Genres of classical literature. Types of literature and their purpose. Types of fiction. Different typologies of literary genres

Genre is a type of literary work. There are epic, lyrical, dramatic genres. There are also lyric epic genres. Genres are also divided by volume into large (including Romani and epic novels), medium (literary works of “medium size” - stories and poems), small (short story, novella, essay). They have genres and thematic divisions: adventure novel, psychological novel, sentimental, philosophical, etc. The main division is related to the types of literature. We present to your attention the genres of literature in the table.

The thematic division of genres is rather arbitrary. There is no strict classification of genres by topic. For example, if they talk about the genre and thematic diversity of lyrics, they usually single out love, philosophical, and landscape lyrics. But, as you understand, the variety of lyrics is not exhausted by this set.

If you set out to study the theory of literature, it is worth mastering the groups of genres:

• epic, that is, prose genres (epic novel, novel, story, short story, short story, parable, fairy tale);
• lyrical, that is, poetic genres (lyric poem, elegy, message, ode, epigram, epitaph),
• dramatic – types of plays (comedy, tragedy, drama, tragicomedy),
• lyroepic (ballad, poem).

Literary genres in tables

Epic genres

• Epic novel

  Epic novel– a novel with an image folk life at turning points in history. “War and Peace” by Tolstoy, “Quiet Don” by Sholokhov.

• Novel

  Novel– a multi-issue work depicting a person in the process of his formation and development. The action in the novel is full of external or internal conflicts. By topic there are: historical, satirical, fantastic, philosophical, etc. By structure: novel in verse, epistolary novel, etc.

• Tale

  Tale- an epic work of average or large shape, constructed in the form of a narrative about events in their natural sequence. Unlike the novel, in P. the material is presented chronically, there is no sharp plot, there is no cunning analysis of the feelings of the characters. P. does not pose tasks of a global historical nature.

• Story

  Story– small epic form, a small work with a limited number of characters. In R. most often one problem is posed or one event is described. The novella differs from R. in its unexpected ending.

• Parable

  Parable- moral teaching in allegorical form. A parable differs from a fable in that it draws its artistic material from human life. Example: Gospel parables, the parable of the righteous land, told by Luke in the play “At the Bottom.”

Lyrical genres

• Lyric poem

  Lyric poem- a small form of lyrics written either on behalf of the author or on behalf of a fictional person lyrical hero. Description of the inner world of the lyrical hero, his feelings, emotions.

• Elegy

  Elegy- a poem imbued with moods of sadness and sadness. As a rule, the content of elegies consists of philosophical reflections, sad thoughts, and grief.

• Message

  Message- a poetic letter addressed to a person. According to the content of the message, there are friendly, lyrical, satirical, etc. The message may be addressed to one person or group of people.

• Epigram

  Epigram- a poem that makes fun of a specific person. Characteristic features are wit and brevity.

• Oh yeah

  Oh yeah- a poem distinguished by solemnity of style and sublimity of content. Praise in verse.

• Sonnet

  Sonnet– a solid poetic form, usually consisting of 14 verses (lines): 2 quatrains (2 rhymes) and 2 tercet tercets

Dramatic genres

• Comedy

  Comedy- a type of drama in which characters, situations and actions are presented in funny forms or imbued with the comic. There are satirical comedies (“The Minor,” “The Inspector General”), high comedies (“Woe from Wit”) and lyrical ones (“The Cherry Orchard”).

• Tragedy

  Tragedy- a work based on an irreconcilable conflict in life, leading to the suffering and death of the heroes. William Shakespeare's play "Hamlet".

• Drama

  Drama- a play with an acute conflict, which, unlike the tragic one, is not so sublime, more mundane, ordinary and can be resolved one way or another. The drama is based on modern rather than ancient material and establishes a new hero who rebelled against circumstances.

Lyric epic genres

(intermediate between epic and lyric)

• Poem

  Poem- an average lyric-epic form, a work with a plot-narrative organization, in which not one, but a whole series of experiences are embodied. Features: the presence of a detailed plot and at the same time close attention to the inner world of the lyrical hero - or an abundance of lyrical digressions. Poem " Dead Souls» N.V. Gogol

• Ballad

  Ballad- a medium lyric-epic form, a work with an unusual, intense plot. This is a story in verse. A story, told in poetic form, of a historical, mythical or heroic nature. The plot of a ballad is usually borrowed from folklore. Ballads “Svetlana”, “Lyudmila” V.A. Zhukovsky

At school, in literature classes, they study stories, novels, essays, and elegies. Cinemas show a variety of films - action films, comedies, melodramas. How can all these phenomena be combined into one term? For this purpose, the concept of “genre” was invented.

Let's figure out what a genre in literature is, what types exist, and how to determine which direction a particular work belongs to.

The division of works into genders has been known since antiquity. What is a genre in ancient literature? This:

• tragedy;
• comedy.

Fiction was practically inseparable from the theater, and therefore the range was limited to what could be realized on stage.

In the Middle Ages, the list expanded: it now included a short story, a novel and a story. The emergence of modern times romantic poem, epic novels, and ballads.

The 20th century, with its enormous changes that continually took place in the life of society and the individual, gave birth to new literary forms:

• thriller;
• action movie;
• fantastic;
• fantasy.

What is a genre in literature

A set of some features of groups literary forms(signs can be both formal and substantive) - these are the genres of literature.

According to Wikipedia they are divided into three large groups:

• by content;
• according to form;
• by birth.

Wikipedia names at least 30 various directions. These include (the most famous):

• story;
• story;
• novel;
• elegy,

and others.

There are also less commonly used ones:

• sketch;
• opus;
• stanzas.

How to determine genre

How to determine the genre of a work? If we are talking about a novel or an ode, then we will not get confused, but something more complex - a sketch or stanzas - can cause difficulties.

So, before us is an open book. We can immediately correctly name well-known literary forms, the definition of which we do not even need. For example, we see a voluminous creation that describes a large period of time in which many characters appear.

There are several storylines - one main one and an unlimited number (at the author's discretion) of secondary ones. If all these requirements are met, then every high school student will say with confidence that this is a novel.

If this is a short narrative, limited to a description of an event, while the author’s attitude to what he is talking about is clearly visible, then it is a story.

It’s more difficult, for example, with an opus.

The interpretation of the concept is ambiguous: most often it means something that causes ridicule, that is, an essay, story or story, the merits of which are questionable.

In principle, many literary works can be classified as “opus” if they are not distinguished by clarity of style, richness of thought, or, in other words, mediocre.

What are stanzas? This is a kind of poem-memory, a poem-reflection. Remember, for example, Pushkin’s “Stanzas,” which he wrote on a long winter road.

Important! To correctly classify a particular literary form, be sure to take into account both external features and content.

Let's try to bring literary genres together, and to do this we will collect the types of works known to us in a table. Of course, we will not be able to cover everything - literary trends are most fully represented in serious philological works. But a small list can be compiled.

The table will look like this:

Types of genres by content

Previously, we touched upon the question of the form of writing and divided the types of literature precisely on this basis. However, directions can be interpreted more broadly. The content and meaning of what is written is very important. In this case, the terms in both lists may overlap or intersect.

Let's say a story falls into two groups at once: stories can be distinguished by external features (short, with clearly expressed attitude author), and in content (one bright event).

Among the areas divided by content, we note:

• comedies;
• tragedy;
• horror;
• dramas.

Comedy is perhaps one of the most ancient movements. The definition of comedy is multifaceted: it can be a sitcom, a comedy of characters. There are also comedies:

• household;
• romantic;
• heroic.

Tragedies were also known to the ancient world. The definition of this genre of literature is a work whose outcome will certainly be sad and hopeless.

Genres of Literature and Their Definitions

List literary genres can be found in any textbook for philology students. For whom is it important to know in what directions literary forms are distinguished?

The following specialists need this information:

• writers;
• journalists;
• teachers;
• philologists.

While creating work of art the author subordinates his creation to certain canons, and their framework - conventional boundaries - allows him to classify what he has created into the group of “novels”, “essays” or “ode”.

This concept relates not only to works of literature, but also to other forms of art. Wikipedia explains: this term can also be used to refer to:

• painting;
• photos;
• movie;
• oratory;
• music.

Important! Even the game of chess is subject to its own genre standards.

However, these are very large separate topics. We are now interested in what genres there are in literature.

Examples

Any concept should be considered with examples, and types of literary forms are no exception. Let's look at examples in practice.

Let's start with the simplest thing - with a story. Surely everyone remembers Chekhov’s work “I Want to Sleep” from school.

This is a terrible story, written in a deliberately simple, everyday style, based on a crime committed by a thirteen-year-old girl in a state of passion, when her consciousness was clouded from fatigue and hopelessness.

We see that Chekhov complied with all the laws of the genre:

• the description practically does not go beyond one event;
• the author is “present”, we feel his attitude to what is happening;
• the story has one main character;
• The essay is short in length and can be read in a few minutes.

As an example of a story, we can take “Spring Waters” by Turgenev. The author here argues more, as if helping the reader to draw conclusions, unobtrusively pushing him to these conclusions. In the story, an important place is given to issues of morality, ethics, and the inner world of the characters - all these problems come to the fore.

– is also a fairly specific thing. This is a kind of sketch where the author expresses his own thoughts on a specific issue.

The essay is characterized by vivid imagery, originality, and frankness. If you have ever read Andre Maurois and Bernard Shaw, you will understand what we are talking about.

Novels and their characteristic features - the length of events over time, multiple storylines, a chronological chain, the author's periodic deviations from a given topic - do not allow the genre to be confused with any other.

In the novel, the author touches on many problems: from personal to acute social ones. When thinking about novels, “War and Peace” by L. Tolstoy, “Fathers and Sons”, “Gone with the Wind” by M. Mitchell, “Wuthering Heights” by E. Bronte immediately come to mind.

Species and groups

In addition to grouping by content and form, we can take advantage of the proposal of philologists and divide everything created by writers, poets and playwrights by gender. How to determine the genre of a work - what type of work can it belong to?

You can create the following list of varieties:

• epic;
• lyrical;
• dramatic.

The first ones are distinguished by a calm narrative and descriptiveness. A novel, essay, or poem can be epic. The second is everything connected with the personal experiences of the heroes, as well as with solemn events. These include ode, elegy, epigram.

Dramatic - comedy, tragedy, drama. For the most part, the theater expresses the “right” to them.

To summarize what has been said, we can apply the following classification: in literature there are three major directions, covering everything that has ever been created by prose writers, playwrights and poets. Works are divided by:

• form;
• content;
• to the birth of what is written.

Within one direction there can be many completely diverse essays. So, if we take the division by form, then here we will include stories, novels, essays, odes, sketches, and novellas.

We determine belonging to any direction by the “external structure” of the work: its size, quantity storylines, the author’s attitude to what is happening.

The division by gender is lyrical, dramatic and epic works. A novel, a story, an essay can be lyrical. The epic category includes poems, fairy tales, and epics. Dramatic plays are plays: comedies, tragicomedies, tragedies.

Important! New times are making adjustments to the system of literary trends. In recent decades, the detective genre, which originated in the 19th century, has developed. In contrast to the utopian novel that emerged during the late Middle Ages, dystopia arose.

Useful video

Let's sum it up

Literature continues to evolve these days. The world is changing at enormous speed, and therefore the forms of expression of thoughts, feelings, and the speed of perception are undergoing changes. Perhaps in the future new genres will be formed - so unusual that for now it is difficult for us to imagine them.

It is possible that they will be at the intersection of several types of art at once, for example, cinema, music and literature. But this is in the future, but for now our task is to learn to understand the literary heritage that we already have.

Which are combined on the basis of formal and meaningful features. They develop historically, experiencing emergence, flourishing, and some decline. These include novels, stories, elegies, feuilletons, stories, comedies, etc. The concept of literary genres is narrower than literary genera. Each contains several genres. For example, a story, a short story, a novel are included in the author's epic genre of literature.

The first attempt to systematize literary genres was made in his work. He presented them as something natural, established once and for all. The author only had to fit into the norms of the genre to which he turned. This understanding led to the emergence of a kind of textbooks on normative poetics. The most famous among them was the treatise “Poetic Art” by N. Boileau. Of course, since the time of Aristotle, literary types and genres have not remained absolutely unchanged, but theorists have preferred either not to notice innovations or to reject them. This lasted until it became impossible not to notice the processes taking place in literature. Some genres of literary works unexpectedly took off and died out just as quickly, only occasionally flaring up on the creative horizon (as was the case with the ballad). Others, on the contrary, emerged from an undeserved “imprisonment” (for example, an affair).

In Russian literary criticism, the theory that substantiates literary genres and genera belongs to V. G. Belinsky. He identified three types, depending on the author’s approach to the way of presenting the subject of conversation: epic, drama and lyric.

Assigning a work to a specific genre depends on what criterion is taken as a basis. If the literary genre (drama, lyric, epic) is taken into account, then all genres are divided, respectively, into dramatic, lyrical and epic.

Works representing the dramatic genre of literature are comedy, drama and tragedy.

Comedy is designed to reflect something incongruous in life, to ridicule an everyday or social phenomenon, human character traits, and sometimes absurd behavior.

Drama is a work that depicts a complex conflict that has arisen between several characters, a serious opposition between them.

Tragedy is a work in which the character of the character is revealed in a struggle leading to his death, or in conditions from which he sees absolutely no way out.

Literary works representing the epic genre of literature are divided into three groups:

Large (novel and epic);

Middle (story);

Small (short story, essay, short story).

This genre also includes fairy tale, epic, ballad, fable, historical song and myth.

Works representing the lyrical genre of literature are stanzas, odes, elegy and epistle.

An elegy is a short poem completely imbued with slight sadness. The most famous are the elegies of the classics of the 19th century.

An epistle is a work written in the form of a poetic appeal to one person or several persons.

An ode is a poem in honor of a past or upcoming celebration, in honor of a person, characterized by enthusiasm.

In addition, at the present stage, literary scholars identify another, lyric-epic type of literature. It combines the features of the lyrical and epic and is represented by a poem. This work really shows itself ambiguously. On the one hand, it tells in detail about some event or character (like an epic), and on the other hand, it conveys the feelings, moods, experiences of the hero or the narrator himself, the inner world, thereby approaching the lyrics.

IN Lately new genres did not appear in literature.

One of the founders of Russian literary criticism was V.G. Belinsky. And although serious steps were taken in developing the concept of literary gender back in antiquity (Aristotle), it was Belinsky who owned the scientifically based theory of three literary genera, which you can get acquainted with in detail by reading Belinsky’s article “The Division of Poetry into Genera and Types.”

There are three types fiction: epic(from Greek Epos, narrative), lyrical(a lyre was a musical instrument, accompanied by chanting poems) and dramatic(from Greek Drama, action).

When presenting this or that subject to the reader (meaning the subject of conversation), the author chooses different approaches to it:

First approach: in detail tell about the object, about the events associated with it, about the circumstances of the existence of this object, etc.; in this case, the author’s position will be more or less detached, the author will act as a kind of chronicler, narrator, or choose one of the characters as the narrator; the main thing in such a work will be the story, the narration about the subject, the leading type of speech will be precisely narration; this kind of literature is called epic;

The second approach: you can tell not so much about the events, but about the impressed, which they produced on the author, about those feelings which they called; image inner world, experiences, impressions and will relate to the lyrical genre of literature; exactly experience becomes the main event of the lyrics;

Third approach: you can depict item in action, show him on stage; introduce to the reader and viewer of it surrounded by other phenomena; this kind of literature is dramatic; In a drama, the author's voice will be heard least often - in stage directions, that is, the author's explanations of the actions and remarks of the characters.

Look at the table and try to remember its contents:

Types of fiction

Each type of literature in turn includes a number of genres.

GENRE is a historically established group of works united by common features of content and form. Such groups include novels, stories, poems, elegies, short stories, feuilletons, comedies, etc. In literary studies, the concept of literary type is often introduced; this is a broader concept than genre. In this case, the novel will be considered a type of fiction, and genres will be various types of novels, for example, adventure, detective, psychological, parable novel, dystopian novel, etc.

Examples of genus-species relationships in the literature:

• Genus: dramatic; view: comedy; genre: sitcom.
• Genus: epic; view: story; genre: fantastic story etc.

Genres being categories historical, appear, develop and over time “leave” from the “active stock” of artists depending on the historical era: ancient lyricists did not know the sonnet; in our time, the ode, born in antiquity and popular in the 17th-18th centuries, has become an archaic genre; Romanticism of the 19th century gave rise to detective literature, etc.

Consider the following table, which presents the types and genres related to the various types of word art:

Genera, types and genres of artistic literature

Modern literary criticism also highlights fourth, a related genre of literature that combines the features of the epic and lyrical genres: lyric-epic, which refers to poem. And indeed, by telling the reader a story, the poem manifests itself as an epic; Revealing to the reader the depth of feelings, the inner world of the person telling this story, the poem manifests itself as lyricism.

In the table you came across the expression “small genres”. Epic and lyrical works are divided into large and small genres, largely in volume. Large ones include an epic, a novel, a poem, and small ones include a story, story, fable, song, sonnet, etc.

Read V. Belinsky’s statement about the genre of the story:

If a story, according to Belinsky, is “a leaf from the book of life,” then, using his metaphor, one can figuratively define a novel from a genre point of view as “a chapter from the book of life,” and a story as “a line from the book of life.”

Minor epic genres to which the story relates is "intense" in terms of content prose: the writer, due to the small volume, does not have the opportunity to “spread his thoughts along the tree”, get carried away with detailed descriptions, enumerations, reproduce a large number of events in detail, but the reader often needs to tell a lot.

The story is characterized by the following features:

• small volume;
• The plot is most often based on one event, the rest are only plotted by the author;
• a small number of characters: usually one or two central characters;
• the author is interested in a specific topic;
• one main issue is being resolved, the remaining issues are “derived” from the main one.

So,
STORY is a small prose work with one or two main characters, dedicated to depicting a single event. Somewhat more voluminous story, but the difference between a story and a story is not always clear: some people call A. Chekhov’s work “The Duel” a short story, and some call it a big story. The following is important: as the critic E. Anichkov wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, " it is the person’s personality that is at the center of the stories, not a whole group of people."

The heyday of Russian short prose begins in the 20s years XIX century, which gave excellent examples of short epic prose, including the absolute masterpieces of Pushkin ("Belkin's Tales", "The Queen of Spades") and Gogol ("Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", St. Petersburg stories), romantic short stories by A. Pogorelsky, A. Bestuzhev -Marlinsky, V. Odoevsky and others. In the second half of the 19th century, short epic works by F. Dostoevsky ("The Dream of a Funny Man", "Notes from the Underground"), N. Leskov ("Lefty", "The Stupid Artist", "Lady Macbeth" were created Mtsensk district"), I. Turgenev ("Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District", "King of the Steppes Lear", "Ghosts", "Notes of a Hunter"), L. Tolstoy ("Prisoner of the Caucasus", "Hadji Murat", "Cossacks", Sevastopol stories), A. Chekhov as the greatest master of the short story, works by V. Garshin, D. Grigorovich, G. Uspensky and many others.

The twentieth century also did not remain in debt - and stories by I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, M. Zoshchenko, Teffi, A. Averchenko, M. Bulgakov appear... Even such recognized lyricists as A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, M. Tsvetaeva “they stooped to despicable prose,” in the words of Pushkin. It can be argued that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the small epic genre took over leading position in Russian literature.

And for this reason alone, one should not think that the story raises some minor problems and touches on shallow topics. Form story concise, and the plot is sometimes uncomplicated and concerns, at first glance, simple, as L. Tolstoy said, “natural” relationships: there is simply nowhere for the complex chain of events in the story to unfold. But this is precisely the task of the writer, to enclose a serious and often inexhaustible subject of conversation in a small space of text.

If the plot of the miniature I. Bunin "Muravsky Way", consisting of only 64 words, captures only a few moments of the conversation between the traveler and the coachman in the middle of the endless steppe, then the plot of the story A. Chekhov "Ionych" enough for a whole novel: artistic time The story spans almost a decade and a half. But it doesn’t matter to the author what happened to the hero at each stage of this time: it is enough for him to “snatch” from the hero’s life chain several “links” - episodes, similar to each other, like drops of water, and the whole life of Doctor Startsev becomes extremely clear to the author, and to the reader. “As you live one day of your life, you will live your whole life,” Chekhov seems to be saying. At the same time, the writer, reproducing the situation in the house of the most “cultured” family in the provincial town of S., can focus all his attention on the knocking of knives from the kitchen and the smell of fried onions ( artistic details!), but to talk about several years of a person’s life as if they never happened at all, or as if it was a “passing”, uninteresting time: “Four years have passed”, “Several more years have passed”, as if it is not worth wasting time and paper for the image of such a trifle...

The depiction of a person’s daily life, devoid of external storms and shocks, but in a routine that forces a person to forever wait for happiness that never comes, became the cross-cutting theme of A. Chekhov’s stories, which determined further development Russian short prose.

Historical upheavals, of course, dictate other themes and subjects to the artist. M. Sholokhov in the cycle of Don stories he talks about terrible and beautiful human destinies in a time of revolutionary upheaval. But the point here is not so much in the revolution itself, but in eternal problem the struggle of a person with himself, in the eternal tragedy of the collapse of the old familiar world, which humanity has experienced many times. And therefore Sholokhov turns to plots that have long been rooted in world literature, depicting private human life as if in the context of the world legendary history. Yes, in the story "Mole" Sholokhov uses a plot as ancient as the world about a duel between father and son, not recognized by each other, which we encounter in Russian epics, in the epics of ancient Persia and medieval Germany... But if the ancient epic explains the tragedy of a father who killed his son in battle by the laws of fate , beyond the control of man, Sholokhov talks about the problem of a person’s choice of his life path, a choice that determines all further events and ultimately makes one a beast in human form, and the other equal to the greatest heroes of the past.

• A. Pushkin. The stories "Dubrovsky", "Blizzard"
• N. Gogol. The stories "The Night Before Christmas", "Taras Bulba", "The Overcoat", "Nevsky Prospekt".
• I.S. Turgenev. Tale " Noble Nest"; "Notes of a Hunter" (2-3 stories of your choice); story "Asya"
• N.S. Leskov. Stories "Lefty", "Stupid Artist"
• L.N. Tolstoy. Stories "After the Ball", "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"
• M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Fairy tales "The Wise Minnow", "The Hero", "The Bear in the Voivodeship"
• A.P. Chekhov. Stories “Jumping”, “Ionych”, “Gooseberry”, “About Love”, “Lady with a Dog”, “Ward Number Six”, “In the Ravine”; other stories of your choice
• I.A.Bunin. Stories and stories "Mr. from San Francisco", "Sukhodol", " Easy breathing", "Antonov apples", "Dark Alleys" by A.I. Kuprin. The story "Olesya", the story "Garnet Bracelet"
• M. Gorky. Stories “Old Woman Izergil”, “Makar Chudra”, “Chelkash”; collection "Untimely Thoughts"
• A.N. Tolstoy. The story "Viper"
• M. Sholokhov. Stories "Mole", "Alien Blood", "The Fate of Man";
• M. Zoshchenko. Stories "Aristocrat", "Monkey Language", "Love" and others of your choice
• A.I. Solzhenitsyn. The story "Matrenin's yard"
• V. Shukshin. Stories “I Believe!”, “Boots”, “Space, the Nervous System and Shmata of Fat”, “Pardon Me, Madam!”, “Stalled”

Before completing task 6, consult a dictionary and establish the exact meaning of the concept you will be working with.

• Grechnev V.Ya. Russian story of the late XIX - early XX centuries. - L., 1979.
• Zhuk A.A. Russian prose second half of the 19th century century. - M.: Education, 1981.
• Literary encyclopedic dictionary. - M., 1987.
• Literary studies: Reference materials. - M., 1988.
• Russian story of the 19th century: History and problems of the genre. - L., 1973.

Literary genres- groups of literary works united by a set of formal and substantive properties (in contrast to literary forms, the identification of which is based only on formal characteristics).

If at the folklore stage the genre was determined from an extra-literary (cult) situation, then in literature the genre receives a description of its essence from its own literary norms, codified by rhetoric. The entire nomenclature of ancient genres that had developed before this turn was then energetically rethought under its influence.

Since the time of Aristotle, who gave the first systematization of literary genres in his “Poetics,” the idea has become stronger that literary genres represent a natural, once and for all fixed system, and the author’s task is only to achieve the most complete compliance of his work with the essential properties of the chosen genre. This understanding of the genre - as a ready-made structure presented to the author - led to the emergence of a whole series of normative poetics containing instructions for authors regarding exactly how an ode or tragedy should be written; The pinnacle of this type of writing is Boileau’s treatise “The Poetic Art” (1674). This does not mean, of course, that the system of genres as a whole and the characteristics of individual genres really remained unchanged for two thousand years - however, the changes (and very significant ones) were either not noticed by theorists, or were interpreted by them as damage, a deviation from the necessary models. And only by the end of the 18th century, the decomposition of the traditional genre system, associated, in accordance with the general principles of literary evolution, both with intraliterary processes and with the influence of completely new social and cultural circumstances, went so far that normative poetics could no longer describe and curb literary reality.

Under these conditions, some traditional genres began to rapidly die out or become marginalized, while others, on the contrary, moved from the literary periphery to the very center literary process. And if, for example, the rise of the ballad at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, associated in Russia with the name of Zhukovsky, turned out to be quite short-lived (although in Russian poetry it then gave an unexpected new surge in the first half of the 20th century - for example, in Bagritsky and Nikolai Tikhonov) , then the hegemony of the novel - a genre that normative poets for centuries did not want to notice as something low and insignificant - lasted in European literature for at least a century. Works of a hybrid or undefined genre nature began to develop especially actively: plays about which it is difficult to say whether they are a comedy or a tragedy, poems for which it is impossible to give any definition. genre definition, except that it is a lyric poem. The decline of clear genre identifications was also manifested in deliberate authorial gestures aimed at destroying genre expectations: from Lawrence Sterne’s novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” which ends mid-sentence, to N. V. Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” where the subtitle is paradoxical for a prose text the poem can hardly fully prepare the reader for the fact that he will now and then be knocked out of the fairly familiar rut of a picaresque novel by lyrical (and sometimes epic) digressions.

In the 20th century, literary genres were particularly strongly influenced by the separation of mass literature from literature focused on artistic exploration. Mass literature has once again felt an urgent need for clear genre prescriptions that significantly increase the predictability of the text for the reader, making it easy to navigate through it. Of course, the previous genres were not suitable for mass literature, and it quite quickly formed a new system, which was based on the genre of the novel, which was very flexible and had accumulated a lot of varied experience. At the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th, the detective and police novels, science fiction and the ladies' (“pink”) novel took shape. It is not surprising that contemporary literature, aimed at artistic search, sought to deviate as far as possible from the mass literature and therefore moved away from genre definition as far as possible. But since the extremes converge, the desire to be further from genre predetermination sometimes led to new genre formation: for example, the French anti-novel did not want to be a novel so much that the main works of this literary movement, represented by such original authors as Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute, clearly have signs of a new genre. Thus, modern literary genres (and we already encounter such an assumption in the thoughts of M. M. Bakhtin) are not elements of any predetermined system: on the contrary, they arise as points of concentration of tension in one place or another of the literary space, in accordance with artistic tasks posed here and now by this circle of authors. Special study of such new genres remains a matter for tomorrow.

List of literary genres:

• By shape
  • Visions
  • Novella
  • Tale
  • Story
  • joke
  • novel
  • epic
  • play
  • sketch
• by content
  • comedy
    • farce
    • vaudeville
    • interlude
    • sketch
    • parody
    • sitcom
    • comedy of characters
  • tragedy
  • Drama
• By birth
  • Epic
    • Fable
    • Bylina
    • Ballad
    • Novella
    • Tale
    • Story
    • Novel
    • Epic novel
    • Fairy tale
    • Fantasy
    • Epic
  • Lyrical
    • Oh yeah
    • Message
    • Stanzas
    • Elegy
    • Epigram
  • Lyric-epic
    • Ballad
    • Poem
  • Dramatic
    • Drama
    • Comedy
    • Tragedy

Poem- (Greek póiema), a large poetic work with a narrative or lyrical plot. A poem is also called an ancient and medieval epic (see also Epic), nameless and authored, which was composed either through the cyclization of lyric-epic songs and tales (the point of view of A. N. Veselovsky), or through the “swelling” (A. Heusler) of one or several folk legends, or with the help of complex modifications of ancient plots in the process of the historical existence of folklore (A. Lord, M. Parry). The poem developed from an epic depicting an event of national historical significance (“Iliad”, “Mahabharata”, “Song of Roland”, “Elder Edda”, etc.).

There are many genre varieties of the poem: heroic, didactic, satirical, burlesque, including heroic-comic, poem with a romantic plot, lyrical-dramatic. The leading branch of the genre for a long time was considered a poem on a national historical or world historical (religious) theme (“The Aeneid” by Virgil, “The Divine Comedy” by Dante, “The Lusiads” by L. di Camoens, “Jerusalem Liberated” by T. Tasso, “ Lost heaven"J. Milton, "Henriad" by Voltaire, "Messiad" by F. G. Klopstock, "Rossiyad" by M. M. Kheraskov, etc.). At the same time, a very influential branch in the history of the genre was the poem with romantic plot features (“The Knight in the Leopard’s Skin” by Shota Rustaveli, “Shahname” by Ferdowsi, to a certain extent, “Furious Roland” by L. Ariosto), connected to one degree or another with the tradition of the medieval , predominantly a chivalric novel. Gradually, personal, moral and philosophical issues come to the fore in the poems, lyrical-dramatic elements are strengthened, the folklore tradition is opened and mastered - features already characteristic of pre-romantic poems (Faust by J. V. Goethe, poems by J. Macpherson, V. Scott). The genre flourished in the era of romanticism, when the greatest poets of various countries turned to creating poems. The “peak” works in the evolution of the romantic poem genre acquire a socio-philosophical or symbolic-philosophical character (“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by J. Byron, “The Bronze Horseman” by A. S. Pushkin, “Dziady” by A. Mickiewicz, “The Demon” by M. Y. Lermontov, “Germany, a winter's tale” by G. Heine).

In the 2nd half of the 19th century. the decline of the genre is obvious, which does not exclude the appearance of individual outstanding works (“The Song of Hiawatha” by G. Longfellow). In the poems of N. A. Nekrasov (“Frost, Red Nose,” “Who Lives Well in Rus'”), genre tendencies characteristic of the development of the poem in realistic literature (synthesis of moral descriptive and heroic principles) are manifested.

In a poem of the 20th century. the most intimate experiences are correlated with great historical upheavals, imbued with them as if from within (“Cloud in Pants” by V. V. Mayakovsky, “The Twelve (poem)” by A. A. Blok, “First Date” by A. Bely).

In Soviet poetry there are various genre varieties poems: reviving the heroic principle (“Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” and “Good!” by Mayakovsky, “Nine Hundred and Fifth” by B. L. Pasternak, “Vasily Terkin” by A. T. Tvardovsky); lyrical-psychological poems (“About this” by V.V. Mayakovsky, “Anna Snegina” by S.A. Yesenin), philosophical (N.A. Zabolotsky, E. Mezhelaitis), historical (“Tobolsk Chronicler” by L. Martynov) or combining moral and socio-historical issues (“Mid-Century” by V. Lugovsky).

The poem as synthetic, lyroepic and monumental genre, allowing you to combine the epic of the heart and “music”, the “element” of world upheavals, intimate feelings and historical concept, remains a productive genre of world poetry: “The Start of the Wall” and “Into the Storm” by R. Frost, “Landmarks” by Saint-John Perse, “The Hollow Men” by T. Eliot, “The Universal Song” by P. Neruda, “Niobe” by K, I . Galchinsky, “Continuous Poetry” by P. Eluard, “Zoe” by Nazim Hikmet.

Epic(Ancient Greek έπος - “word”, “narration”) - a set of works, mainly of an epic kind, united by a common theme, era, nationality, etc. For example, the Homeric epic medieval epic, animal epic.

The emergence of the epic is gradual in nature, but is conditioned by historical circumstances.

The birth of the epic is usually accompanied by the composition of panegyrics and laments, close to the heroic worldview. The great deeds immortalized in them often turn out to be the material that heroic poets base their narratives on. Panegyrics and laments are usually composed in the same style and meter as the heroic epic: in Russian and Turkic literature, both types have almost the same manner of expression and lexical composition. Lamentations and panegyrics are preserved as part of epic poems as decoration.

The epic claims not only objectivity, but also the truthfulness of its story, and its claims, as a rule, are accepted by listeners. In his Prologue to The Earthly Circle, Snorri Sturluson explained that among his sources were “ancient poems and songs that were sung for people’s amusement,” and added: “Although we ourselves do not know whether these stories are true, we know for sure that that the wise men of old believed them to be true.”

Novel- a literary genre, usually prose, which involves a detailed narrative about the life and development of the personality of the main character (heroes) during a crisis/non-standard period of his life.

The name “Roman” arose in the middle of the 12th century along with the genre of chivalric romance (Old French. romanz from late Latin dialect romanice"in the (vernacular) Romance language"), as opposed to historiography in Latin. Contrary to popular belief, from the very beginning this name did not refer to any work in the vernacular (heroic songs or troubadour lyrics were never called novels), but to one that could be contrasted with a Latin model, even if very distant: historiography, fable ( "The Romance of Renard"), vision ("The Romance of the Rose"). However, in the XII-XIII centuries, if not later, the words roman And estoire(the latter also means “image”, “illustration”) are interchangeable. In reverse translation into Latin, the novel was called (liber) romanticus, where in European languages ​​the adjective “romantic” came from, until the end of the 18th century it meant “inherent in novels”, “such as in novels”, and only later the meaning on the one hand was simplified to “love”, but on the other hand it gave rise to the name of romanticism as a literary movement.

The name “novel” was preserved when, in the 13th century, the performed poetic novel was replaced by a prose novel for reading (with full preservation of the knightly topic and plot), and for all subsequent transformations of the knightly novel, right up to the works of Ariosto and Edmund Spenser, which we we call them poems, but contemporaries considered them novels. It persists even later, in the 17th-18th centuries, when the “adventurous” novel is replaced by the “realistic” and “psychological” novel (which in itself problematizes the supposed gap in continuity).

However, in England the name of the genre is also changing: the “old” novels retain the name romance, and the name “new” novels from the middle of the 17th century was assigned novel(from Italian novella - “short story”). Dichotomy novel/romance means a lot for English-language criticism, but adds additional uncertainty to their actual historical relationships rather than clarifies them. Generally romance is considered rather a kind of structural-plot variety of the genre novel.

In Spain, on the contrary, all varieties of the novel are called novela, and what happened from the same romanice word romance from the very beginning it belonged to the poetic genre, which was also destined to have a long history - romance.

Bishop Yue at the end of the 17th century, in search of the predecessors of the novel, first applied this term to a number of phenomena of ancient narrative prose, which have since also come to be called novels.

Visions

Fabliau dou dieu d'Amour"(The Tale of the God of Love), " Venus la déesse d'amors

Visions- narrative and didactic genre.

The plot is told on behalf of the person to whom it was allegedly revealed in a dream, hallucination or lethargic sleep. The core mostly consists of actual dreams or hallucinations, but already in ancient times fictional stories appeared, clothed in the form of visions (Plato, Plutarch, Cicero). The genre received special development in the Middle Ages and reached its apogee in " Divine Comedy"Dante, representing in form the most detailed vision. The authoritative sanction and the strongest impetus for the development of the genre were given by the “Dialogues of Miracles” of Pope Gregory the Great (VI century), after which visions began to appear en masse in church literature in all European countries.

Until the 12th century, all visions (except the Scandinavian ones) were written in Latin; from the 12th century, translations appeared, and from the 13th century, original visions appeared in vernacular languages. The most complete form of visions is presented in the Latin poetry of the clergy: this genre, in its origins, is closely related to canonical and apocryphal religious literature and is close to church sermons.

The editors of the visions (they are always from among the clergy and they must be distinguished from the “clairvoyant” himself) took advantage of the opportunity on behalf of “ higher power”, sending a vision, to propagate their political views or attack personal enemies. Purely fictitious visions also appear - topical pamphlets (for example, the vision of Charlemagne, Charles III, etc.).

However, since the 10th century, the form and content of the visions have caused protest, often coming from the declassed layers of the clergy themselves (poor clergy and goliard scholars). This protest results in parodic visions. On the other hand, courtly knightly poetry in folk languages ​​takes over the form of visions: visions here acquire new content, becoming the frame of a love-didactic allegory, such as, for example, “ Fabliau dou dieu d'Amour"(The Tale of the God of Love), " Venus la déesse d'amors"(Venus is the goddess of love) and finally - the encyclopedia of courtly love - the famous "Roman de la Rose" (Romance of the Rose) by Guillaume de Lorris.

The “third estate” puts new content into the form of visions. Yes, successor unfinished novel Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, turns the exquisite allegory of his predecessor into a ponderous combination of didactics and satire, the edge of which is directed against the lack of “equality”, against the unjust privileges of the aristocracy and against the “robber” royal power). The same is true of Jean Molyneux’s “The Hopes of the Common People.” The sentiments of the “third estate” are no less clearly expressed in Langland’s famous “Vision of Peter the Plowman,” which played a propaganda role in the English peasant revolution of the 14th century. But unlike Jean de Meun, a representative of the urban part of the “third estate,” Langland, the ideologist of the peasantry, turns his gaze to the idealized past, dreaming of the destruction of capitalist usurers.

As a complete independent genre, visions are characteristic of medieval literature. But as a motif, the form of visions continues to exist in the literature of modern times, being especially favorable for the introduction of satire and didactics, on the one hand, and fantasy, on the other (for example, “Darkness” by Byron).

Novella

The sources of the novella are primarily Latin example, as well as fabliaux, stories interspersed in the “Dialogue about Pope Gregory”, apologists from the “Lives of the Church Fathers”, fables, folk tales. In the 13th century Occitan language, the word appeared to denote a story created on some newly processed traditional material nova.Hence - Italian novella(in the most popular collection of the late 13th century, Novellino, also known as One Hundred Ancient Novels), which, starting in the 15th century, spread throughout Europe.

The genre was established after the appearance of Giovanni Boccaccio’s book “The Decameron” (c. 1353), the plot of which was that several people, fleeing the plague outside the city, tell each other short stories. Boccaccio in his book created the classic type of Italian short story, which was developed by his many followers in Italy itself and in other countries. In France, under the influence of the translation of the Decameron, a collection of One Hundred New Novels appeared around 1462 (however, the material owed more to the facets of Poggio Bracciolini), and Margarita Navarskaya, based on the Decameron, wrote the book Heptameron (1559).

In the era of romanticism, under the influence of Hoffmann, Novalis, Edgar Allan Poe, short stories with elements of mysticism, fantasy, and fabulousness spread. Later, in the works of Prosper Mérimée and Guy de Maupassant, this term began to be used to refer to realistic stories.

For American literature, starting with Washington Irving and Edgar Poe, the novella, or short story (English. short story), has special significance as one of the most characteristic genres.

In the second half of the 19th-20th centuries, the traditions of the short story were continued by such different writers as Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gilbert Chesterton, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Karel Capek, Jorge Luis Borges.

The novella is characterized by several important features: extreme brevity, a sharp, even paradoxical plot, a neutral style of presentation, lack of psychologism and descriptiveness, and an unexpected denouement. The novella takes place in modern author world. The plot structure of a novella is similar to a dramatic one, but usually simpler.

Goethe spoke about the action-packed nature of the novella, giving it the following definition: “an unheard-of event that has happened.”

The short story emphasizes the significance of the denouement, which contains unexpected turn(pointe shoe, “falcon turn”). According to the French researcher, “ultimately, one can even say that the entire novel is conceived as a denouement.” Viktor Shklovsky wrote that a description of happy mutual love does not create a novella; a novella requires love with obstacles: “A loves B, B does not love A; when B fell in love with A, then A no longer loves B.” He identified a special type of ending, which he called a “false ending”: usually it is made from a description of nature or weather.

Among Boccaccio's predecessors, the novella had a moralizing attitude. Boccaccio retained this motif, but for him the morality flowed from the story not logically, but psychologically, and was often only a pretext and device. The later novella convinces the reader of the relativity of moral criteria.

Tale

Story

Joke(fr. anecdote- fable, fable; from Greek τὸ ἀνέκδοτоν - unpublished, lit. “not issued”) - genre of folklore - short funny story. Most often, a joke has an unexpected semantic resolution at the very end, which gives rise to laughter. It could be a play on words different meanings words, modern associations that require additional knowledge: social, literary, historical, geographical, etc. Anecdotes cover almost all areas human activity. There are jokes about family life, politics, sex, etc. In most cases, the authors of the jokes are unknown.

In Russia XVIII-XIX centuries. (and in most languages ​​of the world to this day) the word “anecdote” had a slightly different meaning - it could simply be an entertaining story about some famous person, not necessarily with the goal of ridiculing him (cf. Pushkin: “Anecdotes of days gone by”). Such “anecdotes” about Potemkin became classics of that time.

Oh yeah

Epic

Play(French pièce) - dramatic work, usually classic style, created for staging any action in the theater. This is a general specific name for works of drama intended for performance on stage.

The structure of the play includes the text characters(dialogues and monologues) and functional author's remarks (notes containing the designation of the location of the action, interior features, appearance of the characters, their manner of behavior, etc.). As a rule, the play is preceded by a list of characters, sometimes indicating their age, profession, titles, family ties, etc.

Separate finished semantic part a play is called an act or action, which may include smaller components - phenomena, episodes, pictures.

The very concept of a play is purely formal; it does not include any emotional or stylistic meaning. Therefore, in most cases, the play is accompanied by a subtitle that defines its genre - classic, main (comedy, tragedy, drama), or author's (for example: My poor Marat, dialogues in three parts - A. Arbuzov; We'll wait and see, a pleasant play in four acts - B. Shaw; The Good Man from Szechwan, parabolic play - B. Brecht, etc.). The genre designation of the play not only serves as a “hint” to the director and actors during the stage interpretation of the play, but helps to enter into the author’s style and the figurative structure of the dramaturgy.

Essay(from fr. essai“attempt, trial, sketch”, from lat. exagium“weighing”) is a literary genre of prose composition of small volume and free composition. The essay expresses the author’s individual impressions and considerations on a specific occasion or subject and does not pretend to be an exhaustive or definitive interpretation of the topic (in the parodic Russian tradition of “a look and something”). In terms of volume and function, it borders, on the one hand, with a scientific article and a literary essay (with which an essay is often confused), and on the other, with a philosophical treatise. The essayistic style is characterized by imagery, fluidity of associations, aphoristic, often antithetical thinking, an emphasis on intimate frankness and conversational intonation. Some theorists consider it as the fourth, along with epic, lyricism and drama, type of fiction.

Michel Montaigne introduced it as a special genre form, based on the experience of his predecessors, in his “Essays” (1580). Francis Bacon, for the first time in English literature, gave the title English to his works, published in book form in 1597, 1612 and 1625. essays. The English poet and playwright Ben Jonson first used the word essayist. essayist) in 1609.

In the 18th-19th centuries, the essay was one of the leading genres of English and French journalism. The development of essayism was promoted in England by J. Addison, Richard Steele, and Henry Fielding, in France by Diderot and Voltaire, and in Germany by Lessing and Herder. The essay was the main form of philosophical-aesthetic polemic among the romantics and romantic philosophers (G. Heine, R. W. Emerson, G. D. Thoreau)..

The essay genre is deeply rooted in English literature: T. Carlyle, W. Hazlitt, M. Arnold (19th century); M. Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton (XX century). In the 20th century, essayism experienced its heyday: major philosophers, prose writers, and poets turned to the essay genre (R. Rolland, B. Shaw, G. Wells, J. Orwell, T. Mann, A. Maurois, J. P. Sartre).

In Lithuanian criticism, the term essay (lit. esė) was first used by Balis Sruoga in 1923. Characteristics The essays highlight the books “Smiles of God” (lit. “Dievo šypsenos”, 1929) by Juozapas Albinas Gerbachiauskas and “Gods and Smutkyalis” (lit. “Dievai ir smūtkeliai”, 1935) by Jonas Kossu-Alexandravičius. Examples of essays include “poetic anti-commentaries” “Lyrical Etudes” (lit. “Lyriniai etiudai”, 1964) and “Antakalnis Baroque” (lit. “Antakalnio barokas”, 1971) by Eduardas Meželaitis, “Diary without dates” (lit. “Dienoraštis be datų", 1981) by Justinas Marcinkevičius, "Poetry and the Word" (lit. "Poezija ir žodis", 1977) and Papyri from the graves of the dead (lit. "Papirusai iš mirusiųjų kapų", 1991) by Marcelius Martinaitis. An anti-conformist moral position, conceptuality, precision and polemic characterizes the essay by Tomas Venclova

The essay genre was not typical for Russian literature. Examples of the essayistic style are found in A. S. Pushkin (“Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg”), A. I. Herzen (“From the Other Shore”), F. M. Dostoevsky (“A Writer’s Diary”). At the beginning of the 20th century, V. I. Ivanov, D. S. Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, Lev Shestov, V. V. Rozanov turned to the essay genre, and later - Ilya Erenburg, Yuri Olesha, Viktor Shklovsky, Konstantin Paustovsky. Literary critical assessments of modern critics, as a rule, are embodied in a variation of the essay genre.

In musical art, the term piece is usually used as a specific name for works of instrumental music.

Sketch(English) sketch, literally - sketch, draft, sketch), in the 19th - early 20th centuries. a short play with two, rarely three characters. The sketch became most widespread on the stage.

In the UK, television sketch shows are very popular. Similar programs have recently begun to appear on Russian television (“Our Russia”, “Six Frames”, “Give Youth!”, “Dear Program”, “Gentleman Show”, “Town”, etc.) A striking example The sketch show is the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

A famous sketch creator was A.P. Chekhov.

Comedy(Greek κωliμωδία, from Greek κῶμος, kỗmos, “festival in honor of Dionysus” and Greek. ἀοιδή/Greek. ᾠδή, aoidḗ / ōidḗ, “song”) is a genre of fiction characterized by a humorous or satirical approach, as well as a type of drama in which the moment of effective conflict or struggle between antagonistic characters is specifically resolved.

Aristotle defined comedy as “the imitation of the worst people, but not in all their depravity, but in a funny way” (“Poetics”, Chapter V).

Types of comedy include genres such as farce, vaudeville, sideshow, sketch, operetta, and parody. Nowadays, examples of such primitiveness are many comedy films, built solely on external comedy, the comedy of situations in which the characters find themselves in the process of developing the action.

Distinguish sitcom And comedy of characters.

Sitcom (situation comedy, situational comedy) is a comedy in which the source of humor is events and circumstances.

Comedy of characters (comedy of manners) - a comedy in which the source of the funny is inner essence characters (morals), funny and ugly one-sidedness, exaggerated trait or passion (vice, flaw). Very often, a comedy of manners is a satirical comedy that makes fun of all these human qualities.

Tragedy(Greek τραγωδία, tragōdía, literally - goat song, from trаgos - goat and öde - song), dramatic genre, based on the development of events, which, as a rule, is inevitable and necessarily leads to a catastrophic outcome for the characters, often filled with pathos; a type of drama that is the opposite of comedy.

The tragedy is marked by stern seriousness, depicting reality in the most pointed way, like a clot internal contradictions, reveals the deepest conflicts of reality in an extremely intense and rich form, acquiring the meaning of an artistic symbol; It is no coincidence that most tragedies are written in verse.

Drama(Greek Δρα´μα) - one of the types of literature (along with lyric poetry, epic, and lyric epic). It differs from other types of literature in the way it conveys the plot - not through narration or monologue, but through character dialogues. Drama in one way or another includes any literary work constructed in a dialogical form, including comedy, tragedy, drama (as a genre), farce, vaudeville, etc.

Since ancient times it has existed in folklore or literary form among various peoples; The ancient Greeks, ancient Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and American Indians created their own dramatic traditions independently of each other.

In Greek, the word "drama" depicts a sad, unpleasant event or situation of one specific person.

Fable- a poetic or prose literary work of a moralizing, satirical nature. At the end of the fable there is a short moralizing conclusion - the so-called morality. The characters are usually animals, plants, things. The fable ridicules the vices of people.

Fable is one of the oldest literary genres. In Ancient Greece, Aesop (VI-V centuries BC) was famous, who wrote fables in prose. In Rome - Phaedrus (1st century AD). In India, the collection of fables “Panchatantra” dates back to the 3rd century. The most prominent fabulist of modern times was the French poet J. Lafontaine (17th century).

In Russia, the development of the fable genre refers to mid-18th century - early XIX centuries and is associated with the names of A.P. Sumarokov, I.I. Khemnitser, A.E. Izmailov, I.I. Dmitriev, although the first experiments in poetic fables were in the 17th century by Simeon of Polotsk and in the 1st half. XVIII century by A.D. Kantemir, V.K. Trediakovsky. In Russian poetry, fable free verse is developed, conveying the intonations of a relaxed and crafty tale.

I. A. Krylov's fables, with their realistic liveliness, sensible humor and excellent language, marked the heyday of this genre in Russia. IN Soviet time The fables of Demyan Bedny, S. Mikhalkov and others gained popularity.

There are two concepts of the origin of the fable. The first is represented by the German school of Otto Crusius, A. Hausrath and others, the second by the American scientist B. E. Perry. According to the first concept, in a fable the narrative is primary, and the moral is secondary; The fable comes from an animal tale, and the animal tale comes from a myth. According to the second concept, morality is primary in the fable; the fable is close to comparisons, proverbs and sayings; like them, the fable arises as an auxiliary means of argumentation. The first point of view goes back to the romantic theory of Jacob Grimm, the second revives the rationalistic concept of Lessing.

Philologists of the 19th century were long occupied with the debate about the priority of the Greek or Indian fable. It can now be considered almost certain that the common source of the material of the Greek and Indian fables was the Sumerian-Babylonian fable.

Epics- Russian folk epic songs about the exploits of heroes. The basis of the plot of the epic is some heroic event, or a remarkable episode of Russian history (hence the popular name of the epic - “ old man", "old lady", implying that the action in question took place in the past).

Epics are usually written in tonic verse with two to four stresses.

The term “epics” was first introduced by Ivan Sakharov in the collection “Songs of the Russian People” in 1839; he proposed it based on the expression “according to epics” in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” which meant “according to the facts.”

Ballad

Myth(ancient Greek μῦθος) in literature - a legend that conveys people’s ideas about the world, man’s place in it, the origin of all things, about gods and heroes; a certain idea of ​​the world.

The specificity of myths appears most clearly in primitive culture, where myths are the equivalent of science, an integral system in terms of which the whole world is perceived and described. Later, when such forms of social consciousness as art, literature, science, religion, political ideology, etc. are isolated from mythology, they retain a number of mythological models, which are peculiarly rethought when included in new structures; the myth is experiencing its second life. Of particular interest is their transformation in literary creativity.

Since mythology masters reality in the forms of figurative storytelling, it is close in essence to fiction; historically, it anticipated many of the possibilities of literature and had a comprehensive influence on its early development. Naturally, literature does not part with mythological foundations even later, which applies not only to works with mythological basis of the plot, but also to realistic and naturalistic everyday life writing of the 19th and 20th centuries (it is enough to name “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens, “Nana” by E. Zola, “The Magic Mountain” by T. Mann).

Novella(Italian novella - news) is a narrative prose genre characterized by brevity, a sharp plot, a neutral style of presentation, lack of psychologism, and an unexpected ending. Sometimes used as a synonym for story, sometimes called a type of story.

Tale- a prose genre of unstable volume (mostly intermediate between a novel and a story), gravitating towards a chronicle plot that reproduces the natural course of life. The plot, devoid of intrigue, is centered around the main character, whose identity and fate are revealed within a few events.

The story is an epic prose genre. The plot of the story tends more towards epic and chronicle plot and composition. Possible verse form. The story depicts a series of events. It is amorphous, events are often simply added to each other, extra-plot elements play a large independent role. It does not have a complex, intense and complete plot point.

Story- a small form of epic prose, correlated with the story as a more developed form of storytelling. Goes back to folklore genres(fairy tale, parable); how the genre became isolated in written literature; often indistinguishable from a short story, and since the 18th century. - and an essay. Sometimes a short story and an essay are considered as polar varieties of a story.

A story is a work of small volume, containing a small number of characters, and also, most often, having one storyline.

Fairy tale: 1) a type of narrative, mostly prosaic folklore ( fairy tale prose), which includes works of different genres, the content of which, from the point of view of folklore bearers, lacks strict authenticity. Fairy-tale folklore is opposed to the “strictly reliable” folklore narrative ( non-fairy prose) (see myth, epic, historical song, spiritual poems, legend, demonological stories, tale, blasphemy, legend, epic).

2) genre of literary storytelling. A literary fairy tale either imitates a folklore one ( literary fairy tale written in folk poetic style), or creates a didactic work (see didactic literature) based on non-folklore stories. The folk tale historically precedes the literary one.

Word " fairy tale"attested in written sources no earlier than the 16th century. From the word " say" What mattered was: a list, a list, an exact description. It acquires modern significance from the 17th-19th centuries. Previously, the word fable was used, until the 11th century - blasphemy.

The word “fairy tale” suggests that people will learn about it, “what it is” and find out “what” it, a fairy tale, is needed for. The purpose of a fairy tale is to subconsciously or consciously teach a child in the family the rules and purpose of life, the need to protect one’s “area” and a worthy attitude towards other communities. It is noteworthy that both the saga and the fairy tale carry a colossal information component, passed on from generation to generation, the belief in which is based on respect for one’s ancestors.

There are different types of fairy tales.

Fantasy(from English fantasy- “fantasy”) is a type of fantastic literature based on the use of mythological and fairy-tale motifs. IN modern form formed at the beginning of the 20th century.

Fantasy works most often resemble a historical adventure novel, the action of which takes place in a fictional world close to the real Middle Ages, the heroes of which encounter supernatural phenomena and creatures. Fantasy is often built on archetypal plots.

Unlike science fiction, fantasy does not seek to explain the world in which the work takes place from a scientific point of view. This world itself exists in the form of a certain assumption (most often its location relative to our reality is not specified at all: is it a parallel world, or another planet), and its physical laws may differ from the realities of our world. In such a world, the existence of gods, witchcraft, mythical creatures(dragons, gnomes, trolls), ghosts and any other fantastic entities. At the same time, the fundamental difference between the “miracles” of fantasy and their fairy-tale counterparts is that they are the norm of the described world and act systematically, like the laws of nature.

Nowadays, fantasy is also a genre in cinema, painting, computer and board games. Such genre versatility especially distinguishes Chinese fantasy with elements of martial arts.

Epic(from epic and Greek poieo - I create)

1. An extensive narrative in verse or prose about outstanding national historical events (“Iliad”, “Mahabharata”). The roots of the epic are in mythology and folklore. In the 19th century an epic novel arises (“War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy)
2. A complex, long history of something, including a number of major events.

Oh yeah- a poetic, as well as musical and poetic work, distinguished by solemnity and sublimity.

Initially, in Ancient Greece, any form of poetic lyric intended to accompany music was called an ode, including choral singing. Since the time of Pindar, an ode has been a choral epinikic song in honor of the winner in sports competitions of sacred games with a three-part composition and emphasized solemnity and pomp.

In Roman literature, the most famous are the odes of Horace, who used the dimensions of Aeolian lyric poetry, primarily the Alcaean stanza, adapting them to the Latin language; a collection of these works in Latin is called Carmina - songs; they were later called odes.

Since the Renaissance and in the Baroque era (XVI-XVII centuries), odes began to be called lyrical works in a pathetically high style, focusing on ancient examples; in classicism, ode became the canonical genre of high lyricism.

Elegy(Greek ελεγεια) - genre of lyric poetry; in early ancient poetry - a poem written in elegiac distich, regardless of content; later (Callimachus, Ovid) - a poem of sad content. In modern European poetry, elegy retains stable features: intimacy, motives of disappointment, unhappy love, loneliness, the frailty of earthly existence, determines rhetoric in the depiction of emotions; the classic genre of sentimentalism and romanticism (“Confession” by E. Baratynsky).

A poem with the character of thoughtful sadness. In this sense, we can say that most of Russian poetry is in an elegiac mood, at least up to the poetry of modern times. This, of course, does not deny that in Russian poetry there are excellent poems of a different, non-elegiac mood. Initially, in ancient Greek poetry, E. denoted a poem written in a stanza of a certain size, namely a couplet - hexameter-pentameter. Having the general character of lyrical reflection, E. among the ancient Greeks was very diverse in content, for example, sad and accusatory in Archilochus and Simonides, philosophical in Solon or Theognis, warlike in Callinus and Tyrtaeus, political in Mimnermus. One of the best Greek authors E. is Callimachus. Among the Romans, E. became more defined in character, but also freer in form. The importance of love stories has greatly increased. Famous Roman authors of romance include Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Catullus (they were translated by Fet, Batyushkov, etc.). Subsequently there was, perhaps, only one period in development European literature, when the word E. began to mean poems with a more or less stable form. And it began under the influence of the famous elegy English poet Thomas Gray, written in 1750 and causing numerous imitations and translations in almost all European languages. The revolution brought about by this era is defined as the onset of a period of sentimentalism in literature, which replaced false classicism. In essence, this was the decline of poetry from rational mastery in once established forms to the true sources of internal artistic experiences. In Russian poetry, Zhukovsky’s translation of Gray’s elegy (“Rural Cemetery”; 1802) definitely marked the beginning new era, which has finally gone beyond rhetoric and turned to sincerity, intimacy and depth. This internal change was also reflected in the new methods of versification introduced by Zhukovsky, who is thus the founder of new Russian sentimental poetry and one of its great representatives. In the general spirit and form of Gray's elegy, i.e. in the form of large poems filled with mournful reflection, such poems by Zhukovsky were written, which he himself called elegies, such as “Evening”, “Slavyanka”, “On the death of Cor. Wirtembergskaya". His “Theon and Aeschylus” is also considered an elegy (more precisely, it is an elegy-ballad). Zhukovsky called his poem “The Sea” an elegy. In the first half of the 19th century. It was common to give your poems the title of elegies; Batyushkov, Boratynsky, Yazykov and others especially often called their works elegies; subsequently, however, it went out of fashion. Nevertheless, many poems by Russian poets are imbued with an elegiac tone. And in world poetry there is hardly an author who does not have elegiac poems. Goethe's Roman Elegies are famous in German poetry. Elegies are Schiller’s poems: “Ideals” (in Zhukovsky’s translation of “Dreams”), “Resignation”, “Walk”. Much of the elegies belong to Matisson (Batyushkov translated it “On the ruins of castles in Sweden”), Heine, Lenau, Herwegh, Platen, Freiligrath, Schlegel and many others. etc. The French wrote elegies: Millvois, Debord-Valmore, Kaz. Delavigne, A. Chenier (M. Chenier, the brother of the previous one, translated Gray's elegy), Lamartine, A. Musset, Hugo, etc. In English poetry, besides Gray, there are Spencer, Jung, Sidney, and later Shelley and Byron. In Italy, the main representatives of elegiac poetry are Alamanni, Castaldi, Filicana, Guarini, Pindemonte. In Spain: Boscan Almogaver, Gars de le Vega. In Portugal - Camoes, Ferreira, Rodrigue Lobo, de Miranda.

Attempts to write elegies in Russia before Zhukovsky were made by such authors as Pavel Fonvizin, the author of “Darling” Bogdanovich, Ablesimov, Naryshkin, Nartov and others.

Epigram(Greek επίγραμμα “inscription”) - a small satirical poem ridiculing a person or social phenomenon.

Ballad- a lyric epic work, that is, a story told in poetic form, of a historical, mythical or heroic nature. The plot of a ballad is usually borrowed from folklore. Ballads are often set to music.