Plot as a form of a work of art 1 page

After the substantive detailing, it is most logical to continue talking about the form, keeping in mind its most important element - the plot. According to popular ideas in science, the plot is formed by the characters and the author's thought organized by their interactions. The classic formula in this regard is M. Gorky's position on the plot: "... connections, contradictions, sympathies, antipathies and, in general, the relationship of people - the history of growth and organization of one or another character, type." In the normative theory of literature, this position is developed in every possible way. It says that the plot is the development of action in an epic work, where artistic types are certainly present and where there are such elements of action as intrigue and conflict. The plot here acts as the central element of the composition with its beginning, climax, and denouement. This whole composition is motivated by the logic of characters with their background (prologue of the work) and completion (epilogue). Only in this way, by establishing genuine internal connections between plot and character, can one determine the aesthetic quality of the text and the degree of its artistic truthfulness. To do this, you should carefully look into the logic of the author's thought. Unfortunately, this is not always done. But let's look at a school example. In Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? there is one of the plot climaxes: Lopukhov commits an imaginary suicide. He motivates this by saying that he does not want to interfere with the happiness of his wife Vera Pavlovna and friend Kirsanov. Such an explanation follows from the utopian idea of ​​"reasonable egoism" put forward by the writer and philosopher: one cannot build one's happiness on the misfortune of others. But why does the hero of the novel choose this way of resolving the "love triangle"? Fear of public opinion, which can condemn the breakup of the family? It is strange: after all, the book is dedicated to "new people" who, according to the logic of their internal state, should not take this opinion into account. But in this case it was more important for the writer and thinker to show the omnipotence of his theory, to present it as a panacea for all difficulties. And the result was not a romantic, but an illustrative resolution of the conflict - in the spirit of a romantic utopia. And because "What to do?" - far from realistic.

But let us return to the question of the connection between subject and plot details, that is, the details of the action. Plot theorists have provided an abundance of examples of this connection. So, the character from Gogol's story "The Overcoat" of the tailor Petrovich has a snuff box, on the lid of which the general is painted, but there is no face - it is pierced with a finger and sealed with a piece of paper (as if the personification of bureaucracy). Anna Akhmatova speaks of a "significant person" in the same "Overcoat": this is the chief of the gendarmes Benkendorf, after a conversation with which Pushkin's friend, the poet A. Delvig, the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, died (the conversation concerned Delvig's poem about the revolution of 1830). In Gogol's story, as you know, after a conversation with the general, Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin dies. Akhmatova read in her lifetime edition: "a significant person got into the sleigh" (Benckendorff rode standing). Among other things, these examples show that plots, as a rule, are taken from life. Art critic N. Dmitrieva criticizes L. Vygotsky, a well-known psychologist, referring to the words of Grillparzer, who speaks of the miracle of art that turns grapes into wine. Vygotsky talks about turning the water of life into the wine of art, but water cannot be turned into wine, but grapes can. This is the revelation of the real, the knowledge of life. E. Dobin and other plot theorists give numerous examples of the transformation of real events into fictional plots. The plot of the same "Overcoat" is based on the story of an official heard by the writer, to whom colleagues presented a Lepage gun. Sailing on a boat, he did not notice how it caught on the reeds and sank. The official died of frustration. Everyone who listened to this story laughed, and Gogol sat sadly thinking - probably, in his mind a story arose about an official who died due to the loss of not a luxury item, but an overcoat necessary in winter Petersburg.

Very often it is in the plot that the psychological evolution of the character is most fully represented. "War and Peace" by Tolstoy, as you know, is an epic story about the collective, "swarm" and individualistic, "Napoleonic" consciousness. This is precisely the essence of Tolstoy's artistic characterology in relation to the images of Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov. Prince Andrei in his early youth dreamed of his Toulon (the place where Bonaparte began his career). And now Prince Andrei lies wounded on the field of Austerlitz. He sees and hears how Napoleon walks across the field between the corpses and, stopping near one, says: "What a beautiful death." This seems to Bolkonsky false, pictorial, and here begins the gradual disappointment of our hero in Napoleonism. Further development of his inner world, complete liberation from illusions and selfish hopes. And his evolution ends with the words that the truth of Timokhin and the soldiers is dear to him.

A careful consideration of the connection between subject details and the plot helps to reveal the true meaning of an artistic creation, its universality, and richness in content. In Turgenology, for example, there is a point of view according to which the writer's famous cycle "Notes of a Hunter" is an artistic essay that poeticizes peasant types and critically assesses the social life of peasant families, sympathizing with children. However, it is worth looking at one of the most popular stories in this series, "Bezhin Meadow", as the incompleteness of such a view of the writer's artistic world becomes obvious. It seems mysterious a sharp metamorphosis in the impressions of the gentleman, returning from hunting at dusk, about the change of state in nature, which appears to his gaze: clear, calm, suddenly becomes foggy and frightening. There is no obvious, worldly motivation here. In the same way, similar abrupt changes are represented in the reaction of children sitting by the fire to what is happening in the night: easily cognizable, calmly perceived, abruptly turns into obscure, even into some kind of devilry. Of course, the story contains all the above motifs of the "Hunter's Notes". But there is no doubt that we must remember the German philosophy that Turgenev studied while in German universities. He returned to Russia under the influence of materialistic, Feuerbachian, and idealistic, Kantian ideas with their "thing in itself". And this mixture of the knowable and the unknowable in the writer's philosophical thinking is illustrated in his fictional plots.

The connection of the plot with its real source is an obvious thing. Plot theorists are more interested in actual artistic "prototypes" of plots. All world literature is mainly based on such continuity between artistic plots. It is known that Dostoevsky drew attention to Kramskoy's painting "The Contemplator": a winter forest, a peasant in bast shoes is standing, "contemplating" something; he will leave everything, go to Jerusalem, having previously burned his native village. Just such is Yakov Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; he will also do something similar, but somehow in a lackey way. Servantism is, as it were, predetermined by major historical circumstances. In the same novel by Dostoevsky, the Inquisitor speaks of people: they will be timid and cuddle up to us, like "chicks to a hen" (Smerdyakov cuddles like a lackey to Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov). Chekhov said about the plot: "I need my memory to filter the plot and that in it, as in a filter, only what is important or typical remains." What is so important in the plot? The process of influence of the plot, characterized by Chekhov, allows us to say that its basis is the conflict and the through action in it. It, this cross-cutting action, is an artistic reflection of the philosophical law, according to which the struggle of contradictions not only underlies the process of development of all phenomena, but also necessarily permeates each process from its beginning to its end. M. Gorky said: "Drama must be strictly and through and through effective." Through action is the main operating spring of the work. It is directed towards the general, central idea, towards the "super task" of the work (Stanislavsky). If there is no through action, all pieces of the play exist separately from each other, without any hope of coming to life (Stanislavsky). Hegel said: “Since a colliding action violates some opposing side, by this discord it causes an opposite force against itself, which it attacks, and as a result, a reaction is directly connected with the action. Only together with this action and counteraction did the ideal for the first time become completely definite and mobile "in a work of art. Stanislavsky believed that counteraction should also be through. Without all this, works are boring and gray. Hegel, however, was wrong in defining the tasks of art where there is conflict. He wrote that the task of art is that it "carries out before our eyes the split and the struggle associated with it only temporarily, so that through the resolution of conflicts, harmony will be obtained from this split as a result." This is not true because, say, the struggle between the new and the old in the field of history and psychology is uncompromising. In our history of culture there have been cases of following this Hegelian concept, often naive and false. In the film "Star" based on the novel by E. Kazakevich, suddenly dead scouts with Lieutenant Travkin at the head, to the amazement of the audience, "come to life". Instead of an optimistic tragedy, it turned out to be a sentimental drama. In this regard, I would like to recall the words of two famous cultural figures of the middle of the 20th century. The famous German writer I. Becher said: "What gives the work the necessary tension? Conflict. What excites interest? Conflict. What moves us forward - in life, in literature, in all areas of knowledge? Conflict. The deeper, the more significant the conflict, the deeper "The more significant its resolution, the deeper, the more significant the poet. When does the sky of poetry shine most brightly? After a thunderstorm. After a conflict." The outstanding film director A. Dovzhenko said: "Guided by false motives, we removed suffering from our creative palette, forgetting that it is the same great certainty of being as happiness and joy. We replaced it with something like overcoming difficulties ... We are so we want a beautiful, bright life, that we sometimes think of what we passionately desire and expect, as if realized, forgetting that suffering will always be with us, as long as a person is alive on earth, as long as he loves, rejoices, creates.Only the social causes of suffering will disappear The strength of suffering will be determined not so much by the oppression of any external circumstances, but by the depth of the shocks.

The plot arises naturally from the idea of ​​the author. Where there is a logic of connection between ideas and plot and details, there is true art. If Dostoevsky sees the world as monstrous and crime in it, according to the general idea, is a deviation from the norm, for the writer it is the norm itself. That is why criminal actions are so frequent in his artistic plots. Precisely because for Turgenev the moral resolution of all clashes can be an appeal to some moderate golden mean, Turgenev does not like either the extreme aristocracy of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov or the radicalism of Bazarov. That is why the final resolution of all conflicts for him takes place not in a collision (ideological and social clash), but in an intrigue (a private, intimate situation). Tolstoy, on the other hand, has social and moral evaluation criteria side by side, therefore, at the same time, his unjust trial of Katyusha Maslova in Resurrection is motivated by the moral qualities of the judges, they condemn Katyusha because they think selfishly about themselves (about their mistresses and wives). On the other hand, this trial is disgusting to Tolstoy, because the well-fed judge the poor (the boy who stole the rugs).

Sometimes, instead of the concept of plot, the concept of plot is used. Some scholars dispute the need for the existence of the latter term, but since there is a discrepancy between plot actions and their chronological sequence in literary texts (as, for example, in Lermontov's novel "A Hero of Our Time", where the beginning of the main plot is placed in the middle of the entire composition of the novel), there is a need keep this term and say: if the plot is the details of the action, then the plot is the order of the episodes of the plot in the course of the narrative.

Artistic speech

There are two approaches to the study of the language of works of art: linguistic and literary criticism. Between the representatives of these philological disciplines for a long time there is a scientific controversy. An outstanding philologist of the 20th century, academician V.V. Vinogradov, put the linguistic principle as the basis for the study of artistic speech. He connects the development of various stylistic features with the development of the national literary language and the development of the creative method as a substantive category, giving priority to the literary language in its national meaning. He objected to some literary critics, and among them the most convincing - Professor GN Pospelov. The latter believed that the national literary language in the 30s-40s of the XIX century, for example, was one, and the use of rich stylistic means was diverse (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky), although all these writers were realists. Where does this difference come from? From the specifics of the content of their literary texts, from creative typing, from the peculiarities of the emotionally evaluating consciousness. The speech of a work of art is always specifically expressive and, in the final analysis, is conditioned precisely by the peculiarities of the content of the work. The literary language (as well as non-literary dialects) is a living source of possible stylistic colors, from which each writer takes what he needs. There is no stylistic norm here. Therefore, V. Vinogradov is not quite right when he says. that "The Queen of Spades" and "The Captain's Daughter" are higher in realism than "Eugene Onegin", because they have less "exoticism and folk-regional expressions." He is not entirely accurate, stating that the works of the writers of the "natural school" of the 1940s and 1950s (Dostoevsky, Pleshcheev, Palm, Nekrasov) created for the first time properly realistic styles, as they began to apply sharp methods of social-speech, professional typification. The writers of the "natural school" reflected in their work the democratic tendencies of the time (and in language), but they were not more profound realists than their predecessors. They were interested in the social lower classes and presented their speech features, but due to their lesser talent, some of them did not achieve the typification that was characteristic of their predecessors.

The literary principle, which implies that one or another artistic style is determined by specific semantic tasks, explains why authors, as a rule, carefully choose the words that make up the character's speech structure. Most often in characterology, a speech feature, even in small details, helps to understand the character. Moreover, the speech features of the characters "suggest" the genre definition of the text. So, in the play by A.N. Ostrovsky "Our people - we'll settle" the heroine Olimpiada Samsonovna, or simply Lipochka, appears in a strange mixture of the most disparate elements of her language: either the usual form of speech, reduced to everyday jargon, or the language that claims to be evidence of education heroines. Here is the source and motive of the genre definition of the play: comedy. The latter, as you know, represents the contradiction between the internal and external in man. An opposite example is the speech of another heroine in the work of Ostrovsky - Katerina from the play "Thunderstorm". Here the character is sublime, the image of a woman gravitating towards inner freedom is romantic to a certain extent, and therefore her language is full of elements of folklore aesthetics. Therefore, she perceives her seeming moral fall as a betrayal of God and, as a whole person, punishes herself for this, voluntarily leaving life. Therefore, the play can be called a tragedy.

The literary critic G. Gukovsky believed that the "morphology" of a work of art should not include the so-called "extra" words: every verbal detail, every feature of style should "work" for the idea of ​​the work. This, as it were, agrees with Chekhov's famous thesis "Brevity is the sister of talent" and, in general, the cult of laconism accepted in criticism and literary science. However, the thesis about "superfluous" words cannot be understood in a simplified way. Known in the history of world literature are countless examples of "Aesopian speech" and all sorts of lengths dictated either by censorship considerations or by the rules of speech decency. Paradoxically, this idea was expressed in half-joking verses by E. Yevtushenko:

"Hide superfluous words

The essence of the secret nature -

Queen of thread in yarn.

And Vinokurov to us for a long time

Said it was too much

Even necessary.

Imagine if I'm straight

That will come out indecent,

When, a man, not a weakling,

All at once in Russian three words

I'll say it succinctly."

The general rule when considering a word in a work of art is understanding the context of the speech element. The well-known literary theorist L.I. Timofeev gave an example of the diversity of contexts for one word in Pushkin's texts. "Wait," Salieri says to Mozart, who is drinking wine with poison. "Wait," whispers a young gypsy to Zemfira. "Wait," Aleko shouts to the young man, striking him with a dagger. Each time the word is heard differently; it is necessary to find its systemic connections with everything that happens in the work.

How to start systematizing verbal forms in art? it would seem, from the dictionary, from the vocabulary. However, remembering that literature is the highest form of the beautiful, is the aesthetic quality of human thinking, it is most convincing to start this systematization with semantics or stylistic imagery, because imagery is a specific quality of art. It is known that the meaning of words in history often changes. "Table" in the Old Russian language is not at all the same as in the modern one; compare: "the capital city", "captured the Kyiv table". The part of linguistics that studies the meanings of words and the evolution of these meanings is called semantics. In a poetic work, changes occur constantly, and this allows us to talk about poetic semantics. Words used in a figurative sense are tropes. What exactly the meaning of the phrase is - you can find out in the context: "I ate porridge", "the performance represented porridge", "the car turned into porridge when it fell" - it is clear that in the second and third cases the word "porridge" exists in a figurative sense. In Fet's poem: "Spruce covered my path with a sleeve" - ​​no one will take the sleeve literally. Tropes also occur in everyday speech: Ivan Petrovich - a smart head, golden hands, a mountain stream runs. But there are tropes that are natural in literary speech. They are differentiated: stable, which have entered into popular use and are constantly used by writers, and unstable, newly formed, not yet included in popular use, but quite motivated.

One of the most common tropes is a metaphor based on the similarity of two objects or concepts, where, unlike the usual two-term comparison, only one member is given - the result of the comparison, that with which it is compared: "The east burns a new dawn." In this case, the comparison that became the basis of the replacement is implied and can be easily substituted (for example, "the bright light of the morning dawn gives the impression that the east is on fire"). This way of expressing familiar phenomena enhances their artistic effect, makes them perceived more sharply than in practical speech. For a writer who resorts to metaphors, the phraseological connections in which the author includes words are of great importance. For example, in Mayakovsky: "The cavalry of witticisms froze, raising their rhyming peaks." "Cavalry", of course, is not used here in the literal terminological sense.

Metaphors are classifiable. There are metaphors personifying: bad weather broke out, a lucky bond number, the sky frowns - that is, processes in nature are likened to the state, actions and properties of people or animals. Another type is materializing metaphors: a dream was born, burned out of shame - that is, human properties are likened to the properties of material phenomena. You can add: iron will, empty man. There are concrete metaphors when similar parts of different objects are likened to each other: the wings of a mill, a mountain cap, a cap in a newspaper. Abstract metaphors are expressions denoting abstract ideas: a field of social activity, a grain of reasoning, a chain of crimes. All these four types belong to the class of one-term metaphors. There are also binomial ones: he led by the nose, began to work carelessly. Such figurativeness has become firmly established in everyday speech. As for the actual poetic metaphors, the following feature can be noted. The poet uses ordinary metaphors without introducing a new meaning. For example, Nekrasov: "The heart will shrink with a painful thought." Twardowski:

"I am full of undeniable faith,

That life - no matter how fast it runs,

She's not so instant

And it belongs to me."

The second feature is the process by which the writer updates ordinary metaphors in order to enhance their figurativeness. Lermontov: "Rush faster, flying time." And finally. Writers and poets create new metaphors. Gorky: "The sea laughed." Mayakovsky: "Candelabra laugh and neigh." Pushkin: "The Neva tossed about like a sick man in his restless bed." Herzen: "Winter Eyes" of Nicholas I. Each time the author resorts to a metaphor, referring to his goals: elevation or decline. Sometimes the author combines metaphor with literal meaning, and this has its own emotional effect. Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (in Dostoevsky's novel "Demons") went wise: "For twenty years now, I have been sounding the alarm and calling for work. I gave my life to this call and, mad, I believed. Now I no longer believe, but I call and I will call to the end, to the grave I will pull the rope until they ring for my memorial service. The poet creates new metaphors with new semantic shades, which then begin to be widely used as figurative means. Here, for example, is Turgenev's story about love, youth and happy days that quickly passed by - "Spring Waters". There is a figurative-metaphorical meaning in the title itself. Turgenev reveals it in the epigraph (from an old romance): "Jolly years, happy days. They rushed like spring waters." And finally, from the same row. Tvardovsky ("Mothers"):

"And the first noise of the foliage is still incomplete,

And the trail is green on the granular dew,

And the lonely sound of a roll on the river,

And the sad smell of young hay,

And just the sky, blue sky

I am reminded of you every time."

Another important type of trope that constitutes figurativeness is metonymy. It, like a metaphor, is an assimilation of the aspects and phenomena of life. But in metaphor, similar facts are likened to each other. Metonymy, on the other hand, is a word that, in combination with others, expresses the likeness of phenomena adjacent to each other, that is, those that are in any connection with each other. “I didn’t close my eyes all night,” that is, I didn’t sleep. Closing the eyes is outwardly an expression of peace, here the connection of phenomena is obvious. Like a metaphor, this trope lends itself to classification. There are many types of metonymy. For example, there is a likening of an external expression to an internal state: sit back; as well as the above example. There is the metonymy of the place, that is, the assimilation of what is placed somewhere with what contains it: the audience is behaving well, the hall is boiling, the fireplace is burning. In the last two cases, there is a unity of metaphor and metonymy. The metonymy of belonging, that is, the likening of an object to the one to whom it belongs: to read Paustovsky (that is, of course, his books), to ride a cab. Metonymy as likening an action to its tool: to put to fire and sword, that is, to destroy; a lively pen, that is, a lively syllable. Perhaps the most common type of metonymic trope is a synecdoche, when instead of a part the whole is called, and instead of the whole - its part: "All the flags will visit us." We understand that visiting us in a new city - a port on the Baltic Sea - will not be flags as such, but ships from different countries. This stylistic device contributes to the conciseness and expressiveness of artistic speech. The use of synecdoche is one of the features of the art of the word, which requires the presence of imagination, with the help of which the phenomenon characterizes the reader and writer. Strictly speaking, synecdoche in the broadest sense of the word underlies any artistic reproduction of reality associated with a strict, strict selection, even in a novel. In everyday speech, such figurative elements as metonymy are very common, but we often do not notice them: a fur coat from the master's shoulder, the student now went conscious (or unconscious), hey, glasses! Poets either repeat ordinary metonymy: "The Frenchman is a child, he is joking to you" (A. Polezhaev), "Moscow, burned down by fire, is given to the Frenchman" (M. Lermontov). It is clear that we are not talking about one Frenchman. But the most interesting thing, of course, is to find new metonymic formations in literary texts. Lermontov: "Farewell, unwashed Russia and you, blue uniforms." Extensive metonymy also exists in art. They are usually called metonymic paraphrase, this is a whole allegorical turn of speech, which is based on metonymy. Here is a classic example - from "Eugene Onegin":

"He had no desire to rummage

In chronological dust

Genesis of the earth"

(that is, did not want to study history). Perhaps another terminological definition of such a turnover should be sought. The fact is that there is a generic phenomenon in literature that needs to be defined by the word "paraphrase". This phenomenon is commonly erroneously called a parody. In fact, such a paraphrase is not just a metonymic trope, but a kind of satire. Unfortunately, there is no such differentiation in any textbook. Unlike parody, the object of satire in periphrase is a phenomenon that has no direct connection with the content of the work, the form of which is borrowed by the satirist. In such a paraphrase, the poet usually uses the form of the best, popular works, without intending to discredit them: the satirist needs this form in order to enhance the satirical sound of his work by its unusual use. Nekrasov in his poems "It's both boring and sad, and there is no one to cheat at cards in moments of pocket adversity" does not at all intend to ridicule Lermontov. In N. Dobrolyubov's poem "I leave the classroom thoughtfully," Lermontov is also not ridiculed: here we are talking about the reactionary school reform, which was started by the trustee of the Kyiv educational district N.I. Pirogov.

Often the metonymic paraphrase coexists in parallel with the main names in the form of appendices that give a figurative description of what is being described. Here the poet worries about whether every reader understands this kind of imagery, and "accompanies" it with ordinary words. Pushkin:

"And now from the nearest settlement

Ripe young ladies idol,

County mothers joy,

The company commander has arrived."

And again Pushkin:

"But you scattered volumes

From the library of devils

great albums,

Torment of fashionable rhymers".

But, of course, more interesting is the paraphrase, where there is no parallel main name, everyday prosaic speech means. The same Pushkin:

"Did you hear the voice of the night beyond the grove

Singer of love, singer of your sorrow."

The above examples show that tropes in artistic speech very often represent or prepare for broad artistic images that go beyond the boundaries of the proper semantic or stylistic structures. Here, for example, is a kind of allegorical figurativeness, when a whole work or a separate episode is built according to the principles of metaphor. We are talking about a symbol - an image in which the comparison with human life is not expressed directly, but is implied. Here is one of the famous examples - the image of a beaten horse in Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment", a symbol of suffering in general. The lyrical heroes in the poems "Sail" and "Pine" by Lermontov, the Demon in his poem "The Demon", Falcon, Uzh and Petrel by Gorky are represented by the same symbols. How did symbols originate? From direct parallelism in folk song. The birch is leaning - the girl is crying. But then the girl disappeared, and the bowing birch began to be perceived as a symbol of the girl. Symbols are not specific persons, they are generalizations. The symbol has an independent meaning. Already and the Falcon can remain just a falcon and a snake, but if they lose their independent function, they will become an allegory. This is an image that serves only as a means of allegory; it acts more on the mind than on the imagination. Allegories arose in fairy tales about animals - from parallelism. The donkey began to denote stupid people (which, in fact, is unfair), the fox - cunning. So there were fables with "Aesopian" language. It is clear to everyone here that animals are depicted only to convey human relationships. Allegories exist, of course, not only in fairy tales, like those of Saltykov-Shchedrin ("The Eagle-Maecenas", "The Wise Scribbler", "The Sane Hare"), and fables, but also in novels and short stories. One can recall the first three "dreams" of Vera Pavlovna from Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? Dickens says in "Little Dorrit" that the carefree young polyp entered the "Ministry of Roundabouts" in order to be closer to the pie, and it is very well that the purpose and purpose of the ministry is "to protect the pie from the unrecognized."

Nowadays, anyone who would like to understand the nature of art comes across many categories; their number is growing. This is the plot, plot, circumstances, character, style, genre, etc. The question arises: is there no such category that would unite all others - without losing their special meaning? It is enough to put it down to immediately answer: of course, there is, this is a work of art.

Any review of the problems of theory inevitably returns to it. A work of art brings them into one; from it, in fact - from contemplation, reading, acquaintance with it - all the questions that a theoretician or a person simply interested in art can ask, but to him - resolved or unresolved - these questions return, connecting their distant content, revealed by analysis with the same general, albeit now enriched, impression.

In a work of art, all these categories are lost in each other - for the sake of something new and always more meaningful than themselves. In other words, the more there are and the more complex they are, the more pressing and important becomes the question of how an artistic whole, complete in itself, but infinitely expanded into the world, is formed and lives with their help.

It is separated from everything that the categories designate on a fairly simple basis: "complete in itself" remains, although old, but, perhaps, the most accurate definition for this distinction. The fact is that the plot, character, circumstances, genres, styles, etc. -

these are still only the "languages" of art, the image itself is also a "language"; a work is a statement. It uses and creates these "languages" only to the extent and in those qualities that are necessary for the completeness of its thought. A work cannot be repeated, as its elements are repeated. They are only historically changing means, a substantive form; a work is a formalized and not subject to change content. It balances and disappears any means, because they are here to prove something new, not amenable to any other expression. When this new takes and re-creates exactly as many “elements” as are necessary for its justification, then the work will be born. It will grow on the various sides of the image and put into practice its main principle; here art will begin and the finite, isolated existence of various means, which is so beneficial and convenient for theoretical analysis, will cease.

We must agree that, in answering the question about the whole, the theory itself will have to undergo some switching. That is, since a work of art is first of all unique, it will have to generalize, yielding to art, in a manner unusual for itself, within one whole. To talk about a work in general, as one talks, for example, about the structure of an image, would mean to move away from its special theme and place among theoretical problems into something else, for example, into the study of the relationship of different aspects of this “general” figurative structure to each other. The work is solely according to its task; in order to understand this task, its role among other categories of art, it is obviously necessary to take one of all the works.

What to choose? There are thousands of works - perfect and artistic - and most of them are not even known to any individual reader. Each of them, like a person, carries in itself a root relationship with all others, the original knowledge that the machine does not possess and which is “programmed” by the entire self-developing nature. Therefore, we can confidently take any and recognize in it this unique unity, which is only gradually revealed in the repetition of scientific, provable quantities.

Let's try to consider for this purpose the story of L. Tolstoy "Hadji Murad". This choice is, of course, arbitrary; however, several arguments can be made in its defense.

First, we are dealing here with undeniable artistry. Tolstoy is known primarily as an artist, possessing an incomparable material-figurative-bodily power, that is, the ability to capture any detail of the “spirit” in the external movement of nature (compare, for example, Dostoevsky, who is more inclined, as one critic well said, to "hurricane of ideas").

Secondly, this artistry is the most modern; it has only just managed to become a classic and is not as distant from us as the systems of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Aeschylus or Homer.

Thirdly, this story was written at the end of the journey and, as often happens, it carries within itself its concise conclusion, the result - with a simultaneous exit into the future art. Tolstoy did not want to publish it, among other things, because, as he said, "it is necessary that something be left after my death." It was prepared (as an "artistic testament" and turned out to be unusually compact, containing, as in a drop, all the grandiose discoveries of Tolstoy's "past"; this is a concise epic, a "digest" made by the writer himself - a circumstance very beneficial for theory.

Finally, it so happened that in a small introduction, at the entrance to his own building, Tolstoy, as if on purpose, scattered several stones - the material from which it was indestructibly shifted. It is strange to say, but all the beginnings of art really lie here, and the reader can freely survey them: please, the secret is revealed, perhaps in order to see how great it really is. But nevertheless they are named and shown: both the nascent idea, and the first small image that will grow, and the way of thinking in which it will develop; and all three main sources of nutrition, supplies, from where it will gain strength - in a word, everything that will begin to move towards the unity of the work.

Here they are, these beginnings.

“I returned home through the fields. Was the most middle

for the summer. The meadows were cleared, and they were just about to mow the rye.”

These are the first three sentences; Pushkin could have written them - simplicity, rhythm, harmony - and this is no longer accidental. This is indeed the idea of ​​the beautiful that comes from Pushkin in Russian literature (in Tolstoy, of course, it arises spontaneously and only as the beginning of his idea); here she will undergo a terrible test. “There is a lovely selection of colors for this time of year,” Tolstoy continues, “red, white, pink, fragrant, fluffy porridge,” etc. An exciting description of colors follows - and suddenly: the image of a black “dead field”, raised steam - all this must perish . “What a destructive, cruel creature, man, how many various living beings, plants have been destroyed for half the maintenance of his life.” This is no longer Pushkin - "And let the young life play at the coffin entrance" - no. Tolstoy but he agrees. just like Dostoevsky with his “only tear of a child”, just like Belinsky, who returned to Yegor Fedorovich Hegel his “philosophical cap”, does not want to buy progress at the cost of the death and death of the beautiful. He believes that a person cannot come to terms with this, he is called upon to overcome it at all costs. Here begins his own idea-problem, which sounds in "Resurrection": "No matter how hard people try ..." and in "The Living Corpse": "Three people live ..."

And now this idea meets with something that seems ready to confirm it. Looking at the black field, the writer notices a plant that nevertheless stood before man - read: before the destructive forces of civilization; this is a "Tatar" bush by the road. “What, however, is the energy and strength of life,” and in the diary: “I want to write. Defends life to the last” 1 . At this moment, the "general" idea becomes a special, new, individual idea of ​​the future work.

II. In the process of its inception, it is therefore immediately artistic, that is, it appears in the form

1 Tolstoy L.I. Full. coll. soch., v. 35. M., Goslitizdat, 1928 - 1964. p. 585. All subsequent references are to this edition by volume and page.

original image. This image is a comparison of the fate of Hadji Murad, known to Tolstoy, with the "Tatar" bush. From here the idea takes on a social direction and is ready, with the passion characteristic of the late Tolstoy, to fall upon the entire ruling apparatus of the oppression of man. She takes as her main artistic problem the most acute of all possible positions of her time - the fate of the whole person in the struggle of systems alienated from her, in other words, the problem that, in various changes, then passed through the literature of the 20th century in its highest models. However, here it is still only a problem in the bud; the work will help her to become complete and convincing. In addition, in order to develop into art, and not into a logical thesis, it needs various other “substances” - which ones?

III. “And I remembered one old Caucasian story, some of which I saw, some I heard from eyewitnesses, and some I imagined. This story, as it has developed in my memory and imagination, is what it is.

So, they are singled out, and it is only necessary to put signs to distinguish between these isolated sources of art: a) life, reality, fact - what Tolstoy calls "heard from eyewitnesses", that is, this includes, of course, documents, surviving objects, the books and letters he re-read and revised; b) the material of consciousness - "memory" - which is already united according to its own internal personal principle, and not according to some disciplines - military, diplomatic, etc.; c) "imagination" - a way of thinking that will lead the accumulated values ​​to new, still unknown ones.

It only remains for us to take one last look at these origins and say goodbye to them, because we will not see them again. The next line - and the first chapter - already begins the work itself, where there are no traces of a separate memory, or references to an eyewitness, or imagination, - "it seems to me that it could be so," but just some person rides a horse on a cold November evening with whom we have to get to know, who does not suspect that we are following him and what he reveals to us with his behavior

great problems of human existence. And the author, who had appeared at the beginning, also disappeared, even - paradoxically - the work that we took in our hands also left: there was a window into life, thrown open by a single effort of idea, fact and imagination.

Having crossed the threshold of a work, we thus find ourselves inside a wholeness that is so hostile to dismemberment that even the very fact of reasoning about it contains a contradiction: in order to explain such a unity, it seems to be more correct to simply rewrite the work, and not to reason and investigate that only again brings us back to the scattered, albeit aimed at conjugation "elements".

True, there is one natural way out.

After all, the integrity of the work is not some kind of absolute point, devoid of dimensions; a work has extension, its own artistic time, order in alternation and transition from one "language" to another (plot, character, circumstances, etc.), and more often - in the change of those special life-like positions that these "languages" combined. Mutual arrangement and connection within the work, of course, pave and trace many natural roads to its unity; an analyst can also pass them. They, in addition; as a general phenomenon, have long been examined and are called composition.

Composition is the disciplining force and organizer of the work. She is instructed to ensure that nothing breaks out to the side, into its own law, namely, it is conjugated into the whole and turns in addition to his thought: she controls artistry in all joints and in general. Therefore, it usually does not accept either logical derivation and subordination, or a simple life sequence, although it is very similar to it; its purpose is to arrange all the pieces so that they close into the full expression of the idea.

The construction of "Hadji Murad" grew out of Tolstoy's many years of observation of his own and other people's work, although the writer himself opposed this work, far from moral self-improvement, in every possible way. Painstakingly and slowly, he turned over and rearranged the heads of his "burdock", trying to find a match.

perfect frame of the work. “I will do it on the sly,” he said in a letter to M. L. Obolenskaya, having previously announced that he was “on the edge of the grave” (vol. 35, p. 620) and that therefore it was ashamed to deal with such trifles. In the end, he nevertheless managed to achieve a rare order and harmony in the huge plan of this story.

Thanks to his originality, Tolstoy for a long time was incomparable with the great realists of the West. He alone walked the path of entire generations from the epic scope of the Russian Iliad to a new acutely conflicted novel and a compact story. As a result, if one looks at his works in the general current of realistic literature, then, for example, the novel "War and Peace", which stands out as one of the highest achievements of the 19th century, may seem like an anachronism on the part of purely literary technique. In this work, Tolstoy, according to B. Eikhenbaum, who is somewhat exaggerating, but on the whole right, treats “slender architectonics with complete contempt” 1 . The classics of Western realism, Turgenev and other writers in Russia had by that time managed to create a special dramatized novel with one central character and a clearly defined composition.

Balzac's programmatic remarks about the "Parma Monastery" - a work very beloved by Tolstoy - make one feel the difference between a professional writer and such seemingly "spontaneous" artists as Stendhal or Tolstoy of the first half of his creative path. Balzac criticizes the looseness and disintegration of the composition. In his opinion, the events in Parma and the story of Fabrizio are developed into two independent themes of the novel. Abbot Blanes is out of action. Against this, Balzac objects: “The ruling law is the unity of the composition; unity may be in a common idea or plan, but without it, ambiguity will reign” 2 . One must think that if he had War and Peace in front of him, the head of the French realists, having expressed admiration, perhaps no less than for Stendhal's novel, would not fail to make similar reservations.

1 Eichenbaum B. Young Tolstoy, 1922, p. 40.

2 Balzac on art. M. - L., "Art", 1941, p. 66.

It is known, however, that towards the end of his life, Balzac begins to retreat from his rigid principles. A good example is his book "Peasants", which loses its proportion due to psychological and other digressions. A researcher of his work writes: "Psychology, as a kind of commentary on the action, shifting attention from the event to its cause, undermines the powerful structure of the Balzac novel" 1 . It is also known that in the future the critical realists of the West gradually decompose the clear-cut forms of the novel, filling them with sophisticated psychologism (Flaubert, later Maupassant), subordinating documentary materials to the action of biological laws (Zola), etc. Meanwhile, Tolstoy, as Rosa Luxemburg well said , "going indifferently against the current" 2, strengthened and purified his art.

Therefore, while - as a general law - the works of Western novelists of the late 19th - early 20th centuries are moving further and further away from a coherent plot, blurring in fractional psychological details, Tolstoy, on the contrary, rids his "dialectics of the soul" of uncontrolled generosity in shades and reduces the former multi-darkness to single plot. At the same time, he dramatizes the action of his great works, chooses the conflict that explodes more and more each time, and does this at the same depths of psychology as before.

There are great general changes in the formal structure of his creations.

The dramatic succession of paintings clusters around an ever smaller number of basic images; family and love couples, of which there are so many in War and Peace, are first reduced to two lines of Anna - Vronsky, Kitty - Levin, then to one: Nekhlyudov - Katyusha, and, finally, in Hadji Murad they disappear completely, so that Nekrasov's well-known reproach to "Anna Karenina" for excessive attention to adultery, and in itself unfair, could no longer be addressed to this thoroughly social story. This epic drama focuses on one person, one big

1 Reizov B.G. Creativity of Balzac. L., Goslitizdat, 1939, p. 376.

2 About Tolstoy. Collection. Ed. V. M. Friche. M. - L., GIZ, 1928, p. 124.

an event that rallies everything else around itself (such is the regularity of the path from War and Peace to Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Living Corpse, and Hadji Murad). At the same time, the scale of the problems raised does not fall and the volume of life captured in artistic scenes does not diminish - due to the fact that the significance of each person is increased, and the inner connection of their relations to each other as units of a common thought is more strongly emphasized.

Our theoretical literature has already spoken of how the polarities of Russian life in the 19th century influenced artistic consciousness, putting forward a new type of artistic assimilation of contradictions and enriching the forms of thinking in general 1 . Here we must add that the very principle of polarity was innovatively extended in Tolstoy to the end of his way of the form of composition. It can be said that thanks to him in "Resurrection", "Hadji Murad" and other later works of Tolstoy, the general laws of the distribution of the image within the work were more clearly revealed and sharpened. The magnitudes reflected in each other lost their intermediate links, moved away from each other to enormous distances - but each of them began to serve as a semantic center for all the others.

You can take any of them - the smallest event in the story - and we will immediately see that it deepens and becomes clearer when we get acquainted with every detail that is far from it; at the same time, each such detail receives a new meaning and evaluation through this event.

For example, the death of Avdeev - killed in a random shootout of soldiers. What his death means for various human psychologies, laws and social institutions, and what they all mean for him, a peasant son, is unfolded in a fan of details that flashed just as “accidentally” as his death.

“I just started loading, I hear it chirped ... I look, and he fired a gun,” repeats the soldier who was paired with Avdeev, obviously shocked by the ordinariness of what could happen to him.

1 See: G. D. Gachev, The Development of Figurative Consciousness in Literature. - Theory of literature. Main problems in historical coverage, vol. 1. M., Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1962, p. 259 - 279.

“- Te-te,” Poltoratsky clicked his tongue (company commander. - P.P.). - Well, does it hurt, Avdeev? .. ”(To the sergeant major. - P.P.):“- Well, all right, you make arrangements,” he added, and, “waving his whip, rode at a big trot towards Vorontsov.”

Zhurya Poltoratsky for arranging a skirmish (it was provoked in order to introduce Baron Frese, demoted for a duel), Prince Vorontsov casually inquires about the event:

“- I heard a soldier was wounded?

Very pity. The soldier is good.

It seems hard - in the stomach.

Do you know where I'm going?"

And the conversation turns to a more important subject: Vorontsov is going to meet Hadji Murad.

“Who is assigned what,” say the patients in the hospital where they brought Petrukha.

Immediately, “the doctor dug for a long time with a probe in the stomach and felt for a bullet, but could not get it. Bandaging the wound and sealing it with a sticky plaster, the doctor left.

The military clerk informs his relatives about Avdeev's death in the wording that he writes according to tradition, hardly thinking about its content: he was killed, "defending the tsar, the fatherland and the Orthodox faith."

Meanwhile, somewhere in a remote Russian village, although these relatives are trying to forget him (“the soldier was a cut piece”), they still remember him, and the old woman, his mother, even decided to somehow send him a ruble with a letter: “ And also, my dear child, you are my little dove Petrushenka, I cried my eyes out ... "The old man, her husband, who took the letter to the city," ordered the janitor to read the letter to himself and listened attentively and approvingly.

But, having received the news of death, the old woman "wailed while there was time, and then set to work."

And Avdeev's wife, Aksinya, who mourned in public "Pyotr Mikhailovich's blond curls", "in the depths of her soul ... she was glad of Peter's death. She was again a belly from the clerk with whom she lived.

The impression is completed by a magnificent military report, where Avdeev’s death turns into some kind of clerical myth:

“On November 23, two companies of the Kurinsky regiment set out from the fortress for logging. In the middle of the day, a significant crowd of highlanders suddenly attacked the cutters. The chain began to retreat, and at this time the second company struck with bayonets and knocked over the mountaineers. In the case, two privates were lightly wounded and one was killed. The highlanders lost about a hundred people killed and wounded.

These amazing trifles are scattered in different parts of the work and each stand in the natural continuation of its own, different event, but, as we see, they are composed by Tolstoy in such a way that now one or the other whole is closed between them - we took only one!

Another example is a raid on a village.

Cheerful, just escaped from St. Petersburg, Butler eagerly absorbs new impressions from the proximity of the highlanders and the danger: “It’s either the case, or the case, rangers, rangers!” - sang his songwriters. His horse walked with a cheerful step to this music. The company's shaggy, gray Trezorka, like a chief, with a twisted tail, with a preoccupied look, ran in front of Butler's company. My heart was cheerful, calm and cheerful.”

His boss, the drunken and good-natured Major Petrov, views this expedition as a familiar, everyday affair.

“So that's it, sir, father,” said the major in the interval of the song. - Not like you have in St. Petersburg: alignment to the right, alignment to the left. But work hard, and go home.

What they "worked" on is evident from the next chapter, which talks about the victims of the raid.

The old man, who rejoiced when Hadji Murad ate his honey, has now just “returned from his bee-house. The two stacks of hay that were there were burned ... all the beehives with bees were burned.

His grandson, “that handsome boy with sparkling eyes, who enthusiastically looked at Hadji Murad (when Hadji Murad visited their house. - P.P.), was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a cloak. He was pierced in the back with a bayonet ... ”, etc., etc.

Again the whole event is restored, but through what a contradiction! Where is the truth, who is to blame, and if so, how much, for example, the thoughtless campaigner Petrov, who cannot be otherwise, and the young Butler, and the Chechens.

Isn't Butler a man, and aren't people his songwriters? Questions arise here by themselves - in the direction of the idea, but none of them finds a frontal, one-sided answer, bumping into another. Even in one “local” unity, the complexity of artistic thought makes everything dependent on each other, but at the same time, as it were, it accelerates and kindles the need to embrace, understand, balance this complexity in the whole truth. Feeling this incompleteness, all “local” unities move towards the whole that the work represents.

They intersect in all directions in thousands of points, add up to unexpected combinations and gravitate towards the expression of one idea - without losing their "self".

All large categories of the image behave in this way, for example, characters. They, of course, also participate in this intersection, and the main compositional principle penetrates into their own core. This principle consists in, unexpectedly for logic, to place any uniqueness and opposites on some axis passing through the center of the image. The external logic of one sequence breaks down, colliding with another. Between them, in their struggle, artistic truth is gaining strength. The fact that Tolstoy took special care of this is evidenced by entries in his diaries.

For example, on March 21, 1898: “There is such an English peepshow toy - one thing or another is shown under a glass. This is how you need to show a person X (aji) -M (urat): a husband, a fanatic, etc.

Or: May 7, 1901: “I saw in a dream the type of old man that Chekhov anticipated in me. The old man was especially good because he was almost a saint, and meanwhile a drinker and a scolder. For the first time, I clearly understood the power that types gain from boldly applied shadows. I will do it on X (adji) -M (urate) and M (arye) D (mitrievna) ”(v. 54, p. 97).

Polarity, that is, the destruction of external sequence for the sake of internal unity, led the late Tolstoy's characters to a sharp artistic "reduction", that is, the removal of various intermediate links, along which in another case

go reader's thought; this reinforced the impression of extraordinary courage and truth. For example, Comrade Prosecutor Breve (in "Resurrection") graduated from high school with a gold medal, received a prize at the university for an essay on servitudes, is successful with the ladies, and "as a result of this he is extremely stupid." The Georgian prince at dinner at Vorontsov's is "very stupid", but he has a "gift": he is "an unusually subtle and skillful flatterer and courtier."

In the versions of the story there is such a remark about one of the murids of Hadji Murad, Kurban; “Despite his obscurity and not a brilliant position, he was devoured by ambition and dreamed of overthrowing Shamil and taking his place” (vol. 35, p. 484). In the same way, by the way, one “bailiff with a large bundle, in which there was a project on a new method of conquering the Caucasus”, was mentioned, etc.

Any of these particular units was noticed and singled out by Tolstoy from outwardly incompatible, assigned to different rows of signs. The image expanding its space breaks and breaks these rows one by one; polarities grow larger; the idea receives new evidence and confirmation.

It becomes clear that all its so-called contrasts are, on the contrary, the most natural continuation and steps towards the unity of artistic thought, its logic. They are "contrasts" only if we assume that they are supposedly "shown"; but they are not shown, but proved, and in this artistic proof not only do they not contradict each other, but they are simply impossible and meaningless one without the other.

Only for this they constantly reveal themselves and move the story to a tragic end. They are especially felt in places of transition from one chapter or scene to another. For example, Poltoratsky, who returns in an enthusiastic mood from the charming Marya Vasilyevna after a small talk and says to his Vavila: “What did you think of locking up?! Bolvan!. Here I'll show you..." - there is the most convincing logic of the movement of this general thought, as well as the transition from the wretched hut of the Avdeevs to the Vorontsovs' palace, where "the head waiter solemnly poured steaming soup from a silver bowl", or from the end of the story of Hadji Murad Loris - Melikov: “I am tied, and the end of the rope is with Shamil in

hand" - to Vorontsov's exquisitely cunning letter: "I did not write to you with the last mail, dear prince ...", etc.

From the compositional subtleties, it is curious that these contrasting pictures, in addition to the general idea of ​​​​the story - the story of "burdock" - also have special transitions that form in them themselves, which transfer the action, without breaking it, to the next episode. Thus, Vorontsov's letter to Chernyshev introduces us to the emperor's palace with an inquiry about the fate of Hadji Murad, which, that is, fate, depends entirely on the will of those to whom this letter was sent. And the transition from the palace to the chapter on the raid follows directly from Nicholas' decision to burn and ravage the villages. The transition to the family of Hadji Murad was prepared by his conversations with Butler and the fact that the news from the mountains was bad, etc. In addition, scouts, couriers, messengers rush from picture to picture. It turns out that the next chapter necessarily continues the previous one precisely because of the contrast. And thanks to the same idea of ​​the story, while developing, it remains not abstract scientific, but humanly alive.

In the end, the range of the story becomes extremely large, because its grandiose initial thought: civilization - man - the indestructibility of life - requires exhausting all "earthly spheres". The idea “calms down” and reaches its climax only when the entire plan corresponding to itself passes: from the royal palace to the court of the Avdeevs, through ministers, courtiers, governors, officers, translators, soldiers, along both hemispheres of despotism from Nikolai to Petrukha Avdeev, from Shamil to Gamzalo and Chechens, prancing with the singing of "La ilaha il alla." Only then does it become a work. Here it also achieves general harmony, proportionality in complementing each other with different sizes.

In two key places of the story, that is, at the beginning and at the end, the movement of the composition slows down, although the swiftness of the action, on the contrary, increases; the writer plunges here into the most difficult and complex work of setting up and unleashing events. The unusual fascination with details is also explained by the importance of these supporting paintings for the work.

The first eight chapters cover only what happens during one day during the release of Had-

Zhi-Murata to the Russians. In these chapters, a method of opposition is revealed: Hadji Murad in a sakla at Sado (I) - soldiers in the open (II) - Semyon Mikhailovich and Marya Vasilievna Vorontsov behind heavy curtains at the card table and with champagne (III) - Hadji Murad with nukers in the forest (IV) - Poltoratsky's company on logging, Avdeev's injury, Hadji Murad's exit (V) - Hadji Murad visiting Marya Vasilievna (VI) - Avdeev in the Vozdvizhensky hospital (VII) - Avdeev's peasant yard (VIII). The connecting threads between these contrasting scenes are: the envoys of the naib to Vorontsov, the notice of the military clerk, the letter of the old woman, etc. The action fluctuates, now running a few hours ahead (the Vorontsovs go to bed at three o'clock, and the next chapter begins late in the evening), then returning back.

Thus, the story has its own artistic time, but its connection with the external, given time is also not lost: for the convincing impression that the action takes place on the same night, Tolstoy, barely noticeable to the reader, several times “glances” at the star sky. The soldiers have a secret: "The bright stars, which seemed to run along the tops of the trees while the soldiers were walking through the forest, now stopped, shining brightly between the bare branches of the trees." After some time, they also said: "Again everything was quiet, only the wind stirred the branches of the trees, now opening, then closing the stars." Two hours later: “Yes, the stars have begun to go out,” said Avdeev.

On the same night (IV), Hadji Murad leaves the village of Mekhet: "There was no month, but the stars shone brightly in the black sky." After he rode into the forest: "... in the sky, although faintly, the stars shone." And finally, in the same place, at dawn: "... while they were cleaning weapons ... the stars faded." The most precise unity is also maintained in other ways: the soldiers secretly hear the very howl of the jackals that woke Hadji Murad.

For the external connection of the last paintings, the action of which takes place in the vicinity of Nukha, Tolstoy chooses nightingales, young grass, etc., which are described in the same detail. But this "natural" unity we will find only in the framing chapters. In quite different ways, the transitions of the chapters, which are told, are carried out.

about Vorontsov, Nikolai, Shamil. But even they do not violate the harmonic proportions; not without reason Tolstoy shortened the chapter about Nikolai, throwing out a lot of impressive details (for example, the fact that his favorite musical instrument was a drum, or the story about his childhood and the beginning of his reign) in order to leave only those signs that most closely correlate in their inner essence with another pole of absolutism, Shamil.

Creating a holistic thought of the work, the composition brings into unity not only the large definitions of the image, but also coordinates with them, of course, the speech style, syllable.

In "Hadji Murad" this affected the choice by the writer, after long hesitation, of which of the forms of narration would be best for the story: on behalf of Leo Tolstoy or a conditional narrator - an officer who served at that time in the Caucasus. The diary kept these doubts of the artist: “H(adji)-M(urata) thought a lot and prepared materials. I can’t find all the tone ”(November 20, 1897). The initial version of "Repey" is presented in such a way that although it does not have a direct story in the first person, the presence of the narrator is invisible, as in the "Prisoner of the Caucasus"; in the style of speech, an outside observer is felt, who does not pretend to psychological subtleties and great generalizations.

“In one of the Caucasian fortresses lived in 1852 the military commander, Ivan Matveyevich Kanatchikov, with his wife Marya Dmitrievna. They didn’t have children…” (vol. 35, p. 286) and further in the same vein: “As Marya Dmitrievna planned, she did everything” (vol. 35, p. 289); about Hadji Murad: “He was tormented by terrible longing, and the weather was suitable for his mood” (vol. 35, p. 297). About halfway through the work on the story, Tolstoy already simply introduces an officer-witness reinforcing this style with meager information about his biography.

But the plan grows, new big and small people are involved in the case, new scenes appear, and the officer becomes helpless. A huge influx of paintings is cramped in this limited field of vision, and Tolstoy parted with him, but not without pity: “It used to be

the message was written like an autobiography, now written objectively. Both have their advantages” (vol. 35, p. 599).

Why, after all, did the writer tend to the advantages of the “objective”?

The decisive thing here was - this is obvious - the development of an artistic idea, which required "divine omniscience." The humble officer could not grasp all the causes and consequences of Hadji Murad's entry to the Russians and his death. Only the world, knowledge and imagination of Tolstoy himself could correspond to this big world.

When the composition of the story was freed from the plan “with an officer”, the structure of individual episodes within the work also shifted. Everywhere the conditional narrator began to fall out and the author took his place. Thus, the scene of the death of Hadji Murad changed, which, even in the fifth edition, was transmitted through the lips of Kamenev, was interspersed with his words and interrupted by the exclamations of Ivan Matveyevich and Marya Dmitrievna. In the last version, Tolstoy discarded this form, leaving only: “And Kamenev told,” and in the next sentence, deciding not to trust this story to Kamenev, he prefaced Chapter XXV with the words: “It was like this.”

Having become a “small” world, the style of the story freely accepted and expressed the polarity with which the “big” world developed, that is, a work with its many sources and colorful material. Soldiers, nukers, ministers, peasants spoke to Tolstoy themselves, without regard for external communications. It is interesting that in such a construction it turned out to be possible - as it always succeeds in a truly artistic creation - to direct towards unity that which, by its nature, is called upon to isolate, separate, consider in an abstract connection.

For example, Tolstoy's own rationalism. The word "analysis", so often used next to Tolstoy, is, of course, not accidental. Looking more closely at how people feel in him, one can see that these feelings are conveyed by means of an ordinary division, so to speak, by translation into the realm of thought. From this it is easy to conclude that Tolstoy was the father and forerunner of modern intellectual literature; but of course this

far from the truth. It is not a matter of which of the forms of thought lies on the surface; an outwardly impressionistic, scattered style can be essentially abstract-logical, as was the case with the expressionists; on the contrary, Tolstoy's strict rationalistic style turns out to be not at all strict and reveals in every phrase an abyss of incompatibilities that are compatible and reconcilable only in the idea of ​​the whole. Such is the style of Hadji Murad. For example: “The eyes of these two people, having met, told each other a lot that cannot be expressed in words, and certainly not at all what the translator said. They directly, without words, expressed the whole truth about each other: Vorontsov's eyes said that he did not believe a single word of everything that Hadji Murad said, that he knew that he was the enemy of everything Russian, that he would always remain so and now submits only because he is forced to do so. And Hadji Murad understood this, and nevertheless assured him of his devotion. The eyes of Hadji Murad said that this old man should have thought about death, and not about war, but that, although he is old, he is cunning, and one must be careful with him.

It is clear that rationalism here is purely external. Tolstoy does not even care about the apparent contradiction: first he claims that the eyes said "the inexpressible in words", then he immediately begins to report what exactly they "said". But all the same, he is right, because he himself really speaks not in words, but in positions; his thought comes in flashes of those collisions that are formed from the incompatibility of words and thoughts, feelings and behavior of the translator, Vorontsov and Hadji Murad.

The thesis and thought can stand at the beginning - Tolstoy loves them very much - but real thought, artistic, will somehow become clear in the end, through everything that has been, and the first thought will turn out to be only a pointed moment of unity in it.

Actually, we observed this principle already in the beginning of the story. This little exposition, like the prologue in a Greek tragedy, announces in advance what will happen to the hero. There is a legend that Euripides explained such an introduction by the fact that he considered it unworthy for the author to intrigue the viewer with an unexpected

action gate. Tolstoy also neglects this. His lyrical page about burdock anticipates the fate of Hadji Murad, although the movement of the conflict in many versions did not go after the “plowed field”, but right from the moment of the quarrel between Hadji Murad and Shamil. The same "introduction" is repeated in small expositions of some scenes and images. For example, before the end of the story, Tolstoy again resorts to the technique of the "Greek choir", notifying the reader once again that Hadji Murad was killed: Kamenev brings his head in a sack. And in the construction of secondary characters, the same bold tendency is revealed. Tolstoy, not fearing to lose attention, immediately declares: this person is stupid, or cruel, or "does not understand life without power and without humility," as it is said about Vorontsov Sr. But this statement becomes undeniable for the reader only after several completely opposite (for example, the opinion of this person about himself) scene-pictures.

In the same way as rationalism and "thesis" introductions, numerous documentary information entered the unity of the story. They did not need to be specially hidden and processed, because the sequence and connection of thoughts were not kept by them.

Meanwhile, the history of the creation of "Hadji Murad", if traced by variants and materials, as A. P. Sergeenko did, 1 really resembled the history of a scientific discovery. Dozens of people worked in different parts of Russia, looking for new data, the writer himself re-read piles of material for seven years.

In the development of the whole, Tolstoy moved in "leaps", from the accumulated material to a new chapter, excluding the scene in the Avdeevs' courtyard, which he, as an expert on peasant life, wrote immediately and did not remake again. The rest of the chapters demanded the most varied "inlays".

A few examples. The article by A.P. Sergeenko contains a letter from Tolstoy to the mother of Karganov (one of the characters in Hadji Murad), where he asks that “dear Anna Avesealomovna” inform him of some

1 Sergeenko A.P. "Hadji Murad". The history of writing (Afterword) - Tolstoy L. N. Full. coll. cit., v. 35.

other facts about Hadji Murad, and in particular ... “whose horses were on which he wanted to run. His own or given to him. And were these horses good, and what color. The text of the story convinces us that these requests stemmed from an indomitable desire to convey all the variety and variegation required by the plan through accuracy. So, during the exit of Hadji Murad to the Russians, “Poltoratsky was given his little karak Kabardian”, “Vorontsov rode his English, blooded red stallion”, and Hadji Murad “on a white-maned horse”; another time, at a meeting with Butler, near Hadji Murad there was already “a red-brown handsome horse with a small head, beautiful eyes”, etc. Another example. In 1897, Tolstoy writes while reading "Collection of information about the Caucasian highlanders": "They climb onto the roof to see the procession." And in the chapter about Shamil we read: "All the people of the large village of Vedeno stood on the street and on the roofs, meeting their lord."

Accuracy in the story is found everywhere: ethnographic, geographical, etc., even medical. For example, when Hadji Murad's head was cut off, Tolstoy remarked with invariable calmness: "Scarlet blood gushed from the arteries of the neck and black blood from the head."

But just this exactness - the last example is especially expressive - is taken in the story, as it turns out, in order to further and further push the polarities apart, to isolate, remove every trifle, to show that each of them is in its own, as if tightly closed from others, a box that has a name, and with it a profession, a specialty for the people involved in it, while in fact its true and highest meaning is not at all there, but in the sense of life - at least for a person who stands at the center of them. The blood is scarlet and black, but these signs are especially meaningless before the question: why was it shed? And - was the man who defended his life to the last not right?

Scientific and precise, thus, also serve the artistic unity; moreover, in it, in this whole, they become channels for spreading the idea of ​​unity outside, to all spheres of life, including ourselves. A concrete, historical, limited fact, document becomes indefinitely close

for all. The boundaries between time- and place-specific art and life in the broadest sense are crumbling.

In fact, few people think when reading that "Hadji Murad" is a historical story, that Nikolai, Shamil, Vorontsov and others are people who lived without a story, on their own. No one is looking for a historical fact - whether it was, was not, than confirmed - because these people are told many times more interesting than could be extracted from the documents that history has left. At the same time, as mentioned, the story does not contradict any of these documents. He simply looks through them or guesses them in such a way that extinct life is restored between them - it runs like a stream along a dried-up channel. Some facts, external, known, entail others, imaginary and deeper, which, even when they happened, could not be verified or left for posterity - it seemed that they had irretrievably gone in their precious single content. Here they are restored, returned from non-existence, become a part of contemporary life for the reader - thanks to the life-giving activity of the image.

And - a wonderful thing! - when it happens that these new facts somehow manage to be verified from the fragments of the past, they are confirmed. Unity, it turns out, reached out to them. One of the miracles of art is performed (miracles, of course, only from the point of view of a logical calculation that does not know this inner relationship with the whole world and believes that an unknown fact can be reached only by the sequence of the law) - from the transparent emptiness one suddenly hears the noise and cries of a bygone life , as in that scene at Rabelais, when the battle “frozen” in antiquity thawed out.

Here is a small (at first extraneous) example: Nekrasov's sketch of Pushkin. As if an album sketch - not a portrait, but so, a fleeting idea - in the verses "About the Weather".

The old messenger tells Nekrasov about his ordeals:

I've been babysitting with Sovremennik for a long time:

He wore it to Alexander Sergeyich.

And now it's the thirteenth year

I wear everything to Nikolai Alekseich, -

Lives on Li gene...

He visited, according to him, many writers: Bulgarin, Voeikov, Zhukovsky ...

I went to Vasily Andreevich,

Yes, I didn’t see a penny from him,

Not like Alexander Sergeyich -

He often gave me vodka.

But he reproached everything with censorship:

If red meets crosses,

So it will let you proofread:

Get out, please, you!

Watching a man get killed

Once I said: “It will do, and so!”

This is blood, she says, shed, -

My blood - you are a fool! ..

It is difficult to convey why this little passage so suddenly illuminates Pushkin's personality for us; brighter than a dozen historical novels about him, including very smart and scholarly ones. In a nutshell, of course, we can say: because he is highly artistic, that is, he captures, according to the facts known to us, something important from Pushkin's soul - the temperament, passion, loneliness of his genius in the literary and bureaucratic fraternity (not to mention the light) , hot temper and innocence, suddenly breaking into a bitter mockery. However, all the same, listing these qualities does not mean explaining and unraveling this image; he was created by an artistic, integral thought that restored the life-like trifle, the detail of Pushkin's behavior. But what? Having examined it, then suddenly we can come across a fact saved in Pushkin's correspondence - a completely different time and a different situation, from his youth - where the expressions and spirit of speech completely coincide with Nekrasov's portrait! Letter to P. A. Vyazemsky dated February 19, 1825: “Tell Mukhanov from me that it is a sin for him to joke magazine jokes with me. Without asking, he took the beginning of the Gypsies from me and dissolved it around the world. Barbarian! it's my blood, it's money! now I have to print out Tsyganov, and not the time at all” 1 .

In "Hadji Murad" this principle of artistic "resurrection" was expressed, perhaps, more fully than anywhere else in Tolstoy. This work is in the most precise sense - a reproduction. His realism re-creates what has already been, repeats the course of life in such moments that give the focus of everything that was in something personal, free, individual: you look - this fictional past turns out to be a fact.

Here is Nikolai, who is taken from documentary data and dispersed, so to speak, from there into such self-propulsion that a new document, not “laid” into him at first, is restored in him. We can check this through the same Pushkin.

Tolstoy has one of the persistent external leitmotifs - Nikolai "frowns." This happens to him in moments of impatience and anger, when he dares to be disturbed by something that he has resolutely condemned: irrevocably, for a long time and therefore has no right to exist. An artistic find in the spirit of this personality.

"What's your last name? - asked Nikolai.

Brzezovsky.

Of Polish origin and a Catholic,” answered Chernyshev.

Nicholas frowned.

Or: “Seeing the uniform of the school, which he did not like for freethinking, Nikolai Pavlovich frowned, but his tall stature and diligent drawing and saluting with a student’s pointedly protruding elbow softened his displeasure.

What's the last name? - he asked.

Polosatov! Your Imperial Majesty.

Well done!"

And now let's look at Pushkin's random testimony, which has nothing to do with the story of Hadji Murad. Nikolai was "photographed" in it in 1833, that is, twenty years before the time that Tolstoy described, and without the slightest desire to "deep" into the image.

“Here’s the thing,” Pushkin writes to MP Pogodin, “according to our agreement, for a long time I was going to seize the time,

to ask the sovereign for you as an employee. Yes, everything somehow failed. Finally, at Shrovetide, the tsar once spoke to me about Peter I, and I immediately presented to him that it was impossible for me to work alone on the archives and that I needed the help of an enlightened, intelligent and active scientist. The sovereign asked who I needed, and at your name he almost frowned (he confuses you with Polevoy; excuse me generously; he is not a very firm writer, though a fine fellow, and a glorious king). I somehow managed to introduce you, and D. N. Bludov corrected everything and explained that only the first syllable of your surnames is common between you and Polevoy. To this was added the favorable opinion of Benckendorff. Thus the matter is harmonious; and the archives are open to you (except the secret one)" 1 .

Before us, of course, is a coincidence, but what is the correctness of repetitions - in what is unique, in life's little things! Nikolai stumbled upon something familiar - immediate anger ("frowned"), it is now difficult for him to explain anything ("I somehow," writes Pushkin, "managed to recommend you ..."); then some deviation from the expected still "softens his displeasure." Perhaps in life there was no such repetition, but in art - from a similar position - it resurrected and from an insignificant stroke became an important moment in artistic thought. It is especially pleasing that this "movement" into the image took place with the help, albeit without the knowledge, of two geniuses of our literature. In undeniable examples, we observe the process of spontaneous generation of an image in a primary conjugating trifle and, at the same time, the power of art, capable of restoring a fact.

And one more thing: Pushkin and Tolstoy, as one can guess here, are united in the most general artistic approach to the subject; art as a whole, as can be understood even from such a small example, rests on the same foundation, has a single principle - with all the contrast and difference in styles, manners, historical trends.

As for Nicholas I, Russian literature had a special account for him. Still not written

1 Pushkin A. S. Full. coll. cit., vol. X, p. 428.

although sparsely known, the history of the relationship of this person with Russian writers, journalists, publishers and poets. Nikolai dispersed most of them, gave them to the soldiers or killed them, and pestered the rest with police guardianship and fantastic advice.

The well-known Herzen list is far from complete in this sense. It lists only the dead, but there are not many facts about the systematic strangulation of the living - about how Pushkin's best creations were put aside on the table, mangled by the highest hand, how Benckendorff set even on such an innocent, in the words of Tyutchev, "dove" like Zhukovsky, and Turgenev was put under arrest for his sympathetic response to Gogol's death, and so on and so forth.

Leo Tolstoy, with his Hadji Murad, repaid Nikolai for everyone. It was, therefore, not only artistic, but also historical revenge. However, in order for it to come true so brilliantly, it still had to be artistic. It was precisely art that was needed to revive Nicholas for a public trial. This was done by satire - another of the unifying means of this artistic whole.

The fact is that Nikolai in Hadji Murad is not just one of the polarities of the work, he is a real pole, an ice cap that freezes life. Somewhere on the other end there should be its opposite, but only, as the plan of the work finds out, there is the same hat - Shamil. From this ideological and compositional discovery in the story, a completely new type of realistic satire, apparently unique in world literature, is born - a through parallel exposure. By mutual similarity, Nikolai and Shamil destroy each other.

Even the simplicity of these creatures turns out to be false.

“In general, there was nothing shiny, gold or silver on the imam, and his tall ... figure ... produced the same impression of greatness,

“... returned to his room and lay down on the narrow, hard bed, which he was proud of, and covered himself with his cloak, which he considered (and so he said)

which he desired and knew how to produce among the people.

ril) as famous as Napoleon's hat..."

Both of them are aware of their insignificance and therefore hide it even more carefully.

"... despite the public recognition of his campaign as a victory, he knew that his campaign was unsuccessful."

"... although he was proud of his strategic abilities, in the depths of his soul he was aware that they were not."

The majestic inspiration, which, according to despots, should shock subordinates and inspire them with the idea of ​​communication between the ruler and the supreme being, was noticed by Tolstoy back in Napoleon (leg trembling is a “great sign”). Here it rises to a new point.

“When the advisers talked about this, Shamil closed his eyes and fell silent.

The advisers knew that this meant that he was now listening to the voice of the prophet speaking to him.

“Wait a bit,” he said, and closing his eyes, lowered his head. Chernyshev knew, having heard this more than once from Nikolai, that when he needed to solve some important issue, he only needed to concentrate, for a few moments, and that then inspiration came to him ... "

A rare ferocity distinguishes the decisions made by such intuitions, but even this is sanctimoniously presented as mercy.

“Shamil fell silent and looked at Yusuf for a long time.

Write that I took pity on you and will not kill you, but gouge out your eyes, as I do to all traitors. Go."

“Deserves the death penalty. But, thank God, we do not have the death penalty. And it's not for me to enter it. Pass 12 times through a thousand people.

Both of them use religion only to strengthen their power, not at all caring about the meaning of commandments and prayers.

“First of all, it was necessary to perform the midday prayer, for which he now had not the slightest disposition.”

“... he read the usual, since childhood prayers: “Theotokos”, “I believe”, “Our Father”, without attributing any meaning to the spoken words.

They correlate in many other details: the empress “with a shaking head and a frozen smile” plays under Nicholas essentially the same role as “a sharp-nosed, black, unpleasant face and unloved, but older wife” will enter under Shamil; one attends the dinner, the other brings it, these are their functions; therefore, Nikolai's entertainment with the girl Kopervain and Nelidova only formally differ from Shamil's legalized polygamy.

Messed up, merged into one person, imitating the emperor and the highest ranks, all kinds of courtiers, Nikolai is proud of his cloak - Chernyshev that he did not know galoshes, although without them his legs would feel cold. Chernyshev has the same sleigh as the emperor, the adjutant wing on duty, just like the emperor, combing his temples to his eyes; Prince Vasily Dolgorukov’s “stupid face” is decorated with imperial sideburns, mustaches and the same temples. Old Vorontsov, like Nikolai, says "you" to young officers. With another

On the other hand, Chernyshev flatters Nikolai in connection with the affair of Hadji Murad (“He realized that it was no longer possible to hold on to them”) in exactly the same way as Manana Orbeliani and other guests - Vorontsov (“They feel that they now (this now meant: with Vorontsov) cannot withstand"). Finally, Vorontsov himself even somewhat resembles the imam: "... his face smiled pleasantly and his eyes squinted ..."

" - Where? - Vorontsov asked, screwing up his eyes ”(squinted eyes were always a sign of secrecy for Tolstoy, remember, for example, what Dolly thought about why Anna squinted), etc., etc.

What does this similarity mean? Shamil and Nikolai (and with them the “half-frozen” courtiers) prove by this that, unlike other diverse and “polar” people on earth, they do not complement each other, but duplicate, like things; they are absolutely repeatable and therefore, in essence, do not live, although they stand on the official heights of life. This special kind of compositional unity and balance in the work means, therefore, the most profound development of her idea: "a minus by a minus gives a plus."

The character of Hadji Murad, irreconcilably hostile to both poles, ultimately embodying the idea of ​​people's resistance to all forms of an inhuman world order, remained Tolstoy's last word and his testament to the literature of the 20th century.

"Hadji Murad" belongs to those books that should be reviewed, and not written literary works about them. That is, they need to be treated as if they had just left. Only conditional critical inertia still does not allow doing so, although each edition of these books and each encounter with them by the reader is an incomparably stronger intrusion into the central questions of life than - alas - sometimes happens among contemporaries catching up with each other.

“... Perhaps,” Dostoevsky once wrote, “we will say unheard-of, shameless insolence, but let them not be embarrassed by our words; after all, we are talking only one assumption: ... well, if the Iliad is more useful than the works of Marko Vovchka, and not only

before, and even now, with modern questions: is it more useful as a way of achieving the known goals of these same questions, solving desktop problems? one

In fact, why not, at least for the sake of the smallest, harmless projection, our editors not try - at the moment of unsuccessful searches for a strong literary response - to publish a forgotten story, story or even an article (these are just asked) on some similar modern issue by a real deep writer from the past?

That sort of thing is probably justified. As for the literary analysis of classical books, then he, in turn, can try to keep these books alive. For this it is necessary that the analysis of the various categories from time to time return to the whole, to the work of art. Because only through a work, and not through categories, can art act on a person with the quality that only it can act - and nothing else.

1 Russian writers on literature, vol. II. L., "Soviet writer", 1939, p. 171.

Even at first glance, it is clear that a work of art consists of certain sides, elements, aspects, and so on. In other words, it has a complex internal composition. At the same time, the individual parts of the work are connected and united with each other so closely that this gives reason to metaphorically liken the work to a living organism. The composition of the work is characterized, therefore, not only by complexity, but also by order. A work of art is a complexly organized whole; from the realization of this obvious fact follows the need to know the internal structure of the work, that is, to single out its individual components and realize the connections between them. The rejection of such an attitude inevitably leads to empiricism and unsubstantiated judgments about the work, to complete arbitrariness in its consideration, and ultimately impoverishes our understanding of the artistic whole, leaving it at the level of the primary reader's perception.

In modern literary criticism, there are two main trends in establishing the structure of a work. The first proceeds from the separation of a number of layers or levels in a work, just as in linguistics in a separate statement one can distinguish the level of phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic. At the same time, different researchers unequally imagine both the set of levels and the nature of their relationships. So, M.M. Bakhtin sees in the work, first of all, two levels - “plot” and “plot”, the depicted world and the world of the image itself, the reality of the author and the reality of the hero*. MM. Hirshman proposes a more complex, mostly three-level structure: rhythm, plot, hero; in addition, the subject-object organization of the work permeates “vertically” these levels, which ultimately creates not a linear structure, but rather a grid that is superimposed on the work of art**. There are other models of a work of art, representing it in the form of a number of levels, slices.

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* Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979. S. 7–181.

** Girshman M.M. Style of a literary work // Theory of literary styles. Modern aspects of study. M., 1982. S. 257-300.

Obviously, the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the allocation of levels can be considered as a common drawback of these concepts. Moreover, no attempt has yet been made substantiate division into levels by some general considerations and principles. The second weakness follows from the first and consists in the fact that no division by levels covers the entire richness of the elements of the work, does not give an exhaustive idea even of its composition. Finally, the levels must be thought of as essentially equal in rights - otherwise the principle of structuring itself loses its meaning - and this easily leads to a loss of understanding of some core of a work of art, linking its elements into a real integrity; connections between levels and elements are weaker than they really are. Here we should also note the fact that the “level” approach very poorly takes into account the fundamental difference in quality of a number of components of the work: for example, it is clear that an artistic idea and an artistic detail are phenomena of a fundamentally different nature.

The second approach to the structure of a work of art takes such general categories as content and form as its primary division. In the most complete and reasoned form, this approach is presented in the works of G.N. Pospelova*. This methodological trend has far fewer drawbacks than the one discussed above, it is much more in line with the real structure of the work and is much more justified from the point of view of philosophy and methodology.

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* See e.g.: Pospelov G.N. Problems of literary style. M., 1970. S. 31–90.

A work of art is the main object of literary study, a kind of smallest “unit” of literature. Larger formations in the literary process - trends, currents, artistic systems - are built from individual works, they are a combination of parts.

A literary work, on the other hand, has integrity and internal completeness, it is a self-sufficient unit of literary development, capable of independent life. A literary work as a whole has a complete ideological and aesthetic meaning, in contrast to its components - themes, ideas, plot, speech, etc., which receive meaning and in general can exist only in the system of the whole.

Literary work as a phenomenon of art

A literary and artistic work is a work of art in the narrow sense of the word*, that is, one of the forms of social consciousness. Like all art in general, a work of art is an expression of a certain emotional and mental content, some ideological and emotional complex in a figurative, aesthetically significant form. Using the terminology of M.M. Bakhtin, we can say that a work of art is a “word about the world” spoken by a writer, a poet, an act of reaction of an artistically gifted person to the surrounding reality.

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* On the different meanings of the word "art", see: Pospelov G.N. Aesthetic and artistic. M, 1965. S. 159–166.

According to the theory of reflection, human thinking is a reflection of reality, the objective world. This, of course, fully applies to artistic thinking. A literary work, like all art, is a special case of subjective reflection of objective reality. However, reflection, especially at the highest stage of its development, which is human thinking, should by no means be understood as a mechanical, mirror reflection, as a one-to-one copying of reality. The complex, indirect nature of reflection, perhaps to the greatest extent, is reflected in artistic thinking, where the subjective moment, the unique personality of the creator, his original vision of the world and the way of thinking about it are so important. A work of art, therefore, is an active, personal reflection; one in which not only the reproduction of life reality takes place, but also its creative transformation. In addition, the writer never reproduces reality for the sake of reproduction itself: the very choice of the subject of reflection, the very impulse to creative reproduction of reality is born from the personal, biased, indifferent view of the writer on the world.

Thus, a work of art is an indissoluble unity of the objective and the subjective, the reproduction of reality and the author's understanding of it, life as such, which is included in the work of art and is known in it, and the author's attitude to life. These two aspects of art were pointed out by N.G. Chernyshevsky. In his treatise “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality”, he wrote: “The essential meaning of art is the reproduction of everything that is interesting for a person in life; very often, especially in works of poetry, the explanation of life, the verdict on its phenomena, also comes to the fore. True, Chernyshevsky, polemically sharpening the thesis about the primacy of life over art in the struggle against idealistic aesthetics, mistakenly considered the main and obligatory only the first task - "reproduction of reality", and the other two - secondary and optional. It is more correct, of course, to speak not about the hierarchy of these tasks, but about their equality, or rather, about the indissoluble connection between the objective and the subjective in a work: after all, a true artist simply cannot depict reality without comprehending and evaluating it in any way. However, it should be emphasized that the very presence of a subjective moment in a work of art was clearly recognized by Chernyshevsky, and this was a step forward in comparison with, say, the aesthetics of Hegel, who was very inclined to approach a work of art in a purely objectivist way, belittling or completely ignoring the activity of the creator.

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* Chernyshevsky N.G.

Full coll. cit.: In 15 t. M., 1949. T. II. C. 87.

To realize the unity of objective representation and subjective expression in a work of art is also necessary on a methodological level, for the sake of the practical tasks of analytical work with a work. Traditionally, in our study and especially teaching of literature, more attention is paid to the objective side, which undoubtedly impoverishes the idea of ​​a work of art. In addition, a kind of substitution of the subject of research can occur here: instead of studying a work of art with its inherent aesthetic laws, we begin to study the reality reflected in the work, which, of course, is also interesting and important, but has no direct connection with the study of literature as an art form. The methodological approach, aimed at studying the mainly objective side of a work of art, wittingly or unwittingly reduces the importance of art as an independent form of people's spiritual activity, and ultimately leads to ideas about the illustrative nature of art and literature. At the same time, a work of art is largely deprived of its lively emotional content, passion, pathos, which, of course, are primarily associated with the author's subjectivity.

In the history of literary criticism, this methodological trend has found its most obvious embodiment in the theory and practice of the so-called cultural-historical school, especially in European literary criticism. Its representatives looked in literary works, first of all, for signs and features of reflected reality; “they saw cultural and historical monuments in works of literature”, but “artistic specificity, all the complexity of literary masterpieces did not interest researchers”*. Individual representatives of the Russian cultural-historical school saw the danger of such an approach to literature. Thus, V. Sipovsky wrote bluntly: “One cannot look at literature only as a reflection of reality”**.

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* Nikolaev P.A., Kurilov A.S., Grishunin A.L. History of Russian literary criticism. M., 1980. S. 128.

** Sipovsky V.V. The history of literature as a science. St. Petersburg; M. . S. 17.

Of course, a conversation about literature may well turn into a conversation about life itself - there is nothing unnatural or fundamentally untenable in this, because literature and life are not separated by a wall. However, at the same time, the methodological setting is important, which does not allow one to forget about the aesthetic specificity of literature, to reduce literature and its meaning to the meaning of illustration.

If the content of a work of art is a unity of reflected life and the author's attitude towards it, that is, it expresses a certain "word about the world", then the form of the work is figurative, aesthetic. Unlike other types of social consciousness, art and literature, as you know, reflect life in the form of images, that is, they use such specific, single objects, phenomena, events that, in their specific singularity, carry a generalization. In contrast to the concept, the image has a greater “visibility”, it is characterized not by logical, but by concrete-sensual and emotional persuasiveness. Imagery is the basis of artistry, both in the sense of belonging to art and in the sense of high skill: due to their figurative nature, works of art have aesthetic merit, aesthetic value.

So, we can give such a working definition of a work of art: it is a certain emotional and mental content, a “word about the world”, expressed in an aesthetic, figurative form; a work of art has integrity, completeness and independence.

General concept of the theme of a literary work

The concept of a topic, as well as many other terms of literary criticism, contains a paradox: intuitively, a person, even far from philology, understands what is at stake; but as soon as we try to define this concept, to attach to it some more or less strict system of meanings, we are faced with a very difficult problem.

This is due to the fact that the topic is a multidimensional concept. In a literal translation, “theme” is what is laid at the foundation, which is the support of the work. But therein lies the difficulty. Try to unequivocally answer the question: “What is the basis of a literary work?” Once such a question is asked, it becomes clear why the term "theme" resists clear definitions. For some, the most important thing is the material of life - something what is depicted. In this sense, we can talk, for example, about the topic of war, about the topic of family relationships, about love adventures, about battles with aliens, etc. And each time we will go to the level of the topic.

But we can say that the most important thing in the work is what the most important problems of human existence the author poses and solves. For example, the struggle between good and evil, the formation of personality, the loneliness of a person, and so on ad infinitum. And this will also be a theme.

Other answers are possible. For example, we can say that the most important thing in a work is language. It is language, words, that are the most important theme of the work. This thesis usually makes students more difficult to understand. After all, it is extremely rare that a work is written directly about words. It happens, of course, and this, it is enough to recall, for example, the well-known poem in the prose of I. S. Turgenev "Russian language" or - with completely different accents - V. Khlebnikov's poem "Change", which is based on a pure language game, when the string is read the same from left to right and right to left:

Horses, trampling, monk,

But not speech, but he is black.

Let's go, young, down with copper.

Chin is called the sword backwards.

Hunger, how long is the sword?

In this case, the linguistic component of the theme clearly dominates, and if we ask the reader what this poem is about, we will hear a completely natural answer that the main thing here is the language game.

However, when we say that a language is a topic, we mean something much more complex than the examples just given. The main difficulty is that a phrase said differently also changes the “piece of life” that it expresses. In any case, in the mind of the speaker and listener. Therefore, if we accept these "rules of expression", we automatically change what we want to express. To understand what is at stake, it suffices to recall a well-known joke among philologists: what is the difference between the phrases “the young maiden trembles” and “the young maiden trembles”? You can answer that they differ in the style of expression, and this is true. But for our part, we will put the question differently: are these phrases about the same thing, or do “young maid” and “young maid” live in different worlds? Agree, intuition will tell you that in different. These are different people, they have different faces, they speak differently, they have a different social circle. All this difference was suggested to us only by the language.

These differences can be felt even more clearly if we compare, for example, the world of "adult" poetry with the world of poetry for children. In children's poetry, horses and dogs do not "live", horses and dogs live there, there is no sun and rain, there is sun and rain. In this world, the relationship between the characters is completely different, everything always ends well there. And it is absolutely impossible to depict this world in the language of adults. Therefore, we cannot take the "language" theme of children's poetry out of the brackets.

As a matter of fact, the different positions of scientists who understand the term “theme” in different ways are connected precisely with this multidimensionality. Researchers single out one or the other factor as a determining factor. This is reflected in the tutorials as well, which creates unnecessary confusion. Thus, in the most popular textbook on literary criticism of the Soviet period - in the textbook by G. L. Abramovich - the topic is understood almost exclusively as a problem. Such an approach is, of course, vulnerable. There are a huge number of works where the basis is not a problem at all. Therefore, the thesis of G. L. Abramovich is rightly criticized.

On the other hand, it is hardly correct to separate the topic from the problem, limiting the scope of the topic exclusively to the “circle of life phenomena”. This approach was also characteristic of Soviet literary criticism of the mid-twentieth century, but today it is an obvious anachronism, although echoes of this tradition are sometimes still felt in secondary and higher schools.

The modern philologist must be clearly aware that any infringement of the concept of "theme" makes this term non-functional for the analysis of a huge number of works of art. For example, if we understand the topic solely as a circle of life phenomena, as a fragment of reality, then the term retains its meaning in the analysis of realistic works (for example, the novels of L. N. Tolstoy), but becomes completely unsuitable for the analysis of the literature of modernism, where the usual reality is deliberately distorted, or even completely dissolves in the language game (recall the poem by V. Khlebnikov).

Therefore, if we want to understand the universal meaning of the term "theme", we must talk about it in a different plane. It is no coincidence that in recent years the term "theme" is increasingly interpreted in line with structuralist traditions, when a work of art is viewed as an integral structure. Then the "topic" becomes the supporting links of this structure. For example, the theme of a snowstorm in Blok's work, the theme of crime and punishment in Dostoevsky, etc. At the same time, the meaning of the term "theme" largely coincides with the meaning of another basic term in literary criticism - "motive".

The theory of motive, developed in the 19th century by the outstanding philologist A. N. Veselovsky, had a huge impact on the subsequent development of the science of literature. We will dwell on this theory in more detail in the next chapter, for now we will only note that motives are the most important elements of the entire artistic structure, its “bearing pillars”. And just as the supporting pillars of a building can be made of different materials (concrete, metal, wood, etc.), the structural supports of text can also be different. In some cases, these are life facts (without them, for example, no documentary is fundamentally impossible), in others - problems, in the third - author's experiences, in the fourth - language, etc. In a real text, as well as in real construction, it is possible and most often there are combinations of different materials.

Such an understanding of the theme as the verbal and subject support of the work removes many misunderstandings associated with the meaning of the term. This point of view was very popular in Russian science in the first third of the twentieth century, then it was subjected to sharp criticism, which was more ideological than philological in nature. In recent years, this understanding of the topic has again found an increasing number of supporters.

So, the theme can be correctly understood if we return to the literal meaning of this word: that which is laid at the foundation. The theme is a kind of support for the entire text (event, problem, language, etc.). At the same time, it is important to understand that the different components of the concept of "theme" are not isolated from each other, they represent a single system. Roughly speaking, a work of literature cannot be "disassembled" into vital material, problems and language. This is only possible for educational purposes or as an aid to analysis. Just as in a living organism the skeleton, muscles and organs form a unity, in works of literature the different components of the concept of “theme” are also united. In this sense, B. V. Tomashevsky was absolutely right when he wrote that “the theme<...>is the unity of the meanings of the individual elements of the work. In reality, this means that when we talk, for example, about the theme of human loneliness in M. Yu. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, we already have in mind the series of events, the problematics, the structure of the work, and the linguistic features of the novel.

If we try to somehow streamline and systematize all the almost infinite thematic wealth of world literature, we can distinguish several thematic levels.

See: Abramovich G. L. Introduction to literary criticism. M., 1970. S. 122–124.

See, for example: Revyakin A. I. Problems of studying and teaching literature. M., 1972. S. 101–102; Fedotov O. I. Fundamentals of the theory of literature: In 2 hours. Part 1. M., 2003. P. 42–43; Without a direct reference to the name of Abramovich, such an approach is also criticized by V. E. Khalizev, see: Khalizev V. E. Theory of Literature. M., 1999. S. 41.

See: Shchepilova L.V. Introduction to literary criticism. M., 1956. S. 66–67.

This trend manifested itself among researchers directly or indirectly associated with the traditions of formalism and - later - structuralism (V. Shklovsky, R. Yakobson, B. Eichenbaum, A. Evlakhov, V. Fischer, etc.).

For details on this, see, for example: Revyakin A. I. Problems of studying and teaching literature. M., 1972. S. 108–113.

Tomashevsky B. V. Theory of Literature. Poetics. M., 2002. S. 176.

Thematic levels

First, these are the topics that touch on the fundamental problems of human existence. This, for example, is the theme of life and death, the struggle with the elements, man and God, etc. Such topics are usually called ontological(from the Greek ontos - the essence + logos - teaching). Ontological issues dominate, for example, in most of the works of F. M. Dostoevsky. In any particular event, the writer strives to see a "glimpse of the eternal", projections of the most important issues of human existence. Any artist who raises and solves such problems finds himself in line with the most powerful traditions that in one way or another influence the solution of the topic. Try, for example, to depict the feat of a person who gave his life for other people in an ironic or vulgar style, and you will feel how the text will begin to resist, the topic will begin to demand a different language.

The next level can be formulated in the most general form as follows: "Man in Certain Circumstances". This level is more specific; ontological issues may not be affected by it. For example, a production theme or a private family conflict may turn out to be completely self-sufficient in terms of the theme and not claim to solve the “eternal” questions of human existence. On the other hand, the ontological basis may well “shine through” through this thematic level. Suffice it to recall, for example, the famous novel by L. N. Tolstoy "Anna Karenina", where the family drama is comprehended in the system of eternal human values.

Next, one can highlight subject-pictorial level. In this case, ontological issues may fade into the background or not be updated at all, but the linguistic component of the topic is clearly manifested. The dominance of this level is easy to feel, for example, in a literary still life or in playful poetry. This is how, as a rule, poetry for children is constructed, charming in its simplicity and clarity. It is pointless to look for ontological depths in the poems of Agnia Barto or Korney Chukovsky, often the charm of the work is explained precisely by the liveliness and clarity of the thematic sketch being created. Let us recall, for example, the cycle of poems by Agnia Barto “Toys” known to everyone since childhood:

The hostess abandoned the bunny -

A bunny was left in the rain.

Couldn't get off the bench

Wet to the skin.

What has been said, of course, does not mean that the subject-pictorial level always turns out to be self-sufficient, that there are no deeper thematic layers behind it. Moreover, the art of modern times tends to ensure that the ontological level "shines through" through the subject-pictorial. It is enough to recall the famous novel by M. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita" to understand what is at stake. For example, Woland's famous ball, on the one hand, is interesting precisely for its picturesqueness, on the other hand, almost every scene in one way or another touches on the eternal problems of man: this is love, and mercy, and the mission of man, etc. If we compare the images of Yeshua and Behemoth, we can easily feel that in the first case, the ontological thematic level dominates, in the second - the subject-pictorial level. That is, even within one work you can feel different thematic dominants. So, in the famous novel by M. Sholokhov "Virgin Soil Upturned" one of the most striking images - the image of grandfather Shchukar - mainly correlates with the subject-pictorial thematic level, while the novel as a whole has a much more complex thematic structure.

Thus, the concept of "theme" can be considered from different angles and have different shades of meaning.

Thematic analysis allows the philologist, among other things, to see some regularities in the development of the literary process. The fact is that each era actualizes its range of topics, "resurrecting" some and as if not noticing others. At one time, V. Shklovsky remarked: "each era has its own index, its own list of topics forbidden due to obsolescence." Although Shklovsky primarily had in mind the linguistic and structural "supports" of the themes, without too much actualization of life's realities, his remark is very prescient. Indeed, it is important and interesting for a philologist to understand why certain topics and thematic levels turn out to be relevant in a given historical situation. The "thematic index" of classicism is not the same as in romanticism; Russian futurism (Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, etc.) actualized completely different thematic levels than symbolism (Blok, Bely, etc.). Having understood the reasons for such a change in indices, a philologist can say a lot about the features of a particular stage in the development of literature.

Shklovsky V. B. On the theory of prose. M., 1929. S. 236.

External and internal theme. Intermediary sign system

The next step in mastering the concept of "theme" for a novice philologist is to distinguish between the so-called "external" and "internal" themes of the work. This division is conditional and is accepted only for the convenience of analysis. Of course, in a real work there is no "separately external" and "separately internal" theme. But in the practice of analysis, such a division is very useful, since it allows you to make the analysis concrete and conclusive.

Under "external" topic usually understand the system of thematic supports directly presented in the text. This is vital material and the plot level associated with it, the author's commentary, in some cases - the title. In modern literature, the title is not always associated with the external level of the topic, but, say, in the 17th - 18th centuries. tradition was different. There, the title often included a brief summary of the plot. In a number of cases, such "transparency" of titles makes the modern reader smile. For example, the famous English writer D. Defoe, the creator of The Life and Amazing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, used much more lengthy titles in his subsequent works. The third volume of "Robinson Crusoe" is called: "Serious reflections of Robinson Crusoe throughout his life and amazing adventures; with the addition of his visions of the angelic world. And the full title of the novel “The Joys and Sorrows of the Famous Mole Flanders” takes up almost half of the page, as it actually lists all the adventures of the heroine.

In lyrical works, in which the plot plays a much smaller role, and often does not exist at all, “direct” expressions of the author's thoughts and feelings, devoid of metaphorical veil, can be attributed to the field of the external theme. Let us recall, for example, the textbook famous lines of F. I. Tyutchev:

Russia cannot be understood with the mind,

Do not measure with a common yardstick.

She has a special personality.

One can only believe in Russia.

There is no discrepancy here between about what it is said that what it is said not to be felt. Compare with Block:

I can't pity you

And I carefully carry my cross.

What kind of sorcerer do you want

Give me the rogue beauty.

These words cannot be taken as a direct declaration, there is a gap between about what it is said that what said.

The so-called "thematic image". The researcher who proposed this term, V. E. Kholshevnikov, commented on it with a quote from V. Mayakovsky - “felt thought”. This means that any object or situation in the lyrics serve as a support for the development of the author's emotions and thoughts. Let us recall the textbook famous poem by M. Yu. Lermontov “Sail”, and we will easily understand what is at stake. At the “external” level, this is a poem about a sail, but the sail here is a thematic image that allows the author to show the depth of human loneliness and the eternal throwing of a restless soul.

Let's sum up the intermediate result. The external theme is the most visible thematic level directly presented in the text. With a certain degree of conventionality, we can say that the external theme refers to what about what says in the text.

Another thing - internal subject. This is a much less obvious thematic level. To understand internal topic, it is always necessary to abstract from what was said directly, to catch and explain the internal connection of the elements. In some cases, this is not so difficult to do, especially if the habit of such recoding has been developed. Let's say, behind the external theme of I. A. Krylov's fable "The Crow and the Fox", we would easily feel the internal theme - the dangerous weakness of a person in relation to flattery addressed to him, even if Krylov's text did not begin with open morality:

How many times have they told the world

That flattery is vile, harmful; but everything is not for the future,

And in the heart the flatterer will always find a corner.

A fable in general is a genre in which the external and internal thematic levels are most often transparent, and the morality that connects these two levels makes the task of interpretation completely easier.

But in most cases, it's not that simple. The internal theme loses its obviousness, and the correct interpretation requires both special knowledge and intellectual effort. For example, if we think about the lines of Lermontov’s poem “It stands alone in the wild north ...”, then we easily feel that the internal theme is no longer amenable to an unambiguous interpretation:

Stands alone in the wild north

On the bare top of a pine tree,

And dozing, swaying, and loose snow

She is dressed like a robe.

And she dreams of everything that is in the distant desert,

In the region where the sun rises

Alone and sad on a rock with fuel

A beautiful palm tree is growing.

We can see the development of the thematic image without difficulty, but what is hidden in the depths of the text? Simply put, what are we talking about here, what problems are the author worried about? Different readers may have different associations, sometimes very far from what is actually in the text. But if we know that this poem is a free translation of a poem by G. Heine, and we compare Lermontov's text with other translation options, for example, with a poem by A. A. Fet, we will get much more weighty grounds for an answer. Compare with Fet:

In the north, a lonely oak

It stands on a steep hillock;

He slumbers, sternly covered

And snow and ice carpet.

In his dream he sees a palm tree

In a far eastern country

In silent, deep sadness,

One, on a hot rock.

Both poems were written in 1841, but what a difference between them! In Fet's poem - "he" and "she", yearning for each other. Emphasizing this, Fet translates "pine" as "oak" - in the name of preserving the love theme. The fact is that in German "pine" (more precisely, larch) is a masculine word, and the language itself dictates the reading of the poem in this vein. However, Lermontov not only “crosses out” the love theme, but in the second edition in every possible way enhances the feeling of endless loneliness. Instead of a “cold and bare peak”, “the wild north” appears, instead of “a distant eastern land” (cf. Fet), Lermontov writes: “in a distant desert”, instead of a “hot rock” - “a combustible cliff”. If we summarize all these observations, we can conclude that the inner theme of this poem is not the longing of separated, loving people, like in Heine and Fet, not even the dream of another wonderful life - Lermontov is dominated by the theme of “the tragic insurmountability of loneliness with a common affinity of fate, ”as R. Yu. Danilevsky commented on this poem.

In other cases, the situation can be even more complicated. For example, the story of I. A. Bunin "The Gentleman from San Francisco" is usually interpreted by an inexperienced reader as the story of the ridiculous death of a wealthy American, whom no one feels sorry for. But a simple question: “And what did this gentleman do to the island of Capri and why only after his death, as Bunin writes, “peace and tranquility again settled on the island””? - confuses students. The lack of analysis skills, the inability to “link” various fragments of the text into a single whole picture affects. At the same time, the name of the ship - “Atlantis”, the image of the Devil, the nuances of the plot, etc. are missed. If we connect all these fragments together, it turns out that the inner theme of the story will be the eternal struggle of two worlds - life and death. The gentleman from San Francisco is terrible by his very presence in the world of the living, he is foreign and dangerous. That is why the living world calms down only when it disappears; then the sun comes out and illuminates "the unsteady massifs of Italy, its near and distant mountains, the beauty of which is powerless to express the human word."

It is even more difficult to talk about an internal theme in relation to works of a large volume that raise a whole range of problems. For example, to discover these internal thematic springs in L. N. Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" or in M. A. Sholokhov's novel "Quiet Flows the Don" is only possible for a qualified philologist who has both sufficient knowledge and the ability to abstract from the specific vicissitudes of the plot. Therefore, it is better to learn independent thematic analysis on works of relatively small volume - there, as a rule, it is easier to feel the logic of the interconnections of thematic elements.

So, we conclude: internal theme is a complex complex consisting of problems, internal connections of plot and language components. Correctly understood internal theme allows you to feel the non-randomness and deep connections of the most heterogeneous elements.

As already mentioned, the division of thematic unity into external and internal levels is very arbitrary, because in a real text they are merged. It is more of an analysis tool than the actual structure of the text as such. However, this does not mean that such a technique is any kind of violence against the living organics of a literary work. Any technology of knowledge is based on some assumptions and conventions, but this helps to better understand the subject being studied. For example, an x-ray is also a very conditional copy of the human body, but this technique will allow you to see what is almost impossible to see with the naked eye.

In recent years, after the appearance of the research by A.K. Zholkovsky and Yu.K. The researchers proposed to distinguish between the so-called "declared" and "elusive" themes. "Elusive" topics are touched upon in the work most often, regardless of the author's intention. Such, for example, are the mythopoetic foundations of Russian classical literature: the struggle between space and chaos, the motives of initiation, etc. In fact, we are talking about the most abstract, supporting levels of the internal theme.

In addition, the same study raises the question of intraliterary topics. In these cases, thematic supports do not go beyond the literary tradition. The simplest example is a parody, which usually has a different literary work as its subject.

Thematic analysis involves understanding the various elements of the text in their relationship to the external and internal levels of the topic. In other words, the philologist must understand why the outer plane is the expression this internal. Why, when reading poems about a pine tree and a palm tree, we sympathize human loneliness? This means that there are some elements in the text that ensure the “translation” of the external plan into the internal one. These elements can be called intermediaries. If we can understand and explain these intermediary signs, the conversation about thematic levels will become substantive and interesting.

In the strict sense of the word mediator is the entire text. In essence, such an answer is impeccable, but methodologically it is hardly correct, since for an inexperienced philologist the phrase "everything in the text" is almost equal to "nothing." Therefore, it makes sense to concretize this thesis. So, what elements of the text can be first of all paid attention to when conducting a thematic analysis?

First of all, it is always worth remembering that no text exists in a vacuum. It is always surrounded by other texts, it is always addressed to a particular reader, and so on. Therefore, often the "intermediary" can be found not only in the text itself, but also outside it. Let's take a simple example. The famous French poet Pierre Jean Beranger has a funny song called "The Noble Friend". It is a monologue of a commoner, to whose wife a rich and noble count is clearly not indifferent. As a result, some favors fall to the hero. How does the hero perceive the situation?

Last, for example, winter

Appointed by the Minister of Ball:

The count comes for his wife, -

As a husband, and I got there.

There, squeezing my hand with everyone,

Called my friend!

What happiness! What an honor!

After all, I'm a worm compared to him!

Compared to him,

With a face like this

With his Excellency himself!

It is easy to feel that behind the external theme - the enthusiastic story of a small person about his "benefactor" - there is something completely different. The entire poem by Beranger is a protest against slave psychology. But why do we understand it this way, because there is not a word of condemnation in the text itself? The fact of the matter is that in this case, a certain norm of human behavior acts as an intermediary, which turns out to be violated. The elements of the text (style, plot fragments, willing self-deprecation of the hero, etc.) reveal this unacceptable deviation from the reader's idea of ​​a worthy person. Therefore, all elements of the text change polarities: what the hero considers a plus is a minus.

Secondly, the title can act as an intermediary. This does not always happen, but in many cases the title is involved in all levels of the topic. Let us recall, for example, Gogol's Dead Souls, where the outer row (Chichikov's purchase of dead souls) and the inner theme (the theme of spiritual dying) are linked by the title.

In some cases, misunderstanding of the connection between the title and the internal theme leads to reading oddities. For example, the modern reader quite often perceives the meaning of the title of Leo Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" as "war and peacetime", seeing here the antithesis device. However, Tolstoy's manuscript does not say "War and Peace", but "War and Peace". In the nineteenth century, these words were perceived as different. "Mir" - "the absence of a quarrel, enmity, disagreement, war" (according to Dahl's dictionary), "Mir" - "a substance in the universe and a force in time // all people, the whole world, the human race" (according to Dahl). Therefore, Tolstoy had in mind not the antithesis of war, but something completely different: “War and the human race”, “War and the movement of time”, etc. All this is directly related to the problems of Tolstoy's masterpiece.

Thirdly, the epigraph is a fundamentally important intermediary. The epigraph, as a rule, is chosen very carefully, often the author refuses the original epigraph in favor of another, or even the epigraph does not appear from the first edition. For a philologist, this is always “information for thought”. For example, we know that Leo Tolstoy originally wanted to preface his novel Anna Karenina with a completely “transparent” epigraph condemning adultery. But then he abandoned this plan, choosing an epigraph with a much more voluminous and complex meaning: "Vengeance is mine and I will repay." Already this nuance is enough to understand that the problems of the novel are much broader and deeper than the family drama. Anna Karenina's sin is just one of the signs of the colossal "unrighteousness" in which people live. This change of emphasis actually changed the original idea of ​​the whole novel, including the image of the main character. In the first versions, we meet with a woman of repulsive appearance, in the final version - this is a beautiful, intelligent, sinful and suffering woman. The change of epigraphs was a reflection of the revision of the entire thematic structure.

If we remember N.V. Gogol's comedy "The Inspector General", then we will inevitably smile at its epigraph: "There is nothing to blame on the mirror, if the face is crooked." It seems that this epigraph has always existed and is a genre remark of a comedy. But in the first edition of The Inspector General there was no epigraph; Gogol introduces it later, surprised by the incorrect interpretation of the play. The fact is that Gogol's comedy was originally perceived as a parody of some officials, on some vices. But the future author of Dead Souls had something else in mind: he made a terrible diagnosis of Russian spirituality. And such a “private” reading did not satisfy him at all, hence the peculiar polemical epigraph, in a strange way echoing the famous words of the Governor: “Who are you laughing at! Laugh at yourself!" If you carefully read the comedy, you can see how Gogol emphasizes this idea at all levels of the text. universal lack of spirituality, and not at all the arbitrariness of some officials. And the story with the epigraph that appeared is very revealing.

Fourth, you should always pay attention to proper names: the names and nicknames of the characters, the scene, the names of objects. Sometimes the thematic clue is obvious. For example, N. S. Leskov’s essay “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” already in the very title contains a hint at the theme of Shakespearean passions, so close to the writer’s heart, raging in the hearts of seemingly ordinary people of the Russian hinterland. "Talking" names here will be not only "Lady Macbeth", but also "Mtsensk district". "Direct" thematic projections have many names of heroes in the dramas of classicism. We feel this tradition well in A. S. Griboedov’s comedy “Woe from Wit”.

In other cases, the connection of the hero's name with the internal theme is more associative, less obvious. For example, Lermontov's Pechorin already refers to Onegin with his last name, emphasizing not only similarities, but also differences (Onega and Pechora are northern rivers that gave names to entire regions). This similarity-difference was immediately noticed by the insightful V. G. Belinsky.

It may also be that it is not the name of the hero that is significant, but his absence. Recall the story I. A. Bunin mentioned, "The Gentleman from San Francisco." The story begins with a paradoxical phrase: “A gentleman from San Francisco - no one remembered his name either in Naples or in Capri ...” From the point of view of reality, this is completely impossible: the scandalous death of a supermillionaire would have preserved his name for a long time. But Bunin has a different logic. Not only the gentleman from San Francisco, none of the passengers on the Atlantis is ever named. At the same time, the old boatman who appeared episodically at the end of the story has a name. His name is Lorenzo. This, of course, is not accidental. After all, a name is given to a person at birth, it is a kind of sign of life. And the passengers of Atlantis (think about the name of the ship - "non-existent land") belong to another world, where everything is the other way around and where names should not be. Thus, the absence of a name can be very revealing.

Fifth, it is important to pay attention to the stylistic pattern of the text, especially when it comes to fairly large and diverse works. Style analysis is a self-sufficient subject of study, but this is not the point here. We are talking about a thematic analysis, for which it is more important not to scrupulously study all the nuances, but rather “change of timbres”. It is enough to recall the novel by M. A. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita" to understand what is at stake. The life of literary Moscow and the history of Pontius Pilate are written in completely different ways. In the first case, we feel the pen of the feuilletonist, in the second we have before us the author, impeccably accurate in psychological details. There is no trace of irony and ridicule.

Or another example. The story of A. S. Pushkin "The Snowstorm" is the story of two novels of the heroine, Marya Gavrilovna. But the inner theme of this work is much deeper than the plot intrigue. If we carefully read the text, we will feel that the point is not that Marya Gavrilovna "accidentally" fell in love with the person with whom she was "accidentally" and mistakenly married. The fact is that her first love is completely different from the second. In the first case, we clearly feel the author's soft irony, the heroine is naive and romantic. Then the style drawing changes. Before us is an adult, interesting woman, very well distinguishing "bookish" love from real. And Pushkin very accurately draws the line separating these two worlds: "That was in 1812." If we compare all these facts, we will understand that Pushkin was not worried about a funny incident, not an irony of fate, although this is also important. But the main thing for the mature Pushkin was the analysis of "growing up", the fate of romantic consciousness. Such an exact date is not accidental. 1812 - the war with Napoleon - dispelled many romantic illusions. The private fate of the heroine is significant for Russia as a whole. This is precisely the most important internal theme of the Snowstorm.

At sixth, in thematic analysis, it is fundamentally important to pay attention to how different motives relate to each other. Let us recall, for example, A. S. Pushkin's poem "Anchar". Three fragments are clearly visible in this poem: two are approximately equal in length, one is much smaller. The first fragment is a description of the terrible tree of death; the second is a small plot, a story about how the lord sent a slave for poison to certain death. This story is actually exhausted with the words "And the poor slave died at the feet / of the Invincible lord." But the poem does not end there. Last stanza:

And the prince fed that poison

Your obedient arrows

And with them death sent

To neighbors in alien lands, -

this is a new piece. The internal theme - the sentence of tyranny - receives a new round of development here. The tyrant kills one in order to kill many. Like anchar, he is doomed to carry death within himself. Thematic fragments were not chosen by chance, the last stanza confirms the legitimacy of conjugation of the two main thematic fragments. An analysis of the options shows that Pushkin chose his words most carefully. at the borders fragments. Far from immediately, the words “But a man / He sent a man to the Anchar with an authoritative look” were found. This is not accidental, since it is here that the thematic support of the text is.

Among other things, thematic analysis involves the study of the logic of the plot, the correlation of different elements of the text, etc. In general, we repeat, the entire text is a unity of external and internal topics. We paid attention only to some components that an inexperienced philologist often does not update.

For an analysis of the titles of literary works, see, for example. in: Lamzina A. V. Title // Introduction to Literary Studies ” / Ed. L. V. Chernets. M., 2000.

Kholshevnikov V. E. Analysis of the composition of a lyrical poem // Analysis of one poem. L., 1985. S. 8–10.

Lermontov Encyclopedia. M., 1981. S. 330.

Zholkovsky A.K., Shcheglov Yu.K. On the concepts of "theme" and "poetic world" // Uchenye zapiski Tartu gos. university Issue. 365. Tartu, 1975.

See, for example: Timofeev L.I. Fundamentals of the theory of literature. M., 1963. S. 343–346.

The concept of the idea of ​​a literary text

Another basic concept of literary criticism is idea artistic text. The distinction between the theme of an idea is very arbitrary. For example, L. I. Timofeev preferred to talk about the ideological and thematic basis of the work, without too actualizing the differences. In O. I. Fedotov's textbook, the idea is understood as an expression of the author's tendency; in fact, it is only about the author's attitude towards the characters and the world. “An artistic idea,” the scientist writes, “is subjective by definition.” In the authoritative manual on literary criticism edited by L. V. Chernets, built according to the dictionary principle, the term “idea” did not find a place at all. This term is not updated in the voluminous reader compiled by N. D. Tamarchenko. Even more wary is the attitude towards the term "artistic idea" in Western criticism of the second half of the 20th century. Here, the tradition of the very authoritative school of “new criticism” (T. Eliot, C. Brooks, R. Warren, etc.) affected, whose representatives sharply opposed any analysis of the “idea”, considering it one of the most dangerous “heresies” of literary criticism. . They even coined the term "heresy of communication", implying the search for any social or ethical ideas in the text.

Thus, the attitude to the term "idea", as we see, is ambiguous. At the same time, attempts to “remove” this term from the lexicon of literary critics seem not only wrong, but also naive. Talking about an idea implies interpretation figurative meaning works, and the vast majority of literary masterpieces are permeated with meanings. That is why works of art continue to excite the viewer and reader. And no loud statements by some scientists will change anything here.

Another thing is that one should not absolutize the analysis of an artistic idea. Here there is always a danger of "breaking away" from the text, of diverting the conversation into the mainstream of pure sociology or morality.

This is exactly what literary criticism of the Soviet period sinned, hence gross errors arose in the assessments of this or that artist, since the meaning of the work was constantly “checked” with the norms of Soviet ideology. Hence the accusations of lack of ideas addressed to outstanding figures of Russian culture (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Shostakovich, etc.), hence the naive attempts from a modern point of view to classify the types of artistic ideas (“idea - question”, “idea - answer”, “false idea”, etc.). This is also reflected in the textbooks. In particular, L. I. Timofeev, although he speaks of conditionality by classification, nevertheless specifically highlights even the “idea is a mistake”, which is completely unacceptable from the point of view of literary ethics. The idea, we repeat, is the figurative meaning of the work, and as such it can be neither “correct” nor “erroneous”. Another thing is that this may not suit the interpreter, but personal assessment cannot be transferred to the meaning of the work. History teaches us that the assessments of interpreters are very flexible: if, say, we trust the assessments of many of the first critics of A Hero of Our Time by M. Yu. Lermontov (S. A. Burachok, S. P. Shevyrev, N. A. Polevoy, etc. ), then their interpretation of the idea of ​​Lermontov's masterpiece will seem, to put it mildly, strange. However, now only a narrow circle of specialists remembers such assessments, while the semantic depth of Lermontov's novel is beyond doubt.

Something similar can be said about Leo Tolstoy's famous novel Anna Karenina, which many critics hastened to dismiss as "ideologically alien" or not deep enough. Today it is obvious that the criticisms were not deep enough, but everything is in order with Tolstoy's novel.

Such examples could go on and on. Analyzing this paradox of contemporaries’ misunderstanding of the semantic depth of many masterpieces, the well-known literary critic L. Ya. Ginzburg perspicaciously noted that the meanings of masterpieces correlate with “modernity of a different scale”, which a critic who is not endowed with brilliant thinking cannot accommodate. That is why the evaluative criteria of an idea are not only incorrect, but also dangerous.

However, all this, we repeat, should not discredit the very concept of the idea of ​​a work and interest in this side of literature.

It should be remembered that an artistic idea is a very voluminous concept and one can speak of at least several of its facets.

First, this author's idea, that is, those meanings that the author himself more or less consciously intended to embody. Not always the idea is expressed by a writer or a poet. logically, the author embodies it differently - in the language of a work of art. Moreover, writers often protest (I. Goethe, L. N. Tolstoy, O. Wilde, M. Tsvetaeva - just some of the names) when they are asked to formulate the idea of ​​the created work. This is understandable, because, let us repeat the remark of O. Wilde, “the sculptor thinks with marble”, that is, he does not have an idea “torn off” from stone. Similarly, the composer thinks in sounds, the poet in verses, and so on.

This thesis is very popular among both artists and specialists, but at the same time there is an element of unconscious craftiness in it. The fact is that the artist almost always in one way or another reflects both on the concept of the work and on the already written text. The same I. Goethe repeatedly commented on his "Faust", and L. N. Tolstoy was generally inclined to "clarify" the meanings of his own works. Suffice it to recall the second part of the epilogue and afterword to "War and Peace", the afterword to the "Kreutzer Sonata", etc. In addition, there are diaries, letters, memoirs of contemporaries, drafts - that is, a literary critic has at his disposal quite extensive material that directly or indirectly affects problem of the author's idea.

Confirming the author's idea by actually analyzing the literary text (with the exception of comparing options) is a much more difficult task. The fact is that, firstly, in the text it is difficult to distinguish between the position of the real author and the image that is created in this work (in modern terminology, it is often called implicit author). But even direct assessments of the real and implicit author may not coincide. Secondly, in general, the idea of ​​the text, as will be shown below, does not copy the author's idea - something is "spoken out" in the text that the author might not have had in mind. Thirdly, the text is a complex entity that allows for various interpretations. This volume of meaning is inherent in the very nature of the artistic image (remember: the artistic image is a sign with an incremental meaning, it is paradoxical and opposes unambiguous understanding). Therefore, every time it must be borne in mind that the author, creating a certain image, could put in completely different meanings that the interpreter saw.

The foregoing does not mean that it is impossible or incorrect to talk about the author's idea in relation to the text itself. It all depends on the subtlety of the analysis and the tact of the researcher. Convincing are parallels with other works of this author, a finely selected system of circumstantial evidence, the definition of a system of contexts, etc. In addition, it is important to consider what facts of real life the author chooses to create his work. Often this very choice of facts can become a weighty argument in a conversation about the author's idea. It is clear, for example, that of the innumerable facts of the civil war, writers who sympathize with the Reds will choose one, and those who sympathize with the Whites will choose another. Here, however, it must be remembered that a great writer, as a rule, avoids a one-dimensional and linear factual series, that is, the facts of life are not an "illustration" of his idea. For example, in M. A. Sholokhov's novel The Quiet Flows the Don, there are scenes that the writer, who sympathizes with the Soviet government and the Communists, would seem to have had to omit. For example, one of Sholokhov's favorite heroes, communist Podtelkov, in one of the scenes, cuts down captured whites, which shocks even the worldly-wise Grigory Melekhov. At one time, critics strongly advised Sholokhov to remove this scene, so much so that it did not fit into linearly understood idea. Sholokhov at one moment heeded these advice, but then, in spite of everything, he reintroduced it into the text of the novel, since volumetric the author's idea without it would be flawed. The talent of the writer resisted such bills.

But in general, the analysis of the logic of facts is a very effective argument in talking about the author's idea.

The second facet of the meaning of the term "artistic idea" is text idea. This is one of the most mysterious categories of literary criticism. The problem is that the idea of ​​the text almost never completely coincides with the author's. In some cases, these coincidences are striking. The famous "Marseillaise", which became the anthem of France, was written as a marching song of the regiment by officer Rouger de Lille without any pretensions to artistic depth. Neither before nor after his masterpiece, Rouget de Lisle created anything like it.

Leo Tolstoy, creating "Anna Karenina", conceived one thing, but it turned out another.

This difference will be even clearer if we imagine that some mediocre graphomaniac tries to write a novel full of deep meanings. In a real text, there will be no trace of the author's idea, the idea of ​​the text will turn out to be primitive and flat, no matter how much the author wants the opposite.

The same discrepancy, although with other signs, we see in geniuses. Another thing is that in this case the idea of ​​the text will be incommensurably richer than the author's. This is the secret of talent. Many meanings that are important for the author will be lost, but the depth of the work does not suffer from this. Shakespeare scholars, for example, teach us that the brilliant playwright often wrote "on the topic of the day", his works are full of allusions to the real political events of England in the 16th - 17th centuries. All this semantic "secret writing" was important for Shakespeare, it is even possible that it was these ideas that provoked him to create some tragedies (most often, Richard III is remembered in connection with this). However, all the nuances are known only to Shakespeare scholars, and even then with great reservations. But the idea of ​​the text does not suffer from this. In the semantic palette of the text there is always something that does not obey the author, which he did not mean and did not think about.

That is why the point of view, which we have already spoken about, that the idea of ​​the text exclusively subjective, that is, always associated with the author.

In addition, the idea of ​​the text related to the reader. It can be felt and detected only by the perceiving consciousness. And life shows that readers often actualize different meanings, see different things in the same text. As they say, how many readers, so many Hamlets. It turns out that one cannot fully trust either the author's intention (what he wanted to say) or the reader (what he felt and understood). Then is there any point in talking about the idea of ​​the text?

Many modern literary scholars (J. Derrida, J. Kristeva, P. de Mann, J. Miller, and others) insist on the fallacy of the thesis about any semantic unity of the text. In their opinion, the meanings are reconstructed every time a new reader encounters the text. All this resembles a children's kaleidoscope with an infinite number of patterns: everyone will see their own, and it's pointless to say which of the meanings is in fact and which perception is more accurate.

Such an approach would be convincing, if not for one "but". After all, if there is no objective the semantic depth of the text, then all texts will be fundamentally equal: the helpless rhymer and the brilliant Blok, the naive text of a schoolgirl and Akhmatova's masterpiece - all this is absolutely the same, as they say, whoever likes what. The most consistent scientists of this trend (J. Derrida) just conclude that all written texts are equal in principle.

In fact, this levels out talent and crosses out the entire world culture, because it was built by masters and geniuses. Therefore, such an approach, while seemingly logical, is fraught with serious dangers.

Obviously, it is more correct to assume that the idea of ​​a text is not a fiction, that it exists, but exists not in a frozen form once and for all, but in the form of a meaning-generating matrix: meanings are born whenever the reader encounters a text, but this is not at all a kaleidoscope, here has its own boundaries, its own vectors of understanding. The question of what is constant and what is variable in this process is still very far from being resolved.

It is clear that the idea perceived by the reader is most often not identical to the author's. In the strict sense of the word, there is never a complete coincidence; we can only talk about the depth of discrepancies. The history of literature knows many examples when reading even a qualified reader turns out to be a complete surprise for the author. Suffice it to recall the violent reaction of I. S. Turgenev to the article by N. A. Dobrolyubov “When will the real day come?” The critic saw in Turgenev's novel "On the Eve" a call for the liberation of Russia "from the internal enemy", while I. S. Turgenev conceived the novel about something completely different. The case, as you know, ended in a scandal and Turgenev's break with the editors of Sovremennik, where the article was published. Note that N. A. Dobrolyubov rated the novel very highly, that is, we cannot talk about personal grievances. Turgenev was outraged precisely by the inadequacy of the reading. In general, as studies of recent decades show, any literary text contains not only a hidden author's position, but also a hidden supposed reader's position (in literary terminology, this is called implicit, or abstract, reader). This is a kind of ideal reader, under which the text is built. In the case of Turgenev and Dobrolyubov, the discrepancies between the implicit and the real reader turned out to be colossal.

In connection with all that has been said, one can finally raise the question of objective idea works. The legitimacy of such a question has already been substantiated when we spoke about the idea of ​​the text. The problem is, what take it as an objective idea. Apparently, we have no other choice but to recognize as an objective idea some conditional vector value, which is formed from the analysis of the author's idea and the set of perceived ones. Simply put, we must know the author's intent, the history of interpretations, of which our own is also a part, and on this basis find some of the most important points of intersection that guarantee against arbitrariness.

There. pp. 135–136.

Fedotov OI Fundamentals of the theory of literature. Ch. 1, M., 2003. S. 47.

Timofeev L. I. Decree. op. S. 139.

See: Ginzburg L. Ya. Literature in search of reality. L., 1987.

This thesis is especially popular among the representatives of the scientific school called "receptive aesthetics" (F. Vodicka, J. Mukarzhovsky, R. Ingarden, especially H. R. Jauss and W. Iser). These authors proceed from the fact that a literary work receives its final existence only in the reader's mind, so the reader cannot be taken "out of the brackets" when analyzing the text. One of the basic terms of receptive aesthetics is "waiting horizon"- just designed to structure these relationships.

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Volkov I. F. Theory of Literature. M., 1995. S. 60–66.

Zhirmunsky V. M. Theory of Literature. Poetics. Stylistics. L., 1977. S. 27, 30–31.

Zholkovsky A.K., Shcheglov Yu.K. On the concepts of "theme" and "poetic world" // Uchenye zapiski Tartu gos. university Issue. 365. Tartu, 1975.

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