Time and space in a literary work. Space in a work of art
Artistic time and art space the most important characteristics of the artistic image, providing a holistic perception of artistic reality and organizing the composition of the work. The art of the word belongs to the group of dynamic, temporal arts (in contrast to the plastic, spatial arts). But the literary and poetic image, formally unfolding in time (as a sequence of text), with its content reproduces the spatio-temporal picture of the world, moreover, in its symbolic-ideological, value aspect. Such traditional spatial landmarks as “house” (an image of a closed space), “space” (an image of an open space), “threshold”, “window”, “door” (the border between one and the other) have long been the point of application of comprehending forces in literary and artistic (and more broadly cultural) models of the world (the symbolic richness of such spaces, images is obvious, such as the house of Gogol's "old-world landowners" or Raskolnikov's coffin-like room in Crime and Punishment, 1866, F.M. Dostoevsky, like a steppe in "Taras Bulba", 1835, N.V. Gogol or in the story of the same name by A.P. Chekhov). The artistic chronology is also symbolic (the movement from spring and summer heyday to autumn sadness, characteristic of the world of Turgenev's prose). In general, the ancient types of value situations, realized in spatio-temporal images (chronotope, according to M.M. Bakhtin), are “idyllic time” in the father’s house, “adventurous time” of trials in a foreign land, “mystery time” of descending into the underworld of disasters - so or otherwise preserved in a reduced form by the classical literature of the New Age and modern literature (“station” or “airport” as places of decisive meetings and clearings, choice of path, sudden recognition, etc. correspond to the old “crossroads” or roadside tavern; “manhole” - the former “threshold” as the topos of the ritual transition).
In view of the iconic, spiritual, symbolic nature of the art of the word spatial and temporal coordinates of literary reality are not fully concretized, discontinuous and conditional (the fundamental unrepresentability of spaces, images and values in mythological, grotesque and fantastic works; the uneven course of plot time, its delays at the points of descriptions, retreats, parallel flow in different storylines). However, here the temporary nature of the literary image, noted by G.E. Lessing in Laocoön (1766), makes itself felt - the convention in the transfer of space is felt weaker and is realized only when trying to translate literary works into the language of other arts; meanwhile, the conventionality in the transfer of time, the dialectics of the discrepancy between the time of the narration and the time of the events depicted, compositional time with the plot are mastered by the literary process as an obvious and meaningful contradiction.
Archaic, oral and generally early literature is sensitive to the type of temporal confinement, orientation in the collective or historical account of time (for example, in the traditional system of literary genres, lyric is “present”, and epic is “long gone”, qualitatively separated from the life time of the performer and listeners) . The age of myth for its keeper and narrator is not a thing of the past; the mythological narrative ends with the correlation of events with the real composition of the world or its future destiny(the myth of Pandora's box, of the chained Prometheus, who will someday be released). The time of a fairy tale is a deliberately conditional past, a fictitious time (and space) of unheard-of things; the ironic ending (“and I was there, drinking honey-beer”) often emphasizes that there is no way out of the time of the fairy tale during its rendering (on this basis, one can conclude that the fairy tale originated later than the myth).
As the archaic, ritual models of the world, marked by features of naive realism (respect for the unity of time and place in ancient drama with its cult and mythological origins) disintegrate, a degree of conventionality grows in the spatio-temporal representations that characterize literary consciousness. In an epic or fairy tale, the tempo of the narration could not yet sharply outstrip the tempo of the events depicted; an epic or fairy-tale action could not unfold simultaneously (“in the meantime”) on two or more sites; it was strictly linear and, in this respect, remained faithful to empiricism; the epic narrator did not have a field of vision expanded in comparison with the usual human horizon; at each moment he was in one and only one point of the plot space. "Copernican coup" produced by the modern European novel in spatio-temporal organization of narrative genres, consisted in the fact that the author, along with the right to unconventional and frank fiction, acquired the right to dispose of novel time as its initiator and creator. When fiction removes the mask of a real event, and the writer openly breaks with the role of a rhapsodist or chronicler, then there is no need for a naive-empirical concept of event time. Temporal coverage can now be arbitrarily wide, the pace of narration can be arbitrarily uneven, parallel "theaters of action", reversal of time and exits to the future known to the narrator are acceptable and functionally important (for the purposes of analysis, explanation or entertainment). The boundaries between the compressed author's presentation of events, which speeds up the flow of plot time, the description, which stops its course for the sake of reviewing space, and the dramatized episodes, the compositional time of which "keeps up" with the plot time, become much sharper and are realized. Accordingly, the difference between the non-fixed (“omnipresent”) and localized in space (“witness”) position of the narrator, which is characteristic mainly of “dramatic” episodes, is felt more sharply.
If in a short story of a novelistic type ( classic pattern- "The Queen of Spades", 1833, A.S. Pushkin) these moments of the new artistic time and artistic space are still brought to a balanced unity and are in complete submission to the author-narrator, who talks with the reader, as it were, "on the other side" of the fictional space - time, then in the "big" novel of the 19th century, such unity noticeably fluctuates under the influence of emerging centrifugal forces. These "forces" are the discovery of everyday time and inhabited space (in the novels of O. Balzac, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov) in connection with the concept public environment, which forms the human character, as well as the discovery of a multi-subject narrative and transfer of the center of space-time coordinates to the inner world of the characters in connection with the development psychological analysis. When long-term organic processes come into the narrator's field of vision, the author runs the risk of facing the impossible task of reproducing life "from minute to minute." The way out was to transfer the sum of everyday circumstances that repeatedly affect a person beyond the time of the action (the exposition in Father Goriot, 1834-35; Oblomov’s dream is a lengthy digression in Goncharov’s novel) or the distribution of episodes shrouded in the course of everyday life over the entire calendar plan (in the novels of Turgenev, in the "peaceful" chapters of the epic of L.N. Tolstoy). Such an imitation of the “river of life” itself with particular persistence requires the narrator to have a guiding supra-event presence. But, on the other hand, the opposite, in essence, process of “self-elimination” of the author-narrator is already beginning: the space of dramatic episodes is increasingly organized from the “observational position” of one of the characters, events are described synchronously, as they are played out before the eyes of the participant. It is also significant that chronicle-everyday time, in contrast to the eventful (in the origin - adventure) time, does not have an unconditional beginning and an unconditional end ("life goes on").
In an effort to resolve these contradictions, Chekhov, in accordance with his general idea of the course of life (everyday time is the decisive tragic time of human existence), merged eventful time with everyday time to an indistinguishable unity: episodes that happened once are presented in a grammatical imperfect - as repeatedly repeated everyday scenes that fill a whole segment of everyday life. (This folding of a large “piece” of plot time into a single episode, which simultaneously serves as both a summary story about the past stage and an illustration to it, a “test” taken from everyday life, is one of the main secrets of Chekhov’s famous brevity.) From the crossroads In the classic novel of the mid-19th century, the path opposite to Chekhov's was paved by Dostoevsky, who concentrated the plot within the boundaries of a critical, critical time of decisive trials, measured in a few days and hours. The chronicle gradualness here is actually depreciated in the name of the decisive disclosure of the characters in their fateful moments. Dostoevsky's intense turning point corresponds to the highlighted in the form stage platform, maximally involved in the events, measured by the steps of the heroes, the space - "threshold" (doors, stairs, corridors, alleys, where you can't miss each other), "accidental shelter" (tavern, compartment), "hall for a gathering", - corresponding to situations of crime (crossing ), confession, public trial. At the same time, the spiritual coordinates of space and time embrace the human universe in his novels (the ancient golden age, the French Revolution, “quadrillions” of space years and versts), and these instantaneous mental slices of world existence prompt us to compare the world of Dostoevsky with the world of the Divine Comedy (1307 -21) Dante and Faust (1808-31) I.V. Goethe.
In the spatio-temporal organization of a work of literature of the 20th century, the following trends and features can be noted:
- The symbolic plane of the realistic spatio-temporal panorama is accentuated, which, in particular, is reflected in the inclination towards nameless or fictitious topography: City, instead of Kyiv, by M.A. Bulgakov; the county of Yoknapatofa in the south of the USA, created by the imagination of W. Faulkner; the generalized "Latin American" country of Macondo in national epic Colombian G. Garcia Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967). However, it is important that artistic time and artistic space in all these cases require a real historical-geographical identification, or at least rapprochement, without which the work is incomprehensible;
- The closed artistic time of a fairy tale or parable is often used, which is turned off from the historical account, which often corresponds to the uncertainty of the scene (“The Trial”, 1915, F. Kafka; “The Plague”, 1947, A. Camus; “Watt”, 1953, S. Beckett );
- A remarkable milestone in modern literary development is the appeal to the memory of a character as an internal space for the unfolding of events; intermittent, reverse and other course of plot time is motivated not by the author's initiative, but by the psychology of recall (this takes place not only in M. Proust or W. Wolfe, but also in writers of a more traditional realistic plan, for example, in G. Böll, but in modern Russian literature by V.V. Bykov, Yu.V. Trifonov). Such a setting of the hero's consciousness makes it possible to compress the actual time of the action to a few days and hours, while the time and space of an entire human life can be projected onto the screen of recollection;
- Modern literature has not lost a hero moving in an objective earthly expanse, in a multifaceted epic space of collective historical destinies - what are the heroes of The Quiet Don (1928-40) by M.A. Sholokhov, The Life of Klim Samgin, 1927-36, M. Gorky.
- The “hero” of a monumental narrative can become historical time itself in its decisive “nodes”, subordinating the fate of heroes to itself as private moments in an avalanche of events (A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s epic “The Red Wheel”, 1969-90).
Spatial features of the text. Space and image of the world. Physical point of view (spatial plans: panoramic image, close-up, moving - stationary picture of the world, external - internal space, etc.). Features of the landscape (interior). Space types. Valuable value of spatial images (spatial images as an expression of non-spatial relations).
Temporal features of the text. Action time and story time. Types of artistic time, the meaning of temporary images. Vocabulary with temporary meaning. The main chronotopes of the text. Space and time of the author and the hero, their fundamental difference.
Any literary work in one way or another reproduces the real world - both material and ideal: nature, things, events, people in their external and internal being, etc. The natural forms of existence of this world are time and space. However art world, or world of art, always to some extent conditional: it is image reality. Time and space in literature are thus also conditional.
Compared to other arts, literature is the most free to deal with time and space.(It can compete in this area, perhaps, only with the synthetic art of cinema). The "non-materiality of ... images" gives literature the ability to instantly move from one space to another. In particular, events that occur simultaneously in different places can be depicted; for this, it is enough for the narrator to say: "In the meantime, something happened there." Transitions from one time plan to another are just as simple (especially from the present to the past and back). The earliest forms of such temporal switching were memories in the stories of the characters. With the development of literary self-awareness, these forms of mastering time and space will become more sophisticated, but it is important that they always took place in literature, and, therefore, constituted an essential element of artistic imagery.
Another property of literary time and space is their discontinuity. With regard to time, this is especially important, since literature turns out to be able not to reproducethe wholeflow of time, but choose the most significant fragments from it, marking the gaps with formulas like: “several days have passed”, etc. Such temporal discreteness (which has long been characteristic of literature) served as a powerful means of dynamization, first in the development of the plot, and then in psychologism.
Fragmentation of space partly connected with the properties of artistic time, partly it has an independent character.
Characterconventions of time and space highly dependent onfrom the family literature. The lyrics, which represent the actual experience, and the drama, played out before the eyes of the audience, showing the incident at the moment of its completion, usually use the present tense, while the epic (basically a story about what has passed) is in the past tense.
Conditionality is maximum atlyrics it may even completely lack the image of space - for example, in A.S. Pushkin's poem “I loved you; love still, perhaps ... ". Often the space in the lyrics is allegorical: the desert in Pushkin's "Prophet", the sea in Lermontov's "Sail". At the same time, lyrics are capable of reproducing the objective world in its spatial realities. So, in Lermontov's poem "Motherland" a typical Russian landscape is recreated. In his own poem “How often, surrounded by a motley crowd ...” mental transfer lyrical hero from the ballroom to the “wonderful kingdom” embodies oppositions that are extremely significant for the romantic: civilization and nature, artificial and natural man, “I” and “crowd”. And not only spaces, but also times are opposed.
Conditionality of time and space indrama connected mainly with its orientation towards the theatre. With all the diversity in the organization of time and space, some common properties are preserved in the drama: no matter how significant the role of narrative fragments in dramatic works, no matter how fragmented the depicted action is, the drama is committed to pictures closed in space and time.
Much more opportunities for epic kind , where the fragmentation of time and space, transitions from one time to another, spatial movements are carried out easily and freely thanks to the figure of the narrator - an intermediary between the depicted life and the reader. The narrator can "compress" and, on the contrary, "stretch" time, or even stop it (in descriptions, reasoning).
According to the peculiarities of artistic convention time and space in literature (in all its varieties) can be divided into abstract and concrete, especially this distinction is important for space.
As in life, so in literature, space and time are not given to us in pure. We judge space by the objects that fill it (in a broad sense), and we judge time by the processes taking place in it. To analyze a work, it is important to determine the fullness, saturation of space and time, since this indicator in many cases characterizes style works, writer, direction. For example, Gogol's space is usually filled to the maximum with some objects, especially things. Here is one of the interiors in Dead Souls:<...>the room was hung with old striped wallpaper; pictures with some birds; between the windows there are small antique mirrors with dark frames in the form of curled leaves; behind every mirror there was either a letter, or an old pack of cards, or a stocking; wall clock with painted flowers on the dial...” (ch. III). And in Lermontov's style system, the space is practically not filled: it contains only what is necessary for the plot and the depiction of the inner world of the characters, even in "A Hero of Our Time" (not to mention romantic poems) there is not a single detailed interior.
The intensity of artistic time is expressed in its saturation with events.. Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Mayakovsky have an extremely busy time. Chekhov, on the other hand, managed to sharply reduce the intensity of time even in dramatic works, which, in principle, gravitate towards the concentration of action.
The increased saturation of artistic space, as a rule, is combined with a reduced intensity of time, and vice versa: a weak saturation of space is combined with time full of events.
Real (plot) and artistic time rarely match, especially in epic works, where playing with time can be a very expressive technique. In most cases, artistic time is shorter than "real" time: this is the manifestation of the law of "poetic economy". However, there is an important exception related to the image psychological processes and subjective time character or lyrical hero. Experiences and thoughts, unlike other processes, proceed faster than the speech flow, which forms the basis of literary imagery, moves. Therefore, the image time is almost always longer than the subjective time. In some cases, this is less noticeable (for example, in Lermontov's Hero of Our Time, Goncharov's novels, Chekhov's stories), in others it is a conscious artistic device designed to emphasize the richness and intensity of spiritual life. This is typical for many writers-psychologists: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, Proust.
Depicting what the hero has experienced in just a second of "real" time can take up a large amount of narrative.
In literature as a dynamic, but at the same time visual art, quite complex relationships often arise between “ real and artistic time.« Real» time in general can be equal to zero, for example, with various kinds of descriptions. This time can be called eventless . But event time, in which at least something happens, is internally heterogeneous. In one case, literature really captures events and actions that significantly change either a person, or the relationship of people, or the situation as a whole. it plot , or plot , time. In another case, literature paints a picture of a stable being, actions and deeds that are repeated from day to day, from year to year. Events as such at such a time no. Everything that happens in it does not change either the character of a person or the relationship of people, does not move the plot (plot) from plot to denouement. The dynamics of such a time is extremely conditional, and its function is to reproduce a sustainable way of life. This type of artistic time is sometimes called "Chronically-everyday" .
The ratio of eventless and eventful time largely determines tempo organization of artistic time of the work , which, in turn, determines the nature of aesthetic perception. So, Gogol's Dead Souls, in which eventless, "chronicle-everyday" time, create the impression slow pace. A different tempo organization in Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, in which eventful time (not only externally, but also internal, psychological events).
The writer sometimes makes time last, stretches it out to convey a certain psychological state of the hero (Chekhov's story "I want to sleep"), sometimes stops, "turns off" (L. Tolstoy's philosophical excursions in "War and Peace"), sometimes makes time move back.
Important for analysis iscompleteness andincompleteness artistic time. Often writers create in their works closed time that has both an absolute beginning and, more importantly, an absolute end, which, as a rule, represents both the completion of the plot and the resolution of the conflict, and in the lyrics, the exhaustion of a given experience or reflection. Starting from the early stages of the development of literature and almost up to the 19th century. such temporary completeness was practically obligatory and was a sign of artistry. The forms of the end of artistic time were varied: this was the return of the hero to his father's house after wanderings (literary interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son), and the achievement of a certain stable position in life, and the "triumph of virtue", and the final victory of the hero over the enemy, and, of course, same, the death of the protagonist or the wedding. At the end of the XIX century. Chekhov, for whom the incompleteness of artistic time became one of the foundations of his innovative aesthetics, spread the principle open final and unfinished time on dramaturgy, those. to that literary genre in which it was most difficult to do this and which urgently requires temporal and eventual isolation.
Space, like time, can shift at the will of the author. Artistic space is created through the use of an image angle; this happens as a result of a mental change in the place from which the observation is carried out: a general, small plan is replaced by a large one, and vice versa. Spatial concepts in a creative, artistic context can only be an external, verbal image, but convey a different content, not spatial.
Historical development of spatio-temporal organization artistic world reveals a definite tendency towards complication. in the 19th and especially in the 20th century. writers use space-time composition as a special, conscious artistic device; begins a kind of "game" with time and space. Its meaning is to compare different times and spaces, to reveal both the characteristic properties of "here" and "now" and the general, universal laws of being, to comprehend the world in its unity. Each culture has its own understanding of time and space, which is reflected in literature. Since the Renaissance, culture has been dominated by linear concept time associated with the concept progress.Artistic time is also mostly linear, although there are exceptions. On the culture and literature of the late XIX - early XX century. had a significant impact natural sciences concepts time and space, associated primarily with the theory of relativity by A. Einstein. Fiction literature reacted to the changed scientific and philosophical ideas about time and space: it began to contain deformations of space and time. Most fruitfully mastered new ideas about space and time Science fiction.
Titles denoting time and space.
With all the conventionality of the “new artistic reality” created by the writer, the basis of the artistic world, as well as the real world, is its coordinates - time and place, which often indicated in the titles of works. In addition to cyclic coordinates (names of the time of day, days of the week, months), the time of action can be indicated by a date correlated with a historical event (“The ninety-third year” by V. Hugo), or the name of a real historical person with whom the idea of a particular era ("Chronicle of the reign of Charles IX" P. Merime).
In the title of a work of art, not only “points” on the time axis can be indicated, but also entire “segments”, marking the chronological framework of the narrative. At the same time, the author, focusing the reader's attention on a certain time period - sometimes it is only one day or even part of a day - seeks to convey both the essence of life and the “clot of life” of his characters, emphasizes the typical nature of the events he describes (“Morning of the landowner” L.N. Tolstoy, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by A.I. Solzhenitsyn).
The second coordinate of the artistic world of the work - the place - can be indicated in the title with varying degrees of specificity, a real (“Rome” by E. Zola) or a fictional toponym (“Chevengur” by A.P. Platonov, “Solaris” by St. Lem), defined in in the most general form (“The Village” by I.A. Bunin, “Islands in the Ocean” by E. Hemingway). Fictional toponyms often contain an emotional assessment that gives the reader an idea of the author's concept of the work. So, for the reader, the negative semantics of the Gorky toponym Okurov (“Okurov Town”) is quite obvious; the town of Okurov near Gorky is a dead backwater in which life is not seething, but barely glimmering. The most common place names, as a rule, testify to the extremely wide meaning of the image created by the artist. So, the village from the story of the same name by I.A. Bunin is not only one of the villages of the Oryol province, but also a Russian village in general with a whole complex of contradictions associated with the spiritual disintegration of the peasant world, the community.
Titles denoting the scene of action can not only model the space of the artistic world (“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” by A. Radishchev, “Moscow - Petushki” by V. Erofeev), but also introduce the main symbol of the work (“Nevsky Prospekt” by N.V. Gogol, "Petersburg" by A. Bely). Toponymic titles are often used by writers as a kind of bond that unites individual works into a single cycle or book (“Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” by N.V. Gogol).
Main literature: 12, 14, 18, 28, 75
Further reading: 39, 45, 82
Mikhailova Ekaterina Romanovna
Presentation on the topic "Time in a work of art"
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Time in a work of art
Time (in philosophy) is an irreversible flow that flows in only one direction - from the past, through the present to the future, within which all the processes that exist in being, which are facts, take place. Time (in literature) is a time series in various aspects of its embodiment, functioning and perception in works of fiction as a phenomenon of art.
Literature, more than any other art, becomes the art of the times. Time is its object, subject and instrument of representation.
Approaches to the study of tense in literature: one can study grammatical tense in literature. And this approach is very fruitful, especially in relation to lyric poetry (RO Jacobson); one can analyze the manifestations of the understanding of time in literature and science, establish a gradual increase in interest in the problem of time in modern literature, and make assumptions about the significance of the problem of time in literature, science, philosophy, etc. (Poulet and Meyerhoff); but the most essential for the study of literature is the study of artistic time: time as it is reproduced in literary works, time as an artistic factor in literature.
Features of artistic time 1) artistic time is a phenomenon of the very artistic fabric of a literary work, subordinating both grammatical time and its philosophical understanding by the writer to its artistic tasks;
2) Artistic time, in contrast to objectively given time, uses the variety of subjective perception of time. Plot time, acting as an accelerator/decelerator of the narrative, is characterized by speed and consistency. Poetic time is faster than real time in narration, synchronous with it in dialogue, slower in comparison with it in description. A work of art makes this subjective perception of time one of the forms of depicting reality. However, objective time is also used at the same time: either observing the rule of the unity of the time of action and the reader-spectator in French classic dramaturgy, or refusing this unity, emphasizing differences, leading the narration mainly in the subjective aspect of time;
3) Actual time and time depicted are the essential aspects of the whole artistic work. Their options are endless. They are combined with the artistic concept of the work, are in a state of continuous conditionality of their artistic whole of the work; 4) Time in fiction is perceived due to the connection of events - causal or psychological, associative. Time in a work of art is not only and not so much calendar readings, but the correlation of events;
5) the time of a work can be “closed”, closed in itself, taking place only within the plot, not connected with events taking place outside the work, with historical time, and also the time of a work can be “open”, included in a wider flow of time developing against the background of a precisely defined historical epoch. The “open” time of a work, which does not exclude a clear frame delimiting it from reality, presupposes the presence of other events occurring simultaneously outside the work, its plot.
6) story time can speed up and slow down. Plot time can break up into a number of separate forms inherent in the consciousness of time. Very often, the time of action in a work evenly slows down or speeds up its pace. The whole work can have several forms of time, developing at different rates, being thrown from one flow of time to another, forward and backward; 7) The image of time can be illusionistic (especially in sentimental works) or introduce the reader into his unreal, conditional circle. It depends on the artistic intention of the author, but it can also depend on the natural, common for his era ideas about the movement of time.
Artistic time - time as the "fourth coordinate" of the artistic world: the reality of the hero (conceptual time - the objectified background of artistic events, the modeling of external reality in forms adequate for the recipient) and the reality of the subject of the image (perceptual time - the setting of really existing objects in other systems of relations, elements acquire features inherent in the real world to objects of a completely different nature, for example, landscape - mood traits, animals - traits of intelligence and properties of a human character). In the first case, the temporal characteristic (plot time, action time - historical, biographical, natural, social, eventful (adventure) acts as a condition for performing various actions (actions, reactions, mental movements, gestures and facial expressions).
Correlation of time and literary genre Lyric, which represents the actual experience, and the drama, played out before the eyes of the audience, showing the incident at the moment of its completion, usually use the present tense, while the epic is mainly a story about what has passed, and therefore, in the past time.
Classification of forms of time taking into account the folklore and literary tradition Folklore time does not know a clear differentiation into the present, past and future (it presupposes individuality). Human life and the life of nature are perceived in a single complex, all elements of which are equally worthy. A single event of life is revealed in its various aspects and moments. Time in the heroic epic is fenced off from all subsequent times, a closed and completed time of national tradition, a time of memory. The depicted world and the reality of the singer and listeners are separated by an epic distance. The absolute past is a value-temporal category of the epic world. It localizes such categories as ideal, justice, perfection, harmony.
The wonderful time of a chivalrous novel - the world for a knight exists only under the sign of a wonderful “suddenly”, this is the normal state of the world, in contrast to the Greek novel, where a random event is a sign of a broken pattern of the temporal chain of being. Fabulous hyperbolism is inherent in this time: now the hours are stretched, now the days are compressed to an instant, time can be bewitched until the disappearance of entire events. Medieval eschatological time, which corresponds to the spatial vertical, vertical chronotope. Everything that is divided by time on earth converges in eternity in the pure simultaneity of coexistence. To understand the world, it is necessary to compare everything in one time (timeless plan).
The creative, productive, productive time of the Renaissance (the universal chronotope created by Rabelais), the destruction of the historical concept of the Middle Ages, in which real time was devalued and dissolved in timeless categories. The formation of the individual man is not separated from historical growth and cultural progress. The time of the hero's "outlook", the time of ignorance (classic novel) - the present is fundamentally not completed, it needs to be continued in the future. The temporal model of the world is fundamentally changing: the first word is missing, and the last has not yet been said. Time and the world for the first time become historical. The concept of the environment contributes to the appearance in the literature of chronicle-everyday time, which receives a special design: the sum of the circumstances that repeatedly affect a person is taken out of the scope of the time of action.
The time of memory, the "stream of consciousness" - the active work of the narrator's memory, the detailing of the mechanism of recall, in which images of the past float one on top of the other, interpenetrate, transforming in a peculiar way in the mind of the hero. S. Bocharov about the psychology of the process of remembering: “... reality is covered, it acts as separate objects of its own ... which the consciousness arbitrarily extracted and brought closer ...” (Time in the works of M. Proust, V. Wulf, V. Bykov, Yu. Trifonov). The time and space of sleep is a distortion of real perspectives (for example, dreams in the works of Dostoevsky). Artistic time is the most important characteristic artistic image, which provides a holistic perception of the “poetic reality” created by the author in the work (V.V. Fedorov).
Any literary work in one way or another reproduces the real world - both material and ideal. The natural forms of existence of this world are time and space. However, the world of the work is always to some extent conditional, and, of course, time and space are also conditional.
A significant relationship between temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, M.M. Bakhtin suggested calling it a chronotope. The chronotope determines the artistic unity of a literary work in its relation to reality. All temporal-spatial definitions in art and literature are inseparable from each other and are always emotionally-value-based. Abstract thinking can, of course, think of time and space in their separateness and be distracted from their emotional and valuable moment. But living artistic contemplation (which, of course, is also full of thought, but not abstract) does not separate anything and is not distracted from anything. It captures the chronotope in all its integrity and completeness.
Compared with other arts, literature deals with time and space most freely (only cinema can compete with it). The "immateriality of images" gives literature the ability to instantly move from one space and time to another. For example, events can be depicted that take place simultaneously in different places (for example, Homer's Odyssey describes the travels of the protagonist and events in Ithaca). As for time switching, the simplest form is the hero's memory of the past (for example, the famous "Oblomov's Dream").
Another property of literary time and space is their discreteness (i.e. discontinuity). So, literature can not reproduce the entire time stream, but choose the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps (for example, the introduction to Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman": "He stood on the shore of desert waves, full of great thoughts, And looked into the distance.<…>A hundred years have passed, and the young city ... From the darkness of the forests, from the swamp of blat, Ascended magnificently, proudly. The discreteness of space is manifested in the fact that it is usually not described in detail, but only indicated with the help of individual details that are most significant for the author (for example, in "Grammar of Love" Bunin does not fully describe the hall in Khvoshchinsky's house, but only mentions its large size, windows , facing west and north, “clumsy” furniture, “beautiful slides” in the piers, dry bees on the floor, but most importantly - a “deity without glasses”, where there was an image “in a silver riza” and on it “wedding candles in pale -green bows). When we learn that the wedding candles were bought by Khvoshchinsky after Lusha's death, this emphasis becomes clear. There may also be a change in spatial and temporal coordinates at the same time (in Goncharov's novel The Cliff, the transfer of action from St. Petersburg to Malinovka, to the Volga, makes the description of the road unnecessary).
The nature of the conventionality of time and space depends to a great extent on the type of literature. The maximum conventionality in the lyrics, because. it is distinguished by the greatest expression and is focused on the inner world of the lyrical subject. The conditionality of time and space in drama is connected with the possibilities of staging (hence the famous rule of 3 unities). In the epic, the fragmentation of time and space, transitions from one time to another, spatial movements are carried out easily and freely thanks to the figure of the narrator - an intermediary between the depicted life and the reader (for example, an intermediary can “suspend” time during reasoning, descriptions - see the above example about the hall in Khvoshchinsky's house; of course, describing the room, Bunin somewhat "slowed down" the passage of time).
According to the peculiarities of artistic conventionality, time and space in literature can be divided into abstract (one that can be understood as "everywhere" / "always") and concrete. Thus, the space of Naples in The Gentleman from San Francisco is abstract (it has no characteristic features important for the narrative, and is not comprehended, and therefore, despite the abundance of toponyms, it can be understood as "everywhere"). The concrete space actively influences the essence of what is depicted (for example, in Goncharov's "Cliff" the image of Robin is created, which is described down to the smallest detail, and the latter, of course, not only influence what is happening, but also symbolize the psychological state of the characters: for example, the cliff itself indicates the "fall" of Vera, and before her - grandmothers, on Raisky's feverish passion for Vera, etc.). The corresponding properties of time are usually associated with the type of space: a specific space is combined with a specific time (for example, in Woe from Wit, Moscow, with its realities, could not belong to any other time except the beginning of the 19th century) and vice versa. The forms of concretization of artistic time are most often the "binding" of the action to historical landmarks, realities and the designation of cyclic time: the season, the day.
In literature, space and time are not given to us in their pure form. We judge space by the objects that fill it, and we judge time by the processes taking place in it. To analyze a work, it is important to at least approximately determine the fullness, saturation of space and time, because this indicator often characterizes the style of the work. For example, Gogol's space is usually filled to the maximum with some objects (for example, a textbook description of the interior in Sobakevich's house). The intensity of artistic time is expressed in its saturation with events. Cervantes had an extremely busy time in Don Quixote. The increased saturation of artistic space, as a rule, is combined with a reduced intensity of time and vice versa (cf. the examples given above: "Dead Souls" and "Don Quixote").
The depicted time and the time of the image (i.e. real (plot) and artistic time) rarely coincide. Usually artistic time is shorter than “real” time (see the above example about the omission of the description of the road from St. Petersburg to Malinovka in Goncharov’s “Cliff”), however, there is an important exception related to the depiction of psychological processes and the subjective time of the character. Experiences and thoughts flow faster than the speech flow moves, so the time of the image is almost always longer than the subjective time (for example, the textbook episode from War and Peace with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who looked at the high, endless sky and comprehended the secrets of life). "Real time" can generally be equal to zero (for example, with all kinds of lengthy descriptions), such time can be called eventless. Event time is divided into plot time (describes current events) and everyday chronicle (a picture of stable being, repetitive actions and deeds is drawn (one of the most clear examples- description of Oblomov's life at the beginning of Goncharov's novel of the same name)). The ratio of eventless, chronicle-everyday and event types of time determines the tempo organization of the literary time of the work, which determines the nature of aesthetic perception, forms subjective reader time (“Dead Souls” gives the impression of a slow pace, and “Crime and Punishment” - fast, and therefore the novel is read Dostoevsky is often "in the same breath").
Completion and incompleteness of artistic time is of great importance. Often writers create in their works a closed time, which has an absolute beginning and end, which until the 19th century. considered a sign of art. However, the monotonous endings (return to the father's house, wedding or death) already seemed boring to Pushkin, therefore, from the 19th century. there is a struggle with them, but if in the novel it is quite simple to use the other end (as in the already mentioned “Cliff” many times), then the situation is more complicated with the drama. Only Chekhov managed to "get rid" of these ends ("The Cherry Orchard").
The historical development of spatio-temporal organization reveals a tendency towards complication and individualization. But the complexity, individual originality of artistic time and space does not exclude the existence of general, typological models - substantive forms that writers use as "ready-made". Such are the motifs of a house, a road, a horse, a crossroads, up and down, open space, and so on. This also includes the types of organization of artistic time: chronicle, adventurous, biographical, etc. It is for such spatio-temporal typological models that M.M. Bakhtin introduced the term chronotope.
MM. Bakhtin singles out, for example, the chronotope of the meeting; this chronotope is dominated by a temporal shade, and it is distinguished by a high degree of emotional and value intensity. The chronotope of the road associated with it has a wider volume, but somewhat less emotional and value intensity. Encounters in the novel usually take place on the "road". "Road" is the predominant place of chance meetings. On the road (" high road”) intersect at one temporal and spatial point the spatial and temporal paths of various people - representatives of all classes, states, religions, nationalities, ages. Here, those who are normally separated by social hierarchy and spatial distance can accidentally meet, any contrasts can arise here, various destinies can collide and intertwine. Here, the spatial and temporal series of human destinies and lives are combined in a peculiar way, being complicated and concretized by the social distances that are overcome here. This is the point of tying and the place where events take place. Here, time seems to flow into space and flows through it (forming roads).
By the end of the 18th century in England, a new territory for the accomplishment of novel events, the “zbmok”, was formed and consolidated in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel (for the first time in this meaning in Horace Walpole - “Castle of Otranto”). The castle is full of time, moreover, the time of the historical past. The castle is the place of life of historical figures of the past; traces of centuries and generations were deposited in it in a visible form. Finally, legends and traditions enliven all corners of the castle and its environs with memories of past events. This creates a specific plot of the castle, deployed in Gothic novels.
In the novels of Stendhal and Balzac, an essentially new locality of the events of the novel appears - "living room-salon" (in the broad sense). Of course, it does not appear for the first time with them, but only with them does it acquire the fullness of its meaning as a place of intersection of the spatial and temporal series of the novel. From the point of view of the plot and composition, meetings take place here (no longer having the former specifically random nature of meetings on the "road" or in the "foreign world"), plots of intrigue are created, denouements are often made, here, finally, and most importantly, dialogues take place, acquiring exceptional significance in the novel, the characters, “ideas” and “passions” of the characters are revealed (cf. Salon Scherer in “War and Peace” - A.S.).
In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the setting is a "provincial town". A provincial philistine town with its musty way of life is an extremely common place for the accomplishment of novel events in the 19th century. This town has several varieties, including a very important one - idyllic (among the regionalists). We will touch only on the Flaubert variety (created, however, not by Flaubert). Such a town is a place of cyclic household time. There are no events here, but only repeated "occurrences". Time is deprived here of a progressive historical course, it moves in narrow circles: the circle of the day, the circle of the week, the month, the circle of all life. A day is never a day, a year is never a year, life is not life. Day after day, the same everyday actions, the same topics of conversation, the same words, etc. are repeated. This is ordinary everyday cyclic household time. It is familiar to us in different variations, both according to Gogol, and according to Turgenev, according to Shchedrin, Chekhov. Time here is eventless and therefore seems to have almost stopped. There is no "meeting" or "parting". This is a thick, sticky, creeping time in space. Therefore, it cannot be the main tense of the novel. It is used by novelists as a side time, intertwined with or interrupted by other non-cyclical time series, and often serves as a contrasting backdrop for eventful and energetic time series.
Let us also call here such a chronotope imbued with high emotional and value intensity as a threshold; it can also be combined with the motive of the meeting, but its most significant completion is the chronotope of the crisis and the turning point in life. In literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic, sometimes in an open, but more often in an implicit form. For Dostoevsky, for example, the threshold and the adjacent chronotopes of the stairs, the entrance hall and the corridor, as well as the chronotopes of streets and squares that continue them, are the main places of action in his works, places where events of crises, falls, resurrections, renewals, insights, decisions take place. that determine the whole life of a person (for example, in "Crime and Punishment" - A.S.). Time in this chronotope, in essence, is an instant, as if having no duration and falling out of the normal flow of biographical time.
Unlike Dostoevsky, in the work of Leo Tolstoy, the main chronotope is biographical time, which flows in the interior spaces of noble houses and estates. Of course, in the works of Tolstoy there are crises, and falls, and renewals, and resurrections, but they are not instantaneous and do not fall out of the flow of biographical time, but are firmly soldered into it. For example, the renewal of Pierre Bezukhov was long and gradual, quite biographical. Tolstoy did not value the moment, did not seek to fill it with something significant and decisive, the word "suddenly" is rare in him and never introduces any significant event.
In the nature of chronotopes M.M. Bakhtin saw the embodiment of various value systems, as well as types of thinking about the world. So, since ancient times, two main concepts of time have been reflected in literature: cyclic and linear. The first was earlier and relied on natural cyclical processes in nature. Such a cyclic concept is reflected, for example, in Russian folklore. Christianity of the Middle Ages had its own temporal concept: linear-finalistic. It was based on the movement in time of human existence from birth to death, while death was considered as a result, a transition to some kind of stable existence: to salvation or death. Since the Renaissance, culture has been dominated by a linear concept of time associated with the concept of progress. Also, works periodically appear in literature that reflect the atemporal concept of time. These are various kinds of pastorals, idylls, utopias, etc. The world in these works does not need changes, and therefore does not need time (the far-fetchedness, the implausibility of such a flow of time is shown in his anti-utopia “We” by E. Zamyatin). On the culture and literature of the 20th century. the natural science concepts of time and space associated with the theory of relativity had a significant impact. Science fiction, which at that time entered the sphere of "high" literature, posed deep philosophical and moral problems (for example, "It's hard to be a god" by the Strugatskys), most fruitfully mastered the new ideas about time and space.
artistic time
The concept of space-time continuum is essential for the philological analysis of a literary text, since both time and space serve as constructive principles for organizing a literary work. Artistic time is a form of being of aesthetic reality, a special way of knowing the world.
Features of modeling time in literature are determined by the specifics of this type of art: literature is traditionally regarded as a temporary art; unlike painting, it recreates the concreteness of the passage of time. This feature of a literary work is determined by the properties of the linguistic means that form its figurative structure: “grammar determines for each language an order that distributes ... space in time”, transforms spatial characteristics into temporal ones.
The problem of artistic time has long occupied literary theorists, art critics, and linguists. So, A.A. Potebnya, emphasizing that the art of the word is dynamic, showed the limitless possibilities of organizing artistic time in the text. The text was considered by him as a dialectical unity of two compositional and speech forms: description (“image of features that simultaneously exist in space”) and narrative (“Narrative turns a series of simultaneous features into a series of successive perceptions, into an image of the movement of gaze and thought from object to object”) . A.A. Potebnya distinguished between real time and artistic time; having considered the correlation of these categories in the works of folklore, he noted the historical variability of artistic time. Ideas A.A. Potebni received further development in the works of philologists of the late XIX - early XX centuries. However, interest in the problems of artistic time especially revived in the last decades of the 20th century, which was associated with the rapid development of science, the evolution of views on space and time, with the acceleration of social life, with sharpened in connection with this attention to the problems of memory, origins, tradition, on the one hand; and the future, on the other hand; finally, with the emergence of new forms in art.
“The work,” P.A. Florensky - aesthetically forcibly develops ... in a certain sequence. Time in a work of art is the duration, sequence and correlation of its events, based on their causal, linear or associative relationship.
Time in the text has clearly defined or rather vague boundaries (events, for example, can cover tens of years, a year, several days, a day, an hour, etc.), which may or, on the contrary, not be indicated in the work in relation to the historical time or time set conditionally by the author (see, for example, E. Zamyatin's novel "We").
Artistic time is systemic. This is a way of organizing the aesthetic reality of a work, its inner world, and at the same time an image associated with the embodiment of the author's concept, with the reflection of precisely his picture of the world (recall, for example, M. Bulgakov's novel The White Guard). From time as an immanent property of a work, it is advisable to distinguish the time of the flow of the text, which can be considered as the time of the reader; Thus, considering a literary text, we are dealing with the antinomy "the time of the work - the time of the reader." This antinomy in the process of perception of the work can be resolved different ways. At the same time, the time of the work is also non-uniform: thus, as a result of temporary, displacements, “omissions”, highlighting the central events in close-up, the depicted time is compressed, reduced, while comparing and describing simultaneous events, on the contrary, it is stretched.
A comparison of real time and artistic time reveals their differences. The topological properties of real time in the macrocosm are one-dimensionality, continuity, irreversibility, orderliness. In artistic time, all these properties are transformed. It may be multidimensional. This is due to the very nature of a literary work, which has, firstly, an author and presupposes the presence of a reader, and secondly, boundaries: a beginning and an end. Two temporal axes appear in the text - "the axis of narration" and "the axis of the events described": "the axis of narration is one-dimensional, while the axis of the events described is multidimensional." Their correlation creates the multidimensionality of artistic time, makes temporal shifts possible, and determines the multiplicity of temporal points of view in the structure of the text. So, in a prose work, the narrator's conditional present tense is usually set, which correlates with the narrative about the past or future of the characters, with the characteristics of situations in various time dimensions. The action of the work can unfold in different time planes (“Double” by A. Pogorelsky, “Russian Nights” by V.F. Odoevsky, “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, etc.).
Irreversibility (unidirectionality) is not characteristic of artistic time either: the real sequence of events is often violated in the text. According to the law of irreversibility, only folklore time moves. In the literature of the New Age, temporal shifts, violation of the temporal sequence, and switching of temporal registers play an important role. Retrospection as a manifestation of the reversibility of artistic time is the principle of organizing a number of thematic genres (memoirs and autobiographical works, a detective novel). A retrospective in a literary text can also act as a means of revealing its implicit content - subtext.
The multidirectionality, reversibility of artistic time is especially clearly manifested in the literature of the 20th century. If Stern, according to E.M. Forster, “turned the clock upside down”, then “Marcel Proust, even more inventive, reversed the hands ... Gertrude Stein, who tried to banish time from the novel, smashed her watch to smithereens and scattered their fragments around the world..." It was in the 20th century. there is a “stream of consciousness” novel, a “one day” novel, a sequential time series in which time is destroyed, and time acts only as a component of a person’s psychological existence.
Artistic time is characterized by both continuity and discreteness. "Remaining essentially continuous in the successive change of temporal and spatial facts, the continuum in text reproduction is simultaneously broken up into separate episodes." The selection of these episodes is determined by the aesthetic intentions of the author, hence the possibility of temporary gaps, “compression” or, on the contrary, expansion of plot time, see, for example, T. Mann’s remark: “In a wonderful celebration of storytelling and reproduction, gaps play an important and indispensable role.”
The ability to expand or compress time is widely used by writers. So, for example, in the story of I.S. Turgenev's "Spring Waters" close-up highlights the story of Sanin's love for Gemma - the most striking event in the life of the hero, her emotional peak; at the same time, artistic time slows down, “stretches out”, while the subsequent life of the hero is transmitted in a generalized, total way: And there - living in Paris and all the humiliations, all the nasty torments of a slave ... Then - returning to his homeland, a poisoned, devastated life, petty fuss small chores...
Artistic time in the text appears as a dialectical unity of the finite and the infinite. In an endless stream of time, one event or their chain is singled out, their beginning and end are usually fixed. The finale of the work is a signal that the time period presented to the reader has ended, but time continues beyond it. Transformed in a literary text is such a property of works of real time as orderliness. This may be due to the subjective definition of a reference point or a measure of time: for example, in S. Bobrov’s autobiographical story “The Boy”, a holiday serves as a measure of time for the hero:
For a long time I tried to imagine what a year is ... and suddenly I saw in front of me a rather long ribbon of a grayish-pearl fog, lying horizontally in front of me, like a towel thrown on the floor.<...>Was this towel divided into months? .. No, it was imperceptible. For seasons?.. Also somehow not very clear... It was clearer otherwise. These were patterns of holidays that colored the year.
Artistic time is a unity of the private and the general. “As a manifestation of the private, it has the features of individual time and is characterized by a beginning and an end. Like a reflection limitless world it is characterized by infinity; time stream." As a unity of the discrete and the continuous, the finite and the infinite, and can act. a separate temporal situation of a literary text: “There are seconds, five or six of them pass at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, completely achieved ... As if you suddenly feel all of nature and suddenly say: yes, it’s true.” The plan of the timeless in a literary text is created through the use of repetitions, maxims and aphorisms, all sorts of reminiscences, symbols and other tropes. Artistic time in this respect can be considered as a complementary phenomenon, to the analysis of which N. Bohr's principle of complementarity is applicable (opposite means cannot be synchronously combined, two “experiences” separated in time are needed to obtain a holistic view). The antinomy "finite - infinite" is resolved in a literary text as a result of the use of conjugated, but separated in time and therefore multi-valued means, such as symbols.
Fundamentally significant for the organization of a work of art are such characteristics of artistic time as the duration / brevity of the depicted event, the homogeneity / heterogeneity of situations, the relationship of time with subject-event content (its fullness / emptyness, “emptiness”). According to these parameters, both works and fragments of text in them, forming certain temporary blocks, can be contrasted.
Artistic time is based on a certain system of linguistic means. This is primarily a system of tense forms of the verb, their sequence and opposition, transposition (figurative use) of tense forms, lexical units with temporal semantics, case forms with the meaning of time, chronological marks, syntactic constructions that create a specific time plan (for example, nominative sentences represent in the text plan of the present), names of historical figures, mythological heroes, nominations of historical events.
Of particular importance for artistic time is the functioning of verb forms, the predominance of static or dynamic in the text, the acceleration or deceleration of time depends on their correlation, their sequence determines the transition from one situation to another, and, consequently, the movement of time. Compare, for example, the following fragments of E. Zamyatin's story "Mamai": Mamai wandered lost in the unfamiliar Zagorodny. Penguin wings got in the way; his head hung like a crane by a broken samovar...
And suddenly the head tossed up, the legs began to dance like a twenty-five-year-old...
The forms of time act as signals of various subjective spheres in the structure of the narrative, cf., for example:
Gleb was lying on the sand, propping his head in his hands, it was quiet, sunny morning. Today he did not work on his mezzanine. Everything is over. They're leaving tomorrow, Ellie is packing up, everything is re-drilled. Helsingfors again...
(B. Zaitsev. Gleb's journey)
The functions of the types of temporal forms in a literary text are largely typified. As noted by V.V. Vinogradov, narrative ("event") time is determined primarily by the ratio of the dynamic forms of the past perfect tense and the past imperfect forms, acting in a procedural-long or qualitatively characterizing meaning. The latter forms are accordingly assigned to descriptions.
The time of the text as a whole is determined by the interaction of three temporal "axes":
1) calendar time, displayed mainly by lexical units with the seme "time" and dates;
2) event time, organized by the connection of all predicates of the text (primarily verb forms);
3) perceptual time, expressing the position of the narrator and the character (in this case, different lexical and grammatical means and temporary shifts are used).
Artistic and grammatical time are closely related, but they should not be equated. “Grammatical time and the time of a verbal work can differ significantly. The time of action and the time of the author and the reader are created by a combination of many factors: among them, grammatical time is only partly...”.
Artistic time is created by all elements of the text, while the means expressing temporal relations interact with the means expressing spatial relations. We confine ourselves to one example: for example, the change of constructions C; movement predicates (left the city, entered the forest, arrived in the Lower Settlement, drove up to the river, etc.) in the story of A.P. Chekhov) "On the cart", on the one hand, determines the temporal sequence of situations and forms the plot time of the text, on the other hand, reflects the movement of the character in space and participates in the creation of artistic space. To create an image of time in literary texts, spatial metaphors are regularly used.
The oldest works characterized by mythological time, a sign of which is the idea of cyclic reincarnations, "world periods". Mythological time, not in the opinion of K. Levi-Strauss, can be defined as the unity of its characteristics such as reversibility-irreversibility, synchronicity-diachronism. The present and the future in mythological time act only as various temporal incarnations of the past, which is an invariant structure. The cyclical structure of mythological time turned out to be essential for the development of art in different eras. "The exceptionally powerful focus of mythological thinking on the establishment of homo- and isomorphisms, on the one hand, made it scientifically fruitful, and on the other hand, caused its periodic revival in various historical epochs." The idea of time as a change of cycles, "eternal repetition", is present in a number of neo-mythological works of the 20th century. So, according to V.V. Ivanov, this concept is close to the image of time in the poetry of V. Khlebnikov, who "deeply felt the ways of science of his time."
In medieval culture, time was seen primarily as a reflection of eternity, while the idea of it was predominantly eschatological in nature: time begins with the act of creation and ends with the “second coming”. The orientation towards the future becomes the main direction of time - the coming exodus from time to eternity, while the metrication of time itself changes and the role of the present increases significantly, the measurement of which is associated with the spiritual life of a person: “... for the present of past objects, we have memory or memories; for the present of real objects we have a glance, an outlook, a contemplation; for the present, future objects, we have aspiration, hope, hope, ”wrote Augustine. So, in ancient Russian literature, time, as D.S. Likhachev, is not as egocentric as in the literature of the New Age. It is characterized by isolation, one-pointedness, strict observance of the real sequence of events, constant appeal to the eternal: "Medieval literature strives for the timeless, for overcoming time in depicting the highest manifestations of being - the divine establishment of the universe." The achievements of ancient Russian literature in recreating events “from the point of view of eternity” in a transformed form were used by writers of subsequent generations, in particular F.M. Dostoevsky, for whom "the temporal was ... a form of the realization of the eternal." We confine ourselves to one example - the dialogue between Stavrogin and Kirillov in the novel "Demons":
There are minutes, you get to minutes, and time suddenly stops and will be forever.
Do you hope to reach such a moment?
This is hardly possible in our time, - Nikolai Vsevolodovich also responded without any irony, slowly and, as it were, thoughtfully. - In the Apocalypse, an angel swears that there will be no more time.
I know. This is very true there; clearly and precisely. When the whole person reaches happiness, then there will be no more time, because there is no need.
Since the Renaissance, the evolutionary theory of time has been established in culture and science: spatial events become the basis for the movement of time. Time, therefore, is already understood as eternity, not opposed to time, but moving and being realized in every momentary situation. This is reflected in the literature of the New Age, which boldly violates the principle of the irreversibility of real time. Finally, the 20th century is a period of particularly bold experimentation with artistic time. The ironic judgment of Zh.P. Sartre: “... most of the major modern writers - Proust, Joyce ... Faulkner, Gide, W. Wulff - each in his own way tried to cripple time. Some of them deprived him of his past and future in order to reduce the moment from pure intuition ... Proust and Faulkner simply "decapitated" him, depriving him of the future, that is, the dimension of action and freedom.
Consideration of artistic time in its development shows that its evolution (reversibility → irreversibility → reversibility) is a progressive movement in which each higher level denies, removes its lower (previous!), contains its wealth and again removes itself in the next , third, steps.
The features of the modeling of artistic time are taken into account when determining the constitutive features of the genus, genre, and direction in literature. So, according to A.A. Potebni, "lyrics - praesens", "epos - perfectum"; the principle of recreating times can distinguish between genres: aphorisms and maxims, for example, are characterized by a real constant; reversible artistic time is inherent in memoirs, autobiographical works. The literary direction is also associated with a definite "concept of mastering time and the principles of its transmission, while, for example, the measure of the adequacy of real time is different. Thus, symbolism is characterized by the realization of the idea of eternal movement-becoming: the world develops according to the laws of the" triad with the Soul of the world - the rejection of the Soul of the world from unity - the defeat of Chaos).
At the same time, the principles of mastering artistic time are individual, this is a feature of the artist's idiostyle (for example, artistic time in the novels of L.N. Tolstoy, for example, differs significantly from the model of time in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky).
Accounting for the features of the embodiment of time in a literary text, consideration of the concept of time in it and, more broadly, in the work of the writer is a necessary part of the analysis of the work; underestimation of this aspect, absolutization of one of the particular manifestations of artistic time, identification of its properties without taking into account both objective real time and subjective time can lead to erroneous interpretations of a literary text, make the analysis incomplete, schematic.
The analysis of artistic time includes the following main points:
1) determination of the features of artistic time in the work in question:
One-dimensionality or multidimensionality;
Reversibility or irreversibility;
Linearity or violation of the time sequence;
2) selection in the temporal structure of the text of temporary plans (planes) presented in the work, and consideration of their interaction;
4) identification of signals that highlight these forms of time;
5) consideration of the entire system of temporal indicators in the text, identification of not only their direct, but also figurative meanings;
6) determination of the ratio of time historical and everyday, biographical and historical;
7) establishing the connection between artistic time and space.
Let us turn to the consideration of individual aspects of the artistic time of the text on the material of specific works (“The Past and Thoughts” by A. I. Herzen and the story by I. A. Bunin “Cold Autumn”).
"The Past and Thoughts" by A. I. Herzen: features of the temporary organization
In a literary text, a mobile, often changeable and multidimensional time perspective arises, the sequence of events in it may not correspond to their real chronology. The author of the work, in accordance with his aesthetic intentions, then expands, then “condenses” time, then slows it down; it speeds up.
In a work of art, different aspects of artistic time are correlated: plot time (the temporal length of the depicted actions and their reflection in the composition of the work) and plot time (their real sequence), author's time and subjective time of the characters. It presents different manifestations (forms) of time (domestic historical time, personal time and social time). The focus of the writer's or poet's attention may be the image of time itself, associated with the motive of movement, development, formation, with the opposition of the transient and the eternal.
Of particular interest is the analysis of the temporal organization of works in which different time plans are consistently correlated, a broad panorama of the era is given, and they embody a certain philosophy of history. Such works include the memoir-autobiographical epic "The Past and Thoughts" (1852 - 1868). This is not only the pinnacle of A.I. Herzen, but also a work of a “new form” (as defined by L.N. Tolstoy) It combines elements of different genres (autobiographies, confessions, notes, historical chronicles), combines different forms presentations and compositional-semantic types of speech, “a tombstone and confession, past and thoughts, biography, speculation, events and thoughts, heard and seen, memories and ... more memories” (A.I. Herzen). "The best ... of the books devoted to the review of one's own life" (Yu.K. Olesha), "The Past and Thoughts" - the history of the formation of a Russian revolutionary and at the same time the history of social thought in the 30-60s of the XIX century. "There is hardly any other memoir so imbued with conscious historicism."
This is a work that is characterized by a complex and dynamic temporal organization, involving the interaction of various time plans. Its principles are defined by the author himself, who noted that his work is “a story about which, about which captured memories from the past gathered here and there, thoughts stopped here and there and m "(highlighted by A.I. Herzen. - N.N.). This author's description, which opens the work, contains an indication of the basic principles of the temporal organization of the text: this is an orientation towards the subjective segmentation of one's past, freely juxtaposing different time plans, constant switching of time registers; The "thoughts" of the author are combined with a retrospective, but lacking a strict chronological sequence, a story about the events of the past, they include characteristics of persons, events and facts of different historical eras. The narrative of the past is supplemented by stage reproduction of individual situations; the story about the "past" is interrupted by text fragments that reflect the narrator's immediate position at the moment of speech or a recreated period of time.
In this construction of the work, "the methodological principle of "The Past and Thoughts" clearly affected: the incessant interaction of the general and the particular, the transitions from direct author's reflections to their subject illustration and vice versa."
Artistic time in "The Past..." is reversible (the author resurrects the events of the past), multidimensional (the action unfolds in different time planes) and non-linear (the story of the events of the past is broken by self-interruptions, reasoning, comments, assessments). The starting point, which determines the change of temporary plans in the text, is mobile and constantly moving.
The plot time of the work is, first of all, biographical, “past” time, recreated inconsistently, reflects the main stages in the formation of the author's personality.
At the heart of biographical time lies a through image of the path (road), symbolically embodying the life path of the narrator, who is looking for true knowledge and undergoes a series of trials. This traditional spatial image is realized in a system of detailed metaphors and comparisons that are regularly repeated in the text and form a through motive of movement, overcoming oneself, passing through a series of steps: The path we chose was not easy, we never left it; wounded, broken, we walked, and no one overtook us. I reached ... not to the goal, but to the place where the road goes downhill ...; ...June coming of age, with his painful work, with his rubble on the road, takes a person by surprise .; Like lost heroes in fairy tales, we were waiting at the crossroads. If you go to the right, you will lose your horse, but you will be safe yourself; if you go to the left, the horse will be safe, but you will die yourself; go ahead - everyone will leave you; if you go back - this is no longer possible, the road there for us is overgrown with grass.
These tropeic series developing in the text act as a constructive component of the biographical time of the work and form its figurative basis.
Reproducing the events of the past, evaluating them (“The past is not a proof sheet ... Not everything can be corrected. It remains as cast in metal, detailed, unchanged, dark, like bronze. People generally forget only what is not worth remembering or what they don’t understand”) and refracting through his subsequent experience, A.I. Herzen makes the most of the expressive possibilities of aspect tense forms of the verb.
The situations and facts depicted in the past are evaluated by the author in different ways: some of them are described extremely briefly, while others (the most important for the author in an emotionally aesthetic or ideological sense), on the contrary, are highlighted in a “close-up”, while time “stops” or slows down. To achieve this aesthetic effect, the forms of the past tense of the imperfective form or the present tense form are used. If the forms of the past perfect express a chain of successively changing actions, then the forms of the imperfect form do not convey the dynamics of the event, the dynamics of the action itself, presenting it as an unfolding process. Performing in a literary text not only a “reproducing”, but also a “pictorially painting”, “descriptive” function, the forms of the past imperfect stop time. In the text of The Past and Thoughts, they are used as a means of highlighting situations or events that are especially significant for the author (the oath on Sparrow Hill, the death of his father, a meeting with Natalie, leaving Russia, a meeting in Turin, the death of his wife). The choice of forms of the past imperfect as a sign of a definite copyright to the depicted performs in this case an emotionally expressive function. Wed, for example: The nurse in a sundress and a warm jacket still looked after us and cried; Sonnenberg, that amusing figure from his childhood, waved his foulard - all around was an endless steppe of snow.
This function of the forms of the past imperfect is typical of artistic speech; it is associated with the special meaning of the imperfect aspect, which implies the obligatory presence of the moment of observation, a retrospective reference point. A.I. Herzen also uses the expressive possibilities of the past imperfect form with the meaning of a repeated or habitually repetitive action: they serve to typify, generalize empirical details and situations. So, to characterize life in his father's house, Herzen uses the method of describing one day - a description based on the consistent use of forms of an imperfect form. The Past and Thoughts are thus characterized by a constant change in the perspective of the image: isolated facts and situations, highlighted in close-up, are combined with the reproduction of long-term processes, periodically repeating phenomena. In this regard, the portrait of Chaadaev is interesting, built on the transition from specific personal observations of the author to a typical description:
I loved to look at him in the midst of this tinsel nobility, windy senators, gray-haired rake and honorable nonentity. No matter how dense the crowd, the eye found him immediately; summer did not distort his slender figure, he dressed very carefully, his pale, tender face was completely motionless when he was silent, as if made of wax or marble, “a brow like a naked skull” ... For ten years he stood with folded hands , somewhere near a column, near a tree on the boulevard, in halls and theaters, in a club, and - embodied by veto, looked at the whirlwind of faces senselessly circling around him in protest ...
The forms of the present against the background of the forms of the past can also perform the function of slowing down time, the function of highlighting events and phenomena of the past in close-up, however, they, unlike the forms of the past imperfect in the "pictorial" function, primarily recreate the immediate time of the author's experience associated with the moment of the lyrical concentrations, or (less often) convey predominantly typical situations, repeatedly repeated in the past and now reconstructed by memory as imaginary:
Oaky peace and oaky noise, the incessant buzzing of flies, bees, bumblebees... and the smell... that herbal-forest smell... never found. Sometimes it seems to smell like it, after mowed hay, at wide open, before a thunderstorm ... and I remember a small place in front of the house ... on the grass a three-year-old boy, wallowing in clover and dandelions, between grasshoppers, all sorts of beetles and ladybugs, and ourselves, and youth, and friends! The sun has set, it is still very warm, I don’t feel like going home, we are sitting on the grass. The catcher picks mushrooms and scolds me for no reason. What is it like a bell? to us, right? Today is Saturday - maybe ... The troika is rolling through the village, knocking on the bridge.
The forms of the present tense in "The Past..." are associated primarily with the subjective psychological time the author, his emotional sphere, their use complicates the image of time. Recreation of events and facts of the past, again directly experienced by the author, is associated with the use of nominative sentences, and in some cases with the use of past perfect forms in the perfect sense. The chain of forms of the present historical and nominatives not only brings the events of the past as close as possible, but also conveys a subjective sense of time, recreates its rhythm:
My heart was beating strongly when I again saw familiar, native streets, places, houses that I had not seen for about four years ... Kuznetsky Most, Tverskoy Boulevard ... here is Ogarev's house, some huge coat of arms was slapped on him, he is a stranger ... here is Povarskaya - the spirit is busy: in the mezzanine, in the corner window, a candle burns, this is her room, she writes to me, she thinks of me, the candle burns so cheerfully, it burns me so.
Thus, the biographical plot time of the work is uneven and discontinuous, it is characterized by a deep, but mobile perspective; recreation of real biographical facts combined with the transfer of various aspects of subjective awareness and measurement of time by the author.
Artistic and grammatical time, as already noted, are closely related, however, "grammar appears - like a piece of smalt in the overall mosaic picture of a literary work." Artistic time is created by all elements of the text.
Lyrical expression, attention to the “moment” are combined in the prose of A.I. Herzen with constant typification, with a socio-analytical approach to the depicted. Considering that “it is more necessary for us than anywhere else to take off masks and portraits,” since “we are terribly disintegrating with what has just passed,” the author combines; “thoughts” in the present and a story about the “past” with portraits of contemporaries, while restoring the missing links in the image of the era: “universal without personality is an empty distraction; but the individual only has full reality to the extent that he is in society.
Portraits of contemporaries in "The Past and Thoughts" are conditionally possible; divided into static and dynamic. So, in chapter III of the first volume, a portrait of Nicholas I is presented, it is static and emphatically evaluated, the speech means involved in its creation contain a common semantic feature "cold": a shorn and slick jellyfish with a mustache; his beauty was cold... But the main thing was his eyes, without any warmth, without any mercy, winter eyes.
Otherwise, a portrait characteristic of Ogarev is constructed in chapter IV of the same volume. The description of his appearance is followed by an introduction; prospective elements related to the future of the hero. “If a pictorial portrait is always a moment, as it were, stopped in time, then a verbal portrait characterizes a person in “actions and deeds” related to different “moments” of his biography.” Creating a portrait of N. Ogarev in adolescence, A.I. Herzen, at the same time, names the features of the hero in maturity: Early one could see in him that anointing that not many people get - for trouble, for good luck ... but probably for not being in the crowd ... unaccountable sadness and extreme meekness shone through from gray large eyes, hinting at the future growth of a great spirit; that's how he grew up.
The combination of different temporal points of view in the portraits when describing and characterizing the characters deepens the moving temporal perspective of the work.
The multiplicity of temporal points of view presented in the structure of the text increases due to the inclusion of fragments of the diary, letters of other heroes, excerpts from literary works, in particular from N. Ogarev's poems. These elements of the text correlate with the author's narrative or author's descriptions and are often opposed to them as authentic, objective versus subjective, transformed by time. See, for example: The truth of that time, as it was then understood, without the artificial perspective provided by the distance, without being cooled by time, without corrected illumination by rays passing through the series of other events, was preserved in the notebook of that time.
The biographical time of the author is supplemented in the work with elements of the biographical time of other heroes, while A.I. Herzen resorts to detailed comparisons and metaphors that recreate the flow of time: The years of her life abroad were magnificent and noisy, but they walked and plucked flower after flower ... Like a tree in the middle of winter, she retained the linear outline of her branches, the leaves flew around, the bare boughs shivered bonyly , but the more clearly saw the majestic growth, bold dimensions. The image of a clock, which embodies the inexorable power of time, is repeatedly used in “The Past ...” ...; And the sponday of the English watch continued to measure days, hours, minutes... and finally measured it to the fateful second.
The image of fleeting time in "The Past and Thoughts", as we see, is associated with an orientation towards the traditional, often common language type of comparisons and metaphors, which, repeating in the text, undergo transformations and affect the surrounding elements of the context, as a result, the stability of tropeic characteristics is combined with their constant update.
Thus, the biographical time in "The Past and Thoughts" is made up of plot time based on the sequence of events of the author's past, and elements of the biographical time of other characters, while the subjective perception of time by the narrator, his evaluative attitude to the recreated facts is constantly emphasized. “The author is like an editor in cinematography”: he either speeds up the time of the work, then stops it, does not always correlate the events of his life with chronology, emphasizes, on the one hand, the fluidity of time, on the other hand, the duration of individual episodes resurrected by memory.
Biographical time, despite the complex perspective inherent in it, is interpreted in the work of A. Herzen as private time, suggesting the subjectivity of measurement, closed, having a beginning and an end (“Everything personal quickly crumbles ... Let the Past and Thoughts” settle accounts with personal life and will be its table of contents”). It is included in a wide stream of time associated with the historical era reflected in the work. Thus, closed biographical time is opposed to open historical time. This opposition is reflected in the peculiarities of the composition of “Past and Thoughts”: “in the sixth-seventh parts there is no longer a lyrical hero; in general, the personal, “private” fate of the author remains outside the limits of what is depicted”, “thoughts” appearing in a monologue or dialogic form become the dominant element of the author’s speech. One of the leading grammatical forms organizing these contexts is the present tense. If the plot biographical time of "Past and Thoughts" is characterized by the use of the present actual ("actual author's ... the result of moving the "observation point" to one of the moments of the past, the plot action") or the present historical, then for "thoughts" and author's digressions, constituting the main layer of historical time, the present is characteristic in an expanded or constant meaning, acting in interaction with the forms of the past tense, as well as the present of the direct author's speech: Nationality, like a banner, like a battle cry, is only surrounded by a revolutionary halo when the people are fighting for independence, when it overthrows the foreign yoke... The war of 1812 strongly developed the feeling of people's consciousness and love for the motherland, but the patriotism of 1812 did not have an Old Believer-Slavic character. We see him in Karamzin and Pushkin...
“The Past and Thoughts,” wrote A.I. Herzen is not a historical monograph, but a reflection of history in a person who accidentally got on its way.
The life of a person in "Bydrm and Dumy" is perceived in connection with a certain historical situation and is motivated by it. A metaphorical image of the background appears in the text, which is then concretized, acquiring perspective and dynamics: I wanted to convey a thousand times a series of peculiar figures, sharp portraits taken from life ... There is nothing herdlike in them ... one common connection between them, or, better, one common misfortune; peering into the dark gray background, one can see soldiers under sticks, serfs under rods ... wagons rushing to Siberia, convicts trudging there, shaved foreheads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes, sultans ... in a word, St. Petersburg Russia .. They want to run off the canvas and they can't.
If the biographical time of the work is characterized by a spatial image of the road, then to represent historical time, in addition to the image of the background, images of the sea (ocean), elements are regularly used:
Conveniently impressionable, sincerely young, we were easily picked up by a powerful wave ... and early crossed that line at which whole rows of people stop, fold their hands, go back or look around for a ford - across the sea!
In history, it is easier for him [man] to be carried away by the flow of events ... than to peer into the ebb and flow of the waves that carry him. A man ... grows by understanding his position, into a helmsman who proudly cuts the waves with his boat, forcing the bottomless abyss to serve as a way of communication.
Describing the role of the individual in historical process, A.I. Herzen resorts to a number of metaphorical correspondences that are inextricably linked with each other: a person in history is “at once a boat, a wave and a helmsman”, while everything that exists is connected by “ends and beginnings, causes and actions”. Man's aspirations are "clothed with a word, embodied in an image, remain in tradition and are transmitted from century to century." Such an understanding of the place of man in the historical process led the author to turn to the universal language of culture, the search for certain "formulas" to explain the problems of history and, more broadly, being, to classify particular phenomena and situations. Such “formulas” in the text of “The Past and Thoughts” are a special type of tropes, characteristic of the style of A.I. Herzen. These are metaphors, comparisons, paraphrases, which include the names of historical figures, literary heroes, mythological characters, names of historical events, words denoting historical and cultural concepts. These "point quotes" appear in the text as metonymic substitutions for integral situations and plots. The paths they are part of serve to figurative characteristics phenomena, of which Herzen was a contemporary, persons and events of other historical epochs. See, for example: Young students - Jacobins, Saint-Just in the Amazon - everything is sharp, clean, merciless ...; [Moscow] with murmuring and contempt received within its walls a woman stained with the blood of her husband [Catherine II], this Lady Macbeth without remorse, this Lucretia Borgia without Italian blood...
Phenomena of history and modernity, empirical facts and myths, real faces and literary images are compared, as a result, the situations described in the work get a second plan: the general comes through the particular, the repeating through the singular, the eternal through the transient.
The correlation in the structure of the work of two temporal layers: private time, biographical time and historical time - leads to the complication of the subjective organization of the text. The author's self alternates with we, which in different contexts acquires a different meaning: it either points to the author, then to persons close to him, then, with the strengthening of the role of historical time, it serves as a means of pointing to the entire generation, the national collective, or even, more broadly, to the human race. generally:
Our historical vocation, our deed lies in the fact that by our disappointment, by our suffering we reach humility and humility before the truth and deliver the next generations from these sorrows...
In the connection of generations, the unity of the human race is affirmed, the history of which appears to the author as a relentless striving forward, a path that has no end, but which, however, involves the repetition of certain motives. The same repetitions of A.I. Herzen also finds in human life, the course of which, from his point of view, has a peculiar rhythm:
Yes, in life there is a predilection for a returning rhythm, for the repetition of a motive; who does not know how close elderhood is to childhood? Look closely, and you will see that on both sides of the full swing of life, with its wreaths of flowers and thorns, with its cradles and coffins, epochs are often repeated, similar in main features.
It is historical time that is especially important for the narrative: the formation of the era is reflected in the formation of the hero of "The Past and Thoughts", biographical time is not only opposed to historical, but also acts as one of its manifestations.
The dominant images that characterize in the text both biographical time (the image of the path) and historical time (the image of the sea, the elements) interact, their connection gives rise to the movement of private cross-cutting images associated with the deployment of the dominant: I am not going from London. There is nowhere and there is no need ... It was washed up and thrown here by the waves, so ruthlessly breaking, twisting me and everything close to me.
Interaction in the text of different time plans, correlation in the product of biographical time and historical time, “reflection of history in a person” are the distinctive features of A.I. Herzen. These principles of temporary organization determine the figurative structure of the text and are reflected in the language of the work.
Questions and tasks
1. Read the story of A.P. Chekhov "Student".
2. What time plans are compared in this text?
3. Consider speech means of expressing temporary relationships. What role do they play in creating the artistic time of the text?
4. What manifestations (forms) of time are presented in the text of the story "Student"?
5. How are time and space related in this text? What chronotope, in your opinion, underlies the story?
The story of I.A. Bunin "Cold Autumn": the conceptualization of time
In a literary text, time is not only eventful, but also conceptual: the time stream as a whole and its individual segments are divided, evaluated, comprehended by the author, narrator or heroes of the work. Conceptualization of time is a special representation of it in an individual or folk painting world, the interpretation of the meaning of its forms, phenomena and signs - is manifested:
1) in the assessments and comments of the narrator or character included in the text: And much, much has been experienced over these two years, which seem so long, when you carefully think about them, sort through in your memory everything that is magical, incomprehensible, incomprehensible either by mind or heart what is called the past (I. Bunin. Cold autumn);
2) in the use of paths that characterize different signs of time: Time, a timid chrysalis, a cabbage sprinkled with flour, a young Jewish woman clinging to the watchmaker's window - you better not look! (O. Mandelstam. Egyptian stamp);
3) in the subjective perception and division of the temporal flow in accordance with the reference point adopted in the narrative;
4) in contrasting different time plans and aspects of time in the structure of the text.
For the temporal (temporal) organization of a work and its composition, it is usually significant, firstly, the comparison or opposition of past and present, present and future, past and future, past, present and future, and secondly, the opposition of such aspects of artistic time as duration - one-time (instantaneity), transience - duration, repeatability - the singularity of a single moment, temporality - eternity, cyclicality - the irreversibility of time. Both in a lyrical and prose work, the flow of time and its subjective perception can serve as the theme of the text, in this case its temporal organization, as a rule, correlates with its composition, and the concept of time reflected in the text and embodied in its temporal images and the nature of division time series serves as a key to its interpretation.
Consider in this aspect the story of I.A. Bunin "Cold Autumn" (1944), which is part of the cycle "Dark Alleys". Build the text as a first-person narration and is characterized by a retrospective composition: it is based on the heroine's memories. “The plot of the story turns out to be built into the situation of the verbal and cogitative action of recollection (highlighted by M.Ya. Dymarsky. - N.N.) .. The situation of recollection becomes the only main plot of the work.” Before us, therefore, is the subjective time of the heroine of the story.
Compositionally, the text consists of three unequal parts: the first, which forms the basis of the narrative, is constructed as a description of the heroine's engagement and her farewell to her fiancé on a cold September evening in 1914; the second contains generalized information about the thirty years of the subsequent life of the heroine; in the third, extremely brief, part, the ratio of “one evening” - a moment of farewell - and the whole life lived is assessed: But, remembering everything that I have experienced since then, I always ask myself: what did happen in my life? And I answer myself: only that cold autumn evening. Has he ever been? Still, there was. And that's all that was in my life - the rest is an unnecessary dream.
The unevenness of the compositional parts of the text is a way of organizing its artistic time: it serves as a means of subjective segmentation of the temporal flow and reflects the peculiarities of its perception by the heroine of the story, expresses her temporal assessments. The unevenness of the parts determines the special temporal rhythm of the work, which is based on the predominance of statics over dynamics.
Close-up the text highlights the scene of the last meeting of the characters, in which each of them or a replica turns out to be significant, cf .:
Left alone, we stayed a little longer in the dining room, - I decided to play solitaire, - he silently walked from corner to corner, then demand]
Do you want to walk a little? My heart was becoming more and more difficult, I answered indifferently:
Well ... Dressing in the hallway, he continued to think something, with a sweet smile, he remembered Fet's poems: What a cold autumn! Put on your shawl and hood...
The movement of objective time in the text slows down, and then stops: the “moment” in the heroine’s memories acquires duration, and “the physical space turns out to be only a symbol, a sign of some element of experience, capturing the heroes, mastering them”:
At first it was so dark that I held on to his sleeve. Then black boughs began to appear in the brightening sky, showered with minerally shining stars. He paused and turned towards the house.
Look how very special, in autumn, the windows of the house shine ...
At the same time, the description of the “farewell evening” includes figurative means that clearly have a prospective nature: associated with the realities depicted, they associatively indicate future (in relation to the described) tragic upheavals. So, the epithets cold, icy, black (cold autumn, ice stars, black sky) are associated with the image of death, and in the epithet autumn, the semes “leaving”, “farewell” are actualized (see, for example: windows of the house, or: There is some kind of rustic autumn charm in these verses). The cold autumn of 1914 is depicted as the threshold of the fatal "winter" (the air is completely wintry) with its coldness, darkness and cruelty. A metaphor from a poem by A. Fet: ... As if a fire rises - in the context of the whole, it expands its meaning and serves as a sign of impending cataclysms, which the heroine does not know about and which her fiancé foresees:
What fire?
Moonrise, of course... Oh, my God, my God!
Nothing, dear friend. Still sad. Sad and good.
The duration of the “farewell evening” is contrasted in the second part of the story by the summary characteristics of the next thirty years of the narrator’s life, and the concreteness and “domesticity” of the spatial images of the first part (estate, house, office, dining room, garden) are replaced by a list of names of foreign cities and countries: In winter, in hurricane, sailed with a myriad of other refugees from Novorossiysk to Turkey ... Bulgaria, Serbia, Czech Republic, Belgium, Paris, Nice ...
As we can see, the compared time intervals are associated with different spatial images: a farewell party, first of all, with the image of the house, the duration of life, with many loci, the names of which form an unordered, open chain. The chronotope of the idyll is transformed into the chronotope of the threshold, and then is replaced by the chronotope of the road.
The uneven division of the temporal flow corresponds to the compositional-syntactic division of the text - its paragraph structure, which also serves as a way of conceptualizing time.
The first compositional part of the story is characterized by the fragmentation of paragraph division: in the description of the “farewell evening”, different microthemes replace each other - designations of individual events that are of particular importance for the heroine and stand out, as already noted, in close-up.
The second part of the story is one paragraph, although it tells about events that seem to be more significant both for the personal biographical time of the heroine and for historical time (the death of her parents, trading in the market in 1918, marriage, flight to the south , Civil War, emigration, death of husband). “The separateness of these events is removed by the fact that the significance of each of them turns out to be no different for the narrator from the significance of the previous or subsequent one. In a certain sense, they are all so similar that they merge in the mind of the narrator into one continuous stream: the narrative about it is devoid of internal pulsation of assessments (monotonicity of rhythmic organization), devoid of a pronounced compositional division into microepisodes (microevents) and is therefore enclosed in one "solid" paragraph ". It is characteristic that, within its framework, many events in the life of the heroine are either not singled out at all, or are not motivated, and the facts preceding them are not restored, cf .: In the spring of the eighteenth year, when neither father nor mother was already alive, I lived in Moscow , in the basement of a tradeswoman on the Smolensk market ... Neither the cause of death (possibly death) of the parents, nor the events in the life of the heroine from 1914 to 1918 are named in the story.
Thus, the "farewell party" - the plot of the first part of the story - and thirty years of the subsequent life of the heroine are contrasted not only on the basis of "instant / duration", but also on the basis of "significance / insignificance". The omissions of time segments give the story a tragic tension and emphasize the impotence of a person in front of fate.
The value attitude of the heroine to various events and, accordingly, time periods of the past is manifested in their direct assessments in the text of the story: the main biographical time is defined by the heroine as a “dream”, and the dream is “unnecessary”, it is opposed to only one “cold autumn evening”, which has become the only content of the lived life and its justification. At the same time, it is characteristic that the present of the heroine (I lived and still live in Nice than God sends ...) is interpreted by her as an integral part of the “dream” and thereby acquires a sign of unreality. “Dream”-life and one evening opposed to it differ, therefore, in terms of modal characteristics: only one “moment” of life, resurrected by the heroine in her memories, is assessed by her as real, as a result, the opposition of past and present, traditional for artistic speech, is removed. In the text of the story "Cold Autumn", the described September evening loses its temporal localization in the past, moreover, it opposes it as the only real point in the course of life - the present of the heroine merges with the past and acquires signs of illusory, illusory. In the last compositional part of the story, the temporal already correlates with the eternal: And I believe, fervently believe: somewhere there he is waiting for me - with the same love and youth as on that evening. “Live, rejoice in the world, then come to me ...” I lived, rejoiced, now I will come soon.
Participating in eternity is, as we see, the memory of the individual, establishing a connection between the only evening in the past and timelessness. Memory lives with love, which allows "to get out of individuality into the All-Unity and from earthly existence into metaphysical true existence."
It is interesting in this regard to refer to the plan of the future in the story. Against the background of the past tense forms prevailing in the text, a few forms of the future stand out - the forms of “volition” and “openness” (V.N. Toporov), which, as a rule, are devoid of evaluative neutrality. All of them are semantically united: these are either verbs with the semantics of memory / oblivion, or verbs that develop the motive of expectation and a future meeting in another world, cf .: I will be alive, I will always remember this day; If they kill me, you still won't forget me right away? .. - Will I really forget him in some short time? .. Well, if they kill me, I'll wait for you there. You live, rejoice in the world, then come to me. - I lived, I was glad, now I will come soon.
It is characteristic that statements containing forms of the future tense, located at a distance in the text, correlate with each other as replicas of a lyrical dialogue. This dialogue continues thirty years after it began and overcomes the power of real time. The future for Bunin's heroes turns out to be connected not with earthly existence, not with objective time with its linearity and irreversibility, but with memory and eternity. It is the duration and strength of the heroine's memories that serve as an answer to her youthful question-reasoning: And will I really forget him in some short time - after all, everything is eventually forgotten? In the memories of the heroines continue to live and turn out to be more real than her present, and the deceased father and mother, and the groom who died in Galicia, and the clear stars over the autumn garden, and the samovar after the farewell dinner, and the lines of Fet, read by the groom and, in turn , also preserving the memory of the departed (There is some kind of rustic autumn charm in these verses: “Put on your shawl and hood ...” The times of our grandfathers and grandmothers ...).
The energy and creative power of memory free individual moments of existence from fluidity, fragmentation, insignificance, enlarge them, reveal in them the "secret patterns" of fate or the highest meaning, as a result, the true time is established - the time of the narrator's or hero's consciousness, which opposes the "unnecessary dream" of being unique moments, imprinted forever in the memory. Thus, the presence in it of moments involved in eternity and freed from the power of irreversible physical time is recognized as the measure of human life.
Questions and tasks
1. 1. Re-read the story of I. A. Bunin "In a familiar street."
2. What compositional parts divide the text into repeated quotes from a poem by Ya. P. Polonsky?
3. What time periods are displayed in the text? How do they relate to each other?
4. What aspects of time are especially significant for the construction of this text? Name the speech means that distinguish them.
5. How do the plans of the past, present and future correlate in the text of the story?
6. What is the originality of the ending of the story and its surprise for the reader? Compare the endings of the stories "Cold Autumn" and "In a familiar street." What are their similarities and differences?
7. What concept of time is reflected in the story "In a familiar street"?
II. Analyze the temporal organization of V. Nabokov's story "Spring in Fialta". Prepare the message "Artistic time of V. Nabokov's story "Spring in Fialta"".
art space
Text space, i.e. text elements have a certain spatial configuration. Hence the theoretical and practical possibility of spatial interpretation of tropes and figures, the structure of the narrative. So, Ts. Todorov notes: “The most systematic study of the spatial organization in fiction was carried out by Roman Yakobson. In his analyzes of poetry, he showed that all layers of the utterance ... form an established structure based on symmetries, growths, oppositions, parallelisms, etc., which together add up to a real spatial structure. A similar spatial structure also occurs in prose texts, see, for example, repetitions different types and the system of oppositions in the novel by A.M. Remizov "Pond". Repetitions in it are elements of the spatial organization of chapters, parts and the text as a whole. So, in the chapter “One Hundred Mustaches - One Hundred Noses”, the phrase The walls are white-white is repeated three times, they shine from the lamp, as if strewn with grated glass, and the leitmotif of the whole novel is the repetition of the sentence Stone Frog (highlighted by A.M. Remizov. - N.N. ) moved with ugly webbed paws, which is usually included in a complex syntactic construction with varying lexical composition.
The study of the text as a certain spatial organization thus involves consideration of its volume, configuration, system of repetitions and oppositions, analysis of such topological properties of space, transformed in the text, as symmetry and coherence. It is also important to take into account the graphic form of the text (see, for example, palindromes, curly verses, the use of brackets, paragraphs, spaces, the special nature of the distribution of words in a verse, line, sentence), etc. “They often indicate,” I. Klyukanov notes, “ that poetic texts are printed differently from other texts. However, to a certain extent, all texts are printed differently than the rest: at the same time, the graphic appearance of the text “signals” about its genre affiliation, about its attachment to one or another type of speech activity and forces it to a certain way of perception ... So - "spatial architectonics" text acquires a kind of normative status. This norm can be violated by unusual structural placement of graphic signs, which causes a stylistic effect.
In a narrow sense, space in relation to a literary text is the spatial organization of its events, inextricably linked with the temporal organization of the work and the system of spatial images of the text. According to Kestner, "space in this case functions in the text as an operative secondary illusion, that through which spatial properties are realized in temporal art."
Thus, there is a difference between a broad and a narrow understanding of space. This is due to the distinction between the external point of view on the text as a certain spatial organization that is perceived by the reader, and the internal point of view considering the spatial characteristics of the text itself as a relatively closed inner world with self-sufficiency. These points of view do not exclude, but complement each other. When analyzing a literary text, it is important to take into account both of these aspects of space: the first is the “spatial architectonics” of the text, the second is the “artistic space”. In the future, the main object of consideration is precisely the artistic space of the work.
The writer reflects real space-time connections in the work he creates, building his own, perceptual, parallel to the real series, and creates a new - conceptual - space, which becomes a form of realization of the author's idea. To the artist, wrote M.M. Bakhtin, but “the ability to see time, to read time in the spatial whole of the world and ... to perceive the filling of space not as not; moving background... but as a becoming whole, as an event.
Artistic space is one of the forms of aesthetic reality created by the author. This is the dialectical unity of contradictions: based on the objective connection of spatial characteristics (real or possible), it is subjective, it is infinite and at the same time finite.
In the text, being displayed, the general properties of real space are transformed and have a special character: length, continuity - discontinuity, three-dimensionality - and its particular properties: shape, location, distance, boundaries between different systems. In a specific work, one of the properties of space can come to the fore and be specially played up, see, for example, the geometrization of urban space in A. Bely's novel "Petersburg" and the use of images in it associated with the designation of discrete geometric objects (cube, square, parallelepiped, line, etc.): There, the houses merged in cubes into a systematic, multi-storey row ...
Inspiration seized the senator's soul when the Nevskog line was cut by a lacquered cube: one could see the house numbering there...
The spatial characteristics of the events recreated in the text are refracted through the prism of the perception of the author (the leader, the character), see, for example:
The feeling of the city never corresponded to the place where my life flowed in it. Spiritual pressure always threw him into the depths of the described perspective. There, puffing, the clouds trampled about, and, pushing aside their crowd, the smoke of innumerable stoves hung across the sky. There, in lines, as if along the embankments, the porches were dipping into the snow with collapsing houses...
(B. Pasternak. Certificate of protection)
In a literary text, the space of the narrator (narrator) and the space of characters are distinguished accordingly. Their interaction makes the artistic space of the entire work multidimensional, voluminous and devoid of homogeneity, while at the same time, the space of the narrator remains dominant in terms of creating the integrity of the text and its internal unity, the mobility of the point of view of which allows you to combine different angles of description and image. The means of expressing spatial relations in the text and indicating various spatial characteristics are linguistic means: syntactic constructions with the meaning of location, existential sentences, prepositional-case forms with local meaning, verbs of motion, verbs with the meaning of finding a feature in space, adverbs of place, toponyms, etc. ., see, for example: Crossing the Irtysh. The steamboat stopped the ferry... On the other side there is a steppe: yurts, similar to kerosene tanks, a house, cattle... From that side the Kirghiz are coming... (M. Prishvin); A minute later they passed the sleepy desk, stepped out onto the deep, hub-deep sand, and silently sat down in a dusty cab. A gentle ascent uphill among rare crooked lanterns ... seemed endless ... (I.A. Bunin).
“Reproduction (image) of space and an indication of it are included in the work as pieces of a mosaic. Associating, they form a general panorama of space, the image of which can develop into an image of space. The image of artistic space can be of a different nature, depending on what model of the world (time and space) the writer or poet has (whether space is understood, for example, “in a Newtonian way” or mythopoetically).
In the archaic model of the world, space is not opposed to time, time thickens and becomes a form of space, which is “drawn” into the movement of time. “Mythopoetic space is always filled and always material, besides space, there is also non-space, the embodiment of which is Chaos...” Mythopoetic ideas about space, which are so essential for writers, were embodied in a number of mythologemes that are consistently used in literature in a number of stable images. This is, first of all, the image of a path (road), which can involve movement both horizontally and vertically (see folklore works) and is characterized by the selection of a number of equally significant spatial: points, topographic objects - a threshold, a door, a staircase, a bridge, etc. These images, associated with the division of both time and space, metaphorically represent a person's life, its certain moments of crisis, his search on the verge of "one's own" and "alien" worlds, embody movement, point to its limit and symbolize the possibility of choice; they are widely used in poetry and prose, see, for example: Not Joy Wait to cross this prag. While you are here - nothing has died, / Step over - and the sweet is gone (V.A. Zhukovsky); I pretended to be mortal in winter / And the eternal ones closed the doors forever, / But they will still recognize my voice, / And yet they will believe him again (A. Akhmatova).
The space modeled in the text can be open and closed (closed), see, for example, the opposition of these two types of space in F.M. Dostoyevsky: Our prison stood on the edge of the fortress, at the very ramparts. It happened that you looked through the cracks of the fence at the light of day: would you see at least something? - and only you will see that the edge of the sky and a high earthen rampart, overgrown with weeds, and back and forth along the rampart, day and night, sentries pace ... On one side of the fence there are strong gates, always locked, always guarded day and night by sentries ; they were unlocked on demand, for release to work. Behind these gates was a bright, free world...
In a stable way, associated with a closed, limited "space, the image of a wall serves in prose and poetry; Remizov "In captivity", opposed to the reversible in the text and multidimensional image of a bird as a symbol of will.
Space can be represented in text as expanding or contracting in relation to a character or a specific object being described. So, in the story of F.M. Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man", the transition from reality to the hero's dream, and then back to reality, is based on the technique of changing spatial characteristics: the closed space of the hero's "small room" is replaced by an even narrower space of the grave, and then the narrator finds himself in a different, ever expanding space, at the end of the story, the space narrows again, cf .: We rushed in darkness and unknown spaces. I have long ceased to see constellations familiar to the eye. It was already morning ... I woke up in the same armchairs, my candle was all burned out, we were sleeping by the chestnut tree, and there was silence around us, rare in our apartment.
The expansion of space can be motivated by the gradual expansion of the hero's experience, his knowledge of the outside world, see, for example, the novel by I.A. Bunin "The Life of Arseniev": . The world was expanding before us... The garden is cheerful, green, but already known to us... And here is the barnyard, the stable, the carriage house, the barn on the threshing floor, the Failure...
According to the degree of generalization of spatial characteristics, specific space and abstract space (not associated with specific local indicators) are distinguished, cf.: It smelled of coal, burnt oil and that smell of disturbing and mysterious space that always happens at railway stations (A. Platonov). - Despite the endless space, the world was comfortable in this early hour(A. Platonov).
The space actually seen by the character or the narrator is complemented by an imaginary space. The space given in the perception of a character can be characterized by a deformation associated with the reversibility of its elements and a special point of view on it: Shadows from trees and bushes, like comets, fell with sharp clicks on a sloping plain ... He lowered his head down and saw that the grass ... it seemed to grow deep and far away and that above it there was water, transparent as a mountain spring, and the grass seemed to be the bottom of some light, transparent to the very depths of the sea ... (N.V. Gogol. Viy).
Significant for the figurative system of the work and the degree of space filling. So, in the story of A.M. Gorky's "Childhood" with the help of repetitive lexical means (primarily the word cramped and derivatives from it), the "crowding" of the space surrounding the hero is emphasized. The sign of tightness extends both to the external world and to the inner world of the character and interacts with the through repetition of the text - the repetition of the words melancholy, boredom: Boring, somehow especially boring, almost unbearable; the chest is filled with liquid, warm lead, it presses from the inside, bursting the chest, ribs; it seems to me that I swell up like a bubble, and I feel cramped in a small room, under a mushroom-shaped ceiling.
The image of the tightness of space correlates in the story with the through image of "a close, stuffy circle of terrible impressions in which he lived - and still lives - a simple Russian man."
Elements of the transformed artistic space can be associated in the work with the theme of historical memory, thus historical time interacts with certain spatial images that are usually intertextual in nature, see, for example, the novel by I.A. Bunin "The Life of Arseniev": And soon I again set off on wanderings. I was on those very banks of the Donets, where the prince once rushed from captivity “like an ermine into a reed, a white gogol into the water” ... And from Kyiv I went to Kursk, to Putivl. “Saddle, brother, your greyhounds, and my tees are ready, saddle up ahead at Kursk ...”
Artistic space is inextricably linked with artistic time.
The relationship of time and space in a literary text is expressed in the following main aspects:
1) two simultaneous situations are depicted in the work as spaced apart, juxtaposed (see, for example, Hadji Murad by L.N. Tolstoy, The White Guard by M. Bulgakov);
2) the spatial point of view of the observer (character or I narrator) is at the same time his temporal point of view, while the optical point of view can be both static and moving (dynamic): ... So we completely got out, crossed the bridge, climbed to the barrier - and a stone, deserted road looked into my eyes, vaguely whitening and running away and endless distance ... (I.A. Bunin. Sukhodol);
3) a temporal shift usually corresponds to a spatial shift (for example, the transition to the present narrator in I.A. Bunin’s Life of Arseniev is accompanied by a sharp shift in spatial position: A whole life has passed since then. Russia, Orel, spring ... And now, France , South, mediterranean winter days We ... have long been in a foreign country);
4) the acceleration of time is accompanied by the compression of space (see, for example, the novels of F.M. Dostoevsky);
5) on the contrary, time dilation can be accompanied by an expansion of space, hence, for example, detailed descriptions of spatial coordinates, scenes, interiors, etc.;
6) the flow of time is transmitted through a change in spatial characteristics: "The signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time." So, in the story of A.M. Gorky's "Childhood", in the text of which there are almost no specific temporal indicators (dates, an accurate count of time, signs of historical time), the movement of time is reflected in the spatial movement of the hero, his milestones are moving from Astrakhan to Nizhny, and then moving from one house to another , cf .: By spring, the uncles were divided ... and the grandfather bought himself a large, interesting house on Polevaya; Grandfather unexpectedly sold the house to the tavern keeper, buying another, along Kanatnaya Street;
7) the same speech means can express both temporal and spatial characteristics, see, for example: ... they promised to write, they never wrote, everything was cut off forever, Russia began, exiles, water froze in the morning in a bucket, children grew up healthy, the steamer ran along the Yenisei on a bright June day, and then there was St. Petersburg, an apartment on Ligovka, crowds of people in the Tauride courtyard, then there was a front for three years, wagons, rallies, bread rations, Moscow, Alpine Goat, then Gnezdnikovsky, famine, theaters, work in a book expedition ... (Yu. Trifonov. It was a summer afternoon).
To embody the motif of the movement of time, metaphors and comparisons containing spatial images are regularly used, see, for example: A long staircase descending down grew out of days, about which one cannot say: “Lived”. They passed close, slightly touching the shoulders, and at night ... it was clearly visible: all the same, flat steps were going in a zigzag (S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. Babaev).
Awareness of the relationship of space-time made it possible to single out the category of the chronotope, reflecting their unity. “The essential interconnection of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature,” wrote M. M. Bakhtin, “we will call the chronotope (which means “time-space” in literal translation).” From the point of view of M.M. Bakhtin, the chronotope is a formal-content category that has “an essential genre significance... The chronotope, as a formal-content category, also determines (to a large extent) the image of a person in literature. The chronotope has a certain structure: plot-forming motives are singled out on its basis - meeting, separation, etc. Appeal to the category of chronotope allows us to build a certain typology of spatio-temporal characteristics inherent in thematic genres: for example, the idyllic chronotope is distinguished, which is characterized by the unity of place, the rhythmic cyclicity of time, attachment of life to a place - home, etc., and adventurous chronotope, which is characterized by a wide spatial background and the time of the "case". On the basis of the chronotope, "localities" (in the terminology of M.M. Bakhtin) are also distinguished - stable images based on the intersection of temporal and spatial "series" (castle, living room, salon, provincial town, etc.).
Artistic space, like artistic time, is historically changeable, which is reflected in the change of chronotopes and is associated with a change in the concept of space-time. As an example, let us dwell on the features of the artistic space in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and in the New Age.
"Space medieval world is a closed system with sacred centers and mundane periphery. The cosmos of Neoplatonic Christianity is graduated and hierarchized. The experience of space is colored with religious and moral tones. The perception of space in the Middle Ages usually does not imply an individual point of view on the subject or; a series of items. As noted by D.S. Likhachev, “events in the annals, in the lives of saints, in historical stories - this is the main way of moving in space: campaigns and crossings, covering vast geographical spaces ... Life is; manifestation in space. This is a journey on a ship among the sea of \u200b\u200blife. Spatial characteristics are consistently symbolic (up - down, west - east, circle, etc.). “The symbolic approach provides that ecstasy of thought, that pre-rationalist vagueness of the boundaries of identification, that content of rational thinking, which elevate the understanding of life to its highest level.” At the same time, medieval man still recognizes himself in many respects as an organic part of nature, so a view of nature from the outside is alien to him. characteristic feature of folk medieval culture- awareness of the inextricable connection with nature, the absence of rigid boundaries between the body and the world.
In the Renaissance, the concept of perspective (“viewing”, as defined by A. Dürer) was established. The Renaissance succeeded in completely rationalizing the space. It was during this period that the concept of a closed cosmos was replaced by the concept of infinity, which exists not only as a divine prototype, but also empirically as a natural reality. The image of the Universe is deteologized. The theocentric time of medieval culture is replaced by a three-dimensional space with a fourth dimension - time. This is connected, on the one hand, with the development of an objectifying attitude towards reality in the personality; on the other hand, with the expansion of the sphere of "I" and the subjective principle in art. In works of literature, spatial characteristics are consistently associated with the point of view of the narrator or character (cf. direct perspective in painting), and the significance of the position of the latter gradually increases in literature. A certain system of speech means is being formed, reflecting both the static and dynamic point of view of the character.
In the XX century. a relatively stable object-spatial concept is replaced by an unstable one (see, for example, the impressionistic fluidity of space in time). Bold experimentation with time is complemented by equally bold experimentation with space. Thus, "one day" novels often correspond to "enclosed space" novels. The text can simultaneously combine a spatial point of view "from a bird's eye view" and an image of a locus from a specific position. The interaction of time plans is combined with deliberate spatial uncertainty. Writers often turn to the deformation of space, which is reflected in the special nature of speech means. So, for example, in K. Simon's novel "Roads of Flanders", the elimination of precise temporal and spatial characteristics is associated with the rejection of personal forms of the verb and replacing them with forms of present participles. The complication of the narrative structure determines the multiplicity of spatial points of view in one work and their interaction (see, for example, the works of M. Bulgakov, Yu. Dombrovsky, and others).
At the same time in the literature of the XX century. there is a growing interest in mytho-poetic images and the mythopoetic model of space-time (see, for example, the poetry of A. Blok, the poetry and prose of A. Bely, and the works of V. Khlebnikov). Thus, changes in the concept of time-space in science and in human perception of the world are inextricably linked with the nature of the space-time continuum in works of literature and the types of images that embody time and space. The reproduction of space in the text is also determined by the literary direction to which the author belongs: naturalism, for example, seeking to create the impression of genuine activity, is characterized by detailed descriptions of various localities: streets, squares, houses, etc.
Let us now dwell on the method of describing spatial relations in a literary text.
The analysis of spatial relations in a work of art involves:
2) identifying the nature of these positions (dynamic - static; top-bottom, bird's eye view, etc.) in their connection with a temporal point of view;
3) determination of the main spatial characteristics of the work (the scene of action and its change, the movement of the character, the type of space, etc.);
4) consideration of the main spatial images of the work;
5) characteristics of speech means expressing spatial relationships. The latter, of course, corresponds to the various stages of analysis noted above, and forms the basis.
Consider the ways of expressing spatial relations in the story of I.A. Bunin "Easy breathing".
The temporal organization of this text has repeatedly attracted researchers. Having described the differences between “disposition” and “composition”, L.S. Vygotsky noted: “... Events are connected and linked in such a way that they lose their worldly burden and opaque haze; they are melodically linked to each other, and in their growths, resolutions and transitions, they seem to untie the threads that bind them together; they are released from those ordinary connections in which they are given to us in life and in the impression of life; he renounces reality...” The complex temporal organization of the text corresponds to its spatial organization.
In the structure of the narrative, there are three main spatial points of view (the narrator, Olya Meshcherskaya and the class lady). The speech means of their expression are the nominations of spatial realities, prepositional case forms: local meaning, adverbs of place, verbs with the meaning of movement in space, verbs with the meaning of a non-procedural color feature localized in a specific situation (Further, between the monastery and the prison, a cloudy slope turns white the sky and the spring field turns gray); finally, the very order of the components in the composed series, reflecting the direction of the optical point of view: She [Olya] looked at the young king, painted in full growth in the middle of some brilliant hall, at the even parting in the milky, neatly ruffled hair of the boss and was silent expectantly.
All three points of view in the text are brought closer to each other by the repetition of lexemes cold, fresh and derivatives from them. Their correlation creates an oxymoron way of life-death. The interaction of different points of view determines the heterogeneity of the artistic space of the text.
The alternation of heterogeneous time periods is reflected in a change in spatial characteristics and a change in scenes of action; cemetery - gymnasium garden - cathedral street - boss's office - station - garden - glass veranda - cathedral street - (peace) - cemetery - gymnasium garden. In a number of spatial characteristics, as we see, repetitions are found, the rhythmic convergence of which organizes the beginning and end of the work, characterized by elements of a ring composition. At the same time, members of this series enter into oppositions: first of all, “open space - closed space” is contrasted, cf., for example: a spacious county cemetery - the boss’s office or a glass veranda. The spatial images repeated in the text are also opposed to each other: on the one hand, the grave, the cross on it, the cemetery, developing the motive of death (death), on the other hand, the spring wind, an image traditionally associated with the motives of will, life, open space. Bunin uses the technique of comparing narrowing and expanding spaces. The tragic events in the life of the heroine are connected with the space narrowing around her; see, for example: ... a Cossack officer, ugly and of a plebeian appearance ... shot her on the platform of the station, among a large crowd of people ... (in the final to infinity) space: Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy world, in this cold spring wind. Thus, consideration of the spatial organization " Easy breathing” confirms the conclusions of L.S. Vygotsky about the originality of the ideological and aesthetic content of the story, reflected in its construction.
So, taking into account spatial characteristics and considering the artistic space is an important part of the philological analysis of the text.
Questions and tasks
1. Read the story of I.A. Bunin "In a familiar street."
2. Identify the leading spatial point of view in the narrative structure.
3. Determine the main spatial characteristics of the text. How do the places of action allocated in it correlate with the two main time plans of the text (past and present)?
4. What role in the organization of the text of the story is played by its intertextual connections - the quotations from the poem by Ya. P. Polonsky repeated in it? What spatial images stand out in Polonsky's poem and in the text of the story?
5. Indicate speech means expressing spatial relationships in the text. What is their uniqueness?
6. Determine the type of artistic space in the text under consideration and show its dynamics.
7. Do you agree with the opinion of M.M. Bakhtin that “every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of chronotopes”? What chronotopes can you note in Bunin's story? Show the plot-forming role of the chronotope.
Artistic space of the drama: A. Vampilov "Last summer in Chulimsk"
The artistic space of drama is characterized by particular complexity. The space of a dramatic text must necessarily take into account the stage space, determine the forms of its possible organization. Stage space is understood as "a space that is specifically perceived by the public on the stage ... or on fragments of scenes of all kinds of scenography."
The dramatic text, therefore, always correlates the system of events presented in it with the conditions of the theater and the possibilities of translating the action on the stage with its inherent boundaries. "It is at the level of space ... and you carry out the articulation of the text - the spectacle." The forms of the stage space are determined by the author's remarks and spatio-temporal characteristics contained in the replica: the characters. In addition, in the dramatic text there are always indications of an off-stage space that is not limited by the conditions of the theater. What is not shown in the drama nevertheless plays important role in her interpretation. Thus, off-stage space "is sometimes freely used for a certain kind of absence... to deny what "is"... Figuratively off-stage space" (highlighted by Sh. Levy. - N.N.) can be represented as a black aura of the stage or a special type of emptiness that hovers over the stage, sometimes becoming something like stuffing material between reality as such and intra-theatrical reality ... ”In the drama, finally, due to the specifics of this kind of literature, the symbolic aspect of the spatial picture of the world plays a special role.
Let us turn to A. Vampilov's play "Last Summer in Chulimsk" (1972), which is distinguished by a complex genre synthesis: elements of comedy, "drama of morals", parable and tragedy interact in it. The drama "Last Summer in Chulimsk" is characterized by the unity of the scene. It is determined by the first ("situational") remark, which opens the play and is a detailed descriptive text:
Summer morning in the taiga regional center. An old wooden house with a high cornice, a veranda and a mezzanine. Behind the house rises a lone birch, farther on a hill is visible, covered with spruce at the bottom, above - with pine and larch. There are three windows and a door on the veranda of the house, on which the sign “Tea house” is nailed... On the cornices, window casings, shutters, gates, there is openwork carving everywhere. Half upholstered, shabby, black with time, this carving still gives the house an elegant look ...
Already in the first part of the remark, as we see, cross-cutting semantic oppositions are formed that are significant for the text as a whole: “old - new”, “beauty - destruction”. This opposition is preserved in the next part of the remark, the very length of which testifies to its special significance for the interpretation of the drama:
In front of the house there is a wooden sidewalk and as old as the house (its fence is also carved), a front garden with currant bushes along the edges, with grass and flowers in the middle.
Simple white and pink flowers grow right in the grass, sparsely and randomly, like in a forest... On one side, two planks were knocked out of the fence, the currant bushes were broken off, the grass and flowers were dented...
In the description of the house, the signs of beauty and decay are again emphasized, and it is the signs of destruction that dominate. In the remark - the only direct manifestation of the author's position in the drama - speech means are distinguished, which not only indicate the realities of the space recreated on the stage, but also in figurative use indicate the heroes of the play who have not yet appeared on the stage, the features of their life, relationships (simple flowers growing disorderly; rumpled flowers and grass). The remark reflects the spatial point of view of a particular observer, at the same time it is constructed as if the author is trying to revive the pictures of the past in his memory.
The remarks define the nature of the stage space, which is made up of a platform in front of the house, a veranda (tea room), a small balcony in front of the mezzanine, a staircase leading to it, and a front garden. High gates are also mentioned, see one of the following remarks: The bolt rattles, the gate opens, and Pomigalov, Valentina's father, appears... Through the open gate, one can see part of the yard, a shed, a woodpile under a shed, a fence and a gate to the garden... Highlighted details allow organizing a stage action and highlighting a number of key spatial images that are clearly axiological (evaluative) in nature. Such, for example, are the movement up and down the stairs leading to the mezzanine, the closed gates of Valentina's house separating it from the outside world, the window of the old house turned into a buffet window, the broken fence of the front garden. Unfortunately, directors and theater designers do not always take into account the richest possibilities opened up by the author's remarks. “The scenographic appearances of Chulimsk are, as a rule, monotonous... Set designers... showed a tendency not only to simplify the scenery, but to separate the front garden from the house with a mezzanine. “Meanwhile, this “insignificant” detail, the dismantling of the house and its untidiness suddenly turn out to be one of those underwater reefs that do not allow one to get closer to the symbolism of the play, its deeper stage embodiment.”
The space of drama is both open and closed at the same time. On the one hand, the text of the play repeatedly mentions the taiga and the city, which remains unnamed, on the other hand, the action of the drama is limited to only one “locus” - an old house with a front garden, from which two roads diverge to villages with symbolic names - Potereikha and Klyuchi. The spatial image of the crossroads introduces into the text the motif of choice that the characters face. This motif, associated with the ancient type of value situation of “search for the road”, is most clearly expressed in the final scene of the first scene of the second act, while the road leading to Poteryakha is associated with the theme of danger and “fall”, and the hero (Shamanov) at the “crossroads roads" is mistaken in choosing the path.
The image of the House (at the crossroads) has traditional symbolism. In Slavic folk culture, the house is always opposed to the outside (“foreign”) world and serves as a stable symbol of a habitable and orderly space, protected from chaos. The house embodies the idea of a spiritual harmony and requires protection. The actions performed around him are usually protective in nature, it is in this regard that the actions of the main character of the drama, Valentina, can be considered, who, despite the misunderstanding of others, constantly repairs the fence and, as noted in the remark, fixes the gate. The choice of this particular verb by the playwright is indicative: the root mode repeated in the text actualizes such important meanings for the Russian language picture of the world as “harmony” and “organization of the world”.
The image of the House expresses other stable symbolic meanings in the play. This is a micromodel of the world, and a garden surrounded by a fence symbolizes the feminine principle of the universe in world culture. The House, finally, evokes the richest associations with a person, not only with his body, but also with his soul, with his inner life in all its complexity.
The image of the old house, as we can see, reveals the mythopoetic subtext of a seemingly everyday drama from provincial life.
In addition, this spatial image also has a temporal dimension: it links the past and the present and embodies the connection of times, which is no longer felt by most of the characters and is supported only by Valentina. " old house- a mute witness to the irreversible processes of life, the inevitability of leaving, the accumulation of a load of mistakes and the gains of those who live here. He is eternal. They are fleeting."
At the same time, the old house with openwork carvings is only a “point” in the space recreated in the drama. It is part of Chulimsk, which, on the one hand, is opposed to the taiga (open space), on the other hand, to the nameless city, with which some of the characters in the drama are connected. “...Sleepy Chulimsk, in which the working day begins by mutual agreement, a good old village where you can leave an open cash desk ... a prosaic and implausible world where a real revolver is adjacent to no less real chickens and wild boars - this Chulimsk lives in special passions”, above all love and jealousy. Time in the village seemed to have stopped. The social space of the play is determined, firstly, by telephone conversations with invisible authorities (the telephone acts as an intermediary between different worlds), and secondly, by separate references to the city and structures, for which “documents” are most important, cf.:
E r e m e e v. I worked for forty years...
D e rg a h e v. There are no documents, and there is no conversation ... You are entitled to a pension from there (pointed to the sky), but here, brother, you do not wait. You won't break off here.
Thus, the off-stage space in Vampilov's drama is the unnamed city from which Shamanov and Pashka came, and most of Chulimsk, while the realities and "loci" of the regional center are introduced in "one-sided" telephone conversations. In general, the social space of the drama is rather arbitrary, it is separate from the world recreated in the play.
The only character in the play who is outwardly directly connected with the social principle is the "seventh secretary" Mechetkin. This is a comic drama hero. His “meaningful” surname is already indicative, which is clearly of a contaminated nature (it probably goes back to the combination of the verb rushes about with the word ratchet). The author's remarks characterizing the hero also create a comic effect: Not noticing the ridicule, it swells up. Against the background of the speech characteristics of other characters, it is Mechetkin's remarks that stand out with bright characterological means: an abundance of clichés, words-"labels", elements of "clerkship"; cf .: Signals are already coming to you; Stands, you know, on the road, interferes with rational movement; The question is rather double-edged; The question rests on personal initiative.
Only for Mechetkin's speech characterization does the playwright use the technique of a language mask: the character's speech is endowed with properties that "to some extent separate him from the rest of the characters, and belong to him as something constant and indispensable, accompanying him in any of his actions or gestures." Mechetkin is thus separated from the other characters in the play: in the world of Chulimsk, in the space surrounding the old house with carvings, he is a stranger, a fool, a blockhead, cursed (according to the other characters who treat him with mockery).
The old house at the crossroads is the central image of the drama, but its characters are united by the motif of the collapse of family ties, loneliness and the loss of a true home. This motive is consistently developed in the replicas of the characters: Shamanov "left his wife", Valentina's sister "forgotten her own father". Pashka does not find a home in Chulimsk (But they say it's better at home ... Doesn't match ...), Kashkina is lonely, the "dummy" Mechetkin has no family, Ilya remained alone in the taiga.
In the replicas of the characters, Chulimsk appears as a gradually emptying space: young people left it, again to the taiga, where “there is no longer a deer, the beast ... there is not enough”, the old Evenk Eremeev is leaving. The heroes who have lost their real home are temporarily connected by a "repaired" tea house - the main scene of the drama, places of chance meetings, sudden recognitions and everyday communication of the characters. The tragic situations recreated in the play are combined with everyday scenes in which the names of ordered dishes and drinks are regularly repeated. “People dine, just dine, and at that time their happiness is built up and their lives are broken ...” Following Chekhov, Vampilov, in the stream of everyday life, discovers the essential foundations of being. It is no coincidence that in the text of the drama there are almost no lexical signals of historical time, and the speech of most of the characters is almost devoid of bright characterological signs (their remarks use only separate colloquial words and Siberian regionalisms, but nobody's). To reveal the characters of the heroes of the play, spatial characteristics are significant, first of all, the way they move in space - the movement “straight through the front garden” or bypassing the fence.
Another, no less important, spatial characteristic of the characters is static or dynamic. It is revealed in two main aspects: as the stability of connection with the "point" space of Chulimsk and as the activity / passivity of a particular hero. So, in the author's remark, representing Shamanov in the first scene, his apathy, "unfeigned negligence and absent-mindedness" are emphasized, while the key word for the phenomena of the first act in which the hero acts is the word dream: He, as if suddenly falling into a dream, omits head. In the remarks of Shamanov himself in the first act, speech means with the semes "indifference" and "peace" are repeated. The "dream" in which the hero is immersed turns out to be the "sleep" of the soul, which is synonymous with the inner "blindness" of the character. In the second act, these speech means are replaced by lexical units expressing opposite meanings. Thus, in the remark pointing to the appearance of Shamanov, the dynamics is already emphasized, which contrasts with his former state of “apathy”: He moves quickly, almost swiftly. He runs to the veranda.
The transition from static to dynamic is a sign of the hero's rebirth. As for the connection of the characters with the space of Chulimsk, its stability is typical only for Anna Khoroshikh and Valentina, who even "has never even been to the city." It is the female characters who act in the drama as the guardians of “their” space (both external and internal): Anna is busy repairing the teahouse and is trying to save her house (family), Valentina is “fixing” the fence.
The features of the characters' characters are determined by their attitude to the key image of the drama - the front garden with a broken gate: most of the characters go "straight", "straight", the city dweller Shamanov bypasses the front garden, only the old Evenk Eremeev, connected with the open space of the taiga, tries to help fix it. In this context, Valentina's repetitive actions take on a symbolic meaning: she restores what was destroyed, establishes a connection between times, tries to overcome disunity. Her dialogue with Shamanov is indicative:
S h a m a n o v. ...I want to ask you all the time... Why are you doing this?
Valentina (not immediately). Are you talking about the front garden? .. Why am I fixing it?
S h a m a n o v. What for?
Valentyna. But... Isn't it clear?
Shamanov shakes his head: it is not clear...
VALENTINA (fun). Well then, I'll explain to you... I'm repairing the front garden so that it's whole.
Shamanov (chuckled). Yes? And it seems to me that you are repairing the front garden in order to break it.
VALENTINA (becoming serious). I repair it so that it is whole.
“The general and constant feature of the language of drama must be recognized ... symbolism, two-dimensionality (highlighted by B.A. Larin. - N.N.), the double significance of speeches. There are always penetrating themes in the drama - ideas, moods, suggestions, perceived in addition to the main, direct meaning of speeches.
Such a "two-dimensionality" is inherent in the above dialogue. On the one hand, Valentina's words are addressed to Shamanov and the adjective whole appears in their direct meaning, on the other hand, they are addressed to the viewer (reader) and in the context of the whole work acquire "double significance". The word whole in this case is already characterized by semantic diffuseness and at the same time realizes several meanings inherent in it: “one from which nothing is diminished, not separated”; "undestroyed", "whole", "single", "preserved", finally, "healthy". Integrity is opposed to destruction, the disintegration of human ties, disunity and "disorder" (recall the first remark of the drama), is associated with the state of inner health and goodness. It is characteristic that the name of the heroine - Valentina - which served as the original title of the play, has the etymological meaning "healthy, strong." At the same time, Valentina's actions cause misunderstanding of other characters in the drama, the similarity of their assessments emphasizes the tragic loneliness of the heroine in the space around her. Her image evokes associations with the image of a lonely birch in the first stage direction of the drama - a traditional symbol of a girl in Russian folklore.
The text of the play is structured in such a way that it requires constant reference to the “spatial” remark that opens it, which turns from an auxiliary (service) element of the drama into a constructive element of the text: the system of images of the remark and the system of images of characters form an obvious parallelism, turn out to be interdependent. So, as already mentioned, the image of a birch correlates with the image of Valentina, with her image (as well as with the images of Anna, Dergachev, Eremeev) the image of “rumpled” grass is associated.
The world in which the characters of the drama live is emphatically disharmonious. First of all, this is manifested in the organization of the play's dialogues, which are characterized by frequent "inconsistency" of replicas, violations of semantic and structural coherence in dialogic units. The characters in the drama either do not hear each other, or do not always understand the meaning of the remark addressed to them. The disunity of the characters is also reflected in the transformation of a series of dialogues into monologues (see, for example, Kashkina's monologue in the first act).
The text of the drama is dominated by dialogues that reflect the conflicting relationships of the characters (dialogues-disputes, quarrels, squabbles, etc.), and dialogues of a directive nature (such, for example, is the dialogue between Valentina and her father).
The disharmony of the depicted world is also manifested in the names of the sounds characteristic of it. The author's remarks consistently capture the sounds that fill the stage space. As a rule, sharp, annoying, “unnatural” sounds are indicated: in the first act, the scandalous hubbub is replaced by the noise of a machine brake, in the second - the squeal of a hacksaw, the sound of a hammer, the crackle of a motorcycle, the crackle of a diesel engine dominate. "Noises" is opposed to the only melody in the play - Dergachev's song, which serves as one of the leitmotifs of the drama, but remains unfinished.
In the first act, Dergachev's voice sounds three times: the repeated beginning of the song "It was a long time ago, fifteen years ago ..." interrupts the dialogue between Shamanov and Kashkina and at the same time is included in it as one of his lines. This "remark", on the one hand, forms a temporal (temporary) refrain of the scene and refers to the hero's past, on the other hand, it serves as a kind of answer to Kashkina's questions and remarks and replaces Shamanov's replicas. Wed:
K a sh k i n a. I just don’t understand one thing: how did you get to such a life ... I would finally explain.
"It was a long time ago,
Fifteen years ago..."
In the second act, this song opens the action of each of the scenes, framing it. So, at the beginning of the second scene (“Night”), it sounds four times, while its text becomes shorter and shorter. In this act, the song already correlates with the fate of Valentina: the tragic situation of the folk ballad anticipates what happened to the heroine. At the same time, the leitmotif song expands the stage space, deepens the temporal perspective of the drama as a whole and reflects the memories of Dergachev himself, and its incompleteness correlates with open final plays.
Thus, in the space of the drama, dissonant sounds and the sounds of a song of a tragic nature contrast, and it is the former that win. Against their background, rare "zones of silence" are especially expressive. Silence, opposed to "scandalous hubbub" and noise, is established only in the final. It is characteristic that in the final phenomenon of the drama the words silence and silence (as well as the same root with them) are repeated five times in the remarks, and the word silence is placed by the playwright in a strong position of the text - its last paragraph. The silence into which the characters are immersed for the first time serves as a sign of their inner concentration, their desire to peer and listen into themselves and others, and accompanies the actions of the heroine and the end of the drama.
Vampilov's last play is called "Last Summer in Chulimsk". Such a title, which, as already noted, the playwright did not stop at once, suggests a retrospection and highlights the point of view of an observer or participant in the events! to what once happened in Chulimsk. The answer of the researcher of creativity Vampilov to the question: “What happened in Chulimsk?” - "A miracle happened in Chulimsk last summer."
The "miracle" that happened in Chulimsk is the awakening of the hero's soul, Shamanov's insight. This was facilitated by the "horror" experienced by him (Pashka's shot), and the love of Valentina, whose "fall" serves as a kind of expiatory sacrifice and at the same time determines the tragic guilt of the hero.
The spatio-temporal organization of Vampilov's drama is characterized by the chronotope of the threshold, "its most significant completion is the chronotope of crisis and life's turning point", the time of the play is the decisive moments of falls and renewal. With the internal crisis, the adoption of decisions that determine the life of a person, are connected in the drama and its other characters, especially Valentina.
If the evolution of Shamanov's image is mainly reflected in the contrast of speech means in the main compositional parts of the drama, then the development of Valentina's character is manifested in relation to the spatial dominant of this image - the actions of the heroine associated with the "adjustment" of the gate. In the second act, Vadentina tries for the first time to act like everyone else: she goes straight ahead! through the front garden - at the same time, to build her replicas, a technique is used that can be called the technique of Valentin's "semantic echo", firstly, he repeats Shamanov's replica (from act I): Waste labor ...; secondly, in her subsequent statements, the meanings that were previously regularly expressed by the hero's remarks in the first act are "condensed", explicated: It doesn't matter; tired. The movement "straight", a temporary transition to the position of Shamanov lead to disaster. In the finale, after the tragedy experienced by Valentina, we again see a return to the dominant of this image: Strict, calm, she rises to the veranda. She suddenly stopped. She turned her head to the front garden. Slowly, but decisively, he descends into the front garden. Approaches the fence, strengthens the boards... Fixes the gate... Silence. Valentina and Eremeev are restoring the front garden.
The play ends with the motifs of renewal, overcoming chaos and destruction. "... In the finale, Vampilov connects young Valentina and old Eremeev - the harmony of eternity, the beginning and end of life, without the natural light of purity and unthinkable faith." The finale is preceded by an outwardly seemingly unmotivated story by Mechetkin about the history of the old house, cf.:
Mechetkin (addressing either Shamanov or Kashkina). This very house... was built by the merchant Chernykh. And, by the way, this merchant was bewitched (chews), bewitched that he would live until he completed the construction of this very house ... When he completed the house, he began to rebuild it. And rebuilt all my life ...
This story returns the reader (viewer) to the through spatial image of the drama. In Mechetkin’s extended remark, the figurative parallel “life is a rebuilt house” is actualized, which, taking into account the symbolic meanings inherent in the key spatial image of the play house, can be interpreted as “life-renewal”, “life is the constant work of the soul”, finally, as “life - reorganization of the world and oneself in it.
Characteristically, the words repair, remontirovat, regularly repeated in the first act, disappear in the second: the focus is already on the “reorganization” of the souls of the characters. It is interesting that it is the “chewing” Mechetkin who tells the story of the old house: the vanity of the comic hero emphasizes the generalizing meaning of the parable.
At the end of the drama, the space of most of its heroes is transformed: Pashka is preparing to leave Chulimsk, the old man Eremeev goes to the taiga, but Dergachev opens his house for him (There will always be enough space for you), Shamanov’s space expands, which decides to go to the city and speak at the court. Valentina may be waiting for Mechetkin's house, but her actions are unchanged. Vampilov's drama is constructed as a play in which the inner space of the characters changes, but the outer space retains its stability.
“The task of the artist,” the playwright remarked, “is to knock people out of mechanicalness.” This task is solved in the play “Last Summer in Chulimsk”, which, as it is read, ceases to be perceived as everyday and appears as a philosophical drama. This is largely facilitated by the system of spatial images of the play.
Questions and tasks
1. Read L. Petrushevskaya's play "Three Girls in Blue".
2. Highlight the main spatial images of the drama, determine their connections in the text.
3. Indicate the language means that express spatial relations in the text of the play. Which of these means, from your point of view, are especially significant for creating the artistic space of L. Petrushevskaya's drama?
4. Determine the role of the image of the house in the figurative system of the drama. What meanings does it express? What is the dynamics of this image?
5. Give a general description of the space of the drama. How is space modeled in the text of this play?
