Lecture
Realism in literature — the truthful depiction of reality.
In every work of belles-lettres we can distinguish two necessary elements: the objective — the reproduction of phenomena given independently of the artist, and the subjective — something the artist puts into the work from himself. In assessing the relative weight of these two elements, theory in different eras attaches greater importance now to one, now to the other (in connection with the course of art's development and with other circumstances).
Hence two opposite tendencies in theory: one — realism — sets art the task of faithfully reproducing reality; the other — idealism — sees the purpose of art in «supplementing reality», in creating new forms. Here the starting point is not so much the given facts as ideal conceptions.
This terminology, borrowed from philosophy, sometimes introduces extra-aesthetic considerations into the assessment of a work of art: Realism is quite wrongly reproached for lacking moral idealism. In common usage the term «Realism» means the exact copying of details, chiefly external ones. The untenability of this view, whose natural conclusion is to prefer a police report to a novel, and a photograph to a painting, is entirely obvious; a sufficient refutation of it is our aesthetic sense, which does not hesitate for a moment between a wax figure reproducing the subtlest nuances of living colors and a deathly white marble statue. It would be senseless and pointless to create yet another world entirely identical to the existing one.
The copying of the external world in itself has never, even to the most extreme realist theory, seemed the goal of art. In the fullest possible fidelity to reality was seen only a guarantee of the artist's creative originality. In theory, realism is opposed by idealism, but in practice it is opposed by routine, tradition, academic canon, and obligatory imitation of the classics — in other words, by the death of independent creative work. Art begins with the genuine reproduction of nature; but once popular models of artistic thought have been established, secondhand creative work appears — work by formula.
This is an ordinary phenomenon of any school, under whatever banner it first appears. Almost every school lays claim to a new word precisely in the domain of the truthful reproduction of life — and each is right in its own way, and each is rejected and superseded by the next in the name of that same principle of truth. This is especially characteristic of the history of French literature, which as a whole is an unbroken series of conquests by true Realism. The striving for artistic truth lay at the foundation of the very movements which, once they had ossified into tradition and canon, later became a byword for unreal art.
The profound inner Realism of French classical tragedy degenerated, in the arguments of theorists and the works of imitators, into dead schemata, whose yoke was thrown off by literature only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From a broad point of view, every truly progressive movement in art is a movement toward Realism. In this respect even those new currents which appear on the surface to be a reaction against Realism are no exception. In fact they represent merely a reaction against routine, against obligatory artistic dogma — a reaction against realism in name only, which had ceased to be a search for and an artistic recreation of the truth of life. When lyrical symbolism tries by new means to convey the poet's mood to the reader, when the neo-idealists, reviving old conventional devices of artistic depiction, paint stylized images that as it were deliberately depart from reality, they are striving for the very thing that is the goal of all art, even the most arch-naturalistic: the creative reproduction of life. There is no truly artistic work — from a symphony to an arabesque, from the «Iliad» to «Whisper, timid breathing» — that would not, on closer examination, prove to be a truthful depiction of its creator's soul, «a corner of life seen through the prism of temperament».
It is therefore hardly possible to speak of a history of Realism: it coincides with the history of art. One can only characterize particular moments in the historical life of art when the truthful depiction of life was especially insisted upon, seen chiefly as an emancipation from scholastic convention, in the ability to grasp and the courage to depict details that had passed unnoticed by earlier artists or had frightened them by their inconsistency with accepted dogmas. Such was romanticism; such is the contemporary form of Realism — naturalism. The literature on Realism is chiefly polemical, concerned with its contemporary form. Historical works (David, Sauvageot, Lenoir) suffer from vagueness as to their subject. Besides the works cited in the article on Naturalism.
Russian writers who employed realism: Outstanding examples of literature in this current are the works of the late Pushkin (rightly considered the founder of realism in Russian literature) — the historical drama «Boris Godunov», the tales «The Captain's Daughter», «Dubrovsky», and «The Tales of Belkin», the novel in verse «Eugene Onegin», Mikhail Lermontov's novel «A Hero of Our Time», and Nikolai Gogol's novel «Dead Souls». In Russia the term «realism» was first widely introduced into journalism and criticism by Dmitry Pisarev; before that time the term «realism» had been used by Herzen in a philosophical sense, as a synonym for «materialism» (1846).
The origins of realism: There is a view that realism arose in deep antiquity, in the time of the ancient peoples. There are several kinds of realism:
«Antique Realism»
«Realism of the Renaissance»
«Realism of the 18th–19th centuries»
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