The ghost of realism

Consider the most characteristic definitions of artistic realism.

(1) Realism is an artistic direction, “aiming to convey reality as close as possible, striving for maximum likelihood. We declare realistic those works that seem to us to closely convey reality. Jacobson 1976: 66]. This definition was given by R. O. Yakobson in the article “On Artistic Realism” as the most common, vulgar sociological understanding.

(2) Realism is an artistic movement depicting a person whose actions are determined by the social environment around him. This is the definition of Professor G. A. Gukovsky [ Gukovsky 1967].

(3) Realism is such a trend in art, which, unlike the classicism and romanticism that preceded it, where the author’s point of view was respectively inside and outside the text, implements in its texts a systemic plurality of the author’s points of view on the text. This is the definition of Yu. M. Lotman [ Lotman 1966]

R. Jacobson himself sought to define artistic realism in a functionalist way, at the junction of his two pragmatic understandings:

"one. […] A realistic work is a work conceived by a given author as plausible (meaning A).

2. A realistic work is a work that I, having a judgment about it, perceive as plausible” [ Jacobson 1976: 67].

Further, Jacobson says that both the tendency to deform artistic canons and the conservative tendency to preserve canons can be considered as realistic [ Jacobson 1976: 70].

Consider the three definitions of artistic realism listed above in sequence.

First of all, definition (1) is inadequate because it is not a definition of an aesthetic phenomenon, it does not affect its artistic essence. “It is possible to follow reality closer” can not so much be art as any ordinary, historical or scientific discourse. It all depends on what you mean by reality. In a sense, definition (1) is the most formal and, in this sense, correct if it is understood in the spirit of the ideas set forth in Chapter 1, adjusted for Jacobson's ideas. If by the equivalent of "following reality as closely as possible" we mean the closest possible reproduction of the average norms of written speech, then the most realistic work will be the one that will deviate the least from these average norms. But then reality should be understood as a set of semantically correctly constructed statements of the language (that is, reality should be understood as a sign system), and plausibility should be understood as an extensionally adequate transmission of these statements. Roughly speaking, then a statement like:

M. left the room, and unrealistic - a statement like:

M., he, slowly looking around, - and out of the room - swiftly.

The second statement is not realistic in this sense because it does not reflect the average norms of written speech. The sentence lacks a standard predicate; it is elliptic and syntactically broken. In this sense, it is really distorted, "unbelievable" conveys the linguistic reality. We will henceforth call such statements modernist (see also [ Rudnev 1990b]).

However, it is clear that definition (1) has in mind a somewhat different plausibility of a somewhat different reality, such as we considered it above, that is, independent of our experience, "given to us in sensations", opposite to fiction. However, a contradiction immediately arises here. The direction of fiction is determined through the concept of reality, which is opposed to fiction. It is clear that each culture perceives its products as adequately reflecting the reality of this culture. So, if in the Middle Ages they planned to create an artistic direction called realism, then the most believable characters there would be witches, succubi, the devil, etc. And in antiquity, these would be the Olympian gods.

Likelihood criterion is also functionally dependent on culture. A. Greimas writes that in one traditional tribe, discourses were considered plausible (veridictive), in a certain sense equivalent to our fairy tales, and implausible - stories that are equivalent to our historical traditions [ Greimas 1986]. R. Ingarden wrote that what is plausible in art is what is appropriate in this genre [ Ingarden 1962].

It is extremely difficult to rely on the criterion of plausibility when the very concept of truth is going through hard times after the paroxysm of plausibility in neopositivism. Karl Popper already in the 30s put forward the principle of falsificationism, according to which a scientific theory is considered true if it can be refuted, that is, if its refutation is not meaningless [ Popper 1983].

But the most important thing is that if we take a number of statements from some discourse that is considered obviously realistic, for example, from a story by Turgenev, then there will be too many extremely improbable, purely conventional, conventional features. For example, consider the usual statement in realistic prose, when the hero's direct speech is given and then it is added: "so-and-so thought." If we use the likelihood criterion, then such a statement is completely unrealistic. We cannot know what someone thought until he himself tells us about it. In this sense, such a statement, strictly speaking, cannot be considered well-formed from the point of view of ordinary language. The most important thing is that such statements do not occur outside of purely “realistic” artistic discourse. They can be marked with *. For example, it would be strange to hear the following statement in a court testimony:

* After that, M. thought that the best thing to do in this situation was to hide.

Statements with "thought" can only occur in a modal context or in the context of an explicit propositional attitude:

I guess he thought the best thing to do in this situation was to hide,

or in the modalized context of a simple sentence:

He probably thought the best thing to do in this situation was to hide.

In a sense, the literature of the “stream of consciousness” is more plausible, since it, without claiming to be an ontologically plausible reflection of reality, quite plausibly reflects the norms of non-written speech, that is, some generalized ideas about inner speech as elliptical, folded, stuck together, agglutinated , purely predicative, as Vygotsky understood it [ Vygotsky 1934].

Thus, realism is the same conditional art as classicism.

Gukovsky's concept, of course, is more attractive than the semi-official one. But this definition of realism is also not a definition of the aesthetic essence of artistic discourse, but only of its ideological orientation. Gukovsky wanted to say that in the period of the development of literature of the 19th century, the formula of the determinism of individual behavior by the social environment was popular, and that fiction somehow reflected this formula. For example, the bourgeoisie began to emerge - and immediately appeared the money-grubber Chichikov, who buys dead souls, or Hermann, who thinks primarily about enrichment. Of course, now it is difficult to take such an understanding of the artistic direction seriously, although it is a less rough approximation to the essence of things compared to the official definition of realism.

The most attractive is the definition of Yu. M. Lotman. It defines realism not only as an aesthetic phenomenon, but in a number of other aesthetic phenomena, systematically. But the success of this definition lies in the fact that it does not extensionally outline those texts that are traditionally considered to be realistic. Lotman's definition is very well suited to Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but does not fit Turgenev, Goncharov, Ostrovsky, Leskov, Gleb Uspensky at all. These writers hardly considered reality stereoscopically, as given in Lotman's definition of realism. And most importantly, this definition fits too well with the texts of the beginning of the 20th century, with Bely's Petersburg, Sologub's The Little Devil, and indeed with all the literature of European modernism - Joyce, Faulkner, Thomas Mann. This is where stereoscopic viewpoints really reign.

M.: Progress, 1987. - 464 p.
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What is realism in the understanding of the art theorist? This is an artistic movement that aims to convey reality as close as possible, striving for the maximum likelihood. Realistic we declare those works that seem to us to closely convey reality, plausible. And the ambiguity is already striking:

1. It's about about aspiration, tendency, i.e. a realistic work is understood as a work conceived by a given author as plausible (value L).

2. A realistic work is a work that I, having a judgment about it, perceive as plausible (meaning B).

In the first case, we are forced to evaluate immanently, in the second, my impression is the decisive criterion. The history of art hopelessly confuses both these meanings of the term "realism". My private, local point of view is given an objective, unconditionally reliable value. The question of realism or irrealism of certain

The article is written in Russian. First published on Czech under the title I O realismu v spösh" in the journal, ^Ccrvena, Praha, 1921, no. 4, s. 300-304. Published according to the edition: K. Jakobson. Selected Writings, vol. III: Poetry of Crantmat and Grammar of Poetry. The Hague - Paris - New York, Moutoti Publj 1981, p. 723-731.

*Here "chatter" (frd*

26 * pre-divine creations is reduced behind the scenes to the question of my k; him respect. The value of A is imperceptibly replaced by the value of B.

Classics, sentimentalists, partly romantics, even ((realists" of the 19th century, to a large extent modernists and, finally, futurists, expressionists, etc. more than once persistently proclaimed fidelity to reality, maximum likelihood, in a word, realism - the main slogan of their artistic program "In the 19th century, this slogan gave rise to the name of the artistic movement. The current history of art, especially literature, was created mainly by the epigones of this movement. Therefore special case“A separate artistic movement is perceived as a perfect implementation of the trend under consideration, and in comparison with it, the degree of realism of previous and subsequent artistic movements is assessed. Thus, behind the scenes, a new identification takes place, the third meaning of the word “realism” (meaning C) is substituted, namely the sum of the characteristic features of a certain artistic movement of the 19th century. In other words, the realistic works of the last century seem to the historian of literature to be the most plausible.

Let us analyze the concept of artistic credibility. If in painting, in fine arts If you can fall into the illusion of the possibility of some objective, irrelevant fidelity to reality, then the question of the “natural” (in Plato’s terminology) plausibility of a verbal expression, a literary description is clearly meaningless. Can the question arise about the greater plausibility of one or another type of poetic tropes, can it be said that such and such a metaphor or metonymy is objectively more real? Yes, and in painting, reality is conditional, so to speak, figurative. Conventional methods of projection of three-dimensional space onto a plane, conditional coloring, abstraction, simplification of the transmitted object, selection of reproducible features. The conventional pictorial language must be learned in order to see the picture, just as it is impossible to understand what is said without knowing the language. This conventionality, the traditional nature of the pictorial presentation to a large extent determines the very act of our visual perception. As tradition accumulates, the pictorial image becomes an ideogram, a formula, with which the object is immediately associated by contiguity. Recognition becomes instantaneous. We stop seeing the picture. The ideogram must be deformed. To see in a thing what yesterday did not see and must be an innovator painter - to impose a new form on perception. The subject is presented in an unusual perspective. The composition canonized by the predecessors is broken. So, Kramskoy, one of the founders of the so-called realistic school of Russian painting, in his memoirs tells how he tried to deform the academic composition as much as possible, and this “mess” is motivated by approaching reality. This is a typical motivation for Sturm und Drang "a new artistic trends, i.e. motivation for the deformation of ideograms.

In the practical language, there are a number of euphemisms - politeness formulas, words that call it blunt, hinting, conditionally substituted. When we want truthfulness, naturalness, expressiveness from speech, we discard the usual salon props, call things by their proper name, and these names sound, they are fresh, we talk about them:

"388c"est Ie mot*. But in our word usage, the name has become accustomed to the designated object, and then, on the contrary, if we want an expressive name, we resort to metaphor, allusion, allegory. It sounds more sensitive, it is more convincing. In other words, in an effort to find a genuine word that would show us the subject, we use the word attracted, unusual for us, at least in this application, the word raped. Both the figurative and the proper name of the object can turn out to be such an unexpected word, depending on what is in use. Examples of this are the abyss, especially in the history of an obscene dictionary. Calling an act by its proper name sounds outrageous, but if in a given environment a strong word is not unusual, trope, euphemism acts stronger, more convincing. Such is the Russian hussar "dispose of". That is why foreign terms are more offensive, and they are willingly adopted for this purpose, which is why the unthinkable epithet - Dutch or walrus, attracted by a Russian scolder to the name of an object that has nothing to do with walruses or Holland, increases tenfold the effectiveness of the term. That is why the peasant, before the running mention of copulation with his mother (in the notorious swearing formulas), gives preference fantastic image copulation with the soul, still using the form of negative parallelism to strengthen it (“your soul is not the mother”).

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creative principle realism and features of realistic style. V. G. Belinsky - theorist of Russian realism Realism in art is a concept that characterizes the cognitive function of art: the truth of life, embodied by the specific means of art, the measure of its penetration into reality, the depth and completeness of its artistic knowledge. In Russian literature of the 19th century, from Belinsky, the dictatorship of the aesthetics of realism, the dictatorship of a realistic worldview, was gradually established, which was completed by the work of unshakable, absolute authorities: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Thus, this trend largely predetermined and set the direction for the development of Russian literature for decades to come... Today, researchers define realism as follows: “This is an artistic trend that aims to convey reality as close as possible, striving for maximum likelihood. We declare realistic those works that seem to us to closely convey reality, believable. In the 19th century, this slogan gives rise to the name of an artistic movement. Currently, two criteria for determining a realistic work are distinguished: 1) a realistic work is understood as a work conceived by a given author as plausible; 2) a realistic work is such a work that the reader, who has a judgment about it, perceives as plausible. The initial stage in the development of critical realism in Russian literature in the 1940s. 19th century was tentatively called "natural school". This term, first used by F. V. Bulgarin in a dismissive characterization of the work of young followers of N. V. Gogol, was approved in literary criticism by V. G. Belinsky, who polemically rethought its meaning: “natural”, that is, artless , a strictly truthful depiction of reality. The idea of ​​the existence of a literary "school" of Gogol, expressing the movement of Russian literature towards realism, was developed by Belinsky earlier (article "On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol", 1835, etc.); a detailed description of the natural school and its most important works is contained in his articles “A Look at Russian Literature of 1846”, “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847”, “Answer to a Muscovite” (1847). An outstanding role as a collector of the literary forces of the natural school was played by N. A. Nekrasov, who compiled and published its main publications - the almanac "Physiology of Petersburg" (parts 1-2, 1845) and "Petersburg Collection" (1846). The journals Otechestvennye Zapiski and Sovremennik became the printed organs of the natural school. The natural school is characterized by predominant attention to the genres of artistic prose (“physiological essay”, short story, novel). Following Gogol, writers of this trend subjected officialdom to satirical ridicule (for example, in Nekrasov’s poems), depicted the life and customs of the nobility (“Notes of a Young Man” by A. I. Herzen, “Ordinary History” by I. A. Goncharov, etc.), criticized dark sides urban civilization (“Double” by F. M. Dostoevsky, essays by Nekrasov, V. I. Dahl, Ya. M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and others). From A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov N. sh. she took on the themes of the “hero of time” (“Who is to blame?” Herzen, “The Diary of an Extra Man” by I. S. Turgenev, etc.), the emancipation of a woman (“The Thieving Magpie” by Herzen, “Polinka Saks” by A. V. Druzhinin, etc. .). The natural school innovatively solved the themes traditional for Russian literature (for example, a raznochinets became a “hero of the time”: “Andrey Kolosov” by Turgenev, “Doctor Krupov” by Herzen, “The Life and Adventures of Tikhon Trosnikov” by Nekrasov) and put forward new ones (a true depiction of the life of a serf village: "Notes of a hunter" by Turgenev, "Village" and "Anton-Goremyk" by D. V. Grigorovich, etc.). In the desire of the writers of the natural school to be true to "nature" various tendencies lurked creative development- to realism (Herzen, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin) and to naturalism (Dal, I. I. Panaev, Butkov, etc.). In the 40s. these trends have not found a clear distinction, sometimes coexisting in the work of even one writer (for example, Grigorovich). The unification of many talented writers in the natural school, which became possible on the basis of a broad anti-serfdom front, allowed the school to play an important role in the formation and flourishing of Russian literature of critical realism. The leading principles of realism of the 19th century: an objective reflection of the essential aspects of life in combination with the height and truth of the author's ideal; reproduction of typical characters, conflicts, situations with the completeness of their artistic individualization (i.e., concretization of both national, historical, social signs, as well as physical, intellectual and spiritual features); preference in ways of depicting “forms of life itself”; the prevailing interest in the problem of "personality and society" (especially in the inescapable opposition of social laws and the moral ideal, personal and mass, mythologized consciousness). In the stylistic system of realism, as in any system of the positivist persuasion, it is the sphere of the signified, the plan of content, that comes to the fore. Realism as a stylistic system fundamentally opposes all sorts of attempts of the artist's self-expression, experiments in the field of form. Realism is characterized by a distrust of metaphor, a favorite rhetorical figure of the romantic style: realistic art is more metonymic (to use Roman Yakobson's typology) or synecdochic (according to A. Potebne). The theory of critical realism in Russian literature was substantiated by Belinsky. From 1839 to 1846, the critic worked fruitfully in the journal Domestic Notes, successfully edited by N. A. Nekrasov. He successfully refuted the attacks and slander on Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol. The role of Belinsky in Russian criticism, according to many researchers, is similar to the role of A.S. Pushkin in literature. Belinsky created criticism, which, in its significance, was worthy of the high standards of Russian classical literature, and his interpretations significantly complemented the meaning of the work. Belinsky developed the fundamental concepts of the theory of literature: the principle of realism, the concept of nationality, a system of classification by gender and genre. Pushkin and Gogol played an exceptional role in shaping the cultural principles of Belinsky. "We have no literature" - this is the main theme of all Belinsky's "Literary Dreams". Examining in detail the entire Russian belles-lettres of the post-Petrine period, Belinsky finds only four genuine exponents of the national spirit: Derzhavin, Krylov, Griboyedov and Pushkin. big article he dedicated to Gogol ("On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol", 1835), for the first time putting this writer on the proper height; he was the first to reveal the essence of Gogol's creativity - "comic animation, always overcome by a deep feeling of sadness and despondency." Main thoughts about free creativity, about the external aimlessness of art, about the unconscious nationality of the artist - Belinsky applied all these thoughts to the works of Gogol, as theory to facts. Among the literary heritage of Belinsky, 11 articles on the "Works of Alexander Pushkin" occupy a special place. They are rightfully the end of all the literary activity of a brilliant critic. This is the only critical analysis of Pushkin's poetry in Russian literature. The critic saw the closest connection between Pushkin's poetry and the era of the noble Decembrist revolutionaries. A brilliant and deep analysis of the poetry of Pushkin's immediate predecessors and their connection with Pushkin; critical evaluation and classification of the lyrical works of the great poet; determination of the external and internal pathos of his work; a consistent analysis of all Pushkin's poems; a number of brilliant and deep characteristics of the heroes of these poems and, in general, the social types of Russia in the first quarter of the 19th century - all this forever and inextricably linked the name of Belinsky with the name of Pushkin. Since then, three-quarters of a century has passed - and until now this work by Belinsky remains the only one in all of Pushkin's literature. Belinsky substantiated the continuity literature XVIII and XIX centuries, explained the role of Fonvizin, Krylov, Derzhavin in the formation of a truthful artistic image of contemporary reality. Belinsky did not come to realism in his ideological positions immediately, but after passing through the periods of Schellingism and Fichteism. However, in the autumn of 1837, he became acquainted with the philosophical concept of Hegel, which largely determined the subsequent views of the critic. “A new world has opened up to us. It was a liberation,” Belinsky later recalled about the autumn of 1837. “The word “reality” has become for me equivalent to the word God.” This was a break with Fichte's subjective-idealist philosophy; Hegelianism was understood by Belinsky in the sense of philosophical realism. Now Belinsky recognized the whole world around him as "real", recognized the inner rationality of not only the inner, but also the entire external world. This is how Belinsky arrived at the famous theory of rational activity, seeing in it a realistic bulwark against his former idealistic abstractions. A critical analysis of the works of the realistic school, an assessment of their social point of view and an explanation of their meaning - all this became the main task of the critical work of the last years of Belinsky's life. In a sharp controversy with the idealistic aesthetics of the reactionary camp, Belinsky lays the foundations for a new, democratic aesthetics and creates a creative program for Russian critical realism, thus shaping it as a new literary trend. Based on his general propositions on the dependence of a person on society and on the historical laws of social life, he justified the inevitability of a critical image of modern Russian reality by pointing to its negative features, which should be reflected in literature. Distinguishing in real life its internal essential properties and their external manifestations, Belinsky considered the task fiction a complete reflection of the essential properties and relations of reality through its personal, individual manifestations, i.e., the typification of the depicted life. He often pointed out the inadmissibility of simply imitating life in its external manifestations and slavishly copying its random features. He knew, in particular, that the "content" of a work should not be confused with its "plot" and laughed at those who did. The "possibility and reality" of the characters depicted was for Belinsky the main principle for evaluating literary works in his struggle for realism in Russian fiction. He constantly pointed to "fidelity to reality" as the most important task of literature. How correctly Belinsky understood the realistic correspondence of the artistic image with the typical character reflected in it, is shown by the following explanation of him: “Now the “ideal” is understood not as an exaggeration, not a lie, not a childish fantasy, but a fact of reality, such as it is; but a fact not written off from reality, but carried through the poet's fantasy, illuminated by the light of a general ... meaning ... and therefore more similar to himself, more true to himself than the most slavish copy of reality is true to its original. In other words, the writer, reflecting in the personality and actions of his hero some of the characteristic properties that exist in the real life of people, can understand them very deeply and can reveal them more vividly and completely than they are expressed in real reality, in the life of a particular individual. personality. Explaining the principles of realism, Belinsky fought at the same time for the ideological consciousness of advanced Russian literature. Criticizing contemporary moral novels, Belinsky pointed out that "they do not ... look at things, there is no idea, there is no knowledge of Russian society." Rapidly developing ideologically, relentlessly following the "intellectual life of the modern world", the critic demanded the same from writers. Justifying the inevitability of the dominance of critical realism, which exposes existing social relations from the point of view of progressive social views, Belinsky thus fought for the democratization of the content of Russian literature. The significance of Belinsky is enormous not only in the history of Russian literature, but also in the history of Russian social thought. Jacobson R. About artistic realism./ Works on poetics. - M., 1987. - P. 387. Jacobson R. About artistic realism. / Works on poetics. - M., 1987. - S. 387. The remark is first found in the newspaper "Northern Bee" dated January 26, 1846. See A. G. Zeitlin, The Formation of Realism in Russian Literature, M., 1965; Kuleshov V.I., Natural school in Russian literature of the 19th century, M., 1965; Mann Yu. V., Philosophy and poetics of the “natural school”, in the book: Problems of the typology of Russian realism, M., 1969. Yakobson R. On artistic realism. / Works on poetics. - M., 1987. - S. 387-393. Potebnya A.A. theoretical poetics. - M.: Higher. school., 1990. - S. 142. See: Belinsky V. G. Journal and literary notes. - Full, coll. cit., vol. 6, p. 240. Belinsky V. G. - Russian literature in 1842. - Complete, collected works. v. 6, p. 526. Belinsky VG Introduction to the "Physiology of St. Petersburg ...".-Full collection. cit., vol. 8, p. 376.

1. 22. Literary and critical activity of VG Belinsky. Its periodization. Moscow period. Typological analysis of one of the articles of this period

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2. Explanatory note The minimum program of the candidate exam in the specialty 10. 01. 02 ─ Russian literature includes the amount of knowledge provided for by the standard curriculum on the history of Russian literature for the philological faculties of universities in Belarus,

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   "Natural school" in the RL of the 40s. V. G. Belinsky as because of realism: NSh - a stage in the development of Rus. Realism, the border of which is measured in the 40s. NSH unites prose writers, young talented writers who recognize the authority of Belinsky the theorist

Zatonsky

Poetics of realism

Realism as a literary movement was formed in the 19th century. Elements of realism were present in some authors even earlier, starting from ancient times. The immediate forerunner of realism in European literature was romanticism. Having made the unusual the subject of the image, creating an imaginary world of special circumstances and exceptional passions, he (romanticism) at the same time showed a personality richer in spiritual and emotional terms, more complex and contradictory than was available to classicism, sentimentalism and other trends of previous eras. Therefore, realism developed not as an antagonist of romanticism, but as its ally in the struggle against idealization. public relations, for the national-historical originality of artistic images (the color of the place and time). It is not always easy to draw clear boundaries between romanticism and realism in the first half of the 19th century; in the work of many writers, romantic and realistic features merged together - the works of Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, and partly Dickens. In Russian literature, this was especially clearly reflected in the works of Pushkin and Lermontov (Pushkin's southern poems and Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time). In Russia, where the foundations of realism were still in the 1820s - 30s. laid down by the work of Pushkin ("Eugene Onegin", "Boris Godunov" The Captain's Daughter", late lyrics), as well as some other writers ("Woe from Wit" Griboedov, fables by I. A. Krylov), this stage is associated with the names of I. A. Goncharova, I. S. Turgenev, N. A. Nekrasov, A. N. Ostrovsky, etc. The realism of the 19th century is usually called “critical”, since it was the socio-critical that was the determining principle in it. The aggravated socio-critical pathos is one of the main distinguishing features of Russian realism - "Inspector", " Dead Souls» Gogol, the activities of the writers of the "natural school". The realism of the second half of the 19th century reached its peak precisely in Russian literature, especially in the works of L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, who at the end of the 19th century became the Central figures of the world literary process. They enriched world literature new principles for constructing a socio-psychological novel, philosophical and moral issues, new ways of revealing the human psyche in its deepest layers.
Signs of realism:
1. The artist depicts life in images that correspond to the essence of the phenomena of life itself.
2. Literature in realism is a means of a person's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
3. Cognition of reality comes with the help of images created by typing the facts of reality (typical characters in a typical setting). The typification of characters in realism is carried out through the "truthfulness of details" in the "concreteness" of the conditions of the characters' existence.
4. Realistic art is life-affirming art, even in the tragic resolution of the conflict. The philosophical basis for this is gnosticism, the belief in knowability and an adequate reflection of the surrounding world, unlike, for example, romanticism.
5. Realistic art is inherent in the desire to consider reality in development, the ability to detect and capture the emergence and development of new forms of life and social relations, new psychological and social types.

Individual creative artistic consciousness. Romanticism and realism (author's poetics)

On the specifics of literature of the late XVIII - early XX century. profoundly reflected the great social and political changes that took place at that time. Real historical processes were combined with unusually intense ideological movements, a rapid change in forms and ways of understanding history. At the same time, literature itself is perceived as a development, and its history as a development that is inextricably linked with all seemingly external factors in relation to it, with all changes in reality. To characterize the scale of the processes taking place in literature, one can point out that literature (already from the middle and especially from the end of the 18th century) seems to reverse the path that poetic thinking once passed from Homer to rhetorical poetry. On this new path, literature is gradually freed from the "baggage" of rhetoric and at some point reaches Homeric liberty and breadth on material that is not at all Homeric. modern life. Literature as it developed in the 19th century. is extremely close to the immediate and concrete being of a person, imbued with his worries, thoughts, feelings, created according to his measure and in this respect "anthropologized"; in the same way, directly and concretely, with sensory fullness and inexhaustibility, it strives to convey the whole of reality. Life as such and man in his individual appearance and social relations become the main object of poetic depiction. Since the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and during the 19th century - partly under European influence - in the East, traditionalist, rhetorical postulates have been ousted from literary theory and literary practice. Such a turn in the specifics of artistic consciousness has been gradually preparing for a long time “individualistic aspirations in the literature of the Renaissance, the psychological discoveries of Shakespeare and the writers of classicism, the skepticism of Montaigne, Pascal, etc.); enlightenment ideology and, in particular, a new understanding of the relationship between man and the world, in the center of which is not a universal norm, but a thinking "I", deprived rhetoric of its worldview foundation; and classical German philosophy and romanticism completed its discrediting. The stylistic and genre argumentation characteristic of the previous type of artistic consciousness was replaced by a historical and individual vision. The central "character" of the literary process was not a work subject to a given canon, but its creator, the central category of poetics was not STYLE or GENRE, but the AUTHOR. Traditional system genres was destroyed and the novel, a kind of "anti-genre", abolishing the usual genre requirements, comes to the fore. The concept of style is being rethought: it ceases to be normative and becomes individual, and the individual style is precisely opposed to the norm. Separate techniques and rules give way to an emphasized desire for self- and world-knowledge, synthesized in a broad artistic image. Poetics - in the narrow sense of the word - is supplanted by aesthetics: if in the previous, rhetorical, era we extract aesthetics from the "poetic arts" and the establishment of the literary canon, now we must do the reverse operation: in order to extract the general constants of poetics, turn to the aesthetics of the era and the conditions conditioned by it. creative experience of writers. Since the literary process of the period under consideration is more closely than ever connected simultaneously with the personality of the writer and the reality surrounding him, is directed from its development, in the artistic consciousness the primary role is played by literary methods , directions that unite writers with similar aesthetic ideals and worldviews. Such leading methods or trends in the literature of the XIX century. there were romanticism and realism, and their continuity, interaction and opposition determine the main literary content of the era. Romanticism ends the long period of domination of the rhetorical "ready-made word", predetermined forms, genres, and stylistic means of poetry. From now on, the writer begins to master and use the word as a free, unbound tool for reproducing, analyzing and cognizing reality, placed at his disposal. "Literature" gives way to the desire for the truth of life: if before "ready-made forms" separated the writer and reality, and the writer's view of reality, he always met with the traditionally fixed word as a mediator, as a regulator of any meaning, now the writer, turning to reality , applies his word to her. As a result, the poetic word in the literature of the XIX century. becomes individually saturated, free and ambiguous - as opposed to a rhetorical word, which, in principle, should correspond to some stable meaning. Both romanticism and realism, which matures as it develops, are similar in their desire to bring reality and literature, the truth of life and the truth of literature closer together. The difference consisted in the way this aspiration was realized: the romantic writer conceived the expansion of the rights and boundaries of reality in literature as a way of its personal completions; the realist writer tried to depict reality as such, including in all its "non-poetic" layers, giving them an equal opportunity to express themselves. If for romanticism everyday reality is a canvas on which a pattern of higher reality is embroidered, accessible only to the inner vision of the poet, then realism was aimed at finding forms of connections and interdependencies of reality within itself. However, the essential differences between romanticism and realism manifested themselves within the framework of a common task: interpreting, according to the author's worldview, the meaning and laws of reality, and not translating it into conventional, rhetorical forms. Therefore, while affirming the leading role of the author in literature according to the artistic consciousness of the epoch, romanticism and realism understand the author's functions in different ways. At the center of romantic aesthetics is a creative subject, a genius convinced of the universality of his vision of reality ("the world of the soul triumphs over the external world" - Hegel), acting as an interpreter of the world order. Personal elements in the poetics of romanticism come to the fore: the expressiveness and metaphorism of style, the lyricism of genres, the subjectivity of assessments, the cult of the imagination, which is conceived as the only tool for comprehending reality, etc. The ratio of poetry and prose is changing: until the 17th century. poetry was revered as the main genre of literature, in the XVIII century. its place is taken by prose, and in Romanticism poetry is regarded as the highest form of prose. The omnipresence of the "tyrannical presence of the author" (Flaubert) allowed romanticism, even sometimes retaining the outward signs of previous systems of poetics (the notorious "classicism" of the romantics, rhetorical pathos, love of antitheses, etc.), to resolutely reject the "ready-made word", opposing it with the word author's, individual (as a particular example - the attraction of romantics to arbitrary etymologies, as if re-creating the semantics of the word). The romantic poet "appropriates" the word for himself, tries to extend the power of "his" word and thereby his "I" to the whole of reality, but logic literary development leads to the fact that a concomitant and at the same time opposite desire arises to return the word to reality, to return as not only and even not so much the author's, but above all as her word: realism arises. The word in realism, while remaining an individual-personal tool of the writer, at the same time the word "objective", as if belonging to reality itself. The subjectivism of romanticism is dominated by an objective tendency, a tendency to listen to the "voices" of reality with an unprecedentedly complex correlation of these "voices". The situation when a work develops as a polyphony of voices is apparently a common case for realistic literature of the 19th century (starting with Pushkin's Belkin Tales), and polyphony in Dostoevsky's novels is only a particular case of this general situation. In romanticism, the work is built as an external building of internal form, with a certain arbitrariness of the constructing "I"; in realism, everything external becomes an entirely internal task, goes deep, cements the work, giving it a genuine organicity. Accordingly, the relationship between the author and the reader changes. Wordsworth's remark that the author is "a person who converses with people" definitely marks the transition from the conventional reader of the traditionalist era, who is satisfied with the "expectation effect" implied in rhetorical literature, to the reader who is seen by the author as an interlocutor. But in romanticism, expression and immediacy as a conscious stylistic task become forms of such an attitude towards the reader, and in realism, the creation of an atmosphere of authenticity and vitality that brings the reader closer to a knowledgeable and searching author. Personal consciousness, which separated the poetics of literature of the XIX century. the poetics of the previous period, along with a new interpretation of the category of the author, predetermined a new interpretation of the hero of literature; and again, this interpretation, with undoubted similarities, differs significantly in romanticism and realism. Romanticism with its cult of the individual ("only the individual is interesting, everything classical is non-individual" - Novalis) is important in a person not the universal, purified from the accidental, but the individual, the exclusive. At the same time, due to the subjectivism inherent in romantics, the hero and the author are extremely close, the first very often turns out to be a projection of the second's personality. The romantic notion of an artist opposing the world and society corresponds to a hero who "falls out" of reality. Known romantic types of heroes are formed (exile, eccentric, rebel, etc.). ) with an unstable compromise between the literary ("bookishness") of such characters and a pronounced psychological characteristic that creates the illusion of their vitality. The tendency towards vitality (and genuine vitality) prevails in realism: instead of the "non-convergence" of the hero and the world, their fundamental non-coincidence and irreconcilability, it is assumed that any hero exists primarily within reality, even if he opposes it. The one-sided connection of personality and reality through contrast is overcome by the diversity of human types in the realism of the 19th century, a diversity that defies any classification, and each type meets real, and not just literary criteria and is formed on the basis of life, and not "poetic" qualities (cf. ., for example, images " extra people"," nihilists "etc. in Russian literature). The psychological discoveries of romanticism are thus reinforced in realism by a broad social and historical analysis and motivation of the hero's behavior. The situation of the literature of the 19th century, individual creative poetics also lead to a radical rethinking of traditional genres - even when their external nomenclature is preserved. Romantics saw in the ideal poetry extra-genre and extra-general. Lamartine in "The Fates of Poetry" insisted that literature would be neither lyrical, nor epic, nor dramatic, because it should replace the religion and philosophy of F. Schlegel believed that "each poetic work is in itself a separate genre. " Personal genres become practically preferable: diaries, letters, notes, memoirs, lyrical types of poetry; at the same time, drama and novel are lyricized, since the creative "I", trying to express himself lyrically, but, claiming poetic power over the whole world, uses narrative forms of expression deniya (see, for example, the work of Byron). In realism, with its attraction to the knowledge of life "from the inside", narrative genres (and primarily prose genres) come to the fore, and among them the main role begins to belong to the novel. The novel itself is understood not so much as a carrier of certain genre features, but as the most universal poetic word. (The non-genre and non-general literature presented to the romantics of the beginning of the century was, to a certain extent, realized precisely in the novel as all-encompassing in its meaning and at the same time individually constructed form each time. In the variety of types of realistic novel XIX in. one can detect certain tendencies and constants of its development: for example, the extensiveness and concentration of the description, epic spaciousness and dramatic conflict (cf. the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), etc. On the other hand, there is a gradual romanization of various genres, of any narrative, thanks to which even short story can become a carrier of an unusually weighty, own "novel" content (Chekhov). Romanticism and realism posed with particular acuteness the problem of the national specifics of literature, which in its entirety - as a problem of historical poetics (the introduction of the concept of "world literature" is also connected with this) - is realized precisely at that time. Indeed, each national literature of the 19th century, giving a concrete reflection of the general literary process, offers its own version of its development. Thus, a special area is the literature of the East, where the breakdown of traditionalist consciousness takes place on the basis of crossing, combining enlightenment, romantic and realistic tendencies in literature, assimilated in a certain accordance with one's own national experience. But even in Europe, according to the social and cultural development of each country, the literary process takes on various national forms. For German literature, for example, it is very characteristic that after romanticism, as in France, the era of realism does not come, but a kind of buffer period begins, the so-called. "Biedermeier", in which the trends of the old and the new do not receive a clear resolution, but go to a long compromise. In Russia, on the contrary, beginning in the second third of the century, realism becomes unquestionably the leading trend. At the same time, in the course of its development, Russian literature affirms the most influential and generally significant principles of realism and, in particular, critical realism. Despite the fact that romanticism gave impetus to the development of realism, he himself was not overthrown by his "brainchild". Obviously, it is precisely the coexistence of romanticism and realism (see the situation in French literature, where the sober realism of Balzac coexisted with the ardent romanticism of Hugo and even with the so-called. "neoclassicism"; or such figures at the intersection of directions as Heine, Dickens, Lermontov) - these phenomena that have grown from one root - and led to the emergence of the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe eternal struggle between realism and romanticism. But to a large extent it is a "retrospective effect". In the 19th century the existence of each of the two directions is closely connected with the presence of the other. Realistic literature, which is directly connected with reality, sometimes faces the danger of dissolving in it, of abandoning its specificity, the generalizing power of the artistic word. Every time one has to restore the universality of the word that the writer uses in its particular, individualized form, to affirm the universality of the content, overcoming the purely specificity of the details. As soon as realism crossed the line of "literary" and took the form of naturalism, everyday or physiological essay, etc., romantic tendencies came into force, giving rise to the decorativeness of modernity, impressionism with its illusion of the aesthetic value in itself of a random poetic image, symbolism, resorting to a complicated technique of generalizations etc. On the other hand, mature realism creates its own, special means of universalization, deepening the meaning and power of the influence of an individual word, typifies the concrete, achieves an ever greater artistic synthesis of the phenomena of life. Subsequently, in the 20th century, the opposition of romanticism (no matter how strongly it influenced some modernist movements) and realism (no matter how it expanded its capabilities, moving away from dogmatic regulation) ceases to be all-encompassing and defining. The literary process is divided into many schools and trends (futurism, expressionism, surrealism, neoclassicism, neo-baroque, mythological realism, documentaryism, postmodernism, conceptualism, etc.), which, both in their novelty and continuity, are repelled from the most diverse and diverse traditions . However, for all that, for the literature of the 20th century as a whole, the question of the relationship between the author and the work / text remains central and is actualized in the problems of "one's own" and "alien" words, outside or inter-individual beginning and the beginning of individual, collective consciousness and the unconscious and consciousness personal.

T. Venediktova. The secret of the middle world: a cultural function realism XIX in.

"Realism is a terrible word" - lamented a hundred and fifty years ago, the original names of this literary movement, E. Chanfleury and J. Duranty, and it's hard to disagree with them. Having, as a rule, a positive evaluative connotation, the word is discouraging, if only because, along with the word "truthfulness", it is used "in the most varied and obscure sense" . Behind him and in time stretches a long trail of contradictory, even mutually exclusive associations. For the reader, versed in intellectual history, the concept of "realism" comes back to haunt the echo of distant and near ideological battles in which it acted as an antagonist of either "nominalism", then "idealism", then "positivism", then "phenomenologism", etc. confusion disciplinary heteroglossia: a literary critic and a philosopher, a semiotician and a psychologist use the term willingly, but each in his own way.

In all cases, however, the appeal to it involves the problematization of the original concept of "reality" and, accordingly, such categories as real and fictional, objective and subjective, true and false. Dispute-talk about realism, in whatever plane it is, implies (or should imply) raising the question of the nature of knowledge and the ways of representing (representing) knowledge. Not surprisingly, the last round of controversy broke out in European humanities in the early 1960s in connection with the so-called "crisis of rationality", "crisis of representation" - a crisis, in other words, of confidence in the ability (or claim) of scientific reason. serve as a guide to objective truth. Looking back at the cultural experience of the previous two centuries, we can state that it is precisely the degree of epistemological optimism, i.e. the measure of a person's trust in his own cognitive abilities served as a measure of the relevance and relevance of "realism" as an aesthetic, philosophical, ideological category.

In the broadest and most general sense, realism presupposes a point of view on the world as objectively given to a person, gradually revealed in cognitive experience and ideally encompassed by a single theory. The attitude, within the framework of which "reality" appears as "absolutized, that is, the same and the same for any cognizing subject and autonomously existing for itself", has deep roots in modern times. European culture and to this day is perceived by us as "natural". In terms modern man even at the everyday level, "reality" is something tangibly solid, reliable, equal to itself, existing independently of consciousness and perception, and in this sense opposite to subjective desire, individual fantasy - this is why we say that reality "resists", or "reminds of herself," or "dictates," or even "takes revenge" on those who tend to underestimate her.

Such a view correlates in general with the natural-science approach to life, being in many respects precisely by it, if not generated, then brought up. True, today it characterizes scientists to an immeasurably lesser extent than a hundred and fifty or more years ago. Elementary particle physics models the processes under study, taking into account in principle the position of the observer, i.e. proceeding from the premise that subject and object, thought and thing, are only artificially represented in autonomy from each other. And the majority of modern naturalists and humanists agree that the world is not conceivable outside the mediation of experience, language, interpretation (multiple interpretations). It therefore cannot be covered by a unified theory. In the absence of a supreme authority or method capable of certifying (guaranteeing) the correspondence of a concept-representation to the nature of being - even in the physical, not to mention the metaphysical sphere - the discussion on the question of truth moves into the psychological and sociological dimension. Truth then begins to be defined as "consistency" between belief and experience, individual belief and beliefs accepted in a particular human community.

In the light and as a result of the general methodological shift that characterizes the thought of the twentieth century, it was natural to expect a reinterpretation of ideas about literary realism. It has taken place in recent decades, however, mainly in the context of the Western humanities. In the Russian academic environment, the theory of realism in art, with the exception of a short formalistic "interlude", developed in line with objectivist logic and, by virtue of this, tended to apologia for the "honest method" more than to its deep problematization. Prolonged and increased attention to realism in the end offensive, but characteristically turned into a dullness of vision.

In order to define a phenomenon, one must see its limits, and for this it is necessary to take a position from the outside. The English semiotician C. McCabe formulates this position with somewhat "provocative" harshness: a fruitful interpretation of realism, he believes, is possible "only in the light of anti-realist epistemology." However, the idea of ​​searching for a new "optics" instead of the usual one, as if given by the subject itself, was also ripe in Russian literary criticism. Indirectly, its necessity was implied by A.V. Karelsky, when he wrote about the prose of the middle of the 19th century: "The writers of this stage are experiencing the possibility of a strictly consistent, as it were," literal "interpretation (our italics - T.V.) ... the concepts of" realism "and" the truth of life ". "Literalism" writers was of an experimental, creative and productive nature for its time - having been mothballed as a normative theoretical setting, at some point it inevitably lost productivity and had to be reassessed in the changed cultural, scientific and humanitarian context. deserves also to be questioned with the advantage of historical distance.A modern view of realism must involve both a careful reconstruction of those discussions in which it ("ism") justified itself, and an effort to penetrate into their unspoken background, - to reformulate their central plot, that is, to ask the literary past questions that it once did not know how or didn't want to ask myself.
In general, during the XIX and a significant part of the XX century. not only in Russian (from V. Belinsky to D. Zatonsky), but also in Western European literary science (from Hegel to E. Auerbach and G. Lukacs), the “genetic” approach to realism prevailed, within which it was defined as a true reflection of the social reality - not mechanical, but creative, catching through a meticulously reproduced material surface, the "thingness" (res) of life, its "truth", essential laws. Within this approach, a rich range of research possibilities has been demonstrated, but its epistemological limitations and, in part, aesthetic deafness have also emerged over time. The last one at the beginning of the 20th century. was criticized by the "formalists", who rightly pointed out that if the artistic meaning is considered only from the point of view of its social (non-literary) genesis, it is not possible to give realism as art its due.

An early, still concise formulation of the question of realism as a specific form artistic convention we find in R. Yakobson and B. Tomashevsky - in the 1960-1970s, it was developed in line with the structuralist and post-structuralist methodology. R. Barthes, J. Genette, C. Todorov and others developed the idea that realism is essentially "illusionism", an artistic "charm" (in the words of M. Butor, "hantise", - "the amazing power to give presence to the absent objects") or, to put it more philologically, a specific code, a manner of writing.

If, within the framework of the genetic approach, the realist writer appeared as a medium of the objective truth of life, then within the framework of the formalistic approach, he is a skillful master of the word, working in the hermetic space of the text and successfully creating the "effect of reality" through a certain set of techniques. The first approach, which for a long time "reigned" in Russian literary criticism as an official norm (if not a dogma), is rightly perceived today as archaic, sometimes even causing an unnecessarily harsh reaction of rejection. The formalist approach, which is also far from new, retains its instrumental value, although the weariness of immanent textual analysis is very strongly felt today (in Western literary criticism, it seems, even more than in ours).

In the 1970s-1980s. in the focus of discussions about realism was the third approach, which should be called "pragmatic". It was formed in line with the phenomenological tradition and receptive aesthetics, and is associated with the names of such theorists as H.-G. Jauss, W. Iser, P. Reeker. All of them proceed from the idea of ​​a literary work as a system open to the context of culture (which in itself has a partly textual nature) and most fully revealed in the act of perception, interaction with the reader. In part, this perspective was already outlined by the formalists, to the extent that they were occupied not with mimesis, but with semiosis: a "referential illusion" produced by means of a text, but in essence addressed to the one who reads, a partner in the semiotic process.
All three indicated approaches are internally heterogeneous, they lived and live in a multitude of individual variations. Arguing with each other and partly replacing each other in time, they did not truly cancel each other. Each is valuable in that it makes it possible to formulate a key question in a new way, the versions of which are as follows. How does literature reflect reality? - Asked critics of the genetic direction. Formalists were more interested in how literature makes us believe that it reflects reality. In the opinion of pragmatists, the last statement of the question is legitimate, but narrow: by orienting the scientist to the search for intratextual techniques, it thereby limits him, preventing him from seeing the problem in its general cultural dimension. If it is interesting and important for us to know how a realistic artistic illusion is "made", then it is no less important and interesting to ask: why is it so vividly demanded by the readership, moreover in some historical contexts more, and in others less? what is its cultural function? what is its anthropological meaning? - It is these questions, which imply a cultural, interdisciplinary approach to the totality of literary phenomena, which have been assigned the designation "realism", that seem to be the most relevant today.

This brings us back to the key problem of similarity for realism - life and the truth of life (the categories of lifelikeness and plausibility are not identical, but in both everyday and literary discourse they are often used without due rigor, sometimes almost interchangeably). One of the important milestones in the modern discussion on this subject was the famous article by R. Barth "The Reality Effect" (1968). Its central thought grows out of a commentary on a passage in Flaubert's "Simple Soul", which describes Mme. Aubin's living room and, in particular, mentions that "on an old piano, under a barometer, a pyramid of boxes and cartons rose." Based on the general aesthetic prejudice that in an artistic narrative the hanging "guns" should shoot, and the details used by the author should mean, we can assume (which Bart does) that the piano is an index of the bourgeois well-being of the hostess, the "pyramid of boxes and cartons" is a sign of disorderly , like the escheated atmosphere of the Aubin house, etc. For all that, the question remains unanswered: why and why a barometer? The mention of it is functional only as an indication of the physical referent ("what happened"). But there was no referent! The reader understands perfectly well that "in fact" there was no barometer, no living room, no Madame Aubin herself. But even understanding, he voluntarily and conditionally believes what happened, accepting the “illusion of referentiality” proposed by the author, i.e. cultivated by this type literary creativity rules of the game.

The most important feature of the realism of the XIX century. R. Barth proposes to consider "new plausibility", within which there is a demonstrative fusion of the signified with the referent: realism is defined as "a discourse that includes statements guaranteed by the referent alone" . Ts. Todorov also relies on a similar definition in his works: "Lifelikeness is a masquerade outfit in which the laws of the text are put on, becoming invisible in our eyes, forcing us to perceive the work exclusively in its relation to reality" The difference between the "old" likeness and the "new" is , according to Todorov, in the fact that the first was based on the observance of the laws of the genre or the "laws of the text" as a certain formal semantic framework set by cultural tradition, relatively stable and thus pre-organizing individual perception. Under the new conditions, the "frame" seems to be trying to become transparent, imperceptible: the signified is hiding behind an imaginary referent. The historical and cultural foundations and motives of this "masquerade" will continue to occupy us.

Reflecting on the word "real" ("real", "real", "genuine"), the English linguist and philosopher J. L. Austin notices that it differs from ordinary definition words (for example, the word "yellow") in the absence of a positive, a certain value. I can say "It is yellow" but I can't say "It is real". On the other hand, when I say, for example, "This bird is real," I can mean a whole bunch of different meanings: that it is not a stuffed animal, or it is not a toy, or it is not a picture, or it is not a hallucination, etc. As a result, the statement makes sense only if the participants in the speech imagine which of the possible negative meanings is relevant for this case. The question is "is it real?" ("is it real?"), sums up Austin, is always the fruit of doubt, uncertainty, the suspicion that things may be different than they seem.

A very concrete observation of the linguist brings us back to the literary situation of the middle of the century before last: precisely to that in it, which clearly testified to another change in aesthetic milestones, and indirectly to deeper and historically specific shifts in culture. The writers of this time are filled with suspicion of conventions. artistic perception and creativity (genre, stylistic, etiquette), - as if obsessed with the desire to finally deal with them. How long have the romantics rebelled against the classicist hierarchy of styles and genres? Now romantic stylistic and figurative forms, suddenly becoming acutely tangible in their sophistication, artificiality, "fatigue", are becoming the object of denial. Arriving in Paris for the first time, 17-year-old Henri Beyle was, according to his own recollections, incredibly surprised and disappointed that he did not find ... mountains in the city: "So this is Paris?" - the discouraged young man asked himself. A year later, he expressed similar bewilderment to a fellow dragoon on the St. Bernard Pass: "Is this just St. Bernard?" "This little stupid surprise and exclamation haunted me all my life. It seems to me that it depends on the imagination; I make this discovery, like many others, in 1836, when I write this." The irony of the autobiographer is directed here at the blinkeredness (i.e., limitedness) of the imagination with a stilted romantic idea of ​​the lofty and exceptional.

R. Jacobson ABOUT ARTISTIC REALISM(Jacobson R. Works on Poetics. - M., 1987. - S. 387-393) Until recently, the history of art, in particular the history of literature, was not a science, but a causerie. Followed all the laws of causerie.

Boiko skimmed from topic to topic, from lyrical outpourings about the elegance of form to anecdotes from the artist's life, from psychological truisms to the question of philosophical content in the social environment. Talking about life, about an era on the basis of literary works is such a rewarding and easy task: copying from plaster is easier and easier than sketching a living body. Causerie doesn't know the exact terminology. On the contrary, the variety of names, the equivocation, which gives rise to puns - all this often adds great charm to the conversation. Similarly, the history of art did not know scientific terminology, used everyday words without subjecting them to a critical filter, without delimiting them precisely, without taking into account their ambiguity.

For example, literary historians shamelessly confused idealism as a designation of a certain philosophical world outlook and idealism in the sense of disinterestedness, unwillingness to be guided by narrowly material motives. Still more hopeless is the confusion around the term "form", brilliantly revealed in Anton Marty's writings on general grammar.

But the term "realism" is especially unlucky in this respect. The uncritical use of this word, extremely vague in its content, led to fatal consequences. What is realism in the understanding of the art theorist? This is an artistic movement that aims to convey reality as close as possible, striving for maximum likelihood. Realistic we declare those works that seem to us to closely convey reality, plausible. And the ambiguity is already striking: 1. We are talking about aspiration, a trend, i.e. a realistic work is understood as a work conceived by a given author as believable(meaning BUT). 2. A realistic work is a work that I, having a judgment about it, perceive as plausible(meaning AT). In the first case, we are forced to evaluate immanently, in the second, my impression is the decisive criterion.

The history of art hopelessly confuses both these meanings of the term "realism". My private, local point of view is given an objective, unconditionally reliable value. The question of the realism or irrealism of certain artistic creations is implicitly reduced to the question of my attitude towards them. Meaning BUT is replaced by the value AT. Classics, sentimentalists, partly romantics, even "realists" of the 19th century, modernists to a large extent, and, finally, futurists, expressionists, etc. more than once persistently proclaimed fidelity to reality, maximum likelihood, in a word, realism - the main slogan of their artistic program.

In the 19th century, this slogan gives rise to the name of an artistic movement. The current history of art, especially literature, has been created primarily by the epigones of this trend. Therefore, a special case, a separate artistic movement, is recognized as a perfect implementation of the trend under consideration, and in comparison with it, the degree of realism of previous and subsequent artistic movements is assessed.

Thus, behind the scenes, a new identification takes place, the third meaning of the word "realism" (meaning C) is substituted, Namely, the sum of the characteristic features of a certain artistic direction of the XIX century. In other words, the realistic works of the last century seem to the historian of literature to be the most plausible. Let us analyze the concept of artistic credibility.

If in painting, in the visual arts one can fall into the illusion of the possibility of some objective, irrelevant fidelity to reality, then the question of the “natural” (in Plato’s terminology) verisimilitude of verbal expression, literary description is clearly meaningless. Can the question arise about the great plausibility of this or that type of poetic tropes, can it be said that such and such a metaphor or metonymy is objectively more real? Yes, and in painting, reality is conditional, so to speak, figurative.

Conventional methods of projection of three-dimensional space onto a plane, conditional coloring, abstraction, simplification of the transmitted object, selection of reproducible features. The conventional pictorial language must be learned in order to see the picture, just as it is impossible to understand what is said without knowing the language. This convention, the traditional nature of the pictorial presentation to a large extent determines the very act of our visual perception. As tradition accumulates, the pictorial image becomes an ideogram, a formula, with which the object is immediately associated by contiguity. Recognition becomes instantaneous.

We stop seeing the picture. The ideogram must be deformed. To see in a thing what was not seen yesterday, an innovative painter must impose a new form on perception. The subject is presented in an unusual perspective. The composition canonized by the predecessors is broken. So, Kramskoy, one of the founders of the so-called realistic school of Russian painting, in his memoirs tells how he tried to deform the academic composition as much as possible, and this “mess” is motivated by approaching reality.

This is a typical motivation for Sturm und Drang "a new artistic trends, i.e., the motivation for the deformation of ideograms. In practical language, there are a number of euphemisms - politeness formulas, words that call it blunt, hinting, conditionally substituted. When we want truthfulness, naturalness from speech, expressiveness, we discard the usual salon props, call a spade a spade, and these names sound, they are fresh, we talk about them: c "est le mot. But here, in our word usage, the word has become accustomed to the designated object, and then, conversely, if we want an expressive name, we resort to metaphor, allusion, allegory. It sounds more sensitive, it is more revealing.

In other words, in an effort to find a genuine word that would show us the subject, we use the word attracted, unusual for us, at least in this application, the word raped. Both the figurative and the proper name of the object can turn out to be such an unexpected word, depending on what is in use. Examples of this - the abyss, especially in the history of obscene vocabulary. Calling an act by its proper name sounds harsh, but if in a given environment a strong word is not a curiosity, a trope, a euphemism acts stronger, more convincingly. Such is the Russian hussar " Recycle".

That is why foreign terms are more offensive, and they are willingly adopted for these purposes, which is why the unthinkable epithet multiplies the effectiveness of the term - Dutch or walrus, attracted by a Russian scolder to the name of an object that has nothing to do with walruses or Holland. That is why the peasant, before the running mention of copulation with his mother (in the notorious swearing formulas), prefers the fantastic image of copulation with the soul, still using the form of negative parallelism (“your soul is not the mother”) to strengthen it. Such is revolutionary realism in literature. The words of yesterday's narration say nothing more. And now the subject is characterized according to signs that yesterday were recognized as the least characteristic, the least worthy of transmission and which were not noticed.

"He likes to dwell on the unimportant," is the classic judgment of conservative criticism of all time about the modern innovator. I will leave it to the quotation lover to choose the appropriate materials from the critical reviews of contemporaries about Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Andrei Bely, etc. Such a characteristic, by insignificant signs, seems to the adherents of the new movement more real than the petrified tradition that preceded them. The perception of others - the most conservative - continues to be determined by the old canon, and therefore its deformation, carried out by the new current, seems to them a rejection of plausibility, a deviation from realism; they continue to cherish the old canons as the only realistic ones. So, since we talked about the meaning above BUT the term "realism", i.e., the tendency towards artistic plausibility, we see that such a definition leaves room for ambiguity. A1 - a tendency to deformation of these artistic canons, comprehended as an approximation to reality. A2 is a conservative trend within this artistic tradition, understood as fidelity to reality. Meaning AT provides for my subjective assessment of this artistic phenomenon as true to reality; So, substituting the results, we find: The value of B1 - i.e.: I am a revolutionary in relation to these artistic skills, and the deformation of these is perceived by me as an approximation to reality. The value of B2 - i.e.: I am a conservative, and the deformation of these artistic skills is perceived by me as a distortion of reality. In the latter case, only artistic facts that, in my opinion, do not contradict these artistic skills, can be called realistic, but since the most realistic, from my point of view, are precisely my skills (the tradition to which I belong), then, given that within the framework of other traditions, not even contrary to my skills, the latter are not fully realized, I see in these traditions only a partial, rudimentary, underdeveloped or decadent realism, while the one on which I was brought up is declared the only true realism. In the case IN 1 I, on the contrary, treat all art forms that contradict these artistic skills, which are unacceptable for me, in the same way as in the case of IN 2 I would treat the forms NOT contradictory. In this case, I can easily attribute a realistic trend (in A1 sense of the word) forms that are not at all conceived as such. So primitives were often interpreted from the point of view IN 1. Their contradiction to the canon on which we were brought up was striking, while their loyalty to their canon, traditionalism was overlooked ( A2 interpreted as A1). In the same way, writings not intended to be poetic at all can be taken and interpreted as such. Wed Gogol's review of the poetry of the inventory of the Moscow tsars, Novalis's remark on the poetry of the alphabet, the statement of the futurist Kruchenykh about the poetic sound of the laundry bill, or the poet Khlebnikov about how sometimes a misprint artistically distorts the word.

Specific content A1 and A2, IN 1 and IN 2 extremely relative. Thus, a modern appraiser will see realism in Delacroix, but not in Delaroche, in El Greco or Andrei Rublev, but not in Guido Reni, in a Scythian woman, but not in Laocoon. A graduate of the academy of the last century would have judged just the opposite. Racine who captures plausibility does not capture Shakespeare's plausibility, and vice versa. Second half of the 19th century.

A group of artists is fighting in Russia for realism (first phase With, i.e. a special case A1). One of them - Repin - paints a picture "Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan". Repin's associates greet her as a realistic ( With- special case IN 1). Conversely, Repin's academic teacher is outraged by the unreality of the picture, reads in detail Repin's perversions of plausibility in comparison with the only plausible academic canon for him (i.e., from the point of view IN 2). But now the academic tradition has been outlived, the canon of the "realists"-the Wanderers is being assimilated, becoming a social fact. New pictorial tendencies arise, a new Sturm und Drang begins, translated into the language of program declarations - they are looking for a new truth. For a contemporary artist Repin's picture, therefore, of course, will seem unnatural, implausible (from the point of view of IN 1), and only a conservative honors the "realistic covenants", tries to look through the eyes of Repin (the second phase With, i.e. a special case IN 1). Repin, in turn, sees in Degas and Cezanne nothing but antics and perversions (from the point of view of IN 2). In these examples, the entire relativity of the concept of "realism" is obvious; meanwhile, art historians, in their aesthetic skills, belong, as we have already stipulated, for the most part to the epigones of realism ( With second phase), arbitrarily put an equal sign between With and IN 2, although in reality With- just a special case AT. As we know, BUT implicitly replaced by the meaning AT, and there is no fundamental difference between A1 and A2, the destruction of ideograms is perceived only as a means to create new ones - a conservative, of course, does not perceive a self-sufficing aesthetic moment. Thus, meaning as if BUT(actually A2), art historians actually appeal to With. Therefore, when a literary historian roughly states: "realism is characteristic of Russian literature," then this sounds tantamount to the aphorism "it is natural for a person to be twenty." Since the tradition has become established that realism is With, new realist artists (in the sense A1 of this term) are forced to declare themselves neo-realists, realists in the highest sense of the word, or naturalists, to establish a distinction between realism, approximate, imaginary ( With) and, in their opinion, authentic (i.e., their own). "I am a realist, but only in the highest sense," Dostoevsky had already declared. And almost the same phrase was repeated in turn by the symbolists, Italian and Russian futurists, German Expressionists and so on. and so on. Sometimes these neorealists finally identified their aesthetic platform with realism in general, and therefore they are forced, when evaluating the representatives With, separate them from realism.

Thus, posthumous criticism questioned the realism of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Ostrovsky. Most With characterized by historians of art (in particular, literature) is very vague and approximate - we must not forget that epigones give a characteristic. The closest analysis will undoubtedly replace With a series of values ​​of a more precise content will show that the individual techniques that we indiscriminately refer to With, are by no means characteristic of all representatives of the so-called realistic school, but on the other hand, they are also found outside this school. We have already spoken of progressive realism as a characteristic of non-essential features. One of the methods of such a characterization, cultivated, by the way, by a number of representatives of the school With(in Russia - the so-called Gogol school) and therefore sometimes incorrectly identified with With in general, it is a consolidation of the narrative with images drawn by contiguity, i.e., the path from its own term to metonymy and synecdoche. This "compression" is carried out in defiance of the intrigue or completely cancels the intrigue. Let's take a crude example: two literary suicides - poor Lisa and Anna Karenina. Drawing Anna's suicide, Tolstoy writes mainly about her purse. This unimportant feature would have seemed meaningless to Karamzin, although compared to the adventure novel of the 18th century, Karamzin's story is also a chain of non-essential features. If in an adventure novel of the 18th century the hero met a passer-by, then it was exactly the one he needed, or at least the intrigue. And in Gogol, or Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, the hero will necessarily meet at first a passer-by who is unnecessary, superfluous from the point of view of the plot, and will strike up a conversation with him, from which nothing will follow for the plot. Since this technique is often declared realistic, we denote it by D, repeating that D often presented in With. The boy is given a task: a bird flew out of the cage; how long did it take her to reach the forest, if every minute she flew so much, and the distance between the cage and the forest was such and such. The boy asks: what color was the cage? This boy was a typical realist in D sense of the word.

Or another anecdote - "Armenian riddle": "Hanging in the living room, green. What is it?" - It turns out: a herring! - Why in the living room?

Why couldn't they hang it? - Why is it green? - Painted. - But why?

To make it harder to guess. "This desire, to make it harder to guess, this tendency to slow down recognition leads to an accentuation of a new feature, to a newly attracted epithet. Exaggerations are inevitable in art, wrote Dostoevsky; in order to show a thing, it is necessary to deform its yesterday's appearance, color it, how to stain a preparation for observation under a microscope.You color the object in a new way and think: it has become more tangible, more real ( A1). The Cubist multiplied the object in the picture, showed it from several points of view, made it more tangible. This is a painting technique.

But there is still an opportunity - in the picture itself to motivate, justify this method; for example, an object is repeated, reflected in a mirror. The same is true in literature. Herring - green, because they painted it - a stunning epithet is realized - the trope turns into an epic motif.

Why they painted it - the author has an answer, but in fact one answer is true: to make it harder to guess. Thus, an improper term can be imposed on an object, or it can be presented as a private concept of this object. Negative parallelism rejects metaphor in the name of its own term. "I am not a tree, I am a woman," says the girl in a poem by the Czech poet Shramek.

This literary construction can be justified; from the features of a tale it has become a detail of plot development. - Some said: these are traces of an ermine, others answered: no, these are not traces of an ermine, it was Churila Plenkovich.

Reversed negative parallelism rejects its own term for metaphor (in the quoted poem by Schramek - "I am not a woman, I am a tree" or in a theater play by another Czech poet, Karel Capek: - What is it? - Handkerchief. - It's not a handkerchief. This is a beautiful woman standing at the window. She is dressed in white and dreams of love...). In Russian erotic tales, the image of copulation is often presented in terms of reversed parallelism, as well as in wedding songs, with the difference that in these songs the metaphorical construction is usually not justified in any way, while in fairy tales these metaphors are motivated as a way to seduce a girl, used by the evil one. the hero of a fairy tale, or these metaphors depicting copulation are motivated as an animal interpretation of a human act incomprehensible to animals. Consistent motivation, justification of poetic constructions is also sometimes called realism. Thus, the Czech novelist Čapek-Hod half-jokingly calls the "realistic chapter" the motivation through the typhoid delirium of the "romantic" fantasy presented in the first chapter of the story "The Westernmost Slav". Let us denote such realism, i.e. The requirement for consistent motivation, implementation poetic devices , through E. This is E often mixed with C, B etc. Since the theorists and historians of art (especially literature) do not distinguish between the heterogeneous concepts hidden under the term "realism", they treat it like a bag, infinitely stretchable, where you can hide anything. They object: no, not everything.

No one will call Hoffmann's fantasy realism. This means that the word "realism" still has some one meaning, something can be taken as a bracket. I answer: no one will call a spade a scythe, but this does not mean that the word "scythe" is endowed with only one meaning.

It is impossible to identify with impunity the various meanings of the word "realism", just as it is impossible, without the risk of being considered insane, to confuse a woman's scythe with an iron one. True, the first confusion is easier, because the various concepts hidden behind the single term "key" are sharply delimited from each other, while facts are conceivable that can be said at the same time: this is realism in C, B1, A1 and so on in the sense of the word. But nonetheless C, B, A1 etc. mixing is unacceptable.

Probably, there are arapas in Africa, which turn out to be arapas in the game. Undoubtedly, there are gigolos with the godname Alphonse. This does not give us the right to consider every Alphonse as an Alphonse and does not give us the slightest reason to draw conclusions about how the Arap tribe plays cards. The commandment is self-evident to the point of stupidity, but nevertheless those who speak of artistic realism constantly sin against it.