Renaissance realism. Renaissance literature
The literary process in Europe in the 17th century was very complex and contradictory. The 17th century is the era that marked the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and this determined the characteristics of historical and cultural development in European countries; the positions of the feudal-Catholic reaction were strengthened, and this caused a crisis of Renaissance humanism, most forcefully expressed in Baroque art. Baroque as a style is formed not only in literature, but also in painting and music. As a literary movement, the Baroque has a number of common ideological and artistic principles.
The Baroque is based on a concept of man that is polemical in relation to the Renaissance traditions. A weak and fragile creature, man, as Baroque writers believed, is doomed to wander in the tragic chaos of life. A deeply pessimistic concept of existence leads Baroque literature to ascetic religious ideals. Baroque creates an elite theory of art and asserts a special metaphorical ornamental style. Based on the idea of disharmony in the world, Baroque writers, trying to express the idea of disharmony in the very figurative system of the work, are carried away by semantic and pictorial contrasts. The most vivid embodiment of the principles of Baroque was found in the work of the great Spanish playwright P. Calderon.
In European Baroque, two movements emerge - high and low, or democratic, Baroque. To the elite ideas, the sublime rhetoric of the high baroque, represented by the theater of P. Calderon, the poetry of L. de Gongora, D. Donne, the pastoral and gallant-heroic novel, the low baroque contrasts the style of comic burlesque, which in many ways consciously parodies the sublime imagery (these trends are expressed most clearly in a 17th century picaresque novel).
Another literary movement of the 17th century was classicism, which flourished in France. It must be remembered that the origins of classicism go back to the aesthetics of the Renaissance, which created the cult of antiquity as the focus of the artistic ideal.
Classicism reflected the rise of national consciousness of French society. In the first third of the 17th century, the formation of an absolute monarchy took place in France, which led to the elimination of feudal civil strife and the formation of a single centralized state.
This historically progressive process creates objective preconditions for the development of classicism. The ideas of R. Descartes, the creator of the rationalist philosophical school, had a profound impact on the aesthetics of classicism.
In its development, classicism of the 17th century went through two main stages. In the first half of the 17th century, he asserted high ideas of citizenship and heroism, which were reflected in the political tragedies of P. Corneille. In the second half of the 17th century, after the tragic events of the Fronde, tragic motifs deepened in classicism.
Classicism created a coherent aesthetic theory, which was fully embodied in N. Boileau’s treatise “Poetic Art”. The classicists developed a normative theory of art, including a clear differentiation of “high” and “low”, strict genre and style canons. The rationalistic attitude determined the concept of man and the features of conflict in classic works. At the same time, the classicists defended the principle of “imitation of nature,” “reasonable verisimilitude,” which allowed them to recreate in their works the typical features of social life of the 17th century.
The literature of the Renaissance is characterized by the above-mentioned humanistic ideals. This era is associated with the emergence of new genres and with the formation of early realism, which is called “Renaissance realism” (or Renaissance), in contrast to the later stages, educational and critical. socialist.
The works of such authors as Petrarch, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes express a new understanding of life as a person who rejects the slavish obedience preached by the church. They represent man as the highest creation of nature, trying to reveal the beauty of his physical appearance and the richness of his soul and mind. Renaissance realism is characterized by the scale of images (Hamlet, King Lear), poeticization of the image, the ability to have great feelings and at the same time the high intensity of the tragic conflict (Romeo and Juliet), reflecting the clash of a person with forces hostile to him.
Renaissance literature is characterized by various genres. But certain literary forms prevailed. The most popular genre was the short story, which is called the Renaissance short story. In poetry, the sonnet (a stanza of 14 lines with a specific rhyme) becomes the most characteristic form. Dramaturgy is receiving great development. The most prominent playwrights of the Renaissance are Lope de Vega in Spain and Shakespeare in England.
Leonid Efimovich Pinsky
Renaissance realism
© S. Ya. Levit, series compilation, 2015
© L. D. Mazur, copyright holder, 2015
© “Center for Humanitarian Initiatives”, 2015
The essays included in this book are devoted to the realism of the Renaissance as a stage in the history of realism. Despite a number of valuable monographs and many articles about both individual writers and the literature of this era as a whole, the originality of Renaissance realism, its difference from the realism of other eras, has not yet been clarified much in our criticism. Helping to fill this gap is the purpose of this book.
From the analysis of the largest literary monuments, or, more precisely, individual problems associated with their assessment (the comic in Rabelais, the historical content of Shakespeare's tragedy, the significance of the quixotic situation), to elucidation of the general nature of Renaissance realism, its main theme, its understanding of the typical - this path of research seemed to be more fruitful when the problem is not sufficiently developed. But hence the inevitability of limiting the subject matter of the book, which does not replace a course in literature and does not pretend to comprehensively cover artistic life, but only prepares material for determining the uniqueness of a given artistic stage.
As for the selection of names, it does not require any special justification. Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes - the peaks of humanism of the 16th century and its artistic thought - in the most characteristic form represent the realism of the Renaissance in all its historical originality. A short essay on Cellini’s famous memoirs, considered in connection with the Renaissance ethics of “valor,” serves as a kind of “factual” illustration of the main theme of the art of this era.
A general description of Renaissance realism and its evolution is given in the introductory article.
Renaissance Realism
I. Renaissance and humanism
Renaissance, or Renaissance, is the era of transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age in the cultural history of Western and Central Europe.
Between medieval and bourgeois society proper lies the historical period of maturation of the capitalist structure in the depths of the absolutist feudal system. The Renaissance (starting from the middle of the XV-XVI century, and for Italy from the XIV century) is associated with the beginning of this process, with the birth of the capitalist era, just as the Age of Enlightenment (XVIII century) marks its end. Agrarian revolution and transition from craft to manufacture; great geographical discoveries and the beginning of world trade; the victory of royal power and the formation of modern nation states; the beginning of printing, the “discovery” of antiquity and the flowering of free thought; emergence of Protestantism and loss Catholic Church monopolies in spiritual life; the social upheaval of the Great Peasants' War and the Dutch Revolution; the beginning of natural science, social thought, art and literature of the New Age - these are the main features of “the greatest progressive revolution experienced before by humanity.”
“The entire Renaissance... was the fruit of the development of cities,” where this revolution had been brewing for centuries. The cultural history of the Renaissance is preceded by the development of free city-states from the 12th–13th centuries, the spiritual life of which was marked by bold critical and heretical tendencies that marked the crisis of the medieval worldview: “Christian individualism” of mystical movements in religion, the “new path” in philosophy, the flourishing of satirical-critical genres in art. However, there is a noticeable line between the Christian dualistic, restless thought of the late Middle Ages and the integral, cheerful secular thought of the Renaissance. It is not without reason that humanists and artists of the Renaissance turned away from the sterile scholasticism and “barbaric” Gothic of the previous period, turning to new sources - to the study of nature and antiquity. Aware of the historical line that separates them from the past, Italian humanists (historians L. Bruni, F. Biondo) consider it as a completed era, for which they soon find the term “middle time” or “middle age” (media tempestas or medium aevum) in contrast from antiquity to the contemporary era. The name “Renaissance” was first used by Vasari in “Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects” (1550) to designate a new phase in the history of fine art, which, after the medieval “decline,” revived the ancient norms of beauty, based on the study of nature and man.
No matter how great the influence of antiquity on the ideas of the Renaissance, their essence cannot be reduced to it. The view of the Renaissance as “The Revival of Classical Antiquity” (the title of the famous work of G. Voigt, 1859) has long been recognized as too narrow and unsatisfactory. In addition, “interest in antiquity” is historically broader than Renaissance antiquity. The authority of Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Ovid was already quite great in different periods of the Middle Ages, and the volume of acquaintance with ancient texts by Petrarch and Boccaccio, the first humanists of the Renaissance, did not exceed this information from scholastic philosophers, Averroists and Dante (though During the 15th–16th centuries, knowledge of the ancients increased significantly). On the other hand, the cult of Greco-Roman thought characterizes both the classicism of the 17th century and the Age of Enlightenment, especially the social consciousness and art of the period of the French Revolution (“civil classicism”). Each time, the understanding of antiquity and the nature of the orientation towards the “ancients” were different and corresponded to the needs of their own culture. The Renaissance reveals in ancient thought its “pagan” – in contrast to the Middle Ages – interest in man and everything “this-worldly”, its “humanistic” nature. Subsequently, in the 17th century, Malherbe, the founder of French classicism, like his contemporaries, in the name of “civilizing” rational and regulating antiquity, decisively rejected Ronsard, the pinnacle of Renaissance poetry, his pagan sensual ode and the Renaissance free norms of creativity, brought up on the passionate study of everything. the same antiquity.
Fundamental to understanding the Renaissance is its historical place, the relationship of his ideas to the Middle Ages and to the New Age. This question, which previously did not raise any doubts, is extremely confused in modern bourgeois studies of the culture of the Renaissance. Already from the 18th century, the view of the Renaissance as the beginning of the New Age was established. Enlightenment scholars often see their predecessors in the humanists of the 14th–16th centuries. From the struggle of parties in the Italian city-states, Condorcet deduces the emergence of critical thought. Hegel in his Philosophy of History calls the Renaissance the “dawn” of modern culture. The contrast between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages became commonplace in the 19th century, especially after the French historian Michelet. In the work of J. Burckhardt (1860), whose ideas determined the positions of researchers for a long time, the Renaissance, in all its main features (anti-traditionalism, individualism, cult of antiquity, interest in nature and man, aestheticism, break with Christianity) appears as the antipode of the Middle Ages.
But already this work reveals the decline of historicism in the liberal-positivistic approach to the Renaissance, which is described by Burckhardt as a static picture of a closed culture, and not as a three-century process of development of Italy in its emergence and further transformation. Burckhardt’s hidden tendency is to understand the culture of Italy of the 14th–16th centuries as a kind of ideal prototype of a normal and “natural” bourgeois society, free from primitive corporatism, from Christian, and indeed any morality that limits the individual, and from other medieval backwardness. Among the newest followers of Burckhardt, this concept increasingly leads to “sociological” analogies between the 16th and 20th centuries, to the rapprochement of the individualism of the Renaissance with antisocial amoralism and the Nietzschean cult of the “aesthetically refined beast”, to the identification of the centralization of political life in the 16th century with the totalitarian tendencies of the era of imperialism and etc. The purpose of such modernization of the Renaissance is the establishment of an eternal “rhythm” in the development of society, in other words, an apology for capitalism.
The second direction in works on the culture of the Renaissance, openly reactionary, originates in the second half of the 19th century (Pater, Guerzoni), but begins to set the tone mainly after the First World War and the October Revolution (Burdach, Huizinga, Gilson, Nordström, Febvre, Lavedan, Thorndike and etc.). Rejecting revolutionary changes in the history of ideas and adhering to “gradual” evolutionism, representatives of this movement find all the basic principles of the philosophy and art of the Renaissance already in the Middle Ages, starting from the 12th–13th centuries. The art of the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, it turns out, basically still continues the Gothic, just as pious “Christian humanism” develops the religious individualism of medieval mystics. The culture of the Renaissance was supposedly just a late flowering, Indian summer, or, as Pater put it, the “second harvest” of the Middle Ages and did not create essentially anything qualitatively new in the sphere of thought. Therefore, it is not Italy of the 14th–16th centuries, but France of the 12th–13th centuries that is supposedly the birthplace of the Renaissance. The purpose of such a “medievalization” of the Renaissance is to prove that the great art of the Renaissance and its thought, like everything great and creative, is born only in the womb christian church(neo-Thomism).
The essays included in this book are devoted to the realism of the Renaissance as a stage in the history of realism. Despite a number of valuable monographs and many articles about both individual writers and the literature of this era as a whole, the originality of Renaissance realism, its difference from the realism of other eras, has not yet been clarified much in our criticism. Helping to fill this gap is the purpose of this book.
From the analysis of the largest literary monuments, or, more precisely, individual problems associated with their assessment (the comic in Rabelais, the historical content of Shakespeare's tragedy, the significance of the quixotic situation), to elucidation of the general nature of Renaissance realism, its main theme, its understanding of the typical - this path of research seemed to be more fruitful when the problem is not sufficiently developed. But hence the inevitability of limiting the subject matter of the book, which does not replace a course in literature and does not pretend to comprehensively cover artistic life, but only prepares material for determining the uniqueness of a given artistic stage.
As for the selection of names, it does not require any special justification. Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes - the peaks of humanism of the 16th century and its artistic thought - in the most characteristic form represent the realism of the Renaissance in all its historical originality. A short essay on Cellini’s famous memoirs, considered in connection with the Renaissance ethics of “valor,” serves as a kind of “factual” illustration of the main theme of the art of this era.
A general description of Renaissance realism and its evolution is given in the introductory article.
“The entire Renaissance... was the fruit of the development of cities,” where this revolution had been brewing for centuries. The cultural history of the Renaissance is preceded by the development of free city-states from the 12th–13th centuries, the spiritual life of which was marked by bold critical and heretical tendencies that marked the crisis of the medieval worldview: “Christian individualism” of mystical movements in religion, the “new path” in philosophy, the flourishing of satirical-critical genres in art. However, there is a noticeable line between the Christian dualistic, restless thought of the late Middle Ages and the integral, cheerful secular thought of the Renaissance. It is not without reason that humanists and artists of the Renaissance turned away from the sterile scholasticism and “barbaric” Gothic of the previous period, turning to new sources - to the study of nature and antiquity. Aware of the historical line that separates them from the past, Italian humanists (historians L. Bruni, F. Biondo) consider it as a completed era, for which they soon find the term “middle time” or “middle age” (media tempestas or medium aevum) in contrast from antiquity to the contemporary era. The name “Renaissance” was first used by Vasari in “Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects” (1550) to designate a new phase in the history of fine art, which, after the medieval “decline,” revived the ancient norms of beauty, based on the study of nature and man.
No matter how great the influence of antiquity on the ideas of the Renaissance, their essence cannot be reduced to it. The view of the Renaissance as “The Revival of Classical Antiquity” (the title of the famous work of G. Voigt, 1859) has long been recognized as too narrow and unsatisfactory. In addition, “interest in antiquity” is historically broader than Renaissance antiquity. The authority of Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Ovid was already quite great in different periods of the Middle Ages, and the volume of acquaintance with ancient texts by Petrarch and Boccaccio, the first humanists of the Renaissance, did not exceed this information from scholastic philosophers, Averroists and Dante (though During the 15th–16th centuries, knowledge of the ancients increased significantly). On the other hand, the cult of Greco-Roman thought characterizes both the classicism of the 17th century and the Age of Enlightenment, especially the social consciousness and art of the period of the French Revolution (“civil classicism”). Each time, the understanding of antiquity and the nature of the orientation towards the “ancients” were different and corresponded to the needs of their own culture. The Renaissance reveals in ancient thought its “pagan” – in contrast to the Middle Ages – interest in man and everything “this-worldly”, its “humanistic” nature. Subsequently, in the 17th century, Malherbe, the founder of French classicism, like his contemporaries, in the name of “civilizing” rational and regulating antiquity, decisively rejected Ronsard, the pinnacle of Renaissance poetry, his pagan sensual ode and the Renaissance free norms of creativity, brought up on the passionate study of everything. the same antiquity.
Fundamental to understanding the Renaissance is its historical place, the relationship of its ideas to the Middle Ages and to the New Age. This question, which previously did not raise any doubts, is extremely confused in modern bourgeois studies of the culture of the Renaissance. Already from the 18th century, the view of the Renaissance as the beginning of the New Age was established. Enlightenment scholars often see their predecessors in the humanists of the 14th–16th centuries. From the struggle of parties in the Italian city-states, Condorcet deduces the emergence of critical thought. Hegel in his Philosophy of History calls the Renaissance the “dawn” of modern culture. The contrast between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages became commonplace in the 19th century, especially after the French historian Michelet. In the work of J. Burckhardt (1860), whose ideas determined the positions of researchers for a long time, the Renaissance, in all its main features (anti-traditionalism, individualism, cult of antiquity, interest in nature and man, aestheticism, break with Christianity) appears as the antipode of the Middle Ages.
But already this work reveals the decline of historicism in the liberal-positivistic approach to the Renaissance, which is described by Burckhardt as a static picture of a closed culture, and not as a three-century process of development of Italy in its emergence and further transformation. Burckhardt’s hidden tendency is to understand the culture of Italy of the 14th–16th centuries as a kind of ideal prototype of a normal and “natural” bourgeois society, free from primitive corporatism, from Christian, and indeed any morality that limits the individual, and from other medieval backwardness. Among the newest followers of Burckhardt, this concept increasingly leads to “sociological” analogies between the 16th and 20th centuries, to the rapprochement of the individualism of the Renaissance with antisocial amoralism and the Nietzschean cult of the “aesthetically refined beast”, to the identification of the centralization of political life in the 16th century with the totalitarian tendencies of the era of imperialism and etc. The purpose of such modernization of the Renaissance is the establishment of an eternal “rhythm” in the development of society, in other words, an apology for capitalism.
2.5.1. Renaissance Realism
Works approaching modern realistic literary forms were created during the Renaissance (mainly the 14th-16th centuries), associated with the beginning decomposition of the medieval feudal structure and the initial growth of capitalist relations in a number of Western European countries.
An essential feature of the realism of Renaissance literature was, first of all, the enormous range of artistic depiction of life.
In the works of the great writers of the Renaissance, the inner world of people appeared with unprecedented depth and completeness in close and organic connections with the outside world. From the love songs of the early Italian Renaissance (the poetry of Petrarch) to the amazing breadth and insight of Shakespeare's depiction of human characters and circumstances, such is the reach of life in Renaissance literature.
The second feature of Renaissance realism was criticism, which often developed into a sharp satirical denunciation of churchmen, exposure of dilapidated feudal-medieval institutions and norms of human behavior. We find all this in Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, and in Ulrich von Hutten’s “Dialogues”, and in the pamphlets of Thomas Münzer, and in Cervantes’s great work “Don Quixote”.
The third feature of the realistic literature of the Renaissance is its nationality, manifested both in the depiction of important and interesting phenomena for the masses, and in special attention to the national identity of literature, to the purity and improvement of the national language in which it is created.
The realism of the Renaissance, with its wide range, gave rise to and determined the further development of numerous types and genres of literary creativity. Various types of lyrical works, short stories, novels, tragedies, comedies, sonnets, pamphlets, sermons, letters, dialogues characterize the artistic achievements of advanced literature of the Renaissance in this area.
2.5.2. Classicism
Artistic movement in European literature and art of the 18th - early 19th centuries.
Imitation of ancient models became the initial principle of depiction among the classicists. It was joined by two others, closely connected with it: imitation of nature (by nature was meant all of reality) and submission to the voice of reason.
All this to a certain extent continued and developed what was done by the literature of the Renaissance. However, classicism also revealed its weaknesses. Instead of the versatile, lively reproduction of characters, which appeared so brilliantly in Shakespeare, the works of the classicists showed one-sidedness and schematism in the depiction of people.
As an integral artistic system, classicism was formed in France in the 17th century. during the period of strengthening and flourishing of absolutism. The founder of poetry and poetics of classicism was Malherbe. The aesthetics of classicism are based on the principles of rationalism; they affirm the view of a work of art as an artificial creation - consciously created, intelligently organized, logically constructed.
The leading form of literary creativity of French classicism was drama. The dramatic works centered on subjects of interest to the entire nation. This found clear expression in the tragedies of Corneille, especially in his tragedy “Horace”.
In dramaturgy, classicists put forward the widely known principle of three unities: the unity of action, time and place. This principle was conditional. Only the first condition was indisputable: unity of action. As for others, they have become a restrictive framework for depicting the fullness of life. The desire to recreate this completeness forced many representatives of classicism to violate the last two unities.
The class limitations inherent in classicism could not, of course, fail to be reflected in the works of its representatives: in the choice of heroes, in the selection of events, in the language.
But the main thing, naturally, was not this, but the strong and significant thing that paved the way for subsequent forms of realistic depiction of life in later times.
Realistic tendencies also clearly emerged in advanced Russian literature of the late 18th century.
And Derzhavin in his satirical odes, and the young Krylov, and Fonvizin, remaining mainly within the framework of classicism, had already begun to move towards critical realism.
The artistic movement (current) of a pre-realistic as well as a pre-romantic nature, which replaced classicism, was sentimentalism. Sentimentalism arises in the West in conditions of increasingly aggravated contradictions between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, which played a progressive role during the struggle against feudalism. A new artistic direction received vivid expression in the middle of the 18th century in England.
In contrast to the classicist approach to depicting higher social circles in high genres, sentimentalists propose depicting ordinary people in the setting of their everyday life.
Instead of exceptional historical events, the private, personal life of a person becomes the center of the story. In contrast to the lack of attention of classicists to the world of feelings and experiences ordinary people Sentimentalists focus their attention on revealing the richness of the inner life of an ordinary person. In contrast to the demands of aristocratic sophistication of literary speech, sentimentalists rely on the democratization of language, on bringing it closer to colloquial speech.
Literary works, both in content and form, were made more accessible and interesting to a wide circle.
New genres of narrative literature are emerging: travel diaries, epistolary novels, works containing confessions of heroes.
The lyrical element in the epic works of sentimentalists is extremely enhanced. Tracing the inner life of the characters in their works, writers, for moralizing purposes that constituted the pathos of their works, actively intervened in the narrative, expressed their attitude to what was depicted, and directly emphasized the desired position in resolving one or another moral problem. As an example, the works of outstanding English sentimentalists can be mentioned: “Sentimental Journey” and “Tristram Shandy” by Sterne, “Pamela” and “Clarissa Garlow” by Richardson and others.
Sentimentalism acquired greater social urgency in the second half of the 18th century in France, which was on the threshold of the bourgeois revolution. An example is the works of Rousseau. From the standpoint of human freedom that he affirms, Rousseau leads the fight against the crumbling feudal way of life.
In the novel “The New Heloise,” the French writer acts as a herald of the rights of every person to his place in life and human happiness.
The significance of Russian sentimentalism, which emerged at the end of the 18th century, was less than the significance of Western sentimentalism.
In Russia, sentimentalism was only one of the branches of literature, in contrast to which it was already forming and paving the way for itself; a direction marked by the names of Krylov, Novikov, Fonvizin, Radishchev and which prepared the subsequent development of Russian critical realism.
Nevertheless, Russian sentimentalism still played some progressive role. This affected the Russian sentimentalists in sharpening their attention to the inner life of people, in the democratization (compared to classicism) of the themes, characters and language of literary works.
The named features of Russian sentimentalism were most clearly manifested in such works by the founder of this artistic movement in Russia, Karamzin, as “Letters of a Russian Traveler”, “Poor Liza”, “Natalia - the Boyar’s Daughter” and a number of others.
2.5.4. Romanticism
Romanticism is one of the largest trends in European and American literature of the late 18th - first half of the 19th centuries, which gained worldwide significance and distribution. In the 18th century romantic (French romantique, English romantic) was the name given to everything fantastic, unusual, strange, found only in books and not in reality.
Romanticism as an integral artistic system emerged at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. in the era of a decisive change from the feudal system of social relations to the capitalist one. At the same time, the word “romanticism” became a term to designate a new literary movement, opposite to classicism.
The main socio-ideological premise of romanticism was disappointment in the results of the Great French Revolution and in bourgeois civilization in general.
In art, the romantic type of consciousness (which covered the most diverse spheres of social life - philosophy, politics, sociology, political economy), the spiritual development of life took shape in the form of special principles of reproducing characters and circumstances, characteristic only of romanticism, namely, in the form of artistic reproduction of individual character as an absolute self-valuable and internally independent of the external circumstances surrounding it.
The hero of the romantics is lonely, internally independent of anyone or anything, fleeing from his environment, like Byron’s Childe Harold or the hero of Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” Or, by the power of his own will, he dominates the environment, distant from it and mysterious, like Conrad in Byron’s “The Corsair”. Or he becomes a liberator, a savior of people, a nation - thanks to the same mysterious power of his personality, like Laon and Cytne in the poem “The Rise of Islam” by the English revolutionary romantic Shelley. But in all cases, the character of the romantic hero appears as his own property of his very personality. Romanticism, Gorky wrote, “tries to elevate the individual above society, to show him as a source of mysterious forces, rewards a person with miraculous abilities.”
At the same time, the feeling of loneliness, the state of alienation from society weighed heavily on the romantics and gave rise to a desire for other conditions of external existence, consonant with their inner world. Born on the basis of the “bourgeois emancipation” of the individual, romanticism is at the same time a distinctly anti-bourgeois art. Not finding any positive content in the reality around them, the romantics sought this content outside the conditions of their existence or outside reality in general, namely: in the history of the past, or rather, in a dream of the past, in which the individual still felt himself to be a part of the whole; in the aesthetic illusions of the past, in which people imagined their unity with the common and higher destiny of humanity; in exotic countries not yet touched by modern civilization; in liberation and national liberation movements that demanded the consolidation of all the creative forces of the people; in a dream, in fantastic ideas about ideal conditions human life, in dreams of the harmony of personality and social existence.
Romanticism is always characterized by the alienation of the individual from the circumstances that gave rise to it, the desire of this individual for other, albeit completely indefinite, unclear conditions of life. Therefore, in general, the creative principles, the method of romantic art can be defined as follows: romanticism provides for the artistic reproduction of life in the form of self-valued individuals, independent in their characters from surrounding circumstances and directed into another world consonant with them, with an arbitrary (conventional or specific historical) figurative detailing.
The Romantics discovered extraordinary complexity, depth and antinomy spiritual world man, the inner infinity of human individuality. An intense interest in strong and vivid feelings, in the secret movements of the soul, in its “night” side, a craving for the intuitive and unconscious are essential features of the romantic worldview.
The romantics dreamed not of a partial improvement of life, but of a holistic resolution of all its contradictions. The discord between ideal and reality, characteristic of previous movements, acquires extraordinary severity and tension in romanticism, which constitutes the essence of the so-called romantic dual world. At the same time, in the work of some romantics, the prevailing idea was about the dominance of incomprehensible and mysterious forces in life, about the need to submit to fate (poets of the “lake school”, Chateaubriand, Zhukovsky); in the works of others (Byron, Shelley, Mitskevich, Lermontov) the mood of struggle and protest against the evil reigning in the world prevailed.
The theorists of romanticism preached the openness of literary types and genres, the interpenetration of arts, the synthesis of art, philosophy, religion, and emphasized the musical and pictorial principles in poetry. From the point of view of the principles of artistic representation, the romantics gravitated towards fantasy, satirical grotesque, demonstrative conventionality of form, and boldly mixed the ordinary and the unusual, the tragic and the comic.
The dominance of romanticism in the artistic culture of mankind falls in the first third of the 19th century. But romanticism continued to develop in the future - throughout the entire 19th century. and in the 20th century, in those cases when there was a need for special actualization of a person’s personal self-worth.
The classic country of romanticism was Germany. The foundations of the romantic worldview and romantic aesthetics were laid by German writers and theorists of the Jena school (W. G. Wackenroder, Novalis, brothers F. and A. Schlegel, Tieck). Based on the philosophy of I. G. Fichte and F. W. Schelling, they created the philosophical, aesthetic and literary theory of romanticism (including the theory of romantic irony), which received a European resonance, contrasted the idea of transforming the world through art, the “autonomy” of creative "I". The Germans created the first examples of the art of romanticism: Tieck's comedy "Puss in Boots", the lyrical cycle "Hymns for the Night" and the novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" by Novalis, a number of fantastic stories. The hero of Novalis is a dreamer, escaping into the illusory realm of dreams that do not come into any contact with reality. Taking readers to medieval Germany (13th century), Novalis idealizes the Middle Ages, emphasizing in every possible way that the human mind and his social aspirations are fruitless and worthless, that only poetry and religion are the true values, and the true reality is the human dream, which can get its fulfillment only in something else.
The second generation of German romantics (Heidelberg school) is distinguished by an interest in religion, national antiquity, folklore (fairy tales of the brothers J. and W. Grimm, etc.). Lyric poetry reached high perfection (J. Eichendorff). The Heidelberg romantics formalized the principles of the first scientific direction in literary studies (folklore studies) - the mythological school.
In late German romanticism, motives of tragic hopelessness (drama and short stories by Kleist), a critical attitude towards modern society and a feeling of discord between dreams and reality (stories and stories by Hoffmann) grew. Ideas and artistic principles Hoffman influenced subsequent literature - both realistic (Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky) and symbolist (irrational and mystical motifs). The democratic ideas of late romanticism found their expression in the works of A. Chamisso, the lyrics of G. Müller, and in the poetry and prose of Heine.
English romanticism is characterized by a focus on the problems of the development of society and humanity as a whole, an acute sense of inconsistency, even the catastrophic nature of the historical process. Rejection of modern industrial society, idealization of antiquity, pre-bourgeois patriarchal relations, glorification of nature, simple, natural feelings - the main motives of the poets of the “Lake School”: W. Wordsworth, S. T. Coldridge, R. Southey. Not believing in the idea of a “reasonable” reorganization of the world, they contrasted it with Christian humility, religiosity, and penetration into the irrational beginning of the human psyche. Interest in national antiquity and oral folk poetry distinguishes the work of W. Scott, the author of romantic poems on medieval subjects and the founder of the genre of historical novel in European literature. The poetry of J. Keats can be called a hymn to the beauty of the world and the beautiful human nature. The romantic works of Byron and Shelley are permeated with sentiments of struggle and protest. However, the uncertainty of political ideals and prospects for social development gave rise to a feeling of tragic hopelessness and motives of “world sorrow” in Byron’s work. The titanic images of individualistic rebels he created influenced all European, including Russian (Lermontov) literature (so-called Byronism).
In France, where the traditions of classicism were especially strong, romanticism met with the greatest opposition and established itself in literature only in the early 20s of the 19th century. The formation of French romanticism is associated mainly with the genre of lyrical intimate psychological novels and stories: “Atala” and “René” by Chateaubriand, “Dolphine” and “Corinna, or Italy” by J. Stahl, “Obermann” by E. P. Senancourt, “Adolphe” » B. Constanta. In the era of the dominance of romanticism, poetry flourished (Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Musset, S. O. Sainte-Beuve, O. Barbier, M. Debord-Valmor), drama (A. Dumas - father, Hugo, Vigny, Musset); The genre of the novel is further developed: psychological (Musset), historical (Vigny, the early work of Balzac, P. Mérimée), social (Hugo, Georges Sand, E. Sue).
Romanticism became widespread in other European countries (Italy, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Hungary, Romania, Poland).
The assertion of national independence largely determined the development of romanticism in the United States, which is characterized by an optimistic illusion about the future of America and a less close connection (than in European countries) with the cultures of past eras. Romanticism in the United States is related to the movement of transcendentalism (R.W. Emerson, G. Thoreau, Hawthorne), which criticized industrialization and urbanization and proclaimed the cult of nature and “simple” life.
The origin of romanticism in Russia is associated with the socio-ideological atmosphere of Russian life - the national upsurge after the Patriotic War of 1812, the formation of noble revolutionism, and the exacerbation of personal self-awareness.
In Russian literature, romanticism produced significant artistic results already at the beginning of the 19th century.
Since the 40s. XIX century Romanticism in major European countries gives way to critical realism and fades into the background. However, the traditions of romanticism remained effective throughout the 19th century, gaining new impulses and forces at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Neo-romanticism is closely connected with romanticism not so much by themes and motives, not so much by the structure of the work, but by the state of mind, the general principles of poetics - the denial of everything ordinary and prosaic, the “divination” of reflective creative consciousness, an appeal to the irrational, “supersensible”, a penchant for the grotesque and fantasy. Subsequently, the traditions of romanticism were adopted and sometimes polemically rethought by symbolism (A. A. Blok, R. M. Rilke). The famous poem of the early Bryusov “To the Young Poet” means nothing more than the poetic program of romanticism: “don’t live in the present. Only the future is the domain of the poet.” The direct and indirect influence of the ideological and creative principles of romanticism is noticeable in expressionism, partly in the poetry of surrealism and some other avant-garde movements.
The romantic pathos of the transformation of life, the height of romantic ideals are characteristic of the early work of M. Gorky.
Stories about tramps are excellent examples of romantic creativity itself. Gorky portrays tramps as freedom-loving, talented people, with a proud sense of their self-worth and personal dignity. A striking example is the baker Konovalov, the hero from the story of the same name.
In the 20s of the XX century. This is, first of all, the work of A. Green, who from the very beginning entered literature as an extraordinary writer of a traditional romantic type (the novel “The Shining World”, the story “Scarlet Sails”).
In the 30-40s. E. Schwartz creates his amazingly fabulous world. The dragon in the play of the same name subjugated the country to his tyrant power, and everyone got used to this and considers his tyranny a completely normal state of life. But then the wandering knight Lancelot appears and frees the people from the dragon. After this, Lancelot disappeared from the city for some time, and a new dictator appeared in the country, of his own free will. But Lancelot returns - and again the country is free.
When the play appeared in print in 1943, it was interpreted in our country as an anti-fascist work. But it was enough to read it with an open mind to see that the play from beginning to end was turned to our own reality - with a clear exposure of Stalin's tyranny and with a romantic hope for salvation from it.
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Spanish culture during the Renaissance- The completion of the Reconquista and the unification of Castile and Aragon gave a powerful impetus to the development of Spanish culture. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it experienced a period of prosperity known as the “Golden Age.” At the end of the 15th and first half of the 16th century. in Spain… … The World History. Encyclopedia
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Realism- (from Late Lat. realis real, real). 1) A term denoting a truthful reflection of reality in art. images, objective truth in the claim. Synonyms of R. realism, veracity, truthfulness. In that… … Ballet. Encyclopedia
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