Artistic space and time are an integral property of any work of art, including music, literature, theater, etc. Literary chronotopes have primarily plot significance and are the organizational centers of the main events described by the author. There is also no doubt about the pictorial significance of chronotopes, since plot events in them are concretized, and time and space acquire a sensually visual character. Genre and genre varieties are determined by chronotope. All temporal-spatial definitions in literature are inseparable from each other and are emotionally charged.
Artistic time is time that is reproduced and depicted in a literary work. Artistic time, in contrast to objectively given time, uses the diversity of subjective perception of time. A person's sense of time is subjective. It can “stretch”, “run”, “fly”, “stop”. Artistic time makes this subjective perception of time one of the forms of depicting reality. However, objective time is also used at the same time. Time in fiction is perceived through the connection of events - cause-and-effect or associative. Events in a plot precede and follow each other, are arranged in a complex series, and thanks to this, the reader is able to notice time in a work of art, even if nothing is said about time. Artistic time can be characterized as follows: static or dynamic; real - unreal; speed of time; prospective – retrospective – cyclical; past – present – future (in what time are the characters and action concentrated). In literature, the leading principle is time.
Artistic space is one of the most important components of a work. Its role in the text is not limited to determining the place where the event takes place, the plot lines are connected, and the characters move. Artistic space, like time, is special language for the moral assessment of characters. The behavior of the characters is related to the space in which they are located. The space can be closed (limited) - open; real (recognizable, similar to reality) – unreal; his own (the hero was born and raised here, feels comfortable in it, adequate to the space) - strangers (the hero is an outside observer, abandoned in a foreign land, cannot find himself); empty (minimum objects) – filled. It can be dynamic, full of varied movement, and static, “motionless,” filled with things. When movement in space becomes directed, one of the most important spatial forms appears - the road, which can become a spatial dominant that organizes the entire text. The motive of the road is semantically ambiguous: the road can be a concrete reality of the depicted space, it can symbolize the path of the character’s internal development, his fate; Through the road motif, the idea of the path of a people or an entire country can be expressed. Space can be built horizontally or vertically (emphasis on objects stretching upward or objects spreading outwards). In addition, you should look at what is located in the center of this space and what is on the periphery, what geographical objects are listed in the story, what they are called (real names, fictitious names, proper names or common nouns as proper names).
Each writer interprets time and space in his own way, endowing them with his own characteristics that reflect the author’s worldview. As a result, the artistic space created by the writer is unlike any other artistic space and time, much less the real one.
Thus, in the works of I. A. Bunin (the “Dark Alleys” cycle), the lives of the heroes take place in two non-overlapping chronotopes. On the one hand, a space of everyday life, rain, corroding melancholy, in which time moves unbearably slowly, unfolds before the reader. Only a tiny part of the hero’s biography (one day, one night, a week, a month) takes place in a different space, bright, saturated with emotions, meaning, sun, light and, most importantly, love. In this case, the action takes place in the Caucasus or in a noble estate, under the romantic arches of “dark alleys”.
An important property of literary time and space is their discreteness, that is, discontinuity. In relation to time, this is especially important, since literature is capable of not reproducing the entire flow of time, but selecting the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps. Such temporal discreteness served as a powerful means of dynamization.
The nature of the conventions of time and space greatly depends on the type of literature. Conventionality is maximum in lyric poetry, since it is closer to the expressive arts. There may be no space here. At the same time, lyrics can reproduce the objective world in its spatial realities. With the predominance of the grammatical present in the lyrics, it is characterized by the interaction of the present and the past (elegy), past, present and future (to Chaadaev). The category of time itself can be the leitmotif of a poem. In drama, the conventions of time and space are established mainly on the theater. That is, all actions, speeches, and inner speech of the actors are closed in time and space. Against the backdrop of drama, the epic has broader possibilities. Transitions from one time to another, spatial movements occur thanks to the narrator. The narrator can compress or stretch time.
According to the peculiarities of artistic convention, time and space in literature can be divided into abstract and concrete. Abstract is a space that can be perceived as universal. The concrete not only ties the depicted world to certain topographical realities, but also actively influences the essence of what is depicted. There is no impassable border between concrete and abstract spaces. Abstract space draws details from reality. The concepts of abstract and concrete spaces can serve as guidelines for typology. The type of space is usually associated with the corresponding properties of time. Form of specification art. time are most often the linking of action to historical realities and the designation of cyclical time6 time of year, day. In most cases, the bad time is shorter than the real one. This reveals the law of “poetic economy.” However, there is an important exception related to the depiction of psychological processes and subjective time of the character or lyrical hero. Experiences and thoughts flow faster than the flow of speech, which forms the basis of literary imagery. In literature, complex relationships arise between the real and the thin. time. Real time may generally be zero, for example in descriptions. Such time is eventless. But event time is also heterogeneous. In one case, literature records events and actions that significantly change a person. This is plot or plot time. In another case, literature paints a picture of a stable existence that repeats itself day after day. This type of time is called chronicle-domestic time. The ratio of eventless, eventful and chronicle-everyday time creates a tempo organization of art. time of the work. Completeness and incompleteness are important for analysis. It is also worth saying about the types of organization of artistic time: chronicle, adventure, biographical, etc.
Bakhtin identified chronotopes in his heresy:
Meetings.
Roads. On the road (“high road”), the spatial and temporal paths of the most diverse people intersect at one temporal and spatial point - representatives of all classes, conditions, religions, nationalities, ages. This is the starting point and the place where events take place. The road is especially useful for depicting an event governed by chance (but not only for this). (remember Pugachev’s meeting with Grinev in “Kap. Daughter”). Common features chronotope in different types of novels: the road passes through one’s home country, and not in an exotic foreign world; the socio-historical diversity of this native country is revealed and shown (therefore, if we can talk about exoticism here, then only about “social exoticism” - “slums”, “scum”, thieves’ worlds). In the latter function, “road” was also used in journalistic travel of the 18th century (“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” by Radishchev). This feature of the “road” distinguishes the listed types of novels from the other line of the wandering novel, represented by the ancient travel novel, the Greek sophistic novel, and the baroque novel of the 17th century. A “foreign world”, separated from its own country by sea and distance, has a similar function to the road in these novels.
Castle. By the end of the 18th century in England there was a new territory for the fulfillment of novel events - the “castle”. The castle is full of time from the historical past. The castle is the place of life of the rulers of the feudal era (and therefore historical figures of the past); traces of centuries and generations in the past have been deposited in it in visible form. various parts its structure, in its furnishings, in its weapons, in the specific human relations of dynastic succession. This creates a specific plot of the castle, developed in Gothic novels.
Living room-salon. From the point of view of plot and composition, meetings take place here (not random), intrigues are created, denouements are often made, dialogues take place that acquire exceptional significance in the novel, the characters, “ideas” and “passions” of the heroes are revealed. Here is the interweaving of the historical and social-public with the private and even the purely private, alcove, the interweaving of private everyday intrigue with political and financial, state secrets with alcove secrets, the historical series with the everyday and biographical. Here the visually visible signs of both historical time and biographical and everyday time are condensed, condensed, and at the same time they are closely intertwined with each other, fused into single signs of the era. The era becomes visually visible and plot-visible.
Provincial town. It has several varieties, including a very important one - idyllic. Flaubert's version of the town is a place of cyclical domestic time. There are no events here, but only repeating “occurrences.” The same everyday actions, the same topics of conversation, the same words, etc. are repeated day after day. Time here is eventless and therefore seems almost stopped.
Threshold. This is a chronotope of crisis and life turning point. In Dostoevsky, for example, the threshold and the adjacent chronotopes of the staircase, hallway and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of the street and square that continue them, are the main places of action in his works, places where events of crises, falls, resurrections, renewals, insights, decisions take place that determine a person’s entire life. Time in this chronotope is, in essence, an instant, seemingly without duration and falling out of the normal flow of biographical time. These decisive moments are included in Dostoevsky’s large, comprehensive chronotopes of mystery and carnival time. These times coexist in a peculiar way, intersect and intertwine in Dostoevsky’s work, just as they throughout long centuries coexisted in the public squares of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (essentially the same, but in slightly different forms - and in the ancient squares of Greece and Rome). In Dostoevsky, on the streets and in crowd scenes inside houses (mainly in living rooms), the ancient carnival-mystery square seems to come to life and shine through. This, of course, does not exhaust Dostoevsky’s chronotopes: they are complex and diverse, as are the traditions renewed in them.
Unlike Dostoevsky, in the works of L. N. Tolstoy the main chronotope is biographical time, flowing in the interior spaces of noble houses and estates. The renewal of Pierre Bezukhov was also long-term and gradual, quite biographical. The word “suddenly” is rare in Tolstoy and never introduces any significant event. After biographical time and space, the chronotope of nature, the family-idyllic chronotope, and even the chronotope of the labor idyll (when depicting peasant labor) are of significant importance in Tolstoy.
The chronotope, as the primary materialization of time in space, is the center of pictorial concretization, embodiment for the entire novel. All abstract elements of the novel - philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and consequences, etc. - gravitate towards the chronotope and through it are filled with flesh and blood, and are attached to artistic imagery. This is the pictorial meaning of the chronotope.
The chronotopes we have considered are of a genre-typical nature; they underlie certain varieties of the novel genre, which has developed and developed over the centuries.
The principle of chronotopicity of an artistic and literary image was first clearly revealed by Lessing in his Laocoon. It establishes the temporary nature of the artistic and literary image. Everything statically-spatial should not be statically described, but should be involved in the time series of events depicted and the story-image itself. Thus, in the famous example of Lessing, the beauty of Helen is not described by Homer, but her effect on the Trojan elders is shown, and this effect is revealed in a number of movements and actions of the elders. Beauty is involved in the chain of events depicted and at the same time is not the subject of a static description, but the subject of a dynamic story.
There is a sharp and fundamental boundary between the real world depicted and the world depicted in the work. It is impossible to confuse, as was done and is still sometimes done, the depicted world with the depicting world (naive realism), the author - the creator of the work with the human author (naive biographism), recreating and updating the listener-reader of different (and many) eras with a passive listener-reader of his time (dogmatism of understanding and evaluation).
We can also say this: before us are two events - the event that is told in the work, and the event of the telling itself (in this latter we ourselves participate as listeners-readers); these events occur at different times (different in duration) and in different places, and at the same time they are inextricably united in a single, but complex event, which we can designate as a work in its eventful completeness, including here its external material given, and its text, and the world depicted in it, and the author-creator, and the listener-reader. At the same time, we perceive this completeness in its integrity and inseparability, but at the same time we understand all the differences in its constituent moments. The author-creator moves freely in his time; he can begin his story from the end, from the middle and from any moment of the events depicted, without destroying the objective passage of time in the depicted event. Here the difference between depicted and depicted time is clearly manifested.
10. Simple and detailed comparison (short and not essential).
COMPARISON A comparison is a figurative allegory that establishes similarities between two life phenomena. Comparison is an important figurative and expressive means of language. There are two images: the main one, which contains the main meaning of the statement and the auxiliary one, attached to the union “how” and others. Comparison is widely used in literary speech. Reveals similarities, parallels, and correspondences between initial phenomena. Comparison reinforces various associations that arise in the writer. Comparison performs figurative and expressive functions or combines both. A form of comparison is the connection of its two members using the conjunctions “as”, “as if”, “like”, “as if”, etc. There is also a non-union comparison (“The samovar in iron armor // Makes noise like a household general...” N.A. Zabolotsky).
11. The concept of the literary process (I have some kind of heresy, but in response to this question you can blab everything: from the origin of literature from mythology to trends and modern genres)
The literary process is the totality of all works appearing at that time.
Factors that limit it:
For the presentation of literature inside literary process depends on the time when a particular book comes out.
The literary process does not exist outside of magazines, newspapers, and other printed publications. (“Young Guard”, “New World”, etc.)
The literary process is associated with criticism of published works. Oral criticism also has a significant impact on LP.
“Liberal terror” was the name given to criticism in the early 18th century. Literary associations are writers who consider themselves close on certain issues. They act as a certain group that conquers part of the literary process. Literature is, as it were, “divided” between them. They issue manifestos expressing the general sentiments of a particular group. Manifestos appear at the moment of the formation of a literary group. For literature of the early 20th century. manifestos are uncharacteristic (the symbolists first created and then wrote manifestos). The manifesto allows you to look at the future activities of the group and immediately determine what makes it stand out. As a rule, the manifesto (in classic version- anticipating the activities of the group) turns out to be paler than the literary movement that it represents.
Literary process.
With the help of artistic speech in literary works, the speech activity of people is widely and specifically reproduced. A person in a verbal image acts as a “speaker”. This applies primarily to lyrical heroes, acting persons dramatic works and storytellers of epic works. Speech in fiction acts as the most important subject of depiction. Literature not only denotes life phenomena in words, but also reproduces speech activity itself. Using speech as the subject of the image, the writer overcomes the schematic nature of verbal pictures that are associated with their “immateriality.” Without speech, people's thinking cannot be fully realized. Therefore, literature is the only art that freely and widely masters human thought. Thinking processes are the focus of people's mental life, a form of intense action. In the ways and means of comprehension emotional world literature is qualitatively different from other types of art. Literature uses a direct depiction of mental processes with the help of the author's characteristics and statements of the characters themselves. Literature as an art form has a kind of universality. With the help of speech, you can reproduce any aspect of reality; The visual possibilities of the verbal truly have no limits. Literature most fully embodies the cognitive beginning of artistic activity. Hegel called literature “universal art.” But the visual and educational possibilities of literature were realized especially widely in the 19th century, when the realistic method became leading in the art of Russia and Western European countries. Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy artistically reflected the life of their country and era with a degree of completeness that is inaccessible to any other form of art. The unique quality of fiction is also its pronounced, open problematic nature. It is not surprising that it is in the sphere literary creativity, the most intellectual and problematic, directions in art are formed: classicism, sentimentalism, etc.
Any literary work in one way or another reproduces real world- both material and ideal. The natural forms of existence of this world are time and space. However, the world of a work is always conditional to one degree or another, and, of course, time and space are also conditional.
The essential interrelation of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, M.M. Bakhtin proposed to call it a chronotope. The chronotope determines the artistic unity of a literary work in its relation to reality. All time-spatial definitions in art and literature are inseparable from each other and are always emotionally and value-laden. Abstract thinking can, of course, think of time and space in their separateness and be distracted from their emotional and valuable moment. But living artistic contemplation (it is, of course, also full of thought, but not abstract) does not separate anything and is not distracted from anything. It captures the chronotope in all its integrity and completeness.
Compared to other arts, literature deals most freely with time and space (only cinema can compete with it). The “immateriality of images” gives literature the ability to instantly move from one space and time to another. For example, events occurring simultaneously in different places can be depicted (for example, Homer’s Odyssey describes the protagonist’s travels and events in Ithaca). As for temporary switching, the most simple form- the hero’s memory of the past (for example, the famous “Oblomov’s Dream”).
Another property of literary time and space is their discreteness (i.e. discontinuity). Thus, literature can not reproduce the entire time flow, but select the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps (for example, the introduction to Pushkin’s poem “ Bronze Horseman": "On the shore of desert waves He stood, full of great thoughts, And looked into the distance.<…>A hundred years have passed, and the young city... From the darkness of the forests, from the swamps, the cronyism Ascended magnificently, proudly"). The discrete nature of space is manifested in the fact that it is usually not described in detail, but is only indicated with the help of individual details that are most significant for the author (for example, in “The Grammar of Love” Bunin does not fully describe the hall in Khvoshchinsky’s house, but mentions only its large size, windows , facing west and north, “clumsy” furniture, “beautiful slides” in the walls, dry bees on the floor, but most importantly - the “goddess without glass”, where stood the image “in a silver robe” and on it “wedding candles in pale -green bows"). When we learn that the wedding candles were purchased by Khvoshchinsky after Lusha’s death, this emphasis becomes understandable. There may also be a change in spatial and temporal coordinates at the same time (in Goncharov’s novel “The Break,” the transfer of action from St. Petersburg to Malinovka, to the Volga makes the description of the road unnecessary).
The nature of the conventions of time and space greatly depends on the type of literature. Maximum convention in the lyrics, because it is distinguished by the greatest expression and is focused on the inner world of the lyrical subject. The conventions of time and space in drama are related to the possibilities of staging (hence famous rule 3 units). In the epic, the fragmentation of time and space, transitions from one time to another, spatial movements are carried out easily and freely thanks to the figure of the narrator - an intermediary between the depicted life and the reader (for example, the intermediary can “suspend” time during reasoning, descriptions - see the example above about the hall in Khvoshchinsky’s house; of course, when describing the room, Bunin somewhat “slowed down” the passage of time).
According to the peculiarities of artistic convention, time and space in literature can be divided into abstract (one that can be understood as “everywhere”/“always”) and concrete. Thus, the space of Naples in “The Gentleman from San Francisco” is abstract (it does not have characteristic features, important for the narrative, and is not comprehended, and therefore, despite the abundance of toponyms, can be understood as “everywhere”). Concrete space actively influences the essence of what is depicted (for example, in Goncharov’s “Cliff” the image of the Malinovka is created, which is described down to the smallest details, and the latter, undoubtedly, not only influence what is happening, but also symbolize the psychological state of the heroes: thus, the cliff itself indicates “fall” of Vera, and before her grandmother, to Raisky’s feverish passion for Vera, etc.). The corresponding properties of time are usually associated with the type of space: a specific space is combined with a specific time (for example, in “Woe from Wit,” Moscow with its realities could not belong to any other time except the beginning of the 19th century) and vice versa. Forms of concretization of artistic time are most often the “linking” of action to historical landmarks, realities and the designation of cyclical time: time of year, day.
In literature, space and time are not given to us in their pure form. We judge space by the objects that fill it, and we judge time by the processes occurring in it. To analyze a work, it is important to at least approximately determine the fullness and saturation of space and time, because this indicator often characterizes the style of a work. For example, in Gogol’s work the space is usually filled as much as possible with some objects (for example, the textbook description of the interior in Sobakevich’s house). The intensity of artistic time is expressed in its saturation with events. Cervantes's time in Don Quixote is extremely busy. Increased intensity of artistic space, as a rule, is combined with reduced intensity of time and vice versa (cf. the examples given above: “Dead Souls” and “Don Quixote”).
The depicted time and the time of the image (i.e. real (plot) and artistic time) rarely coincide. Typically, artistic time is shorter than “real” (see the example above about the omission of the description of the road from St. Petersburg to Malinovka in Goncharov’s “The Cliff”), but there is an important exception associated with the depiction of psychological processes and the subjective time of the character. Experiences and thoughts flow faster than the flow of speech, so the time of the image is almost always longer than the subjective time (for example, the textbook episode from “War and Peace” with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, looking at the high, endless sky and comprehending the secrets of life). “Real time” can generally be equal to zero (for example, with all kinds of lengthy descriptions); such time can be called eventless. Event time is divided into plot time (describes ongoing events) and chronicle-everyday time (a picture of stable existence, repeated actions and deeds is drawn (one of the most striking examples is the description of Oblomov’s life at the beginning of Goncharov’s novel of the same name)). The ratio of non-event, chronicle-everyday and event types of time determines the tempo organization of the artistic time of the work, which determines the nature of aesthetic perception, forms the subjective reading time (“Dead Souls” creates the impression of a slow pace, and “Crime and Punishment” - a fast pace, and therefore the novel is readable Dostoevsky often “in one breath”).
The completeness and incompleteness of artistic time is important. Often writers create in their works a closed time that has an absolute beginning and end, which until the 19th century. was considered a sign of artistry. However, monotonous endings (return to the father's house, wedding or death) already seemed boring to Pushkin, so from the 19th century. there is a struggle with them, but if in a novel it is quite simple to use the other ending (as in the already mentioned “Precipice” many times), then with drama the situation is more complicated. Only Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) managed to “get rid” of these ends.
The historical development of spatiotemporal organization reveals a tendency towards complication and individualization. But the complexity and individual uniqueness of artistic time and space does not exclude the existence of general, typological models - meaningful forms that writers use as “ready-made”. These are the motifs of a house, a road, a horse, a crossroads, up and down, open space, etc. This also includes types of organization of artistic time: chronicle, adventure, biographical, etc. It is for such spatio-temporal typological models that M.M. Bakhtin introduced the term chronotope.
MM. Bakhtin identifies, for example, the chronotope of a meeting; in this chronotope the temporal connotation predominates, and it is distinguished by a high degree of emotional and value intensity. The associated chronotope of the road has a wider scope, but somewhat less emotional and value intensity. Meetings in the novel usually take place on the “road”. The “road” is the predominant place for random encounters. On the road (“high road”) spatial and temporal paths intersect at one temporal and spatial point different people- representatives of all classes, conditions, religions, nationalities, ages. Here those who are normally separated by social hierarchy and spatial distance can meet by chance; here any contrasts can arise, collide and intertwine different destinies. Here the spatial and temporal series of human destinies and lives are uniquely combined, complicated and concretized by the social distances that are overcome here. This is the starting point and the place where events take place. Here time seems to flow into space and flow through it (forming roads).
By the end of the 18th century in England, a new territory for the fulfillment of novel events was being formed and consolidated in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel - “zbmok” (for the first time in this meaning in Horace Walpole - “The Castle of Otranto”). The castle is full of time, and the time of the historical past. The castle is the place where historical figures of the past lived; traces of centuries and generations have been deposited in it in visible form. Finally, legends and traditions bring memories of past events to life in all corners of the castle and its surroundings. This creates a specific plot of the castle, developed in Gothic novels.
In the novels of Stendhal and Balzac, a significantly new locality of the events of the novel appears - the “living room-salon” (in the broad sense). Of course, it is not with them that it appears for the first time, but only with them does it acquire the fullness of its meaning as the place of intersection of the spatial and temporal series of the novel. From the point of view of plot and composition, meetings take place here (meetings on the “road” or in an “alien world” no longer have the previously specific random nature), the beginnings of intrigues are created, denouements are often made, here, finally, and most importantly, dialogues take place, acquiring exceptional significance in the novel, the characters, “ideas” and “passions” of the heroes are revealed (cf. Scherer’s salon in “War and Peace” - A.S.).
In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the setting is a “provincial town.” A provincial town with its musty way of life is an extremely common setting for novel events in the 19th century. This town has several varieties, including a very important one - idyllic (for regionalists). We will touch only on the Flaubertian variety (though not created by Flaubert). Such a town is a place of cyclical everyday time. There are no events here, but only repeating “occurrences.” Time here is deprived of a progressive historical course; it moves in narrow circles: the circle of the day, the circle of the week, the month, the circle of all life. A day is never a day, a year is never a year, a life is never a life. The same everyday actions, the same topics of conversation, the same words, etc. are repeated day after day. This is everyday cyclical everyday time. It is familiar to us in different variations from Gogol, Turgenev, Shchedrin, Chekhov. Time here is eventless and therefore seems almost stopped. There are no “meetings” or “separations” here. This is thick, sticky time crawling in space. Therefore, it cannot be the main time of the novel. It is used by novelists as a side tense, intertwined with or interrupted by other, non-cyclical time series, and often serves as a contrasting background for event and energy time series.
Let us also call here a chronotope, imbued with high emotional and value intensity, as a threshold; it can also be combined with the motive of the meeting, but its most significant completion is the chronotope of crisis and life turning point. In literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic, sometimes in an open form, but more often in an implicit form. In Dostoevsky, for example, the threshold and the adjacent chronotopes of the staircase, hallway and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of the street and square that continue them, are the main places of action in his works, places where events of crises, falls, resurrections, renewals, insights, decisions take place , determining a person’s entire life (for example, in “Crime and Punishment” - A.S.). Time in this chronotope is, in essence, an instant, seemingly without duration and falling out of the normal flow of biographical time.
Unlike Dostoevsky, in the works of L.N. Tolstoy the main chronotope is biographical time flowing in the internal spaces of noble houses and estates. Of course, in Tolstoy’s works there are crises, falls, renewals, and resurrections, but they are not instantaneous and do not fall out of the flow of biographical time, but are firmly sealed into it. For example, the renewal of Pierre Bezukhov was long-term and gradual, quite biographical. Tolstoy did not value the moment, did not strive to fill it with anything significant and decisive; the word “suddenly” is rarely used in his work and never introduces any significant event.
In the nature of chronotopes M.M. Bakhtin saw the embodiment of various value systems, as well as types of thinking about the world. Thus, since ancient times, literature has reflected two main concepts of time: cyclical and linear. The first was earlier and relied on natural cyclical processes in nature. This cyclical concept is reflected, for example, in Russian folklore. Christianity of the Middle Ages had its own time concept: linear-finalistic. It was based on the movement in time of human existence from birth to death, while death was considered as a result, a transition to some stable existence: to salvation or destruction. Since the Renaissance, the culture has been dominated by a linear concept of time associated with the concept of progress. Also in literature, works periodically appear that reflect the atemporal concept of time. These are various kinds of pastorals, idylls, utopias, etc. The world in these works does not need changes, and therefore does not need time (E. Zamyatin shows the artificiality and implausibility of such a passage of time in his dystopia “We”). On culture and literature of the 20th century. Natural scientific concepts of time and space associated with the theory of relativity had a significant influence. The most fruitful mastery of new ideas about time and space was science fiction, which at that time entered the sphere of “high” literature, raising deep philosophical and moral problems(for example, “It’s Hard to Be a God” by the Strugatskys).
To establish deep (substantive) differences between literary and non-fiction texts, one can turn to the representation of such categories as time and space. The specificity here is obvious; it is not for nothing that corresponding terms exist in philology: artistic time and artistic space.
It is known that the sense of time for a person at different periods of his life is subjective: it can stretch or shrink. This subjectivity of sensations is used in different ways by authors of literary texts: a moment can last a long time or stop altogether, and large periods of time can flash by overnight. Artistic time is a sequence in the description of events that are subjectively perceived. This perception of time becomes one of the forms of depicting reality when, at the will of the author, the time perspective changes. Moreover, the time perspective can shift, the past can be thought of as the present, and the future can appear as the past, etc.
For example, in K. Simonov’s poem “Wait for me,” subjective transfers in time are used: the feeling of expectation is transferred to the plane of the past. The beginning of the poem is structured as a repeated appeal to wait (wait for me, and I will return, just wait very long. Wait when...). This “wait when” and just “wait” is repeated ten times. This is how the prospect of a future that has not yet happened is outlined. However, at the end of the poem a statement of the event is given as having happened:
Wait for me and I will come back
All deaths are out of spite.
Whoever didn't wait for me, let him
He will say: “Lucky.”
Those who were not waiting for them cannot understand,
Like in the middle of fire
By your expectation
You saved me.
We'll know how I survived
Just you and me, -
You just knew how to wait
Like no one else.
So the prospect of the future ended abruptly, and the theme “Wait, and I will return” turned into a statement of the result of this expectation, given in the forms of the past tense: lucky, saved, survived, knew how to wait. The use of the category of time has thus become a specific compositional technique, and the subjectivity in presenting the time plan resulted in the expectation moving into the past. This shift makes it possible to feel confident in the outcome of events; the future is, as it were, predetermined, inevitable.
Time category in literary text It is also complicated by its two-dimensionality - this is the time of the narrative and the time of the event. Therefore, temporary shifts are quite natural. Events that are distant in time can be depicted as immediately occurring, for example, in a character's retelling. Temporary doubling is a common storytelling technique in which the stories of different people, including the author of the text, intersect.
But such a bifurcation is possible without the intervention of characters in the coverage of past and present events. For example, in “The Last Spring” by I. Bunin there is an episode-picture drawn by the author:
No, it's already spring.
Today we went again. And they were silent all the way - fog and spring drowsiness. There is no sun, but behind the fog there is already a lot of spring light, and the fields are so white that it is difficult to look. Curly lilac forests are barely visible in the distance.
Near the village, a guy in a yellow calfskin jacket with a gun crossed the road. A completely wild trapper. He looked at us without bowing, and went straight through the snow, towards the darkening forest in the ravine. The gun is short, with cut barrels and a homemade stock, painted with red lead. A large yard dog runs indifferently behind.
Even the wormwood sticking out along the road, from the snow, into the frost; but spring, spring. The hawks are blissfully dozing, sitting on snowy dung heaps scattered across the field, gently merging with the snow and fog, with all this thick, soft and light white that the happy pre-spring world is full of.
The narrator here talks about a past (even if not so distant in time - now) trip. However, imperceptibly, unobtrusively, the narrative is transferred to the plane of the present. The picture-event of the past again appears before the eyes and, as it were, freezes in immobility. Time stopped.
Space, just like time, can shift at the will of the author. Artistic space is created through the use of image perspective; this occurs as a result of a mental change in the place from which the observation is being made: a general, small plan is replaced by a large one, and vice versa.
If, for example, we take the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov's “Sail” and consider it from the point of view of spatial sensations, it turns out that the distant and the near will be combined at one point: at first the sail is seen at a great distance, it is even faintly visible due to the fog (fog would not be a problem near).
The lonely sail is white
In the blue sea fog!..
(By the way, in the original version it was directly stated about the remoteness of the observed object: The distant sail is white.)
The waves are playing, the wind is whistling,
And the mast bends and creaks...
In the foggy distance it would be difficult to discern the details of the sailboat, much less see how the mast bends and hear how it creaks. And finally, at the end of the poem, we, together with the author, moved to the sailboat itself, otherwise we would not have been able to see what was under and above it:
Below him is a stream of lighter azure,
Above him is a golden ray of sun...
This significantly enlarges the image and, as a result, enhances the detail of the image.
In a literary text, spatial concepts can generally be transformed into concepts of a different plane. According to M.Yu. Lotman, artistic space is a model of the world of a given author, expressed in the language of his spatial ideas.
Spatial concepts in a creative, artistic context can only be an external, verbal image, but convey a different content, not spatial. For example, for B. Pasternak, the “horizon” is both a temporary concept (the future), and an emotional-evaluative one (happiness), and a mythological “path to heaven” (i.e. to creativity). The horizon is the place where the earth meets the sky, or the sky “descends” to the earth, then the poet is inspired, he experiences creative delight. This means that this is not a real horizon as a spatial concept, but something else related to the state of the lyrical hero, and in this case it can shift and end up very close:
In a thunderstorm, purple eyes and lawns
And the horizon smells of damp mignonette, -
it smells, it means it's very close...
Space and time are the basic forms of existence, life, precisely as such realities they are recreated in non-fiction texts, in particular in scientific ones, and in artistic texts they can be transformed, transform into one another.
A. Voznesensky wrote:
What asymmetrical time!
The last minutes - in short,
The last separation is longer.
The category of time has a unique form of expression not only in literary text. The non-fiction text is also notable for its “relationship” to time. Texts such as legislative, instructive, and reference texts are focused on the “non-temporal” expression of thought. The verb tense forms used here do not mean at all what they are intended to mean; in particular, the present tense forms convey the meaning of the constancy of a sign, property or constancy of the action being performed. Such meanings are abstracted from specific verb forms. Time seems to be completely absent here. This is how, for example, descriptive material is presented in encyclopedias:
Jays. The jay stands out in the “black family” of corvids for the beauty of its variegated plumage. This is a very smart, agile and noisy forest bird. When she sees a person or a predatory animal, she always makes a noise, and her loud cries of “gee-gee-gee” echo throughout the forest. In open spaces, the jay flies slowly and heavily. In the forest, she deftly flies from branch to branch, from tree to tree, maneuvering between them. Moves on the ground by jumping<...>.
Only during nesting do the jays seem to disappear - you can’t hear their cries, you can’t see birds flying or climbing all over the place. The jays fly silently at this time, hiding behind the branches, and quietly fly up to the nest.
After the chicks have fledged, at the end of May - in June, jays gather in small flocks and again noisily roam through the forest (Encyclopedia for children. Vol. 2).
The instructive type of text (for example, prescription, recommendation) is based entirely on a linguistic stereotype, where temporary meanings are completely eliminated: It should be based on...; It is necessary to keep in mind...; It is necessary to indicate...; Recommended...; and so on.
The use of verb tense forms in scientific texts is also peculiar, for example: “An event is determined by the place where it happened and the time when it happened. It is often useful for reasons of clarity to use an imaginary four-dimensional space... In this space, an event is represented by a point. These points are called world points” (L.D. Landau, E.M. Lifshits. Field theory). Verb forms of time in such a text indicate the meaning of constancy.
So, literary and non-fiction texts, although they represent sequences of statements combined into interphrase unities and fragments, are fundamentally different in essence - functionally, structurally, communicatively. Even the semantic “behavior” of a word in artistic and non-artistic contexts is different. In non-fiction texts, the word is focused on expressing the nominative-objective meaning and on unambiguousness, while in a literary text actualization is carried out hidden meanings words that create a new vision of the world and its assessment, diversity, and semantic additions. A non-fiction text is focused on reflecting reality, strictly limited by the laws of logical causality; a literary text, as belonging to art, is free from these restrictions.
Literary and non-fiction texts are fundamentally different in their focus on different aspects of the reader’s personality, his emotional and intellectual structure. A literary text primarily affects the emotional structure (of the soul), is associated with the personal feelings of the reader - hence expressiveness, emotiveness, and an attitude of empathy; a non-fiction text appeals more to the mind, the intellectual structure of the individual - hence the neutrality of expression and detachment from the personal-emotional principle.
The concept of the space-time continuum is essential for the philological analysis of a literary text, since both time and space serve as constructive principles for the organization of a literary work. Artistic time is a form of existence of aesthetic reality, a special way of understanding the world.
Features of time modeling in literature are determined by the specifics of this type of art: literature is traditionally viewed as art temporary; unlike painting, it recreates the concreteness of the passage of time. This feature of a literary work is determined by the properties of linguistic means that form its figurative structure: “grammar determines for each language an order that distributes ... space in time,” transforms spatial characteristics into temporal ones.
The problem of artistic time has long occupied literary theorists, art historians, and linguists. So, A.A. Potebnya, emphasizing that the art of words is dynamic, showed the limitless possibilities of organizing artistic time in the text. He considered the text as a dialectical unity of two compositional speech forms: descriptions (“depiction of features, simultaneously existing in space") and narration ("Narration transforms a series of simultaneous signs into a series of sequential perceptions, into an image of the movement of gaze and thought from object to object"). A.A. Potebnya distinguished between real time and artistic time; Having examined the relationship between these categories in works of folklore, he noted the historical variability of artistic time. Ideas by A.A. Potebny received further development in the works of philologists of the late XIX - early - la XX century However, interest in the problems of artistic time especially revived in the last decades of the 20th century, which was associated with the rapid development of science, the evolution of views on space and time, and the acceleration of social life, with increased attention in connection with this to the problems of memory, origins, tradition, on the one hand; and the future, on the other hand; finally, with the emergence of new forms in art.
“The work,” noted P.A. Florensky - aesthetically forcibly develops... in a certain sequence.” Time in a work of art is the duration, sequence and correlation of its events, based on their cause-and-effect, linear or associative relationship.
Time in the text has clearly defined or rather blurred boundaries (events, for example, can cover tens of years, a year, several days, a day, an hour, etc.), which may or, on the contrary, not be designated in the work in relation to the historical time or time established by the author conditionally (see, for example, E. Zamyatin’s novel “We”).
Artistic time wears systemic character. This is a way of organizing the aesthetic reality of a work, its inner world and at the same time an image associated with the embodiment of the author’s concept, with a reflection of his particular picture of the world (remember, for example, M. Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard”). From time as an immanent property of a work, it is advisable to distinguish the time of the passage of the text, which can be considered as the time of the reader; Thus, when considering a literary text, we are dealing with the antinomy “the time of the work - the time of the reader.” This antinomy in the process of perceiving a work can be resolved in different ways. At the same time, the time of the work is heterogeneous: thus, as a result of temporal shifts, “omissions”, highlighting central events in close-up, the depicted time is compressed, shortened, while when juxtaposing and describing simultaneous events, it, on the contrary, is stretched.
A comparison of real time and artistic time reveals their differences. The topological properties of real time in the macroworld are one-dimensionality, continuity, irreversibility, orderliness. In artistic time, all these properties are transformed. It may be multidimensional. This is due to the very nature of a literary work, which has, firstly, an author and presupposes the presence of a reader, and secondly, boundaries: a beginning and an end. Two time axes appear in the text - the “axis of storytelling” and the “axis of events described”: “the axis of storytelling is one-dimensional, while the axis of events described is multidimensional.” Their relationship destroys the multidimensionality of artistic time, makes temporal shifts possible, and determines the multiplicity of temporal points of view in the structure of the text. So, in prose work Usually, the narrator's conditional present tense is established, which correlates with the narration about the past or future of the characters, with the characteristics of situations in various time dimensions. The action of a work can unfold in different time planes (“The Double” by A. Pogorelsky, “Russian Nights” by V.F. Odoevsky, “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, etc.).
Irreversibility (unidirectionality) is also not characteristic of artistic time: the real sequence of events is often disrupted in the text. According to the law of irreversibility, only folklore time moves. In the literature of modern times big role play temporal shifts, violation of the temporal sequence, switching of temporal registers. Retrospection as a manifestation of the reversibility of artistic time is the principle of organization of a number of thematic genres (memoirs and autobiographical works, detective novels). Retrospective in a literary text can also act as a means of revealing its implicit content - subtext.
The multidirectionality and reversibility of artistic time is especially clearly manifested in the literature of the 20th century. If Stern, according to E.M. Forster, “turned the clock upside down,” then “Marcel Proust, even more inventive, swapped the hands... Gertrude Stein, who tried to banish time from the novel, smashed her clock into pieces and scattered its fragments around the world..." It was in the 20th century. a “stream of consciousness” novel arises, a “one day” novel, a sequential time series in which time is destroyed, and time appears only as a component of a person’s psychological existence.
Artistic time is characterized as continuity, so and discreteness.“Remaining essentially continuous in the sequential change of temporal and spatial facts, the continuum in textual reproduction is simultaneously divided into separate episodes.” The selection of these episodes is determined by the author’s aesthetic intentions, hence the possibility of time gaps, “compression” or, conversely, expansion of plot time. - nor, see, for example, the remark of T. Mann: “At the wonderful festival of narration and reproduction, omissions play an important and indispensable role.”
The possibilities of expanding or compressing time are widely used by writers. So, for example, in the story by I.S. Turgenev's "Spring Waters" the story of Sanin's love for Gemma stands out in close-up - the most bright event in the hero's life, its emotional peak; At the same time, artistic time slows down, “stretches out,” but the course of the hero’s subsequent life is conveyed in a generalized, summary way: And there - living in Paris and all the humiliation, all the disgusting torment of a slave... Then- return to homeland, poisoned, devastated life, petty fuss, petty troubles...
Artistic time in the text acts as a dialectical unity final And infinite. In the endless flow of time, one event or a chain of events is singled out; their beginning and end are usually fixed. The ending of the work is a signal that the time period presented to the reader has ended, but time continues beyond it. Such a property of real-time works as orderliness is also transformed in a literary text. This may be due to the subjective determination of the reference point or measure of time: for example, in the autobiographical story “Boy” by S. Bobrov, the measure of time for the hero is a holiday:
For a long time I tried to imagine what a year was... and suddenly I saw in front of me a rather long ribbon of grayish-pearl fog, lying horizontally in front of me, like a towel thrown on the floor.<...>Was this towel divided for months?.. No, it was unnoticeable. For seasons?.. It’s also somehow not very clear... It was clearer something else. These were the patterns of the holidays that colored the year.
Artistic time represents unity private And general.“As a manifestation of the private, it has the features of individual time and is characterized by a beginning and an end. As a reflection of the limitless world, it is characterized by infinity; temporary flow." As a unity of discrete and continuous, finite and infinite, and can act. a separate temporary situation in a literary text: “There are seconds, five or six of them pass at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, completely achieved... As if you suddenly feel all of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true.” The plane of the timeless in a literary text is created through the use of - the use of repetitions, maxims and aphorisms, various kinds of reminiscences, symbols and other tropes. In this regard, artistic time can be considered as a complementary phenomenon, to the analysis of which N. Bohr’s principle of complementarity is applicable (opposite means cannot be combined synchronously; to obtain a holistic view, two “experiences” separated in time are needed). The antinomy “finite - infinite” is resolved in a literary text as a result of the use of conjugate, but spaced apart in time and therefore ambiguous means, for example, symbols.
Fundamentally significant for the organization of a work of art are such characteristics of artistic time as duration / brevity the event depicted, homogeneity / heterogeneity situations, the connection of time with subject-event content (its full/unfilled,"emptiness"). According to these parameters, both works and fragments of text in them, forming certain time blocks, can be contrasted.
Artistic time is based on a certain system of linguistic means. This is, first of all, a system of tense forms of the verb, their sequence and opposition, transposition (figurative use) of tense forms, lexical units with temporal semantics, case forms with the meaning of time, chronological marks, syntactic constructions that create a certain time plan (for example, nominative sentences represent in the text there is a plan of the present), names of historical figures, mythological heroes, nominations of historical events.
Of particular importance for artistic time is the functioning of verb forms; the predominance of statics or dynamics in the text, the acceleration or slowdown of time, their sequence determines the transition from one situation to another, and, consequently, the movement of time, depends on their correlation. Compare, for example, the following fragments of E. Zamyatin’s story “Mamai”: Mamai wandered lostly through the unfamiliar Zagorodny. The penguin wings were in the way; his head hung like the faucet of a broken samovar...
And suddenly his head jerked up, his legs began to prance like a twenty-five-year-old...
Forms of time act as signals of various subjective spheres in the structure of the narrative, cf., for example:
Gleb lying on the sand, resting my head in my hands, it was a quiet, sunny morning. He wasn't working on his mezzanine today. It's all over. Tomorrow are leaving, Ellie fits, everything is re-drilled. Helsingfors again...
(B. Zaitsev. Gleb’s Journey )
The functions of types of tense forms in a literary text are largely typified. As noted by V.V. Vinogradov, narrative (“event”) time is determined primarily by the relationship between the dynamic forms of the past tense of the perfect form and the forms of the past imperfect, acting in a procedural-long-term or qualitative-characterizing meaning. The latter forms are correspondingly assigned to the descriptions.
The time of the text as a whole is determined by the interaction of three temporal “axes”:
1) calendar time, displayed mainly by lexical units with the seme “time” and dates;
2) event-based time, organized by communications all predicates of the text (primarily verbal forms);
3) perceptual time, expressing the position of the narrator and the character (in this case, different lexical and grammatical means and temporal shifts are used).
Artistic and grammatical tenses are closely related, but they should not be equated. “Grammatical tense and the tense of a verbal work can diverge significantly. The time of action and the author’s and reader’s time are created by a combination of many factors: among them, only partly grammatical time...”
Artistic time is created by all elements of the text, while the means expressing temporal relations interact with the means expressing spatial relations. Let's limit ourselves to one example: for example, change of designs C; predicates of motion (we left the city, drove into the forest, arrived in Nizhneye Gorodishche, drove up to the river etc.) in the story of A.P. Chekhov ) “On the Cart,” on the one hand, determines the temporal sequence of situations and forms the plot time of the text, on the other hand, reflects the character’s movement in space and participates in the creation of artistic space. To create an image of time, spatial metaphors are regularly used in literary texts.
The oldest works are characterized mythological time a sign of which is the idea of cyclical reincarnations, “world periods”. Mythological time, not in the opinion of K. Levi-Strauss, can be defined as the unity of such characteristics as reversibility-irreversibility, synchronicity-diachronicity. The present and the future in mythological time appear only as different temporal hypostases of the past, which is an invariant structure. The cyclical structure of mythological time turned out to be significantly significant for the development of art in different eras. “The exceptionally powerful orientation of mythological thinking towards establishing homo- and isomorphisms, on the one hand, made it scientifically fruitful, and on the other, determined its periodic revival in various historical eras.” The idea of time as a change of cycles, “eternal repetition”, is present in a number of neo-mythological works of the 20th century. So, according to V.V. Ivanov, this concept is close to the image of time in the poetry of V. Khlebnikov, “who deeply felt the ways of science of his time.”
IN medieval culture time was viewed primarily as a reflection of eternity, while the idea of it was predominantly of an eschatological nature: time begins with the act of creation and ends with the “second coming.” The main direction of time becomes orientation towards the future - the future exodus from time into eternity, while the metrization of time itself changes and the role of the present, the dimension of which is connected with the spiritual life of a person, significantly increases: “... for the present of past objects we have memory or memories; for the present of real objects we have a look, an outlook, an intuition; for the present of future objects we have aspiration, hope, hope,” wrote Augustine. Thus, in ancient Russian literature, time, as D.S. notes. Likhachev, not as egocentric as in the literature of modern times. It is characterized by isolation, one-pointedness, strict adherence to the real sequence of events, and a constant appeal to the eternal: “Medieval literature strives for the timeless, for overcoming time in the depiction of the highest manifestations of existence - the divine establishment of the universe.” The achievements of ancient Russian literature in recreating events “from the angle of eternity” in a transformed form were used by writers of subsequent generations, in particular F.M. Dostoevsky, for whom “the temporary was... a form of realization of the eternal.” Let us limit ourselves to one example - the dialogue between Stavrogin and Kirillov in the novel “Demons”:
There are minutes, you get to minutes, and time suddenly stops and will be forever.
Are you hoping to get to that point?
“This is hardly possible in our time,” Nikolai Vsevolodovich responded, also without any irony, slowly and as if thoughtfully. - In the Apocalypse, the angel swears that there will be no more time.
I know. This is very true there; clearly and accurately. When the whole person achieves happiness, there will be no more time, because there is no need.
Since the Renaissance, the evolutionary theory of time has been affirmed in culture and science: spatial events become the basis for the movement of time. Time, thus, is understood as eternity, not opposed to time, but moving and being realized in every instantaneous situation. This is reflected in the literature of modern times, which boldly violates the principle of irreversibility of real time. Finally, the 20th century is a period of particularly bold experimentation with artistic time. The ironic judgment of Zh.P. is indicative. Sartre: “...most of the largest modern writers - Proust, Joyce... Faulkner, Gide, W. Wolf - each in their own way tried to cripple time. Some of them deprived him of his past and future in order to reduce him to the pure intuition of the moment... Proust and Faulkner simply simply “decapitated” him, depriving him of the future, that is, the dimension of action and freedom.”
Consideration of artistic time in its development shows that its evolution (reversibility → irreversibility → reversibility) is forward movement, in which each higher level denies, sublates its lower (preceding one), contains its wealth and again sublates itself in the next, third, stage.
Features of modeling artistic time are taken into account when determining the constitutive characteristics of the genus, genre, and movement in literature. So, according to A.A. Potebni, "lyrics" - praesens","epic - perfectum"; the principle of recreating times - can distinguish between genres: aphorisms and maxims, for example, are characterized by a constant present; Reversible artistic time is inherent in memoirs and autobiographical works. The literary direction is also associated with a specific concept of the development of time and the principles of its transmission, while, for example, the measure of adequacy of real time is different. Thus, symbolism is characterized by the implementation of the idea of eternal movement-becoming: the world develops according to the laws of the “triad (the unity of the world spirit with the Soul of the world - the rejection of the Soul of the world from unity - the defeat of Chaos).
At the same time, the principles of mastering artistic time are individual, this is a feature of the artist’s idiostyle (thus, artistic time in the novels of L.N. Tolstoy, for example, differs significantly from the model of time in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky).
Taking into account the peculiarities of the embodiment of time in a literary text, considering the concept of time in it and, more broadly, in the writer’s work is a necessary component of the analysis of the work; underestimation of this aspect, the absolutization of one of the particular manifestations of artistic time, the identification of its properties without taking into account both objective real time and subjective time can lead to erroneous interpretations of the artistic text, making the analysis incomplete and schematic.
The analysis of artistic time includes the following main points:
1) determination of the features of artistic time in the work in question:
Unidimensionality or multidimensionality;
Reversibility or irreversibility;
Linearity or violation of time sequence;
2) highlighting the temporal plans (planes) presented in the work in the temporal structure of the text and considering their interaction;
4) identifying signals that highlight these forms of time;
5) consideration of the entire system of time indicators in the text, identifying not only their direct, but also figurative meanings;
6) determining the relationship between historical and everyday, biographical and historical time;
7) establishing a connection between artistic time and space.
Let us turn to the consideration of individual aspects of the artistic time of the text based on the material of specific works (“The Past and Thoughts” by A. I. Herzen and the story “Cold Autumn” by I. A. Bunin).
“The Past and Thoughts” by A. I. Herzen: features of temporary organization
In a literary text, a moving, often changeable and multidimensional time perspective arises; the sequence of events in it may not correspond to their real chronology. The author of the work, in accordance with his aesthetic intentions, either expands, or “thickens” time, or slows it down; it speeds up.
A work of art correlates different aspect of artistic time: plot time (the temporal extent of the depicted actions and their reflection in the composition of the work) and plot time (their real sequence), author's time and subjective time of the characters. It presents different manifestations(forms) of time (everyday historical time, personal time and social time). The center of attention of a writer or poet can be himself image of time, associated with the motive of movement, development, formation, with the opposition of the transitory and the eternal.
Of particular interest is the analysis of the temporal organization of works in which different time plans are consistently correlated, a broad panorama of the era is given, and a certain philosophy of history is embodied. Such works include the memoir-autobiographical epic “The Past and Thoughts” (1852 - 1868). This is not only the pinnacle of A.I.’s creativity. Herzen, but also the work “ new form"(according to L.N. Tolstoy's definition) It combines elements of different genres (autobiography, confession, notes, historical chronicles), combines different forms of presentation and compositional and semantic types of speech, " tombstone and confession, past and thoughts, biography, speculation, events and thoughts, heard and seen, memories and... more memories” (A.I. Herzen). “The best... of the books devoted to a review of one’s own life” (Yu.K. Olesha), “The Past and Thoughts” is the history of the formation of a Russian revolutionary and at the same time the history of social thought of the 30-60s of the 19th century. “There is hardly another work of memoirs so imbued with conscious historicism.”
This is a work characterized by a complex and dynamic temporal organization, involving the interaction of various time plans. Its principles are defined by the author himself, who noted that his work is “and a confession around which, about which, here and there, captured memories from the past, here and there, stopped thoughts and other m" (highlighted by A.I. Herzen. - N.N.). This author’s characteristic, which opens the work, contains an indication of the basic principles of the temporal organization of the text: this is an orientation toward the subjective segmentation of one’s past, the free juxtaposition of different time plans, the constant switching of time registers; The author’s “thoughts” are combined with a retrospective, but devoid of strict chronological sequence. - features of the story about the events of the past, include characteristics of persons, events and facts of different historical eras. The narration of the past is supplemented by stage reproduction of individual situations; the story about the “past” is interrupted by fragments of text that reflect the immediate position of the narrator at the moment of speech or the reconstructed period of time.
This construction of the work “clearly reflected the methodological principle of “The Past and Thoughts”: the constant interaction of the general and the particular, the transitions from the author’s direct reflections to their substantive illustration and back.”
Artistic time in “Bygone...” reversible(the author resurrects past events), multidimensional(the action unfolds in different time planes) and nonlinear(the story about past events is disrupted by self-interruptions, reasoning, comments, assessments). The starting point that determines the change of time plans in the text is mobile and constantly moving.
The plot time of the work is time first of all biographical, The “past”, reconstructed inconsistently, reflects the main stages in the development of the author’s personality.
At the heart of biographical time is the end-to-end image of a path (road), in symbolic form embodying the life path of the narrator, seeking true knowledge and going through a series of tests. This traditional spatial image is realized in a system of expanded metaphors and comparisons, regularly repeated in the text and forming a cross-cutting motif of movement, overcoming oneself, and passing through a series of steps: The path we chose was not easy, we never left it; wounded, broken, we walked, and no one overtook us. I reached... not to the goal, but to the place where the road goes downhill...; ...the June of coming of age, with its painful work, with its rubble on the road, takes a person by surprise.; Like lost knights in fairy tales, we waited at a crossroads. You'll go right- you will lose your horse, but you yourself will be safe; if you go to the left, the horse will be intact, but you yourself will die; if you go forward, everyone will leave you; If you go back, this is no longer possible, the road there is overgrown with grass for us.
These tropical series developing in the text act as a constructive component of the biographical time of the work and form its figurative basis.
Reproducing past events, evaluating them ("Past- not a proof sheet... Not everything can be corrected. It remainsas cast in metal, detailed, unchanging, dark as bronze. People generally forget only what is not worth remembering or what they do not understand") and refracting through his subsequent experience, A.I. Herzen makes maximum use of the expressive capabilities of the tense forms of the verb.
The situations and facts depicted in the past are assessed by the author in different ways: some of them are described extremely briefly, while others (the most important for the author in an emotional, aesthetic or ideological sense), on the contrary, are highlighted “close-up”, while time “stops” or slows down. To achieve this aesthetic effect, imperfective past tense forms or present tense forms are used. If the forms of the past perfect express a chain of successively changing actions, then the forms of the imperfect form convey not the dynamics of the event, but the dynamics of the action itself, presenting it as an unfolding process. Performing in a literary text not only a “reproducing”, but also a “visually pictorial”, “descriptive” function, the forms of the past imperfect stop time. In the text of “Past and Thoughts” they are used as a means of highlighting in “close-up” situations or events that are especially significant for the author (the oath on Vorobyovy Mountain, the death of his father, a meeting with Natalie, leaving Russia, a meeting in Turin, the death of his wife). The choice of forms of the past imperfect as a sign of a definite author's attitude in this case also performs an emotional-expressive function towards the depicted. Wed, for example: The nurse in a sundress and a shower jacket is still watched follow us and cried; Sonnenberg, that funny figure from childhood, waved foulard- All around is an endless steppe of snow.
This function of the forms of the past imperfect is typical of artistic speech; it is associated with the special meaning of the imperfect form, which presupposes the obligatory presence of a moment of observation, a retrospective point of reference. A.I. Herzen also uses the expressive possibilities of the past imperfect form with the meaning of multiple or habitually repeated action: they serve for typification, generalization of empirical details and situations. Thus, to characterize life in his father’s house, Herzen uses the technique of describing one day - a description based on the consistent use of imperfective forms. “Past and Thoughts” is thus characterized by a constant change in the perspective of the image: isolated facts and situations, highlighted in close-up, are combined with the reproduction of long-term processes, periodically repeating phenomena. Interesting in this regard is the portrait of the Chaadaevs, built on the transition from the author’s specific personal observations to a typical characteristic:
I loved to look at him in the midst of this tinsel nobility, flighty senators, gray-haired rakes and honorable nonentities. No matter how dense the crowd, the eye found him immediately; summer did not distort his slender figure, he dressed very carefully, his pale, tender face was completely motionless, when he was silent, as if made of wax or marble, “a forehead like a naked skull”... For ten years he stood with folded arms , somewhere near a column, near a tree on the boulevard, in halls and theaters, in a club and - the embodiment of veto, he looked with lively protest at the whirlwind of faces spinning meaninglessly around him...
The forms of the present tense against the background of the forms of the past can also perform the function of slowing down time, the function of highlighting events and phenomena of the past in close-up, but they, unlike the forms of the past imperfect in the “picturesque” function, recreate, first of all, the immediate time of the author’s experience associated with the moment of lyrical concentrations, or (less often) convey predominantly typical situations, repeatedly repeated in the past and now reconstructed by memory as imaginary:
The peace of the oak forest and the noise of the oak forest, the continuous buzzing of flies, bees, bumblebees... and the smell... this grass-forest smell... which I so greedily sought in Italy, and in England, and in the spring, and in the hot summer, and almost never found it. Sometimes it seems to smell like it, after mown hay, in broad daylight, before a thunderstorm... and I remember a small place in front of the house... on the grass, a three-year-old boy, lying in clover and dandelions, between grasshoppers, all sorts of beetles and ladybugs, and ourselves, both youth and friends! The sun has set, it’s still very warm, we don’t want to go home, we’re sitting on the grass. The catcher picks mushrooms and scolds me for no reason. What is this, like a bell? to us, or what? Today is Saturday - maybe... The troika rolls through the village, knocking on the bridge.
The forms of the present tense in “The Past...” are associated primarily with the subjective psychological time the author, his emotional sphere, their use complicates the image of time. The reconstruction of events and facts of the past, again directly experienced by the author, is associated with the use of nominative sentences, and in some cases with the use of forms of the past perfect in the perfect meaning. The chain of forms of the historical present and nominatives not only brings the events of the past as close as possible, but also conveys a subjective sense of time and recreates its rhythm:
My heart was beating strongly when I again saw familiar, dear streets, places, houses that I had not seen for about four years... Kuznetsky Most, Tverskoy Boulevard... here is Ogarev’s house, they stuck some kind of huge coat of arms on him, it’s someone else’s already... here Povarskaya - the spirit is engaged: in the meso- - Nina, in the corner window, a candle is burning, this is her room, she writes to me, she thinks about me, the candle burns so cheerfully, so to me burns.
Thus, the biographical plot time of the work is uneven and discontinuous, it is characterized by a deep but moving perspective; recreation of real biographical facts combined with the transfer of various aspects of subjective awareness and measurement of time by the author.
Artistic and grammatical time, as already noted, are closely related, however, “grammar appears as a piece of smalt in the overall mosaic picture of a verbal work.” Artistic time is created by all elements of the text.
Lyrical expression and attention to the “moment” are combined in the prose of A.I. Herzen with constant typification, with a social-analytical approach to what is depicted. Considering that “it is more necessary here than anywhere else to take off masks and portraits,” since “we are terribly falling apart from what has just passed,” the author combines; “thoughts” in the present and a story about the “past” with portraits of contemporaries, while restoring the missing links in the image of the era: “the universal without personality is an empty distraction; but a person only has full reality to the extent that he is in society.”
Portraits of contemporaries in “The Past and Thoughts” are conditionally possible; divided into static and dynamic. Thus, in Chapter III of the first volume, a portrait of Nicholas I is presented, it is static and emphatically evaluative, the speech means involved in its creation contain the common semantic feature “cold”: a cropped and shaggy jellyfish with a mustache; His beauty filled him with cold... But the main thing was his eyes, without any warmth, without any mercy, winter eyes.
The portrait description of Ogarev is constructed differently in Chapter IV of the same volume. A description of his appearance is followed by an introduction; elements of prospection related to the hero’s future. “If a pictorial portrait is always a moment stopped in time, then a verbal portrait characterizes a person in “actions and deeds” relating to different “moments” of his biography.” Creating a portrait of N. Ogarev in adolescence, A.I. Herzen, at the same time, names the traits of the hero in maturity: Early on one could see in him that anointing that not many people receive,- for bad luck or for good luck... but probably so as not to be in the crowd... unaccountable sadness and extreme meekness shone from the big gray eyes, hinting at the future growth of the great spirit; That's how he grew up.
The combination of different time points of view in portraits when describing and characterizing the characters deepens the moving time perspective of the work.
The multiplicity of time points of view presented in the structure of the text is increased by the inclusion of fragments of the diary, letters of other characters, excerpts from literary works, in particular from the poems of N. Ogarev. These elements of the text are correlated with the author's narrative or author's descriptions and are often contrasted with them as genuine, objective - subjective, transformed by time. See for example: The truth of that time, as it was then understood, without the artificial perspective that distance gives, without the cooling of time, without the corrected illumination by rays passing through a series of other events, was preserved in the notebook of that time.
The biographical time of the author is supplemented in the work with elements of the biographical time of other heroes, while A.I. Herzen resorts to extensive comparisons and metaphors that recreate the passage of time: The years of her life abroad passed luxuriantly and noisily, but they went and plucked flower after flower... Like a tree in the middle of winter, she retained the linear outline of her branches, the leaves flew around, the bare branches chilled bonyly, but the majestic growth and bold dimensions were seen all the more clearly. The image of a clock is repeatedly used in “The Past...”, embodying the inexorable power of time: The large English table clock, with its measured*, loud spondee - tick-tock - tick-tock - tick-tock... seemed to be measuring out the last quarter of an hour of her life...; And the spondee English clock continued to measure out days, hours, minutes... and finally reached the fateful second.
The image of fleeting time in “The Past and Thoughts,” as we see, is associated with an orientation towards the traditional, often general linguistic type of comparisons and metaphors, which, repeated in the text, undergo transformations and affect the surrounding elements of the context; as a result, the stability of tropical characteristics is combined with their constant update.
Thus, biographical time in “My Past and Thoughts” consists of plot time, based on the sequence of events of the author’s past, and elements of the biographical time of other characters, while the subjective perception of time by the narrator, his evaluative attitude to the reconstructed facts are constantly emphasized. “The author is like an editor in cinematography”: he either speeds up the time of the work, then stops it, does not always correlate the events of his life with chronology, emphasizes, on the one hand, the fluidity of time, on the other hand, the duration of individual episodes resurrected by memory.
Biographical time, despite the complex perspective inherent in it, is interpreted in the work of A. Herzen as private time, presupposing subjectivity of measurement, closed, having a beginning and an end (“Everything personal quickly crumbles away... Let “The Past and Thoughts” settle accounts with personal life and be its table of contents”). It is included in the broad flow of time associated with the historical era reflected in the work. Thus, closed biographical time contrasted open historical time. This opposition is reflected in the features of the composition of “The Past and Thoughts”: “in the sixth and seventh parts there is no longer a lyrical hero; in general, the personal, “private” fate of the author remains outside the boundaries of what is depicted,” the dominant element of the author’s speech becomes “thoughts” that appear in a monologue or dialogized form. One of the leading grammatical forms organizing these contexts is the present tense. If the plot biographical time of “The Past and Thoughts” is characterized by the use of the actual present (“the author’s current ... the result of moving the “observation point” to one of the moments of the past, the plot action”) or the historical present, then for “thoughts” and the author’s digressions, constituting the main layer of historical time, characterized by the present in an expanded or constant meaning, acting in interaction with the forms of the past tense, as well as the present of direct author’s speech: The nationality, like a banner, like a battle cry, is only surrounded by a revolutionary aura when the people fight for independence, when they overthrow the foreign yoke... The War of 1812 greatly developed a sense of popular consciousness and love for the homeland, but the patriotism of 1812 did not have the Old Believer-Slavic character. We see him in Karamzin and Pushkin...
““The past and thoughts,” wrote A.I. Herzen, is not a historical monograph, but a reflection of history in a person, accidentally caught on her way."
The life of an individual in “Bydrm and Thoughts” is perceived in connection with a certain historical situation and is motivated by it. A metaphorical image of the background appears in the text, which is then concretized, acquiring perspective and dynamics: A thousand times I wanted to convey a series of peculiar figures, sharp portraits taken from life... There is nothing gregarious in them... one general connection connection- em them or better yet one general unhappiness; Peering into the dark gray background, you can see soldiers under sticks, serfs under rods... wagons rushing to Siberia, convicts trudged there, shaved foreheads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes, sultans... in a word, St. Petersburg Russia.. They want to run away from the canvas and cannot.
If the biographical time of a work is characterized by a spatial image of a road, then to represent historical time, in addition to the image of the background, images of the sea (ocean) and elements are regularly used:
Impressive, sincerely young, we were easily caught up in a powerful wave... and early we swam across that line at which whole rows of people stop, fold their arms, walk back or look around for a ford - across the sea!
In history, it is easier for him [man] to be passionately carried away by the flow of events... than to peer into the ebb and flow of the waves that carry him. A man... grows by understanding his position into a helmsman who proudly cuts through the waves with his boat, forcing the bottomless abyss to serve him through communication.
Characterizing the role of the individual in the historical process, A.I. Herzen resorts to a number of metaphorical correspondences that are inextricably linked with each other: a person in history is “at once a boat, a wave and a helmsman,” while everything that exists is connected by “ends and beginnings, causes and actions.” A person’s aspirations “are clothed in words, embodied in images, remain in tradition and are passed on from century to century.” This understanding of the place of man in the historical process led to the author’s appeal to the universal language of culture, the search for certain “formulas” to explain the problems of history and, more broadly, of existence, to classify particular phenomena and situations. Such “formulas” in the text of “Past and Thoughts” are a special type of tropes, characteristic of the style of A.I. Herzen. These are metaphors, comparisons, periphrases, which include the names of historical figures, literary heroes, mythological characters, names of historical events, words denoting historical and cultural concepts. These “point quotes” appear in the text as metonymic replacements for entire situations and plots. The paths of which they are included serve to figuratively characterize phenomena of which Herzen was a contemporary, persons and events of other historical eras. See for example: Student young ladies- Jacobins, Saint-Just in the Amazon - everything is sharp, pure, merciless...;[Moscow] with murmuring and contempt she received into her walls a woman stained with the blood of her husband[Catherine II], this Lady Macbeth without repentance, this Lucretia Borgia without Italian blood...
Phenomena of history and modernity, empirical facts and myths, real persons and literary images, as a result, the situations described in the work receive a second plan: through the particular the general appears, through the individual - the repeating, through the transitory - the eternal.
The relationship in the structure of the work of two time layers: private time, biographical time and historical time - leads to a complication of the subjective organization of the text. Copyright I alternates sequentially with We, which in different contexts takes on different meanings: it points either to the author, or to persons close to him, or, with the strengthening of the role of historical time, serves as a means of pointing to the entire generation, a national collective, or even, more broadly, to the human race as a whole:
Our historical vocation, our deed lies in this: through our disappointment, through our suffering, we reach the point of humility and submission before the truth and deliver the next generations from these sorrows...
In the connection of generations, the unity of the human race is affirmed, the history of which seems to the author to be a tireless striving forward, a path that has no end, but presupposes, however, the repetition of certain motives. The same repetitions of A.I. Herzen also finds in human life, the flow of which, from his point of view, has a peculiar rhythm:
Yes, in life there is an addiction to the returning rhythm, to the repetition of the motive; who doesn’t know how close old age is to childhood? Take a closer look and you will see that on both sides of the full height of life, with its wreaths of flowers and thorns, with its cradles and coffins, eras are often repeated, similar in the main features.
It is historical time that is especially important for the narrative: the formation of the hero of “Past and Thoughts” reflects the formation of the era; biographical time is not only contrasted with historical time, but also acts as one of its manifestations.
Dominant images that characterize both biographical time (the image of the path) and historical time (the image of the sea, the elements) in the text interact, their connection gives rise to the movement of particular end-to-end images associated with the deployment of the dominant: I'm not coming from London. There is nowhere and no reason... It was washed here and thrown by the waves, which so mercilessly broke and twisted me and everything close to me.
Interaction in the text of different time plans, correlation in the work of biographical time and historical time, “reflection of history in man” - distinctive features memoir-autobiographical epic by A.I. Herzen. These principles of temporal organization determine the figurative structure of the text and are reflected in the language of the work.
The natural forms of existence of the depicted world (as well as the world of time and the real) are time and space. Time and space in literature represent a kind of convention, on the nature of which various forms of spatio-temporal organization depend art world.
Among other arts, literature deals most freely with time and space (only the art of cinema can compete in this regard).
In particular, literature can show events occurring simultaneously in different places: for this, the narrator only needs to introduce into the narrative the formula “Meanwhile, such and such was happening there” or a similar one. Just as simply, literature moves from one time layer to another (especially from the present to the past and back); the earliest forms of such a temporary switch were memories and the story of a hero - we meet them already in Homer.
Another important property of literary time and space is their discreteness (discontinuity). In relation to time, this is especially important, since literature does not reproduce the entire time flow, but selects only artistically significant fragments from it, designating “empty” intervals with formulas such as “how long, how short,” “several days have passed,” etc. Such temporal discreteness serves as a powerful means of dynamizing first the plot, and subsequently psychologism.
The fragmentation of artistic space is partly related to the properties of artistic time, and partly has an independent character. Thus, an instantaneous change in space-time coordinates, natural for literature (for example, the transfer of action from St. Petersburg to Oblomovka in Goncharov’s novel “Oblomov”) makes the description of the intermediate space (in this case, the road) unnecessary. The discreteness of the actual spatial images lies in the fact that in literature this or that place may not be described in all details, but only indicated by individual signs that are most significant for the author and have a high semantic load. The remaining (usually large) part of the space is “completed” in the reader’s imagination. Thus, the scene of action in Lermontov’s “Borodino” is indicated by only four fragmentary details: “large field”, “redoubt”, “guns and forests with blue tops”. Also fragmentary, for example, is the description of Onegin’s village office: only “Lord Byron’s portrait”, a figurine of Napoleon and - a little later - books are noted. Such discreteness of time and space leads to significant artistic economy and increases the significance of an individual figurative detail.
The nature of the conventions of literary time and space greatly depends on the type of literature. In the lyrics this convention is maximum; in lyrical works, in particular, there may be no image of space at all - for example, in Pushkin’s poem “I loved you...”. In other cases, spatial coordinates are present only formally, being conditionally allegorical: for example, it is impossible to say that the space of Pushkin’s “Prophet” is the desert, and Lermontov’s “Sails” is the sea. However, at the same time, lyrics are capable of reproducing the objective world with its spatial coordinates, which have a large artistic significance. Thus, in Lermontov’s poem “How often, surrounded by a motley crowd...” the contrast of spatial images of the ballroom and the “wonderful kingdom” embodies the antithesis of civilization and nature, which is very important for Lermontov.
Lyrics deal with artistic time just as freely. We often observe in it a complex interaction of time layers: past and present (“When a noisy day falls silent for a mortal...” by Pushkin), past, present and future (“I will not humiliate myself before you...” by Lermontov), mortal human time. and eternity (“Having rolled down the mountain, the stone lay in the valley...” Tyutchev). There is also a complete absence of a significant image of time in the lyrics, as, for example, in Lermontov’s poems “And Bored and Sad” or Tyutchev’s “Wave and Thought” - the time coordinate of such works can be defined by the word “always”. On the contrary, there is also a very acute perception of time by the lyrical hero, which is characteristic, for example, of the poetry of I. Annensky, as evidenced even by the names of his works: “Moment”, “The melancholy of fleetingness”, “Minute”, not to mention the more profound images However, in all cases, lyrical time has a high degree of conventionality, and often abstraction.
The conventions of dramatic time and space are mainly associated with the orientation of drama towards theatrical production. Of course, each playwright has his own construction of the spatio-temporal image, but the general character of the convention remains unchanged: “No matter how significant the role narrative fragments acquire in dramatic works, no matter how fragmented the depicted action is, no matter how the characters’ spoken statements are subordinated to their internal logic speech, drama is committed to pictures closed in space and time”*.
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* Khalizev V.E. Drama as a kind of literature. M., 1986. P. 46.
The epic genre has the greatest freedom in handling artistic time and space; It is also where the most complex and interesting effects in this area are observed.
According to the peculiarities of artistic convention, literary time and space can be divided into abstract and concrete. This division is especially important for the artistic space. We will call abstract a space that has a high degree of conventionality and which, in the limit, can be perceived as a “universal” space, with coordinates “everywhere” or “nowhere.” It does not have a pronounced characteristic and therefore does not have any influence on the artistic world of the work: it does not determine the character and behavior of a person, is not associated with the characteristics of the action, does not set any emotional tone, etc. Thus, in Shakespeare’s plays, the location of the action is either completely fictitious (“Twelfth Night,” “The Tempest”) or does not have any influence on the characters and circumstances (“Hamlet,” “Coriolanus,” “Othello”). According to Dostoevsky’s correct remark, “his Italians, for example, are almost entirely the same English”*. In a similar way, artistic space is built in the dramaturgy of classicism, in many romantic works (ballads by Goethe, Schiller, Zhukovsky, short stories by E. Poe, “The Demon” by Lermontov), in the literature of decadence (plays by M. Maeterlinck, L. Andreev) and modernism (“ Plague" by A. Camus, plays by J.-P. Sartre, E. Ionesco).
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* Dostoevsky F.M. Full collection cit., In 30 volumes. M., 1984. T. 26. P. 145.
On the contrary, concrete space does not simply “tie” the depicted world to certain topographical realities, but actively influences the entire structure of the work. In particular, for Russian literature of the 19th century. characterized by the concretization of space, the creation of images of Moscow, St. Petersburg, a district town, an estate, etc., as discussed above in connection with the category of literary landscape.
In the 20th century Another trend has clearly emerged: a peculiar combination of concrete and abstract space within a work of art, their mutual “flowing” and interaction. In this case, a specific place of action is given symbolic meaning and a high degree of generalization. A specific space becomes a universal model of existence. At the origins of this phenomenon in Russian literature were Pushkin (“Eugene Onegin”, “The History of the Village of Goryukhin”), Gogol (“The Inspector General”), then Dostoevsky (“Demons”, “The Brothers Karamazov”); Saltykov-Shchedrin “The History of a City”), Chekhov (almost all mature creativity). In the 20th century, this tendency finds expression in the works of A. Bely (“Petersburg”), Bulgakov (“The White Guard”, “The Master and Margarita”), Ven. Erofeev (“Moscow–Petushki”), and in foreign literature– in M. Proust, W. Faulkner, A. Camus (“The Stranger”), etc.
(It is interesting that a similar tendency to transform real space into symbolic is observed in the 20th century and in some other arts, in particular in cinema: for example, in the films of F. Coppola “Apocalypse Now” and F. Fellini “Orchestra Rehearsal”, the very concrete at the beginning the space gradually, towards the end, transforms into something mystical-symbolic.)
The corresponding properties of artistic time are usually associated with abstract or concrete space. Thus, the abstract space of a fable is combined with abstract time: “For the strong, the powerless are always to blame...”, “And in the heart the flatterer will always find a corner...”, etc. In this case, the most universal patterns of human life, timeless and spaceless, are mastered. And vice versa: spatial specificity is usually complemented by temporal specificity, as, for example, in the novels of Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy and others.
The forms of concretization of artistic time are, firstly, the “linking” of action to real historical landmarks and, secondly, the precise definition of “cyclical” time coordinates: seasons and time of day. The first form received special development in the aesthetic system of realism of the 19th–20th centuries. (thus, Pushkin insistently pointed out that in his “Eugene Onegin” time is “calculated according to the calendar”), although, of course, it arose much earlier, apparently already in antiquity. But the degree of specificity in each individual case will be different and emphasized to varying degrees by the author. For example, in “War and Peace” by Tolstoy, “The Life of Klim Samgin” by Gorky, “The Living and the Dead” by Simonov, etc. in artistic worlds, real historical events are directly included in the text of the work, and the time of action is determined with an accuracy not only to the year and month, but often to one day. But in “A Hero of Our Time” by Lermontov or “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky, the time coordinates are quite vague and can be guessed by indirect signs, but at the same time the connection in the first case to the 30s, and in the second to the 60s.
The depiction of the time of day has long had a certain emotional meaning in literature and culture. Thus, in the mythology of many countries, night is the time of undivided dominance of secret and most often evil forces, and the approach of dawn, heralded by the crowing of a rooster, brought deliverance from evil spirits. Clear traces of these beliefs can be easily found in literature up to the present day (“The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, for example).
These emotional and semantic meanings were preserved to a certain extent in the literature of the 19th–20th centuries. and even became persistent metaphors such as “the dawn of a new life.” However, a different tendency is more typical for the literature of this period - to individualize the emotional and psychological meaning of the time of day in relation to a specific character or lyrical hero. Thus, the night can become a time of intense thought (“Poems composed at night during insomnia” by Pushkin), anxiety (“The pillow is already hot...” by Akhmatova), melancholy (“The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov). Morning can also change its emotional coloring to the exact opposite, becoming a time of sadness (“Foggy morning, gray morning...” by Turgenev, “A Pair of Bays” by A.N. Apukhtin, “Gloomy Morning” by A.N. Tolstoy). In general, individual shades in the emotional coloring of time exist in latest literature great multitude.
The season has been mastered in human culture since ancient times and was associated mainly with the agricultural cycle. In almost all mythologies, autumn is a time of dying, and spring is a time of rebirth. This mythological scheme passed into literature, and its traces can be found in a wide variety of works. However, more interesting and artistically significant are the individual images of the season for each writer, filled, as a rule, with psychological meaning. Here there are already complex and implicit relationships between the time of year and state of mind, giving a very wide emotional range (“I don’t like spring...” by Pushkin – “I love spring most of all...” by Yesenin). The correlation of the psychological state of the character and the lyrical hero with a particular season becomes in some cases a relatively independent object of comprehension - here we can recall Pushkin’s sensitive feeling of the seasons (“Autumn”), Blok’s “Snow Masks”, the lyrical digression in Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin” : “And at what time of year // Is it easier to die in war?” The same time of year is individualized for different writers and carries different psychological and emotional loads: let’s compare, for example, Turgenev’s summer in nature and the St. Petersburg summer in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”; or almost always the joyful Chekhovian spring (“It felt like May, dear May!” - “The Bride”) with spring in Bulgakov’s Yershalaim (“Oh, what a terrible month of Nisan this year!”).
Like local space, specific time can reveal in itself the beginnings of absolute, infinite time, as, for example, in “Demons” and “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoevsky, in the late prose of Chekhov (“Student”, “On Business”, etc.) , in “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, the novels of M. Proust, “The Magic Mountain” by T. Mann, etc.
Both in life and in literature, space and time are not given to us in their pure form. We judge space by the objects that fill it (in a broad sense), and we judge time by the processes occurring in it. For practical analysis of a work of art, it is important to at least qualitatively (“more - less”) determine the fullness, saturation of space and time, since this indicator often characterizes the style of the work. For example, Gogol’s style is characterized mainly by maximally filled space, as we discussed above. We find a somewhat lesser, but still significant saturation of space with objects and things in Pushkin (“Eugene Onegin”, “Count Nulin”), Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gorky, Bulgakov. But in the style system, for example, Lermontov, the space is practically not filled. Even in “A Hero of Our Time,” not to mention such works as “The Demon,” “Mtsyri,” and “Boyarin Orsha,” we cannot imagine a single specific interior, and the landscape is most often abstract and fragmentary. There is also no substantive saturation of space in such writers as L.N. Tolstoy, Saltykov-Shchedrin, V. Nabokov, A. Platonov, F. Iskander and others.
The intensity of artistic time is expressed in its saturation with events (by “events” we mean not only external, but also internal, psychological ones). There are three possible options here: average, “normal” time filled with events; increased time intensity (the number of events per unit of time increases); reduced intensity (saturation of events is minimal). The first type of organization of artistic time is presented, for example, in Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gorky.
The second type is in the works of Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov. The third is from Gogol, Goncharov, Leskov, Chekhov.
Increased saturation of artistic space is combined, as a rule, with a reduced intensity of artistic time, and vice versa: reduced occupancy of space - with increased saturation of time.
For literature as a temporary (dynamic) art form, the organization of artistic time is, in principle, more important than the organization of space. The most important problem here becomes the relationship between the time depicted and the time of the image. Literary reproduction of any process or event requires a certain time, which, of course, varies depending on the individual pace of reading, but still has some certainty and in one way or another correlates with the time of the depicted process. Thus, Gorky’s “The Life of Klim Samgin,” which covers forty years of “real” time, requires, of course, a much shorter period of time to read.
Depicted time and image time or, in other words, real and artistic time, as a rule, do not coincide, which often creates significant artistic effects. For example, in Gogol’s “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” about a decade and a half passes between the main events of the plot and the last visit of the narrator to Mirgorod, which are extremely sparingly noted in the text (of the events of this period, only the deaths of judge Demyan Demyanovich and crooked Ivan Ivanovich). But these years were not completely empty: all this time the litigation continued, the main characters grew old and approached inevitable death, still busy with the same “business”, in comparison with which even eating a melon or drinking tea in a pond seems like meaningful activities. The time interval prepares and enhances the sad mood of the finale: what was only funny at first becomes sad and almost tragic after a decade and a half.
In literature, rather complex relationships between real and artistic time often arise. Yes, in some cases real time in general can be equal to zero: this is observed, for example, with various types of descriptions. Such time is called eventless. But the event time in which at least something happens is internally heterogeneous. In one case, we have before us events and actions that significantly change either a person, or relationships between people, or the situation as a whole - such time is called plot time. In another case, a picture of sustainable existence is drawn, i.e. actions and deeds that are repeated day after day, year after year. In the System of such artistic time, which is often called “chronicle-everyday”, practically nothing changes. The dynamics of such time are as conditional as possible, and its function is to reproduce a stable way of life. Good example Such a temporary organization is the image of the cultural and everyday way of life of the Larin family in Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” (“They kept in a peaceful life // Habits of dear old times ...”). Here, as in some other places in the novel (the depiction of Onegin’s daily activities in the city and in the countryside, for example), it is not dynamics that are reproduced, but statics, something that does not happen once, but always happens.
The ability to determine the type of artistic time in a particular work is a very important thing. The ratio of eventless (“zero”) time, chronicle-everyday and event-plot time largely determines the tempo organization of the work, which, in turn, determines the nature of aesthetic perception and forms the reader’s subjective time. So, " Dead Souls"Gogol, in which eventless and chronicle-everyday time predominates, create the impression of a slow pace and require an appropriate “reading mode” and a certain emotional mood: artistic time is leisurely, and the same should be the time of perception. For example, Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” has a completely opposite tempo organization, in which event time predominates (let us recall that by “events” we include not only plot twists and turns, but also internal, psychological events). Accordingly, both the mode of its perception and the subjective pace of reading will be different: often the novel is simply read “absorbedly”, in one breath, especially for the first time.
The historical development of the spatio-temporal organization of the artistic world reveals a very definite tendency towards complication. In the 19th and especially in the 20th centuries. writers use space-time composition as a special, conscious artistic device; a kind of “game” begins with time and space. Her idea, as a rule, is to compare different times and spaces to identify both the characteristic properties of “here” and “now”, and the general, universal laws of human existence, independent of time and space; this is an understanding of the world in its unity. This artistic idea Chekhov expressed it very accurately and deeply in his story “The Student”: “The past,” he thought, “is connected with the present by a continuous chain of events that flow from one another. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of this chain: he touched one end, as the other trembled<...>truth and beauty, which guided human life there, in the garden and in the courtyard of the high priest, continued uninterrupted to this day and, apparently, always constituted the main thing in human life and in general on earth.”
In the 20th century comparison, or, in Tolstoy’s apt words, “conjugation” of space-time coordinates has become characteristic of many writers - T. Mann, Faulkner, Bulgakov, Simonov, Aitmatov, etc. One of the most striking and artistically significant examples of this trend is Tvardovsky’s poem "Beyond the distance - the distance." The spatio-temporal composition creates in it an image of the epic unity of the world, in which there is a rightful place for the past, present, and future; and the small forge in Zagorye, and the great forge of the Urals, and Moscow, and Vladivostok, and the front, and the rear, and much more. In the same poem, Tvardovsky figuratively and very clearly formulated the principle of space-time composition:
There are two categories of travel:
One is to set off into the distance,
The other one is to sit in one’s place,
Flip back through the calendar.
This time there is a special reason
It will allow me to combine them.
And that one, and that one - by the way, both of them,
And my path is doubly beneficial.
These are the basic elements and properties of that side of the artistic form that we called the depicted world. It should be emphasized that the depicted world is an extremely important aspect of the entire work of art: the stylistic and artistic originality of the work often depends on its features; Without understanding the features of the depicted world, it is difficult to analyze the artistic content. We remind you of this because in the practice of school teaching, the depicted world is not singled out at all as a structural element of the form, and therefore its analysis is often neglected. Meanwhile, as one of the leading writers of our time, W. Eco, said, “for storytelling, first of all, it is necessary to create a certain world, arranging it as best as possible and thinking through it in detail”*.
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* Eco U. Name of the rose. M., 1989. P. 438.
CONTROL QUESTIONS:
1. What is meant in literary criticism by the term “depicted world”? How is its non-identity with primary reality manifested?
2. What is an artistic detail? What groups of artistic details exist?
3. What is the difference between a detail part and a symbol part?
4. What is the purpose of a literary portrait? What types of portraits do you know? What is the difference between them?
5. What functions do images of nature perform in literature? What is a “city landscape” and why is it needed in a work?
6. What is the purpose of describing things in a work of art?
7. What is psychologism? Why is it used in fiction? What forms and techniques of psychologism do you know?
8. What are fantasy and life-like as forms of artistic convention?
9. What functions, forms and techniques of fiction do you know?
10. What are plot and descriptiveness?
11. What types of spatio-temporal organization of the depicted world do you know? What artistic effects does the writer extract from the images of space and time? How do real time and artistic time relate?
Exercises
1. Determine what type of artistic details (detail-detail or detail-symbol) is typical for “Belkin’s Tales” by A.S. Pushkin, “Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev, “The White Guard” by M.A. Bulgakov.
2. What type of portrait (portrait-description, portrait-comparison, portrait-impression) belongs to:
a) portrait of Pugachev (“ Captain's daughter» A.S. Pushkin),
b) portrait of Sobakevich (“Dead Souls” by N.V. Gogol),
c) portrait of Svidrigailov (“Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky),
d) portraits of Gurov and Anna Sergeevna (“Lady with a Dog” by A.P. Chekhov),
e) portrait of Lenin (“V.I. Lenin” by M. Gorky),
f) portrait of Beach Saniel (“Running on the Waves” by A. Green).
3. In the examples from the previous exercise, establish the type of connection between the portrait and character traits:
– direct correspondence,
– contrast discrepancy,
- complex relationship.
4. Determine what functions the landscape performs in the following works:
N.M. Karamzin. Poor Lisa,
A. S. Pushkin. Gypsies,
I.S. Turgenev. Forest and steppe
A.P. Chekhov. Lady with a dog,
M. Gorky. Okurov town,
V.M. Shukshin. The desire to live.
5. In which of the following works does the image of things play a significant role? Determine the function of the world of things in these works.
A.S. Griboyedov. Woe from mind
N.V. Gogol. Old world landowners
L.N. Tolstoy. Resurrection,
A.A. Block. Twelve,
A.I. Solzhenitsyn. One day of Ivan Denisovich,
A. and B. Strugatsky. Predatory things of the century.
6. Identify the predominant forms and techniques of psychologism in the following works:
M.Yu. Lermontov. Hero of our time,
N.V. Gogol. Portrait,
I.S. Turgenev. Asya,
F.M. Dostoevsky. Teenager,
A.P. Chekhov. New dacha,
M. Gorky. At the bottom,
M.A. Bulgakov. Dog's heart.
7. Determine in which of the following works fantasy is an essential characteristic of the depicted world. In each case, analyze the predominant functions and techniques of fiction.
N.V. Gogol. The missing certificate
M.Yu. Lermontov. Masquerade,
I.S. Turgenev. Knocking!,
N.S. Leskov. The Enchanted Wanderer,
M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Chizhikovo grief, conscience has disappeared,
F.M. Dostoevsky. Bobok,
S.A. Yesenin. Black man,
M.A. Bulgakov. Fatal eggs.
8. Determine in which of the works below the essential characteristic of the depicted world is plot, descriptiveness and psychologism:
N.V. Gogol. The story of how Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich quarreled, Marriage,
M.Yu. Lermontov. Hero of our time,
A.N. Ostrovsky. Wolves and sheep
L.N. Tolstoy. After the ball,
And P. Chekhov. Gooseberry,
M. Gorky. Life of Klim Samgin.
9. How and why space-time effects are used in the following works:
A.S. Pushkin. Boris Godunov,
M.Yu. Lermontov. Daemon,
N.V. Gogol. Enchanted place
A.P. Chekhov. Gull,
M.A. Bulgakov. Diaboliad,
A.T. Tvardovsky. Ant Country,
A. and B. Strugatsky. Noon. XXII century.
Final task
Analyze the structure of the depicted world in two or three of the works below using the following algorithm:
1. For the depicted world the following are essential:
1.1. plot,
1.2. descriptiveness
1.2.1. analyze:
a) portraits,
b) landscapes,
c) the world of things.
1.3. psychologism
1.3.1. analyze:
a) forms and techniques of psychologism,
b) functions of psychologism.
2. For the depicted world it is essential
2.1. lifelikeness
2.1.1. determine life-like functions,
2.2. fantastic
2.2.1. analyze:
a) type of fantastic imagery,
b) forms and techniques of fiction,
c) functions of fiction.
3. What type of artistic details predominates
3.1. details-details
3.1.1. analyze, using one or two examples, artistic features, the nature of the emotional impact and the functions of details,
3.2. details-symbols
3.2.1. analyze, using one or two examples, artistic features, the nature of the emotional impact and the functions of symbolic details.
4. Time and space in the work are characterized
4.1. concreteness
4.1.1. analyze the artistic impact and functions of a specific space and time,
4.2. abstractness
4.2.1. analyze the artistic impact and functions of abstract space and time,
4.3. abstractness and concreteness of time and space are combined in an artistic image
4.3.1.analyze the artistic impact and functions of such a combination.
Make a summary of the previous analysis about the artistic features and functions of the depicted world in this work.
Texts for analysis
A.S. Pushkin. Captain's daughter, Queen of Spades,
N.V. Gogol. May Night, or Drowned Woman, Nose, Dead Souls,
M.Yu. Lermontov. Demon, Hero of our time,
I.S. Turgenev. Fathers and Sons,
N.S. Leskov. Old years in the village of Plodomasovo, Enchanted wanderer,
I.A. Goncharov. Oblomov,
ON THE. Nekrasov. Who lives well in Rus',
L.N. Tolstoy. Childhood, Death of Ivan Ilyich,
F.M. Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment,
A.P. Chekhov. On matters of service, Bishop,
E. Zamyatin. We,
M.A. Bulgakov. Dog's heart,
A.T. Tvardovsky. Terkin in the next world,
A. I. Solzhenitsyn. One day of Ivan Denisovich.
