The idea is artistic. Theme and idea of ​​the work of art

Artistic idea

Artistic idea

The main idea contained in a work of art. The idea expresses the author’s attitude to the problem posed in his work, to the thoughts expressed by the characters. The idea of ​​a work is a generalization of the entire content of the work.
Only in normative-didactic works the idea of ​​a work takes on the character of a clearly expressed unambiguous judgment (such, for example, fable). As a rule, an artistic idea cannot be reduced to a single statement that reflects the author’s thought. Thus, the idea of ​​“War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy cannot be reduced to thoughts about the insignificant role of the so-called. great people in history and about fatalism as the idea most acceptable in explaining historical events. When perceiving the plot narrative and historical and philosophical chapters of “War and Peace” as a single whole, the idea of ​​the work is revealed as a statement about the superiority of natural, elemental life over the false and vain existence of those who thoughtlessly follow public fashion and strive for fame and success. The idea of ​​the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky“Crime and Punishment” is broader and more multifaceted than the idea expressed by Sonya Marmeladova about the inadmissibility of a person deciding whether another has the right to live. For F. M. Dostoevsky, no less important are thoughts about murder as a sin committed by a person against himself, and as a sin that alienates the murderer from those close and dear to him. Equally important for understanding the idea of ​​the novel is the idea of ​​​​the limitations of human rationality, of the insurmountable flaw of the mind, capable of constructing any logically consistent theory. The author shows that only life and religious intuition and faith can refute the atheistic and inhumane theory.
Often the idea of ​​a work is not reflected at all in the statements of the narrator or characters and can be defined very roughly. This feature is inherent primarily in many so-called. post-realistic works (for example, stories, novellas and plays by A.P. Chekhov) and the works of modernist writers depicting an absurd world (for example, novels, novellas and stories by F. Kafka).
Denial of the existence of the idea of ​​a work is characteristic of literature postmodernism; The idea of ​​the work is not recognized by postmodern theorists either. According to postmodernist ideas, artistic text independent of the will and intention of the author, and the meaning of the work is born when it is read by the reader, who freely places the work in one or another semantic context. Instead of the idea of ​​a work, postmodernism offers a play of meanings, in which a certain final semantic authority is impossible: any idea contained in a work is presented with irony, with detachment. However, in fact, it is hardly justified to talk about the absence of ideas in postmodernist writings. The impossibility of serious judgment, total irony and the playful nature of existence - this is the idea that unites postmodern literature.

Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. - M.: Rosman. Edited by prof. Gorkina A.P. 2006 .


See what an “artistic idea” is in other dictionaries:

    The semantic integrity of works of art as a product of emotional experience and mastery of life by the author. It cannot be adequately recreated by means of other arts and logical formulations; expressed throughout... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

    Content-semantic integrity work of art as a product of emotional experience and mastery of life by the author. It cannot be adequately recreated by means of other arts and logical formulations; expressed throughout... encyclopedic Dictionary

    IDEA artistic- (from the Greek idea representation) embodied in production. claim is an aesthetically generalized author's thought, reflecting a certain concept of the world and man (Artistic Concept). I. constitutes the value-ideological aspect of art. prod. And… … Aesthetics: Vocabulary

    ARTISTIC IDEA- AN ARTISTIC IDEA, a generalizing, emotional, figurative thought underlying a work of art. The subject of artistic thought is always those individual phenomena of life in which it is most clearly and actively manifested... ...

    artistic idea- (from the Greek idea idea, concept, prototype, representation) the main idea underlying a work of art. Their. is realized through the entire system of images, is revealed in the entire artistic structure of the work and thus gives... ... Dictionary of literary terms

    art form- FORM ARTISTIC concept, denoting the constructive unity of a work of art, its unique integrity. Includes the concepts of architectural, musical and other forms. Spatial and temporal are also distinguished... Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

    Children's art school city ​​of Obninsk (MU "Children's Art School") Founded 1964 Director Nadezhda Petrovna Sizova Address 249020, Kaluga region, Obninsk, Guryanova street, building 15 Telephone Work+7 48439 6 44 6 ... Wikipedia

    Coordinates: 37°58′32″ N. w. 23°44′57″ E. d. / 37.975556° n. w. 23 ... Wikipedia

    ARTISTIC CONCEPT- (from Lat. conceptus thought, idea) figurative interpretation of life, its problems in production. lawsuit va, specific ideologically aesthetic orientation both an individual work and the artist’s work as a whole. K. x. differs. both direct and... Aesthetics: Vocabulary

    ARTISTRY- ARTISTICITY, a complex combination of qualities that determines whether the fruits of creative labor belong to the field of art. For H., the sign of completeness and adequate embodiment of the creative concept, that “artistry” that is... ... Literary encyclopedic dictionary

Books

  • The Knight in Tiger Skin, Shota Rustaveli. Moscow, 1941. State Publishing House " Fiction". Publisher's binding with a gilded profile of the author. Good preservation. With many individual illustrations...

The gasoline is yours, the ideas are ours

When analyzing literary work traditionally use the concept of “idea,” which most often means the answer to a question supposedly posed by the author.

The idea of ​​a literary work - this is the main idea that summarizes the semantic, figurative, emotional content of a literary work.

Artistic idea of ​​the work – this is the content-semantic integrity of a work of art as a product of emotional experience and mastery of life by the author. This idea cannot be recreated by means of other arts and logical formulations; it is expressed throughout artistic structure work, the unity and interaction of all its formal components. Conventionally (and in a narrower sense), an idea stands out as the main thought, ideological conclusion and “ life lesson", naturally arising from a holistic comprehension of the work.

An idea in literature is a thought contained in a work. There are a great many ideas expressed in literature. Exist logical ideas And abstract ideas . Logical ideas are concepts that are easily conveyed without figurative means; we are able to perceive them with our intellect. Logical ideas are characteristic of nonfiction literature. Fictional novels and stories are characterized by philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and consequences, that is, abstract elements.

But there is also a special type of very subtle, barely perceptible ideas in a literary work. Artistic idea is a thought embodied in figurative form. It lives only in figurative transformation and cannot be expressed in the form of sentences or concepts. The peculiarity of this thought depends on the disclosure of the topic, the author’s worldview, conveyed by the speech and actions of the characters, and on the depiction of pictures of life. It lies in the combination of logical thoughts, images, and all significant compositional elements. An artistic idea cannot be reduced to a rational idea that can be specified or illustrated. The idea of ​​this type is integral to the image, to the composition.

Forming an artistic idea is difficult creative process. In literature it is influenced personal experience, the writer’s worldview, understanding of life. An idea can be nurtured for years and decades, and the author, trying to realize it, suffers, rewrites the manuscript, and looks for suitable means of implementation. All themes, characters, all events selected by the author are necessary for a more complete expression of the main idea, its nuances and shades. However, it is necessary to understand that an artistic idea is not equal ideological plan, that plan that often appears not only in the writer’s head, but also on paper. Exploring extra-artistic reality, reading diaries, notebooks, manuscripts, archives, literary scholars restore the history of the idea, the history of creation, but often do not discover artistic idea. Sometimes it happens that the author goes against himself, yielding to the original plan for the sake of artistic truth, an internal idea.

One thought is not enough to write a book. If you know in advance everything that you would like to talk about, then you should not contact artistic creativity. Better - to criticism, journalism, journalism.

The idea of ​​a literary work cannot be contained in one phrase and one image. But writers, especially novelists, sometimes struggle to formulate the idea of ​​their work. Dostoevsky about “The Idiot” he wrote: “The main idea of ​​the novel is to portray positively wonderful person" For such a declarative ideology Dostoevsky scolded, for example, Nabokov. Indeed, the phrase of the great novelist does not clarify why, why he did it, what is the artistic and vital basis of his image. But here you can hardly take sides Nabokov, a down-to-earth second-line writer, never, unlike Dostoevsky who does not set himself creative super-tasks.

Along with the authors' attempts to determine the so-called main idea of his work, opposite, although no less confusing, examples are known. Tolstoy to the question “what is “War and Peace”? answered as follows: ““War and Peace” is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed.” Reluctance to translate the idea of ​​your work into the language of concepts Tolstoy demonstrated once again, speaking about the novel “Anna Karenina”: “If I wanted to say in words everything that I had in mind to express in a novel, then I would have to write the very one that I wrote first” (from a letter to N.Strakhov).

Belinsky very accurately pointed out that “art does not allow abstract philosophical, much less rational ideas: it allows only poetic ideas; and the poetic idea is<…>It’s not a dogma, it’s not a rule, it’s a living passion, pathos.”

V.V. Odintsov expressed his understanding of the category “artistic idea” more strictly: “Idea literary composition is always specific and is not directly derived not only from the individual statements of the writer lying outside him (the facts of his biography, public life etc.), but also from the text - from replicas goodies, journalistic inserts, comments by the author himself, etc.”

2000 ideas for novels and stories

Literary critic G.A. Gukovsky also spoke about the need to distinguish between rational, that is, rational, and literary ideas: “By idea I mean not only a rationally formulated judgment, statement, not even just the intellectual content of a work of literature, but the entire sum of its content, constituting its intellectual function, its goal and task.” And he further explained: “To understand the idea of ​​a literary work means to understand the idea of ​​each of its components in their synthesis, in their systemic interconnection.<…>. At the same time, it is important to take into account structural features works - not only the words-bricks from which the walls of the building are made, but the structure of the combination of these bricks as parts of this structure, their meaning.”

The idea of ​​a literary work is an attitude towards what is depicted, the fundamental pathos of the work, a category that expresses the author’s tendency (inclination, intention, preconceived thought) in the artistic coverage of a given topic. In other words, idea is the subjective basis of a literary work. It is noteworthy that in Western literary criticism, based on other methodological principles, instead of the category “artistic idea”, the concept of “intention”, a certain premeditation, the tendency of the author to express the meaning of the work is used.

The greater the artistic idea, the longer the work lives. The creators of pop literature who write outside of great ideas face very rapid oblivion.

V.V. Kozhinov called an artistic idea a semantic type of work that grows out of the interaction of images. An artistic idea, unlike a logical idea, is not formulated by an author’s statement, but is depicted in all the details of the artistic whole.

IN epic works the idea can be partly formulated in the text itself, as was the case in the narrative Tolstoy: “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.” More often, especially in lyric poetry, the idea permeates the structure of the work and therefore requires a lot of analytical work. A work of art as a whole is much richer than the rational idea that critics usually isolate, and in many lyrical works isolating an idea is simply impossible, because it practically dissolves in pathos. Consequently, the idea of ​​a work should not be reduced to a conclusion or a lesson, and in general one should certainly look for it.

The concept of a literary work

Literary work- this is the systemic unity of many of its components. When starting to consider and analyze it, we must have an idea of ​​these components. In this section we will look at individual elements content and form of a work of verbal creativity.

The content of a literary work, its theme and issues

IN content of a literary work It is customary to distinguish two important components - its subject matter and problems.
Theme or a set of many topics (thema Greek, what is the basis) - subject, object artistic image, this is vital material that attracted and interested the author, the social, historical, cultural reality to which he addresses.
You can't come up with a theme - it comes from real life. For example, the theme of the novel “Eugene Onegin” cannot be considered the fate of Eugene Onegin or dramatic story love of Tatyana Larina, since all this is the fruit of the author’s imagination. We consider the life of the Russian nobility of the 20s of the 19th century to be the main, but, of course, not the only theme of this novel, because this is the cultural and historical material that Pushkin refers to.
The range of topics in a particular work can be quite wide.

Types of themes in literary works

In a literary work, as a rule, there are two types of themes:
- Universal or eternal, forming the basis of world art, the heritage of all countries and all eras. Ontological (Greek: ontos being + logos teaching) eternal themes fix the most important properties of our world, its existential foundations: life and death, time and eternity, light and darkness, creation and destruction, etc. Anthropological (Greek anthropos man + logos teaching) eternal themes are addressed to man, his spiritual and physical essence: pride and humility, sinfulness and righteousness, love and hatred, loyalty and betrayal, masculinity and femininity, youth and old age, etc.
Appeal to one or another eternal themes predetermines philosophical depth and the significance of a literary work.
- Cultural and historical topics are important for people of a certain culture and a specific historical era: the life of society, relationships between classes, national traditions, education, scientific and technical progress, military, political events etc.
As a rule, a work has not one, but many themes, and how more significant work, the more there are. To properly understand the work, it is necessary to highlight the most important ones related to the plot, images of the main characters, conflict, issues and the author’s idea.

Problems of a literary work

Problematics (Greek problema, given, task) is a set of questions that the author poses in his work on specific life material, i.e. addressing a specific range of topics. Problematics are the author’s comprehension and understanding of the depicted reality: unlike themes, problematics are the subjective side of the content of a work of art. Thematically, the works of contemporary writers may be close, since they were created in the same historical era, but understanding life material at the level of posed questions, stated problems is always individual, this is a kind of business card author. For example, “War and Peace” by L. Tolstoy and “Roslavlev or the Russians in 1812” by M. Zagoskin.
Problems (like topics) are very diverse:
- philosophical (meaning human life, personal freedom, man’s place in the world, his relationship with nature, the role of predestination in human life, the struggle between good and evil, reasons for the imperfection of the world, etc.);
- moral (a person’s honor and conscience, spiritual and material values, altruism and selfishness, the influence of upbringing on character, etc.);
- social (relations in society, the influence of a person’s social status on his life, class differences, level of material and economic development, etc.);
- ideological and political (people and government, legal relations in the state, political ideas and their influence on the fate of the country, the level of civil consciousness of society, the ideological and political situation and prospects for the further development of the country, etc.);
- cultural and historical (features of the cultural way of life, attitude to national, cultural traditions, originality national culture, patterns historical development countries, etc.);
- religious (belief in God as free choice man, true and false in faith, religious commandments and morality of people, causes and consequences of an atheistic worldview, the life of the church, etc.);
- psychological (contradictions in inner world of a person, patterns of emotional and mental life, psychology of communication, spiritual growth and spiritual degradation of a person, harmoniously developed personality, etc.).
Of course, all of the problems listed above cannot be addressed in one work, but major epic and dramatic works always raise multiple issues that complement each other. But even in this multitude, the attentive reader sees central problem, the solution to which the author devotes his work. It is often emphasized by a title or epigraph; the character traits of the main characters also help to understand it.

When analyzing a literary work, the concept of “idea” is traditionally used, which most often means the answer to the question allegedly posed by the author.

The idea of ​​a literary work is the main idea that summarizes the semantic, figurative, emotional content of a literary work.

The artistic idea of ​​a work is the content-semantic integrity of a work of art as a product of emotional experience and mastery of life by the author. This idea cannot be recreated by means of other arts and logical formulations; it is expressed by the entire artistic structure of the work, the unity and interaction of all its formal components. Conventionally (and in a narrower sense), an idea stands out as the main thought, ideological conclusion and “life lesson” that naturally follows from a holistic comprehension of the work.

An idea in literature is a thought contained in a work. There are a great many ideas expressed in literature. There are logical ideas and abstract ideas. Logical ideas are concepts that are easily conveyed without figurative means; we are able to perceive them with our intellect. Logical ideas are characteristic of nonfiction literature. Fictional novels and stories are characterized by philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and consequences, that is, abstract elements.

But there is also a special type of very subtle, barely perceptible ideas in a literary work. An artistic idea is a thought embodied in figurative form. It lives only in figurative transformation and cannot be expressed in the form of sentences or concepts. The peculiarity of this thought depends on the disclosure of the topic, the author’s worldview, conveyed by the speech and actions of the characters, and on the depiction of pictures of life. It lies in the combination of logical thoughts, images, and all significant compositional elements. An artistic idea cannot be reduced to a rational idea that can be specified or illustrated. The idea of ​​this type is integral to the image, to the composition.

Forming an artistic idea is a complex creative process. In literature, it is influenced by personal experience, the writer’s worldview, and understanding of life. An idea can be nurtured for years and decades, and the author, trying to realize it, suffers, rewrites the manuscript, and looks for suitable means of implementation. All themes, characters, all events selected by the author are necessary for a more complete expression of the main idea, its nuances and shades. However, it is necessary to understand that an artistic idea is not equal to an ideological plan, that plan that often appears not only in the writer’s head, but also on paper. Exploring extra-artistic reality, reading diaries, notebooks, manuscripts, archives, literary scholars restore the history of the idea, the history of creation, but often do not discover the artistic idea. Sometimes it happens that the author goes against himself, yielding to the original plan for the sake of artistic truth, an internal idea.

One thought is not enough to write a book. If you know in advance everything that you would like to talk about, then you should not turn to artistic creativity. Better - to criticism, journalism, journalism.

The idea of ​​a literary work cannot be contained in one phrase and one image. But writers, especially novelists, sometimes struggle to formulate the idea of ​​their work. Dostoevsky wrote about “The Idiot”: “The main idea of ​​the novel is to portray a positively beautiful person.” For such a declarative ideology, Dostoevsky was scolded, for example, by Nabokov. Indeed, the phrase of the great novelist does not clarify why, why he did it, what is the artistic and vital basis of his image. But here it is hardly possible to take the side of Nabokov, a down-to-earth writer of the second rank, who, unlike Dostoevsky, never set himself creative super-tasks.

PLOT AND FABULA

The difference between “plot” and “fable” is defined in different ways; some literary scholars do not see a fundamental difference between these concepts, while for others, “plot” is the sequence of events as they occur, and “plot” is the sequence in which the author has them.

The plot is the factual side of the story, those events, incidents, actions, states in their causal and chronological sequence. The term “plot” refers to what is preserved as the “base”, “core” of the narrative.

The plot is a reflection of the dynamics of reality in the form of the action unfolding in the work, in the form of internally related (causal-temporal) actions of characters, events that form a unity, constituting some complete whole. The plot is a form of theme development - an artistically constructed distribution of events.

Driving force plot development, as a rule, is a conflict (literally “clash”), conflict life situation, placed by the writer at the center of the work.

SUBJECT- Subject, main content of reasoning, presentation, creativity. (S. Ozhegov. Dictionary of the Russian language, 1990.)
SUBJECT(Greek Thema) - 1) The subject of presentation, depiction, research, discussion; 2) statement of the problem, which predetermines the selection of life material and the nature of the artistic narrative; 3) the subject of the linguistic utterance (...). (Dictionary foreign words, 1984.)

Already these two definitions can confuse the reader: in the first, the word “theme” is equated in meaning to the term “content,” while the content of a work of art is immeasurably broader than the topic, the topic is one of the aspects of the content; the second makes no distinction between the concepts of topic and problem, and although topic and problem are philosophically related, they are not the same thing, and you will soon understand the difference.

The following definition of the topic, accepted in literary criticism, is preferable:

SUBJECT- This life phenomenon, which became the subject of artistic consideration in the work. The range of such life phenomena is SUBJECT literary work. All phenomena of the world and human life constitute the artist’s sphere of interests: love, friendship, hatred, betrayal, beauty, ugliness, justice, lawlessness, home, family, happiness, deprivation, despair, loneliness, struggle with the world and oneself, solitude, talent and mediocrity, the joys of life, money, relationships in society, death and birth, secrets and mysteries of the world, etc. and so on. - these are the words that name life phenomena that become themes in art.

The artist's task is to creatively study a life phenomenon with interesting to the author sides, that is express the topic artistically. Naturally, this can only be done posing a question(or several questions) to the phenomenon under consideration. This question that the artist asks, using the figurative means available to him, is problem literary work.

So,
PROBLEM is a question that does not have a clear solution or involves many equivalent solutions. Polysemy possible solutions the problem is different from tasks. The set of such questions is called PROBLEMATICS.

The more complex the phenomenon of interest to the author (that is, the more complex the chosen subject), the more questions ( problems) it will cause, and the more difficult these issues will be to resolve, that is, the deeper and more serious it will be problems literary work.

The topic and problem are historically dependent phenomena. Different eras dictate to artists different topics and problems. For example, the author of the ancient Russian poem of the 12th century “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was worried about the topic of princely strife, and he asked the questions: how to force the Russian princes to stop caring only about personal gain and to be at enmity with each other, how to unite the disparate forces of the weakening Kyiv state? The 18th century invited Trediakovsky, Lomonosov and Derzhavin to think about scientific and cultural transformations in the state, about what an ideal ruler should be, and raised in literature the problems of civic duty and equality of all citizens, without exception, before the law. Romantic writers were interested in the mysteries of life and death, penetrated into dark corners human soul, solved the problems of human dependence on fate and unsolved demonic forces, the interaction of a talented and extraordinary person with a soulless and mundane society of ordinary people.

19th century with its focus on literature critical realism turned artists to new topics and forced them to think about new problems:

  • Through the efforts of Pushkin and Gogol, the “little” man entered literature, and the question arose about his place in society and relationships with “big” people;
  • became the most important feminine theme, and with it the so-called social “women’s question”; A. Ostrovsky and L. Tolstoy paid a lot of attention to this topic;
  • the theme of home and family acquired a new meaning, and L. Tolstoy studied the nature of the connection between upbringing and a person’s ability to be happy;
  • the unsuccessful peasant reform and further social upheaval aroused keen interest in the peasantry, and the topic peasant life and the fate discovered by Nekrasov became leading in literature, and with it the question: how will the fate of the Russian peasantry and all of great Russia turn out?
  • tragic events of history and public sentiment brought to life the theme of nihilism and opened up new facets in the theme of individualism, which received further development from Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy in attempts to resolve the questions: how to warn the younger generation against tragic mistakes radicalism and aggressive hatred? How to reconcile generations of “fathers” and “sons” in a turbulent and bloody world? How do we understand the relationship between good and evil today and what is meant by both? How can you avoid losing yourself in your quest to be different from others?
  • Chernyshevsky turns to the topic of public good and asks: “What to do?” so that a person Russian society could he honestly earn a comfortable living and thereby increase public wealth? How to “equip” Russia to have a prosperous life? Etc.

Note! The problem is question, and it should be formulated primarily in interrogative form, especially if formulating problems is the task of your essay or other work on literature.

Sometimes in art, a real breakthrough is precisely the question posed by the author - a new one, previously unknown to society, but now burning and vitally important. Many works are created to pose a problem.

So,
IDEA(Greek Idea, concept, representation) - in literature: the main idea of ​​a work of art, the method proposed by the author for solving the problems he poses. A set of ideas, a system of author’s thoughts about the world and man, embodied in artistic images called IDEAL CONTENT a work of art.

Thus, the scheme of semantic relationships between the topic, problem and idea can be represented as follows:


When you interpret a literary work, you look for hidden (scientifically speaking, implicit) meanings, analyze the thoughts expressed explicitly and subtly by the author, you are studying ideological content works. While working on task 8 of your previous work (analysis of a fragment of M. Gorky’s story “Chelkash”), you were specifically concerned with issues of its ideological content.


When completing tasks on the topic “Content of a literary work: Author's position"Please note the contact statement.

You have been given a goal: to learn to understand a critical (educational, scientific) text and to correctly and accurately present its content; learn to use analytical language when presenting such a text.

You must learn to solve the following problems:

  • highlight the main idea of ​​the entire text, determine its topic;
  • highlight the essence of individual statements of the author and their logical connection;
  • convey the author’s thoughts not as “their own,” but through indirect speech (“The author believes that...”);
  • expand your vocabulary of concepts and terms.

Source text: With all his creativity, Pushkin, of course, is a rebel. He certainly understands that Pugachev, Stenka Razin, and Dubrovsky are right. He, of course, would have been, if he could, on December 14 at Senate Square together with your friends and like-minded people. (G. Volkov)

Variant of the completed task: According to the firm conviction of the critic, in his work Pushkin is a rebel. The scientist believes that Pushkin, understanding the rightness of Pugachev, Stenka Razin, Dubrovsky, would definitely have been, if he could, on December 14 on Senate Square along with like-minded people.