Lecture
Let us begin with the properties of the depicted world. By the depicted world in a literary work is meant that picture of reality, conditionally similar to the real world, which the writer draws: people, things, nature, actions, experiences, and so on. In a literary work a kind of model of the real world is created. This model is distinctive in the works of each writer; the depicted worlds in different literary works are extremely diverse and may be more or less similar to the real world. But in any case one must remember that before us is an artistic reality created by the writer, not identical to primary reality.
Let us now turn to a concrete examination of the varieties of artistic detail.
The portrait. By a literary portrait is understood the depiction, in a literary work, of a person's entire appearance, including the face, the physique, the clothing, the manner of behavior, gestures, and facial expressions. The reader's acquaintance with a character usually begins with the portrait. Every portrait is, to one degree or another, characterological – that is, from external features we can, if only cursorily and approximately, judge a person's character. Here the portrait may be furnished with an authorial commentary revealing the connections between the portrait and the character (for example, the commentary on Pechorin's portrait), or it may act on its own (Bazarov's portrait in Fathers and Sons). In this case the author, as it were, relies on the reader to draw conclusions about the person's character himself. Such a portrait requires closer attention. In general, a full perception of a portrait requires somewhat heightened work of the imagination, since the reader must construct a visible image from a verbal description.
The correspondence of the features of a portrait to the features of character is a rather conventional and relative matter; it depends on the views and beliefs accepted in a given culture, on the nature of artistic convention. At early stages in the development of culture it was assumed that a beautiful outward appearance corresponded to inner beauty; positive heroes were often depicted as beautiful in appearance as well, negative ones as ugly and repulsive. Later, the connections between the outer and the inner in the literary portrait become significantly more complex. In particular, already in the nineteenth century a completely inverse relationship between portrait and character becomes possible: a positive hero may be ugly, and a negative one beautiful. An example is Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and Milady from Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. Thus we see that the portrait in literature has always performed not only a depictive but also an evaluative function.
If one examines the history of the literary portrait, one may notice that this form of literary representation has moved from a generalized, abstract portrait characterization toward ever greater individualization. At early stages of literature's development heroes are often endowed with a conventional-symbolic appearance; thus we can barely distinguish, by their portraits, the heroes of Homer's poems or of the Russian military tales. Such a portrait carried only very general information about the hero; this happened because literature had not yet, at that time, learned to individualize the characters themselves. Over time the portrait became increasingly individualized, that is, filled with those unique traits and details which no longer allowed us to confuse one hero with another, and which at the same time pointed no longer to the hero's social or other status, but to individual differences in character. The literature of the Renaissance already knew a highly developed individualization of the literary portrait (an excellent example is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza), which was subsequently intensified in literature.
An individualized detail, becoming fixed to a character, may become his permanent attribute, a sign by which the given character is recognized; such, for example, are Helene's gleaming shoulders or Princess Marya's radiant eyes in War and Peace.
The simplest and at the same time the most frequently employed form of portrait characterization is the portrait description. In it a kind of list of portrait details is given consecutively, with varying degrees of completeness, sometimes with a generalizing conclusion or authorial commentary regarding the character revealed in the portrait; sometimes with special emphasis on one or two leading details. Such, for example, is the portrait of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, the portrait of Natasha in War and Peace.
Another, more complex kind of portrait characterization is the comparison-portrait. Here it is important not only to help the reader more clearly picture the hero's appearance, but also to create in him a definite impression of the person, of his appearance.
Finally, the most complex variety of portrait is the impression-portrait. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that portrait features and details as such are absent here altogether; only the impression produced by the hero's appearance on an outside observer or on one of the work's characters remains. Thus, for example, Chekhov characterizes the appearance of one of his heroes as follows: "His face looked as though it had been pinched by a door or beaten with a wet rag" ("Two in One"). It is practically impossible to draw an illustration from such a portrait characterization, but Chekhov does not need the reader to visualize all the hero's portrait features; what matters is that a definite emotional impression of his appearance has been achieved, and that it is fairly easy to draw a conclusion about his character as well.
Landscape. In literature, landscape refers to the depiction, in a work, of animate and inanimate nature. By no means every literary work contains landscape sketches, but when they do appear, they as a rule perform significant functions. The first and simplest function of the landscape is to indicate the setting. However simple this function may seem at first glance, its aesthetic effect on the reader should not be underestimated. Often the setting has fundamental significance for a given work. Thus, for example, very many Russian and foreign Romantics used the exotic nature of the East as a setting: bright, colorful, unfamiliar, it created in the work a romantic atmosphere of the exceptional, which was precisely what was needed.
Often the attitude toward nature shows us certain essential sides of a character's personality or worldview. Thus, Onegin's indifference to landscape shows us the extreme degree of this hero's disillusionment. The discussion about nature that takes place against the background of a beautiful, aesthetically significant landscape in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons reveals the differences in the characters and worldviews of Arkady and Bazarov.
The setting in the literature of modern times often becomes the city. Moreover, in recent times nature as a setting has increasingly been yielding this role to the city, entirely in keeping with what is happening in real life as well. The city as a setting possesses the same functions as landscape; in literature there has even appeared the imprecise and oxymoronic term "urban landscape." Just as the natural environment does, the city has the ability to affect people's character and psyche. Moreover, in any work the city has its own unique image, and this is not surprising, since every writer does not simply create a topographical setting, but, in accordance with his artistic aims, constructs a definite image of the city. Thus, Petersburg in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is, above all, "restless," bustling, fashionable. But at the same time it is a finished, aesthetically valuable, integral city that can be admired. And finally, Petersburg is a repository of high aristocratic culture, above all spiritual culture.
Returning specifically to the literary depiction of nature, one more function of landscape must be mentioned, one that may be called psychological. It has long been noticed that certain states of nature correlate in one way or another with certain human feelings and experiences: the sun with joy, rain with sadness; compare also expressions such as "a storm of the soul." That is why landscape details, from the very earliest stages of literature's development, have been successfully used to create a definite emotional atmosphere in a work (for example, in The Tale of Igor's Campaign the joyful finale is created with the help of the image of the sun) and as a form of indirect psychological depiction, when the characters' state of mind is not described directly but is, as it were, conveyed to the surrounding nature, this device often being accompanied by psychological parallelism or comparison ("It is not the wind that bends the branch, not the oak grove that rustles. It is my little heart that groans, trembling like an autumn leaf"). In the further development of literature this device became increasingly refined, and it became possible to correlate states of mind not directly but indirectly with this or that state of nature. Here the mood of a character may correspond to it, or, on the contrary, may contrast with it.
A special case, one that occurs rather rarely, deserves separate mention: when nature itself becomes, as it were, a character in a literary work. Fables and fairy tales are not meant here, because the animal characters participating in them are in essence merely masks for human characters. But in some cases animals become genuine characters of a work, with their own psychology and character. The best-known works of this kind are Tolstoy's tale "Kholstomer" and Chekhov's "Kashtanka" and "Whitebrow."
The world of things. At early stages of development the world of things did not receive broad reflection, and the object-details themselves were little individualized. A thing was depicted only insofar as it turned out to be a sign of a person's belonging to a particular profession or a sign of social standing. The indispensable attributes of royal dignity were the throne, the crown, and the scepter; the things of a warrior were above all his weapons, those of a farmer – the plow, the harrow, and so on. This kind of thing, which we shall call an accessory, was not yet in any way correlated with the character of a specific person, that is, the same process was underway here as in portrait detailing: the individuality of a person had not yet been mastered by literature, and consequently there was not yet any need to individualize the thing itself. Over time the accessory-thing, although it remains in literature, loses its significance and no longer carries any meaningful artistic information.
Another function of the object-detail develops later, beginning approximately with the Renaissance, but it is this function that becomes the leading one for this type of detail. The detail becomes a means of characterizing a person, an expression of his individuality.
An object-detail can sometimes convey a character's psychological state with extraordinary expressiveness; Chekhov was especially fond of using this device of psychologism. Here, for example, is how the psychological state of the hero in the story "Three Years" is depicted with the help of a simple, everyday object-detail: "At home he saw on a chair an umbrella forgotten by Yulia Sergeevna, seized it, and kissed it hungrily. The umbrella was silk, no longer new, bound with an old rubber band; the handle was of plain, white bone, cheap. Laptev opened it above himself, and it seemed to him that there was even a scent of happiness around him."
An object-detail has the capacity simultaneously to characterize a person and to express the author's attitude toward the character. Here, for example, is an object-detail in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons – an ashtray in the shape of a silver bast shoe, standing on the table of Pavel Petrovich, who lives abroad. This detail not only characterizes the character's showy love of the common people, but also expresses Turgenev's negative evaluation. The irony of the detail lies in the fact that the crudest and at the same time perhaps the most essential object of peasant everyday life is here made of silver and performs the function of an ashtray. By studying the world of things as such, the material surroundings of a person, one can understand a great deal – not about the life of this or that individual, but about the way of life as a whole.
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