Novel: genre essence. Novel as a literary genre

The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, rivets close attention literary scholars and critics. It also becomes a subject of thought for the writers themselves.

However, this genre still remains a mystery. A variety of, sometimes opposing, opinions are expressed about the historical fate of the novel and its future. “His,” wrote T. Mann in 1936, “his prosaic qualities, consciousness and criticism, as well as the richness of his means, his ability to freely and quickly manage display and research, music and knowledge, myth and science, his human breadth, his objectivity and irony make the novel what it is in our time: a monumental and dominant form of fiction."

O.E. Mandelstam, on the contrary, spoke about the decline of the novel and its exhaustion (article “The End of the Novel”, 1922). In the psychologization of the novel and the weakening of the external event element in it (which took place already in the 19th century), the poet saw a symptom of decline and the threshold of the death of the genre, which has now become, in his words, “old-fashioned.”

Modern concepts of the novel in one way or another take into account statements about it made in the last century. If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre (“A hero in whom everything is small is only suitable for a novel”; “Inconsistencies with a novel are inseparable”), then in the era of romanticism it rose to the top as a reproduction of “everyday reality” and at the same time - “ mirror of the world and<…>of his century,” the fruit of a “fully mature spirit”; as a “romantic book”, where, in contrast to the traditional epic, there is a place for a relaxed expression of the moods of the author and heroes, and humor and playful lightness. “Every novel must harbor the spirit of the universal,” wrote Jean-Paul.

Thinkers of the turn of the 18th-19th centuries wrote their theories of the novel. justified by experience modern writers, first of all—I.V. Goethe as the author of books about Wilhelm Meister.

The comparison of the novel with the traditional epic, outlined by aesthetics and criticism of romanticism, was developed by Hegel: “Here<…>again (as in an epic - V.Kh.) the wealth and versatility of interests, states, characters, living conditions, a broad background appears in its entirety whole world, as well as an epic depiction of events."

On the other hand, 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.” This conflict, Hegel notes, is “resolved tragically or comically” and often ends with the heroes reconciling with the “usual order of the world,” recognizing in it a “genuine and substantial beginning.”

Similar thoughts were expressed by 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.” In the second half of the 1840s, the critic argued that the novel and its related story “have now become the head of all other types of poetry.”

In many ways, he echoes Hegel and Belinsky (at the same time complementing them), M.M. Bakhtin in works on the novel, written mainly in the 1930s and awaiting publication in the 1970s.

Based on judgment writers XVIII V. G. Fielding and K.M. Wieland, a scientist in the article “Epic and Novel (On the Methodology of Research of the Novel)” (1941) argued that 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 the tragic sense of the word, the romantic hero combines both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious.” At the same time, the novel captures the “living contact” of a person “with an unready, becoming modernity (unfinished present).”

And it “more deeply, significantly, sensitively and quickly” than any other genre “reflects the formation of reality itself.” Most importantly, the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of revealing in a person not only the properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized possibilities, a certain personal potential: “One of the main internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the inadequacy of the hero’s fate and his position,” a person here can to be “either greater than one’s destiny, or less than one’s humanity.”

The above judgments of Hegel, Belinsky and Bakhtin can rightfully be considered axioms of the theory of the novel, which masters the life of a person (primarily private, individual biographical) in dynamics, formation, evolution and in situations of complex, usually conflicting, relationships between the hero and others.

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 with its imperatives, rites, rituals, who is not characterized by “herd” inclusion in society.

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. Such are “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius, the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, “The History of Gil Blas of Santillana” by A.R. Lesage. Let us also remember Julien Sorel (“Red and Black” by Stendhal), Eugene Onegin (“Stranger to everyone, not bound by anything,” Pushkin’s hero laments about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Herzen’s Beltov, Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov from F.M. Dostoevsky. Romance heroes of this kind (and there are countless of them) “rely only on themselves.”

The alienation of a person from society and the world order was interpreted by M.M. Bakhtin as necessarily dominant in the novel. The scientist argued that here not only the hero, but also the author himself appears unrooted in the world, removed from the principles of sustainability and stability, alien to tradition. The novel, in his opinion, captures the “disintegration of the epic (and tragic) integrity of man” and carries out a “ludicrous familiarization of the world and man.” “The novel,” wrote Bakhtin, “has a new, specific problem; it is characterized by eternal rethinking - revaluation." In this genre, reality “becomes a world where the first word (the ideal beginning) is not there, and the last has not yet been said.” Thus, the novel is seen as an expression of a skeptical and relativistic worldview, which is conceived as a crisis and at the same time having a perspective. The novel, Bakhtin argues, prepares a new, more complex integrity of man “at a higher level<…>development".

There are many similarities with Bakhtin’s theory of the novel in the judgments of the famous Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic D. Lukács, who called this genre the epic of a godless world, and the psychology of the novel’s hero demonic. He considered history to be the subject of the novel human soul, which manifests itself and discovers itself in all sorts of adventures (adventures), and its predominant tonality is irony, which it defined as the negative mysticism of eras that broke with God.

Considering the novel as a mirror of growing up, the maturity of society and the antipode of the epic, which captured the “normal childhood” of humanity, D. Lukács spoke about the reconstruction of the human soul by this genre, lost in an empty and imaginary reality.

However, the novel does not completely plunge into the atmosphere of demonism and irony, the disintegration of human integrity, the alienation of people from the world, but it also resists it. The hero's self-reliance in classical novels of the 19th century. (both Western European and domestic) was most often presented in a dual light: on the one hand, as “independence” worthy of a person, sublime, attractive, enchanting, on the other hand, as a source of delusions and defeats in life. “How wrong I was, how I was punished!” - Onegin exclaims sadly, summing up his solitary free path. Pechorin complains that he did not guess his own “high purpose” and did not find a worthy use for the “immense powers” ​​of his soul. At the end of the novel, Ivan Karamazov, tormented by his conscience, falls ill with delirium tremens. “And may God help the homeless wanderers,” it is said about the fate of Rudin at the end of Turgenev’s novel.

At the same time, many novel heroes strive to overcome their solitude and alienation, they long for “a connection with the world to be established in their destinies” (A. Blok). Let us recall once again the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin, where the hero imagines Tatyana sitting by the window rural house; as well as Turgenev's Lavretsky, Goncharov's Raisky, Tolstoy's Andrei Volkonsky, or even Ivan Karamazov, in his best moments, directed towards Alyosha. This kind of novel situation was characterized by G.K. Kosikov: “The “heart” of the hero and the “heart” of the world are drawn to each other, and the problem of the novel lies<…>the fact that they will never be able to unite, and the hero’s guilt for this sometimes turns out to be no less than the guilt of the world.”

Another thing is also important: 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 “communication and communication figures.” Such is Natasha Rostova, “overflowing with life,” who, in the words of S.G. Bocharova, invariably “renews, liberates” people, “defines them<…>behavior". This heroine L.N. Tolstoy naively and at the same time confidently demands “immediately, now open, direct, humanly simple relations between people.” Such are Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoevsky.

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 Soborians” and “A Seedy Family” by N.S. Leskova; " Noble Nest» I.S. Turgenev; “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” by L.N. Tolstoy). The heroes of such works (remember the Rostovs or Konstantin Levin) perceive and think of the surrounding reality as friendly and familiar rather than alien and hostile to themselves. What is inherent in them is that M.M. Prishvin called it “kindred attention to the world.”

The theme of Home (in the high sense of the word - as an irreducible existential principle and indisputable value) persistently (most often in intensely dramatic tones) sounds in the novels of our century: in J. Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga and subsequent works), R. Martin du Gard (“The Thibault Family”), W. Faulkner (“The Sound and the Fury”), M.A. Bulgakov (“The White Guard”), M.A. Sholokhov (“ Quiet Don"), B.L. Pasternak (“Doctor Zhivago”), V. G. Rasputin (“Live and Remember”, “Deadline”).

Novels of eras close to us, as can be seen, are to a large extent focused on idyllic values ​​(although they are not inclined to highlight situations of human harmony and reality close to him). Even Jean-Paul (probably referring to such works as “Julia, or the New Heloise” by J. J. Rousseau and “The Priest of Wakefield” by O. Goldsmith) noted that the idyll is “a genre akin to the novel.” And according to M.M. Bakhtin, “the significance of the idyll for the development of the novel<…>was huge."

The novel absorbs the experience not only of the idyll, but also of a number of other genres; in this sense he is like a sponge. This genre is able to include the features of an epic into its sphere, capturing not only the private lives of people, but also events of a national-historical scale (“The Monastery of Parma” by Stendhal, “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy, “Gone with the Wind” by M. Mitchell) . 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, “Resurrection” by L.N. Tolstoy. As shown by M.M. Bakhtin is far from alien to the novel (especially the picaresque and adventurous) and the familiarly funny, carnival element, originally rooted in the comedy-farce genres. Vyach. Ivanov, not without reason, characterized the works of F.M. Dostoevsky as “tragedy novels”. “The Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov is a kind of myth-novel, and R. Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” is an essay-novel. In his report on it, T. Mann called his tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers” a “mythological novel”, and its first part (“The Past of Jacob”) - a “fantastic essay”. The work of T. Mann, according to the German scientist, marks the most serious transformation of the novel: its immersion into mythological depths.

The novel, apparently, has a dual content: firstly, it is specific to it (“independence” and the 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 syntheticism, 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.

The many faces of the novel create serious difficulties for literary theorists. Almost everyone who tries to characterize the novel as such, in its universal and necessary properties, faces the temptation of a kind of synecdoche: replacing the whole with its part. So, O.E. Mandelstam judged the nature of this genre from the “career novels” of the 19th century, the heroes of which were carried away by the unprecedented success of Napoleon.

In novels that emphasized not the willful aspiration of a self-affirming person, but the complexity of his psychology and internal action, the poet saw a symptom of the decline of the genre and even its end. T. Mann, in his judgments about the novel as full of soft and benevolent irony, relied on his own artistic experience and, to a large extent, on the novels of J. V. Goethe’s upbringing.

Bakhtin's theory has a different orientation, but also local (primarily on the experience of Dostoevsky). At the same time, the writer’s novels are interpreted by scientists in a very unique way. Dostoevsky's heroes, according to Bakhtin, are, first of all, bearers of ideas (ideology); their voices are equal, as is the author’s voice in relation to each of them. This is seen as polyphony, which is the highest point of novelistic creativity and an expression of the writer’s non-dogmatic thinking, his understanding that a single and complete truth is “fundamentally incompatible within the limits of one consciousness.”

Dostoevsky's novelism is considered by Bakhtin as an inheritance of the ancient “Menippean satire”. Menippea is a genre “free from tradition,” committed to “unbridled fantasy,” recreating “the adventures of an idea or truth in the world: on earth, in the underworld, and on Olympus.” It, Bakhtin argues, is a genre of “final questions” that carries out “moral and psychological experimentation” and recreates a “split personality”, “ unusual dreams, passions bordering on madness.

Other varieties of the novel that are not involved in polyphony, where the writers’ interest in people rooted in reality close to them predominates, and the author’s “voice” dominates over the voices of the heroes, Bakhtin rated less highly and even spoke about them ironically: he wrote about the “monological” one-sidedness and the narrowness of “manor-house-room-apartment-family novels” that seem to have forgotten about a person’s presence “on the threshold” of eternal and insoluble questions. At the same time they were called L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov.

In the centuries-old history of the novel, two types of it are clearly visible, more or less corresponding to two stages literary development. 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 Byron’s “Don Juan” or 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 the internal action successfully competes with the external action: the eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the consciousness of the hero in its diversity and complexity, with its endless dynamics and psychological nuances, comes to the fore.

The characters in such novels are depicted not only as striving for some private goals, but also as comprehending their place in the world, clarifying and realizing their value orientation. It was in this type of novel that the specificity of the genre that was discussed was reflected with maximum completeness. Close to man reality (“daily life”) is mastered here not as a deliberately “low prose”, but as involved in genuine humanity, the trends of a given time, universal principles of existence, and most importantly - as an arena of the most serious conflicts. Russian novelists of the 19th century. knew well and persistently showed that “amazing events are a lesser test for human relations) than everyday life with minor displeasures.”

One of the most important features the novel and related stories (especially in the 19th-20th centuries) - the authors’ close attention to the microenvironment surrounding the heroes, the influence of which they experience and which they influence in one way or another. Outside of recreating the microenvironment, it is “very difficult for the novelist to show the inner world of the individual.” The origins of the now established novel form are the dilogy of I.V. Goethe about Wilhelm Meister (these works T. Mann called “in-depth in inner life, sublimated adventure novels"), as well as “Confession” by Zh.Zh. Rousseau, “Adolphe” by B. Constant, “Eugene Onegin,” which conveys the “poetry of reality” inherent in the works of A. S. Pushkin. Since that time, novels, focused on a person’s connections with a reality close to him and, as a rule, giving preference to internal action, have become a kind of center of literature. They seriously influenced all other genres, even transformed them.

According to M.M. Bakhtin, the romanization of verbal art has occurred: when the novel comes to “ great literature", other genres are sharply modified, "to a greater or lesser extent "romanized"." At the same time, the structural properties of genres are also transformed: their formal organization becomes less strict, more relaxed and free. We will turn to this (formal-structural) side of genres.

V.E. Khalizev Theory of literature. 1999

Let's turn to one of the founders of Russian literary criticism- V.G. Belinsky, who wrote in the first half of the 19th century: “... now our literature has turned into a novel and a story (...) What books are most read and sold out? Novels and stories. (...) What books do all our writers write, called and uncalled (...)? Novels and stories (...) in which books is human life, and the rules of morality, and philosophical systems, and, in a word, all sciences described?

The 19th century is called the “golden age of the Russian novel”: A. Pushkin and F. Dostoevsky, N. Gogol and I. Turgenev, L. Tolstoy and N. Leskov, A. Herzen and M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, N. Chernyshevsky and A. K. Tolstoy worked fruitfully in this large view epics. Even A. Chekhov dreamed of writing a novel about love...

A novel, in contrast to a short story and a novella, can be called an “extensive” type of literature, since it requires a wide coverage of artistic material.

The novel is characterized by the following features:

• branching plot, multiple storylines; often the central characters of a novel have “their own” storylines, the author tells their story in detail (the story of Oblomov, the story of Stolz, the story of Olga Ilyinskaya, the story of Agafya Matveena in Goncharov’s novel “Oblomov”);
• diversity of characters (by age, social groups, personalities, types, views, etc.);
• global themes and issues;
• a large scope of artistic time (the action of L. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” fits into one and a half decades);
• a well-developed historical background, correlation of the heroes’ destinies with the characteristics of the era, etc.

The end of the 19th century somewhat weakened the interest of writers in large epic forms, and small genres came to the fore - short stories and tales. But since the 20s of the twentieth century, the novel has again become relevant: A. Tolstoy writes “Walking in the Torment” and “Peter I”, A. Fadeev - “Destruction”, I. Babel - “Cavalry”, M. Sholokhov - “Quiet Don" and "Virgin Soil Upturned", N. Ostrovsky - "Born of the Revolution" and "How the Steel Was Tempered", M. Bulgakov - " White Guard" and "The Master and Margarita" ...

There are many varieties (genres) of the novel: historical, fantastic, gothic (or horror novel), psychological, philosophical, social, novel of morals (or everyday life novel), utopian or dystopian novel, parable novel, anecdote novel, adventure (or adventure) novel, detective novel etc. A special genre can be attributed ideological a novel in which the author’s main task is to convey to the reader a certain ideology, a system of views on what society should be like. The novels by N. Chernyshevsky “What to do?”, M. Gorky “Mother”, N. Ostrovsky “How the Steel Was Tempered”, M. Sholokhov “Virgin Soil Upturned”, etc. can be considered ideological.

• Historical the novel is interested in major, turning-point historical events and determines the fate of a person in a particular era by the features of the time depicted;
• fantastic the novel tells about fantastic events that go beyond the usual material world scientifically known by man;
• psychological the novel tells about the characteristics and motives of human behavior in certain circumstances, about the manifestation of internal properties and qualities human nature, about personal, individual characteristics a person, often considering various psychological types of people;
• philosophical the novel reveals the writer’s system of philosophical ideas about the world and man;
• social the novel comprehends the laws of social organization, studies the influence of these laws on human destinies; depicts the state of individual social groups and explains it artistically;
• novel of manners or everyday life-descriptive the novel depicts the everyday side of a person’s existence, the features of his daily life, reflects his habits, moral standards, perhaps some ethnographic details;
• in the center adventurous a novel, of course, the adventures of the hero; at the same time, the characteristics of the characters, historical truth and historical details are not always interesting to the author and are often in the background, or even in the third place;
• utopian novel depicts the wonderful future of a person or the ideal structure of a state, from the author’s point of view; dystopian novel on the contrary, it depicts the world and society as, in the author’s opinion, they should not be, but can become due to the fault of man.
• The largest epic genre is epic novel, in which each of the above features is globally developed and developed by the writer; the epic creates a broad canvas of human existence. Epic is usually not enough of one human fate; it is interested in the stories of entire families, dynasties in a long time context, against a broad historical background, making a person an important part of a vast and eternal world.

All these genres of the novel - except, perhaps, the Gothic or horror novel, which did not take root in Russia - are widely represented in Russian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Each era prefers certain genres of the novel. Thus, Russian literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century gave preference to a realistic novel with socio-philosophical and everyday-writing content. The twentieth century demanded a variety of novel content, and all genres of the novel received powerful development at that time.

Accent placement: ROMAN'N

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Nozhinov.

Sources:

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

novel literary narrative genre

The term “novel,” which arose in the 12th century, has undergone a number of semantic changes over the nine centuries of its existence and covers an extremely diverse range of literary phenomena. Moreover, the forms called novels today appeared much earlier than the concept itself. The first forms of the novel genre go back to antiquity (love and love-adventure novels of Heliodorus, Iamblichus and Longus), but neither the Greeks nor the Romans left special name for this genre. Using later terminology, it is usually called a novel. Bishop of Yue late XVII century, in search of the predecessors of the novel, he first applied this term to a number of phenomena of ancient narrative prose. This name is based on the fact that the ancient genre that interests us, having as its content the struggle of isolated individuals for their personal, private goals, represents a very significant thematic and compositional similarity with certain types of later European novels, in the formation of which the ancient novel played a significant role. The name “novel” arose later, in the Middle Ages, and initially referred only to the language in which the work was written.

The most common language of medieval Western European writing was, as is known, literary language ancient Romans - Latin. In the XII-XIII centuries. AD, along with plays, tales, stories written in Latin and existing mainly among the privileged classes of society, the nobility and clergy, stories and stories began to appear written in Romance languages ​​and distributed among democratic strata of society who did not know the Latin language, among trading bourgeoisie, artisans, villans (the so-called third estate). These works, unlike the Latin ones, began to be called: conte roman - a Romanesque story, a story. Then the adjective acquired independent meaning. This is how a special name arose for narrative works, which later became established in the language and over time lost its original meaning. A novel began to be called a work in any language, but not just any one, but only one that is large in size, distinguished by certain features of its subject matter, compositional construction, plot development, etc.

We can conclude that if the closest to modern meaning Since this term appeared in the era of the bourgeoisie - the 17th and 18th centuries, it is logical to attribute the origin of the theory of the novel to the same time. And although already in the 16th - 17th centuries. certain “theories” of the novel appear (Antonio Minturno “Poetic Art”, 1563; Pierre Nicole “Letter on the Heresy of Writing”, 1665), only together with classical German philosophy did the first attempts appear to create a general aesthetic theory of the novel, to include it in the system artistic forms. “At the same time, the statements of great novelists about their own writing practice acquire greater breadth and depth of generalization (Walter Scott, Goethe, Balzac). The principles of the bourgeois theory of the novel in its classical form were formulated precisely during this period. But more extensive literature on the theory of the novel appeared only in the second half of the 19th century. Now the novel has finally established its dominance as typical shape expressions of bourgeois consciousness in literature".

From a historical and literary point of view, it is impossible to talk about the emergence of the novel as a genre, since essentially “novel” is “an inclusive term, overloaded with philosophical and ideological connotations and indicating a whole complex of relatively autonomous phenomena that are not always genetically related to each other.” The “emergence of the novel” in this sense occupies entire eras, starting from antiquity and ending with the 17th or even 18th century.

On appearance and justification this term, of course, was influenced by the history of the development of the genre as a whole. An equally important role in the theory of the novel is played by its formation in various countries.