Gnostics were in conflict with the official church, both Catholic and Orthodox, and therefore became the main distributors in Europe, and especially in the Slavic world, of apocryphal stories coming from Byzantium.
Through such complex searches, A.N. Veselovsky restored the history and ways of movement of many monuments. Sometimes he found a genetic connection between such works, about the dependence of which on each other the researchers had not even thought before.
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUTHERN RUSSIAN VARIANT OF BYLIN
The area of preservation of Russian epics, where they were mainly recorded, is the Russian North and North-West. But their content, as you know, is connected with the events that took place in the South. However, in the south, epics were not preserved. In this regard, Veselovsky put forward a hypothesis: there must be a southern Russian version of epics, and in terms of time of occurrence - the original, earlier than the variants that have survived in the north.
To prove this hypothesis, Veselovsky uses materials from a variety of sources: Slavic, Byzantine, Western.
For example, in the work Epics about Ivan the Gostiny son and the Old French novel about Heraclius, Veselovsky compared the Western European version of the plot with the cycle of Russian “visits”, moreover, comparing both with Byzantine sources. As a result, it was on Byzantine soil that he found a common ancestor of both the Russian epic and the old French novel.
Using the method of comparative historical analysis, he divided epics into parts and separate elements, found these parts and elements in the composition of works not only of the epic, but also of other genres and, moreover, of a different time (for example, in Ukrainian ritual and historical songs, fairy tales, sayings, where he found fragments and clear traces motifs of the past epic). The researcher correlated all this found material with Byzantine, Greek, Romanian, Serbian and other sources. In this way, in all these numerous sources, similar, identical, passing, invariant parts were singled out. And on the basis of them, the southern Russian version of the epics was reconstructed as an earlier parallel to the northern one. The northern variants, therefore, were formed later and developed into a series of epic cycles.
In this way, Veselovsky proved the existence of South Russian epics during the time of Kievan Rus exactly where the events described in them took place.
Extraordinary discoveries were made by A.N. Veselovsky also in his studies of spiritual verse2.
Assessing the scale of the discoveries made by A.N. Veselovsky in the field of folklore and medieval writing, in the field of problems of literary relations, academician I.I. Sreznevsky wrote: “They are irreplaceable in Russian scientific literature”3.
THEORY OF "COUNTER CURRENTS"
As a result of his specific historical studies in the field of literary connections, studies that are completely striking in the volume of material subjected to comparative historical analysis, A. Veselovsky formulated his famous "theory of countercurrents", which became a kind of integrating factor for the synthesis of Grimm's, Benfeev's and Taylor's concepts of the genesis of poetry and its main original forms.
“When explaining the similarity of myths, fairy tales, epic stories among different peoples,” he wrote, “researchers usually diverge in two opposite directions: the similarity is either explained from the general foundations to which similar legends are presumably built [i.e. on the basis of Grimm's concept - S.S.], or the hypothesis that one of them borrowed its content from the other [in other words, in accordance with the idea of Benfey - S.S.]. But in essence, none of these theories separately is applicable, and they are conceivable only together. Thus, Veselovsky clearly formulates the idea of the one-sidedness and limitations of the Grimm and Benfeev conSee: Veselovsky A.N. South Russian epics. St. Petersburg, 1884.
See: Veselovsky A.N. Research in the field of Russian spiritual poetry. P. St. George in legend, song and ritual. SPb., 1880 (Sb. ORyaS, vol. 21, No. 2); Research in the field of Russian spiritual verse.
Sh-U. SPb., 1881. (Sb. ORyaS, vol. 28, No. 2); Research in the field of Russian spiritual verse. U1 - X.
SPb., 1883. (Sb. ORyaS, vol. 32, No. 4); Research in the field of Russian spiritual verse. X1 - XUP.
SPb., 1889 (Sb. ORyaS, vol. 46); Research in the field of Russian spiritual verse. XUSH - XX1U.
SPb., 1891 (Sb. ORYAS, vol. 53, No. 6) Collection of the Department of the Russian Language and Literature of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, vol. KhUSh.
SPb., 1878. S. LXX.
conceptions, which individually, by themselves, do not explain either the genesis or the history of plots.
And then he formulates the idea of the condition of borrowing - a condition without which the borrowing itself will not take place and without which the theory of borrowing loses its explanatory power, becomes purely formal: empty place but countercurrents, a similar line of thought, similar images of fantasy"1.
The idea of “opposite currents” formed in his mind gradually and gradually, and even at the beginning of his research activity, when Veselovsky was still under the influence of the methodology of the cultural-historical school, one could come across thoughts in his publications that potentially led in this direction.
For example, in his report on his “business trip abroad” back in 1863, he said: “The influence of an alien element is always determined by its internal agreement with the level of the environment in which it has to act”2.
The theory of “counter currents” connected and supplemented hypotheses that opposed each other, formed a new, deeper foundation, a more general methodological basis for connecting the positive aspects of the concepts of the Grimm school mythologists and Benfeists, which previously seemed to many to be incompatible, opposite.
At the same time, it organically included Taylor's idea of spontaneous generation, but not as an isolated and the only possible one, but as one of the elements and as one of the conditions for the similarity of plots, as the basis, the ground for the emergence of countercurrents, the attraction of elements of one culture to another.
4. Discovery of Byzantium
In his study of the problem of the development of literary connections, A.N. Veselovsky showed the enormous role of Byzantium and Byzantine material, which had previously been completely unknown in the West.
There were very serious inconsistencies, omissions, gaps in the studies of Western scientists on this issue, precisely because they did not know this material and did not take it into account. So Veselovsky Veselovsky A.N. Research in the field of Russian spiritual verse, X1-XUP. St. Petersburg, 1889. pp. 115–116 [italics mine - S.S.].
Extracts from the reports of persons sent abroad to prepare for a professorship // Journal of the Ministry of National Education, 1863, part CXX, Dec., otd.P. P.558.
filled this gap missing link in the reconstruction of many literary connections and in the restoration of the migration routes of literary motifs and plots in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages.
5. Solving the problem of "dual faith" (mixing of pagan and Christian elements in folklore and ancient literature) This problem was dealt with a lot before Veselovsky both in the West and in Russia (for example, F.I. Buslaev). The mixing of pagan and Christian was observed not only in Russian, but also in medieval European literature and folklore, and it caused a lot of trouble for researchers.
What is the difference between Veselovsky's approach to solving this problem and its solution itself in comparison with other scientists?
Russian Slavophiles, for example, were convinced of the special predisposition of the European peoples towards Christianity. In their opinion, this preference of theirs quickly eradicated pagan culture, from which only a slightly noticeable coating, faint traces remained in ancient monuments.
Veselovsky, in contrast to the Slavophile point of view, was convinced that the abstract dogmas of Christianity were hardly so easily accepted by the people. He (i.e. the people) was more understandable and closer not to the dogmas of Christianity, but to its ritual side and simple teachings about the salvation of the soul, mercy, etc.
Therefore, the Christian worldview spread among the people most of all thanks to lively preaching and popular church literature, which, in turn, was itself under the strong influence of oral folk art.
Mythologists, unlike the Slavophiles, believed that the European peoples - of the Aryan root - sacredly kept their ancient traditions, on which Christianity was layered only externally, therefore, from any monument of folklore or writing, with any Christian symbolism and content, they easily “husked” the original "archetypes" - ancient mythological images and symbols.
Veselovsky considered this point of view to be superficial. In his opinion, what the mythologists were talking about could only take place at the very early stage of Christian influence on paganism, but in the further development of Christian and pagan elements in folklore, See about this: I.K. Gorsky. Alexander Veselovsky // Acad. schools in Russian literary criticism.., p. 273.
and in writing they entered into more complex connections and relationships - relations of both struggle and interpenetration, but in the course of this process the pagan elements gradually weakened and disappeared, while the Christian ones intensified and grew.
And from here follows the main conclusion of Veselovsky: such processes made possible the emergence of a new mythology: with the Christian rethinking of the world in medieval Europe, the second great era of myth-making in the history of mankind began. “And Veselovsky, in many cases where the followers of the Grimms saw primordial myths, discovered manifestations of a new mythology. According to his observations, the creation of this “new world of fantastic images” did not at all require a preliminary strong development of pagan mythology. For this, it was enough to have a special way of thinking, which was never distracted from concrete ideas about life. “If in such a mental environment,” he wrote, “the skeleton of some moralizing apologist, a legend full of the most ascetic impulses, falls, they will come out of it as a saga, a fairy tale, a myth”2.
In the works of the Middle Ages, the old was crossed with the new, one's own with someone else's, alien, pagan - with Christian, folklore - with books.
Veselovsky deeper and more concretely than Western scientists, not only thanks to his methodology, but also due to the extraordinary breadth of knowledge of empirical material, revealed in the phenomena of the so-called "dual faith" the processes of interaction of pagan elements with Christian beliefs.
His idea of a new era of mythmaking complemented Grimm's mythological theory, introducing into the understanding of mythology the notion of not one (pre-Aryan) source, but also of another one, connected with the period of the emergence and introduction of the Christian worldview and dogma into the worldview of the peoples3.
6. A.N. Veselovsky’s research on Western literatures. "The Dante Question"
Veselovsky owns an almost completely new coverage of the Renaissance and the era of Dante, his work. As for the Italian Renaissance, Veselovsky's first work is the Academic Schools in Russian Literary Studies.., p. 273 Veselovsky A.N. Sobr. op. v. USh, issue 1. Pg., 1921. P.11 On the mythological concept of A.N. Veselovsky, see: Toporkov A.N. The theory of myth in Russian philological science of the 19th century. M., 1997. P.315 - 380 the master's thesis "Villa Alberti" - M.A. Gukovsky appreciated so highly that he considered the one put forward in it scientific concept The Renaissance was several decades ahead of its time: from his point of view, European science reached such a level “only in the third decade of the 20th century”1, i.e. more than half a century after Veselovsky (“Villa Alberti” is a work of 1870).
In addition to Villa Alberti, Veselovsky wrote a cycle of works on Dante, a two-volume major study on Boccaccio, a book on Petrarch, the monographs The Italian Renaissance and Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, History of English Literature, Rabelais and His Novel, Pierre Bayle” and many reviews and reviews of the works of scientists from many countries, and in the reviews, he, as a rule, gave not only his own assessment of the work being reviewed, but also stated his own concept on the issue raised.
But his favorite topic in the field of foreign literature was the theme of the Renaissance, and especially the work and era of Dante.
"Dante's Question"
In general, the problem of the Renaissance for Veselovsky is inseparable from the “Dante question”, firstly, because Dante stood at the origins of the Renaissance, and secondly, in him, in his work, according to Veselovsky, for the first time, the features of a man of the new time were clearly identified.Veselovsky believed that, unlike medieval poets, in Dante for the first time the features and signs of a very individual artist were clearly identified, and, consequently, the problem of personal creativity came to the fore in the science of literature.
But Veselovsky's thought was not as simple as it might seem, if we confine ourselves to the wording just given in its presentation. For him, the matter was not only in the individual genius of Dante, but also (and perhaps, above all) in the fact that he expressed the movement of the era - a huge internal shift in the general popular consciousness (by the way, the idea that geniuses are the spokesmen for the movement peoples and people's consciousness - one of the main methodological guidelines of Veselovsky since the time of his passion for the ideas of the cultural-historical school).
Veselovsky proved that in the transitional era - the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance - Dante, as a poet, just expressed the moment of this transition. He believed: the main thing in Dante is the consciousness personally Gukovsky M.A. Italian Renaissance in the works of Russian scientists of the 19th century // Questions of History, 1945, No. 5-6. S.108 of dignity; his desire to wrest the truth from the hands of the churchmen was the first step towards the criticism of medieval scholasticism. Subsequently, this criticism led to the destruction of the foundations of the Middle Ages (moreover, Veselovsky believed that Dante himself did not want this, did not assume and could not know - but nevertheless, this is exactly what he did, or rather, took the first decisive step for this).
Dante's thirst for truth was reflected in the author's assessment of the heroes of his Divine Comedy. The author judges them not only by church criteria of sin and virtue, but also by the concepts of civic duty and personal responsibility for what they have done.
How does Veselovsky install it?
By comparing Dante's hell and paradise, on the one hand, with the Christian visions and lives that preceded the Divine Comedy, and on the other hand, with stories about posthumous wanderings and adventures of Hindus, Tatars, Caucasian peoples and other similar sources.
As a result of such comparative studies, he comes to the conclusion that it was the factor of personal attitude to the world that led Dante to transform the old genre scheme of afterlife journeys by synthesizing it with other genre forms.
He considers The Divine Comedy as a kind of unique genre, which is a synthesis of the latest scientific data of that time with a synthetic combination of various genres of medieval literature and folklore.
The result of this synthesis was the creation of a special one. a unique genre form that has never been repeated in art.
The Divine Comedy, as it were, broke away from other genres, separated itself from them and stands in the history of world literature as a majestic separate peak in splendid isolation.
But in fact, it completed the previous centuries-old history of literary development and became the eternal monument of this history, an unattainable model that can neither be continued nor repeated. Why? Because the time when people undividedly believed in the afterlife and when such a form of literature as “afterlife walking” was a natural embodiment of the highest ideal aspirations of people has irrevocably gone.
Dante was a poet of the transitional age, and the Divine Comedy
- a work of transitional time from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Its genre uniqueness has precisely this main reason and should not be interpreted only in the narrowly individual sense of Dante's exclusively "personal initiative", as the uniqueness of the creative individuality is now interpreted.
The greatness of Dante is not that he stands apart and that the whole value of the Divine Comedy lies in its individual uniqueness, but quite the opposite - that Dante, having so brilliantly completed an entire era of literary development, closed it, completed it, made it impossible any repetition of what has already passed away, obsolete, and thereby gave a powerful impetus to move along a new path - the path of the Renaissance, apparently going as if from the classical, ancient tradition, but in essence representing a new giant step in the cultural and proper artistic development of mankind.
If Dante, according to Veselovsky, gave rise to the transition from medieval canonicity and anonymity to personal creativity, then his successors - Boccaccio and Petrarch - continued this path and gave a new powerful impetus to the development of a personal initiative in art. Veselovsky's special works are devoted to these discoveries: a two-volume monograph on Boccaccio and the work "Petrarch in the Poetic Confession of Canzoniere", remarkable for the subtlety of stylistic analysis.
7. Works by A.N. Veselovsky on new Russian literature
Veselovsky also wrote his works on the new Russian literature from the same point of view of the study of the personal principle in his work.
His monograph on the work of P.A. Zhukovsky is still one of the best works about this poet.
Veselovsky collected materials for a monograph on Pushkin, who was his favorite poet, for a long time. On May 26, 1899, he delivered a speech in honor of Pushkin's centenary at a solemn meeting of the Academy of Sciences. For Veselovsky, Pushkin, like Dante in his time, was the initiator new era in literary development Russia and was a poet of world significance, world size. But the monograph on Pushkin was never written by him, just as it was not completed and main job his life - "Historical Poetics".
After all, all the concrete historical and literary works of Veselovsky were only side branches, offshoots, increments and a kind of "experimental field" in relation to the main cause of his life - to his grandiose project of creating "Historical Poetics" and historical and theoretical works within the framework of this plan.
§ 4. HISTORICAL POETICS:
DESIGN AND GENERAL CONCEPT
1. Material of historical poetics and methods of its study. synchronic aspect. 2. Diachronic aspect of the study of the elements of art form. 3. Analysis of the historical fate of poetic forms. 4. The source of development and the basic law of the evolution of literary forms. 5. Essence evolutionary processes and tasks of the history of literature. 6. Literary process and creative individuality. 7. Difficulties in studying personal creativity and modern process evolution of literary forms. Veselovsky's forecast.
What are the main theoretical ideas of Veselovsky and how does the conception built on them, the project of historical poetics as a special science, look like? Let's try to summarize them briefly, in the form of a few basic provisions.
– – –
From the point of view of Veselovsky, literature is a special historical element, independent, developing according to its own laws, although not isolated from reality, because it is brought to life by the factors of public social life and they are in their own way and on their own. own language expressing.
Literary phenomena (in particular, elements of a literary form) live their own lives, interact with each other, wander from people to people, from country to country, change, develop, die, but can rise again and continue their journey in space and time of the global literary and artistic world. life. They are similar to, say, phonetic or morphological combinations existing in a language, very stable and practically independent of the influence of the individuality of the person using them in speech (pronouncing or writing).
Literary phenomena consist of certain constant, unchanging elements that form the general basis of the poetic form (so to speak, its drawing, skeleton, material) in any work.
It is these constant elements that are subject to the study of poetics.
Its material, subject matter, is, first of all, repetitive, general, invariant (to use a modern term), that which constitutes the backbone, the material of the literary form.
The best, most reliable method for establishing, extracting constant values and elements, i.e. invariants, - comparative.
Therefore, a literary phenomenon cannot and should not be studied in isolation, from itself, but without fail in comparison with other phenomena. And - for the development of historical poetics - on the scale of the entire world literature.
As Veselovsky said about the epic, “the epic of every historical people is an international epic”1. But this is just an example. “International” is not only the epic as a genus or genre, but also any other genus, any other literary form in the sense that it is an artistic language common to all mankind, which is intelligible to every nation and every people, even if their languages are in the usual - linguistic - the sense is not similar, and may be incomprehensible to people of different nations. But artistic techniques, expressed at least in different languages, can basically be understood by everyone.
In a comparative study of the literatures of different peoples in order to highlight the common, repetitive, constant elements of the artistic language, according to Veselovsky, it is expedient and justified to use the methods of the "borrowing theory", i.e. Benfey's schools (but within certain limits - without exaggeration, their globalization, universalization). For example, these methods are applicable in the selection and study of wandering plots and plot schemes.
Comparing literary phenomena, highlighting plots, breaking them down into smaller units, isolating the invariant elements of an artistic form at the level of poetic language, style, plot, genre - this is the task of a comparative study of literary phenomena on the largest possible scale, ideally on the scale of world literature.
Ultimately, the purpose of such a study is to find the primary elements of form that are indecomposable further, to find those “bricks”, those “cubes”, those, so to speak, “elementary particles” (not only in the matter studied by physicists, but in literature), various combinations and combinations of which result in all possible forms and types of literary works.
Veselovsky A.N. South Russian epics, W - X1. SPb., 1884. P. 401
– – –
But what was said above: the establishment, selection of constant elements, " elementary particles”and their stable combinations that make up poetic forms (using the method of comparisons, comparisons) is only part of the task.
Rather, the first stage of its solution. And after its fulfillment, the turn of the second stage and another principle and method of study should come: the synchronic comparative study of literary form should be supplemented by a diachronic one, first in the direction from the present to the past.
After all, when, by means of a comparison of literary phenomena on the widest possible scale in a synchronous plan, these sought-for constant elements are established, the following question arises: about the common origin of these literary phenomena, i.e. about their common literary ancestry.
So at this second stage, the comparative juxtaposition must be continued in the diachronic, historical aspect, but, since the purpose of this stage is to establish the origin, the genesis of forms, the diachronic study must initially proceed in retrospective terms, in the direction from the present to the past.
That is, you need to do the following:
establish parallel series of works similar in origin, first in one national literature, then in several, ideally in all literatures of the world;
build in this way genealogical series, ladders of genres, individual plots, poetic and stylistic formulas, schemes and techniques; to create, so to speak, cycles of genealogies of various poetic forms, going further and further from modernity into antiquity, deep into the centuries.
In other words, it is necessary to establish a kind of etymological chain of poetic forms and devices and go further and further in depth along it, to their origin, until the researcher runs into the origins of human culture, “into the darkness of the elemental, not yet illuminated by the fires of self-consciousness of primitive culture. There, at the source of human culture in general, one must look for sources of these constant forms and patterns. There, for the only time in history, a poetic "deed" was accomplished; was created in the main features of a poetic language, to trace the historical destinies of which historical poetics is called upon.
– – –
But the restoration of the genesis of literary phenomena is only half the task of diachronic analysis, and even less than half of it.
The further - and main - task of historical poetics, and - accordingly - its third and main stage, is already another task: to trace also diachronically, but in reverse order (from past to present) the historical fate of these elements, which, according to Veselovsky, all changes, stratifications and transformations remain basically constant throughout the entire further path of development - from the depths of centuries to the present - constant (relatively constant, of course).
As B. M. Engelhardt expounded this idea of Veselovsky, “an individual, even a “brilliant” initiative, is almost powerless before this powerful element; need tireless creative activity successive generations to change here [i.e. in the composition and in the system of poetic forms - S.S.] became noticeable”2.
Thus, on the basis of the elements of poetic language created once, in ancient times (meaning stylistic turns, tropes, substantive motifs, plot schemes, genre "skeletons", etc.) - in further historical evolution they are added up, combined , are borrowed, wander, travel, acquire their own special composition and their outlines more and more new forms.
– – –
But the question arises: what is the reason for their further evolution after the emergence of primary literary forms?
What is its source, driving force?
In solving this question, the researcher always faces a dilemma, a choice between two answers:
Engelhardt B.M. A.N. Veselovsky. Pg., 1924. P. 81 Engelgardt B.M. A.N. Veselovsky. Pg., 1924. P. 81 should we look for the cause of the modifications of the forms and states of literature in literature itself, in the special structure of its constituent elements, i.e. in immanent laws?
Or, conversely, should literary evolution, the evolution of forms, be regarded as a reflection of the historical development of other phenomena in human history and should its connection be established with them?
In this alternative, Veselovsky made a very definite choice, namely, he chose the second answer: the evolution of literary forms is conditioned by the evolution of worldview, world-experience, i.e. content evolution.
Sustainable forms are subject to significant changes and restructuring, adapting to the new content.
A new form (a new combination of form elements) is not to change the old form, but to express a new content.1 What is the content?
From Veselovsky's point of view, fiction and poetry in general reflect real life, and not only express beauty (cf. Chernyshevsky's thesis about the reflection in art of the "general interest" in life).
Therefore, not only the history of forms, but also the "history of contents" in Veselovsky's system has its own special place. Contrasting the history of contents with historical poetics, which studies history, with the evolution of stable formal elements of poetry, he puts this evolution of formal elements in connection with and in functional dependence on the evolution of contents.
It is this (and only this) idea that expresses for him the definition of the history of literature as one of the sections of the history of social thought. “The history of literature,” he wrote, “is the history of social thought, insofar as it is expressed in a philosophical, religious and poetic movement and is fixed by the word.” Then, later, in 1893, clarifying this idea, he said: “The history of thought is a broader concept, literature is its partial manifestation; its isolation presupposes a clear understanding of what poetry is, what is the evolution of poetic consciousness and its forms, otherwise we would not talk about history. Statements of this kind are only outwardly similar to the attitudes of the cultural-historical school, because in the context general concept Veselovsky they have in principle This fundamental position of Veselovsky's concept will then be turned inside out by the formalists and on this basis they will build their theory of literary evolution.
different content, because for Veselovsky the main "nerve" of the history of literature as a science is the moment of connection between the history of contents and the history of forms, i.e. interaction, mutual influence and interdependence between what the cultural-historical school exclusively focused on, and what the new science - "historical poetics" should establish, and as for the science "history of literature" as the final, highest stage of building a system scientific knowledge about literature, it must organically combine, synthesize both.
From this point of view, Veselovsky considers, for example, the history of the novel, which changes its "morphology", its composition and its appearance under the influence of the ideas of Christianity, chivalry, burgher ideals, etc.
From the same point of view, he also conducts research on individual techniques - plot schemes, stylistic formulas, epithets, metaphors, etc.
5. Essence of evolutionary processes and tasks of the history of literature
Thus, according to Veselovsky, literature, like its creator
- the people, including in the person of its most talented representatives
- poets, including geniuses - is in the process of constant development.
As a result, life constantly gives poetry new content, and this leads to a change in its forms, to recombinations and transformations of those elements of form that came from the darkness of ages.
The essence of the development process is the struggle between obsolete form and new thought, new content.
The history of literature must investigate the course and outcome of this struggle - in parallel in all literatures and taking into account their interaction.
Therefore, the main tasks of the history of literature (and historical poetics is its most important part, its foundation) are as follows:
firstly, to find out the genesis of a work of art as a complex combination of traditional forms (given in the literary "tradition") with content that is a reflection of new ideological movements taking place in society, among the broad masses, and to determine those shifts in form that are caused by this new content ;
secondly, to trace its (an artistic phenomenon, and, in particular, its form) historical fate, i.e. the changes that it experiences, existing from century to century in the minds of the people. In other words, to trace the changes in its content (in the theme, in all its possible formal expressions that have been in the history of mankind), and, conversely, the forms - in all ways of expressing its elements and their combinations and variations of the contents associated with it in the same the history of mankind.
thirdly, to describe the evolution (transformation) of formal elements in connection with the influx of new content with each new historical epoch;
fourthly, to reveal the genesis of poetry as a set of given facts of an aesthetic order and facts of an extra-aesthetic series that preceded it (in other words, to show how the sphere of the aesthetic expands, how the non-aesthetic is transformed into the aesthetic).
6. Literary process and creative individuality
According to Veselovsky's concept, only that which is supported by the collective, the masses, and the people wins in the literary struggle.
For great personalities, including artistic geniuses, are only the brightest spokesmen for a social movement, its more or less bright reflections.
In one of his first works, a review of G. Flotto's book about Dante, Veselovsky said about its author: cannot be separated from the present…”1.
“A poet will be born,” he wrote later, “but the materials and moods of his poetry were prepared by the group. In this sense, we can say that Petrarchism is older than Petrarch.
Agree, a very extraordinary view: after all, according to this logic, it turns out that the so-called "ism" implies not only what follows the activity of its founder, but also precedes the activity of the one who gives the name to this "ism".
The main object of research in the history of literature is the literary process, and not the personal activity of poets.
Arguing with his opponents from the camp of abstract philosophical aesthetics, Veselovsky wrote: “It seems to me that A.N. Veselovsky is inexplicable. Sobr. cit., vol. Sh. St. Petersburg, 1908, p. 10, the inevitability of poetry stemmed mainly from the fact that the analysis of the poetic process began with the personality of the poet”1.
Even in her (i.e., in her, separate personality, creativity) - from the point of view of historical and literary - it is much more important to single out the traditional than the actually new, individual. Not least because it is possible to understand novelty, evaluate its measure and degree only by highlighting the new against the background of tradition.
According to Veselovsky, excessive attention to personal initiative, a clear exaggeration of the role of the individual principle is the main obstacle to the transformation of the history of literature into a strict scientific discipline. Why?
Because the literary process - according to Veselovsky - is the result of collective efforts accumulated over the centuries, in which an individual, even a genius, owns only a part, a small share.
The role of genius is not so much in the invention of an absolutely new form, but in a new combination of old elements, their renewal - and, as a result, in the creation of a new concrete integrity of the work.
The indicator, the sign of genius is not in an arbitrary handling of the form it finds, but, on the contrary, the degree, the measure of consciousness, or intuition, or taste, with which genius relies in its creativity on general rules the use of stable formal elements developed over the centuries to express new social moods, which he expresses most clearly.
Therefore, knowledge, the description of the personal beginning in creativity is not the starting point, but final destination, the ultimate goal of the study.
The volume of the traditional (general) and individual (personal) is incomparable either in literature as a whole, or in the creation of an individual artist (it can be a ratio of 90:10 or 99:1, or another close to this kind of proportions). And in general, this ratio does not change, because what was new and individual in some phase of the development of literature and in the work of individual writers either passes into the sphere of the general, collective, becomes the property of others and can be used by them, or it is generally discarded, forgotten and disappears, having sunk into oblivion.
The main method of developing historical poetics and the history of literature in general is the comparative historical study of facts.
See: Zhirmunsky V. An unpublished chapter from A. Veselovsky’s “Historical Poetics” // Russian Literature, 1959, No. 2. P. 179 Only he leads the science of literature out of the impasse into which it is led by normative aesthetics and the study of “literary generals” .
And the main difficulty in applying this method to modern literature is the illusion that it is created exclusively by a person, only by a personal initiative.
But from the point of view of Veselovsky, this is precisely an illusion: in any artistic phenomenon the role, the share of the inherited, the traditional is always greater, stronger than the individual, personal initiative.
There are no absolutely new inventions in the literature.
“In vain, artist, you think that you are the creator of your creations:
Forever they hovered over the earth, invisible to the eye.
(A.K. Tolstoy).
"And again the skald will fold someone else's song And, as if it were his own, he will pronounce it"
(O. Mandelstam).
Even modern theorists of "postmodernism", who defend the absolute subjective arbitrariness of the writer, more precisely, the "scriptor"
Veselovsky's thought was simple: the share of the traditional, developed over the centuries, in the arsenal of literary forms is immeasurably greater than any individual additions to this arsenal, even if by the efforts of the greatest geniuses.
Later, the formalists would simplify, straighten out, absolutize and use this idea of his in their theory of literary evolution.
But Veselovsky himself, based on this view of the relationship between the traditional and the new, the inherited and the personal, formulated an extremely curious forecast:
“True, setting such a task [i.e. comparative historical study of modern literature and individual creativity - S.S.] encounters serious doubt: after all, modern literature, with its strongly pronounced personal self-awareness of poets, seems to exclude the possibility of talking about the repetition of literary forms.
But when literature [new and latest - S.S.] finds itself in the same distant perspective for future generations as antiquity is for us, from prehistoric to medieval times, when the synthesis of time, this great simplifier, having gone through the complexity of phenomena, will simplify, shorten them to the size of points that go deep, their lines will merge with those that are revealed to us now, when we look back at the distant historical past - and the phenomena of schematism and repetition will be established throughout.
These are the main ideas of Veselovsky; such is the grand design of his historical poetics.
The scale of the idea is still amazing. The clearness and clarity of the formulation of such a majestic task is also striking.
How to do it? What forces? Who is in a position to conduct such a labor-intensive, such a gigantic study?
In principle, this is the task of literary criticism as a whole, if it were something unified and organized, and not a motley, chaotic, Brownian movement of scientific thought, an arena of struggle between scientific schools, trends, individual efforts of research thought moving in different directions Not only an individual, but also a research institute - even IMLI or some similar scientific institution - is hardly capable of doing this.
Even now, when the researcher has at his disposal such a powerful assistant as modern computer technology.
Of course, even its author, Veselovsky, a polyglot who was fluent in several dozen new and ancient languages, a scientist who possessed colossal erudition, was not given the opportunity to realize such a grandiose project in its entirety, striking in its volume and variety of knowledge.
None of his students was able to solve even one of the particular tasks set within the framework of the project of "historical poetics" by Veselovsky.
What did Veselovsky himself manage to do?
What are his specific discoveries, the results of special historical and theoretical studies within the framework of his plan, his "project" of "historical poetics"?
More on this in the following paragraphs.
§ 5. HISTORICAL POETICS:
POETRY GENESIS (ORIGIN THEORY
LITERARY GENERATIONS)
1. Methodological approaches to the study of the problems of the genesis of literary genres. The concept of primitive syncretism. 2. Prehistory of poetry. Three phases of the syncretic stage of its development (pre-ritual, ritual, lyrical-epic). 3. Poetic stage of development. The rise of the epic. Stages of epic cyclization: natural, genealogical, artistic. 4. The emergence of lyrics and the main phases of its development: ritual (collective), group, personal (individual). What comes first: epic or lyric? 5. Origin of drama. Common and different in the positions of Hegel and Veselovsky. Prehistory of dramatic action. Rites and cults, their role in the development of dramatic action. Indian and Greek varieties of the emergence of drama from the rite. Cult form and origin ancient Greek tragedy. Formation of drama from ritual forms.
The origins of ancient Greek comedy. 6. The inductive theory of the origin of literary genera by A.N. Veselovsky and the philosophical and aesthetic theory of the epic, lyrics and drama of Aristotle - Hegel.
1. Methodological approaches to the study of the problems of the genesis of literary genres.
The concept of primitive syncretism The theory of literary genres - epic, lyric poetry and drama - from Aristotle to Hegel and further to the modern theory of literature is built mainly on deductive grounds: in a logical way, through the study of the dialectics of the philosophical categories of objective and subjective.
It highlights the differences between:
object and subject of poetic expression;
objective and subjective as elements of the content of literary genres;
objective and subjective ways of expressing this content.
In this way, the differences between all these varieties, aspects, nuances of objective and subjective are explored and then terminologically defined; thus, the main features of literary genres are logically deduced and their definitions are given, i.e.
the essence of the phenomena of epic, lyric and drama is formulated.
As for the problem of their (i.e. epic, lyric and drama) ORIGIN, it is again solved by a logical, speculative philosophical analysis dialectics of the categories of subjective and objective, i.e. by logical reasoning on topics: what is primary from them, what stands out and is realized earlier, what grows out of what and why, etc.
So, according to Hegel, EPOS is primary as an expression of an object, an objective world, impressions from which suppress the undeveloped consciousness of a person who has not yet emerged, who has not realized himself as something separate.
The growth of self-consciousness of the individual opens the way to a new form - the poetry of the subject, i.e. LYRICA.
And when it arose, appeared, the very opposition of the subject (personality) to the object was realized, and not only the possibility of their opposition appeared, but also the possibility of awareness, understanding of their relationship - a new kind appeared - DRAMA, the poetry of "subject-object", i.e. synthesis, fusion of the epic and lyrical beginnings in something third, which is the drama.
These are, in principle (and in the briefest form) Hegel's answers to all the questions formulated above.
But philosophical-deductive analysis can and does give other constructions, i.e. other answers to the same questions.
Thus, Jean-Paul Richter, proceeding from psychological premises, asserts something other than Hegel, namely: “Lyre (lyricism) precedes all forms of poetry, since feeling is the mother, the spark that ignites all poetry, just like a fire without an image Prometheus revives all images. Veselovsky believed that the source, the motive for such a position is associated with the idyllic view of J.-P.
Richter on a primitive man, who allegedly in a lyrical outpouring raises a cry of gratitude to the Creator.
There is another, third point of view on the same subject, which differs from the two above. It belongs to the French Cit. by: Veselovsky A.N. Sobr. cit., v.1. SPb, 1913, the aesthetics of Letourneau, who believed that the development of poetry goes from dramatic games and amusements to still undeveloped forms of drama, from which lyric poetry, and then epic, gradually separated.
You can argue as much as you like, whose argument is logically preferable, because the initial assumptions of all three concepts are a priori. Therefore, A.N. Veselovsky, citing all these and some other points of view, concludes that the question of the genesis of poetic genera remains still vague, and offers his own way of solving it and his own answer.
He goes to an understanding of the essence and history of poetic genera in a different, opposite, inductive way. The material for him is not concepts that are interpreted this way and that and one is deduced from the other, but facts, and he proceeds to the formation of concepts through an investigation of the question of the origin of literary genres on the basis of an analysis not of philosophical categories of objective and subjective and not of psychological assumptions, but by comparative study of factual material obtained by many sciences: linguistics, psychology, anthropology, ethnography, archeology, the history of primitive society.
It is known that the essence of a new literary phenomenon (any
- for example, the emergence of a new genre, or a new literary method, or a new direction, trend, poetic school) is most clearly highlighted at the moment of its birth, sprout from others, opposing oneself to others, self-awareness, etc. Then this essence can become more complex, remaining as such, but it can also be blurred, clouded, lose its certainty, and the phenomenon dissolves among others.
Unlike Aristotle, Hegel, Belinsky, as well as their opponents: J.-P. Richter, Letourneau, later D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky with his original theory of lyrics, etc., going further than his predecessors and in a different way, A.N. Veselovsky translated the question of literary genera from the abstract sphere of philosophical aesthetics, from the sphere of deductive-logical judgments into a more specific plan for the study and generalization of facts. After all, by the way, both Aristotle and Hegel built their classification of literary genres on the basis of taking into account mainly only one - ancient Greek - classical literature. Veselovsky turned to find answers to these questions in general in the pre-literary period.
According to Veselovsky, the former scientists, and especially Hegel, lacked the data that were obtained by folklorists and ethnographers, who clarified for science the significance of the phenomenon of primitive syncretism discovered by them. And he believed that the origins of poetry, its main forms, should be sought precisely there.
The concept of the origin of literary genres (and, therefore, their essence), as well as the analysis of the phenomenon of primitive syncretism from this point of view, are systematically presented by A.N. Veselovsky in his work “Three Chapters from Historical Poetics” (1899), which is the result of his 30 years of work on this problem. It was published in the first volume of the posthumously already published regular Collected Works of A.N. Veselovsky in 1913.
2. Prehistory of poetry. Three phases of the syncretic stage of its development
What is the phenomenon of primitive syncretism?
According to Veselovsky, this is a kind of folk action, a collective, choral game, consisting of a combination of rhythmic movements with a song-melody (music) and word elements, causing the effect of psychophysical catharsis.
But before it decomposes and the initial forms, the rudiments poetic creativity as such, this syncretic action goes through a series of stages of its own development. (This differentiation of primitive syncretism, which in itself was discovered by historians of primitive society, ethnographers and other specialists, the idea of its evolution, the theory of stadiality is the merit of Veselovsky. He was the first to distinguish the stages of development of a synthetic action and analyze them).
FIRST STAGE: PRE-RITUAL SYNCRETISM.
At the early - still pre-ritual - stage of syncretism, rhythm was the formally organizing moment of the combination of dance, music and words.
The facts of ethnographic research indicate that rhythm and melody arose before the text. The word then played the role of accompaniment and only partly the bearer of rhythm and melody, expressing emotion more than any other meaning.
And the actual verbal-semantic moment played almost no role at this stage. The elements of the word were reduced to exclamations, as an expression of emotions. When an element of word-meaning begins to develop in syncretic games, then rhythm and melody turn out to have already been worked out earlier, and the text, thus, obeys the formal requirements of music, rhythm, which play a decisive role in the formation of poetic style. The poetic form and all the features associated with it arose thanks to syncretism (but then - much later)1.
And initially the text was improvised in the course of a song-dance game, and the improvisation was limited to the repetition of two or three exclamations (such as interjections) that expressed emotions - impressions.
It was a mass, collective play-relaxation, in which psychophysical energy found an outlet (cf. modern "roctus" or the principles of Artaud's theater in the history of French dramaturgy).
The syncretic action reflected the life and psyche of primitive tribes and the naive belief that by imitation one can achieve the desired realization. So, in the primitive action, elements of the hunt or the image of the upcoming struggle with the enemy - a hostile tribe, etc. played a significant role.
The way of performing such a syncretic action is collective singing and dancing, in chorus.
According to Veselovsky, the choir is the same for the emergence of poetry as society is for the emergence and development of language. Only with joint participation in a collective choral action, from his point of view, could the verbal form of such an exchange of meanings be gradually developed and, with repeated repetition, consolidated.
(Purely individual, all the more singular and isolated within the boundaries of the consciousness or expression of one individual does not create a tradition - it is formed only in communication, only in the process of transmission from person to person, from generation to generation).
That is why Veselovsky said: "If we did not have evidence of the antiquity of the choral principle, we would have to assume it theoretically."
But there were such evidence and facts: by the time of Veselovsky, they had already been given by ethnography and the study of the customs of modern peoples standing at a low level of cultural development (African, South American, Pacific island, Siberian, northern tribes and nationalities).
Three chapters from historical poetics
Veselovsky A.N. Three chapters from historical poetics // Veselovsky A.N. Historical poetics. M., 1989. S.155-157.
(Preface to a separate edition)
"Three chapters from historical poetics" are excerpts from the book I proposed, some chapters of which were placed at different times in the "Journal of the Ministry of National Education". I printed them not in the order in which they should appear in the final edition of the work - if at all it is destined to see the light, but as some of them seemed to me more integral, embracing a self-contained question, capable of evoking criticism of the method and factual additions, the more desirable, the more immense the material to be worked out.
Syncretism of ancient poetry
and the beginning of the differentiation of poetic genera.
Trying to build genetic definition poetry from the point of view of its content and style on the evolution of language-myth*1 will necessarily be incomplete if it does not take into account one of the most essential elements of what is defined: rhythmic. Its historical explanation is in the syncretism*2 of primitive poetry: I mean by it the combination of rhythmic, orchestic*3 movements with song-music and word elements.
In the most ancient combination, the leading role fell to the lot of rhythm, which consistently normalized the melody and the poetic text that developed with it. The role of the latter should at first be assumed to be the most modest*4: they were exclamations, the expression of emotions, a few insignificant, meaningless words, carriers of tact and melody. From this cell, meaningful text has developed in the slow course of history; so in the primitive word, the emotional element of voice and movement (gesture) supported the content, inadequately expressing the impression of the object; its fuller expression will be obtained with the development of the sentence ...
This is the nature of the ancient song-game, which answered the need to give an outlet, relief, expression of the accumulated physical and mental energy through rhythmically ordered sounds and movements. The choral song, after tedious work, normalizes with its tempo the next muscle tension; seemingly aimless play responds to an unconscious urge to exercise and regulate muscular or brain power. This is the need for the same psychophysical catharsis that was formulated by Aristotle for the drama*5; it is also reflected in the virtuoso gift of tears in the women of Maoris<маори>*6, and in the rampant tearfulness of the 18th century. The phenomenon is the same; the difference is in expression and understanding: after all, even in poetry, the principle of rhythm is felt by us as artistic, and we forget its simplest psychophysical principles.
The predominant way of performing it also belongs to the features of syncretic poetry: it was sung and is still sung and played by many, in chorus; traces of this chorism remained in the style and techniques of later, folk and artistic song.
If we did not have evidence of the antiquity of the choral principle, we would have to assume it theoretically: both language and primitive poetry were formed in the unconscious cooperation of the masses, with the assistance of many*7. Called up, as part of ancient syncretism, by the requirements of psychophysical catharsis, it gave form to ritual and cult, meeting the requirements of religious catharsis. The transition to its artistic goals, to the isolation of poetry as an art, was made gradually.
The materials for characterizing syncretic poetry are diverse, requiring the widest possible comparison and cautious criticism.
First of all: 1) the poetry of peoples who are at the lowest level of culture, which we too unconditionally equate with the level of primitive culture, while in other cases it is not a matter of experiencing the old order, but of possible everyday new formations on the soil of savagery. In such cases, comparison with 2) analogous phenomena among modern, so-called cultural, peoples, more accessible to observation and evaluation, may indicate similarities and differences that take on significance in the eyes of the researcher.
In case of coincidence, in the absence of the possibility of influence of one sphere on another, the facts outlined among a cultural people can be recognized as real experiences of more ancient everyday relations and, in turn, throw light on the significance of the corresponding forms in a people that stopped at earlier stages. development. The more such comparisons and coincidences, and the wider the area occupied by them, the stronger the conclusions, especially if analogies are selected for them from our memories of ancient cultural peoples. So the Greek imitative game of Heravos<журавль>finds a match for itself in the same dance games of the North American Indians, which, for their part, make it possible to eliminate, as a later historical fabrication, the legend that<журавль>was introduced on Delos by Theseus in remembrance and imitation of his wanderings in the Labyrinth*8. Thus, the development of amoeba*9 singing in folk poetry, which has not experienced literary influences, puts limits on Reizenstein's hypothesis about the cult origin of the Sicilian bucolic*10.
The following messages are grouped, perhaps somewhat superficially, into sections of uncultured and cultured peoples. The records concerning the former are far from uniform: the old ones, which appeared before the isolation of folklore as a science, did not have in mind its requests and could bypass as unimportant such aspects of phenomena that have since become the center of its interests; new entries only accidentally and sideways captured the area of folk poetic data that is subject to our observation, and do not always meet its special, sometimes petty requirements. So, for example, we are often in the dark, in what relation is the text of the lead singer to the chorus of the choir, what is the chorus, whether it comes from a choral or solo song, etc.
The situation is different with parallel phenomena in the sphere of cultural peoples: here, with an abundance of materials, the possibility of people's communications and influences can make it difficult to question whether in each individual case one's own or another's is or is not considered a unit in the amount of data to be generalized. However, in the realm of ritual and ritual poetry, conditioned by the forms of everyday life, the transfer is limited for the most part to episodic details, regarding which only doubts about borrowing can arise. I have in mind at least the songs that play a role in the connection of the rite; they may be from time immemorial strong to him, they could be brought into it later, in the place of the ancients, if they corresponded to the content of the ritual moment. An example of the former is the Finnish rune about Sampo * 11, which is sung during sowing; an example of the second is ballad songs, which are performed both separately and at weddings, obviously in connection with the traces of ancient "snatching" *12 preserved in it. Another example is the new songs, which are not only sung, but also played in the style of the old folk syncretic ones. It was not the content of the song that survived, but the choric beginning of the performance; we do not take into account the first, the second is subject to our generalization as an experience.
These few methodological remarks will prepare us for the following review, which is necessarily incomplete.
Notes
For the first time: ZHMNP. 1898. March. No. 4-5. Ch. 312. Dep. II. pp. 62-131; There. April S. 223-289. Subsequent publications: Collected. op. T. 1. S. 226-481; IP. pp. 200-380; partially (extracts from chapters I and III) - in: Poetics. pp. 263-272; 467-508. It is printed with abbreviations according to: IP.
This is a large work devoted to the origin of poetry, its internal and external differentiation, the formation of a special poetic language, which actually and chronologically completes the published studies of A.N. Veselovsky in the field of historical poetics, which began in his university courses in the 80s, and the subsequent development is reflected in the publications of the 90s.
*1 A.N. Veselovsky, in agreement with many scientists of the second half of the 19th century. believed that the ancient origins of poetry can be sought in the early stages of the development of the language, which is still closely connected with mythology. The later development of similar thoughts led in the 20th century. to the allocation of a special "mythopoetic" era in the history of culture. - See: Frankfort G., Frankfort G.A., Wilson J., Jacobsen T. On the Threshold of Philosophy. Spiritual quest of an ancient person / Per. T.N. Tolstoy. M., 1984. S. 24-44.
*2 The concept of syncretism, i.e. the initial indivisibility of various types of art, refers to the central ones in the teachings of A.N. Veselovsky (cf.: Engelhardt B.M. Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky. S. 88, 134; Shishmarev V.F. Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky // Shishmarev V.F. Selected articles. L., 1972. S. 320-330). About the meaning for modern science this theory of Veselovsky, as well as on the assessment of the scientist as one of the forerunners of modern semiotic ethnology and poetics, see Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Essays on the history of semiotics in the USSR. pp. 6-10.
Veselovsky's theory of primitive syncretism was further corrected by scientists. So, O.M. Freidenberg pointed out that the elements of the syncretic pre-ritual action (dance, singing, etc.) "in the form in which Veselovsky took them for the embryo of literature, actually have long separate paths of their own development, where they have not been yet neither dance, nor song, nor cult action; the data of such pseudo-syncretism can be used in the study of the later stages of the tribal system, but one cannot see in them the genesis of literature, either in fact or in method "(Freidenberg O.M. Poetics of plot and genre. P. 17 -18, 134; cf.: her own, Myth and Literature of Antiquity, pp. 73-80). As N.V. Braginskaya emphasizes, "for O.M. Freidenberg, not from a syncretic ritual-verbal complex, for external" historical "reasons, one or another literary genre stands out, but thinking by identity, semantically equating speech, action and thing, creates the possibility of them " symbiosis". This symbiosis looks like something "syncretic" where ethnography observes it" (Braginskaya N.V. From the compiler // Freidenberg O.M. Myth and literature of antiquity. S. 570-571: Note 6). The absolutization of the formal syncretism of the genres of poetry and types of art, and at the same time the underestimation of the ideological syncretism of primitive culture, in which myth was the dominant, is seen in the theory of Veselovsky and E.M. Meletinsky. In his opinion, Veselovsky underestimated the semantic unity of ritual and myth, which was not violated even in cases where myths and rituals existed independently of each other (See: Meletinsky E.M. Introduction to the historical poetics of the epic and the novel. P. 6; cf.: his own: The Poetics of Myth, p. 138). In general, the problem of myth in Veselovsky’s theory, where the emphasis is “not on the ideological, content, but on the artistic syncretism of the arts and types of poetry”, remains in the shadows, and this, first of all, needs to be corrected, because formal syncretism (of the types of poetry), on which First of all, the attention of Veselovsky is focused, it was not strictly observed and is not always extended to the epic, while ideological and semantic syncretism was initially mandatory and its focus was the mythical narrative (see: Meletinsky E.M. Myth and historical poetics of folklore // Folklore : Poetic System, pp. 25-27). However, E.M. Meletinsky admits that “in general, the theory of primitive syncretism must still be recognized as correct today,” although it underestimates “primitive ideological syncretism, embracing in an undifferentiated unity the rudiments of religion, art, and positive knowledge. And it is not religious ideology as such, but precisely this syncretic complex that is the ideological source of emerging art "(Meletinsky E.M. "Historical Poetics" by A.N. Veselovsky and the Problem of the Origin of Narrative Literature. S. 30-31). Compare different from A. A. Potebnya (see: Potebnya A. A. Aesthetics and Poetics, pp. 418, 426) In the light of ethnological theories of the 20th century, the development of sign systems used in human society, and other systems exchange (including economic and social) is carried out by their differentiation from the originally unified syncretic sign system.Thus, A.N. Veselovsky - on his material - acted as a forerunner of the idea of "ethnological syncretism".See: Ivanov Vyach. Semiotics in the USSR, pp. 54-55.
* 3 Orchestic (from the Greek to dance) - dance.
*4 Insignificance, randomness of a text element in primitive syncretism in the interpretation of A.N. Veselovsky is today recognized as exaggerated (see: Meletinsky E.M. "Historical poetics" by A.N. Veselovsky and the problem of the origin of narrative literature. P. 33-34).
*5 The concept of catharsis, i.e. purification through compassion and fear, Aristotle formulates in connection with tragedy (Aristotle. Poetics. 1449 b 24-28 // Aristotle and ancient literature. P. 120). The traditional understanding of this place in Aristotle, read as "purification of passions", is the interpretation of catharsis in a psychophysiological key, i.e. as relief, discharge associated with pleasure, satisfaction, stress relief. However, this traditional understanding is not the only one - it is opposed by interpretations based on a different reading of the relevant places in Aristotle (in particular, it is assumed that the original text of the Poetics read "clarification of knowledge", since the word "catharsis" also has the meaning of clarification , explanations). - See about this: Braginskaya N.V. Tragedy and ritual by Vyacheslav Ivanov // Archaic ritual in folklore and early literary monuments / Comp. L.Sh. Rozhansky. M., 1988. S. 318-323, 328-329.
V.M. Zhirmunsky believes that A.N. Veselovsky, speaking of "psychophysical catharsis", relies on the theory put forward by G. Spencer of primitive art as a game that serves to liberate one from an excess of strength (see: IP, p. 625). The desire to reveal the psycho-physiological principles underlying art, to point out its biological significance (“Art, apparently, resolves and processes some highly complex aspirations of the body”) marked the works of L.S. Vygotsky (see, for example: Vygotsky L.S. Psychology of Art. P. 310).
*6 Maoris, Maori - the native population of New Zealand.
*7 See: Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Essays on the history of semiotics in the USSR. S. 6; Bogatyrev P.G., Yakobson R.O. Folklore as a special form of creativity // Bogatyrev P.G. Questions of the theory of folk art. pp. 369-383; Typological studies on folklore: Collection of articles in memory of V.Ya. Propp. M „ 1975.
* 8 Labyrinth - according to legend, the Greek hero Theseus managed (thanks to the thread of Ariadne - see note 55) to find a way out of the Labyrinth and defeat the monster - the Minotaur; according to legend, these wanderings of Theseus are immortalized in the games later introduced by him on the Aegean island of Delos.
* 9 Amebay singing (from gr. - alternating, alternate, following one after another) - alternate singing of two singers or two choirs. To the early amoebaism of A.N. Veselovsky and erected later repetitions in the epic.
*10 Sicilian bucolic is one of the lyrical genres of Italian literature of the 13th century, the thematic dominant of which was the glorification of the beauty of nature. The mentioned hypothesis about the cult origin of the genre is contained in: Reitzenstein R. Epigram und Scholion. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der alexandrinischen Dichtung. Giessen, 1893.
*11 For runes, see note. 43 to Art. 4: (Finnish runes - epic songs included by E. Lennrot in "Kalevala". See: Evseev V.Ya. Historical foundations of the Karelian-Finnish epos. M.; L., 1957-1960. Book 1-2).
There are works of this genre that tell about the magical Sampo mill (something like a cornucopia or self-made tablecloth) forged by the mythical blacksmith Ilmarinen as a ransom for a bride (for example, the X rune of the Kalevala). - See: Meletinsky E.M. The origin of the heroic epic. pp. 125-130.
*12 Abduction is an ancient rite of forcible kidnapping of the bride, one of the earliest forms of marriage.
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