Tragic in art. Abstract on the topic of its tragic manifestation in art and in life Message on the topic of tragedy in art

The status of the tragic and comic as aesthetic categories was often questioned: for example, V. Tatarkevich considered them ethical in life and aesthetic only in art. This view is common but superficial; if you look deeper, you can see an aesthetic struggle - the struggle between perfection and imperfection. The tragic conflict is deep (perfection dies or suffers irreparable damage), the comic conflict is not (perfection is temporarily lost, but the damage can be repaired). Development always involves conflicts of varying depth; the aesthetic aspect of conflicts (and, more broadly, development) is a decrease/increase in perfection. Moreover, both the perfection of the developing object and the perfection of the conflict itself: what can be called the beauty of tragedy or comedy arises, the presence of which in art is not denied by anyone. But this beauty is not only in art; there it is only presented in its pure form. The connection between “conflict” categories and perfection is twofold: on the one hand, perfection suffers damage in conflicts, on the other hand, it is born anew from them.

The ethical serves as the basis for the aesthetic, but does not exhaust it. “The essence of the tragically sublime,” writes Nikolai Hartman, “is the death of what is highly valued by man... Only the seriousness of a real threat subjects a person to the highest tests; Only such trials make it possible to reveal what is great in him. Aesthetic value is precisely connected with this manifestation... It is not the death of good as such that is sublime, but the good itself in its destruction is illuminated by the sublime. And the more clearly death is reflected in the suffering and defeat of the fighter, the more the charm of the tragic intensifies”; the position of a person who knows how to capture the beauty of tragedy “borders on the superhuman” and, perhaps, is characteristic only of a poet. Likewise, the comic is “devoid of practical interest. It always relates not to the affected person, but to the phenomenon, the incident as such. The compassion and gloating that may appear in this case belong not to an aesthetic phenomenon, but to an ethical position.”

Tragic is an aesthetic category applied to deep conflict. It is always associated with the irreversibility of changes, irreparable consequences, and irreparable losses. The tragic is not removed by victory, does not dissolve in the future, it cannot be corrected. But there is a search for a way out and a focus on the future - the tragic victims are not in vain.

Is the tragic objective? Aristotle saw in tragedy and comedy the imitation of people’s actions (“inspiring compassion and fear” for tragedy; “the actions of the worst, but not in all their meanness” for comedy), that is, he recognized the objectively tragic and the objectively comic in people’s lives. Since actions are conscious, and the conflict unfolds against the backdrop of the material world, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between materialistic and objective-idealistic interpretations: “The essence of tragedy lies in a collision, that is, in a collision, an error of the natural attraction of the heart with a moral duty or simply with an insurmountable obstacle... What is a collision? - Fate’s unconditional demand for sacrifice to oneself... What is this “fate” that people tremble at and to which the gods themselves unquestioningly obey? This is the concept of the Greeks about what we, the newest, call rational necessity, the laws of reality, the relationship between causes and effects, in a word - an objective action that develops and moves on its own, driven by the internal power of its rationality...”

Nevertheless, discrimination is possible. It is noticeable in the desire of idealists to take as a basis not so much fate, which requires sacrifice, as a conscious protest against it, not so much external (necessity) as internal (the desire to resist it); thereby limiting the tragic to the framework of the human and ultimately identifying tragedy with its awareness. Materialism sees tragedy in the conflicts inherent in reality itself, objective idealism transfers the tragic conflict into the sphere of ideas - into the struggle of the subject and the objectively existing idea: tragedy was understood as the struggle of “freedom in the subject and the necessity of the objective,” in which both sides were defeated and won at the same time; the victory of the eternal over the earthly (transient), in which human individuality perishes, or of “eternal substantiality” - over the one-sidedness of man. “Tragic is the suffering of a valuable person. The tragic is limited to man." The tragic and comic were also classified as “social categories” in our country. Thus, nature was excluded from the sphere of the tragic. But the objectively tragic - as a deep conflict - is inalienable from nature, if only because of the irreversibility of time. “A high aesthetic charm in the kingdom of organic forms is created” by the fact that organisms “carelessly abandon themselves to their fate, die in thousands, but other thousands flourish in their place. They have a vague presentiment of the terrible cruelty that dominates the life of clans - cruelty against the individual in favor of the life of generations ... "

If the sign of the tragic is not the depth of the conflict, but the ideal character, then, although victory does not go completely to either side, the vanquished is matter; in this way the tragic is different from the comic, which remains in the material sphere. August Schlegel was the first to take such an anti-Aristotelian position: “Internal freedom and external necessity are the two extreme poles in the tragic world... Necessity, which a person must recognize along with freedom, cannot be a natural necessity. It lies on the other side of the sensory world, in the depths of the infinite; therefore, it manifests itself as the incomprehensible power of fate... We are accustomed to call all kinds of terrible and sad incidents tragic... However, a sad end is in no way a necessity... the reason why the tragic image should not give way to the most severe and gloomy paintings, is that the invisible spiritual force can be measured by the resistance that it offers to an external, sensually measurable force... if the tragic goal needs a definition, then it is this: in order to justify the claims of the spirit to the inner divinity, earthly existence should be considered nothing."

Schelling goes even further: tragedy is not in misfortune, but in the freedom of a person who goes against necessity until it is known, after which both sides of the conflict will dissolve in the highest harmony. “I affirm: only this is the truly tragic element in tragedy. It's not a matter of an ill-fated end... Misfortune exists only until the will of necessity has spoken its word and revealed itself. As soon as the hero himself has clarified everything for himself and his fate has become obvious, there are no more doubts for him... and just at the moment of supreme suffering he moves on to the highest liberation and the highest dispassion.” This understanding of the tragic comes to self-denial: there is nothing tragic in the fact that tragedies occur in the world (in the usual sense). Tragedy is not even just individuality, the separation of a person from the will of higher powers, but a person’s awareness of his individuality and rejection of it. “This is the greatest thought and the highest victory of freedom - to voluntarily bear punishment for an inevitable crime, in order to prove precisely this freedom by the loss of one’s freedom and to die, declaring one’s free will.” Human freedom lies in losing it. For the highest necessity there are no tragedies; when we understand this necessity, there will be no tragedies for us either, because individual free existence will cease. What is true here, I think, is only the dialectical moment of mutual victory/defeat of the participants in the tragic conflict.

Non-classical philosophy, affirming subjective idealism, completely deprived the tragic of objectivity. “The essence of the tragic is not in the chain of events, but in a person’s reaction to them,” writes personalist Jean-Marie Domenac, “I’m not talking about uprisings, revolutions, repressions, civil, colonial, world wars - there is no tragedy here.” If we make the tragic dependent on its awareness, it is logical to reduce it to a subjective reaction: there is no tragic object without a subject, hence not every subject is worthy of tragedy. “Not every death is tragic,” wrote Max Scheler. “There is a difference between whether a vegetable merchant or a king fulfills his duty... Tragic figures are the Prometheans of morality, in whose eyes new, previously unknown values sparkle...” Idealism is also represented in our country: “the tragic is based on a bright flash of the ideal , which perishes in an unequal confrontation with the present,” preparing the death of a “breakthrough into the future” based on “hidden reserves of the ideal”; “a necessary subjective component of tragedy is the hero’s awareness of the situation... tragedy begins when the hero realizes the tragedy of his situation.”

But Othello's tragedy began when he was deceived, and not when he realized the deception. Hoffmann in Offenbach's opera is tragic when he mistakes the doll Olympia for a woman and falls in love with her; The symbol of his tragic blindness is the witch glasses that distort reality, which the insidious magician Coppelius gives him. And King Canute in A.K. Tolstoy’s ballad rides towards certain death, without knowing it.

Why is Verdi's opera Aida tragic? Because spirit (love) conquers life? Or is it because life is dying? Then why is the price like this? The source of the tragic must be sought in the world, and not in consciousness. There is tragedy where there is no way out that suits everyone. “This is not good... This is also not good,” - the character of A. V. Vampilov’s play “Last Summer in Chulimsk” unexpectedly accurately defines the essence of the tragic conflict. Then - regardless of the degree of awareness of the conflict - “value stands against value”, because interest stands against interest, and the victory of one side becomes the defeat of the other, and no one is completely innocent. The most striking example is the tragedy of Christian Friedrich Hebbel “Agnes Bernauer”. A story that really happened in the 15th century. and repeatedly embodied in art (from folk ballads to the opera of Karl Orff), is this: the young Duke of Bavaria Albrecht married the daughter of the barber Agnes Bernauer; the rights of their children to the throne would certainly be challenged by representatives of the subsidiary branches of the dynasty; Albrecht's father, Duke Ernst, without waiting for the heirs to appear, ordered the murder of Agnes Bernauer. Hebbel amazed his contemporaries by showing that Duke Ernst - the murderer - also had his own right: he seeks to prevent internecine war in the only way that is available to him. It is here that the line separates tragedy from melodrama with its innocent sufferers and gratuitous villains. The play, despite the conservatism of the author, was banned: Hebbel honestly showed what the interests of the state are and at what price stability is paid.

Associated with the problem of awareness of a tragic conflict is the concept of the tragic guilt of the hero and, accordingly, the justice of the tragic outcome. Schelling, Hegel (“above simple fear and tragic empathy rises the feeling of reconciliation that tragedy evokes with its picture of eternal justice”) and especially their epigones, understanding justice as absolute, sought to find an adequate tragic guilt of any character (Romeo and Juliet, Cordelia, Desdemona, Ophelia), which led to inhumane and tense constructions. On the other hand, N. G. Chernyshevsky, and after him many literary scholars, denied the tragic guilt of those heroes who are usually called positive. In this case, their death is absolute injustice. It is clear that the dialectical solution will be the recognition of relative guilt and justice. There are no completely innocent people, but there is no complete justice in retribution. Romeo and Juliet are more right than the Montagues and Capulet families, but the enmity of the latter is not a quirk that can be gotten rid of by an effort of will. It is incorrect and cruel to say that Romeo and Juliet deserved death because they placed themselves outside of society and its laws, Desdemona - because they did not think enough about their unusual marriage, Cordelia - because they were unable to calm their father’s vanity in time, but also completely These arguments cannot be dismissed. The active person inevitably enters into conflicts - this can be called guilt; he accepts the consequences of his actions - this can be called justice. But the balance between both is very approximate and almost never absolute. Maria Stuart speaks about this in Schiller, in response to the phrase “you only shared blood with him for blood,” answering: “for this they will repay me with blood too.”

So, Aristotle's path is correct, but departure from it was not useless. The concept of the tragic has deepened from the completely accidental (“a person who is not distinguished by either virtue or righteousness, and falls into misfortune not because of depravity and meanness, but due to some mistake”) to the necessary in Hegel (“the original tragedy consists precisely in the fact that in such a collision both sides of the opposite, taken separately, are justified, but they can achieve the true positive meaning of their goals and characters only by denying another equally legitimate force and violating its integrity, and therefore they are equally guilty precisely because of their morality"; "for great characters it is an honor to be guilty") and Hartmann ("some believed that we could fully sympathize only with the innocent. They were sorely mistaken: a person innocent in a conflict is hardly human... situations of real life are not such that a person can emerge from them innocent... Most likely, value always stands against value, and the will must decide which one it wants to violate and which one it wants to agree with”). The tragedy of inevitability is deeper than the tragedy of chance.

The question of the types of tragedy - like other problems of the “poetics of evil” - was raised by Friedrich Schiller. Our compassion, he notes, is weakened by irritation towards the unfortunate person if he suffers through his own fault, and even more so by disgust if others also suffer through his fault. But - and this “but” is very important - tragedy is present in these cases. Moreover, Schiller distinguishes two types of non-heroic tragedy: “If misfortune stems not from moral sources, but from external phenomena that do not have a will and are not subject to the will” and “when the object of compassion is not only the one who experiences suffering, but also the one who who causes them." Neither the stupidity nor the meanness of a suffering person puts him outside the tragedy. In my opinion, this is a correct formulation of the question, and Schiller can only be reproached for inconsistency. He draws a line separating those who are not entirely stupid and not entirely vile (still tragic characters!) from those who, like Iago and Franz Moor, are deprived of the right to tragedy in their suffering.

The line is arbitrary, but after Schiller the theory of the tragic moved towards consolidating rather than destroying this line: the only type of tragedy was considered sublime tragedy, expressed in the conflict “between a historically necessary requirement and the practical impossibility of its implementation,” the tragedy of a hero serving humanity and not dying in vain . But not every tragedy is like that. The tragedy of the bearers of evil (willing or involuntary, erring) and the tragedy of a victim incapable of fighting - the tragedy of evil power and the tragedy of weakness - can be combined into one concept of non-heroic tragedy, the best symbol of which can be the image of Rigoletto. “In the end, in some graveyards there lie only scoundrels, but this does not make the graves any less sacred or less sad.”

Non-heroic tragedies also include death for false ideals, including religious fanaticism; as G. E. Lessing noted, a Christian martyr is “a madman who willingly goes to death without any need, neglecting his civic duties... Doesn’t his expectation of a reward of bliss beyond this life contradict the selflessness that... should distinguish all good and great deeds? Such plots (for example, M. P. Mussorgsky’s opera “Khovanshchina”) will, according to Lessing, only make us shed a tear of regret for blindness and unreason (I will add - not only fanatics, but also the conditions that create them).

In our aesthetics, it was often directly stated that there could be no non-heroic tragedy: “... if a person died by accident, which is not in a deep, significant connection with social laws (an accident), then... an objectively genuine tragedy may not yet exist”; otherwise, “a person who stepped on a watermelon rind, fell and was seriously injured, would turn into an important object of creative interest for a tragedy writer.” The arrogance of this tirade (striking in its cynicism, if you think about it) is due to several reasons: idealism (the conflict is necessarily realized), the separation of chance from necessity (allegedly there is an accident that has nothing to do with the structure of society) and, ultimately, contempt for the “ordinary” person . But the experience of mankind teaches that there are no “ordinary” people, and tragedy is not the privilege of the chosen few. “In the room next to mine lived a copyist of court papers with his wife. Both were old and desperately poor. It wasn't their fault. Despite the truisms, in our world there is still such a thing as bad luck, constant and monotonous, gradually destroying any desire to resist it. They told me their story - hopelessly simple and in no way instructive. He was a school teacher, she was a student, also a future teacher: they got married early, and for some time fate was favorable to them. But then illness struck both; nothing from which a moral lesson could be drawn - an ordinary case: bad pipes, and as a result - typhus...” As you know, the fact that there was no nail in the forge can also become tragic; The story of a man who stepped on a banana peel became the plot of the story "Victory Fall" by Leslie Powles Hartley. “In life, the outcome is often completely accidental, and a tragic fate is often completely accidental, without losing any of its tragedy... Isn’t the fate of Gustav Adolf, who died completely by accident in the battle of Lützen, on the path of victory and triumph, tragic?”

Moreover, the tragedy of the bearers of evil was denied: the death of Shakespeare’s Iago or the death of Nazi criminals, both in life and in art (Kukryniksy’s painting “The End. The last days of Hitler’s headquarters in the dungeon of the Reich Chancellery”), is not tragic. It is impossible to agree with this: where is the line separating those whose death is not tragic? This division is just too similar to the division of people into super- and sub-humans. Fortunately, Soviet art did not follow such guidelines, remaining humanistic; In addition to the aforementioned picture by the Kukryniksy, which is undoubtedly tragic, it is enough to recall the death of the provocateur Klaus in “Seventeen Moments of Spring”, the reaction of the heroes of the film “There is No Ford in Fire” to the news of the execution of Nicholas II, the death of the Dragon in the fairy tale of the same name by E. L. Schwartz.

Let the latest absolutist regimes be comical; But is the fate of the adherents of a dying system comical? How to relate to the tragedy of well-deserved retribution to a nonentity - for example, Peter III? To the tragedy of the inevitable decline of Rome, led by rulers, Nero or Caligula, into the abyss created by history? To the tragedy of those who followed them? Their lives are wasted on unworthy things. Nothing can be fixed. We see the same phenomenon in private life - at least in the fate of the four old misers from Andre Maurois' story “The Curse of the Golden Calf”, who guarded a suitcase with money and died on it; in the fate of the little idiot who committed suicide from Francois Mauriac’s story “The Monkey”. Heroes? No. Tragedy? Yes.

“The efforts of representatives of the dying classes to “save the situation” cannot in any way be considered sublime, and their struggle cannot in any way be called tragic. Their fight low-lying..." But the point is that tragic it can be And sublime, and base: it is enough to compare the death of Hamlet and the death of the king, the death of Karl and the death of Franz Moor, the tragedy of Pechorin and the tragedy of Grushnitsky, the two possible fates of Lensky. The tragedy of the sublime is called pathetic; there is no base name for tragedy, but it is the antipode of the pathetic - tragedy without pathos, this is a pathetic tragedy. (The last line of King Claudius is “Help! I’m just wounded!”, but he knows the deadly power of the poison prepared for Hamlet; “Why am I so afraid of this edge?” Franz Moor asks himself, driven into a corner, but unable to finish with himself.) Sasha Cherny ends “A Scary Story” like this:

What is this story for?

Did you tell the world again?

Just because in the world

And we were talking about a petty-bourgeois marriage without love and self-satisfied prosperity, in which the poet clearly saw a base tragedy in contrast to another story, “there is nothing sadder in the world” - the sublime tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

I cannot help but note the efforts of bourgeois authors to give a sublime character to the tragedy of Nicholas II (S. Kuznetsov’s play “And I Will Repay”, I. Glazunov’s painting “Mystery of the 20th Century”, a monument on the site of the Ipatiev House) and a base character to Lenin’s tragedy (M. Aldanov’s novel “Suicide”, film by A. Sokurov “Taurus”). However, such a creative search is nothing compared to what is written in textbooks (recommended, etc.): Professor L.A. Nikitich found an example of the tragic in the impossibility of victory for the white movement as a conflict between “the need to save Russia from impending barbarism and devilry and the practical impossibility of carrying this out,” and the tragic hero is in Admiral A.V. Kolchak, a putschist who in 1918 staged a military coup and destroyed the deputies of the Constituent Assembly, who imprudently gave him the post of Minister of War, then a dictator and protege of the Entente who recognized pre-revolutionary debts of Russia (cancelled by the Bolsheviks) and fought with his people with the money of the Western bourgeoisie, which he himself did not deny: “... I found myself in a position close to a condottiere.” No matter how much you rewrite history, this “tragic hero” will remain in the memory of posterity not with the romance “Shine, burn, my star,” but with completely different verses: “English uniform, Russian shoulder straps, Japanese tobacco, Omsk ruler.” It is easy to see that the theoretical source of the glorification of any tragedy is precisely the narrow understanding of the tragic. Therefore, if you wish, you can replace Kolchak with Hitler, who fell in an unequal struggle (“practical impossibility”) with world Jewry and Bolshevism, from which the Aryan race must be saved (“historically necessary requirement”). This is what the Catacomb Church of True Orthodox Christians did, canonizing the Fuhrer under the name of “Holy Great Martyr Ataulf of Berlin.”

Let's return to sublime tragedy. It is not necessarily associated with public struggle, but is also present in private life. “Great disasters do not sadden me at all,” says the narrator in Guy de Maupassant’s short story. - The brutal cruelty of nature and people can evoke a cry of horror or indignation from us, but it is not at all capable of pinching the heart or causing a shiver to run down the spine, just as happens at the sight of some small things that shake the soul... Other encounters, others barely noticed or guessed events, other hidden sorrows, other treacherous blows of fate, awakening in us a swarm of sad thoughts, suddenly open before us the mysterious door of moral suffering, complex, incurable, the more profound, the more harmless they seem, the more painful, the more elusive they seem, the more stubborn, the less natural they seem..."

The essence of the comic was often sought in the contrast of form and content, appearance and reality, external and internal - in surprise: “The comic is a socially significant discrepancy between the goal and the means, the form - the content, the action - the circumstances, the essence - its manifestation, the claims of the individual - its subjective capabilities ". This line comes from Hobbes (“for the emergence of laughter, three prerequisites are required: an unworthy act, the fact that it is committed by another, and its suddenness”) and Kant (“laughter is an affect arising from the sudden transformation of tense expectation into nothingness”). N. Hartmann notes that at this point “the development of the theory of the comic stopped.”

The Polish author B. Dzemidok, in his book “On the Comic,” identifies what he considers to be five different theories of the comic: the negative quality of the object; degradation; contrast; contradictions; deviations from the norm - without noticing that they come down to two: 1) the Aristotelian understanding of the comic as a shallow conflict and 2) the opposite - the comic as a surprise (appearing in the form of the discovery of a negative quality, degradation, contrast, contradiction, deviation from the norm, etc. ). But the second does not make it possible to distinguish the comic from the tragic. Surprise and incongruity are not always comical. This is a sign of any conflict. Aristotle saw surprise as a sign of tragedy: “[tragedy] is the imitation of an action that is not only completed, but also [inspiring] compassion and fear, and this most often happens when one thing unexpectedly turns out to be a consequence of another...”

Jan Mukarzowski defines the main property of “the entire sphere of the comic” through inconsistency: “... it is always about the opposition of two semantic connections, in the light of which a given reality is considered... a statement of one of the persons, into which this person puts a completely definite semantic connection, considering it obvious, by another person... is included in another connection, in which it unexpectedly acquires a different meaning.” But the result of misunderstanding is not always comical. In V. O. Bogomolov’s novel “The Moment of Truth” the tragic collision is that one of the characters - army officer Anikushin - based on his life experience, incorrectly interprets the words and behavior of other characters - counterintelligence officers, which leads to Anikushin’s inappropriate behavior during the detention of a sabotage group and his death. There is a “contradiction of two semantic connections in the light of which this reality is viewed,” which does not contain the slightest comedy. Not every discrepancy between “form and content, the claims of the individual and its subjective capabilities” is funny: this formulation applies equally to Truffaldino from Bergamo (the servant of two masters) and to Nero. Let me remind you of an episode from Agatha Christie’s novel “Ten Little Indians”: Puritan Emily Brent seems like a funny old prude to those around her, until it turns out that her prudery made her a murderer incapable of repentance. Her claims to morality “do not correspond to subjective possibilities” (according to the quoted definition of the comic) - so much so that the novel’s character Vera Claythorne “the puny old maid no longer seemed funny. She seemed scary to her." The very textbook nature of this phrase shows that the notorious incongruity is comical only to a certain extent. Is it funny when a man mistakes an automatic doll for a living woman? Not always. It is comical in “Coppelia” by L. Delibes and tragic in “The Tales of Hoffmann” by J. Offenbach.

What is the reason for the popularity of the interpretation of the comic as incongruity? The fact that such an understanding can be, so to speak, ontologized and inscribed in the system of objective idealism: a surprise not for the subject, but for the objective idea that creates the world and stumbles upon its materiality (created by it, but this is the logic of idealism - matter is always to blame) . In this capacity, the comic replaces the ugly (which simply does not exist in the world created by God) and thereby plays the role of justifying all existing ugliness: what seems ugly to us is just comic, and the comic itself is a consequence of the materiality of things; the idea is always great. The comic is a “reversal” of the beautiful (“the wisdom of God is objectified mainly in the stupidity of people”); it appears when the idea that creates matter dies (“the essence is forced to plunge into earthly life with everything insignificant and accidental that is characteristic of it”).

E. G. Yakovlev also sees the difference between the comic and the tragic in the lack of awareness of the conflict: “The tragic hero feels and realizes the tragedy of his situation (Hamlet), the comic character (Jourdain) is completely unaware of his comedy.” As a rule, yes, but this is an external sign: it is not about awareness as such, but about the consequences of awareness. As soon as a person realized that he was ridiculous, he corrects himself, but a tragic situation cannot be overcome by awareness; comedy is easy to fix, tragedy is not. The interpretation of the comic as the death of an idea and the triumph of matter (death is not taken seriously - the idea is immortal) follows from the interpretation of the tragic as the triumph of an idea over matter: “There the spirit, despite all the horrors of destruction, remains unshakable. A man dies, but steadfastly defends his principles; here material existence does not cease, but a sudden turn occurs in the principles. An antithesis is built: material, random - comic; inevitable, ideal - tragic.

In order to laugh at the death of principles, one must look at the material world as a temporary chimera, whose triumph will be short-lived. Unfortunately, this view is too optimistic. “Human souls, my dear, are very tenacious. If you cut a body in half, the person will die. But if you tear your soul apart, it will become more obedient, and that’s all,” says the Dragon in the fairy tale by E. Schwartz. The death of principles while preserving life is by no means synonymous with comedy: there are different principles. “With its ending, A Doll's House provides an example of a very unique resolution to the conflict of drama, in which drama directly comes into contact with tragedy; the hero does not die here, but, on the contrary, turns out to be a winner, since he seems to find himself and has enough courage to carry out his will and throw away everything that hindered him; At the same time, this victory of the hero is colored tragically, since it means a painful break with his entire previous existence.” Loyalty to principles can be comical, otherwise the tragic hero would be the esthete to whom R. Kipling’s epitaph is dedicated:

I went to do this not where the rest of the soldiers were.

And the sniper sent me to the next world at that very second.

I think you're wrong to make fun of me

The deceased in principle, without changing his rules.

Tragedy is present here too, but only in the death of the esthete, and not in the fact that the spirit, despite all the horrors of destruction, remains unshakable. This is just funny!

TO ohmic - an aesthetic category applied to a superficial conflict, one that can be corrected by laughter. By violating the measure, we destroy the comic. “For one has only to admit that Thersites’ insidious attempt to humiliate Agamemnon would have cost him dearly... we would immediately stop laughing at him. This moral and physical monster is still a man, whose death will immediately seem to us a much greater evil than all his misdeeds and sins.” The measure can be violated in the other direction - non-conflict. The comedy ends the moment the negative character becomes positive. You can check the accuracy of the definition by contradiction: imagine that you need to kill laughter, as in the story “A Nightmare Case” by G. Green. A man in Naples died under a collapsed balcony that could not withstand the weight of a well-fed pig. The son of the deceased was faced with a problem: how to talk about the death of his father, excluding the comic? He came up with two options. Brief: “my father was killed by a pig” - the conflict emphasizes the tragic. Long - “turn a funny incident into a boring story”, talk about Naples, about the habits of the poor, about balconies, about the father’s route and add: “falling from a great height, she picked up decent speed and broke his neck” - the conflict is almost invisible.

B. Dzemidok considers Aristotle’s definition incomplete: 1) “a person can be funny precisely because he is harmed” and 2) “ugly handwriting or spelling errors may not cause suffering or harm, but they will not always be a source of comedy.” The first statement is answered above; If spelling errors are not comical, they are either tragic or not worthy of attention at all: that is, either the conflict is deep, or there is none at all.

Is the comic objective? As in the case of the tragic, the anti-Aristotelian interpretation starts from the subject: there is no comic object without a subject, with the difference that now this subject is not the one who suffers, as in tragedy, but the one who observes the “undignified act”, the “sudden transformation”, “discrepancy between form and content”. “The comic, the ability to laugh, is always in the one who laughs, but in no case in the object of laughter,” writes Charles Baudelaire in the essay “On the Nature of Laughter and the Comic in the Plastic Arts in General.” “There is no comic outside the strictly human,” says Bergson. Many agree with him: “...the sphere of the comic is not just everything human, but something to which a person can give meaning, and then put himself in a playful relationship to this meaning. The comic is a game with meaning." Since there is no objectively comic, it means there is no objectively tragic, there is nothing except the playing individual, which is combined with the statement of the same author: “... everything can change in an instant. And this is perhaps our only reliable knowledge.” Somehow it's not funny. If this is a definition, it is not of comedy, but of cynicism - the life position of a cynic. The playful (subjective) moment in the comic cannot be absolutized. Play is not necessarily about laughter.

Landscape cannot be comic, says Bergson, seeing this as an argument in favor of the subjectivity of the comic and following the idealistic rule: development is dictated by consciousness. But the comic is where there is conflict, and conflict is where there is development. It is not the absence of consciousness, but the absence of conflict that deprives the landscape of its comedy.

We see the comic, not invent it. The comic in art (and in general humor in the human attitude to the world) is a special view of the world that reduces conflicts to their superficial component. This is the ability to see the objectively comic, present in all life situations.

A comic attitude simplifies conflicts. That's why humorous and especially satirical characters are so unambiguous, ridiculous - anecdotal. Jokes constantly talk about misfortunes, deaths, injuries, lies, but we laugh. In “The Story of a City,” blood flows like a river, and we laugh. The distance between us and our simplified likeness in humor and satire is great enough that we do not empathize with their (ultimately our!) misfortunes. True, satire is different in that behind the comic layer the tragic layer is constantly visible; and in “black humor,” the third type of comic in art, more than the tragic shines through - the terrible.

Each era brings its own features to the tragic and emphasizes certain aspects of its nature.

For example, Greek tragedy is characterized by an open course of action. The Greeks managed to keep their tragedies entertaining, although both the characters and the audience were often told about the will of the gods or the chorus predicted the further course of events. The audience knew well the plots of ancient myths, on the basis of which tragedies were mainly created. The entertainment of Greek tragedy was firmly based on the logic of action. The meaning of the tragedy lay in the character of the hero's behavior. The death and misfortunes of the tragic hero are known. And this is the naivety, freshness and beauty of ancient Greek art. This course of action played a great artistic role, enhancing the tragic emotion of the viewer.

The hero of the ancient tragedy is unable to prevent the inevitable, but he fights, acts, and only through his freedom, through his actions, is what must happen realized. This is, for example, Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King.” Of his own free will, he consciously and freely searches for the causes of the misfortunes that befell the inhabitants of Thebes. And when it turns out that the “investigation” threatens to turn against the main “investigator” and that the culprit of Thebes’s misfortune is Oedipus himself, who by the will of fate killed his father and married his mother, he does not stop the “investigation”, but brings it to the end. Such is Antigone, the heroine of another tragedy by Sophocles. Unlike her sister Ismene, Antigone does not obey the order of Creon, who, on pain of death, forbids the burial of her brother, who fought against Thebes. The law of tribal relations, expressed in the need to bury the body of a brother, no matter what the cost, applies equally to both sisters, but Antigone becomes a tragic hero because she fulfills this necessity in her free actions.

Greek tragedy is heroic.

The purpose of ancient tragedy is catharsis. The feelings depicted in the tragedy purify the viewer's feelings.

In the Middle Ages, the tragic appears not as heroic, but as martyrdom. Its purpose is consolation. In medieval theater, the passive principle was emphasized in the actor's interpretation of the image of Christ. Sometimes the actor got used to the image of the crucified man so much that he himself found himself close to death.

The concept of medieval tragedy is alien catharsis . This is not a tragedy of purification, but a tragedy of consolation. It is characterized by logic: you feel bad, but they (the heroes, or rather, the martyrs of the tragedy) are better than you, and they are worse off than you, so take comfort in your suffering in the fact that there are sufferings that are worse, and the torments of people are even less severe, than you who deserve it. Earthly consolation (you are not the only one suffering) is enhanced by otherworldly consolation (there you will not suffer, and you will be rewarded as you deserve).

If in ancient tragedy the most unusual things happen quite naturally, then in medieval tragedy the supernatural nature of what is happening occupies an important place.

At the turn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the majestic figure of Dante rises. Dante has no doubt about the need for the eternal torment of Francesca and Paolo, who with their love violated the moral foundations of their age and the monolith of the existing world order, shaking and transgressing the prohibitions of earth and heaven. And at the same time, in The Divine Comedy there is no supernaturalism or magic. For Dante and his readers, the geography of hell is absolutely real and the hellish whirlwind that carries lovers is real. Here is the same naturalness of the supernatural, the reality of the unreal, which was inherent in ancient tragedy. And it is precisely this return to antiquity on a new basis that makes Dante one of the first exponents of the ideas of the Renaissance.

Medieval man explained the world by God. The man of modern times sought to show that the world is the cause of itself. In philosophy, this was expressed in Spinoza's classic thesis about nature as its own cause. In art, this principle was embodied and expressed by Shakespeare half a century earlier. For him, the whole world, including the sphere of human passions and tragedies, does not need any otherworldly explanation; he himself is at its core.

Romeo and Juliet carry the circumstances of their lives within them. From the characters themselves comes the action. The fatal words: “His name is Romeo: he is the son of Montague, the son of your enemy” - did not change Juliet’s attitude towards her lover. The only measure and driving force of her actions is herself, her character, her love for Romeo.

The Renaissance in its own way solved the problems of love and honor, life and death, personality and society, revealing for the first time the social nature of the tragic conflict. The tragedy during this period revealed the state of the world, confirmed the activity of man and his freedom of will. At the same time, the tragedy of the unregulated personality arose. The only regulation for a person was the first and last commandment of the Thelema monastery: “Do what you want” (Rabelais. “Gargartua and Pantagruel”). However, freed from medieval religious morality, the individual sometimes lost all morality, conscience, and honor. Shakespeare's heroes (Othello, Hamlet) are uninhibited and not limited in their actions. And the actions of the forces of evil are just as free and unregulated (Iago, Claudius).

The hopes of humanists that the individual, having gotten rid of medieval restrictions, would use his freedom wisely and in the name of good, turned out to be illusory. The utopia of an unregulated personality in fact turned into its absolute regulation. In France in the 17th century. This regulation manifested itself: in the sphere of politics - in the absolutist state, in the sphere of science and philosophy - in Descartes's teaching about the method that introduces human thought into the mainstream of strict rules, in the sphere of art - in classicism. The tragedy of utopian absolute freedom is replaced by the tragedy of real absolute normative conditioning of the individual.

In the art of romanticism (H. Heine, F. Schiller, J. Byron, F. Chopin), the state of the world is expressed through the state of the spirit. Disappointment in the results of the Great French Revolution and the resulting disbelief in social progress give rise to the world grief characteristic of romanticism. Romanticism realizes that the universal principle may not have a divine, but a diabolical nature and is capable of bringing evil. Byron's tragedies (“Cain”) affirm the inevitability of evil and the eternity of the struggle against it. The embodiment of such universal evil is Lucifer. Cain cannot come to terms with any restrictions on the freedom and power of the human spirit. But evil is omnipotent, and the hero cannot eliminate it from life even at the cost of his death. However, for the romantic consciousness, the struggle is not meaningless: the tragic hero, through his struggle, creates oases of life in the desert, where evil reigns.

The art of critical realism revealed the tragic discord between the individual and society. One of the greatest tragic works of the 19th century. - “Boris Godunov” by A. S. Pushkin. Godunov wants to use power for the benefit of the people. But on the way to power, he commits evil - he kills the innocent Tsarevich Dimitri. And between Boris and the people there was an abyss of alienation, and then anger. Pushkin shows that you cannot fight for the people without the people. Human fate is the people's fate; For the first time, the actions of the individual are compared with the good of the people. Such problems are the product of a new era.

The same feature is inherent in the operatic and musical tragic images of M. P. Mussorgsky. His operas “Boris Godunov” and “Khovanshchina” brilliantly embody Pushkin’s formula of tragedy about the unity of human and national destinies. For the first time, a people appeared on the opera stage, animated by a single idea of the struggle against slavery, violence, and tyranny. An in-depth description of the people highlighted the tragedy of Tsar Boris’s conscience. For all his good intentions, Boris remains alien to the people and secretly fears the people, who see him as the cause of their misfortunes. Mussorgsky deeply developed specific musical means of conveying the tragic content of life: musical-dramatic contrasts, bright thematicism, mournful intonations, gloomy tonality and dark timbres of orchestration.

The development of the theme of rock in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was of great importance for the development of the philosophical principle in tragic musical works. This theme was further developed in Tchaikovsky's Fourth, Sixth and especially Fifth symphonies. The tragic in Tchaikovsky's symphonies expresses the contradiction between human aspirations and life's obstacles, between the infinity of creative impulses and the finitude of personal existence.

In critical realism of the 19th century. (Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and others) a non-tragic character becomes the hero of tragic situations. In life, the tragedy has become an “ordinary story”, and its hero has become an alienated person. And therefore, in art, tragedy as a genre disappears, but as an element it penetrates into all types and genres of art, capturing the intolerance of the discord between man and society.

In order for tragedy to cease to be a constant companion of social life, society must become humane and come into harmonious harmony with the individual. A person’s desire to overcome discord with the world, the search for the lost meaning of life - this is the concept of the tragic and the pathos of the development of this topic in the critical realism of the 20th century. (E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner, L. Frank, G. Böll, F. Fellini, M. Antonioni, J. Gershwin and others).

Tragic art reveals the social meaning of human life and shows that the immortality of man is realized in the immortality of the people. An important theme of the tragedy is “man and history.” The world-historical context of a person’s actions turns him into a conscious or unwilling participant in the historical process. This makes the hero responsible for choosing the path, for correctly solving the issues of life and understanding its meaning. The character of the tragic hero is verified by the very course of history, its laws. The theme of the individual’s responsibility to history is deeply explored in “Quiet Flows the Don” by M. A. Sholokhov. The character of his hero is contradictory: he either becomes shallow, then deepens with internal torment, or is tempered by difficult trials. His fate is tragic.

In music, a new type of tragic symphonism was developed by D. D. Shostakovich. If in the symphonies of P. I. Tchaikovsky rock always invades the life of the individual from the outside as a powerful, inhuman, hostile force, then in Shostakovich such a confrontation arises only once - when the composer reveals a catastrophic invasion of evil, interrupting the calm flow of life (the theme of invasion in the first part of the Seventh symphonies).

The tragic as a category of aesthetics Categories of aesthetics are the fundamental, most general concepts of aesthetics, which reflect the essential definitions of cognizable objects and are the key stages of cognition. Aesthetic theory, like any scientific theory, has a certain system of categories. As a category of aesthetics, tragic means a form of dramatic consciousness and a person’s experience of conflict with forces that threaten his existence and lead to the destruction of important spiritual values.

The place of the tragic in the categories of aesthetics CategoryActionSubject of the category BeautifulAesthetic idealArt of the SublimeAesthetic tasteArtistic image TragicAesthetic feelingsCreativity Comic Objective statesSpiritual and practical construction of the world Subject of socio-spiritual life

The subject of the tragic The subject of the tragic action presupposes a heroic personality striving to achieve sublime goals, therefore the category of the tragic is closely related to the category of the sublime. The category of catharsis is inseparable from the tragic, which is not associated only with the field of dramatic art, but has a broader meaning associated with the socio-psychological impact of art in general. The idea of the tragic was formed in connection with the theory of drama, and in a narrower sense with the theory of tragedy as a type of dramatic art.

Tragic in art The feeling of tragedy is affective in nature, accompanied by strong mental shocks, sometimes expressed in sobs. The artistic image of a person created by a writer or artist sometimes reaches its highest power: we not only experience an aesthetic feeling from the perception of a beautiful work of art, it makes us suffer, sympathize, and be indignant. Works of art, evoking a sense of tragedy, ennoble a person, make him detach himself from the everyday trifles of life, think about its deep foundations, they encourage him to actively fight against the shortcomings of life. But to evoke such a feeling, a work of art must be artistically beautiful.

Tragic in ancient art The hero of ancient tragedy acts in line with necessity. He is unable to prevent the inevitable, but he fights, and it is through his activity that the plot is realized. It is not necessity that draws the ancient hero to the denouement, but through his actions he himself fulfills his tragic destiny. This is Oedipus in Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus the King. Of his own free will, he consciously and freely searches for the causes of the disasters that befell the inhabitants of Thebes. The hero of the ancient tragedy acts freely even when he understands the inevitability of his death. He is not a doomed creature, but a hero, independently acting in accordance with the will of the gods, according to necessity.

The Tragic in the Art of the Middle Ages In the Middle Ages, the tragic appears not as heroic, but as martyrdom. Here tragedy reveals the supernatural, its purpose is consolation. Unlike Prometheus, the tragedy of Christ is illuminated by martyrdom. In medieval Christian tragedy, the martyrdom, the suffering principle was emphasized in every possible way. Its central characters are martyrs.

Tragic in the Renaissance The Renaissance gave rise to the tragedy of the unregulated individual. The only regulation for a person at that time was the Rabelaisian commandment - do what you want. And then the utopia of an unregulated personality in fact turned into its absolute regulation. In France of the 17th century, this regulation manifested itself in the absolutist state, and in the teachings of Descartes, which introduced human thought into the mainstream of strict rules, and in classicism. The universal principle in the form of the individual’s duty in relation to the state acts as restrictions on his behavior, and these restrictions conflict with the free will of a person, with his passions, desires, and aspirations. This conflict becomes central to the tragedies of Corneille and Racine.

Tragic in Romanticism In the art of romanticism (G. Heine, F. Schiller, J. Byron, F. Chopin), the state of the world is expressed through the state of the spirit. Disappointment in the results of the bourgeois revolution and the resulting disbelief in social progress gives rise to the world sorrow characteristic of romanticism. The tragedies of Byron (Cain) affirm the inevitability of evil and the eternity of the struggle against it. However, for the romantic consciousness, the struggle is not meaningless: the tragic hero does not allow the undivided dominance of evil to be established on earth. With his struggle, he creates oases of life in the desert, where evil reigns.

The tragic in critical realism The art of critical realism revealed the tragic discord between the individual and society. One of the greatest tragic works of the 19th century - Boris Godunov A.S. Pushkin. Godunov wants to use power for the benefit of the people. But, trying to fulfill his intentions, he commits evil - he kills the innocent Tsarevich Dmitry. And between Boris’s actions and the aspirations of the people there was an abyss of alienation. The same feature is inherent in the operatic and musical tragic images of M.P. Mussorgsky. His operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina brilliantly embody Pushkin's formula of tragedy about the unity of private and popular destinies. In the literature of critical realism of the 19th century. (Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, etc.) a non-tragic character becomes the hero of tragic situations. And therefore, in art, tragedy as a genre disappears, but as an element it penetrates into all types and genres of art, capturing the intolerance of the discord between man and society.

A pessimistic worldview naturally developed in well-known historical epochs - in critical epochs, when the collapse of a certain system of life was perceived as proof of the impossibility of the victory of the ideal. But along with pessimistic tragedy in the history of art there has always been another type of tragedy - optimistic tragedy.

Pessimism in the tragic The ideal idea of human life, when faced with a vulgar, ugly reality, is defeated, leaving not the slightest hope for its revival. And this defeat of the ideal gives rise to tragedy. Such a resolution of a tragic conflict, such a worldview, such a philosophy of life are called pessimistic. Pessimism took especially deep roots at the beginning of the 19th century during the era of romanticism. Social contradictions in the aesthetics of romanticism found their expression in the absolute opposition of ideal and reality.

P. Fedotov Anchor, another anchor Let's remember the small canvas by P. Fedotov Anchor, another anchor. It would seem that what could be tragic about an officer playing with his dog? But, peering and getting used to the picture, we feel that we are captured by a feeling of deep tragedy.

Pieter Bruegel The Blind One of the most stunning artistic expressions of this worldview during the era of the crisis of Renaissance culture was the painting by Pieter Bruegel The Blind. A chain of blind men wandering towards a cliff is perceived as a symbol of the historical path of all mankind.

Optimism in the tragic Along with pessimistic tragedy in the history of art, there has always been another type of tragedy, the essence of which was very accurately defined by Vsevolod Vishnevsky in the title of his play - Optimistic Tragedy. In Shakespeare's work we encounter the first classical examples of optimistic tragedy, free from mythological mystifications. The aesthetic meaning of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Othello is that the death of a beautiful person who embodies an ideal or fights for it is not the death of the ideal itself. On the contrary, Shakespeare's tragedies breathe a fierce faith in the inevitable future triumph of reason, justice, the beauty of free feeling, and human trust.

Raphael, “Sistine Madonna” The immortality of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna lies precisely in the fact that the traditional theme of the Madonna and Child was freed by the painter from the religious mysticism so characteristic of the Middle Ages and from the idyllic chanting of maternal happiness, no less characteristic of Renaissance art. Raphael turned this theme into a high optimistic tragedy: a mother carries her son to humanity, anticipating with him his tragic fate and at the same time realizing the necessity and justification of the sacrifice.

Conclusions Thus, the tragic reveals: the death or severe suffering of the individual; the irreplaceability of its loss for people; immortal socially valuable principles inherent in unique individuality, and its continuation in the life of humanity; the highest problems of existence, the social meaning of human life; activity of a tragic nature in relation to circumstances; a philosophically meaningful state of the world; historically, temporarily unresolvable contradictions; the tragic, embodied in art, has a cleansing effect on people. Tragedy reveals the social meaning of life. The essence and purpose of human existence: the development of the individual should not come at the expense, but in the name of the whole society, in the name of humanity. On the other hand, the whole of society must develop in man and through man, and not in spite of him and not at the expense of him. This is the highest aesthetic ideal, this is the path to a humanistic solution to the problem of man and humanity, offered by the world history of tragic art.

Abstract on the topic of the Tragic, its manifestation in art and in life free download

Section: Ethics
Type of work: abstract

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..3

1. Tragedy – irreparable loss and affirmation of immortality………………..4

2. General philosophical aspects of the tragic……………….………………………...5

3. Tragic in art……………………………………………………….7

4. Tragic in life………………………………………………………..12

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….16

References…………………………………………………………………………………18

INTRODUCTION

By aesthetically assessing phenomena, a person determines the extent of his dominance over the world. This measure depends on the level and nature of development of society and its production. The latter reveals one or another meaning for a person of the natural properties of objects, determines their aesthetic properties. This explains that the aesthetic manifests itself in different forms: beautiful, ugly, sublime, base, tragic, comic, etc.

The expansion of human social practice entails an expansion of the range of aesthetic properties and aesthetically assessed phenomena.

There is no era in the history of mankind that is not saturated with tragic events. Man is mortal, and every person living a conscious life cannot help but, in one way or another, comprehend his relationship to death and immortality. Finally, great art, in its philosophical reflections on the world, always internally gravitates towards a tragic theme. The tragic theme runs through the entire history of world art as one of the general themes. In other words, the history of society, the history of art, and the life of the individual in one way or another come into contact with the problem of the tragic. All this determines its importance for aesthetics.

1. TRAGEDY – IRREPAIRABLE LOSS AND ESTABLISHMENT OF IMMORTALITY

The 20th century is the century of the greatest social upheavals, crises, and rapid changes that create the most complex and tense situations in one place or another on the globe. Therefore, a theoretical analysis of the problem of the tragic for us is introspection and comprehension of the world in which we live.

In the art of different nations, tragic death turns into resurrection, and sorrow into joy. For example, ancient Indian aesthetics expressed this pattern through the concept of “samsara,” which means the cycle of life and death, the reincarnation of a deceased person into another living being depending on the nature of the life he lived. The reincarnation of souls among the ancient Indians was associated with the idea of aesthetic improvement, ascent to something more beautiful. The Vedas, the oldest monument of Indian literature, affirmed the beauty of the afterlife and the joy of going into it.

Since ancient times, human consciousness could not come to terms with non-existence. As soon as people began to think about death, they asserted immortality, and in non-existence people made a place for evil and accompanied it there with laughter.

Paradoxically, it is not tragedy that speaks about death, but satire. Satire proves the mortality of living and even triumphant evil. And tragedy affirms immortality, reveals the good and beautiful principles in a person, which triumph and win, despite the death of the hero.

Tragedy is a mournful song about an irreparable loss, a joyful hymn to the immortality of man. It is this deep nature of the tragic that manifests itself when the feeling of sorrow is resolved by joy (“I am happy”), death by immortality.

2. GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE TRAGIC

A person dies irreversibly. Death is the transformation of living things into non-living things. However, the dead remains alive in the living: culture stores everything that has passed, it is the extragenetic memory of humanity. G. Heine said that under every tombstone is the history of an entire world that cannot leave without a trace.

Understanding the death of a unique individuality as an irreparable collapse of the whole world, tragedy at the same time affirms the strength and infinity of the universe, despite the departure of a finite being from it. And in this very finite being, tragedy finds immortal traits that unite the personality with the universe, the finite with the infinite. Tragedy is a philosophical art that poses and resolves the highest metaphysical problems of life and death, realizing the meaning of existence, analyzing the global problems of its stability, eternity, infinity, despite constant variability.

In tragedy, as Hegel believed, death is not only annihilation. It also means preserving in a transformed form that which must perish in this form. Hegel contrasts a creature suppressed by the instinct of self-preservation with the idea of liberation from “slave consciousness”, the ability to sacrifice one’s life for higher goals. For Hegel, the ability to comprehend the idea of endless development is the most important characteristic of human consciousness.

K. Marx, already in his early works, criticized Plutarch’s idea of individual immortality, putting forward in contrast to it the idea of social immortality of man. For Marx, people who fear that after their death the fruits of their deeds will go not to them, but to humanity, are untenable. The products of human activity are the best continuation of human life, while hopes for individual immortality are illusory.

In understanding tragic situations in world artistic culture, two extreme positions have emerged: existentialist and Buddhist.

Existentialism made death the central problem of philosophy and art. The German philosopher K. Jaspers emphasizes that knowledge about man is tragic knowledge. In the book “On the Tragic,” he notes that the tragic begins where a person takes all his capabilities to the extreme, knowing that he will die. This is, as it were, the self-realization of the individual at the cost of his own life. “Therefore, in tragic knowledge it is essential what a person suffers from and because of what he dies, what he takes upon himself, in the face of what reality and in what form he betrays his existence.” Jaspers proceeds from the fact that the tragic hero carries within himself both his happiness and his death.

A tragic hero is a bearer of something that goes beyond the scope of individual existence, a bearer of power, a principle, a character, a demon. Tragedy shows a person in his greatness, free from good and evil, writes Jaspers, substantiating this position by referring to Plato’s thought that neither good nor evil flows from a petty character, and a great nature is capable of both great evil and great good.

Tragedy exists where forces collide, each of which considers itself true. On this basis, Jaspers believes that the truth is not unified, that it is split, and tragedy reveals this.

Thus, existentialists absolutize the intrinsic value of the individual and emphasize its isolation from society, which leads their concept to a paradox: the death of the individual ceases to be a social problem. A person left alone with the universe, not feeling humanity around him, is overwhelmed by the horror of the inevitable finitude of existence. She is cut off from people and in fact turns out to be absurd, and her life is devoid of meaning and value.

For Buddhism, when a person dies, he turns into another creature; he equates death with life (a person, while dying, continues to live, so death does not change anything). In both cases, all tragedy is actually removed.

The death of a person acquires a tragic sound only where a person, having self-worth, lives in the name of people, their interests become the content of his life. In this case, on the one hand, there is a unique individual identity and value of the individual, and on the other, the dying hero finds continuation in the life of society. Therefore, the death of such a hero is tragic and gives rise to a feeling of irretrievable loss of human individuality (and hence grief), and at the same time the idea of the continuation of the life of the individual in humanity arises (and hence the motive of joy).

The source of the tragic is specific social contradictions - collisions between a socially necessary, urgent requirement and the temporary practical impossibility of its implementation. The inevitable lack of knowledge and ignorance often become the source of the greatest tragedies. The tragic is the sphere of understanding world-historical contradictions, the search for a way out for humanity. This category reflects not just the misfortune of a person caused by private problems, but the disasters of humanity, certain fundamental imperfections of existence that affect the fate of the individual.

3. TRAGIC IN ART

Each era brings its own features to the tragic and emphasizes certain aspects of its nature.

The hero of the ancient tragedy is unable to prevent the inevitable, but he fights, acts, and only through his freedom, through his actions, is what must happen realized. This is, for example, Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King.” Of his own free will, he consciously and freely searches for the causes of the misfortunes that befell the inhabitants of Thebes. And when it turns out that the “investigation” threatens to turn against the main “investigator” and that the culprit of Thebes’ misfortune is Oedipus himself, who by the will of fate killed his father and married his mother, he does not stop the “investigation”, but brings it to the end. Such is Antigone, the heroine of another tragedy by Sophocles. Unlike her sister Ismene, Antigone does not obey the order of Creon, who, on pain of death, forbids the burial of her brother, who fought against Thebes. The law of tribal relations, expressed in the need to bury the body of a brother, no matter what the cost, applies equally to both sisters, but Antigone becomes a tragic hero because she fulfills this necessity in her free actions.

Greek tragedy is heroic.

The purpose of ancient tragedy is catharsis. The feelings depicted in the tragedy purify the viewer's feelings.

The concept of catharsis is alien to medieval tragedy. This is not a tragedy of purification, but a tragedy of consolation. It is characterized by logic: you feel bad, but they (the heroes, or rather, the martyrs of the tragedy) are better than you, and they are worse off than you, so take comfort in your suffering in the fact that there are sufferings that are worse, and the torments of people are even less severe, than you who deserve it. Earthly consolation (you are not the only one suffering) is enhanced by otherworldly consolation (there you will not suffer, and you will be rewarded as you deserve).

If in ancient tragedy the most unusual things happen quite naturally, then in medieval tragedy the supernatural nature of what is happening occupies an important place.

The hopes of humanists that the individual, having gotten rid of medieval restrictions, would use his freedom wisely and in the name of good, turned out to be illusory. The utopia of an unregulated personality in fact turned into its absolute regulation. In France in the 17th century. This regulation manifested itself: in the sphere of politics - in the absolutist state, in the sphere of science and philosophy - in Descartes' teaching about the method that introduces human thought into the mainstream of strict rules, in the sphere of art - in classicism. The tragedy of utopian absolute freedom is replaced by the tragedy of real absolute normative conditioning of the individual.

The art of critical realism revealed the tragic discord between the individual and society. One of the greatest tragic works of the 19th century. - “Boris Godunov” by A. S. Pushkin. Godunov wants to use power for the benefit of the people. But on the way to power, he commits evil - he kills the innocent Tsarevich Dimitri. And between Boris and the people there was an abyss of alienation, and then anger. Pushkin shows that you cannot fight for the people without the people. Human destiny is the people's destiny; For the first time, the actions of the individual are compared with the good of the people. Such problems are the product of a new era.

Type of work: abstract

Levandovsky, A.A., Shchetinov, Yu.A. Russian history. XX – early XXI centuries. – 2003. – p.21-24
Orlov, A.S., Georgiev, V.A., Polunov, A.Yu., Tereshchenko, Yu.Ya. Fundamentals of the Russian history course. – 1997. – p.373-377, 396-404
Chudakova, N.V., Gromov, A.V. I'm exploring the world. Story. - 1998. – p. 430-431
Romanovs. Dynasty in novels. Nicholas II. – 1995. – p.5-7
Mosolov, A.A., At the court of the last Russian emperor. – 1993. – p.109

The tragedy of the individual, family, people in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem Requiem

Type of work: essay

1937 A terrible page in our history. I remember the names: O. Mandelstam, V. Shalamov, A. Solzhenitsyn... Dozens, thousands of names. And behind them are crippled destinies, hopeless grief, fear, despair, oblivion. But human memory is strange. She keeps the most intimate, dear things. And scary...
\"White Clothes\" by V. Dudintsev, \"Children of Arbat\" by A. Rybakov, \"By Right of Memory\" by A. Tvardovsky, \"The Problem of Bread\" by V. Podmogilny, \"The Gulag Archipelago\" by A. Solzhenitsyn - these and others p We angered God and sinned:
Ruler for himself the regicide
We named it.
A. S. Pushkin, \"Boris Godunov\"
Pushkin conceived "Boris Godunov" as a historical and political tragedy. The drama "Boris Godunov" opposed the romantic tradition. As a political tragedy, it addressed contemporary issues: the role of the people in history and the nature of tyrannical power.
If in \"Eugene Onegin\" there is a harmonious composition

The people in the tragedy of A.S. Pushkin Boris Godunov

Type of work: essay

The tragedy "Boris Godunov" was written by Pushkin in 1825. Pushkin was always concerned about the causes of the collapse of the revolutionary and people's liberation movements (in Spain, Italy, Greece). His attention was attracted to such historical figures as Stepan Razin and Emelyan Pugachev. In 1824, Pushkin became very interested in the events of the late 16th - early 17th centuries, when the Russian state was ruled by Boris Godunov, and subsequently by False Dmitry. While studying this material, Pushkin decided to write about

Tragic

One of the categories traditionally (at least in the 19th-20th centuries) related to aesthetics is tragic. The tragic as an aesthetic category applies only to art, in contrast to other aesthetic categories - the beautiful, the sublime, the comic, which have their own subject both in art and in life.

The tragic in life has nothing to do with aesthetics, because when contemplating it, and especially when participating in a tragic collision, no aesthetic event occurs in normal people, no one receives aesthetic pleasure, no aesthetic catharsis occurs. In particular, the tragedy of the inhabitants of the barbarously destroyed Guernica has nothing to do with aesthetics, and Picasso’s painting “Guernica” carries a powerful charge of tragedy in the sphere of aesthetic perception.

The aesthetic experience that interests us here, which in modern times received the name “tragic,” was realized in the most complete and concentrated form in ancient Greek tragedy- one of the highest forms of art in general, and at the same time the first attempts were made to comprehend it and theoretically consolidate it.

The essence of the tragic aesthetic phenomenon lies in image unexpected suffering and death of the hero, which occurred not because of an accident, but as an inevitable consequence of his (as a rule, initially unconscious) misdeeds or guilt. The hero of a tragedy, as a rule, makes attempts to fight the fatal inevitability, rebels against Fate and dies or suffers torment and suffering, thereby demonstrating the act or state of his inner freedom in relation to the forces and possibilities of the elements that outwardly exceed him. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is extremely laconic and succinct in meaning: “So, tragedy is the imitation of an action that is important and complete, having a certain volume,<подражание>with the help of speech, differently decorated in each of its parts; through action, not story, which, through compassion and fear, purifies (catharsis) such affects“This is the tragic catharsis characteristic only of this type of dramatic art.

F. Schiller in the article “On Tragic Art” he explains the conditions under which “tragic emotions”, a feeling of the tragic, can arise. “Firstly, the object of our compassion must be related to us in the full sense of the word, and the action that is to evoke sympathy must be moral, i.e. free. Secondly, suffering, its sources and degrees, must be fully communicated to us in the form of a series of interconnected events, that is, thirdly, it is sensually reproduced, not described in a narrative, but directly presented to us in the form of an action. Art unites all these conditions and realizes them in tragedy.”

F. Schelling in his “Philosophy of Art” he explores tragedy in a special section, based on the ideas of Aristotle and using the tragedy of the ancient classics as a model. For him, the tragic manifests itself in the struggle between freedom and necessity. At the moment of resolution of the tragic situation, "at the moment of his higher he suffers (a tragic hero ) passes to the highest liberation and to the highest dispassion." The viewer reaches the state of catharsis, which Aristotle wrote about.

Hegel sees the essence of the tragedy in the moral sphere, in the conflict between moral strength interpreted by him as "the divine in his worldly reality" as substantial, governing human actions, and the “acting characters” themselves. In particular, in tragedy, a person fears not the external power that suppresses him, “but the moral force, which is the definition of his own free mind and at the same time something eternal and indestructible, so that, turning against it, a person restores it against himself.”

In the 20th century the tragic for the most part goes beyond the scope of aesthetic experience itself, merges with the tragedy of life, i.e. becomes simply a statement in works of art of the tragedy of life, as if repeating it, not conducive to restoration harmony a person with the Universe, which is what the entire sphere of aesthetic experience, aesthetic activity, art in its artistic and aesthetic sense is oriented towards. Modern non-classical aesthetics, having pushed such concepts as almost to the level of categories absurdity, chaos, cruelty, sadism, violence and the like, practically knows neither category nor phenomenon tragic.

Comic - This category of classical aesthetics, although traditionally paired with the category of tragic, in principle is neither its antipode nor any modification. The only thing they have in common is that historically they trace their origins to two ancient genres of dramatic art: tragedy and comedy.

The phenomenon of the comic is one of the oldest in the history of culture. It involves arousing a person's laughter reaction, laughter, however, it is not limited to him. In this case, we are talking about a special laughter caused by an intellectual and semantic game. Jokes, witticisms, ridicule of human shortcomings, absurd situations, harmless deceptions have accompanied human life since ancient times, easing its burdens and hardships, helping to relieve mental stress. And in the case when the funny brought pleasure and joy to the laugher, we can talk about the aesthetic phenomenon of the comic.

Already Homer's epic is permeated with comic elements. At the same time, first of all, the life of the gods, the inhabitants of Olympus, is described with humor. Moreover, Homer presents it as permeated with comedy, humor, slyness, harmless tricks, and “Homeric” laughter. The ideal life (the life of the celestials) according to Homer is a life of fun, fueled by endless jokes, affairs and divine pranks. In contrast, the life of people (the heroes of his epic poems) is fraught with difficulties, dangers, death, and here, as a rule, there is no time for jokes and humor.

One of the followers of Aristotle, who lived in the 1st century. BC. a, defines comedy by analogy with the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, i.e. and she is connected with catharsis:“Comedy is the imitation of a funny and insignificant action, having a certain volume, with the help of decorated speech, and different types of decorations are especially given in different parts of the play; imitation through characters rather than story; thanks to pleasure and laughter, which purifies such affects. Its mother is laughter." Cleansing with laughter, relieving mental, emotional, intellectual, moral tensions in aesthetic catharsis is indeed one of the essential functions of the comic, and antiquity clearly grasped this function.

Christianity in general had a negative attitude towards comic genres of art and with caution towards laughter and the funny in everyday life. However, the comic is preserved, develops, and often flourishes exclusively in grassroots, non-professional folk culture.

Only in the Age of Enlightenment did art theorists and philosophers again become interested in the comic genres of art, in the funny and laughter, as effective methods of influencing people’s shortcomings, their stupidity and countless mistakes, immoral acts, false judgments, etc. The largest comedian of the 17th century. Moliere was convinced that the task of comedy was to “correct people by amusing them.”

Kant deduces, without consciously striving for this, one of the essential principles of the comic - unexpected discharge of artificially created tension of expectation (of something significant) in nothing through special gaming reception.

N. Chernyshevsky, reinterpreting Hegel, saw the essence of the comic in internal emptiness and insignificance, hiding behind an appearance that has a claim to content and significance. Russian literature of the 19th century. gave him rich food for such a conclusion. Especially the work of Gogol. Just look at the characters in The Inspector General, who confirm this position of Chernyshevsky with the utmost completeness.

Thus, it can be stated that the category comic in aesthetics it is designated a specific sphere of aesthetic experience in which, on an intellectual and playful basis, a benevolent denial, exposure, condemnation of a certain fragment of everyday reality (character, behavior, claims, actions, etc.) is carried out, claiming to be something higher, significant, ideal than it allows its nature, from the position of this ideal (moral, aesthetic, religious, social, etc.).

From this it is clear that the comic is most fully realized in those types and genres of art where a more or less isomorphic pictorial and descriptive presentation of everyday life is possible. It is in literature, drama, theater, realistic fine arts (especially graphics), and cinema. Architecture by its nature is alien to the comic. There are comic forms in music, but they tend to be closely correlated with corresponding comic verbal texts.