Linguistic features of the work. Language of fiction

Complex goal

know

fiction as a verbal form of creativity;
organization and features of poetic language, poetic figures;
poetic stylistics (hyperbole, grotesque, litotes, amplification);
syntactic figures (inversion, signs);
intonation and graphics (italics, ellipses, pause, anaphora, simploca, epiphora, sylleps, oxymoron, anacoluth, antithesis, allegory, alogism);
poetic phonetics (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, anagram);
tropes (metaphor, metonymy, comparison, epithet, personification, periphrase);
reminiscences, literary parodies;

be able to

distinguish between the function of language as a grammatical category and the function of speech as a category of artistic style of use;
distinguish between the forms of poetic and prose language;

own

terminology of linguistic culture;
the corresponding conceptual apparatus of scientific literature;
skills of speech analysis of artistic language.

Features of poetic language

Language fiction, in other words, poetic language is the form in which the form of art of words, verbal art, is materialized, objectified, in contrast to other types of art, such as music or painting, where sound, paint, and color serve as means of materialization.

Each nation has its own language, which is the most important feature of the national specificity of the people. Having its own vocabulary and grammatical norms, the national language primarily performs a communicative function and serves as a means of communication. Russian national language in its modern form basically completed its formation during the time of A.S. Pushkin and in his work. On the basis of the national language, a literary language is formed - the language of the educated part of the nation.

The language of fiction is a national language, processed by masters of artistic expression, subject to the same grammatical norms as the national language. The specificity of poetic language is only its function: it expresses the content of fiction, verbal art. Poetic language performs this special function at the level of living linguistic usage, at the level of speech, which in turn forms art style.

Of course, the speech forms of the national language presuppose their own specifics: dialogical, monological, story-telling features of written and oral speech. However, in fiction these means should be considered in the general structure of the ideological, thematic, genre, compositional and linguistic originality of the work.

An important role in the implementation of these functions is played by figurative and expressive means of language. The role of these means is that they give speech a special flavor.

Flowers nod to me, bow your heads,

And the bush beckons with a fragrant branch;

Why are you the only one chasing me?

With your silk mesh?

In addition to the fact that this line is from the poem “A Moth for a Boy” with its own rhythm, its own size, rhyme pattern, and a certain syntactic organization, it contains a number of additional figurative and expressive means. Firstly, this is the speech of the moth addressed to the boy, a meek plea for the preservation of life. In addition to the image of a moth created by means of personification, flowers are personified here, which “nod” their heads to the moth, and a bush, which “beckons” with its branches. Here we will find the metonymically depicted image of a net ("silk net"), an epithet ("fragrant branch"), etc. In general, the stanza recreates the picture of nature, the images of a moth and a boy in certain respects.

By means of language, typification and individualization of characters’ characters, unique application, and use of speech forms are carried out, which may not exist outside of this use. by special means. Thus, the word “brother”, characteristic of Davydov (“Virgin Soil Upturned” by M. A. Sholokhov), includes him among the people who served in the navy. And the words “fact”, “actual” that he constantly uses distinguish him from everyone around him and are a means of individualization.

There are no areas in language where the possibility of an artist’s activity, the possibility of creating poetic visual and expressive means, would be excluded. In this sense, we can conditionally speak of “poetic syntax”, “poetic morphology”, “poetic phonetics”. It's about here we are not talking about special laws of language, but, according to the correct remark of Professor G. O. Vinokur, about “a special tradition of language use.”

Thus, expressiveness itself, special figurative and expressive means are not a monopoly of the language of fiction and do not serve as the only formative material of verbal work of art. In the vast majority of cases, the words used in a work of art are taken from the general arsenal of the national language.

“He treated peasants and servants strictly and capriciously,” says A.S. Pushkin about Troekurov (“Dubrovsky”).

There is no expression or special means of expression here. And yet, this phrase is a phenomenon of art, since it serves as one of the means of depicting the character of the landowner Troekurov.

The ability to create an artistic image using language is based on the general laws inherent in language. The fact is that the word carries within itself not just elements of a sign, a symbol of a phenomenon, but is its image. When we say “table” or “house,” we imagine the phenomena denoted by these words. However, there are still no artistic elements in this image. We can talk about the artistic function of a word only when, in a system of other image techniques, it serves as a means of creating an artistic image. This, in fact, is the special function of poetic language and its sections: “poetic phonetics”, “poetic syntax”, etc. We are not talking about a language with special grammatical principles, but about a special function, a special use of forms of the national language. Even so-called word-images receive aesthetic meaning only in a certain structure. Thus, in the famous line from M. Gorky: “Over the gray plain of the sea, the wind gathers clouds” - the word “gray-haired” in itself does not have an aesthetic function. It acquires it only in combination with the words “plain of the sea.” “The gray plain of the sea” is a complex verbal image, in the system of which the word “gray-haired” begins to have the aesthetic function of a trope. But this trope itself becomes aesthetically significant in the overall structure of the work. So, the main thing that characterizes poetic language is not its saturation with special means, but its aesthetic function. Unlike any other use of them in a work of art, all linguistic means are, so to speak, aesthetically charged. “Any linguistic phenomenon under special functional and creative conditions can become poetic,” academician V. Vinogradov rightly asserts.

But the internal process of "poeticization" of language, however, is depicted by scientists in different ways.

Some scientists believe that the core of an image is a representation, a picture fixed in the forms of language; other researchers, developing the position about the linguistic core of an image, consider the process of “poeticization of speech as an act of accretion” to a word of additional quality or meaning. In accordance with this point of view, a word becomes a phenomenon of art (figurative) not because it expresses an image, but because, due to its inherent immanent properties, it changes quality.

In one case, the primacy of the image is affirmed, in the other - the primacy and primacy of the word.

There is no doubt, however, that the artistic image in its verbal expression represents an integral unity.

And if there is no doubt that the language of a work of art should be studied, like any phenomenon, on the basis of mastering the general laws of language development, that without special linguistic knowledge one cannot deal with the problems of poetic language, then at the same time it is quite obvious that, as a phenomenon of verbal art, language cannot be removed from the sphere of literary sciences that study verbal art at the figurative-psychological, social and other levels.

Poetic language is studied in connection with the ideological, thematic and genre-compositional specifics of a work of art.

Language is organized in accordance with certain tasks that a person sets for himself in the process of his activities. Thus, the organization of language in a scientific treatise and in a lyric poem are different, although in both cases forms of literary language are used.

The language of a work of art has two main types of organization - poetic And prosaic(the language of drama is close in its organization to the language of prose). Forms and means of organizing types of speech are at the same time speech means (rhythm, size, methods of personification, etc.).

The source for poetic language is the national language. However, the norms and level of development of language at a particular historical stage do not in themselves determine the quality of verbal art, the quality of the image, just as they do not determine the specifics of the artistic method. During the same periods of history, works were created that differed in artistic method and by their poetic significance. The process of selecting linguistic means is subordinated to the artistic concept of a work or image. Only in the hands of an artist does language acquire high aesthetic qualities.

Poetic language will recreate life in its movement and in its possibilities with great completeness. With the help of a verbal image, you can “draw” a picture of nature, show the history of the formation of human character, and depict the movement of masses. Finally, a verbal image can be close to a musical one, as is observed in poetry. The word is firmly connected with thought, with the concept, and therefore, compared to other means of creating an image, it is more capacious and more active. A verbal image, which has a number of advantages, can be characterized as a “synthetic” artistic image. But all these qualities of a verbal image can only be identified and realized by an artist.

The process of artistic creativity or the process of poetic processing of speech is deeply individual. If in everyday communication you can distinguish a person by the manner of his speech, then in artistic creativity you can identify the author by his own unique method artistic treatment language. In other words, the writer’s artistic style is refracted in the speech forms of his works, etc. The entire infinite variety of forms of verbal art is based on this feature of poetic language. In the process of creativity, the artist does not passively apply the treasures of the language already obtained by the people - a great master with his creativity influences the development of the national language, improving its forms. At the same time, it relies on the general patterns of language development and its folk basis.

Journalism(from lat. publicus- public) - a type of literature whose content is primarily contemporary issues, of interest to the general reader: politics, philosophy, economics, morality, law, etc. The closest to journalism in terms of the specifics of creativity are journalism and criticism.

The genres of journalism, journalism, and criticism are often identical. This is an article, a series of articles, a note, an essay.

A journalist, a critic, and a publicist often act as one person, and the boundaries between these types of literature are quite fluid: for example, a magazine article can be critical and journalistic. It is quite common for writers to act as publicists, although often a journalistic work is not artistic: it is based on real facts of reality. The goals of a writer and a publicist are often close (both can contribute to the solution of similar political and moral problems), but the means are different.

The figurative expression of content in a work of art corresponds to the direct, conceptual expression of problems in journalistic work, which in this respect is closer in form to scientific knowledge.

Artistic and journalistic literature includes works in which specific life facts are expressed in figurative form. In this case, elements of creative imagination are used. The most common genre is the artistic essay.

Vinokur G. O. Selected works In Russian. M., 1959. P. 388.
Vinogradov V.V. Stylistics. Theory of poetic speech. Poetics. M., 1963. P. 139.

Language, of course, is inherent not only literary creativity, it covers all aspects of the surrounding reality, so we will try to determine those specific features of language that make it a means of artistic reflection of reality.

The function of cognition and the function of communication are two main, closely related aspects of language. In progress historical development a word can change its original meaning, so much so that we begin to use some words in meanings that contradict them: for example, red ink (from the word black, blacken) or a cut piece (break off), etc. These examples suggest that the creation of a word is the cognition of a phenomenon, language reflects the work of human thought, different aspects life, historical phenomena. It is estimated that there are about 90 thousand words in modern usage. Each word has its own stylistic coloring (for example: neutral, colloquial, colloquial) and history, and, in addition, the word acquires additional meaning from the words surrounding it (context). An unfortunate example in this sense was given by Admiral Shishkov: “Carried by fast horses, the knight suddenly fell from his chariot and left his face bloody.” The phrase is funny because words of different emotional connotations are combined.

The task of selecting certain speech means quite complex for a work. Usually this selection is motivated by the imagery system underlying the work. Speech is one of the important characteristics of the characters and the author himself.

The language of fiction contains a huge aesthetic principle, so the author of a work of fiction not only generalizes linguistic experience, but also to some extent determines the speech norm and is the creator of language.

The language of a work of art. Fiction is a variety literary works, each of which represents an independent whole. A literary work that exists as a completed text, written in one language or another (Russian, French) is the result of the writer’s creativity. Usually the work has a title; in lyric poems, its functions are often performed by the first line. Centuries-old tradition external design The text emphasizes the special significance of the title of the work: during manuscript writing, and after the invention of printing. Various works: typological properties on the basis of which a work is classified as a certain literary family(epic, lyric, drama, etc.); genre(story, short story, comedy, tragedy, poem); aesthetic category or mode of art(sublime, romantic); rhythmic organization of speech(verse, prose); style dominance(life-likeness, conventionality, plot) ; literary trends(symbolism and acmeism).

Fine and expressive means of poetic language. The languages of spiritual culture are more monological: they serve primarily to identify content, whether emotional or mental, but embodied in a completely adequate way. Their essence lies in the flexibility of expressive means, albeit sometimes at the expense of their accessibility: neither a priest, nor a poet, nor a scientist will ever sacrifice accuracy and adequacy of expression in the name of ease of perception. Language came to be seen as expression, art as communication; the result was the grammaticalization of art history. Later, expressiveness, understood as a special function of language, was separated from its proper poetic function, which appears in the reflectivity of the word, in its turning towards itself, or in focusing on the message for its own sake.

Firstly, the speech form of the work can be prosaic or poetic - this is understandable and requires no comment. Secondly, it can be distinguished monologism or heteroglossia. Monologism presupposes a single speech style for all the characters in the work, which, as a rule, coincides with the speech style of the narrator. Heterogeneity is the development of different qualities of speech manners; in it, the speech world becomes the object of artistic depiction. Monologism as a stylistic principle is associated with an authoritarian point of view on the world, heteroglossia - with attention to various options for understanding reality, since the different qualities of speech manners reflect the different qualities of thinking about the world. In heteroglossia, it is advisable to distinguish two varieties: one is associated with the reproduction of the speech manners of different characters as mutually isolated, and the case when the speech manners of different characters and the narrator interact in a certain way, “penetrate” each other. The last type of heteroglossia in the works of M.M. Bakhtin received the name polyphony. Thirdly, and finally, the speech form of a work can be characterized nominality or rhetoric. Nominativity presupposes an emphasis, first of all, on the accuracy of the literary word when using neutral vocabulary, simple syntactic structures, the absence of tropes, etc. In nominativity, the object of the image itself is emphasized, in rhetoric - the word depicting the object. Colloquial speech (linguists call it “uncodified”) is associated with communication (conversations) of people, primarily in their private lives. It is free from regulation and tends to change its forms depending on the situation. Conversation(conversation) as the most important form of human culture strengthened and declared itself already in antiquity. The verbal fabric of literary works, as can be seen, is deeply connected with orally and is actively stimulated by it. Artistic speech often also transforms into written forms outside artistic speech(numerous novels and stories of an epistolary nature, prose in the form of diaries and memoirs).

Artistic speech is the first element of literature. This is thinking in images. The material carrier of the imagery of literature is the word.

Verbal and speech structure - to attract attention.

Artistic language= poetic language = external form.

Artistic speech is more correct!!!

A. B. Esin: “Fiction uses one of the existing national languages, rather than creating its own.”

Artistic style - concept, types of speech, genres

All researchers talk about the special position of the style of fiction in the system of styles of the Russian language. But his highlighting in this common system perhaps, because it arises from the same basis as other styles.

The field of activity of the style of fiction is art.

The “material” of fiction is the common language.

He depicts in words thoughts, feelings, concepts, nature, people, and their communication. Each word in an artistic text is subject not only to the rules of linguistics, it lives according to the laws of verbal art, in a system of rules and techniques for creating artistic images.

Form of speech - predominantly written; for texts intended to be read aloud, prior recording is required.

Fiction uses all types of speech equally: monologue, dialogue, polylogue.

Type of communication - public.

Genres of fiction known - thisnovel, story, sonnet, short story, fable, poem, comedy, tragedy, drama, etc.

all elements of the artistic system of a work are subordinated to the solution of aesthetic problems. The word in a literary text is a means of creating an image and conveying the artistic meaning of the work.

These texts use the entire variety of linguistic means that exist in the language (we have already talked about them): means artistic expression, and both means of the literary language and phenomena outside the literary language can be used - dialects, jargon, means of other styles, etc. At the same time, the selection of linguistic means is subject to the artistic intention of the author.

For example, the character's surname can be a means of creating an image. This technique was widely used by writers of the 18th century, introducing “speaking surnames” into the text (Skotinins, Prostakova, Milon, etc.). To create an image, the author can, within the same text, use the possibilities of word ambiguity, homonyms, synonyms and other linguistic phenomena

(The one who, having sipped passion, only gulped down mud - M. Tsvetaeva).

Repetition of a word that, scientifically and officially, is business styles emphasizes the accuracy of the text, in journalism it serves as a means of enhancing impact, in artistic speech it can underlie the text, create art world author

(cf.: S. Yesenin’s poem “You are my Shagane, Shagane”).

The artistic means of literature are characterized by the ability to “increase meaning” (for example, with information), which makes it possible different interpretations artistic texts, its various assessments.

For example, critics and readers assessed many works of art differently:

drama by A.N. Ostrovsky called “The Thunderstorm” “a ray of light in a dark kingdom,” seeing in its main character a symbol of the revival of Russian life;
his contemporary saw in “The Thunderstorm” only “a drama in a family chicken coop”,
modern researchers A. Genis and P. Weil, comparing the image of Katerina with the image of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, saw many similarities and called “The Thunderstorm” “the tragedy of bourgeois life.”

There are many such examples: interpretation of the image of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Turgenev's, Dostoevsky's heroes.

The literary text has the author's originality - the author's style. This is this characteristics language of the works of one author, consisting in the choice of characters, compositional features of the text, the language of the characters, speech features of the author’s text itself.

So, for example, for the style of L.N. Tolstoy is characterized by a technique that the famous literary critic V. Shklovsky called “detachment.” The purpose of this technique is to return the reader to a vivid perception of reality and expose evil. This technique, for example, is used by the writer in the scene of Natasha Rostova’s visit to the theater (“War and Peace”): at first, Natasha, exhausted by separation from Andrei Bolkonsky, perceives the theater as an artificial life, opposed to her, Natasha’s, feelings (cardboard scenery, aging actors), then, after meeting Helen, Natasha looks at the stage through her eyes.

Another feature of Tolstoy’s style is the constant division of the depicted object into simple constituent elements, which can manifest itself in rows homogeneous members offers; at the same time, such dismemberment is subordinated to a single idea. Tolstoy, fighting against the romantics, developed his own style and practically abandoned the use of figurative means of language.

In a literary text we also encounter the image of the author, which can be presented as an image - a storyteller or an image of a hero, a narrator.

This is a conventional image . The author ascribes to him, “transfers” the authorship of his work, which may contain information about the writer’s personality, facts of his life that do not correspond to the actual facts of the writer’s biography. By this he emphasizes the non-identity of the author of the work and his image in the work.

actively participates in the lives of the heroes,
included in the plot of the work,
expresses his attitude to what is happening and characters

Artistic language, being designed for perception and understanding against the backdrop of a common, national language, differs from it in that the reality of the language of a work of art is the reality of an integral artistic world, as a result of which the linguistic and extra-linguistic (content) aspects of a work of art are welded together much more firmly, than in other functional styles. Therefore, the patterns of constructing artistic language are explained not by grammatical and syntactic rules, but by the rules of constructing meaning. The language with its direct meanings is, as it were, completely overturned into the theme and idea of the artistic concept. Thus, the semantic duality of artistic language arises as a result of the collision of the objective meaning of words

with their subjective semantic orientation. This explains the appearance of additional meanings that “seem to shine through the direct meanings of words in poetic language” (Vinokur).

3. “Image of the author” as a substitute for the speech genre in a work of fiction

The speech genre in a prose work is personified. Unlike the communicative process in non-fictional functional styles, where real people act as communicants and the communicative process itself is single-layered, in a work of art the communicative process is two-layered: one communicative layer is formed by fictional communicants, they are part of the work of art. The other layer is formed by the real author-writer and the real reading public. Since the world depicted in the work is fictitious, made up, the communication system in the work is also fictitious, invented by the writer in order to make the content of the work reliable, alive, and create the illusion of real communication. Therefore, fictitious communicants in a work of art are not the real author and the real reader, but the creation of the writer - the “image of the author” and the “image of the reader.” In this sense, “speech genre,” being an abstract category, in a work of art acquires concreteness due to the invented communicants that specify the communicative process. In turn, the plot and images of the characters are already a product of the “image of the author-narrator”, and not the real author. In a prose work, someone must tell about the event. This “someone” is the substitute for the real writer in the work - “the image of the author-narrator.” When reading a work, the reader has an idea of both the characters who reveal themselves in direct speech, and the author-narrator who reveals himself in the author’s speech. Every utterance has its own author, there is no speech that is not spoken by anyone, it is always tied to the subject of speech, the speaker or the writer. Such a subject of speech in a work of fiction and prose is the “about-

times the author-narrator." The reader develops an idea of the narrator even when he is not named in the work and is not characterized in any way. Even in the most objective narration there is an "image of the author", because this objectivity is nothing more than a special construction, a special construction of the “image of the author-narrator”.

The “image of the author” is an image of a special type, different from other images of the work. It is the creation of a real writer and is connected dialectically with him, for the writer’s creativity is concrete. The Creator is always depicted in his creation. Therefore, there are objective reasons for mixing these concepts: the creator of the work is a real person, but the specificity of prose is such that someone must tell a novel, short story, or short story. Therefore, the writer’s personality recedes into the background, and his role in the work is transferred to the narrator, who recreates events and destinies.

“The image of the author-narrator” is organically connected with the correlative category of the reader. The reader is not the actual public that turned out to be the reading mass of a given writer, but something created by him - the “image of the reader.” The character of the reader, the nature of communication and forms of contact with him determine the structure of the artistic narrative.

The inner world and thinking of each person has its own stable social audience, in the atmosphere of which his internal arguments, internal motives, assessments, etc. are built. Speech is always focused on the interlocutor. It is a product of the relationship between the speaker and the listener. Any utterance is constructed between two socially organized people, and if there is no real interlocutor, then he is assumed to be a normal representative of the social group to which the speaker belongs.

From the outside- this is a certain speech organization of the work, behind which the “face” of the narrator shines through in all aspects of its functioning.

The typology of author-narrators is similar to the classification of speech genres in non-fiction styles. There are three main types of author-narrators in a prose work: 1) “autorial author-narrator” in the form “he” (Er-Erzähler); 2) “personal author-narrator” in the form of “I” (Ich-Erzähler), or in the form of a character in the work, but speaking on behalf of “I”; 3) “personalized author-narrator,” the so-called “narrator designated (by some name).” Within the boundaries of these types of author-narrators, there are various transitional forms.

1) Auditorial author-narrator in the form of "he" is outside the action of the work, outside the world of the content of the narrative, he stands above this world. How the reader sees him depends on the role he plays - a historian-chronicler, an objective publisher, an erudite writer or an ignorant graphomaniac. The author-narrator in the “he” form can simply narrate the story objectively, limiting himself to comments. Or maybe interfere with it. In the case when the author-narrator in the form of “he” seems to disappear from the narrative, hiding behind the heroes of the work, he nevertheless exists, but acts in the most objective roles: observer, reporter, director, etc. The narrative looks like this faceless cases. Most often these are silent scenes, detailed, filmed as if in close-up. Language, as a rule, in such a narrative form is a specially processed literary language that has the structure of speech of the script genre.

Often the narrator in the form "he" is identified with a personal narrator, in which case the use of "he" serves to emphasize the fact that the narrator is outside the action, outside the depicted world. But his personality manifests itself in language, in the sense of his social or some other characteristic. The author in the form “he” can act in different roles.

2) Personal author-narrator in the form of "I" very diverse. From this diversity, two main forms of such a narrator should be distinguished - subjective and objective. For subjective The narrator's form is characterized by greater individualization, a greater degree of sensation of the presence of a living individual person. The personal subjective narrator creates the illusion of the absence of a narrator, the absence of narration, he shows, represents, depicts. Most often, such a narrator in the form of “I” acts either as an eyewitness or as a confidant of the hero, less often as a character. In this case, the reader’s position also changes: he either directly perceives the world, without the guiding and commentary help of the narrator, or he looks at everything through the eyes of the hero, taking part in the feelings and thoughts of the hero. Often this form is associated not with the narration of an event, but with the expression of a person’s state, mood, and experiences. The narrator in the form of "I" can combine two functions - the actor and the narrator. This form is widely used in autobiographical and confessional novels. In such narratives, all the accompanying social and characterological features of the narrator are presented most fully. In such cases, “I” brings with it all sorts of introductory words, reservations, parentheses, because he speaks openly for the heroes on his own behalf, and here, in order for the author’s knowledge of the hidden life of the heroes to be plausible, it is impossible not to stipulate that, they say, you, the author, It seems that you think, you are convinced, but, however, you are not sure, although you guess and, as I later found out, it was confirmed, etc., etc. in that spirit.

A personal narrator often creates a very detailed narrative, focusing on details. It can also approach either an auditorial or an objective narrative in the form of the self.

Objective form the narrator in the form of “I” is close to the auditorial one. Such a narrator, like an auditory one, is located outside or on the periphery of the event and is content with the role of a correspondent, observer, witness. Events described by an objective narrator in the form

“he” acquire illumination from the outside, and the events described by the objective narrator in the form of “I” - from the inside.

Writers often use both the subjective and objective forms of the personal author-narrator in different parts of the narrative in the same work.

Between the two forms of personal narrator - objective and subjective - are their various modifications. Thus, the narrator in the form of “I” exists in tales, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and confessions.

As examples of these narrators, the following can be cited: in T. Mann's novel "Doctor Faustus" the narrator Serenus Zeitblom is inserted. In M. Frisch's novel "Stiller" in the first part the narration is told on behalf of the hero, in the second - on behalf of one of his friends. In Strittmater's novel Tinko, the story is narrated by the boy Tinko. In the same writer's novel "Ole Binkopp" the narrative is of a clearly subjective nature. Although the narrator speaks in the form of “he,” the complete impression is created that this is one of the characters in the novel, and sometimes he directly addresses the heroes of the novel, i.e. interferes in their lives, forgetting that he tells the reader everything.

Concerning structural organization“the image of the author-narrator”, then it is due to the diversity of this phenomenon and its scattered nature in the work. There are three types of organization of the “image of the author-narrator”: 1) the “image of the author-narrator” represents a single point of view throughout the entire work; 2) the “image of the author-narrator” in the work is one, but splits into different “faces” in the process of narration, and 3) the “image of the author-narrator” represents a plurality of narrators, where each image expresses its own point of view, its attitude towards what is depicted. The testimony of S. Maugham is interesting in this regard: “It is possible that in every

Among us there are several individuals mixed together that exclude each other, but the writer, the artist clearly senses this. For other people, due to their lifestyle, one side or the other outweighs, and all the others disappear or are pushed far into the subconscious.... a writer is not one person, but many. That is why he can create many, his talent is measured by the number of hypostases that he includes... The writer does not sympathize, he feels for others. He feels not sympathy, but what psychologists call empathy, it seems that Goethe was the first among writers to realize his diversity..."

THE LANGUAGE OF FICTION, poetic language, the language of verbal art is one of the languages of spiritual culture, along with the language of religion (cult) and the language of science. Along with them throughout the series last centuries In European-type cultures, the language of fiction is opposed, first of all, to the standard literary language as the language of official life. Just like other languages of spiritual culture, poetic language is focused on conscious and active change, on the search for new expressive possibilities, and in other cases - on originality, while “language changes in the mass” happen completely “independently of any deliberate creativity."

The languages of spiritual culture and literary language to some extent share the functions of expressing meaning and conveying it. The aesthetic “orientation to expression” was conceptualized by I.G. Haman, I.G. Herder, W. von Humboldt, and German romantics. They gave impetus to linguistic poetics, primarily in Germany (among the German followers of B. Croce: K. Vossler, L. Spitzer) and in Russia (A. A. Potebnya and his school, and later - theorists of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and Petrograd OPOYAZ ). Spitzer wrote: “Language is first of all communication, art is expression... only with the high sophistication that the corresponding disciplines achieved, language began to be considered also as expression, and art as communication.” By Russian “formalists”, expressiveness, understood as a special (“emotive”) function of language, was separated from its proper “poetic function”, manifested in the “reflectiveness” of the word, in its “turning on itself”, or, what is the same, in “focusing on the message for its own sake.”

Unlike literary language, the language of fiction (like other languages of spiritual culture), due to its “orientation to expression,” is organically connected with the content and directly contains it. In verbal art, unity of form and content is achieved, if not complete, then at least partial: here any element of the external linguistic structure can be semanticized. Not to mention vocabulary and phonetics, “including grammatical categories, used for correspondence by similarity or contrast, in poetry there are all categories of changeable and unchangeable parts of speech, numbers, genders, cases, tenses, types, moods, voices, classes of abstract and concrete words, negations, finite and non-finite verbal forms, certain And indefinite pronouns or members and, finally, various syntactic units and designs." In poetic language, in addition to the auxiliary, grammatical role, all these forms can play the role of a figurative device. Let us at least recall L.V. Shcherba’s observations on the semantics of gender and voice, dating back to A. Grigoriev and Potebnya, in G. Heine’s poem about the pine and palm tree (“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam...”) and in his Russian translations: “It is absolutely obvious... that the masculine gender (Fichtenbaum, not Fichte) is not accidental... and that in its opposite feminine Palme, he creates the image of a man’s unsatisfied love for a distant, and therefore inaccessible, woman.”

The close connection between content and expression also determines the semiotic nature of the most significant differences between the language of fiction and other languages of spiritual culture. If a religious-mythological symbol in the extreme tends towards omni-meaning, and a scientific term - towards unambiguity, then an artistic (poetic) image in the general case is ambiguous, “figurative”, because it combines “direct” and “figurative” meaning. Since all verbal art is fiction to one degree or another, “the real meaning of an artistic word is never confined to its literal meaning.” But poetic fiction is almost always more or less plausible, and therefore the possibility of its real interpretation never completely disappears. And since to express poetic meaning, “broader” or “more distant”, the artist of the word freely uses the forms of everyday language, the direct, primary, general linguistic meaning is sometimes considered as an “internal form”, as a connecting link between the external forms of language and poetic semantics .

The simultaneous actualization of the “poetic” (artistic) and “prosaic” (everyday) understanding of the text creates the prerequisites for the potential double meaning of almost any linguistic form: lexical, grammatical, phonetic. This is clearly seen in the example of word order in a poem. Inversion in general literary language- this is a strong emphatic means, but in poetry the order of words is syntactically much freer, and therefore, its violation is less significant, especially since grammatical freedom in verse is strictly limited by size and rhyme. The placement of a word is predetermined by its rhythmic form and often cannot be changed without damaging the given line or stanza. In Pushkin’s “The Stone Guest” (1830), Don Guan asks a monk about Don Anna: “Who is this strange widow? And not bad?” - “We, hermits, should not be seduced by the beauty of women...” From the point of view of standard syntax (“We, hermits, should not be seduced by female beauty”), in the Monk’s remark all the words are out of place, but from this they are highlighted no more than the word “not bad”, the rhythmic position of which does not in the least contradict the grammatical one.

This feature of many poetic contexts was absolutized by B.V. Tomashevsky. He considered that “verse is speech without logical stress”: all the words in it are equally stressed and therefore “much more significant.” However, even where word order is strictly connected with the metrical structure, inversion, if it does not diverge from the meaning, can be read in an expressive manner, especially when supported by transfer: “The first step is difficult and the first path is boring. I overcame early adversity. I set the craft as the footstool of art...” (A.S. Pushkin. Mozart and Salieri. 1830). It is hardly possible to categorically protest against phrasal stress on the words “overcame”, “craft”, but one cannot insist on such phrasing, because the order of words is completely explainable by the pressure of the meter. On the other hand, as G.O. Vinokur noted, inversions in poetic language “were not always generated by versification conditions, for example, in Lomonosov’s line: “warmed by the gentle waters of the south” - the rhythm does not prevent the rearrangement of the words “gentle” and “water” . In such cases, there is a temptation to look for a semantic background: “As if I had committed a grave duty” (“As if I had committed a grave duty”); “Although I deeply feel the insult, Although I love life a little” (here is an undoubted inversion, destroying the parallelism: “Although I deeply feel the insult, Although I love life a little”), etc. (“Mozart and Salieri”). However, even in these examples it is impossible to see an unambiguous emphasis, since lines of this kind are perceived against the backdrop of many poems in which inversions are only a concession to meter or even ornamental poetism, a tribute to literary tradition. This is how grammatical ambiguity is realized: through the “poetic” meaning of the inversion the “prosaic” one shines through, and vice versa.

The originality of the language of fiction is not only functional-semantic, but also formal. Thus, in the field of phonetics of the Russian poetic language, there may be non-normative shifts, shifts in stress, as well as differences in sound distribution or sound composition, in particular the inclusion of sounds from other languages as “quotations”: “Before the Genius of Fate, it’s time to humble yourself, rubbish” - rhyme for the word “carpet” (A.A. Blok. “ Autumn evening was. To the sound of glass rain...", 1912). Particularly noteworthy is the phenomenon of complete poetic reduction of vowels, the possibility of which was pointed out by V.K. Trediakovsky in “New and short way to the composition of Russian poems" (1735). Among modern authors, D.A. Prigov often uses this technique: “But justice will come And the free peoples of the Isthmus of Gibraltar will reunite with their homeland” (“Isthmus of Gibraltar ...”, 1978).

Features of syntax in the language of fiction may consist in the use of various kinds of non-literary constructions: foreign, archaic or colloquial. The syntax of colloquial and literary speech is brought together, including frequent omissions of grammatically implied forms, but the functions of ellipsis in literature and beyond often do not coincide: in poetic speech, the restoration of omitted members is often impossible and undesirable, since the semantics is indefinitely polysemantic corresponds to the poet's intent. In the 12 lines of M.I. Tsvetaeva’s poem “On the hills - round and dark ...” (1921) there is not a single subject and predicate: “On the hills - round and dark, Under the ray - strong and dusty, With a boot - timid and meek - For a cloak - stained and torn." But the absence verbal predicates not only does it not deprive the poem of dynamics, but on the contrary, it emphasizes it: in place of one missing verb there are four dashes, emphasizing the swiftness and inexorability of the movement of women's boots following the man's cloak.

The area of poetic syntax also includes all deviations from standard language norms, expressed in violation of grammatical communication. The deformation of general language grammar can be expressed in such figures as ellipsis, anacoluth, sylleps, enallag, parcellation, etc. Special view solecism - omission of prepositions, as in the poems of D.D. Burliuk or V.V. Mayakovsky: “Once the plague approached the throne” (V. Mayakovsky. I and Napoleon, 1915), - if desired, this and similar examples can be interpreted as both an ellipsis and an anacoluth. A separate category of cases consists of inversions; sometimes the poetic order is so free that it obscures the meaning: “His yearning bones, And by death - guests alien to this land, not calmed down” (A.S. Pushkin. Gypsies. 1824; instead of “guests of this alien land, not calmed by death”). Finally, in poetry there can be an overcoming of syntax and the liberation of semantics from the connection of formal relations. Vinokur discovered movement in this direction in Mayakovsky: “Morgan. Wife. In corsets. It won’t move” (“Proletarian, nip the war in the bud!”, 1924). This is not a parcellation: “words that could be ... subject and predicate,” the poet “separates ... with inserted phrases.”

Poetic morphology is all types of violation of standard inflection. This is, firstly, the change of unchangeable words and, secondly, conversion, i.e. transition of a word to another grammatical category: change of gender or declension, singular in nouns that in literary language have only the form plural, and vice versa, the transition of relative adjectives into qualitative ones, change of verb aspect (for example, simple future tense for imperfect verbs), reflexivity of irreflexive verbs, transitivity of intransitive ones and much more. Plus, poetic morphology allows for colloquial, dialectal or archaic inflection: “I am - of course you are too!” (G.R. Derzhavin. God. 1784).

Along with poetic form-creation there is poetic word-creation. If it is carried out in accordance with general language word-formation models, it should be classified as poetic lexicology, but if the writer’s word-creation sets in motion models that are unproductive or unproductive outside of fiction, then we are dealing with poetic word-formation. The most radical inventor of occasional methods of word production, admittedly, was V. Khlebnikov, who expanded the poetic vocabulary through, for example, “abortion” of consonants (by analogy with declension and conjugation): “creators”<- «дворяне», «могатырь» <- «богатырь», «можар» <- «пожар». Если у Маяковского большинство неологизмов строится из готовых, легко вычленяемых морфем, то у Хлебникова «смехачи» и «гордешницы» - это ранний этап его словоновшества, от которого он ушел к неологизмам типа «резьмо» и «мнестр».

Perhaps the most noticeable differences between the poetic language and the language of official life are concentrated in the field of vocabulary: a work of any genre can organically include Slavicisms and historicisms, archaisms and occasionalisms, barbarisms, professionalisms, argotisms, dialectisms, vernacular, slang, which are outside the scope of the commonly used dictionary, as well as swearing and swearing. Less attention is usually paid to poetic phraseology, the sphere of interest of which is not only the formation of more or less stable figures of speech inherent in a given author, direction or era, but also the transformation of general linguistic phraseological units in the language of fiction. N.V. Gogol, apparently, most often resorted to the “decomposition of phraseological adhesions into component parts” among Russian writers. In just one sentence from “Taras Bulba” (1835), he contaminates four clichés: “And the gray ones, standing like gray doves, nodded their heads and, blinking their gray mustache, quietly said: “A well spoken word!” Pigeons are gray, and geldings are gray; they usually twirl their whiskers and blink their eyes.

In addition to creative deviations from the literary language, writers often take advantage of the right to make an accidental, unintentional mistake. Their language also allows for any distortion of national speech in order to convey the state of mind or indicate the ethnic or social background of the speaking subject: “My friend, my ears are blocked; Slice it a bit more…” (A.S. Griboyedov. Woe from Wit). A literary text easily includes foreign language inserts that appear with any frequency (for example, in macaroni poetry) and of almost any length (phoneme, morpheme, word, combination of words, phrase, etc.). At the same time, multilingual elements can be clearly differentiated, as in A.K. Tolstoy’s “History of the Russian State” (1868), or they can be “fused” so that the “superstrate language” becomes inseparable from the “substrate language” (classical sample - “Finnegans Wake”, 1939, J. Joyce). In some cases, a work of national literature is entirely created in another language: for example, the languages of Russian fiction were French and German, Latin and Church Slavonic.

Due to the ordering and semantization of external form, a new level arises in the language of fiction - compositional. Of course, texts composed according to the rules of literary language also have their own composition. But the composition of the composition is different. In the language of official life, composition is determined primarily by pragmatics, and in the languages of spiritual culture - by semantics: a change in composition directly affects the content (it is not difficult to imagine what will happen if we rearrange the composition of novels by L. Stern or M. Yu. Lermontov in accordance with the plot). In this regard, the “reverse” order of phrases, paragraphs, chapters, and parts is, in principle, no different from the reverse order of words. In the normal case, the theme (what is known) precedes the rheme (what is communicated). Likewise, in a narrative work, what happens earlier usually precedes what happens later; the opposite sequence is a compositional inversion, which, just like a syntactic inversion, is stylistically and semantically marked.

The content of the compositional level of the language of fiction consists of semantic structures, which do not fit into the framework of a simple sentence. This is, for example, the plot: it as a whole or its individual links can be common to a number of works, authors, literary eras, i.e. belonging not to the text, but to the language (in fact, it was the linguistic nature of the plot of a fairy tale that was established by V.Ya. Propp). In poetic language, the main unit of the compositional level is . The same strophic form, found in many works, has its own meaning, its own “semantic halo”, which makes its use more or less appropriate here and now. A stanza can not only enhance the semantics of other linguistic forms, but also impart to the text its own semantics associated with the history of its use: for example, the odic tenth, the “high” semantics of which is due to its connection with the solemn and spiritual ode, falling into the “low” works of I. S. Barkova, N.P. Osipova and others, gave their works a comical flavor.

There are truly countless examples of how compositional forms accompany general semantics. It is more difficult to demonstrate how composition forms meaning on its own, without the support of other linguistic means. The simplest example of this kind is given by N.M. Karamzin’s poem “Cemetery” (1792), written in two voices. The first voice paints the picture of a sepulchral dream exclusively in dark tones, the second - exclusively in light ones. Symmetrical replicas alternate one after another, occupying three lines each. It would seem that polar points of view on “life after life” are represented equally - no one is given preference. However, the “dark voice” in this duet begins, and the “light” one ends, and therefore the poem becomes a hymn to eternal peace: “The wanderer is afraid of the dead vale; Feeling horror and trembling in his heart, he hurries past the cemetery.” - “A tired wanderer sees the abode of the Eternal World - throwing away his staff, He remains there forever.” The author's position is stated only with the help of compositional forms, and this is one of the fundamental differences between aesthetic language and everyday language: in everyday dialogue, unlike poetic dialogue, the one who has the last word does not always win. Thus, behind the imaginary dialogical nature of the composition, the monologic nature of the artistic expression is hidden.