Artistic details and their analysis in the work. Artistic detail: definition, classification, functions, role of the medium

Meaning of ARTISTIC DETAILS in the Dictionary of Literary Terms

ARTISTIC DETAILS

- (from French detail - detail, trifle, particularity) - one of the means of creating an image: an element of an artistic image highlighted by the author, which carries a significant semantic and emotional load in the work. D. x. can reproduce features of everyday life, environment, landscape, portrait (portrait detail), interior, action or state (psychological detail), hero's speech (speech detail), etc.; it is used to visualize and characterize the characters and their environment. The author's desire for detail is dictated, as a rule, by the task of achieving an exhaustive completeness of the image. Efficiency of use of D. x. is determined by how significant this detail is in aesthetic and semantic terms: especially significant from an artistic point of view, D. x. often becomes a motive or leitmotif of the text (for example, the too big nose of the hero of E. Rostand's play "Cyrano de Bergerac" or the iron arshin of the undertaker Yakov Ivanov in A.P. Chekhov's story "Rothschild's Violin"). Artistic detailing may be necessary or, conversely, redundant. In particular, in the description of the heroine of the story A.P. Chekhov "Ionych": "...Vera Iosifovna, a thin, pretty lady in pence-nez, wrote stories and novels and willingly read them aloud to her guests" - a detail of the portrait (pence-nez - men's glasses) emphasizes the author's ironic attitude to emancipation Vera Iosifovna, and the indication "aloud", redundant in relation to the combination "read to the guests", is a mockery of the "education and talent" of the heroine.

Dictionary of literary terms. 2012

Definition

Few people thought about the fact that literature is the art of the real word. This implies a close connection between linguistics and literary criticism. When a person reads or listens to a poem, he imagines a picture. It becomes reliable only when he hears certain subtleties, thanks to which he can present the information received.

And we turn to the question: what is an artistic detail? This is an important and significant tool for building detail, which carries a huge ideological, emotional and semantic load.

Not all writers used these elements masterfully. They were actively used in their work by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov and other word artists.

Parts classification

What artistic details do you know? Difficult to answer? Then we carefully study the issue further. There are several classifications of this element.

We will consider the option proposed by the domestic literary critic and philologist - Esin Andrey Borisovich. In his book "Literary work" he defined a successful typology, in which he singled out three large groups of details:

psychological;
descriptive;
plot.

But literary critics distinguish several more types:

landscape;
verbal;
portrait.

For example, in Gogol's story "Taras Bulba" plot details dominated, in "Dead Souls" - descriptive ones. While in Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" the emphasis is on the psychological factor. However, it is worth remembering that the named types of details can be combined within the framework of one work of art.

Functions of the artistic detail

Literary critics distinguish several functions of this tool:

1. Excretory. It is needed in order to highlight any event, image or phenomenon from its like.

2. Psychological. In this case, the detail, as a means of psychological portrait, helps to reveal the inner world of the character.

3. Factual. The tool characterizes a fact from the world of reality of the characters.

4. Naturalistic. The detail clearly, objectively and accurately conveys an object or any phenomenon.

5. Symbolic. The element is endowed with the role of a symbol, that is, it becomes a multi-valued and artistic image that has an allegorical meaning based on the similarities of phenomena from life.

Artistic detail and its role in creating an image

In a poem, such expressive details very often serve as a reference point for the image, pushing our imagination, prompting us to complete the lyrical situation.

An artistic image often has one bright individual detail. As a rule, the development of lyrical thought begins with it. Other elements of the image, including expression, are forced to adapt to this instrument. It happens that an artistic detail resembles an external touch of the image, but it carries a surprise that refreshes the reader's perception of the world.

This tool enters our consciousness and sense of life in such a way that a person no longer thinks of poetic discoveries without it. A lot of details are present in Tyutchev's lyrics. When reading his poems, a picture of green fields, blooming and fragrant roses opens before our eyes ...

Creativity N. V. Gogol

In the history of Russian literature, there are such writers whom nature endowed with special attention to life and things, in other words, to the surrounding human existence. Among them is Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, who managed to anticipate the problem of the reification of a person, where he is not the creator of things, but their thoughtless consumer. In his work, Gogol skillfully depicted a substantive or material detail that replaces the soul of the character without a trace.

This element performs the function of a mirror that reflects the character. Thus, we see that the details in Gogol's work are the most important tool for depicting not only a person, but also the world in which the hero lives. They leave little space for the characters themselves, which is why it seems that there is no room for life at all. But for his heroes this is not a problem, because the everyday world for them is in the foreground, in contrast to being.

Conclusion

The role of the artistic detail cannot be overestimated, without it it is impossible to create a full-fledged work. The poet, writer or composer uses this instrument in their own way in their creations. So, for example, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, with the help of details, depicts not only the images of heroes or St. Petersburg, but also reveals the boundless philosophical and psychological depths of his novels.

Skillfully and skillfully used such expressive details not only Gogol and Chekhov, but also Goncharov, Turgenev and other writers.

Word artists used detail extensively in their works. After all, its significance is enormous. Without this tool, it would be unrealistic to clearly and concisely give an individual characterization of the character. The author's attitude to the hero can also be determined using this tool. But, of course, the depicted world is also created and characterized with the help of a detail.

Functions of the artistic detail

A detail can perform important ideological and semantic functions and give an emotional load to the entire text. The functions of details can be psychological, plot and descriptive. An artistic detail is not only able to convey the necessary information. With the help of a detail in a literary work, you can get the most vivid idea of the character, his appearance, psychological state, or the environment surrounding the hero.

Detail can also act as a means of figurative expression. For example:

The forest stood motionless, quiet in its dull pensiveness, just as sparse, half-naked, entirely coniferous. Only here and there were frail birch trees with rare yellow leaves. (V.P. Astafiev)

In this sentence, for example, epithets are an artistic detail, with the help of which a picture of an uncomfortable forest is drawn. The role of their use is to emphasize the frightened, tense state of the literary hero. Here, for example, what kind of Vasyutka in Astafiev's story sees nature when it realizes its loneliness.

"... Taiga... Taiga... Without end and edge, it stretched in all directions, silent, indifferent ...".

“From above, it seemed like a huge dark sea. The sky did not break off immediately, as it happens in the mountains, but stretched far, far away, closer and closer to the tops of the forest. The clouds overhead were rare, but the farther Vasyutka looked, the thicker they became, and finally the blue openings disappeared altogether. Clouds of pressed cotton wool lay on the taiga, and it dissolved in them.

The landscape indicates the boy's great inner anxiety, and also describes the cause of this anxiety. He sees a "silent" and "indifferent" taiga, similar to a dark sea, a low sky descending almost to the very forest. Combinations in the text of epithet and comparison (“compressed cotton wool”), personification and metaphor (“lay down”, “dissolved”), which is an artistic detail, help the reader to better imagine the heavy sky hanging over the dark taiga and at the same time conveys the idea that nature is indifferent to the fate of man. And here the function of the detail is semantic.

Consider another example of a detail from the text of the writer V.P. Astafyeva: “With a beating heart, he ran to the tree to feel the notch with drops of resin with his hand, but instead he found a rough fold of bark.” This descriptive and plot detail reinforces the drama of the situation in which the hero of the story finds himself.

Also, in the text of a work of art, there may be a sound descriptive detail or a metaphorical detail. For example, this is a description of a helpless fly stuck in the net of a web from the same work:

“An experienced hunter - a spider stretched a web over a dead bird. The spider is no longer there - it must have gone to spend the winter in some kind of hollow, and abandoned the trap. A well-fed, large spit fly caught in it and beats, beats, buzzes with weakening wings. Something began to disturb Vasyutka at the sight of a helpless fly stuck in a net. And then it seemed to hit him: why, he got lost!

For the same purpose, to convey the internal discomfort of his hero, the writer uses the method of internal monologue more than once in the text, and this is also a striking artistic detail. For example:

"F-fu-you, damn it! Where are the grips? - Vasyutka's heart sank, perspiration appeared on his forehead. - All this capercaillie! Rushed like a goblin, now think about where to go, - Vasyutka spoke aloud to drive away the approaching fear. - Nothing, I'll think about it and find a way. So-so ... The almost bare side of the spruce - it means that the north is in that direction, and where there are more branches - the south. Ta-ak ... ".

Just as a large mosaic picture is made up of pieces of a mosaic, a spacious integrity of literary character, narrative and description is made up of artistic details, individual images. This comparison, if lame, is only in the sense that the “mechanical” principle of addition (a whole from “pieces”) is still noticeable in the mosaic composition and the boundaries of the parts are easily noticeable. Meanwhile, in a verbal work of art, small details in the composition of a large figurative whole are connected by an organic connection, naturally “flow” into each other, so that only a keen “gazing” allows us to notice the outlines of individual microstructures.

And one more condition is required for the aesthetic perception of a detail: one must appreciate the characteristic and individual in reality, the fullness and lively play of life, even in its small manifestations. A detail, of course, is a detail in the picture of the whole, but not every detail is a detail, but only that which is saturated with the energy of individual vision. In what the indifferent gaze glides past, the keen eye of the artist sees not only a manifestation of the infinite diversity of life (after all, we cease to feel it over the years), but also such details in which a thing, a phenomenon, a character sometimes turns to us with its most essential side. .

Obviously, this requires not only the gift of special observation, not only a special sharpness of external vision, but the insight and power of internal vision, a heightened sensitivity of the soul. That is why we perceive a correctly and accurately found detail as a small discovery (especially in poetry), which gives rise to delight, as if the naive and blissfully clairvoyant "vision" of childhood has suddenly returned to us.

The fact that this requires a special ability, which is the most important component of artistic talent, is convinced by the recognition of the great artists of the word. Ivan Bunin wrote that nature gave him a special gift of “tenfold” vision and “tenfold hearing”.

Afanasy Fet in his memoirs admits that he consciously exercised in himself the powers of observation originally bestowed upon him, taking lonely walks, in which there was always food for her. The life of nature in its small, semi-observable manifestations, some kind of bustle of ants dragging a blade of grass or something of the same kind, were endlessly entertaining for him, riveted his attention for a long time.

Behind all this lies the ability for deep contemplation, peculiar only to an artist (whether it is a painter, a poet, or a prose writer). This is a special, cognizing contemplation, in which, according to A. F. Losev, there is no longer a subject and an object taken in their separation, but there is, as it were, a “marriage” fusion of both, born of love (only on it is any true cognition). This is "disinterested" contemplation, free from the predatory desires of the will - the eternal source of suffering. That is why, according to Schopenhauer, the poet is the "clear eye of the universe."

Artistic detail in lyrics

In a lyrical poem, a detail or a chain of details are often the reference points of an image. Sometimes such details carry special associative possibilities, pushing our imagination, prompting it to "finish" the fullness of the lyrical situation, outlined only by cursory strokes. Its objective and psychological perspective is expanding before our very eyes, receding into the mysterious depths of life. And now, sometimes, the whole fate of a person with its hidden tragedy flashes before our mind's eye.

A lyrical image is sometimes born in the bosom of one brightly individual detail. There is still nothing, no pattern of rhythm, no vague prototype of the composition, only an indistinctly sounding "musical" wave torments the poet's imagination, and already a living detail of being flashed in this fog with a bright light, closing in itself the outer world and the inner world. The movement of lyrical thought sometimes begins with it, other details are adjusted to it, the expression contained in them spills over the entire lyrical image. But even if such a detail is just a stroke of the “external” picture (a lyrical landscape, for example), even here it contains a poetic surprise that refreshes our perception of the world.

Such a detail sometimes enters indelibly into our sense of life, so that our very attitude to it is no longer conceivable without these poetic discoveries. It is unthinkable, for example, our perception of a pre-storm without Tyutchev's details: “Greening fields Greener before a thunderstorm”, “Hotter than roses fragrance. The voice of the dragonfly is louder. The fact is that in these details the sharpness of Tyutchev's poetic vision was not simply imprinted. In them, if you like, a certain real law of the phenomenon emerges: the awakening before a thunderstorm of the implicit, muffled in the usual sound and flowering of nature, some “selected” sounds and “selected” colors that accompany its “fateful minutes”.

Artistic detail at Ryleev and Pushkin

A detail directed into the inner world is especially eloquent when it contains a laconic image of some instantaneous movement, in which, as if involuntarily, an integral image of the soul emerges. Pushkin was delighted with Ryley's lines in the poem "Voynarovsky":

Mazepa smiled bitterly,
Lying silent on the grass
And wrapped himself in a wide cloak.

The external gesture of the hero here is more eloquent than many descriptions. The artistic echo of this detail is echoed in Pushkin's depiction of Napoleon in the poem "Hero":

He fades motionless.
Cloaked with a combat cloak ...

Unlike Ryleyev, Pushkin sharpens the contrast between immobility and Napoleon's soul-burning need for action. The battle cloak of the leader, tormented by the torture of peace, is a detail that strikes with its tragic depth.

Artistic detail at Turgenev's ("On the Eve")

In prose, such an artistic detail, rooted in an instantaneous psychological gesture, can flicker in the composition of a fairly spacious description, marking a strong emotional outburst in the development of experience, tantamount to a mental crisis. In the novel "On the Eve", Turgenev portrays Elena's growing impatience in anticipation of the last meeting with Insarov. Everything that happens to her in this scene happens as if by inertia. She does not find a place for herself, taking up one thing, then another, and does everything as if automatically. Turgenev depicts this all-consuming impatience of the soul, for which everything habitual would definitely lose its meaning, forcing rhythmic-intonational means of influencing the reader. Elena begins to eagerly rush time, and the rhythm of Turgenev's speech reflects this pulsation of the empty, traceless flow of time. At this moment, a sharp decline occurs in the soul of the heroine. The strength of this decline is equal to the strength of expectation. Turgenev does not further reveal the train of thought of the heroine, he focuses only on the external manifestations of the storm that broke out in her soul. After this impotence, following the river of tears, a decision suddenly ripens in Elena, a strong-willed impulse, the essence of which is not yet clear to herself. And here, in a rich psychological context, there is an external gesture, a detail symbolizing the transformation of the soul: “She suddenly got up and sat down: something strange was happening in her: her face changed, her moist eyes dried up and shone by themselves, her eyebrows moved, her lips shrank."

This is the peak of the most complex mental process, and in depicting a sharp and seemingly unforeseen fracture of the soul, Turgenev accurately and subtly maintains the logic of character. After all, his Elena is a strong-willed and active nature, and the effective warehouse of her character eventually takes its toll. As before, as if automatically, not yet conscious of her act, but driven by an irresistible force, which is the call of the will, she rushes to the goal, which reminds of itself almost instinctively, almost subconsciously. And this goal is to see Insarov at all costs.

Such extremely saturated psychological details Turgenev rarely places in the image, but large. The excessive, in his opinion, psychological detailing of Leo Tolstoy clearly did not suit him.

Artistic detail at Gogol

In the history of literature there are artists who are keenly attentive to the life of things, to the attributes of the objective world that surrounds human existence. Such were Gogol and Goncharov. With rare insight, Gogol anticipated the threat of the total reification of man, the sign of the coming civilization, in which man is no longer so much the creator and master of things as their slave and thoughtless consumer. In Gogol, an objective, material detail sometimes becomes, as it were, an “index” of the soul and replaces it without a trace. In its pictorial function, it is a “mirror” in which the character is reflected. Under these conditions, a special stake is placed on substantive detail: for Gogol, it is the most important means of depicting the world and man. There is no trace of Pushkin's restraint in handling the detail. Gogol's detailing is demonstratively abundant: things crowd human space here and crowd it so much that there is no longer a sense of the spaciousness of life. However, Gogol's characters, inseparably merged with this reified reality, no longer yearn for this expanse. Life for them forever obscured being.

The "ship" of Gogol's plot in "Dead Souls", for example, sails in the middle of a boundless "ocean" of things. The world of things here is either thickened or somewhat sparse, but in any case it is so vast that in this respect Gogol is hardly comparable to any of the Russian classics. The same dense material environment surrounds (even earlier) the characters of Mirgorod and Petersburg Tales. Where there is an abundance of subject details, the specificity of each individual weakens somewhat, but it is precisely the totality of things that acquires special pictorial power - a system of mirrors in which the dead face of the character is reflected. In the emptiness of existence, the thing acquires a fatal irrational power over Gogol's heroes. She (the thing) claims to be a hero in Gogol, sometimes falling into the energy center of the plot, becoming the source of his movement (the gun in The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, a carriage, an overcoat). The material world is that "crust of the earth" which, in Gogol's words, crushed the "high purpose of man" (words spoken by Gogol while still studying at the Nizhyn Gymnasium).

Artistic detail at Goncharov's ("Oblomov")

A material detail lives a different life in I. Goncharov's novel Oblomov. The object environment here is both denser and more spacious than anywhere else in Goncharov's work, and in the depiction of things here, Gogol's artistic lessons are too clearly felt. But here, and in all its obviousness, Goncharov's unique attitude to real artistic detail comes through. The connection between the subject and the character in Goncharov is warmer and more intimate. Oblomov's dressing gown, which has its own plot story, symbolically objectifying the spiritual movement of the hero, his milestones and stages, this dressing gown, of course, is shrouded in comic expression, but neither the tragedy that accompanies it, nor the grotesque quirkiness in the spirit of Gogol is not in sight here.

The comic radiated by this detail is smiling and sad, it is completely devoid of satirical poison, just as the author's attitude towards the hero has nothing to do with any kind of exposure. Oblomov's affection for a dressing gown is almost a reflex and characterizes not only Oblomov's laziness, but also the need for breadth and space, even if in everyday manifestations of both. After all, it is important to understand that this is a dressing gown “without a hint of Europe,” and, at the risk of falling into comic seriousness, one can still say that it marks an aversion to any regulation and purely external goodness, elevated to a cult, but at the same time, of course. and the excesses of Eastern quietism, the captivity of contemplation that suppresses the will. Finally, Goncharov's detailing reflects the author's attraction to a solid way of life, to the traditional foundations of Russian life, eroded by the caricaturally absurd and predatory passions of the time, the foam and scum of nihilism. That is why the objective world of Grandma Berezhkova's "noble nest" in "The Cliff" is fanned with the poetry of Russian life, permeated with the warm glow of kindred love for the whole world.

Artistic detail at Chekhov

A different attitude to the subject detail in artistic styles that gravitate towards small narrative forms. It is clear that on this artistic basis, detail is not treated as extravagantly as in a great epic. “He never has superfluous details,” L. N. Tolstoy said about A. P. Chekhov (according to A. V. Goldenweiser), “every one is either necessary or beautiful.” The laconicism and concentration of meaning in Chekhov's subject detail are such that the detail is capable of replacing a spacious description in him. In this sense, Treplev’s words about Trigorin’s manner (“The Seagull”): “The neck of a broken bottle glistens on the dam and the shadow of the mill wheel turns black - now the moonlit night is ready ...” - are close to Chekhov’s handling of the detail. But it would be reckless to perceive them as an unconditional rule, as a principle of Chekhov's style, excluding deviations. It is enough to recall the spacious landscape descriptions in The House with a Mezzanine, in The Black Monk, in The Student, etc., and it will become clear that the range of deviations from Trigorin's "canon" is very extensive. A detailed description, seemingly risky in terms of compression and concentration of forms, is easily and organically combined in Chekhov with the symbolization of a detail, as the composition of the story “Student” convinces of this. Against the background of a fairly spacious landscape description, a detail stands out here weightily and large, pulling the “lines of force” of the whole to itself - the “bonfire”. Pushing the hero's imagination, resurrecting in his memory the episode of the gospel night in the Garden of Gethsemane, this detail connects the temporal layers of the image, throwing a bridge from the past to the present.

The picture of the depicted world is made up of individual artistic details. By artistic detail, we will understand the smallest pictorial or expressive artistic detail: an element of a landscape or portrait, a separate thing, an act, a psychological movement, etc. Being an element of an artistic whole, the detail itself is the smallest image, a micro-image. At the same time a detail almost always forms part of a larger image; it is formed by details, folding into “blocks”: for example, the habit of not waving your arms when walking, dark eyebrows and mustaches with blond hair, eyes that did not laugh - all these micro-images add up to a “block "a larger image - a portrait of Pechorin, which, in turn, merges into an even larger image - a holistic image of a person.

For ease of analysis, artistic details can be divided into several groups. Details come first external and psychological. External details, as it is easy to guess from their name, draw us the external, objective existence of people, their appearance and habitat. External details, in turn, are divided into portrait, landscape and real. Psychological details depict the inner world of a person for us, these are separate mental movements: thoughts, feelings, experiences, desires, etc.

External and psychological details are not separated by an impenetrable boundary. So, an external detail becomes psychological if it conveys, expresses certain mental movements (in this case we are talking about a psychological portrait) or is included in the course of the hero’s thoughts and experiences (for example, a real ax and the image of this ax in Raskolnikov’s mental life).

By the nature of the artistic impact, they differ details-details and symbol details. Details act in mass, describing an object or phenomenon from all conceivable sides, a symbolic detail is single, trying to grasp the essence of the phenomenon at once, highlighting the main thing in it. In this regard, the modern literary critic E. Dobin proposes to separate details and details, believing that the detail is artistically higher than the detail. However, this is hardly the case. Both the principle of using artistic details are equivalent, each of them is good in its place. Here, for example, is the use of detail-detail in the description of the interior in Plyushkin's house: “On the bureau ... lay a lot of all sorts of things: a bunch of finely written pieces of paper, covered with a green marble press with an egg on top, some old book bound in leather with a red edge, a lemon , all dried up, no more than a hazelnut, a broken armchair, a glass with some kind of liquid and three flies, covered with a letter, a piece of sealing wax, a piece of a rag raised somewhere, two feathers stained with ink, dried up, as in consumption, a toothpick , completely yellowed. Here Gogol needs just a lot of details in order to reinforce the impression of senseless stinginess, pettiness and wretchedness of the hero's life. Detail-detail also creates a special persuasiveness in the descriptions of the objective world. With the help of details-details, complex psychological states are also transmitted, here this principle of using a detail is indispensable. The symbolic detail has its advantages, it is convenient to express the general impression of an object or phenomenon in it, with its help the general psychological tone is well captured. The detail-symbol often conveys with great clarity the author's attitude to the depicted - such, for example, is Oblomov's dressing gown in Goncharov's novel.

Let us now turn to a concrete consideration of the varieties of artistic details.

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