Define the literary genre novel. Novel: genre essence

The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, attracts the close attention of literary scholars and critics. It also becomes a subject of thought for the writers themselves.

However, this genre still remains a mystery. A variety of, sometimes opposing, opinions are expressed about the historical fate of the novel and its future. “His,” wrote T. Mann in 1936, “his prosaic qualities, consciousness and criticism, as well as the richness of his means, his ability to freely and quickly manage display and research, music and knowledge, myth and science, his human breadth, his objectivity and irony make the novel what it is in our time: a monumental and dominant form of fiction."

O.E. Mandelstam, on the contrary, spoke about the decline of the novel and its exhaustion (article “The End of the Novel”, 1922). In the psychologization of the novel and the weakening of the external event element in it (which took place already in the 19th century), the poet saw a symptom of decline and the threshold of the death of the genre, which has now become, in his words, “old-fashioned.”

Modern concepts of the novel in one way or another take into account statements about it made in the last century. If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre (“A hero in whom everything is small is only suitable for a novel”; “Inconsistencies with a novel are inseparable”), then in the era of romanticism it rose to the top as a reproduction of “everyday reality” and at the same time - “ mirror of the world and<…>of his century,” the fruit of a “fully mature spirit”; as a “romantic book”, where, in contrast to the traditional epic, there is a place for a relaxed expression of the moods of the author and heroes, and humor and playful lightness. “Every novel must harbor the spirit of the universal,” wrote Jean-Paul.

Thinkers of the turn of the 18th-19th centuries wrote their theories of the novel. justified by experience modern writers, first of all—I.V. Goethe as the author of books about Wilhelm Meister.

The comparison of the novel with the traditional epic, outlined by aesthetics and criticism of romanticism, was developed by Hegel: “Here<…>again (as in the epic - V.Kh.) the richness and versatility of interests, states, characters, living conditions, the broad background of the holistic world, as well as the epic depiction of events appear in their entirety.”

On the other hand, the novel lacks the “originally poetic state of the world” inherent in the epic; here there is a “prosaically ordered reality” and “a conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of everyday relationships.” This conflict, Hegel notes, is “resolved tragically or comically” and often ends with the heroes reconciling with the “usual order of the world,” recognizing in it a “genuine and substantial beginning.”

Similar thoughts were expressed by V. G. Belinsky, who called the novel an epic of private life: the subject of this genre is “the fate of a private person,” ordinary, “everyday life.” In the second half of the 1840s, the critic argued that the novel and its related story “have now become the head of all other types of poetry.”

In many ways, he echoes Hegel and Belinsky (at the same time complementing them), M.M. Bakhtin in works on the novel, written mainly in the 1930s and awaiting publication in the 1970s.

Based on the judgments of writers of the 18th century. G. Fielding and K.M. Wieland, a scientist in the article “Epic and Novel (On the Methodology of Research of the Novel)” (1941) argued that the hero of the novel is shown “not as ready-made and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, educated by life”; this person “should not be “heroic” either in the epic or in the tragic sense of the word, the romantic hero combines both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious.” At the same time, the novel captures the “living contact” of a person “with an unready, becoming modernity (unfinished present).”

And it “more deeply, significantly, sensitively and quickly” than any other genre “reflects the formation of reality itself.” Most importantly, the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of revealing in a person not only the properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized possibilities, a certain personal potential: “One of the main internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the inadequacy of the hero’s fate and his position,” a person here can to be “either greater than one’s destiny, or less than one’s humanity.”

The above judgments of Hegel, Belinsky and Bakhtin can rightfully be considered axioms of the theory of the novel, which masters the life of a person (primarily private, individual biographical) in dynamics, formation, evolution and in situations of complex, usually conflicting, relationships between the hero and others.

In the novel, artistic comprehension is invariably present and almost dominates - as a kind of “supertheme” (let’s use in famous words A.S. Pushkin) “human independence,” which constitutes (let us add to the poet) both “the guarantee of his greatness” and the source of sorrowful downfalls, life’s dead ends and catastrophes. The ground for the formation and consolidation of the novel, in other words, arises where there is interest in a person who has at least relative independence from institutions social environment with its imperatives, rites, rituals, which is not characterized by “herd” inclusion in society.

The novels widely depict situations of the hero’s alienation from his surroundings, emphasizing his lack of roots in reality, homelessness, everyday wandering and spiritual wandering. Such are “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius, the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, “The History of Gil Blas of Santillana” by A.R. Lesage. Let us also remember Julien Sorel (“Red and Black” by Stendhal), Eugene Onegin (“Stranger to everyone, not bound by anything,” Pushkin’s hero laments about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Herzen’s Beltov, Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov from F.M. Dostoevsky. Romance heroes of this kind (and there are countless of them) “rely only on themselves.”

The alienation of a person from society and the world order was interpreted by M.M. Bakhtin as necessarily dominant in the novel. The scientist argued that here not only the hero, but also the author himself appears unrooted in the world, removed from the principles of sustainability and stability, alien to tradition. The novel, in his opinion, captures the “disintegration of the epic (and tragic) integrity of man” and carries out a “ludicrous familiarization of the world and man.” “The novel,” wrote Bakhtin, “has a new, specific problem; it is characterized by eternal rethinking - revaluation." In this genre, reality “becomes a world where the first word (the ideal beginning) is not there, and the last has not yet been said.” Thus, the novel is seen as an expression of a skeptical and relativistic worldview, which is conceived as a crisis and at the same time having a perspective. The novel, Bakhtin argues, prepares a new, more complex integrity of man “at a higher level<…>development".

There are many similarities with Bakhtin’s theory of the novel in the judgments of the famous Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic D. Lukács, who called this genre the epic of a godless world, and the psychology of the novel’s hero demonic. He considered the subject of the novel to be the history of the human soul, which manifests itself and discovers itself in all sorts of adventures (adventures), and its predominant tone was irony, which he defined as the negative mysticism of eras that broke with God.

Considering the novel as a mirror of growing up, the maturity of society and the antipode of the epic, which captured the “normal childhood” of humanity, D. Lukács spoke about the reconstruction of the human soul by this genre, lost in an empty and imaginary reality.

However, the novel does not completely plunge into the atmosphere of demonism and irony, the disintegration of human integrity, the alienation of people from the world, but it also resists it. The hero's self-reliance in classical novels of the 19th century. (both Western European and domestic) was most often presented in a dual light: on the one hand, as worthy of a person“independence”, sublime, attractive, enchanting, on the other - as a source of delusions and defeats in life. “How wrong I was, how I was punished!” - Onegin exclaims sadly, summing up his solitary free path. Pechorin complains that he did not guess his own “high purpose” and did not find a worthy use for the “immense powers” of his soul. At the end of the novel, Ivan Karamazov, tormented by his conscience, falls ill with delirium tremens. “And may God help the homeless wanderers,” it is said about the fate of Rudin at the end of Turgenev’s novel.

At the same time, many novel heroes strive to overcome their solitude and alienation, they long for “a connection with the world to be established in their destinies” (A. Blok). Let us recall once again the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin, where the hero imagines Tatyana sitting by the window rural house; as well as Turgenev's Lavretsky, Goncharov's Raisky, Tolstoy's Andrei Volkonsky, or even Ivan Karamazov, in his best moments, directed towards Alyosha. This kind of novel situation was characterized by G.K. Kosikov: “The “heart” of the hero and the “heart” of the world are drawn to each other, and the problem of the novel lies<…>the fact that they will never be able to unite, and the hero’s guilt for this sometimes turns out to be no less than the guilt of the world.”

Another thing is also important: in novels, a significant role is played by heroes whose independence has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, and reliance only on themselves. Among the novel characters we find those who, using the words of M.M. Prishvin about himself can rightfully be called “communication and communication figures.” Such is Natasha Rostova, “overflowing with life,” who, in the words of S.G. Bocharova, invariably “renews, liberates” people, “defines them<…>behavior". This heroine L.N. Tolstoy naively and at the same time confidently demands “immediately, now open, direct, humane simple relations between people". Such are Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoevsky.

In a number of novels (especially persistently in the works of Charles Dickens and Russian XIX literature c.) the spiritual contacts of a person with the reality close to him and, in particular, family ties (“The Captain’s Daughter” by A.S. Pushkin; “The Cathedral People” and “ Seedy family» N.S. Leskova; " Noble Nest» I.S. Turgenev; “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” by L.N. Tolstoy). Heroes similar works(remember the Rostovs or Konstantin Levin) perceive and think of the surrounding reality as friendly and familiar rather than alien and hostile to themselves. What is inherent in them is that M.M. Prishvin called it “kindred attention to the world.”

The theme of Home (in the high sense of the word - as an irreducible existential principle and indisputable value) persistently (most often in intensely dramatic tones) sounds in the novels of our century: in J. Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga and subsequent works), R. Martin du Gard (“The Thibault Family”), W. Faulkner (“The Sound and the Fury”), M.A. Bulgakov (“The White Guard”), M.A. Sholokhov (“Quiet Don”), B.L. Pasternak (“Doctor Zhivago”), V. G. Rasputin (“Live and Remember”, “Deadline”).

Novels of eras close to us, as can be seen, are to a large extent focused on idyllic values (although they are not inclined to highlight situations of human harmony and reality close to him). Even Jean-Paul (probably referring to such works as “Julia, or the New Heloise” by J. J. Rousseau and “The Priest of Wakefield” by O. Goldsmith) noted that the idyll is “a genre akin to the novel.” And according to M.M. Bakhtin, “the significance of the idyll for the development of the novel<…>was huge."

The novel absorbs the experience of not only the idyll, but also a number of other genres; in this sense he is like a sponge. This genre is able to include the features of an epic into its sphere, capturing not only the private lives of people, but also events of a national-historical scale (“The Monastery of Parma” by Stendhal, “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy, “Gone with the Wind” by M. Mitchell) . Novels are able to embody the meanings characteristic of a parable. According to O.A. Sedakova, “in the depths of the “Russian novel” usually lies something similar to a parable.”

There is no doubt that the novel is involved in the traditions of hagiography. The hagiographic principle is very clearly expressed in Dostoevsky’s works. Leskovsky’s “Soboryan” can rightfully be described as a novel-life. Novels often acquire the features of a satirical description of morality, such as, for example, the works of O. de Balzac, W.M. Thackeray, “Resurrection” by L.N. Tolstoy. As shown by M.M. Bakhtin is far from alien to the novel (especially the picaresque and adventurous) and the familiarly funny, carnival element, originally rooted in the comedy-farce genres. Vyach. Ivanov, not without reason, characterized the works of F.M. Dostoevsky as “tragedy novels”. “The Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov is a kind of myth-novel, and R. Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” is an essay-novel. In his report on it, T. Mann called his tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers” a “mythological novel”, and its first part (“The Past of Jacob”) - a “fantastic essay”. The work of T. Mann, according to the German scientist, marks the most serious transformation of the novel: its immersion into mythological depths.

The novel, apparently, has a dual content: firstly, it is specific to it (“independence” and the evolution of the hero, revealed in his private life), and secondly, it came to him from other genres. The conclusion is valid; genre essence the novel is synthetic. This genre is capable of combining, with effortless freedom and unprecedented breadth, the substantive principles of many genres, both funny and serious. Apparently doesn't exist genre beginning, from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.

The novel as a genre, prone to syntheticism, is sharply different from others that preceded it, which were “specialized” and operated in certain local “areas” of artistic comprehension of the world. He (like no other) turned out to be able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, inconsistency and richness. The novel's freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras use this freedom in a variety of ways.

The many faces of the novel create serious difficulties for literary theorists. Almost everyone who tries to characterize the novel as such, in its universal and necessary properties, faces the temptation of a kind of synecdoche: replacing the whole with its part. So, O.E. Mandelstam judged the nature of this genre from the “career novels” of the 19th century, the heroes of which were carried away by the unprecedented success of Napoleon.

In novels that emphasized not the willful aspiration of a self-affirming person, but the complexity of his psychology and internal action, the poet saw a symptom of the decline of the genre and even its end. T. Mann, in his judgments about the novel as full of soft and benevolent irony, relied on his own artistic experience and, to a large extent, on the novels of J. V. Goethe’s upbringing.

Bakhtin's theory has a different orientation, but also local (primarily on the experience of Dostoevsky). At the same time, the writer’s novels are interpreted by scientists in a very unique way. Dostoevsky's heroes, according to Bakhtin, are, first of all, bearers of ideas (ideology); their voices are equal, as is the author’s voice in relation to each of them. This is seen as polyphony, which is highest point novelistic creativity and the expression of the writer’s non-dogmatic thinking, his understanding that a single and complete truth “is fundamentally incompatible within the limits of one consciousness.”

Dostoevsky's novelism is considered by Bakhtin as an inheritance of the ancient “Menippean satire”. Menippea is a genre “free from tradition,” committed to “unbridled fantasy,” recreating “the adventures of an idea or truth in the world: on earth, in the underworld, and on Olympus.” It, Bakhtin argues, is a genre “ latest questions”, carrying out “moral and psychological experimentation”, and recreates “split personality”, “unusual dreams, passions bordering on madness.

Other varieties of the novel that are not involved in polyphony, where the writers’ interest in people rooted in reality close to them predominates, and the author’s “voice” dominates over the voices of the heroes, Bakhtin rated less highly and even spoke about them ironically: he wrote about the “monological” one-sidedness and the narrowness of “manor-house-room-apartment-family novels” that seem to have forgotten about a person’s presence “on the threshold” of eternal and insoluble questions. At the same time they were called L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov.

In the centuries-old history of the novel, two types of it are clearly visible, more or less corresponding to two stages literary development. These are, firstly, works of acute events, based on external action, the heroes of which strive to achieve some local goals. These are adventurous novels, in particular picaresque, knightly, “career novels,” as well as adventure and detective stories. Their plots are numerous concatenations of event nodes (intrigues, adventures, etc.), as is the case, for example, in Byron’s “Don Juan” or in A. Dumas.

Secondly, these are novels that have prevailed in literature over the last two or three centuries, when one of central problems social thought, artistic creativity and culture as a whole became the spiritual independence of man. Here it successfully competes with external action internal action: the eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the consciousness of the hero in its diversity and complexity, with its endless dynamics and psychological nuances, comes to the fore.

The characters in such novels are depicted not only as striving for some private goals, but also as comprehending their place in the world, clarifying and realizing their value orientation. It was in this type of novel that the specificity of the genre that was discussed was reflected with maximum completeness. Close to man reality (" daily life") is mastered here not as a deliberately "low prose", but as involved in genuine humanity, the trends of a given time, universal principles of existence, and most importantly - as an arena of the most serious conflicts. Russian novelists of the 19th century. knew well and persistently showed that “amazing events are a lesser test for human relations) than everyday life with minor displeasures.”

One of the most important features of the novel and related stories (especially in the 19th-20th centuries) is the close attention of the authors to the microenvironment surrounding the heroes, the influence of which they experience and which they influence in one way or another. Outside of recreating the microenvironment, it is “very difficult for the novelist to show the inner world of the individual.” The origins of the now established novel form are the dilogy of I.V. Goethe about Wilhelm Meister (these works T. Mann called “in-depth in inner life, sublimated adventure novels"), as well as “Confession” by Zh.Zh. Rousseau, “Adolphe” by B. Constant, “Eugene Onegin,” which conveys the “poetry of reality” inherent in the works of A. S. Pushkin. Since that time, novels, focused on a person’s connections with a reality close to him and, as a rule, giving preference to internal action, have become a kind of center of literature. They seriously influenced all other genres, even transformed them.

According to M.M. Bakhtin, Romanization occurred verbal art: when the novel comes to “great literature”, other genres are sharply modified, “to a greater or lesser extent “romanized””. At the same time, the structural properties of genres are also transformed: their formal organization becomes less strict, more relaxed and free. We will turn to this (formal-structural) side of genres.

V.E. Khalizev Theory of literature. 1999

Literary genres are groups of works distinguished within types of literature. Each of them has a certain set of stable properties. Many literary genres have their origins and roots in folklore. The newly emerged genres in literary experience proper are the fruit of the combined activities of the founders and successors. Such, for example, is the lyric-epic poem that emerged in the era of romanticism.

Genres are difficult to systematize and classify (unlike types of literature), and stubbornly resist them. First of all, because there are a lot of them: each artistic culture has specific genres (Hokku, Tanka, Gazelle in the literature of Eastern countries). In addition, genres have different historical scope. Some exist throughout the entire history of verbal art (such as, for example, the ever-living fable from Aesop to S.V. Mikhalkov); others are correlated with certain eras (for example, liturgical drama consisting of European Middle Ages). In other words, genres are either universal or historically local.
The picture is further complicated by the fact that the same word often denotes deeply different genre phenomena. Thus, the ancient Greeks thought of elegy as a work written in a strictly defined poetic meter - an elegiac distich (a combination of hexameter and pentameter) and performed in recitative to the accompaniment of a flute. And in the second half of the 18th century - early XIX V. The elegiac genre, thanks to T. Gray and V.A. Zhukovsky, began to be defined by the mood of sadness and melancholy, regret and melancholy.

Authors often designate the genre of their works arbitrarily, without conforming to the usual usage of words. So, N.V. Gogol called " Dead Souls"poem; "House by the Road" by A.T. Tvardovsky has the Subtitle "lyrical chronicle", "Vasily Terkin" - "a book about a fighter."

Consideration of genres is unimaginable without reference to the organization, structure, and form of literary works.

G.N. Pospelov differentiated genre forms"external" ("closed compositional and stylistic whole") and "internal" ("specific genre content" as a principle " imaginative thinking"and "cognitive interpretation of characters"). Having assessed the external (compositional and stylistic) genre forms as content-neutral (in this, Pospelov's concept of genres, as has been repeatedly noted, is one-sided and vulnerable), the scientist focused on the internal side of genres. He identified and characterized three supra-epochal genre groups, basing their differentiation on the sociological principle: the type of relationship between an artistically comprehended person and society, the social environment in in a broad sense. “If works of national-historical genre content (meaning epics, epics, odes. - V.Kh.),” wrote G.N. Pospelov, “experience life in the aspect of the formation of national societies, if romantic works comprehend the formation of individual characters in private relations, then works of “ethological” genre content reveal the state national society or some part of it." ("Travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow" by A.N. Radishchev, "Who Lives Well in Rus'" by N.A. Nekrasov).

NOVEL
The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, attracts the close attention of literary scholars and critics.

If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre, then in the era of romanticism it rose to the top as a reproduction of “everyday reality” and at the same time “a mirror of the world and<...>of his age", the fruit of a "quite mature spirit

Hegel: the novel lacks the “originally poetic state of the world” inherent in the epic; here there is a “prosaically ordered reality” and “a conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of everyday relationships.” V. G. Belinsky, who called the novel an epic of private life: the subject of this genre is “the fate of a private person,” ordinary, “everyday life.”

MM. Bakhtin: the hero of the novel is shown “not as ready-made and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, educated by life”; this person “should not be “heroic” either in the epic or tragic sense of the word; the romantic hero combines both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious.” At the same time, the novel captures the “living contact” of a person “with an unready, becoming modernity (unfinished present).” And it “more deeply, significantly, sensitively and quickly” than any other genre “reflects the formation of reality itself.” The main thing is that the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of revealing in a person not only the properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized possibilities, a certain personal potential

In the novel, there is invariably present and almost dominates - as a kind of “super-theme” - artistic comprehension (to use the famous words of A.S. Pushkin) “human independence”, which constitutes (let us add to the poet) “the guarantee of his greatness”, and the source of sad falls, life dead ends and disasters. The ground for the formation and consolidation of the novel, in other words, arises where there is interest in a person who has at least relative independence from the establishment of the social environment

The novels widely depict situations of the hero’s alienation from his surroundings, emphasizing his lack of roots in reality, homelessness, everyday wandering and spiritual wandering. Evgeny Onegin (“A stranger to everything, not bound by anything,” Pushkin’s hero laments about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Raskolnikov from F.M. Dostoevsky

in novels, a significant role is played by heroes whose independence has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, and reliance only on themselves. Among the novel characters we find those who, using the words of M.M. Prishvin about himself can rightfully be called “a figure of communication and communication.” This is Natasha Rostova, “overflowing with life.” In a number of novels (especially persistently in the works of Charles Dickens and Russian literature of the 19th century), a person’s spiritual contacts with the reality close to him and, in particular, family ties ("The Captain's Daughter" by A.S. Pushkin) are presented in an elevating and poetic way. . The heroes of such works perceive and think of the surrounding reality as friendly and familiar rather than alien and hostile to themselves. What is inherent in them is that M.M. Prishvin called it “kindred attention to the world.”
The theme of the house is also heard in the novels of our century: in J. Galsworthy ("The Forsyte Saga" and subsequent works), M.A. Bulgakov ("The White Guard"), M.A. Sholokhov ("Quiet Don"),

This genre is able to include the features of an epic into its sphere, capturing not only the private lives of people, but also events of a national-historical scale ("The Parma Monastery" by Stendhal). Novels are able to embody the meanings characteristic of a parable. According to O.A. Sedakova, “in the depths of the “Russian novel” usually lies something similar to a parable.”
There is no doubt that the novel is involved in the traditions of hagiography. The hagiographic principle is very clearly expressed in Dostoevsky’s works. Leskovsky's "Soboryan" can rightfully be described as a novel-life.

Novels often acquire the features of a satirical description of morality, such as, for example, the works of O. de Balzac, W.M. Thackeray

The novel, as can be seen, has a dual content: firstly, it is specific to it (the “independence” and evolution of the hero, revealed in his private life), and secondly, it came to him from other genres. The conclusion is valid; the genre essence of the novel is synthetic. This genre is capable of combining, with effortless freedom and unprecedented breadth, the substantive principles of many genres, both funny and serious. Apparently, there is no genre principle from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.
The novel as a genre, prone to synthetics, is sharply different from others that preceded it, which were “specialized” and operated in certain local “areas” of artistic comprehension of the world. He (like no other) turned out to be able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, inconsistency and richness. The novel's freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras use this freedom in a variety of ways.

In the centuries-old history of the novel, two types of it are clearly visible. These are, firstly, works of acute events, based on external action, the heroes of which strive to achieve some local goals. These are adventurous novels, in particular picaresque, knightly, “career novels,” as well as adventure and detective stories. Their plots are numerous concatenations of event nodes (intrigues, adventures, etc.), as is the case, for example, in A. Dumas.
Secondly, these are novels that have prevailed in the literature of the last two or three centuries, when one of the central problems of social thought, artistic creativity and culture in general became the spiritual independence of man. Here internal action successfully competes with external action: the eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the consciousness of the hero in its diversity and complexity comes to the fore.

Let's turn to one of the founders of Russian literary criticism- V.G. Belinsky, who wrote in the first half of the 19th century: “... now our literature has turned into a novel and a story (...) What books are most read and sold out? Novels and stories. (...) What books do all our writers write, called and uncalled (...)? Novels and stories. (...) what books expound human life, and the rules of morality, and philosophical systems, and, in a word, all sciences? In novels and stories."

The 19th century is called the “golden age of the Russian novel”: A. Pushkin and F. Dostoevsky, N. Gogol and I. Turgenev, L. Tolstoy and N. Leskov, A. Herzen and M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, N. Chernyshevsky and A. K. Tolstoy worked fruitfully in this large form of epic. Even A. Chekhov dreamed of writing a novel about love...

A novel, in contrast to a short story and a novella, can be called an “extensive” type of literature, since it requires a wide coverage of artistic material.

The novel is characterized by the following features:

branching plot, multiple storylines; often central characters the novels have “their own” plot lines, the author tells their story in detail (the story of Oblomov, the story of Stolz, the story of Olga Ilyinskaya, the story of Agafya Matveena in Goncharov’s novel “Oblomov”);
diversity of characters (by age, social groups, personalities, types, views, etc.);
global themes and issues;
a large scope of artistic time (the action of L. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” fits into one and a half decades);
a well-developed historical background, correlation of the heroes’ destinies with the characteristics of the era, etc.

The end of the 19th century somewhat weakened the interest of writers in large epic forms, and small genres came to the fore - short stories and tales. But since the 20s of the twentieth century, the novel has again become relevant: A. Tolstoy writes “Walking in the Torment” and “Peter I”, A. Fadeev - “Destruction”, I. Babel - “Cavalry”, M. Sholokhov - “Quiet Don" and "Virgin Soil Upturned", N. Ostrovsky - "Born of the Revolution" and "How the Steel Was Tempered", M. Bulgakov - " White Guard" and "The Master and Margarita" ...

There are many varieties (genres) of the novel: historical, fantastic, gothic (or horror novel), psychological, philosophical, social, novel of morals (or everyday novel), utopian or dystopian novel, parable novel, anecdote novel, adventure (or adventure) novel, detective novel etc. TO special genre can be attributed ideological a novel in which main task The author’s goal is to convey to the reader a certain ideology, a system of views on what society should be like. The novels by N. Chernyshevsky “What to do?”, M. Gorky “Mother”, N. Ostrovsky “How the Steel Was Tempered”, M. Sholokhov “Virgin Soil Upturned”, etc. can be considered ideological.

Historical the novel is interested in major, turning-point historical events and determines the fate of a person in a particular era by the features of the time depicted;
fantastic the novel tells about fantastic events that go beyond the usual material world scientifically known by man;
psychological the novel tells about the characteristics and motives of human behavior in certain circumstances, about the manifestation of the internal properties and qualities of human nature, about the personal, individual characteristics of a person, often considering various psychological types of people;
philosophical the novel reveals the writer’s system of philosophical ideas about the world and man;
social the novel comprehends the laws of social organization, studies the influence of these laws on human destinies; depicts the state of individual social groups and explains it artistically;
novel of manners or everyday life-descriptive the novel depicts the everyday side of a person’s existence, the features of his daily life, reflects his habits, moral standards, perhaps some ethnographic details;
in the center adventurous a novel, of course, the adventures of the hero; at the same time, the characteristics of the characters, historical truth and historical details are not always interesting to the author and are often in the background, or even in the third place;
utopian novel depicts the wonderful future of a person or the ideal structure of a state, from the author’s point of view; dystopian novel on the contrary, it depicts the world and society as, in the author’s opinion, they should not be, but can become due to the fault of man.
The largest epic genre is epic novel, in which each of the above features is globally developed and developed by the writer; epic creates a wide canvas human existence. One epic is usually not enough human destiny, she is interested in the stories of entire families, dynasties in a long time context, against a broad historical background, making a person an important part of a vast and eternal world.

All these genres of the novel - except, perhaps, the Gothic or horror novel, which did not take root in Russia - are widely represented in Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Each era prefers certain genres of the novel. Thus, Russian literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century gave preference realistic novel socio-philosophical and everyday-writing content. The 20th century demanded diversity novel content, and all genres of the novel received powerful development at this time.

Novel — literary genre, as a rule, prosaic, which involves a detailed narrative about the life and development of the personality of the main character (heroes) in a crisis, non-standard period of his life.

A novel is a work in which the narrative is focused on the fate of an individual in the process of its formation and development. According to Belinsky's definition, a novel is an "epic of private life" ("Oblomov" by Goncharov, "Fathers and Sons" by Turgenev).

History of the name

The name "Roman" arose in the middle of the 12th century along with the genre chivalric romance(old French) romanz from Late Latin romanice "in the (popular) Romance language"), as opposed to historiography in Latin. Contrary to popular belief, this name from the very beginning did not refer to any composition in in native language (heroic songs or the lyrics of the troubadours were never called novels), but to one that could be contrasted with the Latin model, even if very distant: historiography, fable (“The Romance of Renard”), vision (“The Romance of the Rose”). However, in the XII-XIII centuries, if not later, the words roman And estoire(the latter also means “image”, “illustration”) are interchangeable. In reverse translation into Latin, the novel was called (liber) romanticus, from where to European languages and the adjective “romantic” was born, which until the end of the 18th century meant “inherent in novels,” “the same as in novels,” and only later the meaning, on the one hand, was simplified to “love,” but on the other hand, it gave rise to the name of romanticism as a literary movement .

The name “novel” was preserved when, in the 13th century, the performed poetic novel was replaced by a prose novel for reading (with full preservation of the knightly topic and plot), and for all subsequent transformations of the knightly novel, right up to the works of Ariosto and Edmund Spenser, which we we call them poems, but contemporaries considered them novels. It persists even later, in the 17th-18th centuries, when the “adventurous” novel is replaced by the “realistic” and “psychological” novel (which in itself problematizes the supposed gap in continuity).

However, in England the name of the genre is also changing: the “old” novels retain the name romance, and the name “new” novels from the middle of the 17th century was assigned novel(from Italian novella - “short story”). Dichotomy novel/romance means a lot for English-language criticism, but rather introduces additional uncertainty into their actual historical relations, which makes it clearer. Generally romance is considered rather a kind of structural-plot type of genre novel.

In Spain, on the contrary, all varieties of the novel are called novela, and what happened from the same romanice word romance from the very beginning it belonged to a poetic genre that was also destined to have a long history - romance.

Bishop of Yue late XVII century, in search of the predecessors of the novel, he first applied this term to a number of phenomena of ancient narrative prose, which since then also began to be called novels.

The epic nature of the novel

The novel dominates among the epic genres modern literature. Its epic nature lies in its focus on the universal scope of reality, which is presented through the prism of individual consciousness. The novel appears in an era when the value of an individual personality is realized, it becomes interesting in itself, and therefore can become the subject of depiction in art. If the characters of the epic were gods and heroes, endowed with abilities much greater than those of the average person, if the epic described the events of the national past, then the hero of the novel is an ordinary person, and every reader can put himself in his place. Equally obvious are the differences between the heroes of the new genre and the exceptional heroes of the chivalric romance, whose life was presented in the form of a chain extraordinary adventures knights errant.

Tracing the destinies of private people, far removed from the feat, the novel recreates through them a panorama of modernity; the action in the novel takes place “here” and “now,” and this is its second difference from the folk and heroic epic, where the action takes place in the absolute past, and from the chivalric romance, where the space-time structure belongs to the realm of the magical.

The third significant difference between the novel and previous epic genres lies in the author’s position: the heroic epic, as we remember, reflected the impersonality of tribal consciousness; although we know the names of some of the “creators” of the chivalric romance, they still did not create their own plots, but drew them from the book tradition (ancient and Byzantine cycles) or from the same inexhaustible folk tradition (Breton cycle), that is, their authorship consisted of processing finished material with a relatively small degree of independence. On the contrary, a novel of modern times is unthinkable without an author; the author does not hide the fact that his heroes and their adventures are the work of him creative imagination, and does not hide his attitude to what is being described.

The novel is a genre that, from the moment of its appearance, openly absorbs any elements of the previous literary tradition, playing with these elements; a genre that reveals its literary nature. The first novels were parodies of the most popular genres of medieval literature. The great French humanist Francois Rabelais in the novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (1532-1553) parodies popular folk books, and Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote (part I - 1605, part II - 1616) is a chivalric romance.

In terms of its goals and characteristics, the novel contains all the characteristic features of the epic form: the desire for an adequate form of depiction of life life content, the universality and breadth of coverage of the material, the presence of many plans, the subordination of the principle of transmitting life phenomena through an exclusively personal, subjective attitude towards them (as, for example, in lyrics) to the principle of plastic representation, when people and events appear in the work as if on their own, as living images of external reality. But all these tendencies achieve their complete and complete expression only in the epic poetry of antiquity, forming the “classical form of epic” (Marx). In this sense, the novel is a product of the decomposition of the epic form, which, along with the death of ancient society, lost the soil for its flourishing. The novel strives for the same goals as the ancient epic, but can never achieve them, because in the conditions of bourgeois society, which form the basis for the development of the novel, the methods of achieving epic goals become so different from the ancient ones that the results are directly opposite to the intentions. The contradiction in the form of the novel lies precisely in the fact that the novel, as the epic of bourgeois society, is the epic of a society that destroys the possibilities of epic creativity. But this circumstance, as we will see, which constitutes the main reason for the artistic shortcomings of the novel in comparison with the epic, at the same time gives it a number of advantages. The novel, as the decomposition of the epic, opens the way to its new flowering, new artistic possibilities, which Homeric poetry did not know.

The problem of the novel

In the study of the novel, there are two main problems associated with the relativity of its genre unity:

Genetic. Between historical varieties of the novel, only a dotted, barely discernible continuity can be established. Taking this circumstance into account, as well as on the basis of the normatively understood genre content, attempts have been made more than once to exclude the “traditional” type of novel (ancient, knightly and generally adventurous) from the concept of a novel. These are the concepts of Lukács (“bourgeois epic”) and Bakhtin (“dialogism”).
Typological. There is a tendency to consider the novel not historically, but as a staged phenomenon that naturally arises in the course of literary evolution, and to classify among it some major narrative forms in “medieval” (pre-modern) China, Japan, Persia, Georgia, etc.

Despite the exceptional prevalence of this genre, its boundaries are still not clear and defined enough. Along with works bearing this name, we find in the literature of recent centuries large narrative works called stories. Some writers give their great epic works the title of a poem (just recall Gogol, his “Dead Souls”).

All these big ones epic genres exist along with the novel and differ from it, although their names, like those of the novel, are poorly defined. The problem, therefore, is to approach the works themselves, their distinctive features, and, based on their study, determine what a novel is, how it differs from other major narrative genres, and what its essence is. This kind of research has been repeatedly carried out by historians and literary theorists. Trying to determine the features of the novel as a genre, they, however, went into a scrupulous description of individual novels, their structure, their compositional originality; they sought an answer to the question in the plane of formal observations, based on purely morphological generalizations. They made their research static, missing the socio-historical perspective. A striking example of this kind of research can be the work of the “formal school,” in particular the work of V. B. Shklovsky.

A different kind of error occurs among those literary historians who proceeded from a completely correct methodological premise: the solution to the problem of the novel, like all other poetic forms, is possible only in a historical perspective. They gave, first of all, the history of the novel, hoping to capture its unity, its historical essence, in the succession of various branches of this genre. A clear example of this kind of research is the work of K. Tiander “Morphology of the Novel”. However, he was unable to theoretically master the mass of historical material, differentiate it and outline the correct perspective; his “morphology” of the novel was reduced to the external history of this genre. This is the fate of the overwhelming majority of studies of novels of this type.

IN special situation It turned out to be those researchers who combined the historicity of the study with the height of theoretical premises. Among the specialist literary critics, representatives of the old bourgeois literary criticism, there were, unfortunately, almost no such people. The greatest bourgeois dialectical philosophers, and above all Hegel, did much more for the theory of the novel. But the main conclusions of Hegelian aesthetics, in addition to the fact that they must be rearranged from the “head” to the “legs,” are still insufficient for constructing a theory of the novel. To resolve the problem of the novel, it is necessary first of all to raise the question of how and when, in what socio-historical conditions this genre arose, what and whose artistic and ideological needs it satisfied, what and whose other poetic genres it came to replace.

Literary (from the French genre genus, type), historically developing type literary work(novel, poem, ballad, etc.); V theoretical concept about J. the features characteristic of a more or less extensive group of works are generalized... ... Literary encyclopedic dictionary

The gallant novel (also the noble novel) is a genre of French and German literature from the mid-17th century. A precise, gallantly heroic novel is, on the one hand, the fruit of the transformation of a chivalric romance, and on the other, the result of the influence... ... Wikipedia

Novel. History of the term. The problem of the novel. The emergence of the genre. From the history of the genre. Conclusions. The novel as a bourgeois epic. The fate of the theory of the novel. Specificity of the novel form. The birth of a novel. The novel's conquest of everyday reality... Literary encyclopedia

NOVEL (French roman, German Roman; English novel/romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), the central genre (see GENRE) of European literature of the New Time (see NEW TIME (in history)), fictional, in difference from the neighboring genre of the story (see... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

A; m. [French] genre] 1. A historically established type of art or literature, characterized by certain plot, compositional, stylistic and other features; individual species of this genus. Musical and literary genres... encyclopedic Dictionary

A novel in verse is a literary genre that combines the properties of composition, chronotope and character system inherent in the novel with a poetic form. Although certain analogies are possible between a novel in verse and poetic epic, especially in his... ... Wikipedia

Novel- ROMAN is one of the freest literary forms, which involves a huge number of modifications and embraces several main branches narrative genre. In the new European literature Under this term there is usually some kind of... Dictionary literary terms

- (French genre) (in art) a historically established internal division in all types of art; type work of art in the unity of the specific properties of its form and content. The concept of genre generalizes the features characteristic of a broad... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

- “Roman” Single by the group “Vintage” from the album Anechka Released... Wikipedia

Tyutchev, pioneer of the Russian Internet Date of birth: July 2, 1963 Place of birth: Kyiv ... Wikipedia

Books

Game of the Cat, Roman Yurievich Prokofiev. Attention! The audio contains obscene language Fantasy novel Roman Prokofiev, the first book of the “Game of the Cat” series, genre: combat fantasy, heroic fantasy, LitRPG. At the Merchant's...audiobook
Cat game. Book two, Roman Yurievich Prokofiev. Attention! The audio recording contains obscene language. A science fiction novel by Roman Prokofiev, the second book in the “Cat’s Game” series, genre: combat fantasy, heroic fantasy, LitRPG. Virtual market...