Artistic idea. Theme and idea of ​​a work of art

Artistic idea

Artistic idea

The main idea of ​​a work of art. The idea expresses the attitude of the author to the problem posed in his essay, to the thoughts expressed by the characters. The idea of ​​the work is a generalization of the entire content of the work.
Only in normative-didactic essays does the idea of ​​a work take on the character of a clearly expressed, unambiguous judgment (such, for example, fable). As a rule, an artistic idea cannot be reduced to some separate statement reflecting the author's thought. So, 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 a representation that is most acceptable in explaining historical events. When perceiving the plot narrative and the 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, spontaneous life over the false and vain existence of those who thoughtlessly follow the social fashion, 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 for a person to decide whether another has the right to live. For F. M. Dostoevsky, no less important are the thoughts about murder as a sin committed by a person against himself, and as a sin that alienates the killer from people close and dear to him. Just as important for understanding the idea of ​​the novel is the idea of ​​the limitations of human rationality, of an insurmountable flaw in the mind, capable of constructing any logically consistent theory. The author shows that only life and religious intuition, faith can be a refutation of the God-fighting and inhuman theory.
Often the idea of ​​a work is not reflected at all in the statements of the narrator or characters and can be determined very approximately. This feature is inherent primarily in many so-called. post-realistic works (for example, stories, novels and plays by A.P. Chekhov) and the writings of modernist writers depicting an absurd world (for example, novels, stories and short stories by F. Kafka).
The denial of the existence of the idea of ​​a work is characteristic of literature postmodernism; the idea of ​​a work is not recognized by the theorists of postmodernism either. According to postmodern ideas, artistic text is 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 instance is impossible: any idea contained in a work is presented with irony, with detachment. However, in fact, it is hardly justified to speak of the absence of an idea in postmodernist writings. The impossibility of a serious judgment, the total irony and the playful nature of existence - this is the idea that unites postmodern literature.

Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. - M.: Rosman. Under the editorship of prof. Gorkina A.P. 2006 .


See what an "artistic idea" is in other dictionaries:

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

    Content-semantic integrity artwork as a product of emotional experience and development of life by the author. Adequately cannot be recreated by means of other arts and logical formulations; expressed throughout... encyclopedic Dictionary

    IDEA artistic- (from the Greek idea idea) embodied in production. a claim is an aesthetically generalized author's thought that reflects a certain concept of the world and a person (Artistic Concept). I. is the value-ideological aspect of the artist. prod. And… … Aesthetics: Dictionary

    ARTISTIC IDEA- ARTISTIC IDEA, a generalizing, emotional, figurative thought underlying a work of art. The subject of artistic thought is always such 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 the 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. There are also spatial and temporal ... ... 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, Guryanov street, house 15 Phone Work + 7 48439 6 44 6 ... Wikipedia

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    ARTISTRY- ARTISTRY, a complex combination of qualities that determines the belonging of the fruits of creative work to the field of art. For H., a sign of completeness and adequate embodiment of a creative idea, that “artistry”, which is ... ... Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary

Books

  • The Knight in the Panther's Skin, Shota Rustaveli. Moscow, 1941. State publishing house " Fiction". Publisher's binding with a gilded profile of the author. Good preservation. With many separate illustrations ...

Gasoline is yours, our ideas

When analyzing literary work traditionally use the concept of "idea", which most often means the answer to a question allegedly 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 development of life by the author. This idea cannot be recreated by means of other arts and logical formulations; it is expressed throughout artistic structure product, unity and interaction of all its formal components. Conditionally (and in a narrower sense), the idea stands out as the main idea, the 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 lot of ideas expressed in the literature. Exist logical ideas And abstract ideas . Logical ideas are concepts that are easily transmitted without figurative means, we are able to perceive them with the intellect. Logical ideas are inherent in documentary literature. But artistic novels and stories are characterized by philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and effects, that is, abstract elements.

But there is also a special kind of very subtle, barely perceptible ideas of a literary work. artistic idea is a thought embodied in a figurative form. It lives only in figurative implementation and cannot be expressed in the form of a sentence or concepts. The peculiarity of this thought depends on the disclosure of the topic, the worldview of the author, transmitted by the speech and actions of the characters, on the depiction of pictures of life. It is in the clutch of logical thoughts, images, all significant compositional elements. An artistic idea cannot be reduced to a rational idea that can be concretized or illustrated. The idea of ​​this type is inseparable from the image, from the composition.

The formation of an artistic idea is a complex creative process. In the literature, it is influenced personal experience, worldview of the writer, understanding of life. An idea can be nurtured for years and decades, and the author, trying to realize it, suffers, rewrites the manuscript, looking 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, shades. However, it must be understood that an artistic idea is not equal to ideological concept, the plan that often appears not only in the head of the writer, but also on paper. Exploring non-artistic reality, reading diaries, notebooks, manuscripts, archives, literary critics restore the history of design, the history of creation, but often do not discover artistic idea. Sometimes it happens that the author goes against himself, yielding to the original idea for the sake of artistic truth, an inner 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 try to formulate the idea of ​​their work. Dostoevsky about The Idiot he wrote: “The main idea of ​​the novel is to portray positively beautiful 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 it is hardly possible to stand on the side Nabokov, the mundane writer of the second row, never, unlike Dostoevsky that does not set itself creative supertasks.

Along with the attempts of the authors to define 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.” Unwillingness to translate the idea of ​​your work into the language of concepts Tolstoy demonstrated once again, speaking of 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, and even more rational ideas: it allows only poetic ideas; and the poetic idea is<…>not a dogma, not a rule, this is a living passion, pathos.

V.V. Odintsov expressed his understanding of the category "artistic idea" more strictly: "The idea literary composition is always specific and is not derived directly 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, remarks of the author himself, etc.”

2000 ideas for novels and short stories

Literary critic G.A. Gukovsky also spoke of the need to distinguish between rational, that is, rational, and literary ideas: "By an idea, I mean not only a rationally formulated judgment, statement, even not only the intellectual content of a work of literature, but the whole sum of its content, which constitutes its intellectual function, its goal and task." And further he 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 that make up the walls of the building, but the structure of the combination of these bricks as parts of this structure, their meaning.

The idea of ​​a literary work is the attitude to the depicted, the fundamental pathos of the work, a category that expresses the author's tendency (inclination, intention, preconceived idea) in the artistic coverage of this 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”, some kind of premeditation, the author’s tendency to express the meaning of the work, is used.

The grander the artistic idea, the longer the work lives. The creators of pop literature, who write outside of great ideas, will soon be forgotten.

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

IN epic works the idea may 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 lyrics, 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 single out, and in many lyrical works it is simply impossible to single out an idea, because it practically dissolves in pathos. Therefore, one should not reduce the idea of ​​a work to a conclusion or a lesson, and in general it is imperative to look for it.

The concept of a literary work

Literary work is a systemic unity of many of its constituent components. Starting its consideration and analysis, we must have an idea about 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 problems

IN content of a literary work It is customary to single out two most important components - its subject and problems.
Subject or set of many topics (Greek thema, what is the basis) - subject, object artistic image, this is vital material that attracted, interested the author, that social, historical, cultural reality to which he refers.
The theme cannot be invented - it is taken 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 fiction. We consider the life of the Russian nobility in 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 of literary works

In a literary work, as a rule, two types of topics are distinguished:
- Universal or eternal, which form the basis of world art, the property of all countries and all eras. Ontological (Greek: ontos being + logos doctrine) 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 doctrine) 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 the other eternal themes determines philosophical depth and significance of the literary work.
- Cultural and historical topics are important for people of a certain culture and a specific historical era: the life of society, relations between estates, national traditions, education, scientific and technical progress, military, political events etc.
As a rule, in a work there is not one, but many themes, and how more significant work, the more there are. For a correct understanding of 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 (problema in Greek, set, 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 is the comprehension, understanding by the author of the depicted reality: unlike the subject matter, the problematic is the subjective side of the content of a work of art. Thematically, the works of contemporary writers can be close, since they are created in the same historical era, but comprehension of life material at the level of the questions posed, the stated problems is always individual, it 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 (as well as topics) are very diverse:
- philosophical (meaning human life, freedom of the individual, a person's place in the world, his relationship with nature, the role of predestination in a person's life, the struggle between good and evil, the reasons for the imperfection of the world, etc.);
- moral (honor and conscience of a person, spiritual and material values, altruism and selfishness, the influence of education on character, etc.);
- social (relationships in society, the impact of a person's social status on his life, class differences, the level of material and economic development, etc.);
- ideological and political (people and power, 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 a person, true and false in faith, religious commandments and morality of people, the 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, a harmoniously developed personality, etc.).
Of course, not all of the problems listed above can be posed in one work, but major epic and dramatic works always raise many issues that complement each other. But even in this set, the attentive reader sees central problem, to which the author devotes his work. Often it is underlined by the title or epigraph, and the features of the characters 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 a 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 development 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, by the unity and interaction of all its formal components. Conditionally (and in a narrower sense) the idea stands out as the main idea, 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 lot of ideas expressed in the literature. There are logical ideas and abstract ideas. Logical ideas are concepts that are easily transmitted without figurative means, we are able to perceive them with the intellect. Logical ideas are inherent in documentary literature. But artistic novels and stories are characterized by philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and effects, that is, abstract elements.

But there is also a special kind of very subtle, barely perceptible ideas of a literary work. An artistic idea is a thought embodied in a figurative form. It lives only in figurative implementation and cannot be expressed in the form of a sentence or concepts. The peculiarity of this thought depends on the disclosure of the topic, the worldview of the author, transmitted by the speech and actions of the characters, on the depiction of pictures of life. It is in the clutch of logical thoughts, images, all significant compositional elements. An artistic idea cannot be reduced to a rational idea that can be concretized or illustrated. The idea of ​​this type is inseparable from the image, from the composition.

The formation of 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, looking 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, shades. However, it is necessary to understand that an artistic idea is not equal to an ideological concept, the plan that often appears not only in the head of the writer, but also on paper. Exploring non-artistic reality, reading diaries, notebooks, manuscripts, archives, literary critics 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 idea for the sake of artistic truth, an inner idea.

One thought is not enough to write a book. If everything that I would like to talk about is known in advance, 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 try 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 one can hardly take the side of Nabokov, a mundane writer of the second rank, who, unlike Dostoevsky, never sets himself creative supertasks.

Plot and plot

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

The plot is the actual side of the narrative, those events, cases, actions, states in their causal-chronological sequence. The term "plot" refers to what is preserved as the "basis", "core" of the narrative.

The plot is a reflection of the dynamics of reality in the form of an action unfolding in a work, in the form of interrelated (by causal relationship) actions of characters, events that form a unity, that make up some complete whole. The plot is a form of development of the theme - an artistically constructed distribution of events.

driving force development of the plot, as a rule, is a conflict (literally "collision"), a conflict life situation put by the writer in the center of the work.

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

Already these two definitions can confuse the reader: in the first, the word "theme" is equated in meaning with the term "content", while the content of a work of art is immeasurably wider than the theme, the theme 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 vital phenomenon, which has become the subject of artistic consideration in the work. The range of such life phenomena is THEME literary work. All phenomena of the world and human life constitute the sphere of the artist's 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, joys of life, money, social relations, death and birth, secrets and mysteries of the world, etc. and so on. - these are the words that call life phenomena that become themes in art.

The task of the artist is to creatively study the life phenomenon with interesting to the author sides, that is artistically reveal the theme. Naturally, this can only be done asking a question(or several questions) to the phenomenon under consideration. This very question, which the artist asks, using the figurative means available to him, is problem literary work.

So,
PROBLEM is a question that does not have a unique solution or involves a set of equivalent solutions. ambiguity possible solutions problem is different from tasks. The collection of such questions is called PROBLEMS.

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

The theme and the 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 XII century "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" was worried about the topic of princely strife, and he asked himself questions: how to make the Russian princes stop caring only about personal gain and quarrel with each other, how to unite the disparate forces of the weakening Kiev 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 like, raised in literature the problems of civic duty and equality of all citizens without exception before the law. Romantic writers were interested in the secrets of life and death, penetrated into the dark nooks and crannies human soul, solved the problems of a person's dependence on fate and unsolved demonic forces, the interaction of a talented and extraordinary person with a soulless and mundane society of inhabitants.

19th century with its focus on literature critical realism drew artists to new themes and made them think about new problems:

  • Through the efforts of Pushkin and Gogol, the “small” person entered literature, and the question arose about his place in society and his relationship with “big” people;
  • became the most important women's theme, and with it the so-called public "women's question"; A. Ostrovsky and L. Tolstoy paid much 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;
  • unsuccessful peasant reform and further social upheavals aroused a keen interest in the peasantry, and the topic peasant life and fate, discovered by Nekrasov, became the leading one in literature, and with it the question: what will be the fate of the Russian peasantry and all of great Russia?
  • tragic events in history and public sentiments brought to life the theme of nihilism and opened up new facets in the theme of individualism, which received further development Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy in an attempt to resolve the issues: how to warn the younger generation against tragic mistakes radicalism and aggressive hatred? How to reconcile the generations of "fathers" and "children" in a troubled and bloody world? How is the relationship between good and evil to be understood today, and what is meant by both? How, in an effort to be different from others, do not lose yourself?
  • Chernyshevsky addresses the topic of the public good and asks: "What should be done?" so that a person in Russian society could honestly earn a comfortable life and thereby increase social wealth? How to "equip" Russia to prosperous life? Etc.

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

Sometimes in art, it is the question posed by the author that becomes a real breakthrough - a new one, previously unknown to society, but now burning, vital. Many works are created in order 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 posed by him. A set of ideas, a system of author's thoughts about the world and man, embodied in artistic images called IDEA CONTENT artistic work.

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


When you are engaged in the interpretation of a literary work, you are looking for hidden (in scientific terms, implicit) meanings, analyze explicitly and gradually the thoughts expressed by the author, you just study ideological content works. While working on task 8 of your previous work (analysis of a fragment of M. Gorky's story "Chelkash"), you dealt precisely with questions of its ideological content.


When performing tasks on the topic "Content of a literary work: Author's position"Pay attention to the contact statement.

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

You must learn to solve the following tasks:

  • 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 "one's 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 the correctness of Pugachev, Stenka Razin, Dubrovsky. He, of course, would be, if he could, on December 14 at Senate Square along with your friends and associates. (G.Volkov)

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