Which means the plot is a creative fiction. Fiction
Theory of literature. Artistic fiction - depicted in fiction events, characters, circumstances that do not actually exist. Fiction does not pretend to be true, but it is not a lie either. This special kind artistic convention, both the author of the work and the readers understand that the events and characters described did not actually exist, but at the same time they perceive what is depicted as something that could happen in our everyday earthly life or in some other world. Fiction varied. He can not deviate from the verisimilitude of the image Everyday life, how in realistic novels, but can also completely break with the requirements of compliance with reality, as in many modernist novels (for example, in the novel by the Russian symbolist writer A. Bely “Petersburg”), as in literary fairy tales(for example, in the fairy tales of the German romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann, in the fairy tales of the Danish writer H. C. Andersen, in the fairy tales of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin) or in works related to fairy tales in the genre of fantasy novels (for example, in the novels of J. Tolkien and C. Lewis). Fiction is an integral feature of historical novels, even if all their heroes are real persons. In literature, the boundaries between fiction and authenticity are very conditional and fluid: they are difficult to draw in the genre of memoirs, artistic autobiographies, literary biographies talking about life famous people. Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. - M.: Rosman. Edited by prof. Gorkina A.P. 2006.
Slide 10 from the presentation "Literature". The size of the archive with the presentation is 98 KB.Literary theory
summary other presentations“Theory and History of Literature” - Nationality of Literature. With the help of detail, the writer highlights the event. Psychologism. The detail externally accurately, dispassionately, objectively depicts the object. The debate began in the 1840s. Subtext is the meaning hidden “beneath” the text. Arsenal artistic means development inner life person. Historicism of literature. Historicism. The psychologism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is artistic expression. Tiya, in which all sectors of society inevitably participate.
“Fundamentals of the Theory of Literature” - Pushkin. Eternal themes in fiction. Speech characteristics hero. Way. Monologue. Characters. Tale An example of opposition. Pathos. Emotional content of a work of art. Contents of the work. Eternal themes. Theory of literature. Pathos consists of varieties. Historical figures. Fable. Temporary sign. Fabular development. Two ways to create speech characteristics.
“Questions on the theory of literature” - Events in the work. Allegory. Intentional use of identical words in a text. Inner monologue. Periphrase. Grotesque. Symbol. Expressive detail. Description of the character's appearance. Epilogue. Term. Epic works. Display method internal state. A tool that helps describe the hero. Description of nature. Type of literature. Plot. Interior. Flame of talent. Exposition.
“Literary Theory” - Pathos. Sarcasm. Message. Tasks. Parable. Feature article. Detail. Author. Denouement. Plot. Inner monologue. Theme and idea. Style. Ballad. Literary genera. Combination of strings. Remark. Reminiscence. Grotesque. Comedy. Artistic technique. Tragic. Epigram. Character. Subtext. Author's position. Conflict. Stages of action development. Hymn. Lyrics. Problem. Psychologism. Idea. Scenery. The beginning. Literary types and genres.
“Theory of literature at school” - Realism. Dramatic genres. Folklore. Artistic time. Plot. Literary genera. Theme of the work of art. Genres of folklore. Portrait. Author's position. Generalized image human individuality. Classicism. Sentimentalism. Symbolism. Content and form literary work. Lyrical genres. Ballad. Literary process. Fiction as the art of words. Pathos.
Emphasis: YOU'RE AN ARTISTIC THOUGHT
ARTISTIC FICTION - an act of artistic thinking; everything that is created by the writer’s imagination, his fantasy. V. x. - a means of creating artistic images. It is based on life experience writer.
The poet speaks “not about what actually happened, but about what could happen, therefore, about what is possible by probability or by necessity” (Aristotle, “Poetics”). Fiction, the creative fantasy of the artist, does not oppose reality, but is a special form of reflection of life, its knowledge and generalization, inherent only in art.
If events taken separately human life are more or less random in nature, then the artist, grouping these facts in his own way, enlarging some, leaving others in the shadows, creates, as it were, his own figurative “reality”, revealing with great force the objective truth of life. "The truth of life can be conveyed in a work of art only with the help creative imagination", says K. Fedin. He admitted in one of his letters: “Now, after the end of a huge duology, a total of sixty printed sheets, I estimate the ratio of fiction to “fact” to be ninety-eight to two.”
Even in works based on documentary material, V. x. must be present. Thus, N. Ostrovsky asked not to consider his novel “How the Steel Was Tempered” as autobiographical, emphasizing that he used the right to V. x. It exists, as Furmanov admits, in his “Chapaev”. V. x. V varying degrees is also in lyric poem, where the poet seems to speak on his own behalf about his feelings. A. Blok, for example, ended one of the poems with the lines:
You confessed your love to me passionately, And I... fell at your feet...
noted later: “Nothing like that happened.”
Thanks to V. x. the writer gets so accustomed to his characters that he imagines and feels them as if they existed in life. “Until he (the hero - Ed.) becomes a good acquaintance for me, until I see him and hear his voice, I do not begin to write” (L. Tolstoy).
According to writers with a strong imagination, creative process sometimes bordering on hallucination. Turgenev cried while recreating last minutes the life of his Bazarov. “When I described the poisoning of Emma Bovary,” Flaubert recalls, “I had a real taste of arsenic in my mouth, I myself was... poisoned.”
The power of imagination and a rich knowledge of life help the writer to imagine how the character he created would act in each specific situation. The image begins to live an “independent” life according to the laws of artistic logic, performing actions that are “unexpected” for the writer himself. Pushkin’s words are well known: “Imagine what a joke Tatyana played on me! She got married. I never expected this from her.” I. Turgenev made a similar confession: “Bazarov suddenly came to life under my pen and began to act on his own saltyk.” A. Tolstoy, summarizing the rich experience of working on historical novel, concludes: “It is impossible to write without fiction...” He admits the possibility of V. x. even on reliable historical material: “You are asking whether it is possible to “invent” a biography historical figure? Must. But to make it so that it was probable, to make it so that it (composed), if it did not exist, then should have been... there are random dates that do not matter in development historical events. They can be treated as the artist pleases."
However, works are known in which V. x. does not seem to have such of great importance. Balzac says about “Eugene Grande”: “...Any of them (facts. - Ed.) are taken from life - even the most romantic ones...” Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is a story by an old Cuban fisherman Miguel Ramirez (aka prototype of the Old Man). V. Kaverin wrote his “Two Captains” without deviating from the facts known to him.
Measure V. x. in the work is different. It varies depending on the personality of the writer, his creative principles, design and many other factors. But always V. x. as a means of typification (see Typical) is present in the writer’s work. For “to invent means to extract from the sum of the real from the given its main meaning and translate it into an image - this is how we get realism” (M. Gorky).
Lit.: Aristotle, On the art of poetry, M., 1957; Russian writers about literary work, vol. 1 - 4, L., 1954 - 56; Dobin E., Life material And artistic plot, 2nd ed., expanded. and modified, L., 1958; Tseitlin A.G., The Work of a Writer. Questions of psychology of creativity, culture and technology writing work, M., 1968.
E. Aksenova.
Sources:
- Dictionary literary terms. Ed. From 48 comp.: L. I. Timofeev and S. V. Turaev. M., "Enlightenment", 1974. 509 p.
Art. Rassadin, B. Sarnov
Does he do what he wants?
Two writers can take the same historical hero, even one about whom we know exactly what he really was, and portray him in completely different ways. One will portray him as noble and brave, while the other will portray him as nasty and funny. The writer has the right to this, because the main thing for him is to express himself, his thoughts and feelings in his work.
But what happens then? So the writer does what he wants? It turns out that the writer is not interested in truth at all?
This is one of the most complex issues artistic creativity. People have argued about this for centuries, expressing very different, very opposing views.
There were artists who directly said:
- Yes, we are not interested in the truth. We are not interested in reality. The goal of creativity is the free flight of imagination. Unfettered, unrestricted fiction.
Not only in ancient times, but also in our time, many writers and poets openly and even proudly expressed similar views.
“I take a piece of life, rough and poor, and create a sweet legend from it, for I am a poet...” - one said.
Another stated even more frankly:
I don't care if a person is good or bad,
I don't care if he's telling the truth or a lie...
And the third explained why “it doesn’t matter”:
Perhaps everything in life is just a means
For brightly melodious verses,
And you from a carefree childhood
Look for combinations of words.
Literature, poetry, and art, it turns out, do not exist at all to express the truth of life. It turns out that it’s quite the opposite: life itself is just a “vehicle for brightly melodious poetry.” And the only goal of creativity is to look for combinations of words, sounds, images...
And all this was asserted not by some weak poets who left no trace in literature, but by talented people, even unusually talented ones.
They were sharply objected to by supporters of the so-called “literature of fact”:
“No,” they said. – We are not interested in fiction! We are categorically against free flight fantasies. Not novels and poems, but essays about real people, about non-fictional facts - that’s what we need!
Some of them even believed that art should die out altogether.
You remember, of course, how N.A. Nekrasov dreamed of the time when the Russian peasant “would carry Belinsky and Gogol from the market...” So, there were people to whom this Nekrasov dream seemed simply a whim:
“It’s not Belinsky and Gogol that a man should carry from the market, but a popular guide to grass sowing. Not theater studios need to open in the village, and livestock breeding studios..."
So, on the one hand: “Everything in life is just a means for brightly melodious poetry.”
On the other hand: "Grass Sowing Guide" instead of " Dead souls" and "Inspector".
It would seem that even on purpose you cannot come up with two views that would be so irreconcilably hostile to each other.
In fact, they are not that different.
In essence, both of these views stem from the belief that truth and fiction are completely mutually exclusive. Or the truth - and no fiction. Or a fiction - and then there can be no question of the truth.
Both of these points of view - so different - proceed from the fact that the concept of “truth” is entirely reduced to the formula: “This is how it really happened.”
Meanwhile, truth in general, and artistic truth in particular, is an immeasurably more complex concept.
So which one is real?
So which Napoleon is the real one? In other words, who wrote the truth: Lermontov or Tolstoy?
It would seem that there is not even anything to argue about. It is known for sure from history that Napoleon was a man of bright and extraordinary talent: great commander, a powerful statesman. Even Napoleon's enemies could not deny this.
But Tolstoy is an insignificant, vain, empty little man. Vulgarity personified. Zero.
Everything seems to be clear. Lermontov wrote the truth, Tolstoy wrote a lie.
And yet, the first thing I want to say when reading the pages about Napoleon in “War and Peace” is: what a truth!
Maybe it's all about Tolstoy's enormous artistic gift? Perhaps the charm of his talent helped him make even untruths credible and convincing, downright indistinguishable from the truth?
No. Even Tolstoy would not have been able to do this.
However, why “even Tolstoy”? It was Tolstoy who could not pass off lies as truth. Because than bigger artist, the more difficult it is for him to be at odds with the truth.
One Russian poet said this very accurately:
– The inability to find and tell the truth is a shortcoming that cannot be covered by any ability to tell a lie.
By portraying Napoleon, Tolstoy sought to express the truth that was hidden from view, lying deep under the surface of well-known facts.
Tolstoy shows courtiers, marshals, chamberlains, servilely groveling before the emperor:
“One gesture from him - and everyone tiptoed out, leaving the great man to himself and his feelings.”
Next to the description of Napoleon's insignificant, petty, ostentatious feelings, the words " great person“They sound, of course, ironically. Even mockingly.
Tolstoy peers into the behavior of Napoleon's servants, analyzes and studies the nature of this creepiness. He clearly understands that all these titled lackeys look at their master with humiliation and servility only because he is their master. It no longer matters whether he is great or insignificant, talented or untalented.
Reading these Tolstoy pages, we understand: even if Napoleon were a complete nonentity, everything would be exactly the same. Marshals and footmen would look at their master in the same obsequious way. They would also sincerely consider him a great man.
This is the truth Tolstoy wanted to express and expressed. And this truth has the most direct relation to Napoleon and his entourage, to the nature of individual despotic power. And because Tolstoy deliberately exaggerated the colors, drawing an evil caricature of him instead of the real Napoleon, this truth only became more obvious.
By the way, Tolstoy’s truth does not at all contradict the picture that Lermontov created in the poem “Airship”.
Furthermore. Since both are true, they cannot resist each other. They are even united in some ways.
Lermontov portrayed Napoleon defeated and lonely. He sympathizes with him because this Napoleon has ceased to be a powerful ruler. And a ruler who has lost power is not afraid of anyone and is of no use to anyone: He is buried without honors by his enemies in shifting sand...
And those same marshals, about whose servility Tolstoy wrote with contempt, remained true to themselves: they serve the new rulers with the same servility. They do not hear and do not want to hear the call of their former idol:
And the marshals do not hear the call:
Others died in battle.
Others cheated on him
And they sold their sword.
So, both Napoleons are “real”, although different.
This is what usually happens in art. Two photographs of the same person, taken by different photographers, will certainly be similar to each other. And two of his portraits, painted by different artists, can be very, very different from each other, at the same time without losing their resemblance to the original.
Why, by different artists! Even the same artist, depicting the same person, can paint two completely different portraits.
This is the essence of art.
Everyone remembers Pushkin’s “Poltava”:
Peter comes out. His eyes
They shine. His face is terrible.
The movements are fast. He is beautiful,
He's like God's thunderstorm.
Peter in “Poltava” is not only majestic and humanly beautiful. He is the embodiment of courage, nobility, justice. He gives honor even to defeated enemies: “And he raises a healthy cup for his teachers.”
But here is another poem by the same Pushkin - " Bronze Horseman". Once again Peter is before us. However, how little similar this “idol on a bronze horse” is to the hero of “Poltava”. He did not flinch before enemy bullets and cannonballs - this one sees danger for himself even in Evgeniy’s timid and inarticulate threat. He generously drank to the health of his recent enemies - this one vindictively pursues a pathetic, unfortunate, powerless person.
Is there a difference between these two Peters?
Even some!
Does this mean that only one of them is "real"?
In no case! 
When we say that we want to know the truth about a historical figure, we mean not only his personal qualities. We want to understand and appreciate his work, to see the result of his efforts, their historical meaning.
Both in "Poltava" and in "The Bronze Horseman" Pushkin depicts the case of Peter. But in one case, Peter is in battle, in work, in burning, in creation. In another case, we already see the result of battle and work, which is why it is not Peter himself who is acting here, but his bronze monument, a symbol of his era and his cause. And so it turned out that among the results of the life of the great king there was the victoriously completed construction of a mighty empire and, on the other hand, an oppressed and oppressed little man.
So soberly and wisely Pushkin saw the complex inconsistency of Peter’s case.
When a person climbs a mountain peak, he can no longer see in detail what remains below, but the entire terrain is in front of him in full view.
The more time passes since the time of Peter, Napoleon or any other historical figure, the more their features become clouded. But the meaning of everything they did, good and bad, becomes clearer. And the more fully the truth emerges.
Ivan the Terrible and Ivan Vasilievich
In Poltava, Pushkin spoke about what really happened. The Bronze Horseman talks about events that not only did not happen in reality, but could not have happened. As you know, bronze horsemen do not gallop along the pavement, but calmly stand in place.
We have already said that the artist invents things in order to better understand and express the truth.
But is it really necessary to invent something that did not exist? And even more so, inventing something that could not have happened?
Let's say Pushkin could not express his complex thought any other way. But “The Bronze Horseman” is not an ordinary work. Still, it does not depict a living Peter. But much more often in works of art It is not symbols that act, but living people.
But it turns out that he is alive, real, completely special person can be placed by the writer in invented and even the most implausible circumstances.
The writer Mikhail Bulgakov has a comedy "Ivan Vasilyevich".
Its hero, engineer Timofeev, invented a time machine, with the help of which he found himself in the era of Ivan the Terrible. A small accident happened, and Timofeev, together with Tsar Ivan, found himself in modern Moscow, in a communal apartment.
"John. Oh my God, Lord Almighty! 
Timofeev. Shhh... hush, hush! Just don't scream, I beg you! We will cause terrible trouble and, in any case, a scandal. I'm going crazy myself, but I'm trying to control myself.
John. Oh, it's hard for me! Tell me again, are you not a demon?
Timofeev. Oh, have mercy, I explained to you that I am not a demon.
John. Oh, don't lie! You are lying to the king! Not by human will, but by God's will, I am a king!
Timofeev. Very good. I understand that you are a king, but I ask you to forget about it for a while. I will not call you Tsar, but simply Ivan Vasilyevich. Believe me, it's for your own good.
John. Alas for me, Ivan Vasilyevich, alas!..”
How unlike this timid, frightened old man is from the mighty and imperious Tsar depicted in Lermontov’s “Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov”...
Remember how he condemned Stepan Kalashnikov to execution: It’s good for you, child, A daring fighter, a merchant’s son, That you answered according to your conscience. I will reward your young wife and your orphans from my treasury, I command your brothers from this very day throughout the wide Russian kingdom to trade freely, duty-free. And you yourself, little child, go to the high place of the forehead, lay down your wild little head...
This Ivan is cruel and terrible, he uses his right to send an innocent person to death with voluptuous pleasure, and at the same time he is majestic in his own way and, in any case, is not devoid of a piercing mind and a kind of dark irony.
The king does not want to tolerate a man who dared to speak boldly and directly in front of him, accustomed to servile obedience, without bowing his head, and executes him. But in him - in the way the poet intended to portray him - there is still a vivid consciousness that the deed he is doing is not very noble. And so he wants to drown out his conscience, generously giving gifts to his wife and Kalashnikov’s brothers, he wants to amaze those around him with the greatness of his royal mercy.
In the final lines of the monologue, all this merged together: cruelty, irony, muffled conscience, and, as we would now say, “playing for the audience”:
I order the ax to be sharpened and sharpened,
I'll order the executioner to dress up,
IN big bell I'll order you to call
So that all the people of Moscow know,
That you too are not abandoned by my mercy...
Such is the terrible mercy of the king.
Yes, Lermontov’s Ivan the Terrible is cruel, treacherous, even vile. But it is impossible to imagine circumstances in which he would look pitiful and funny.
Impossible?
But Mikhail Bulgakov created precisely such circumstances.
In his comedy, engineer Timofeev talks to the tsar as an elder talks to a younger one. Would someone try to talk like that with Lermontov’s Grozny!..
And events happen to this Bulgakovsky, Ivan Vasilyevich, that paint him in the most pitiful light. Then he will be scared to death by the voice coming from handset, and asks in horror: “Where are you sitting?” Then he will be mistaken for an artist in the makeup and costume of Tsar Ivan. His very attempt to show royal favor, so terribly majestic in Lermontov, here turns out to be absurd, pathetic and funny.
Here Ivan, with a broad gesture, gives one of the characters in the play a hryvnia:
- Take it, slave, and glorify the Tsar and Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich!..
And he disdainfully refuses the royal gift, and is even offended by the word “serf”:
– For such things you can get into a people’s court. I don’t need your coin, it’s not real.
It may seem that all this was invented by the writer solely for the sake of laughter. That the character of Ivan Vasilyevich, a character in Bulgakov’s comedy, has nothing in common with the character of Tsar Ivan, who was not called the Terrible for nothing.
But no. Not only for fun did Bulgakov transfer the formidable tsar to ours modern life and made him tremble in front of the telephone set so familiar to us.
Why is Ivan the Terrible so majestic in Lermontov’s song? Why is even the gesture with which he sends Kalashnikov to the chopping block not without a certain eerie charm?
Because Ivan is surrounded by fear and admiration, because his every desire is law and every act, even the most vile, is met with flattery and enthusiasm. It may seem that this is the charm of the powerful personality of the king. In fact, this charm does not belong to a person, but to the Monomakh’s cap, a symbol of royal power.
Having placed Ivan the Terrible in unusual, alien conditions, depriving him of all the advantages associated with the royal title, the writer immediately exposed his human essence, exposed the truth hidden under the luxurious royal vestments.
This always happens in real art.
No matter how a writer fantasizes, no matter how far he flies on the wings of his imagination, no matter how bizarre and even implausible his invention may seem, he always has one goal: to tell people the truth.
Drawings by N. Dobrokhotova.
The writer's goal is to understand and reproduce reality in its intense conflicts. The idea is the prototype of the future work; it contains the origins of the main elements of content, conflict, and structure of the image. The birth of an idea is one of the mysteries of the writing craft. Some writers find the themes of their works in newspaper columns, others - in famous literary subjects, others turn to their own everyday experience. The impulse to create a work can be a feeling, an experience, an insignificant fact of reality, a story heard by chance, which in the process of writing the work grows to a generalization. An idea can linger for a long time notebook as a humble observation.
The individual, the particular, observed by the author in life, in a book, passing through comparison, analysis, abstraction, synthesis, becomes a generalization of reality. The movement from concept to artistic embodiment includes the pangs of creativity, doubt and contradiction. Many word artists have left eloquent testimonies about the secrets of creativity.
It is difficult to build a conventional scheme for creating a literary work, since each writer is unique, but in this case, indicative trends are revealed. At the beginning of the work, the writer faces the problem of choosing the form of the work, decides whether to write in the first person, that is, prefer a subjective manner of presentation, or in the third, maintaining the illusion of objectivity and letting the facts speak for themselves. The writer can turn to the present, to the past or the future. The forms of understanding conflicts are varied - satire, philosophical understanding, pathos, description.
Then there is the problem of organizing the material. Literary tradition offers many options: you can follow the natural (plot) course of events in presenting the facts; sometimes it is advisable to start from the ending, with the death of the main character, and study his life until his birth.
The author is faced with the need to determine the optimal boundaries of aesthetic and philosophical proportionality, entertainment and persuasiveness, which cannot be crossed in the interpretation of events, so as not to destroy the illusion of “reality” art world. L.N. Tolstoy stated: “Everyone knows the feeling of mistrust and rebuff that is caused by the apparent intentionality of the author. If the narrator says ahead: get ready to cry or laugh, and you probably won’t cry or laugh.”
Then the problem of choosing a genre, style, and repertoire of artistic means is revealed. One should look, as Guy de Maupassant demanded, for “that one word that can breathe life into dead facts, the one verb that alone can describe them.”
Special Aspect creative activity- her goals. There are many motives that writers used to explain their work. A.P. Chekhov saw the writer’s task not in searching for radical recommendations, but in “ correct positioning» questions: “In “Anna Karenina” and “Onegin” not a single question is resolved, but they are completely satisfying, only because all the questions are posed in them correctly. The court is obliged to pose the right questions, and let the jury decide, each to their own taste.”
One way or another, a literary work expresses the author's attitude to reality , which becomes, to a certain extent, the initial assessment for the reader, the “plan” for subsequent life and artistic creativity.
The author's position reveals a critical attitude towards the environment, activating people's desire for an ideal, which, like absolute truth, is unattainable, but which needs to be approached. “It is in vain that others think,” reflects I. S. Turgenev, “that in order to enjoy art, one innate sense of beauty is enough; without understanding there is no complete pleasure; and the sense of beauty itself is also capable of gradually becoming clearer and ripening under the influence of preliminary work, reflection and study of great examples.”
Fiction - a form of recreation and re-creation of life inherent only in art in plots and images that do not have a direct correlation with reality; a means of creating artistic images. Artistic fiction is a category important for differentiating the artistic itself (there is“attachment” to fiction) and documentary-informational (fiction is excluded) works. Measureartistic fiction in a work may be different, but it is a necessary component artistic image life.
Fantastic - this is one of the types of fiction in which ideas and images are based solely on fictional by the author wonderful world, on the image of the strange and implausible. It is no coincidence that the poetics of the fantastic is associated with the doubling of the world, its division into the real and the imagined. Fantastic imagery is inherent in such folklore and literary genres as fairy tales, epics, allegory, legends, grotesques, utopias, and satires.
3. Fiction. Conventionality and life-likeness
Fiction in the early stages of the development of art, as a rule, was not realized: the archaic consciousness did not distinguish between historical and artistic truth. But already in folk tales, which never present themselves as a mirror of reality, conscious fiction is quite clearly expressed. We find judgments about artistic fiction in Aristotle’s “Poetics” (chapter 9—the historian talks about what happened, the poet talks about the possible, about what could happen), as well as in the works of philosophers of the Hellenistic era.
For a number of centuries, fiction has appeared in literary works as a common property, as inherited by writers from their predecessors. Most often, these were traditional characters and plots, which were somehow transformed each time (this was the case (92), in particular, in the drama of the Renaissance and classicism, which widely used ancient and medieval plots).
Much more than was the case before, fiction manifested itself as the individual property of the author in the era of romanticism, when imagination and fantasy were recognized as the most important facet of human existence. "Fantasy<...>- wrote Jean-Paul, - there is something higher, it is the world soul and the elemental spirit of the main forces (such as wit, insight, etc. - V.Kh.)<...>Fantasy is hieroglyphic alphabet nature" 1. The cult of imagination, characteristic of the beginning of the 19th century, marked the emancipation of the individual, and in this sense constituted a positively significant fact of culture, but at the same time it also had negative consequences (artistic evidence of this is the appearance of Gogol’s Manilov, the fate of the hero of Dostoevsky’s White Nights) .
In the post-romantic era, fiction somewhat narrowed its scope. Flights of imagination of writers of the 19th century. often preferred direct observation of life: characters and plots were close to their prototypes. According to N.S. Leskova, real writer- this is a “note-taker”, not an inventor: “Where a writer ceases to be a note-taker and becomes an inventor, all connection between him and society disappears” 2. Let us also recall Dostoevsky’s well-known judgment that a close eye is capable of detecting in the most ordinary fact “a depth that is not found in Shakespeare” 3 . Russian classic literature was more a literature of conjecture” than of fiction as such 4 . At the beginning of the 20th century. fiction was sometimes regarded as something outdated, rejected in the name of reconstruction real fact, documented. This extreme has been disputed 5 . The literature of our century - as before - relies widely on both fiction and non-fictional events and persons. At the same time, the rejection of fiction in the name of following the truth of the fact, in a number of cases justified and fruitful 6, can hardly become the main line of artistic creativity: without relying on fictional images, art and, in particular, literature are unrepresentable.
Through fiction, the author summarizes the facts of reality, embodies his view of the world, and demonstrates his creative energy. Z. Freud argued that artistic fiction is associated with unsatisfied drives and suppressed desires of the creator of the work and involuntarily expresses them 7.
The concept of artistic fiction clarifies the boundaries (sometimes very vague) between works that claim to be art and documentary information. If documentary texts (verbal and visual) exclude the possibility of fiction from the outset, then works with the intention of perceiving them as fiction readily allow it (even in cases where the authors limit themselves to recreating actual facts, events, and persons). Messages in literary texts are, as it were, on the other side of truth and lies. At the same time, the phenomenon of artistry can also arise when perceiving a text created with a documentary mindset: “... for this it is enough to say that we are not interested in the truth of this story, that we read it “as if it were the fruit<...>writing" 1.
Forms of “primary” reality (which is again absent in “pure” documentary) are reproduced by the writer (and artist in general) selectively and in one way or another transformed, resulting in a phenomenon that D.S. Likhachev named internal the world of the work: “Every work of art reflects the world of reality in its creative perspectives<...>. The world of a work of art reproduces reality in a certain “abbreviated”, conditional version<...>. Literature takes only some phenomena of reality and then conventionally reduces or expands them” 2.
In this case, there are two trends in artistic imagery, which are designated by the terms convention(the author’s emphasis on non-identity, or even opposition, between what is depicted and the forms of reality) and lifelikeness(leveling such differences, creating the illusion of the identity of art and life). The distinction between convention and life-likeness is already present in the statements of Goethe (article “On truth and verisimilitude in art”) and Pushkin (notes on drama and its implausibility). But the relationships between them were especially intensely discussed at the turn of the 19th – (94) 20th centuries. L.N. carefully rejected everything implausible and exaggerated. Tolstoy in his article “On Shakespeare and His Drama.” For K.S. Stanislavsky’s expression “conventionality” was almost synonymous with the words “falsehood” and “false pathos.” Such ideas are associated with an orientation towards the experience of Russian realistic literature of the 19th century, the imagery of which was more life-like than conventional. On the other hand, many artists of the early 20th century. (for example, V.E. Meyerhold) preferred conventional forms, sometimes absolutizing their significance and rejecting life-likeness as something routine. Thus, in the article P.O. Jacobson's “On Artistic Realism” (1921) emphasizes conventional, deforming, and difficult techniques for the reader (“to make it more difficult to guess”) and denies verisimilitude, which is identified with realism as the beginning of the inert and epigonic 3 . Subsequently, in the 1930s – 1950s, on the contrary, life-like forms were canonized. They were considered the only acceptable ones for the literature of socialist realism, and convention was suspected of being related to odious formalism (rejected as bourgeois aesthetics). In the l960s, the rights of artistic convention were again recognized. Nowadays, the view has been strengthened that life-likeness and conventionality are equal and fruitfully interacting tendencies of artistic imagery: “like two wings on which creative imagination rests in an indefatigable thirst to find out the truth of life” 4.
At the early historical stages in art, forms of representation prevailed, which are now perceived as conventional. This is, firstly, generated by a public and solemn ritual idealizing hyperbole traditional high genres (epic, tragedy), the heroes of which manifested themselves in pathetic, theatrically effective words, poses, gestures and had exceptional appearance features that embodied their strength and power, beauty and charm. (Remember the epic heroes or Gogol’s Taras Bulba). And secondly, this grotesque, which was formed and strengthened as part of carnival celebrations, acting as a parody, laughter “double” of the solemn-pathetic one, and later acquired programmatic significance for the romantics 1 . It is customary to call the artistic transformation of life forms, leading to some kind of ugly incongruity, to the combination of incompatible things, grotesque. Grotesque in art is akin to paradox in (95) logic. MM. Bakhtin, who studied traditional grotesque imagery, considered it the embodiment of a festive and cheerful free thought: “The grotesque frees us from all forms of inhuman necessity that permeate the prevailing ideas about the world<...>debunks this necessity as relative and limited; grotesque form helps liberation<...>from walking truths, allows you to look at the world in a new way, feel<...>the possibility of a completely different world order” 2. In the art of the last two centuries, the grotesque, however, often loses its cheerfulness and expresses a total rejection of the world as chaotic, frightening, hostile (Goya and Hoffmann, Kafka and the theater of the absurd, to a large extent Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin).
Art initially contains life-like principles, which made themselves felt in the Bible, classical epics of antiquity, and Plato’s dialogues. In the art of modern times, life-likeness almost dominates (the most striking evidence of this is the realistic narrative prose of the 19th century, especially L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov). It is essential for authors who show man in his diversity, and most importantly, who strive to bring what is depicted closer to the reader, to minimize the distance between the characters and the perceiving consciousness. However, in art of the 19th century–XX centuries conditional forms were activated (and at the same time updated). Nowadays this is not only traditional hyperbole and grotesque, but also all kinds of fantastic assumptions (“Kholstomer” by L.N. Tolstoy, “Pilgrimage to the Land of the East” by G. Hesse), demonstrative schematization of the depicted (plays by B. Brecht), exposure of the technique (“ Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin), effects of the montage composition (unmotivated changes in the place and time of action, sharp chronological “breaks”, etc.).