Lecture
In literary studies this word is used in several related but relatively independent senses. First of all, a distinction must be drawn between the real, biographical author and the author as a category of literary analysis. In the second sense we understand the author as the bearer of the ideological conception of a work of art. He is connected with the real author, but not identical to him, since a work of art embodies not the whole fullness of the author's personality, but only some facets of it (though often the most important ones). Moreover, the author of a literary work, as an impression made on the reader, may differ strikingly from the real author. Thus, brightness, festivity, and a romantic striving toward the ideal characterize the author in the works of A. Grin, whereas A.S. Grinevsky himself was, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, quite a different person, rather gloomy and morose. It is well known that far from all humorist writers are cheerful people in life. It should also be noted that the author must not be confused with the narrator of an epic work or with the lyrical hero in lyric poetry.
The author as a real biographical person and the author as the bearer of a work's conception should not be confused with the image of the author, which is created in some works of verbal art. The image of the author is a special aesthetic category that arises when, within a work, an image of the creator of that work is constructed. This may be an image of "the author himself" (Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?), or an image of a fictitious, invented author (Kozma Prutkov, Pushkin's Ivan Petrovich Belkin). In the image of the author, artistic convention and the non-identity of literature and life are revealed with particular clarity — thus, in Eugene Onegin, the author can converse with the hero he himself created — a situation impossible in real actuality. The image of the author appears in literature rather rarely; it is a specific artistic device and therefore requires careful analysis, since it reveals the artistic distinctiveness of the given work.
Author (from Latin au(c)tor — originator, founder, establisher, composer) — one of the key concepts of literary scholarship, defining the subject of a verbal-artistic utterance. In contemporary literary studies a clear distinction is drawn between: 1) the biographical author — a creative personality existing in extra-artistic, primary empirical reality, and 2) the author in his intra-textual, artistic embodiment.
The author in the first sense is a writer with his own biography (there is a well-known literary genre of the scholarly biography of a writer, for example S.A. Makashin's four-volume work devoted to the life of M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin1, and others), who creates, composes another reality — verbal-artistic utterances of any kind and genre — and who lays claim to ownership of the text he has created.
The author in his intra-textual existence is in turn considered in a broad sense and in a more specific, particular sense.
In the broad sense, the author acts as the organizer, embodier, and expresser of the emotional-semantic wholeness, the unity of a given literary text, as the author-creator. In a sacred sense it is customary to speak of the living presence of the author within the creation itself (cf. in Pushkin's poem "I have raised myself a monument not made by hands...": "...The soul in the cherished lyre / Will outlive my ashes and escape decay..."). The author who has created a text objectively loses power over it; he is no longer free to influence the fate of his work, its real life in the world of readers. Remarkable in this respect are the closing lines of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin: Go then to the banks of the Neva, newborn creation, and earn me the tribute of fame: crooked gossip, noise, and abuse!
The author — the "originator" of another, artificial reality — stands outside it. But the constant and ubiquitous traces of his creative personality are preserved by the work as an artistic world composed and organized by him, as a certain poetic structure with its own particular phonographic realization.
The relations between the author who stands outside the text and the author imprinted within the text are reflected in notions — difficult to describe exhaustively — of the subjective and omniscient authorial role, the authorial design, the authorial conception (idea, will), discoverable in every "cell" of the narrative, in every plot-compositional unit of the work, in every component of the text and in the artistic whole of the work.
At the same time, many authors are known to have confessed that literary characters, in the process of their creation, begin to live, as it were, independently, according to the unwritten laws of their own inner organic logic, acquiring a certain inner sovereignty and acting contrary to the author's original expectations and assumptions. L.N. Tolstoy recalled (this example has long since become a textbook one) that Pushkin once confessed to one of his friends: "Imagine what a trick Tatiana played on me! She got married. I never expected that of her." And he went on: "I can say the same about Anna Karenina. In general, my heroes and heroines sometimes do such things as I would not wish: they do what they must do in real life and as happens in real life, and not what I want..."1
More concrete, "personified" authorial intra-textual manifestations give literary scholars solid grounds to closely examine the image of the author in literature, to discover various forms of the author's presence in the text. These forms depend on the generic affiliation of the work, on its genre, but there are also general tendencies. As a rule, authorial subjectivity is clearly manifested in the frame components of the text: the title, the epigraph, the beginning and the ending of the main text. In some works there are also dedications, authorial notes (as in Eugene Onegin), a preface, an afterword, which together form a kind of meta-text forming a whole with the main text. To this same range of questions belongs the use of pen names with an expressive lexical meaning: Sasha Chorny, Andrei Bely, Demyan Bedny, Maxim Gorky. This too is a way of constructing the image of the author, of purposefully affecting the reader2.
With varying degrees of fullness, the author's lyrical "I" may be delegated to various heroes or characters (the so-called role-playing lyric), expressed in a dialogue of characters, and so on. A special, playful variety of authorial manifestation in lyric poetry is the acrostic, a verse structure known since ancient times whose initial letters spell out the name of the author, the addressee, or others.
Authorial intonations are clearly discernible in authorial digressions (most often lyrical, literary-critical, historico-philosophical, or publicistic) which are organically woven into the structure of works that are essentially epic. In drama, the author is more in the shadow of his characters. But even here his presence can be discerned in the title, the epigraph (if there is one), the list of dramatis personae, in various kinds of stage directions, prefatory remarks (e.g., in Gogol's The Government Inspector — "Characters and Costumes. Notes for the Gentlemen Actors," etc.), in the system of stage directions and any other scenic indications, in asides. The characters themselves can serve as the author's mouthpiece: raisonneur heroes (cf. the monologues of Starodum in D.I. Fonvizin's comedy The Minor), the chorus (from ancient Greek theater to the theater of Bertolt Brecht), and others.
The extreme expression of this position consists in the author's text becoming merely a pretext for subsequent active reader receptions, literary reworkings, willful translations into the languages of other arts, and so on. Consciously or unwittingly, this justifies a presumptuous readerly categorism, a peremptoriness of judgment. In the practice of school and sometimes even specialized philological education there arises a confidence in the reader's boundless power over the literary text; Marina Tsvetaeva's hard-won formula "My Pushkin" is endlessly reproduced, and involuntarily another formula is born, going back to Gogol's Khlestakov: "On friendly terms with Pushkin." The problem of the author continues to be one of the most sharply debated in the literary studies of the late twentieth century.
Belinsky saw the difference between the artist and the thinker in the fact that one of them, the scholar, thinks in syllogisms, that is, in concepts, while the thought of the other, the artist, is expressed in images. If the artist and the scholar share a common goal — the knowledge of the world and of man — they arrive at this goal by different paths. The scholar discovers the objective laws governing the world, and his personality is not reflected in them. That is why the scholar's biography and his spiritual and moral character matter only for the history of science. By contrast, by penetrating into the artist's personality, by understanding him as a person, we understand his works more deeply as well. Leo Tolstoy wrote in his article on Maupassant that when we begin to become acquainted with the work of this or that writer, the following questions arise before us: "Well now, what kind of person is he? What new thing can you tell me about life?" In art the main thing is the human being — not only in the sense that the image of a person stands at the center of art, but also in the sense that the artist comprehends the world around him from a definite human point of view, each time working out the paths and means that lead the human personality to flourishing or to decline. This question is equally decisive for works as dissimilar as Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family, or Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don.
A writer must not only know people, and know them thoroughly, but must also possess sufficient inner experience, which is necessary for giving each created image vital authenticity, human genuineness. The writer invests a particle of himself in every character he creates, even one toward whom he feels negatively.
That is why the method of vulgar sociologism in literary studies is unproductive, for it regards the writer as a function of class and thus fails to see the difference between one writer and another if, by origin and general convictions, they belong to the same class. Whether a writer is a realist or a romantic, he is significant above all for his uniqueness — for what is new, what is his own, that he brings to realism or to romanticism. The concept of the writer's creative individuality embraces the unique qualities belonging to this or that writer, but in such a way that they reflect the features of the literature of the era and movement to which he belongs. A writer freely chooses his material and style, but he is subject to certain regularities, for his true strength lies in the contribution he makes to the development of literature, in the influence he exerts on his contemporaries and on succeeding generations.
The concept of the writer's creative individuality did not arise all at once; it took shape historically. The works of ancient literature were anonymous, the author remained unknown. Sometimes the author's name was concealed in an acrostic (see). The creative individuality of the writer was first most clearly defined in the age of the Renaissance. This is noted also in Engels's famous characterization of the "titans in power of thought, passion, and character, in versatility and learning" (K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 346). In the work of the great masters of the Renaissance, not only does the picture of the world expand boundlessly, but the individuality of the writer is revealed with extraordinary force — in Petrarch's sonnets, in Cervantes's novel, in Shakespeare's tragedies. In the literature of seventeenth-century classicism and in the Age of Enlightenment, the writer's creative individuality was, of course, not lost. But the theorists of that era sought to emphasize the general rather than the individual, the laws of reason ruling in literature, rather than the personality that creates it.
Only at a late stage of the Enlightenment, when the sentimentalists appeared (see Sentimentalism), did the writer's creative individuality once again come to the center of attention. The most important theoretical document was Edward Young's treatise Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), directed against normative aesthetics, which declared all manner of rules and conventions to be "crutches" hindering the revelation of the writer's creative individuality. Young considered Shakespeare the greatest example of original genius. In Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of "genius" was developed by Herder and found vivid artistic expression in the work of the writers of the Sturm und Drang. The image of Prometheus in the young Goethe's dramatic fragment reflects to a certain degree this view of the artist as a creator-man, independent and profoundly original in his daring:
Here I fashion men
In my own image,
A race to be like me...
The writer's creative individuality became one of the central concerns in the aesthetics of Romanticism (see). But it was precisely here that its interpretation acquired an idealist character (the German Romantics in this proceeded from Fichte's subjective-idealist doctrine). The artist's personality was elevated above reality, often mystified, even deified. Characteristic of Romanticism, too, was the assertion of the tragic solitude of the artist in the surrounding world, which was an expression of rejection of bourgeois society as hostile to all spiritual activity (Byron's proud and solitary heroes, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "wandering enthusiasts," Alfred de Vigny's Chatterton). The most profound philosophical treatment of this problem was first given by Hegel in his Aesthetics. Hegel established that in modern times, beginning with the Renaissance, when mythology ceased to be the source and reservoir of art, the artist faced the task of determining for himself both the material for his works and the manner of treating it. It was then that the question of "subjective mastery," that is, the mastery of each individual writer, arose with full sharpness. In a truly artistic work, according to Hegel, the objective laws of the literary process are refracted through the subjective peculiarities of the artist as his worldview. The writer's creative individuality is a multifaceted concept. It comprises the writer's biography, his worldview, his talent, and his mastery. Biography is not merely the external facts of a life; it is also his attitude toward the people and events he encounters. A writer's worldview cannot be understood only in its political or philosophical aspect. To say of Turgenev only that he was a liberal in his worldview is to say far from everything. Turgenev had his own ideal of the human personality, and this ideal raises him immeasurably above liberalism.
If the writer's creative individuality is a historically formed category, then it is, consequently, also a changing one. One must speak of the Soviet writer as a creative individuality of a new type. Gorky, the first great writer of the socialist world, represents a new type of artistic individuality. His talent, the talent of a realist writer marked by an investigative pathos, is fused with the most advanced, revolutionary, genuinely scientific worldview.
All Soviet writers stand on the position of a single, Marxist-Leninist worldview. But this not only does not constrain them — on the contrary, it opens up hitherto unprecedented possibilities for the realization of diverse creative individualities.
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