The content and form of a literary work. art form

V.G. Belinsky wrote: "Art is a reproduction of reality, created, as it were, a newly created world." Creating the world of the work, the writer structures it, placing it in a certain time and space. D.S. Likhachev noted that "the transformation of reality is connected with the idea of the work"60, and the task of the researcher is to see this transformation in the objective world. Life is both material reality and the life of the human spirit; that which is, that which was and will be, that which is "possible by virtue of probability or necessity" (Aristotle). It is impossible to understand the nature of art if one does not ask a philosophical question, what is it - “the whole world”, is this phenomenon integral, how can it be recreated? After all, the most important task of the artist, according to I.-V. Goethe - "to master the whole world and find expression for it."

A work of art is an internal unity of content and form. Content and form are inextricably linked concepts. The more complex the content, the richer the form should be. The variety of content can also be judged by the artistic form.

The categories "content" and "form" were developed in German classical aesthetics. Hegel argued that “the content of art is the ideal, and its form is a sensual figurative embodiment”61. In the interpenetration of "ideal" and "image"

Hegel saw the creative specificity of art. The leading pathos of his teaching is the subordination of all the details of the image, and above all the subject, to a certain spiritual content. The integrity of the work arises from the creative concept. The unity of a work is understood as the subordination of all its parts, details to the idea: it is internal, not external.

The form and content of literature are “fundamental literary concepts that generalize ideas about the external and internal aspects of a literary work and, at the same time, rely on the philosophical categories of form and content”62. In reality, form and content cannot be separated, for form is nothing but content in its directly perceived being, and content is nothing but the inner meaning of the form given to it. In the process of analyzing the content and form of literary works, its external and internal sides are distinguished, which are in organic unity. Content and form are inherent in any phenomenon of nature and society: each of them has external, formal elements and internal, meaningful ones.

Content and form have a complex multi-stage structure. For example, the external organization of speech (style, genre, composition, meter, rhythm, intonation, rhyme) acts as a form in relation to the internal artistic meaning. In turn, the meaning of speech is a form of plot, and the plot is a form that embodies characters and circumstances, and they appear as a form of manifestation of an artistic idea, a deep holistic meaning of a work. Form is the living flesh of content.

The conceptual pair "content and form" is firmly established in theoretical poetics. Even Aristotle singled out in his "Poetics" "what" (the subject of the image) and "how" (the means of the image). Form and content are philosophical categories. “Form I call the essence of the being of every thing,” wrote Aristotle63.

Fiction is a set of literary works, each of which is an independent whole.

What is the unity of a literary work? The work exists as a separate text that has boundaries, as if enclosed in a frame: a beginning (usually a title) and an end. The work of art has another frame as well, since it functions as an aesthetic object, as a "unit" of fiction. Reading a text generates in the reader's mind images, ideas about objects in their entirety.

The work is enclosed, as it were, in a double frame: as a conditional world created by the author, separated from the primary reality, and as a text, delimited from other texts. We must not forget about the playful nature of art, because within the same framework the writer creates and the reader perceives the work. Such is the ontology of a work of art.

There is another approach to the unity of a work - an axiological one, in which questions come to the fore about whether it was possible to coordinate the parts and the whole, to motivate this or that detail, because the more complex the composition of the artistic whole (multi-linearity of the plot, an extensive system of characters, change time and place of action), the more difficult is the task for the writer64.

The unity of the work is one of the cross-cutting problems in the history of aesthetic thought. Even in ancient literature, requirements for various artistic genres were developed, the aesthetics of classicism was normative. An interesting (and logical) overlap between the texts of the "poetic" Horace and Boileau, which L.V. draws attention to in his article. Chernets.

Horace advised:

The strength and charm of order, I think, lies in the fact that the writer Knows exactly what should be said where, and everything else - after, Where what goes; so that the creator of the poem knows what to take, what to throw away, Only so that he is not generous with words, but also stingy and picky

Boileau also argued the need for a holistic unity of the work:

The poet should place everything thoughtfully,

Merging the beginning and the end into a single stream And, subordinating the words to its indisputable power, Artfully combine the disparate parts65.

A deep substantiation of the unity of a literary work was developed in aesthetics. A work of art is an analogue of nature for I. Kant, because the integrity of phenomena is, as it were, repeated in the integrity of artistic images: “Beautiful art is such art, which at the same time appears to us by nature”66. The substantiation of the unity of a literary work as a criterion of its aesthetic perfection is given in Hegel’s Aesthetics, in which the beautiful in art is “higher” than the beautiful in nature, since in art there are no (should not be!) Details that are not connected with a number of details, but the essence of artistic creativity and consists in the process of “cleansing” phenomena from features that do not reveal its essence, in creating a form corresponding to the content67.

The criterion of artistic unity in the XIX century. united critics of different directions, but in the movement of aesthetic thought towards the "age-old rules of aesthetics" the demand for artistic unity, consistency of the whole and parts in the work remained inevitable.

An example of an exemplary philological analysis of a work of art is B.A. Larina. The outstanding philologist called his method "spectral analysis", the purpose of which is "to reveal what is "given" in the text of the writer, in all its vacillating depth." Let us give as an example the elements of his analysis of M. Sholokhov's story "The Fate of a Man":

“Here, for example, from his (Andrey Sokolov) memories of parting at the station on the day of departure for the front: I broke away from Irina. He took her face in his hands, kissed her, and her lips were like ice.

What a significant word "broke off" in this situation and in this context: and "broke out" from her convulsive embrace, shocked by his wife's death anxiety; and "torn away" from the native family, native home, like a leaf picked up by the wind and carried away away from its branch, tree, forest; and rushed away, overpowered, suppressed tenderness - tormented by a lacerated wound ...

“I took her face in my palms” - in these words both the rude caress of the hero “with foolish strength” next to his small, fragile wife, and the elusive image of farewell to the deceased in the coffin, generated by the last words: “... and her lips, like ice".

Andrey Sokolov speaks even more unpretentiously, as if quite awkwardly, simply about his mental catastrophe - about the consciousness of captivity:

Oh, brother, this is not an easy thing to understand that you are in captivity not of your own free will. Whoever has not experienced this in their own skin, you will not immediately enter into the soul, so that it humanly reaches him what this thing means.

“Understand” here is not only “to comprehend what was unclear”, but also “to assimilate to the end, without a shadow of a doubt”, “to be established by reflection in something urgently needed for peace of mind”. The following selectively rude words explain this word in a bodily tangible way. Sparing with words, Andrey Sokolov seems to be repeating himself here, but you can’t immediately say it in such a way that it “comes humanly” to each of those “who have not experienced this in their own skin” ”K

It seems that this passage clearly demonstrates the fruitfulness of Larin's analysis. The scientist, without destroying the whole text, comprehensively uses the techniques of both the linguistic and literary methods of interpretation, revealing the originality of the artistic fabric of the work, as well as the idea “given” in the text by M. Sholokhov. Aarin's method is called lingo poetic.

In modern literary criticism, in the works of S. Averintsev, M. Andreev, M. Gasparov, G. Kosikov, A. Kurilov, A. Mikhailov, a view was established on the history of literature as a change in the types of artistic consciousness: “mythopoetic”, “traditionalist”, "individual-author's", gravitating towards a creative experiment. During the period of domination of the individual-author's type of artistic consciousness, such a property of literature as dialogicity is realized. Each new interpretation of a work (at different times, by different researchers) is at the same time a new understanding of its artistic unity. The law of integrity presupposes the internal completeness (fullness) of the artistic whole. This means the ultimate ordering of the form of a work in relation to its content as an aesthetic object.

M. Bakhtin argued that the art form does not make sense without its inseparable connection with the content, and operated on the concept of "substantial form". Artistic content is embodied in the whole work. Yu.M. Lotman wrote: “The idea is not contained in any, even well-chosen quotations, but is expressed in the entire artistic structure. The researcher sometimes does not understand this and looks for an idea in individual quotations; he is like a person who, having learned that a house has a plan, would begin to break down the walls in search of a place where this plan is walled up. The plan is not walled up in the walls, but implemented in the proportions of the building. The plan is the architect's idea, and the structure of the building is its realization.

A literary work is a holistic picture of life (in epic and dramatic works) or some kind of holistic experience (in lyrical works). Each work of art, according to V.G. Belinsky, - "it is a holistic, self-contained world." D.S. Merezhkovsky gave a high appraisal to Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina", arguing that ""Anna Karenina" as a complete artistic whole is the most perfect of L. Tolstoy's works. In "War and World" he wanted, perhaps more, but did not achieve: and we saw that one of the main characters, Napoleon, did not succeed at all. In "Anna Karenina" - everything, or almost everything, succeeded; here, and only here, the artistic genius of L. Tolstoy reached its highest point, to complete self-control, to the final balance between design and execution. If ever he was stronger, then, in any case, he has never been more perfect, neither before nor after.

The holistic unity of a work of art is determined by a single author's intention and appears in all the complexity of the depicted events, characters, thoughts. A true work of art is a unique artistic world with its own content and with a form that expresses this content. The artistic reality objectified in the text is the form.

The inextricable connection between content and artistic form is the criterion (ancient Greek kkgegup - a sign, indicator) of the artistry of a work. This unity is determined by the socio-aesthetic integrity of the literary work.

Hegel wrote about the unity of content and form: “A work of art that lacks a proper form is, precisely for this reason, not a genuine, i. the works are good (or even superior) but lack proper form. Only those works of art in which content and form are identical are true works of art.

The only possible form of embodiment of life's content is the word, and any word becomes artistically significant when it begins to convey not only factual, but also conceptual, subtextual information. All these three types of information are complicated by aesthetic information71.

The concept of artistic form should not be identified with the concept of writing technique. "What is it to trim a lyric poem,<...>to bring the form to its possible grace? This, probably, is nothing more than to finish and bring to the grace possible in human nature one’s own, this or that feeling ... To work on a verse for a poet is the same as to work on one’s soul, ”wrote Ya.I. Polonsky. An opposition can be traced in the work of art: organization (“madeness”) and organicity (“birth”). Recall the article by V. Mayakovsky “How to make poetry?” and the lines of A. Akhmatova "If only you knew from what rubbish poetry grows ...".

In one of the letters to F.M. Dostoevsky conveys the words of V.G. Belinsky about the importance of form in art: “You, artists, with one line, at once, in an image, expose the very essence, so that it would be a hand to feel, so that everything suddenly becomes clear to the most unreasoning reader! This is the secret of artistry, this is the truth in art.

The content is expressed through all sides of the form (system of images, plot, language). Thus, the content of the work appears primarily in the relationship of characters (characters) ^ which are found in the events (plot). It is not easy to achieve complete unity of content and form. A.P. wrote about the difficulty of this. Chekhov: “You need to write a story for 5-6 days and think about it all the time while you are writing ... It is necessary that each phrase lie in the brain for two days and get oiled ... The manuscripts of all real masters are soiled,

Theory of Interratdra

crossed out along and across, worn and covered with patches, in turn crossed out ... ".

In the theory of literature, the problem of content and form is considered in two aspects: in the aspect of reflecting objective reality, when life acts as content (subject), and the artistic image as a form (form of knowledge).

Thanks to this, we can find out the place and role of fiction in a number of other ideological forms - politics, religions, mythology, etc.

The problem of content and form can also be considered in terms of clarifying the internal laws of literature, because the image that has developed in the mind of the author represents the content of a literary work. Here we are talking about the internal structure of an artistic image or a system of images of a literary work. An artistic image can be regarded not as a form of reflection, but as a unity of its content and its form, as a specific unity of content and form. There is no content at all, there is only formalized content, that is, content that has a definite form. Content is the essence of something (someone) something. Form is a structure, organization of content, and it is not something external in relation to the content, but inherent in it. Form is the energy of the essence or the expression of the essence. Art itself is a form of knowledge of reality. Hegel wrote in Logic: "Form is content, and in its developed definiteness it is the law of phenomena." Hegel's philosophical formula: "Content is nothing but the transition of form, and form is nothing but the transition of content into form." It warns us against a rough, simplified understanding of the complex, mobile, dialectical unity of the categories of form and content in general, and in the field of art in particular. It is important to understand that the boundary between content and form is not a spatial concept, but a logical one. The relationship of content and form is not the relationship of the whole and the part, the core and the shell, the inner and the outer, the quantity and quality, it is the relationship of opposites, passing into each other. L.S. Vygotsky in his book The Psychology of Art analyzes the composition of I. Bunin's short story Easy Breathing and reveals its "basic psychological law": about worldly turbidity "into" a story about easy breathing. He remarks: “The true theme of the story is not the story of the confused life of a provincial schoolgirl, but light breathing, a feeling of liberation and lightness, reflected ™ and the perfect transparency of life, which cannot be taken out of the events themselves,” which are connected in such a way that they lose their worldly burden; "complex temporal permutations turn the story of the life of a frivolous girl into the light breath of Bunin's story." He formulated the law of destruction by the form of content, which can be illustrated: the very first episode, which tells about the death of Olya Meshcherskaya, relieves the tension that the reader would experience upon learning about the murder of the girl, as a result of which the climax ceased to be a climax, the emotional coloring of the episode was extinguished . She was “lost” among the calm description of the platform, the crowd of people and the officer who came, “lost” and the most important word “shot”: the very structure of this phrase drowns out the shot1.

The distinction between content and form is necessary at the initial stage of studying works, at the stage of analysis.

Analysis (Greek analysis - decomposition, dismemberment) literary - the study of the parts and elements of the work, as well as the relationships between them.

There are many ways to analyze a work. The most theoretically substantiated and universal is the analysis proceeding from the category of “substantial form” and revealing the functionality of the form in relation to the content.

A synthesis is built on the results of the analysis, that is, the most complete and correct understanding of both the content and the formal artistic originality and their unity. Literary synthesis in the field of content is described by the term "interpretation", in the field of form - by the term "style". Their interaction makes it possible to comprehend the work as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Each form element has its own specific “meaning”. Forman is something independent; The form is, in fact, the content. Perceiving the form, we comprehend the content. A. Bushmin wrote about the difficulty of scientific analysis of the artistic image in the unity of content and form: “And there is still no other way out, how to deal with the analysis, “splitting” of unity in the name of its subsequent synthesis”73.

When analyzing a work of art, it is necessary not to ignore both categories, but to catch their transition into each other, to understand content and form as a mobile interaction of opposites, sometimes diverging, sometimes approaching, up to identity.

It is appropriate to recall Sasha Cherny's poem about the unity of content and form:

Some shout: “What is the form? Trivia!

When slurry is poured into crystal -

Will the crystal become infinitely lower?

Others object: “Fools!

And the best wine in the night vessel

Decent people won't drink."

They can’t solve the dispute ... but it’s a pity!

After all, you can pour wine into crystal.

The ideal of literary analysis will always remain such a study of a work of art that captures the nature of interpenetrating ideological and figurative unity to the greatest extent.

The form in poetry (as opposed to the prose form) is naked, addressed to the physical senses of the reader (listener) and considers a number of "conflicts" that form the poetic form, which can be: -

lexico-semantic: 1) a word in speech - a word in verse; 2) a word in a sentence - a word in a verse (a word in a sentence is perceived in the flow of speech, in a verse it tends to be emphasized); -

intonation-sound: 1) between meter and rhythm; 2) between meter and syntax.

In the book of E. Etkind "The Matter of Verse" there are many interesting examples that convince of the validity of these provisions. Here is one of them. To prove the existence of the first conflict “a word in speech - a word in verse”, M. Tsvetaeva’s eight-verse, written in July 1918, is taken. Its text shows that pronouns for prose are an insignificant lexical category, and in poetic contexts they receive new shades of meaning and come to the fore:

I am a page to your pen.

I will accept everything. I am white page.

I am the keeper of your good:

I will return and return a hundredfold.

I am a village, black earth.

You are my ray and rain moisture.

You are the Lord and Master, and I -

Chernozem and white paper.

The compositional core of this poem is the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person. In stanza 1, their opposition is outlined: I - to yours (twice in verses 1 and 3); in the second stanza it reaches full distinctness: I am you, you are me. You are at the beginning of the verse, I am at the end before a pause with a sharp transfer.

The contrast of "white" and "black" (paper - earth) reflects metaphors that are close and at the same time opposite to each other: a woman in love is a page of white paper; she captures the thought of the one who is for her Lord and Lord (passivity of reflection), and in the second metaphor - the activity of creativity. “I of a woman combines black and white, opposites that materialize in grammatical genders:

I am a page (f)

I am the keeper (m)

I am a village, black earth (w)

I am black soil (m)

The same applies to the second pronoun, and it combines contrasts materialized in the grammatical gender:

You are my ray and rain moisture.

We can also find a roll call of close and at the same time opposite words in such actually close, compared words with each other, such as the verbs:

So I am you. But who is hiding behind both pronouns? Woman and Man - in general? Real M.I. Tsvetaeva and her lover? The poet and the world Man and God? Soul and body? Each of our answers is correct; but the vagueness of the poem is also important, which, due to the ambiguity of pronouns, can be interpreted in different ways, in other words, it has a semantic layering”74.

All material elements - words, sentences, stanzas - are semantized to a greater or lesser extent, become elements of content: “The unity of content and form - how often do we use this formula that sounds like a spell, use it, do not think about its real meaning! Meanwhile, in relation to poetry, this unity is of particular importance. In poetry, everything, without exception, turns out to be content - each, even the most insignificant element of form builds a meaning, expresses it: the size, arrangement and nature of the rhyme, the ratio of the phrase and the line, the ratio of vowels and consonants, the length of words and sentences, and much more ... ' - notes E. Etkind75.

The ratio of "content - form" in poetry is unchanged, but it changes from one artistic system to another. In classic poetry, one-dimensional meaning was put forward in the first place, associations were obligatory and unambiguous (Parnassus, Muse), style was neutralized by the law of the unity of style. In romantic poetry, the meaning deepens, the word loses its semantic unambiguity, different styles appear.

E. Etkind opposes the artificial separation of content and form in poetry: “There is no content outside the form, because each element of the form, no matter how small or external, builds the content of the work; there is no form outside the content, because every element of the form, no matter how empty, is charged with an idea.

Another important question: where should the analysis begin, with the content or with the form? The answer is simple: it doesn't matter. It all depends on the nature of the work, the specific objectives of the study. It is not at all necessary to start the study with the content, guided only by the one thought that the content determines the form. The main task in the analysis is to catch the transition of these two categories into each other, their interdependence.

The artist creates a work in which content and form are two sides of one single whole. Work on form is at the same time work on content, and vice versa. In the article "How to make poetry?" V. Mayakovsky spoke about how he worked on a poem dedicated to S. Yesenin. The content of this poem was born in the very process of creating the form, in the process of the rhythmic and verbal matter of the line:

You went ra-ra-ra to another world...

You have gone to another world...

You have gone, Seryozha, to another world... - this line is false.

You have gone irrevocably to another world - unless someone died turning. You have gone, Yesenin, to another world - this is too serious.

You have gone, as they say, into another world - the final design.

“The last line is correct, it, “as they say”, without being a direct mockery, subtly reduces the pathos of the verse and at the same time eliminates all suspicions about the author’s belief in all afterlife ahi-

dmteratzra theory

her,” notes V. Mayakovsky76. Conclusion: on the one hand, we are talking about working on the form of verse, about choosing a rhythm, word, expression. But Mayakovsky is also working on the content. He does not just choose the size, but strives to make the line "sublime", and this is a semantic category, not a formal one. It replaces words in a line not just to more accurately or more vividly express a pre-prepared thought, but also to create this thought. By changing the form (size, word), Mayakovsky thereby changes the content of the line (ultimately, the poem as a whole).

This example of work on a verse demonstrates the basic law of creativity: work on form is at the same time work on content, and vice versa. The poet does not and cannot create form and content separately. He creates a work in which content and form are two sides of a single whole.

How is a poem born? Fet noticed that his work was born from a simple rhyme, "swelling" around him. In one of his letters, he wrote: "The whole image that arises in a creative kaleidoscope depends on elusive accidents, the result of which is success or failure." An example can be given that confirms the correctness of this recognition. A wonderful connoisseur of Pushkin's creativity S.M. Bondi told the strange story of the birth of the well-known Pushkin line:

On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night ... Initially, Pushkin wrote this:

Everything is quiet. The night shadow fell on the Caucasus...

Then, as is clear from the draft manuscript, the poet crossed out the words "night shadow" and wrote the words "the night is coming" above them, leaving the word "lay down" without any changes. How to understand this? S. Bondi proves that a random factor intervened in the creative process: the poet wrote the word “lay down” in a cursory handwriting, and the rounded part, the “loop” did not turn out in the letter “e”. The word "lay down" looked like the word "mist". And this random, extraneous reason prompted the poet to a different version of the line:

Everything is quiet. The darkness of the night is coming to the Caucasus...

In these phrases, very different in meaning, a different vision of nature was embodied. The random word "darkness" could act as a form of the creative process, a form of Pushkin's poetic thinking. This particular case reveals the general law of creativity: the content is not simply embodied in the form; it is born in it and can be born only in it.

Creating a form that matches the content of a literary work is a complex process. It requires a high degree of skill. No wonder L.N. Tolstoy wrote: “A terrible thing is this concern for the perfection of form! No wonder she. But not without reason when the content is good. If Gogol had written his comedy (The Inspector General) rudely, weakly, even one millionth of those who read it now would not have read it. If the content of the work is “evil”, and its artistic form is impeccable, then there is a kind of aestheticization of evil, vice, as, for example, in the poetry of Baudelaire (“Flowers of Evil”), or in P. Suskind's novel “Perfumer”.

The problem of the integrity of a work of art was considered by G.A. Gukovsky: “An ideologically valuable work of art does not include anything superfluous, that is, nothing that would not be necessary to express its content, ideas, nothing, not even a single word, not a single sound. Each element of a work means, and only in order to mean, it exists in the world ... The elements of a work as a whole do not constitute an arithmetic sum, but an organic system, constitute the unity of its meaning ... And to understand this meaning ^ to understand the idea, the meaning works, ignoring some of the components of this meaning, is impossible”78.

The main "rule" of the analysis of a literary work is a careful attitude to artistic integrity, revealing the content of its form. A literary work acquires great social significance only when it is artistic in its form, i.e., corresponds to the content expressed in it.

The form of existence of art is a work of art (work of art) as a system of artistic images that form a single whole. It represents a spiritual and material reality that arose as a result of human creative efforts, an aesthetic value that meets artistic criteria. In a work of art, in a figurative, symbolic form, both objective reality and the subjective world of the artist, his worldview, experiences, feelings, ideas are reflected. The means of expressing all this diversity is a peculiar language of art. “A work of art is a complete effect, resting in itself and existing for itself, and opposes the latter, as an independent reality, to nature. In a work of art, the form of being exists only as a reality of influence. A work of art, perceiving nature as a relationship between motor directions and visual impressions, is freed from everything changeable and accidental.
One of the most important principles of artistic creativity and the existence of a work of art is the principle of the unity of form and content. The essence of this principle is that the form of a work of art is organically connected with the content and is determined by it, and the content appears only in a certain form.
Artistic form (from Latin forma - appearance) - the structure of a work of art, its internal organization, the whole complex of expressive means. Created with the help of figurative and expressive means of a certain type of art to express artistic content, the form always indicates the means by which the content is conveyed in a work of art. The content, according to L.S. Vygotsky, is everything that the author took as ready-made, that existed before the story and can exist outside and independently of it. Content is a necessary constitutive element of an aesthetic object. M.M. Bakhtin wrote in his work “The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Artistic Creativity”: “The reality of cognition and aesthetic act, which, in its recognition and evaluation, enters into an aesthetic object and is subjected here to a specific intuitive association, individuation, concretization, isolation and completion, i.e. comprehensive artistic design with the help of the material, we call the content of the aesthetic object. In other words, the content is all artistically reflected phenomena of reality in their evaluative comprehension.
The dependence of the form on the content of the work is expressed in the fact that the first does not exist without the second. The content is the inner meaning of a certain form, and the form is the content in its immediate being.
The opposition of content and form is characteristic primarily for the stage of creativity, i.e. for their mutual, mutual formation, when the artist comprehends what he wants to express in a work of art and looks for adequate means for this. In a finished work of art, form and content must certainly constitute an inseparable, harmonious unity.
Speaking about the unity of content and form, one should not underestimate the importance of the artistic form as an expressive force. It is no coincidence that in the European philosophical tradition since the time of Aristotle, form has been understood as a specific principle of a thing, its essence and driving force. The content of a work of art becomes emotionally perceived, acquires aesthetic significance due to its realization in an artistic form, which thus actively influences the content. It can contribute to the most complete and convincing disclosure of the content, but it can also interfere with its expression, weaken the power of its impact and, accordingly, perception.
If you carefully analyze a work of art, it is quite easy to find that all its elements can be divided into formal and content. The content elements of a work of art include the theme, conflict, idea, characters, plot, plot. The formal elements of a work of art include composition, genre, speech, and rhythm. The specificity of the artistic language of various types of art determines the decisive importance for them of individual formal elements: in music - melodies, in painting - colors, in graphics - drawing, etc. The form of the work must have internal unity. Harmony, proportionality of its elements is a necessary condition for completeness, perfection, beauty of a work of art.
The content is always structured and expressed only in ways characteristic of art, i.e. essentially inseparable from form. It is multi-layered and multifaceted. The highest levels of content are the idea and theme that determine the entire content structure of the work.
The idea is the main figurative and aesthetic meaning. An artistic idea is always original and unique. It may include philosophical, political, scientific and other ideas, but is not completely limited to them. The structure of the work is very rich, combining both these ideas and all the richness of the aesthetic vision of the world. Art is interested not only in politics, philosophy, science, but also in the whole system of human relations to the world, to other people, to oneself. These relationships, reflected by art, turn out to be more complex and richer than the system of the deepest ideas. We will reveal the amazing philosophical tale of Richard Bach "The Seagull Jonathan Livingston" and we will find in it a huge number of philosophical ideas: moral and physical improvement, the search for the meaning of life and mentorship, loneliness and exile, death and resurrection. But the meaning of this small work is wider than any of these ideas: in it, in the form of a seagull, the essence of a restless and restless human soul is revealed, the eternal aspiration of a person to knowledge, to perfection, to finding the true meaning of life is shown:
“And the deeper Jonathan learned the lessons of kindness, the more clearly he saw the nature of love, the more he wanted to return to Earth. For despite his life of loneliness, Jonathan Seagull was born to be a teacher. He saw what was true for him, and he could realize love only by revealing his knowledge of the truth to someone else - to someone who was looking for and who needed only a chance to discover the truth for himself.
The idea of The Seagull, published as a separate edition at the end of 1970, draws more than one generation of readers into the eternal realm of allegory. So, Ray Bradbury once said that this book gives him a sense of flight and returns youth.
The theme of a work of art (Greek thema - literally what is put [as a basis]) is an object of an artistic image, a circle of life phenomena captured in a work and held together by the author's idea-problem. The theme is one of the most important elements of the content of a work of art. It points to the range of phenomena that serve as the starting point for the creation of a work of art. For example, the theme of L. Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina" is the tragic fate of the relationship between Anna and Vronsky.
In addition to the main theme, the work may contain side themes that are closely related to the main theme, subordinate to it. For example, along with the main theme of the relationship between Onegin and Tatyana, in the poem "Eugene Onegin" by A.S. Pushkin there are many side themes: the theme of the relationship between Lensky and Olga, the theme of parental relationships, etc.
The theme is closely related to the idea of the work. Together they form a single ideological and thematic basis of the work. The theme finds its further expression through characters, conflicts, plots. This is the next, lower content level of a work of art.
Character is the artistic embodiment of a system of distinctive properties of a person, which are manifested in his self-esteem, relations with the outside world and other people, in difficult and ordinary life circumstances. Depending on the direction of art, characters can be depicted in different ways. They may appear conditional. This is how realism draws them, demonstrating how conditions, events, phenomena of reality affect the formation of character and its manifestations. Such are the heroes of O. de Balzac, C. Dickens, J. Galsworthy. Characters can be considered as derived from heredity and physiological characteristics, as is done in naturalism (E. Zola, E. and J. Goncourt). They can be portrayed as idealized and opposed to the whole surrounding, often hostile, world. This is how many romantics draw characters. Here is how M.Yu. Lermontov conveys the character of the hero in the poem "The Corsair":
Since then with a deceived soul
I became distrustful of everyone.
Oh! Not under the native roof
I was then - and withered.
I could not with a smile of humility
Since then, I've been transferring everything:
Ridicule, pride, contempt...
I could only love more passionately.
Dissatisfied with myself
Wanting to be calm, free,
I often wandered through the woods
And only there he lived with his soul ...
However, every true artist, regardless of the direction of art, strives to depict typical characters in their individual originality, to show the complexity of their development, the inconsistency of their inner life, and moral quests.
Conflict - an artistically designed contradiction in a person's life, a clash of different characters, views, ideas, interests, etc. The role of the conflict and its originality directly depend not only on the reflected aspects of reality, but also on the specific features and means of typification, types and genres of art. For example, in tragedy or in monumental painting, the conflict manifests itself as a direct depiction of the struggle of opposite characters, and in lyrics - as an emotional expression of the collision of different people and feelings. The depth of the conflict, its sharpness and completeness in the artistic form largely determine the depth of the emotional impact of the work of art on the perceiving subject. As a result, works of art of those types and genres of art that most deeply embody dramatic conflict have the strongest impact on a person.
The plot (French sujet - literal subject) is a reproduced action in its entirety. The plot is the spatio-temporal dynamics of the depicted, the course of events in a literary work. This is a set of events expressed in artistic form. The plot expresses the narrative side of a work of art, and individual episodes, characters, and actions of heroes are organically combined in it.
The plot is characteristic of various types and genres of art. It can be expanded (in historical novels, in epics, etc.), simple (in painting, graphics, etc.). In literary lyrics, fine arts, music, plotless or practically plotless works can be found (for example, in abstractionism, in instrumental non-program music, architecture). The most obvious plot in painting. The plot involves action, movement, therefore, in those works of art where there is a plot, it develops from the plot through the climax to the finale. The plot is closely related to the plot, but does not always coincide with it.
The plot (from the Latin fabula - a fable, a story) is a cultural and typological scheme of the main events, set out in their chronological sequence. This is a chain or scheme of events, which is described in detail in the plot. For example, N.G. Chernyshevsky’s novel “What to do?” begins with a description of the mysterious disappearance of one of the characters, while the plot of this novel (the unfolding of events in a space-time sequence) begins with a description of Vera Pavlovna's life in her parents' house. The plot serves as an auxiliary tool for revealing the plot, helping to establish the sequence of unfolding events and understand the goals that the artist pursued with a peculiar construction of the plot. The plot is more general than the plot.
If we return to the plot again, it should be noted that in large epic works, the plot, as a rule, is divided into a number of storylines. So, in M.Yu. Lermontov's novel "A Hero of Our Time" there are a number of relatively independent storylines (Bela, smugglers, etc.), which are grouped around Pechorin's storyline.
As mentioned above, the means of expression and existence of content is the form. The process of shaping affects the content through composition, rhythm, opposition.
Composition (from Latin compositio - addition, composition) - the construction of a work of art, the systematic and consistent arrangement of its elements and parts, ways of connecting images and the totality of all means of their disclosure. Composition is the most important organizing element of the artistic form, giving unity and integrity to the work, subordinating its components to each other and to the whole. This is the consciously semantic ordering of the work. The task of the composition is the organization of separate disparate elements into integrity. All compositional techniques are determined by the ideological concept of the author, his creative task. Let's look closely at the painting by P.A. Fedotov “Morning after a feast, or
Fresh Cavalier. The plot of the picture is taken from life: a petty official received the first order and arranged in his room for this occasion. On the morning after the booze, the “fresh cavalier”, barely throwing a dressing gown over his shoulders, has already put on the order and points to it to his cook. The cook, not sharing the owner's blissful mood, points to the holey boots. The idea of the picture is broad: the poverty of the bureaucratic spirit, unable to rise above careerist aspirations, the common sense of the servant, who is aware of the comical claims of the owner. The ideological outline of the work helps to reveal the composition. The picture is built on two figures opposed to each other: an official frozen in a proud pose and a cook expressing the natural sanity of a simple person. P.A. Fedotov fills the room in the picture with a large number of things that explain the plot and plot to us: the remnants of yesterday's feast, rubbish on the floor, a book thrown on the floor, a guitar with broken strings leaning against a chair on which hang a master's coat and suspenders. A cage is visible under the ceiling, an awakened cat is stretching. All these details are calculated to create the brightest possible picture of a room where everything is thrown without any regard for decency. This is the world of an insignificant official, devoid of lofty thoughts and a sense of beauty, but striving to achieve success.
The next element of the form is rhythm. Rhythm (Greek rhythmos, from rheo - flow) - the alternation of various commensurate elements (sound, speech, etc.), occurring with a certain sequence, frequency. Rhythm as a means of shaping in art is based on the regular repetition in space or time of similar elements at commensurate intervals. The function of rhythm is the simultaneous separation and integration of the aesthetic impression. Thanks to rhythm, the impression is divided into similar intervals, but at the same time it is integrated into a set of interrelated elements and intervals, i.e. into artistic integrity. A stable repetitive rhythm evokes in the perceiving subject the expectation of its repetition and the specific experience of its “failure”. Hence, another function of rhythm is the dynamics of the effects of expectation and surprise. Rhythm, moreover, reflects dynamics, as opposed to symmetry, which reflects statics. The dynamics of rhythm contributes to the creation of an artistic structure that is most adequate to the psychophysical structure of a person, which is also dynamic and mobile.
Rhythm is of paramount importance in music, where it manifests itself as a temporal organization of musical intervals and consonances. According to Aristotle, the rhythm in music is similar to the emotional states of a person and reflects such feelings and properties as anger, meekness, courage, moderation. Starting from the 17th century. in music, a clock, accent rhythm based on the alternation of strong and weak accents was established. In a poem, rhythm denotes the general ordering of the sound structure of poetic speech, as well as the real sound structure of a particular poetic line. In the visual arts (painting, graphics, etc.) and architecture, rhythm manifests itself in various combinations of patterns, colors, arrangement of columns, etc. In choreography, rhythm is the combination of a sequence of body movements.
Style occupies a special place in shaping. However, it must be remembered that style is not in its pure form either form or content, or even their unity. “Style refers to form, content and their unity in the same way as in a living organism its “form” and “content” refer to the gene set in the cell. Style is the "gene set" of culture, which determines the type of cultural integrity. Style (from the Greek stylos - a pointed stick for writing on wax, a manner of writing) is a common figurative system, means of artistic expression, creative techniques, due to the unity of ideological and artistic content. We can talk about the style of a particular work or genre (for example, the style of the Russian novel of the mid-19th century), about the individual style or creative manner of a particular author (for example, about the style of P. Picasso), as well as the style of entire artistic epochs or major artistic directions (Gothic or Romanesque style, Baroque, Romanticism, Classicism styles).
In the aesthetics of formalism, style is often understood as a commonality of techniques that is not related to the content of works. Thus, the German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) in his work “Basic Concepts of the History of Art” divides the entire history of fine art into two styles: linear and pictorial.
Such a formalistic understanding of style leads to a mechanical transfer of the common features of architectural and decorative styles to all other types of art, which have a much greater richness and variety of content, and therefore a much greater variety of styles.
Style is not a formal unity of visual and expressive means and techniques, but their stable commonality, determined by the ideological content. The style of a work of art is not just its external form, but, first of all, the nature of its material and spiritual existence within a particular culture. This is evidence that an aesthetic object belongs to a particular culture. Thus understood style should not be confused with stylization. Stylization is a deliberate imitation of the artistic style of an author, genre, trend, era, people. Stylization is often associated with a rethinking of the artistic content that formed the basis of the imitated style. Style performs many functions in the process of creating and perceiving a work of art. In artistic creativity, he directs the creative process in a certain direction, ensures the processing of disparate impressions into a single system, and helps to preserve continuity in the artistic tradition. In the process of artistic perception of a work, style determines the nature of the impact of the work on a person, orients the public towards a certain type of artistic value.
Style has important informative value. It reports the overall quality of the work. The author, creating a work of art, always focuses on the viewer, reader, listener, who is invisibly present in art as a goal for which the artist creates. The perceiving subject also has the author in his mind: he knows his name, is familiar with his previous works, understands his artistic skill and taste. All this is a psychological background and motivating motive for the perception of a work of art. The meeting point of the author and the perceiving subject is the style, which acts as evidence of authorship, belonging to an era, nationality, culture, art form. Style is a kind of core of the artistic process as a whole. The organic nature of the style, its indisputable unity with the entire formal and substantive structure of the work distinguish truly great works of art.
Thus, any work of art can be represented as an objectively existing reality, which has an appropriate material shell and structure.

The world of a literary work is always a conditional world created with the help of fiction, although reality serves as its “conscious” material. A work of art is always connected with reality and at the same time is not identical to it. V.G. Belinsky wrote: "Art is a reproduction of reality, created, as it were, a newly created world." Creating the world of the work, the writer structures it, placing it in a certain time and space. D.S. Likhachev noted that "the transformation of reality is connected with the idea of the work"60, and the task of the researcher is to see this transformation in the objective world. Life is both material reality and the life of the human spirit; that which is, that which was and will be, that which is "possible by virtue of probability or necessity" (Aristotle). It is impossible to understand the nature of art if one does not ask a philosophical question, what is it - "the whole world", is this phenomenon integral, how can it be recreated? After all, the most important task of the artist, according to I.-V. Goethe, "master the whole world and find expression for it."

A work of art is an internal unity of content and form. Content and form are inextricably linked concepts. The more complex the content, the richer the form should be. The variety of content can also be judged by the artistic form.

The categories "content" and "form" were developed in German classical aesthetics. Hegel argued that "the content of art is the ideal, and its form is a sensual figurative embodiment." In the interpenetration of the "ideal" and "image" Hegel saw the creative specificity of art. The leading pathos of his teaching is the subordination of all the details of the image, and above all the subject, to a certain spiritual content. The integrity of the work arises from the creative concept. The unity of a work is understood as the subordination of all its parts, details to the idea: it is internal, not external.

Form and content of literature- "fundamental literary concepts that generalize in themselves ideas about the external and internal aspects of a literary work and, at the same time, rely on the philosophical categories of form and content." In reality, form and content cannot be separated, for form is nothing but content in its directly perceived being, and content is nothing but the inner meaning of the form given to it. In the process of analyzing the content and form of literary works, its external and internal sides are distinguished, which are in organic unity. Content and form are inherent in any phenomenon of nature and society: each of them has external, formal elements and internal, meaningful ones.

Content and form have a complex multi-stage structure. For example, the external organization of speech (style, genre, composition, meter, rhythm, intonation, rhyme) acts as a form in relation to the internal artistic meaning. In turn, the meaning of speech is a form of plot, and the plot is a form embodying characters and circumstances, and they appear as a form of manifestation of an artistic idea, a deep holistic meaning of a work. Form is the living flesh of content.

Content can only exist in matter, in the form. Any change in form is at the same time a change in content, and vice versa. The division is fraught with the danger of mechanical division (then the form is only a shell of the content). The study of a work as an organic unity of content and form, the understanding of form as content, and content as formed is a difficult task.

Concept pair " content and form” has firmly established itself in theoretical poetics. Even Aristotle singled out in his "Poetics" "what" (the subject of the image) and "how" (the means of the image). Form and content are philosophical categories. “Form I call the essence of the being of every thing,” wrote Aristotle.

Fiction is a set of literary works, each of which is an independent whole.

There is another approach to the unity of the work - an axiological one, in which questions come to the fore about whether it was possible to coordinate the parts and the whole, to motivate this or that detail, because the more complex the composition of the artistic whole (multi-linearity of the plot, an extensive system of characters, change time and place of action), the more difficult the task for the writer.

Horace advised:

The strength and charm of order, I think, lies in the fact that the writer Knows exactly what should be said where, and everything else - after, Where what goes; so that the creator of the poem knows what to take, what to throw away, Only so that he is not generous with words, but also stingy and picky.

Boileau also argued the need for a holistic unity of the work:

The poet should place everything thoughtfully,

Beginning and end into a single stream to merge And, subordinating the words to their undeniable power, Artfully combine disparate parts.

A deep substantiation of the unity of a literary work was developed in aesthetics. A work of art is an analogue of nature for I. Kant, because the integrity of phenomena is, as it were, repeated in the integrity of artistic images: "Beautiful art is such art, which at the same time appears to us by nature." The substantiation of the unity of a literary work as a criterion of its aesthetic perfection is given in Hegel’s Aesthetics, in which the beautiful in art is “higher” than the beautiful in nature, since in art there are no (should not be!) Details that are not connected with a number of details, but the essence of artistic creativity and consists in the process of “cleansing” phenomena from features that do not reveal its essence, in creating a form corresponding to the content.

An example of an exemplary philological analysis of a work of art is “The experience of form analysis” B.A. Larina. The outstanding philologist called his method “spectral analysis”, the purpose of which is “to reveal what is “given” in the writer’s text, in all its fluctuating depth.” Let us give as an example the elements of his analysis of M. Sholokhov's story "The Fate of a Man":

“Here, for example, from his (Andrey Sokolov) memories of parting at the station on the day of departure for the front: I broke away from Irina. He took her face in his hands, kissed her, and her lips were like ice.

What a significant word "broke off" in this situation and in this context: and "broke out" from her convulsive embrace, shocked by his wife's death anxiety; and "torn away" from the native family, native home, like a leaf picked up by the wind and carried away away from its branch, tree, forest; and rushed away, overpowered, suppressed tenderness - tormented by a lacerated wound ...

"I took her face in my palms" - in these words both the rude caress of the hero "with foolish strength" next to his small, fragile wife, and the elusive image of farewell to the deceased in the coffin, generated by the last words: "... and her lips, like ice".

Andrey Sokolov speaks even more unpretentiously, as if quite awkwardly, simply about his mental catastrophe - about the consciousness of captivity:

Oh, brother, this is not an easy thing to understand that you are in captivity not of your own free will. Whoever has not experienced this in their own skin, you will not immediately enter into the soul, so that it humanly reaches him what this thing means.

“Understand” here is not only “to comprehend what was not clear”, but also “to assimilate to the end, without a shadow of a doubt”, “to be established by reflection in something essential for peace of mind”. The following selectively rude words explain this word in a bodily tangible way. Sparing with words, Andrey Sokolov seems to be repeating himself here, but you can’t immediately say it in such a way that “humanly it comes down” to each of those “who have not experienced this in their own skin” ”

This means the ultimate ordering of the form of a work in relation to its content as an aesthetic object.

M. Bakhtin argued that the art form does not make sense without its inseparable connection with the content, and operated on the concept of "substantial form". Artistic content is embodied in the whole work. Yu.M. Lotman wrote: “The idea is not contained in any, even well-chosen quotations, but is expressed in the entire artistic structure. The researcher sometimes does not understand this and looks for an idea in individual quotations; he is like a person who, having learned that a house has a plan, would begin to break down the walls in search of a place where this plan is walled up. The plan is not walled up in the walls, but implemented in the proportions of the building. The plan is the architect's idea, and the structure of the building is its realization."

A literary work is a holistic picture of life (in epic and dramatic works) or some kind of holistic experience (in lyrical works). Each work of art, according to V.G. Belinsky - "it is a holistic, self-contained world." D.S. Merezhkovsky gave a high appraisal to Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina", arguing that ""Anna Karenina" as a complete artistic whole is the most perfect of L. Tolstoy's works. In "War and World" he wanted, perhaps more, but did not achieve: and we saw that one of the main characters, Napoleon, did not succeed at all. In "Anna Karenina" - everything, or almost everything, succeeded; here, and only here, the artistic genius of L. Tolstoy reached its highest point, to complete self-control, to the final balance between design and execution. If ever he was stronger, then, in any case, he has never been more perfect, neither before nor after.

The holistic unity of a work of art is determined by a single author's intention and appears in all the complexity of the depicted events, characters, thoughts. A true work of art is a unique artistic world with its own content and with a form that expresses this content. The artistic reality objectified in the text is the form.

The inseparable connection between content and artistic form is the criterion(Other Greek kgkegup - sign, indicator) artistry of the work. This unity is determined by the socio-aesthetic integrity of the literary work.

The only possible form of embodiment of the content of life is the word, and any word becomes artistically significant when it begins to convey not only factual, but also conceptual, subtextual information. All these three types of information are complicated by aesthetic information.

The content is expressed through all sides of the form (system of images, plot, language). Thus, the content of the work appears primarily in the relationship of characters (characters), which are found in the events (plot). It is not easy to achieve complete unity of content and form. A.P. wrote about the difficulty of this. Chekhov: “You need to write a story for 5-6 days and think about it all the time while you are writing ... It is necessary that each phrase lie in the brain for two days and get oiled ... The manuscripts of all real masters are soiled, crossed out along and across, worn and covered with patches, in turn crossed out ... ".

Literary theory

In literary theory The problem of content and form is considered in two aspects: in the aspect of reflecting objective reality, when life acts as a content (object), and an artistic image as a form (a form of knowledge). Thanks to this, we can find out the place and role of fiction in a number of other ideological forms - politics, religions, mythology, etc.

Hegel wrote in Logic: "Form is content, and in its developed definiteness it is the law of phenomena." Hegel's philosophical formula: "Content is nothing but the transition of form, and form is nothing but the transition of content into form." It warns us against a rough, simplified understanding of the complex, mobile, dialectical unity of the categories of form and content in general, and in the field of art in particular. It is important to understand that the boundary between content and form is not a spatial concept, but a logical one. The relationship of content and form is not the relationship of the whole and the part, the core and the shell, the inner and the outer, the quantity and quality, it is the relationship of opposites, passing into each other. L.S. Vygotsky in his book The Psychology of Art analyzes the composition of I. Bunin's short story Easy Breathing and reveals its "basic psychological law": about worldly turbidity "into" a story about easy breathing. He remarks: “The true theme of the story is not the story of the confused life of a provincial schoolgirl, but light breathing, a feeling of liberation and lightness, reflected ™ and the perfect transparency of life, which cannot be taken out of the events themselves,” which are connected in such a way that they lose their worldly burden; "complex temporal permutations turn the story of the life of a frivolous girl into the light breath of Bunin's story." He formulated the law of destruction by the form of content, which can be illustrated: the very first episode, which tells about the death of Olya Meshcherskaya, relieves the tension that the reader would experience upon learning about the murder of the girl, as a result of which the climax ceased to be a climax, the emotional coloring of the episode was extinguished . She was “lost” among the calm description of the platform, the crowd of people and the officer who came, “lost” and the most important word “shot”: the very structure of this phrase drowns out the shot.

The distinction between content and form is necessary at the initial stage of studying works, at the stage of analysis.

Analysis(Greek analysis - decomposition, dismemberment) literary - the study of the parts and elements of the work, as well as the relationships between them.

There are many methods work analysis. The most theoretically substantiated and universal is the analysis proceeding from the category of “substantial form” and revealing the functionality of the form in relation to the content.

Each form element has its own specific “meaning”. Form is not something independent; the form is, in fact, the content. Perceiving the form, we comprehend the content. A. Bushmin wrote about the difficulty of scientific analysis of the artistic image in the unity of content and form: "And there is still no other way out, how to deal with the analysis," splitting "of unity in the name of its subsequent synthesis."

It is appropriate to recall Sasha Cherny's poem about the unity of content and form:

Some shout: “What is the form? Trivia!

When slurry is poured into crystal -

Will the crystal become infinitely lower?

Others object: “Fools!

And the best wine in the night vessel

Decent people won't drink."

They can’t solve the dispute ... but it’s a pity!

After all, you can pour wine into crystal.

The ideal of literary analysis will always remain such a study of a work of art that captures the nature of interpenetrating ideological and figurative unity to the greatest extent.

The form in poetry (as opposed to the prose form) is naked, addressed to the physical senses of the reader (listener) and considers a number of "conflicts" that form the poetic form, which can be:

lexico-semantic:
1) a word in speech - a word in verse;
2) a word in a sentence - a word in a verse (a word in a sentence is perceived in the flow of speech, in a verse it tends to be emphasized);
intonation-sound:
1) between meter and rhythm;
2) between meter and syntax.

I am a page to your pen.

I will accept everything. I am white page.

I am the keeper of your good:

I will return and return a hundredfold.

I am a village, black earth.

You are my ray and rain moisture.

You are the Lord and Master, and I am

Chernozem and white paper.

The compositional core of this poem is the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person. In stanza 1, their opposition is outlined: I - yours (twice in verses 1 and 3); in the second stanza it reaches full distinctness: I am you, you are me. You are at the beginning of the verse, I am at the end before a pause with a sharp transfer.

The contrast of "white" and "black" (paper - earth) reflects metaphors that are close and at the same time opposite to each other: a woman in love is a page of white paper; it captures the thought of the one who is Lord and Lord for it (passivity of reflection), and in the second metaphor - the activity of creativity. “I of a woman combines black and white, opposites that materialize in grammatical genders:

I am a page (w)

I am the keeper (m)

I am a village, black earth (f)

I am black soil (m)

The same applies to the second pronoun, and it combines contrasts materialized in the grammatical gender:

You are my ray and rain moisture.

We can also find a roll call of close and at the same time opposite words in such actually close, compared with each other words, such as the verbs: I will increase and In about the return, and nouns: Lord and Lord.

All material elements - words, sentences, stanzas - are semantized to a greater or lesser extent, become elements of content: "The unity of content and form - how often do we use this formula that sounds like a spell, use it, do not think about its real meaning! Meanwhile, in relation to poetry, this unity is of particular importance. In poetry, everything without exception turns out to be content - each, even the most insignificant element of form builds meaning, expresses it: the size, location and nature of rhyme, the ratio of phrase and line, the ratio of vowels and consonants, the length of words and sentences, and much more ... ”- notes E. Etkind.

You went ra-ra-ra to another world...

You have gone to another world...

You have gone, Seryozha, to another world ... - this line is false.

You have gone irrevocably to another world - unless someone died turning. You have gone, Yesenin, to another world - this is too serious.

You have gone, as they say, into another world - the final design.

“The last line is true, “as they say”, without being a direct mockery, it subtly reduces the pathos of the verse and at the same time eliminates all suspicions about the author’s belief in all afterlife nonsense,” V. Mayakovsky notes.

Conclusion: on the one hand, we are talking about working on the form of verse, about choosing a rhythm, word, expression. But Mayakovsky is also working on the content. He does not just choose the size, but strives to make the line "sublime", and this is a semantic category, not a formal one. It replaces words in a line not just to more accurately or more vividly express a pre-prepared thought, but also to create this thought. By changing the form (size, word), Mayakovsky thereby changes the content of the line (ultimately, the poem as a whole).

On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night...

Pushkin originally wrote:

Everything is quiet. The night shadow fell on the Caucasus...

Everything is quiet. The darkness of the night is coming to the Caucasus...

The concept of content and form lit. works and their relationship.

Content- this is the meaning of the work, embodied in a special, figurative form. The study of various aspects of the content leads from superficial, shallow judgments about the material chosen by the writer to a true understanding of the ideas, moods, worldview of the writer expressed in the work. There are three aspects to the content of a literary work: theme (subject, i.e. a set of topics) problem (problematics, i.e. a set of problems) and author's position.

The form is a way of detecting the content of literary works. The content of a work is always framed in some way; outside the form, all elements of the content cannot exist.

The literary and artistic form is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Form analysis involves the study of three main aspects of a literary work: subject representation, composition, and speech structure of the work.

Object depiction - the first component of the form - these are all life phenomena depicted by the writer. The range of these phenomena can be extremely wide: events that really took place in life and fictional, relationships between people, participants in events with their biographies, the material world.

Composition is the second component of the form. The analysis of composition involves the study of the relationship between all sides of the form. It is the composition that clarifies the writer's intention, the "plan" implemented in the work.

The specificity of literature as an art form is manifested in the third component of the form - the speech structure of the work. Language is the material of verbal creativity. Language is, as it were, an analogue of the colors of a painter, the sounds of a musician, the bronze of a sculptor, any material from which people create works of art. The form of literary works distinguishes literature from all other types of speech activity: an information message, a journalistic or scientific article, an abstract, a report, etc. About man and the world around him can be said in different ways; the writer speaks about him in such a way that, even repeating himself, echoing one of his predecessors or contemporaries, remains unique and unrepeatable. After all, the thoughts and feelings that the writer expressed in his work are inseparable from the new art form he created, which is unique to him.

Theme, idea, problem lit. works. Eternal themes. Cultural and historical aspect of topics.

A work of art is a system, the center of which is the ideological and thematic content. Topic text (from the ancient Greek thema - “what is given is the basis”) is a concept that indicates which side of life the author pays attention to in his work, i.e. the subject of the image. To formulate a topic, you need to answer the question: “What is this work about?”. Very often the theme of the work is reflected in its title.

Unlike the topic problem is not a nomination of any phenomenon of life, but a formulation of the contradiction associated with this life phenomenon. In other words, a problem is a question that the author is trying to answer in his work, an aspect in which the topic is considered. For example, in the play "Woe from Wit" the problem of mind and happiness is posed.

Idea(from the Greek word "idea" - what is seen) - the main idea of a literary work, the author's tendency to reveal the topic, the answer to the questions posed in the text - in other words, what the work was written for. M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin called the idea the soul of the work. The idea is always subjective (because it bears the imprint of the author's personality, his aesthetic and ethical views, likes and dislikes) and figurative (that is, it is expressed not in a rational way, but through images, it permeates the entire work). The idea is not presented in the artistic text explicitly, that is, clearly; to see it, to understand it, it is necessary to analyze the text in detail and deeply. If a work of literature was created by a great master, then it will be distinguished by the richness of its ideological content.

Thus, the theme, the problem and the idea are the elementary components of three different, albeit interconnected, levels of the artistic content of a literary work. The first - the subject-thematic content of the work - is its building material; the second - problematics - organizes this largely "raw" material into a single artistic and aesthetic construction of the whole; the third - the ideological and aesthetic concept - completes this artistically organized unity with a system of authorial conclusions and assessments of an ideological nature.

Depicting the phenomena of life in his work, the author expresses his attitude to the subject of the image using different kindspathos (from the Greek pathos - inspiration, passion, suffering), or copyright types emotionality : heroics, romance, tragedy, comedy, etc. Heroic pathos consists in affirming the greatness of the feat of an individual or a group of people. For example, in the odes of M.V. Lomonosov, a poem by A.S. Pushkin "Poltava" created the image of Peter I, surrounded by a heroic halo. tragic pathos associated with the image of acute internal contradictions and the struggle taking place in the mind and soul of a person. Trag. pathos finds expression in Lermontov's poem "Mtsyri": the reader becomes a witness of a deep contradiction between romance. a thirst for freedom, Mtsyri's aspiration to the "wonderful world of anxieties and battles" and the inability to find a way into this world, the consciousness of his weakness, doom. Kinds comic - satire, sarcasm, irony, humor. Humor(from English humor - humor, disposition, mood) - this is a special kind of comic in which the author combines comic. image of an object or phenomenon with inner seriousness. species comic are also irony and sarcasm. Irony is a form of the comic that suggests superiority or condescension, skepticism or derision. Sarcasm- this is the highest degree of irony, a judgment containing a caustic, caustic mockery of the depicted. Sentimental pathos. Sentimentality literally translated from French means sensitivity. This is spiritual tenderness, caused by the awareness of moral virtues in the characters of people who are socially humiliated or associated with an immoral privileged environment. In lit. works, sentimentality has an ideological and affirmative orientation. Romantically pathos- the rise of romantic self-awareness is caused by the aspiration to the ideal of civil freedom. This is an enthusiastic state of mind, caused by the desire for a lofty ideal. A romantic hero is always tragic, he does not accept reality, is at odds with himself, he is a rebel and a victim.

CATHARSIS(from Greek - purification, clarification, liberation of the soul from the burdensome and unnecessary, and the body from harmful substances) - a term introduced by Aristotle in "Poetics" associated with his doctrine of tragedy and denoting the spiritual relaxation of the viewer, who, empathizing with the events unfolding in tragedy, feels compassion for the heroes of the play, genuine fear for their fate. This excitement leads the viewer to catharsis, that is, it cleanses his soul, elevates him above the surrounding reality, and ultimately has a profound educational effect on him.

Composition lit. works and its elements.

Composition - the construction of a work of art, due to its content, character and purpose, and largely determining its perception. Composition is the most important, organizing component of the artistic form, giving unity and integrity to the work, subordinating its elements to each other and to the whole. Composition organizes the entire artistic form of the text and operates at all levels: the figurative system, the system of characters, artistic speech, plot and conflict, extra-plot elements.

The composition of a literary work is based on such an important category of text as connectedness.

Types of composition.

1.Ring 2.Mirror 3.Linear 4.Default 5.Flashback 6.Free 7.Open etc.

Composition types.

1. Simple (linear). 2. Complex (transformational).

The composition includes the arrangement of characters, their system (in epic and dramatic works); the order of reporting events in the plot (plot composition); alternation of plot and extra-plot components of the narrative, change of narrative techniques in epic works (author's speech, first-person narrative, dialogues and monologues of characters, various types of descriptions: landscapes, portraits, interiors), as well as the ratio of chapters, parts, stanzas, speech revolutions.

The elements of the composition of a literary work include epigraphs, dedications, prologues, epilogues, parts, chapters, acts, phenomena, scenes, prefaces and afterwords of "publishers" (non-plot images created by the author's imagination), dialogues, monologues, episodes, insert stories and episodes, letters , songs; all artistic descriptions - portraits, landscapes, interiors - are also compositional elements.

literary forms

literary forms- groups of literary works, united by one or another formal and only formal properties (as opposed to literary genres, the selection of which is based on a combination of formal and meaningful features). The boundary between forms and genres is permeable and historically changeable: for example, the sonnet, which in the early stages of its existence gravitated towards genre nature (i.e., to a fairly certain range of topics and images), by the 20th century retained only some elements of the formal structure (14 poetic lines with a certain strophic pattern), while monostych, initially characterized by a single formal feature (one-line poem), in the work of Vladimir Vishnevsky acquires the properties of the author's genre. Disputes between supporters of the formal and genre understanding of haiku have accompanied this type of poetic miniature throughout the history of its existence in the Western literary tradition.

Due to the greater conventionality, canonization of form in poetry, formal grouping is easier than in prose. At the same time, we can talk about literary forms in dramaturgy (for example, one-act plays in their opposition to multi-act ones or mono-pieces, in contrast to plays with a large number of characters). Literary forms should also include such a phenomenon as a palindrome (in those cases when it is an author's work of art, and not a separate palindromic word that exists in the language), since a palindromic text can be both poetic and prose.

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