Creation of an artistic image in literature. Artistic image

a way and form of mastering reality in art, a general category of arts. creativity. Among other aesthetic. categories category X. o. are of comparatively late origin. In ancient and middle-century. aesthetics, which did not single out the artistic in a special sphere (the whole world, space - an artistic work of the highest order), art was characterized by predominantly. canon - a set of technological. recommendations that provide imitation (mimesis) of art. the beginning of life itself. To the anthropocentric The aesthetics of the Renaissance goes back (but terminologically fixed later - in classicism) the category of style associated with the idea of the active side of the art, the right of the artist to form a work in accordance with his creative work. initiative and immanent laws of a particular type of art or genre. When, following the de-aestheticization of being, the de-aestheticization of practical activity, a natural reaction to utilitarianism gave a specific. understanding of the arts. forms as organization according to the principle of internal. purpose, not external use (beautiful, according to Kant). Finally, in connection with the process of "theorizing" the claims, they will finish. separating it from the dying arts. crafts, pushing architecture and sculpture to the periphery of the system of arts and pushing to the center of more "spiritual" arts in painting, literature, music ("romantic forms", according to Hegel), it became necessary to compare the arts. creativity with the sphere of scientific and conceptual thinking to understand the specifics of both. Category X. o. took shape in Hegel's aesthetics precisely as an answer to this question: the image "... puts before our eyes, instead of an abstract essence, its concrete reality ..." (Soch., vol. 14, M., 1958, p. 194). In the doctrine of forms (symbolic, classical, romantic) and types of art, Hegel outlined various principles construction X. o. how different types relationship "between image and idea" in their historical. and logical. sequences. Going back to Hegelian aesthetics, the definition of art as "thinking in images" was subsequently subjected to vulgarization in a one-sided intellectualistic. and positivist-psychological. concepts of X. o. late 19th - early 20th century In Hegel, who interpreted the entire evolution of being as a process of self-knowledge, self-thinking abs. spirit, just when understanding the specifics of the claim, the emphasis was not on "thinking", but on the "image". In the vulgarized understanding of X. o. was reduced to a visual representation of the general idea, to a special cognition. a technique based on demonstration, demonstration (instead of scientific evidence): an example image leads from the particulars of one circle to the particulars of another circle (to its "applications"), bypassing an abstract generalization. From this perspective, art. the idea (or rather, the plurality of ideas) lives separately from the image - in the head of the artist and in the head of the consumer, who finds one of the possible uses for the image. Hegel saw the knower. side X. about. in his ability to be the bearer of a particular art. ideas, the positivists - in the explanatory power of its depiction. At the same time, the aesthetic pleasure was characterized as a kind of intellectual satisfaction, and the whole sphere is not depicted. claim-in was automatically excluded from consideration, which called into question the universality of the category "X. o." (for example, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky divided suits into "figurative" and "emotional", i.e. ugly). As a protest against intellectualism in the beginning. 20th century shameless theories of art arose (B. Christiansen, Wölfflin, Russian formalists, and partly L. Vygotsky). If already positivism is intellectualistic. sense, putting the idea, meaning out of the brackets X. o. - in psychology. the area of "applications" and interpretations, identified the content of the image with its thematic. filling (despite the promising doctrine of the internal form developed by Potebnya in line with the ideas of W. Humboldt), the formalists and "emotionalists" actually took a further step in the same direction: they identified the content with the "material", and the concept of the image was dissolved in the concept form (or design, reception). In order to answer the question for what purpose the material is processed by the form, it was necessary - in a hidden or frank form - to ascribe to the work of art an external, in relation to its integral structure, purpose: art began to be considered in some cases as hedonistically individual, in others - as a social "technique of the senses." Cognitive. utilitarianism was replaced by educational-"emotional" utilitarianism. Modern aesthetics (Soviet and partly foreign) returned to the figurative concept of art. creativity, extending it to non-depicts. claims-va and thereby overcoming the original. intuition "visibility", "seeing" in letters. sense of these words, to-heaven was included in the concept of "X. o." under the influence of antiquity. aesthetics with its experience of plasticity. claim-in (Greek ????? - image, image, statue). Semantics of Russian. the word "image" successfully points to a) the imaginary existence of art. fact, b) its objective existence, the fact that it exists as a certain integral formation, c) its meaningfulness (the "image" of what?, i.e. the image assumes its semantic prototype). X. o. as a fact of imaginary being. Each work of art-va has its own material and physical. the basis, which is, however, immediate. bearer of non-arts. meaning, but only the image of this meaning. Potebnya with his characteristic psychologism in the understanding of X. o. proceeds from the fact that X. o. there is a process (energy), a crossing of creative and co-creative (perceiving) imagination. The image exists in the soul of the creator and in the soul of the perceiver, but the objectively existing art. the object is only a material means of arousing fantasy. In contrast, objectivist formalism considers art. a work as a made thing, which has an existence independent of the creator's intentions and the perceptions of the perceiver. Having studied the objective-analytical through material senses. the elements of which this thing consists, and their relationships, one can exhaust its construction, explain how it is made. The difficulty, however, lies in the fact that art. the work as an image is both a given and a process, it both abides and lasts, it is both an objective fact and an intersubjective procedural connection between the creator and the perceiver. Classic German. aesthetics considered art as a kind of middle sphere between the sensual and the spiritual. “In contrast to the immediate existence of objects of nature, the sensuous in a work of art is elevated by contemplation into pure vision and power, and the work of art is in the middle between immediate sensibility and thought belonging to the realm of the ideal” (Hegel V. F., Aesthetics, vol. 1, Moscow, 1968, p. 44). The very material X. o. already to a certain extent decomposed, ideal (see Ideal), and natural material here plays the role of material for material. For example, White color a marble statue does not appear in itself, but as a sign of a certain figurative quality; we must see in the statue not a "white" man, but the image of a man in his abstract corporeality. The image is both embodied in the material and, as it were, not embodied in it, because it is indifferent to the properties of its material basis as such and uses them only as signs of its own. nature. Therefore, the being of an image, fixed in its material basis, is always realized in perception, addressed to it: until a person is seen in a statue, it remains a piece of stone, until a melody or harmony is heard in a combination of sounds, it does not realize its figurative quality. The image is imposed on consciousness as an object given outside of it, and at the same time it is given freely, non-violently, because a certain initiative of the subject is required in order to given subject became the image. (The more idealized the material of the image, the less unique and easier it is to copy its physical basis - the material of the material. Printing and sound recording cope with this task almost without loss for literature and music, copying works of painting and sculpture already encounters serious difficulties, and an architectural structure is hardly suitable for copying, because the image here is so closely fused with its material basis that the very natural environment of the latter becomes a unique figurative quality.) This appeal of X. o. to the perceiving consciousness is an important condition for its historical. life, its potential infinity. In X. o. there is always an area of the unspoken, and understanding-interpretation is therefore preceded by understanding-reproduction, some free imitation of the inner. the artist's facial expressions, creatively voluntary following it along the "grooves" of the figurative scheme (to this, in the most general terms, the doctrine of the internal form as the "algorithm" of the image, developed by the Humboldt-Potebnian school, is reduced). Consequently, the image is revealed in each understanding-reproduction, but at the same time remains itself, because. all implemented and many unrealized interpretations are contained as a provided creative. an act of possibility, in the very structure of X. o. X. o. as an individual wholeness. Artistic likeness. works for a living organism were already planned by Aristotle, according to whom poetry should "... produce its inherent pleasure, like a single and whole living being" ("On the art of poetry", M., 1957, p. 118). It is noteworthy that the aesthetic pleasure ("pleasure") is considered here as a consequence of the organic nature of the arts. works. Representation of X. about. as an organic whole played a prominent role in later aesthetic. concepts (especially in German romanticism, Schelling, in Russia - A. Grigoriev). With this approach, the expediency of X. o. acts as its wholeness: each detail lives thanks to its connection with the whole. However, any other integral structure (for example, a machine) determines the function of each of its parts, thereby bringing them to a whole-created unity. Hegel, as if anticipating the criticism of later primitive functionalism, sees the difference. features of living integrity, animated beauty in that unity does not manifest itself here as abstract expediency: "... members of a living organism receive ... visibility by chance, that is, together with one member is not given also the determinateness of the other" (Aesthetics, vol. 1, M., 1968, p. 135). Like this, art. the work is organic and individual, i.e. all its parts are individualities, combining dependence on the whole with self-sufficiency, for the whole does not simply subjugate the parts to itself, but endows each of them with a modification of its fullness. The hand on the portrait, a fragment of the statue produce independent art. impression precisely because of this presence in them of the whole. This is especially clear in the case of lit. characters who have the ability to live outside of their art. context. "Formalists" rightly pointed out that lit. the hero acts as a sign of plot unity. However, this does not prevent him from maintaining his individual independence from the plot and other components of the work. On the inadmissibility of decomposing the works of the claim into technical service and independent. moments spoke many. Russian critics. formalism (P. Medvedev, M. Grigoriev). In arts. the work has a constructive frame: modulations, symmetry, repetitions, contrasts, carried out differently at each of its levels. But this frame is, as it were, dissolved and overcome in the dialogically free, ambiguous communication of the parts of X. o. the life of figurative unity, its animation and actual infinity. In X. o. there is nothing accidental (i.e., extraneous to its integrity), but there is nothing uniquely necessary either; the antithesis of freedom and necessity is "removed" here in the harmony inherent in X. o. even when he reproduces the tragic, the cruel, the terrible, the absurd. And since the image is ultimately fixed in the "dead", inorganic. material, there is a visible revitalization of inanimate matter (the exception is the theater, which deals with living "material" and all the time strives, as it were, to go beyond the framework of art and become a vital "act"). The effect of the "transformation" of the inanimate into the animate, the mechanical into the organic - ch. source of aesthetic pleasure delivered by the claim, and the premise of its humanity. Some thinkers believed that the essence of creativity lies in the destruction, overcoming the material by form (F. Schiller), in the violence of the artist over the material (Ortega y Gaset). L. Vygotsky in the spirit of the influential in the 1920s. constructivism compares the work of art with flying. apparatus heavier than air (see "Psychology of Art", M., 1968, p. 288): the artist conveys the moving through the resting, the airy through the heavy, the visible through the audible, or the beautiful through the terrible, the high through the low, etc. Meanwhile, the "violence" of the artist over his material consists in the release of this material from mechanical external relations and clutches. The freedom of the artist is in harmony with the nature of the material, so that the nature of the material becomes free and the freedom of the artist is involuntary. As has been repeatedly noted, in perfect poetic works, the verse reveals in the alternation of vowels such an immutable ext. coercion, which makes it look like natural phenomena. those. in the general language phonetic. In the material, the poet releases such an opportunity, forcing him to follow him. According to Aristotle, the realm of claims is not the realm of the actual and not the realm of the regular, but the realm of the possible. Art cognizes the world in its semantic perspective, recreating it through the prism of the arts embedded in it. opportunities. It gives specific. arts. reality. Time and space in art-ve, in contrast to empirical. time and space, are not clippings from a homogeneous time or space. continuum. Arts. time slows down or speeds up depending on its content, each temporal moment of the work has a special significance depending on its correlation with the "beginning", "middle" and "end", so that it is evaluated both retrospectively and prospectively. Thus art. time is experienced not only as fluid, but also as spatially closed, visible in its completeness. Arts. space (in space arts) is also formed, regrouped (condensed in some parts, rarefied in others) by its content and therefore coordinated within itself. The frame of the picture, the pedestal of the statue do not create, but only emphasize the autonomy of the artistic architectonic. space, being auxiliary. means of perception. Arts. space, as it were, harbors temporal dynamics: its pulsation can be revealed only by moving from a general view to a gradual multi-phase consideration in order to then return to a holistic coverage. In arts. phenomenon, the characteristics of real being (time and space, rest and movement, object and event) form such a mutually justified synthesis that they do not need any motivations and additions from outside. Arts. idea (meaning X. o.). Analogy between X. o. and a living organism has its limit: X. o. as an organic integrity is, first of all, something significant, formed by its own meaning. Art, being image-creation, necessarily acts as meaning-creation, as the incessant naming and renaming of everything that a person finds around and within himself. In art, the artist always deals with expressive, intelligible being and is in a state of dialogue with it; "For a still life to be created, the painter and the apple must collide and correct each other." But for this, the apple must become a "talking" apple for the painter: many threads must extend from it, weaving it into an integral world. Any work of art is allegorical, since it speaks of the world as a whole; it does not "explore" c.-l. one aspect of reality, and concretely represents on its behalf in its universality. In this it is close to philosophy, also, unlike science, it is not of a sectoral nature. But, unlike philosophy, art is not systemic either; in private and specific. material, it gives the personified Universe, while at the same time there is a personal universe of the artist. It cannot be said that the artist depicts the world and, "besides," expresses his attitude towards it. In such a case, one would be an annoying hindrance to the other; we would be interested either in the fidelity of the image (the naturalistic concept of art), or the meaning of the individual (psychological approach) or ideological (vulgar sociological approach) "gesture" of the author. Rather, the opposite is true: the artist (in sounds, movements, object forms) gives expression. being, on which was inscribed, depicted his personality. How does the expression express. being X. o. There is allegory and knowledge through allegory. But as an image of the personal "handwriting" of the artist X. o. there is a tautology, a complete and only possible correspondence with the unique experience of the world that gave rise to this image. As the personified Universe, the image is ambiguous, because it is the living center of many positions, both one and the other, and the third at once. As a personal universe, the image has a strictly defined evaluative meaning. X. o. - the identity of allegory and tautology, ambiguity and certainty, knowledge and evaluation. The meaning of the image, art. an idea is not an abstract position, which has become concrete, embodied in an organized feeling. material. On the way from conception to the embodiment of art. an idea never passes the stage of abstraction: as an idea, it is a concrete point in a dialogic the artist's encounter with being, i.e. prototype (sometimes a visible imprint of this original image is preserved in the finished work, for example, the prototype of the "Cherry Orchard", which remained in the title of Chekhov's play; sometimes the prototype-intent is dissolved in the completed creation and we catch it only indirectly). In arts. thought loses its abstractness, and reality loses its silent indifference to human beings. "opinion" about her. This grain of the image from the very beginning is not only subjective, but also subjective-objective and vital-structural, and therefore has the ability for spontaneous development, for self-explanation (as evidenced by numerous recognition of people claim-va). The prototype as a "forming form" draws into its orbit all new layers of material and shapes them through the style it sets. The conscious and volitional control of the author is to protect this process from accidental and incidental moments. The author, as it were, compares the created work with a certain standard and removes the excess, fills in the voids, eliminates the gaps. The presence of such a "standard" we usually acutely feel "on the contrary" when we assert that in such and such a place or in such and such a detail the artist did not remain faithful to his plan. But at the same time, as a result of creativity, something truly new arises, something that has never been before, and, therefore, there is essentially no "standard" for the work being created. Contrary to the Platonic view, sometimes popular even among the artists themselves ("In vain, artist, you think that you are the creator of your creations ..." - A. K. Tolstoy), the author does not just reveal art in the image. idea, but creates it. The prototype-design is not a formalized given that builds up material shells on itself, but rather a channel of imagination, a "magic crystal", through which the distance of future creation is "indistinctly" discerned. Only upon completion of art. work, the indefiniteness of the idea turns into a multi-valued certainty of meaning. Thus, at the stage of conception of art. the idea acts as a certain concrete impulse that arose from the "collision" of the artist with the world, at the stage of incarnation - as a regulative principle, at the stage of completion - as a semantic "facial expression" of the microcosm created by the artist, his living face, which at the same time is a face the artist himself. varying degree regulatory power of art. ideas in combination with different material gives different types of X. o. A particularly energetic idea can, as it were, subdue its art. realization, to "acquaint" it to such an extent that the objective forms will be barely outlined, as is inherent in certain varieties of symbolism. A meaning that is too abstract or indefinite can only conditionally come into contact with objective forms, without transforming them, as is the case in naturalistic. allegories, or mechanically connecting them, as is typical of allegorical magic. fantasy ancient mythologies. The meaning is typical. the image is concrete, but limited by specificity; the characteristic feature of an object or person here becomes a regulative principle for constructing an image that fully contains its meaning and exhausts it (the meaning of Oblomov's image is in "Oblomovism"). At the same time, a characteristic feature can subjugate and "signify" all the others to such an extent that the type develops into a fantastic one. grotesque. On the whole, the diverse types of X. o. art dependent. self-awareness of the era and are modified internally. the laws of each claim. Lit.: Schiller F., Articles on aesthetics, trans. [from German], [M.–L.], 1935; Goethe V., Articles and thoughts about the art, [M.–L.], 1936; Belinsky V. G., The idea of art, Poln. coll. soch., vol. 4, M., 1954; Lessing G. E., Laokoon ..., M., 1957; Herder I. G., Izbr. cit., [trans. from German.], M.–L., 1959, p. 157–90; Schelling F.V., Philosophy of art, [transl. from German.], M., 1966; Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky D., Language and Art, St. Petersburg, 1895; ?fuck off?. ?., From notes on the theory of literature, X., 1905; his own, Thought and Language, 3rd ed., X., 1913; his, From lectures on the theory of literature, 3rd ed., X., 1930; Grigoriev M.S., Form and content of the literary art. Prod., M., 1929; Medvedev P. N., Formalism and Formalists, [L., 1934]; Dmitrieva N., Image and word, [M., 1962]; Ingarden R., Studies in Aesthetics, trans. from Polish., M., 1962; Theory of literature. Main problems in history. lighting, book 1, M., 1962; ? Alievsky P. V., Khudozhestv. Prod., ibid., book. 3, M., 1965; Zaretsky V., Image as information, "Questions of Literature", 1963, No 2; Ilyenkov E., About aesthetic. the nature of fantasy, in Sat: Vopr. aesthetics, vol. 6, M., 1964; Losev?., Artistic Canons as a Problem of Style, ibid.; Word and image. Sat. Art., M., 1964; intonation and music. image. Sat. Art., M., 1965; Gachev G. D., The content of the artist. forms. Epos. Lyrics. Theatre, M., 1968; Panofsky E., "Idea". Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der ?lteren Kunsttheorie, Lpz.–B., 1924; his own, Meaning in the visual arts, . Garden City (N.Y.), 1957; Richards?. ?., Science and poetry, N. Y., ; Pongs H., Das Bild in der Dichtung, Bd 1–2, Marburg, 1927–39; Jonas O., Das Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerks, W., 1934; Souriau E., La correspondance des arts, P., ; Staiger E., Grundbegriffe der Poetik, ; his own, Die Kunst der Interpretation, ; Heidegger M., Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, in his book: Holzwege, Fr./M., ; Langer S.K. Feeling and form. A theory of art developed from philosophy in a new key, ?. Y., 1953; her own, Problems of art, ?. Y., ; Hamburger K., Die Logik der Dichtung, Stuttg., ; Empson W., Seven types of ambiguity, 3 ed., N. Y., ; Kuhn H., Wesen und Wirken des Kunstwerks, M?nch., ; Sedlmayr H., Kunst und Wahrheit, 1961; Lewis C. D., The poetic image, L., 1965; Dittmann L. Stil. symbol. Struktur, Mönch., 1967. I. Rodnyanskaya. Moscow.

literary image- a verbal image, designed in a word, that peculiar form of reflection of life, which is inherent in art.

So, imagery is the central concept of the theory of literature, it answers its most basic question: what is the essence of literary creativity?

Image - a generalized reflection of reality in the form of a single, individual - such a common definition of this concept. The most basic features are emphasized in this definition - generalization and individualization. Indeed, both of these features are essential and important. They are present in every literary work.

For example, in the image of Pechorin, common features the younger generation of the time in which M.Yu. Lermontov, and at the same time it is obvious that Pechorin is an individual depicted by Lermontov with the utmost concreteness of life. And not only this. To understand the image, it is necessary, first of all, to find out: what is the artist really interested in, what does he focus on among life phenomena?

« Artistic image, - according to Gorky, - almost always wider and deeper ideas, he takes a person with all his diversity of his spiritual life, with all the contradictions of his feelings and thoughts.

So, the image is a picture of human life. To reflect life with the help of images means to paint pictures of the human life of people, i.e. actions and experiences of people characteristic of a given area of life, allowing to judge it.

Speaking about the fact that the image is a picture of human life, we mean precisely that it is reflected in it synthetically, holistically, i.e. "personally", and not any one of its side.

A work of art is valuable only when it makes the reader or viewer believe in itself as a phenomenon of human life, either external or spiritual.

Without a concrete picture of life, there is no art. But concreteness itself is not the end in itself of artistic representation. It necessarily follows from its very subject, from the task that art faces: the depiction of human life in its entirety.

So, let's complete the definition of the image.

An image is a concrete picture of human life, i.e. her personalized image.

Let's consider further. The writer studies reality on the basis of a certain worldview; in the process of his life experience, he accumulates observations, conclusions; he comes to certain generalizations that reflect reality and at the same time express his views. He shows these generalizations to the reader in living, concrete facts, in the destinies and experiences of people. Thus, in the definition of "image" we supplement: An image is a specific and at the same time a generalized picture of human life.

But even now our definition is not yet complete.

Fiction plays a very important role in the image. Without the creative imagination of the artist, there would be no unity of the individual and the generalized, without which there would be no image. On the basis of his knowledge and understanding of life, the artist imagines such life facts by which it would be possible to judge the life he depicts better than his own. This is the meaning of fiction. At the same time, the artist's fiction is not arbitrary, it is suggested to him by his life experience. Only under this condition will the artist be able to find real colors for depicting the world into which he wants to introduce the reader. Fiction is a means of selection by the writer of the most characteristic of life, i.e. is a generalization of the life material collected by the writer. It should be noted that fiction does not oppose reality, but is a special form of reflection of life, a peculiar form of its generalization. Now we must again complete our definition.

So, the image is a concrete and at the same time a generalized picture of human life, created with the help of fiction. But that's not all.

A work of art evokes in us a feeling of immediate excitement, sympathy for the characters, or resentment. We treat it as something that personally affects us, directly relating to us.

So. This is an aesthetic feeling. The purpose of art is to aesthetically comprehend reality, in order to evoke an aesthetic feeling in a person. Aesthetic sense is associated with the idea of the ideal. It is this perception of the ideal embodied in life, the perception of the beautiful that causes us aesthetic feelings: excitement, joy, pleasure. This means that the significance of art lies in the fact that it should evoke an aesthetic attitude towards life in a person. Thus, we have come to the conclusion that the essential side of the image is its aesthetic value.

Now we can give a definition of the image, which has absorbed the features that we talked about.

So, summing up what has been said, we get:

IMAGE - A SPECIFIC AND AT THE SAME TIME GENERALIZED PICTURE OF HUMAN LIFE, CREATED WITH THE HELP OF FICTION AND HAVING AESTHETIC SIGNIFICANCE.

The most important category of literature, which determines its essence and specificity, is the artistic image. What is the meaning of this concept? It means a phenomenon that the author creatively recreates in his creation. The image in a work of art is presented as the result of meaningful conclusions by the writer about some process or phenomenon. The peculiarity of this concept is that it not only helps to comprehend reality, but also to create your own fictional world.

Let's try to trace what an artistic image is, its types and means of expression. After all, any writer tries to depict certain phenomena in such a way as to show his vision of life, its trends and patterns.

What is an artistic image

Domestic literary criticism borrowed the word "image" from the Kievan-church lexicon. It has a meaning - a face, a cheek, and its figurative meaning is a picture. But it is important for us to analyze what an artistic image is. By it they mean a specific, and sometimes a generalized picture of people's lives, which carries aesthetic value and is created with the help of fiction. An element or part of a literary work that has independent life- that's what an artistic image is.

Such an image is called artistic not because it is identical to real objects and phenomena. The author simply transforms reality with the help of his imagination. The task of the artistic image in literature is not just to copy reality, but to convey the most important and essential.

So, Dostoevsky put into the mouth of one of his heroes the words that it is rarely possible to recognize a person from a photograph, because the face does not always speak about the most important character traits. From photographs, Napoleon, for example, seems stupid to some. The task of the writer is to show in the face and character the most important, specific. Creating a literary image, the author in words reflects human characters, objects, phenomena in an individual form. By image, literary scholars mean the following:

Characters of a work of art, heroes, actors and their characters.
Depiction of reality in a concrete form, with the help of verbal images and tropes.

Each image created by the writer carries a special emotionality, originality, associativity and capacity.

Changing forms of artistic representation

In the course of how humanity changes, so there are changes in the image of reality. There is a difference between what the artistic image was 200 years ago and what it is now. In the era of realism, sentimentalism, romanticism, modernism, the authors displayed the world in different ways. Reality and fiction, reality and ideal, general and individual, rational and emotional - all this changed in the course of the development of art. In the era of classicism, writers highlighted the struggle between feelings and duty. Often heroes chose duty and sacrificed personal happiness in the name of the public interest. In the era of romanticism, rebel heroes appeared who rejected society or it them.

Realism introduced rational knowledge of the world into literature, taught to identify cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena and objects. Modernism called on writers to cognize the world and man by irrational means: inspiration, intuition, insight. For realists, at the head of everything is a person and his relationship with the outside world. Romantics are interested in the inner world of their characters.

Readers and listeners can also be called in some way co-creators of literary images, because their perception is important. Ideally, the reader does not just passively stand aside, but passes the image through his own feelings, thoughts and emotions. Readers of different eras open up completely different sides of what kind of artistic image the writer portrayed.

Four types of literary images

The artistic image in literature is classified on various grounds. All these classifications only complement each other. If we divide the images into types according to the number of words or characters that create them, then the following images stand out:

Small images in the form of details. An example of an image-detail is the famous Plyushkin pile, a structure in the form of a heap. She characterizes her character very clearly.
Interiors and landscapes. Sometimes they are part of the image of a person. So, Gogol constantly changes interiors and landscapes, making them a means of creating characters. Landscape lyrics are very easy for the reader to imagine.
Character images. So, in the works of Lermontov, a person with his feelings and thoughts is at the center of events. Characters are also called literary heroes.
complex literary systems. As an example, we can name the image of Moscow in the lyrics of Tsvetaeva, Russia in the work of Blok, St. Petersburg in Dostoevsky. An even more complex system is the image of the world.

Classification of images according to generic and style specifics

All verbal and artistic creations are usually divided into three types. In this regard, the images can be:

lyrical;
epic;
dramatic.

Every writer has their own style of portraying characters. This gives reason to classify images into:

realistic;
romantic;
surreal.

All images are created according to a certain system and laws.

The division of literary images according to the nature of generalization

Uniqueness and originality are characterized by individual images. They are invented by the imagination of the author himself. Individual images are used by romantics and science fiction writers. In Hugo's Notre Dame Cathedral, readers can see an unusual Quasimodo. The Shuttlecock in Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita", the Demon in the work of the same name by Lermontov, is an individual.

The generalization, opposite to the individual, is characteristic. It contains the characters and customs that people of a certain era have. Such are the literary heroes of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, in Ostrovsky's plays, in Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga.

The highest level of characteristic characters are typical images. They were the most probable for a particular era. It is typical heroes that are most often found in the realistic literature of the 19th century. This is the father of Goriot and Gobsek Balzac, Plato Karataev and Anna Karenina Tolstoy, Madame Bovary Flaubert. Sometimes the creation of an artistic image is intended to capture the socio-historical signs of an era, universal human character traits. Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet, Oblomov, Tartuffe can be added to the list of such eternal images.

From the framework of individual characters go motif images. They are constantly repeated in the subject matter of the works of some author. As an example, Yesenin's "village Russia" or Blok's "Beautiful Lady" can be cited.

Typical images found not only in the literature of individual writers, but also of nations, eras, are called topos. Such Russian writers as Gogol, Pushkin, Zoshchenko, Platonov used the topos image of the "little man" in their writings.

The universal image, which is unconsciously transmitted from generation to generation, is called archetype. It includes mythological characters.

Means of creating an artistic image

Each writer, to the best of his talent, reveals images with the means available to him. Most often, he does this through the behavior of the characters in certain situations, through his relationship with the outside world. Of all the means of an artistic image, the speech characteristics of the characters play an important role. The author can use monologues, dialogues, internal statements of a person. To the events taking place in the book, the writer can give his author's description.

Sometimes readers observe an implicit, hidden meaning in the works, which is called subtext. Of great importance external characteristic heroes: height, clothes, figure, facial expressions, gestures, voice timbre. It's easier to call it a portrait. A great semantic and emotional load is carried in the works details, expressing details . To express the meaning of a phenomenon in objective form, the authors use symbols. The idea of the habitat of a particular character gives a description of the interior of the room - interior.

In what order is literary

character image?

To create an artistic image of a person is one of the most important tasks of any author. Here's how to characterize this or that character:

Indicate the place of the character in the system of images of the work.
Describe it in terms of social type.
Describe the character's appearance, portrait.
Name the features of his worldview and worldview, mental interests, abilities and habits. Describe what he does, his life principles and influence on others.
Describe the sphere of feelings of the hero, the features of inner experiences.
Analyze the author's attitude towards the character.
Reveal the most important character traits of the hero. As the author opens them, other characters.
Analyze the actions of the hero.
Name the personality of the character's speech.
What is his relationship to nature?

Mega, macro and micro images

Sometimes the text of a literary creation is perceived as a mega-image. It has its own aesthetic value. Literary critics give him the highest generic and indivisible value.

To depict life in larger or smaller segments, pictures or parts, macro images are used. The composition of the macro image is made up of small homogeneous images.

The microimage is distinguished by the smallest text size. It can be in the form of a small segment of reality depicted by the artist. It can be one phrase word (Winter. Frost. Morning.) Or a sentence, a paragraph.

Image-symbols

A characteristic feature of such images is metaphor. They carry semantic depth. So, the hero Danko from Gorky's work "The Old Woman Izergil" is a symbol of absolute selflessness. He is opposed in the book by another hero - Larra, who is a symbol of selfishness. The writer creates a literary image-symbol for hidden comparison, in order to show its figurative meaning. Most often, symbolism is found in lyrical creations. It is worth remembering Lermontov's poems "The Cliff", "It Stands Lonely in the Wild North...", "Leaf", the poem "Demon", the ballad "Three Palm Trees".

Eternal images

There are images that never fade, they combine the unity of historical and social elements. Such characters of world literature are called eternal. Prometheus, Oedipus, Cassandra immediately come to mind. Any intelligent person will add here Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Iskander, Robinson. There are immortal novels, short stories, lyrics in which new generations of readers discover unprecedented depths.

Artistic images in lyrics

An unusual look at ordinary things allows you to see the lyrics. The keen eye of the poet notices the most everyday things that bring happiness. The artistic image in the poem can be the most unexpected. For some it is the sky, the day, the light. Bunin and Yesenin have a birch. The images of the beloved or beloved are endowed with special tenderness. Very often there are images-motives, such as: a woman-mother, wife, bride, beloved.

Poetic art is thinking in images. The image is the most important and directly perceived element literary work. The image is the focus of the ideological and aesthetic content and the verbal form of its embodiment.

The term "artistic image" is of relatively recent origin. It was first used by J. W. Goethe. However, the problem of the image itself is one of the ancient ones. The beginning of the theory of the artistic image is found in Aristotle's doctrine of "mimesis". The term “image” was widely used in literary criticism after the publication of the works of G. W. F. Hegel. The philosopher wrote: “We can designate a poetic representation as figurative, since it places before our eyes, instead of an abstract essence, its concrete reality.”

G. V. F. Hegel, reflecting on the relationship of art with the ideal, decided the question of the transformative impact of artistic creativity on the life of society. The "Lectures on Aesthetics" contains a detailed theory of the artistic image: aesthetic reality, artistic measure, ideological content, originality, uniqueness, general validity, dialectics of content and form.

In modern literary criticism, the artistic image is understood as the reproduction of the phenomena of life in a concrete, individual form. The purpose and purpose of the image is to convey the general through the individual, not imitating reality, but reproducing it.

The word is the main means of creating a poetic image in literature. The artistic image reveals the visibility of an object or phenomenon.

The image has the following parameters: objectivity, semantic generalization, structure. Object images are static and descriptive. These include images of details, circumstances. Semantic images are divided into two groups: individual - created by the talent and imagination of the author, reflect the patterns of life in certain era and in a certain environment; and images that outgrow the boundaries of their era and acquire universal human significance.

Images that go beyond the scope of the work and often beyond the limits of the work of one writer include images that are repeated in a number of works by one or more authors. Images characteristic of an entire era or nation, and images-archetypes, contain the most stable "formulas" of human imagination and self-knowledge.

The artistic image is connected with the problem of artistic consciousness. When analyzing an artistic image, it should be borne in mind that literature is one of the forms public consciousness and a variety of practical-spiritual human activity.

The artistic image is not something static, it is distinguished by a procedural character. In different eras, the image is subject to certain specific and genre requirements that develop artistic traditions. At the same time, the image is a sign of a unique creative individuality.

An artistic image is a generalization of the elements of reality, objectified in sensually perceived forms, which are created according to the laws of the type and genre of this art, in a certain individual creative manner.

Subjective, individual and objective are present in the image in an inseparable unity. Reality is the material to be known, the source of facts and sensations, exploring which creative person studies himself and the world, embodies his ideological, moral ideas about the real and the proper in the work.

The artistic image, reflecting life trends, at the same time is an original discovery and the creation of new meanings that did not exist before. The literary image correlates with life phenomena, and the generalization contained in it becomes a kind of model for the reader's understanding of his own problems and conflicts of reality.

A holistic artistic image also determines the originality of the work. Characters, events, actions, metaphors are subordinated in accordance with the original intention of the author and in the plot, composition, main conflicts, theme, idea of the work express the nature of the artist's aesthetic attitude to reality.

The process of creating an artistic image, first of all, is a strict selection of material: the artist takes the most character traits depicted, discards everything random, giving development, enlarging and sharpening certain features to full distinctness.

V. G. Belinsky wrote in the article “Russian Literature in 1842”: “Now the “ideal” is understood not as an exaggeration, not a lie, not a childish fantasy, but a fact of reality, such as it is; but a fact not written off from reality, but carried through the poet's fantasy, illumined by the light of a general (and not exceptional, particular and accidental) meaning, erected into a pearl of consciousness and therefore more similar to itself, more true to itself than the most slavish copy with true to its original. So, in a portrait made by a great painter, a person is more like himself than even his reflection in a daguerreotype, because the great painter with sharp features brought out everything that lurks inside such a person and which, perhaps, is a secret for this person himself. ".

The persuasiveness of a literary work is not reduced and is not limited to the fidelity of the reproduction of reality and the so-called "truth of life". It is determined by the originality of creative interpretation, the modeling of the world in forms, the perception of which creates the illusion of understanding the phenomenon of man.

Artistic images created by D. Joyce and I. Kafka are not identical life experience reader, they are difficult to read as a complete coincidence with the phenomena of reality. This “non-identity” does not mean a lack of correspondence between the content and structure of the writers’ works and allows us to say that the artistic image is not a living original of reality, but is a philosophical and aesthetic model of the world and man.

In the characterization of the elements of the image, their expressive and pictorial possibilities are essential. By "expressiveness" one should mean the ideological and emotional orientation of the image, and by "pictoriality" - its sensual being, which turns the subjective state and assessment of the artist into artistic reality. The expressiveness of the artistic image is irreducible to the transfer of the subjective experiences of the artist or the hero. It expresses the meaning of certain psychological states or relationships. The figurativeness of the artistic image allows you to recreate objects or events in visual clarity. Expressiveness and figurativeness of an artistic image are inseparable at all stages of its existence - from the initial idea to the perception of the completed work. The organic unity of figurativeness and expressiveness is fully related to the integral image-system; separate images-elements are not always carriers of such unity.

It should be noted socio-genetic and epistemological approaches to the study of the image. The first establishes social needs and reasons that give rise to a certain content and functions of the image, and the second analyzes the correspondence of the image to reality and is associated with the criteria of truth and veracity.

AT artistic text the concept of "author" is expressed in three main aspects: a biographical author, which the reader knows about as a writer and a person; the author "as the embodiment of the essence of the work"; the image of the author, similar to other images-characters of the work, is the subject of personal generalization for each reader.

The definition of the artistic function of the image of the author was given by V. V. Vinogradov: “The image of the author is not just a subject of speech, most often it is not even named in the structure of the work. This is a concentrated embodiment of the essence of the work, uniting the entire system of speech structures of characters in their relationship with the narrator, narrator or narrators and through them being the ideological and stylistic focus, the focus of the whole.

It is necessary to distinguish between the image of the author and the narrator. The narrator is a special artistic image invented by the author, like everyone else. It has the same degree of artistic conventionality, which is why the identification of the narrator with the author is unacceptable. There can be several narrators in a work, and this once again proves that the author is free to hide "under the mask" of one or another narrator (for example, several narrators in "Belkin's Tales", in "A Hero of Our Time"). The image of the narrator in the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky "Demons" is complex and multifaceted.

The narrative style and specificity of the genre determines the image of the author in the work. As Yu. V. Mann writes, "each author appears in the rays of his genre." In classicism, the author of a satirical ode is an accuser, and in an elegy, a sad singer, in the life of a saint, a hagiographer. When the so-called period of “poetics of the genre” ends, the image of the author acquires realistic features, acquires an expanded emotional and semantic meaning. “Instead of one, two, several colors, there is their motley multicolor, and iridescent,” says Yu. Mann. Author's digressions appear - this is how it is expressed direct communication the creator of the work with the reader.

The formation of the genre of the novel contributed to the development of the image-narrator. In the baroque novel, the narrator acts anonymously and does not seek contact with the reader; in the realistic novel, the author-narrator is a full-fledged hero of the work. In many ways, the main characters of the works express the author's concept of the world, embody the experiences of the writer. M. Cervantes, for example, wrote: “Idle reader! You can believe without an oath, as I would like this book, the fruit of my understanding, to be the height of beauty, grace and thoughtfulness. But it is not in my power to cancel the law of nature, according to which every living being gives birth to its own kind.

And yet, even when the heroes of the work are the personification of the author's ideas, they are not identical to the author. Even in the genres of confession, diary, notes, one should not look for the adequacy of the author and the hero. The conviction of J.-J. Rousseau is that the autobiography - perfect shape introspection and exploration of the world, was questioned literature XIX century.

Already M. Yu. Lermontov doubted the sincerity of the confessions expressed in the confession. In the preface to Pechorin's Journal, Lermontov wrote: "Rousseau's confession already has the disadvantage that he read it to his friends." Without a doubt, every artist strives to make the image vivid, and the plot captivating, therefore, pursues "a vain desire to arouse participation and surprise."

A. S. Pushkin generally denied the need for confession in prose. In a letter to P. A. Vyazemsky regarding Byron’s lost notes, the poet wrote: “He (Byron) confessed in his poems, involuntarily, carried away by the delight of poetry. In cold-blooded prose, he would lie and cunning, now trying to show off sincerity, now slandering his enemies. He would have been caught, as Rousseau was, and there malice and slander would have triumphed again... You love no one so much, you know no one as well as yourself. The subject is inexhaustible. But it's difficult. It is possible not to lie, but to be sincere is a physical impossibility.”

Introduction to Literary Studies (N.L. Vershinina, E.V. Volkova, A.A. Ilyushin and others) / Ed. L.M. Krupchanov. - M, 2005

Briefly:

The artistic image is one of the aesthetic categories; image of human life, description of nature, abstract phenomena and concepts that form a picture of the world in the work.

The artistic image is a conditional concept, it is the result of poetic generalizations, it contains the author's fiction, imagination, fantasy. It is formed by the writer in accordance with his worldview and aesthetic principles. There is no single point of view on this issue in literary criticism. Sometimes one work or even the entire work of the author is considered as an integral artistic image (the Irishman D. Joyce wrote with such a program setting). But most often the work is studied as a system of images, each element of which is connected with the others by a single ideological and artistic concept.

Traditionally, it is customary to distinguish between the following levels of figurativeness in the text: images-characters, images of wildlife(animals, birds, fish, insects, etc.), landscape images, object images, verbal images, sound images, color images(for example, black, white and red in the description of the revolution in A. Blok's poem "The Twelve"), scent images(for example, the smell of fried onions, rushing through the courtyards of the provincial town of S. in Chekhov's "Ionych"), signs, emblems, as well as symbols, allegories and so on.

A special place in the system of images of the work is occupied by the author, narrator and narrator. These are not identical concepts.

Image of the author- the form of existence of the writer in a literary text. It brings the entire character system together and speaks directly to the reader. We can find an example of this in A. Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin".

The image of the narrator in the work is generalized-abstract, this person, as a rule, is devoid of any portrait features and manifests himself only in speech, in relation to what is being reported. Sometimes it can exist not only within the framework of one work, but also within the literary cycle (as in I. Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter). In a literary text, the author reproduces in this case not his own, but his, the narrator's, manner of perceiving reality. He acts as an intermediary between the writer and the reader in the transmission of events.

The image of the narrator- This is the character on whose behalf the speech is being made. Unlike the narrator, the narrator is given some individual features (portrait details, biography facts). In works, sometimes the author can narrate on a par with the narrator. There are many examples of this in domestic literature: Maxim Maksimych in M. Lermontov's novel "A Hero of Our Time", Ivan Vasilyevich in L. Tolstoy's story "After the Ball", etc.

An expressive artistic image can deeply excite and shock the reader, and have an educational impact.

Source: Schoolchildren's Handbook: Grades 5-11. — M.: AST-PRESS, 2000

More:

An artistic image is one of the most ambiguous and broad concepts that is used by theorists and practitioners of all types of art, including literature. We say: the image of Onegin, the image of Tatyana Larina, the image of the Motherland or a successful poetic image, meaning the categories of poetic language (epithet, metaphor, comparison ...). But there is one more, perhaps the most important meaning, the broadest and most universal: the image as a form of expression of content in literature, as the primary element of art as a whole.

It should be noted that the image in general is an abstraction, which acquires concrete outlines only as an elementary component of a certain artistic system as a whole. The whole work of art is figurative, and all its components are figurative.

If we turn to any work, for example, to Pushkin's "Demons", the beginning of "Ruslan and Lyudmila" or "To the Sea", we read it and ask ourselves the question: "Where is the image?" - the correct answer will be: “Everywhere!”, because imagery is a form of existence of a work of art, the only way of its being, a kind of “matter” of which it consists, and which, in turn, breaks down into “molecules” and “atoms” ".

The artistic world is primarily a figurative world. A work of art is a complex single image, and each of its elements is a relatively independent, unique particle of this whole, interacting with it and with all other particles. Anything and everything in poetic world imbued with imagery, even if the text does not contain a single epithet, comparison or metaphor.

In Pushkin's poem "I loved you ..." there is not one of the traditional "decorations", i.e. tropes, habitually referred to as "artistic images" (the extinguished language metaphor "love ... faded away" does not count), therefore it is often defined as "ugly", which is fundamentally wrong. As R. Jacobson superbly showed in his famous article "The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry", using exclusively the means of poetic language, with only one skillful contrasting of grammatical forms, Pushkin created a striking noble simplicity and naturally exciting artistic image of the experiences of a lover who deifies the object of his love and sacrifices his happiness for him. The components of this complex figurative whole are private images of a purely speech expression, revealed by an insightful researcher.

In aesthetics, there are two concepts of the artistic image as such. According to the first of them, the image is a specific product of labor, which is called upon to "objectify" a certain spiritual content. Such an idea of the image has the right to life, but it is more convenient for spatial arts, especially for those that have applied value (sculpture and architecture). According to the second concept, the image as a special form of theoretical exploration of the world should be considered in comparison with concepts and ideas as categories of scientific thinking.

The second concept is closer and more understandable to us, but, in principle, both suffer from one-sidedness. Indeed, do we have the right to identify literary creativity with a kind of production, ordinary routine work that has quite definite pragmatic goals? Needless to say, art is hard, exhausting work (let us recall Mayakovsky's expressive metaphor: "Poetry is the same extraction of radium: / In the year of extraction - a gram of labor"), which does not stop day or night. The writer sometimes creates literally even in a dream (as if the second edition of the Henriade appeared to Voltaire in this way). There is no leisure. Personal privacy no, too (as O Henry perfectly portrayed in the story "Confessions of a Humorist").

Is it labor artistic creativity? Yes, of course, but not only labor. It is torment, and incomparable pleasure, and thoughtful, analytical research, and unrestrained flight of free fantasy, and hard, exhausting work, and an exciting game. In a word, it is art.

But what is the product of literary labor? How and with what can it be measured? After all, not liters of ink and not kilograms of worn out paper, not embedded in the Internet sites with texts of works that now exist in a purely virtual space! The book, which is still a traditional way of fixing, storing and consuming the results of a writer's work, is purely external, and, as it turned out, not at all an obligatory shell for the figurative world created in its process. This world is both created in the consciousness and imagination of the writer, and is transmitted, respectively, into the field of consciousness and imagination of readers. It turns out that consciousness is created through consciousness, almost like in Andersen's witty fairy tale "The King's New Clothes".

So, the artistic image in literature is by no means a direct "objectification" of the spiritual content, any idea, dream, ideal, as it is easily and clearly presented, say, in the same sculpture (Pygmalion, who "objectified" his dream in ivory, it remains only to beg the goddess of love Aphrodite to breathe life into the statue in order to marry her!). Literary work does not carry direct materialized results, some tangible practical consequences.

Does this mean that the second concept is more true, insisting that the artistic image of a work is a form of exclusively theoretical exploration of the world? No, and there is a well-known one-sidedness here. figurative thinking in fiction, of course, opposes the theoretical, scientific, although it does not exclude it at all. Verbal-figurative thinking can be represented as a synthesis of philosophical or, rather, aesthetic understanding of life and its object-sensory design, reproduction in the material specifically inherent in it. However, there is no clear definition, canonical sequence, sequence of both, and cannot be, if, of course, we mean true art. Comprehension and reproduction, interpenetrating, complement each other. Comprehension is carried out in a concrete-sensory form, and reproduction clarifies and refines the idea.

Cognition and creativity are a single holistic act. Theory and practice in art are inseparable. Of course, they are not identical, but they are one. In theory, the artist asserts himself practically; in practice, theoretically. For each creative individuality, the unity of these two sides of one whole manifests itself in its own way.

So, V. Shukshin, “exploring”, as he put it, life, saw it, recognized it with the trained look of an artist, and A. Voznesensky, who appeals to “intuition” in knowledge (“If you look for India, you will find America!”), With an analytical look architect (education could not but affect). The difference was also reflected in terms of figurative expression (naive sages, “freaks”, animated birch trees by Shukshin and “atomic minstrels”, culture tragers of scientific and technological revolution, “triangular pear” and “trapezoidal fruit” by Voznesensky).

Theory, in relation to the objective world, is a "reflection", while practice is the "creation" (or rather, "transformation") of this objective world. The sculptor "reflects" a person - for example, a sitter, and creates a new object - a "statue". But the works of the material arts are evident in the very direct meaning of this word, which is why it is so easy to trace the most complex aesthetic patterns on their example. In fiction, in the art of words, everything is more complicated.

Knowing the world in images, the artist plunges into the depths of the subject, like a naturalist in a dungeon. He cognizes its substance, fundamental principle, essence, extracts from it the very root. The secret of how satirical images are created was wonderfully revealed by the character of Heinrich Böll's novel “Through the Eyes of a Clown” Hans Schnier: “I take a piece of life, raise it to a power, and then extract the root from it, but with a different number.”

In this sense, one can seriously agree with the witty joke of M. Gorky: "He knows reality as if he himself did it! .." and with the definition of Michelangelo: "This is the work of a man who knew more than nature itself," which leads to V. Kozhinov in his article.

The creation of an artistic image least of all resembles a search for beautiful clothes for a ready-made primary idea; planes of content and expression are born and ripen in it in full harmony, together, simultaneously. Pushkin's expression "the poet thinks in verse" and practically the same version of Belinsky in his 5th article on Pushkin: "The poet thinks in images". “By verse we mean the original, immediate form of poetic thought” authoritatively confirm this dialectic.