What is called a novel? Novel: genre essence

Accent placement: ROMAN'N

NOVEL (from the French roman - originally a work in Romance languages) is a large form of the epic genre of literature of modern times. Its most common features: the image of a person in complex forms life process, multi-linearity of the plot, covering the destinies of a number of characters, polyphony, hence the large volume compared to other genres. It is clear, of course, that these features characterize the main trends in the development of the novel and manifest themselves in extremely diverse ways.

The very emergence of this genre - or, more precisely, its prerequisites - is often attributed to antiquity or the Middle Ages. So, they talk about “ancient R.” ("Daphnis and Chloe", "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass" by Apuleius, "Satyricon" by Petronius, etc.) and "R. knightly" ("Tristan and Isolde", "Lohengrin" by von Eschenbach, "Le Morte d'Arthur" by Malory etc.). These prose narratives actually have certain features that bring them closer to R. in the modern, proper sense of the word. However, we still have before us rather similar, analogous, rather than homogeneous phenomena.

In ancient and medieval narrative prose literature there is not a whole series of those essential properties of content and form that play a decisive role in poetry. It would be more correct to understand these works of antiquity as special genres of idyllic (Daphnis and Chloe) or comic (Satyricon ") stories, and the stories of medieval knights should be considered as, again, a unique genre of knightly epic in prose. R. in its proper sense begins to take shape only at the end of the Renaissance. Its origin is inextricably linked with that new artistic element, which was originally embodied in the Renaissance short story (see), more precisely, in a special genre of “book of short stories” such as “The Decameron” by Boccaccio.

R. was an epic privacy. If in the previous epic the central role was played by images of representatives of the people, society, state (leaders, generals, priests) or images of heroes who openly embodied the strength and wisdom of the entire human collective, then in R. the images of ordinary people, people , in the actions of which only their individual fate, their personal aspirations are directly expressed. The previous epic was based on major historical (even legendary) events, in which the main characters were participants or, more precisely, direct creators. Meanwhile, R. (with the exception of the special form of historical R., as well as R.-epic) is based on events in private life and, moreover, usually on fictional by the author events.

Further, the action of the folk and, more broadly, historical epic, as a rule, unfolded in the distant past, a kind of “epic time,” while for R. the connection with living modernity or at least with the most recent past is typical, with the exception special type R. - historical. Finally, the epic had, above all, heroic character, was the embodiment of high poetic element; R. acts as a prose genre, as an image of everyday life, Everyday life in all the versatility of its manifestations. More or less conventionally, one can define the novel as a fundamentally “average”, neutral genre. And this clearly expresses the historical novelty of the genre, because previously the “high” (heroic) or “low” (comic) genres dominated, and the “average”, neutral genres did not receive any widespread development. R. was the most complete and complete expression of the art of epic prose. But despite all the profound differences from previous forms of epic, R. is a true heir to ancient and medieval epic literature, a genuine epic of modern times. On a completely new artistic basis in R., as Hegel said, “the wealth and diversity of interests, states, characters, life relationships, the broad background of the entire world" (Oc., vol. 14, p. 273). This is not at all contradicted by the fact that in the center of R. there is usually the image of a “private” person with his purely personal fate and experiences. In the era of the emergence of R. "... the individual person appears freed from natural connections, etc., which in the past historical eras made him a part of a certain limited human conglomerate" (K. Marx, Towards a Critique of Political Economy, 1953, pp. 193-94). On the one hand, this means that an individual no longer acts primarily as a representative of a certain group of people; he acquires his own personal destiny and individual consciousness. But at the same time, this means that an individual person is now directly connected not with a certain limited collective, but with the life of an entire society or even all of humanity. And this, in turn, leads to , which becomes possible and, moreover, necessary, artistic development public life through the prism of the individual fate of a “private” person.

Of course, this mastery is accomplished in a much more complex and indirect way than mastering the fate of the people in the image of a majestic folk hero, as was the case in the ancient epic. But there is no doubt that the novels of Prevost, Fielding, Stendhal, Lermontov, Dickens, Turgenev, etc., in the personal destinies of the main characters, reveal the broadest and deepest content of the social life of the era. Moreover, in many R. there is not even a somewhat detailed picture of the life of society as such; the entire image is focused on the private life of the individual. However, since in the new society, built after the Renaissance, the private life of a person turned out to be inextricably linked with the entire life of the social whole (even if the person did not act as a politician, leader, ideologist), Tom’s completely “private” actions and experiences Jones (in Fielding), Werther (in Goethe), Pechorin, Madame Bovary appear as an artistic exploration of the holistic essence of the social world that gave birth to these heroes. Therefore, R. was able to become a genuine epic of modern times and, in its most monumental manifestations, seemed to revive the genre of epic (see). The first historical form of R., which was preceded by the short story and the epic of the Renaissance, was the picaresque R., which actively developed in the late 16th century - early. 18th century (“Lazarillo from Tormes”, “Franción” by Sorel, “Simpli-cissimus” by Grimmelhausen, “Gilles Blas” by Lesage, etc.). From the end of the 17th century. psychological prose developed, which was of great importance for the development of R. (books by La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Lafayette’s story “The Princess of Cleves”). Finally, very important role Memoir literature of the 16th and 17th centuries played a role in the formation of R., in which for the first time the private lives and personal experiences of people began to be objectively depicted (books by Benvenuto Cellini, Montaigne, Sevigny, etc.); Thus, it was memoirs (or, more precisely, travel notes of a sailor) that served as the basis and incentive for the creation of one of the first great works of literature, Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” (1719). R. reaches maturity in the 18th century. One of the earliest genuine examples of the genre is “Manon Lescaut” (1731) by Antoine Prevost. In this R., the traditions of picaresque R., psychological prose (in the spirit of “Maxim” by La Rochefoucauld) and memoir literature seemed to merge into an innovative organic integrity (it is characteristic that this R. originally appeared as a fragment of multi-volume fictional memoirs of a certain person).

During the 18th century. R. gains a dominant position in literature (in the 17th century it still appeared as a side, secondary sphere of word art). In R. 18th century. two are already developing different lines- social and everyday R. (Fielding, Smollett, Louvet de Couvray, etc.) and a more powerful line of psychological R. (Richardson, Rousseau, Stern, Goethe, etc.).

At the turn of the 18th - 19th centuries, during the era of romanticism, the genre of romance was experiencing a kind of crisis; the subjective-lyrical character of romantic literature contradicts the epic essence of R. Many writers of this time (Chateaubriand, Senancourt, Schlegel, Novalis, Constant) created R., which are more reminiscent lyric poems in prose.

However, at the same time, a special form was flourishing - historical literature, which acts as a kind of synthesis of poetry in the proper sense and the epic poem of the past (novels by Walter Scott, Vigny, Hugo, Gogol).

In general, the period of romanticism had a renewing significance for R., preparing for its new rise and flowering. In the second third of the 19th century. dates back to the classical era of R. (Stendhal, Lermontov, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Turgenev, Flaubert, Maupassant, etc.). A special role is played by Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century, primarily the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In the works of these greatest writers, one of the decisive properties of R. reaches a qualitatively new level - his ability to embody universal, pan-human meaning in the private destinies and personal experiences of heroes. In-depth psychologism, mastery of the subtlest movements of the soul, characteristic of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, not only do not contradict, but, on the contrary, define this property. Tolstoy, noting that in R. Dostoevsky “not only we, people related to him, but foreigners recognize ourselves, our soul...”, explained it this way: “The deeper you scoop, the more common to all, more familiar and dear” (Tolstoy L N., About literature, M., 1955, p. 264).

The novel by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had a huge impact on the further development of the genre in world literature. The greatest novelists of the 20th century. - T. Mann, France, Rolland, Hamsun, Martin du Gard, Galsworthy, Laxness, Faulkner, Hemingway, Tagore, Akutagawa - were direct students and followers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. T. Mann said that Tolstoy’s novels “lead us into the temptation to overturn the relationship between the novel and the epic, affirmed by school aesthetics, and to consider not the novel as a product of the collapse of the epic, but the epic as a primitive prototype of the novel.” (Collected works, vol. 10, M., 1961, p. 279).

The traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were innovatively continued by Gorky, who became the founder of R. socialist realism. In the highest examples of this art, life and existence are presented as a creative act of the people, and therefore the art of socialist realism especially organically embodies the epic essence of the genre and gravitates toward epic in the strict sense of the word. This is clearly evident in such major phenomena of Soviet R. as “The Life of Klim Samgin” and “Quiet Don”. But this does not mean at all that the R. of socialist realism abandons the multifaceted nature of the genre. Even just the works mentioned above characterize a deep understanding of the life and consciousness of the individual, which has always been characteristic of R.

In the first post-October years, the idea was popular that in the new, revolutionary R. the main or even the only content should be the image of the masses. However, when implementing this idea, R. was in danger of collapse; he turned into a chain of incoherent episodes (for example, in the works of B. Pilnyak). In 20th century literature. the frequent desire to limit oneself to depicting the inner world of the individual is expressed in attempts to recreate the so-called. "stream of consciousness" (Proust, Joyce, modern school"new R." in France). But, deprived of an objective and effective basis, R., in essence, loses its epic nature and ceases to be R. in the true sense of the word.

R. can really develop only on the basis of the harmonious unity of the objective and subjective, external and internal in a person. This unity is characteristic of the largest novels of recent times - the novels of Sholokhov, Laxness, Graham Greene, Faulkner, and others.

Lit.: Griftsov B. A., Theory of the Novel, M., 1927; Chicherin A.V., The emergence of an epic novel, M., 1958; Fox R., Roman and the people, M., 1960; Dneprov V., Roman - a new kind of poetry, in his book: Problems of Realism, L., 1961; Kozhinov V., The Origin of the Novel, M., 1963; The present and future of the novel (Discussion materials), "In. Literature", 1964, No. 6, 10; Bakhtin M., The Word in the Novel, "Vopr. Literary", 1965, No. 8; History of the Russian novel, vol. 1 - 2, M. - L., 1962 - 64; Russian history Soviet novel, book 1 - 2, M. - L., 1965; D e k s P., Seven centuries of the novel. Sat. Art., trans. from French, M., 1962.

V. Nozhinov.

Sources:

Dictionary literary terms. Ed. From 48 comp.: L. I. Timofeev and S. V. Turaev. M., "Enlightenment", 1974. 509 p.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in novels, a significant role is played by heroes whose independence has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, and reliance only on themselves. Among the novel characters we find those who, using the words of M.M. Prishvin about himself can rightfully be called “a figure of communication and communication.” This is Natasha Rostova, “overflowing with life.” In a number of novels (especially persistently in the works of Charles Dickens and Russian XIX literature c.) the spiritual contacts of a person with the reality close to him and, in particular, family and tribal ties are presented in an elevating and poetic way (“ Captain's daughter"A.S. Pushkin). The heroes of such works perceive and think of the surrounding reality not so much as alien and hostile to themselves, but as friendly and akin. They are characterized by what M.M. Prishvin called “kindred attention to the world.”
The theme of the house is also heard in the novels of our century: in J. Galsworthy ("The Forsyte Saga" and subsequent works), M.A. Bulgakov ("The White Guard"), M.A. Sholokhov ("Quiet Don"),

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

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

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

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

One of the most important features of the novel and related stories (especially in the 19th-20th centuries) is the close attention of the authors to the microenvironment surrounding the heroes, the influence of which they experience and which they influence in one way or another.

In literature, a novel is a genre of work. It is mainly written in prose, has a narrative character and is relatively large in volume.

Literary term

The medieval chivalric romance gave the world modern name genre. It comes from Old French romanz. Further development V different cultures and countries led to some differences in terms. So, the English name of the genre is novel- from the word novella. The Old French term in English culture gave the name to a movement in art (romanticism) and one of the forms of the genre - the love story (romance).

Character traits

A novel in literature is a long fictional narrative about the life or moment in the life of a hero. Today it is most often characterized by the following features:

Speech. Most novels today are written in prose, despite the fact that they were originally called that poetic works. After works began to be written more for reading than for performance in the 13th century, prose almost completely took over the literary speech of the European novel.
Fiction. In contrast to biography, journalism and historiography, this genre is different fictional plot, having no connection with real events and people.
Volume. Today, the novel is the longest genre of fiction, although there is controversy regarding the minimum required length. In this regard, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a novel from a story.
Content is the most complex and controversial characteristic of the genre. Previously it was believed that this was a description of the fictional life and emotions of the hero. Today it is customary to describe in a novel personal experience one or more characters. The content of the novel varies so much that there is a division into forms and subgenres.

Historical typology of the novel

Historically, it is difficult to determine the origins of the novel as a separate literary genre. Strictly speaking, the first European novel is Don Quixote, but the history of the genre begins to be counted from the Middle Ages. Throughout its evolution, the following forms were distinguished:

A chivalric romance is epic genre poetry using elements of fantasy. The main focus of the story is actions. Contemporaries called this form a courtly novel.
An allegorical novel is a form of genre that uses concrete images and actions to explain abstract, complex concepts. The ideal example of allegory in literature is fables, and the pinnacle of the allegorical novel was Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy.

A novel of morals, or satirical novel, differs more in content than in strict compliance with any historical period. Petronius's Satyricon can be called a novel of morals, just like Cervantes's Don Quixote.
The philosophical novel is a movement in 18th-century literature that focuses on finding answers to eternal questions. The pinnacle of the philosophical novel was Voltaire's Candide. Philosophy has always played an important role in literature, so the philosophical novel cannot be limited to one century. The works of Hesse, Mann and Nietzsche were written much later, but are prominent representatives of this trend.
A psychological novel is a type of genre aimed at studying the inner world of heroes. No historical form of the novel has had such a dramatic and profound influence on the development of the genre as psychological novel. In fact, it revolutionized the very definition of literary genre and is the dominant type of novel today.

Novel - literary genre, usually prosaic, which involves a detailed narrative about life and personal development Main character(heroes) in a crisis/non-standard period of his life.

The novel is a biography or a piece of biography. The novel is an epic of private life, modeling reality, but not claiming that the events are actually happening.

The novel must be viewed historically.

The oldest form that has come down to us is the adventure novel. They have a certain plot core. It consists mainly of overcoming external obstacles, is devoid of signs of time, there is no psychologism, there are no changes in the heroes. This plot is in many ways close to a fairy tale plot. But there is detailed descriptions exotic countries. The difference from the epic is that the hero is a private person. Such novels were entertaining.

In antiquity, another type of novel arose - a parody novel (a parody of an adventure novel). Example: Apuleius "The Golden Ass". Traveling around Greece. Small scale hazards. He travels in the form of a donkey, the novel is very frank, through the eyes of a donkey the author can show low life, which the adventurous novel has never been interested in. The prospect for satire opens up.

In the Middle Ages, a chivalric romance (courtly romance) appeared. Created in the 12th-13th centuries. Centered around all that is noble. It's like returning to a fairy tale. Absorbs mythology. (About the search for the Holy Grail). The knights who act in these novels resemble fairy-tale heroes. Fairytale motifs are transformed here. Has a huge impact courtly lyrics(about service beautiful lady). "Tristan and Isolde" - moments of transition from a fairy tale to a novel.

"Don Quixote" is the most important stage in the development of the novel. Originally, it was a parody of a chivalric romance. Marked the transition from the chivalric romance to the novel itself. The novel widely describes the cruel prose of life. This is what Cervantes brings to the table. Cervantes is born new topic- a lonely eccentric in cruel world. This low reality becomes central to the picaresque novel.

A picaresque novel

The heroes of picaresque novels became crooks, adventurers, scoundrels. Usually the sympathies of the readers were on their side. Their victims were respectable ordinary people, officials, criminal elements, as well as the same rogues, just like them.

The picaresque novel develops into a social one. Such a novel appears in the 17th and 18th centuries. Gradually develops into psychological. MM. Bakhtin: “A novel is the inconsistency of the hero with his fate.” “Man is greater than his destiny or less than his humanity.” The genre of the novel becomes universal. The most common form of the novel is the biographical novel.

Possible narrative options in the novel:

from the birth of the hero until his death (“ Perfumer» P. Zyskinda, “Doctor Zhivago” Pasternak), Oblomov;

from the birth of the hero until his/her life emerges from the crisis state of life (“ Life of David Copperfield», Charles Dickens or " The burden of human passions», William Somerset Maugham);

from the point of entry of the protagonist into a crisis state of life until the denouement (“ Crime and Punishment», Fedor Dostoevsky). Fathers and Sons

Novel forms:

cultural-historical novel (Turgenev, Goncharov)

a typical hero of his era. Such a novel is constructed as an ideological dialogue. The novel actually turns into a study.

ideological (ideological novel) Dostoevsky. The author does not accept the heroes' ideas, he lets the heroes speak out to the end and shows the consequences. " Polyphonic novel"(Bakhtin)

naturalistic novel

a naturalistic novel is an exploration of nature, people, and the environment. Its authors are no longer attracted by intricate intrigue, a deftly invented plot and developed according to certain rules.

prosthetic novel

able to absorb everything

The novel will die only along with literature. This is a universal genre.

Novel (French roman, German Roman; English novel/romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), central genre European literature New times, fictional, in contrast to the neighboring genre of the story, an extensive, plot-branched prose narrative (despite the existence of compact, so-called “little novels” (French le petit roman), and poetic novels, for example “a novel in verse " "Eugene Onegin").

In contrast to the classical epic, the novel is focused on depicting the historical present and the destinies of individuals, ordinary people searching for themselves and their purpose in a this-worldly, “prosaic” world that has lost its pristine stability, integrity and sacredness (poetry). Even if in a novel, for example, in a historical novel, the action is transferred to the past, this past is always assessed and perceived as immediately preceding the present and correlated with the present.

The novel, as an open to modernity, formally not ossified, emerging genre of literature of the New and Contemporary times, cannot be exhaustively defined in universalist terms theoretical poetics, but can be characterized in the light of historical poetics, exploring the evolution and development of artistic consciousness, the history and prehistory of artistic forms. Historical poetics takes into account both the diachronic variability and diversity of the novel, and the convention of using the word “novel” itself as a genre “label”. Not all novels, even exemplary novels from a modern point of view, were defined by their creators and the reading public as “novels.”

Initially, in the 12th-13th centuries, the word roman meant any written text in Old French, and only in the second half of the 17th century. partially acquired its modern semantic content. Cervantes, the creator of the paradigmatic novel of the New Age “Don Quixote” (1604-1615), called his book “history”, and used the word “novela” for the title of the book of stories and short stories “Edifying Novels” (1613).

On the other hand, many works that criticism of the 19th century - the heyday realistic novel- called them “novels” after the fact; they are not always such. Typical example- poetic and prose pastoral eclogues of the Renaissance, which turned into “pastoral novels”, the so-called “ folk books» 16th century, including the parody Pentateuch of F. Rabelais. Fantastic or allegorical satirical narratives dating back to the ancient “Menippean satire”, such as “Critikon” by B. Gracian, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by J. Bunyan, “The Adventures of Telemachus” by Fenelon, satires by J. Swift, “philosophical tales” are artificially classified as novels. Voltaire, “poem” by N.V. Gogol “Dead Souls”, “Penguin Island” by A. France. Also, not all utopias can be called novels, although at the border of utopia and novel at the end of the 18th century. the genre of utopian novel arose (Morris, Chernyshevsky, Zola ), and then its antipodean counterpart, a dystopian novel (“When the Sleeper Awakens” by H. Wells, “We” by Evg. Zamyatin).

The novel, in principle, is a borderline genre, associated with almost all adjacent types of discourse, both written and oral, easily absorbing foreign genre and even foreign verbal structures: document-essays, diaries, notes, letters ( epistolary novel), memoirs, confessions, newspaper chronicles, plots and images of folk and literary fairy tale, national and sacred tradition (for example, gospel images and motifs in the prose of F. M. Dostoevsky). There are novels in which the lyrical principle is clearly expressed, in others the features of farce, comedy, tragedy, drama, and medieval mystery are discernible. It is natural for the concept (V. Dneprov) to emerge, according to which the novel is the fourth - in relation to epic, lyricism and drama - type of literature.

A novel is a multilingual, multifaceted and multi-perspective genre that represents the world and people in the world from a variety of points of view, including multi-genre ones, and includes other genre worlds as the object of the image. The novel preserves in its meaningful form the memory of myth and ritual (the city of Macondo in the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by G. García Márquez). Therefore, being “the standard-bearer and herald of individualism” (Vyach. Ivanov), the novel in a new form (in the written word) simultaneously strives to resurrect the primitive syncretism of word, sound and gesture (hence the organic birth of cinema and television novels), to restore the original unity of man and of the universe.

The problem of the place and time of birth of the novel remains debatable. According to both the extremely broad and extremely narrow interpretation of the essence of the novel - an adventure narrative focused on the destinies of lovers striving for union - the first novels were created in Ancient India and, regardless of that, in Greece and Rome in the 2nd-4th centuries. The so-called Greek (Hellenistic) novel - chronologically the first version of the “adventurous novel of trial” (M. Bakhtin) lies at the origins of the first stylistic line of development of the novel, which is characterized by “monolinguality and monostylism” (in English-language criticism, narratives of this kind are called romance).

The action in “romance” takes place in “adventurous time”, which is removed from real (historical, biographical, natural) time and represents a kind of “gap” (Bakhtin) between the starting and ending points of the development of the cyclic plot - two moments in the lives of the heroes -lovers: their meeting, marked by a sudden outbreak of mutual love, and their reunion after separation and each of them overcoming various kinds of trials and temptations.

The interval between the first meeting and the final reunion is filled with events such as a pirate attack, a bride being kidnapped during a wedding, a sea storm, a fire, a shipwreck, miraculous salvation, false news of the death of one of the lovers, imprisonment on false charges of another, threatening him the death penalty, the ascension of another to the heights of earthly power, an unexpected meeting and recognition. The artistic space of the Greek novel is a “foreign”, exotic world: events take place in several Middle Eastern and African countries, which are described in sufficient detail (the novel is a kind of guide to an alien world, replacing the geographical and historical encyclopedias, although it also contains a lot of fantastic information).

Key role in the development of the plot in ancient novel chance plays a role, as well as various kinds of dreams and predictions. The characters and feelings of the characters, their appearance and even their age remain unchanged throughout the development of the plot. The Hellenistic novel is genetically connected with myth, with Roman legal proceedings and rhetoric. Therefore, in such a novel there are many discussions on philosophical, religious and moral topics, speeches, including those made by the heroes in court and built according to all the rules of ancient rhetoric: the adventurous love plot of the novel is also a judicial “incident”, the subject of its discussion from both sides diametrically opposed points of view, pro and contra (this contraversity, the pairing of opposites will remain as a genre feature of the novel at all stages of its development).

In Western Europe, the Hellenistic novel, forgotten throughout the Middle Ages, was rediscovered during the Renaissance by the authors of late Renaissance poetics, created by admirers of the also rediscovered and read Aristotle. Trying to adapt Aristotelian poetics (which says nothing about the novel) to the needs modern literature with its rapid development of various kinds fictional stories, neo-Aristotelian humanists turned to the Greek (as well as the Byzantine) novel as an ancient example-precedent, focusing on which, one should create a plausible narrative (truthfulness, reliability is a new quality prescribed in humanistic poetics to novelistic fiction). The recommendations contained in the neo-Aristotelian treatises were largely followed by the creators of pseudo-historical adventure-love novels of the Baroque era (M. de Scuderi and others .) .

The plot of the Greek novel is not only exploited in popular literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. (in the same Latin American television novels), but can also be seen in the plot collisions of “high” literature in the novels of Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Dostoevsky, A. N. Tolstoy (trilogy “Sisters”, “Walking in the Torments”, “The Eighteenth Year”) , Andrei Platonov (“Chevengur”), Pasternak (“Doctor Zhivago”), although they are often parodied (“Candide” by Voltaire) and radically rethought (the purposeful destruction of the mythology of the “sacred wedding” in the prose of Andrei Platonov and G. García Márquez ).

But we cannot reduce the novel to a plot. A truly novel hero is not exhausted by the plot: he, as Bakhtin puts it, is always either “more than the plot or less than his humanity.” He is not only and not so much an “external man”, realizing himself in action, in deed, in a rhetorical word addressed to everyone and no one, but as an “internal man”, aimed at self-knowledge and confessional and prayerful appeal to God and a specific “other”: such a person was discovered by Christianity (the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, “Confessions” of Aurelius Augustine), which prepared the ground for the formation of the European novel.

The novel, as a biography of an “inner man,” began to take shape in Western European literature in the form of a poetic and then a prosaic knightly novel in the 12th and 13th centuries. - the first narrative genre of the Middle Ages, perceived by authors and educated listeners and readers as fiction, although according to tradition (also becoming the subject of a parody game) it was often passed off as the works of ancient “historians”. At the heart of the plot collision of the knightly novel is the indestructible confrontation between the whole and the individual, the knightly community (the mythical chivalry of the times of King Arthur) and the hero-knight, who stands out among others for his merits, and - according to the principle of metonymy - is the best part of the knightly class. In the knightly feat destined for him from above and in the loving service of the Eternal Femininity, the hero-knight must rethink his place in the world and in society, divided into classes, but united by Christian, universal human values. The knightly adventure is not just a test of the hero’s self-identity, but also a moment of his self-knowledge.

Fiction, adventure as a test of self-identity and as a path to self-knowledge of the hero, a combination of motives of love and heroism, the interest of the author and readers of the novel in the inner world of the characters - all these are characteristic genre signs of a knightly novel, “reinforced” by the experience of the “Greek”, which is similar to it in style and structure. novel, at the end of the Renaissance will turn into a novel of the New Age, parodying the knightly epic and at the same time preserving the ideal of knightly service as a value guide (Don Quixote by Cervantes).

The cardinal difference between a novel of the New Age and a medieval novel is the transfer of events from a fairy-tale-utopian world (the chronotope of a chivalric novel is “a wonderful world in adventurous time,” according to Bakhtin’s definition) into recognizable “prosaic” modernity. One of the first (along with the Cervantes novel) genre varieties of the new European novel is oriented towards modern, “low” reality - the picaresque novel (or picaresque), which developed and flourished in Spain in the second half of the 16th - first half of the 17th century. (“Lazarillo from Tormes”, Mateo Aleman, F. de Quevedo. Genetically, picaresque is associated with the second stylistic line of development of the novel, according to Bakhtin (cf. the English term novel as the opposite of romance). It is preceded by the “lower” prose of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and not formed in the form of an actual novel narrative, which includes “The Golden Ass” of Apuleius, “Satyricon” of Petronius, menippeia of Lucian and Cicero, medieval fabliaux, schwanks, farces, soti and other humorous genres associated with the carnival (carnivalized literature, on the one hand , contrasts “inner man” with “external man”, on the other hand, with man as a socialized being (the “official” image of man, according to Bakhtin) with natural, private, everyday man. The first example picaresque genre- the anonymous story “The Life of Lazarillo from Tormes” (1554) is parodically oriented towards the genre of confession and is structured as a pseudo-confessional narrative on behalf of the hero, aimed not at repentance, but at self-praise and self-justification (Denis Diderot and “Notes from the Underground” by F.M. Dostoevsky). The ironic author, hiding behind the hero-narrator, stylizes his fiction as a “human document” (characteristically, all four surviving editions of the story are anonymous). Later, genuine autobiographical narratives (The Life of Estebanillo Gonzalez), already stylized as picaresque novels, will branch off from the picaresque genre. At the same time, picaresque, having lost its actual novelistic properties, will turn into an allegorical satirical epic (B. Gracian).

The first examples of the novel genre reveal a specific novelistic attitude towards fiction, which becomes the subject of an ambiguous game between the author and the reader: on the one hand, the novelist invites the reader to believe in the authenticity of the life he depicts, to immerse himself in it, to dissolve in the flow of what is happening and in the experiences of the characters, on the other - every now and then ironically emphasizes the fictionality, the creation of the novel's reality. “Don Quixote” is a novel in which the defining beginning is the dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, author and reader. A picaresque novel is a kind of negation of the “ideal” world of novels of the first stylistic line - chivalric, pastoral, “Moorish”. "Don Quixote", parodying chivalric novels, includes novels of the first stylistic line as objects of depiction, creating parodic (and not only) images of the genres of these novels. The world of Cervantes’s narrative is divided into “book” and “life,” but the boundary between them is blurred: Cervantes’s hero lives life like a novel, brings a conceived but unwritten novel to life, becoming the author and co-author of the novel of his life, while the author is under mask of the fake Arab historian Sid Ahmet Benengeli - becomes a character in the novel, without leaving his other roles at the same time - the author-publisher and the author-creator of the text: starting from the prologue to each of the parts, he is the interlocutor of the reader, who is also invited to join the game with the text of the book and the text of life. Thus, the “quixotic situation” unfolds in the stereometric space of the tragifarcical “novel of consciousness”, in the creation of which three main subjects are involved: Author - Hero - Reader. In "Don Quixote" for the first time in European culture the “three-dimensional” novel word began to sound - the most striking sign of novel discourse.