Lecture
The category of genre in the analysis of a literary work is of somewhat lesser importance than the category of kind, but in a number of cases knowledge of a work's generic nature can aid analysis, indicating which aspects deserve attention. In literary scholarship genres are called groups of works within literary kinds, united by common formal, thematic, or functional features. By no means do all works have a clearly defined generic nature. Thus, Pushkin's poem «On the hills of Georgia lies the night mist...», Lermontov's «The Prophet», the plays of Chekhov and Gorky, Tvardovsky's «Vasily Tyorkin», and many other works cannot be defined in generic terms. But even in cases where a genre can be defined fairly unambiguously, such a definition does not always aid analysis, since generic structures are often identified by a secondary feature that does not create any particular distinctiveness of content and form. This applies chiefly to lyric genres such as the elegy, the ode, the epistle, the epigram, the sonnet, and others. But the category of genre is nonetheless sometimes significant, pointing to a dominant of content or form, certain features of problematics, pathos, or poetics.
In epic genres what matters above all is the opposition of genres according to their length. The established literary-scholarly tradition here distinguishes genres of large (novel, epic novel), medium (novella/tale), and small (short story) length, though in reality the typology involves only two positions, since the novella/tale is not an independent genre, gravitating in practice either toward the short story (Pushkin's «Tales of Belkin») or toward the novel (his own «The Captain's Daughter»). But the distinction between large and small length is essential, above all for the analysis of the small genre – the short story. The small length of the short story dictates distinctive principles of poetics and specific artistic devices. Above all this affects the properties of literary depiction. The short story is characterized in the highest degree by a «regime of economy»; it cannot contain lengthy descriptions, and so it is characterized not by details-as-particulars but by details-as-symbols, especially in the description of landscape, portrait, or interior. Such a detail acquires heightened expressiveness and, as a rule, appeals to the reader's creative imagination, presupposing co-creation, inference. Masters of this kind of psychological short story include Maupassant, Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Hemingway, and others.
In the composition of the short story, as of any short form, the ending is very important, bearing either the character of a plot resolution or of an emotional finale. Also notable are those endings that do not resolve the conflict but merely demonstrate its irresolvability – so-called «open» endings, as in Chekhov's «The Lady with the Dog».
One of the generic varieties of the short story is the novella. The novella is a sharply plotted narrative in which the action develops quickly and dynamically, striving toward a denouement that contains the entire meaning of what has been told: it is above all through this denouement that the author offers an understanding of the life situation, passing a «verdict» on the characters portrayed. In novellas the plot is compressed and the action concentrated. The rapidly developing plot is characterized by a very economical system of characters: there are usually exactly as many as are needed for the action to develop without interruption. Episodic characters are introduced (if at all) only to give impetus to the plot action and then immediately disappear. As a rule, the novella has no subsidiary plotlines or authorial digressions; of the characters' past only what is absolutely necessary for understanding the conflict and plot is reported. Descriptive elements that do not advance the action are kept to a minimum and appear almost exclusively at the beginning; later, closer to the end, they would only get in the way, slowing the development of the action and distracting attention.
When all these tendencies are carried to their logical conclusion, the novella acquires the pronounced structure of an anecdote with all its principal features: a very small length, an unexpected, paradoxical «punch-line» ending, minimal psychological motivation of actions, an absence of descriptive moments, and so on. The anecdotal short story was widely used by Leskov, the early Chekhov, Maupassant, O. Henry, Jack London, Zoshchenko, and many other novella writers.
The major epic genres – the novel and the epic novel (epopee) – differ in their content, above all in their problematics. The dominant content in the epopee is national in character, while in the novel it is novelistic problematics (adventure-based or ideological-moral). For the novel, accordingly, it is extremely important to determine to which of the two types it belongs. Depending on the genre's content dominant, the poetics of the novel and of the epopee are constructed differently. The epopee gravitates toward plot-centeredness; the image of the hero in it is built as a quintessence of the typical qualities inherent in a people, an ethnos, a class, etc. In the adventure novel, plot-centeredness also clearly predominates, but the image of the hero is constructed differently: he is markedly free of class, corporate, or other ties to the milieu that produced him. In the ideological-moral novel, the stylistic dominants are almost always psychologism and heteroglossia (raznorechie).
Over the last century and a half a new large-scale genre has taken shape in epic literature – the novel-epopee, uniting the properties of these two genres. Works such as Tolstoy's «War and Peace», Sholokhov's «And Quiet Flows the Don», Pasternak's «Doctor Zhivago», and some others can be assigned to this generic tradition. The novel-epopee is characterized by a combination of national and ideological-moral problematics, not a simple summation of the two but an integration in which the individual's ideological-moral quest is correlated above all with the truth of the people. The problem of the novel-epopee becomes, in Pushkin's phrase, «the fate of the individual and the fate of the people» in their unity and mutual conditioning; events critical for the entire ethnos lend the hero's philosophical quest a particular sharpness and urgency, and the hero faces the necessity of defining his position not simply in the world but within national history. In terms of poetics, the novel-epopee is characterized by a combination of psychologism with plot-centeredness, a compositional blend of general, medium, and close-up planes, a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, and authorial digressions.
The fable genre is one of the few canonized genres that have retained genuine historical currency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Certain features of the fable genre can suggest promising directions for analysis. First, there is a high degree of convention and even outright fantastical quality in its imagery system. In the fable the plot is conventional, and so, although it can be analyzed element by element, such analysis yields nothing of interest. The imagery system of the fable is built on the principle of allegory; its characters denote some abstract idea – of power, of justice, of ignorance, and so on. Therefore the conflict in a fable should be sought not so much in the clash of real characters as in the confrontation of ideas: thus in Krylov's «The Wolf and the Lamb» the conflict is not between the Wolf and the Lamb but between the ideas of force and justice; the plot is driven not so much by the Wolf's desire to dine as by his striving to give the matter a «lawful appearance and rationale».
In the composition of a fable two parts are usually clearly distinguished – the plot (often unfolding in the form of a dialogue between characters) and the so-called moral – the author's evaluation and interpretation of what has been depicted, which may be placed either at the beginning or at the end of the work, but never in the middle. There are also fables without a moral.
The lyric-epic genre of the ballad is likewise a canonized genre, but one belonging to the aesthetic system not of Classicism but of Romanticism. It presupposes the presence of a plot (usually simple and single-stranded) and, as a rule, its emotional interpretation by the lyric hero. The form of speech organization is verse; the meter is free. An essential formal feature of the ballad is the presence of dialogue. The ballad often contains an element of mystery, a secret with which the emergence of conventionally fantastic imagery is connected (Zhukovsky); the motif of fate or destiny is not uncommon (Pushkin's «Song of the Wise Oleg», A. Kochetkov's «Ballad of a Smoke-filled Railway Carriage»). The pathos of the ballad is elevated (tragic, romantic, more rarely heroic).
In drama over the last hundred to hundred and fifty years there has been an erosion of generic boundaries, and many plays become indefinable in generic terms (Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky, Shaw, and others). However, alongside genre-amorphous constructions there also appear more or less pure genres of tragedy and comedy. Both genres are defined by their dominant pathos. For tragedy, accordingly, the nature of the conflict acquires primary importance; the analysis must show its irresolvability despite the characters' active attempts to resolve it. It should be borne in mind that the conflict in a tragedy is usually multi-layered, and while on the surface the tragic collision appears as a confrontation between characters, at a deeper level it is almost always a psychological conflict, a tragic inner division within the hero. Thus in Pushkin's tragedy «Boris Godunov» the main stage action is built on external conflicts: Boris versus the Pretender, Boris versus Shuisky, and so forth. Deeper aspects of the conflict emerge in the crowd scenes and especially in the scene of Boris with the holy fool – this is a conflict between tsar and people. And finally, the deepest conflict of all is the contradictions within Boris's soul, his struggle with his own conscience. It is precisely this final collision that makes Boris's position and fate truly tragic. The means of revealing this deep conflict in the tragedy is a distinctive psychologism, to which attention must certainly be paid; in a selective analysis one must dwell on the scenes of high psychological content and emotional intensity – for example, in «Boris Godunov» such supporting points of the composition would be Shuisky's account of Dimitri's death, the scene with the holy fool, and Boris's inner monologues.
In comedy the content dominant becomes the pathos of satire or humor, more rarely of irony; the problematics may be extremely varied, but most often sociocultural. In the realm of style, properties such as heteroglossia, plot-centeredness, and heightened convention become important and subject to analysis. In the main, the analysis of form should be directed toward clarifying why a given character, episode, scene, or line is comic or funny, and toward the forms and devices used to achieve the comic effect. Thus in Gogol's comedy «The Government Inspector», one should dwell in detail on those scenes where an internal, deeper comic quality manifests itself, consisting in the contradiction between what ought to be and what is. Aesthetic analysis in the examination of comedy should prevail over problem-thematic analysis, in complete contrast to traditional teaching practice.
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