Innovation in any field is innovation, the invention of the new on the basis of the old, sometimes accompanied by the breaking of former traditions and foundations. Innovation is a special gift, the ability to invent and think progressively, if we talk about the quality of the human person.
Innovation in art
In art, innovation is always a collision with criticism, misunderstanding, even condemnation. However, without sculptors, painters, innovative writers, culture would not have developed.
For example, Giotto di Bondone was the greatest innovator of his era. Since antiquity, it has been customary for figures in religious paintings and frescoes to float in the air. But the Florentine Giotto was the first to put them firmly on the ground. He also changed the spatial concept and the relationship between the painting and the artist and between the painting and the viewer. Naturally, this innovation did not immediately meet with a warm response, although Giotto di Bondone was once recognized as a great master.
Innovators hit by criticism
The innovator painter Michelangelo Buonarotti was almost accused of heresy for his innovations. After all, he depicted the bodies of saints not just naked, but with uncovered genitals. Three decades later, the saints were "dressed" by other artists on the orders of the authorities. And only in 1994 the images were returned to their original appearance. Centuries have passed since then.
The sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, the artist Theodore Gericault (of the Romantic era) and many others suffered from criticism of their innovations in art.
Innovation in literature in Russia
From Latin, novator is translated as “renovator”. Innovation is the enrichment of its renewal, new discoveries and achievements in literature.
In Russian literature, the nineteenth century, its 50-60s, was the richest in innovative solutions. Then publicism and literary criticism flourished. In the 19th century, Russian literature became a trendsetter at the global level. It was actively discussed abroad. The 19th century is the century of the formation of the literary language in Russia, and Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin contributed to this in many respects. (as the 19th century is called in literature) began to rethink their work. A new quality appeared in poetry, poets tried to influence the minds of people for civil purposes, in order to improve their native country.
Prose also did not stand still. Gogol and Pushkin were the founders of new artistic types. This is Gogol's "little man", and Pushkin's "extra man", and others.
The nineteenth century ended with pre-revolutionary sentiments. The end of the century opens up new names - Leskov, Gorky, Ostrovsky and Chekhov.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's innovation as a playwright
Anton Pavlovich updated the dramaturgy. He was against theatricality and unnaturalness. In his plays, people and life were shown as they are. He abandoned the effects of the old theater.
For example, the play "The Cherry Orchard" was absolutely new for the theatre. It was not a drama, but the play lacked shots, external intrigue and a spectacular ending. The whole idea rested on the general mood created by the totality of all the scenes. Chekhov did not give the play any complicating elements, he did not create the main character - a person around whom the conflict would unfold. Chekhov gives viewers and readers an understanding of the psychology of the characters. Lyricism, simplicity, pauses to enhance the effect and describe the landscape - all contribute to an increase in emotional perception.
Stanislavsky said that Chekhov on the stage owns the internal and external truth. Chekhov introduces omissions, understatements, as well as simple dialogues into his plays - as in life.
This was an innovation for the Russian stage and literature.
Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky (1703-1768). Trediakovsky's reforms were half-hearted. But from 1730 (preface to the translation of the novel "Riding to the Island of Love") to 1739 (the eve of Lomonosov's speech), Trediakovsky was the only major representative of the emerging Russian critical thought. In the works written by him during this period of time, some questions were raised about the future reforms and discoveries of Lomonosov. In the preface to the novel, Trediakovsky stated that the Russian spoken language could well become literary, and that “Slavic-Russian” (i.e., Church Slavonic) is “very obscure” for a “secular” book, many do not understand it. However, the language of Trediakovsky himself was still very obscure.
In "Speech on the Purity of the Russian Language" (1735), he again returned to this problem and called on the members of the Russian Assembly of the Academy of Sciences: "Work, gentlemen, diligent work conquers everything."
Still not guessing about the role of talent, inspiration in creativity, Trediakovsky, as a classicist-rationalist, believes that “from solid grammar and red rhetoric it is not difficult to produce a word that delights the heart and mind…”. It is precisely Lomonosov who later will create these necessary manuals for the work of "Russian Grammar" and "Rhetoric". As possible obstacles to creativity, Trediakovsky names only the existing "incorrect" (i.e., syllabic) composition of verses and the disorder of the lexicon. The lexicon would later be streamlined by Lomonosov in grammar and in the doctrine of the "three styles", and as for the way to compose Russian verses, Trediakovsky immediately declared, not without pride, that "there are no ways", that is, they exist, and pointed out: "I also have some." He alluded to his New and Concise Method for the Composition of Russian Poetry (1735).
Here Trediakovsky first introduced the concepts of "tonic meter" and "foot" as a measure of rhythm and pointed out that the syllabic system of versification practiced in Russia until now, following the Polish model, leads to awkwardness and that the Russian people achieve greater "sweetness" in their songs built on the tonic principle. But Trediakovsky scholastically rejected the three-syllable sizes - dactyl, amphibrach, anapaest, and treated the iambic with disdain. Trediakovsky recognized only the feminine rhyme in the trochee he had chosen and rejected the masculine rhyme characteristic of iambic. However, he changed his mind several times: at first he recognized rhyme, albeit with restrictions, and then he refused it altogether, because there is no rhyme in folk poetry; rebelled against the alternating combination of feminine and masculine rhymes, and then he practiced it himself.
In the second, revised edition of his "New and Brief Way ...", entitled "The Method for Adding Russian Poetry" (1752), Trediakovsky made improvements taking into account what Lomonosov had done. A number of his observations are an essential addition to Lomonosov. For example, he correctly pointed out that “pure iambs” in Russian are optional and difficult, many stops in iambs are replaced by pyrrhic, that rhyme does not yet make verses into verses, for this something more is needed, i.e. poetic thinking. Rhyme is "rich" and "semi-rich", that is, accurate and inaccurate. Here Trediakovsky was even ahead of his time: let us recall that even in the Pushkin era it was absolutely impossible to allow inaccurate rhyme; all classical poetry of the 19th century strove to observe this rule. The rhyme was “shattered” by the symbolists, and then, on the basis of assonances and consonances, it was greatly enriched and, one might say, recreated by the futurists.
In his Discourse on the Ode in General, attached to the Ode on the Capture of the City of Gdansk (1734), Trediakovsky was the first to formulate some features of one of the leading classicist genres (lyrical disorder, "God's language", etc.), so brilliantly later developed by Derzhavin. “The ode,” wrote Trediakovsky, “is the copulation of many stanzas, consisting of equal, and sometimes unequal verses, which always and certainly describe noble, important matter, rarely tender and pleasant, in speeches very poetic and magnificent”1. The ode is akin to psalms, stanzas in terms of the “highness” of the speeches of epic poetry, but differs sharply from “any worldly song”, the content of which “always read love, or something else like it, frivolously ...”, and speech, which is “sometimes sweet, but always flattering, often vain and joking, often peasant and childish”.
Trediakovsky is no stranger to a historical approach to resolving the issue of the causes of the rise and fall of poetry. He was worried about the possibility of the existence of Russian poetry, the fact of the appearance of which he had already proclaimed in the Epistle from Russian Poetry to Apolly (1734). Trediakovsky's article "On the ancient, middle and new Russian poem" was the first attempt to create a history of Russian literature; when considering poetic examples, it gives characteristics of the activities of Smotritsky, Polotsky, Medvedev, Istomin, Magnitsky, Buslaev, Kantemir and other Russian poets. Russian poetry, in his opinion, went through three periods: "ancient" - pagan, with spontaneously natural tonic versification, entrenched in folklore; then the "middle" - syllabic, under the religious-Christian and - in the field of rhythm - mainly Polish influence, and, finally, entered the third, "new" period. Now she is again returning to natural tonic versification, already meaningfully, throwing off the yoke of other people's influences and mastering the rules of creativity, as Trediakovsky himself understood them. Trediakovsky proudly emphasized his merit in this transformation of Russian poetry.
In "Letter to a friend about the current benefits of poetry from citizenship", "Discourse on comedy in general" and the preface to "Tilemachida", Trediakovsky placed classical antiquity above contemporary European literature. The first was predominantly the poetry of free citizens, and therefore flourished, the current one is inferior to it, because it is associated with monarchical rule. In a hidden form, Trediakovsky criticized the influence of the courts of Elizabeth and Catherine II. He stood up for serious, lofty and free poetry, glorified Fenelon for the fact that in his Telemachus he showed how “the royal power is then only firm when it is strengthened by the love of the subjects ...”.
Trediakovsky's articles matured, still in a naive form, the problems of the form and content of art, its specificity in comparison with science. “A new and brief way to compose Russian poetry” opens with the following statement: “In poetry in general, two things must be noted. First: matter, or the work that the piit undertakes to write. Second: versification, that is, a way of adding poetry.
It is important that the problem of content (“matter”) and form was posed by Trediakovsky already in 1735. True, the form was understood narrowly, it was reduced to language and versification, and the elements of form, “the rules of the epic poem,” fell into the concept of content. In addition, if the form turned out to be national, then the content was declared "to all languages in a common light."
In other articles Trediakovsky scattered curious and more meaningful remarks about this problem. In the article “Opinion on the Beginning of Poetry and Poetry in General”, Trediakovsky emphasized the priority of content over form. He developed the Aristotelian position that poets are soothsayers, and poetic creativity is the invention of possibilities, i.e. "not such a representation of acts as they are in themselves, but how they can be, or should ..."
In the preface to Tilemakhida, Trediakovsky compares poetry (the "heroic poem") with history, science, and other forms of art and finds specific advantages in poetry. She, like other forms of knowledge, teaches to love virtue, but as if history “nailed to a single point”, “so that, suddenly contemplated by a single view”, “through that, it would stare and impress the mind for all ages unforgettably”.
What is the innovation of Trediakovsky as a critic?
Other essays on the topic:
- In the article "On the current state of the verbal sciences in Russia," Lomonosov emphasized the importance of writers in processing the living literary language. Unfinished article...
- In 1730, Vasily Trediakovsky's "Riding to the Island of Love" was published - the first book in which poetry was presented ...
- Usually poetry gravitates towards harmony and beauty, this is natural. But from time to time there are poets who seek to create a deliberately difficult ...
- The outstanding Norwegian writer of the 19th century, the glorious reformer of the theater, Henrik Ibsen, in his works posed questions that worried his contemporaries. Ibsen...
- The main creators of the theoretical system of Russian classicism were (if you follow the chronology) Trediakovsky, Lomonosov and Sumarokov. But it’s not for nothing that Belinsky’s entire initial ...
- "Real Criticism" theoretically took on almost nothing in relation to the study of the biography of the writer, the creative history of the work, the idea, drafts and ...
- Forming the basic requirements for the knowledge and skills of students from literature, the program first of all determines for each class the assimilation of a certain ...
- Poetic arrangement of "The Adventures of Telemachus" by Fenelon in 24 books. An ancient size I sing with a verse the Father-loving Son, Koy, swam from the natural shores, and ...
- Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov (1873-1924). With Bryusov, something happened that often happens with the founders of any directions and systems: they are the first to outgrow ...
- "The Shore" by Yuri Bondarev can rightly be called a novel of questions. Assessing the merits and demerits of the novel, one cannot discount this ...
- Becher's innovation was even brighter in the genre of the sonnet. This example shows especially clearly how Becher was able to renew a genre that was considered ...
- Works on literature: What is Raskolnikov's internal inconsistency In world literature, Dostoevsky has the honor of discovering the inexhaustibility and multidimensionality of human ...
- Classicist criticism was the program of an entire literary movement for three-quarters of a century. She carried through the decades loyalty to the original principles of Lomonosov...
- Every outstanding playwright of the 20th century was also a theoretician of the theater who tried to develop fundamentally new ways of stage embodiment of life. Chekhov...
Fonvizin's innovation
One of the most successful works of D.I. Fonvizin is the comedy "Undergrowth". This is a short story about what happens in the family of the Russian noblewoman Prostakova. "Undergrowth" was written in the 18th century - the century of dominant classicism, from the canons of which Fonvizin departed. I can confidently, without a doubt, say that Fonvizin is an innovator. What was the innovation of the “Russian from the pre-Russians”? (as Fonvizin called the young A.S. Pushkin).
Classicism has certain limits and strict rules, such as frozen characters; mandatory system of roles; one idea; one conflict; unity of action; speaking surnames; happy ending, etc. Fonvizin, although he wrote the work during the heyday of classicism, touched upon several types of conflicts. For example, a love conflict (Skotinin, Milon and Mitrofan want Sophia as a wife), and this conflict is not the main one, it serves as a background. Fonvizin also touched upon the social conflict - Prostakova's attitude towards the peasants. Heartlessness, tyranny, despotism... All these are the qualities of a noblewoman, a representative of the elite of the Russian Empire. The author shows the unacceptable development of characters in classicism, indeed, Mitrofanushka does not completely remain a “sissy”, he refuses his “beloved mother” when he finds out that she is deprived of the rights to manage the estate.
Undoubtedly, innovation is the idea of a work - the fault of the state. Beginning with the comedy The Undergrowth, Russian literature enters into a noble struggle with state power, a struggle for justice. Indeed, Fonvizin pointed to the problem of power, the problem of laws and their implementation in the society of the 18th century. If you think carefully about the comedy, you can understand that the author blames the government for the problems of education and serfdom.
“Russian comedy began long before Fonvizin, but only with Fonvizin. His "Undergrowth" and "The Brigadier" made a terrible noise when they appeared and will forever remain in the history of Russian literature, if not art, as one of the most remarkable phenomena. In fact, these comedies are the essence of the work of a strong mind. A gifted person." I fully agree with the words of Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky. Fonvizin is not only a talented, but also a brave writer. Not everyone at that time could point out to the authorities their vices and inaction. In classicism, representatives of the government are an ideal, something high and noble, and in the comedy "Undergrowth" Fonvizin showed the truth, for which he had to resign.
Fonvizin is the father of the Great Russian Comedy, who destroyed the canons of classicism.
