Form and content are the two most important literary concepts. They are applicable, in essence, to any natural or social phenomena. However, in artistic creation, the concepts of "content" and "form" acquire a special meaning and significance. Content, Generally speaking, this is about what is narrated in the work, and form - like it is done, what artistic means are used.

The categories "form" and "content" were introduced into philosophical and literary criticism only in the 19th century. Until then, the work has always been considered in its entirety. And such an approach to a work of art was fully justified, because in it the form is organically connected with the content, and it is possible to dismember these two of its components only in a purely abstract way.

German philosophers of the 19th century, primarily Hegel in his Aesthetics, studied the essence of these two categories in great detail. Hegel and other thinkers focused, however, more on the content than on the form of its expression. And the very concept of "content" was introduced into scientific use by Hegel.

It suffices to point to those sections of Hegel's Aesthetics where he examines the content and form of lyrical works. The philosopher convincingly shows that the content of the latter is "the very soul of the poet, subjectivity as such, so that the point is in the feeling soul, and not in what particular subject it is about." Analyzing the form of lyrical works, Hegel largely repeats his previous thoughts about the content, adding to this, basically, only observations on what distinguishes lyrics from epic. He does not consider the problem of form in detail and specifically. This emphasis on content, which led to a somewhat skewed understanding of the work of art, did not go unnoticed. And as a reaction to it in the 20th century, another extreme was outlined - an excessive interest in form. In many countries, including Russia, so-called formalists appeared (1910–1920). The latter did a lot to understand the importance of the formal aspects of the work, but they often sinned by inattention to its content. From the correct premise, which says that a change in form leads to the destruction of the content of the work, they hastily concluded that the latter is dominated by the form, and its content is purely "internal", poetic. Moreover, statements have appeared that along with "objective" reality there is also "poetic reality" (F. Wheelwright). This radically changed the understanding of the essence of content and its relationship to form. If in the 19th century the form was considered as something less important than the content, now the opposite is true - the content has come to be understood as "formal". His ties with the "outside" world were cut off. American "new critics", in particular, refused to notice their emotional "content" in poetic works and deny even the slightest connection between a work and the personality of its creator.

Both of these extremes - excessive attention to content or, conversely, to form - lead to a misunderstanding of the work. Form and content are equally important. And most importantly, they are inseparable from each other in each specific work. This applies to both poetry and prose. W. Faulkner, justifying the complexity, unreadability of his novels, emphasized that their form is an inevitable consequence of the complexity of the content, that it would be impossible to express this content in another form. "We (I and Thomas Wolfe)," W. Faulkner wrote, "tried to squeeze everything, all our experience literally into every paragraph, to embody in it any detail of life at every given moment, to penetrate it with rays from all sides. Therefore, our novels so clumsy, that's why they're so hard to read. It's not that we deliberately tried to make them clumsy, it just didn't work out otherwise."

Faulkner's idea about the inseparability of content and form, about their unity, is shared by scientists. So, V. Kozhinov rightly asserts that "the form is nothing but the content in its directly perceived being, and the content is nothing but the inner meaning of this form. Individual aspects, levels and elements literary work, having a formal character (style, genre, composition, artistic speech, rhythm), meaningful (theme, plot, conflict, characters and circumstances, artistic idea, trend) or content-formal (plot), they also act as single, integral realities of form and content".

As can be seen from this statement, in some cases it is very difficult to determine whether one or another element of a work is formal or substantive. In this regard, the thoughts of R. Yakobson, one of the most prominent literary critics and linguists of the 20th century, about "sound symbolism" in poetry attract attention. R. Yakobson believes that not only words, but also sounds in poetry, their combinations, can carry a semantic load, i.e., have content. The concept of "sound symbolism" is very important for understanding the specifics of the poetic art form and its relation to the artistic content. The fact is that the poetic form is distinguished by a special richness, abundance and subtlety of shades. For the expression of scientific truth, a dry form of expression is preferable. Ideally, this is a formula. In artistic creation, especially in poetry, it is rather the other way around - the content is expressed with the help of metaphors, polysemantic, often very vague symbols, unexpected associations, comparisons, etc. Therefore, those who talk about the radical difference between the language of poetry and the language of science have everything grounds for such an assertion. Another thing is that the goals of art and science often coincide.

It is necessary to distinguish between the artistic form "in general" (genres, types of literature, etc.) and the form of an individual work. The generally accepted laws of the genre, for example, require certain form requirements to be met. Already Aristotle clearly defined the formal requirements of this or that genre of literature. Since the era of romanticism, these requirements have been weakened, although they have not completely disappeared. For example, the form of the sonnet, so popular during the Renaissance, is also observed by modern authors.

The content side of literature also experiences a certain historical conditioning. Already the literature of the Hellenistic era (4th-1st centuries BC) in its content differs significantly from the ancient Greek literature of the classical period. The change of literary eras inevitably entailed changes both in the form and in the content of artistic creativity. At the same time, a characteristic detail was often revealed - the new content was often clothed in old art forms and vice versa. In both cases it was detrimental to the development of literature. And, as a rule, there was a genius who was able to clothe the new content in appropriate new forms. These were, in particular, Byron and Pushkin. If the creator of new forms expressing new content did not appear, then epigonism flourished, hindering the development of literature.

However, it should be borne in mind that in artistic creation, new forms are most often suitable for expressing only new content. They are not universal and should not be considered superior to the former. The latter could at one time best correspond to their content. This is one of the most characteristic features of artistic creativity, which distinguishes it from science. In science, the discovery of the new most often marks the end of the old. The theory of Copernicus meant the death of the teachings of Ptolemy. The brilliant dramas of Shakespeare did not "cancel" the brilliant tragedies of Euripides.

And one more significant moment in this regard - freedom from norms, from rigid frameworks and restrictions regarding form and content does not at all guarantee the appearance of more perfect works. The great authors of ancient Greek tragedies worked under conditions of the most severe normativity, both in terms of form and content, but who can say that their tragedies are inferior in some way to the dramas of the romantics, who cast aside, as they said, the "fetters" of classicism, the requirements of normativity and enjoyed almost unlimited freedom.

Literary scholars often need to consider only one of the components of the unity that form and content represent. It was pointed out above that there is a danger of attempts to overemphasize and exaggerate the role of each of them individually. Only an understanding of their inseparability and interpenetration contributes to a balanced solution of the numerous problems generated by these complex literary and philosophical categories.

Integrity- the category of aesthetics, expressing the ontological problems of the art of the word. Each literary work is an independent, complete whole, not reducible to the sum of elements and indecomposable into them without a trace.

The law of integrity presupposes subject-semantic exhaustion, internal completeness (completeness) and non-redundancy of a work of art. With the help of the plot, composition, images, etc. an artistic whole is formed, complete in itself and expanded into the world. The composition plays a particularly important role here: all parts of the work must be arranged so that they fully express the idea.

Artistic unity, consistency of the whole and parts in the work were already noted by the ancient Greek philosophers of the 4th century BC. Plato and Aristotle. The latter wrote in his “Poetics”: “... The whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end”, “parts of events (Aristotle refers to drama) should be so composed that with a rearrangement or removal of one of the parts, the the whole was upset, for that, the presence or absence of which is imperceptible, is not a part of the whole. This rule of aesthetics is also recognized by modern literary criticism.

A work of literature is indecomposable at any level. Each image of the hero of a given aesthetic object, in turn, is also perceived as a whole, and not divided into separate components. Each detail exists thanks to the imprint of the whole lying on it, "each new feature only expresses the whole figure more" (L. Tolstoy).

Despite this, when analyzing a work, it is still divided into separate parts. An important question is what exactly each of them is.

The question of the composition of a literary work, more precisely, of its constituent parts, has long attracted the attention of researchers. Thus, Aristotle in his Poetics distinguished between a certain “what” (an object of imitation) and a certain “how” (means of imitation) in works. In the 19th century, G.V.F. Hegel used the concepts of "form" and "content" in relation to art.

In modern literary criticism, there are two main trends in establishing the structure of a work. The first proceeds from the separation of a number of layers or levels in a work, just as in linguistics in a separate statement one can distinguish the level of phonetic, morphological, lexical syntactic. At the same time, different researchers unequally imagine both the set of levels and the nature of their correlation. So, M.M. Bakhtin sees in the work, first of all, two levels - "plot" and "plot", the depicted world and the world of the image itself, the reality of the author and the reality of the hero.

MM. Hirshman proposes a more complex, mostly three-level structure: rhythm, plot, hero; in addition, the subject-object organization of the work permeates “vertically” these levels, which ultimately creates not a linear structure, but rather a grid that is superimposed on the work of art (Style of a literary work. There are other models of a work of art that represent it in the form of a series of levels, slices.

The second approach to the structure of a work of art takes such general categories as content and form as a primary division. (In a number of scientific schools, they are replaced by other definitions. Thus, for Yu.M. Lotman and other structuralists, these concepts correspond to "structure" and "idea", for semiotics - "sign" and "meaning", for post-structuralists - "text" and "meaning").

Thus, in literary criticism, along with the identification of two fundamental aspects of a work, there are other logical constructions. But it is obvious that the dichotomous approach corresponds much more to the real structure of the work and is much more justified from the point of view of philosophy and methodology.

Content and the form- philosophical categories that are used in different fields of knowledge. They serve to designate the essential external and internal aspects inherent in all phenomena of reality. This pair of concepts meets the needs of people to understand the complexity of objects, phenomena, personalities, their diversity, and, above all, to comprehend their implicit, deep meaning. The concepts of content and form serve to mentally demarcate the external - from the internal, essence and meaning - from their embodiment, from the ways of their existence, that is, they correspond to the analytical impulse of human consciousness. content at the same time, the basis of the subject, its defining side, is called. The form is an organization and appearance object, its defined side.

The form understood in this way is secondary, derivative, dependent on content and at the same time is a condition for the existence of an object. Its secondary nature in relation to content does not mean its secondary significance: form and content are equally necessary aspects of the phenomena of being.

Forms expressing content can be associated with it (associated) in different ways: one thing is science and philosophy with their abstract semantic principles, and something completely different is the fruits of artistic creativity, marked by the predominance of the singular and uniquely individual.

In the literary concepts of “content” and “form”, ideas about the external and inner sides literary work. Hence the naturalness of defining the boundaries of form and content in works: the spiritual principle is the content, and its material embodiment is the form.

The ideas about the inseparability of the content and form of works of art were fixed by G.V.F. Hegel at the turn of 1810 - 1820s. The German philosopher believed that concreteness should be inherent in "both sides of art, both the depicted content and the form of the image", it "is precisely the point at which they can coincide and correspond to each other." It was also significant that Hegel likened the work of art to a single, integral "organism".

According to Hegel, science and philosophy, which constitute the sphere of abstract thought, "possess a form not posited by itself, external to it." It is legitimate to add that the content here does not change when it is restructured: the same thought can be captured in different ways. Something completely different are works of art, where, as Hegel argued, the content (idea) and its (its) embodiment correspond to each other as much as possible: the artistic idea, being concrete, “carries in itself the principle and method of its manifestation, and it freely creates its own form."

Similar statements are also found in V.G. Belinsky. According to the critic, the idea in the poet’s work is “not an abstract thought, not a dead form, but a living creation, in which (...) there is no feature that indicates a stitching or adhesion, there is no border between the idea and the form, but both are whole and a single organic creation."

A similar point of view is shared by most modern literary critics. Wherein content literary work is defined as its essence, spiritual being, and the form - as a way of existence of this content. The content, in other words, is the "statement" of the writer about the world, a certain emotional and mental reaction to certain phenomena of reality. The form- the system of methods and means in which this reaction finds expression, embodiment. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that the content is what the writer wanted to say with his work, and the form is how he did it.

The form of a work of art has two main functions. The first is carried out within the artistic whole, so it can be called internal: it is a form of expression of content. The second function is found in the impact of the work on the reader, so it can be called external (in relation to the work). It consists in the fact that the form has an aesthetic impact on the reader, because it is the form that acts as the bearer of the aesthetic qualities of a work of art. The content itself cannot be beautiful or ugly in a strict, aesthetic sense - these are properties that arise exclusively at the level of form.

Modern science proceeds from the idea of ​​the primacy of content over form. In relation to a work of art, this is true as for a creative process (the writer looks for the appropriate form, even if for a vague, but already existing content, but in no case vice versa - he does not first create a “ready-made form”, and then pours some content into it) , and for the work as such (features of the content determine and explain the specifics of the form). However, in a certain sense, namely in relation to the perceiving consciousness, it is the form that is primary, and the content secondary. Since sensory perception is always ahead of the emotional reaction and, moreover, the rational comprehension of the subject, moreover, serves as a basis for them, readers perceive in the work first its form, and only then and through it - the corresponding artistic content.

In the history of European aesthetics, there were other points of view, statements about the priority of form over content in art. Ascending to the ideas of the German philosopher I. Kant, they received further development in the works of the writer F. Schiller and representatives of the formal school. In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller wrote that in a truly beautiful work (such are the creations of ancient masters), “everything should depend on the form, and nothing on the content, because only the form affects the whole person as a whole, while the content only affects separate forces. Content, no matter how sublime and all-encompassing, always acts on the spirit in a restrictive way, and true aesthetic freedom can only be expected from form. So, the real secret of the art of the master is to destroy the content with the form. Thus, Schiller exaggerated such a property of form as its relative independence.

Such views were developed in the early works of Russian formalists (for example, V.B. Shklovsky), who generally proposed replacing the concepts of “content” and “form” with others - “material” and “reception”. Formalists saw the content as a non-artistic category and therefore evaluated the form as the only bearer of artistic specificity, considered a work of art as the “sum” of its constituent techniques.

In the future, in an effort to point out the specifics of the relationship between content and form in art, literary critics proposed a special term specifically designed to reflect the inseparability of the fusion of the sides of the artistic whole - " meaningful form". In Russian literary criticism, the concept of meaningful form, which is hardly central to the composition of theoretical poetics, was substantiated by M.M. Bakhtin in the works of the 1920s. He argued that the artistic form has no meaning outside of its correlation with the content, which was defined by the scientist as the cognitive and ethical moment of an aesthetic object, as a recognized and evaluated reality: the "moment of content" allows "to comprehend the form in a more significant way" than roughly hedonistically.

In another wording about the same thing: the art form needs "extra-aesthetic significance of the content." Using the phrases "meaningful form", "formed content", "form-forming ideology", Bakhtin emphasized the inseparability and inseparability of form and content. “In every smallest element of the poetic structure,” he wrote, “in every metaphor, in every epithet, we will find a chemical combination of cognitive definition, ethical assessment and artistically completed design.”

In the above words, the most important principle of artistic activity is convincingly and clearly characterized - installation on unity of content and form in created works. The fully implemented unity of form and content makes the work organically integral, as if it were a living being, born, and not rationally (mechanically) constructed.

Other researchers also spoke about the fact that the artistic content is embodied (materialized) not in any individual words, phrases, phrases, but in the aggregate of everything that is present in the work. So, according to Yu.M. Lotman, “the idea is not contained in any, even well-chosen quotations, but is expressed in the entire artistic structure. The researcher who does not understand this and looks for an idea in individual quotations is like a person who, having learned that a house has a plan, would begin to break down the walls, looking for a place where this plan is walled up. The plan is not walled up in the walls, but implemented in the proportions of the building.

However, this or that formal element would not be so meaningful, no matter how close the connection between content and form may be, this connection does not turn into identity. Content and form are not the same, they are different, singled out in the process of abstraction and analysis of the side of the artistic whole. They have different tasks and different functions. The true content of the form is revealed only when the fundamental differences between these two sides of a work of art are sufficiently realized, when, consequently, it becomes possible to establish certain relationships and regular interactions between them.

Thus, in a work of art, the beginnings are distinguishable formal-meaningful and proper content .

Artistic content is a unity of objective and subjective principles. This is a combination of what came to the author from outside and was known to him (the subject of art), and what he expressed and comes from his views, intuition, personality traits.

The point of view on the form, which many modern scientists adhere to, was substantiated by G.N. Pospelov, who singled out “objective representation”, verbal structure, composition in artistic texts (Problems of literary style - M .. 1970, p. 80; Holistic and systemic understanding of literary works // Questions of methodology and poetics.

According to this point of view, which is shared by many researchers, the composition of the form that carries the content traditionally distinguishes three sides that are necessarily present in any literary work. “This is, first of all, subject(subject-pictorial) Start: all those single phenomena and facts that are indicated with the help of words and in their totality constitute the world of a work of art (there are also expressions “poetic world”, “inner world” of a work, “direct content”). This, secondly, is the actual verbal fabric of the work: artistic speech, often fixed by the terms "poetic language", "stylistics", "text". And, thirdly, this is the correlation and arrangement in the work of units of the subject and verbal “rows”, that is, the composition” (Khalizev V.E. Theory of Literature.

The selection in the product of its three sides goes back to ancient rhetoric. It has been repeatedly noted that the speaker needs to:

1) find material (that is, choose a subject that will be presented and characterized by speech); somehow arrange (build this material;

2) to embody it in such words that will make the proper impression on the listeners.

It should be noted that, taking the point of view that two components of a work are distinguished - form and content - some researchers distinguish between them somewhat differently. So, in the textbook T.T. Davydova, V.A. Pronin "Theory of Literature" states: "The content components of a literary work are the theme, characters, circumstances, problem, idea"; “The formal components of a literary work are style, genre, composition, artistic speech, rhythm; content-formal - plot and plot, conflict. The lack of a unified position of literary critics is explained by the complexity of such cultural phenomena as works of art.

The plot and plot of a work of literature are its content-formal features, composition is a formal feature. If the plot is a category characteristic of the epic and drama, then the composition and plot are inherent in the works of all three types of literature, but the lyrical plot is peculiar.

“Poetic plots are distinguished by a much greater degree of generalization than prose plots.<…>In this sense, poetry is closer to a myth than to a novel,” we read from Yu.M. Lotman. So, in Pushkin's lyrics, written in a southern exile, a typical romantic "myth" about a "poetic escape" from the world of slavery to the world of freedom is created, so it cannot be understood from it that in fact the poet was exiled to Chisinau and Odessa.

"Another distinctive feature of a poetic plot is the presence in it of a certain rhythm, repetition, parallelism." The list of lyrical plots, as well as the set of lyric themes, is relatively small. This is the essence of poetry.

In Aristotle's Poetics, which basically determined the development of the theory of plot until the 19th century, action is distinguished as an event system, i.e. the plot, and the plot in the proper sense - a living sequence of movements embodied in words. There is also a distinction between plot and holistic action in Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy. A great contribution to the study of the plot was made by the outstanding Russian philologist A.N. Veselovsky, who, however, called it the plot.

To explain the emergence of the "plot" (plot), A.N. Veselovsky used in Historical Poetics (1940) the concept of a motive, elements of lower mythology and fairy tales that cannot be further decomposed. The scientist expressed the simplest type of motive by the formula "the evil old woman does not love the beauty and sets her a life-threatening task." Each part of this formula is capable of changing, especially the number of tasks increased frequently - as a rule, up to three. So the motif grew into a plot. The plot (in the historical and genetic aspect) is a complex of motives. At the same time, Veselovsky already saw the content side of the plot when he emphasized: “Plots are complex schemes, in the imagery of which are known acts of human life and the psyche in alternating forms of everyday reality.”

Another way to form plots is to borrow them from other peoples. In the process of the emergence of written literature, plots varied (some motifs invaded them) or combined with each other, new illumination was obtained from a different understanding of the eternal type or types (Faust, Don Juan, Don Quixote). Thus, the individual beginning was manifested in the way this or that author uses the traditional plot. The appeal to traditional plot schemes is especially characteristic of the literatures of the East. For European literature, ancient myths and biblical mythology have become traditional plot schemes with a rich cultural code.

The terminological distinction between the concepts of fabula (lat. fabula - fable, narration) and plot (fr. le sujet - subject) occurs only in the science of literature of the 20th century.

Formalists (V.B. Shklovsky, B.V. Tomashevsky and others) interpret the plot as a chronological sequence in the life of events that form the basis of the action of a literary work, and the plot as “an artistically constructed distribution of events in a work<…>". The concept of composition is not used by them at all, which impoverishes the idea of ​​a literary work. In the famous book by P.N. Medvedev's "Formal Method in Literary Studies" (1928), the plot is understood more broadly - as the general course of events drawn from a real life incident, and the plot - as "the real deployment of the work."

The plot is the action of the work in its entirety, the real chain of depicted movements, and the plot is the system of main events that can be retold. The plot only informs about the objective action and its main vicissitudes, while the plot unfolds this action before the reader's eyes. Once N.V. Gogol heard a joke about a poor official, a passionate bird hunter, who saved up money for a gun, which, during the first hunt, got tangled in the bushes and drowned in the river. Colleagues of the official, who fell ill with grief, collected money by subscription and bought him a new gun. This anecdote, modified by the writer, became the plot of the story "The Overcoat". And its plot is the totality of events in the work.

The plot and the plot are not always unidirectional in time. They are unidirectional in folklore tales. A classic example of their multidirectionality is M.Yu. Lermontov's novel "A Hero of Our Time", in which the narrative begins with the later stages of Pechorin's fate, and then moves back and the narrator talks about his past. Such a retrospection is found, as a rule, in the epic - the novel "The Lady with the Camellias" by A. Dumas-son, the short story "Light Breath" by I.A. Bunin, stories "Farewell, Gulsary!" and "White steamer" Ch.T. Aitmatov. However, sometimes the plot and plot are also multidirectional in the drama: in M.A. Bulgakov’s comedy “Ivan Vasilyevich”, the brilliant inventor Timofeev, using the time machine he created, is transferred from Moscow in the 1920s to the era of Ivan the Terrible and then returns to the 20th century.

The plot is revealed in the drama and especially in the epic in many aspects, expressing different facets of the characters' individuality. The plot in a literary work includes the entire event side, or the external actions of the characters; their external and internal statements that move the action, and, thanks to this, the conflicts or conflicts underlying the plot develop; narration about the experiences and mental demands of the characters, the dynamics of their thoughts and feelings.

The first aspect of the plot is usually called external plot, the third - internal, the second refers equally to external and internal action. These aspects of the plot are distinguished both in the drama and in the epic.

In W. Shakespeare's tragedy "Hamlet", along with external action - the crime committed by King Claudius, and Hamlet's revenge for his murdered father - there is also an internal struggle of conflicting feelings in the soul of the Danish prince: a sense of crisis, "looseness" of the whole world, awareness of his mission not as a narrow personal, but as a public, desire to quickly carry out the planned revenge and doubts inherent in a reflective personality, etc. External and internal plots also take place in "Boris Godunov" by A.S. Pushkin (the story of the crime of Boris Godunov and the pangs of his criminal conscience). Particularly saturated with the internal action of the play by A.P. Chekhov.

The plot is based on a conflict (from lat. conflictus - clash) - a struggle between the heroes of an epic or drama, or between characters and circumstances, or within the character and consciousness of a character. A historically large-scale, global conflict is called a collision (Latin colisio clash). The struggle, in which the characters of a tragedy, an epic, a great historical novel take part, is based on a collision - the goals that are pursued here are so majestic. The struggle waged by the characters of the genres of drama, comedy, melodrama, fable is based on conflict - the goals pursued here are much less significant. Although each of the terms "conflict" and "collision" has its own meaning, in modern literary criticism they are often used as synonyms.

The theory of collision was developed by G.E. Lessing and G.W.F. Hegel. According to Hegel, "dramatic action is not limited to the simple unimpeded achievement of a certain goal, but always rests on circumstances, passions and characters that enter into collisions.<…>. The individual acting in the drama “finds himself in conflict and in struggle with other individuals. Thus, the action is assigned to the vicissitudes and collisions, which<…>lead to such a denouement, where the own inner essence of human goals, characters and conflicts is clearly revealed. As can be seen from the arguments of the German philosopher given here, the condition for the emergence of a conflict is “situations fraught with conflicts”, the conflict in a work of art is temporary and ends with resolution (reconciliation), i.e. artistic harmony. True, Hegel makes an essential reservation: in a certain outcome that resolves conflicts, the basis for new interests and conflicts can be laid. This usually happens in tragedies. It is especially important that the plot reveals the inner essence of human characters. That is why the plot and the conflict underlying it are substantive-formal categories.

The action in drama and epic develops through collisions and twists and turns. Peripetia (peripeteia, Greek) - any sudden, sharp turn in the development of action. Aristotle described the ups and downs as a turning point from misfortune to happiness in the fate of the hero of the tragedy.

Such is the turning point from happiness to misfortune in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which takes place in the fate of the protagonist after he learns that he has committed a number of crimes.

There are many ups and downs in epic works. In the novel by I.S. Turgenev's "Nest of Nobles" is false news of the death of Fyodor Lavretsky's wife, after which he gives vent to a feeling of love for Lisa Kalitina; the arrival of his wife to Lavretsky, after which the dreams of Lavretsky and Liza about family happiness turn out to be unrealizable; finally, Liza's decision to enter a convent. In The Brothers Karamazov by F. M. Dostoevsky, the coming of Katerina Ivanovna to Dmitry Karamazov for money, after which a knot of complex relationships between these heroes is tied, and Katerina Ivanovna’s reading of Dmitry’s letter at the trial, which plays the role of the most important evidence and leads to Dmitry's conviction for the murder of his father that he did not commit.

Conflict, the basis and driving force of action, determines the main story development stages both off-plot and plot. Already Aristotle made one of the first attempts to define these stages with the help of the concepts of the plot and denouement of the tragic action. He calls the plot both what is outside the drama, and “what [extends] from the beginning [of the tragedy] to that part of it, at the turn of which the transition to happiness begins [from misfortune or from happiness to misfortune]; denouement - everything from the beginning of this transition to the end. Thus, the ancient philosopher included such extra-plot elements as a prologue (in the epic, lyric-epos and lyrics) and exposition, the beginning of the action, the actual plot and further development of the action; to the denouement he attributed the climax, the decline of the action and the resolution of the conflict, or the actual denouement.

Aristotle's ideas about the plot were developed and concretized by Hegel, to whose aesthetics modern ideas about the stages of the plot go back. Hegel singled out these stages on the example of a drama of three acts: “The first of them represents the discovery of a collision, which is then revealed in the second act as a live clash of interests, as separation, struggle and conflict, and, finally, in the utmost aggravation of its contradiction, it is necessarily resolved. in the third act. “Collision detection” here is the plot, “struggle and conflict” is the further development of the action on the rise, “ultimate aggravation of the contradiction” is the climax, conflict resolution is the denouement. However, Hegel did not characterize such extra-plot elements as exposition (prologue) and epilogue. And his definitions of the stages of action in modern literary criticism have been expanded and modified.

The exposition prepares the beginning of the conflict, depicts the state of the world that has not yet wavered. An important stage of the conflict is the plot, the moment from which the moving forward and tangible movement of the plot begins. The climax is the moment highest voltage, the most acute and open clash of characters and circumstances. Then the action, as a rule, goes into decline and ends with a denouement. The denouement is a stage in the development of the plot that resolves the collision by the victory of one of the warring parties, reconciliation, and so on. The denouement is an optional stage of the plot. Often the denouement is deprived of action in the lyrics. In some works, usually lyrical-epic or epic, the denouement of the action is followed by such an extra-plot element as epilogue or conclusion. This is a concentrated description of the state of the world or the further destinies of the characters, as a rule, some time after the denouement.

According to drama researcher V.E. Khalizeva, external volitional action is based on incidental conflicts: local and transient contradictions, closed within a single set of circumstances and fundamentally resolvable by will individual people. Artistic collisions were reduced to such conflicts by Hegel. The "Ibsen" action, which B. Shaw wrote about in the article "The Quintessence of Ibsenism" (1891), is based on substantial conflicts, i.e. states of life marked by contradictions, which are either universal and essentially unchanging, or arise and disappear according to the transpersonal will of nature and history, but not due to individual actions and accomplishments of people and their groups. The conflict of a dramatic (and any other) plot either marks disruption of the world order, fundamentally harmonic and perfect, or acts as feature of the world order, evidence of its imperfection or disharmony. The first plot type is widespread in archaic mythology and folklore, ancient and medieval literature (up to the Renaissance), the second - in prose and drama at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. and the last century (creativity of A.P. Chekhov, M. Gorky, Yu.P. Kazakov, G. Ibsen, B. Shaw, M. Proust).

The preference given by many first-class writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. the second type of plot, does not mean that the traditional external-volitional action has been “passed into the archive”. The “conflict-free theory”, guided by which Soviet prose writers and playwrights worked in the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, turned out to be untenable. It is no coincidence that in subsequent periods of Russian literature, such a lightweight and superficial recreation of life was replaced by its deeper depiction in such highly conflicted works as V.D. Dudintseva, "The Scaffold" by Ch.T. Aitmatov, "Life and Fate" by V.S. Grossman, "Fire" by V.G. Rasputin, "The Sad Detective" by V.P. Astafiev. Energetic and socially active heroes of each of these works take on the burden of fighting the imperfection of the surrounding being. Thus, the theory of conflict developed in German classical aesthetics is still viable today.

There may be several conflicts in the work and, accordingly, several storylines. Sometimes these storylines are equal. Sometimes one of the storylines is the main one, and the other side.

Composition - construction, arrangement of all elements of an art form. With the help of composition, the meaning (idea) of the work is expressed. The composition is external and internal. The sphere of external composition includes the division of an epic work into books, parts and chapters, a lyrical work into parts and stanzas, a lyrical-epic work into songs, a dramatic work into acts and pictures. The area of ​​internal composition includes all the static elements of the work: different types of descriptions - portrait, landscape, description of the interior and everyday life of the characters, summarizing characteristics; extra-plot elements - exposition (prologue, introduction, "prehistory" of the hero's life), epilogue ("subsequent history" of the hero's life), inserted episodes, short stories; all kinds of digressions (lyrical, philosophical, journalistic); motivations for narrative and description; forms of characters' speech: monologue, dialogue, letter (correspondence), diary, notes; narrative forms, i.e. points of view: spatio-temporal, psychological, ideological, phraseological.

In any of the epic masterpieces there are many memorable descriptions: these are contrasting verbal portraits of Napoleon and Kutuzov, Karenin and Anna Karenina, the sky and oak seen by Prince Andrei ("War and Peace"), descriptions of the interiors of the landlords' houses and their everyday life in Dead Souls "and" Oblomov. Despite the fact that such descriptions hinder the external development of the action, each of them reveals some facet of the hero’s character or the state of the social and social environment and thereby contributes to the embodiment of a certain aspect of the content of the work and, as a rule, to the development of internal action. A similar artistic role is played by such elements of the composition as letters, notes, diaries.

The letters of the doggie, read by the crazy official Poprishchin, contain the effect of "estrangement", which helps to understand the absurdity of human existence in Gogol's Petersburg. The epistolary form used by F.M. Dostoevsky, helps to reveal the images of the main characters from the inside.

Sometimes the background of the hero serves as a kind of exposition, and the subsequent story of his life serves as a variant of the epilogue. Such is the story of Onegin's childhood and youth, told not at the very beginning of the novel, but after the internal monologue of the hero going to the village to visit his sick uncle, the story of the subsequent life of Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov from the epilogue to the novel by A. Bely "Petersburg".

Narrative forms, called points of view, play an important role in the composition of a work. Point of view - "the position from which the story is told or from which the event of the story is perceived by the hero of the story." The concept of point of view in literature is analogous to the concept of angle in painting and cinema. Modern Russian literary criticism owes the development of this aspect of the composition to B.A. Uspensky and B.O. Korman, who singled out the following types of point of view: ideological and value (ideological), linguistic ("phraseological"), spatio-temporal, psychological, as well as internal and external. Different approaches to isolating a point of view in a work of art correspond to different levels of analysis of the composition of this work.

1. Ideological-value (ideological) point of view. The author in the work evaluates and ideologically perceives the depicted world either from his own point of view, explicit or hidden, or from the point of view of the narrator, which does not coincide with the author's, or from the point of view of one of the characters. This is the deep compositional structure of the work. Evaluation in a work can be made from one dominant point of view, subordinating all other positions to itself. But there may be a change in assessment positions. For example, in the novel A Hero of Our Time, Pechorin's personality is given through the eyes of the narrator, Pechorin himself, Maxim Maksimych, etc. These different points of view are difficult to correlate with each other, and only thanks to their presence, different facets of the contradictory personality of the protagonist of the novel are revealed.

If different points of view in a work are not subordinate to each other, but act as equals, then the phenomenon of polyphony arises. The concept of polyphony was characterized by M.M. Bakhtin in the monograph "Problems of Dostoevsky's Creativity" (1929): "A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of full-fledged voices<…>is the main feature of Dostoevsky's novels", the writer's works unfold "a plurality of equal consciousnesses with their worlds", his main characters "are not only objects of the author's word, but also subjects of his own directly meaningful word". In Dostoevsky's dialogical works, a hero appears whose voice is built in the same way as the voice of the author himself is built in a novel of the usual, monologue, or homophonic type. The hero's word about himself and the world is as full-fledged as the usual author's word: it owns independence in the structure of the work, it is combined in a special way with the author's word and the full-fledged voices of other heroes.

According to B.A. Uspensky, in terms of points of view, the phenomenon of polyphony is as follows:

• the presence in the work of several independent points of view,
• points of view should belong to the participants in the action,
• points of view should manifest themselves primarily in terms of evaluation, i.e. as points of view ideologically valuable. The difference in points of view is revealed, first of all, in how this or that hero evaluates the reality surrounding him.

The protagonist of the work can act either as a subject of evaluation (Onegin, Bazarov), or as its carrier (Chatsky, Alyosha Karamazov). The carrier of the evaluative author's point of view can also be a secondary, almost episodic character (the choir in ancient drama, the reasoners in the works of classicism do not participate much in the action, they combine the participant in the action and the spectator who perceives and evaluates the action).

2. Linguistic ("phraseological") point of view. Linguistic means of expressing a point of view are used to characterize its carrier. The style of speech of the narrator or hero is determined by his worldview, references in the text to one or another point of view used by the author are essential. Thus, improperly direct speech in the narrator's text indicates the use of the hero's point of view. As the narrator in A.I. Solzhenitsyn "Matryona Dvor" recognizes the peasant woman Matryona Vasilievna and understands that she is the only righteous man in the village, he begins to use dialectisms inherent in the speech of the heroine. Thus, subtly, through the speech plan, the writer shows that the narrator admires the spirituality and high morality of the heroine.

3. Spatio-temporal point of view. The images of the characters are also revealed through the spatial and temporal positions of the narrator and the character, most fully if these positions coincide. Sometimes the narrator, as it were, transforms into a hero and takes his position in space. Tolstoy's narrator follows Pierre Bezukhov in the scene of the Battle of Borodino, then loses sight of the hero, since such following is a convenient occasion for describing this event. The spatial positions of the narrator and the characters may not coincide.

The narrator can count time in a work from his own position or from the position of some character. The narrator can take the position of either one or the other hero (in The Queen of Spades, first Liza's experience of time, then Hermann's) is given. Thus, a plurality of temporary positions arises in a realistic work.

4. Psychological point of view. This point of view is revealed when the narrator relies on one or another individual consciousness. In "War and Peace" the scene of Natasha's visit to the opera is presented by the author in an emphatically subjective way, thus he describes the theatrical performance, seen through the eyes of the most "natural", close to nature heroine. In F.M. Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot", the story of Rogozhin's attempt on Myshkin is given twice - through the eyes of Myshkin and the narrator, which helped to present this event from different angles.

Associated with a psychological point of view new type polyphony - polyphony of individual perceptions, characteristic of the prose of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. Already in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn brings the image of the narrator and the protagonist as close as possible, describing Shukhov from the outside, but from his own point of view. In The Red Wheel, the narrator's point of view is constantly identified with the points of view of numerous characters in the work, which makes it possible to depict the cataclysms of the history of the 20th century. Thus, Solzhenitsyn, without refusing to express his point of view, compares it with other positions, expressed as convincingly as the "author's". And this, according to Solzhenitsyn's plan, makes it possible to approach the comprehension of life's reality in all its complexity and depth.

5. External and internal point of view. The external point of view is the story of an observer who looks at what is happening from the side. He can observe both one and several heroes. He is able to evaluate and sometimes predict events. The internal point of view is represented by the hero, on behalf of whom the narration is being conducted. He thinks and feels real, "here and now", the reader lives his life with him and has no idea about his future. The observer can also personify the inner point of view, but on condition that he penetrates deeply into the thoughts and feelings of the hero and, like him, knows nothing about the future.

Usually in the work these points of view coexist or replace each other.

And, finally, in a work there can be several narrators: a common narrator and a direct observer, and, accordingly, several points of view of each type. A similar structure was used by A.S. Pushkin in Belkin's Tales. In such cases, the author's position grows out of a complex correlation of points of view of different narrators and characters.

An extensive typology of points of view is necessary for a deeper understanding of realistic and modernist works, in which, with the help of various compositional techniques, the multilateral communication of characters with the world and with each other is shown.

Consideration of the multidirectional plot and plot helps to understand the activity of the artistic form of the work. So, in I. A. Bunin's "Easy Breathing", a violation of the reproduction of the chronology of events leads to the creation of a sense of harmony, embodied in the personality of Olya Meshcherskaya, and its gradual loss, "dispersion" in a cold world.

Analyzing the plots of works of large genres, as a rule, they single out those storylines that make up the action, as well as the conflicts on which each of the storylines is based. It is not easy to express the specificity of life through the eventful side of a great epic novel. Some writers, trying to give the story as much dynamics as possible, are fond of extreme situations (murders, robberies, accidents, natural disasters). These plot devices are used mainly in the works of the so-called grassroots genres - detective, thriller, as well as in "production" prose or drama. Such stamps lead to a schematic and unartistic depiction of life.

Since the plot is closely connected with the characters, you need to pay attention to how legitimate this or that plot detail is from the point of view of the logic of the character. It is also important to analyze the actions of the characters, and the correspondence of these actions to the character. If the hero of the work changes throughout the action, then such a change should not be declared, but shown through the plot. The more multifaceted the character depicted by the writer, the more diverse the combination of compositional techniques and points of view in the work.

When analyzing the forms of composition, one should pay attention to how the narration is conducted - from the third person (objective narration) or from the first person (subjective narration). In the second case, it is important to understand whether the ideological and evaluative positions of the author and the narrator differ and how convincing the motivations for the story are, since the narrator does not have the omniscience of the narrator of the object type. Among such motivations may be eavesdropping, peeping, etc. Improperly direct speech and internal monologue provide more opportunities for self-disclosure of the characters in the objective narrative.

Students should get acquainted with the concepts of plot, plot, conflict, composition, basic ideas about them at different stages of European literary criticism; know what the Hegelian theory of conflict is. Need have an idea on the difference between conflict and conflict.

Students must have clear ideas:

• about the typology of points of view, about polyphonic composition and different types polyphony.

Student must acquire skills

• use of scientific-critical and reference literature, analysis of the plot, plot, main and side storylines, composition, external and internal points of view, their validity in literary and artistic works.

1. For which literary genres are plot and plot obligatory?

2. What kind of literary genre can do without a plot?

3. What is the difference between plot and plot?

4. In the works of what genres is the plot and the plot the same direction?

5. What is the basis of conflict?

6. Give examples of collisions from classical works.

7. Select all the elements of the composition of the novels by A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin" and O. de Balzac "Father Goriot".

Principles and methods of analysis of a literary work Esin Andrey Borisovich

Artwork as structure

Even at first glance, it is clear that a work of art consists of certain aspects, elements, aspects, etc. In other words, it has a complex internal composition. At the same time, the individual parts of the work are connected and united with each other so closely that this gives reason to metaphorically liken the work to a living organism. The composition of the work is characterized, therefore, not only by complexity, but also by order. A work of art is a complexly organized whole; from the realization of this obvious fact follows the need to know the internal structure of the work, that is, to single out its individual components and realize the connections between them. The rejection of such an attitude inevitably leads to empiricism and unsubstantiated judgments about the work, to complete arbitrariness in its consideration, and ultimately impoverishes our understanding of the artistic whole, leaving it at the level of the primary reader's perception.

In modern literary criticism, there are two main trends in establishing the structure of a work. The first proceeds from the separation of a number of layers or levels in a work, just as in linguistics in a separate statement one can distinguish the level of phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic. At the same time, different researchers unequally imagine both the set of levels and the nature of their relationships. So, M.M. Bakhtin sees in the work, first of all, two levels - "plot" and "plot", the depicted world and the world of the image itself, the reality of the author and the reality of the hero. MM. Hirshman proposes a more complex, mostly three-level structure: rhythm, plot, hero; in addition, the subject-object organization of the work permeates “vertically” these levels, which ultimately creates not a linear structure, but rather a grid that is superimposed on the work of art. There are other models of a work of art, representing it in the form of a number of levels, slices.

Obviously, the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the allocation of levels can be considered as a common drawback of these concepts. Moreover, no attempt has yet been made substantiate division into levels by some general considerations and principles. The second weakness follows from the first and consists in the fact that no division by levels covers the entire richness of the elements of the work, does not give an exhaustive idea even of its composition. Finally, the levels must be thought of as fundamentally equal - otherwise the very principle of structuring loses its meaning - and this easily leads to the loss of the idea of ​​a certain core of a work of art, linking its elements into a real integrity; connections between levels and elements are weaker than they really are. Here we should also note the fact that the “level” approach very poorly takes into account the fundamental difference in quality of a number of components of the work: for example, it is clear that an artistic idea and an artistic detail are phenomena of a fundamentally different nature.

The second approach to the structure of a work of art takes such general categories as content and form as its primary division. In the most complete and reasoned form, this approach is presented in the works of G.N. Pospelov. This methodological trend has far fewer drawbacks than the one discussed above, it is much more in line with the real structure of the work and is much more justified from the point of view of philosophy and methodology.

FROM philosophical justification we will begin to highlight content and form in the artistic whole. The categories of content and form, excellently developed back in Hegel's system, have become important categories of dialectics and have been repeatedly successfully used in the analysis of various complex objects. The use of these categories in aesthetics and literary criticism also forms a long and fruitful tradition. Nothing prevents us, therefore, from applying the well-established philosophical concepts and to the analysis of a literary work, moreover, from the point of view of methodology, it will only be logical and natural. But there are also special reasons to begin the division of a work of art with the allocation of content and form in it. A work of art is not a natural phenomenon, but a cultural one, which means that it is based on a spiritual principle, which, in order to exist and be perceived, must certainly acquire some material embodiment, a way of existing in a system of material signs. Hence the naturalness of defining the boundaries of form and content in a work: the spiritual principle is the content, and its material embodiment is the form.

We can define the content of a literary work as its essence, spiritual being, and the form as a way of existence of this content. The content, in other words, is the "statement" of the writer about the world, a certain emotional and mental reaction to certain phenomena of reality. Form is the system of means and methods in which this reaction finds expression, embodiment. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that content is what what the writer said with his work, and the form - how he did it.

The form of a work of art has two main functions. The first is carried out within the artistic whole, so it can be called internal: it is a function of expressing content. The second function is found in the impact of the work on the reader, so it can be called external (in relation to the work). It consists in the fact that the form has an aesthetic impact on the reader, because it is the form that acts as the bearer of the aesthetic qualities of a work of art. The content itself cannot be beautiful or ugly in a strict, aesthetic sense - these are properties that arise exclusively at the level of form.

From what has been said about the functions of form, it is clear that the question of conventionality, which is so important for a work of art, is solved differently in relation to content and form. If in the first section we said that a work of art in general is a convention in comparison with primary reality, then the measure of this convention is different for form and content. Within a work of art the content is unconditional, in relation to it it is impossible to raise the question “why does it exist?” Like the phenomena of primary reality, in the art world content exists without any conditions, as an immutable given. Nor can it be a conditionally fantasy, arbitrary sign, by which nothing is meant; in the strict sense, the content cannot be invented - it directly comes to the work from the primary reality (from the social being of people or from the consciousness of the author). On the contrary, the form can be arbitrarily fantastic and conditionally implausible, because something is meant by the conditionality of the form; it exists "for something" - to embody the content. Thus, Shchedrin's city of Foolov is a creation of the author's pure fantasy, it is conditional, since it never existed in reality, but autocratic Russia, which became the subject of the "History of a City" and embodied in the image of the city of Foolov, is not a convention or fiction.

Let us note to ourselves that the difference in the degree of conventionality between content and form gives clear criteria for attributing one or another specific element of a work to form or content - this remark will be useful to us more than once.

Modern science proceeds from the primacy of content over form. With regard to a work of art, this is true as for a creative process (the writer looks for the appropriate form, even if for a vague, but already existing content, but in no case vice versa - he does not first create a “ready-made form”, and then pours some content into it) , and for the work as such (features of the content determine and explain to us the specifics of the form, but not vice versa). However, in a certain sense, namely in relation to the perceiving consciousness, it is the form that is primary, and the content secondary. Since sensory perception always outstrips the emotional reaction and, moreover, the rational understanding of the subject, moreover, it serves as the basis and foundation for them, we first perceive its form in the work, and only then and only through it - the corresponding artistic content.

From this, by the way, it follows that the movement of the analysis of a work - from content to form or vice versa - is of no fundamental importance. Any approach has its justifications: the first - in the defining nature of the content in relation to the form, the second - in the laws of the reader's perception. Well said about this A.S. Bushmin: “It is not at all necessary ... to start research from the content, guided only by the one thought that the content determines the form, and not having other, more specific reasons for this. Meanwhile, it was precisely this sequence of consideration of a work of art that turned into a coercive, beaten, boring scheme for everyone, having become widespread both in school teaching and in teaching aids, and in scientific literary works. Dogmatic transfer of the correct general position literary theory on the method of concrete study of works gives rise to a dull pattern. Let us add to this that, of course, the opposite pattern would not be any better - it is always obligatory to start the analysis from the form. It all depends on the specific situation and specific tasks.

From all that has been said, a clear conclusion suggests itself that both form and content are equally important in a work of art. The experience of the development of literature and literary criticism also proves this position. Belittling the meaning of content or completely ignoring it leads in literary criticism to formalism, to meaningless abstract constructions, leads to oblivion of the social nature of art, and in artistic practice, guided by this kind of concept, it turns into aestheticism and elitism. However, the neglect of the art form as something secondary and, in essence, optional has no less negative consequences. Such an approach actually destroys the work as a phenomenon of art, forces us to see in it only this or that ideological, and not ideological and aesthetic phenomenon. In creative practice, which does not want to reckon with the enormous importance of form in art, flat illustrativeness, primitiveness, the creation of “correct”, but emotionally unexperienced declarations about a “relevant”, but artistically unexplored topic, inevitably appear.

Highlighting the form and content in the work, we thereby liken it to any other complexly organized whole. However, the relationship between form and content in a work of art has its own specifics. Let's see what it consists of.

First of all, it is necessary to firmly understand that the relationship between content and form is not a spatial relationship, but a structural one. The form is not a shell that can be removed to open the nut kernel - the content. If we take a work of art, then we will be powerless to “point the finger”: here is the form, but the content. Spatially they are merged and indistinguishable; this unity can be felt and shown at any “point” of a literary text. Let's take, for example, that episode from Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, where Alyosha, when asked by Ivan what to do with the landowner who baited the child with dogs, answers: "Shoot!". What is this "shoot!" content or form? Of course, both are in unity, in fusion. On the one hand, it is part of the speech, verbal form of the work; Alyosha's remark occupies a certain place in the compositional form of the work. These are formal points. On the other hand, this "shoot" is a component of the hero's character, that is, the thematic basis of the work; the replica expresses one of the turns of the moral and philosophical searches of the characters and the author, and of course, it is an essential aspect of the ideological and emotional world of the work - these are meaningful moments. So in one word, fundamentally indivisible into spatial components, we saw content and form in their unity. The situation is similar with the work of art in its entirety.

The second thing to note is the special connection between form and content in the artistic whole. According to Yu.N. Tynyanov, relations are established between the artistic form and the artistic content, unlike the relations of “wine and glass” (glass as form, wine as content), that is, relations of free compatibility and equally free separation. In a work of art, the content is not indifferent to the specific form in which it is embodied, and vice versa. Wine will remain wine, whether we pour it into a glass, a cup, a plate, etc.; content is indifferent to form. In the same way, milk, water, kerosene can be poured into a glass where there was wine - the form is “indifferent” to the content that fills it. Not so in a work of art. There, the connection between formal and substantive principles reaches its highest degree. Perhaps best of all, this manifests itself in the following regularity: any change in form, even seemingly small and private, is inevitable and immediately leads to a change in content. Trying to find out, for example, the content of such a formal element as poetic meter, versifiers conducted an experiment: they “transformed” the first lines of the first chapter of “Eugene Onegin” from iambic to choreic. It turned out this:

Uncle of the most honest rules,

He was not jokingly sick,

Made me respect myself

Couldn't think of a better one.

The semantic meaning, as we see, remained practically the same, the changes seemed to concern only the form. But it can be seen with the naked eye that one of the most important components of the content has changed - the emotional tone, the mood of the passage. From epic-narrative, it turned into playful-superficial. And if we imagine that the entire "Eugene Onegin" was written in chorea? But such a thing is impossible to imagine, because in this case the work is simply destroyed.

Of course, such an experiment on form is a unique case. However, in the study of a work, we often, completely unaware of this, perform similar "experiments" - without directly changing the structure of the form, but only without taking into account one or another of its features. So, studying in Gogol's "Dead Souls" mainly Chichikov, landowners, and "individual representatives" of the bureaucracy and the peasantry, we study hardly a tenth of the "population" of the poem, ignoring the mass of those "minor" heroes who are just not secondary in Gogol , but are interesting to him in themselves to the same extent as Chichikov or Manilov. As a result of such an “experiment on form”, our understanding of the work, that is, its content, is significantly distorted: after all, Gogol was not interested in the history of individuals, but in the way of national life, he created not a “gallery of images”, but an image of the world, a “way of life”.

Another example of the same kind. In the study of Chekhov's story "The Bride", a fairly strong tradition has developed to consider this story as unconditionally optimistic, even "spring and bravura". V.B. Kataev, analyzing this interpretation, notes that it is based on "reading not to the end" - the last phrase of the story in its entirety is not taken into account: "Nadya ... cheerful, happy, left the city, as she thought, forever." “The interpretation of this “as I thought,” writes V.B. Kataev, - very clearly reveals the difference in research approaches to Chekhov's work. Some researchers prefer, interpreting the meaning of "The Bride", to consider this introductory sentence as if it does not exist.

This is the “unconscious experiment” that was discussed above. “Slightly” the structure of the form is distorted - and the consequences in the field of content are not long in coming. There is a “concept of unconditional optimism, “bravura” of Chekhov’s work of recent years”, while in fact it represents “a delicate balance between truly optimistic hopes and restrained sobriety in relation to the impulses of those very people about whom Chekhov knew and told so many bitter truths” .

In the relationship between content and form, in the structure of form and content in a work of art, a certain principle, a regularity, is revealed. We will talk in detail about the specific nature of this regularity in the section “Comprehensive consideration of a work of art”.

In the meantime, we note only one methodological rule: For an accurate and complete understanding of the content of a work, it is absolutely necessary to pay as close attention as possible to its form, down to its smallest features. In the form of a work of art there are no "little things" that are indifferent to the content; According to a well-known expression, “art begins where “a little bit” begins.

The specificity of the relationship between content and form in a work of art has given rise to a special term, specifically designed to reflect the inseparability, fusion of these sides of a single artistic whole - the term "meaningful form". This concept has at least two aspects. The ontological aspect affirms the impossibility of the existence of an empty form or unformed content; in logic such concepts are called correlative: we cannot think one of them without simultaneously thinking the other. A somewhat simplified analogy can be the ratio of the concepts of "right" and "left" - if there is one, then the other inevitably exists. However, for works of art, another, axiological (evaluative) aspect of the concept of “substantial form” seems to be more important: in this case, we mean the regular correspondence of the form to the content.

A very deep and in many ways fruitful concept of meaningful form was developed in the work of G.D. Gacheva and V.V. Kozhinov "Contentiousness of literary forms". According to the authors, “any artistic form is “…” nothing but a hardened, objectified artistic content. Any property, any element of a literary work that we now perceive as "purely formal" was once directly meaningful." This richness of form never disappears, it is really perceived by the reader: “referring to the work, we somehow absorb into ourselves” the richness of formal elements, their, so to speak, “primary content”. “It is a matter of content, of a certain sense, and not at all about the senseless, meaningless objectivity of form. The most superficial properties of the form turn out to be nothing more than a special kind of content that has turned into a form.

However, no matter how meaningful this or that formal element is, no matter how close the connection between content and form, this connection does not turn into identity. Content and form are not the same, they are different, singled out in the process of abstraction and analysis of the side of the artistic whole. They have different tasks, different functions, different, as we have seen, the degree of conventionality; there is a certain relationship between them. Therefore, it is unacceptable to use the concept of meaningful form, as well as the thesis of the unity of form and content, in order to mix and lump together formal and content elements. On the contrary, the true content of the form is revealed to us only when the fundamental differences between these two sides of a work of art are sufficiently realized, when, consequently, it becomes possible to establish certain relationships and regular interactions between them.

Speaking about the problem of form and content in a work of art, it is impossible not to touch at least in in general terms another concept, actively existing in modern science about literature. It is about the concept of "inner form". This term really implies the presence "between" content and form of such elements of a work of art that are "form in relation to elements more high level(image as a form that expresses the ideological content), and content - in relation to the lower levels of the structure (image as the content of a compositional and speech form). Such an approach to the structure of the artistic whole looks doubtful, primarily because it violates the clarity and rigor of the original division into form and content as, respectively, the material and spiritual principles in the work. If some element of the artistic whole can be both meaningful and formal at the same time, then this deprives the very dichotomy of content and form and, which is important, creates significant difficulties in further analysis and comprehension of the structural relationships between the elements of the artistic whole. One should undoubtedly listen to the objections of A.S. Bushmin against the category of "internal form"; “Form and content are extremely general correlative categories. Therefore, the introduction of two concepts of form would require, respectively, two concepts of content. The presence of two pairs of similar categories, in turn, would entail the need, according to the law of subordination of categories in materialistic dialectics, to establish a unifying, third, generic concept of form and content. In a word, terminological duplication in the designation of categories does not give anything but logical confusion. And general definitions external and inner, allowing the possibility of spatial differentiation of form, vulgarize the idea of ​​the latter.

So, fruitful, in our opinion, is a clear opposition of form and content in the structure of the artistic whole. Another thing is that it is immediately necessary to warn against the danger of dismembering these aspects mechanically, roughly. There are such artistic elements in which form and content seem to touch, and very subtle methods and very close observation are needed in order to understand both the fundamental non-identity and the closest relationship between formal and content principles. The analysis of such “points” in the artistic whole is undoubtedly the greatest difficulty, but at the same time it is of the greatest interest both in the aspect of theory and in the practical study of a particular work.

? TEST QUESTIONS:

1. Why is it necessary to know the structure of a work?

2. What is the form and content of a work of art (give definitions)?

3. How are content and form related?

4. "The relationship between content and form is not spatial, but structural" - how do you understand this?

5. What is the relationship between form and content? What is a "substantial form"?

Chapter 12 Editing and Finishing the Work Scripture and Editing Scripture is not a one-time process. There are two activities involved in storytelling, and confusing one with the other can backfire. In phase