|
Lecture 5. The 19th century Realism and naturalism. Similar and different features of these trends
Plan:
1.Realism in French and Russian Literature.
2. Ivan Turgenev is a great Russian novelist.
Honore de Balzac is a French writer
American realism.
The second half of the 1800's brought reaction against romanticism. A new group of writers called realists turned against the exaggerated feelings stressed by the romantics. Truth and accuracy became the goals of the realists. The novel and the drama were their best means of expression.
The great novelists of realism include Stendhal, Honore de Balzac and Grestave Flaubert of France, and Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy of Russia. Realism was mixed with Romanticism in the writings of the English author Charles Dickens. Emile Zola of France led the naturalist movement in literature. His writings emphasized the most sordid aspects of society. The naturalists and realists treated their characters as though they were specimen in a laboratory. Such wrights as Henric Ibsen in Norway, August Strinberg in Sweden and George B. Shaw in England used much the same approach.
In the United States Walt Whiteman combined realism and romanticism in his poetry. The novels of Mark Twain, Hanry James and Stephan Grame also reflected the realistic movement.
Turgenev Ivan (1818- 1883), was one of the greatest Russian novelists. He was the first Russian writer to achieve substantial recognition in the West. Turgenev became noted for his realistic portrayals of the Russian nobility and intellectuals. He examined social and critical culture interests in novels that read like a diary of that part of Russian society from the 1840'sto the 1870's. These novels are Rudin (1856), A Nest of Gentlefolk(1859), On the Eve (1867), Fathers and Sons (1862).
In this novel and in the short story "The Dairy of superfluous Man (1850), Turgenev described a type of educated, well-meaning, but disillusioned Russian nobleman.
This type of character as the superfluous man, is unable to find an outlet for his talents and energies. This passive and politically ineffective figure was the most common type of male character in Russian literature of Turgenev's time.
Turgenev's masterpiece "Fathers and sons" is about the young Russian radicals of the 1860's. Bazarov, the main character is a nihilist- that is a person who opposes all tradition and convincing character, but he dies inactive and frustrated.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born and raised on his family estate in Orel.
He first won recognition as a writer in 1852 with his a sport man's stretches. novel whose tragic hero, Prince Myshkin resembles Don Quixote in many respects. Turgenev, whose knowledge of Spanish, thanks to his contact with Pauline Viardot and her family, was good enough for him to have considered translating Cervantes's novel into Russian, played an important role in introducing this immortal figure of world literature into the Russian context.
Fathers and Sons ("Отцы и дети"), Turgenev's most famous and enduring novel, appeared in 1862. Its leading character, Bazarov, was in turns heralded and reviled as either a glorification or a parody of the 'new men' of the 1860s. However, the issues treated in the novel transcend the merely contemporary. Many radical critics at the time (with the notable exception of Dimitri Pisarev) did not take Fathers and Sons seriously and, after the relative critical failure of his masterpiece, Turgenev was disillusioned and started to write less.
Turgenev's next novel, Smoke ("Дым"), was published in 1867 and was again received less than enthusiastically in his native country, as well as triggering a quarrel with Dostoevsky in Baden-Baden.His last substantial work attempting to do justice to the problems of contemporary Russian society, Virgin Soil ("Новь"), was published in 1877. Stories of a more personal nature, such as Torrents of Spring ("Вешние воды"), King Lear of the Steppes ("Степной король Лир"), and The Song of Triumphant Love ("Песнь торжествующей любви") were also written in these autumnal years of his life. Other last works included the Poems in Prose and "Clara Milich" ("After Death"), which appeared in the journal European Messenger.
Turgenev wrote on themes similar to those found in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but he did not approve of the religious and moral preoccupations that his two great contemporaries brought to their artistic creation. Turgenev was closer in temperament to his friends Gustave Flaubert and Theodor Storm, the North German poet and master of the novella form who also often dwelt on memories of the past and evoked the beauty of nature. Turgenev's artistic purity made him a favorite of like-minded novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom greatly preferred Turgenev to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. James, who wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev's work, claimed that "his merit of form is of the first order" (1873) and praised his "exquisite delicacy", which "makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us in comparison by violent means, and introduce us in comparison to vulgar things" (1896). The notoriously critical Vladimir Nabokov praised Turgenev's "plastic musical flowing prose", but criticized his "labored epilogues" and "banal handling of plots." Nabokov stated that Turgenev "is not a great writer, though a pleasant one", and ranked him fourth among nineteenth-century Russian prose writers, behind Tolstoy, Gogol, and Anton Chekhov but ahead of Dostoevsky sympathetic light - even though they are the center of the book's most brutal scenes. This was the first book Balzac released under his own name, and it gave him what one critic called "passage into the Promised Land" It established him as an author of note (even if the surface owes a debt to Walter Scott) and provided him with a name outside the pseudonyms of his past.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
