Artistic image- a general category of artistic creativity, a form of interpretation and development of the world from the standpoint of a certain aesthetic ideal by creating aesthetically influencing objects. An artistic image is also called any phenomenon that is creatively recreated in a work of art. An artistic image is an image from art, which is created by the author of a work of art in order to most fully reveal the described phenomenon of reality. The artistic image is created by the author for the most complete development of the artistic world of the work. First of all, through the artistic image, the reader reveals the picture of the world, plot-plot moves and features of psychologism in the work.

The artistic image is dialectical: it combines living contemplation, its subjective interpretation and evaluation by the author (and also by the performer, listener, reader, viewer).

An artistic image is created on the basis of one of the means: image, sound, language environment, or a combination of several. It is inseparable from the material substratum of art. For example, the meaning, internal structure, clarity of a musical image is largely determined by the natural matter of music - the acoustic qualities of musical sound. In literature and poetry, an artistic image is created on the basis of a specific language environment; all three means are used in theatrical art.

At the same time, the meaning of an artistic image is revealed only in a certain communicative situation, and the final result of such communication depends on the personality, goals and even the momentary mood of the person who encountered it, as well as on the specific culture to which he belongs. Therefore, often after one or two centuries have passed since the creation of a work of art, it is perceived in a completely different way than its contemporaries and even the author himself perceived it.

Artistic image in romanticism

It is characterized by the assertion of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the image of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, spiritualized and healing nature.

In Russian poetry, M. Yu. Lermontov is considered a prominent representative of romanticism. Poem "Mtsyri". The poem "Sail"

Artistic image in surrealism

The main concept of surrealism, surreality is the combination of dream and reality. To do this, the surrealists offered an absurd, contradictory combination of naturalistic images through collage. This direction was formed under the great influence of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. The primary goal of the Surrealists was spiritual elevation and separation of the spirit from the material. One of the most important values ​​was freedom, as well as irrationality.

Surrealism was rooted in Symbolism and was initially influenced by Symbolist artists such as Gustave Moreau. The famous artist of this direction is Salvador Dali.

Question 27. Cervantes. Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), whose life itself reads like a novel, conceived his work as a parody of a romance of chivalry, and on the last page, saying goodbye to the reader, confirms that he "had no other desire, besides to instill in people an aversion to the fictitious and ridiculous stories described in chivalric romances. This was a very urgent task for Spain at the turn of the 16th–17th centuries. By the beginning of the 17th century, the era of chivalry in Europe had passed. However, during the century preceding the appearance of Don Quixote, about 120 chivalric novels were published in Spain, which were the most popular reading of all walks of life. Many philosophers and moralists spoke out against the pernicious passion for the absurd inventions of an obsolete genre. But if "Don Quixote" were only a parody of a chivalric romance (the highest example of the genre is "The Death of Arthur" by T. Mallory), the name of its hero would hardly have become a household name.

The fact is that in Don Quixote, the already middle-aged writer Cervantes went on a bold experiment with unforeseen consequences and possibilities: he verifies the knightly ideal with contemporary Spanish reality, and as a result, his knight wanders through the space of the so-called picaresque novel.

A picaresque novel, or picaresque, is a narrative that arose in Spain in the middle of the 16th century, claiming to be an absolute documentary and describing the life of a rogue, a swindler, a servant of all masters (from Spanish picaro - a rogue, a swindler). By itself, the hero of a picaresque novel is shallow; he is carried around the world by an unfortunate fate, and his many adventures on the high road of life are the main interest of picaresque. That is, the picaresque material is emphatically low reality. The lofty ideal of chivalry clashes with this reality, and Cervantes, as a novelist of a new type, explores the consequences of this collision.

The plot of the novel is summarized as follows. Poor middle-aged hidalgo Don Alonso Quijana, a resident of a certain village in the provincial Spanish province of La Mancha, goes crazy after reading chivalric novels. Imagining himself a knight-errant, he sets off in search of adventure in order "to eradicate all kinds of untruth and in the struggle against all sorts of accidents and dangers to acquire an immortal name and honor."

he renames the howling old horse Rocinante, calls himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, declares the peasant woman Aldonsa Lorenzo his beautiful lady Dulcinea of ​​Toboso, takes the farmer Sancho Panza as a squire, and in the first part of the novel makes two trips, mistaking the inn for a castle, attacking windmills, in which he sees evil giants, standing up for the offended. Relatives and those around him see Don Quixote as a madman, he gets beaten and humiliated, which he himself considers the usual misadventures of a wandering knight. The third departure of Don Quixote is described in the second, more bitter in tone part of the novel, which ends with the recovery of the hero and the death of Alonso Quixana the Good.

In Don Quixote, the author summarizes the essential features of human character: a romantic thirst for the affirmation of an ideal, combined with comic naivety and recklessness. The heart of the "scrawny, skinny and eccentric knight" burns with love for humanity. Don Quixote was truly imbued with the chivalrous and humanistic ideal, but at the same time he completely broke away from reality. His worldly martyrdom follows from his mission as a "corrector of falsehood" in an imperfect world; his will and courage are manifested in the desire to be himself, in this sense the old miserable hidalgo is one of the first heroes of the era of individualism.

The noble madman Don Quixote and the sensible Sancho Panza complement each other. Sancho admires his master because he sees that Don Quixote somehow rises above everyone he meets, pure altruism triumphs in him, the rejection of everything earthly. The madness of Don Quixote is inseparable from his wisdom, the comic in the novel is from tragedy, which expresses the fullness of the Renaissance worldview.

In addition, Cervantes, emphasizing the literary nature of the novel, complicates it by playing with the reader. So, in chapter 9 of the first part, he passes off his novel as a manuscript of the Arab historian Sid Ahmet Beninhali, in chapter 38, through the mouth of Don Quixote, he prefers the military field, rather than learning and belles-lettres.

Immediately after the publication of the first part of the novel, the names of its heroes became known to everyone, Cervantes' linguistic findings entered the popular speech.

From the balcony of the palace, the Spanish king Philip III saw a student reading a book on the go and laughing out loud; the king suggested that the student had either gone mad or was reading Don Quixote. The courtiers hurried to find out and made sure that the student had read Cervantes' novel.

Like any literary masterpiece, Cervantes' novel has a long and fascinating history of perception, interesting in itself and from the point of view of deepening the interpretation of the novel. In the rationalistic 17th century, the hero of Cervantes was seen as a type, although sympathetic, but negative. For the Age of Enlightenment, Don Quixote is a hero who is trying to introduce social justice into the world with the help of obviously unsuitable means. The revolution in the interpretation of "Don Quixote" was made by the German romantics, who saw in it an inaccessible model of the novel. For F. Novalis and F. Schlegel, the main thing in it is the manifestation of two vital forces: poetry, represented by Don Quixote, and prose, whose interests are protected by Sancho Panza. According to F. Schelling, Cervantes created from the material of his time the story of Don Quixote, who, like Sancho, bears the features of a mythological personality. Don Quixote and Sancho are mythological figures for all mankind, and the history of windmills and the like constitute the true myths. The theme of the novel is the real versus the ideal. From the point of view of G. Heine, Cervantes, "without himself clearly realizing it, wrote the greatest satire on human enthusiasm."

G. Hegel, as always, spoke most profoundly about the peculiarities of the psychology of Don Quixote: “Cervantes also made his Don Quixote an initially noble, versatile and spiritually gifted nature. Don Quixote is a soul that, in its madness, is completely confident in itself and in its work or rather, his madness consists only in the fact that he is confident and remains so confident in himself and in his work. Without this reckless calmness in relation to the character and success of his actions, he would not be truly romantic; this self-confidence is really great and brilliant ".

V. G. Belinsky, emphasizing the realism of the novel, the historical concreteness and typicality of its images, remarked: “Every person is a little Don Quixote; but most of all Don Quixotes are people with a fiery imagination, a loving soul, a noble heart, even a strong will and mind but without reason and the tact of reality. In the famous article by I. S. Turgenev "Hamlet and Don Quixote" (1860), the hero of Cervantes was first interpreted in a new way: not as an archaist who does not want to reckon with the requirements of the times, but as a fighter, a revolutionary. I. S. Turgenev considers self-sacrifice and activity to be its main properties. Such publicism in the interpretation of the image is characteristic of the Russian tradition. F. M. Dostoevsky is just as subjective, but psychologically deeper in his approach to the image. For the creator of Prince Myshkin, in the image of Don Quixote, doubt comes to the fore, almost shaking his faith: "The most fantastic of people, who has believed in the most fantastic dream imaginable to the point of insanity, suddenly falls into doubt and bewilderment ..."

The greatest German writer of the 20th century, T. Mann, in his essay "Journey by Sea with Don Quixote" (1934) makes a number of subtle observations on the image: "... surprise and reverence are invariably mixed with laughter caused by his grotesque figure."

But Spanish critics and writers approach Don Quixote in a very special way. Here is the opinion of J. Ortega y Gasset: “Fleeting insights about him dawned on the minds of foreigners: Schelling, Heine, Turgenev ... Revelations are mean and inferior. Don Quixote was an admirable curiosity for them; it was not what it is for us it is a problem of fate." M. Unamuno in his essay "The Way to the Tomb of Don Quixote" (1906) sings in it of the Spanish Christ, his tragic enthusiasm of a loner, doomed to defeat in advance, and describes "quixoticism" as a national version of Christianity.

Soon after the publication of the novel, Don Quixote began to live an "independent" life from his creator. Don Quixote - the hero of G. Fielding's comedy "Don Quixote in England" (1734); there are features of quixoticism in Mr. Pickwick from the "Notes of the Pickwick Club" (1836) by C. Dickens, in Prince Myshkin from "The Idiot" by F. M. Dostoevsky, in "Tartarin from Tarascon" (1872) by A. Daudet. "Don Quixote in a skirt" is the name given to the heroine of G. Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary (1856). Don Quixote is the first in the gallery of images of great individualists created in the literature of the Renaissance, just as Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first example of a new genre of the novel.

The word "image" (from other gr. Eyes- appearance, appearance) is used as a term in various fields of knowledge. In philosophy, an image is understood as any reflection of reality; in psychology, it is a representation, or mental contemplation of an object in its entirety; in aesthetics - the reproduction of the integrity of the subject in a certain system of signs. In fiction, the material carrier of imagery is word . A.A. Potebnya in his work "Thought and Language" considered the image as a reproduced representation, sensible given . It is this meaning of the term "image" that is relevant for the theory of literature and art. The artistic image has the following properties : has a subject-sensory character, is characterized by the integrity of the reflection of reality; he is emotional, individualized; different vitality, relevance, ambiguity; may appear as a result of creative fiction with the active participation of the author's imagination. In a work of art there is a fictitious objectivity, which does not fully correspond to itself in reality.

The origins of the theory of the image lie in the ancient concept of mimesis. During the period of the birth of the artistic image in the activity of the artist, two main creative stages : prehistory and history of creating an image. In the first period of work, the accumulated vital material is concentrated, ideas are developed, images of heroes are outlined, and so on. Similar sketches are found in writers' notebooks. An artist's literary work begins at the moment when his idea is realized in words. Here, at the second stage of work, an image is crystallized that will act both as a new, created object in the world, and as a new world. In the poem "Autumn" A.S. Pushkin figuratively presented the process of the birth of images:

And I forget the world - and in sweet silence

I am sweetly lulled by my imagination,

And poetry awakens in me:

The soul is embarrassed by lyrical excitement,

It trembles and sounds, and searches, as in a dream,

Finally pour out free manifestation -

And then an invisible swarm of guests comes to me,

Old acquaintances, fruits of my dreams.

And the thoughts in my head are worried in courage,

And light rhymes run towards them,

And fingers ask for a pen, pen for paper,

A minute - and the verses will flow freely.

The artistic image carries a generalization, has typical meaning (from gr. Typos imprint, imprint). If in the surrounding reality the ratio of the general and the particular can be different, then the images of art are always bright: they contain a concentrated embodiment of the general, the essential in the individual.

In creative practice, artistic generalization takes different forms, colored by the author's emotions and assessments. The image is always expressive, it expresses the ideological and emotional attitude of the author to the subject. The most important types of the author's assessment are aesthetic categories, in the light of which the writer, like another person, perceives life: he can heroize it, expose comic details, express tragedy, etc. An artistic image is an aesthetic phenomenon, the result of an artist’s understanding of a phenomenon, the process of life in a way characteristic of a particular type of art, objectified in the form of both a whole work and its individual parts.

The artistic image is one of the most important categories of aesthetics, defining the essence of art, its specificity. Art itself is often understood as thinking in images and is opposed to conceptual, scientific thinking that arose at a later stage of human development.

An image is fundamentally polysemantic (unlike a concept in science), since art thinks in sums of meanings, and the presence of a sum of meanings is an indispensable condition for the “life” of an artistic image. Is scientific comprehension of an artistic image possible? Theoretically, artistic content can be reduced to scientific content, to a logically developed system of concepts. But practically it is impossible, and it is not necessary. We are dealing with an abyss of meanings. The knowledge of a highly artistic work is an endless process. The image is indecomposable. And its perception can only be holistic: as an experience of thought, as a sensually perceived essence. Aesthetic (inseparable) perception is at the same time empathy (“I will shed tears over fiction”), co-creation, as well as an approach to artistic integrity with the help of scientific dialectical logic.

Thus, the artistic image is a concrete-sensory form of reproduction and transformation of reality. The image conveys reality and at the same time creates a new fictional world that we perceive as existing in reality. “The image is many-sided and multi-component, including all the moments of the organic mutual transformation of the real and the spiritual; through an image that connects the subjective with the objective, the essential with the possible, the individual with the general, the ideal with the real, the agreement of all these opposing spheres of being is developed, their all-encompassing harmony” (Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1987).

Speaking of artistic images, they mean the images of heroes, characters of the work, primarily people. However, the concept of an artistic image often also includes various objects or phenomena depicted in a work. Some scholars protest against such a broad understanding of the artistic image, considering it wrong to use concepts like “the image of a tree” (leaf in V. Rasputin’s “Farewell to Mother” or oak in L. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”), “image of the people” (including same epic novel by Tolstoy). In such cases, it is proposed to talk about the figurative detail that a tree can be, and about the idea, theme or problem of the people. Even more difficult is the case with the image of animals. In some well-known works (“Kashtanka” and “White-browed” by A. Chekhov, “Strider” by L. Tolstoy), the animal appears as a central character, whose psychology and worldview are reproduced in great detail. And yet there is a fundamental difference between the image of a person and the image of an animal, which does not allow, in particular, to seriously analyze the latter, because there is deliberateness in the artistic image itself (the inner world of an animal is characterized by concepts related to human psychology).

What are the classifications of artistic images? This is a rather ambiguous question. In the traditional typological classification (V.P. Meshcheryakov, A.S. Kozlov), according to the nature of generalization, artistic images are divided into individual, characteristic, typical, images-motifs, topoi, archetypes and images-symbols.

Individual images are characterized by originality, originality. They are usually the product of the writer's imagination. Individual images are most often found among romantics and science fiction writers. Such, for example, are Quasimodo in V. Hugo's Notre Dame Cathedral, the Demon in the poet M. Lermontov of the same name, Woland in M. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

Characteristic the image, in contrast to the individual, is generalizing. It contains common traits of characters and morals inherent in many people of a certain era and its public spheres (characters of "The Brothers Karamazov" by F. Dostoevsky, plays
A. Ostrovsky, "The Forsyte Sagas" by J. Galsworthy).

Typical the image is the highest level of the characteristic image. Typical is the most likely, so to speak, exemplary for a certain era. The depiction of typical images was one of the main goals, as well as achievements, of the realistic literature of the 19th century. Suffice it to recall Father Goriot and Gobsek Balzac, Anna Karenina and Platon Karataev L. Tolstoy, Madame Bovary
G. Flaubert and others. Sometimes both socio-historical signs of the era and universal human character traits of a particular hero (the so-called eternal images) can be captured in an artistic image - Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet, Oblomov, Tartuffe ...

Images-motifs and topoi go beyond individual characters. An image-motif is a theme that is consistently repeated in the work of a writer, expressed in various aspects by varying its most significant elements (“village Russia” by S. Yesenin, “Beautiful Lady” by A. Blok).

Topos (gr. topos- place, locality, letters. meaning - "common place") denotes general and typical images created in the literature of an entire era, a nation, and not in the work of an individual author. An example is the image of the "little man" in the work of Russian writers - from A. Pushkin and N. Gogol to M. Zoshchenko and A. Platonov.

Recently, in the science of literature, the concept is very widely used. "archetype" (from Greek arche - beginning and typos - image). For the first time this term is found among German romantics at the beginning of the 19th century, however, the work of the Swiss psychologist C. Jung (1875–1961) gave him a true life in various fields of knowledge. Jung understood the "archetype" as a universal image, unconsciously transmitted from generation to generation. Most often, archetypes are mythological images. The latter, according to Jung, literally “stuffed” all of humanity, and the archetypes nest in the subconscious of a person, regardless of his nationality, education or tastes. “As a physician,” wrote Jung, “I had to bring out the images of Greek mythology in the delusions of purebred Negroes.”

Brilliant ("visionary", in Jung's terminology) writers not only carry these images in themselves, like all people, but are also able to produce them, and the reproduction is not a simple copy, but is filled with new, modern content. In this regard, K. Jung compares the archetypes with the beds of dry rivers, which are always ready to be filled with new water. In the concept of the archetype, Jung includes not only images of mythological heroes, but also universal symbols - fire, sky, house, road, garden, etc.

To a large extent, the term widely used in literary criticism is close to the Jungian understanding of the archetype. "mythologeme" (in English literature - "mytheme"). The latter, like an archetype, includes both mythological images and mythological plots or parts of them.

Much attention in literary criticism is paid to the problem of the correlation of the image and symbol . This problem was mastered in the Middle Ages, in particular by Thomas Aquinas (XIII century). He believed that the artistic image should reflect not so much the visible world as express what cannot be perceived by the senses. Thus understood, the image actually turned into a symbol. In the understanding of Thomas Aquinas, this symbol was intended to express primarily the divine essence. Later, among the symbolist poets of the 19th–20th centuries, symbolic images could also carry earthly content (“the eyes of the poor” in
S. Baudelaire, A. Blok's "yellow windows"). The artistic image does not have to be "dry" and cut off from objective, sensual reality, as Thomas Aquinas proclaimed. Blok's Stranger is an example of a magnificent symbol and at the same time a full-blooded living image, perfectly inscribed in the "objective", earthly reality.

Recently, literary critics have paid much attention to the structure of the artistic image, based on the understanding of man as a social and mental being, based on features of personality consciousness . Here they rely on research in philosophy and psychology (Freud, Jung, Fromm).

The famous literary critic V.I. Tyupa (“Analysis of a literary text”) believes that in a work the image of a person is a reproduction of his consciousness, or rather, a certain type of consciousness, mentality. So, he considers, for example, Pushkin's "Little Tragedies" as a dramatic clash of consciousnesses, different ways of thinking, worldviews, value positions. Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time" is analyzed in the same vein. All the heroes of Pushkin's cycle of "Little Tragedies" correspond to three types of consciousness: either authoritarian-role , or solitary , or convergent . Here, Tyupa draws on Teilhard de Chardin's study of The Phenomenon of Man.

Man role-playing type of consciousness dogmatically proceeds from the world order - one and only. This is a patriarchal type of consciousness (Alber, Salieri, Leporello, Commander, Donna Anna, Don Carlos, Mary, Priest, Valsingam). The authoritarian consciousness divides the participants in the world order into “us” and “them” and does not know the category of “other”, does not know the non-role individuality.

solitary The (romantic) consciousness sees a special world in the person's personality. It is not bound by moral prohibitions and regulations, it is demonic in its freedom to transgress any boundaries. In the field of solitary consciousness, its own, isolated, sovereign world is formed, all other personalities appear not as subjects of equal consciousnesses, but as objects of thought of a lonely “I” (Baron, Salieri, Don Guan, Laura, Valsingam). Variants of solitary consciousness are its introverted, "underground" (stingy Baron) variety and its extroverted, "Napoleonic" (Don Guan). Both authoritarian role-playing and solitary consciousness are inherently monological types of consciousness, they are antagonistic. Evolution from one type of consciousness to another is also possible, which we observe in the example of the image of Salieri. From the authoritarian worldview of a priest, a servant of music, he evolves to the position of an internally secluded envious person who has lost faith in the supreme truth.

Convergent(convergence - convergence, divergence - divergence) consciousness is dialogic in its essence, it is capable of empathy with someone else's "I". Such is Mozart, his “I” does not think of himself outside of correlation with “you”, with an original personality his other(when the other is perceived as one's own). Teilhard de Chardin writes: “To be completely yourself, you have to go ... in the direction of convergence with everyone else, towards the other. The pinnacle of ourselves ... not our individuality, but our personality; and this last we can find ... only by uniting among ourselves. We can say that the perspective of convergent consciousness, personified by Mozart, opens up to a consciousness that is solitary as a result of its break with authoritarianism. But Pushkin's Salieri stops halfway and does not take that step from monologism to dialogism, which suddenly turns out to be possible for Don Juan. In the finale, his "demonism" is crushed, he appeals to God and to Donna Anna, the symbol of virtue found in her face.

Albert Albert

Duke Duke

Salieri Salieri Mozart

Leporello Don Guan

Commander Laura

Donna Anna

Don Carlos

priest young man

Mary Louise

Walsingam Walsingam Walsingam

Such an approach to understanding a character sometimes turns out to be quite productive for understanding the concept of personality created by the author in the work.

Volkov, I.F. Theory of Literature: textbook. allowance / I.F. Volkov. - M., 1995.

Theory of Literature: in 3 vols. - M., 1964.

Fundamentals of literary criticism: textbook. allowance / V.P. Meshcheryakov, A.S. Kozlov. - M., 2000.

Fedotov, O.I. Fundamentals of the theory of literature: textbook. allowance: at 2 o'clock /
O.I. Fedotov. - M., 1996.

Khalizev, V.E. Theory of Literature / V.E. Khalizev. - M., 2002.

Artistic image: definitions, structure, typology of artistic images. The dependence of images on the type of literature.

Image: sign - allegory - symbol - archetype - myth. Stages of generalization of images.

The concept of typical.

The peculiarity of the literary form, its figurativeness and expressiveness.

Literature and folklore.

Literary work: the artistic unity of the figurative system.

The concept of form and content in philosophy and literature.

The unity of form and content in a literary work.

Artistic technique and life principle of the author in the form and content of a literary work.

Question 1. Artistic image: definitions, structure, typology of artistic images. The dependence of images on the type of literature

Image as a method of artistic knowledge of the world

In art, the leading is the image. In literature, this is a VERBAL image.

Different sciences cognize the world. Scientists depict the world with different means of their sciences: formulas (bridge formula), numbers (g = 9.8), theorems (Pythagorean theorem), axioms, laws (three laws of Newton, three laws of dialectics), tables (Mendeleev), theories (Theory relativity), etc.

Art also cognizes the world - external and internal. Remember what Kant said about man's eternal interest in the world: "Two things will never cease to amaze humanity: the starry sky above my head and the moral law within me").

Artist depicts the world that he cognizes (both external and internal) with the help of images. In addition, the artist expresses their attitude to this world with the help of images. Consequently, in the art of literature, the peculiarity of knowing the world with the help of images is expressed as in its figurativeness, and in her expressiveness.

In the humanities and economics, scholars prove that the condition of the people has improved or worsened. The artists show how people live and express their relationship to people's lives.

But both - both the scientist and the artist - in some way CONSULT!

Scientists show what was, what is, what may be.

The artist shows what always HAPPENS, what was, is and will always be.

Our sensations and consciousness are only an image of the external world. According to the laws of materialism, the displayed cannot exist without the displayed, but the second exists independently of the first and the display (that is, in literature, the displayed exists regardless of the author).

Remember in more detail: three stages of knowledge (perception - thinking - practice) and three laws of dialectics (negation - transition - opposites) - NB: write, what is the point?

Image = combination of object and subject. Subject in literature = both author and reader.

Many definitions of ARTISTIC IMAGE:

An image is a VISION of an OBJECT

The image is the result of not sensory perception (1st stage of cognition), and not abstract thinking (2nd stage of cognition), but both together, and even + practice

The image is always specific and unique. In art - in an image - an image, it is impossible, as in science, to convey the general in a general form.

An image is a living picture of life, conveying the general in the concrete and the individual.

In art - in the image - there cannot be a person AT ALL (as, for example, in anatomy), each image of a person will be unique.

The image is a product of the relationship between the object and the subject

An image is something in the form of which an artist in any form of art conveys his knowledge of the world.

An image is a way of reflecting and cognizing reality

An image is always a translation of meaning

Characteristic features of artistic images:

The image is formed on the deep soil of reality, the historically established life of the people

The idea cannot be outside the artistic image

Artistic language is built on a foundation consisting of images

The image connects two antagonistic worlds through the equestrian leap of the imagination

An image is an exchange of form and purpose between objects and ideas of nature.

Inspiration gives the image, but clothes the observation of the word.

Imagination gives rise to images caused by real objects.

An image is a plastic analogy of real visible objects and sensual sensations, it is inspiration, love, faith.

Literary artistic image - it is an image created by the word. Literary material is language.

Ways to create images - characters:

Historical prototype (Gorky's essay "Lenin")

Synthesis of real prototypes, when one trait is taken from many people of the same type (“Marriage” by Gogol)

- “first comer” as a prototype (Turgenev saw his images of people, but without faces, until he “met a face”)

Typology of images

I. Types of imagesby layers of artistic language

1) Figurative word (poetic or artistic vocabulary)

2) Image - trope (poetic semantics)

3) Image - figure (poetic syntax)

4) Image - sound (poetic phonics)

І І . Types of images in form - in ascending order of semantic load:

Image - detail

image is a thing

Image - landscape

Image - interior

Image - picture

animal image

The image of a literary work

The image is a symbol

Image - archetype

Image - idea

Image - experience

ІІ І . Types of images by content- these are only images of people, arranged in ascending order of generalization of images, while each of them retains concreteness and singularity, individuality:

An image is a character, a protagonist - these images are neutral, equal, they are like everyone else, like any of us

Literary character - a set of mental, emotional, effective-practical and physical qualities of a person

Type = typical character is an image, in the individual form of which the essence or essential features of a phenomenon, time, social group, people, etc. are revealed.

The hero is a positive typical character (or, according to another literary school, also a negative one).

І V. Types of images by type of literature:

epic

Lyric

dramatic

V. Classification of images by generalization

Image (in the narrow sense of the word)

Allegory

The interpretation of the image (by readers, critics, literary critics) will always lag behind its real artistic content, artistic meaning, artistic significance.

Give examples from the literature on one type of each image from all these classifications (types of images by language, by form, by content, by generalization) - NB

Poetic art is thinking in images. The image is the most important and directly perceived element of a literary work. The image is the focus of the ideological and aesthetic content and the verbal form of its embodiment.

The term "artistic image" is of relatively recent origin. It was first used by J. W. Goethe. However, the problem of the image itself is one of the ancient ones. The beginning of the theory of the artistic image is found in Aristotle's doctrine of "mimesis". The term “image” was widely used in literary criticism after the publication of the works of G. W. F. Hegel. The philosopher wrote: “We can designate a poetic representation as figurative, since it puts before our eyes, instead of an abstract essence, its concrete reality.”

G. V. F. Hegel, reflecting on the relationship of art with the ideal, decided the question of the transformative impact of artistic creativity on the life of society. The "Lectures on Aesthetics" contains a detailed theory of the artistic image: aesthetic reality, artistic measure, ideological content, originality, uniqueness, general validity, dialectics of content and form.

In modern literary criticism, the artistic image is understood as the reproduction of the phenomena of life in a concrete, individual form. The purpose and purpose of the image is to convey the general through the individual, not imitating reality, but reproducing it.

The word is the main means of creating a poetic image in literature. The artistic image reveals the visibility of an object or phenomenon.

The image has the following parameters: objectivity, semantic generalization, structure. Object images are static and descriptive. These include images of details, circumstances. Semantic images are divided into two groups: individual - created by the talent and imagination of the author, reflect the patterns of life in a certain era and in a certain environment; and images that outgrow the boundaries of their era and acquire universal human significance.

Images that go beyond the scope of the work and often beyond the limits of the work of one writer include images that are repeated in a number of works by one or more authors. Images characteristic of an entire era or nation, and images-archetypes, contain the most stable "formulas" of human imagination and self-knowledge.

The artistic image is connected with the problem of artistic consciousness. When analyzing an artistic image, it should be taken into account that literature is one of the forms of social consciousness and a kind of practical-spiritual human activity.

The artistic image is not something static, it is distinguished by a procedural character. In different eras, the image is subject to certain specific and genre requirements that develop artistic traditions. At the same time, the image is a sign of a unique creative individuality.

An artistic image is a generalization of the elements of reality, objectified in sensually perceived forms, which are created according to the laws of the type and genre of this art, in a certain individual creative manner.

Subjective, individual and objective are present in the image in an inseparable unity. Reality is the material to be known, the source of facts and sensations, exploring which the creative person studies himself and the world, embodies his ideological, moral ideas about the real and the proper in the work.

The artistic image, reflecting life trends, at the same time is an original discovery and the creation of new meanings that did not exist before. The literary image correlates with life phenomena, and the generalization contained in it becomes a kind of model for the reader's understanding of his own problems and conflicts of reality.

A holistic artistic image also determines the originality of the work. Characters, events, actions, metaphors are subordinated in accordance with the original intention of the author and in the plot, composition, main conflicts, theme, idea of ​​the work express the nature of the artist's aesthetic attitude to reality.

The process of creating an artistic image, first of all, is a strict selection of material: the artist takes the most characteristic features of the depicted, discards everything random, giving development, enlarging and sharpening certain features to complete clarity.

V. G. Belinsky wrote in the article “Russian Literature in 1842”: “Now the “ideal” is understood not as an exaggeration, not a lie, not a childish fantasy, but a fact of reality, such as it is; but a fact not written off from reality, but carried through the poet's fantasy, illumined by the light of a general (and not exceptional, particular and accidental) meaning, erected into a pearl of consciousness and therefore more similar to itself, more true to itself than the most slavish copy with true to its original. So, in a portrait made by a great painter, a person is more like himself than even his reflection in a daguerreotype, because the great painter with sharp features brought out everything that lurks inside such a person and which, perhaps, is a secret for this person himself. ".

The persuasiveness of a literary work is not reduced and is not limited to the fidelity of the reproduction of reality and the so-called "truth of life". It is determined by the originality of creative interpretation, the modeling of the world in forms, the perception of which creates the illusion of understanding the phenomenon of man.

The artistic images created by D. Joyce and I. Kafka are not identical to the reader's life experience, it is difficult to read them as a complete coincidence with the phenomena of reality. This "non-identity" does not mean a lack of correspondence between the content and structure of the writers' works and allows us to say that the artistic image is not a living original of reality, but is a philosophical and aesthetic model of the world and man.

In the characterization of the elements of the image, their expressive and pictorial possibilities are essential. By “expressiveness” one should mean the ideological and emotional orientation of the image, and by “pictoriality” - its sensual being, which turns the subjective state and assessment of the artist into artistic reality. The expressiveness of the artistic image is irreducible to the transfer of the subjective experiences of the artist or the hero. It expresses the meaning of certain psychological states or relationships. The figurativeness of the artistic image allows you to recreate objects or events in visual clarity. Expressiveness and figurativeness of an artistic image are inseparable at all stages of its existence - from the initial idea to the perception of the completed work. The organic unity of figurativeness and expressiveness is fully related to the integral image-system; separate images-elements are not always carriers of such unity.

It should be noted socio-genetic and epistemological approaches to the study of the image. The first establishes social needs and reasons that give rise to a certain content and functions of the image, and the second analyzes the correspondence of the image to reality and is associated with the criteria of truth and veracity.

In a literary text, the concept of "author" is expressed in three main aspects: a biographical author, whom the reader knows about as a writer and a person; the author "as the embodiment of the essence of the work"; the image of the author, similar to other images-characters of the work, is the subject of personal generalization for each reader.

The definition of the artistic function of the image of the author was given by V. V. Vinogradov: “The image of the author is not just a subject of speech, most often it is not even named in the structure of the work. This is a concentrated embodiment of the essence of the work, uniting the entire system of speech structures of characters in their relationship with the narrator, narrator or narrators and through them being the ideological and stylistic focus, the focus of the whole.

It is necessary to distinguish between the image of the author and the narrator. The narrator is a special artistic image invented by the author, like everyone else. It has the same degree of artistic conventionality, which is why the identification of the narrator with the author is unacceptable. There can be several narrators in a work, and this once again proves that the author is free to hide "under the mask" of one or another narrator (for example, several narrators in "Belkin's Tales", in "A Hero of Our Time"). The image of the narrator in the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky "Demons" is complex and multifaceted.

The narrative style and specificity of the genre determines the image of the author in the work. As Yu. V. Mann writes, "each author appears in the rays of his genre." In classicism, the author of a satirical ode is an accuser, and in an elegy, a sad singer, in the life of a saint, a hagiographer. When the so-called period of “poetics of the genre” ends, the image of the author acquires realistic features, acquires an expanded emotional and semantic meaning. “Instead of one, two, several colors, there is their motley multicolor, and iridescent,” says Yu. Mann. Authorial digressions appear - this is how the direct communication of the creator of the work with the reader is expressed.

The formation of the genre of the novel contributed to the development of the image-narrator. In the baroque novel, the narrator acts anonymously and does not seek contact with the reader; in the realistic novel, the author-narrator is a full-fledged hero of the work. In many ways, the main characters of the works express the author's concept of the world, embody the experiences of the writer. M. Cervantes, for example, wrote: “Idle reader! You can believe without an oath, as I would like this book, the fruit of my understanding, to be the height of beauty, grace and thoughtfulness. But it is not in my power to cancel the law of nature, according to which every living being gives birth to its own kind.

And yet, even when the heroes of the work are the personification of the author's ideas, they are not identical to the author. Even in the genres of confession, diary, notes, one should not look for the adequacy of the author and the hero. The conviction of J.-J. Rousseau that autobiography, an ideal form of introspection and exploration of the world, was questioned by the literature of the 19th century.

Already M. Yu. Lermontov doubted the sincerity of the confessions expressed in the confession. In the preface to Pechorin's Journal, Lermontov wrote: "Rousseau's confession already has the disadvantage that he read it to his friends." Without a doubt, every artist strives to make the image vivid, and the plot captivating, therefore, pursues "a vain desire to arouse participation and surprise."

A. S. Pushkin generally denied the need for confession in prose. In a letter to P. A. Vyazemsky regarding Byron’s lost notes, the poet wrote: “He (Byron) confessed in his poems, involuntarily, carried away by the delight of poetry. In cold-blooded prose, he would lie and cunning, now trying to show off sincerity, now slandering his enemies. He would have been convicted, as Rousseau was, and there malice and slander would have triumphed again... You love no one so much, you know no one as well as yourself. The subject is inexhaustible. But it's difficult. It is possible not to lie, but to be sincere is a physical impossibility.”

Introduction to Literary Studies (N.L. Vershinina, E.V. Volkova, A.A. Ilyushin and others) / Ed. L.M. Krupchanov. - M, 2005

The artistic image is one of the most important categories of aesthetics, defining the essence of art, its specificity. Art itself is often understood as thinking in images and is contrasted with conceptual thinking that emerged at a later stage of human development. The idea that initially people thought in concrete images (otherwise they simply did not know how) and that abstract thinking arose much later was developed by G. Vico in the book "Foundations of a New Science of the General Nature of Nations" (1725). "Poets," wrote Vico, "used to form a poetic (figurative. - Ed.) speech, composing frequent ideas ... and the peoples that subsequently appeared formed prose speech, combining in each individual word, as if in one generic concept, those parts that had already been composed of poetic speech. For example, from the following poetic phrase: "The blood boils in my heart," the peoples made a single word "anger."

Archaic thinking, or rather, figurative reflection and modeling of reality, has survived to the present and is the main one in artistic creativity. And not only in creativity. Figurative "thinking" forms the basis of the human worldview, in which reality is figuratively and fantastically reflected. In other words, each of us brings some share of his imagination into the picture of the world he presents. It is no coincidence that researchers in depth psychology from Z. Freud to E. Fromm so often pointed out the closeness of dreams and works of art.

Thus, the artistic image is a concrete-sensory form of reproduction and transformation of reality. The image conveys reality and at the same time creates a new fictional world that we perceive as existing in reality. "The image is many-sided and multi-component, including all moments of the organic mutual transformation of the real and the spiritual; through the image that connects the subjective with the objective, the essential with the possible, the individual with the general, the ideal with the real, the agreement of all these opposing spheres of being is developed, their all-embracing harmony ".

Speaking of artistic images, they mean the images of heroes, characters of the work and, of course, first of all, people. And it is right. However, the concept of "artistic image" often also includes various objects or phenomena depicted in the work. Some scientists protest against such a broad understanding of the artistic image, considering it wrong to use concepts like "the image of a tree" (leaf in "Farewell to Matera" by V. Rasputin or oak in "War and Peace" by L. Tolstoy), "image of the people" (including same epic novel by Tolstoy). In such cases, it is proposed to talk about the figurative detail that a tree can be, and about the idea, theme or problem of the people. Even more difficult is the case with the image of animals. In some well-known works ("Kashtanka" and "White-browed" by A. Chekhov, "Strider" by L. Tolstoy), the animal appears as a central character, whose psychology and worldview are reproduced in great detail. And yet there is a fundamental difference between the image of a person and the image of an animal, which does not allow, in particular, to seriously analyze the latter, because there is deliberateness in the artistic image itself (the inner world of an animal is characterized by concepts related to human psychology).

Obviously, with good reason, only images of human characters can be included in the concept of "artistic image". In other cases, the use of this term implies a certain amount of conventionality, although its "expanding" use is quite acceptable.

For domestic literary criticism, "an approach to the image as a living and holistic organism, to the greatest extent capable of comprehending the full truth of being ... is especially characteristic ... In comparison with Western science, the concept of" image "in Russian and Soviet literary criticism is itself more "figurative", polysemantic , having a less differentiated scope of use.<...>The fullness of the meanings of the Russian concept of "image" is shown only by a number of Anglo-American terms... - symbol, copy, fiction, figure, icon...".

According to the nature of generalization, artistic images can be divided into individual, characteristic, typical, image-motives, topoi and archetypes.

Individual images characterized by originality, originality. They are usually the product of the writer's imagination. Individual images are most often found among romantics and science fiction writers. Such, for example, are Quasimodo in V. Hugo's Notre Dame Cathedral, the Demon in M. Lermontov's poem of the same name, Woland in M. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

typical image, in contrast to the individual, is generalizing. It contains common traits of character and morals inherent in many people of a certain era and its social spheres (characters of "The Brothers Karamazov" by F. Dostoevsky, plays by A. Ostrovsky, "The Forsyte Saga" by J. Galsworthy).

typical image represents the highest level of the characteristic image. Typical is the most likely, so to speak, exemplary for a certain era. The depiction of typical images was one of the main goals, as well as the achievements of the realistic literature of the 19th century. Suffice it to recall Father Goriot and Gobsek O. Balzac, Anna Karenina and Platon Karataev L. Tolstoy, Madame Bovary G. Flaubert and others. (the so-called eternal images) - Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet, Oblomov, Tartuffe...

Images-motifs and topoi go beyond individual characters. An image-motif is a theme that is consistently repeated in the work of a writer, expressed in various aspects by varying its most significant elements (“village Russia” by S. Yesenin, “Beautiful Lady” by A. Blok).

topos(gr. topos- place, locality, letters, meaning - common place) denotes general and typical images created in the literature of an entire era, a nation, and not in the work of an individual author. An example is the image of the "little man" in the work of Russian writers - from A. Pushkin and N. Gogol to M. Zoshchenko and A. Platonov.

Recently, in the science of literature, the concept is very widely used. "archetype"(from Greek. arc he- start and typos- image). For the first time this term is found among German romantics at the beginning of the 19th century, however, the work of the Swiss psychologist C. Jung (1875–1961) gave him a true life in various fields of knowledge. Jung understood the archetype as a universal image, unconsciously passed on from generation to generation. Most often, archetypes are mythological images. The latter, according to Jung, literally “stuffed” all of humanity, and the archetypes nest in the subconscious of a person, regardless of his nationality, education or tastes. "As a doctor," wrote Jung, "I had to bring out the images of Greek mythology in the delusions of purebred Negroes."

Brilliant ("visionary", in Jung's terminology) writers not only carry these images in themselves, like all people, but are also able to reproduce them, and the reproduction is not a simple copy, but is filled with new, modern content. In this regard, K. Jung compares the archetypes with the beds of dry rivers, which are always ready to be filled with new water.

To a large extent, the term widely used in literary criticism is close to the Jungian understanding of the archetype. "mythologeme"(in English literature - "mytheme"). The latter, like an archetype, includes both mythological images and mythological plots or parts of them.

Much attention in literary criticism is paid to the problem of the relationship between image and symbol. This problem was posed in the Middle Ages, in particular by Thomas Aquinas (XIII century). He believed that the artistic image should reflect not so much the visible world as express what cannot be perceived by the senses. Thus understood, the image actually turned into a symbol. In the understanding of Thomas Aquinas, this symbol was intended to express primarily the divine essence. Later, among the symbolist poets of the 19th–20th centuries, symbolic images could also carry an earthly content (“eyes of the poor” by Ch. Baudelaire, “yellow windows” by A. Blok). The artistic image does not have to be "dry" and divorced from objective, sensual reality, as Thomas Aquinas proclaimed. Blok's Stranger is an example of a magnificent symbol and at the same time a full-blooded living image, perfectly inscribed in the "objective", earthly reality.

Philosophers and writers (Viko, Hegel, Belinsky and others), who defined art as "thinking in images", somewhat simplified the essence and functions of the artistic image. A similar simplification is also characteristic of some modern theorists, who at best define the image as a special "iconic" sign (semiotics, partly structuralism). It is obvious that through images they not only think (or primitive people thought, as J. Vico rightly noted), but also feel, not only "reflect" reality, but also create a special aesthetic world, thereby changing and ennobling the real world.

The functions performed by the artistic image are numerous and extremely important. They include aesthetic, cognitive, educational, communicative and other possibilities. We confine ourselves to just one example. Sometimes a literary image created by a brilliant artist actively influences life itself. So, imitating Goethe's Werther ("The Suffering of Young Werther", 1774), many young people, like the hero of the novel, committed suicide.

The structure of the artistic image is both conservative and changeable. Any artistic image includes both the real impressions of the author and fiction, however, as art develops, the ratio between these components changes. Thus, in the images of Renaissance literature, the titanic passions of heroes come to the fore, in the Age of Enlightenment the “natural” person and rationalism become the object of the image, in the realistic literature of the 19th century, writers strive for a comprehensive coverage of reality, discovering the inconsistency of human nature, etc. d.

If we talk about the historical fate of the image, then there is hardly any reason to separate the ancient figurative thinking from the modern one. At the same time, for each new era, there is a need for a new reading of the images created before. "Subjected to numerous interpretations that project the image into the plane of certain facts, trends, ideas, the image continues its work of displaying and transforming reality already outside the text - in the minds and lives of successive generations of readers" .

The artistic image is one of the most multifaceted and complex literary and philosophical categories. And it is not surprising that the scientific literature devoted to him is extremely large. The image is studied not only by writers and philosophers, but also by mythologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians and psychologists.

• Literary encyclopedic dictionary. M., 1987. S. 252.
• Literary encyclopedic dictionary. S. 256.
• Literary encyclopedic dictionary. S. 255.