What is a literary novel? Definition, characteristics and typology of the genre. What is the difference between a novel and a story? Features of genres
NOVEL (literary genre) NOVEL (literary genre)
ROMAN (French roman, German Roman; English novel/romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), central genre (cm. GENRE) European literature of modern times (cm. NEW TIME (in history)), fictional, in contrast to the neighboring genre of the story (cm. 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, the “novel in verse” “Eugene Onegin”).
In contrast to the classical epic (cm. EPOS) the novel focuses on depicting the historical present and destinies 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 the universalist terms of theoretical poetics, but can be characterized in the light of historical poetics, exploring the evolution and development of artistic consciousness, 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 (cm. CERVANTES Saavedra Miguel de)- 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. A typical example is poetic and prose pastoral eclogues (cm. ECLOGUE (in literature)) Renaissance, which turned into “pastoral novels”, the so-called “ folk books» 16th century, including the parody Pentateuch of F. Rabelais. (cm. Rabelais Francois) Fantastic or allegorical satirical narratives, dating back to the ancient “Menippean satire,” are artificially classified as novels. (cm. MENIPPEAN SATIRE)”, such as “Critikon” by B. Gracian (cm. GRACIAN Y MORALES Baltasar), "The Pilgrim's Progress" by J. Bunyan (cm. BUNYAN John), "The Adventures of Telemachus" by Fenelon (cm. FENELON Francois), satires by J. Swift (cm. SWIFT Jonathan), "philosophical tales" of Voltaire (cm. VOLTER), “poem” by N.V. Gogol (cm. GOGOL Nikolai Vasilievich)“Dead Souls”, “Penguin Island” by A. France (cm. FRANCE Anatole). Also, not all utopias can be called novels. (cm. UTOPIA), although - on the border of utopia and novel at the end of the 18th century. the genre of utopian novel arose (Morris (cm. MORRIS William), Chernyshevsky (cm. CHERNYSHEVSKY Nikolai Gavrilovich), Zola (cm. ZOLYA Emil)), and then its antipodean counterpart - a dystopian novel (“When the Sleeper Awake” by H. Wells (cm. WELLS Herbert), “We” Evg. Zamyatin (cm. ZAMYATIN Evgeniy Ivanovich)).
The novel, in principle, is a borderline genre, associated with almost all adjacent types of discourse. (cm. DISCURSIVE), both written and oral, easily incorporating foreign genre and even foreign verbal structures: essay documents, diaries, notes, letters (epistolary novel (cm. EPISTOLARY LITERATURE)), memoirs, confessions, newspaper chronicles, plots and images of folk and literary fairy tales, national and sacred traditions (for example, gospel images and motifs in the prose of F. M. Dostoevsky (cm. DOSTOEVSKY Fyodor Mikhailovich)). 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. The emergence of the concept is natural (V. Dneprov (cm. CITY OF MILITARY GLORY)), according to which the novel is the fourth - in relation to epic, lyricism and drama - type of literature.
The 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 by G. García Márquez (cm. GARCIA MARQUEZ (Gabriel)"One Hundred Years of Solitude") Therefore, being “the standard bearer and herald of individualism” (Vyach. Ivanov (cm. IVANOV Vyacheslav Ivanovich)), the novel in a new form (in the written word) simultaneously seeks to resurrect primitive syncretism (cm. SYNCRETISM) words, sound and gesture (hence the organic birth of cinema and television novels), to restore the original unity of man and 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 back in Ancient India and regardless - in Greece (cm. ANCIENT GREECE) and Rome (cm. ANCIENT ROME) in the II-IV centuries. The so-called Greek (Hellenistic) novel is chronologically the first version of the “adventurous novel of trials” (M. Bakhtin (cm. BAKHTIN Mikhail Mikhailovich)) 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 “gaping” (Bakhtin (cm. BAKHTIN Mikhail Mikhailovich)) between the starting and ending points of the development of the cyclical plot - two moments in the life 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 the other, facing the death penalty, the ascension of the other to the heights of earthly power, unexpected meeting and recognition. Art space Greek novel - an “alien”, 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, a replacement for geographical and historical encyclopedias, although it also contains a lot of fantastic information).
A key role in the development of the plot in an ancient novel is played by chance, 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 genre feature novel at all stages of its development).
IN Western Europe the Hellenistic novel, forgotten throughout the Middle Ages, was rediscovered in the Renaissance by the authors of late Renaissance poetics, created by admirers of the also rediscovered and read Aristotle (cm. 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 neo-Aristotelian treatises were largely followed by the creators of pseudo-historical adventure and love novels of the Baroque era (M. de Scuderi (cm. SCUDERI Madeleine de) etc.).
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 is also visible 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. Genuinely novel hero the plot is not exhausted: it, as Bakhtin puts it, is always either “more than the plot or less than its 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 (Epistle of the Apostle Paul, Confessions of Aurelius Augustine (cm. AUGUSTINE the Blessed)), 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 prosaic knightly novel (cm. ROMANCE) 12-13 centuries - first narrative genre 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 conflict of the knightly novel is the indestructible confrontation between the whole and the separate knightly community (the mythical knighthood of the times of King Arthur) seeking a compromise. (cm. ARTHUR (legendary king))) and the hero-knight, who stands out among others with his merits, and - according to the principle of metonymy - is the best part 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 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) into recognizable “prosaic” modernity. One of the first (along with the Cervantes novel) genre varieties of the new European novel - the picaresque novel - is oriented towards modern, “low” reality. (cm. PLUTOVISIAN 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 (cm. LAZARILLO FROM TORMEZ)", Mateo Aleman (cm. ALEMAN Y DE ENERO Mateo), F. de Quevedo (cm. QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS Francisco). 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, which never took shape in the form of an actual novel narrative, which includes Apuleius’s “The Golden Ass” (cm. APULEUS), "Satyricon" by Petronius (cm. PETRONIUS Gaius), Lucian's menippea (cm. LUKIAN) and Cicero (cm. CICERO), medieval fabliaux (cm. FABLIO), schwanks (cm. SCHVANK), farces (cm. Farce (in the theater)), soti (cm. SOTI) and other humorous genres associated with carnival (carnivalized literature, on the one hand, contrasts the “inner man” with the “external man”, on the other, with man as a socialized being (the “official” image of man, according to Bakhtin) with the natural, private, everyday man. The first example of the 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 (cm. DIDRO Denis) 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 and 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, the author and the reader, that runs through it. 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 the romances of chivalry, 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’ narrative is divided into “book” and “life,” but the boundary between them is blurred: Cervantes’s hero lives his life like a novel, brings his 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.
Just as Cervantes’s novel combines both stylistic lines of development of the novel, the traditions of rhetorical and carnivalesque discourses, English novelists of the Enlightenment (D. Defoe (cm. DEFO Daniel), G. Fielding (cm. FIELDING Henry), T. Smollett (cm. SMOLLETT (Tobias George)) reconcile the initially incompatible novel of the “Cervantes type” and picaresque, creating a “high road novel”, which, in turn, absorbs the experience that originated in early Renaissance Italy (“Fiametta” by Boccaccio (cm. BOCCACCIO Giovanni)) and finally took shape in France in the 17th century. (“Princess of Cleves” M. de Lafayette (cm. LAFAYETTE Marie Madeleine)) psychological novel, as well as features of the idyll. Traditions of the English love-sentimental and family novel of the Enlightenment (S. Richardson (cm. RICHARDSON, Samuel), O. Goldsmith (cm. GOLDSMITH Oliver)) will be picked up by novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Having, in turn, absorbed the experience of what also took shape in England under the pen of W. Scott (cm. SCOTT Walter) historical novel, in a specifically Russian cultural context, the genre of the epic novel will arise (L.N. Tolstoy), which centuries later will be compared in a single artistic structure two opposites - the epic and the novel, once again confirming the fundamental feature of the novel - its essential contraversity and the dialectic of its internal form.
The ability of a novel to constantly renew itself throughout its life in the culture of New and Contemporary times is confirmed by the regular appearance of novels-parodies of certain examples of the genre tending towards canonization: parody and self-parody are present in the prose of Fielding and Stern (cm. STERN Lawrence), Wilanda (cm. WIELAND Christophe Martin), Dickens, M. Twain (cm. TWAIN Mark), Joyce (cm. JOYCE James), Pushkin (cm. PUSHKIN Alexander Sergeevich), Dostoevsky, Nabokov (cm. NABOKOV Vladimir Vladimirovich), G. García Márquez and others. Most parody and self-parody novels can be called “self-conscious novels” or metanovels, that is, texts based on parodic quotation and ironic reinterpretation of other people’s texts. At the origins of this tradition is also the first “exemplary” novel of the New Age - “Don Quixote”.
The diversity of the novel tradition, reflecting the inexhaustibility of the genre itself, is also manifested in the emergence of specific national varieties of the genre: the “novel of education” in Germany (Goethe (cm. GOETHE Johann Wolfgang), T. Mann ( cm.
Roman (French roman, German Roman; English novel/romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), the central genre of European literature of the New Age, a 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 the universalist terms of theoretical poetics, but can be characterized in the light of historical poetics, exploring the evolution and development of artistic consciousness, 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 critics of the 19th century - the heyday of the realistic novel - after the fact called “novels” are not always such. A typical example is the poetic and prose pastoral eclogues of the Renaissance, which turned into “pastoral novels”, the so-called “folk books” of the 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 tales, 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.
The 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 such events as an attack by pirates, the kidnapping of a bride during a wedding, a storm at sea, a fire, a shipwreck, a miraculous rescue, the false news of the death of one of the lovers, imprisonment on false charges of another, a death threat execution, the ascension of another to the heights of earthly power, an unexpected meeting and recognition. The artistic space of the Greek novel is an “alien”, 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, a replacement for geographical and historical encyclopedias, although it also contains a lot of fantastic information ).
A key role in the development of the plot in an ancient novel is played by chance, 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 of modern literature with its rapid development of various kinds of fictional narratives, neo-Aristotelian humanists turned to the Greek (as well as the Byzantine) novel as an ancient example-precedent, focusing on which to create plausible narration (truthfulness, reliability - a new quality prescribed in humanistic poetics to novel fiction). The recommendations contained in 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 is also visible 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, the 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 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) 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 a natural, private, everyday man. The first example of the picaresque genre is 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 and 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, the author and the reader, that runs through it. 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 the romances of chivalry, 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’ narrative is divided into “book” and “life,” but the boundary between them is blurred: Cervantes’s hero lives his life like a novel, brings his 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 was heard - the most striking sign of novelistic discourse.
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. Re-emerging in the actual literary experience Genres are the fruit of the combined activities of beginners and successors. Such, for example, is the lyric-epic poem that emerged in the era of romanticism.
Genres are difficult to systematize and classify (unlike types of literature), and stubbornly resist them. First of all, because there are a lot of them: each artistic culture has specific genres (Hokku, Tanka, Gazelle in the literature of Eastern countries). In addition, genres have different historical scope. Some exist throughout the entire history of verbal art (such as, for example, the ever-living fable from Aesop to S.V. Mikhalkov); others are correlated with certain eras (such, for example, as liturgical drama in the 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" a poem; "House by the Road" by A.T. Tvardovsky has the Subtitle “lyrical chronicle”, “Vasily Terkin” - “a book about a fighter”.
Consideration of genres is unimaginable without reference to the organization, structure, and form of literary works.
G.N. Pospelov differentiated genre forms"external" ("closed compositional and stylistic whole") and "internal" ("specific genre content" as a principle " imaginative thinking"and "cognitive interpretation of characters"). Having assessed the external (compositional and stylistic) genre forms as content-neutral (in this, Pospelov's concept of genres, as has been repeatedly noted, is one-sided and vulnerable), the scientist focused on the internal side of genres. He identified and characterized three supra-epochal genre groups, basing their differentiation on a sociological principle: the type of relationship between an artistically comprehended person and society, the social environment in the broad sense “If works of national-historical genre content (meaning epics, epics, odes. - V.Kh.) , - wrote G.N. Pospelov, - they experience life in the aspect of the formation of national societies; if romantic works comprehend the formation of individual characters in private relationships, then works of “ethological” genre content reveal the state national society or some part of it." ("Travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow" by A.N. Radishchev, "Who Lives Well in Rus'" by N.A. Nekrasov).
NOVEL
The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, attracts the close attention of literary scholars and critics.
If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre, then in the era of romanticism it rose to the top as a reproduction of “everyday reality” and at the same time “a mirror of the world and<...>of his age", the fruit of a "quite mature spirit
Hegel: the novel lacks the “originally poetic state of the world” inherent in the epic; here there is a “prosaically ordered reality” and “a conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of everyday relationships.” V. G. Belinsky, who called the novel an epic of private life: the subject of this genre is “the fate of a private person,” ordinary, “everyday life.”
MM. Bakhtin: the hero of the novel is shown “not as ready-made and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, educated by life”; this person "should not be 'heroic' either in the epic or in in a tragic sense of this 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 "live contact" of a person "with the unprepared, becoming modernity (the unfinished present) ". And it "more deeply, significantly, sensitively and quickly" than any other genre, "reflects the formation of reality itself." Most importantly, the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of revealing in a person not only the properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized opportunities, some 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,” laments Pushkin hero to 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 (" Parma monastery"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, apparently, has a dual content: firstly, it is specific to it (the “independence” and evolution of the hero, revealed in his private life), and secondly, it came to him from other genres. The conclusion is valid; the genre essence of the novel is synthetic. This genre is capable of combining, with effortless freedom and unprecedented breadth, the substantive principles of many genres, both funny and serious. Apparently, there is no genre principle from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.
The novel as a genre, prone to synthetics, is sharply different from others that preceded it, which were “specialized” and operated in certain local “areas” of artistic comprehension of the world. He (like no other) turned out to be able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, inconsistency and richness. The novel's freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras use this freedom in a variety of ways.
In the centuries-old history of the novel, two types of it are clearly visible. These are, firstly, works of acute events, based on external action, the heroes of which strive to achieve some local goals. These are adventurous novels, in particular picaresque, knightly, “career novels,” as well as adventure and detective stories. Their plots are numerous concatenations of event nodes (intrigues, adventures, etc.), as is the case, for example, in A. Dumas.
Secondly, these are novels that have prevailed in 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 internal action successfully competes with external action: the eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the consciousness of the hero in its diversity and complexity comes to the fore.
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.
Roman is large shape epic genre literature of modern times. Its the most common features: depiction of Man in complex forms of the life process, multi-linearity of the plot, covering the destinies of a number of characters, polyphony, hence the large volume compared to other genres. The emergence of the genre or its prerequisites is often attributed to antiquity or the Middle Ages. Thus, they talk about the “ancient romance” (“Daphnis and Chloe” by Long; “Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass” by Apuleius; “Satyricon” by Petronius) and the “knightly romance” (“Tristan and Isolde”, 12th century; “Parzival”, 1198 -1210, Wolfram von Eschenbach; Le Morte d'Arthur, 1469, Thomas Malory). These prose narratives actually have some features that bring them closer to the novel in modern sense words. However, these are rather similar than homogeneous phenomena. In ancient and medieval narrative prose literature, a number of those essential properties of content and form that play a decisive role in the novel are absent. It would be more correct to understand these works of antiquity as special genres of idyllic (“Daphnis and Chloe”) or comic (“Satyricon”) stories, and to consider the stories of medieval knights as a unique genre of knightly epic in prose. The novel begins to take shape only at the end of the Renaissance. Its origin is connected with that new artistic element, which was originally embodied in the Renaissance short story, or more precisely, in the special genre of the “book of short stories” such as “The Decameron” (1350-53) by G. Boccaccio. The novel was an epic of private life. If in the previous epic the central role was played by the images of heroes who openly embodied the strength and wisdom of an entire human collective, then in the novel the images of ordinary people come to the fore, in whose actions only their individual fate and their personal aspirations are directly expressed. The previous one was based on large historical (even legendary) events, the participants or creators of which were the main characters. Meanwhile, the novel (with the exception of the special form of the historical novel, as well as the epic novel) is based on events in private life and, moreover, usually on facts fictitious by the author.
The difference between a novel and a historical epic
The action of a historical epic, as a rule, unfolded in the distant past, a kind of “epic time,” while a connection with living modernity or at least with the most recent past is typical for the novel, with the exception of special type novel - historical. The epic had above all heroic character, was the embodiment of high poetic element, the novel acts as prose genre, like 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 were not widely developed. The novel was the most complete and complete expression of the art of epic prose. But with all the differences from previous forms of epic, the novel is the heir to the ancient and medieval epic literature, a true epic of the New Age. On a brand new artistic basis in the novel, as Hegel said, “the richness and diversity of interests, states, characters, life relationships, the broad background of an integral world again fully appears.” The individual no longer acts as a representative certain group people; he finds his personal destiny and individual consciousness. But at the same time, an individual person is now directly connected not with a limited group, but with the life of an entire society or even all of humanity. And this, in turn, leads to the fact that artistic development becomes possible and necessary public life through the prism of the individual fate of a “private” person. The novels of A. Prevost, G. Fielding, Stendhal, M. Yu. Lermontov, C. Dickens, I. S. Turgenev reveal the broadest and deepest content of the social life of the era in the personal destinies of the main characters. Moreover, in many novels 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 privacy 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) - the completely “private” actions and experiences of Tom Jones (in Fielding), Werther (in Goethe), Pechorin (in Lermontov ), Madame Bovary (in Flaubert) appear as an artistic exploration of the holistic essence of the social world that gave birth to these heroes. Therefore, the novel was able to become a genuine epic of the New Age and, in its most monumental manifestations, seemed to revive the epic genre. First historical form The novel, which was preceded by a short story and an epic of the Renaissance, was a picaresque novel that actively developed in the late 16th - early 18th centuries (“Lazarillo from Tormes”, 1554; “Francion”, 1623, C. Sorel; “Simplicissimus”, 1669, H. Ya .K.Grimmelshausen; “Gilles Blas”, 1715-35, A.R.Lesage). Since the end of the 17th century, psychological prose has been developing, which had great importance for the development of a novel (books by F. La Rochefoucauld, J. La Bruyère, Marie Lafayette’s story “The Princess of Cleves”, 1678). Finally, a very important role in the formation of the novel was played by memoir literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which for the first time the private lives and personal experiences of people began to be objectively depicted (books by Benvenuto Cellini, M. Montaigne); It was the memoirs (or, more precisely, the travel notes of a sailor) that served as the basis and incentive for the creation of one of the first great novels - “Robinson Crusoe” (1719) by D. Defoe.
The novel reaches maturity in the 18th century. One of the earliest genuine examples of the genre is “Manon Lescaut” (1731) by Prevost. In this novel, the traditions of the picaresque novel seemed to merge into an innovative organic integrity, psychological prose(in the spirit of "Maxim", 1665, La Rochefoucauld) and memoir literature(characteristically, this novel originally appeared as a fragment of the multi-volume fictional memoirs of a certain person). During the 18th century, the novel gained a dominant position in literature (in the 17th century it still appeared as a side, secondary sphere of the art of words). In the 18th century novel, two different lines were already developing - the social novel (Fielding, T. J. Smollett, S. B. Louvet de Couvray) and the more powerful line of the psychological novel (S. Richardson, J. J. Rousseau, L. Stern, J.W. Goethe, etc.). At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, during the era of romanticism, the novel genre was experiencing a kind of crisis; subjective-lyrical character romantic literature contradicts the epic essence of the novel. Many writers of this time (F.R. de Chateaubriand, E.P. de Senancourt, F. Schlegel, Neuvalis, B. Constant) create novels that are more reminiscent lyric poems in prose. However, at the same time, a special form is flourishing - the historical novel, which acts as a kind of synthesis of the novel in the proper sense and epic poem past (novels by V. Scott, A. de Vigny, V. Hugo, N.V. Gogol). In general, the period of romanticism had a renewing significance for the novel, preparing for its new rise and flowering. The second third of the 19th century was classical era novel (Stendhal, Lermontov, O. Balzac, Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Turgenev, G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant, etc.). A special role is played by the Russian novel of the second half of the 19th century, primarily the novels of L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky. In the works of these greatest writers one of the decisive properties of the novel reaches a qualitatively new level - its ability to embody universal, pan-human meaning in the private destinies and personal experiences of the 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, determine this property. Tolstoy, noting that in Dostoevsky’s novels “not only we, people related to him, but foreigners recognize ourselves, our souls,” explained it this way: “The deeper you scoop, the more common to everyone, more familiar and dear” (Tolstoy L.N. O literature). The novel of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky influenced the further development of the genre in world literature. The greatest novelists of the 20th century - T. Mann, A. France, R. Rolland, K. Hamsun, R. Martin du Gard, J. Galsworthy, H. Laxness, W. Faulkner, E. Hemingway, R. Tagore, R. 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 not to consider the novel as a product of the collapse of the epic, but the epic as a primitive prototype of the novel” (Collected Works: In 10 volumes).
In the first post-October years, the idea was popular that in a new, revolutionary novel the main or even the only content should be the image of the masses. However, when this idea was realized, the novel was in danger of collapse; it turned into a chain of incoherent episodes (for example, in the works of B. Pilnyak). In the literature of the 20th century, there is a frequent desire to limit ourselves to depicting inner world personality is expressed in attempts to recreate the so-called “stream of consciousness” (M. Proust, J. Joyce, the school of the “new novel” in France). But, deprived of an objective and effective basis, the novel, in essence, loses its epic nature and ceases to be a novel in the true sense of the word. A novel can truly 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 the 20th century - the novels of M.A. Sholokhov, Faulkner and others.
In the variety of genre definitions of the novel, two large groups are visible:: thematic definitions- autobiographical, military, detective, documentary, women's, intellectual, historical, maritime, political, adventure, satirical, sentimental, social, fantastic, philosophical, erotic, etc.; structural - novels in verse, novel-pamphlet, novel-parable, novel with a key, novel-saga, novel-feuilleton, novel-box (a set of episodes"), novel-river, epistolary, etc., up to modern television novels, photo novels . The historical designations of the novel stand apart: ancient, Victorian, Gothic, modernist, naturalistic, picaresque, enlightenment, knightly, Hellenistic, etc.
The word novel comes from French roman, which in translation means - originally a work in Romance languages.
Literary (from the French genre genus, type), historically developing type literary work(novel, poem, ballad, etc.); V theoretical concept about J. the features characteristic of a more or less extensive group of works are generalized... ... Literary encyclopedic dictionary
Gallant novel (also precios novel) is a genre of French and German literature mid-17th century. A precise, gallantly heroic novel is, on the one hand, the fruit of the transformation of a chivalric romance, and on the other, the result of the influence of... ... Wikipedia
Novel. History of the term. The problem of the novel. The emergence of the genre. From the history of the genre. Conclusions. The novel as a bourgeois epic. The fate of the theory of the novel. Specificity of the novel form. The birth of a novel. The novel's conquest of everyday reality... Literary encyclopedia
NOVEL (French roman, German Roman; English novel/romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), the central genre (see GENRE) of European literature of the New Time (see NEW TIME (in history)), fictional, in difference from the neighboring genre of the story (see... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary
A; m. [French] genre] 1. A historically established type of art or literature, characterized by certain plot, compositional, stylistic and other features; individual species of this genus. Musical and literary genres... Encyclopedic Dictionary
A novel in verse is a literary genre that combines the properties of composition, chronotope and character system inherent in the novel with a poetic form. Although certain analogies are possible between a novel in verse and poetic epic, especially in his... ... Wikipedia
Novel- THE NOVEL is one of the freest literary forms, suggesting a huge number of modifications and embracing several main branches of the narrative genre. In new European literature, this term is usually used to describe some... ... Dictionary literary terms
- (French genre) (in art) a historically established internal division in all types of art; type of artistic work in unity specific properties its form and content. The concept of genre generalizes the features characteristic of a broad... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
- “Roman” Single by the group “Vintage” from the album Anechka Released... Wikipedia
Tyutchev, pioneer of the Russian Internet Date of birth: July 2, 1963 Place of birth: Kyiv ... Wikipedia
Books
- Game of the Cat, Roman Yurievich Prokofiev. Attention! The audio recording contains obscene language. A science fiction novel by Roman Prokofiev, the first book in the “Cat’s Game” series, genre: combat fantasy, heroic fantasy, LitRPG. At the Merchant's...audiobook
- Cat game. Book two, Roman Yuryevich Prokofiev. Attention! The audio recording contains obscene language. A science fiction novel by Roman Prokofiev, the second book in the “Cat’s Game” series, genre: combat fantasy, heroic fantasy, LitRPG. Virtual market...
