The novel is the name of the novel is a literary genre. The origin, characteristics and meaning of the name novel

Introduction

Chapter 1. The emergence and development of the novel as a literary genre

1 Definition of the novel

1.2Literary and historical context in the development of the novel

3Antique Novel

Chapter 2. Artistic and aesthetic originality of Apuleius' novel "Metamorphoses"

Conclusion

List of used literature

INTRODUCTION

In the theory of the novel, a number of still solved problems are essential: the question of the definition of this term is sharply raised, and the question of the genre model of the novel is no less heterogeneous. In the opinion of M.M. Bakhtin, “It is never possible to give any encompassing formula for the novel as a genre. Moreover, researchers fail to indicate a single definite and firm feature of the novel without such a reservation that would not completely cancel this feature, as a genre one.

In modern literary criticism, there are different definitions of the novel.

TSB (Great Soviet Encyclopedia): “Roman (French roman, German Roman), a kind of epic as a kind of literature, one of the largest epic genres in terms of volume, which has substantial differences from another genre of the same genre - the national-historical (heroic) epic , has been actively developing in Western European literature since the Renaissance, and in modern times it is gaining dominance in world literature. "

"The latest literary dictionary-reference book" NV Suslova: "The novel is an epic genre that reveals the history of several, sometimes many human destinies, sometimes entire generations, deployed in a wide artistic space and time, which has sufficient duration."

“The novel is one of the free literary forms, involving an enormous amount of modification and embracing several main ramifications of the narrative genre. In the new European literature, this term is usually understood as some kind of imaginary story that arouses interest in the reader by depicting passions, painting morals, or the fascination of adventures, always deployed in a wide and integral picture. This completely determines the difference between a novel and a story, fairy tale or song. "

In our opinion, the most complete definition of this term is given by S.P. Belokurov: “A novel - (from French roman - originally: a work written in one of the Romance (ie, modern, living) languages, as opposed to written in Latin) is an epic genre: a large epic work in which the life of people is comprehensively depicted in a certain period of time or during a whole human life. Characteristic properties of the novel: multilinearity of the plot, covering the fate of a number of characters; the presence of a system of equivalent characters; coverage of a wide range of life phenomena, formulation of socially significant problems; significant time duration of action ”. The author of one of the dictionary of literary terms correctly notes the initial meaning that was put into this concept, while indicating its modern sound. At the same time, the very name "novel" in different eras had "its own", different from the modern, interpretation.

A number of works by modern scholars question the validity of the use of the term "novel" in relation to the works of antique artistic and narrative prose. But the matter, of course, is not only in the term, although behind it there is a definition of the genre of these works, but in a whole series of problems that arise when considering them: the question of the ideological and artistic prerequisites and the time of appearance of this new type of literature for antiquity, the question of its relationship with reality, genre and style features.

Despite many theories of the origin of the Hellenistic novel, its beginnings "remain obscure, as do many other questions related to the history of Hellenistic prose. Attempts to" deduce "the novel from an earlier genre or from the" fusion "of several genres have not led to results; generated by a new ideology, the novel does not arise mechanically, but constitutes a new artistic unity that has absorbed diverse elements from the literature of the past. "

Despite the existing problem associated with the development of the genre of the novel, namely the origin of the antique novel and the fact that it has not yet received its final resolution, regarding the place of the antique novel in the general world literary process, it seems to us indisputable the assertion of most researchers that continuous development there was no genre of the novel from antiquity to the present day. The antique novel originated and ended its existence in antiquity. The modern novel, the appearance of which is attributed to the time of the Renaissance, arose independently, apparently outside the influence of the established forms of the antique novel. Subsequently, having emerged independently, the modern novel has experienced some kind of antique influence. However, the denial of the continuity of the development of the genre of the novel does not at all deny, in our opinion, the existence of the novel in antiquity.

The relevance of this topic is due to the extraordinary interest in the mysterious personality of Apuleius and in the language of his work.

The subject of research is the artistic originality of the novel "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Donkey".

The object of research is the named novel.

The main goal of the research is to highlight all theories of the origin and development of the antique novel, as well as to identify the artistic and aesthetic value of Apuleius' novel.

The purpose of the course work involves solving a number of problems:

1.To get acquainted with the existing theory on the course topic, with different views on the emergence and formation of the genre in question.

.Define the genre of the antique novel.

.Explore the artistic and aesthetic features of Apuleev's "Golden Donkey".

The work consists of an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion.

CHAPTER 1. THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL AS A LITERARY GENRE

.1 DEFINITION OF NOVEL

novel literary narrative genre

The term "novel", which arose in the XII century, managed to undergo a number of semantic changes over the nine centuries of its existence and covers an extremely diverse literary phenomenon. In addition, the forms that are called novels today appeared much earlier than the concept itself. The first forms of the genre of the novel date back to antiquity (love and love-adventure novels of Heliodorus, Iamblichus and Long), but neither the Greeks nor the Romans left a special name for this genre. Using the later terminology, it is customary to call it a novel. Bishop Yue at the end of the 17th century, in search of the predecessors of the novel, first applied this term to a number of phenomena in ancient narrative prose. This name is based on the fact that the antique genre of interest to us, having as its content the struggle of isolated individuals for their personal, private goals, represents a very significant thematic and compositional similarity with some types of the later European novel, in the formation of which the antique novel played a significant role. The name "novel" arose later, in the Middle Ages, and initially referred only to the language in which the work was written.

The most common language of medieval Western European writing was, as you know, the literary language of the ancient Romans - Latin. In the XII-XIII centuries. AD, along with plays, stories, stories written in Latin and prevailing mainly among the privileged estates of society, the nobility and the clergy, stories and stories written in Romance languages \u200b\u200bbegan to appear and were common among democratic strata of society who do not know Latin, among commercial bourgeoisie, artisans, villans (the so-called third estate). These works, in contrast to the Latin, and began to be called: conte roman - a romance story, novella. Then the adjective acquired an independent meaning. This is how a special name arose for narrative works, which later became established in the language and over time lost its original meaning. A novel began to be called a work in any language, but not any, but only large in size, differing in some features of the subject matter, compositional structure, plot development, etc.

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

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

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

1.2 LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL

The historical development of the novel in different European countries reveals rather large differences caused by the uneven socio-economic development and the individual originality of the history of each country. But along with this, the history of the European novel also contains some common, recurring features that should be dwelt upon. In all major European literatures, although each time in its own way, the novel goes through certain regular stages. In the history of the European novel of the Middle Ages and Modern Times, the priority belongs to the French novel. The largest representative of the French Renaissance in the field of the novel was Rabelais (first half of the 16th century), who discovered in his Gargantua and Pantagruel the full breadth of bourgeois free-thinking and denial of the old society. “The novel is born in the fiction of the bourgeoisie in the era of the gradual disintegration of the feudal system and the rise of the commercial bourgeoisie. According to its artistic principle, it is a naturalistic novel, according to the thematic-compositional - an adventurous one, in the center of which is "a hero who experiences all kinds of adventures, amusing readers with his clever robbers, a successful career, a clever money scam, etc.), without being interested in either deep social characteristics or complex psychological motivations. These adventures are interspersed with everyday scenes, express a tendency to rude jokes, a sense of humor, hostility to the ruling classes, an ironic attitude towards their morals and manifestations. At the same time, the authors failed to grasp life in its deep social perspective, limiting itself to external characteristics, showing a tendency to detail, to savor everyday details. Typical examples of it are Lazarillo of Tormes (16th century) and Gilles Blaz by the French writer Lesage (first half of the 18th century). From among the petty and middle bourgeoisie by the middle of the XVIII century. an advanced petty-bourgeois intelligentsia is growing up, starting an ideological struggle against the old order and using artistic creativity for this. On this basis, a psychological petty-bourgeois novel arises, in which the central place is no longer an adventure, but deep contradictions and contrasts in the minds of heroes fighting for their happiness, for their moral ideals. The clearest example of this can be called "New Eloise" Rousseau (1761). In the same era as Rousseau, Voltaire appears with his philosophical and publicistic novel Candide. In Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. there is a whole group of romantic writers who have created very vivid examples of the psychological novel in different literary styles. Such are Novalis (Heinrich von Ofterdingen), Friedrich Schlegel (Lucinda), Teak (William Lovel), and finally the famous Hoffmann. "Along with this, we find a psychological novel in the style of the patriarchal aristocracy of the nobility, perishing along with the entire old regime and realizing its death in the plane of the deepest moral and ideological conflicts." Such is Chateaubriand with his "Rene" and "Atala". Other layers of the feudal nobility are characterized by the cult of graceful sensuality and boundless, sometimes unbridled epicureanism. This is the origin of the Rococo noble novels with their cult of sensuality. For example, the novel by Couvray "The Amorous Adventures of the Chevalier de Foble".

English novel in the first half of the 18th century. nominates such prominent representatives as J. Swift with his famous satirical novel "Gulliver's Travel" and D. Defoe, the author of the equally famous "Robinson Crusoe", as well as a number of other novelists expressing the social outlook of the bourgeoisie.

In the era of the birth and development of industrial capitalism, the adventurous, naturalistic novel is gradually losing its meaning. " It is replaced by a novel of social and everyday life, which arises and develops in the literature of those strata of capitalist society that are the most advanced, and in the conditions of a given country. In a number of countries (France, Germany, Russia), during the period of replacement of the adventure novel by the social and everyday one, i.e., during the change of the feudal system to the capitalist one, a psychological romance with a romantic or sentimental orientation, reflecting the social imbalance of the transitional period, temporarily acquires great importance. Paul, Chateaubriand and others). The heyday of the social and everyday novel coincides with the period of growth and flourishing of the industrial-capitalist society (Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Zola, etc.). A novel is being created on the artistic principle - realistic. In the middle of the XIX century. the English realistic novel is making significant strides. The pinnacle of the realistic novel are Dickens's novels David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Nikolai Nickleby, as well as Thackeray with his Vanity Fair, which provides a more embittered and powerful criticism of the noble-bourgeois society. “The realistic novel of the 19th century is distinguished by an extremely acute formulation of moral problems, which henceforth occupy a central place in artistic culture. This is due to the experience of breaking with traditional ideas and the task of finding new moral guidelines for the individual in a situation of isolation, to develop moral regulators that do not ignore, but morally regulate the interests of the real practical activity of an isolated individual. "

A special line is the novel of "mysteries and horrors" (the so-called "Gothic novel"), the plots of which, as a rule, are chosen in the realm of the supernatural and the heroes of which are endowed with the features of dark demonism. The largest representatives of the Gothic novel are A. Radcliffe and C. Maturin.

The gradual transition of capitalist society to the era of imperialism with its growing social conflicts leads to the degradation of bourgeois ideology. The cognitive level of bourgeois novelists is declining. In this regard, in the history of the novel there is a return to naturalism, to psychologism (Joyce, Proust). In the course of its development, the novel, however, not only repeats a certain logical line, but also retains some genre characteristics. The novel is historically repeated in different literary styles, in different styles it expresses different artistic principles. And for all that, the novel still remains a novel: a huge number of the most diverse works of this genre have something in common, some recurring features of content and form, which turn out to be signs of a genre that receives its classical expression in a bourgeois novel. “No matter how different the features of the historical class consciousness, those social moods, those specific artistic ideas that are reflected in the novel, the novel expresses a certain type of self-awareness, certain ideological needs and interests. The bourgeois novel lives and develops as long as the individualistic self-consciousness of the capitalist epoch is alive, as long as there continues to be an interest in individual fate, in personal life, in the struggle of individuality for their personal needs, for the right to life. " These features of the content of the novel lead to the formal features of this genre. Thematically, the bourgeois novel depicts private, personal, everyday life and against the background of its clash and struggle of personal interests. The composition of the novel is characterized by a more or less complex, straight or broken line of a single personal intrigue, a single causal chain of events, a single course of the narrative, to which all and all descriptive moments are subordinated. In all other respects, the novel is "historically infinitely diverse."

Any genre, on the one hand, is always individual, on the other, it always relies on literary tradition. Genre category - historical category: each era is characterized not only by the genre system as a whole, but also genre modifications or varieties in particular in relation to one or another genre. Today literary scholars distinguish the varieties of the genre on the basis of a set of stable properties (for example, the general nature of the subject matter, the properties of imagery, the type of composition, etc.).

Based on the foregoing, conventionally, the typology of the modern novel can be presented as follows:

the themes differ autobiographical, documentary, political, social; philosophical, intellectual; erotic, female, family and household; historical; adventurous, fantastic; satirical; sentimental, etc.

by structural features: a novel in verse, a travel novel, a pamphlet novel, a parable novel, a feuilleton novel, etc.

Often, the definition correlates the novel with the era in which one or another type of novel prevailed: antique, chivalrous, enlightenment, Victorian, Gothic, modernist, etc.

In addition, an epic novel stands out - a work in the center of artistic attention of which is the fate of the people, and not the individual (Leo Tolstoy "War and Peace", MA Sholokhov "Quiet Don").

A polyphonic novel (according to M.M. Bakhtin) is distinguished into a special type, which assumes such a construction, when the main idea of \u200b\u200bthe work is formed by the simultaneous sounding of "many voices", since none of the characters, nor the author has a monopoly on truth and is not it carrier.

Summing up all of the above, we note once again that despite the long history of this term and even more ancient genre form, in modern literary criticism there is no unambiguous view of the problems associated with the concept of "novel". It is known that it appeared in the Middle Ages, the first examples of novels - even more than five centuries ago, in the history of the development of Western European literature, the novel had many forms and modifications.

Concluding the conversation about the novel as a whole, we cannot but draw attention to the fact that, like any genre, it must have some peculiarities. Here we will remain in solidarity with the adherent of "dialogism" in literature - M.M. Bakhtin, who identifies three main features of the genre model of the novel, which fundamentally distinguish it from other genres:

“1) the stylistic three-dimensionality of the novel associated with the multilingual consciousness realized in it; 2) a radical change in the temporal coordinates of the literary image in the novel; 3) a new zone of construction of the literary image in the novel, namely the zone of maximum contact with the present (modernity) in its incompleteness ”.

1.3 ANTIQUE NOVEL

It is known that in different historical periods of ancient literature, certain literary genres come to the fore: in the archaic era, first the heroic epic dominates, later lyric poetry develops. The classical era of ancient Greek literature was marked by the rise of drama, tragedy and comedy; later, in the IV century. BC. in the literature of Greece, prose genres are intensively developing. Hellenism is characterized mainly by the development of small genre forms.

The decline of Greek literature was marked by the appearance of the first examples of the antique novel or "epic of private life", which, transforming, enriching and developing, will probably become the favorite genre in the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. What was the first antique novel? At the dawn of its formation, the novel is represented by a special kind - a love-adventure novel. B. Gilenson refers to this genre the story "The Acts of Alexander", "erroneously attributed to the historian Callisthenes (IV century BC): in its center is not the real Alexander the Great, but rather a fairy-tale character who has incredible adventures in the land of giants, dwarfs, cannibals "(B. Gilenson, p. 379). The peculiarities of this genre variety are presented more expressively in Khariton's "The Tale of Love of Khereus and Kalliroi" (1st century AD). A characteristic feature of a love-adventure novel is that it contains fixed standard situations and characters: two beautiful loving people are separated; they are haunted by the wrath of the gods and hostile parents; they fall into the hands of robbers, pirates, they can fall into slavery, be thrown into prison. Their love and loyalty, as well as happy accidents, help to pass all the tests. In the finale, the heroes reunite happily. "This is in many ways an early, somewhat naive form of Roma." The naivety is undeniably influenced by Hellenistic poetry, elegy and idyll. Adventures and all sorts of accidents play a huge role in the genre that has not yet taken shape. This is how we see the "ETHIOPICA" of HELIODOR, which is based on a story popular in antiquity: the Ethiopian queen, who looked at the image of Andromeda at the moment of conception, had a white daughter. To get rid of the tormenting suspicions of her husband, the queen threw up her daughter. She came to Delphi to the priest Charikles, who named her Chariklia. The beautiful young man Theagen is in love with this girl of rare beauty. Their feelings are mutual, but the priest, the adoptive father, assigns the girl to another - to his nephew. The wise old man Kalasirides, having read the signs on the bandage of Chariklia, reveals the secret of her birth. He advises young people to flee to Ethiopia and thereby escape the marriage that awaits Chariklia in Delphi. Theagen kidnaps the girl, sails on a ship to the banks of the Nile in order to continue from there to the homeland of Chariklia. A lot of adventures happen with lovers, they either part, then reunite, then they are captured by robbers, then they run away from them. Finally, the lovers reach Ethiopia. There, King Gidas is going to sacrifice them to the gods, but then it turns out that he is the father of Chariklia. There is a happy "recognition" of the abandoned child - a popular motive. The parents agree to the marriage of their daughter with Theagen. The novel is melodramatic and sentimental. He affirms the beauty of love and chastity, in the name of which young people meekly endure the adversity that falls to their lot. The style of the novel is flowery and rhetorical. Heroes are usually expressed in a sublime style. This feature is clear, since a special place in antiquity was occupied by rhetoric - the art of speaking beautifully. The rhetorical story was supposed to contain "a cheerful tone of the story, dissimilar characters, seriousness, frivolity, hope, fear, suspicion, longing, pretense, compassion, a variety of events, a change of fate, unexpected disasters, sudden joy, a pleasant outcome of events."

We noticed that the novel used the traditions and techniques of previously established literary genres. But it was preceded not only by oratory, but also by entertaining stories, erotic elegies, ethnographic descriptions and historiography. If we consider the end of the 2nd - the beginning of the 1st century AD as a separate genre of the antique novel. BC, it should be noted that even in the II century. BC. The collection of stories by Aristide of Miletus, "The Milesian Tales", enjoyed particular success. In the Hellenistic novel, stories of travel and adventures merge with love-pathetic stories.

In contrast to the interpretation of Greek novels as artificial and in their own way rational products of rhetorical skill, characteristic of Rode and his school, in recent decades, attention has begun to pay attention precisely to the primordial and traditional elements of myth and aretalogy present in the novel. So, according to B. Lavagnini, the novel is born from local legends and traditions. These local legends become an "individual novel" when in Greek literature interest moves from the fate of the state to the fate of the individual, and when in historiography the theme of love acquires an independent, "human" interest. For example, touching upon the contradictions between slaves and slave owners, Long - the author of the novel "Daphnis and Chloe" - does not tell about the fate of the people, but depicts a shepherd and a shepherdess, awakening the love of these two pure and innocent creatures. The adventures in this novel are few in number and episodic, which distinguishes it, first of all, from "Ethiopica". "Unlike the love-adventure novel of Heliodorus, this is a love novel." It is sometimes called an idyllic novel. Not sharp plot twists and turns, not exciting adventures, but love experiences of a sensual nature, deployed in the bosom of a rural poetic landscape, determine the value of this work. True, there are pirates, wars, and happy "recognitions" here too. In the final, the heroes, who turned out to be the children of wealthy parents, unite in marriage. Much later, Long will also become popular in Europe, especially during the late Renaissance. Literary critics will say out loud that he revealed the prototype of the so-called. pastoral novels.

According to V.V. Kozhinov, the sources of the novel must be sought in the oral work of the masses. According to the law of folklore, it is made up of old plot, figurative, linguistic elements, in fact forming something fundamentally new. This was the earliest monument to a Greek novel that has survived only in papyrus passages - the novel about the Assyrian prince Nina and his wife Semiramis.

N.A. Chistyakova and N.V. Vulikh in their "History of Ancient Literature" jokingly call the novel "the illegitimate offspring of a decrepit epic and a capricious mince - Hellenistic historiography." It is undeniable that some of the Greek novels sometimes portrayed historical figures. For example, in Khariton's novel "Hereus and Kalliroi" one of the heroes is the Syracuse strategist Hermocrates, who, during the Peloponnesian War, won a brilliant victory over the Athenian navy in 413.

A review of Greek romance and adventure novels preserved in whole or fragmentary form helps us to understand some of the basic patterns in the history of the genre. The similarities between individual novels are so great that considering them in close connection with each other seems completely justified. The novels can be divided into groups due to a number of stylistic and genre features. Here I would like to note that although the questions about the relationship of the narrative in the novel with reality, the genre and stylistic features of this genre, about its development in Ancient Greece, remain open, almost all researchers distinguish two of its varieties. And which ones exactly is another question.

Thus, the author of the "History of Ancient Literature" B. Gilenson, along with Griftsov, Kuznetsov sees "Ethiopica" by Heliodorus (as well as the novels of Iamblichus, Achilles Tatia, Long) marked by the wide use of all the techniques and means of that specific rhetorical skill that was cultivated in the new sophistry. The traditional plot scheme does not weigh on the authors, they treat it quite freely, enriching the traditional plot with introductory episodes. Not to mention Heliodorus, who in a completely different way gave the chronological manner of presentation of events, which is usual in novels, and Iamblichus, Achilles Tatius, and Long - each in their own way overcome the canon inherited from the past.

Quite different literary scholars see early novels - fragments of the novel about Nina, the novels of Khariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, The History of Apollonius - are simple in compositional terms, strictly adhere to the developed canon - the depiction of exoticism and adventures, and are also inclined to briefly retell the events already described before. The novels of this category, designed mainly for the widest masses, in many cases approach the style of a fairy tale. Their language is close to that "common" literary language, which does not differ in rhetoric.

Despite some possibility of classifying the Hellenistic novel, all the considered Greek novels are united by one common feature: they depict the world of exotic places, dramatic events and ideally sublime feelings, a world deliberately opposed to real life, diverting thought from everyday prose.

Created under the conditions of the decline of ancient society, under the conditions of the intensification of religious searches, the Greek novel reflected in itself the features of its time. "Only an ideology that broke with mythology and put a person in the center of attention" could contribute to the creation of a novel, which depicted not the exploits of mythological heroes, but the lives of ordinary people with their joys and sorrows. The heroes of these works felt like puppets in the hands of fate or gods, they suffer and accept suffering as the lot of life, they are virtuous and chaste.

As we can see, the new genre, crowning the glorious path of development of ancient literature, reflected the profound changes that took place in ancient society at the junction of the old and new eras, and "as if heralded its beginning decline."

Tronsky also looks at two paths of development of the Attic novel. This is either a pathetic story about ideal figures, bearers of lofty and noble feelings, or a satirical narrative that has a pronounced "base" bias. The literary critic considers the above-mentioned novels to be the first type of Greek novel. The second type of the antique novel - a satirical romance of mores with a comic-everyday bias - is not represented by a single monument and is known only for the presentation of the "donkey novel" that has come down to us among the works of Lucian. The researcher believes that its origin began with a historical (or pseudo-historical) depiction of reality.

The development and formation of the antique novel was impossible without its embodiment not only in Greek, but also in Roman literature. Roman literature is known to be more recent: it arises and flourishes in a period that for Greece was already a time of decline. It is in Roman literature that we find the use of the surrounding life and the drama of her works. Despite the age difference of 400-500 years, like Greek, Roman literature went through the same periods of social development: pre-classical, classical and post-classical.

All three considered stages of Roman literature, with all the difference between them due to the rapid pace of social development of Rome in the III-II centuries, are united by one common problem that remained the main one for all writers - the problem of the genre. Rome enters this period with an almost amorphous material of oral ceremonial literature, and leaves it, owning the entire genre repertoire of Greek literature. Through the efforts of the first Roman writers, Roman genres acquired at this time that solid appearance that they retained almost until the end of antiquity. The elements that made up this look were of threefold origin: from the Greek classics, from the Hellenistic modernity and from the Roman folk tradition. In different genres, this development went in different ways. As for the genre of the novel, it is brilliantly represented by Apuleius and Petronius. The novel, the last narrative genre of fading antiquity, seems to prelude the medieval development, where the adventurous "philistine" novel also takes shape, on the one hand, as a chain of short stories, and on the other, as a parody of the forms of chivalrous narration.

CHAPTER 2. ARTISTIC AND AESTHETIC SELF-IMAGE OF THE NOVEL APOLEUS "METAMORPHOSIS"

One of the most famous novels of ancient (namely, Roman) literature is the novel "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Donkey" by Apuleius.

A philosopher, sophist and magician, Apuleius is a characteristic phenomenon of his time. His creativity is extremely diverse. He wrote in Latin and in Greek, composed speeches, philosophical and natural science works, poetry in various genres. But the legacy of this author today consists of six works: "Metamorphoses" (a novel, which will be discussed later), "Apology, or About Magic", a collection of excerpts from speeches from "Florida" and philosophical works "On the deity of Socrates", " About Plato and His Teachings "and" About the Universe ". According to most literary critics, the world significance of Apuleius is based on the fact that he penned the novel "Metamorphoses".

The plot of the novel is closely related to its title, or rather - it starts from it. Metamorphosis is a transformation, and it is a human transformation.

The plot of "Metamorphosis" is based on the story of a young Greek named Lucius, who came to Thessaly, a country famous for sorcery, and stayed in the house of a friend, whose wife is reputed to be a powerful sorceress. In a thirst to join the mysterious sphere of magic, Lucius enters into a relationship with a maid, somewhat involved in the art of the mistress, but the maid mistakenly turns him into a donkey instead of a bird. Lucius preserves the human mind and human tastes. He even knows a way to free himself from the spell: for this it is enough to chew the roses. But the reverse transformation is delayed for a long time. The "donkey" is kidnapped by robbers on the same night, he goes through various adventures, gets from one owner to another, suffers beatings everywhere and repeatedly finds himself on the brink of death. When an outlandish animal attracts attention, it is destined for a shameful public presentation. All this constitutes the content of the first ten books of the novel. At the last moment, Lucius manages to escape to the seashore, and in the final 11th book he appeals to the goddess Isis. The goddess appears to him in a dream, promises salvation, but so that his future life is devoted to serving her. Indeed, the next day the donkey meets the sacred procession of Isis, chews roses from the wreath of her priest and becomes a man. The reborn Lucius now acquires the features of Apuleius himself: he turns out to be a native of Madavra, takes initiation into the mysteries of Isis and goes by divine inspiration to Rome, where he is awarded the highest degrees of initiation.

In the introduction to the novel, Apuleius characterizes it as a "Greek tale", that is, containing novelistic features. What are the similarities and differences between the Greek novel and the novel of Apuleius? According to IM Tronsky, "Metamorphoses" are a reworking of a Greek work, a shortened retelling of which we find in "Lucian or the donkey" attributed to Lucian. This is the same plot, with the same series of adventures: even the verbal form of both works is in many cases the same. Both here and here the story is in the first person, on behalf of Lucius. But the Greek "Lucius" (in one book) is much shorter than "Metamorphoses", constituting 11 books. The story, preserved among the works of Lucian, contains only the main plot in a condensed presentation and with obvious abbreviations that obscure the course of the action. Apuleius has expanded the plot with numerous episodes in which the hero takes a personal part, and with a number of plug-in short stories that are not directly related to the plot and are introduced as stories about what he saw and heard before and after the transformation. So, for example, according to the remarks of E. Po, “the unsuccessful escape of the donkey and the captive girl from the den of robbers was told and motivated by Apuleius in more detail than by Lucian<…> If Lucian simply informs about the fact of their capture by the robbers, then Apuleius tells about the dispute during the journey, about the delay that occurred because of this, which was the reason that they again got to the robbers. " In the same way, Apuleius' story with a soldier looks more understandable and motivated than the Greek author's story [Metamorphoses, IX, 39]. The endings are also different: there is no Isis interference in Luke. The hero himself tastes the saving roses, and the author exposes him, already a man, "the compiler of stories and other works," to the final humiliation: the lady who liked him when he was a donkey rejects his love as a man. This unexpected ending, which gives a parody-satirical coverage to the dry retelling of the misadventures of the "donkey", sharply opposes the religiously solemn ending of the novel by Apuleius. In the Latin revision, the names of the characters were also changed, except for the name of the protagonist, Lucia (Lucius). I.M. Tronsky compared the plot of the Greek and Roman analogies.

We know that the Roman novel as a whole, in many ways, repeated the development of the Greek, and, despite the similarity of both, Apuleius' Metamorphoses differ in many respects from all Greek novels. The Roman novel, for all its dependence on the Greek, differs from it both in technique and structure, but - even more significantly - in its everyday-descriptive character; so, Apuleius has historically accurate background details and characters. Despite this, "Metamorphoses" are written in the stylistic traditions of rhetorical prose, in a flowery and sophisticated manner. The style of insert stories is simpler. Unlike the accepted canons of the genre, this work excludes both moral didactics and a condemning attitude towards the depicted. Naturally, we would in vain look for a psychological revelation of the character of its hero in the novel, although Apuleius has individual - and sometimes subtle - psychological observations. The author's task excluded the need for this, and the phases of Lucius's life had to reveal themselves in the change of his appearance. A well-known role in such a construction of the image was probably also played by the desire of Apuleius not to abandon the exclusion of folklore technique, since the plot was of folklore origin.

V.V. Kozhinov sees the difference between the Roman novel and the Greek in different approaches to the depiction of private life: Apuleius considers private life only as a specific phenomenon, "justified" only where there is no "truly social life, - among slaves, heterosexuals or conventionally -the fantastic world - in a person who has taken the form of an animal. Society itself should be portrayed as if from a bird's eye view, illuminating in close-up the activities of prominent citizens of the state and not dwelling on the little things of private life. "

Speaking about the genre features of this work, it is important to note that most literary scholars mark it as an adventurous everyday model of an antique novel. M.M. Bakhtin also highlights the special nature of time in it - a combination of adventurous time with everyday life, sharply different from Greek. “These features: 1) the life path of Lucius is given in the shell of“ metamorphosis ”; 2) the most vital path merges with the real path of wandering - the wanderings of Lucius around the world in the form of a donkey. The life path in the shell of metamorphosis in the novel is given both in the main plot of the life path of Lucius and in the inserted short story about Cupid and Psyche, which is a parallel semantic version of the main plot. "

Apuleius' language is rich and colorful. He uses many vulgarisms, dialectisms, and at the same time - this is the sonorous, cultured Latin language of the author ... Greek in the essence of his education and personal orientation. Apuleius wrote a multivalued, multifaceted - polyphonic novel, in which "the contrast between literal and symbolic content, between everyday comedy and religious-mystical pathos is quite similar to the contrast between the" low "language and the" high "style of the novel."

Apuleius's novel, like the European rogue novels of the New Age, like the famous "Don Quixote" by Cervantes, is full of inserted stories that diversify its content, captivate the reader and give a broad panorama of the contemporary author's life and culture. There are sixteen such short stories in "Metamorphoses". Many of them were later reworked by other writers and, having changed the social and temporal flavor, adorned such masterpieces as Boccaccio's Decameron (short stories about a lover in a barrel and a lover who gave himself away by sneezing); others changed so that they entered new books in an almost unrecognizable form. But the greatest glory fell on the short story about Cupid and Psyche. Here is a summary.

The youngest of the three earthly princesses, Psyche, angered Venus with her amazing beauty. The goddess decided to destroy her, forcing her to fall in love with the most unfit of mortals, for which she sent her son, Cupid, known for his cruel love arrows. True, for Apuleius, Cupid is not a curly capricious child, but a wonderful young man, moreover, having a good character. Fascinated by the beauty of Psyche, Cupid himself falls in love with her and secretly marries the princess. Psyche settles in a magic castle, where her every desire is prevented, where she experiences all the joys of life and love with only one condition: she has no right to see her beloved husband. The instigation of the sisters and her own curiosity connecting Psyche with the main character of the novel push her to violate the ban. In the middle of the night, Psyche lights up the light and, shocked by the beauty of Cupid, accidentally drips boiling oil from an icon lamp onto his shoulder. The spouse disappears, and Psyche, shocked by her "crime", expecting a child, embarks on a long search for her beloved. At the same time, Venus, having learned about everything, is looking for the heroine. In her search, Mercury helps her, who delivers her unloved daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law. Further, Psyche, with the help of other gods and nature itself, performs completely insoluble tasks assigned to her by Venus, until finally the touched Jupiter bestows immortality on Psyche, thus calming Venus and uniting the spouses.

Apuleius considered himself and really belonged to the number of Platonist philosophers, and the tale of Cupid and Psyche confirms this, once again retelling Plato's idea of \u200b\u200bthe wanderings of the soul. But not only this makes it absolutely irreplaceable in the novel, because, as already noted, both Lucius and Psyche suffer from the same - their own curiosity - the driving rod of the entire book. Only "for Psyche - this is an apotheosis (Here - glorification, exaltation.); For Lucius - divine initiation. The theme of suffering and moral purification through suffering, common for the tale and the novel, communicates unity to these parts of Apuleius' work" - believes I.P. Strelnikov. The author, as we see, is worried about the problem of fate. “A sensual person, according to the author, is at the mercy of blind fate, which unfairly inflicts its blows on him” [15; p.16].

An important role in the narrative and in the disclosure of the ideological concept of the novel is played by the appearance in "Metamorphoses" of another mythological personality - the goddess Isis. Information about her is contained in Egyptian mythology: in the legends about the god Ra and Isis, about Isis and Osiris. The cult of Isis is a story according to which Osiris was a pharaoh and ruled a great country. Isis was his wife. Their brother, Seth, was jealous of Pharaoh's glory and plotted to kill him. Seth gave a rich feast in honor of his brother Osiris, during the celebration of which he proudly showed everyone a magnificent coffin, decorated with silver, gold and precious stones. It was a coffin worthy of the gods, and Seth offered a simple competition, the winner of which would get the coffin: everyone present at the holiday had to lie in it, and whoever would have had it at the right time would receive it as a reward. Pharaoh Osiris should have been the first. The coffin served as a trap, and as soon as the powerful Pharaoh lay in it, the coffin was closed with a lid, nailed and thrown into the Nile, which carried it into the sea. After the loss of her husband, Isis was overcome with grief. She was said to have traveled extensively in search of an ornate coffin. After spending many years in wandering, Isis landed on the shores of Phenicia, where Astarte reigned, Astarte did not recognize the goddess, but, feeling pity for her, took her to look after her little son. Isis took good care of the boy and decided to make him immortal. To do this, it was necessary to place the child in a flame. Unfortunately, Queen Astarte saw her son on fire, grabbed him and took him, breaking the spell and forever depriving him of this gift. When Isis was called to the council to be held accountable for her actions, the goddess revealed her name. Astarte helped her find Osiris, telling her that a large tamarisk had grown near the ocean shore. The tree was so huge that it was cut down and used as a pillar in the palace temple. The Phoenicians did not know that the body of the great Pharaoh Osiris was hidden in a beautiful tree. Isis brought the body hidden in tamarisk to Egypt. The evil Seth learned of their return and cut the body of the pharaoh into pieces and only after that threw it into the Nile. Isis had to search for all parts of Osiris's body. She managed to find everything except the penis. Then she made it out of gold and folded the body of her husband. With the help of embalming (Isis is considered the creator of the art of embalming) and spells, Isis revived her husband, who returns to her every year during the harvest.

Isis was the supreme goddess of magic and thanks to her love for Osiris became the great goddess of love and healing. Her temples in Egypt were used for healing, and Isis was famous for the miraculous healings she performed.

The glory of Isis and her cult spread to other countries. She entered the Greek and Roman pantheons of the gods. Isis became known as the Lady with ten thousand names, since in every country where her cult appeared, she absorbed many features and hypostases of local goddesses.

“Pay attention, reader: you will have some fun,” - with these words the introductory chapter of “Metamorphoses” ends. The author promises to entertain the reader, but also pursues a moralizing goal. The ideological concept of the novel is revealed only in the last book, when the lines between the hero and the author begin to blur. The plot receives an allegorical interpretation, in which the moral side is complicated by the teachings of the sacramental religion. Staying sensible Lucius in the skin of a voluptuous animal, "which has long been disgusting" to pure Isis, becomes an allegory of sensual life. "It was no use to you," the Isis priest says to Luke, "neither the origin, nor the position, nor even the very science that distinguishes you, because you, having become a slave to voluptuousness out of the passion of your young age, received fatal retribution for inappropriate curiosity." Thus, sensuality is joined by a second vice, the perniciousness of which can be illustrated by the novel — “curiosity,” the desire to delve into the hidden secrets of the supernatural without permission. But the other side of the question is even more important for Apuleius. A sensual person is a slave to "blind fate"; the one who has overcome sensuality in the religion of initiation, "reigns victory over fate." "Another destiny, but already sighted, took you under its protection." This opposition is reflected in the entire structure of the novel. Before his initiation, Lucius never ceases to be a toy of an insidious fate, pursuing him in the same way as it pursues the heroes of an antique love story, and leading him through an incoherent series of adventures; the life of Lucius after initiation moves in a planned manner, according to the order of the deity, from the lowest to the highest. We already met with the idea of \u200b\u200bovercoming fate in Sallust, but there it was achieved by "personal valor"; two centuries after Sallust, the representative of the late antique society Apuleius no longer counts on his own strength and entrusts himself to the patronage of the deity.

"Metamorphoses" of Apuleius - a story about a man turned into a donkey - even in ancient times received the name "Golden Donkey", where the epithet meant the highest form of assessment, coinciding in meaning with the words "wonderful", "most beautiful." Such an attitude to the novel, which was both entertaining and serious, is understandable - it met a wide variety of needs and interests: if desired, one could find satisfaction in its amusement, and more thoughtful readers received answers to moral and religious questions. The glory of Apuleius was very great. Legends were created around the name of the "magician"; Apuleius was contrasted with Christ. "Metamorphoses" were well known in the Middle Ages; novellas about a lover in a barrel and a lover who betrayed himself by sneezing were transferred to Boccaccio's Decameron. But the greatest success fell to the lot of Cupid and Psyche. This plot has been processed many times in literature (for example, La Fontaine, Wieland, we have Bogdanovich's Darling) and provided material for the work of the greatest masters of fine arts (Raphael, Canova, Thorvaldsen, etc.).

CONCLUSION

Despite the long history of this term and an even more ancient genre form, in modern literary criticism there is no unambiguous view of the problems associated with the concept of "novel". It is known that it appeared in the Middle Ages, the first examples of novels - even more than five centuries ago, in the history of the development of Western European literature, the novel had many forms and modifications.

In a number of works of modern scholars questioning the legitimacy of using the term "novel" in relation to the works of antique artistic and narrative prose, we determined that Apuleius's novel "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Donkey" is an example of an antique novel.

"Metamorphoses" of Apuleius - a story about a man turned into a donkey - even in ancient times received the name "Golden Donkey", where the epithet meant the highest form of assessment, coinciding in meaning with the words "wonderful", "most beautiful." Such an attitude to the novel, which was both entertaining and serious, is understandable - it met a wide variety of needs and interests: if desired, one could find satisfaction in its amusement, and more thoughtful readers received answers to moral and religious questions.

Nowadays, this side of "Metamorphosis", of course, retains only cultural and historical interest. But the artistic impact of the novel has not lost its strength, and the remoteness of the time of creation gave it an additional attraction - the opportunity to penetrate the glorified and unfamiliar world of a foreign culture. So we also call "Metamorphoses" "Golden Donkey" not only by tradition.

LIST OF USED LITERATURE

1) Antique novel / Collection of articles. - M., 1969.

) Apuleius "Metamorphoses" and other works / ed. S. Averintseva. - M .: Fiction, 1988.

) Bakhtin, M.M. Essays on historical poetics / M.M. Bakhtin. -

) Belokurova, S.P. Dictionary of literary terms / S.P. Belokurova. - M., 2005.

) TSB: in 30 T. / 3rd edition. - M .: Soviet encyclopedia, 1969 - 1978.

) Wikipedia

) Gasparov, M.L. Greek and Roman literature of the 2nd - 3rd centuries n. B.C. // History of World Literature. - T. 1.

) Gilenson, B.A. History of ancient literature / B.A. Gilenson. - M .: Flinta, Science, 2001.

) Grigorieva, N. The magic mirror "Metamorphoses" // Apuleius "Metamorphoses" and other works / under the general ed. S. Averintseva. - M .: Fiction, 1988.

) Grossman, L. // Literary encyclopedia: in 11 T. - V. 9. - M .: OGIZ RSFSR, State Institute, Soviet Encyclopedia, 1935.

) Kozhinov, V.V. The origin of the novel / V.V. Kozhinov. - M., 1963.

) Kuhn, N.A. Legends and myths of Ancient Greece / N.A. Kuhn. - M., 2006.

) Literary encyclopedia in 11 Vol. - Vol. 9. - M .: OGIZ RSFSR, State Institute, Soviet Encyclopedia, 1935.

) Losev, A.F. History of ancient literature / A.F. Losev. - M .: Nauka, 1977.

) Polyakova, S.V. About the antique novel // Achilles Tatius. Leucippus and Clitophon. Long. Daphnis and Chloe. Petronius. Satyricon. Apuleius. Metamorphoses. - M., 1969 .-- S. 5-20

) Pospelov, G. // Literary encyclopedia: in 11 Vol. - Vol. 9. - M .: OGIZ RSFSR, State Institute, Soviet Encyclopedia, 1935.

) Po, E. Antique novel // Antique novel. - M., 1969.

) Raspopin, V.N. The misadventures of Apuleius of Madavra // Literature of Ancient Rome. - M., 1996.

) Rymar, T.N. // Literary encyclopedia: in 11 T. - V. 9. - M .: OGIZ RSFSR, State Institute, Soviet Encyclopedia, 1935.

) Strelnikova, I.P. Apuleius' Metamorphoses // Antique Novel. - M., 1969.

) Suslova, N.V. The newest literary dictionary-reference book / N.V. Suslova. - Mn., 2002.

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Roman (French Roman, German Roman; English novel / romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), the central genre of European literature of the New Time, fictional, in contrast to the adjacent genre of the story, an extensive, subject-branching prose narration ( despite the existence of compact, so-called "little novels" (fr. le petit roman), and novels of poetry, for example. "novel in verse" "Eugene Onegin").

In contrast to the classical epic, the novel focuses on depicting the historical present and the destinies of individuals, ordinary people who are looking for themselves and their destiny in this worldly, "prosaic" world that has lost its original stability, integrity and sacredness (poetry). Even if in a novel - for example, in a historical novel, the action is transferred to the past, this past is always evaluated and perceived as immediately preceding the present and correlated with the present.

The novel as open to modernity, formally not ossified, becoming a genre of literature of the New and Modern times, cannot be exhaustively defined in universalist terms of theoretical poetics, but can be characterized in the light of historical poetics, which examines the evolution and development of artistic consciousness, the history and prehistory of artistic forms. Historical poetics takes into account both the diachronic variability and multifaceted nature of the novel and the conventionality of using the word “novel” itself as a genre “label”. Not all novels, even novels exemplary from a modern point of view, were defined by their creators and the reading public as “novels”.

Initially, in the 12-13th centuries, the word roman denoted any written text in Old French, and only in the second half of the 17th century. partially acquired its modern semantic content. Cervantes, the creator of the modern paradigmatic novel Don Quixote (1604-1615), called his book "history" and used the word "novela" for the title of the book of novellas and novellas "Instructive Novels" (1613).

On the other hand, many works that the criticism of the 19th century - the heyday of the realistic novel - after the fact called "novels", are not always such. A typical example is the poetic-prosaic pastoral eclogs of the Renaissance, which turned into "pastoral novels", the so-called "folk books" of the 16th century, including the parody five-book by F. Rabelais. Fantastic or allegorical satirical narratives dating back to the ancient "menippean satire", such as "Criticon" by B. Gracian, "The Pilgrim's Way" by J. Benyan, "The Adventures of Telemachus" by Fenelon, satire by J. Swift, "Philosophical Stories" Voltaire, "Poem" by N. V. Gogol "Dead Souls", "Island of Penguins" by A. France. Also, not all utopias can be called novels, although - on the border of utopia and the novel at the end of the 18th century. the genre of the utopian novel arose (Morris, Chernyshevsky, Zola ), and then his counterpart, the antipode, an anti-utopian novel ("When the Sleeper Wakes" by H. Wells, "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin).

The novel, in principle, is a borderline genre, associated with almost all types of discourse adjacent to it, both written and oral, easily absorbing foreign genre and even foreign verbal structures: essay documents, diaries, notes, letters ( epistolary novel), memoirs, confessions, newspaper chronicles, plots and images of folk and literary fairy tales, national and sacred tradition (for example, gospel images and motives in the prose of F.M.Dostoevsky). There are novels in which the lyrical beginning is clearly expressed, in others features of farce, comedy, tragedy, drama, medieval mystery are distinguishable. The emergence of the concept (V. Dneprov) is natural, according to which the novel is the fourth - in relation to the epic, lyrics and drama - a kind of literature.

The novel is a multilingual, multidimensional and multi-perspective genre, representing the world and man in the world from diverse, including multi-genre points of view, including other genre worlds as the object of the image. The novel preserves in its meaningful form the memory of myth and ritual (the city of Macondo in G. García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude). Therefore, being a "standard bearer and herald of individualism" (Viach. Ivanov), the novel in a new form (in a written word) simultaneously seeks to resurrect the primitive syncretism of word, sound and gesture (hence the organic birth of cinema and TV novels), restore the original unity of man and universe.

The problem of the place and time of the birth of the novel remains controversial. According to both the extremely wide and extremely narrow interpretation of the essence of the novel - an adventure narrative focused on the fate of lovers striving for unification - the first novels were created in ancient India and regardless of that - in Greece and Rome in the II-IV centuries. The so-called Greek (Hellenistic) novel - chronologically the first version of the "adventure novel of trial" (M. Bakhtin) lies at the origins of the first stylistic line in the development of the novel, which is characterized by "monolingualism and monostyle" (in English-language criticism, narratives of this kind are called romance).

The action in “romance” takes place in “adventurous time”, which is removed from real (historical, biographical, natural) time and represents a kind of “gaping” (Bakhtin) between the initial and final points of the development of a cyclical plot - two moments in the life of the heroes - lovers: their meeting, marked by a sudden outbreak of mutual love, and their reunion after separation and overcoming each of them different kinds of trials and temptations.

The interval between the first meeting and the final reunion is filled with events such as a pirate attack, a bride kidnapping during a wedding, a sea storm, a fire, a shipwreck, a miraculous salvation, the false news of the death of one of the lovers, imprisonment on the false accusation of another, a mortal threatening him execution, the ascension of another to the heights of earthly power, an unexpected meeting and recognition. The artistic space of the Greek novel is an "alien", exotic, world: events take place in several Middle Eastern and African countries, which are described in sufficient detail (the novel is a kind of guide to an alien world, a replacement for geographical and historical encyclopedias, although it also contains a lot of fantastic information ).

A key role in the development of the plot in the antique novel is played by chance, as well as various kinds of dreams and predictions. The characters and feelings of the characters, their appearance and even age remain unchanged throughout the development of the plot. The Hellenistic novel is genetically related to myth, Roman justice and rhetoric. Therefore, in such a novel there is a lot of reasoning on philosophical, religious and moral topics, speeches, including those delivered by the heroes at the trial and built according to all the rules of ancient rhetoric: the adventure-love plot of the novel is also a judicial "incident", the subject of its discussion from two diametrically opposed points of view, pro and contra (this contraversion, conjugation of opposites will remain as a genre feature of the novel at all stages of its development).

In Western Europe, the Hellenistic novel, forgotten during the Middle Ages, was rediscovered in the Renaissance by the authors of the late Renaissance poetics, created by admirers of the same rediscovered and read Aristotle. Trying to adapt Aristotelian poetics (in which nothing is said about the novel) to the needs of modern literature with its rapid development of various kinds of fictional narratives, neo-Aristotelian humanists turned to the Greek (as well as Byzantine) novel as an ancient example-precedent, based on which, one should create believable narration (truthfulness, authenticity is a new quality prescribed in the humanistic poetics of the novel fiction). The recommendations contained in the neo-Aristotelian treatises were largely followed by the creators of pseudo-historical adventure romance novels of the Baroque era (M. de Scuderi et al. .) .

The plot of the Greek novel is not only exploited in mass literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. (in the same Latin American TV novels), but also seen in the plot collisions of "high" literature in the novels of Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Dostoevsky, A.N. Tolstoy (trilogy "Sisters", "Walking through the agony", "The Eighteenth Year") , Andrey Platonov ("Chevengur"), Pasternak ("Doctor Zhivago"), although they often parody ("Candide" by Voltaire) and radically rethink (deliberate destruction of the mythologeme "sacred wedding" in the prose of Andrey Platonov and G. García Márquez ).

But the novel is not reducible to the plot. A truly novel hero is not limited to a plot: he, in the words of Bakhtin, is always either "more plot or less than his humanity." He is not only and not so much an “external person”, realizing himself in action, in an act, in a rhetorical word addressed to everyone and anyone, as an “internal person” aimed at self-knowledge and at a confessional-prayer appeal to God and a specific “other”: such a person was discovered by Christianity (Epistles of the Apostle Paul, "Confessions" of Aurelius Augustine), which paved the way for the formation of the European novel.

The novel, as a biography of the "inner man", began to take shape in Western European literature in the form of a poetic and then prose chivalric novel of the 12-13 centuries. - the first narrative genre of the Middle Ages, perceived by authors and educated listeners and readers as fiction, although by tradition (also becoming the subject of a parody game) it is often passed off as the works of ancient "historians". At the heart of the plot collision of the chivalric novel is the indestructible confrontation between the whole and the separate, the chivalrous community (the mythical chivalry of the times of King Arthur) and the hero-knight, who stands out among others for his merits, and, according to the principle of metonymy, is the best part of the knightly estate, seeking a compromise. In the knightly deed intended for him from above and in the love service of Eternal femininity, the hero-knight must reconsider his place in the world and in society, divided into estates, but united by Christian, universal human values. The knightly adventure is not just a test of the hero for self-identity, but also the moment of his self-knowledge.

Fiction, an adventure as a test of self-identity and as a path to self-knowledge of the hero, a combination of motives of love and heroism, the interest of the author and readers of the novel to the inner world of the characters - all these characteristic genre signs of a chivalric novel, "supported" by the experience of a close to him in style and structure of the "Greek" of the novel, at the end of the Renaissance they will pass into the novel of the New Age, parodying the chivalrous epic and at the same time preserving the ideal of chivalry as a value guide ("Don Quixote" by Cervantes).

The cardinal difference between the New Age novel and the medieval novel is the transfer of events from the fabulous-utopian world (the chronotope of the chivalrous novel is “a wonderful world in an adventurous time,” according to Bakhtin's definition) into a recognizable “prosaic” modernity. One of the first (along with Cervantes' novel) genre varieties of the New European novel is oriented towards modern, "low" reality - the roguish novel (or picaresque), which took shape and flourished in Spain in the second half of the 16th - first half of the 17th century. ("Lasarillo from Tormesa", Mateo Aleman, F. de Quevedo. Genetically picaresque is associated with the second stylistic line of development of the novel, according to Bakhtin (cf. the English-language term novel as the opposite of romance). It is preceded by the "grassroots" prose of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and which did not take the form of a novel narrative proper, which includes Apuleius's Golden Donkey, Petronius's Satyricon, Lucian and Cicero's menipppeias, medieval fablio, Schwanki, farces, sotis and other humorous genres associated with the carnival (carnivalized literature, on the one hand , contrasts the “inner man” with the “outer man”, on the other hand, with the man as a socialized being (the “official” image of a person, according to Bakhtin), a natural, private, everyday person. The first example of the rogue genre is the anonymous story “Life of Lasarillo from Tormes” (1554 ) - parodically oriented towards the genre of confession and is built as a pseudo-confessional narration on behalf of the hero, aimed not at repentance, but at self-praise and self-justification (Denis Diderot and "Notes from the Underground" by FM Dostoevsky). The author-ironist, hiding behind the hero-narrator, stylizes his fiction as a “human document” (it is characteristic that all four surviving editions of the story are anonymous). Later, genuine autobiographical narratives (“The Life of Estebanillo Gonzalez”), already stylized as rogue novels, would branch off from the picaresque genre. At the same time, the picaresque, having lost its own novel properties, will turn into an allegorical satirical epic (B. Gracian).

The first examples of the novel genre reveal a specific novel attitude towards fiction, which becomes the subject of an ambiguous game between the author and the reader: on the one hand, the novelist invites the reader to believe in the authenticity of the life he depicts, to immerse himself in it, to dissolve in the stream of what is happening and in the experiences of the heroes, on the other - every now and then ironically emphasizes the fiction, the co-creation of novel reality. Don Quixote is a novel in which the defining beginning is the dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, author and reader, passing through it. The crooked novel is a kind of denial of the "ideal" world of novels of the first stylistic line - chivalrous, pastoral, "Moorish". "Don Quixote", parodying novels of chivalry, includes novels of the first stylistic line as objects of the image, creating parody (and not only) images of the genres of these novels. The world of Cervantes' narrative splits into “book” and “life”, but the border between them is blurred: the hero of Cervantes lives his life as a novel, brings the planned, but not written novel to life, becoming the author and co-author of the novel of his life, while the author under the mask of a dummy Arab historian Sid Ahmet Benenkheli - becomes a character in the novel, without leaving at the same time his other roles - author-publisher and author-creator of the text: starting with the prologue to each of the parts, he is the interlocutor of the reader, who is also invited to join the game with the text of the book and the text of life. Thus, the “quixotic situation” unfolds in the stereometric space of the tragic-farsighted “novel of consciousness”, in the creation of which three main subjects are involved: Author - Hero - Reader. In Don Quixote, for the first time in European culture, a “three-dimensional” novelistic word sounded - the most striking feature of novelistic discourse.

Literary genres are groups of works distinguished within the framework of the genres of literature. Each of them has a certain set of stable properties. Many literary genres have their origins and roots in folklore. The genres that have re-emerged in literary experience proper are the fruit of the combined activity of initiators and successors. Such, for example, is the lyric-epic poem formed in the era of romanticism.

Genres are difficult to systematize and classify (in contrast to types of literature), stubbornly resist them. First of all, because there are a lot of them: in each artistic culture, genres are specific (hokku, tanka, gazelle in the literatures of the countries of the East). In addition, genres have different historical volumes. Some have existed throughout the history of verbal art (such as, for example, the fable that is eternally alive from Aesop to S.V. Mikhalkov); others are associated with certain eras (such is, for example, the liturgical drama in the European Middle Ages). In other words, genres are either universal or historically local.
The picture becomes more complicated also because the same word often denotes genre phenomena that are deeply different. Thus, the ancient Greeks thought of an elegy as a work written in a strictly defined poetic size - an elegiac distichus (a combination of a hexameter with a pentameter) and performed in a recitative to the accompaniment of a flute. And in the second half of the 18th - early 19th century. The elegiac genre, thanks to T. Gray and VA Zhukovsky, began to be determined by the mood of sadness and sadness, regret and melancholy.

authors often designate the genre of their works arbitrarily, out of conformity with the usual word usage. So, N.V. Gogol called Dead Souls a poem; "House by the Road" by A.T. Tvardovsky has a subtitle "lyrical chronicle", "Vasily Terkin" - "a book about a soldier."

Consideration of genres is unimaginable without reference to the organization, structure, and form of literary works.

G.N. Pospelov distinguished between genre forms "external" ("closed compositional and stylistic whole") and "internal" ("specifically genre content" as the principle of "figurative thinking" and "cognitive interpretation of characters"). Considering the external (compositional-stylistic) genre forms as meaningfully neutral (in this, Pospelov's concept of genres, which has been repeatedly noted, is one-sided and vulnerable), the scientist focused on the internal side of genres. He singled out and characterized three supra-epoch genre groups, basing their differentiation on the sociological principle: the type of relationship between the artistically comprehended person and society, the social environment in a broad sense. "If works of national-historical genre content (meaning epics, epics, odes. - V.Kh.), - wrote GN Pospelov, - learn life in the aspect of the formation of national societies, if novels comprehend the formation of individual characters in private relations, then works of "ethological" genre content reveal the state of the national society or some part of it. " ("Travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow" by AN Radishchev, "Who Lives Well in Russia" by NA Nekrasov).

NOVEL
The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, attracts close attention of literary critics and critics.

If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre, then in the era of romanticism it rose to the shield as a reproduction of "everyday reality" and at the same time "a mirror of the world and<...> of his century ", the fruit" of a fully mature spirit

Hegel: the novel lacks the "initially poetic state of the world" inherent in the epic; it contains "prosaically ordered reality" and "the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the prose of everyday relations opposed to it." VG Belinsky, who called the novel an epic of private life: the subject of this genre is "the fate of a private person", ordinary, "everyday life".

M.M. Bakhtin: the hero of the novel is shown “not as ready and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, brought up by life”; this face "should not be" heroic "neither in the epic nor in the tragic sense of the word, the novelist combines both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious." At the same time, the novel captures the "living contact" of a person "with an unprepared, becoming modernity (unfinished present)." And he "more deeply, substantially, sensitively and quickly" than any other genre, "reflects the formation of reality itself." The main thing is that the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of discovering in a person not only properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized possibilities, a certain personal potential.

The novel invariably contains and almost dominates - as a kind of "super theme" - artistic comprehension (we will use the well-known words of A.S. Pushkin) "self-permanence of man", which is (let us add the poet) and "the guarantee of his greatness" and the source of grievous falls, dead ends and disasters. The ground for the formation and consolidation of the novel, in other words, arises where there is interest in a person who has at least relative independence from the institutions of the social environment

The novels widely depict situations of the hero's alienation from the environment, accentuating his lack of root in reality, homelessness, everyday wandering and spiritual wandering. Eugene Onegin ("A stranger to everything, is not bound by anything," the Pushkin hero complains about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Raskolnikov at F.M. Dostoevsky

in novels, a significant role is played by heroes, whose independence has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, relying only on themselves. Among the characters in the novel, we find those who, using the words of M.M. Prishvin about himself, it is legitimate to call "figures of communication and communication." Such is Natasha Rostova, "overflowing with life". In a number of novels (especially persistently - in the works of Charles Dickens and Russian literature of the 19th century), the spiritual contacts of a person with a reality close to him and, in particular, family ties ("The Captain's Daughter" by A.S. Pushkin) are presented in an uplifting and poetic manner. ... The heroes of such works perceive and think the surrounding reality not so much alien and hostile to themselves as friendly and akin. It is inherent in them that M.M. Prishvin called "kindred attention to the world."
The theme of the house is also heard in the novels of our century: J. Galsworthy ("The Forsyte Saga" and subsequent works), MA Bulgakov ("The White Guard"), MA Sholokhova ("Quiet Don"),

This genre is capable of incorporating features of the epic into its sphere, capturing not only the private life of people, but also events of a national-historical scale (Stendhal's "Parma monastery"). Novels are able to embody the meanings characteristic of the parable. According to O.A. Sedakova, "in the depths" of the Russian novel "usually lies something like a parable."
The involvement of the novel in the traditions of hagiography is undoubted. The life principle is very clearly expressed in the work of Dostoevsky. Leskovskikh's "Soboryans" can rightfully be described as a novel-life.

Novels often take on the features of satirical moral description, such as the works of O. de Balzac, W.M. Thackeray

The novel, as you can see, has a twofold content: first, it is specific to him ("self-constancy" and the evolution of the hero, manifested in his private life), and secondly, which came to him from other genres. The conclusion is legitimate; the genre essence of the novel is synthetic. This genre is capable of combining, with unconstrained freedom and unprecedented breadth, the substantive principles of many genres, both comic and serious. Apparently, there is no genre beginning from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.
The novel, as a genre prone to synthetics, is sharply different from others that preceded it, which were "specialized" and acted on certain local "areas" of artistic comprehension of the world. He (like no other) proved to be able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, contradictions and wealth. Novel freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras use this freedom in a variety of ways.

In the long history of the novel, two types of it are clearly visible. These are, firstly, highly eventful works based on external action, the characters of which strive to achieve some local goals. Such are the adventurous novels, in particular the roguish, chivalrous, "career romances", as well as adventure and detective novels. Their plots are numerous links of event nodes (intrigues, adventures, etc.), as is the case, for example, in A. Dumas.
Secondly, these are novels that have prevailed in literature for the last two or three centuries, when the spiritual self-permanence of a person became one of the central problems of social thought, artistic creativity and culture as a whole. Internal action successfully competes with external action: eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the consciousness of the hero in its versatility and complexity comes to the fore

One of the most important features of the novel and a related story (especially in the 19th-20th centuries) is the close attention of the authors to the microenvironment surrounding the heroes, the influence of which they experience and on which they affect in one way or another.

In this article, we will talk about how a novel differs from a story. First, let's define these genres, and then compare them.

and the story

A rather large artistic novel is called a novel. This genre belongs to the epic. There can be several main characters, and their lives are directly connected with historical events. In addition, the novel tells about the entire life of the characters, or about some significant part of it.

A story is a literary work in prose, which usually tells about some important episode in the life of the hero. There are usually few acting characters, with only one of them being the main one. Also, the volume of the story is limited and should not exceed about 100 pages.

Comparison

And yet, how does a novel differ from a story? Let's start with the novel form. So, this genre presupposes the depiction of large-scale events, the versatility of the plot, a very long time frame that includes the entire chronology of the narrative. The novel has one main storyline and several side stories that are closely intertwined into a compositional whole.

The ideological component is manifested in the behavior of the heroes, the disclosure of their motives. The novel takes place against a historical or everyday descriptive background, touching upon a wide range of psychological, ethical and worldview problems.

The novel has several subspecies: psychological, social, everyday, adventure, detective, etc.

Now let's take a closer look at the story. In works of this genre, the development of events is limited to a specific place and time. The personality of the protagonist and fate is revealed in 1-2 episodes, which are turning points for his life.

There is only one plot in the story, but it can have several unexpected turns that give it diversity and depth. All actions are associated with the main character. In such works there are no pronounced links to history or socio-cultural events.

Problems of prose are much narrower than in the novel. Usually it is associated with morality, ethics, personal development, the manifestation of personal qualities in extreme and unusual conditions.

The story is subdivided into subgenres: detective, fantastic, historical, adventure, etc. A psychological story is rarely found in literature, but satirical and fabulous ones are very popular.

How a novel differs from a story: conclusions

Let's summarize:

• The novel reflects social and historical events, and in the story they serve only as a background for the narrative.
• The life of the characters in the novel is presented in a socio-psychological or historical context. And in the story, the image of the protagonist can be revealed only in certain circumstances.
• In the novel, there is one main plot and several minor ones, which form a complex structure. The story in this regard is much simpler and not complicated by additional plot lines.
• The novel takes place over a long period of time, and the story takes place in a very limited one.
• The novel problematics includes a large number of issues, and the story touches on only a few of them.
• The heroes of the novel express ideological and social ideas, and in the story the inner world of the character and his personal qualities are important.

Novels and stories: examples

We list the works that are:

• Belkin's Tale (Pushkin);
• "Spring Waters" (Turgenev);
• "Poor Liza" (Karamzin).

Among the novels are the following:

• The Noble Nest (Turgenev);
• The Idiot (Dostoevsky);
• Anna Karenina (L. Tolstoy).

So, we found out how the novel differs from the story. In short, the difference boils down to the scale of the literary work.