Reader content. The problem of the image of the reader in modern literary criticism
“His name was Vasily Yegorych Knyazev. He was thirty-nine years old. He worked as a projectionist in the village. He loved detectives and dogs. As a child I dreamed of being a spy."
The plot and plot of a literary work.
Elements of the plot. Composition of a literary work.
Real and intratextual reader of a literary work.
The language of a literary work.
Precision of words in the language of literature.
The language of literature and literary language.
No matter what components of a literary work we talk about, one way or another we understand that everything in a literary text happens at the will and with the participation of the author. In literary criticism, a certain scale has long been built, indicating the degree and nature of the author’s presence in a work: author, storyteller, narrator.
The author of a literary work, a writer in Russia has traditionally been perceived as a prophet, a messiah, who is called into this world to open people's eyes to the deep, hidden meaning human existence. Pushkin’s famous lines about this:
Arise, prophet, and see and listen,
Be fulfilled by my will,
And, bypassing the seas and lands,
Burn the hearts of people with the verb.
Another poet already in the 20th century. came up with the formula: “A poet in Russia is more than a poet” (E.A. Yevtushenko). Intrinsic value artistic word, the meaning of the purpose and fate of the writer in Russia has indeed always been very high. It was believed that the author of a literary work is the one who is gifted by God's grace, someone of whom Russia is rightfully proud.
Author work of art- the person whose name is printed on the cover. Literary scholars call such an author real or biographical author, because this author has his own, very real biography and a body of written works. The writer's biography is recorded in his memoirs, in the memoirs of people who knew the writer.
Years later, the writer’s biography becomes the property of literary criticism; scientific publications of the writer’s biography appear, recreating the details of the writer’s life and work. The most important material for writing a biography are scientific publications chronicles of the writer's life and work.
The literary genre of chronicling the life and work of a writer is a detailed, strictly documented chronicle, including everything reliably known facts everyday and creative biography of the writer, the stages of his work on works (from the inception of the idea to the final publications and reissues), information about lifetime translations into foreign languages, about performances and theatrical productions based on his texts, etc.
In addition to the real (biographical) author, literary scholars distinguish intratextual author- the one on whose behalf the story is being told. An intratextual author can be endowed with his own biographical history; he can be an observer or participant in the events depicted in the work. Characteristics and ratings literary characters can be given by both a real (biographical) author and an intratextual author.
In a lyrical work, the place of the author is taken by lyrical hero, the feelings and experiences of which constitute the content lyrical work. In dramatic works, the author is eliminated in appearance; he gives his voice primarily through stage directions. The characters in a dramatic work “act” independently, exchanging remarks and monologues.
In an epic work one can find three main forms of intratextual authorial presence. The most common literary form is a third person narration. This form is so called because the author talks about the character in the third person: “Retired Major General Buldeev had a toothache. He rinsed his mouth with vodka, cognac, applied tobacco soot, opium, turpentine, kerosene to the sore tooth […] The doctor came. He picked his tooth and prescribed quinine, but that didn’t help either” (story by A.P. Chekhov “The Horse’s Name”).
Another form actively used by writers is first-person narration. Such an author is usually called narrator. He is a witness to the events he talks about. He sees events, records them, evaluates the characters, but does not interfere with events, does not become actor narratives. Such a narrator can claim that he is familiar with the characters, sometimes even closely acquainted, but it also happens that he accidentally witnessed some incident, episode, fact. For example, in the novel “A Hero of Our Time,” Maxim Maksimych is a good friend of Pechorin, who can tell him in detail. The narrator from “Notes of a Hunter” I.S. Turgenev is an eyewitness to the events that become the subject of his stories.
The third form is also a first-person narrative, but the author here transforms himself not just into a narrator, but into Storyteller(we use a capital letter to emphasize the role of the Narrator, equal to other characters). At the same time, the Narrator becomes not only a recorder of events, but also an active character in the narrative, a character like the others. The narrator is usually endowed with an individual character, psychological characteristics, details of behavior, special manners: “I thoughtfully traced with a pen the round, trembling shadow of the inkwell. The clock struck in the far room, and I, a dreamer, imagined that someone was knocking on the door, first quietly, then louder; knocked twelve times in a row and froze expectantly.
“Yes, I’m here, come in…” (story by V.V. Nabokov “Undead”).
Since the Narrator talks about other characters and himself, the main means of revealing his character is speech. The speech characteristic in this form of narration becomes so dominant that the form of narration itself began to bear the name fantastic form, or tale
Using the tale form, writers strive to diversify the narrator’s speech and emphasize the features of his individual style. This is unhurried, with the active inclusion of words indicating folk etymology (small scope - instead of a microscope, Solid Earth Sea - instead of the Mediterranean) the tale of the famous Leskovsky left-hander, these are the tales of P.P. Bazhova.
Most often, the tale form is used in works where the Narrator’s speech becomes a way of his satirical presentation. This is the Narrator in “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” by N.V. Gogol. The tale form was highly valued by M.M. Zoshchenko, with the help of his speech manner, endows his funny ordinary Narrators with such qualities as lack of education, pettiness, lack of logic in words and actions, ignorance, stinginess: “Once I stand at the cinema and wait for one lady. Here, I must say, we liked one person. Such a rather interesting childless girl, an employee. Well, of course, love. Meetings. Different to that similar words. And even writing poems on a topic that has nothing to do with construction, something like this: “A bird is jumping on a branch, the sun is shining in the sky... Accept, dear, my greetings... And something like that, I don’t remember, - ta-ta- ta-ta... it hurts..." (story by M.M. Zoshchenko "A minor incident from his personal life").
Thus, in the text we distinguish several levels of authorial presence. The author is the creator, the author is the one who leads the narrative, having complete knowledge about the events and characters, and, finally, the Storyteller in works of the fairy tale form. This is how the scale of authorial self-expression in a literary work, created in literary studies, arises: author - narrator - storyteller and above all Author - creator of a literary work.
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The Reader as a Reader We have already said that the majority of the audience of “Literary Studies” did not read too much, but it is difficult to more or less clearly determine the volume and nature of the literary products they consumed. Based on the general level of education, The author appears to be more involved in the event of the work in Only the genres of autobiographical story or autobiographical novel, as well as adjacent works with fictional characters, warmed by the light of autobiographical lyricism, present the author to a certain extent directly (in “Confession” by J.-J. Rousseau, “Poetry and Truth” by I.V. Goethe, “Before and Thoughts” by A.I. Herzen, “Poshekhon Antiquity” by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, in “The History of My Contemporary” by V.G.
Most often the author acts as narrator, leading story from third party in an extra-subjective, impersonal form. The figure has been known since the time of Homer omniscient author, knowing everything and everyone about his heroes, freely moving from one time plane to another, from one space to another. In modern literature, this method of narration, the most conventional (the narrator’s omniscience is not motivated), is usually combined with subjective forms, with the introduction storytellers, with transmission in speech formally belonging to the narrator, points of view this or that hero (for example, in “War and Peace” the reader sees the Battle of Borodino “through the eyes” of Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov). In general, in an epic, the system of narrative instances can be very complex, multi-stage, and the forms of input of “alien speech” are very diverse. The author can entrust his stories to someone he has written, to a dummy Narrator (participant in events, chronicler, eyewitness, etc.) or to narrators, who can thus be characters in their own narrative. The narrator leads first person narration; depending on its closeness/alienity to the author’s outlook, the use of this or that vocabulary, some researchers distinguish personal narrator(“Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev) and the narrator himself, with his characteristic, patterned tale (“Warrior” by N.S. Leskov) 1.
In any case, the unifying principle of the epic text is the author’s consciousness, which sheds light on the whole and on all components of the literary text. “...The cement that binds every work of art into one whole and therefore produces the illusion of a reflection of life,” wrote L.N. Tolstoy, “is not the unity of persons and positions, but the unity of the original moral attitude of the author to the subject” 2. In epic works, the author's beginning appears in different ways: as the author's point of view on the recreated poetic reality, as the author's commentary on the course of the plot, as a direct, indirect or improperly direct characterization of the heroes, as the author's description of the natural and material world, etc.
A special type of storytelling was created in the womb satirical literature of the New Age with its ironically, sarcastically portrayed narrators - “half-heroes, half-authors” 1 .
Author's image as a semantic-style category epic And lyric-epic the works are purposefully comprehended by V.V. Vinogradov as part of the theory of functional styles he developed 2. The image of the author was understood by V.V. Vinogradov as the main and multi-valued stylistic characteristic of a single work and of all fiction as a distinctive whole. Moreover, the image of the author was conceived primarily in his stylistic individualization, in his artistic and speech expression, in the selection and implementation of the corresponding lexical and syntactic units in the text, in the general compositional embodiment; The image of the author, according to Vinogradov, is the center of the artistic and speech world, revealing the author’s aesthetic relationship to the content of his own text.
A fundamentally new concept of the author as a participant in an artistic event belongs to M.M. Bakhtin. Emphasizing the deep value role of dialogue in our being I and the Other, Bakhtin believed that the author in his text “must be on the border of the world he creates as its active creator, for his intrusion into this world destroys its aesthetic stability.” The author’s internal aspiration to create a sovereign another reality capable of meaningful self-development. The logic of verbal and artistic creativity is such that the author is not engaged in self-directed processing, but in overcoming language: “The poet does not create in the world of language, he only uses language”; “The creative consciousness of the author-artist never coincides with linguistic consciousness; linguistic consciousness is only a moment, a material entirely controlled by a purely artistic task.” According to Bakhtin, the author, using language as matter and overcoming it as material (just as in the hands of a sculptor marble ceases to “persist like marble” and, obedient to the will of the master, expresses plastically the forms of the body), in accordance with his internal task, expresses something new content 3.
The author’s problem reaches particular acuteness in connection with the always relevant and controversial tasks interpretations literary work, analytical-emotional penetration into a literary text, in connection with the reader’s direct perception of artistic literature. In the modern culture of communication with literary texts, two major trends that have a long and complex pedigree.
One of them recognizes complete or almost complete omnipotence in a dialogue with a literary text reader, his unconditional and natural right to freedom of perception of a poetic work, to freedom from the author, from obediently following the author’s concept embodied in the text, to independence from the author’s will and position. Going back to the works of W. Humboldt, AL. Potebni, this point of view was embodied in the works of representatives of the psychological school of literary criticism of the 20th century. AG. Gornfeld wrote about a work of art: “Complete, detached from the creator, it is free from his influence, it has become a playground of historical fate, for it has become an instrument of someone else’s creativity: the creativity of those who perceive. We need the artist’s work precisely because it is the answer to our questions: our, for the artist did not set them for himself and could not foresee them<...>every new reader of Hamlet is, as it were, his new author...” 1 . Yu.I. Aikhenwald offered his own maxim on this matter: “The reader will never read exactly what the writer wrote” 2 .
The extreme expression of this position is that the author’s text becomes only a pretext for subsequent active reader receptions, literary adaptations, willful translations into the languages of other arts, etc. Consciously or unintentionally, the reader’s arrogant categorism and categorical judgments are justified. In the practice of school, and sometimes special philological education, confidence in the limitless power of the reader over a literary text is born, and the hard-won M.I. Tsvetaeva’s formula is “My Pushkin,” and involuntarily another one comes into being, going back to Gogol’s Khlestakov: “On friendly terms with Pushkin.”
In the second half of the 20th century. The “reader-centric” point of view has been taken to its extreme limit. Roland Barthes, focusing on the so-called poststructuralism in literary literature and philological science and announcing the text is a zone of exclusively linguistic interests, capable of bringing the reader mainly playful pleasure and satisfaction, argued that in verbal and artistic creativity “traces of our subjectivity are lost”, “all self-identity and, first of all, the bodily identity of the writer disappears”, “the voice is torn away from its source , death comes for the author." Artistic text, according to R. Barth, is an extra-subjective structure, and the owner-manager, co-natural with the text itself, is the reader: “... the birth of the reader has to be paid for with the death of the Author” 3. Despite its proud shockingness and extravagance, the concept death of the author, developed by R. Barth, helped to focus philological research attention on the deep semantic-associative roots that precede the observed text and constitute its genealogy, which is not fixed by the author’s consciousness (“texts within a text”, dense layers of involuntary literary reminiscences and connections, archetypal images, etc.).
Another trend in research and reader communication with a literary text has in mind the fundamental the secondary nature of reader creativity. In the Russian aesthetic tradition, this tendency goes back to Pushkin’s call to judge the writer “according to the laws he has recognized above himself” 1 .
A.P. Skaftymov, in his 1922 article “On the question of the relationship between theoretical and historical consideration in the history of literature,” noted: “No matter how much we talk about the reader’s creativity in the perception of a work of art, we still know that the reader’s creativity is secondary, it is in its own direction and edges is determined by the object of perception. The reader is still led by the author, and he demands obedience in following his creative path. And a good reader is one who knows how to find in himself a breadth of understanding and give himself to the author” 2. The connection between the writer and the reader is mutual, inverse. And if the reader likes/dislikes this or that author, then, therefore, first of all, the reader himself liked/did not like the author, as they say, to his taste, and did not become an interesting interlocutor/empathizer for the author. Its really the last word the author has already said in the work. A literary text, with all its complex polysemy, has an objective artistic and semantic core, and the author, with the work itself, with its entire multi-level structure, marks and chooses his reader, patiently waits for him and conducts a confidential dialogue with him. “The composition of the work,” wrote A.P. Skaftymov, “carries within himself the norms of his interpretation” 3 . According to Bakhtin, the author enters into a relationship with the reader not as a specific biographical person, not as another person, not as a literary hero, but primarily as a “principle to be followed.” In the artistic world, the author, according to Bakhtin, is the “authoritative leader” of the reader 4.
L.V. Chernets DESTINATION
It is difficult to overestimate the role of the reading public in the literary process: after all, the fate of the book depends on its approval (the silent path), indignation or complete indifference. Readers' debates about the character of the hero, the convincingness of the denouement, the symbolism of the landscape, etc. - this is the best evidence of the “life” of an artistic work. “As for my last work: “Fathers and Sons,” I can only say that I stand amazed at its effect,” writes I.S. Turgenev P.V. Annenkov 1.
But the reader makes his presence known not only when the work is completed and offered to him. It is present in the consciousness (or subconscious) of the writer in the very act of creativity, influencing the result. Sometimes the thought of the reader is framed as an artistic image.
To denote the reader’s participation in the processes of creativity and perception, various terms are used: in the first case - addressee (imaginary, implicit, internal reader); in the second - real reader (public, recipient). In addition, they highlight reader's image in work 2. Here we will talk about the reader-addressee of creativity, some related problems (mainly based on the material of Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries).
This concept was introduced into the literary apparatus in the 1920s; in the works of A.I. Beletsky, V.N. Voloshinov’s “imaginary reader” (listener) is contrasted with the “real”. In 1922 A.I. Beletsky proposed a classification of reader groups, in which the first are the “fictitious” or “imaginary” interlocutors of the writer (most often not coinciding with real-life contemporaries). At the same time, the “imaginary reader” was perceived by scientists not as optional (characteristic, for example, of the works of A.S. Pushkin, N.A. Nekraeov, O.E. Mandelstam, who have poems, judgments about their reader), but as inevitable an accomplice in the creation of a work, influencing its style. “In studying poets, we rarely take into account these imaginary interlocutors; and yet it is they who would often help us in our efforts to understand both the methods of creativity and the entire poetics of the poet; in every work of art... there is an imperative hidden more or less skillfully; every speech always has an impact in mind” 3.
In 1926 V.N. Voloshinov (M.M. Bakhtin), considering “utterance” (to which he included a work of art) as social communication, emphasized the style-forming function of “that listener who is taken into account by the author himself...” 4.
The selection of the “imaginary reader” (“addressee”) as a subject of special study emphasizes dialogical the beginning of creativity, its focus on the reader. The literary text appears as the embodiment of a certain program impact(the impact of a work must be distinguished from its perception, where the active party is the reader).
An analogy with oratory is appropriate here, the main goal of which is to convince the listener. According to Aristotle, “speech is composed of three elements: from the speaker himself, from the subject about which he speaks, and from the person to whom he addresses; this is the ultimate goal of everything (I mean the listener).” Since the issues being discussed allow for “the possibility of a double solution,” it is necessary to influence both the mind and the feelings of the listener. This implies the importance for the speaker of knowledge of human nature (passions, morals, virtues and vices) and characteristics given listener. Thus, one should speak differently with people of different ages: young men “live more by their hearts than by calculations,” old people “are guided more by calculations than by their hearts,” while in their mature years they adhere to “proper proportions” in everything. A powerful means of influence is style, in particular the choice of epithet, metaphor: “... you can create epithets based on the bad or shameful, for example, [the epithet] “matricide,” but you can also create them based on the good, for example, “avenger of the father.” " 1 .
Any comparison is lame: the speaker firmly knows what he wants, the writer - relatively rarely (“Did I want to scold Bazarov or extol him? I don’t know that myself,” 2 Turgenev admits to A.A. Fet); in fiction, unlike rhetorical practice, the addressee usually differs sharply from the real reader. These differences are aggravated by differences in communication channels and the enormous role of intermediaries (publishers, editors, booksellers, etc.) in the world of the printed word. E.A. Baratynsky contrasted the ancient Greek orators and “pets of the muses” who speak directly to the audience with modern authors who entrust the fate of their work to the printing press:
But there are no marketplaces for our thought, But there is no forum for our thought!.. Between us, the poet does not know, Whether his flight is high or not, How great is the creative thought.
("Rhyme")
And yet there is a similarity between these two arts of speech: thinking about the subject of speech (inventio), its construction { dispositio) and stylistics (elocutio) 1 , both the speaker and the literary writer seek the impact of speech.
Valuable material for understanding “imaginary readers” are statements on this topic by the writers themselves (in letters and diaries, articles, as well as in works). Taken together, they give a very varied picture and indicate a wide range of addressees. So, L.N. Tolstoy liked to call his novels “universal”, or “collective letters”, following the expression he liked: “Une composition est une lettre, qu"on e"crit a tous ses amis inconnus" (French: An essay is a letter addressed to to all unknown friends). But in 1887, during the period of writing “People’s Stories,” Tolstoy’s addressee was “not a writer, editor, official, student, etc., but a 50-year-old well-literate peasant,” in front of whom “you will not talk empty and unnecessary , and you will speak clearly, concisely and meaningfully." “FurWenige” (German: “For the few”) - this is what V.A. called one of his collections of poetic translations. Zhukovsky; the circle of these “few” included kindred female souls - “a very attractive address for creativity” 4. K.I. Chukovsky “would never have dared to start writing... “Moidodyrov” if he had not tried to find out in advance what the needs and tastes of young “readers” were; as a result, he develops “six commandments” for children’s poets (the first of them is a verbal plate: “in every stanza, and sometimes in every couplet, there must be material for the artist”)” 5.
Can become a hypothetical reader (usually in a situation of conflict between writers and the public) descendant like E.A. Baratynsky: “...And just as I found a friend in a generation,/I will find a reader in posterity” (“My gift is poor, and my voice is not loud...”). Or from M. Tsvetaeva:
Scattered in the dust in stores (Where no one took them and does not take them!), My poems, like precious wines, will have their turn.
(“To my poems written so early...”)
The identification of these three tasks of composition has traditionally united “poetics” and “rhetoric”. Commentator on “Poetics” Yu.Ts. Scaliger (1561) ML. Andreev notes “... the process of creating a literary work is divided into inventio” (for a rhetorician - analysis of material, for a poet - choice of topic), “dispositio” (compositional organization of a topic), “elocutio” (verbal expression - selection and combination of words, poetic figures and tropes). (Literary manifestos of Western European classicists. M., 1980. P. 512.)
However, the thought or dream of your reader (even the future) does not always accompany creativity. In the statements of writers one can find opposing judgments on this matter. Literary activity without confidence in the receptivity of the reader M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin compared it to “a boundless field overgrown with thistles, in the naked space of which a voice is heard aimlessly crying in the desert” (cycle “Little Things in Life”). Moreover, he valued the rare “reader-friend”, who was greatly squeezed by the “reader-hater”, “respectable” and “simple” (this is the classification proposed in the same cycle). After the closure of “Notes of the Fatherland” (1884), the satirist with great pain wrote: “I see that my connection with the reader has been interrupted, and I must admit, I only loved this semi-abstract person called the “reader”” 1.
Oscar Wilde had a completely different mindset, writing at about the same time (in 1890) in connection with critics’ attacks on the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (as if it was corrupting the public) the following: “The artist works, concentrating entirely on the subject depicted. Nothing else interests him. He doesn’t think about what people will say, it doesn’t even occur to him! He is absorbed in his work. He is indifferent to the opinions of others. I write because writing is my greatest artistic pleasure. If my work is liked by a select few, I'm happy about it. If not, I'm not upset. As for the crowd, I don’t want to be a popular novelist. It's too easy." 2.
But Wilde’s declared indifference to the real reader is not indifference to artistic structure and its impact, the force of which the author - first the reader of his text checks it for himself. “Mine gold by sifting,” advises L.N. Tolstoy A.A. Fet, who wrote the story “The Goltz Family.” “Just sit down and rewrite the whole story first, criticizing yourself...” 3 According to I.A. Bunin, “the writing of every word in “War and Peace” is at the same time the strictest weighing, the most subtle assessment of this word” 4.
The attitude towards self-expression par excellence is usually combined with the idea of a certain ideal reader-alter ego of the author. A.S. Griboedov explains to P.A. Katenin, who, based on the norms of classicism, blamed the arbitrary connection of scenes in “Woe from Wit”: “I write for my own kind, and when I guess the tenth scene from the first scene, I gape and run out of the theater” 5. L.N. Tolstoy, while working on “Childhood,” prepared for the strictest judgment: “Every writer has in mind a special category of ideal readers for his work. You need to clearly define for yourself the requirements of these ideal readers, and if in reality there are at least two such readers in the whole world - write only for them" 1 .
The presence of an addressee already follows from communicative functions of speaking and writing. “It does not directly depend on the authors who reads what they write. However, the attitude towards the reader, mediated by the addressee, is immanent in the act of writing” 2, emphasizes M. Na-uman in his criticism monologue creativity concepts. The impossibility of publication is usually experienced by the author as a tragedy (N.G. Chernyshevsky, M.A. Bulgakov, A.I. Solzhenitsyn).
Writers' judgments about the intended reader are an authoritative and important source; the collection and systematization of such materials is a necessary stage of literary research. But this source is more reliable in psychological, than in fact. Isn’t Baratynsky in his poems addressing, in addition to the unknown “distant descendant of mine,” the poetic fraternity well known to him, and above all to A.S. Pushkin, his most attentive reader and admirer? In Pushkin's letters there are a scattering of comments about his friend-poet; here is one of them: “Baratynsky is a charm and a miracle, “Confession” is perfection. After him I will never begin to print my elegies...” (from a letter to A.A. Bestuzhev dated January 12, 1824) 3. And in “Eugene Onegin” the author remembers precisely “the singer of Feasts and tender sadness” when he dreams of an ideal translation into Russian of the “foreign words” of Tatyana’s letter (chapter 3, stanza XXX).
The key to the future wide recognition of the writer’s work, one or another of his works, underestimated by his contemporaries, is the sound of lonely friendly voices. The fact that Baratynsky “neighs and fights” when reading “Belkin’s Tales” gives Pushkin the determination to publish them 4 .
The study of the writer’s immediate literary environment (microenvironment), his first readers, whose opinions he especially valued (like Pushkin - by the court of P.A. Vyazemsky, Turgenev - P.V. Annenkov, Tolstoy - N.N. Strakhov), allows us to specify the features addressee, one way or another always correlated with a real reader.
The evolution of worldview and creativity is usually accompanied by changes in the microenvironment and, as a consequence, a “redirection” of works. According to the conclusions of A.I. Beletsky, for N.A. Nekrasov in the 1840-1850s, the imaginary reader is “a kind of collective person, with individual features of Turgenev, Botkin, Druzhinin, Annenkov - an idealist, an esthete and a sybarite; despite all the desire to be independent, Nekrasov is afraid of him<...>But from the 50s and 60s, next to this interlocutor in Nekrasov’s imagination, another began to emerge, already embodied once in the figure of a citizen in a famous poem; this is also a strict critic, but at the same time a teacher who shows the way; again an image woven from real elements - from the images of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, the revolutionary youth of the 60s, whose Tyrtaeus Nekrasov wanted to be at all costs. And behind these two interlocutors stands the grandiose figure of a third, with whom one critic characterized Nekrasov’s relationship as a romance; this Third is a people, a touching and mysterious image, much less real than the previous ones: that distant unknown friend, the thought of whom inspires Nekrasov’s muse for her most energetic flights” 1 .
The ideological quest of the poet, known from biographical and other materials, is directly captured in literary texts; analysis of the program of a specific, targeted impact embodied in them is the main argument in the reconstruction of a hypothetical reader. The “program” of the impact of a work is obviously already its perception potential, in the disclosure of which the many-sided and unexpected real reader participates - “all unknown friends” (according to Tolstoy’s favorite expression): both contemporaries and descendants. The work is created Here And Now and is aimed at a reader who can understand it. It's already begun (title, genre designation, first paragraph) creates a certain horizon of expectation, which may or may not correspond to the amount of cultural memory, aesthetic norms, habitual associations, and finally, the life experience of the reader 2. The most important regulator of aesthetic communication is genre designation works; French researcher P. Kohler even compared genres to “contracts between producers and consumers of art” 1 . Many genre concepts focus on communicative, the “pragmatic” function of genres, on how writers take into account the expectations that the words “novel”, “comedy”, “melodrama”, etc. evoke in the public.
Used in the work "codes"(in particular, the system of allegories, quotes, solid shapes verse), may not be understood or simply not noticed by an insufficiently prepared reader. Thus, the smell of cannabis in Turgenev’s “Ace” or “Bezhin Meadow” awakens the feeling of homeland in the Russian heart. The motif of pallor in the portrait characteristics of the main characters of Pushkin’s story “The Snowstorm” suggests in the reader an ironic attitude towards romantic cliches. Sonnet, terzas, octave are addressed to connoisseurs stanzas, sensitive to semantic halo of solid forms; not recognized by the reader metric quotation can turn into misunderstanding general plan poems (cf. “On the Death of Zhukov” by I.A. Brodsky and “Snigir” by G.R. Derzhavin). “Urbi et orbi” (Latin: To the city and the world) - the very name of this book of poems by V. Bryusov limits the number of his hypothetical readers. Abundance reminiscences in "Ulysses" by J. Joyce refers to Homer's "Odyssey". And the semantics of color among the symbolists will only be understood by an initiate who knows the corresponding code (“Do not confuse "red With purple. They're breaking down here<...>The color purple is noumenal, and red is phenomenal,” A. Bely parodied the conversation between two theosophists 3).
But the most serious obstacle on the way to understanding the author’s concept is not semiotic, but ideological, existential properties. This is a difference in the system of moral values, worldview as a whole, life experience, etc., which is usually very clearly and violently manifested in reader discussions, for example, in the rejection by many groups of readers of “immoral” novels (“A Hero of Our Time”, “Madame Bovary”, “Portrait of Dorian Gray", "Ulysses") 4.
The correspondence of a work to the typical horizons of public expectation, of course, contributes to its success. functioning, however, at the same time it threatens the rapid oblivion of the work, where everything is too familiar and recognizable (the use genre and thematic canons- in the era of the dominance of individual styles - especially characteristic of mass literature). Artistic discoveries, as a rule, at first complicate perception: they entail a change and expansion of the reader’s horizon, develop and educate taste. This was the case, for example, with Pushkin’s “Belkin’s Stories,” which was polemical in relation to the romantic and other stereotypes that prevailed in 1830 (Belkin, as stated in the preface “From the Publisher,” suffered from “lack of imagination”).
Wanting to be understood, writers often resort to self-interpretation, self-criticism(especially if the work is acutely problematic, experimental in genre and style). They write articles and give presentations: “About Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons””, “A few words about Tolstoy’s book “War and Peace””, “Introduction to “The Magic Mountain””, “Report for students of Princeton University” T. Manna. The works introduced into the text serve the same purpose. retreats on literary topics, creation reader's image(“The Story of Tom Jones, a Foundling” by G. Fielding, “Eugene Onegin” by Pushkin, “Dead Souls” by Gogol, “What to Do?” by Chernyshevsky, “Gentlemen of Tashkent” by Saltykov-Shchedrin, “Beyond the Distance” by Tvardovsky). The traditional zone of auto-interpretation is frame components of the text: titles And subheadings, epigraphs And dedications, author's prefaces, afterwords, - and even notes(“Don Juan” by Byron, “Eugene Onegin” by Pushkin). Often these prefaces, afterwords, and notes are crafty and ambiguous, and it is in this capacity that they are components of an artistic whole (for example, Cervantes’s preface to Don Quixote). Sometimes this is a direct hoax: for example, V. Nabokov prefaced “Lolita” with a foreword signed by a certain John Ray, Ph.D. The author enters into polemics with this dummy reviewer, concerned about moral issues and their interpretation in the novel, in the afterword to Lolita (1958 edition). John Ray's judgments, introduced into the structure of the book, are an anticipation of the typical reader reaction, more positive than negative (the reviewer emphasizes in Lolita its “moral impact on the serious reader”), but not at all pleasing to the author: “...what would No matter what dear John Ray said, “Lolita” is not at all a tugboat dragging a barge of morality behind it. For me, a story or a novel exists only because it gives me what I will simply call aesthetic pleasure...”
N.A. Kafidova THE READER AS A PROBLEM OF POETICS
The purpose of the article is an attempt to analyze the reader’s existing theories, outlining problem areas and promising points; Having considered the history of the formation of terms and the modern terminological spectrum, identify the existing typology of readers (real, imaginary, explicit, implicit). The main object of the study is the reader as a phenomenon immanent in the work, the reader as a category of poetics, factors of addressing in a work of art.
Key words: reader, poetics, reader theories, real reader, imaginary reader, explicit reader, implicit reader.
There is no doubt that the reader research problem is becoming increasingly important in the literary and theoretical thought of the 20th century. If we talk about receptive issues as a view of a work from the point of view of its impact on the audience, then we can admit that the reader’s problem has ancient history: scientists note its emergence back in antiquity - in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Horace and other thinkers. The interest in the reader in our era is undeniable. The reader in all his faces is recognized as an indispensable participant in the literary process. The real reader became the subject of literary reflection, as it became clear that the functioning of a work often begins before the completion of work on the text. At this time, interest also arose in the imaginary reader, the “ideal” addressee, existing in the mind of the author and influencing the process of creating the work. In both cases
© Kafidova N.A., 2010
the figure of the reader becomes “not so much a subject of theoretical, literary and aesthetic reflection, but rather an object of interest literary criticism, history of literature, sociology, psychology, pedagogy and related humanities"1. According to L.V. Chernets, the study of a real reader can become a legitimate subject of literary criticism, if the subject of study is not the real readers themselves, their worldview, degree of preparedness, tastes, but the meaning of the work. The study of a real reader will have certain literary reasons if the study of the public’s attitude towards a work makes it possible to understand the possibilities of its potential perception contained in the text, the internal readiness of the work to influence the reader2.
Finally, a view is formed on the work as a communicative event of communication between the author, the hero and the reader, which leads to the reader’s awareness of the implicit and explicit. Thus, on the one hand, there arises the idea of the reader as a co-creator of an aesthetic event, a bearer of “formative activity” (M.M. Bakhtin). The meaning of a work of art is no longer perceived as ready-made; rather, it is seen as a potential that needs to be realized in the act of perception: “the artistic meaning is actualized by the reader’s consciousness as complementary to the author’s consciousness manifested in the text”3. Every meaning is intersubjective: it “requires a plurality of consciousnesses”, “it can be actualized only by coming into contact with another (alien) meaning, at least with a question in the inner speech of the understander”4. The complexity of the communicative organization of the work, the presence of several levels and several pairs of senders/recipients are also realized; the term “explicit reader” arises to designate the addressee of the subject of speech. Interest in the reader in the creative reflection of writers of the 20th century has been noted more than once in science. (“Reader” by Gumilyov, “About the interlocutor” by Mandelstam, “About good readers And good writers"Nabokov).
However, the reader's problem has not been sufficiently studied. The reader's aspect in literary theory still remains poorly understood. If we compare the degree of study of the participants in a communicative event, we must admit that both the author and the hero have been studied this moment much more complete. The terminology is fixed in dictionaries, educational and specialized literature: the author-creator is compared with the biographical author, the image of the author and various subjects of speech. And although the scientist rightly notes that “for all the fundamental differences between
two main meanings of the term (the author as real face and the author as a subject aesthetic activity) they often do not differ, since the need to explain the work and its meaning is considered as a reason for searching for the sources of both in the psychology and biography of its creator”5, yet the impossibility of mixing and identifying various subjects of the author’s plan is understood in much to a greater extent than a similar problem in the reading area. The essence, functions, goals and nature of the author’s activity as the creator of artistic completion have been studied. The author's position is outlined, tools for its detection in a work of art are developed, and ideas about the forms of the author's presence and methods for its detection in works of various types of literature are clarified. “Changing stages and artistic directions in the interpretation of the category of author-creator”6. Historical poetics has studied the status of the author as a subject of aesthetic activity at various stages of the development of literature.
The third participant in the aesthetic event - the hero - is also carefully studied. Terminology has been developed in relation to the characters: in the scientific literature and in the practice of analysis, a character is compared with a hero, character, type, character. The functional differences between the hero and the character are realized; the concept of “character” is correlated with the concepts of “type” and “character”. Historical poetics has also largely explored the character sphere at different stages of the development of literature. There are serious studies devoted to the relationship between the author and the hero, literary hero as such and the structure of the character, the history of the character and type, etc.
Against this background, the searching state of the reader's theory becomes obvious. In a textbook on historical poetics, for example, the status of a work is declared as an aesthetic object, the architectonics of which is determined by the relationships of the subjects of the aesthetic event (author, hero and reader), and the author's and hero's components of the subjective organization are traced at each stage of the development of literature, while the reader's aspect still remains unclear. The conceptual and terminological sphere is extremely wide: real reader, addressee, hypothetical reader (M. Nauman), image of the audience (Yu.M. Lotman), overaddressee, listener, contemplator, reader (M.M. Bakhtin), image of the reader. The term “imaginary reader,” introduced into literary use by A. Beletsky, gained particular popularity. The widest terminological spectrum is observed in Western literary criticism: abstract reader (V. Schmid), exemplary
reader (W. Eco), arch-reader (M. Riffaterre), implicit reader (V. Iser), informed reader (S. Fish), imaginary reader (Wolf).
Analysis scientific literature allows us to suggest that the result of scientific reflection dedicated to the reader was the formation of a typology of readers based on the division of his four hypostases: a real reader (a participant in the literary process; empirically a real man); imaginary reader (ideal addressee existing in the mind of the biographical author); explicit reader (one of the varieties of internal addressee, an explicit or implied interlocutor to whom the narrator’s speech is addressed); implicit reader (presumed by the entire structure of the work as a subject who perceives it holistically). An analysis of the scientific literature showed that, firstly, the maturation of these categories was a long process and has not yet been enshrined in dictionaries, educational and specialized literature. Secondly, an analysis of the abundance of the author’s concepts of the reader (already indicated in our work and listed more than once in the scientific literature) revealed that the amazingly wide terminological spectrum nevertheless does not lead to the emergence of any other type of reader (except for the four indicated), but Consequently, when working with this literature, it is necessary to “translate” terms from one scientific tradition to another (the choice remains with the researcher), enriching ideas about the essence of the reader’s position, the reader’s place in the structure of the work of art, its functions, but without obtaining other figures of the reader’s plan.
The “maturing” of terms, as the study revealed, is a long and difficult process. The reader as a literary and theoretical problem was recognized in Russia back in the 20s. XX century A.I. Beletsky formulated the need to study the reader, his tastes and their evolution, the one-sidedness of the history of literature only as the history of writers. According to the scientist, it is the readers who are the criterion aesthetic value of a work of art, creating its “idea, which the writer is often unaware of”7. At the same time, it should be noted that Beletsky is primarily interested in real and imaginary readers. Beletsky's theoretical approach to considering the history of the reader primarily as the history of an imaginary reader, like the term “imaginary reader” itself, became the basis of many theories of the reader in Russia in the 1970-1980s, when interest in the reader was revived again.
Analysis of “reader studies” works of the 1920-2000s. showed that the main attention in the works of this time is paid to the real reader and the imaginary reader. Both are perceived as objects and subjects of the literary process: the author’s idea of his likely reader-addressee determines “the ideological and aesthetic position of the author, his angle of view on what is depicted, special artistic selectivity, thematic, genre, plot-but-compositional, artistic- speech selection"8. These studies are characterized by vagueness and unreflective terminology: thus, Beletsky, recognizing the imaginary reader as part of the author’s consciousness, still considers it possible to detect it not only in memoirs, correspondence, but also in the works themselves; authors often place the real reader in the structure of the author’s consciousness, thereby depriving the very existence of the concept of “real reader” of meaning. It is difficult to agree with the opinion that “the stage of “zero passage” was overcome already in the 1970s. as the vague figure of the reader began to take on more specific theoretical and literary outlines”9. Referring to Prozorov’s book, the author of the article states that “as in Western literature, in Russia it was in the 1970s. a distinction was made at the theoretical level between real and literary readers”10. In Prozorov’s work, the reader-recipient is indeed opposed to the reader-addressee, but the essence of the latter is clarified to the most insignificant extent. Thus, there is no doubt that the main direction of the scientist’s understanding of the addressee coincides with the idea of an imaginary reader, but in some cases it is obvious that the scientist, calling this reader still internal, is no longer talking about an imaginary reader. So, for example, the scientist says that “the imaginary reader influences both the process and the final result writing work; his image is imprinted in the work itself.”11 The scientist looks for “traces” of the imaginary reader in the text, rather than reconstructing the supposed reader from the text. Or he does both, but calls it all a search for traces of the internal reader in the text. By internal reader we also mean an explicit reader (the scientist refers to cases when “the reader becomes the object of the author’s teasing, ridicule, even mockery”12 and thus “we get an idea of such a likely interlocutor, on whose primary attention the artist relies” (author speaks of an imaginary reader, but in modern terminology it is an implicit reader).
Thus, it is difficult to agree that the figure of the reader at this time had already gained clarity. Rather, it must be stated that Soviet literary criticism mainly interested in
both real and imagined by readers. Collections are published with telling titles “The Reader in the Creative Consciousness of Russian Writers”, the subject of research of which is the reader’s perception as one of the facets of the writer’s creative thinking, as a creative model that exists in the author’s mind. The authors themselves define the concept of their collection as “an attempt to determine the role of the intended and real reader’s perception in the artistic thinking and creative laboratory of the author.” Scientists are concerned not with the question of the reader’s position created by the text, but with the question of the biographical reader’s position assumed by the author and the degree to which it is reflected in the text (see: Yukhnovich V.I. “The Imaginary Reader” by L. Tolstoy and his role in the creation of the introductory scene of “War and Peace” "). Of the two components of the relationship between the reader and the text (the reader shapes the style of the work and is shaped by it), authors are only interested in the first component. Without distinguishing between the biographical author and the conceptual author, scientists are thereby deprived of the opportunity to distinguish between the imaginary and the implicit reader. The concept of an implicit reader has not yet been found in Russian works of this time; some of its functions (as well as the functions of an explicit reader) and features are unconsciously transferred to the imaginary reader, which is an absolute obstacle to a clear and productive study of types of readers. The reader imagined by most scientists is included in the structure of a work of art. The terminological unity of the author's concepts of biographical, conceptual and even the subjects of the image in the work (narrator and storyteller) is closely related to the lack of reflection on the specifics of the imaginary reader. It is isolated and determined on the basis of all kinds of extra-textual statements of the biographical author, but nevertheless, scientists do not simply look for its traces in the figure of the addressee formed by the text, but actually identify the subject of perception, ideal for the biographical author, and the subject of perception formed by the entire text (the author conceptualized). The imaginary reader is able, being within the text, to have his own position in relation to it. It should be recognized that this practice of inaccurate use of terminology is characteristic not only of the studies discussed above, but also of many works of the 1990s. generally. The imaginary reader and the implicit reader are not yet clearly defined: the implicit reader is also found outside the text, at the same time the text becomes a source for determining the characteristics of the imaginary reader. Meanwhile
That confusion in the concepts of explicit, implicit, imaginary reader (a mixture of explicit and implicit, implicit and imaginary) that we observed in special works, is also noted in dictionaries. So, for example, in the dictionary by Wilpert G. von “Sachwoerterbuch der Literatur” two types of readers are distinguished: the real reader and the unreal reader (while we know, in addition to the real reader, three more ideas about the reader). Thus, it can be assumed that the unreal reader either refers to explicit, implicit and imaginary readers, or its definition mixes the features of these three reader hypostases. The second assumption turns out to be correct. Examples of such vague definitions can be multiplied endlessly.
At the same time, it should be noted that recently works have appeared in which the reader is aware of his different guises, and the terminology is fixed. N.D. Tamarchenko, in a textbook on the theory of literature, not only defines the position of the perceiving subject in relation to two aspects of the work (the text and the world of the hero), but also pays special attention to the very concept of “reader”. The scientist identifies two polar meanings of this term: the historical-real reader, the concrete reader, the extra-textual subject of perception and the “image of the reader, i.e. certain character created by the author and existing within the work”13. Particularly important, according to the researcher, for poetics is the third meaning that connects these poles: “The reader is also a subject of co-creative activity, “programmed” by the author”14. This aspect is captured by the special term of modern narratology “implicit reader” (as opposed to “explicit”, from the image of the reader inside the work). Within this third approach, the scientist identifies three possible interpretations of the implicit reader. Thus, only the figure of the imaginary reader is outside the sphere of interest of the scientist; all the others are realized and precisely defined. In a later dictionary of poetics, the author of the article “Reader” S.P. Lavlinsky already gives a four-part typology of the reader. In the dictionary “Modern foreign literary criticism (Western European countries and the USA): concepts, schools, terms. Encyclopedic reference book" already consistently distinguishes between implicit and explicit readers.
At present, apparently, it is possible to state that the conceptual sphere in this area is well-formed (which does not negate the frequent confusion of the designated reader interpretation strategies both in theoretical works and in the practice of specific analysis of a work).
It is obvious that special attention was paid to two aspects of the reader, which are not related to the domain of poetics. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the reader as a category of poetics was poorly studied (since the figure of the reader was studied mainly in the aspects of the history of literature, aesthetics, psychology of creativity and perception), there was and was continued the tradition of studying the reader as a phenomenon immanent in the work (implicit and explicit reader). The merit of resolving the dispute about the existence of the reader as a phenomenon immanent in the work, determining its form from within, belongs to M.M. Bakhtin. Without using the specified terminology, the scientist succinctly but accurately characterizes the connection between the work and the reader (in all its faces). The scientist emphasizes the exceptional importance of the role of others in the formation of statements. In his opinion, the other is not a passive listener, but an active participant, towards whose answer the entire utterance is built. For the first time, the idea is clearly formulated that the style of utterance is determined not only by the subject of speech and speech intent, the speech will of the speaker, but also by “the attitude of the speaker to another and his statements (present and anticipated)”15 (present utterances - the real reader, anticipated - imaginary or implicit ). Each speech genre, according to the author, has its own typical concept of the addressee that defines it as a genre. Ignoring the role of the listener is unforgivable mistake, because “to whom the statement is addressed, how the speaker (or writer) feels and imagines his addressees, what is the strength of their influence on the statement - the composition and, in particular, the style of the statement depend on this”16. Bakhtin also speaks about the historicity of the addressee’s concepts: a special understanding of one’s reader is characteristic of each era, each literary direction, for each literary and artistic style and genre (about the implicit reader). In addition, the scientist talks about differences in taking into account the addressee, anticipating his response and the degree of his influence on the construction of the statement in different speech genres: from very simple (difference in the amount of specialized knowledge of the reader of popular scientific and specialized educational literature) to “multilateral, complex and intense, introducing a kind of internal drama-
tism in statements (in some types of everyday dialogue, in letters, in autobiographical and confessional genres)”17. In fact, the scientist here is talking about some criteria for a possible classification of types of implicit readers, about those features of their structure on the basis of which they can be distinguished.
Bakhtin distinguishes between implicit and explicit readers. An important point in the theory of the reader M. Bakhtin is the distinction between “real sensations and ideas of their addressee, which really determine the style of statements (works)” and “conditional or semi-conditional forms of appeal to readers, listeners, descendants, etc., just as along with the actual author there are the same conventional and semi-conventional images of dummy authors, publishers, storytellers of various kinds”18. In this passage, without using narratological terminology, M. Bakhtin essentially separates the concepts of implicit and explicit reader, defining the first as a form- and style-forming “figure”, and the second as literary image in the system of other images of a work of art. Currently, the reader as “a receptive function of the text, not identified either with its actual reader or with the conventional (“explicit”)”19, is generally recognized. The term is enshrined in dictionaries, as part of educational literature, there is a significant amount of theoretical research in which the reader is described as “the pole of adequate response understanding” (V.I. Tyupa), a position that any individual can and should take in order to be a full-fledged addressee of this statements (Foucault), the reader, assumed by the entire structure of the work as a subject who perceives it holistically (V. Markovich). Works devoted to this topic are listed in the scientific literature more than once. As already noted, “the specification of theoretical ideas about the reader largely depends on the type of aesthetic convention formed at a certain stage in the development of literature, as well as on the aesthetic experience of the researcher”20. Each new school updates its own aspects of the reader’s characteristics, his essence and functions (hermeneutics creates a theory and methodology of interpretation; V. Iser, paying main attention to the “potential of the text,” which is infinitely broader than any individual interpretations, creates a theory of the implicit reader as a “universal text structure, providing for many possible reactions of the reader and involving the synthesis of disparate receptive attitudes and impressions from the reading process”; Jauss studies the “horizon of expectation”, its historically determined changes and its intra-textual conditionality associated with it.
with the presence in the text of “special receptive signals that set the reader’s expectations”; structuralists are interested different kinds“code” specification of the text; poststructuralists create well-known theory the reader as a new creator of a work of art; W. Eco considers the reader as an “active interpretative principle”, studies the nature of his activity, its components, distinguishes works by the degree of the reader’s participation in its completion, etc.). Discussion has also been mastered by science, reflecting the difference in views on the reader as an element artistic structure, subject artistic activity(which can be attributed varying degrees activity). So, for example, N.D. Tamarchenko identifies three possible interpretations of the implicit reader.
A) “The Ideal Reader” by Yu.M. Lotman and B.O. Corman, “but the reader is not a pickup” when playing a record. “Active perception,” which is usually meant, is not the same as adequate reproduction of the finished product. And not only that: it is not even the same as co-creation, when the latter is understood as “completing” an aesthetic object intentionally “under-created” by the author (even if the text is complete): such co-creation is just the work of the reader’s imagination, allowing one to fill in those specially created by the author (using omissions or uncertainty) gaps in the image of the subject (for example, a contour image or a depiction of the characters’ appearance completely omitted by the author).
B) Reader-co-creator, following the will of the author and at the same time actively completing the work of R. Ingarden and M.M. Bakhtin. R. Ingarden explains the reader’s activity using the term “construction”: “the function of the contemplator is not reproduction, even with the completion of construction of an aesthetic object, but construction, but construction according to a given, and not arbitrary, scheme and logic.” Bakhtin puts forward, in contrast to the concept of the “ideal” reader, the idea of a fundamentally and essentially “replenishing” perception of a work of art. “From the point of view of the Russian philosopher, the reconstruction of an aesthetic object (the world of the hero as the bearer of a value system) is an answer, not a repetition”; the function of the reader's response is aesthetic completion, that is, “establishing the boundary between the hero’s world as artistic reality and the extra-aesthetic reality in which the reader finds himself”21. The reader, together with the author, must answer the meaning of the hero’s life “from another plane of existence, where there is neither the hero nor his goal.”
B) The reader in poststructuralist theories, the reader replacing the creator.
There are works devoted to the peculiarities of the poetics and communicative organization of the works of a particular author, which study the reader as “a position of worldview prepared for each potential recipient” (works on Chekhov by V.I. Tyupa22, V.M. Markovich23, on Mandelstam -S. Averintseva24, about Nabokov - A.V. Ledeneva25, etc.). The need to study structure as presupposing and setting a certain perception is recognized.
However, these studies are not the norm. General practice analysis of a work of art still does not necessarily require taking into account its “reader’s” component. Moreover, text-limited studies aimed at discovering the impact agenda embodied in the text are much less common than comprehensive analysis the reader both as an addressee and as artistic image, and as a real readership.
There is another problem: there are often studies that miss the fact that the reading event, formed by the reader’s consciousness, is a way of realizing an aesthetic object. Ignoring the sphere of communication between the author-creator and the implicit reader, scientists come to completely unfounded conclusions regarding the communicative structure of the work as a whole. So, A.D. Stepanov, who studies the problem of communication in Chekhov, examining the level of communication of the characters, comes to the conclusion that Chekhov actualized communication failures, forgetting that at the level of communication between the author, hero and reader, the possibility of an active response position is assumed26. A similar mistake is repeated by S.V. Sysoev. By specifically studying the communicative system of Pushkin’s lyrics, the scientist not only understands it as the relationship between the subject and the addressee of the utterance, making the hero not involved in the sphere of communication, but also limits the sphere of communication of poems to the communication of characters27. “Completion”, which is possible only in the sphere of communication between the author-hero-reader, and in this concept turns out to be outside the field of view of the researcher.
The question of the factors of addressing in the text of a work of art remains insufficiently clarified. In some scientific literature, the reader is recognized as a potential for perception, a principle organizing perception, given by the text. An idea has been formed about the presence in the text of special receptive signals that set the reader's expectations. But the elusiveness of the reader's aspect in a specific text is noted.
One way or another, all scientists recognize that there should be close attention to everything that can influence the reader, to the “factors of artistic impression” present in the work. The following are indicated as identifying the reader and guiding the process of perception: a telling title, epigraph, special author's notes, introduction, first phrase, place and time of action (V. Prozorov28); direct appeal to the reader, anticipation of reader expectations, reactions, reproduction and depiction of the reader’s words (V. Krivonos29); genre designation, epigraphs, first paragraph, dark places in the text, suggesting the co-creation of the reader (L.V. Chernets30).
It is easy to see that this list, while pointing out some border zones in the text, still does not offer criteria for identifying targeting factors, since the “place” of the reader’s presence refers to the entire text.
A number of works offer a different view of this problem. M. Riffaterre points out that the reader's attention is fixed on key points, semantic condensations in the text. L.V. Chernets believes that the subject close attention the reader are places of ambiguity, the main thing of which is not verbal allegory and not composition, but objective world works. There are works devoted to forms of consolidating the reader’s position with specific authors. Thus, Shabliy comes to the conclusion that in Lermontov the reader’s zone is formed at the intersection of the plot and plot plans. A number of scientists note the “uneven presence of the author’s consciousness in the structure of the artistic whole” inherent in all texts, the unequal degree of development of layers artistic reality suggests an unequal degree of saturation of their factors of artistic impression (M.M. Bakhtin, V.I. Tyupa, I.A. Esaulov, N.D. Tamarchenko). Consequently, the reader of a particular work may be required (and at the same time developed by the text) to have various competencies and reading skills.
Such judgments, as well as the reflections of scientists within the framework of phenomenology, receptive aesthetics, narratology and other schools, undoubtedly clarify much on the issue of the function and position of the reader, but do not negate the need to formulate methodological approaches to the study of the reader as an intra-textual phenomenon and an instrument of literary analysis; the need to develop criteria for distinguishing between implicit and implicit readers, to understand the mechanisms for detecting “traces” of the reader’s presence in the text.
Notes
1 Lavlinsky S.P. Reader // Poetics: a dictionary of current terms and concepts / Scientific. ed. N.D. Tamarchenko. M.: Kulagina Publishing House; Intrada, 2008. P. 294.
2 See: Chernets L.V. “How our word will respond...” The fate of literary works. M., 1995.
3 Topa V.I. Artistic meaning // Poetics: a dictionary of current terms and concepts. P. 238.
4 Quoted. from: Artistic meaning. P. 238.
7 Beletsky A.I. On one of the immediate tasks of historical and literary science. Studying the history of the reader // Beletsky A.I. In the workshop of a word artist. M., 1989. P. 115.
8 Ibid. P. 32.
9 Bolshakova A. Reader theories and literary-theoretical thought of the 20th century // Theoretical and literary results of the 20th century. Reader: problems of perception. M.: Science; Praxis, 2005. P. 517.
10 Ibid. P. 540.
11 Prozorov V.V. The reader and the literary process. Saratov: Publishing house Sarat. Univ., 1965. P. 33.
12 Ibid. P. 40.
13 Broitman S.N., Tamarchenko N.D., Tyupa V.I. Theory of literature. Textbook manual: In 2 volumes. M.: Academy, 2004. T. 1. P. 174.
15 Bakhtin M.M. The problem of speech genres // Bakhtin M.M. Author and hero. Towards the philosophical foundations of the humanities. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000. P. 295.
16 Ibid. P. 292.
17 Ibid. P. 293.
18 Ibid. P. 29.
19 Tyupa V.I. Addressee // Poetics: a dictionary of current terms and concepts. P. 14.
20 Lavlinsky S.P. Decree. op. P. 294.
21 Broitman S.N., Tamarchenko N.D., Topa V.I. Decree. op. P. 175.
22 Topa V.I. Communicative strategy of Chekhov’s poetics // Chekhov readings in Ottawa. Tver; Ottawa, 2006. pp. 17-32.
23 Markovich V.M. Pushkin, Chekhov and the fate of “soul-nurturing humanity” // Chekhoviana. Chekhov and Pushkin. M.: Nauka, 1998. pp. 10-19.
24 Averintsev S.S. The fate and message of Osip Mandelstam // Averintsev S.S. Poets. M.: Languages of Russian Culture, 1996.
25 Ledenev A.V. Poetics and stylistics V.V. Nabokov in the context of artistic quests late XIX- first half of the 20th century: Dis. ... Dr. Philol. Sci. M., 2005.
26 See: Stepanov A.D. Chekhov has communication problems. M.: Languages Slavic culture, 2005.
27 See: Sysoev S.V. Communicative system of lyrics by A.S. Pushkin. M.: ECON, 2001.
28 Prozorov V.V. Decree. op.