Time and space in a literary work. Space in a work of art

Artistic time and artistic space are the most important characteristics of an artistic image, providing a holistic perception of artistic reality and organizing the composition of the work. The art of words belongs to the group of dynamic, temporary arts (as opposed to 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” (the image of a closed space), “open space” (the image of open space), “threshold”, “window”, “door” (the boundary between one and the other), have long been the point of application of meaningful forces in literary and artistic (and more broadly, cultural) models of the world (the symbolic richness of such spaces and images as the house of Gogol’s “old world landowners” or Raskolnikov’s coffin-like room in “Crime and Punishment”, 1866, F.M. Dostoevsky, like the steppe is obvious in “Taras Bulba”, 1835, by 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, ancient types of value situations, realized in spatio-temporal images (chronotope, according to M.M. Bakhtin) - “idyllic time” in the father’s house, “adventurous time” of trials in a foreign land, “mysterious time” of descent into the underworld of disasters - so or otherwise preserved in a reduced form by classical literature of the New Age and modern literature (“station” or “airport” as places of decisive meetings and clearances, choice of path, sudden recognition, etc. correspond to the ancient “crossroads” or roadside inn; “hole” - the former “threshold” as the topos of the ritual transition).

Due to the iconic, spiritual, symbolic nature of the art of words spatial and temporal coordinates of literary reality are not fully specified, discontinuous and conditional (the fundamental non-representability of spaces, images and quantities in mythological, grotesque and fantastic works; the uneven course of plot time, its delays at points of description, retreats, parallel flow in different storylines). However, here the temporary nature of the literary image, noted by G.E. Lessing in “Laocoon” (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 conventions in the transmission of time, the dialectic of the discrepancy between the time of the narrative 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 (so in the traditional system of literary genres, lyrics are “present”, and epic is “long past”, qualitatively separated from the life time of the performer and listeners) . The time of myth for its keeper and storyteller is not a thing of the past; the mythological narrative ends with the correlation of events with the real structure of the world or its future destiny(the myth of Pandora's Box, of the chained Prometheus who will someday be freed). The time of a fairy tale is a deliberately conventional past, a fictitious time (and space) of non-existence; 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 at the time of its rendering (on this basis we can conclude that the fairy tale has a later origin compared to the myth).

With the collapse of archaic, ritual models of the world, marked by the features of naive realism (observance of the unities of time and place in ancient drama with its cult-mythological origins), in the spatio-temporal ideas that characterize literary consciousness, the measure of convention increases. In an epic or fairy tale, the pace of the narrative could not yet sharply advance the pace of the events depicted; an epic or fabulous 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 storyteller did not have a field of vision expanded in comparison with the ordinary human horizon; at each moment he was in one and only one point of the plot space. The “Copernican revolution” produced by the new European novel in spatiotemporal organization of narrative genres, was that the author, along with the right to unconventional and frank fiction, acquired the right to manage the novel’s time as its initiator and creator. When artistic fiction removes the mask of a real event, and the writer openly breaks with the role of rhapsodist or chronicler, then the need for a naive-empirical concept of event time disappears. From now on, the temporal scope can be as wide as desired, the pacing of the narrative can be as uneven as desired, parallel “theatres of action,” turning back time and exits into the future known to the narrator are acceptable and functionally important (for the purposes of analysis, explanation, or entertainment). The boundaries between the author’s condensed presentation of events, accelerating the passage of plot time, descriptions, stopping its progress for the sake of an overview of space, and dramatized episodes, the compositional time of which “keeps pace” with plot time, become much sharper and are realized. Accordingly, the difference between the unfixed (“omnipresent”) and spatially localized (“witness”) position of the narrator, characteristic mainly of “dramatic” episodes, is more acutely felt.

If in a short story of a novelistic type ( classic sample- “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 completely subordinate to the author-narrator, talking with the reader as if “on the other side” of the fictional space - time, then in the “great” novel of the 19th century such unity noticeably fluctuates under the influence of emerging centrifugal forces. These “forces” are the discovery of chronicle-everyday time and lived-in space (in the novels of O. Balzac, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov) in connection with the concept social environment, shaping human character, as well as the discovery of multi-subject narrative and transferring the center of space-time coordinates to the inner world of the heroes in connection with the development psychological analysis. When long-term organic processes come into the narrator’s field of view, the author risks facing the impossible task of reproducing life “from minute to minute.” The solution was to move the sum of everyday circumstances that repeatedly affect a person beyond the time of action (exposition in “Père Goriot”, 1834-35; “Oblomov’s dream” - a lengthy digression in Goncharov’s novel) or to distribute throughout the entire calendar of the work episodes shrouded in the course of everyday life (in Turgenev’s novels, in the “peaceful” chapters of L.N. Tolstoy’s epic). Such 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 essentially opposite 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 play out before the eyes of the participant. It is also important that chronicle-everyday time, unlike event time (in its 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 (the time of everyday life is the decisive tragic time of human existence), merged event time with everyday time to an indistinguishable unity: episodes that once happened are presented in the grammatical imperfect - as repeatedly repeated scenes of everyday life, filling a whole segment of everyday chronicle. (In this collapsing 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, lies one of the main secrets of the famous Chekhov’s brevity.) From the crossroads 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 turning point, crisis time of decisive trials, measured in a few days and hours. The chronicle gradualism here is actually devalued in the name of the decisive revelation of the heroes in their fateful moments. Dostoevsky’s intense turning point time corresponds to what is highlighted in the form stage area, the space extremely involved in the events, measured by the steps of the heroes - the “threshold” (doors, stairs, corridors, alleys, where you can’t miss each other), the “casual shelter” (tavern, compartment), the “gathering hall” - corresponding to situations of crime (stepping ), 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 cosmic years and versts), and these instantaneous mental snapshots of world existence encourage 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:

1. The symbolic plan of a realistic space-time panorama is emphasized, which, in particular, is reflected in the attraction to nameless or fictitious topography: the City, instead of Kyiv, in M.A. Bulgakov; Ioknapatawpha County in the southern United States, created by the imagination of W. Faulkner; 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 requires real historical and geographical identification or at least rapprochement, without which the work is incomprehensible;
2. The closed artistic time of a fairy tale or parable is often used, excluded from the historical account, which often corresponds to the uncertainty of the place of action (“The Trial”, 1915, F. Kafka; “The Plague”, 1947, A. Camus; “Watt”, 1953, S. Beckett );
3. 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; the intermittent, reverse and other course of plot time is motivated not by the author’s initiative, but by the psychology of remembering (this occurs not only in M. Proust or W. Woolf, but also in writers of a more traditional realistic plan, for example, in G. Böll, and in modern Russian literature from V.V. Bykov, Yu.V. Trifonov). This formulation of the hero’s consciousness makes it possible to compress the actual time of 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;
4. Modern literature has not lost a hero moving in the objective earthly expanse, in the 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.
5. The “hero” of a monumental narrative can become historical time itself in its decisive “nodes”, subordinating the fate of the heroes 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). Types of space. The value of spatial images (spatial images as an expression of non-spatial relationships).

Temporal features of the text. Action time and storytelling time. Types of artistic time, the meaning of temporary images. Vocabulary with temporary meaning. Basic 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 existence, etc. The natural forms of existence of this world are time And space. However art world, or world of art, always conditional to one degree or another: it exists image reality. Time and space in literature are thus also conditional.

Compared to other arts, literature deals most freely with time and space.(Perhaps only the synthetic art of cinema can compete in this area). The “immateriality of... images” gives literature the ability to instantly move from one space to another. In particular, events occurring simultaneously in different places can be depicted; To do this, it is enough for the narrator to say: “Meanwhile, such and such was happening there.” Equally simple are transitions from one time plane to another (especially from the present to the past and back). The earliest forms of such time switching were flashbacks in the stories of characters. With the development of literary self-awareness, these forms of mastering time and space will become more sophisticated, but the important thing is that they have always taken place in literature, and, therefore, constituted an essential element of artistic imagery.

Another property of literary time and space is their discontinuity. In relation to time, this is especially important, since literature turns out to be capable of not reproducingallflow of time, but select the most significant fragments from it, marking the gaps with formulas like: “several days have passed,” etc. Such temporal discreteness (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 has an independent character.

Characterconventions of time and space highly dependentfrom birth literature. Lyrics, which present an actual experience, and drama, which plays out before the eyes of the audience, showing an incident at the moment of its occurrence, usually use the present tense, while the epic (basically a story about what has passed) uses the past tense.

Conditionality is maximum inlyrics, it may even completely lack the image of space - for example, in the poem by A.S. Pushkin “I loved you; love still, perhaps...” Space in lyric poetry is often 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. Thus, in Lermontov’s poem “Motherland” a typically Russian landscape is recreated. In his poem “How often, surrounded by a motley crowd...” mental transference lyrical hero from the ballroom to the “wonderful kingdom” embodies extremely significant oppositions for the romantic: civilization and nature, artificial and natural man, “I” and “crowd”. And not only spaces are opposed, but also times.

Conventions of time and space Vdrama associated mainly with her orientation towards the theater. With all the diversity in the organization of time and space in drama, some common properties are preserved: no matter how significant the role narrative fragments acquire in dramatic works, no matter how the depicted action is fragmented, drama is committed to pictures closed in space and time.

Much wider possibilities 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 life depicted 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 types) can be divided into abstract And specific, This distinction is especially important for space.

Both in life and in literature, space and time are not given to us in pure form. We judge space by the objects that fill it (in a broad sense), and we judge time by the processes occurring 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, in Gogol the space is usually filled as much as possible with some objects, especially things. Here is one of the interiors in “Dead Souls”: “<...>the room was hung with old striped wallpaper; paintings with some birds; between the windows there are old small mirrors with dark frames in the shape of curled leaves; Behind every mirror there was either a letter, or an old deck of cards, or a stocking; wall clock with painted flowers on the dial...” (Chapter III). And in Lermontov’s stylistic system, the space is practically not filled: it contains only what is necessary for the plot and depiction of the inner world of the heroes; 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 had an extremely busy time. Chekhov managed to sharply reduce the intensity of time even in dramatic works, which in principle tend to concentrate action.

Increased saturation of artistic space, as a rule, is combined with a reduced intensity of time, and vice versa: weak saturation of space - with time, rich in events.

Real (plot) and artistic time rarely coincide, 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 where the law of “poetic economy” manifests itself. 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 flow of speech, which forms the basis of literary imagery. Therefore, the image time is almost always longer than the subjective time. In some cases this is less noticeable (for example, in “A Hero of Our Time” by Lermontov, Goncharov’s novels, in Chekhov’s stories), in others it constitutes a conscious artistic device designed to emphasize the richness and intensity of mental life. This is typical of many psychological writers: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, Proust.

The depiction of what the hero experienced in just a second of “real” time can take up a large amount of the 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 can generally be equal to zero, for example, with various types of descriptions. This time can be called eventless . But event time, in which at least something happens, is internally heterogeneous. In one case, literature actually records events and actions that significantly change either a person, or the relationships between people, or the situation as a whole. This plot , or plot , time. In another case, literature paints a picture of stable existence, actions and deeds repeated day after day, year after 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 relationships between people, does not move the plot (plot) from beginning to end. The dynamics of such time are extremely conditional, and its function is to reproduce a stable way of life. This type of artistic time is sometimes called "chronicle-everyday" .

The ratio of non-event and event time largely determines tempo organization of artistic time of a work , which, in turn, determines the nature of aesthetic perception. Thus, Gogol’s “Dead Souls”, in which predominates eventless, “chronic-everyday” time, create the impression slow tempo. There is a different tempo organization in Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”, in which event-based time (not only externally, but also internal, psychological events).

The writer sometimes makes time last, stretches it to convey a certain psychological state of the hero (Chekhov’s story “I want to sleep”), sometimes stops, “turns off” (philosophical excursions of L. Tolstoy in “War and Peace”), sometimes makes time move backwards.

Important for analysis iscompleteness Andincompleteness artistic time. Writers often create in their works closed time, which has both an absolute beginning and - what is more important - an absolute end, which, as a rule, represents the completion of the plot, the denouement of the conflict, and in the lyrics - the exhaustion of a given experience or reflection. From the early stages of the development of literature and almost until the 19th century. such temporary completeness was practically obligatory and constituted a sign of artistry. The forms of completion of artistic time were varied: this was the hero’s return to his father’s house after wanderings (literary interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son), and his achievement of a certain stable position in life, and the “triumph of virtue,” and the hero’s final victory over the enemy, and, of course, same, the death of the main character or a wedding. At the end of the 19th century. Chekhov, for whom the incompleteness of artistic time became one of the foundations of his innovative aesthetics, extended the principle open finals and unfinished time on dramaturgy, those. to the literary genre in which it was most difficult to do this and which urgently requires temporal and eventual isolation.

Space, just like time, can shift at the will of the author. Artistic space is created through the use of image perspective; this occurs as a result of a mental change in the place from which the observation is being made: 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 space-time organization art world shows a definite tendency towards complication. In the 19th and especially in the 20th centuries. writers use space-time composition as a special, conscious artistic device; a kind of “game” begins with time and space. Its meaning is to compare different times and spaces, to identify both the characteristic properties of “here” and “now”, and the general, universal laws of existence, 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 culture and literature of the late XIX – early XX centuries. had a significant impact natural sciences concepts time and space, associated primarily with A. Einstein’s theory of relativity. Fiction responded to changing scientific and philosophical ideas about time and space: it began to contain deformations of space and time. Most fruitfully mastered new concepts of space and time Science fiction.

Titles denoting time and space.

Despite all the conventions of the “new artistic reality” created by the writer, the basis of the artistic world, like 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” by P. Merimee).

The title of a work of art can indicate not only “points” on the time axis, but also entire “segments” that mark 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 just one day or even part of a day - strives to convey both the essence of existence and the “clump of everyday life” of his heroes, emphasizing the typicality of the events he describes (“Morning of the Landowner” by L.N. Tolstoy, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by A.I. Solzhenitsyn).

The second coordinate of the artistic world of a work - place - can be indicated in the title with varying degrees of specificity, by 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 (“Village” by I.A. Bunin, “Islands in the Ocean” by E. Hemingway). Fictional toponyms often contain an emotional assessment, giving the reader an idea of ​​the author’s concept of the work. Thus, the negative semantics of Gorky’s toponym Okurov (“Okurov Town”) is quite obvious to the reader; Gorky’s town of Okurov is a dead outback, in which life does not seethe, but barely glimmers. The most common names of places, as a rule, indicate the extremely broad meaning of the image created by the artist. Thus, 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 and community.

Titles indicating the place 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).

Basic 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, flowing in only one direction - from the past, through the present to the future, within which all processes existing in existence, 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 time. Time is its object, subject and instrument of image.

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 (R. O. Yakobson); you 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. (Pule 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 diversity of subjective perception of time. Plot time, serving 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 unity of time of action and the reader-viewer in French classicist drama, then abandoning this unity, emphasizing the differences, leading the narrative primarily in the subjective aspect of time;

3) Actual time and depicted time are essential aspects of the entire artistic work. Their options are endlessly varied. They are combined with the artistic concept of the work, are in a state of continuous conditioning of their artistic whole of the work; 4) Time in fiction is perceived through the connection of events - cause-and-effect or psychological, associative. Time in a work of art is not only and not so much calendar references, but the correlation of events;

5) the time of a work can be “closed”, self-contained, taking place only within the plot, not connected with events occurring outside the work, with historical time, and also the time of a work can be “open”, included in a broader flow of time developing against the backdrop of a precisely defined historical era. The “open” time of a work, which does not exclude a clear frame delimiting it from reality, presupposes the presence of other events taking place simultaneously outside the work, its plot.

6) story time can speed up and slow down. Plot time can be divided into a number of separate forms inherent in the consciousness of time. Very often, the time of action in a work gradually slows down or speeds up its pace. The entire work can have several forms of time, developing at different paces, moving from one flow of time to another, forward and backward; 7) The depiction of time can be illusionistic (especially in works of a sentimental direction) or introduce the reader into its unreal, conventional circle. It depends on the artistic intention of the author, but it can also depend on natural, common for its era, ideas about the movement of time.

Artistic time is time as the “fourth coordinate” of the artistic world: the reality of the hero (conceptual time - the objectified background of artistic events, modeling of external reality in forms adequate for the recipient) and the reality of the subject of the image (perceptual time - the placement of real-life objects in other systems of relations, elements acquire features inherent in the real world to objects of a completely different nature, for example, a landscape - mood traits, animals - traits of rationality and properties of human character). In the first case, the temporal characteristic (plot time, time of action - historical, biographical, natural, social, everyday, event (adventure)) acts as a condition for the performance of diverse actions (actions, reactions, mental movements, gestures and facial expressions).

Correlation of time and literary genre Lyrics, which represent an actual experience, and drama, played out before the eyes of the audience, showing an incident at the moment of its occurrence, 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 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 life event is revealed in its various sides 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 real reality of the singer and listeners are separated by an epic distance. The absolute past is a value-time category of the epic world. It localizes such categories as ideal, justice, perfection, harmony.

The wonderful time of the knightly novel - the world for the knight exists only under the sign of the miraculous “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 existence. This time is characterized by fabulous hyperbolism: sometimes the hours stretch out, sometimes the days shrink to an instant; time can be bewitched until entire events disappear. Medieval eschatological time, which corresponds to a spatial vertical, a vertical chronotope. Everything that is separated by time on earth converges in eternity in the pure simultaneity of coexistence. To understand the world, you need to compare everything in one time (timeless plane).

Creative, productive, productive time of the Renaissance (universal chronotope created by Rabelais), 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 person is not separated from historical growth and cultural progress. The time of the hero’s “outlook”, the time of ignorance (classical novel) - the present is fundamentally incomplete, requires continuation in the future. The temporal model of the world is radically changing: the first word is gone, and the last has not yet been said. Time and the world become historical for the first time. The concept of environment contributes to the appearance in literature of chronicle-everyday time, which receives a special design: the sum of the circumstances repeatedly affecting a person is taken out of the scope of the time of action.

The time of memory, the “stream of consciousness” is the active work of the narrator’s memory, the detailing of the remembering mechanism, in which images of the past flow one upon another, interpenetrate, uniquely transforming in the consciousness of the hero. S. Bocharov about the psychology of the remembering process: “... reality is covered, it appears as separate objects... which consciousness has arbitrarily extracted and brought closer...” (Time in the works of M. Proust, V. Wulf, V. Bykov, Y. Trifonov). The time and space of dreams are a distortion of real perspectives (for example, dreams in the works of Dostoevsky). Artistic time is the most important characteristic artistic image, providing 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 a work is always conditional to one degree or another, and, of course, time and space are also conditional.

The essential interrelation of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, M.M. Bakhtin proposed to call it a chronotope. The chronotope determines the artistic unity of a literary work in its relation to reality. All time-spatial definitions in art and literature are inseparable from each other and are always emotionally and value-laden. 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 (it is, of course, 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 to other arts, literature deals most freely with time and space (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 occurring simultaneously in different places can be depicted (for example, Homer’s Odyssey describes the protagonist’s travels 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). Thus, literature can not reproduce the entire time stream, but select the most significant fragments from it, indicating gaps (for example, the introduction to Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman”: “On the shore of desert waves He stood, 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 swamps, the cronyism Ascended magnificently, proudly"). The discrete nature of space is manifested in the fact that it is usually not described in detail, but is only indicated with the help of individual details that are most significant for the author (for example, in “The Grammar of Love” Bunin does not fully describe the hall in Khvoshchinsky’s house, but mentions only its large size, windows , facing west and north, “clumsy” furniture, “beautiful slides” in the walls, dry bees on the floor, but most importantly - the “goddess without glass”, where stood the image “in a silver robe” and on it “wedding candles in pale -green bows"). When we learn that the wedding candles were purchased by Khvoshchinsky after Lusha’s death, this emphasis becomes understandable. 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 conventions of time and space greatly depends on the type of literature. Maximum convention in the lyrics, because it is distinguished by the greatest expression and is focused on the inner world of the lyrical subject. The conventions of time and space in drama are related to 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, the intermediary can “suspend” time during reasoning, descriptions - see the example above about the hall in Khvoshchinsky’s house; of course, when describing the room, Bunin somewhat “slowed down” the passage of time).

According to the peculiarities of artistic convention, 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 does not have characteristic features important for the narrative and is not conceptualized, and therefore, despite the abundance of toponyms, can be understood as “everywhere”). Concrete space actively influences the essence of what is depicted (for example, in Goncharov’s “Cliff” the image of the Malinovka is created, which is described down to the smallest details, and the latter, undoubtedly, not only influence what is happening, but also symbolize the psychological state of the heroes: thus, the cliff itself indicates “fall” of Vera, and before her grandmother, to 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. Forms of concretization of artistic time are most often the “linking” of action to historical landmarks, realities and the designation of cyclical time: time of year, 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 occurring in it. To analyze a work, it is important to at least approximately determine the fullness and saturation of space and time, because this indicator often characterizes the style of a work. For example, in Gogol’s work the space is usually filled as much as possible with some objects (for example, the textbook description of the interior in Sobakevich’s house). The intensity of artistic time is expressed in its saturation with events. Cervantes's time in Don Quixote is extremely busy. Increased intensity of artistic space, as a rule, is combined with 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. Typically, artistic time is shorter than “real” (see the example above about the omission of the description of the road from St. Petersburg to Malinovka in Goncharov’s “The Cliff”), but there is an important exception associated with the depiction of psychological processes and the subjective time of the character. Experiences and thoughts flow faster than the flow of speech, 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, looking at the high, endless sky and comprehending 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 ongoing events) and chronicle-everyday time (paints a picture of stable existence, repeated actions and deeds (one of the most bright examples- a description of Oblomov’s life at the beginning of Goncharov’s novel of the same name)). The ratio of non-event, chronicle-everyday and event types of time determines the tempo organization of the artistic time of the work, which determines the nature of aesthetic perception, forms the subjective reading time (“Dead Souls” creates the impression of a slow pace, and “Crime and Punishment” - a fast pace, and therefore the novel is readable Dostoevsky often “in one breath”).

The completeness and incompleteness of artistic time is important. Often writers create in their works a closed time that has an absolute beginning and end, which until the 19th century. was considered a sign of artistry. However, monotonous endings (return to the father's house, wedding or death) already seemed boring to Pushkin, so from the 19th century. there is a struggle with them, but if in a novel it is quite simple to use the other end (as in the already mentioned “Precipice”), then with drama the situation is more complicated. Only Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) managed to “get rid” of these ends.

The historical development of spatiotemporal organization reveals a tendency towards complication and individualization. But the complexity and individual uniqueness of artistic time and space does not exclude the existence of general, typological models - meaningful forms that writers use as “ready-made”. These are the motifs of a house, a road, a horse, a crossroads, up and down, open space, etc. This also includes types of organization of artistic time: chronicle, adventure, biographical, etc. It is for such spatio-temporal typological models that M.M. Bakhtin introduced the term chronotope.

MM. Bakhtin identifies, for example, the chronotope of a meeting; in this chronotope the temporal connotation predominates, and it is distinguished by a high degree of emotional and value intensity. The associated chronotope of the road has a wider scope, but somewhat less emotional and value intensity. Meetings in the novel usually take place on the “road”. The “road” is the predominant place for random encounters. On road (" high road") the spatial and temporal paths of different people intersect at one time and spatial point - representatives of all classes, conditions, religions, nationalities, ages. Here those who are normally separated by social hierarchy and spatial distance can meet by chance; here any contrasts can arise, different destinies can collide and intertwine. Here the spatial and temporal series of human destinies and lives are uniquely combined, complicated and concretized by the social distances that are overcome here. This is the starting point and the place where events take place. Here time seems to flow into space and flow through it (forming roads).

By the end of the 18th century in England, a new territory for the fulfillment of novel events - "zbmok" (for the first time in this meaning in Horace Walpole - "Castle of Otranto") was being formed and consolidated in the so-called "Gothic" or "black" novel. The castle is full of time, and the time of the historical past. The castle is the place where historical figures of the past lived; traces of centuries and generations have been deposited in it in visible form. Finally, legends and traditions bring to life all corners of the castle and its surroundings with memories of past events. This creates a specific plot of the castle, developed in Gothic novels.

In the novels of Stendhal and Balzac, a significantly new locality of the events of the novel appears - the “living room-salon” (in the broad sense). Of course, it is not with them that it appears for the first time, but only with them does it acquire the fullness of its meaning as the place of intersection of the spatial and temporal series of the novel. From the point of view of plot and composition, meetings take place here (meetings on the “road” or in an “alien world” no longer have the previously specific random nature), the beginnings of intrigues 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 heroes are revealed (cf. Scherer’s salon in “War and Peace” - A.S.).

In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the setting is a “provincial town.” A provincial town with its musty way of life is an extremely common setting for novel events in the 19th century. This town has several varieties, including a very important one - idyllic (for regionalists). We will touch only on the Flaubertian variety (created, however, not by Flaubert). Such a town is a place of cyclical everyday time. There are no events here, but only repeating “occurrences.” Time here is deprived 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, a life is never a life. The same everyday actions, the same topics of conversation, the same words, etc. are repeated day after day. This is everyday cyclical everyday time. It is familiar to us in different variations from Gogol, Turgenev, Shchedrin, Chekhov. Time here is eventless and therefore seems almost stopped. There are no “meetings” or “separations” here. This is thick, sticky time crawling in space. Therefore, it cannot be the main time of the novel. It is used by novelists as a side tense, intertwined with or interrupted by other, non-cyclical time series, and often serves as a contrasting background for event and energy time series.

Let us also call here 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 crisis and life turning point. In literature, the chronotope of the threshold is always metaphorical and symbolic, sometimes in an open, but more often in an implicit form. In Dostoevsky, for example, the threshold and the adjacent chronotopes of the staircase, hallway and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of the street and square that continue them, are the main places of action in his works, places where events of crises, falls, resurrections, renewals, insights, decisions take place , determining a person’s entire life (for example, in “Crime and Punishment” - A.S.). Time in this chronotope is, in essence, an instant, seemingly without duration and falling out of the normal flow of biographical time.

Unlike Dostoevsky, in the works of L.N. Tolstoy the main chronotope is biographical time flowing in the internal spaces of noble houses and estates. Of course, in Tolstoy’s works there are crises, falls, renewals, and resurrections, but they are not instantaneous and do not fall out of the flow of biographical time, but are firmly sealed into it. For example, the renewal of Pierre Bezukhov was long-term and gradual, quite biographical. Tolstoy did not value the moment, did not strive to fill it with anything significant and decisive; the word “suddenly” is rarely used in his work 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. Thus, since ancient times, literature has reflected two main concepts of time: cyclical and linear. The first was earlier and relied on natural cyclical processes in nature. This cyclical concept is reflected, for example, in Russian folklore. Christianity of the Middle Ages had its own time 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 stable existence: to salvation or destruction. Since the Renaissance, the culture has been dominated by a linear concept of time associated with the concept of progress. Also in literature, works periodically appear 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 (E. Zamyatin shows the artificiality and implausibility of such a passage of time in his dystopia “We”). On culture and literature of the 20th century. Natural scientific concepts of time and space associated with the theory of relativity had a significant influence. Science fiction, which at that time entered the sphere of “high” literature, posing deep philosophical and moral problems (for example, “It’s Hard to Be a God” by the Strugatskys) most fruitfully mastered new ideas about time and space.

Artistic time

The concept of the space-time continuum is essential for the philological analysis of a literary text, since both time and space serve as constructive principles for the organization of a literary work. Artistic time is a form of existence of aesthetic reality, a special way of understanding the world.

Features of time modeling in literature are determined by the specifics of this type of art: literature is traditionally viewed 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 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 historians, and linguists. So, A.A. Potebnya, emphasizing that the art of words is dynamic, showed the limitless possibilities of organizing artistic time in the text. He viewed the text as a dialectical unity of two compositional speech forms: description (“depiction of features that simultaneously exist in space”) and narration (“Narration transforms a series of simultaneous features into a series of sequential 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 examined the relationship between these categories in works of folklore, he noted the historical variability of artistic time. Ideas by A.A. Potebny 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, and the acceleration of social life, with increased attention in connection with this 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,” noted 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 cause-and-effect, linear or associative relationship.

Time in the text has clearly defined or rather blurred 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 designated in the work in relation to the historical time or time established by the author conditionally (see, for example, E. Zamyatin’s novel “We”).

Artistic time is systemic in nature. 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, reflecting precisely his picture of the world (remember, 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 passage of the text, which can be considered as the time of the reader; Thus, when 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 perceiving the work can be resolved different ways. At the same time, the time of the work is heterogeneous: thus, as a result of temporal shifts, “omissions”, highlighting central events in close-up, the depicted time is compressed, shortened, while when juxtaposing and describing simultaneous events, it, on the contrary, is stretched.

A comparison of real time and artistic time reveals their differences. The topological properties of real time in the macroworld are one-dimensionality, continuity, irreversibility, orderliness. In artistic time, all these properties are transformed. It can 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 time axes appear in the text - the “axis of storytelling” and the “axis of events described”: “the axis of storytelling is one-dimensional, while the axis of events described is multidimensional.” Their relationship destroys the multidimensionality of artistic time, makes temporal shifts possible, and determines the multiplicity of temporal points of view in the structure of the text. Thus, in a prose work, the narrator’s conditional present tense is usually established, which correlates with the narration about the past or future of the characters, with the characteristics of situations in various time dimensions. The action of a work can unfold in different time planes (“The Double” by A. Pogorelsky, “Russian Nights” by V.F. Odoevsky, “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, etc.).

Irreversibility (unidirectionality) is also not characteristic of artistic time: the real sequence of events is often disrupted in the text. According to the law of irreversibility, only folklore time moves. In the literature of modern times, temporal displacements, disruption of 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 organization of a number of thematic genres (memoirs and autobiographical works, detective novels). Retrospective in a literary text can also act as a means of revealing its implicit content - subtext.

The multidirectionality and 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, swapped the hands... Gertrude Stein, who tried to banish time from the novel, smashed her clock into pieces and scattered its fragments around the world..." It was in the 20th century. a “stream of consciousness” novel arises, a “one day” novel, a sequential time series in which time is destroyed, and time appears only as a component of a person’s psychological existence.

Artistic time is characterized by both continuity and discreteness. “Remaining essentially continuous in the sequential change of temporal and spatial facts, the continuum in textual reproduction is simultaneously divided into separate episodes.” The selection of these episodes is determined by the aesthetic intentions of the author, hence the possibility of temporal lacunae, “compression” or, on the contrary, expansion of plot time, see, for example, the remark of T. Mann: “At the wonderful festival of narration and reproduction, omissions play an important and indispensable role.”

The possibilities of expanding or compressing time are widely used by writers. So, for example, in the story by I.S. Turgenev's "Spring Waters" highlights Sanin's love story for Gemma in close-up - the most striking event in the hero's life, its emotional peak; At the same time, artistic time slows down, “stretches out,” but the course of the hero’s subsequent life is conveyed in a generalized, summary manner: And then - life in Paris and all the humiliations, all the disgusting torments of a slave... Then - the return to his homeland, a poisoned, devastated life, petty fuss , minor troubles...

Artistic time in the text appears as a dialectical unity of the finite and the infinite. In the endless flow of time, one event or a chain of events is singled out; their beginning and end are usually fixed. The ending of the work is a signal that the time period presented to the reader has ended, but time continues beyond it. Such a property of real-time works as orderliness is also transformed in a literary text. This may be due to the subjective determination of the reference point or measure of time: for example, in S. Bobrov’s autobiographical story “Boy”, the measure of time for the hero is a holiday:

For a long time I tried to imagine what a year was... and suddenly I saw in front of me a rather long ribbon of grayish-pearly fog, lying horizontally in front of me, like a towel thrown on the floor.<...>Was this towel divided for months?.. No, it was unnoticeable. For seasons?.. It’s also somehow not very clear... It was clearer something else. These were the patterns of the holidays that colored the year.

Artistic time represents the unity of the particular 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; temporary flow." As a unity of discrete and continuous, finite and infinite, and can act. a separate temporary situation in 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, this is true.” The plane of the timeless in a literary text is created through the use of repetitions, maxims and aphorisms, various kinds of reminiscences, symbols and other tropes. In this regard, artistic time can be considered as a complementary phenomenon, to the analysis of which N. Bohr’s principle of complementarity is applicable (opposite means cannot be combined synchronously; to obtain a holistic view, two “experiences” separated in time are needed). The antinomy “finite - infinite” is resolved in a literary text as a result of the use of conjugate, but spaced apart in time and therefore ambiguous means, for example, 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 connection of time with subject-event content (its fullness/emptiness, “emptiness”). According to these parameters, both works and fragments of text in them, forming certain time blocks, can be contrasted.

Artistic time is based on a certain system of linguistic means. This is, first of all, 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 certain time plan (for example, nominative sentences represent in the text there is a 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 statics or dynamics in the text, the acceleration or slowdown of time, 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. The penguin wings were in the way; his head hung like the faucet of a broken samovar...

And suddenly his head jerked up, his legs began to prance like a twenty-five-year-old...

Forms of time act as signals of various subjective spheres in the structure of the narrative, cf., for example:

Gleb lay on the sand, resting his head in his hands, it was a quiet, sunny morning. He wasn't working on his mezzanine today. It's all over. Tomorrow they are leaving, Ellie is packing up, everything is re-drilled. Helsingfors again...

(B. Zaitsev. Gleb’s Journey)

The functions of types of tense forms in a literary text are largely typified. As noted by V.V. Vinogradov, narrative (“event”) time is determined primarily by the relationship between the dynamic forms of the past tense of the perfect form and the forms of the past imperfect, acting in a procedural-long-term or qualitative-characterizing meaning. The latter forms are correspondingly assigned to the descriptions.

The time of the text as a whole is determined by the interaction of three temporal “axes”:

1) calendar time, displayed predominantly by lexical units with the seme “time” and dates;

2) event time, organized by the connection of all predicates of the text (primarily verbal forms);

3) perceptual time, expressing the position of the narrator and the character (in this case, different lexical and grammatical means and temporal shifts are used).

Artistic and grammatical tenses are closely related, but they should not be equated. “Grammatical tense and the tense of a verbal work can diverge significantly. The time of action and the author’s and reader’s time are created by a combination of many factors: among them, only partly grammatical time...”

Artistic time is created by all elements of the text, while the means expressing temporal relations interact with the means expressing spatial relations. Let's limit ourselves to one example: for example, change of designs C; predicates of movement (left the city, entered the forest, arrived in Nizhneye Gorodishche, 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 character’s movement in space and participates in the creation of artistic space. To create an image of time, spatial metaphors are regularly used in literary texts.

Ancient works characterized by mythological time, a sign of which is the idea of ​​cyclical reincarnations, “world periods”. Mythological time, not in the opinion of K. Levi-Strauss, can be defined as the unity of such characteristics as reversibility-irreversibility, synchronicity-diachronicity. The present and the future in mythological time appear only as different temporal hypostases of the past, which is an invariant structure. The cyclical structure of mythological time turned out to be significantly significant for the development of art in different eras. “The exceptionally powerful orientation of mythological thinking towards establishing homo- and isomorphisms, on the one hand, made it scientifically fruitful, and on the other, determined its periodic revival in various historical eras.” 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 viewed primarily as a reflection of eternity, while the idea of ​​it was predominantly of an eschatological nature: time begins with the act of creation and ends with the “second coming.” The main direction of time becomes orientation towards the future - the future exodus from time into eternity, while the metrization of time itself changes and the role of the present, the dimension of which is connected with the spiritual life of a person, significantly increases: “... for the present of past objects we have memory or memories; for the present of real objects we have a look, an outlook, an intuition; for the present of future objects we have aspiration, hope, hope,” wrote Augustine. Thus, in ancient Russian literature, time, as D.S. notes. Likhachev, not as egocentric as in the literature of modern times. It is characterized by isolation, one-pointedness, strict adherence to the real sequence of events, and a constant appeal to the eternal: “Medieval literature strives for the timeless, for overcoming time in the depiction of the highest manifestations of existence - the divine establishment of the universe.” The achievements of ancient Russian literature in recreating events “from the angle of eternity” in a transformed form were used by writers of subsequent generations, in particular F.M. Dostoevsky, for whom “the temporary was... a form of realization of the eternal.” Let us limit 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.

Are you hoping to get to that point?

“This is hardly possible in our time,” Nikolai Vsevolodovich responded, also without any irony, slowly and as if thoughtfully. - In the Apocalypse, the angel swears that there will be no more time.

I know. This is very true there; clearly and accurately. When the whole person achieves happiness, there will be no more time, because there is no need.

Since the Renaissance, the evolutionary theory of time has been affirmed in culture and science: spatial events become the basis for the movement of time. Time, thus, is understood as eternity, not opposed to time, but moving and being realized in every instantaneous situation. This is reflected in the literature of modern times, which boldly violates the principle of irreversibility of real time. Finally, the 20th century is a period of particularly bold experimentation with artistic time. The ironic judgment of Zh.P. is indicative. Sartre: “...most of the largest modern writers - Proust, Joyce... Faulkner, Gide, W. Wolf - each in their own way tried to cripple time. Some of them deprived him of his past and future in order to reduce him to the pure intuition of the moment... Proust and Faulkner simply 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 forward movement in which each higher stage negates, removes its lower (preceding) one, contains its richness and again removes itself in the next , third, stage.

Features of modeling artistic time are taken into account when determining the constitutive characteristics of the genus, genre, and movement in literature. So, according to A.A. Potebnya, “lyrics - praesens”, “epic - perfectum”; the principle of recreating times can distinguish between genres: aphorisms and maxims, for example, are characterized by a constant present; Reversible artistic time is inherent in memoirs and autobiographical works. The literary direction is also associated with a specific concept of the development of time and the principles of its transmission, while, for example, the measure of adequacy of real time is different. Thus, symbolism is characterized by the implementation of the idea of ​​​​eternal movement-becoming: the world develops according to the laws of the “triad (the unity of the world spirit 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 (thus, 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).

Taking into account the peculiarities of the embodiment of time in a literary text, considering the concept of time in it and, more broadly, in the writer’s work is a necessary component 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 the artistic text, making the analysis incomplete and schematic.

The analysis of artistic time includes the following main points:

1) determination of the features of artistic time in the work in question:

Unidimensionality or multidimensionality;

Reversibility or irreversibility;

Linearity or violation of time sequence;

2) highlighting the temporal plans (planes) presented in the work in the temporal structure of the text and considering their interaction;

4) identifying signals that highlight these forms of time;

5) consideration of the entire system of time indicators in the text, identifying not only their direct ones, but also figurative meanings;

6) determining the relationship between historical and everyday time, biographical and historical;

7) establishing a connection between artistic time and space.

Let us turn to the consideration of individual aspects of the artistic time of the text based on the material of specific works (“The Past and Thoughts” by A. I. Herzen and the story “Cold Autumn” by I. A. Bunin).

“The Past and Thoughts” by A. I. Herzen: features of temporary organization

In a literary text, a moving, 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, sometimes expands, sometimes “thickens” time, sometimes slows it down; it speeds up.

In a work of art, different aspects of artistic time are correlated: plot time (the temporal extent of the depicted actions and their reflection in the composition of the work) and plot time (their real sequence), the author’s time and the subjective time of the characters. It presents different manifestations (forms) of time (everyday historical time, personal time and social time). The focus of a writer or poet’s attention may be the image of time itself, associated with the motive of movement, development, formation, with the opposition of the transitory 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 a certain philosophy of history is embodied. Such works include the memoir-autobiographical epic “The Past and Thoughts” (1852 - 1868). This is not only the pinnacle of A.I.’s creativity. Herzen, but also a work of “new form” (as defined by L.N. Tolstoy) It combines elements of different genres (autobiography, confession, notes, historical chronicle), combines different shapes presentations and compositional and semantic types of speech, “gravestone 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 a review of one’s own life” (Yu.K. Olesha), “The Past and Thoughts” is the history of the formation of a Russian revolutionary and at the same time the history of social thought of the 30-60s of the 19th century. “There is hardly another work of memoirs so imbued with conscious historicism.”

This is a work 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 “and a confession around which, about which, here and there, captured memories from the past, here and there, stopped thoughts and other m" (highlighted by A.I. Herzen. - N.N.). This author’s characteristic, 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, the free juxtaposition of different time plans, the constant switching of time registers; The author’s “thoughts” are combined with a retrospective, but devoid of strict chronological sequence, story about the events of the past, and include characteristics of persons, events and facts from different historical eras. The narration of the past is supplemented by stage reproduction of individual situations; the story about the “past” is interrupted by fragments of text that reflect the immediate position of the narrator at the moment of speech or the reconstructed period of time.

This construction of the work “clearly reflected the methodological principle of “Past and Thoughts”: the constant interaction of the general and the particular, the transitions from the author’s direct thoughts to their substantive illustration and back.”

Artistic time in “The Past...” is reversible (the author resurrects the events of the past), multidimensional (the action unfolds in different time planes) and nonlinear (the story about the events of the past is disrupted by self-interruptions, reasoning, comments, and assessments). The starting point that determines the change of time plans in the text is mobile and constantly moving.

The plot time of the work - time is primarily biographical, “past”, reconstructed inconsistently - reflects the main stages in the development of the author’s personality.

At the heart of biographical time is the end-to-end image of a path (road), in symbolic form embodying the life path of the narrator, seeking true knowledge and going through a series of tests. This traditional spatial image is realized in a system of expanded metaphors and comparisons, regularly repeated in the text and forming a cross-cutting motif 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...; ...the June of coming of age, with its painful work, with its rubble on the road, takes a person by surprise.; Like lost knights in fairy tales, we waited at a crossroads. If you go to the right, you will lose your horse, but you yourself will be safe; if you go to the left, the horse will be intact, but you yourself will die; if you go forward, everyone will leave you; If you go back, this is no longer possible, the road there is overgrown with grass for us.

These tropical 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 if cast in metal, detailed, unchanging, dark, like bronze. People generally only forget what is not worth remembering or what they don’t understand”) and refracting through his subsequent experience, A.I. Herzen makes maximum use of the expressive capabilities of the tense forms of the verb.

The situations and facts depicted in the past are assessed by the author in different ways: some of them are described extremely briefly, while others (the most important for the author in an emotional, aesthetic or ideological sense), on the contrary, are highlighted “close-up”, while time “stops” or slows down. To achieve this aesthetic effect, imperfective past tense forms or present tense forms are used. If the forms of the past perfect express a chain of successively changing actions, then the forms of the imperfect form convey not the dynamics of the event, but the dynamics of the action itself, presenting it as an unfolding process. Performing in a literary text not only a “reproducing”, but also a “visually pictorial”, “descriptive” function, the forms of the past imperfect stop time. In the text of “Past and Thoughts” they are used as a means of highlighting in “close-up” situations or events that are especially significant for the author (the oath on Vorobyovy Mountain, 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 author's attitude in this case also performs an emotional-expressive function towards the depicted. Wed, for example: The nurse in a sundress and a warmer still looked after us and cried; Sonnenberg, this funny 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 form, which presupposes the obligatory presence of a moment of observation, a retrospective point of reference. A.I. Herzen also uses the expressive possibilities of the past imperfect form with the meaning of multiple or habitually repeated action: they serve for typification, generalization of empirical details and situations. Thus, to characterize life in his father’s house, Herzen uses the technique of describing one day - a description based on the consistent use of imperfective forms. “Past and Thoughts” is 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. Interesting in this regard is the portrait of the Chaadaevs, built on the transition from the author’s specific personal observations to a typical characteristic:

I loved to look at him in the midst of this tinsel nobility, flighty senators, gray-haired rakes 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 forehead like a naked skull”... For ten years he stood with folded arms , somewhere near a column, near a tree on the boulevard, in halls and theaters, in a club and - the embodiment of veto, he looked with lively protest at the whirlwind of faces spinning meaninglessly around him...

The forms of the present tense 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, but they, unlike the forms of the past imperfect in the “picturesque” function, recreate, first of all, the immediate time of the author’s experience associated with the moment of lyrical concentrations, or (less often) convey predominantly typical situations, repeatedly repeated in the past and now reconstructed by memory as imaginary:

The peace of the oak forest and the noise of the oak forest, the continuous buzzing of flies, bees, bumblebees... and the smell... this grass-forest smell... which I so greedily sought in Italy, and in England, and in the spring, and in the hot summer, and almost never found it. Sometimes it seems to smell like it, after mown hay, in broad daylight, before a thunderstorm... and I remember a small place in front of the house... on the grass, a three-year-old boy, lying in clover and dandelions, between grasshoppers, all sorts of beetles and ladybugs, and ourselves, both youth and friends! The sun has set, it’s still very warm, we don’t want to go home, we’re sitting on the grass. The catcher picks mushrooms and scolds me for no reason. What is this, like a bell? to us, or what? Today is Saturday - maybe... The troika rolls 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. The reconstruction 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 forms of the past perfect in the perfect meaning. The chain of forms of the historical present and nominatives not only brings the events of the past as close as possible, but also conveys a subjective sense of time and recreates its rhythm:

My heart was beating strongly when I again saw familiar, dear streets, places, houses that I had not seen for about four years... Kuznetsky Most, Tverskoy Boulevard... here is Ogarev’s house, they stuck some kind of huge coat of arms on him, it’s someone else’s already... here is Povarskaya - the spirit is busy: in the mezzanine, in the corner window, a candle is burning, this is her room, she writes to me, she is thinking about me, the candle burns so cheerfully, it burns so much for me.

Thus, the biographical plot time of the work is uneven and discontinuous, it is characterized by a deep but moving 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 as a piece of smalt in the overall mosaic picture of a verbal work.” Artistic time is created by all elements of the text.

Lyrical expression and attention to the “moment” are combined in the prose of A.I. Herzen with constant typification, with a social-analytical approach to what is depicted. Considering that “it is more necessary here than anywhere else to take off masks and portraits,” since “we are terribly falling apart from 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: “the universal without personality is an empty distraction; but a person 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. Thus, in Chapter III of the first volume, a portrait of Nicholas I is presented, it is static and emphatically evaluative, the speech means involved in its creation contain the common semantic feature “cold”: a cropped and shaggy jellyfish with a mustache; His beauty filled him with cold... But the main thing was his eyes, without any warmth, without any mercy, winter eyes.

The portrait description of Ogarev is constructed differently in Chapter IV of the same volume. A description of his appearance is followed by an introduction; elements of prospection related to the hero’s future. “If a pictorial portrait is always a moment stopped in time, then a verbal portrait characterizes a person in “actions and deeds” relating 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 on one could see in him that anointing that not many people get - for bad luck or for good luck... but probably for the purpose of not being in the crowd... unaccountable sadness and extreme meekness shone through large gray eyes, hinting at the future growth of a great spirit; That's how he grew up.

The combination of different time points of view in portraits when describing and characterizing the characters deepens the moving time perspective of the work.

The multiplicity of time points of view presented in the structure of the text is increased by the inclusion of fragments of the diary, letters of other characters, excerpts from literary works, in particular from the poems of N. Ogarev. These elements of the text are correlated with the author's narrative or author's descriptions and are often contrasted with them as genuine, objective - subjective, transformed by time. See, for example: The truth of that time, as it was then understood, without the artificial perspective that distance gives, without the cooling of time, without the corrected illumination by rays passing through a 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 extensive comparisons and metaphors that recreate the passage of time: The years of her life abroad passed luxuriantly and noisily, but they went and plucked flower after flower... Like a tree in the middle of winter, she retained the linear outline of her branches, the leaves flew away, the bare branches chilled bonyly , but the majestic growth and bold dimensions were all the more clearly visible. The image of a clock is repeatedly used in “The Past...”, embodying the inexorable power of time: The large English table clock, with its measured*, loud spondee - tick-tock - tick-tock - tick-tock... seemed to be measuring out the last quarter of an hour of her life ...; And the spondee of the English clock continued to measure days, hours, minutes... and finally reached 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 general linguistic type of comparisons and metaphors, which, repeated in the text, undergo transformations and affect the surrounding elements of the context; as a result, the stability of tropical characteristics is combined with their constant update.

Thus, biographical time in “Past and Thoughts” consists 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 reconstructed facts are 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, presupposing subjectivity of measurement, closed, having a beginning and an end (“Everything personal quickly crumbles away... Let “The Past and Thoughts” settle accounts with personal life and will be its table of contents"). It is included in the broad flow of time associated with the historical era reflected in the work. Thus, closed biographical time is contrasted with open historical time. This opposition is reflected in the features of the composition of “The Past and Thoughts”: “in the sixth and seventh parts there is no longer a lyrical hero; in general, the personal, “private” fate of the author remains outside the boundaries of what is depicted,” the dominant element of the author’s speech becomes “thoughts” that appear in a monologue or dialogized form. One of the leading grammatical forms organizing these contexts is the present tense. If the plot biographical time of “The Past and Thoughts” is characterized by the use of the actual present (“the author’s current ... the result of moving the “observation point” to one of the moments of the past, the plot action”) or the historical present, then for “thoughts” and the author’s digressions, constituting the main layer of historical time, characterized by the present 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: The nation, like a banner, like a battle cry, is only surrounded by a revolutionary aura when the people are fighting for independence, when he overthrows the foreign yoke... The War of 1812 greatly developed a sense of national consciousness and love for the homeland, 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 fell on its road.”

The life of an individual in “Bydrm and Thoughts” 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: A thousand times I wanted to convey a series of peculiar figures, sharp portraits taken from life... There is nothing gregarious in them... one common connection between them, or, better, one common misfortune; Peering into the dark gray background, you can see soldiers under sticks, serfs under rods... wagons rushing to Siberia, convicts trudged there, shaved foreheads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes, sultans... in a word, St. Petersburg Russia.. They want to run from the canvas and cannot.

If the biographical time of a work is characterized by a spatial image of a road, then to represent historical time, in addition to the image of the background, images of the sea (ocean) and elements are regularly used:

Impressive, sincerely young, we were easily caught up in a powerful wave... and early we swam across that line at which whole rows of people stop, fold their arms, walk back or look around for a ford - across the sea!

In history, it is easier for him [man] to be passionately 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 through the waves with his boat, forcing the bottomless abyss to serve him through communication.

Characterizing 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.” A person’s aspirations “are clothed in words, embodied in images, remain in tradition and are passed on from century to century.” This understanding of the place of man in the historical process led to the author’s appeal to the universal language of culture, the search for certain “formulas” to explain the problems of history and, more broadly, of existence, to classify particular phenomena and situations. Such “formulas” in the text of “Past and Thoughts” are a special type of tropes, characteristic of the style of A.I. Herzen. These are metaphors, comparisons, periphrases, 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 replacements for entire situations and plots. The trails they are part of serve for figurative characteristics phenomena of which Herzen was a contemporary, persons and events of other historical eras. See, for example: Students-young ladies - Jacobins, Saint-Just in an Amazon - everything is sharp, pure, 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 repentance, this Lucrezia Borgia without Italian blood...

Phenomena of history and modernity, empirical facts and myths, real persons and literary images are compared, as a result the situations described in the work receive a second plan: through the particular the general appears, through the individual - the repeating, through the transitory - the eternal.

The relationship in the structure of the work of two time layers: private time, biographical time and historical time - leads to a complication of the subjective organization of the text. The author's I consistently alternates with we, which in different contexts takes on different meanings: it points either to the author, or to persons close to him, or, with the increasing role of historical time, serves as a means of indicating the entire generation, a national collective, or even, more broadly, the human race generally:

Our historical vocation, our deed lies in this: through our disappointment, through our suffering, we reach the point of humility and submission 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 seems to the author to be a tireless striving forward, a path that has no end, but presupposes, however, 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 an addiction to the returning rhythm, to the repetition of the motive; who doesn’t know how close old age is to childhood? Take a closer look and you will see that on both sides of the full height of life, with its wreaths of flowers and thorns, with its cradles and coffins, eras are often repeated, similar in the main features.

It is historical time that is especially important for the narrative: the formation of the hero of “Past and Thoughts” reflects the formation of the era; biographical time is not only contrasted with historical time, but also acts as one of its manifestations.

Dominant images that characterize both biographical time (the image of the path) and historical time (the image of the sea, the elements) in the text interact, their connection gives rise to the movement of private cross-cutting images associated with the deployment of the dominant: I’m not coming from London. There is nowhere and no reason... It was washed here and thrown by the waves, which so mercilessly broke and twisted me and everything close to me.

The interaction of different time plans in the text, the correlation of biographical and historical time in the work, “the reflection of history in a person” are the distinctive features of the memoir-autobiographical epic of A.I. Herzen. These principles of temporal organization determine the figurative structure of the text and are reflected in the language of the work.

Questions and tasks

1. Read A. P. Chekhov’s story “Student”.

2. What time plans are compared in this text?

3. Consider the verbal means of expressing temporary relationships. What role do they play in creating the artistic time of a text?

4. What manifestations (forms) of time are presented in the text of the story “Student”?

5. How are time and space connected in this text? What chronotope, from your point of view, underlies the story?

Story by I.A. Bunin “Cold Autumn”: conceptualization of time

In a literary text, time is not only event-based, but also conceptual: the flow of time as a whole and its individual segments are divided, evaluated, and comprehended by the author, narrator, or characters of the work. Conceptualization of time - a special representation of it in an individual or folk painting the world, the interpretation of the meaning of its forms, phenomena and signs - manifests itself:

1) in the assessments and comments of the narrator or character included in the text: And much, much has been experienced during these two years, which seem so long, when you think about them carefully, you sort through in your memory everything that is magical, incomprehensible, incomprehensible neither with your mind nor with your heart what is called the past (I. Bunin. Cold Autumn);

2) in the use of tropes 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 - it would be better if you didn’t look! (O. Mandelstam. Egyptian stamp);

3) in the subjective perception and division of the time flow in accordance with the starting point adopted in the narrative;

4) in the contrast of 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 occurrence (instantaneity), transience - duration, repeatability - the singularity of a single moment, temporality - eternity, cyclicity - the irreversibility of time. In both lyrical and prose works, the passage 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 the key to its interpretation.

Let us consider in this aspect the story by I.A. Bunin “Cold Autumn” (1944), part of the “Dark Alleys” cycle. The text is structured as a first-person narrative and is characterized by a retrospective composition: it is based on the heroine’s memories. “The plot of the story turns out to be embedded in the situation of the speech-mental action of memory (emphasized by M.Ya. Dymarsky - N.N.).. The situation of memory 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 parts unequal in volume: the first, which forms the basis of the narrative, is structured as a description of the heroine’s engagement and her farewell to her groom on a cold September evening in 1914; the second contains generalized information about the thirty years of the heroine’s subsequent life; in the third, extremely brief, part, the relationship between “one evening” - a moment of farewell - and the entire life I have lived is assessed: But, remembering everything that I have experienced since then, I always ask myself: what happened in my life? And I answer myself: only that cold autumn evening. Was he really there once? Still, it was. And that’s all that happened in my life - the rest was 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 time 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 characters’ last meeting, in which each of their remarks or remarks turn 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 go for a little walk? My soul became increasingly heavier, I responded indifferently:

Okay... While getting dressed in the hallway, he continued to think about 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 “physical space turns out to be only a symbol, a sign of a certain element of experience that captures the heroes and takes possession of them”:

At first it was so dark that I held on to his sleeve. Then black branches, showered with mineral-shining stars, began to appear in the brightening sky. He paused and turned towards the house:

Look how the windows of the house shine in a very special, autumn-like way...

At the same time, the description of the “farewell evening” includes figurative means that clearly have prospectivity: associated with the depicted realities, they associatively indicate future (in relation to what is being described) tragic upheavals. Thus, the epithets cold, icy, black (cold autumn, icy stars, black sky) are associated with the image of death, and in the epithet autumn the semes “departing”, “farewell” are actualized (see, for example: Somehow they shine in a particularly autumnal way windows of the house. Or: There is some kind of rustic autumn charm in these poems). The cold autumn of 1914 is depicted as the eve of the fateful “winter” (the air is completely winter) with its cold, darkness and cruelty. The metaphor from A. Fet’s poem: ... It’s as if a fire is rising - in the context of the whole it expands its meaning and serves as a sign of future cataclysms, which the heroine is not aware of 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 with the summary characteristics of the next thirty years of the narrator’s life, and the concreteness and “homelikeness” 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 countless crowd of other refugees from Novorossiysk to Turkey... Bulgaria, Serbia, Czech Republic, Belgium, Paris, Nice...

The compared time periods are associated, as we see, with different spatial images: a farewell evening - primarily with the image of a house, life expectancy - with many loci, the names of which form a disordered, open chain. The chronotope of the idyll is transformed into the chronotope of the threshold, and then replaced by the chronotope of the road.

The uneven division of the time flow corresponds to the compositional and 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 fragmented paragraph division: in the description of the “farewell evening”, various micro-themes 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 would seem to be more significant both for the heroine’s personal biographical time and for historical time (the death of parents, trading at 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 identical that they merge in the narrator’s mind into one continuous stream: the narrative about it is devoid of internal pulsation of assessments (monotony of rhythmic organization), devoid of a pronounced compositional division into micro-episodes (micro-events) and is therefore contained in one “solid” paragraph " It is characteristic that within its framework, many events in the heroine’s life are either not highlighted at all, or are not motivated, and the facts preceding them are not restored, cf.: In the spring of the eighteenth year, when neither my father nor my mother was already alive, I lived in Moscow , in the basement of a merchant at the Smolensk market... Neither the cause of death (possibly death) of the parents, nor the events in the heroine’s life from 1914 to 1918 are mentioned in the story.

Thus, the “farewell evening” - the plot of the first part of the story - and the thirty years of the heroine’s subsequent life are contrasted not only on the basis of “moment / duration”, but also on the basis of “significance / insignificance”. Omissions of time periods add tragic tension to the narrative and emphasize man’s powerlessness before fate.

The heroine’s value attitude towards 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 contrasted with only one “cold autumn evening”, which has become the only content of the lived life. life and its justification. It is characteristic that the heroine’s present (I lived and still live in Nice whatever God sends...) is interpreted by her as an integral part of a “dream” and thereby acquires a sign of unreality. “Dream”-life and one evening opposed to it differ, therefore, in their modal characteristics: only one “moment” of life, resurrected by the heroine in her memories, is assessed by her as real, as a result, the traditional contrast between the past and the present 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 heroine’s present merges with the past and acquires signs of illusoryness and illusoryness. In the last compositional part of the story, the temporal is already correlated with the eternal: And I believe, I fervently believe: somewhere there he is waiting for me - with the same love and youth as that evening. “You live, enjoy the world, then come to me...” I lived, rejoiced, and now I’ll come soon.

Involved in eternity, as we see, is the memory of the individual, establishing a connection between a single evening in the past and timelessness. Memory lives with love, which allows “to emerge from individuality into the All-Unity and from earthly existence into metaphysical true existence.”

In this regard, it is interesting to turn to the plan for the future in the story. Against the background of the forms of the past tense that predominate in the text, a few forms of the future stand out - forms of “volition” and “openness” (V.N. Toporov), which, as a rule, lack evaluative neutrality. All of them are united semantically: 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 forever 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 be waiting for you there. Live, enjoy the world, then come to me. “I’ve lived, I’m happy, and now I’ll be back soon.”

It is characteristic that statements containing forms of the future tense, located distantly 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 the answer to her youthful question-reasoning: And will I really forget him in some short time - after all, everything is forgotten in the end? In the memories the heroine continues to live and turns 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 Fet’s lines 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 grandparents...).

The energy and creative power of memory frees individual moments of existence from fluidity, fragmentation, insignificance, enlarges them, reveals in them the “secret patterns” of fate or the highest meaning, as a result, true time is established - the time of consciousness of the narrator or hero, which contrasts the “unnecessary sleep” of existence unique moments, imprinted forever in memory. The measure of human life thereby recognizes the presence in it of moments involved in eternity and freed from the power of irreversible physical time.

Questions and tasks

1. 1. Re-read I. A. Bunin’s story “In a Familiar Street.”

2. What compositional parts are the repeated quotes from the poem by Ya. P. Polonsky divided into?

3. What time periods are shown in the text? How do they relate to each other?

4. What aspects of time are particularly significant to the structure of this text? Name the speech means that highlight them.

5. How do the plans of the past, present and future correlate in the text of the story?

6. What is unique about the ending of the story and how unexpected it is for the reader? Compare the endings of the stories “Cold Autumn” and “In One Familiar Street.” What are their similarities and differences?

7. What concept of time is reflected in the story “On a Familiar Street”?

II. Analyze the temporal organization of V. Nabokov’s story “Spring in Fialta”. Prepare a message “The artistic time of V. Nabokov’s story “Spring in Fialta”.

Art space

The text is spatial, i.e. elements of the text have a certain spatial configuration. Hence the theoretical and practical possibility of spatial interpretation of tropes and figures, the structure of the narrative. Thus, Ts. Todorov notes: “The most systematic study of spatial organization in fiction was carried out by Roman Jacobson. In his analyzes of poetry, he showed that all layers of utterance... form an established structure based on symmetries, build-ups, oppositions, parallelisms, etc., which together form a real spatial structure.” A similar spatial structure 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. Thus, in the chapter “One Hundred Mustaches - One Hundred Noses,” the phrase The walls are white and white, they shine from the lamp, as if strewn with grated glass, and the leitmotif of the entire novel is the repetition of the sentence Stone Frog (highlighted by A.M. Remizov. - N.N. ) moved her ugly webbed feet, which is usually included in a complex syntactic construction with varying lexical composition.

The study of a text as a certain spatial organization thus presupposes 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, figured verses, the use of brackets, paragraphs, spaces, the special nature of the distribution of words in a verse, line, sentence), etc. “They often indicate,” notes I. Klyukanov, “ that poetic texts are printed differently than other texts. However, to a certain extent, all texts are printed differently than others: at the same time, the graphic appearance of the text “signals” its genre affiliation, its attachment to one or another type of speech activity and forces a certain image of perception... So - “spatial architectonics” the text acquires a kind of normative status. This norm may be violated by the 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 Kästner’s definition, “space in this case functions in the text as an operative secondary illusion, something through which spatial properties are realized in temporal art.”

Thus, there is a distinction between broad and narrow understandings of space. This is due to the distinction between an external point of view on the text as a certain spatial organization that is perceived by the reader, and an internal point of view that considers the spatial characteristics of the text itself as a relatively closed internal world that is self-sufficient. 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 what follows, the main object of consideration is the artistic space of the work.

The writer reflects real space-time connections in the work he creates, building his own perceptual series parallel to the real one, and creates a new - conceptual - space, which becomes a form of implementation of the author's idea. To the artist, wrote M.M. Bakhtin, is characterized by “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; a 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 a 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, when displayed, the general properties of real space are transformed and have a special character: extension, continuity - discontinuity, three-dimensionality - and its particular properties: shape, location, distance, boundaries between different systems. In a particular work, one of the properties of space can come to the fore and be specially played out, see, for example, the geometrization of urban space in A. Bely’s novel “Petersburg” and the use in it of images associated with the designation of discrete geometric objects (cube, square, parallelepiped, line, etc.): There the houses merged in cubes into a systematic, multi-story row...

Inspiration took possession of the senator’s soul when a lacquered cube cut the Nevskog line: the house numbering was visible there...

The spatial characteristics of the events recreated in the text are refracted through the prism of the author’s perception (the story of the warrior, the character), see, for example:

The feeling of the city never corresponded to the place where my life took place. The emotional pressure always threw him into the depths of the described perspective. There, puffing, the clouds trampled, and, pushing aside their crowd, the floating smoke of countless furnaces hung across the sky. There, in lines, exactly along the embankments, crumbling houses plunged into the snow with their entrances...

(B. Pasternak. Safe-conduct)

In a literary text, there is a corresponding distinction between the space of the narrator (storyteller) and the space of the characters. Their interaction makes the artistic space of the entire work multidimensional, voluminous and devoid of homogeneity, while at the same time, the dominant space in terms of creating the integrity of the text and its internal unity remains the space of the narrator, whose mobility of point of view makes it possible to combine different angles of description and image. Language means serve as means of expressing spatial relationships in the text and indicating various spatial characteristics: syntactic constructions with the meaning of location, existential sentences, prepositional-case forms with local meaning, verbs of motion, verbs with the meaning of detecting a feature in space, adverbs of place, toponyms, etc. ., see, for example: Crossing the Irtysh. The steamer stopped the ferry... On the other side is the steppe: yurts that look like kerosene tanks, a house, cattle... The Kyrgyz are coming from the other side... (M. Prishvin); A minute later they passed the sleepy office, came out onto sand deep as deep as the hub, and silently sat down in a dusty cab. The gentle climb uphill among rare crooked lanterns... seemed endless... (I.A. Bunin).

“The reproduction (image) of space and indication of it are included in the work like pieces of a mosaic. By 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 have a different character depending on what model of the world (time and space) the writer or poet has (whether space is understood, for example, “in Newtonian” or mythopoetic).

In the archaic model of the world, space is not opposed to time; time condenses and becomes a form of space, which is “drawn” into the movement of time. “Mythopoetic space is always filled and always material; in addition to space, there is also a non-space, the embodiment of which is Chaos...” Mythopoetic ideas about space, so important for writers, are embodied in a number of mythologemes that are consistently used in literature in a number of stable images. This is, first of all, an image of a path (road), which can involve movement both horizontally and vertically (see works of folklore) and is characterized by the identification of a number of equally significant spatial: points, topographical objects - threshold, door, staircase, 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 quest on the edge of “his” 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 The news is knocking on the grave... / Oh! Wait to cross this step. While you were here, nothing died, / Step over - and the sweet was gone (V.A. Zhukovsky); I pretended to be mortal in winter / And the eternal doors closed forever, / But they still recognize my voice, / And yet they will believe me again (A. Akhmatova).

The space modeled in the text can be open or closed (closed); see, for example, the contrast between these two types of space in “Notes from the House of the Dead” by F.M. Dostoevsky: Our prison stood on the edge of the fortress, right next to the ramparts. It happened that you looked through the cracks of the fence into the light of day: wouldn’t you see anything? - and all you will see is the edge of the sky and a high earthen rampart, overgrown with weeds, and sentries walking back and forth along the rampart, day and night... In one of the sides of the fence there is a strong gate, always locked, always guarded day and night by sentries ; they were unlocked upon request to be released to work. Behind these gates there was a bright, free world...

The image of a wall serves as a stable image associated with a closed, limited space in prose and poetry, see, for example, L. Andreev’s story “The Wall” or the recurring images of a stone wall (stone hole) in the autobiographical story of A.M. Remizov’s “In Captivity”, contrasted with the reversible in the text and multidimensional image of a bird as a symbol of will.

Space may be represented in the 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 “The Dream of a Funny 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 the 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 through the darkness and unknown spaces. I have long ceased to see the constellations familiar to the eye. It was already morning... I woke up in the same chairs, my candle had all burned out, they were sleeping by the chestnut tree, and all around there was a silence 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, I. A. Bunin’s novel “The Life of Arsenyev”: And then ... we learned the barnyard, the stable, the carriage house, the threshing floor, Proval, Vyselki . The world kept 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 Proval...

According to the degree of generalization of spatial characteristics, concrete space and abstract space (not associated with specific local indicators) are distinguished, cf.: It smelled of coal, burnt oil and that smell of alarming and mysterious space that always happens at train stations (A. Platonov). - Despite the endless space, the world was comfortable at this time early hour(A. Platonov).

The space actually visible by the character or narrator is supplemented by imaginary space. The space given in the perception of a character can be characterized by 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 onto the 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 as clear 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).

The degree of filling of space is also significant for the figurative system of the work. So, in the story by A.M. Gorky's "Childhood" with the help of repeated lexical means (primarily the word cramped and derivatives from it) emphasizes the "crowdedness" of the space surrounding the hero. The sign of cramped space extends both to the outside world and to the inner world of the character and interacts with the end-to-end repetition of the text - the repetition of the words melancholy, boredom: Boring, boring in a special way, almost unbearable; the chest fills with liquid, warm lead, it presses from the inside, bursts the chest, ribs; It seems to me that I am swelling up like a bubble, and I am cramped in a small room under a mushroom-shaped ceiling.

The image of cramped space is correlated in the story with the end-to-end image of “the cramped, stuffy circle of terrible impressions in which a simple Russian man lived - and still lives to this day.”

Elements of the transformed artistic space can be associated in a work with the theme of historical memory, thereby historical time interacts with certain spatial images, which are usually intertextual in nature, see, for example, the novel by I.A. Bunin's "The Life of Arsenyev": And soon I again set off on a journey. I was on the very banks of the Donets, where the prince once threw himself from captivity “as an ermine into the reeds, a white nog into the water”... And from Kyiv I went to Kursk, to Putivl. “Saddle up, brother, your greyhounds, and my ti are ready, saddle up at Kursk in front...”

Artistic space is inextricably linked with artistic time.

The relationship between time and space in a literary text is expressed in the following main aspects:

1) two simultaneous situations are depicted in the work as spatially separated, juxtaposed (see, for example, “Hadji Murat” by L.N. Tolstoy, “The White Guard” by M. Bulgakov);

2) the spatial point of view of the observer (character or 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 got out completely, crossed the bridge, climbed to the barrier - and looked into the eyes of a stone, deserted road, vaguely white and running away into an endless distance... (I.A. Bunin. Sukhodol);

3) a temporal shift usually corresponds to a spatial shift (for example, the transition to the present of the narrator in “The Life of Arsenyev” by I.A. Bunin 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 been in a foreign country for a long time);

4) the acceleration of time is accompanied by a 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, scene of action, interior, etc.;

6) the passage of time is conveyed through changes in spatial characteristics: “Signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time.” So, in the story by A.M. Gorky’s “Childhood”, in the text of which there are almost no specific temporal indicators (dates, exact timing, signs of historical time), the movement of time is reflected in the spatial movement of the hero, his milestones are the move from Astrakhan to Nizhny, and then moves from one house to another , cf.: By spring, the uncles separated... and the grandfather bought himself a large, interesting house on Polevaya; Grandfather unexpectedly sold the house to the tavern owner, buying another one on 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 ended forever, Russia began, exiles, the water froze in the bucket by morning, the children grew up healthy, the ship was running along the Yenisei on a bright June day, and then there was St. Petersburg, an apartment on Ligovka, crowds of people in the Tavrichesky courtyard, then there was a front for three years, carriages, rallies, bread rations, Moscow, “Alpine Goat”, then Gnezdnikovsky, famine, theaters, work on a book expedition... (Yu. Trifonov. It was a summer afternoon).

To embody the motif of the movement of time, metaphors and similes containing spatial images are regularly used, see, for example: A long staircase grew down from days about which it is impossible to say: “lived.” They passed close, barely 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 between space and time made it possible to identify the category of chronotope, reflecting their unity. “We will call the essential interconnection of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature,” wrote M. M. Bakhtin, “a chronotope (which literally means “time-space”).” From the point of view of M.M. Bakhtin, chronotope is a formal-substantive category that has “significant genre significance... Chronotope as a formal-substantive category determines (to a large extent) the image of a person in literature. The chronotope has a certain structure: on its basis, plot-forming motifs are identified - meeting, separation, etc. Turning to the category of chronotope allows us to construct a certain typology of spatio-temporal characteristics inherent in thematic genres: there are, for example, an idyllic chronotope, which is characterized by the unity of place, the rhythmic cyclicity of time, the attachment of life to a place - home, etc., and an adventurous chronotope, which is characterized by a wide spatial background and time of “case”. On the basis of the chronotope, “localities” are also distinguished (in the terminology of M.M. Bakhtin) - stable images based on the intersection of temporal and spatial “rows” (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, Renaissance and Modern times.

"Space medieval world is a closed system with sacred centers and secular periphery. The cosmos of Neoplatonic Christianity is graded and hierarchized. The experience of space is colored by 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 objects. As noted by D.S. Likhachev, “events in the chronicle, in the lives of saints, in historical stories are mainly movements in space: campaigns and crossings, covering vast geographical spaces... Life is; manifestation of oneself in space. This is a journey on a ship among the sea of ​​life.” Spatial characteristics are consistently symbolic (top - bottom, west - east, circle, etc.). “The symbolic approach provides that rapture of thought, that pre-rationalistic 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 ways as an organic part of nature, so looking at nature from the outside is alien to him. A characteristic feature of folk medieval culture- awareness of the inextricable connection with nature, the absence of rigid boundaries between the body and the world.

During the Renaissance, the concept of perspective (“looking through”, as defined by A. Dürer) was established. The Renaissance managed to completely rationalize space. It was during this period that the concept of a closed cosmos was replaced by the concept of infinity, existing not only as a divine prototype, but also empirically as a natural reality. The image of the Universe is detheologized. The theocentric time of medieval culture is replaced by 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 individual; 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 (compare with direct perspective in pictorial painting), and the importance of the latter’s position gradually increases in literature. A certain system of speech means is emerging, reflecting both the static and dynamic point of view of the character.

In the 20th century a relatively stable subject-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, novels of “one day” often correspond to novels of “closed space”. The text can simultaneously combine a bird's eye view of space and an image of the 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 “The Roads of Flanders” the elimination of precise temporal and spatial characteristics is associated with the abandonment of personal forms of the verb and their replacement 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, etc.).

At the same time, in the literature of the 20th century. interest in mytho-poetic images and the mythopoetic model of space-time is increasing (see, for example, the poetry of A. Blok, the poetry and prose of A. Bely, the works of V. Khlebnikov). Thus, changes in the concept of time-space in science and in human worldview 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 movement to which the author belongs: naturalism, for example, which strives 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 methodology for describing spatial relationships in a literary text.

Analysis of spatial relationships in a work of art assumes:

2) identifying the nature of these positions (dynamic - static; top-bottom, bird's eye view, etc.) in their connection with the time point of view;

3) determination of the main spatial characteristics of the work (location of action and its changes, movement of the character, type of space, etc.);

4) consideration of the main spatial images of the work;

5) characteristics of speech means expressing spatial relationships. The latter, naturally, corresponds to all the various stages of analysis noted above, and forms the basis.

Let's consider ways of expressing spatial relationships in I.A.'s story. 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 everyday burden and opaque dregs; they are melodically linked to each other, and in their build-ups, resolutions and transitions they seem to unravel the threads that bind them; 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, three main spatial points of view are distinguished (the narrator, Olya Meshcherskaya and the class lady). The verbal means of their expression are nominations of spatial realities, prepositional case forms: with local meaning, adverbs of place, verbs with the meaning of movement in space, verbs with the meaning of a non-processual color attribute localized in a specific situation (Further, between the monastery and the prison, the cloudy slope turns white sky and the spring field turns grey); 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 to his full height in the middle of some brilliant hall, at the even parting in the milky, neatly crimped hair of the boss and She was silent expectantly.

All three points of view in the text are brought closer to each other by the repetition of the lexemes cold, fresh and derivatives from them. Their correlation creates an oxymoronic image of life and 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 by changes in spatial characteristics and a change in locales of action; cemetery - gymnasium garden - cathedral street - boss's office - station - garden - glass veranda - cathedral street - (world) - 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 a work characterized by elements of a ring composition. At the same time, the 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. Spatial images that are repeated in the text are also contrasted with each other: on the one hand, a grave, a cross on it, a cemetery, developing the motif of death (death), on the other, the spring wind, an image traditionally associated with the motifs of will, life, open space. Bunin uses the technique of comparing narrowing and expanding spaces. The tragic events in the heroine's life are associated with the shrinking space around her; see, for example: ... a Cossack officer, ugly and plebeian in appearance... shot her on the station platform, among a large crowd of people... The cross-cutting images of the story that dominate the text - images of the wind and light breathing - are associated with the expanding (in the finale 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 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 artistic space is an important part of the philological analysis of the text.

Questions and tasks

1. Read I. A. Bunin’s story “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 highlighted in it relate to the two main time plans of the text (past and present)?

4. What role do its intertextual connections play in the organization of the text of the story - repeated quotes from the poem by Ya. P. Polonsky? What spatial images stand out in Polonsky’s poem and in the text of the story?

5. Indicate the means of speech that express spatial relationships in the text. What makes them unique?

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 “any entry into the sphere of meanings occurs 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 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 and determine the forms of its possible organization. Stage space is understood as “the space specifically perceived by the public on stage... or on fragments of scenes of various scenographies.”

A dramaturgical text, thus, always correlates the system of events presented in it with the conditions of the theater and the possibilities of embodying the action on stage with its inherent boundaries. “It is at the level of space... that you realize the articulation between text and performance.” The forms of the stage space are determined by the author's stage directions and the spatio-temporal characteristics contained in the cue: the characters. In addition, the dramatic text always provides indications of off-stage space, not limited by the conditions of the theater. What is not shown in the drama nevertheless plays out 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” (emphasized by Sh. Levi - 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 padding material between reality as such and intratheatrical reality...” In drama, finally, due to the specifics of this type 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: it combines elements of comedy, “moral drama,” parable and tragedy. The drama “Last Summer in Chulimsk” is characterized by the unity of the scene. It is defined by the first (“setting”) 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 lonely birch tree, further away you can see a hill, covered with spruce below, pine and larch above. Three windows and a door open onto the veranda of the house, on which is nailed a “Tea House” sign... There are openwork carvings everywhere on the cornices, window frames, shutters, and gates. Half-upholstered, shabby, black with age, 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 continues in the next part of the remark, the very volume of which indicates 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 decorated with carvings), 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, as in a forest... On one side, two boards have been knocked out of the fence, currant bushes have been broken off, the grass and flowers are dented...

The description of the house again emphasizes signs of beauty and decay, with signs of destruction dominating. In the stage direction - the only direct manifestation of the author's position in the drama - speech means are highlighted that not only denote the realities of the space recreated on stage, but also, in figurative use, indicate the characters of the play who have not yet appeared on stage, the features of their lives, relationships (simple flowers, growing disorderly; rumpled flowers and grass). The remark reflects the spatial point of view of a specific observer, at the same time it is constructed as if the author is trying to revive pictures of the past in his memory.

The stage directions determine the nature of the stage space, which consists 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 canopy, a woodpile under the canopy, a tyn and a gate to the garden... Highlighted details allow you to organize stage action and highlight a number of key spatial images that are clearly of an axiological (evaluative) nature. Such are, for example, the movement up and down the stairs leading to the mezzanine, the closed gate of Valentina’s house, separating it from the outside world, the window of an old house turned into a display case for a buffet, a broken front garden fence. Unfortunately, directors and theater designers do not always take into account the rich possibilities opened up by the author's stage directions. “The scenographic appearance of Chulimsk, as a rule, is monotonous... Scenographic artists... have revealed 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 disorganization of the house and its untidiness suddenly turn out to be one of those underwater reefs that do not allow us to get closer to the symbolism of the play, its deeper stage embodiment.”

The space of drama is both open and closed. 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 - Poteryaikha and Klyuchi. The spatial image of a crossroads introduces into the text the motive of choice that the heroes face. This motive, associated with the ancient type of value situation of “searching for the road,” is most clearly expressed in the final phenomenon of the first scene of the second act, while the theme of danger and “fall” is associated with the road leading to Poteryaikha, and the hero (Shamanov) is at the “crossroads” roads" makes a mistake 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 external (“alien”) world and serves as a stable symbol of a habitable and ordered space, protected from chaos. The house embodies the idea of ​​spiritual harmony and requires protection. The actions taken around him are usually of a protective 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 those around her, constantly repairs the fence and, as noted in the stage directions, adjusts the gate. The playwright’s choice of this particular verb is indicative: the root fret, repeated in the text, actualizes such important meanings for the Russian linguistic picture of the world as “harmony” and “order of the world.”

The image of the House expresses other stable symbolic meanings in the play. This is a micromodel of the world, and the 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 see, reveals the mythopoetic subtext of a seemingly everyday drama from provincial life.

In addition, this spatial image also has a temporal dimension: it connects the past and present and embodies the connection of times, which is no longer felt by most of the characters and is supported only by Valentina. " an old house- a mute witness to the irreversible processes of life, the inevitability of departure, the accumulation of the burden 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 just 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, 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 unlocked cash register... a prosaic and implausible world, where a real revolver coexists with no less real chickens and wild boars - this Chulimsk lives in special ways passions,” above all love and jealousy. Time seemed to have stopped in the village. 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 individual references to the city and structures for which “documents” are most important, cf.:

E R E M E V. I worked for forty years...

Dergachev. There are no documents, and there is no conversation... You are due a pension from there (pointing his finger to the sky), but here, brother, don’t wait. It won't break off for you here.

The non-stage space in Vampilov’s drama is thus 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-way” telephone conversations. In general, the social space of drama is quite conventional; 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 the comic hero of the drama. His “meaningful” surname is already indicative, which is clearly of a contaminated nature (it possibly goes back to the combination of the verb rushes with the word rattle). A comic effect is also created by the author's remarks characterizing the hero: He behaves strangely tensely, clearly assuming an authoritative sternness and guiding concern; Not noticing the ridicule, he swells up. Against the background of the speech characteristics of other characters, it is Mechetkin’s remarks that stand out with their bright characterological means: an abundance of cliches, “label” words, elements of “clericalism”; Wed: Signals are already coming at you; It stands, you know, on the road, preventing rational movement; The question is quite double-edged; The question comes down to personal initiative.

Only to characterize Mechetkin’s speech does the playwright use the technique of a linguistic mask: the hero’s speech is endowed with properties that “to one degree or another separate him from the rest of the characters, and which belong to him as something constant and indispensable, accompanying him in any of his actions or gestures.” Mechetkin is thereby 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 fool, a damned one (according to the assessment of the other characters, who treat him with ridicule).

An old house at a crossroads is the central image of the drama, but its characters are united by the motif of the breakdown of family ties, loneliness and the loss of a true home. This motif is consistently developed in the characters’ remarks: Shamanov “left his wife,” Valentina’s sister “forgot her own father.” Pashka does not find a home in Chulimsk (But they say that home is better... Doesn’t correspond...), Kashkina is lonely, the “boob” Mechetkin has no family, Ilya is the only one left in the taiga.

In the characters’ remarks, Chulimsk appears as a gradually emptying space: young people have left it, and the old Evenk Eremeev is leaving again for the taiga, where “there are no deer, there are no animals... there are not enough animals.” The heroes, who have lost their real home, are temporarily united by a “renovated” teahouse - the main location of the drama, the place of chance meetings, sudden recognition and everyday communication of the characters. The tragic situations recreated in the play are combined with everyday scenes in which the names of the ordered dishes and drinks are regularly repeated. “People have lunch, just have lunch, and at this time their happiness is formed and their lives are shattered...” Following Chekhov, Vampilov, in the flow of everyday life, reveals the essential foundations of existence. 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 features (in their remarks only individual colloquial words and Siberian regionalisms are used, however, no one’s). To reveal the characters of the characters in the play, spatial characteristics are significant, first of all, the way they move in space - moving “straight through the front garden” or bypassing the fence.

Another, no less important, spatial characteristic of characters is static or dynamic. It is revealed in two main aspects: as the stability of the connection with the “point” space of Chulimsk and as the activity / passivity of a particular hero. Thus, in the author’s remark introducing Shamanov in the first scene, his apathy, “unfeigned negligence and absent-mindedness” are emphasized, while using the key word for the phenomena of the first act in which the hero acts, the word sleep: He, as if suddenly plunging into sleep, lowers head. In the remarks of Shamanov himself in the first act, speech devices with the semes “indifference” and “peace” are repeated. The “sleep” in which the hero is immersed turns out to be a “sleep” of the soul, synonymous with the character’s internal “blindness.” In the second act, these speech means are replaced by lexical units expressing opposite meanings. Thus, in the remark indicating the appearance of Shamanov, the dynamics are already emphasized, contrasting with his previous state of “apathy”: He walks quickly, almost swiftly. Runs up 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 characteristic only of Anna Khoroshikh and Valentina, who “has never even been to the city.” It is the female characters who act in the drama as guardians of “their” space (both external and internal): Anna is busy renovating the teahouse and trying to save her home (family), Valentina is “fixing” the fence.

The characteristics of the characters’ characters are determined by their relationship to the key image of the drama - a front garden with a broken gate: most of the characters walk “straight”, “ahead”, the townsman Shamanov goes around the front garden, only the old Evenk Eremeev, associated with the open space of the taiga, tries to help fix it. In this context, Valentina’s repeated actions take on a symbolic meaning: she restores what was destroyed, establishes a connection between times, and tries to overcome disunity. Her dialogue with Shamanov is indicative:

Shamanov. ...So I still want to ask you... Why are you doing this?

VALENTINE (not right away). Are you talking about the front garden?.. Why am I fixing it?

Shamanov. What for?

VALENTINE. But... Isn't it clear?

Shamanov shakes his head: it’s unclear...

VALENTINE (cheerfully). Well then, I’ll explain to you... I’m fixing the front garden so that it’s intact.

Shamanov (grinned). Yes? But it seems to me that you are repairing the front garden so that it will be broken.

VALENTINA (becoming serious). I am repairing it so that it is intact.

“One must recognize as a general and constant feature of the language of drama... symbolism, two-dimensionality (emphasized by B.A. Larin - N.N.), the dual significance of speeches. In drama there are always running themes - ideas, moods, suggestions, perceived in addition to the main, direct meaning of the speeches.

Such “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 them in its direct meaning, on the other hand, they are addressed to the viewer (reader) and in the context of the entire work acquire “dual significance.” The word whole in this case is already characterized by semantic diffuseness and at the same time realizes several inherent meanings: “one from which nothing is subtracted or separated”; “undestroyed”, “whole”, “united”, “preserved”, finally, “healthy”. Integrity is opposed to destruction, the disintegration of human connections, disunity and “disorder” (remember the first remark of the drama), and is associated with the state of internal 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 of “healthy, strong.” At the same time, Valentina’s actions cause misunderstanding of the other characters in the drama; the similarity of their assessments emphasizes the tragic loneliness of the heroine in the space surrounding her. Her image evokes associations with the image of a lonely birch tree in the first stage directions 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” stage direction that opens it, which from an auxiliary (service) element of the drama turns into a constructive element of the text: the system of images of the stage directions and the system of images of the characters form an obvious parallelism and turn out to be interdependent. Thus, as already mentioned, the image of a birch tree is correlated with the image of Valentina, and the image of “crushed” grass is associated with her image (as well as with the images of Anna, Dergachev, Eremeev).

The world in which the drama's heroes live is distinctly 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 unities. 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 number of dialogues into monologues (see, for example, Kashkina’s monologue in the first act).

The text of the drama is dominated by dialogues reflecting the conflicting relationships of the characters (dialogues-arguments, quarrels, squabbles, etc.), and dialogues of a directive nature (such, for example, Valentina’s dialogue with her father).

The disharmony of the depicted world is also manifested in the names of its characteristic sounds. The author's stage directions consistently record the sounds filling the stage space. As a rule, the sounds are sharp, irritating, “unnatural”: in the first act, the scandalous hubbub is replaced by the noise of a machine brake, in the second, the screech of a hacksaw, the knock of a hammer, the crackling of a motorcycle, the crackling of a diesel engine dominate. “Noise” is contrasted with the only melody in the play - Der-gachev’s song, which serves as one of the leitmotifs of the drama, but remains unfinished.

In the first act, Dergachev’s voice is heard 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 “replica,” on the one hand, forms the temporal 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 comments and replaces Shamanov’s remarks. Wed:

Kashkina. There’s just one thing I don’t understand: how did you get to such a life... I would finally explain.

"It was a long time ago,

About fifteen years ago..."

In the second act, this song opens the action of each scene, 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 precedes what happened to the heroine. At the same time, the leitmotif song expands the stage space, deepens the time perspective of the drama as a whole and reflects the memories of Dergachev himself, and its incompleteness correlates with open ending plays.

Thus, in the space of drama, dissonant sounds and 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, contrasted with the “scandalous hubbub” and noise, is established only in the finale. It is characteristic that in the final scene of the drama, the words silence and silence (as well as those of the same root) are repeated in the stage directions five times, and the word silence is placed by the playwright in a strong position in the text - its last paragraph. The silence into which the heroes are first immersed serves as a sign of their inner concentration, the desire to peer and listen to themselves and others, and accompanies the actions of the heroine and the end of the drama.

Vampilov’s latest play is called “Last Summer in Chulimsk.” Such a title, which, as already noted, the playwright did not immediately settle on, suggests 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?” is indicative. - “Last summer a miracle happened in Chulimsk.”

The “miracle” that happened in Chulimsk is the awakening of the hero’s soul, Shamanov’s insight. This was facilitated by the “horror” he experienced (Pashka’s shot) and the love of Valentina, whose “fall” serves as a kind of atoning 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 replenishment is the chronotope of crisis and life turning point,” the time of the play is the decisive moments of falls and renewal. Other characters in the drama, especially Valentina, are also associated with the internal crisis, making decisions that determine a person’s life.

If the evolution of Shamanov’s image is predominantly 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 “setting up” the gate. In the second act, Vadentina for the first time tries to do like everyone else: she goes straight! through the front garden - in this case, to construct her replicas, a technique is used that can be called the “semantic echo” technique. Valentin, firstly, repeats Shamanov’s replica (from Act I): Vain labor...; secondly, in her subsequent statements they “condense”, explicate the meanings that were previously regularly expressed by the hero’s remarks in the first act: It doesn’t matter; tired of it. A “direct” movement, a temporary transition to Shamanov’s position, leads to disaster. In the finale, after the tragedy Valentina experienced, we again see a return to the dominant of this image: Strict, calm, she goes up to the veranda. Suddenly she stopped. She turned her head towards the front garden. Slowly, but decisively, he descends into the front garden. He approaches the fence, strengthens the boards... Adjusts the gate... Silence. Valentina and Eremeev are restoring the front garden.

The play ends with the motives of renewal, overcoming chaos and destruction. “...In the finale, Vampilov unites young Valentina and old man Eremeev - the harmony of eternity, the beginning and end of life, without the natural light of purity and faith unthinkable.” The ending is preceded by Mechetkin’s seemingly unmotivated story 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), they bewitched that he would live until he completed this very house... When he completed the house, he began to rebuild it. And I've been rebuilding my whole life...

This story returns the reader (viewer) to the end-to-end spatial image of the drama. In Mechetkin’s extended remark, the figurative parallel “life is a rebuilt house” is updated, which, taking into account the symbolic meanings inherent in the key spatial image of the play, a house, can be interpreted as “life-renewal”, “life is the constant work of the soul”, finally, as “life - reconstruction of the world and oneself in it.”

It is characteristic that the words repair, repair, regularly repeated in the first act, disappear in the second: the focus is already on the “reconstruction” 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 general meaning of the parable.

At the end of the drama, the space of most of its characters is transformed: Pashka is preparing to leave Chulimsk, the old man Eremeev goes into the taiga, but Dergachev opens his house for him (There is always enough room for you), the space of Shamanov expands, who decides to go to the city and speak at the trial. Valentina may be waiting for Mechetkin's house, but her actions remain unchanged. Vampilov's drama is constructed as a play in which the internal space of the characters changes, but the external space retains its stability.

“The artist’s task,” the playwright noted, “is to knock people out of mechanicalness.” This problem is solved in the play “Last Summer in Chulimsk,” which, as you read it, ceases to be perceived as everyday and appears as a philosophical drama. This is largely facilitated by the play’s system of spatial images.

Questions and tasks

1. Read the play “Three Girls in Blue” by L. Petrushevskaya.

2. Identify the main spatial images of the drama and determine their connections in the text.

3. Indicate the linguistic means that express spatial relationships 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 drama space. How is space modeled in the text of this play?