Novel as a type of literature. What is a novel and how does it happen? Historical typology of the novel
The word "novel", which came to us from the French language, has several meanings. Surely each of us has ever bought a novel in a bookstore or heard that someone was having an affair.
Let's take a closer look at the meaning of this word.
Novel as a literary genre
Novel is a literary term meaning one of the epic genres (along with short story, novella, novella).
Originally, a novel meant only those works that were written in the living Romance language, as opposed to spiritual canonical or scientific works written in Latin. Romanesque stories and stories with “light” plots were distributed among ordinary people who did not know Latin. Later, the adjective "Roman" acquired its own meaning. This is how this genre of narrative works arose in any language.
In the modern sense, a novel is understood as a fictional (or based on real events, but with a share of fiction) story with a solid plot, detailing the picture of life and covering the fates, as a rule, of several characters.
A novel can be psychological, everyday, or adventure. It can be written both in prose and in verse (remember the novel in verse by Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”).
If you are seriously interested in this literary genre and are thinking about how to create your own work in this genre, refer to the article.
And you will learn about the literary movement that has a consonant name in the article.
Romance in the meaning of love relationships
If you heard that a man and a woman are having an affair, it means that they are in love with each other and have entered into a love relationship. Sometimes the word in this meaning has an ironic connotation and suggests that such a love affair will not last long.
It is almost impossible to give an accurate and absolutely complete classification of such a genre as the novel, since basically such works are always in conflict with accepted literary conventions. In this literary genre, at all stages of its development, elements of modern drama, journalism, and cinema are always closely intertwined. The only constant element of the novel remains the method of narration in the form of reportage. Thanks to this, the main types of the novel can still be identified and described.
Initially, in the 12th-13th centuries, the word roman meant any written text in Old French, and only in the second half of the 17th century. partially acquired its modern semantic content.
Social novel
The basis of such works is the various behavior options accepted in a particular society, and the actions of the heroes that contradict or correspond to these values. The social novel has 2 varieties: cultural-historical and moral-descriptive.
A moral novel is an intimate social narrative focused on the standards and moral nuances of behavior in society. A striking example of a work of this type is Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice.
A cultural-historical novel, as a rule, describes the history of a family against the backdrop of the cultural and moral standards of its time. Unlike the moral novel, this type of novel touches on history, subjects individuals to in-depth study, and offers its own social psychology. A classic example of a cultural-historical novel is Tolstoy's War and Peace. It is noteworthy that this form of the novel is very often imitated by so-called blockbusters. For example, M. Mitchell’s work “Gone with the Wind,” at first glance, has all the signs of a cultural and historical novel. But the abundance of melodramatic episodes, stereotypical characters and superficial social psychology suggests that this novel is just an imitation of a serious work.
Psychological novel
In this form, all the reader’s attention is focused on the inner world of a person. The work in the genre of psychological novel is full of internal monologues, stream of consciousness of the main character, analytical comments and symbolism. Dickens's "Great Expectations" and Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" are striking representatives of the psychological form of the novel.
A novel of ideas
The novel of ideas or "philosophical" novel uses its characters as carriers of various intellectual theories. In works of this type, a lot of space is always devoted to various kinds of ideas and opinions regarding everything in the world, from the moral values of society to space. An example of such a novel is the work of the famous philosopher Plato “Dialogues”, in which the participants and heroes are the mouthpiece of Plato himself.
Adventure novel
A quest novel, a novel with intrigue, a chivalric novel, and a spy thriller also belong to this type of novel. As a rule, such works are full of action, plot intricacies, brave and strong heroes, love and passion. The main purpose of adventure novels is to entertain the reader, comparable, for example, to cinema.
The longest novel, Men of Good Will, by Louis Henri Jean Farigouille, aka Jules Romain (France), was published in 27 volumes in 1932-1946. The novel has 4,959 pages and approximately 2,070,000 words (not including the 100-page index).
Experimental novel
The main thing about experimental novels is that they are quite difficult to read. Unlike classical types of novels, these works break down the logic of cause and effect. In an experimental novel, for example, there may be no plot as such; it is also not necessary to know who the main character is; all attention is paid to the style, structure and form of reproduction.
Roman is a large form of the epic genre of modern literature. Its most common features are: the depiction of Man in the complex forms of the life process, the multilinearity of the plot, covering the fates of a number of characters, polyphony, hence the large volume compared to other genres. The emergence of the genre or its prerequisites is often attributed to antiquity or the Middle Ages. Thus, they talk about the “ancient romance” (“Daphnis and Chloe” by Long; “Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass” by Apuleius; “Satyricon” by Petronius) and the “knightly romance” (“Tristan and Isolde”, 12th century; “Parzival”, 1198 -1210, Wolfram von Eschenbach; Le Morte d'Arthur, 1469, Thomas Malory). These prose narratives indeed have some features that bring them closer to the novel in the modern sense of the word. However, these are rather similar than homogeneous phenomena. In ancient and medieval narrative prose literature, a number of those essential properties of content and form that play a decisive role in the novel are absent. It would be more correct to understand these works of antiquity as special genres of idyllic (“Daphnis and Chloe”) or comic (“Satyricon”) stories, and to consider the stories of medieval knights as a unique genre of knightly epic in prose. The novel begins to take shape only at the end of the Renaissance. Its origin is connected with that new artistic element, which was originally embodied in the Renaissance short story, or more precisely, in the special genre of the “book of short stories” such as “The Decameron” (1350-53) by G. Boccaccio. The novel was an epic of private life. If in the previous epic the central role was played by the images of heroes who openly embodied the strength and wisdom of an entire human collective, then in the novel the images of ordinary people come to the fore, in whose actions only their individual fate and their personal aspirations are directly expressed. The previous epic was based on major historical (even legendary) events, the participants or creators of which were the main characters. Meanwhile, the novel (with the exception of the special form of the historical novel, as well as the epic novel) is based on events in private life and, moreover, usually on facts fictitious by the author.
The difference between a novel and a historical epic
The action of a historical epic, as a rule, unfolded in the distant past, a kind of “epic time,” while a connection with living modernity or at least with the most recent past is typical for a novel, with the exception of a special type of novel - historical. The epic had, first of all, a heroic character, was the embodiment of high poetic element, while the novel acts as a prose genre, as an image of everyday, everyday life in all the versatility of its manifestations. More or less conventionally, one can define the novel as a fundamentally “average”, neutral genre. And this clearly expresses the historical novelty of the genre, because previously the “high” (heroic) or “low” (comic) genres dominated, and the “average”, neutral genres were not widely developed. The novel was the most complete and complete expression of the art of epic prose. But despite all the differences from previous forms of epic, the novel is the heir of ancient and medieval epic literature, a true epic of the New Age. On a completely new artistic basis in the novel, as Hegel said, “the richness and diversity of interests, states, characters, life relationships, the broad background of the integral world again fully appears.” An individual no longer acts as a representative of a certain group of people; he acquires his personal destiny and individual consciousness. But at the same time, an individual person is now directly connected not with a limited group, but with the life of an entire society or even all of humanity. And this, in turn, leads to the fact that the artistic development of public life through the prism of the individual fate of a “private” person becomes possible and necessary. The novels of A. Prevost, G. Fielding, Stendhal, M. Yu. Lermontov, C. Dickens, I. S. Turgenev reveal the broadest and deepest content of the social life of the era in the personal destinies of the main characters. Moreover, in many novels there is not even a somewhat detailed picture of the life of society as such; the entire image is focused on the private life of the individual. However, since in the new society the private life of a person turned out to be inextricably linked with the entire life of the social whole (even if the person did not act as a politician, leader, ideologist), the completely “private” actions and experiences of Tom Jones (in Fielding), Werther ( in Goethe), Pechorin (in Lermontov), Madame Bovary (in Flaubert) appear as an artistic exploration of the holistic essence of the social world that gave birth to these heroes. Therefore, the novel was able to become a genuine epic of the New Age and, in its most monumental manifestations, seemed to revive the epic genre. The first historical form of the novel, which was preceded by the short story and the epic of the Renaissance, was the picaresque novel, which actively developed in the late 16th - early 18th centuries (“Lazarillo from Tormes”, 1554; “Francion”, 1623, C. Sorel; “Simplicissimus”, 1669, H.J.K.Grimmelshausen; “Gilles Blas”, 1715-35, A.R.Lesage). Since the end of the 17th century, psychological prose has been developing, which was of great importance for the development of the novel (books by F. La Rochefoucauld, J. La Bruyère, Marie Lafayette’s story “The Princess of Cleves”, 1678). Finally, a very important role in the formation of the novel was played by memoir literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which for the first time the private lives and personal experiences of people began to be objectively depicted (books by Benvenuto Cellini, M. Montaigne); It was the memoirs (or, more precisely, the travel notes of a sailor) that served as the basis and incentive for the creation of one of the first great novels - “Robinson Crusoe” (1719) by D. Defoe.
The novel reaches maturity in the 18th century . One of the earliest genuine examples of the genre is “Manon Lescaut” (1731) by Prevost. In this novel, the traditions of the picaresque novel, psychological prose (in the spirit of “Maxim”, 1665, La Rochefoucauld) and memoir literature seemed to merge into an innovative organic integrity (it is characteristic that this novel originally appeared as a fragment of multi-volume fictional memoirs of a certain person). During the 18th century, the novel gained a dominant position in literature (in the 17th century it still appeared as a side, secondary sphere of the art of words). In the 18th century novel, two different lines were already developing - the social novel (Fielding, T. J. Smollett, S. B. Louvet de Couvray) and the more powerful line of the psychological novel (S. Richardson, J. J. Rousseau, L. Stern, J.W. Goethe, etc.). At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, during the era of romanticism, the novel genre was experiencing a kind of crisis; the subjective-lyrical nature of romantic literature contradicts the epic essence of the novel. Many writers of this time (F.R. de Chateaubriand, E.P. de Senancourt, F. Schlegel, Neuvalis, B. Constant) create novels that are more reminiscent of lyrical poems in prose. However, at the same time, a special form is flourishing - the historical novel, which acts as a kind of synthesis of the novel in the proper sense and the epic poem of the past (novels by W. Scott, A. de Vigny, V. Hugo, N.V. Gogol). In general, the period of romanticism had a renewing significance for the novel, preparing for its new rise and flowering. The second third of the 19th century marks the classical era of the novel (Stendhal, Lermontov, O. Balzac, Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Turgenev, G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant, etc.). A special role is played by the Russian novel of the second half of the 19th century, primarily the novels of L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky. In the work of these greatest writers, one of the decisive properties of the novel reaches a qualitatively new level - its ability to embody universal, pan-human meaning in the private destinies and personal experiences of the heroes. In-depth psychologism, mastery of the subtlest movements of the soul, characteristic of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, not only do not contradict, but, on the contrary, determine this property. Tolstoy, noting that in Dostoevsky’s novels “not only we, people related to him, but foreigners recognize ourselves, our souls,” explained it this way: “The deeper you scoop, the more common to everyone, more familiar and dear” (Tolstoy L.N. O literature). The novel of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky influenced the further development of the genre in world literature. The greatest novelists of the 20th century - T. Mann, A. France, R. Rolland, K. Hamsun, R. Martin du Gard, J. Galsworthy, H. Laxness, W. Faulkner, E. Hemingway, R. Tagore, R. Akutagawa were direct students and followers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. T. Mann said that Tolstoy’s novels “lead us into the temptation to overturn the relationship between the novel and the epic, affirmed by school aesthetics, and not to consider the novel as a product of the collapse of the epic, but the epic as a primitive prototype of the novel” (Collected Works: In 10 volumes).
In the first post-October years, the idea was popular that in a new, revolutionary novel the main or even the only content should be the image of the masses. However, when this idea was realized, the novel was in danger of collapse; it turned into a chain of incoherent episodes (for example, in the works of B. Pilnyak). In the literature of the 20th century, the frequent desire to limit oneself to depicting the inner world of the individual is expressed in attempts to recreate the so-called “stream of consciousness” (M. Proust, J. Joyce, the school of the “new novel” in France). But, deprived of an objective and effective basis, the novel, in essence, loses its epic nature and ceases to be a novel in the true sense of the word. A novel can truly develop only on the basis of the harmonious unity of the objective and subjective, external and internal in a person. This unity is characteristic of the largest novels of the 20th century - the novels of M.A. Sholokhov, Faulkner and others.
In the variety of genre definitions of the novel, two large groups are visible:: thematic definitions - autobiographical, military, detective, documentary, women's, intellectual, historical, maritime, political, adventure, satirical, sentimental, social, fantastic, philosophical, erotic, etc.; structural - novels in verse, novel-pamphlet, novel-parable, novel with a key, novel-saga, novel-feuilleton, novel-box (set of episodes"), novel-river, epistolary, etc., up to modern television novels, photo novels . The historically established designations of the novel stand apart: ancient, Victorian, Gothic, modernist, naturalistic, picaresque, educational, knightly, Hellenistic, etc.
The word novel comes from French roman, which in translation means - originally a work in Romance languages.
The novel is one of the leading genres of modern literature. Despite the fact that it appeared in the eighteenth century, the peak of its popularity falls directly on modern and recent times. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that in the modern world, novelistic issues, often dedicated to the fate of individuals, encounter fewer obstacles and restrictions than in previous eras.
If you answer the question of what a novel is, you can find two definitions. On the one hand, this is an epic work, exceeding several hundred pages in length. On the other hand, it is a work that tells about the destinies of individuals who are looking for their purpose in the world. Moreover, given that there are both novels in verse and lyric-epic novels, the second definition is closer to the truth. Works in this genre tend to depict modernity, either directly or indirectly. In the second case, the novel may take place in an alternative universe or in the past, but its problems will still refer us to the world of the present.
It is impossible to talk about what a novel is without mentioning its forms. Since there are many different works of this genre, their classification was adopted depending on some specific features. The most common forms of the novel include the following:
Adventure novel. In it, the plot revolves around the adventures of heroes who find themselves in various specific situations.
Well-known epics fall into this category. In such works, the author, as a rule, refers to a specific era and seeks to depict the fate of a particular class of people.
Psychological novel. In it, the reflections and experiences of the main character (who, as a rule, is alone) come to the fore. An effective plot line may be practically absent.
Satirical novel. As the name suggests, this form of novel satirizes various social phenomena.
Realistic novel. Works of this variety are aimed at an objective reflection of the surrounding reality.
Fantastic novel. This also includes works in the fantasy genre. In novels of this form, the author creates his own world in which the action takes place. This could be some parallel reality or a distant mechanized future.
Journalistic novel. It is a work of journalism, created with the help and equipped with a plot.
So, the answers to the question of what a novel is can be extensive and varied, nevertheless, works of this genre are quite easy to distinguish from all other prose. As a rule, novels have a large length, and the characters in them develop throughout the plot. Many of them cover a wide range of issues that in one way or another relate to the modern world. Therefore, when discussing what a novel is, one should remember that this genre is inseparable from the time in which its author lived and created. And then it becomes clear that the novel is an artistic reflection of reality.
Roman (French roman, German Roman; English novel/romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), the central genre of European literature of the New Age, a fictional, in contrast to the neighboring genre of the story, an extensive, plot-branched prose narrative ( despite the existence of compact, so-called “little novels” (French le petit roman), and poetic novels, for example, “a novel in verse” “Eugene Onegin”).
In contrast to the classical epic, the novel is focused on depicting the historical present and the destinies of individuals, ordinary people searching for themselves and their purpose in a this-worldly, “prosaic” world that has lost its pristine stability, integrity and sacredness (poetry). Even if in a novel, for example, in a historical novel, the action is transferred to the past, this past is always assessed and perceived as immediately preceding the present and correlated with the present.
The novel, as an open to modernity, formally not ossified, emerging genre of literature of the New and Contemporary times, cannot be exhaustively defined in the universalist terms of theoretical poetics, but can be characterized in the light of historical poetics, exploring the evolution and development of artistic consciousness, history and prehistory of artistic forms. Historical poetics takes into account both the diachronic variability and diversity of the novel, and the convention of using the word “novel” itself as a genre “label”. Not all novels, even exemplary novels from a modern point of view, were defined by their creators and the reading public as “novels.”
Initially, in the 12th-13th centuries, the word roman meant any written text in Old French, and only in the second half of the 17th century. partially acquired its modern semantic content. Cervantes, the creator of the paradigmatic novel of the New Age “Don Quixote” (1604-1615), called his book “history”, and used the word “novela” for the title of the book of stories and short stories “Edifying Novels” (1613).
On the other hand, many works that critics of the 19th century - the heyday of the realistic novel - after the fact called “novels” are not always such. A typical example is the poetic and prose pastoral eclogues of the Renaissance, which turned into “pastoral novels”, the so-called “folk books” of the 16th century, including the parody pentateuch of F. Rabelais. Fantastic or allegorical satirical narratives dating back to the ancient “Menippean satire”, such as “Critikon” by B. Gracian, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by J. Bunyan, “The Adventures of Telemachus” by Fenelon, satires by J. Swift, “philosophical tales” are artificially classified as novels. Voltaire, “poem” by N.V. Gogol “Dead Souls”, “Penguin Island” by A. France. Also, not all utopias can be called novels, although at the border of utopia and novel at the end of the 18th century. the genre of utopian novel arose (Morris, Chernyshevsky, Zola ), and then its antipodean counterpart, a dystopian novel (“When the Sleeper Awakens” by H. Wells, “We” by Evg. Zamyatin).
The novel, in principle, is a borderline genre, associated with almost all adjacent types of discourse, both written and oral, easily absorbing foreign genre and even foreign verbal structures: document-essays, diaries, notes, letters ( epistolary novel), memoirs, confessions, newspaper chronicles, plots and images of folk and literary fairy tales, national and sacred tradition (for example, gospel images and motifs in the prose of F. M. Dostoevsky). There are novels in which the lyrical principle is clearly expressed, in others the features of farce, comedy, tragedy, drama, and medieval mystery are discernible. It is natural for the concept (V. Dneprov) to emerge, according to which the novel is the fourth - in relation to epic, lyricism and drama - type of literature.
The novel is a multilingual, multifaceted and multi-perspective genre that represents the world and people in the world from a variety of points of view, including multi-genre ones, and includes other genre worlds as the object of the image. The novel preserves in its meaningful form the memory of myth and ritual (the city of Macondo in the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by G. García Márquez). Therefore, being “the standard-bearer and herald of individualism” (Vyach. Ivanov), the novel in a new form (in the written word) simultaneously strives to resurrect the primitive syncretism of word, sound and gesture (hence the organic birth of cinema and television novels), to restore the original unity of man and of the universe.
The problem of the place and time of birth of the novel remains debatable. According to both the extremely broad and extremely narrow interpretation of the essence of the novel - an adventure narrative focused on the destinies of lovers striving for union - the first novels were created in Ancient India and, regardless of that, in Greece and Rome in the 2nd-4th centuries. The so-called Greek (Hellenistic) novel - chronologically the first version of the “adventurous novel of trial” (M. Bakhtin) lies at the origins of the first stylistic line of development of the novel, which is characterized by “monolinguality and monostylism” (in English-language criticism, narratives of this kind are called romance).
The action in “romance” takes place in “adventurous time”, which is removed from real (historical, biographical, natural) time and represents a kind of “gap” (Bakhtin) between the starting and ending points of the development of the cyclic plot - two moments in the lives of the heroes -lovers: their meeting, marked by a sudden outbreak of mutual love, and their reunion after separation and each of them overcoming various kinds of trials and temptations.
The interval between the first meeting and the final reunion is filled with such events as an attack by pirates, the kidnapping of a bride during a wedding, a storm at sea, a fire, a shipwreck, a miraculous rescue, false news of the death of one of the lovers, imprisonment on false charges of another, a death threat execution, the ascension of another to the heights of earthly power, an unexpected meeting and recognition. The artistic space of the Greek novel is an “alien”, exotic world: events take place in several Middle Eastern and African countries, which are described in sufficient detail (the novel is a kind of guide to an alien world, a replacement for geographical and historical encyclopedias, although it also contains a lot of fantastic information ).
A key role in the development of the plot in an ancient novel is played by chance, as well as various kinds of dreams and predictions. The characters and feelings of the characters, their appearance and even their age remain unchanged throughout the development of the plot. The Hellenistic novel is genetically connected with myth, with Roman legal proceedings and rhetoric. Therefore, in such a novel there are many discussions on philosophical, religious and moral topics, speeches, including those made by the heroes in court and built according to all the rules of ancient rhetoric: the adventurous love plot of the novel is also a judicial “incident”, the subject of its discussion from both sides diametrically opposed points of view, pro and contra (this contraversity, the pairing of opposites will remain as a genre feature of the novel at all stages of its development).
In Western Europe, the Hellenistic novel, forgotten throughout the Middle Ages, was rediscovered during the Renaissance by the authors of late Renaissance poetics, created by admirers of the also rediscovered and read Aristotle. Trying to adapt Aristotelian poetics (which says nothing about the novel) to the needs of modern literature with its rapid development of various kinds of fictional narratives, neo-Aristotelian humanists turned to the Greek (as well as the Byzantine) novel as an ancient example-precedent, focusing on which to create plausible narration (truthfulness, reliability - a new quality prescribed in humanistic poetics to novel fiction). The recommendations contained in neo-Aristotelian treatises were largely followed by the creators of pseudo-historical adventure-love novels of the Baroque era (M. de Scuderi and others .) .
The plot of the Greek novel is not only exploited in popular literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. (in the same Latin American television novels), but is also visible in the plot collisions of “high” literature in the novels of Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Dostoevsky, A. N. Tolstoy (the “Sisters” trilogy, “Walking in the Torments”, “The Eighteenth Year”) , Andrei Platonov (“Chevengur”), Pasternak (“Doctor Zhivago”), although they are often parodied (“Candide” by Voltaire) and radically rethought (the purposeful destruction of the mythology of the “sacred wedding” in the prose of Andrei Platonov and G. García Márquez ).
But we cannot reduce the novel to a plot. A truly novel hero is not exhausted by the plot: he, as Bakhtin puts it, is always either “more than the plot or less than his humanity.” He is not only and not so much an “external man”, realizing himself in action, in deed, in a rhetorical word addressed to everyone and no one, but as an “internal man”, aimed at self-knowledge and confessional and prayerful appeal to God and a specific “other”: such a person was discovered by Christianity (the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, the Confessions of Aurelius Augustine), which prepared the ground for the formation of the European novel.
The novel, as a biography of an “inner man,” began to take shape in Western European literature in the form of a poetic and then a prosaic knightly novel in the 12th and 13th centuries. - the first narrative genre of the Middle Ages, perceived by authors and educated listeners and readers as fiction, although according to tradition (also becoming the subject of a parody game) it was often passed off as the works of ancient “historians.” At the heart of the plot collision of the knightly novel is the indestructible confrontation between the whole and the individual, the knightly community (the mythical chivalry of the times of King Arthur) and the hero-knight, who stands out among others for his merits, and - according to the principle of metonymy - is the best part of the knightly class. In the knightly feat destined for him from above and in the loving service of the Eternal Femininity, the hero-knight must rethink his place in the world and in society, divided into classes, but united by Christian, universal values. The knightly adventure is not just a test of the hero’s self-identity, but also a moment of his self-knowledge.
Fiction, adventure as a test of self-identity and as a path to self-knowledge of the hero, a combination of motives of love and heroism, the interest of the author and readers of the novel in the inner world of the characters - all these are characteristic genre signs of a knightly novel, “reinforced” by the experience of the “Greek”, which is similar to it in style and structure. novel, at the end of the Renaissance will turn into a novel of the New Age, parodying the knightly epic and at the same time preserving the ideal of knightly service as a value guide (Don Quixote by Cervantes).
The cardinal difference between a novel of the New Age and a medieval novel is the transfer of events from a fairy-tale-utopian world (the chronotope of a chivalric novel is “a wonderful world in adventurous time,” according to Bakhtin) into recognizable “prosaic” modernity. One of the first (along with the Cervantes novel) genre varieties of the new European novel is oriented towards modern, “low” reality - the picaresque novel (or picaresque), which developed and flourished in Spain in the second half of the 16th - first half of the 17th century. (“Lazarillo from Tormes”, Mateo Aleman, F. de Quevedo. Genetically, picaresque is associated with the second stylistic line of development of the novel, according to Bakhtin (cf. the English term novel as the opposite of romance). It is preceded by the “lower” prose of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and not formed in the form of an actual novel narrative, which includes “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius, “Satyricon” by Petronius, menippeia of Lucian and Cicero, medieval fabliaux, schwanks, farces, soti and other humorous genres associated with the carnival (carnivalized literature, on the one hand , contrasts “inner man” with “external man”, on the other hand, with man as a socialized being (the “official” image of man, according to Bakhtin) with a natural, private, everyday man. The first example of the picaresque genre is the anonymous story “The Life of Lazarillo from Tormes” (1554). ) – is parodically oriented towards the genre of confession and is structured as a pseudo-confessional narrative on behalf of the hero, aimed not at repentance, but at self-praise and self-justification (Denis Diderot and “Notes from the Underground” by F. M. Dostoevsky). The ironic author, hiding behind the hero-narrator, stylizes his fiction as a “human document” (characteristically, all four surviving editions of the story are anonymous). Later, genuine autobiographical narratives (The Life of Estebanillo Gonzalez), already stylized as picaresque novels, will branch off from the picaresque genre. At the same time, picaresque, having lost its actual novelistic properties, will turn into an allegorical satirical epic (B. Gracian).
The first examples of the novel genre reveal a specific novelistic attitude towards fiction, which becomes the subject of an ambiguous game between the author and the reader: on the one hand, the novelist invites the reader to believe in the authenticity of the life he depicts, to immerse himself in it, to dissolve in the flow of what is happening and in the experiences of the characters, on the other - every now and then ironically emphasizes the fictionality and creation of the novel's reality. “Don Quixote” is a novel in which the defining beginning is the dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the author and the reader, that runs through it. A picaresque novel is a kind of negation of the “ideal” world of novels of the first stylistic line - chivalric, pastoral, “Moorish”. "Don Quixote", parodying the romances of chivalry, includes novels of the first stylistic line as objects of depiction, creating parodic (and not only) images of the genres of these novels. The world of Cervantes’ narrative is divided into “book” and “life,” but the boundary between them is blurred: Cervantes’s hero lives his life like a novel, brings his conceived but unwritten novel to life, becoming the author and co-author of the novel of his life, while the author is under mask of the fake Arab historian Sid Ahmet Benengeli - becomes a character in the novel, without leaving his other roles at the same time - the author-publisher and the author-creator of the text: starting from the prologue to each of the parts, he is the interlocutor of the reader, who is also invited to join the game with the text of the book and the text of life. Thus, the “quixotic situation” unfolds in the stereometric space of the tragifarcical “novel of consciousness”, in the creation of which three main subjects are involved: Author - Hero - Reader. In Don Quixote, for the first time in European culture, the “three-dimensional” novel word was heard - the most striking sign of novelistic discourse.
