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About what the pathos of a literary work is

Reading various works, you have probably already noticed that some of them arouse a joyful feeling in you, others make you sad, others cause indignation, still others laugh, etc. Why is this happening? The point here is in such an important property of a work of art as pathos. Pathos- this is the main emotional mood of the work, its emotional richness. Depending on the type of pathos inherent in the work, we experience certain emotions.

The concept of pathos is used in literary criticism to characterize the ideological world of a work and the originality of artistic ideas. The great Russian critic VG Belinsky wrote: “Every poetic work is the fruit of a powerful thought that possessed the poet. If we admitted that this thought is only the result of the activity of his reason, we would kill by this not only art, but the very possibility of art ... Art does not admit abstract philosophical, and even less rational ideas: it admits only poetic ideas; and a poetic idea is not a syllogism, not a dogma, not a rule, it is a living passion, it is pathos ”.

Thus, in pathos, the rational and the emotional, the writer's thought and his experience, are organically merged. Being embodied in pathos, the idea becomes personal, deeply felt by the writer. Only pathos, and not abstract ideas, has the ability to evoke a reciprocal experience of the reader, makes him vividly perceive the emotional and ideological charge of the entire work, and the fate of individual heroes, and the author's lyrical statements.

Paphos is one of the main criteria for the artistic perfection of a work. All great works of the past and present are invariably distinguished by the depth of pathos. It is thanks to the pathos that the work turns out to be capable of a long historical life. The pathos, for example, of heroism, tragedy or drama is understandable to a person of any era, no matter what specific circumstances it may have been caused by. For a century now, readers have been laughing at the story of AP Chekhov, "The Death of an Official," although the types depicted in it have long since passed away.

Note that the term "pathos" is often associated with a special structure of artistic speech - with its solemnity, sublimity, focus on oratorical intonation. Hence the expression "speak with pathos", which sometimes takes on an ironic connotation - in those cases when theatricality and rhetoric in the expression of feelings seem inappropriate to us. The fact is that pathos, that is, an idea emotionally experienced by the artist, does not always and does not have to be embodied in the forms of rhetorical, sublime, "decorated" speech. In the history of the development of literature, we observe that the expression of pathos is becoming more simple and natural. The principles of hidden, implicit expression of pathos reached their highest point at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, especially in the work of A.P. Chekhov, who wrote the following statement: it’s like a background against which it will appear more prominent ... You can cry and moan over stories, you can suffer along with your heroes, but, I suppose, this should be done in such a way that the reader does not notice. The more objective, the stronger the impression is. "

Many masters of the artistic word followed the path laid by A.P. Chekhov, whose work you will get to know later. Now, using the example of some famous work, try to see how the principles of creating pathos were reflected in artistic practice.

And in the XX century, solemnly uplifted, sublime speech, access to literature is not closed. See, for example, how the ways of expressing pathos are combined in the poem by AT Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin", with which you have yet to get acquainted. When the need was felt for this, the author did not hesitate to express lofty pathos in lofty words:

He walks, holy and sinful,

Russian miracle man ...

Mortal combat is not for the glory

For the sake of life on earth ...

Compare these passages with another example from the same work:

The heroic pathos is unchanged - we are talking about the same defender of "life on earth" - but it is expressed by other lexical means: vernacular, sometimes even rude.

The pathos of works of art is extremely diverse in its manifestations. Some are already familiar to you. So, in Russian folk epics we meet with heroic pathos, in ballads - with romantic or tragic. In the future, you will enrich your ideas about the known types of pathos and get to know others - sentimentality, drama, humor, satire etc. Please note that division of pathos into types based on the fact that pathos expresses the personal, biased and interested attitude of the writer to what he writes about. Consequently, the pathos of a work is always evaluative in nature, expresses approval or disapproval, admiration, delight, contempt, ridicule, etc. Therefore, to understand the pathos of a work means in many ways to understand the author's concept of the world and man, the author's system of values, that is, the most important , which is contained in the content of a work of art.

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1. (Greek suffering), a passion that causes an act that entails suffering, as well as the suffering itself experienced DOS. spend element in antiquity. If P. is in the middle of tragic. action, it is pathetic. tragedy (as opposed to ethical, in which character and its development are more important). P.'s action in the tragedy is enhanced when P. arises unexpectedly. P. belongs to the emotional elements of tragedy and creates in it, as in the pathetic. music (playing the flute), creatures, the premise of catharsis. P.'s action in poetry and in music is not aimed at educating the listener, but is associated with pleasure. Plato therefore argues with tragedy, while Aristotle justifies it.

2. city ​​on zatt. the coast of Cyprus, colonized in the Mycenaean times by the Arcadians. A place of worship for Aphrodite.

Excellent definition

Incomplete definition ↓

PATHOS

from the Greek. pathos - suffering, inspiration, passion), the emotional content of a work of art, feelings and emotions that the author puts into the text, expecting the reader's empathy. In modern literary criticism, the term is used in combination with "the pathos of a work" - for example, the pathos of "Dead Souls" and "The Inspector General" by N. V. Gogol (according to the author himself) - "laughter visible to the world through tears invisible to him." In the history of literature, the term "pathos" had different meanings: in the ancient theory, pathos is passion as a property of the soul, its ability to feel anything. In German classical aesthetics, pathos is the aggregate of passions that determine the content of human behavior. For the German philosopher GWF Hegel, pathos is the essential content of the human "I" (for example, the pathos of Romeo is his love for Juliet). VG Belinsky for the first time shifts the emphasis from the properties of a person to the properties of a text: pathos is characteristic not of a writer or his hero, but of a work or creativity as a whole. Contemporary literary criticism is close to Belinsky's interpretation. Sometimes there is the use of the word "pretentious" in the meaning of "too emotional, too tragic."

The last element entering the ideological world of the work is pathos, which can be defined as the leading emotional tone of the work, its emotional mood. A synonym for the term "pathos" is the expression "emotional-value orientation."

To analyze the pathos in a work of art means to establish its typological variety, the type of emotional-value orientation, attitude towards the world and the person in the world. Epic-dramatic pathos is a deep and undeniable acceptance of the world as a whole and of oneself in it, which is the essence of the epic worldview. Epic-dramatic pathos is the maximum trust in the objective world in all its real versatility and contradictions. Note that this type of pathos is rarely presented in literature, even less often it appears in its pure form.

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer can be named as works based on the whole on the epic-dramatic pathos. The objective basis of the pathos of heroism is the struggle of individuals or collectives for the implementation and protection of ideals that are necessarily perceived as lofty. Another condition for the manifestation of the heroic in reality is the free will and initiative of a person: forced actions, as Hegel pointed out, cannot be heroic. With heroism as pathos based on the sublime, other types of pathos that have a sublime character come into contact - first of all, it is tragedy and romance. Romance is related to heroism by striving for a lofty ideal.

But if heroics is a sphere of active action, then romance is an area of ​​emotional experience and aspiration that does not turn into action. The pathos of tragedy is the awareness of the loss, and the loss of irreparable, of some important life values ​​- human life, social, national or personal freedom, the possibility of personal happiness, cultural values, etc. Literary critics and aesthetics have long considered the insoluble nature of this or that life conflict to be the objective basis of the tragic. In sentimentality - another type of pathos - we, as in romance, observe the predominance of the subjective over the objective.

The pathos of sentimentality often played a dominant role in the works of Richardson, Russo, Karamzin. Moving on to the consideration of the following typological varieties of pathos - humor and satire - we note that they are based on the common basis of the comic. In addition to the subjective, irony as pathos also has an objective specificity. Unlike all other types of pathos, it is aimed not at objects and phenomena of reality as such, but at their ideological or emotional comprehension in one or another philosophical, ethical, thin system.


Pathos is emotional, subjective in relation to the author.

Idea - comprehension of the topic, which leads to the ideal of the author. The problem is how the theme is interpreted in the work.

Paphos - in plot and characters - in artistic speech

Paphos = thoughts and feelings. In the Russian tradition, Belinsky was the first to use this concept. Paphos is the thought of the writer, which he experiences especially passionately. Pathos depends on a) the object of the image (hero) b) the subject of creativity (the author)

Types of pathos:

a) heroic (heroes in myths) positive character traits are assessed;

b) idyllic (the attitude of people to nature, trusting relationships among people to each other) positively depicts the relationship of people;

d) romantic (excited portrayal of the characters of people);

g) comic - reality is ridiculed, criticized;

h) humor - a kind of comic pathos, where contradictions are highlighted in such a way that the weaknesses of the characters do no harm.

Pathos(Greek. pathos- passion, inspiration, suffering) denotes what is commonly called the soul of the work. In other words, this is the feeling, the passion that the author put into his creation and with which he would like to inspire the reader. If the purpose of a scientific text is, first of all, the transmission of certain information, then for a work of fiction it is more important to ignite, "infect" the reader with the author's emotions.

Different meanings were put into the term "pathos" depending on the time. Ancient rhetoricians were the first to use this term, and from rhetoric it passed into poetics. Aristotle in his "Rhetoric" believed that well-structured speech should be "pathetic". At the same time, he condemned excessive emotionality, urging the speaker to be "even" and "not to be led by passion."

In the era of romanticism, this Aristotelian position was rejected. Cultivating passions, romantics saw the dignity of literature precisely in the depiction of violent passions.

In Russian literary criticism, the theory of pathos, developed by V. Belinsky, was widespread. Although the critic sharply condemned the biographical method of C. Sainte-Beuve with his delving into the details of the writer's life, he nevertheless agreed that "the source of a person's creative activity is his spirit, expressed in his personality." At the same time, Belinsky sympathized with the spirit of personality that the romantics glorified - fiery, passionate, opposing the cold rationality of classicism, despite the fact that he resolutely rejected both classicism and romanticism in general. "Art," wrote Belinsky, "does not admit to itself abstract philosophical, and still less rational ideas: it admits only poetic ideas; and a poetic idea is not a syllogism, not a dogma, not a rule, it is a living passion, it is pathos."

Belinsky explained in detail the difference between pathos and passion. In passion, in his opinion, "there is a lot of purely sensual, blood, nervous, earthly", while "under" pathos "is meant also passion, and, moreover, combined with excitement in the blood, with a shock of the entire nervous system, like any other passion; but pathos is a passion that is kindled in a person's soul by an idea and always striving for an idea, therefore, a purely spiritual, moral, heavenly passion. "

Paphos is understood here as an indissoluble unity of thought and feeling. Such a unity arises only in genuine art. Thus, true pathos (and sometimes it may turn out to be false) becomes an indicator and criterion for the value of a work of art.

In Western European aesthetics, F. Schiller, P. Rüder, G. Hegel were engaged in the development of the theory of pathos. The latter called pathos "the rational content that is present in the human" I ", filling and permeating the whole soul." The idea was expressed (I. Vinkelmann) that pathos can be associated with suffering. F. Schiller in this regard spoke about the pathos of a tragic hero suffering, but struggling with this suffering.

Hegel, reflecting on the essence of pathos, spoke of noble and "wild" passions. Art, the philosopher believed, is designed to ennoble these "wild" passions. "... The savagery and unbridled power of passion," Hegel wrote, "art softens by the fact that it brings to consciousness everything that a person feels and does in such a state."

Here we are talking about the ethical aspect of pathos. Indeed, the intensity of passion embedded in a work and capable of igniting the reader cannot always serve as a criterion for the true value of a given work. It is not in vain that Plato was so afraid of the "obsession" of poets and the "violent" element in their creations, because the defense of inhuman (racist, for example) ideals can also be passionate.

Each truly artistic work has its own pathos. At the same time, all the work of this or that author is marked by a single, dominant pathos. Moreover, the dominant pathos can be characterized by entire epochs in art. So, we can talk about the revolutionary pathos of the literature of critical epochs, in particular, Russian and Soviet literature of the first third of the XX century. The revolutionary pathos determines the tonality of the poetry of Mayakovsky and many of his other contemporaries.

As noted, pathos can be true or false. The latter usually means the arrogance, empty rhetoric of a work, the idea of ​​which is false or is expressed by the author not from a pure heart, but "on request." But even that which was inspired by the poet's sincere pathos can be perceived by a certain category of readers as false and harmful. This is how the works of revolutionary "red" writers were viewed by emigrant readers. And vice versa, the pathos of denial and denunciation of the Soviet system that prevailed in the literature of the Russian emigration was regarded in "red" Russia as false.

So, the concept of "pathos" in different eras had a different meaning, although the majority of literary scholars base their definition of pathos on the thought of Belinsky, who believed that pathos is a "spiritual" passion dominating a work. At the same time, modern researchers (G. Pospelov) distinguish several types of pathos.

Paphos heroic- "the embodiment in the actions of an individual, with all the limitations of its forces, great national progressive aspirations ..." (pathos of ancient myths and legends, medieval knightly and heroic poetry, etc.).

Paphos is dramatic arising in a work under the influence of external forces and circumstances that threaten the desires and aspirations of the characters and even their lives ("Dowry" by A. Ostrovsky, "Anna Karenina" by L. Tolstoy).

Paphos tragic consists in depicting insoluble contradictions between the requirements of life and the impossibility of their implementation. “The tragic,” wrote Belinsky, “consists in the collision of the natural attraction of the heart with the idea of ​​duty, in the resulting struggle and, finally, victory or fall” (“Hamlet” by W. Shakespeare, “Doctor Zhivago” by B. Pasternak).

Paphos satirical spiritualizes works in which the order of life and human characters are the subject of indignantly mocking illumination. Such are Gulliver's Travels by J. Swift, The History of a City by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin. In those cases when the author is aware of the imperfection of life and human capabilities, but does not castigate them, does not indignant, but laughs at his heroes and even pity them, we are dealing with a humorous or comic pathos. Dickens's Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, A. Chekhov's stories The Death of an Official and A. Averchenko's The Rat on a Tray are imbued with comic pathos.

Sentimental pathos characteristic primarily of the literary trend of the 18th century, consists in "emotional tenderness caused by the awareness of moral merits in the characters of people who are socially humiliated or associated with an immoral privileged environment." As examples of works of this kind, the most indicative are "Julia, or New Eloise" by J. J. Rousseau, "The Suffering of Young Werther" by JV Goethe, "Poor Liza" by N. Karamzin. Basically, hypertrophied sensitivity as a determining factor in sentimental pathos by the beginning of the 19th century was gradually disappearing in literature. At the same time, the author's sensitively affectionate attitude towards his heroes, to one degree or another, never disappears in the art of words. Writers have always regretted and will regret some of their heroes (Poor People by F. Dostoevsky, Frost, Red Nose by N. Nekrasov, Matrenin's Dvor by A. Solzhenitsyn, some works by K. Paustovsky, V. Belov, etc.).

Romantic paphos conveys reflective spiritual enthusiasm, which arises as a result of the identification of a certain sublime principle and the desire to identify its features (Byron, Hoffman, Zhukovsky, early Pushkin). And the romantic pathos that appeared at the beginning of the 19th century survived the era of romanticism and is often present in the literature of the 20th century. For example, A. Green's story "Scarlet Sails", some stories by Ch. Aitmatov and B. Vasiliev, are imbued with romantic pathos.

In recent years, the concept of pathos in literary criticism has almost fallen out of use. The reason for this is not only a change in literary "fashion". Another thing is more important: our century shuns the open manifestation of feelings, it is not for nothing that for a long time both in Russian and foreign literature a reflective personality has become the central hero, far from both heroism and romanticism, if it reveals any emotions, then, as a rule, disguised irony.

  • Introduction to Literary Studies / Ed. G.N. Pospelova. 3rd ed., Rev. and add. M., 1988.S. 114.
  • Introduction to Literary Studies. P. 137.