The principles of realism in the work of O. de Balzac. Features of the realistic manner of balzac Realism as a flow based on the novels of balzac

The writing

On the whole, it should be emphasized that French realism, especially during its formation, was not a closed and internally complete system. It arose as a natural stage in the development of the world literary process, as an integral part of it, widely using and creatively comprehending artistic discoveries previous and contemporary literary trends and directions, in particular romanticism.

Stendhal's treatise "Racine and Shakespeare", as well as the preface to Balzac's "The Human Comedy," outlined the basic principles of realism, which was rapidly developing in France. Revealing the essence of realistic art, Balzac wrote: "The task of art is not to copy nature, but to express it." In the preface to The Dark Cause, the writer also put forward his own concept of an artistic image (“type”), emphasizing, first of all, its difference from any real person. Typicality, in his opinion, reflects the most important features of the general in a phenomenon, and for this reason alone, "type" can only be "the creation of the artist's creative activity."

"Poetry of fact", "poetry of reality" became fertile ground for realist writers. The main difference between realism and romanticism became clear. If romanticism in creating the otherness of reality started from inner peace the writer, expressing the inner aspiration of the artist's consciousness, directed to the world of reality, then realism, on the contrary, repelled from the realities of the surrounding reality. It is to this essential difference between realism and romanticism that Georges Sand drew attention to in her letter to Honore de Balzac: “You take a person as he appears to your eyes, and I feel a vocation to portray him as I would like to see”.

Hence the different understanding by realists and romantics of the image of the author in a work of art. For example, in "The Human Comedy" the image of the author, as a rule, is not singled out as a person at all. And this is the fundamental artistic decision of the realist Balzac. Even when the image of the author expresses his own point of view, he only states the facts. The story itself, in the name of artistic plausibility, is emphatically impersonal: "Although Madame de Langeais did not confide her thoughts to anyone, we have the right to assume ..." ("The Duchess de Langeais"); "Perhaps this story brought him back to the happy days of his life ..." ("Facino Canet"); "Each of these knights, if the data is accurate ..." ("Old Maid").

The French researcher of "The Human Comedy", a contemporary of the writer A. Wurmser, believed that Honore de Balzac "can be called the predecessor of Darwin", for "he develops the concept of the struggle for existence and natural selection." In the writer's works, "the struggle for existence" is the pursuit of material values, and "natural selection" is the principle according to which the strongest wins and survives in this struggle, the one in whom cold calculation kills all living human feelings.

At the same time, Balzac's realism differs significantly from Stendhal's realism in its accents. If Balzac, as the “secretary of the French society”, “first of all paints his customs, manners and laws, not shying away from psychologism, then Stendhal, as an“ observer of human characters, ”is primarily a psychologist.

The core of the composition of Stendhal's novels is invariably the story of one person, from which his favorite "memoir-biographical" development of the narrative begins. In the novels of Balzac, especially of the late period, the composition is "eventful", it is always based on a case that unites all the characters, involving them in a complex cycle of actions, one way or another related to this case. Therefore, Balzac the narrator covers with his mind's eye the vast spaces of the social and moral life of his heroes, digging into the historical truth of his century, to those social conditions that shape the characters of his heroes.

The originality of Balzac's realism was most clearly manifested in the novel of the writer "Father Goriot" and in the story "Gobsek", connected with the novel by some common heroes.

Honoré de Balzac (fr. Honoré de Balzac [ɔnɔʁe də balˈzak]; May 20, 1799, Tour - August 18, 1850, Paris) - French writer, one of the founders of realism in European literature.

Balzac's largest work is a series of novels and short stories "The Human Comedy", which paints a picture of the life of the contemporary writer of French society. Balzac's work was very popular in Europe and during his lifetime earned him a reputation as one of the greatest prose writers of the 19th century. Balzac's works influenced the prose of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Zola, Faulkner and others.

Balzac's father became rich by buying and selling confiscated noble lands during the revolution, and later became an assistant to the mayor of the city of Tours. Has nothing to do with the French writer Jean-Louis Gueuze de Balzac (1597-1654). Father Honoré changed his last name and became Balzac, and later bought himself a particle "de". The mother was the daughter of a Parisian merchant.

The father was preparing his son for advocacy. In 1807-1813 Balzac studied at the Vendome College, in 1816-1819 - at the Paris School of Law, at the same time he worked as a scribe for a notary; however, he gave up a legal career and devoted himself to literature. Parents did little to do with their son. In the Vendome College, he was placed against his will. Meetings with relatives there were prohibited all year round, except for the Christmas holidays. During the first years of his studies, he had to visit the punishment cell many times. In the fourth grade, Honore began to come to terms with school life, but he did not stop making fun of the teachers ... At the age of 14, he fell ill, and his parents took him home at the request of the college administration. For five years Balzac was seriously ill, it was believed that there was no hope of recovery, but soon after the family moved to Paris in 1816, he recovered.

After 1823 he published several novels under various pseudonyms in the spirit of "violent romanticism." Balzac strove to follow the literary fashion, and later he himself called these literary experiments "sheer literary swinishness" and preferred not to remember them. In 1825-1828 he tried to get involved in publishing, but failed.

Balzac wrote a lot. The Human Comedy alone contains over ninety works. This is a real encyclopedia of bourgeois society, a whole world created by the artist's imagination in the image and likeness of the real world. Balzac has his own social hierarchy: noble and bourgeois dynasties, ministers and generals, bankers and criminals, notaries and prosecutors, priests and cocottes of all ranks, great writers and literary jackals, barricade fighters and police officers. There are about two thousand characters in "The Human Comedy", many of them move from novel to novel, constantly returning to the reader's field of vision. But, despite such a variety of characters and positions, the theme of Balzac's works is always the same. He depicts the tragedy of the human person under the yoke of the inexorable antagonistic laws of bourgeois society. This theme and the corresponding way of depicting is Balzac's independent discovery, his real step forward in the artistic development of mankind. He understood the originality of his literary position. In the preface to the collection of his works in 1838, Balzac sets out it as follows: "The author expects other reproaches, among them there will be a reproach for immorality; but he has already clearly explained that we are obsessed with the obsession with describing society as a whole, as it is: with his virtuous, honorable, great, shameful sides, with the confusion of his mixed estates, with the confusion of principles, with his new needs and old contradictions ... He thought that there was nothing more surprising, except for the description of a great social disease, and it could only be described together with society, since the patient is the disease itself "

Realism and Balzac's The Human Comedy. Features of the writer's artistic manner. The Human Comedy is a cycle of works by the French writer Honore de Balzac, composed by himself from his 137 works and including novels with real, fantastic and philosophical plots, depicting French society during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy (1815-1848). French writer Honore de Balzac (1799 - 1850) - the largest representative critical realism (It is generally accepted that critical realism reveals the conditioning of the circumstances of a person's life and his psychology by the social environment (the novels of O. Balzac, J. Eliot) in Western European literature. "The Human Comedy" genius writer was supposed to become the same encyclopedia of life, which was Dante's "Divine Comedy" for his time, unites about a hundred works. Balzac sought to capture "the entire social reality, not bypassing any position of human life." The "Human Comedy" is opened by the philosophical novel "Shagreen Skin", which was, as it were, a prelude to it. "Shagreen leather" - the starting point of my business ", - wrote Balzac. Behind allegories philosophical novel Balzac concealed a deep realistic generalization. The search for artistic generalization, synthesis, determines not only the content, but also the composition of Balzac's works. Many of them are built on the development of two subjects of equal importance. In monetary relations, Balzac saw the "nerve of life" of his time, "the spiritual essence of the entire current society." A new deity, a fetish, an idol - money distorted human lives, took away children from parents, wives from husbands ... Behind individual episodes of the story "Gobsek" there are all these problems, Anastasi, who pushed the body of her deceased husband out of bed to find his business papers, was for Balzac the embodiment of destructive passions generated by monetary interests. The main feature of Balzac's portraits is their typical character and clear historical concretization. Balzac wrote his work in defense of truly human relationships between people. But the world that he saw around him showed only ugly examples. The novel "Eugene Grande" was innovatively produced precisely because it shows without embellishment "what such a life happens". In his political views, Balzac was a supporter of the monarchy. By exposing the bourgeoisie, he idealized the French "patriarchal" nobility, which he considered disinterested. Balzac's contempt for bourgeois society led him after 1830 to cooperate with the party of the Legitimists - supporters of the so-called legitimate, that is, legitimate, dynasty of monarchs overthrown by the revolution. Balzac himself called this party disgusting. He was by no means a blind supporter of the Bourbons, but nevertheless embarked on the path of defending this political program, hoping that France would be saved from the bourgeois "knights of profit" by an absolute monarchy and an enlightened nobility who is aware of their duty to the country. The political ideas of Balzac the Legitimist were reflected in his work. In the preface to The Human Comedy, he even misinterpreted his entire work, declaring: "I write in the light of two eternal truths: monarchy and religion." Balzac's work did not turn, however, into a statement of legitimist ideas. This side of Balzac's worldview was won by his irrepressible striving for truth.

16. Biography of Stendhal.Participation in the Napoleonic campaigns. Treatise "On Love".

Biography of Stendhal

The treatise "On Love" is devoted to the analysis of the emergence and development of feelings. Here Stendhal offers a classification of the varieties of this passion. He sees passion-love, passion-ambition, passion-attraction, physical passion. The first two are especially significant. The first is true, the second was born in the hypocritical 19th century. Stendhal's psychologism is based on the principle of correlating passions and reason, their struggle. In his hero, as in himself, it was as if two faces were connected: one acts, and the other is watching him. Observing, he makes the most important discovery, which he himself would not have been able to fully realize: "The soul has only states, it has no stable properties." We are talking about the dialectic of the soul of the Tolstoyan character, but S., forcing his characters to go through the painful path of knowledge, change their judgments under the influence of circumstances, already at one time approaches the Tolstoyan type. Julien Sorel's inner monologues testify to his intense mental life. For S. - a student of the enlighteners - the movement of thought is more interested in the mental life of a person. The passions of the heroes are permeated with thoughts. True, sometimes Stendhal nevertheless reproduces the actions of the heroes under the influence of passion, for example, Julien's attempt to kill Madame Renal. However, Stendhal avoids the study of conditions here. Sometimes he also conveys the subconscious actions of the characters, decisions that suddenly came to them, which he also does not investigate, but only indicates their existence. Stendhal's psychologism is a new stage in the development of literary research of personality. The materialistic basis of it leads to the fact that a writer familiar with the experience of Konstan, the author of "Adolf", not only depicts a split personality, the unexpectedness of the character's actions, but also seeks to describe them himself, and to enable the reader to independently assess the situation or character trait. Therefore, Stendhal draws actions, depicts the various reactions of a character or a number of characters to them, showing how different people are, how unexpected their reactions are. About what his means of expression are, in a letter to Balzac, he noted: "I try to write 1 - truthfully, 2 - clearly about what is happening in the heart of a person."

Honore de Balzac began writing novels to earn money. And very quickly he surprised the world with the absolute maturity of his style. "Chouans, or Brittany in 1799" - the first work of Balzac, signed by his real name, includes all the constituent works of the writer, who began as the author of commercial novels about vampires ("Biragska heiress", "The Hundred Years Old Man") and suddenly decided to create serious romance. Balzac took Scott and Cooper as his teacher. Scott was attracted by the historical approach to life, but he did not like the dullness and schematism of characters. The young writer decides to follow Scott's path in his work, but to show readers not so much a moral model in the spirit of his own ethical ideal, but to describe passion, without which there is no truly brilliant creation. In general, Balzac's attitude to passion was contradictory: “killing passion would mean killing society,” he said; and added: "passion is extreme, it is evil." That is, Balzac was fully aware of the sinfulness of his characters, but he also did not think to give up artistic analysis sin, which interested him very much and, practically, formed the basis of his work. In the way Balzac was interested in human vices, of course, there is a certain part of the romantic thinking that was always characteristic of the great realist. But Balzac understood human vice not as evil, but as a product of a certain historical epoch, a certain segment of the existence of a country and society. The world of Balzac's novels carries a clear definition of the material world. Personal life is very closely connected with the official one, so big political decisions do not descend from the sky, but are pondered and discussed in living rooms and notaries' offices, in the boudoirs of singers, and face personal and family relationships. Society is studied in Balzac's novels in such detail that even modern economists and sociologists study the state of society behind his novels. Balzac showed the interaction between people not against the background of God, as did Shakespeare, he showed the interaction between people against the background of economic relations. Society for him appears as a living being, the only living organism. This creature is constantly moving, changing, like the ancient Proteus, but its essence remains unchanged: the stronger eat the weaker. Hence the paradoxicality of Balzac's political views: the global realist never concealed his royalist sympathies and sarcastically over revolutionary ideals. In the essay “Two Meetings in One Year” (1831), Balzac disrespectfully responded to the revolution in 1830 and its achievement: “After a fight comes victory, after victory comes distribution; and then there are many more winners than those who were seen on the barricades. " Such an attitude towards people in general is characteristic of the writer who studied humanity in the same way that biologists study the animal world.

Philosophy has been one of Balzac's most serious passions since childhood. IN school age he was not a little distraught when, in a Catholic boarding house, he became acquainted with the old monastery library. He did not begin serious writing until he studied the works of all the more or less outstanding philosophers of old and new times. Therefore, the "Philosophical Studies" (1830 - 1837) appeared, which can be considered not only works of art, but also quite serious philosophical works. The novel Shagreen Skin, which is fantastic and at the same time deeply realistic, belongs to the "Philosophical Etudes". Science fiction, in general, is a characteristic of the "Philosophical Studies". It plays the role of a deus ex machine, that is, it performs the function of a central plot premise. Like, for example, a piece of old, dilapidated leather, which accidentally goes to poor student Valentin in an antique dealer's shop. Covered with ancient writings, a piece of shagreen leather fulfills all the desires of its owner, but at the same time shrinks and in the same way shortens the life of the “lucky one”. Shagreen Skin, like many other Balzac's novels, is dedicated to the theme of “lost illusions”. All of Raphael's wishes were fulfilled. He could buy everything: women, valuables, exquisite surroundings, he did not have only natural life, natural youth, natural love, and therefore had no sense in living. When Raphael learns that he has become the heir of six million, and sees that the shagreen skin has decreased again, speeding up his old age and death, Balzac notes: "The world belonged to him, he could do everything - and did not want anything." The search for an artificial diamond, to which Valtasar Klaas sacrifices his own wife and children (“The Search for the Absolute”), and the creation of a super-creation of art, which acquires the meaning of manic passion for the artist Frenhofer and is embodied in a “chaotic combination of strokes,” can also be considered “lost illusions”. ".

Balzac said that Uncle Toby from L. Stern's novel "Tristram Shandy" became for him a model of how to mold character. Uncle Toby was an eccentric, he had a "horse" - he did not want to get married. The characters of Balzac's heroes - Grande ("Eugenia Grande"), Gobsek ("Gobsek"), Gorio ("Father Goriot") are built on the principle of a "skate". In Grande, such a hobbyhorse (or mania) is the accumulation of money and jewelry, in Gobsek - enrichment of his own bank accounts, with Father Goriot - fatherhood, serving daughters who are demanding more and more money.

Balzac described the story "Eugene Grande" as a bourgeois tragedy "without poison, without a dagger, without bloodshed, but for actors more brutal than all the dramas that took place in the famous clan of the Atrides. " Balzac feared the power of money more than the power of the feudal lords. He viewed the kingdom as the only family in which the king is the father, and where there is a natural state of affairs. As for the reign of bankers, which began after the revolution in 1830, Balzac saw a serious threat to all life on earth, because he felt the iron and cold hand of monetary interests. And the power of money, which he constantly exposed, Balzac identified with the power of the devil and opposed it to the power of God, the natural course of things. And here it is difficult to disagree with Balzac. Although Balzac's views on society, which he expressed in articles and sheets, can not always be taken seriously. After all, he believed that humanity is a kind of fauna, with its own species, species and subspecies. Therefore, he appreciated the aristocrats as representatives of the best breed, which supposedly was brought to the basis of the cultivation of spirituality, which neglects the benefit and useless calculation. Balzac in the press supported the insignificant Bourbons as "the lesser evil" and promoted an elite state in which class privileges would be inviolable, and the right to vote would apply only to those who have money, intelligence and talent. Balzac even justified serfdom, which he saw in Ukraine, and which he was fond of. The views of Stendhal, who valued the culture of the aristocrats only at the level of aesthetics, look much more fair in this case.

Balzac did not accept any revolutionary actions. During the revolution in 1830, he did not interrupt his vacation in the provinces and did not go to Paris. In the novel "The Peasants", expressing regret for those who are "great through their hard life", Balzac says about the revolutionaries:" We poeticized the criminals, we had mercy on the executioners, and we almost created an idol from the proletarian! " But it is no coincidence that they say: Balzac's realism turned out to be smarter than Balzac himself. Wise is the one who evaluates a person not according to his political views, but according to her moral qualities. And in the works of Balzac, thanks to an attempt at an objective depiction of life, we see honest republicans - Michel Chretien ("Lost Illusions"), Nizron ("The Peasants"). But the main object of the study of Balzac's work is not they, but the main force of today's time - the bourgeois, the same "money angels" who acquired the significance of the main driving force of progress and whose morals were exposed by Balzac, exposed in detail and not fussy, like a biologist, which investigates the habits of a certain subspecies of animals. “In commerce, Monsieur Grandet was like a tiger: he knew how to lie down, curl up into a ball, take a long look at his prey, and then rush at it; opening the trap of his wallet, he swallowed another fate and again lay down like a boa constrictor digesting food; he did all this calmly, coldly, methodically. " The increase in capital looks in the character of Grande as something like an instinct: before his death, he "with a terrible movement" grabs the golden cross of the priest, who bent over the swooning man. Another "knight of money" - Gobsek - acquires the meaning of the only god in whom he believes modern world... The expression "money rules the world" is vividly realized in the story "Gobsek" (1835). A small, inconspicuous, at first glance, man, holds the whole of Paris in his hands. Gobsek punishes and pardons, he is just in his own way: he can bring almost to suicide, the one who neglects piety and because of this gets into debt (Countess de Resto), and can let go of a pure and simple soul that works day and night, and finds himself in debt not through his own sins, but through difficult social conditions (seamstress Ogonyok).

Balzac liked to repeat: “The historian itself must be French society. I can only serve as his secretary. " These words point to the material, to the object of study of Balzac's work, but they ignore the means of its processing, which cannot be called “secretarial”. On the one hand, Balzac relied on what he saw in real life (the names of almost all the heroes of his works can be found in the newspapers of that time), but on the basis of the material of life, he deduced certain laws behind which there existed, and, unfortunately, there is a society. He did this not as a scientist, but as an artist. Therefore, the method of typification (from the Greek typos - imprint) acquires such significance in his work. A typical image has a specific design (appearance, character, fate), but at the same time it embodies a certain tendency that exists in society at a certain historical interval. Balzac created typical grievances in different ways. He could be aimed only at typicality, as, for example, in the "Monograph on the Rentiers", and could sharpen certain character traits or create aggravated situations, as, for example, in the stories "Eugene Grande" and "Gobsek". For example, here is a description of a typical rentier: “Almost all persons of this breed are armed with a reed or a snuffbox. Like all humans (mammals), it has seven valves on its face and most likely has a complete skeletal system. His face is pale and often in the form of an onion, it lacks the characteristic that is his characteristic feature. " And here is filled with spoiled canned food, never stoked fireplace in the house of a millionaire - Gobsek is certainly a sharpened trait, but it is this sharpness that emphasizes the typicality, exposes the tendency that exists in reality, the ultimate expression of which is Gobseck.

in 1834 - 1836 Balzac issues a 12-volume collection of his own works, which is called "Studies on the customs of the nineteenth century." And in 1840-1841. the decision to generalize all creative activity Balzac called "The Human Comedy", which is often called "the comedy of money." Balzac's relationships between people are mainly determined by monetary relations, but not only they were of interest to the author of The Human Comedy, who divided his gigantic work into the following sections: Studies on Morals, Physiological Studies and Analytical Studies. Thus, the whole of France appears before us, we see a huge panorama of life, a huge living organism that is constantly moving due to the incessant movement of its individual organs.

The feeling of constant movement and unity, the synthetic nature of the picture arises due to the characters who return. For example, we first meet Lucien Chardon in "Lost Illusions", and there he will try to conquer Paris, and in "Glitter and Poverty of Courtesans" we will see Lucien Chardon, who was conquered by Paris and turned into a meek weapon of the devilish ambition of the Abbot Herrera-Vautrin one through character). In Father Goriot, we meet for the first time with Rastignac, a kind guy who came to Paris to get an education. And Paris provided him with an education - a simple and honest guy turned into a rich man and a member of the cabinet, he conquered Paris, understood its laws and challenged him to a duel. Rastignac defeated Paris, but destroyed himself. He deliberately killed a guy from the province in himself, who loved to work in the vineyard and dreamed of getting a law degree in order to improve the lives of his mother and sister. The naive provincial turned into a soulless egoist, because otherwise in Paris it is impossible to survive. Rastignac went through various novels of the "Human Comedy" and acquired the meaning of a symbol of careerism and the notorious "social success". Maxime de Trai, the de Resto family constantly appear on the pages of various works, and we get the impression that there are no dots at the end of individual novels. We are not reading a collection of works, we are looking at a huge panorama of life. "The Human Comedy" is a vivid example of the self-development of a work of art, which never diminishes the greatness of the work, but, on the contrary, provides it with the greatness of something provided by Nature. It is this powerful, far exceeding the personality of the author, that Balzac's brilliant work is.

balzac gobsec short story

What was the impact of the formation of realism in the work of Balzac?

) A person, the main object of a realistic story or novel, ceases to be a separate person separated from society and class. The whole social fabric is investigated, which by its nature is infinitely multiple, in which each character is its particle. So, in the novel "Father Goriot" in the foreground - Mrs. Voke's boarding house. The yellow paint, the smell of putrefaction and the hostess herself with her flip-flopping shoes and a corny smile summarize the impression of the boarding house. And there is something in common in social status of all its inhabitants, which, however, does not prevent a sharp selection of its individually specific inhabitants: the cynic Vautrin, the young ambitious Rastignac, the noble worker Bianchon, the shy Quiz, the complacent and anxious daddy Goriot. In Balzac's "The Human Comedy" there are more than two thousand very significant and many-sided investigated characters.

Balzac's creative activity is infinitely difficult. Learn to penetrate into the minds and hearts of people who are close and alien to him from different classes of society, different ages and professions. Balzac in the short story "Facino Canet" told how he learned this. He peered into unfamiliar faces, caught snatches of other people's conversations, he taught himself to live with the feelings and thoughts of other people, felt their worn clothes on his shoulders, their leaky shoes on his feet, he lived in a strange environment of poverty, or luxury, or average income. He himself becomes now a curmudgeon, now a wasteful, now an irresistibly passionate seeker of new truths, now an idle adventurer.

It is with this penetration into other people's characters and mores that realism begins.

1) Not only a person, not only the relationship of people - the history of contemporary society occupied Balzac. His method was the knowledge of the general through the particular. Through daddy Goriot, he learned how people get rich and how people are ruined in bourgeois society, through Tayfer - how crime becomes the first step to creating a large fortune for a future banker, through Gobsek - how the passion for accumulating money suppresses all living things in the bourgeois of this era, in Vautrin he sees an extreme expression of that philosophical cynicism, which, like an illness, affects different strata of society.
2) Balzac is one of the creators and classics of critical realism. It is in vain that the word "critical" is sometimes equated with the word negative and it is believed that this concept includes only one negative attitude to the depicted reality. The concepts "critical" and "accusatory" are identified. Critical means analyzing, researching, discerning. "Criticism" - search and judgment on the merits and demerits ... ".

) To reproduce the history and philosophy of contemporary society, Balzac could not limit himself to a single novel or a series of separate independent novels. It was necessary to create something whole and at the same time facing in different directions. "The Human Comedy" is a series of novels connected by one grandiose plan. In relatively rare cases, one novel is a continuation of another. So, in "Gobsek" - the further fate of the family of Count de Resto, shown in the novel "Father Goriot". The connection between "Lost Illusions" and "Splendor and Poverty of Courtesans" is even more consistent. But most novels have their own complete plot, their own complete idea, although the characters, both primary and secondary, constantly move from novel to novel.

) Balzac's predecessors taught to understand the lonely, suffering human soul. Balzac discovered something new: the wholeness, the interdependence of human society. Antagonism tearing apart this society. With what contempt the Marquis d'Espard will reject the young poet when he learns that he is the son of an Angoulême pharmacist! The class struggle will form the basis of The Peasants. And each of his characters is a part of that huge picture, both disharmonious and dialectically whole, which the author always has before his eyes. Therefore, in "The Human Comedy" the author is quite different from that in the romantic novel. Balzac called himself a secretary. Society uses his pen and through it speaks about itself. It is in this that the novelist approaches the scientist. The main thing is not the expression of something personal, but the correct understanding of the subject being studied, the disclosure of the laws governing it.

) The concreteness and diversity of language in Balzac's works are associated with a new kind of detailing, when the color of the house, the look of an old chair, the creak of a door, the smell of mold become meaningful, socially saturated signals. This is the imprint of human life, telling about it, expressing its meaning.

The image of the external appearance of things becomes an expression of the stable or changeable state of mind of people. And it turns out that not only man and his way of life affect the material world, subordinate to him, but, on the contrary, a kind of power of the world of things that can warm and enslave the human soul is reflected. And the reader of Balzac's novel lives in the sphere of objects that express the meaning of the bourgeois way of life, which oppresses the human personality.

6) Balzac comprehends and establishes the laws of social life, the laws of human characters, ultimately the human spirit, infringed by the conditions of the proprietary world and striving for freedom. It is Balzac's humanity, the ability to penetrate into the inner structure of people, young and old, poor and rich, men and women, this is the true wealth of the "Human Comedy".

Therefore, the reader of this multi-component work, already in its linguistic fabric, should feel the strongest scope of the author's thought, which is being introduced everywhere and with many volumes. If we knew our era perfectly, we would know ourselves better ", - says Balzac in the philosophical and political novel" Z. Marx. "Through the understanding of the whole society, a complete understanding of oneself and of any other person is achieved. And vice versa, through the understanding of many people, one can achieve an understanding of the people. Such clues, important for the correct and integral perception of the" Human Comedy ", saturate the author's speech. only pictorially visual, but also philosophically penetrating.

The formation of French realism, starting with the work of Stendhal, took place in parallel with the further development of romanticism in France. It is significant that Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Georges Sand (1804-1876), prominent representatives of French romanticism of the era of the Restoration and Revolution of 1830, were the first who came out with support and generally positively assessed the realistic searches of Stendhal and Balzac.
On the whole, it should be emphasized that French realism, especially during its formation, was not a closed and internally complete system. It arose as a natural stage in the development of the world literary process, as an integral part of it, widely using and creatively comprehending the artistic discoveries of previous and contemporary literary trends and trends, in particular romanticism.
Stendhal's treatise "Racine and Shakespeare", as well as the preface to Balzac's "The Human Comedy," outlined the basic principles of the rapidly developing realism in France. Revealing the essence of realistic art, Balzac wrote: "The task of art is not to copy nature, but to express it." In the preface to The Dark Cause, the writer also put forward his own concept of an artistic image (“type”), emphasizing, first of all, its difference from any real person. Typicality, in his opinion, reflects in the phenomenon the most important features of the general, and for this reason alone, “type” can only be “the creation of the artist's creative activity”.
"Poetry of fact", "poetry of real reality" became fertile ground for realist writers. The main difference between realism and romanticism became clear. If romanticism in creating the otherness of reality repelled from the inner world of the writer, expressing the inner aspiration of the artist's consciousness, directed to the world of reality, then realism, on the contrary, repelled from the realities of the surrounding reality. It is to this essential difference between realism and romanticism that Georges Sand drew attention to in her letter to Honore de Balzac: “You take a person as he appears to your eyes, and I feel a calling to portray him as I would like to see him”.
Hence the different understanding by realists and romantics of the image of the author in a work of art. For example, in "The Human Comedy" the author's image, as a rule, is not singled out as a person at all. And this is the fundamental artistic decision of the Realist Balzac. Even when the image of the author expresses his own point of view, he only states the facts. The story itself, in the name of artistic plausibility, is emphatically impersonal: “Although Madame de Langeais did not confide her thoughts to anyone, we have the right to assume ...” (“Duchess de Langeais”); “Perhaps this story brought him back to the happy days of his life ...” (Facino Canet); “Each of these knights, if the data is accurate…” (“The Old Maid”).
The French researcher of The Human Comedy, a contemporary of the writer A. Würmser, believed that Honore de Balzac “can be called the predecessor of Darwin”, for “he develops the concept of the struggle for existence and natural selection”. In the writer's works, “the struggle for existence” is the pursuit of material values, and “natural selection” is the principle according to which the strongest wins and survives in this struggle, the one in whom cold calculation kills all living human feelings.
At the same time, Balzac's realism differs significantly from Stendhal's realism in its accents. If Balzac, as the “secretary of the French society,” “first of all paints his customs, manners and laws, not shying away from psychologism, then Stendhal, as an“ observer of human characters, ”is primarily a psychologist.
The core of the composition of Stendhal's novels is invariably the story of one person, from which his favorite “memoir-biographical” development of the narrative begins. In the novels of Balzac, especially of the late period, the composition is "eventful", it is always based on a case that unites all the heroes, involving them in a complex cycle of actions, one way or another connected with this case. Therefore, Balzac the narrator encompasses vast spaces of the social and moral life of his heroes in his mind's eye, digging into the historical truth of his century, to those social conditions that shape the characters of his heroes.
The peculiarity of Balzac's realism was most clearly manifested in the novel of the writer "Father Goriot" and in the story "Gobsek", connected with the novel by some common heroes.

Essay on literature on the topic: Realism About de Balzac

Other compositions:

But it is no coincidence that they say: Balzac's realism turned out to be smarter than Balzac himself. The wise is the one who evaluates a person not according to his political views, but according to his moral qualities. And in the works of Balzac, thanks to the diligence of an objective depiction of life, we see honest republicans - Read More ......
Balzac's works are those works to which a person will return more than once during his life and perceive them as something new and rediscovered for himself. According to Seneca, life is measured not by length, but by content. Apparently, the same criteria Read More ......
Stendhal's work belongs to the first stage in the development of French critical realism. Stendhal introduces the fighting spirit and heroic traditions of the revolution and Enlightenment that have just died away into literature. His connection with the enlighteners preparing their heads for the upcoming revolution can be observed as in the work of Read More ......
The writer, like his parents, spontaneously added the aristocratic particle “de” to his surname. O. de Balzac's correspondence with E. Hanska covers five volumes. It was published under the general title Letters to a Foreign Woman (this is how she signed in her first letters to the writer Read More ......
At one time, Dostoevsky had a chance to hear many reproaches against him: why does he portray life in such sharp collisions, conflicts, even catastrophes, is he too cruel in his perception of reality, are there not many elements of chance in his novels and Read More ... ...
There is always a place for exploits in life. M. Gorky The formation and development of realism in Russian literature was undoubtedly influenced by trends arising in the general mainstream of European literature. However, Russian realism differs significantly from French, English, German and in the time of its origin, Read More ......
The restored Bourbon monarchy collapsed in 1830. After the July revolution, financiers, bankers, and money-mongers came to power in France. They put the king on the throne. Louis Philippe, they distributed ministerial portfolios and stocks, they dictated laws and guided policy Read More ......
The novel “The Last Chouan, or Brittany in 1799” (in subsequent editions Balzac called it shorter - “Chouans”) was published in March 1829. Balzac released this work under his real name. He was able to convey in this novel and the air Read More ......

Realism of Eau de Balzac