Images in literature and art. What is an artistic image

Briefly:

The artistic image is one of the aesthetic categories; image human life, a 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. In literature, there is no single point view on this issue. 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.

It is customary in the text to distinguish next levels imagery: 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 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 Russian 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 categories 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 that 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 its being, a kind of "matter" of which it is composed, 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, commonly referred to as "artistic images" (extinguished language metaphor"love ... faded" does not count), so it is often defined as "ugly", which is fundamentally wrong. As R. Jakobson superbly showed in his famous article “The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry”, using only the means of poetic language, only one skillful contrasting grammatical forms, Pushkin created an exciting artistic image of the experiences of a lover who deifies the object of his love and sacrifices his happiness for him, striking in its noble simplicity and naturalness. 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 special shape theoretical development 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 some kind of production, ordinary routine work, with well-defined 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 art work labor? 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 that now exist in a purely virtual space works! The book is still traditional way fixing, storing and consuming the results of literary 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 correct, insisting that the artistic image of a work is a form of exclusively theoretical exploration of the world? No, and here there is a well-known one-sidedness. figurative thinking in fiction, of course, opposes the theoretical, scientific, although it does not exclude it at all. Verbal- creative thinking can be imagined 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 definiteness, canonical sequence, sequence of both, and cannot be, if, of course, true art is meant. 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. 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 in Shukshin and “atomic minstrels”, culture tragers of scientific and technological revolution, “triangular pear” and “trapezoidal fruit” in 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 new item- "statue". But the works material types the 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 Hans Schnier, a character in Heinrich Böll's novel Through the Eyes of a Clown: "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 Michelangelo’s definition: “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 the search for beautiful clothes for an initially 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.

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

So, imagery central concept 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 younger generation 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?

“The artistic image, according to Gorky, is almost always wider and deeper than the idea, it 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 reflecting reality and at the same time expressing his views. These generalizations he shows the reader alive, specific facts, in the fates 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 creative imagination artist there would be no unity of the individual and the generalized, without which there is 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.

Created by a talented artist, leaves a "deep mark" in the heart and mind of the viewer or reader. What does this strong impact, makes you deeply worry and empathize with what you see, read or hear? This is an artistic image in literature and art, created by the skill and personality of the creator, who was able to amazingly rethink and transform reality, make it consonant and close to our own personal feelings.

Artistic image

In literature and art, this is any phenomenon that is generalized and creatively recreated by an artist, composer or writer in an art object. It is visual and sensual; understandable and open to perception, and capable of evoking deep emotional experiences. These features are inherent in the image because the artist does not just copy life phenomena, but fills them with a special meaning, colors them with the help of individual techniques, makes them more capacious, solid and voluminous. Naturally, unlike scientific creativity, artistic creativity is very subjective, and it attracts to itself primarily by the personality of the author, the degree of his imagination, fantasy, erudition and sense of humor. A vivid image in literature and art is also created due to the complete freedom of creativity, when the creator opens up the boundless horizons of artistic fiction and limitless ways of expressing it, with the help of which he creates his work.

The originality of the artistic image

The artistic image in art and literature is remarkable for its amazing integrity, in contrast to scientific creation. He does not divide the phenomenon into its component parts, but considers everything in the indivisible integrity of internal and external, personal and public. originality and depth artistic world manifest themselves in the fact that the images in works of art are not only people, but also nature, inanimate objects, cities and countries, individual character traits and personality traits, which are often given the appearance of fantastic creatures or, on the contrary, very mundane, ordinary objects. Landscapes and still lifes depicted in the paintings of artists are also images of their work. Aivazovsky, painting the sea in different time years and days, created a very capacious artistic image, which, in the smallest nuances of color and light, conveyed not only the beauty of the seascape, the artist's attitude, but also awakened the viewer's imagination, causing purely personal sensations in him.

The image as a reflection of reality

The artistic image in literature and art can be very sensual and rational, very subjective and personal or factographic. But in any case, it is a reflection of real life (even in fantastic works), since the creator and the viewer tend to think in images and perceive the world as a chain of images.

Any artist is a creator. He not only reflects reality and tries to answer existential questions, but also creates new meanings that are important for him and for the time in which he lives. Therefore, the artistic image in literature and art is very capacious and reflects not only the problems of the objective world, but also the subjective experiences and reflections of the author who created it.

Art and literature, as a reflection of the objective world, grow and develop along with it. Times and epochs are changing, new directions and currents are emerging. Cross-cutting artistic images pass through time, transforming and changing, but at the same time new ones arise in response to the demands of the time, historical changes and personal changes, because art and literature are, first of all, a reflection of reality through a system of images that is constantly changing and commensurate with time.

The word "image" (from other gr. Eyes- appearance, appearance) is used as a term in various areas knowledge. In philosophy, an image is understood as any reflection of reality; in psychology, it is a representation, or mental contemplation of an object in its entirety; in aesthetics - the reproduction of the integrity of the subject in a certain system of signs. In fiction, the material carrier of imagery is word . A.A. Potebnya in his work "Thought and Language" considered the image as a reproduced representation, sensible given . It is this meaning of the term "image" that is relevant for the theory of literature and art. The artistic image has the following properties : has a subject-sensory character, is characterized by the integrity of the reflection of reality; he is emotional, individualized; different vitality, relevance, ambiguity; may come about as a result of creativity active participation the author's imagination. AT work of art there is a fictitious objectivity that does not fully correspond to itself in reality.

The origins of the theory of the image lie in the ancient concept of mimesis. During the period of the birth of the artistic image in the activity of the artist, two main creative stages : prehistory and history of creating an image. In the first period of work, the accumulated vital material is concentrated, ideas are developed, images of heroes are outlined, and so on. Similar sketches are found in writers' notebooks. An artist's literary work begins at the moment when his idea is realized in words. Here, at the second stage of work, an image is crystallized that will act both as a new, created object in the world, and as new world. In the poem "Autumn" A.S. Pushkin figuratively presented the process of the birth of images:

And I forget the world - and in sweet silence

I am sweetly lulled by my imagination,

And poetry awakens in me:

The soul is embarrassed by lyrical excitement,

It trembles and sounds, and searches, as in a dream,

Finally pour out free manifestation -

And then an invisible swarm of guests comes to me,

Old acquaintances, fruits of my dreams.

And the thoughts in my head are worried in courage,

And light rhymes run towards them,

And fingers ask for a pen, pen for paper,

A minute - and the verses will flow freely.

The artistic image carries a generalization, has typical meaning (from gr. Typos imprint, imprint). If in the surrounding reality the ratio of the general and the particular can be different, then the images of art are always bright: they contain a concentrated embodiment of the general, the essential in the individual.

In creative practice, artistic generalization takes different forms, colored by the author's emotions and assessments. The image is always expressive, it expresses the ideological and emotional attitude of the author to the subject. The most important types author's assessment are aesthetic categories in the light of which the writer, like the other person, perceives life: he can heroize it, expose comic details, express tragedy, etc. An artistic image is an aesthetic phenomenon, the result of an artist’s understanding of a phenomenon, the process of life in a way characteristic of a particular type of art, objectified in the form of both a whole work and its individual parts.

An image is fundamentally polysemantic (unlike a concept in science), since art thinks in sums of meanings, and the presence of a sum of meanings is an indispensable condition for the “life” of an artistic image. Is scientific comprehension of an artistic image possible? In theory artistic content can be reduced to scientific, to a logically developed system of concepts. But practically it is impossible, and it is not necessary. We are dealing with an abyss of meanings. The knowledge of a highly artistic work is an endless process. The image is indecomposable. And its perception can only be holistic: as an experience of thought, as a sensually perceived essence. Aesthetic (inseparable) perception is at the same time empathy (“I will shed tears over fiction”), co-creation, as well as an approach to artistic integrity with the help of scientific-dialectical logic.

Thus, the artistic image is a concrete-sensory form of reproduction and transformation of reality. The image conveys reality and at the same time creates a new one. fictional world, which we perceive as existing in reality. “The image is many-sided and multi-component, including all the moments of the organic mutual transformation of the real and the spiritual; through an image that connects the subjective with the objective, the essential with the possible, the individual with the general, the ideal with the real, the agreement of all these opposing spheres of being is developed, their all-encompassing harmony” (Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1987).

Speaking of artistic images, they mean the images of heroes, characters of the work, primarily people. However, the concept of an artistic image often also includes various objects or phenomena depicted in a work. Some scholars protest against such a broad understanding of the artistic image, considering it wrong to use concepts like “the image of a tree” (leaf in V. Rasputin’s “Farewell to Mother” or oak in L. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”), “image of the people” (including same epic novel by Tolstoy). In such cases, it is proposed to talk about the figurative detail that a tree can be, and about the idea, theme or problem of the people. Even more difficult is the case with the image of animals. In some famous works(“Kashtanka” and “White-browed” by A. Chekhov, “Strider” by L. Tolstoy) the animal appears as a central character, whose psychology and worldview are reproduced in great detail. And yet there is a fundamental difference between the image of a man and the image of an animal, which does not allow, in particular, to seriously analyze the latter, because in the very artistic image there is deliberateness ( inner world animal is characterized by means of concepts related to human psychology).

What are the classifications of artistic images? This is a rather ambiguous question. In the traditional typological classification(V.P. Meshcheryakov, A.S. Kozlov) according to the nature of generalization, artistic images are divided into individual, characteristic, typical, images-motives, topoi, archetypes and images-symbols.

Individual images are characterized by originality, originality. They are usually the product of the writer's imagination. Individual images are most often found among romantics and science fiction writers. Such, for example, are Quasimodo in V. Hugo's Notre Dame Cathedral, the Demon in the poet M. Lermontov of the same name, Woland in M. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

Characteristic the image, in contrast to the individual, is generalizing. It contains common features of characters and mores inherent in many people of a certain era and its public spheres(characters of "The Brothers Karamazov" by F. Dostoevsky, plays
A. Ostrovsky, "The Forsyte Sagas" by J. Galsworthy).

Typical the image is the highest level of the characteristic image. Typical is the most likely, so to speak, exemplary for a certain era. The depiction of typical images was one of the main goals, as well as achievements, of the realistic literature of the 19th century. Suffice it to recall Father Goriot and Gobsek Balzac, Anna Karenina and Platon Karataev L. Tolstoy, Madame Bovary
G. Flaubert and others. Sometimes in an artistic image both socio-historical signs of an era and universal character traits of a particular hero (the so-called eternal images) - Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet, Oblomov, Tartuffe ...

Images-motifs and topoi go beyond individual characters. An image-motif is a theme that is consistently repeated in the work of a writer, expressed in various aspects by varying its most significant elements (“village Russia” by S. Yesenin, “ Beautiful lady» from A. Blok).

Topos (gr. topos- place, locality, letters. meaning - " common place”) denotes general and typical images created in the literature of an entire era, a nation, and not in the work of an individual author. An example is the image " little man» in the work of Russian writers - from A. Pushkin and N. Gogol to M. Zoshchenko and A. Platonov.

AT recent times in the science of literature, the concept is very widely used "archetype" (from Greek arche - beginning and typos - image). For the first time this term is found among the German romantics in early XIX c., but the real life in various fields knowledge was given to him by the work of the Swiss psychologist C. Jung (1875–1961). Jung understood the "archetype" as a universal image, unconsciously transmitted from generation to generation. Most often, archetypes are mythological images. The latter, according to Jung, literally “stuffed” all of humanity, and the archetypes nest in the subconscious of a person, regardless of his nationality, education or tastes. “As a physician,” Jung wrote, “I had to identify images Greek mythology in the delirium of purebred Negroes."

Genius ("visionary", in Jung's terminology) writers not only carry these images in themselves, like all people, but are also able to produce them, and reproduction is not a simple copy, but is filled with new, contemporary content. In this regard, K. Jung compares the archetypes with the beds of dry rivers, which are always ready to be filled with new water. Jung's concept of archetype includes not only images mythological heroes, but also universal symbols - fire, sky, house, road, garden, etc.

To a large extent, the term widely used in literary criticism is close to the Jungian understanding of the archetype. "mythologeme" (in English literature - "mytheme"). The latter, like an archetype, includes both mythological images and mythological plots or parts of them.

Much attention in literary criticism is paid to the problem of the correlation of the image and symbol . This problem was mastered in the Middle Ages, in particular by Thomas Aquinas (XIII century). He believed that the artistic image should reflect not so much visible world how much to express what cannot be perceived by the senses. Thus understood, the image actually turned into a symbol. In the understanding of Thomas Aquinas, this symbol was intended to express primarily the divine essence. Later, among the symbolist poets of the 19th–20th centuries, symbolic images could also carry earthly content("the eyes of the poor" at
S. Baudelaire, A. Blok's "yellow windows"). The artistic image does not have to be "dry" and divorced from objective, sensual reality, as Thomas Aquinas proclaimed. Blok's Stranger is an example of a magnificent symbol and at the same time a full-blooded living image, perfectly inscribed in the "objective", earthly reality.

Recently, literary critics have paid much attention to the structure of the artistic image, based on the understanding of man as a social and mental being, based on features of personality consciousness . Here they rely on research in philosophy and psychology (Freud, Jung, Fromm).

The famous literary critic V.I. Tyupa ("Analysis artistic text”) believes that in the work the image of a person is a reproduction of his consciousness, or rather, certain type consciousness, mentality. So, he considers, for example, Pushkin's "Little Tragedies" as a dramatic clash of consciousnesses, different ways of thinking, worldviews, value positions. Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time" is analyzed in the same vein. All the heroes of Pushkin's cycle of "Little Tragedies" correspond to three types of consciousness: either authoritarian-role , or solitary , or convergent . Here, Tyupa draws on Teilhard de Chardin's study of The Phenomenon of Man.

Man role-playing type of consciousness dogmatically proceeds from the world order - one and only. This is a patriarchal type of consciousness (Alber, Salieri, Leporello, Commander, Donna Anna, Don Carlos, Mary, Priest, Valsingam). The authoritarian consciousness divides the participants in the world order into “us” and “them” and does not know the category of “other”, does not know the non-role individuality.

solitary(romantic) consciousness sees special world in the person's personality. It is not bound by moral prohibitions and regulations, it is demonic in its freedom to transgress any boundaries. In the field of solitary consciousness, its own, isolated, sovereign world is formed, all other personalities appear not as subjects of equal consciousnesses, but as objects of thought of a lonely “I” (Baron, Salieri, Don Guan, Laura, Valsingam). Variants of solitary consciousness are its introverted, "underground" (stingy Baron) variety and its extroverted, "Napoleonic" (Don Guan). Both authoritarian role-playing and solitary consciousness are inherently monological types of consciousness, they are antagonistic. Evolution from one type of consciousness to another is also possible, which we observe in the example of the image of Salieri. From the authoritarian worldview of a priest, a servant of music, he evolves to the position of an internally secluded envious person who has lost faith in the supreme truth.

Convergent(convergence - convergence, divergence - divergence) consciousness is dialogic in its essence, it is capable of empathy with someone else's "I". Such is Mozart, his “I” does not think of himself outside of correlation with “you”, with an original personality his other(when the other is perceived as one's own). Teilhard de Chardin writes: “To be completely yourself, you have to go ... in the direction of convergence with everyone else, towards the other. The pinnacle of ourselves ... not our individuality, but our personality; and this last we can find ... only by uniting among ourselves. We can say that the perspective of convergent consciousness, personified by Mozart, opens up to a consciousness that is solitary as a result of its break with authoritarianism. But Pushkin's Salieri stops halfway and does not take that step from monologism to dialogism, which suddenly turns out to be possible for Don Juan. In the finale, his "demonism" is crushed, he appeals to God and to Donna Anna, the symbol of virtue found in her face.

Albert Albert

Duke Duke

Salieri Salieri Mozart

Leporello Don Guan

Commander Laura

Donna Anna

Don Carlos

priest young man

Mary Louise

Walsingam Walsingam Walsingam

Such an approach to understanding a character sometimes turns out to be quite productive for understanding the concept of personality created by the author in the work.

Volkov, I.F. Theory of Literature: textbook. allowance / I.F. Volkov. - M., 1995.

Theory of Literature: in 3 vols. - M., 1964.

Fundamentals of literary criticism: textbook. allowance / V.P. Meshcheryakov, A.S. Kozlov. - M., 2000.

Fedotov, O.I. Fundamentals of the theory of literature: textbook. allowance: at 2 o'clock /
O.I. Fedotov. - M., 1996.

Khalizev, V.E. Theory of Literature / V.E. Khalizev. - M., 2002.

The artistic image is one of the most important categories of aesthetics, defining the essence of art, its specificity. Art itself is often understood as thinking in images and is contrasted with conceptual thinking that emerged at a later stage of human development. The idea that initially people thought in concrete images (otherwise they simply did not know how) and that abstract thinking arose much later, was developed by J. Vico in the book "Foundations new science about the common nature of nations" (1725). "Poets, - Vico wrote, - used to form a poetic (figurative. - Ed.) speech, composing frequent ideas ... and the peoples that subsequently appeared formed prosaic speech, combining in each individual word, as if in one generic concept, those parts that had already been poetic speech. For example, from the following poetic phrase: "The blood boils in my heart," the peoples made a single word "anger."

Archaic thinking, or rather, figurative reflection and modeling of reality has survived to the present and is the main artistic creativity. And not only in creativity. Figurative "thinking" forms the basis of the human worldview, in which reality is figuratively and fantastically reflected. In other words, each of us brings some share of his imagination into the picture of the world he presents. It is no coincidence that researchers in depth psychology from Z. Freud to E. Fromm so often pointed out the closeness of dreams and works of art.

Thus, the artistic image is a concrete-sensory form of reproduction and transformation of reality. The image conveys reality and at the same time creates a new fictional world that we perceive as existing in reality. "The image is many-sided and multi-component, including all moments of the organic mutual transformation of the real and the spiritual; through the image that connects the subjective with the objective, the essential with the possible, the individual with the general, the ideal with the real, the agreement of all these opposing spheres of being is developed, their all-embracing harmony ".

Speaking of artistic images, they mean the images of heroes, characters of the work and, of course, first of all, people. And it is right. However, the concept of "artistic image" often also includes various objects or phenomena depicted in the work. Some scientists protest against such a broad understanding of the artistic image, considering it wrong to use concepts like "the image of a tree" (leaf in "Farewell to Matera" by V. Rasputin or oak in "War and Peace" by L. Tolstoy), "image of the people" (including same epic novel by Tolstoy). In such cases, it is proposed to talk about the figurative detail that a tree can be, and about the idea, theme or problem of the people. Even more difficult is the case with the image of animals. In some well-known works ("Kashtanka" and "White-browed" by A. Chekhov, "Strider" by L. Tolstoy), the animal appears as a central character, whose psychology and worldview are reproduced in great detail. And yet there is a fundamental difference between the image of a person and the image of an animal, which does not allow, in particular, to seriously analyze the latter, because there is deliberateness in the artistic image itself (the inner world of an animal is characterized by concepts related to human psychology).

It is obvious that with with good reason the concept of "artistic image" can only include images of human characters. In other cases, the use of this term implies a certain amount of conventionality, although its "expanding" use is quite acceptable.

For domestic literary criticism, "an approach to the image as a living and whole organism, to the greatest extent capable of comprehending the full truth of being ... In comparison with Western science, the concept of "image" in Russian and Soviet literary criticism is itself more "figurative", polysemantic, having a less differentiated scope of use.<...>The fullness of the meanings of the Russian concept of "image" is shown only by a number of Anglo-American terms... - symbol, copy, fiction, figure, icon...".

According to the nature of generalization, artistic images can be divided into individual, characteristic, typical, image-motives, topoi and archetypes.

Individual images characterized by originality, originality. They are usually the product of the writer's imagination. Individual images are most often found among romantics and science fiction writers. Such, for example, are Quasimodo in the "Notre Dame Cathedral" by V. Hugo, the Demon in poem of the same name M. Lermontov, Woland in "The Master and Margarita" by M. Bulgakov.

typical image, in contrast to the individual, is generalizing. It contains common traits of character and morals inherent in many people of a certain era and its social spheres (characters of "The Brothers Karamazov" by F. Dostoevsky, plays by A. Ostrovsky, "The Forsyte Saga" by J. Galsworthy).

typical image represents the highest level of the characteristic image. Typical is the most likely, so to speak, exemplary for a certain era. The depiction of typical images was one of the main goals, as well as the achievements of the realistic literature of the 19th century. Suffice it to recall Father Goriot and Gobsek O. Balzac, Anna Karenina and Platon Karataev L. Tolstoy, Madame Bovary G. Flaubert and others. (the so-called eternal images) - Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet, Oblomov, Tartuffe...

Images-motifs and topoi go beyond individual characters. An image-motif is a theme that is consistently repeated in the work of a writer, expressed in various aspects by varying its most significant elements (“village Russia” by S. Yesenin, “Beautiful Lady” by A. Blok).

topos(gr. topos- place, locality, letters, meaning - common place) denotes general and typical images created in the literature of an entire era, a nation, and not in the work of an individual author. An example is the image of the "little man" in the work of Russian writers - from A. Pushkin and N. Gogol to M. Zoshchenko and A. Platonov.

Recently, in the science of literature, the concept is very widely used. "archetype"(from Greek. arc he- start and typos- image). For the first time this term is found among German romantics at the beginning of the 19th century, however, the work of the Swiss psychologist C. Jung (1875–1961) gave him a true life in various fields of knowledge. Jung understood the archetype as a universal image, unconsciously passed on from generation to generation. Most often, archetypes are mythological images. The latter, according to Jung, literally “stuffed” all of humanity, and the archetypes nest in the subconscious of a person, regardless of his nationality, education or tastes. "As a doctor," wrote Jung, "I had to bring out the images of Greek mythology in the delusions of purebred Negroes."

Brilliant ("visionary", in Jung's terminology) writers not only carry these images in themselves, like all people, but are also able to reproduce them, and the reproduction is not a simple copy, but is filled with new, modern content. In this regard, K. Jung compares the archetypes with the beds of dry rivers, which are always ready to be filled with new water.

To a large extent, the term widely used in literary criticism is close to the Jungian understanding of the archetype. "mythologeme"(in English literature - "mytheme"). The latter, like an archetype, includes both mythological images and mythological plots or parts of them.

Much attention in literary criticism is paid to the problem of the relationship between image and symbol. This problem was posed in the Middle Ages, in particular by Thomas Aquinas (XIII century). He believed that the artistic image should reflect not so much the visible world as express what cannot be perceived by the senses. Thus understood, the image actually turned into a symbol. In the understanding of Thomas Aquinas, this symbol was intended to express primarily the divine essence. Later, among the symbolist poets of the 19th–20th centuries, symbolic images could also carry an earthly content (“eyes of the poor” by Ch. Baudelaire, “yellow windows” by A. Blok). The artistic image does not have to be "dry" and divorced from objective, sensual reality, as Thomas Aquinas proclaimed. Blok's Stranger is an example of a magnificent symbol and at the same time a full-blooded living image, perfectly inscribed in the "objective", earthly reality.

Philosophers and writers (Viko, Hegel, Belinsky and others), who defined art as "thinking in images", somewhat simplified the essence and functions of the artistic image. A similar simplification is characteristic of some modern theorists, in best case defining the image as a special "iconic" sign (semiotics, partly structuralism). It is obvious that through images they not only think (or primitive people thought, as J. Vico rightly noted), but also feel, not only "reflect" reality, but also create a special aesthetic world, thereby changing and ennobling the real world.

The functions performed by the artistic image are numerous and extremely important. They include aesthetic, cognitive, educational, communicative and other possibilities. We confine ourselves to just one example. Sometimes a literary image created by a brilliant artist actively influences life itself. So, imitating Goethe's Werther ("Suffering young Werther", 1774), many young people, like the hero of the novel, committed suicide.

The structure of the artistic image is both conservative and changeable. Any artistic image includes both the real impressions of the author and fiction, however, as art develops, the ratio between these components changes. Thus, in the images of Renaissance literature, the titanic passions of heroes come to the fore; literature XIX century, writers strive for a comprehensive coverage of reality, discovering the inconsistency of human nature, etc.

If we talk about historical destinies image, then there is hardly any reason to separate ancient figurative thinking from modern. However, for each new era there is a need for a new reading of the images created before. "Subjected to numerous interpretations that project the image into the plane of certain facts, trends, ideas, the image continues its work of displaying and transforming reality already outside the text - in the minds and lives of successive generations of readers" .

The artistic image is one of the most multifaceted and complex literary and philosophical categories. And it is not surprising that dedicated to him scientific literature extremely large. The image is studied not only by writers and philosophers, but also by mythologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians and psychologists.

Literary encyclopedic dictionary. M., 1987. S. 252.
Literary encyclopedic dictionary. S. 256.
Literary encyclopedic dictionary. S. 255.