How is the plot related to the artistic features of the work. Categories of artistic form

The problem of content and form is one of the key ones in literary theory. Her decision is not easy. Moreover, this problem in the scientific literature appears to be either real or supposed, imaginary. There are three most common points of view on it. One comes from the idea of ​​the primacy of content and the secondary nature of form. Another interprets the relationship between these categories in the opposite way. The third approach eliminates the need to use these categories. The prerequisite for such a theoretical view is the idea of ​​the unity of content and form. Since such unity is stated, the possibility of differentiation of concepts and, consequently, a separate consideration of content and form is excluded. Let's try to express our attitude to all these views. Literary theory is an autonomous field of knowledge that is not directly subordinate to other aspects of the science of art, and especially artistic practice. However, there is always a natural need to “test” the concepts and terms of science with a real picture of this practice, artistic material. And the very primary idea of ​​a work of art, as well as the process of its creation, makes us discover certain different moments, which prompt us to give them the appropriate terminological designation: content and form. Even at the level of ordinary consciousness, it is very often easy to notice the differences between significant and less significant moments in a work of art. And at the same level, questions often arise: what and how? And most often, in this unsystematized view of art, one gets an idea of ​​what is more significant and what is less significant. Thus, any reader or viewer, recreating his reaction to what he saw or read, characterizes the action in the work and only then the form in which this action is presented: the color of the paint, the narrative style in the novel, the camera style in the film, etc.

The creative process itself, which the artist often willingly talks about himself, suggests to the perceiver the existence of these various aspects in art. We often notice how an artist in his creative process, making some seemingly private adjustments, fundamentally changes the feeling of the work or its individual components. So. It is known that Gogol, starting his “The Inspector General,” put long phrases into the mouth of the mayor, giving the beginning of the comedy a certain stylistic lethargy. In the last version, which is familiar to everyone, this beginning acquired dynamism, enhanced by repetition, widespread in verbal art, one of the most revealing in poetic syntax.

Gorky’s formula is well known, which has long been considered almost classical: “the word is the primary element of literature.” It is not difficult to agree with this, but the question arises: what element of literature is thought? It is unlikely that the latter can be classified as a secondary element of art, rather the opposite. Strictly speaking, the debate about what is primary in art, thought or word, is metaphysical, just as the long-standing debate in European philosophy is metaphysical regarding what is higher: the beautiful in life or the beautiful in art. This debate, as is known, was carried out between German epigones like Fischer and Russian materialists led by Chernyshevsky. Along the way, we will add that in general, posing the question of what is higher, art or life, is meaningless from a logical point of view. For art is also life, its part, perhaps the most essential. But judgments about words and thoughts contribute to the differentiation of the concepts of content and form. Simply put, in this case it is more natural to classify a thought as a content area, a word as a formal one. To support the thesis about the difference between these categories, a difference that has been stated by many artistic and theoretical minds such as Kant, Hegel, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky can be illustrated with several examples. Thus, it is known that in the first part of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” the credo of the central character is set out. The underground man opposes various utopian ideas, which, however, are altruistic in nature, clinging to the imprecise terminology of utopian socialists, he accuses them of egocentrism, considering the consequences of any individualistic knowledge to be destructive. Here one can discern a dispute between Dostoevsky and his ideological antipode, a contemporary who went through the same stages of dramatic life path, as Fyodor Mikhailovich himself (at the end of the 40s, the civil execution of Dostoevsky took place in one of the squares of St. Petersburg, a decade and a half later it was repeated with Chernyshevsky). These judgments underground man appear persuasive and psychologically motivated. Now let's look at the second part of "Notes from Underground". If we called the first part the “creed” of the underground man, then the second can be called the “history” of the underground man. What is this story? The little official was walking down the street and accidentally collided on the sidewalk with a confidently walking officer. The officer, wanting to free himself from the obstacle, took our hero and moved him to the side, moving him from place to place, as the story says, like a chair.

The offended official decided to take revenge on the officer. He had been preparing for this revenge for a long time. Actively arousing this feeling in yourself. This long period of preparation included various everyday episodes, in particular, a meeting with a girl who treated him with complete sympathy. How did it all end? Wanting to take revenge on the officer, he violated the girl, satisfying, as it seemed to him, his wounded sense of pride. Before us is the story of a man with morbid ambition, weak spiritually, and essentially crippled morally. And if we had known in advance the inner appearance of this character, we would have reacted differently to his theses regarding utopian socialism. But Dostoevsky simply rearranged the parts; he disrupted the logical flow of the narrative, according to which one should first recognize the person and then listen to his philosophy. But a purely external factor, the composition itself, the rearrangement of parts of the narrative, played a certain role in the perception of the content.

In Anna Karenina, the artist Mikhailov, whom Vronsky and Anna met in Italy, could not remember what a person looks like when he is angry. What pose to give to this character reproduced by the artist - the pose of someone in anger. While going through the sketches of the portrait being created, he found one filled with a large drop of stearine, and this random external detail clarified the pictorial concept for him, and he quickly sketched the portrait. Tolstoy was very fond of distinguishing between the concepts of content and form. He said more than once how important it is for an artist to master the form; if Gogol had written his works poorly, not artistically, no one would have read them. The incident with this stearic drop is a particular manifestation of the interaction of different parties in art. When at the beginning of the 20th century it developed new school in literary criticism, which rejected all previous ideas of philosophers and writers about the primacy of content and the secondary nature of form (hence, it did not accept Tolstoy’s just stated position), a widespread belief arose that in art the “controlling force” is form. This formal school was represented by great minds such as Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, and partly Zhirmunsky and Vinogradov. But even those who did not consider themselves formalists experienced the magic of their logic. Here is the famous outstanding psychologist Vygotsky. In his basic research“The Psychology of Art” is directly related to our topic in a short essay dedicated to Bunin’s short story “Easy Breathing”. Vygotsky says that the content of Bunin’s short story, or “material,” is “everyday dregs.” The plot of the novel is the story of high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, who received angry remarks from the head of the school for her frivolous behavior, committed an early moral failure and was killed by a Cossack officer on the station platform. It would seem to be an ordinary story of provincial Russian life, but why is its ending so poetic and joyful? At the cemetery, to Olya’s grave, above which there is a cross and with the image of a young beautiful face, one of the mentors comes - a gymnasium teacher - looks at this face with concentration, tenderness, sentimentality and with almost some kind of joyful feeling of relief. And these final words of the short story “in this frosty spring air there was a spill easy breath, a certain liberation was felt in everything." Why does Bunin want to convey the feeling of some kind of liberation from all everyday dregs. From everything bad, to convey the feeling even in the cemetery of something affirming and beautiful? Vygotsky answers this way: here it’s all about the novelistic form, which in its own way genre structure always presents the event and its consequences as unexpected. Vygotsky believes that Bunin chose a special “teleology” of style for his novelistic form." It could be stated as follows: hiding the scary in the non-scary. The head of the gymnasium in her comfortable office, carefully dressed, with her hair done well, scolds young Olya for that she runs noisily along the corridors of the gymnasium, that she has ink stains on her face, a disheveled head... And as the finale of these moralizing maxims, her phrase sounds: “Olya, you’re a girl! How are you behaving?" And Olya quietly replies: "No, I’m not a girl; and your brother is to blame for this." Subsequently, Olya's memories of how this happened. But the reader does not seem to notice this, because this "information" is surrounded by so many different details that this is an admission of the fall, in essence, as if did not take place (did not sound).

When she met her fiancé, a Cossack officer, on the station platform, she immediately handed him her diary so that he would immediately read the corresponding pages. He read the lines where she wrote that she did not love him and, due to sad circumstances, was forced to marry a stranger to her. And then he killed her right there, on the platform, with a pistol. And here, according to Vygotsky, the teleology of style also worked: it was as if we had not heard this shot in this station hubbub, again the terrible was hidden in the non-fearful. From all this, Vygotsky concludes that the form dictated to the reader a feeling of a certain freedom, a certain lightness of being, ease of breathing, i.e. form governed content. However, the outstanding theorist made a fundamental theoretical mistake. We should have noticed it at the very beginning of his essay, when he called its material the content of the story. But this is a fundamental difference - material and content. The material is passive, the content is active. The concept of content includes the author’s attitude towards the subject of the image. And then it turns out that Bunin portrays a young natural being who does not recognize regulation, moral and aesthetic escort on the part of adults, who, as we see, do not have any moral right to do so.

This is a Pushkin theme. Pushkin - this is the most important thing in his poetry and prose - saw the main divide in existence. There is an artificial, regulated, false life. Stingy Knight counts money, sorts through coins he doesn’t need, living in this strange alienation from living life, in some kind of spiritual underground, and his nephew Albert jumps in tournaments, life plays in him, its triumph, this is natural life, natural!

Salieri came up with a craft for himself - he wanted to become a musician and became one, began to strainingly, carefully, but compose and perform his works. And Mozart, as if sent by God to earth, personifies natural impulses and abilities to create great music. Pushkin considers this regulated, artificial form of existence to be a disaster both for the person himself and for another person. This may sound paradoxical and incorrect, but Don Juan in Pushkin’s “The Stone Guest” dies because he violated the natural law, which is present in him, in his appearance, as dominant. He loved many women, and then he fell in love with one Donna Anna and must die under the steps of the Commander.

Bunin - both in poetry and prose - Pushkin of the early 20th century. And all his work demonstrates the same divide - between the natural and the artificial. For him, there is no doubt that the spots on her face and Olya Meshcherskaya’s disheveled hair are all poetry of natural behavior. But for him it is also certain that in certain circumstances of life, one can even say that at a certain stage of human civilization, human impulses towards the natural are cut short by the boring or even cynical course of things, determined by bad adults. And yet this victory of the dark and bad over the natural is a temporary phenomenon. Ultimately, light breathing, a clean, bright world of liberation from everything invented, must and will triumph in human life. false norms and regulations.

So, theoretical judgment and creative practice itself speak in favor of the differentiated principle of considering content and form. Moreover, in the first case, thinkers of different philosophical and aesthetic orientations are united. Now it is fashionable to be ironic about Marx’s views, but it was he who said that if the form of manifestation and the essence of things directly coincided, then all science would be superfluous. But a similar thought, albeit not in such theoretical certainty, was expressed by Leo Tolstoy: “a terrible thing is concern for the perfection of form. It’s not for nothing. But it’s not for nothing when the content is good. If Gogol had written his comedy roughly, weakly, it would not have been read even by one millionth of those who have read it now." Belinsky called Baratynsky’s poems “On the Death of Goethe” “wonderful,” but denied the poem the value of its content: “Uncertainty of ideas, infidelity in content.”

Chernyshevsky called Goethe’s poem “Herman and Dorothea” “excellent in artistically", but in content "harmful and pathetic, sugary-sentimental." The point here is not in the actual accuracy of the assessments, but in their theoretical orientation.

The history of culture in the 20th century demonstrated countless variants of inconsistencies between content and form. Sometimes they, especially in those cases when they tried to clothe the old content in new uniform, acquired a comic effect. For example: they tried to transform the well-known classical motif “here a young gentleman drove up to me” with the help of modern details - “here a collective farm truck drove up to us.” This was especially common in folklore modifications, say, “here a hero sat down in a high-speed ZIS.”

In a word, it is not the artificial terminological enrichment of literary science, but real practice that dictates the need for separate consideration of these categories. And there’s not much to talk about educational purposes and benefits. But the final solution to the issue, of course, is possible after systematizing the elements of content and form.

A thorough, systematized view of content in recent years has been stimulated by the fact that the traditional Hegelian concept of the formal specificity of art has been replaced by a meaningful one. Art has appeared in current scientific systems as a form of consciousness that has not only external (imagery), but also internal semantic feature. The dominance of the Hegelian point of view objectively sometimes reduced art to an illustrative function or, in any case, was most often perceived as a secondary phenomenon of social consciousness: after all, such forms of consciousness as philosophy, and even more so journalism, turned out to be more operative forms. Hence, by the way, there was a very arrogant attitude of politics towards art, a lack of faith in its ability to get ahead of political doctrines or, even more so, specific social and public recommendations. A new look at the specifics of artistic creativity equated art with all other forms of social consciousness. As a result of this new concept, it became necessary to consider not only the content itself, but also its sources. There are different approaches here. Not all of them, even those that arise from the recognition of the specific content of figurative reflection, can be agreed with. The most preferable thought should be that which takes into account the specificity of both content and, at the same time, form, and also evaluates art not only as social phenomenon, but also as an aesthetic phenomenon. According to the German esthetician Baumgarten, beauty is a specifically sensual, objective phenomenon; This provision also applies to art. Therefore, the idea of ​​the source of artistic content, which considers the writer’s ideological views to be such, is a certain extreme that arose in polemics with the concept of figurative specificity.

Another source of content should be named. Not ideology as a system of beliefs, but social Psychology, ordinary consciousness, unsystematized by impression, emotional reaction on what is happening, etc. This was well understood by young Dobrolyubov, who found two sides in the writer’s creative consciousness: theoretical views and worldview. The latter is the source of the content. And due to a number of features and its activity, it often comes into conflict with the author’s theories.

But this same circumstance makes it difficult to analyze the specific features of the content and the “mechanism” of the influence of some objective ideas of the work, its theoretical premises.

So what is content? Undoubtedly, this is the subject of the image, what is often called material. Recognizing that Vygotsky narrows artistic content, reducing it to the subject of reproduction, one cannot, of course, exclude the latter from the content. We should talk about the unity, so to speak, of the “passive” and “active” sides of the content literary text. Activity is the essence of the author’s relationship to the object of the story. It is clear that these relationships are multifaceted. They consist in highlighting special aspects of the subject under consideration, then in their specific emotional assessment.

Where to start classifying the content of a work? Most likely, from the answer to the question - is such a classification necessary? As a matter of fact, this question is the methodological key of all theoretical knowledge. The answer in our case is obvious. We must try to consider “morphology” at an unsystematized, everyday level. work of art. And this is what this consideration leads to. With all the limitless diversity of creative individuals, the plots, motifs, and even the objects themselves are very often similar or even almost identical. But the latter has a relative property, that is, artists can coincide either in the general picture of a life situation or in its particulars. But in any case, all these similarities and differences encourage us to typologize, and, therefore, terminologically designate aspects of the content. In the most general sense and scope, the subject of artistic knowledge is one - this is life. But that is why artistic individuality exists, because it always has its own artistic life as a product of its observation and imagination. There are many easily accessible understandings and very convenient examples for educational purposes that convince of the need for the named terminological distinction. Here is one of the classic and, one might say, school examples that belong to the category of self-evident truths. Russian literature of the 19th century, according to a long-standing traditional definition, is a variety of stories about the so-called superfluous people and the little man. The combination of relevant artistic types allows us to talk about a broad topic artistic literature last century. But it is equally obvious that the general subject of artistic attention multiplies greatly in the eyes of the writer. No matter how close the moral properties of Onegin, Pechorin and Rudin are, their differences are striking upon the most approximate examination. Birth characteristics extra person as if realized in its species qualities. Of course, we should not ignore the fact that generic and species classifications are rather arbitrary. And for theoretical consciousness, in this case, a metonymic approach is not acceptable, when it is possible to reduce the general to the particular and vice versa. The picture of such a unification and separation of artistic types is especially visible when we're talking about about a little man. Here is also a school example, allowed in a university course for the reason that the explanatory function of literary thought should operate here. Any attentive reader of Russian classics, talking about the little man in it, will name three stories: “The Station Agent” by Pushkin, “The Overcoat” by Gogol and “Poor People” by Dostoevsky. Three giants of Russian prose, three founders of the great humanistic theme. Once upon a time, in the 30s of the 20th century, in the theory of the “single stream”, in this dictatorial leveling of Russian culture, an analysis of the differences between the named stories was not supposed. Culture had to be interpreted from the point of view of the unity of common motives and moral premises. Since the humanistic pathos of their authors dominated in all these stories, it was hardly necessary to bother oneself with the search for fundamental substantive differences. People interested in the history of science know that the single-stream concept, capable of stating, for example, the coincidence of humanistic motives in the novels of Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky, was not able to explain the major ideological differences between the “sixties”. Yes, Samson Vyrin, Akakiy Bashmachkin and Makar Devushkin are siblings in the social and hierarchical sense, but it is easy to see that in Pushkin’s character the “controlling force” of his actions is the defense of human and paternal honor, which, as it seems to him, has been violated. A.A. Bashmachkin is a much different modification of the spiritual state of the poor official from Vyrin. It may even seem that here the spiritual principle itself is exhausted to the limit by material concerns. The almost selfless dream of an overcoat threatens to turn into a complete loss of his human appearance for Bashmachkin. In her social invisibility and spiritual obliteration there are signs of rejection from normal life human society. If there were no motive in the story, expressed by the words “this is your brother,” there would be every reason to talk about the transformation of a person into a thing. That “electricity,” which Gogol considered a factor determining the absurdity and grotesqueness of human relations in cold St. Petersburg, essentially makes the entire legal order and way of life unreal. In Gogol's story, a person appears in strict social determination, which has certain consequences: he was a good man Yes, he became a general. Makar Devushkin is a completely different type of official from the St. Petersburg slums. He has great internal dynamism in his perception of what is happening. The range of his judgments is so wide and contrasting that at times it even seems artificial, but this is not so. There is logic in the transition from a spontaneous awareness of the social absurdity of life to a conciliatory consolation regarding its troubles. Yes, says Makar Devushkin, I am a rat, but I earn my bread with my own hands. Yes. He soberly understands that some people travel in carriages, while others splash around in the mud. But the phrases “morbid ambition” and “submissive self-consolation” are suitable for the emotional characterization of his reflection: ancient philosophers walked barefoot, and wealth often goes to fools. “We all came out of The Overcoat,” Dostoevsky allegedly said. This is fair, but only in a general sense, because Gogol’s coloring is unacceptable for Makar Devushkin. He likes Pushkin’s character and the whole story about Vyrin much better. This is easy to explain. Lyubov Devushkin's Makara to Varenka and caring for her is essentially the only thread connecting him with spiritual forms of life. Soon they will break off, the landowner Bykov will appear, and Devushkin will lose Varenka. And, fearing this approaching future, Devushkin is indignant about his possible reproduction. Makar Devushkin stands, as it were, between Samson Vyrin and Akaki Akakievich. Consequently, it is clear that we are faced with completely different forms of incarnation little man, i.e. different problems.

Here is a visual effect and example, beloved by art critics. There are three monuments to Gogol in Moscow: the front one - on Arbat, as if a government gift to admirers of the author of Dead Souls; the brilliant Andreevsky in the courtyard of one of the houses on Gogolevsky Boulevard and the caustic Gogol of Manizer in the foyer of the Maly Theater. Despite the mediocrity of the first, it cannot be said that it contained absolute untruth: faith in the greatness of the future of Russia to a large extent determined the writer’s ideological position. As for the outstanding monument created by Andreev, here it is all the more necessary to see the appearance of a stern and sad lover of truth. The satirical mockery of Gogol, placed in the spotlight by Manizer, is unconditional for the author of The Inspector General. In a word, we have before us a self-evident case of “classification” of a single historical material according to the most characteristic psychological characteristics - another proof of the legitimacy of the terminological definition of an artistic object: theme and problem or theme and problematic. The substitution of concepts that occurs in the scientific literature confuses the issue.

In relation to the actual literary material such a theoretical recommendation is confirmed by the greatest artistic synonyms. You can take confirmation in the case of an interaction between the topic and the problem that is opposite to the above. In "War and Peace", "Anna Karenina", naturally, various topics: historical events early XIX century and social and moral issues characteristic of the middle of the century, but the problems of the novels contain great similarities.

True, Tolstoy notes: in “War and Peace” there is a folk thought, in “Anna Karenina” it is a family thought. But these definitions cannot be unconditionally attributed only to the problem, as well as to the topic. Here Tolstoy emphasizes a certain angle of view, the issue of human behavior is considered. If we specify the problems of the novels, it turns out that it can be reduced to the thesis - the inability to live according to the laws of collective consciousness and feeling is evil. The “swarm”, which unites the beginning of life according to the laws of the “peace” - like a peasant gathering - is the highest saving good. This relationship can also be traced within the same work - in different storylines. A classic example is families falling apart and being created in Anna Karenina; here the guarantee, so to speak, of moral success is in the altruistic feeling of the internal connection of one person with another. The discrepancy between the categories of theme and problem is perhaps a universal law of all types of art. When there is a “translation” of the content of one type of art into the content of another, then cases are common when one type of art can provide a variety of content in other types of art. For example, if the famous Pushkin words “don’t sing, beauty, in front of me” are declared as the theme of a literary work, then in the corresponding romances on these words, thanks to the aesthetic shade, there will be different problematics: the bright, elegant romance of Glinka and the passionate romance of Rachmaninov. If you have a general aesthetic point of view on the issue under study, you can recall the essential provisions of Chernyshevsky’s famous dissertation “Aesthetic relations of art to reality,” according to which artistic creativity reproduces, explains and sometimes “pronounces a verdict.” Reproduces and explains - this is, relatively speaking, a topic and a problem. As for the sentence, it is the most “active” aspect of the content. This is the artist’s emotional assessment of what is depicted. It is not difficult to imagine how diverse such assessments are; they are the basis of a very specific classification. Of course, there is a temptation to abandon scientific systematization in this case: there are so many creative individuals, so many assessments and, therefore, scientific systematization is impossible, because it always presupposes the existence of a general law or several patterns. The first, long-pronounced and familiar word in this usage is idea, but the word needs to be used carefully. It is difficult to agree with the point of view that a direct statement by a writer in or outside the text, for example an epigraph, can be called the author’s idea, and the ideological meaning of the entire work, in all its main details, can be called the objective idea of ​​this work. It is clear that the famous epigraph to Anna Karenina - “Vengeance is mine and I will repay” - constitutes a certain author’s idea, and the entire main text of the novel is an objective idea.

Subject detail artistic images as one of the main forms of storytelling

Usually, when they talk about artistic form, they turn first of all to speech, to language. There is a well-known classic formula, popular in the 20th century: language is the primary element of literature. However, taking into account the well-known position of the outstanding German esthetician of the 18th century A. Baumgarten that beauty is a concrete sensory feature of the world, and remembering that art is the highest degree of beauty, it is more logical to begin the study of form with the characteristics subject details. In addition, the emphasis on the objective world, on the landscape, on the portrait, on the everyday environment is motivated by the fact that a person, as the main subject of art, very often in its content is essentially reduced to this objective feature of life. In other words, the essence of a person, and it is precisely the psychological essence of a person that can very often be reduced to this world of things.

This emphasis on detail provides ample scope for the most various forms Conventions: grotesque, anecdotal. G. Uspensky in his story “Morals of Rasteryaeva Street” talks about the husband of a certain Balkanikha, whom he, seeing on the threshold of the closet, where he entered secretly from her to try the jam, “gave up the ghost” from fear. In this episode, Balkanikha’s character is visible, manically focused on the thing, and the whole situation of their family life. This motif was repeated by Chekhov in the story “Carelessness,” where the hero also secretly goes to the cupboard to drink something strong. But he drank kerosene. His sister-in-law Dasha woke up to his screams, and when he, surprised that he did not die, and began to explain this with his righteous life, the gloomy sister-in-law began to mutter: no, not because he was righteous, but because they gave him the wrong kerosene, the wrong one, some for 5 kopecks, some for three. Christ sellers! Here is another version of the manic nature of human passion.

Chekhov's example forces us to pay attention to the fact that one subject detail can be a characterological feature of the structure of a work. In Chekhov's story "On a Nail," the birthday boy Struchkov takes his government friends to dinner. They see a large nail on the wall in the hallway, and on it a new cap with a shining visor and a badge. The officials, turning pale, left to wait while their boss visited the birthday boy. When they return, they see: a marten cap is already hanging on a nail. It was another boss who came to visit Struchkov’s wife, and they again left their friend’s house.

The function of an object detail has received a classical definition as an absolutely effective, both numerically and in terms of plot, aesthetic phenomenon. More than a hundred years ago it was said: if a gun is displayed in one of the acts of the play, then it must fire. And not just be removed at intermission. By the way, these words are inaccurately attributed to Chekhov; in fact, they belong to the director V. Nemirovich-Danchenko. Although this should not be understood too straightforwardly: a gun may not necessarily fire, it may function differently, but it certainly functions. There is some special, cosmic secret in a person’s attraction to the natural concrete world. Sometimes it seems paradoxical that art speaks of a person passing away in a situation of some kind of real pantheism. That is, a person thinks most of all about nature, and not about the people he leaves, even the closest ones. But this is exactly what happens in art, and one of the most illustrative examples in this regard are the lines of B. Pasternak in the poem “English Lessons”:

When I wanted to sing to Desdemona,

And there was so little left to live,

Not for her love - the star...she

According to the willow, she burst into tears.

When I wanted to sing to Ophelia,

And I'm tired of the bitterness of dreams,

What trophies did you go with?

With an armful of willows and celandine.

Very often artists semantic characteristics resort to the substantive details of the situation. Here Turgenev in “Fathers and Sons” characterizes everyday details in the setting of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, whom he disliked. Abroad, he “adheres to Slavophile views, ... he doesn’t read anything Russian, but on desk he has a silver ashtray in the shape of a peasant's bast shoe." Here is an almost satirical image of an ostentatious lover of the people: the bast shoe is a symbol of peasant poverty, but for Kirsanov it is silver, that is, it is only an object of secular use. Such an example of a direct critical method in the literary characterology of the writer is essentially universal in classical literature. Writers, as a rule, have a direct comparison of the external and the internal. Here is a popular example. In Gogol’s Sobakevich in “Dead Souls,” everything in the house “was of the heaviest and most restless nature, in a word, every object, every chair, it seemed, said: “I, too, Sobakevich.” Everyone knows this, but they do not always notice the meaning of the word “restless,” and yet Sobakevich is full of anxiety before new phenomena, before the adventure that is the traveling salesmanship of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. Gogol in general, perhaps, is the first writer in Russia for his bold introduction of these very substantive details into characterology.In his “Marriage,” Podkolesin, before the wedding, no longer thinks about the bride, but about waxing and cloth.

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Plot (from French sujet - subject)

1) in literature - action development, the course of events in narrative and dramatic works, and sometimes in lyrical ones. To literature the word "S." first used in the 17th century. classicists P. Corneille and N. Boileau, meaning, following Aristotle, events in life legendary heroes antiquities (for example, Antigone and Creon or Medea and Jason), borrowed by playwrights of later times. But Aristotle in “Poetics” used the ancient Greek word “myth” (мýthos) in the sense of “tradition” to refer to such incidents, which in Russian literary criticism is usually translated incorrectly by the Latin word “fable”. The Latin word “fabula” (from the same root as the verb fabulari - to tell, narrate) was used by Roman writers to designate all kinds of stories, including myths and fables, and became widespread much earlier than the French term “S.” In German classical aesthetics (Schelling, Hegel), the events depicted in works were called “action” (Handlung). The difference in terms denoting one phenomenon has made them unstable and ambiguous.

In modern Soviet literary criticism and school practice terms "S." and “fabula” are understood either as synonyms, or S. is called the entire course of events, and fabula is the main artistic conflict that develops in them (in both cases the terms are doubled). In literary criticism, two other interpretations collide. In the 1920s representatives of OPOYAZ proposed an important distinction between two sides of the narrative: the development of the events themselves in the lives of the characters, the order and method of reporting about them by the author-storyteller; attaching great importance to how the work was “made”, they began to call S. the second side, and the first - the plot. This tradition continues to be preserved (see “The Theory of Literature...” in three volumes, vol. 2, M., 1964). Another tradition comes from Russian democratic critics of the mid-19th century, as well as from A. N. Veselovsky (See Veselovsky) and M. Gorky; all of them S. called the development of action (Belinsky V.G.: “Gogol’s poem can be fully enjoyed only by those who... the content is important, and not the “plot”” - Complete collection soch., vol. 6, 1955, p. 219; Gorky M.: “... The plot... connections, contradictions, likes and dislikes and in general the relationships of people...” - Collection of works, vol. 27, 1953, p. 215). Such terminology is not only more traditional and familiar, but also more etymologically accurate (S., in the meaning of the word, is the “subject”, that is, what is being narrated, the plot; from the same point of view, the story itself about S.). However, it is important for supporters of this theory to assimilate the theoretical innovation of the “formal school” and, calling the main, objective side of the narrative or stage action, use the term “plot” to designate the second, actually compositional side (see Composition).

S. works are one of the most important means of embodying the content - the generalizing “thought” of the writer, his ideological and emotional understanding of the real characteristics of life, expressed through the verbal depiction of fictional characters in their individual actions and relationships. S. in all its unique originality is the main aspect of the form (and thereby the style (See Style)) of the work in its correspondence with the content, and not the content itself, as is often understood in school practice. The entire structure of the story, its conflicts and the relationship between narrative and dialogic episodes that develop them must be studied functionally, in its connections with content, in its ideological and aesthetic meaning. At the same time, it is necessary to distinguish S. in its uniqueness from abstract plot, or more precisely, conflict “schemes” (A loves B, but B loves C, etc.), which can be historically repeated, borrowed and each time find a new concrete artistic embodiment .

On early stages historical development His epic stories were built on the temporary, chronicle principle of combining episodes (fairy tales, knightly and picaresque novels). Later, in European epic, concentric conflicts appeared, based on a single conflict. In the concentric style of epic and drama, the conflict runs through the entire work and is distinguished by the definiteness of its plot (See Plot) and climax (See Climax). and interchanges (See Interchange).

Only on the basis of the analysis of S. can one functionally analyze the plot of a work in all the complex relationships of its own aspects (see Plot).

2) B fine arts- a certain event, situation depicted in a work and often indicated in its title. Unlike theme (See theme) , S. is a specific, detailed, figurative and narrative disclosure of the idea of ​​a work. S.'s particular complexity is typical for works of everyday and historical genres.

Lit.: Aristotle. On the art of poetry, M., 1937; Lessing G. E., Laocoon, or On the Borders of Painting and Poetry, M., 1957; Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, M., 1968: Belinsky V.G., Complete. collection soch., vol. 5, M., 1954, p. 219; Veselovsky A. N., Poetics of plots, in his book: Historical poetics, Leningrad, 1940; Shklovsky V.B., On the theory of prose, M.-L., 1925; Medvedev P. N., Formal method in literary criticism, L., 1928: Freidenberg O. M., Poetics of plot and genre, L., 1936; Kozhinov V.V., Plot, plot, composition, in the book: Theory of Literature..., vol. 2, M., 1964; Questions of film dramaturgy, in. 5 - Plot in cinema, M., 1965; Pospelov G. N., Problems literary style, M., 1970; Lotman Yu. M., The structure of a literary text, M., 1970; Timofeev L.I., Fundamentals of the Theory of Literature, M., 1971; Wellek R., Warren A., Theory of literature, 3 ed., N. Y., 1963.

G. N. Pospelov(S. in literature).

Great Soviet Encyclopedia. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1969-1978 .

Synonyms:

See what “Plot” is in other dictionaries:

- (from the French sujet subject) in literature, drama, theater, cinema and games, a series of events (sequence of scenes, acts) occurring in a work of art (on the theater stage) and built for the reader (viewer, player) ... Wikipedia

1. S. in literature, a reflection of the dynamics of reality in the form of the action unfolding in the work, in the form of internally connected (causal and temporal connection) actions of characters, events that form a certain unity, constituting some ... Literary encyclopedia

Plot- PLOT is the narrative core of a work of art, a system of effective (factual) mutual direction and arrangement of speakers in this work persons (objects), provisions put forward in it, events developing in it... ... Dictionary of literary terms

- (French, from Latin subjectum subject). The content, the interweaving of external circumstances that form the basis of the known. literary or arts. works; in music: fugue theme. In theatrical language, an actor or actress. Dictionary foreign words, included in... ... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

Cm … Synonym dictionary

- (from French sujet subject, subject) sequence of events in a literary text. The paradox associated with the fate of the concept of S. in the twentieth century is that as soon as philology learned to study it, literature began to destroy it. In studying C... Encyclopedia of Cultural Studies

PLOT, plot, husband. (French sujet). 1. A set of actions and events in which the main content of a work of art is revealed (lit.). Plot Queen of Spades Pushkin. Choose something as the plot of a novel. 2. transfer Content, topic of what... ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary

From life. Razg. Joking. iron. About what l. an everyday life episode, an ordinary everyday story. Mokienko 2003, 116. Plot for a short story. Razg. Joking. iron. 1. Something worth talking about. 2. Which l. strange, interesting story. /i> From... ... Large dictionary of Russian sayings

- (French sujet, literally subject), in an epic, drama, poem, script, film, the way the plot unfolds, the sequence and motivation for presenting the events depicted. Sometimes the concepts of plot and plot are defined the other way around; sometimes they are identified... Modern encyclopedia

- (French sujet lit. subject), in an epic, drama, poem, script, film, the way the plot unfolds, the sequence and motivation for presenting the events depicted. Sometimes the concepts of plot and plot are defined the other way around; sometimes they are identified. IN… … Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Architectonics of the work. Composition of the work.

Architectonics is the construction of a work as a single whole, the relationship of its constituent parts and elements, determined by the idea of ​​the work.

Architectonics is the construction of a work of art, its general external form and the interrelation of individual parts.

The concept of architectonics combines the relationship of parts of a work, the arrangement and mutual connection of its components (components), which together form some kind of artistic unity. The concept of architectonics includes both the external structure of the work and the construction of the plot: the division of the work into parts, the type of narration (from the author or on behalf of a special narrator), the role of dialogue, one or another sequence of events (temporal or in violation of the chronological principle), an introduction to narrative fabric of various descriptions, author's reasoning and lyrical digressions, grouping characters etc. Architectural techniques constitute one of the essential elements of style (in in a broad sense words) and together with it are socially conditioned. If we take, for example, Turgenev’s novels, we will find in them consistency in the presentation of events, smoothness in the course of the narrative, an emphasis on the harmonious harmony of the whole, and the important compositional role of the landscape. These features are easily explained both by the life of the estate and the psyche of its inhabitants. Dostoevsky's novels are constructed according to completely different laws: the action begins in the middle, the narrative flows quickly, in leaps and bounds, and the external disproportion of the parts is also noticeable. These properties of architectonics are in the same way determined by the characteristics of the depicted environment - the metropolitan philistinism. Within the same literary style, the techniques of architectonics vary depending on the artistic genre (novel, story, short story, poem, dramatic work, lyric poem). Each genre is characterized by a number of specific signs, requiring a unique composition.

Composition- the construction of a work of art, determined by its content and character. Composition is the most important element of the artistic form, giving the work unity and integrity.

Composition(from Latin compositio - composition, composition), 1) the construction of a work of art, determined by its content, nature and purpose and largely determining its perception. Composition is the most important organizing component of a work of art, giving it integrity, subordinating its elements to each other and to the whole. The laws of composition in a work of art, which develop in the process of artistic comprehension of reality, to one degree or another reflect objective laws real world. These patterns appear in a figuratively translated form, associated with the specifics of a particular type of art, artistic idea, material of the work, etc., reflecting the aesthetic principles of the era, style, artistic direction.

Composition determines the nature and strength of the influence of a literary text on perception.

#composition of “The Iliad” – several days and several bright episodes.

Free composition - through the perception of the heroes of life associated with associations # "Wheels" J. Joyce

The drama has its own composition. There are works without the composition “Theater of the Absurd”

The problem of composition is connected with the problem of artistic time - perhaps. sequential “War and Peace”, maybe linear (develops in the present and past) # “The Shore” by Bondarev; M.B. time is “flat” - the principle of the bed “The Sound and the Fury” William F.

Types of metaphor

Since antiquity, there have been descriptions of some traditional types of metaphor:

• A sharp metaphor is a metaphor that brings together concepts that are far apart from each other. Model: saying filling.
• An erased (genetic) metaphor is a generally accepted metaphor, the figurative nature of which is no longer felt. Model: chair leg.
• A formula metaphor is close to an erased metaphor, but differs from it by even greater stereotyping and sometimes the impossibility of transformation into a non-figurative construction. Model: worm of doubt.
• An extended metaphor is a metaphor that is consistently implemented throughout a large fragment of a message or the entire message as a whole. Model: The book hunger does not go away: products from the book market increasingly turn out to be stale - they have to be thrown away without even trying.
• A realized metaphor involves operating with a metaphorical expression without taking into account its figurative nature, that is, as if the metaphor had a direct meaning. The result of the implementation of a metaphor is often comic. Model: I lost my temper and got on the bus.

Among other tropes (Trope- change eigenvalue words or a turn of phrase that enriches the meaning), metaphor occupies a central place, as it allows you to create a capacious image based on vivid, unexpected associations. Metaphorization can be based on the similarity of the most varied characteristics of objects: color, shape, volume, purpose, position, etc. In poetry, metaphors are most often used to help create images. In a broad sense, the term “image” means a reflection of some phenomenon outside world in our minds. In a work of art, images are the embodiment of the author’s thinking, his unique vision and a vivid image of the picture of the world. Creation bright image based on the use of similarities between two objects that are distant from each other, almost on a kind of contrast. For a comparison of objects or phenomena to be unexpected, they must be quite different from each other, and sometimes the similarity can be quite insignificant, unnoticeable, giving food for thought, or may be absent altogether.
The uniqueness of metaphor, as a type of trope, is that it represents a comparison, the members of which have merged so much that what was being compared was supplanted by what it was being compared with, for example:
"A bee from a wax cell
Flies for field tribute"
(A.S. Pushkin)
In the above lines, honey is compared with tribute and a beehive with a cell, with the first terms being replaced by the second.

Why do we need metaphors at all? Russian language experts say that:
- Metaphor is needed to make some idea or thought more memorable.
- Metaphor is necessary when you need to reformulate a problem, destroy a limitation, see the situation in new perspective.
- Metaphor can be used to subtly convey new point vision, or even make it clear that a person’s problem is not new and there have been solutions to it for a long time.
- Metaphor is even used to change a person’s limiting beliefs, leading the person to new possibilities.

Forms of irony

Direct irony is a way to belittle, give a negative or funny character to the phenomenon being described.

Anti-irony is the opposite of direct irony and allows you to present the object of anti-irony as underestimated.

Self-irony is irony directed at oneself. In self-irony and anti-irony, negative statements may imply the opposite (positive) subtext. Example: “Where can we fools drink tea?”

Socrates irony is a form of self-irony constructed in such a way that an object, to which it is addressed, as if independently comes to natural logical conclusions and finds hidden meaning ironic statement, following the premises of “one who does not know the truth” subject.

Ironic worldview- a state of mind that allows one not to take common assertions on faith and stereotypes, and not to take various “generally accepted values” too seriously.

Irony as a means comic presentation of material is a powerful tool for the formation of literary style, built on contrasting the literal meaning of words and statements with their true meaning (“The bullet turned out to be poisoned after hitting the leader’s poisonous body” - Georgy Alexandrov)

The plot of a literary work of art.

Plot (from French sujet) – a chain of events depicted in literary

work, the life of the characters in its spatio-temporal

dimensions, in changing positions and circumstances.

The events recreated by the creator form the basis of the objective

the world of a work are an integral part of its form. How

the organizing beginning of most epic and dramatic

works, the plot can be significant in a lyrical way

literature.

Understanding the plot as a set of events recreated in

work, goes back to the domestic literary criticism XIX V. :

A. N. Veselovsky in one of the sections of the monograph “Historical Poetics”

presented a holistic description of the problem of literary plots from the point of view

from the point of view of comparative historical analysis.

At the beginning of the 20th century, V. B. Shklovsky, B. V. Tomashevsky and others

representatives of the formal school of literary criticism made an attempt

change the proposed terminology and connect the plot of the work with its

plot (from Latin fibula - legend, myth, fable). They offered under

plot to understand the artistically constructed distribution of events, and

under the plot - a set of events in their mutual internal connection.

Sources of plots - mythology, historical legend, literature

past times. Traditional subjects, i.e. antique, wide

used by classicist playwrights.

Numerous works are based on events

historical nature, or taking place in a place close to the writer

reality, his own life. So, the tragic story of the Don

Cossacks and the drama of the military intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century, life

prototypes and other phenomena of reality were the subject of the author's

attention in the works of M. A. Sholokhov “Quiet Don”, M. A. Bulgakov

« White Guard", V.V. Nabokov "Mashenka". In literature, plots that arose are also common

as a figment of the artist’s imagination (the story “The Nose” by N.V. Gogol).

It happens that the series of events in a work go into subtext,

giving way to the recreation of the hero’s impressions, thoughts, experiences,

descriptions of nature. These are, in particular, stories

I. A. Bunin “Chang’s Dreams”, L. E. Ulitskaya “Pearl Soup”.

The plot has various functions. Firstly, he

captures the picture of the world: the writer’s vision of being, possessing

deep meaning, giving hope - a harmonious world order.

In historical poetics, this type of artist’s views is defined as

classic, it is typical for the plots of literature of past centuries

(works of G. Heine, N. Karamzin, I. Goncharov,

A. Chekhov, etc.). Conversely, a writer can imagine the world as

hopeless, deadly existence, conducive to spiritual

darkness. The second way of seeing the world - non-classical - underlies

many literary plots XX–XXI centuries Literary heritage

F. Kafka, B. Poplavsky and others were noted by everyone

pessimism and disharmony in the general state of the characters.

Secondly, the series of events in the works are designed to reveal and

to recreate life's contradictions - conflicts in the fate of heroes who are excited, tense, and experience deep dissatisfaction with something. By its nature, the plot is involved in

What is meant by the term “drama”.

Thirdly, plots organize a field of active search for characters,

allow them to fully reveal themselves to the thinking reader in their actions,

cause a range of emotional and mental responses to what is happening.

The plot form is well suited for detailed recreation

volitional principle in a person and is characteristic of the literature of the detective genre.

Theorists, professional researchers, literary editors

art publications The following types of literary literature are distinguished:

plots: concentric, chronicle, and also, according to V. E. Khalizev,

those that are in cause-and-effect relationships are supra-genre.

Plots in which one particular aspect comes to the fore

event situation (and the work is based on one plot

lines) are called concentric. Single-line event series

were widespread in the literature of antiquity and classicism.

In literature, chronicles are stories in which events

dispersed and deployed separately from each other. According to

V. E. Khalizeva, in these plots the events have no causal relationship with each other.

investigative connections and are correlated with each other only in time, as is

takes place in Homer's epic "Odyssey", Cervantes' novel " Don Quixote»,

Byron's poem "Don Juan".

The same scientist identifies as a type of chronicle

multilinear plots, i.e. unfolding parallel to each other,

somewhat independent; only occasionally touching

plot schemes, such as, for example, in L. N. Tolstoy’s novels “Anna

Karenina”, I. A. Goncharova “Cliff”.

Particularly deeply rooted in world history literature plots,

where events are concentrated among themselves in cause-and-effect relationships and reveal a full-fledged conflict: from the beginning of an action to its denouement.

A good example is the tragedies of W. Shakespeare, the dramas of A. S. Griboedov and

A. N. Ostrovsky, novels by I. S. Turgenev.

These types of literary plots are well described and carefully

studied in literary criticism. V. Ya. Propp in the monograph “Morphology

fairy tales" with the help of the concept of "function of characters" revealed

the significance of the character’s action for the further course of events39.

Researchers of structuralist orientation A. Greimas, K. Bremont

believe that storytelling meditation relies on a special way

thinking associated with a change in view of the essence of human

activities marked by signs of freedom and independence, responsibility

and irreversibility.

IN classic stories, where actions move from beginning to end,

big role vicissitudes play - sudden shifts in the destinies of the characters:

all sorts of turns from happiness to unhappiness, from success to failure or

vice versa, etc. Unexpected incidents with the characters give

the work is deep philosophical meaning. As a rule, in stories with

abundant twists and turns embody a special idea of ​​power

various accidents over the fate of a person.

The twists and turns add an important element of entertainment to the work.

Causing increased interest in reading among the contemplative reader,

event intricacies are characteristic of both literature

of an entertaining nature, as well as for serious, “summit” literature.

In the literature, along with the considered plots (concentric,

chronicle, those where there is a plot, conflict, denouement),

special emphasis is placed on event sequences that focus on the state

human world in its complexity, versatility and persistent conflict. Moreover, the hero here craves not so much to achieve some

then the goal, how much it correlates itself with the surrounding disharmonious

reality as an integral part of it. He is often task-focused

knowledge of the world and one’s place in it, is in constant search

agreement with oneself. Philosophically important “self-discoveries” of heroes

F. Dostoevsky, N. Leskov, S. Aksakov, I. Goethe, Dante are leveled

external event dynamics of the narrative, and the twists and turns here

turn out to be unnecessary.

The stable-conflict state of the world was actively mastered

literature: works by M. de Cervantes “Don Quixote”, J. Milton

« Lost heaven", "The Life of Archpriest Avvakum", A. Pushkin "Eugene

Onegin”, A. Chekhov’s “Lady with a Dog”, plays by G. Ibsen and others deeply

debatable, consistently revealing “layers of life” and “doomed”

be left without a solution.

Because the plot of a literary work orders the world

artistic images in its temporal extent, then in the environment

professional researchers inevitably face the question of

sequence of events in plots and techniques that provide

unity of perception of the artistic canvas.

Classic scheme single-line plot: plot, development of action,

climax, denouement. Chronicle story make up, frame chains

episodes, sometimes including concentric microplots, are not outwardly

related to the main action - inserted short stories, parables, fairy tales and

other literary processed material. This method of connecting parts

the work deepens the internal semantic connection between the inserted and

main plots.

The technique of plot framing in the presence of a narrator reveals

the deep meaning of the story being conveyed, as, for example, reflected in

the work of Leo Tolstoy “After the Ball”, or emphasizes various

attitude to many actions, both of the hero-narrator himself and of his

random fellow travelers, in particular, in the story by Nikolai Leskov

"The Enchanted Wanderer".

The method of installation (from the gr. montage - assembly, selection) came to

literature from cinema. As a literary term, it

the meaning comes down to the discontinuity (discreteness) of the image, the breakdown

narratives into many small episodes, the fragmentation of which

the unity of the artistic concept is also hidden. Assembly

the image of the surrounding world is characteristic of the prose of A. I. Solzhenitsyn.

In a work, the plot inversion is most often

various silences, secrets, omissions that prepare recognition,

discovery, organizing the twists and turns that move the action itself towards

interesting ending.

Plot is a system of incidents, the course of events in narrative and dramatic works, and sometimes in lyrical works. In an extremely general form, a plot is a kind of basic scheme of a work, which includes the sequence of actions occurring in the work and the totality of character relationships existing in it. Typically, a plot includes the following elements: exposition, beginning, development of action, climax, denouement and postposition, and also, in some works, prologue and epilogue. The main prerequisite for the development of the plot is time, and how historical period actions and the passage of time during the work. The basis of the plot is conflict, it can be: 1) a conflict of desires, 2) interests, 3) heroes, 4) persons. The concept of plot is closely related to the concept of the plot of the work. In modern Russian literary criticism The term “plot” usually refers to the very course of events in a work, and the plot is understood as the main artistic conflict that develops in the course of these events. Repeated attempts have been made to classify the plots of literary works, divide them according to various criteria, and highlight the most typical ones. The analysis made it possible, in particular, to identify a large group of so-called “wandering plots” - plots that are repeated many times in different designs among different peoples and in different regions, mostly in folk art (fairy tales, myths, legends). The French researcher Georges Polti published the book “Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations” in 1895, in which he reduced the entire experience of world drama to the development of 36 standard plot collisions.

Plot (from the French sujet - subject) - the course of the narrative about the events unfolding and happening in a work of art. As a rule, any such episode is subordinated to the main or subplot.

However, in literary criticism there is no uniform definition of this term. There are three main approaches:

1) plot is a way of developing a theme or presenting a plot;

2) plot is a way of developing a theme or presenting a plot;

3) plot and plot have no fundamental difference.

The plot is based on a conflict (a clash of interests and characters) between the characters. That is why where there is no narrative (lyrics), there is no plot.

The term “plot” was introduced in the 11th century. classicists P. Corneille and N. Boileau, but they were followers of Aristotle. Aristotle called what is called “plot” “legend”. Hence the “course of the narrative.”

The plot consists of the following main elements:

Exposition

Action development

Climax

Denouement

Exposition (Latin expositio - explanation, presentation) is a plot element containing a description of the lives of the characters before they begin to act in the work. Direct exposition is placed at the beginning of the story, delayed exposition is placed anywhere, but it must be said that modern writers rarely use this plot element.

The plot is the initial, starting episode of the plot. She usually appears at the beginning of the story, but this is not the rule. So, we learn about Chichikov’s desire to buy up dead souls only at the end of Gogol’s poem.

The development of the action proceeds “according to the will” of the characters in the story and author's intention. The development of action precedes the climax.

Climax (from Latin culmen - peak) is the moment of the highest tension of action in a work, its turning point. After the climax comes the denouement.

The denouement is the final part of the plot, the end of the action, where the conflict is resolved and the motivation for the actions of the main and some secondary characters is clarified and their psychological portraits are clarified.

The denouement sometimes precedes the plot, especially in detective works, where in order to interest the reader and capture his attention, the story begins with a murder.

Other supporting plot elements are a prologue, backstory, author's aside, insert novella, and epilogue.

However, in modern literary process we often do not encounter any extended expositions, nor prologues and epilogues, nor other elements of the plot, and sometimes even the plot itself is blurred, barely outlined, or even completely absent.

Subsection Terminology

Plot Fable

Plot outline: completed, unfinished

Plot technique: recurrent, complicated, framing, linear

Exposition Commencement Development of action Climax Resolution Ending

Exposure: direct, delayed, diffuse, reverse

Prologue Epilogue

Inception: motivated, sudden

Peripeteia

Climax: eventual, psychological

Resolution: motivated, unmotivated, zero

Additional Information; separated by spaces from the main one.

Plot and plot

As already mentioned, dramatic and epic works depict events in the lives of characters, their actions taking place in space and time. This side of artistic creativity (the course of events, usually consisting of the actions of the characters, i.e., the spatio-temporal dynamics of what is depicted) is designated by the term plot.

Plot (from French sujet) – a chain of events depicted in a literary work, i.e. the life of the characters in its spatio-temporal changes, in changing positions and circumstances.

Ø Plots are often taken from mythology, historical legend, from the literature of past eras, and are processed, changed, and supplemented.

Ø The plot, as a rule, comes to the fore in the test and determines its construction (composition). But sometimes the depiction of events gives way to impressions, thoughts, experiences of the characters, descriptions of the external world and nature.

Like the character system, the plot carries a number of meaningful functions.

1. Identifies and characterizes a person’s connections with his environment, i.e., his place in reality and destiny, creates a picture of the world.

2. Recreates life's contradictions (it is difficult to imagine a plot without conflict).

Plots are organized in different ways. There are plots with a predominance of purely temporary connections (chronicle) and plots with a predominance of cause-and-effect relationships (concentric).

Wed. The king died and the queen died- chronicle story.

The king died and the queen died of grief- concentric plot.

One way or another, plots are made up of the actions of the characters.

Action- the manifestation of a person’s emotions, thoughts and intentions in his actions, movements, spoken words, gestures, and facial expressions.

Known in literature different types actions. In the process of external action, the relationships between the characters, their fate, and public understanding change in one direction or another. Internal action presupposes the behavior of characters in which they show feelings in behavior, words, gestures, but do nothing to change their lives.

In traditional plots, where the action moves from beginning to end, twists and turns play a significant role - all kinds of turns from happiness to misfortune, from failure to success.

Ø Peripeteias were of great importance in the heroic tales of antiquity and in fairy tales, in comedies and tragedies of antiquity and the Renaissance, in early short stories and novels (love-knightly and adventure-punctual), later - in adventure and detective literature.

Plots with twists and turns embody the idea of ​​the power of chance over people.

There are two types of sequence of events in a work: logical, also causal-temporal, (event A - event B - event C - event D) and constructed by the author (for example, event D - event A - event B - event C). For example, in L.N. Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Vasilyevich,” the reader first sees the hero’s corpse, and then gets acquainted with the story of his life. This is how two concepts arise in literary criticism: plot and plot.

According to B.V. Tomashevsky, plot– an artistically constructed distribution of events in the work, and plot– a set of events in their internal connection.

However, in literature, the concepts of plot and fable are often identified or not differentiated. Strictly speaking, such a distinction is necessary only in a number of cases: for the author when working on a work, for a reader for a competent retelling, for a specialist when analyzing a work, especially if the series of events is complex.

As an example, consider the story by M. Yu. Lermontov “A Hero of Our Time.”

This arrangement serves special artistic purposes: in particular, Pechorin is first shown through the eyes of Maxim Maksimych, and only then we see him from the inside, according to entries from the diary.

Remember the plot of I. A. Bunin’s story “Easy Breathing” and restore its plot.