Francois Rabelais and folk culture. Bakhtin M. Creativity of Francois Rabelais and folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Essay on literature on the topic: Creativity of Francois Rabelais and folk culture of the Middle Ages

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Mikhail Bakhtin
Francois Rabelais' creativity and folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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Introduction
Formulation of the problem

Of all the great writers of world literature, Rabelais is the least popular, least studied, least understood and appreciated in our country.

Meanwhile, Rabelais belongs to one of the very first places among the great creators of European literature. Belinsky called Rabelais a genius, "Voltaire of the XVI century", and his novel - one of the best novels of the past. Western literary critics and writers usually place Rabelais - for his artistic and ideological strength and for his historical significance - immediately after Shakespeare or even next to him. French romantics, especially Chateaubriand and Hugo, attributed him to a small number of the greatest "geniuses of mankind" of all times and peoples. He was considered and is considered not only a great writer in the ordinary sense, but also a sage and a prophet. Here is a very revealing judgment of the historian Michelet about Rabelais:

“Rabelais collected wisdom in folk elements of old provincial dialects, sayings, proverbs, school farces, from the lips of fools and jesters. But refracting through this buffoonery, reveals in all its greatness the genius of the century and its prophetic power. Wherever he does not find yet, he foresees he promises, he directs. In this forest of dreams, under each leaf lies the fruits that will be collected future. This whole book is "Golden bough"1
Michlielet J., Histoire de France, v. X, p. 355. " Golden bough"- the prophetic golden branch, presented by Sibylla to Aeneas.

(here and in subsequent quotes, italics are mine. - M. B.).

All such judgments and assessments are, of course, relative. We are not going to solve here the questions of whether it is possible to put Rabelais next to Shakespeare, whether he is higher than Cervantes or lower, etc. But Rabelais's historical place among these creators of new European literatures, that is, in the series: Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare , Cervantes, - in any case, there is no doubt about it. Rabelais substantially determined the fate of not only French literature and the French literary language, but also the fate of world literature (probably no less than Cervantes). There is also no doubt that he - most democratic among these pioneers of new literatures. But the most important thing for us is that he is more closely and more essential than others. with folk sources, moreover - specific (Michelet lists them quite correctly, although far from complete); these sources determined the entire system of his images and his artistic worldview.

It is precisely this special and, so to speak, radical nationality of all Rabelais' images that explains the exceptional richness of their future, which Michelet quite correctly emphasized in our judgment. It also explains Rabelais' special "non-literary" character, that is, the inconsistency of his images with all the canons and norms of literaryism that have dominated from the end of the 16th century to our time, no matter how their content changes. Rabelais did not correspond to them to an incomparably greater degree than Shakespeare or Cervantes, who did not correspond only to the relatively narrow classicist canons. Rabelais' images are inherent in some special principled and indestructible "informality": no dogmatism, no authoritarianism, no one-sided seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images hostile to any completeness and stability, any limited seriousness, any readiness and determination in the field of thought and worldview.

Hence - Rabelais' special loneliness in subsequent centuries: it is impossible to approach him along any of those great and beaten paths along which the artistic creativity and ideological thought of bourgeois Europe went during the four centuries that separated him from us. And if during these centuries we meet many enthusiastic connoisseurs of Rabelais, then we do not find any complete and expressed understanding of him anywhere. The romantics who discovered Rabelais, as they discovered Shakespeare and Cervantes, did not manage to reveal him, however, they did not go beyond enthusiastic amazement. Rabelais repelled and repelled very many. The vast majority simply do not understand him. In fact, the images of Rabelais still remain a mystery to this day.

This riddle can only be solved through deep study. folk sources Rabelais... If Rabelais seems so lonely and unlike anyone else among the representatives of the "big literature" of the last four centuries of history, then against the background of correctly disclosed folk art, on the contrary, it is more likely that these four centuries of literary development may seem like something specific and like nothing similar and the images of Rabelais will find themselves at home in millennia of development of folk culture.

Rabelais is the most difficult of all the classics of world literature, since for his understanding he requires a significant restructuring of the entire artistic and ideological perception, requires the ability to abandon many deeply rooted requirements of literary taste, revision of many concepts, most importantly, he requires deep penetration into the little and superficial explored areas of folk laughing creativity.

Rabelais is difficult. But on the other hand, his work, correctly disclosed, sheds a reverse light on the millennia of development of the folk culture of laughter, of which he is the greatest exponent in the field of literature. Rabelais's illuminating significance is enormous; his novel should become the key to the little-studied and almost completely misunderstood grandiose treasures of folk art of laughter. But first of all it is necessary to master this key.

The purpose of this introduction is to pose the problem of the folk culture of laughter in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to determine its scope and to give a preliminary description of its originality.

Folk laughter and its forms are, as we have already said, the least studied area of folk art. The narrow concept of nationality and folklore, formed in the era of pre-romanticism and completed mainly by Herder and the romantics, almost did not at all fit into its framework the specific folk culture and folk laughter in all the richness of its manifestations. And in the subsequent development of folklore and literary studies, the people laughing in the square did not become the subject of any close and deep cultural-historical, folkloristic and literary study. In the vast scientific literature devoted to the rite, myth, lyric and epic folk art, only the most modest place is given to the laughing moment. But at the same time, the main trouble is that the specific nature of folk laughter is perceived completely distorted, since ideas and concepts of laughter that are completely alien to it, which have developed in the conditions of bourgeois culture and aesthetics of modern times, are applied to it. Therefore, it can be said without exaggeration that the deep originality of the folk laughter culture of the past is still not revealed at all.

Meanwhile, both the volume and significance of this culture in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance were enormous. A whole boundless world of laughter forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious (in its tone) culture of the ecclesiastical and feudal Middle Ages. With all the variety of these forms and manifestations - areal festivals of the carnival type, individual laughter rites and cults, jesters and fools, giants, dwarfs and freaks, buffoons of various kinds and ranks, huge and varied parody literature and much more - all of them, these forms, have a single style and are parts and particles of a single and integral folk-laughter, carnival culture.

All the diverse manifestations and expressions of folk laughter culture can be subdivided into three main types of forms by their nature:

1. Ritual and spectacular forms(festivities of the carnival type, various public laughing events, etc.);

2. Verbal laughter(including parody) works of various kinds: oral and written, in Latin and in folk languages;

3. Various forms and genres of familiar-areal speech(swear words, God, oath, folk blazons, etc.).

All these three types of forms, reflecting - for all their heterogeneity - a single laughing aspect of the world, are closely interconnected and are diversely intertwined with each other.

Let's give a preliminary description of each of these types of laughter forms.

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Carnival-type festivals and associated laughing acts or rituals occupied a huge place in the life of a medieval person. In addition to carnivals in the proper sense with their many-day and complex square and street actions and processions, special “festivals of fools” (“festa stultorum”) and “donkey festival” were held, there was a special free “Easter laughter” (“risus paschalis”), consecrated by the tradition. ). Moreover, almost every church holiday had its own, also consecrated by tradition, folk-square laughing side. Such are, for example, the so-called "temple holidays", usually accompanied by fairs with their rich and varied system of areal amusements (with the participation of giants, dwarfs, freaks, "learned" animals). The carnival atmosphere prevailed in the days of the performances of the Mysteries and Sotis. It also reigned at such agricultural festivals as the grape harvest (vendange), which was also held in cities. Laughter usually accompanied both civil and domestic ceremonies and rituals: jesters and fools were their constant participants and parodically duplicated various moments of a serious ceremony (glorification of winners in tournaments, ceremonies for the transfer of fiefs, knights, etc.). And household feasts were not complete without elements of a laughter organization, for example, the election of queens and kings for the time of the feast “for laughter” (“roi pour rire”).

All the ritual and spectacular forms that we have named, organized at the beginning of laughter and consecrated by tradition, were common in all countries of medieval Europe, but they were distinguished by their special wealth and complexity in the Romanesque countries, including France. In the future, we will give a more complete and detailed analysis of ritual and spectacular forms in the course of our analysis of Rabelais' figurative system.

All these ceremonial-spectacular forms, as organized at the beginning laughter, extremely sharply, one might say fundamentally, differed from serious official - ecclesiastical and feudal-state - cult forms and ceremonies. They gave a completely different, emphatically unofficial, extra-church and extra-state aspect of the world, man and human relations; they seemed to be building on the other side of everything official second world and second life, in which all medieval people were more or less involved, in which they at certain times lived... This is a special kind two-worldness, without taking into account which neither the cultural consciousness of the Middle Ages, nor the culture of the Renaissance can be correctly understood. Ignoring or underestimating the laughing person folk medieval distorts the picture of the entire subsequent historical development of European culture.

The double aspect of the perception of the world and human life existed already at the earliest stages of the development of culture. In the folklore of primitive peoples, along with serious (in terms of organization and tone) cults, there were also laughter cults that ridiculed and humiliated the deity ("ritual laughter"), along with serious myths - laughter and abusive myths, next to the heroes - their parody doubles. Recently, these laughing rites and myths have begun to attract the attention of folklorists. 2
See very interesting analyzes of laughter doubles and considerations on this issue in the book "The Origin of the Heroic Epic" by EM Meletinsky (Moscow, 1963; in particular, on pp. 55–58); the book also contains bibliographic indications.

But in the early stages, in the conditions of the pre-class and pre-state social system, the serious and laughable aspects of the deity, the world and man were, apparently, equally sacred, equally, so to speak, “official”. This persists sometimes in relation to individual rites and in later periods. So, for example, in Rome and at the state stage, the ceremony of triumph almost on an equal footing included glorification and ridicule of the winner, and the funeral rite - and mourning (glorifying) and ridicule of the deceased. But under the conditions of the existing class and state system, complete equality of the two aspects becomes impossible, and all forms of laughter - some earlier, others later - move to the position of the unofficial aspect, undergo a certain rethinking, complication, deepening and become the main forms of expression of the people's world outlook, folk culture. Such are the carnival type of festivities of the ancient world, especially the Roman Saturnalia, such are the medieval carnivals. They, of course, are already very far from the ritual laughter of the primitive community.

What are the specific features of the laughter ritual and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages and - above all - what is their nature, that is, what is the kind of their being?

These, of course, are not religious rites like, for example, the Christian liturgy, with which they are linked by a distant genetic relationship. The laughter principle organizing carnival rituals absolutely frees them from any religious and church dogmatism, from mysticism and from reverence, they are completely devoid of both a magical and prayerful character (they do not force anything and do not ask for anything). Moreover, some carnival forms are directly a parody of a church cult. All carnival forms are consistently outside of the church and outside of the religion. They belong to a completely different sphere of being.

By its visual, concrete-sensual character and by the presence of a strong gaming element, they are close to artistic and figurative forms, namely to theatrical and spectacular. Indeed, theatrical and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages in a significant part gravitated towards the folk-square carnival culture and, to a certain extent, were part of it. But the main carnival core of this culture is not at all purely artistic a theatrical and spectacular form and is generally not included in the field of art. It is located on the borders of art and life itself. In essence, this is life itself, but framed in a special playful way.

Indeed, the carnival knows no division into performers and spectators. He does not know the ramp, even in its rudimentary form. The ramp would destroy the carnival (and vice versa: destroying the ramp would destroy the theatrical show). Carnival is not contemplated - in it live, and live all because, in theory, he nationwide... While the carnival is taking place, there is no other life for anyone but the carnival. There is nowhere to go from it, because the carnival knows no spatial boundaries. During the carnival, one can live only according to its laws, that is, according to the laws of the carnival freedom... The carnival has a universal character, it is a special state of the whole world, its rebirth and renewal, in which everyone is involved. Such is the carnival in its idea, in its essence, which was vividly felt by all its participants. This idea of carnival was most clearly manifested and realized in the Roman Saturnalia, which was thought of as a real and complete (but temporary) return to the earth of the Saturnian golden age. The traditions of the Saturnalia were not interrupted and were alive in the medieval carnival, which, more fully and purely than other medieval festivals, embodied this idea of universal renewal. Other medieval festivals of the carnival type were limited in one way or another and embodied the idea of carnival in a less complete and pure form; but even in them it was present and vividly felt as a temporary exit outside the usual (official) order of life.

So, in this respect, the carnival was not an artistic theatrical and spectacular form, but a kind of real (but temporary) form of life itself, which was not just played out, but which was lived almost in fact (for the duration of the carnival). It can be expressed this way: in the carnival, life itself plays, acting out - without a stage, without a stage, without actors, without spectators, that is, without any artistic and theatrical specifics - another free (free) form of its realization, its rebirth and renewal on best beginnings. The real form of life is here at the same time its revived ideal form.

The laughter culture of the Middle Ages is characterized by such figures as jesters and fools. They were, as it were, permanent, bearers of the carnival principle, fixed in ordinary (i.e., non-carnival) life. Such jesters and fools, such as, for example, Triboulet under Francis I (he also appears in Rabelais' novel), were not at all actors playing the roles of a jester and a fool on the stage (as later comic actors who played the roles of Harlequin, Hanswurst, etc. .). They remained fools and fools always and everywhere, wherever they appeared in life. Like jesters and fools, they are carriers of a special life form, real and ideal at the same time. They are on the borders of life and art (as if in a special intermediate sphere): they are not just eccentrics or stupid people (in the everyday sense), but they are not comic actors either.

So, in the carnival, life itself plays, and the game for a while becomes life itself. This is the specific nature of the carnival, the special kind of its being.

Carnival is the second life of the people, organized at the beginning of laughter. it his holiday life... Festivity is an essential feature of all laughter ritual and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages.

All these forms were also externally associated with church holidays. And even the carnival, which was not timed to coincide with any event of sacred history or any saint, adjoined the last days before Lent (that's why in France it was called “Mardi gras” or “Caremprenant”, in German countries “Fastnacht”). Even more significant is the genetic connection of these forms with the ancient pagan festivals of the agrarian type, which included an element of laughter in their ritual.

Celebration (any) is very important primary form human culture. It cannot be deduced and explained from the practical conditions and goals of social labor, or, in an even more vulgar form of explanation, from the biological (physiological) need for periodic rest. The festival has always had a substantial and deep semantic, world-contemplative content. No "exercise" in the organization and improvement of the social labor process, no "game of work" and no rest or respite from work by themselves can never become festive... For them to become festive, they must be joined by something from another sphere of being, from the sphere of spiritual and ideological. They must get sanction out of the world funds and necessary conditions, and from the world higher goals human existence, that is, from the world of ideals. Without this there is no and cannot be any festivity.

Celebration always has a significant bearing on time. It is always based on a definite and concrete concept of natural (cosmic), biological and historical time. At the same time, the festivities at all stages of their historical development were associated with crisis, turning points in the life of nature, society and man. Moments of death and rebirth, change and renewal have always been leading in the festive attitude. It was these moments - in the specific forms of certain holidays - that created the specific festivity of the holiday.

In the conditions of the class and feudal-state system of the Middle Ages, this festivity of the holiday, that is, its connection with the higher goals of human existence, with rebirth and renewal, could be realized in all its undistorted completeness and purity only in the carnival and in the folk-market side of other holidays. Here festivity became a form of the second life of the people, temporarily entering the utopian kingdom of universality, freedom, equality and abundance.

Official holidays of the Middle Ages - both church and feudal-state - did not take anywhere from the existing world order and did not create any second life. On the contrary, they sanctified, sanctioned the existing system and consolidated it. The connection with time became formal, changes and crises were relegated to the past. The official holiday, in essence, looked only back into the past, and with this past it sanctified the existing system in the present. The official holiday, sometimes even contrary to its own idea, asserted the stability, immutability and eternity of the entire existing world order: the existing hierarchy, existing religious, political and moral values, norms, and prohibitions. The holiday was a triumph of a ready-made, victorious, ruling truth, which appeared as an eternal, unchanging and indisputable truth. Therefore, the tone of the official holiday could only be monolithic serious, the laughing principle was alien to his nature. That is why the official holiday changed genuine the nature of human festivity, distorted it. But this genuine festivity was ineradicable, and therefore it was necessary to endure and even partially legalize it outside the official side of the holiday, to concede the people's square to it.

In contrast to the official holiday, the carnival triumphed, as it were, a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the existing system, the temporary abolition of all hierarchical relations, privileges, norms and prohibitions. It was a true celebration of time, a celebration of formation, change and renewal. He was hostile to all perpetuation, completion and end. He looked into an unfinished future.

Of particular importance was the abolition of all hierarchical relations during the carnival. On official holidays, hierarchical differences were clearly demonstrated: they were supposed to appear in all regalia of their rank, rank, merit and take a place corresponding to their rank. The holiday sanctified inequality. In contrast, at the carnival, everyone was considered equal. Here, on the carnival square, a special form of free familiar contact prevailed between people divided in ordinary, that is, non-carnival life by insurmountable barriers of class, property, official, family and age status. Against the background of the exceptional hierarchy of the feudal-medieval system and the extreme class and corporate disunity of people in the conditions of ordinary life, this free familiar contact between all people was felt very sharply and constituted an essential part of the general carnival outlook. A person was, as it were, reborn for new, purely human relations. The alienation temporarily disappeared. Man returned to himself and felt himself a man among people. And this genuine humanity of relations was not only an object of imagination or abstract thought, but was actually realized and experienced in living material-sensory contact. The ideal-utopian and the real temporarily merged in this one-of-a-kind carnival perception of the world.

This temporary ideal-real abolition of hierarchical relations between people created a special type of communication on the carnival square, impossible in ordinary life. Here, special forms of areal speech and gesture are developed, frank and free, not recognizing any distance between communicators, free from the usual (non-carnival) norms of etiquette and decency. A special carnival-areal style of speech has developed, examples of which we will find in abundance in Rabelais.

In the process of the centuries-old development of the medieval carnival, prepared by millennia of development of more ancient laughter rites (including - at the antique stage - Saturnalia), a kind of special language of carnival forms and symbols was developed, a language that is very rich and capable of expressing a single but complex carnival outlook of the people. This perception of the world, hostile to everything ready and completed, all claims to inviolability and eternity, required dynamic and changeable ("proteic"), playful and unsteady forms for its expression. All the forms and symbols of the carnival language are imbued with the pathos of changes and renewals, the consciousness of the cheerful relativity of the ruling truths and powers. It is very characteristic of a kind of logic of "reverse" (à l'envers), "on the contrary", "inside out", the logic of incessant movements of the top and bottom ("wheel"), face and rear, various types of parodies and travesty, reductions, profanation , clownish crowns and debunks. The second life, the second world of folk culture, is constructed to a certain extent as a parody of ordinary, that is, extra-carnival life, as "the world inside out." But it must be emphasized that carnival parody is very far from the purely negative and formal parody of modern times: in denial, carnival parody simultaneously revives and renews. In general, naked denial is completely alien to popular culture.

Here, in the introduction, we have only skimmed over the exceptionally rich and distinctive language of carnival forms and symbols. To understand this half-forgotten and in many ways already dark language for us is the main task of all our work. After all, it was this language that Rabelais used. Without knowing him, one cannot truly understand the Rabelaisian system of images. But the same carnival language was used in different ways and to varying degrees by Erasmus, and Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Lope de Vega, and Tirso de Molina, and Guevara, and Quevedo; it was used by the German "literature of fools" ("Narrenliteratur"), and Hans Sachs, and Fishart, and Grimmelshausen, and others. Without knowledge of this language, a comprehensive and complete understanding of the literature of the Renaissance and the Baroque is impossible. And not only fiction, but also the Renaissance utopias and the Renaissance worldview itself were deeply imbued with the carnival attitude and were often clothed in its forms and symbols.

A few preliminary words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. This is primarily holiday laugh... This, therefore, is not an individual reaction to this or that single (separate) "funny" phenomenon. Carnival laughter, first, nationwide(the nation, as we have already said, belongs to the very nature of the carnival), laugh all, this is laughter "to the world"; secondly, he versatile, it is aimed at everything and everyone (including the participants in the carnival themselves), the whole world seems funny, perceived and comprehended in its laughter aspect, in its cheerful relativity; third, finally, this laugh ambivalent: he is cheerful, jubilant and - at the same time - mocking, ridiculing, he denies and affirms, and buries and revives. This is carnival laughter.

Let us note an important feature of folk-festive laughter: this laughter is also directed at the laughing ones themselves. The people do not exclude themselves from the emerging whole world. He, too, is incomplete, too, dying, is born and renewed. This is one of the essential differences between folk-festive laughter from the purely satirical laughter of the new era. A pure satirist who knows only denying laughter puts himself outside the laughed phenomenon, opposes himself to it - this destroys the integrity of the laughter aspect of the world, the funny (negative) becomes a private phenomenon. Ambivalent laughter of the people expresses the point of view of the becoming whole world, which includes the laughing one himself.

Let us emphasize here the especially world-contemplative and utopian nature of this festive laughter and its focus on the higher. In it - in a significantly rethought form - there was still vivid ritual ridicule of the deity of the most ancient laughter rites. Everything that is cultic and limited has disappeared here, but the all-human, universal and utopian have remained.

The greatest bearer and culminator of this folk-carnival laughter in world literature was Rabelais. His work will allow us to penetrate into the complex and deep nature of this laughter.

The correct formulation of the problem of popular laughter is very important. In the literature about him, there is still a rough modernization of him: in the spirit of laughter literature of the new time, he is interpreted either as a purely denying satirical laughter (Rabelais is declared to be a pure satirist), or as a purely entertaining, thoughtlessly cheerful laughter, devoid of any world-contemplative depth. and strength. His ambivalence is usually not perceived at all.

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We turn to the second form of the laughter folk culture of the Middle Ages - to verbal laughter works (in Latin and in folk languages).

Of course, this is no longer folklore (although some of these works in folk languages can be attributed to folklore). But all this literature was imbued with a carnival outlook, widely used the language of carnival forms and images, developed under the cover of legalized carnival liberties and - in most cases - was organizationally connected with carnival-type festivals, and sometimes directly constituted, as it were, a literary part of them. 3
The situation was similar in ancient Rome, where the liberties of the Saturnalia, with which it was organizationally connected, extended to the laughter literature.

And the laughter in her is an ambivalent holiday laughter. It was all festive, recreational literature of the Middle Ages.

Carnival-type festivals, as we have already said, occupied a very large place in the life of medieval people even in time: the big cities of the Middle Ages lived a carnival life for up to three months a year in total. The influence of the carnival outlook on the vision and thinking of people was irresistible: it forced them, as it were, to abandon their official position (monk, cleric, scientist) and perceive the world in its carnival-laughter aspect. Not only schoolchildren and petty clergymen, but also high-ranking churchmen and learned theologians allowed themselves merry recreation, that is, rest from reverent seriousness, and "monastic jokes" ("Joca monacorum"), as one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages was called. In their cells, they created parody or semi-parody learned treatises and other humorous works in Latin.

The laughter literature of the Middle Ages developed for a whole millennium and even more, since its beginnings date back to Christian antiquity. Over such a long period of its existence, this literature, of course, has undergone quite significant changes (the literature in Latin has changed least of all). Diverse genre forms and stylistic variations were developed. But for all the historical and genre differences, this literature remains - to a greater or lesser extent - an expression of the people's carnival outlook and uses the language of carnival forms and symbols.

Semi-parody and purely parody literature in Latin was very widespread. The number of manuscripts of this literature that have come down to us is enormous. All official church ideology and rituals are shown here in a laughable aspect. Laughter penetrates here into the highest spheres of religious thought and worship.

One of the oldest and most popular works of this literature - "The Supper of Cyprian" ("Coena Cypriani") - provides a kind of carnival-feast travesty of the entire Holy Scripture (both the Bible and the Gospel). This work was sanctified by the tradition of free "Easter laughter" ("risus paschalis"); by the way, the distant echoes of the Roman Saturnalia are also heard in it. Another of the most ancient works of laughter literature - "Virgil Maro grammatical" ("Vergilius Maro grammaticus") - a semi-parody scholarly treatise on Latin grammar and at the same time a parody of school wisdom and scientific methods of the early Middle Ages. Both of these works, created almost at the very turn of the Middle Ages with the ancient world, open up the ludicrous Latin literature of the Middle Ages and have a decisive influence on its traditions. The popularity of these works survived almost to the Renaissance.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin wrote a serious and deep research about François Rabelais. It greatly influenced domestic and foreign literary criticism. Finished in 1940, the book was published only twenty years later - in 1960. In the manual, we will refer to the second edition: “MM Bakhtin Francois Rabelais' creativity and folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. - M .: Hood. lit., 1990. - 543 p. "
FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM. In our country, little attention is paid to Rabelais' work. Meanwhile, Western literary critics place him in genius immediately after Shakespeare or even next to him, as well as next to Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes. There is no doubt that Rabelais influenced the development of not only French, but also world literature in general. Bakhtin stresses the connection between Rabelais' creativity and the folk culture of humor of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is in this direction that Bakhtin interprets Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Researchers of Rabelais' work usually note the predominance in his work of images of the "material-bodily bottom" (M. Bakhtin's term - SS). Feces, sex life, gluttony, drunkenness - everything is shown very realistically, stuck out in the foreground. These images are presented in a literal and figuratively exaggerated form, in all their naturalism. Similar images are found in Shakespeare, and in Boccaccio, and in Cervantes, but not in such a richly satiated form. Some researchers have explained this side of Rabelais's work as "a reaction to the asceticism of the Middle Ages" or the emerging bourgeois egoism. However, Bakhtin explains this specificity of Rabelais' text by the fact that it comes from the folk laughter culture of the Renaissance, because it was in carnivals and familiar square speech that the images of the material-bodily bottom were used very actively and from there Rabelais was drawn. Bakhtin calls this side of the French writer 's creativity "grotesque realism."
The bearer of material-bodily imagery is not an individual egoist, Bakhtin believes, but the people themselves, "eternally growing and renewing." Gargantua and Pantagruel are symbols of the people. Therefore, everything bodily here is so grandiose, exaggerated, immense. This exaggeration, according to Bakhtin, has a positive, affirming character. This explains the fun, festivity of bodily images. On the pages of Rabelais's book, a jubilant holiday is celebrated - "a feast for the whole world." The main feature of what Bakhtin called "grotesque realism" is the function of "lowering", when everything lofty, spiritual, ideal is transferred to the bodily plane, "to the plane of earth and body." Bakhtin writes: “The top is the sky, the bottom is the earth; the earth is the consuming principle (grave, womb), and the beginning giving birth, regenerating (mother's womb). This is the cosmic aspect of top and bottom topography. But there is also a bodily aspect. The top is the face, the head; bottom - genitals, abdomen and backside. Descent is a landing when buried and sown at the same time. Buried in the ground so that she gives birth more and better. This is on the one hand. On the other hand, decline means approaching the lower organs of the body, therefore, familiarization with processes such as copulation, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, digestion, and excrement. And since this is so, then, Bakhtin believes, the decline is "ambivalent," it simultaneously denies and affirms. He writes that the bottom is the giving birth earth and the bodily bosom, "the bottom always conceives." The body shown in this way is an eternally unprepared, eternally created and creative body, this is a link in the chain of generic development, Bakhtin believes.
This concept of the body is also found among other masters of the Renaissance, for example, among the artists I. Bosch and Bruegel the Elder. To understand the undeniable charm of Rabelais' text, Bakhtin believes, one must bear in mind the closeness of his language to the folk culture of laughter. Let's turn to the text of Rabelais in order to draw unique examples of his work.

INTRODUCTION FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM

Chapter one. SLAVE IN A STORY OF LAUGHTER

Chapter two. A FLAT WORD IN ROMANE RABLE

Chapter three. FOLK-FESTIVAL FORMS AND IMAGES IN ROMANE RABLA

Chapter four. RABLE FOOD

Chapter five. SMOOTHY BODY IMAGE IN RABLE AND ITS SOURCES

Chapter six. IMAGES OF THE MATERIAL-BODY BOTTOM IN ROMANE RABLE

Chapter seven. IMAGES OF RABLE AND MODERN REALITY

Application. RABLE AND GOGOL

NOTES

INTRODUCTION FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM

Of all the great writers of world literature, Rabelais is the least popular, least studied, least understood and appreciated in our country.

“Rabelais collected wisdom in the folk element of old provincial dialects, sayings, proverbs, school farces, from the lips of fools and jesters. But, being refracted through this buffoonery, the genius of the century and its prophetic power are revealed in all its greatness. Wherever he does not find yet, he foresees, he promises, he directs. In this forest of dreams, under each leaf there are fruits that the future will gather. This whole book is a “golden branch” (here and in subsequent quotations, italics are mine. - MB).

All such judgments and assessments are, of course, relative. We are not going to solve here the questions of whether it is possible to put Rabelais next to Shakespeare, whether he is higher or lower than Cervantes, etc. But the historical place of Rabelais among these creators of new European literatures, that is, in the series: Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes, in any case, is not subject to any doubt. Rabelais substantially determined the fate of not only French literature and the French literary language, but also the fate of world literature (probably no less than Cervantes). There is also no doubt that he is the most democratic among these founders of new literatures. But the most important thing for us is that it is more closely and more essential than others associated with folk sources, moreover - specific (Michelet lists them quite correctly, although far from complete); these sources determined the entire system of his images and his artistic worldview.

This riddle can only be resolved through a deep study of Rabelais' folk sources. If Rabelais seems so lonely and unlike anyone else among the representatives of the "big literature" of the last four centuries of history, then against the background of correctly disclosed folk art, on the contrary, these four centuries of literary development may seem to be something specific and like nothing similar, and the images of Rabelais will be at home in the millennia of development of folk culture.

Folk laughter and its forms are, as we have already said, the least studied area of folk art. The narrow concept of nationality and folklore, formed in the era of pre-romanticism and completed mainly by Herder and the romantics, almost did not at all fit into its framework the specific folk culture and folk laughter in all the richness of its manifestations. And in the subsequent development of folklore and literary studies the people laughing in the square did not become the subject of any close and deep cultural-historical, folkloristic and literary study. In the vast scientific literature devoted to the rite, myth, lyric and epic folk art, only the most modest place is given to the laughing moment. But at the same time, the main trouble is that the specific nature of folk laughter is perceived completely distorted, since ideas and concepts of laughter that are completely alien to it, which have developed in the conditions of bourgeois culture and aesthetics of modern times, are applied to it. Therefore, it can be said without exaggeration that the deep originality of the folk laughter culture of the past is still not revealed at all.

All the diverse manifestations and expressions of folk laughter culture can be subdivided into three main types of forms by their nature:

1. Ritual and spectacular forms (carnival-type festivities, various outdoor laughing events, etc.);

2. Verbal laughter (including parody) works of various kinds: oral and written, in Latin and in folk languages;

3. Various forms and genres of familiar-areal speech (curses, God, oath, folk blazons, etc.).

All these three types of forms, reflecting - for all their heterogeneity - a single laughing aspect of the world, are closely interconnected and are diversely intertwined with each other.

Let's give a preliminary description of each of these types of laughter forms.

All these ceremonial and spectacular forms, as organized at the beginning of laughter, differed extremely sharply, one might say in principle, from the serious official - church and feudal-state - cult forms and ceremonies. They gave a completely different, emphatically unofficial, extra-church and extra-state aspect of the world, man and human relations; they, as it were, were building on the other side of the official world a second world and a second life, in which all medieval people were more or less involved, in which they lived at certain times. This is a special kind of two-worldness, without which neither the cultural consciousness of the Middle Ages nor the culture of the Renaissance can be correctly understood. Ignoring or underestimating the laughing folk Middle Ages distorts the picture and the entire subsequent historical development of European culture.

But in the early stages, in the conditions of the pre-class and pre-state social system, the serious and laughable aspects of the deity, the world and man were, apparently, equally sacred, equally, so to speak, “official”. This persists sometimes in relation to individual rites and in later periods. So, for example, in Rome and at the state stage, the ceremony of triumph almost on an equal footing included glorification and ridicule of the winner, and the funeral rite - and mourning (glorifying) and ridicule of the deceased. But in the conditions of the existing class and state system, complete equality of the two aspects becomes impossible and all forms of laughter - some earlier, others later - move to the position of the unofficial aspect, undergo a certain rethinking, complication, deepening and become the main forms of expression of the people's world outlook, folk culture. Such are the carnival type of festivities of the ancient world, especially the Roman Saturnalia, such are the medieval carnivals. They, of course, are already very far from the ritual laughter of the primitive community.

What are the specific features of the laughter ritual and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages and - above all - what is their nature, that is, what is the kind of their being?

In their visual, concrete-sensual character and in the presence of a strong playful element, they are close to artistic-figurative forms, namely to theatrical and spectacular ones. Indeed, theatrical and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages in a significant part gravitated towards the folk-square carnival culture and, to a certain extent, were part of it. But the main carnival core of this culture is not at all a purely artistic theatrical and spectacular form and does not belong to the realm of art at all. It is located on the borders of art and life itself. In essence, this is life itself, but framed in a special playful way.

Indeed, the carnival knows no division into performers and spectators. He does not know the ramp, even in its rudimentary form. The ramp would destroy the carnival (and vice versa: destroying the ramp would destroy the theatrical show). Carnival is not contemplated, - everyone lives in it, and everyone lives in it, because, according to its idea, it is nationwide. While the carnival is taking place, there is no other life for anyone but the carnival. There is nowhere to go from it, because the carnival knows no spatial boundaries. During the carnival, one can only live according to its laws, that is, according to the laws of carnival freedom. The carnival has a universal character, it is a special state of the whole world, its rebirth and renewal, in which everyone is involved. Such is the carnival in its idea, in its essence, which was vividly felt by all its participants. This idea of carnival was most clearly manifested and realized in the Roman Saturnalia, which was thought of as a real and complete (but temporary) return to the earth of the Saturnian golden age. The traditions of the Saturnalia were not interrupted and were alive in the medieval carnival, which, more fully and purely than other medieval festivals, embodied this idea of universal renewal. Other medieval festivals of the carnival type were limited in one way or another and embodied the idea of carnival in a less complete and pure form; but even in them it was present and vividly felt as a temporary exit outside the usual (official) order of life.

The laughter culture of the Middle Ages is characterized by such figures as jesters and fools. They were, as it were, permanent, fixed in ordinary (i.e. non-carnival) life, carriers of the carnival principle. Such jesters and fools, such as, for example, Triboulet under Francis I (he also appears in Rabelais' novel), were not at all actors playing the roles of a jester and a fool on the stage (as later comic actors who played the roles of Harlequin, Hanswurst, etc. .). They remained fools and fools always and everywhere, wherever they appeared in life. Like jesters and fools, they are carriers of a special life form, real and ideal at the same time. They are on the borders of life and art (as if in a special intermediate sphere): they are not just eccentrics or stupid people (in the everyday sense), but they are not comic actors either.

So, in the carnival, life itself plays, and the game for a while becomes life itself. This is the specific nature of the carnival, the special kind of its being.

Carnival is the second life of the people, organized at the beginning of laughter. This is his holiday life. Festivity is an essential feature of all laughter ritual and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages.

Celebration (whatever) is a very important primary form of human culture. It cannot be deduced and explained from the practical conditions and goals of social labor, or, in an even more vulgar form of explanation, from the biological (physiological) need for periodic rest. The festival has always had a substantial and deep semantic, world-contemplative content. No "exercise" in the organization and improvement of the social labor process, no "game of work" and no rest or respite from work in and of themselves can never become festive. For them to become festive, they must be joined by something from another sphere of being, from the sphere of spiritual and ideological. They must receive sanction not from the world of means and necessary conditions, but from the world of the highest goals of human existence, that is, from the world of ideals. Without this there is no and cannot be any festivity.

Celebration always has a significant bearing on time. It is always based on a definite and concrete concept of natural (cosmic), biological and historical time. At the same time, the festivities at all stages of their historical development were associated with crisis, turning points in the life of nature, society and man. Moments of death and rebirth, change and renewal have always been leading in the festive attitude. It was these moments - in the specific forms of certain holidays - that created the specific festivity of the holiday.

Official holidays of the Middle Ages - both church and feudal-state - did not take anywhere from the existing world order and did not create any second life. On the contrary, they sanctified, sanctioned the existing system and consolidated it. The connection with time became formal, changes and crises were relegated to the past. The official holiday, in essence, looked only back, into the past, and with this past it consecrated the existing system. The official holiday, sometimes even contrary to its own idea, asserted the stability, immutability and eternity of the entire existing world order: the existing hierarchy, existing religious, political and moral values, norms, and prohibitions. The holiday was a triumph of a ready-made, victorious, ruling truth, which appeared as an eternal, unchanging and indisputable truth. Therefore, the tone of the official holiday could only be monolithically serious, the laughing principle was alien to its nature. That is why the official holiday betrayed the true nature of human festivity, distorted it. But this genuine festivity was ineradicable, and therefore it was necessary to endure and even partially legalize it outside the official side of the holiday, to concede the people's square to it.

In the process of the centuries-old development of the medieval carnival, prepared by millennia of development of more ancient laughter rites (including - at the antique stage - Saturnalia), a kind of special language of carnival forms and symbols was developed, a language that is very rich and capable of expressing a single but complex carnival outlook of the people. This perception of the world, hostile to everything ready and completed, all claims to inviolability and eternity, required dynamic and changeable ("proteic"), playful and unsteady forms for its expression. All the forms and symbols of the carnival language are imbued with the pathos of changes and renewals, the consciousness of the cheerful relativity of the ruling truths and powers. It is very characteristic of a kind of logic of "reverse" (al`envers), "on the contrary", "inside out", the logic of incessant movements of the top and bottom ("wheel"), face and rear, various types of parodies and travesty, reductions, profanations, clownish crowns and debunks. The second life, the second world of folk culture, is constructed to a certain extent as a parody of ordinary, that is, extra-carnival life, as "the world inside out." But it must be emphasized that carnival parody is very far from the purely negative and formal parody of modern times: in denial, carnival parody simultaneously revives and renews. In general, naked denial is completely alien to popular culture.

Here, in the introduction, we have only skimmed over the exceptionally rich and distinctive language of carnival forms and symbols. To understand this half-forgotten and in many ways already dark language for us is the main task of all our work. After all, it was this language that Rabelais used. Without knowing him, one cannot truly understand the Rabelaisian system of images. But the same carnival language was used in different ways and to varying degrees by Erasmus, and Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Lope de Vega, and Tirso de Molina, and Guevara, and Quevedo; it was used by the German "literature of fools" ("Narrenliteratur"), and Hans Sachs, and Fishart, and Grimmelshausen, and others. Without knowledge of this language, a comprehensive and complete understanding of the literature of the Renaissance and the Baroque is impossible. And not only fiction, but also Renaissance utopias, and the Renaissance worldview itself were deeply imbued with the carnival worldview and were often clothed in its forms and symbols.

A few preliminary words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. This is, first of all, a festive laugh. This, therefore, is not an individual reaction to this or that single (separate) "funny" phenomenon. Carnival laughter, firstly, is nationwide (nationwide, as we have already said, belongs to the very nature of the carnival), everyone laughs, this is laughter “in the world”; secondly, it is universal, it is aimed at everything and everyone (including the participants in the carnival themselves), the whole world seems funny, perceived and comprehended in its laughter aspect, in its cheerful relativity; thirdly, finally, this laughter is ambivalent: it is cheerful, exultant and - at the same time - mocking, ridiculing, it denies and affirms, and buries and revives. This is carnival laughter.

The greatest bearer and culminator of this folk-carnival laughter in world literature was Rabelais. His work will allow us to penetrate into the complex and deep nature of this laughter.

We turn to the second form of the laughter folk culture of the Middle Ages - to verbal laughter works (in Latin and in folk languages).

Of course, this is no longer folklore (although some of these works in folk languages can be attributed to folklore). But all this literature was imbued with a carnival outlook, widely used the language of carnival forms and images, developed under the cover of legalized carnival liberties and - in most cases - was organizationally connected with carnival-type festivals, and sometimes directly constituted, as it were, a literary part of them. And the laughter in her is an ambivalent holiday laughter. It was all festive, recreational literature of the Middle Ages.

In the further development of ludicrous Latin literature, parody doublets are created for literally all moments of church worship and doctrine. This is the so-called "parodia sacra", that is, "sacred parody", one of the most distinctive and still insufficiently understood phenomena of medieval literature. Quite numerous parody liturgies have come down to us ("The Liturgy of Drunkards", "The Liturgy of the Players", etc.), parodies of the Gospel readings, of prayers, including the most sacred ones ("Our Father", "Ave Maria", etc.) , on litanies, on church hymns, on psalms, travesty of various evangelical sayings, etc. Parodic wills were also created ("The Testament of a Pig", "The Testament of a Donkey"), parodic epitaphs, parodic resolutions of cathedrals, etc. This literature is almost boundless. And all of it was sanctified by tradition and, to some extent, was tolerated by the church. Part of it was created and existed under the auspices of "Easter laughter" or "Christmas laughter", while a part (parody liturgies and prayers) was directly related to the "holiday of fools" and, possibly, was performed during this holiday.

In addition to the above, there were other varieties of laughter Latin literature, for example, parody disputes and dialogues, parody chronicles, etc. All this literature in Latin suggested that its authors have a certain degree of scholarship (sometimes quite high). All these were echoes and time off of the open-air carnival laughter within the walls of monasteries, universities and schools.

Latin laughter literature of the Middle Ages found its completion at the highest Renaissance stage in the "Praise of Folly" by Erasmus (this is one of the greatest products of carnival laughter in all world literature) and in "Letters of Dark Men."

No less rich and even more varied was the laughter literature of the Middle Ages in folk languages. And here we will find phenomena similar to the “parodia sacra”: parody prayers, parodic sermons (the so-called “sermons joieux”, that is, “merry sermons”, in France), Christmas songs, parody hagiographic legends, etc. But prevail here secular parodies and travesty, giving a laughable aspect of the feudal system and feudal heroism. Such are the parodic epics of the Middle Ages: animals, buffoonery, roguish and foolish; elements of the parodic heroic epic among the Kantastorians, the appearance of laughable understudies of epic heroes (comic Roland), etc. Parody chivalric novels were created (The Mule Without a Bridle, Aucassin and Nicolette). Various genres of laughter rhetoric are developing: all kinds of "debates" of a carnival type, disputes, dialogues, comic "words of praise" (or "Glorifications"), etc. Carnival laughter sounds in the fablio and in a kind of laughing lyrics of vagants (wandering schoolchildren).

All these genres and works of laughter literature are associated with the carnival square and, of course, use carnival forms and symbols much more widely than Latin laughter literature. But the most closely and directly connected with the carnival square is the laughter drama of the Middle Ages. Already the first (of those that have come down to us) comic play by Adam de la Halle "Playing in the Gazebo" is a wonderful example of a purely carnival vision and understanding of life and the world; it contains in embryonic form many moments of the future world of Rabelais. To a greater or lesser extent, miracles and morals are carnivalized. Laughter has penetrated into the mysteries too: the diableries of the mysteries are of a sharply expressed carnival character. Soti is a deeply carnivalized genre of the late Middle Ages.

We have touched upon here only some of the most famous phenomena of laughter literature, which can be discussed without any special comments. This is enough to pose the problem. In the future, in the course of our analysis of Rabelais's work, we will have to dwell in more detail on both these and many other less well-known genres and works of laughter literature of the Middle Ages.

We pass to the third form of expression of folk laughter culture - to some specific phenomena and genres of familiar-areal speech of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

We have already said before that on the carnival square, in the conditions of the temporary abolition of all hierarchical differences and barriers between people and the abolition of some norms and prohibitions of ordinary, that is, non-carnival life, a special ideal-real type of communication between people is created, which is impossible in ordinary life. This is a free familiar-areal contact between people, who does not know any distance between them.

A new type of communication always gives rise to new forms of speech life: new speech genres, rethinking or abolition of some old forms, etc. Similar phenomena are known to everyone and in the conditions of modern speech communication. For example, when two people enter into a close friendship, the distance between them decreases (they are “on short leg"), And therefore the forms of verbal communication between them change dramatically: a familiar" you "appears, the form of address and name changes (Ivan Ivanovich turns into Vanya or Vanka), sometimes the name is replaced by a nickname, abusive expressions used in an affectionate sense appear, it becomes possible mutual ridicule (where there are no short relationships, only someone “third” can be the object of ridicule), you can pat each other on the shoulder and even on the stomach (a typical carnival gesture), speech etiquette and speech prohibitions are weakened, obscene words and expressions appear, and etc., etc. But, of course, such familiar contact in modern life is very far from free familiar contact in the people's carnival square. He lacks the main thing: nationality, festivity, utopian comprehension, world-contemplative depth. In general, the popularization of some carnival forms in modern times, while retaining the outer shell, loses their inner meaning. Let us note here in passing that the elements of the ancient rituals of twinning were preserved in the carnival in a rethought and deepened form. Through the carnival, some of these elements entered the life of modern times, almost completely losing their carnival comprehension here.

So, a new type of carnival-areal familiar address is reflected in a number of phenomena of speech life. Let's dwell on some of them.

For familiar-areal speech, a rather frequent use of swearing is characteristic, that is, swear words and whole swear words, sometimes quite long and complex. Swearing is usually grammatically and semantically isolated in the context of speech and is perceived as complete whole, like sayings. Therefore, swearing can be spoken of as a special speech genre of familiar-areal speech. By its genesis, curses are not homogeneous and had different functions in the conditions of primitive communication, mainly of a magical, incantatory nature. But for us, of particular interest are those profanity-shame words of the deity, which were a necessary component of the ancient laughter cults. These swear words, shameful words, were ambivalent: reducing and mortifying, they simultaneously revived and renewed. It was these ambivalent shameful words that determined the nature of the speech genre of swearing in carnival-market communication. In the conditions of the carnival, they underwent a significant rethinking: they completely lost their magical and generally practical nature, acquired an end in themselves, universality and depth. In such a transformed form, curses contributed to the creation of a free carnival atmosphere and the second, laughable, aspect of the world.

Swearing is in many ways analogous to god or vows (jurons). They also flooded with familiarity speech. Bozhba should also be considered a special speech genre on the same grounds as swearing (isolation, completeness, self-determination). Bozhba and oaths were initially not associated with laughter, but they were ousted from the official spheres of speech, as violating the speech norms of these spheres, and therefore moved to the free sphere of familiar-areal speech. Here, in the carnival atmosphere, they were imbued with a laughing principle and acquired an ambivalence.

The fate of other speech phenomena is similar, for example, obscenities of various kinds. Familiar-areal speech became, as it were, the reservoir where various speech phenomena, forbidden and ousted from official speech communication, accumulated. For all their genetic heterogeneity, they were equally imbued with a carnival outlook, changed their ancient speech functions, assimilated a common laughing tone and became, as it were, sparks of a single carnival fire that renewed the world.

We will dwell on other peculiar speech phenomena of familiar-areal speech in due time. In conclusion, let us emphasize that all genres and forms of this speech had a powerful influence on the artistic style of Rabelais.

These are the three main forms of expression of the folk culture of laughter in the Middle Ages. All the phenomena we have analyzed here are, of course, known to science and have been studied by it (especially laughter literature in popular languages). But they were studied separately and in complete isolation from their mother's womb - from carnival ritual and spectacular forms, that is, they were studied outside the unity of the folk culture of laughter of the Middle Ages. The problem of this culture was not raised at all. Therefore, behind the diversity and heterogeneity of all these phenomena, they did not see a single and deeply peculiar laughter aspect of the world, of which they are different fragments. Therefore, the essence of all these phenomena remained not fully disclosed. These phenomena were studied in the light of the cultural, aesthetic and literary norms of the new time, that is, they were measured not by their own measure, but by measures alien to them of the new time. They have been modernized and therefore misinterpreted and misjudged. Remained incomprehensible and uniform in its diversity, a special type of laughter imagery, characteristic of the folk culture of the Middle Ages and generally alien to the new time (especially the 19th century). We must now proceed to a preliminary characterization of this type of laughter imagery.

In the work of Rabelais, they usually note the exclusive predominance of the material-bodily principle of life: images of the body itself, food, drink, feces, sex life. Moreover, these images are given in an overly exaggerated, exaggerated form. Rabelais was hailed as the greatest poet of "flesh" and "womb" (for example, Victor Hugo). Others accused him of "crude physiology", "biologism", "naturalism", etc. Similar phenomena, but in a less harsh expression, were found in other representatives of the literature of the Renaissance (Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes). This was explained as the "rehabilitation of the flesh" characteristic of the Renaissance, as a reaction to the asceticism of the Middle Ages. Sometimes they saw this as a typical manifestation of the bourgeois principle in the Renaissance, that is, the material interest of the "economic man" in its private, egoistic form.

All these and similar explanations are nothing more than various forms of modernization of material-bodily images in the literature of the Renaissance; those narrowed and changed meanings that “materiality”, “body”, “bodily life” (food, drink, excrement, etc.) received in the worldview of subsequent centuries (mainly the 19th century) are transferred to these images.

Meanwhile, the images of the material-bodily principle in Rabelais (and in other writers of the Renaissance) are the legacy (albeit somewhat changed at the Renaissance stage) of folk laughter culture, of that special type of imagery and, more broadly, of that special aesthetic concept of being that is characteristic of this culture and which differs sharply from the aesthetic concepts of subsequent centuries (starting with classicism). We will call this aesthetic concept - for the time being conventionally - grotesque realism.

The material-bodily principle in grotesque realism (that is, in the figurative system of folk laughter culture) is given in its national, festive and utopian aspect. The cosmic, social and corporeal are given here in an indissoluble unity, as an inseparable living whole. And this whole is cheerful and blissful.

In grotesque realism, the material-bodily element is a deeply positive beginning, and this element is given here not at all in a particular-egoistic form and not at all in isolation from other spheres of life. The material-bodily principle is perceived here as universal and nation-wide, and it is precisely how this is opposed to any separation from the material-bodily roots of the world, any isolation and closure in oneself, any abstract ideality, any claims to a significance detached from the earth and the body. The body and bodily life, we repeat, are here cosmic and at the same time nationwide; it is not at all a body or physiology in the narrow and precise modern sense; they are not completely individualized and not delimited from the rest of the world. The bearer of the material-bodily principle is here not an isolated biological individual and not a bourgeois egoistic individual, but the people, moreover, the people in their development are eternally growing and renewing. That is why everything bodily here is so grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. This exaggeration is positive and affirming. The leading moment in all these images of material-bodily life is fertility, growth, overflowing excess. All manifestations of material-bodily life and all things are referred here, we repeat once again, not to a single biological individual and not to a private and egoistic, "economic" person, but, as it were, to a national, collective, generic body (further we will clarify the meaning these statements). The surplus and nationality determine the specific cheerful and festive (and not everyday) character of all images of material bodily life. The material-bodily principle here is the beginning of a festive, feasting, jubilant, this is a "feast for the whole world." This character of the material-bodily principle is preserved to a large extent in literature and in the art of the Renaissance, and most fully, of course, in Rabelais.

The leading feature of grotesque realism is the reduction, that is, the transfer of everything high, spiritual, ideal abstract into the material-bodily plane, into the plane of the earth and the body in their indissoluble unity. So, for example, "The Supper of Cyprian", which we mentioned above, and many other Latin parodies of the Middle Ages are reduced to a large extent to a selection from the Bible, the Gospel and other sacred texts of all material-bodily degrading and grounding details. In the laughter dialogues of Solomon and Marcolf, very popular in the Middle Ages, the high and serious (in tone) maxims of Solomon are contrasted with the cheerful and derogatory sayings of the jester Marcolf, transferring the issue under discussion to the emphatically rough material-bodily sphere (food, drink, digestion, sex life). It must be said that one of the leading moments in the comic of the medieval jester was precisely the translation of any high ceremony and rite into the material-bodily plane; such was the behavior of jesters at tournaments, at knighthood ceremonies and others. It is in these traditions of grotesque realism that lie, in particular, many of the declines and landings of chivalric ideology and ceremonial in Don Quixote.

In the Middle Ages, a cheerful parody grammar was widespread among schoolchildren and scholars. The tradition of such grammar, dating back to the "Grammar Virgil" (we mentioned it above), stretches through all the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and is still alive today orally in theological schools, colleges and seminaries in Western Europe. The essence of this cheerful grammar comes down mainly to rethinking all grammatical categories - cases, verb forms, etc. - in the material-bodily plane, mainly erotic.

But not only parodies in the narrow sense, but also all other forms of grotesque realism are degraded, grounded, excluded. This is the main feature of grotesque realism, which distinguishes it from all forms of high art and literature of the Middle Ages. Folk laughter, organizing all forms of grotesque realism, was from time immemorial associated with the material-bodily lower. Laughter detracts and materializes.

What is the nature of these reductions inherent in all forms of grotesque realism? We will give a preliminary answer to this question here. Rabelais' work will allow us in subsequent chapters to clarify, expand and deepen our understanding of these forms.

The lowering and lowering of the high in grotesque realism is not at all formal and not at all relative. "Top" and "bottom" here have an absolute and strictly topographic meaning. The top is the sky; the bottom is the earth; the earth is the consuming principle (the grave, the womb) and the beginning giving birth, regenerating (the mother's womb). This is the topographic meaning of the top and bottom in the cosmic aspect. In the actual bodily aspect, which is nowhere clearly limited from the cosmic, the top is the face (head), the bottom is the productive organs, the stomach and back. With these absolute topographic values of top and bottom, grotesque realism, including medieval parody, works. Decrease here means landing, communion with the earth, as an absorbing and at the same time giving birth principle: lowering, and burying and sowing at the same time, mortifying, in order to give birth again better and more. Decrease also means an introduction to the life of the lower body, the life of the abdomen and the productive organs, and therefore to such acts as copulation, conception, pregnancy, birth, devouring, and excrement. The decline is digging a bodily grave for a new birth. Therefore, it has not only a destructive, negating meaning, but also a positive, regenerating one: it is ambivalent, it denies and affirms at the same time. They are not simply thrown down into oblivion, into absolute annihilation - no, they are thrown down to the productive bottom, to the very bottom where conception and new birth take place, from where everything grows in abundance; grotesque realism does not know the other bottom, the bottom is the giving birth earth and the bodily bosom, the bottom always conceives.

Therefore, medieval parody is completely unlike the purely formal literary parody of modern times.

And literary parody, like any parody, reduces, but this decline is purely negative and devoid of reviving ambivalence. Therefore, parody as a genre and all kinds of decline under the conditions of modern times could not, of course, retain their former enormous significance.

Decreases (parody and others) are very characteristic of the literature of the Renaissance, which continued in this respect the best traditions of folk laughter culture (especially full and deep in Rabelais). But the material-bodily principle is already undergoing some rethinking and narrowing, its universalism and festivity are somewhat weakened. True, this process is still at its very beginning here. This can be seen in the example of Don Quixote.

The main line of parodic declines for Cervantes is in the nature of a landing, an introduction to the regenerating productive force of the earth and the body. This is a continuation of the grotesque line. But at the same time, Cervantes's material-bodily principle has already become somewhat depleted and smaller. It is in a state of a kind of crisis and bifurcation, the images of material-bodily life begin to live with it a double life.

Sancho's fat belly ("Panza"), his appetite and thirst are fundamentally still deeply carnival; his craving for abundance and completeness, at its core, is not yet of a private-egoistic and detached character, it is a craving for universal abundance. Sancho is a direct descendant of the ancient belly demons of fertility, whose figures we see, for example, on the famous Corinthian vases. Therefore, in the images of food and drink, a folk-feast, festive moment is still alive here. Sancho's materialism - his belly, appetite, his abundant excrement - is the absolute bottom of grotesque realism, this is a cheerful bodily grave (belly, belly, earth) dug for the detached, abstract and dead idealism of Don Quixote; in this grave, the "knight of the sad image" must, as it were, die in order to be born new, better and bigger; it is a material-bodily and nationwide adjustment to individual and abstract-spiritual claims; in addition, it is a popular correction of laughter to the one-sided seriousness of these spiritual claims (the absolute bottom always laughs, this is a giving birth and laughing death). The role of Sancho in relation to Don Quixote can be compared with the role of medieval parodies in relation to high ideology and cult, with the role of a jester in relation to a serious ceremony, the role of "Charnage" in relation to "Careme", etc. A reviving cheerful beginning, but in a weakened degree, is also found in the grounding images of all these mills (giants), taverns (castles), herds of rams and sheep (troops of knights), innkeepers (the owner of the castle), prostitutes (noble ladies), etc. NS. All this is a typical grotesque carnival that traverses the battle into a kitchen and a feast, weapons and helmets into kitchen utensils and razor bowls, blood into wine (an episode of the battle with wine skins), etc. This is the first carnival side of the life of all these material-bodily images on the pages of Cervantes's novel. But it is precisely this side that creates the great style of Cervantes realism, its universalism and its deep popular utopianism.

On the other hand, bodies and things begin to acquire a private, private character from Cervantes, become smaller, become domesticated, become immovable elements of private life, objects of selfish lust and possession. This is no longer a positive giving birth and renewal bottom, but a dull and deathly obstacle to all ideal aspirations. In the private-everyday sphere of life of detached individuals, the images of the bodily bottom, while retaining the moment of negation, almost completely lose their positive generating and renewing power; their connection with the earth and space is broken, and they are narrowed down to naturalistic images of everyday eroticism. But with Cervantes, this process is only at the very beginning.

This second aspect of the life of corporeal images is woven into a complex and contradictory unity with their first aspect. And in the dual tense and contradictory life of these images - their strength and their highest historical realism. This is a kind of drama of the material-bodily principle in the literature of the Renaissance, the drama of the separation of the body and things from that unity of the giving birth earth and the nation's growing and eternally renewing body with which they were associated in folk culture. This gap for the artistic and ideological consciousness of the Renaissance has not yet been fully completed. The material-bodily bottom of grotesque realism performs here its uniting, reducing, debunking, but at the same time regenerating functions. No matter how scattered, separated and isolated individual "private" bodies and things - the realism of the Renaissance does not cut the umbilical cord that connects them with the giving birth womb of the earth and people. A single body and a thing do not coincide here with themselves, are not equal to themselves, as in the naturalistic realism of subsequent centuries; they represent the material-bodily growing whole of the world and, therefore, go beyond the boundaries of their individuality; the particular and the universal are still fused in them in a contradictory unity. The carnival outlook is the deep foundation of Renaissance literature.

The complexity of Renaissance realism is still not sufficiently understood. In it, two types of the figurative concept of the world are crossed: one, which goes back to the folk culture of laughter, and the other, the bourgeois concept of ready-made and scattered existence proper. Renaissance realism is characterized by interruptions in these two conflicting lines of perception of the material-bodily principle. The growing, inexhaustible, indestructible, excess, bearing the material principle of life, the eternally laughing principle, dethroning and renewing everything, is contradictory combined with the crushed and inert "material principle" in the everyday life of class society.

Ignoring grotesque realism makes it difficult to correctly understand not only Renaissance realism, but also a number of very important phenomena in subsequent stages of realistic development. The entire field of realistic literature of the last three centuries of its development is literally littered with fragments of grotesque realism, which sometimes turn out to be not only fragments, but show the ability for new life activity. In most cases, all these are grotesque images that have either completely lost or weakened their positive pole, their connection with the universal whole of the emerging world. The real meaning of these debris or these half-living formations can be understood only against the background of grotesque realism.

The grotesque image characterizes the phenomenon in a state of its change, still unfinished metamorphosis, in the stage of death and birth, growth and formation. An attitude to time, to becoming, is a necessary constitutive (defining) feature of the grotesque image. Another related necessary feature of it is ambivalence: in it, in one form or another, both poles of change are given (or outlined) - the old and the new, and the dying and the new, and the beginning and end of metamorphosis.

The underlying attitude of these forms to time, the feeling and awareness of it, during the process of development of these forms, which lasted millennia, of course, significantly evolves, changes. At the early stages of the development of the grotesque image, in the so-called grotesque archaic, time is given as a simple juxtaposition (in essence, simultaneity) of two phases of development - initial and final: winter - spring, death - birth. These still primitive images move in the biocosmic circle of the cyclical alternation of the phases of natural and human productive life. The components of these images are the change of seasons, seeding, conception, dying, growth, etc. The concept of time, which implicite was contained in these ancient images, is the concept of cyclical time of natural and biological life. But grotesque images do not, of course, remain at this primitive stage of development. Their inherent sense of time and temporal change is expanding, deepening, involving socio-historical phenomena in its circle; its cyclical nature is overcome, it rises to the sensation of historical time. And now grotesque images with their essential relation to temporal change and with their ambivalence become the main means of artistic and ideological expression of that powerful sense of history and historical change, which awakened with exceptional force in the Renaissance.

But even at this stage of their development, especially in Rabelais, grotesque images retain their peculiar nature, their sharp difference from the images of ready, completed being. They are ambivalent and contradictory; they are ugly, monstrous and ugly from the point of view of any "classical" aesthetics, that is, the aesthetics of a finished, completed being. The new historical sensation that has permeated them rethinks them, but retains their traditional content, their matter: copulation, pregnancy, generic act, an act of bodily growth, old age, disintegration of the body, its dismemberment into parts, etc., in all their immediate materiality, remain highlights in the system of grotesque images. They oppose the classic images of ready-made, complete, mature human body, as if cleansed of all the slags of birth and development.

Among the famous Kerch terracottas kept in the Hermitage, there are, by the way, peculiar figures of pregnant old women, whose ugly old age and pregnancy are grotesquely emphasized. Pregnant old women laugh at the same time. This is a very characteristic and expressive grotesque. He is ambivalent; it is a pregnant death giving birth to death. There is nothing complete, stable and calm in the body of a pregnant old woman. It combines a decaying senile, already deformed body and an unformed, conceived body of new life. Here life is shown in its ambivalent, internally contradictory process. Nothing is ready here; it is incompleteness itself. And that is precisely the grotesque concept of the body.

Unlike the canons of modern times, the grotesque body is not delimited from the rest of the world, not closed, not completed, not ready, it outgrows itself, goes beyond its limits. The accents lie on those parts of the body where it is either open to the outside world, that is, where the world enters the body or protrudes from it, or it itself sticks out into the world, that is, on holes, on protuberances, on all branches and processes: an open mouth , genital organ, breasts, phallus, fat belly, nose. The body reveals its essence, as a growing and transcending beginning, only in such acts as copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, agony, eating, drinking, excrement. This is an eternally unprepared, eternally created and creative body, this is a link in the chain of generic development, more precisely, two links shown where they are connected, where they enter each other. This is especially striking in the grotesque archaic.

One of the main tendencies of the grotesque body image is to show two bodies in one: one is giving birth and dying, the other is conceived, nurtured, born. It is always a fertile and giving birth body, or at least ready for conception and fertilization - with an accentuated phallus or genital organ. From one body, another, new body always sticks out in one form or another.

Further, the ages of this body, in contrast to the new canons, are taken mainly in the maximum proximity to birth or death: this is infancy and old age with a sharp emphasis on their proximity to the womb and the grave, to the giving birth and absorbing womb. But in the tendency (so to speak, in the limit), both of these bodies are combined in one. Individuality is given here in the stage of melting down, as already dying and not yet ready; this body stands on the threshold of both the grave and the cradle together and at the same time, it is no longer one, but not yet two bodies; two pulses always beat in him: one of them is maternal - dying.

Further, this unprepared and open body (dying - giving birth - being born) is not separated from the world by clear boundaries: it is mixed with the world, mixed with animals, mixed with things. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material-bodily world in all its elements (elements). In the tendency, the body represents and embodies the entire material-bodily world as an absolute bottom, as the beginning that absorbs and gives birth, as a bodily grave and bosom, as a cornfield into which new seedlings are sown and ripen.

These are the rough and deliberately simplified lines of this peculiar concept of the body. In Rabelais's novel, she found her most complete and brilliant conclusion. In other works of Renaissance literature, it is weakened and softened. In painting, she is represented both by Hieronymus Bosch and by Bruegel the Elder. Elements of it can be found earlier in those frescoes and bas-reliefs that adorned cathedrals and even rural churches from the XII and XIII centuries.

This body image received an especially large and significant development in the folk-festive spectacular forms of the Middle Ages: in the festival of fools, in shawaris, in carnivals, in the folk-square side of the festival of the body of the Lord, in mystery dialeries, in soti and in farces. The entire folk culture of the Middle Ages knew only this concept of the body.

In the realm of literature, all medieval parody rests on the grotesque concept of the body. The same concept organizes body images in a huge mass of legends and literary works associated with both the "Indian miracles" and the Western wonders of the Celtic Sea. The same concept organizes the images of the body in the vast literature of afterlife visions. It also determines the images of legends about giants; we find elements of it in the animal epic, in fablio and schwanks.

Finally, this concept of the body underlies curses, curses and deities, the significance of which for understanding the literature of grotesque realism is extremely great. They exerted a direct organizing influence on the entire speech, on the style, on the construction of the images of this literature. They were a kind of dynamic formulas of the frank truth, deeply related (in genesis and function) to all other forms of the "decline" and "landing" of grotesque and Renaissance realism. In modern obscene curses and curses, dead and purely negative remnants of this concept of the body are preserved. Curses such as our "three-story" (in all its various variations), or expressions such as "go to .....", reduce the abused one according to the grotesque method, that is, send him to the absolute topographic bodily bottom, to the zone of giving birth , of the productive organs, into the bodily grave (or into the bodily underworld) for destruction and a new birth. But from this ambivalent reviving meaning in modern curses, almost nothing has remained, except for naked denial, pure cynicism and insult: in the semantic and value systems of new languages and in the new picture of the world, these expressions are completely isolated: these are scraps of some foreign language, on which once it was possible to say something, but which now can only be pointlessly insulted. However, it would be absurd and hypocritical to deny that they still retain some degree of charm (moreover, without any relation to eroticism). In them, as it were, a vague memory of past carnival liberties and carnival truth is dormant. The serious problem of their indestructible vitality in the language has not really been posed yet. In the era of Rabelais, curses and curses in those spheres of the folk language, from which his novel arose, still retained the fullness of their meaning and, above all, retained their positive reviving pole. They were deeply related to all forms of decline inherited from grotesque realism, forms of folk-festive carnival travesty, images of diableries, images of the underworld in walking literature, images of soti, etc. Therefore, they could play a significant role in his novel.

It is especially necessary to note the very vivid expression of the grotesque concept of the body in the forms of folk booth and in general areal comedians of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These forms carried in the best-preserved form the grotesque concept of the body into modern times: in the 17th century she lived in Tabaren's “parades”, in the Tyurlupen comic and in other similar phenomena. We can say that the concept of the body of grotesque and folklore realism is still alive today (albeit in a weakened and distorted form) in many forms of booth and circus comics.

The concept of the body of grotesque realism, outlined by us, is, of course, in sharp contradiction with the literary and pictorial canon of "classical" antiquity, which formed the basis of the Renaissance aesthetics and turned out to be far from indifferent to the further development of art. All these new canons see the body in a completely different way, at completely different moments of his life, in completely different relations to the external (out-of-body) world. The body of these canons is, first of all, a strictly completed, completely finished body. It, further, is lonely, one, separated from other bodies, closed. Therefore, all signs of its unpreparedness, growth and reproduction are eliminated: all its protrusions and processes are removed, all protuberances (meaning new shoots, budding) are smoothed, all holes are closed. The eternal unpreparedness of the body is, as it were, concealed, hidden: conception, pregnancy, childbirth, agony are usually not shown. Age is preferred as far as possible from the mother's womb and from the grave, that is, at the maximum distance from the "threshold" of individual life. The emphasis is on the complete, self-contained individuality of a given body. Only such actions of the body in the external world are shown, in which clear and sharp boundaries remain between the body and the world; intra-bodily actions and processes of absorption and eruption are not disclosed. The individual body is shown outside of its relation to the generic folk body.

These are the main leading tendencies of the canons of modern times. It is quite understandable that from the point of view of these canons, the body of grotesque realism seems to be something ugly, ugly, shapeless. This body does not fit into the framework of the "aesthetics of beauty" that has developed in modern times.

And here, in the introduction, and in the subsequent chapters of our work (especially in Chapter V), when comparing the grotesque and classical canons of the image of the body, we do not at all assert the advantages of one canon over the other, but establish only significant differences between them. But in our study, naturally, the grotesque concept is in the foreground, since it is this concept that determines the figurative concept of folk laughter culture and Rabelais: we want to understand the peculiar logic of the grotesque canon, its special artistic will. The classical canon is artistically comprehensible to us, to a certain extent we still live for it ourselves, while the grotesque one we have long ceased to understand or understand it distortedly. The task of historians and theorists of literature and art is to reconstruct this canon in its true sense. It is inadmissible to interpret it in the spirit of the norms of modern times and see in it only a deviation from them. The grotesque canon must be measured by its own measure.

Some more clarifications are needed here. We do not understand the word "canon" in the narrow sense of a certain set of consciously established rules, norms and proportions in the image of the human body. In such a narrow sense, one can still speak of the classical canon at some specific stages of its development. The grotesque body image has never had such a canon. It is non-canon in nature. We use the word "canon" here in the broader sense of a definite but dynamic and evolving tendency to depict the body and bodily life. We observe in the art and literature of the past two such tendencies, which we designate conventionally as grotesque and as classical canons. We have given here definitions of these two canons in their pure, so to speak, ultimate expression. But in living historical reality, these canons (including the classical one) have never been something frozen and unchanged, but were in constant development, giving rise to various historical variations of the classics and the grotesque. At the same time, various forms of interaction usually took place between both canons - struggle, mutual influence, crossing, mixing. This is especially characteristic of the Renaissance (as we have already indicated). Even Rabelais, who was the purest and most consistent exponent of the grotesque concept of the body, has elements of the classical canon, especially in the episode of Gargantua's upbringing by Ponocrates and in the episode with Thelem. But for the tasks of our research, it is important, first of all, that there are significant differences between the two canons in their pure expression. We focus our attention on them.

The specific type of imagery inherent in folk laughter culture in all forms of its manifestation, we conditionally called "grotesque realism." Now we have to substantiate the terminology we have chosen.

Let us first of all dwell on the term "grotesque". Let us give a history of this term in connection with the development of both the grotesque itself and its theory.

The grotesque type of imagery (that is, the method of constructing images) is the oldest type: we meet with it in mythology and in archaic art of all peoples, including, of course, in the pre-classical art of the ancient Greeks and Romans. And in the classical era, the grotesque type does not die, but, driven out of the bounds of large official art, continues to live and develop in some of its "low", non-canonical areas: in the field of laughter plastics, mainly small ones, such are, for example, the Kerch terracotta that we have mentioned, comic masks, selenes, figurines of demons of fertility, very popular figurines of the freak Tersit, etc.; in the field of laughter vase painting - for example, images of laughter understudies (comic Hercules, comic Odyssey), scenes from comedies, the same demons of fertility, etc .; finally, in the vast areas of laughter literature, associated in one form or another with carnival-type festivities - satyr dramas, ancient Attic comedy, mimes, etc. In the era of late antiquity, the grotesque type of imagery flourishes and renews and captures almost all spheres of art and literature. Here, under the significant influence of the art of the Eastern peoples, a new kind of grotesque is created. But the aesthetic and art criticism of antiquity developed in the mainstream of the classical tradition, and therefore the grotesque type of imagery received neither a stable generalizing name, that is, a term, nor theoretical recognition and comprehension.

In the ancient grotesque at all three stages of its development - in the grotesque archaic, in the grotesque of the classical era and in the late antique grotesque - essential elements of realism were formed. It is wrong to see in him only "crude naturalism" (as it was sometimes done). But the antique stage of grotesque realism goes beyond our work. In subsequent chapters, we will touch upon only those phenomena of the ancient grotesque that influenced Rabelais' work.

The flourishing of grotesque realism is the figurative system of the folk culture of laughter of the Middle Ages, and its artistic peak is the literature of the Renaissance. Here, in the Renaissance, the term grotesque first appears, but initially only in a narrow sense. At the end of the 15th century in Rome, during the excavation of the underground parts of the thermal baths of Titus, a previously unknown type of Roman pictorial ornament was discovered. This type of ornament was called in Italian "la grottesca" from the Italian word "grotta", that is, grotto, underground. Somewhat later, similar ornaments were found in other places in Italy. What is the essence of this type of ornament?

The newly found Roman ornament amazed contemporaries with an extraordinary, bizarre and free play of plant, animal and human forms, which transform into each other, as it were, give rise to each other. There are no those sharp and inert boundaries that separate these "kingdoms of nature" in the usual picture of the world: here, in the grotesque, they are boldly violated. There is also no usual statics in the depiction of reality: movement ceases to be the movement of ready-made forms - plant and animal - in a ready-made and stable world, but turns into an internal movement of being itself, expressed in the transition of some forms into others, in the eternal unpreparedness of being. In this ornamental play one can feel the exceptional freedom and lightness of artistic fantasy, and this freedom is felt as cheerful, as almost laughing freedom. This cheerful tone of the new ornament was correctly understood and conveyed by Raphael and his students in their imitations of the grotesque when they painted the Vatican loggias.

This is the main feature of the Roman ornament to which the specially born term "grotesque" was first applied for it. It was just a new word to denote a new, as it seemed then, a phenomenon. And its original meaning was very narrow - a newly found variety of Roman ornament. But the fact is that this variety was a small piece (fragment) of the huge world of grotesque imagery, which existed at all stages of antiquity and continued to exist in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. And in a piece of this, the characteristic features of this vast world were reflected. This ensured the further productive life of the new term - its gradual spread to the entire almost boundless world of grotesque imagery.

But the expansion of the scope of the term proceeds very slowly and without a clear theoretical understanding of the originality and unity of the grotesque world. The first attempt at theoretical analysis, more precisely, simply describing and evaluating the grotesque, belongs to Vasari, who, relying on the judgments of Vitruvius (the Roman architect and art critic of the Augustus era), negatively evaluates the grotesque. Vitruvius - Vasari quotes him sympathetically - condemned the new "barbaric" fashion "to paint walls with monsters instead of clear representations of the objective world", that is, he condemned the grotesque style from classical positions as a gross violation of "natural" forms and proportions. Vasari is in the same position. And this position, in essence, remained dominant for a long time. A deeper and broader understanding of the grotesque will appear only in the second half of the 18th century.

In the era of the dominance of the classicist canon in all areas of art and literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, the grotesque associated with folk culture of laughter found itself outside the great literature of the era: it descended into low comicism or underwent naturalistic decay (which we have already discussed above).

In this era (in fact, from the second half of the 17th century), the process of gradual narrowing, grinding and impoverishment of ritual and spectacular carnival forms of folk culture takes place. There is, on the one hand, the nationalization of festive life, and it becomes ceremonial, on the other hand, it becomes everyday life, that is, it goes into private, home, family life. The former privileges of the festive square are more and more limited. A special carnival outlook with its nationality, freedom, utopianism, aspiration for the future begins to turn simply into a festive mood. The holiday has almost ceased to be the second life of the people, its temporary rebirth and renewal. We emphasized the word "almost" because the folk-festive carnival beginning is, in essence, indestructible. Narrowed and weakened, it still continues to fertilize various areas of life and culture.

The special aspect of this process is important for us here. The literature of these centuries is almost not directly influenced by the impoverished folk festive culture. The carnival outlook and grotesque imagery continue to live and be transmitted as a literary tradition, mainly as a tradition of Renaissance literature.

Having lost its vivid ties with the popular arena culture and has become a purely literary tradition, the grotesque is reborn. A well-known formalization of carnival-grotesque images takes place, allowing them to be used in different directions and for different purposes. But this formalization was not only external, and the content of the carnival-grotesque form itself, its artistic-heuristic and generalizing power remained in all significant phenomena of that time (that is, in the 17th and 18th centuries): in the "commedia dell'arte" (it most fully preserved connection with the carnival bosom that gave birth to it), in the comedies of Moliere (associated with the commedia dell'arte), in the comic novel and in the travesty of the 17th century, in the philosophical stories of Voltaire and Diderot ("Immodest Treasures", "Jacques the Fatalist"), in the works of Swift and in some other works. In all these phenomena - with all the differences in their character and directions - the carnival-grotesque form has similar functions: it sanctifies the freedom of fiction, allows you to combine the heterogeneous and bring the distant together, helps liberation from the dominant point of view of the world, from all conventions, from current truths, from everything ordinary, familiar, generally accepted, allows you to look at the world in a new way, to feel the relativity of everything that exists and the possibility of a completely different world order.

But a clear and distinct theoretical understanding of the unity of all these phenomena, covered by the term grotesque, and their artistic specificity matured only very slowly. And the term itself was duplicated by the terms "arabesque" (mainly applied to ornament) and "burlesque" (mainly applied to literature). In the conditions of the dominance of the classicist point of view in aesthetics, such a theoretical understanding was still impossible.

In the second half of the 18th century, significant changes took place both in literature itself and in the field of aesthetic thought. In Germany, at this time, a literary struggle flared up around the figure of Harlequin, who was then an invariable participant in all theatrical performances, even the most serious ones. Gottshed and other classicists demanded the expulsion of Harlequin from the "serious and decent" scene, which they did for a while. Lessing took part in this fight on the side of the Harlequin. Behind the narrow question of the Harlequin was a broader and more fundamental problem of the admissibility in art of phenomena that did not meet the requirements of the aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, that is, the admissibility of the grotesque. This problem was devoted to the small work of Justus Möser, published in 1761, "The Harlequin, or Defense of the Grotesque-Comic" (Moser Justus. Harlekin oder die Verteidigung des Grotesck-Komischen). The defense of the grotesque is here invested in the mouth of the Harlequin himself. Möser's work emphasizes that the Harlequin is a particle of a special world (or little world), which includes Columbine, the Captain, the Doctor, and others, that is, the world of the commedia dell'arte. This world has integrity, a special aesthetic regularity and its own special criterion of perfection, which does not obey the classicist aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime. But at the same time, Möser opposes this world to the "low" booth comic and thereby narrows the concept of the grotesque. Further, Möser reveals some of the features of the grotesque world: he calls it "chimerical", that is, combining alien elements, notes the violation of natural proportions (hyperbolicity), the presence of a caricatured and parodic element. Finally, Möser emphasizes the laughter beginning of the grotesque, and he deduces laughter from the need. human soul in joy and fun. This is the first, as yet rather narrow, apology for the grotesque.

In 1788, the German scientist Flögel, the author of a four-volume history of comic literature and the book "The History of Court Fools", published his "History of the Grotesque Comic". Flögel does not define or limit the concept of the grotesque from either a historical or a systematic point of view. He refers to the grotesque everything that sharply deviates from the usual aesthetic norms and in which the material-bodily moment is sharply emphasized and exaggerated. But for the most part, Flögel's book is devoted precisely to the phenomena of the medieval grotesque. He examines medieval folk-festive forms ("the holiday of fools", "the holiday of the donkey", folk-square elements of the holiday of the body of the Lord, carnivals, etc.), buffoonery literary societies of the late Middle Ages ("Kingdom of Bazosh", "Carefree guys", etc. ), soti, farces, Pancake week games, some forms of folk-market comedians, etc. In general, the scope of the grotesque in Flögel is nevertheless somewhat narrowed: he does not at all consider the purely literary phenomena of grotesque realism (for example, medieval Latin parody). The absence of a historical-systematic point of view determined some randomness in the selection of material. The understanding of the meaning of the phenomena themselves is superficial - in fact, there is no understanding at all: he collects them simply as curiosities. But, despite this, Flögel's book, in terms of its material, retains its significance to this day.

Both Möser and Flögel know only the grotesque comedian, that is, only the grotesque organized by the laughter principle, and this laughter principle is thought by them as cheerful, joyful. Such was the material of these researchers: the commedia dell'arte for Möser and the medieval grotesque for Flögel.

But just in the epoch of the appearance of the works of Möser and Flögel, which seemed to turn back to the stages of the development of the grotesque, the grotesque itself entered a new phase of its formation. In pre-romanticism and in early romanticism, there is a revival of the grotesque, but with a radical rethinking of it. The grotesque becomes a form for expressing a subjective, individual attitude, very far from the folk-carnival attitude of the past centuries (although some elements of this latter remain in it). The first and very significant expression of the new subjective grotesque is Stern's Tristram Shandy (a kind of translation of the Rabelaisian and Cervantes worldview into the subjective language of the new era). Another variety of the new grotesque is the gothic or black novel. In Germany, the subjective grotesque received, perhaps, the strongest and most original development. These are the drama of "storm and onslaught" and early romanticism (Lenz, Klinger, young Thicke), the novels of Hippel and Jean-Paul and, finally, the work of Hoffmann, who had a tremendous influence on the development of the new grotesque in subsequent world literature. Fr. Schlegel and Jean-Paul became the theorists of the new grotesque.

The romantic grotesque is a very significant and influential phenomenon in world literature. To a certain extent, he was a reaction to those elements of classicism and the Enlightenment that gave rise to the narrowness and one-sided seriousness of these currents: to narrow rationalism, to state and formal-logical authoritarianism, to the desire for readiness, completeness and unambiguity, to the didacticism and utilitarianism of the enlighteners, naive or official optimism, etc. Rejecting all this, the romantic grotesque relied primarily on the traditions of the Renaissance, especially on Shakespeare and Cervantes, who were rediscovered at that time and in the light of which the medieval grotesque was also interpreted. A significant influence on the romantic grotesque was exerted by Stern, who in a sense may even be considered its founder.

As for the direct influence of living (but already very impoverished) folk spectacular carnival forms, it, apparently, was not significant. Purely literary traditions prevailed. It should be noted, however, a rather significant influence of folk theater (especially puppet theater) and some types of booth comics.

In contrast to the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, which was directly connected with folk culture and was of an areal and national character, the romantic grotesque becomes chamber: it is like a carnival, experienced alone with a keen awareness of its isolation. The carnival perception of the world is, as it were, translated into the language of subjectively idealistic philosophical thought and ceases to be that concretely experienced (one might even say, physically experienced) feeling of the unity and inexhaustibility of being, as it was in the medieval and Renaissance grotesque.

The beginning of laughter underwent the most significant transformation in the romantic grotesque. Laughter, of course, remained: after all, in conditions of monolithic seriousness, no grotesque, even the most timid, is possible. But laughter in the romantic grotesque was reduced and took the form of humor, irony, sarcasm. It ceases to be a joyful and jubilant laugh. The positive revitalizing moment of the laughter beginning is weakened to a minimum.

A very characteristic discourse on laughter is found in one of the most remarkable works of the romantic grotesque - in Bonaventure's Night Watch (the pseudonym of an unknown author, perhaps Vezel). These are the stories and reflections of the night watchman. In one place, the narrator characterizes the meaning of laughter as follows: “Is there an even stronger means in the world to resist all the mockery of the world and fate than laughter! Before this satirical mask, the strongest enemy is terrified, and the very misfortune recedes before me if I dare to ridicule him! And what the hell, besides ridicule, this land deserves, together with its sensitive companion - the month! "

Here the world-contemplative and universal character of laughter is declared - an obligatory sign of any grotesque - and its liberating power is glorified, but there is not even a hint of the reviving power of laughter, and therefore it loses its cheerful and joyful tone.

The author (through the mouth of his narrator - the night watchman) gives this a peculiar explanation in the form of a myth about the origin of laughter. Laughter was sent to earth by the devil himself. But he - laughter - appeared to people under the guise of joy, and people willingly accepted him. And then laughter threw off its cheerful mask and began to look at the world and at people like an evil satire.

The rebirth of the laughter principle that organizes the grotesque, the loss of its reviving power by it leads to a number of other significant differences between the romantic grotesque and the grotesque of the medieval and Renaissance. These differences are most clearly manifested in relation to the terrible. The world of the romantic grotesque is, to one degree or another, a scary and alien world. Everything familiar, ordinary, ordinary, habitual, generally recognized suddenly turns out to be meaningless, doubtful, alien and hostile to a person. Your world suddenly turns into a foreign world. In the ordinary and fearless, the terrible is suddenly revealed. This is the tendency of the romantic grotesque (in its most extreme and sharp forms). Reconciliation with the world, if it occurs, takes place on a subjective-lyrical or even mystical level. Meanwhile, the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, associated with the folk culture of laughter, knows the terrible only in the form of funny bogeymen, that is, only the terrible that has already been defeated by laughter. It always turns out to be funny and funny here. The grotesque, associated with folk culture, brings the world closer to man and removes him, makes him more complex through the body and bodily life (as opposed to abstract spiritual romantic exploration). In the romantic grotesque, the images of material bodily life - food, drink, excrement, copulation, childbirth - almost completely lose their reviving meaning and turn into a "low life".

The images of the romantic grotesque are expressions of fear of the world and seek to instill this fear in readers ("scare"). The grotesque images of folk culture are absolutely fearless and add their fearlessness to everyone. This fearlessness is characteristic of the greatest works of the literature of the Renaissance. But the pinnacle in this respect is Rabelais' novel: here fear is destroyed in the bud and everything turns into fun. This is the most fearless work of world literature.

Other features of the romantic grotesque are associated with the weakening of the reviving moment in laughter. The motive of madness, for example, is very characteristic of any grotesque, because it allows you to look at the world with different eyes, unclouded by "normal", that is, generally accepted, ideas and assessments. But in the popular grotesque madness is a cheerful parody of the official mind, of the one-sided seriousness of the official "truth." This is holiday madness. In the romantic grotesque, the madness takes on a dark tragic shade of individual isolation.

The motive of the mask is even more important. This is the most complex and multifaceted motive of folk culture. The mask is associated with the joy of changes and reincarnations, with a cheerful relativity, with a cheerful denial of identity and uniqueness, with a denial of stupid coincidence with oneself; the mask is associated with transitions, metamorphoses, violations of natural boundaries, with ridicule, with a nickname (instead of a name); the mask embodies the playful beginning of life, it is based on a very special relationship between reality and the image, characteristic of the most ancient ritual and spectacular forms. Of course, it is impossible to exhaust the polysyllabic and ambiguous symbolism of the mask. It should be noted that such phenomena as parody, caricature, grimace, antics, antics, etc., are essentially derivatives of the mask. The very essence of the grotesque is revealed very clearly in the mask.

In the romantic grotesque, the mask, torn from the unity of the folk-carnival outlook, becomes impoverished and receives a number of new meanings that are alien to its original nature: the mask hides something, conceals, deceives, etc. Such meanings, of course, are completely impossible when the mask functions in the organic whole of the folk culture. In romanticism, the mask almost completely loses its revitalizing and renewing moment and acquires a gloomy shade. Behind the mask, there is often a terrible void, "Nothing" (this motive is very strongly developed in Bonaventure's "Night Watch"). Meanwhile, in the folk grotesque behind the mask, there is always the inexhaustibility and many-sidedness of life.

But even in the romantic grotesque, the mask retains something of its folk-carnival nature; this nature is indestructible in it. Indeed, even in the conditions of ordinary modern life, the mask is always shrouded in some kind of special atmosphere, perceived as a particle of some other world. A mask can never become just a thing among other things.

In the romantic grotesque, the motive of a puppet or a doll plays an important role. This motive, of course, is not alien to the folk grotesque. But for romanticism, this motive brings to the fore the notion of an alien inhuman force that controls people and turns them into puppets, a notion that is not at all characteristic of folk laughter culture. Only romanticism is characterized by a kind of grotesque motif of the doll's tragedy.

The difference between the romantic and the folk grotesque is also sharply manifested in the interpretation of the image of the devil. In the diableries of medieval mysteries, in laughable afterlife visions, in parody legends, in fablio, etc. the devil is a cheerful ambivalent carrier of unofficial points of view, holiness inside out, a representative of the material-bodily lower class, etc. There is nothing terrible or alien in him (in Rabelais' vision of Epistemon after death, “devils are nice guys and excellent drinking companions”). Sometimes devils and hell itself are just "funny monsters." In the romantic grotesque, the devil takes on the character of something terrible, melancholic, tragic. Infernal laughter becomes a gloomy, gloating laugh.

It should be noted that ambivalence in the romantic grotesque usually turns into a sharp static contrast or a frozen antithesis. So, the narrator in "Night Watch" (the night watchman) has a father - a devil, and a mother - a canonized saint; he himself has a habit of laughing in temples and crying in houses of fun (i.e. in dens). So the ancient popular ritual ridicule of the deity and medieval laughter in the temple during the festival of fools turns at the turn of the 19th century into eccentric laughter in the church of a lonely eccentric.

Let us finally note one more feature of the romantic grotesque: it is predominantly nocturnal grotesque (Bonaventure's Night Watch, Hoffmann's Night Stories), it is generally characterized by darkness, but not light. For the folk grotesque, on the contrary, light is characteristic: it is spring and morning, dawn grotesque.

Such is the romantic grotesque on German soil. We will consider the Romanesque version of the romantic grotesque below. Here we will dwell a little on the romantic theory of the grotesque.

Friedrich Schlegel in his "Conversation on Poetry" (Schlegel Friedrich, Gesprach uber die Poesie, 1800) touches the grotesque, although without a clear terminological designation (usually he calls it arabesque). Fr. Schlegel considers grotesque ("arabesque") "the most ancient form of human fantasy" and "a natural form of poetry." He finds grotesque in Shakespeare and Cervantes, in Stern and Jean-Paul. He sees the essence of the grotesque in a bizarre mixture of alien elements of reality, in the destruction of the usual order and structure of the world, in the free fantasy of images and in "a change of enthusiasm and irony."

Jean-Paul reveals the features of the romantic grotesque more sharply in his "Introduction to aesthetics" ("Vorschule der Asthetic"). And he does not use the term grotesque here and sees it as "annihilating humor." Jean-Paul understands grotesque ("annihilating humor") quite broadly, not only within the limits of literature and art: he includes here both the festival of fools and the festival of the donkey ("donkey masses"), that is, laughable ritual and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages. From the literary phenomena of the Renaissance, he quite often attracts both Rabelais and Shakespeare. He speaks, in particular, of Shakespeare's "mockery of the whole world" ("Welt-Verlachung"), referring to his "melancholic" jesters and Hamlet.

Jean-Paul is well aware of the universal nature of grotesque laughter. "Destructive humor" is directed not at individual negative phenomena of reality, but at all of reality, at the entire finite world in its entirety. All that is finite, as such, is destroyed by humor. Jean-Paul emphasizes the radicalism of this humor: the whole world turns into something alien, terrible and unjustified for him, we lose ground under our feet, we feel dizzy, because we do not see anything stable around us. Jean-Paul sees the same universalism and radicalism in the destruction of all moral and social foundations in the laughable ritual and spectacular forms of the Middle Ages.

Jean-Paul does not tear himself away from grotesque laughter. He understands that grotesque is impossible without a laughing beginning. But his theoretical concept knows only reduced laughter (humor), devoid of positive regenerating and renewing power, and therefore joyless and gloomy. Jean-Paul himself emphasizes the melancholic nature of destructive humor and says that the greatest humorist would be the devil (of course, in his romantic sense).

Although Jean-Paul attracts the phenomena of the medieval and Renaissance grotesque (including even Rabelais), he gives, in essence, only the theory of the romantic grotesque, through the prism of which he looks at the past stages of the development of the grotesque, "romanticizing" them (mainly in the spirit of the Sternian interpretation of Rabelais and Cervantes).

The positive moment of the grotesque, its last word, Jean-Paul (like Fr. Schlegel) already thinks outside the laughter principle as going beyond the bounds of everything finite, destroyed by humor, into a purely spiritual sphere.

Much later (starting from the end of the twenties of the XIX century) there was a revival of the grotesque type of imagery in French romanticism.

Interestingly and very characteristic of French romanticism, Victor Hugo posed the problem of the grotesque, first in his preface to Cromwell, and then in his book about Shakespeare.

Hugo understands the grotesque type of imagery very broadly. He finds it in pre-classical antiquity (Hydra, Harpies, Cyclops and other images of the grotesque archaic), and then attaches to this type all post-antique literature, starting with the medieval one. “Grotesque,” says Hugo, “is everywhere: on the one hand, it creates the formless and terrible, on the other, the comic and buffoon.” An essential aspect of the grotesque is the ugly. The aesthetics of the grotesque is largely the aesthetics of the ugly. But at the same time, Hugo weakens the independent meaning of the grotesque, declaring it to be a contrasting means for the sublime. The grotesque and the sublime mutually complement each other, their unity (achieved most fully in Shakespeare) and gives a genuine beauty inaccessible to pure classics.

The most interesting and specific analyzes of grotesque imagery and, in particular, of the humorous and material-bodily principle, Hugo gives in the book about Shakespeare. But we will dwell on this in the future, since Hugo develops here his own concept of Rabelais' creativity.

Interest in the grotesque and in the past stages of its development was shared by other French romantics, and on French soil, grotesque was perceived as a national tradition. In 1853, a book (a kind of collection) by Théophile Gautier called "Les grotesques" was published. Théophile Gaultier gathered here representatives of the French grotesque, understanding it quite broadly: we will find here Villon, and the libertine poets of the 17th century (Théophile de Vio, Saint-Aman), and Scarron, and Cyrano de Bergerac, and even Scudery.

This is the romantic stage in the development of the grotesque and its theory. In conclusion, two positive points must be emphasized: firstly, the romantics looked for the folk roots of the grotesque and, secondly, they never attributed purely satirical functions to the grotesque.

Our analysis of the romantic grotesque is, of course, far from complete. In addition, it is somewhat one-sided and even almost polemical in nature. This is explained by the fact that here only the differences between the romantic grotesque and the grotesque imagery of the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were important to us. But romanticism had its own positive discovery of great importance - the discovery of the inner, subjective man with its depth, complexity and inexhaustibility.

This inner infinity of the individual personality was alien to the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, but its discovery by the romantics became possible only thanks to their application of the grotesque method with its power that frees from all dogmatism, completeness and limitation. In a closed, ready-made, stable world with clear and unshakable boundaries between all phenomena and values, the inner infinity could not be open. To be convinced of this, it is enough to compare the rationalized and exhaustive analyzes of inner experiences in the classicists with the images of inner life in Stern and the romantics. Here the artistic and heuristic power of the grotesque method is clearly revealed. But all this is already beyond the scope of our work.

A few words about the understanding of the grotesque in the aesthetics of Hegel and F.? T. Fisher.

Speaking of grotesque, Hegel, in essence, has in mind only grotesque archaism, which he defines as an expression of the pre-classical and pre-philosophical state of mind. Based mainly on the Indian archaic, Hegel characterizes the grotesque with three features: the confusion of heterogeneous areas of nature, the immensity of exaggeration and the multiplication of individual organs (multi-armed, many-legged images of Indian gods). Hegel does not at all know the organizing role of the laughter principle in the grotesque and considers the grotesque without any connection with the comic.

F.? T. Fischer in the question of grotesque deviates from Hegel. The essence and driving force of the grotesque, according to Fischer, is funny, comic. “The grotesque is the comic in the form of the miraculous, it is the 'mythological comic'. These definitions of Fischer are not devoid of a certain depth.

It must be said that in the further development of philosophical aesthetics up to the present day, grotesque has not received proper understanding and appreciation: there was no place for it in the system of aesthetics.

After romanticism, from the second half of the XIX century, interest in the grotesque is sharply weakening both in literature itself and in literary thought. The grotesque, since it is mentioned, is either referred to the forms of low vulgar comics, or is understood as a special form of satire aimed at separate, purely negative phenomena. With this approach, all the depth and all the universalism of grotesque images disappears without a trace.

In 1894 the most extensive work devoted to grotesque was published - the book of the German scientist Schneegans "History of grotesque satire" (Schneegans. Geschichte der grotesken Satyre). This book is largely devoted to the work of Rabelais, whom Schneegans considers the greatest representative of grotesque satire, but it also gives a brief outline of some of the phenomena of medieval grotesque. Schneegans is the most consistent representative of the purely satirical understanding of the grotesque. Grotesque for him is always and only a purely negative satire, this is an "exaggeration of the inappropriate", denied, moreover, such an exaggeration that goes beyond the limits of the probable becomes fantastic. It is through such excessive exaggerations of the inappropriate that a moral and social blow is inflicted on him. This is the essence of Schneegans's concept.

Schneegans does not at all understand the positive hyperbolism of the material-bodily principle in the medieval grotesque and in Rabelais. Nor does he understand the positive regenerating and renewing power of grotesque laughter. He knows only the purely negative, rhetorical, non-laughing satire of the 19th century and interprets the phenomenon of medieval and Renaissance laughter in its spirit. This is an extreme expression of the distorting modernization of laughter in literary studies... Schneegans does not understand the universalism of grotesque images. But Schneegans concept is very typical of everything literary studies the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries. Even today, a purely satirical understanding of the grotesque and, in particular, Rabelais' creativity in the spirit of Schneegans is still far from obsolete.

As we have already said, Schneegans develops his concept mainly on the analysis of Rabelais' creativity. Therefore, in the future, we still have to dwell on his book.

In the 20th century, a new and powerful revival of the grotesque takes place, although the word “revival” is not fully applicable to some forms of the newest grotesque.

The picture of the development of the latest grotesque is rather complex and contradictory. But, in general, two lines of this development can be distinguished. The first line is the modernist grotesque (Alfred Jarry, surrealists, expressionists, etc.). This grotesque is associated (to varying degrees) with the traditions of the romantic grotesque, currently it is developing under the influence of various currents of existentialism. The second line is realistic grotesque (Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, etc.), it is associated with the traditions of grotesque realism and folk culture, and sometimes reflects the direct influence of carnival forms (Pablo Neruda).

Characterization of the features of the newest grotesque is not at all included in our tasks. We will dwell only on the latest theory of the grotesque, associated with the first, modernist line of its development. We mean the book of the outstanding German literary critic Wolfgang Kaiser "The Grotesque in Painting and Literature" (Kayser Wolfgang. Das Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung, 1957).

The Kaiser's book is, in fact, the first and - so far - the only serious work on the theory of the grotesque. It contains many valuable observations and subtle analyzes. But one cannot agree with the general concept of the Kaiser.

According to its design, Kaiser's book should provide a general theory of the grotesque, reveal the very essence of this phenomenon. In fact, it only gives a theory (and brief history) romantic and modernist grotesque, and strictly speaking - only modernist, since the romantic grotesque Kaiser sees through the prism of the modernist grotesque and therefore understands and evaluates it somewhat distortedly. To the millennia of development of the pre-romantic grotesque - to the grotesque archaic, to the ancient grotesque (for example, to the satire drama or to the ancient Attic comedy), to the medieval and Renaissance grotesque associated with the folk culture of laughter - Kaiser's theory is absolutely inapplicable. In his book, the Kaiser does not touch on all these phenomena (he only names some of them). He builds all his conclusions and generalizations on analyzes of the romantic and modernist grotesque, and, as we have already said, it is this latter that determines the Kaiser's concept. Therefore, the true nature of the grotesque, inseparable from the unified world of folk culture of humor and carnival perception of the world, remained incomprehensible. In the romantic grotesque, this nature is weakened, impoverished and largely rethought. However, all the main motives in it, which are clearly carnival in origin, retain some kind of memory of that mighty whole, of which they were once a part. And this memory awakens in best works romantic grotesque (especially strong, but in different ways, in Stern and Hoffmann). These works are stronger and deeper - and more joyful - of the subjective-philosophical worldview that is expressed in them. But the Kaiser does not know this genre memory and does not seek in them. The modernist grotesque, which sets the tone for his concept, has almost completely lost this memory and almost to the limit formalized the carnival heritage of grotesque motifs and symbols.

What, according to Kaiser, are the main features of grotesque imagery?

In the definitions of the Kaiser, first of all, one is struck by the general gloomy and terrible, frightening tone of the grotesque world, which the researcher only catches in it. In fact, such a tone is absolutely alien to the entire development of the grotesque to romanticism. We have already said that the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, imbued with a carnival outlook, frees the world from everything terrible and frightening, makes it extremely fearless and therefore extremely cheerful and light. Everything that was scary and frightening in the ordinary world turns into funny "funny monsters" in the carnival world. Fear is an extreme expression of one-sided and stupid seriousness, conquered by laughter (we will meet with the magnificent development of this motive in Rabelais, in particular, with the "theme of Malbrook"). Only in an extremely fearless world is that ultimate freedom that is characteristic of the grotesque possible.

For the Kaiser, the main thing in the grotesque world is "something hostile, alien and inhuman" ("das Unheimliche, das Verfremdete und Unmenschliche", p. 81).

The Kaiser especially emphasizes the moment of alienation: “The grotesque is a world that has become alien” (“das Groteske ist die entfremdete Welt”, p. 136). Kaiser explains this definition by comparing the grotesque with the world of a fairy tale. After all, the world of a fairy tale, if you look at it from the outside, can also be defined as alien and unusual, but this is not a world that has become alien. In the grotesque, what was for us our own, relatives and friends, suddenly becomes alien and hostile. It is our world that suddenly turns into a stranger.

This definition of the Kaiser is applicable only to certain phenomena of the modernist grotesque, but it becomes not quite adequate when applied to the romantic grotesque and is no longer at all applicable to the previous stages of its development.

In fact, the grotesque - including the romantic one - reveals the possibility of a completely different world, a different world order, a different order of life. It takes you beyond the apparent (false) uniqueness, indisputability and inviolability of the existing world. The grotesque, generated by the folk culture of humor, in essence, always - in one form or another, by one means or another - plays out the return of the golden age of Saturn to the earth, a living possibility of its return. And the romantic grotesque does this (otherwise it would cease to be grotesque), but in its characteristic subjective forms. The existing world suddenly turns out to be alien (to use the terminology of the Kaiser) precisely because the possibility of a truly native world, the world of the golden age, carnival truth is revealed. Man returns to himself. The existing world is being destroyed in order to be reborn and renewed. The world, dying, gives birth. The relativity of everything that exists in the grotesque is always cheerful, and it is always imbued with the joy of changes, even if this fun and joy is reduced to a minimum (as in romanticism).

It should be emphasized once again that the utopian moment ("golden age") in the pre-romantic grotesque is not revealed for abstract thought and not for inner experience, but is played out and experienced by the whole person, an integral person, and thought, and feeling, and body. This bodily involvement in a possible other world, its bodily comprehensibility is of great importance for the grotesque.

In the Kaiser's concept, however, there is no place at all for the material-bodily principle with its inexhaustibility and eternal renewal. There is no time, no shifts, no crises in his concept, that is, there is no everything that happens with the sun, with the earth, with a person, with human society, and which is exactly what the true grotesque lives on.

It is very characteristic of the modernist grotesque and the following definition by the Kaiser: “The grotesque is a form of expression for“ IT ”(p. 137).

The Kaiser understands "it" not so much in the Freudian as in the existentialist spirit: "it" is an alien, inhuman force that controls the world, people, their lives and their actions. Many of the main motives of the grotesque are reduced by the Kaiser to a sense of this alien force, for example, the motive of puppets. To him he also reduces the motive of madness. In a madman, according to the Kaiser, we always feel something alien, as if some inhuman spirit penetrated his soul. We have already said that the motive of madness is used in a completely different way by the grotesque: in order to free oneself from the false "truth of this world", in order to look at the world with eyes free from this "truth".

The Kaiser himself repeatedly speaks of the freedom of imagination characteristic of the grotesque. But how is such freedom possible in relation to the world, where the alien force "it" dominates? This is the insurmountable contradiction of the Kaiser's concept.

In fact, the grotesque frees one from all those forms of inhuman necessity that permeate the prevailing ideas about the world. The grotesque debunks this necessity as relative and limited. The need for any picture of the world prevailing in a given era always appears as something monolithically serious, unconditional and indisputable. But historically, ideas about necessity are always relative and changeable. The laughter principle and the carnival outlook that underlie the grotesque destroy the limited seriousness and all claims to the timeless significance and unconditionality of ideas about necessity and free human consciousness, thought and imagination for new possibilities. That is why great upheavals, even in the field of science, are always preceded, preparing them, by a certain carnivalization of consciousness.

In a grotesque world, every “it” is debunked and turned into a “ridiculous monster”; Entering this world - even the world of romantic grotesque - we always feel some kind of special cheerful freedom of thought and imagination.

Let us dwell on two more points of the Kaiser's concept.

Summing up his analyzes, Kaiser argues that "the grotesque is not about the fear of death, but about the fear of life."

This statement, sustained in the spirit of existentialism, contains, first of all, the opposition between life and death. Such a juxtaposition is completely alien to the imaginative system of the grotesque. Death in this system is not at all a denial of life in its grotesque understanding as the life of a large body of the whole people. Death here enters into the whole of life as its necessary moment, as a condition for its constant renewal and rejuvenation. Death here is always correlated with birth, the grave - with the birthing womb of the earth. Birth - death, death - birth - the defining (constitutive) moments of life itself, as in the famous words of the Spirit of the Earth in Goethe's Faust. Death is included in life and along with birth determines its eternal movement. Even the struggle of life with death in the individual body is understood by grotesque imaginative thinking as the struggle of a persistent old life with a new one being born (having to be born), as a crisis of change.

Leonardo da Vinci said: when a person is looking forward to a new day, a new spring, a new year with joyful impatience, he does not even suspect that by doing so he, in essence, longs for his own death. Although this aphorism of Leonardo da Vinci is not grotesque in its form of expression, it is based on a carnival attitude.

So, in the system of grotesque imagery, death and renewal are inseparable from each other in the whole of life, and this whole is least of all capable of causing fear.

It must be said that the image of death in the medieval and Renaissance grotesque (including the pictorial one, for example, in Holbein's "Dance of Death" or in Durer's) always includes an element of the funny. It is always - more or less - a ridiculous monster. In subsequent centuries, and especially in the 19th century, they almost completely forgot how to hear the laughter principle in such images and perceived them in a one-sidedly serious way, where they became flat and distorted. The bourgeois 19th century respected only purely satirical laughter, which was, in essence, a non-laughing rhetorical laughter, serious and instructive (it was not without reason that it was equated with a whip or rods). In addition to him, purely entertaining laughter, thoughtless and harmless, was also allowed. Yet the serious had to be serious, that is, straightforward and flat in tone.

The theme of death as renewal, the combination of death with birth, images of merry deaths play an essential role in the figurative system of Rabelais' novel, and in subsequent parts of our work will be subjected to specific analysis.

The last point in the Kaiser's concept, which we will focus on, is his interpretation of grotesque laughter. Here is his wording: "Laughter mixed with bitterness, when passing into the grotesque, takes on the features of a mocking, cynical and, finally, satanic laughter."

We see that the Kaiser understands grotesque laughter completely in the spirit of Bonaventure's "night watchman" and Jean-Paul's theory of "destructive humor", that is, in the spirit of romantic grotesque. A cheerful, liberating and reviving, that is, precisely creative, moment of laughter is absent. However, the Kaiser understands the complexity of the problem of laughter in the grotesque and rejects its unambiguous solution (op.cit., See p. 139).

This is the book of the Kaiser. As we have said, the grotesque is the predominant form of various trends in modern modernism. The theoretical foundation of this modernist grotesque is, in essence, the concept of the Kaiser. With certain reservations, it can still illuminate some aspects of the romantic grotesque. But to extend it to other epochs of the development of grotesque imagery seems to us completely unacceptable.

The problem of the grotesque and its aesthetic essence can be correctly posed and solved only on the basis of the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the literature of the Renaissance, and the illuminating significance of Rabelais is especially great here. It is possible to understand the true depth, ambiguity and strength of individual grotesque motives only in the unity of folk culture and carnival outlook; taken apart from it, they become unambiguous, flat and impoverished.

The justification for applying the term "grotesque" to a special type of figurativeness of the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the literature of the Renaissance associated with it cannot cause any doubts. But to what extent is our term "grotesque realism" justified?

Here, in the introduction, we can give only a preliminary answer to this question.

Those features that so sharply distinguish the medieval and Renaissance grotesque from the romantic and modernist grotesque - and above all the spontaneously materialistic and spontaneously dialectical understanding of life - can most adequately be defined as realistic. Our further concrete analyzes of grotesque images will confirm this position.

Renaissance grotesque imagery, directly associated with folk carnival culture - in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare - had a decisive influence on all the great realistic literature of subsequent centuries. The realism of the grand style (the realism of Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, etc.) has always been associated (directly or indirectly) with the Renaissance tradition, and a break with it inevitably led to the crushing of realism and its transformation into naturalistic empiricism.

Already in the 17th century, some forms of the grotesque began to degenerate into a static "characteristic" and narrow genre. This degeneration is associated with the specific limitations of the bourgeois worldview. Genuine grotesque is least of all static: it strives to capture in its images the very formation, growth, eternal incompleteness, unpreparedness of being; therefore, he gives in his images both poles of becoming, at the same time - the outgoing and new, dying and being born; he shows in one body two bodies, budding and division of a living cell of life. Here, at the heights of grotesque and folklore realism, as in the death of unicellular organisms, there is never a corpse (the death of a unicellular organism coincides with its reproduction, that is, with disintegration into two cells, two organisms, without any "mortal waste"), here is old age pregnant, death is fraught, everything that is limited and characteristic, frozen, ready is thrown into the bodily bottom for melting and a new birth. In the process of degeneration and disintegration of grotesque realism, the positive pole disappears, that is, the second young link of becoming (it is replaced by a moral maxim and an abstract concept): there remains a clean corpse, devoid of pregnancy, pure, equal to itself, detached old age, torn off from that growing whole, where she was connected with the next young link in a single chain of development and growth. It turns out a broken-off grotesque, the figure of a fertility demon with a cut off phallus and a depressed belly. This is where all these sterile images of the "characteristic" are born, all these "professional" types of lawyers, merchants, pimps, old men and women, etc., all these masks of diminishing and degenerating realism. There were all these types in grotesque realism, but there they did not build a picture of the whole life, there they were still only a dying part of the giving birth to life. The fact is that the new concept of realism differently draws the boundaries between all bodies and things. It cuts through two-body bodies and cuts off things of grotesque and folklore realism that have grown together with the body; it seeks to complete each individuality without connection with the last whole, for which the old image has already been lost and a new one has not yet been found. The understanding of time has also changed significantly.

The literature of the so-called “everyday realism” of the 17th century (Sorel, Scarron, Füretier), along with truly carnival moments, is already filled with such images of the stopped grotesque, that is, the grotesque, almost withdrawn from the great time, from the stream of becoming and therefore either frozen in its duality, or split in two. Some scholars (for example, Rainier) tend to interpret this as the beginning of realism, as its first steps. In fact, all these are just dead and sometimes almost meaningless fragments of a powerful and deep grotesque realism.

We have already said at the beginning of our introduction that both individual phenomena of the folk laughter culture of the Middle Ages and special genres of grotesque realism have been studied quite fully and thoroughly, but, of course, from the point of view of those historical-cultural and historical-literary methods that prevailed in science XIX and the first decades of the XX century. Studied, of course, not only literary works, but also such specific phenomena as "the holidays of fools" (F. Burkelo, G. Drews, Villetar, etc.), "Easter laughter" (I. Schmid, S. Reinach, etc. ), "Sacred parody" (F. Novati, E. Ilvanen, P. Lehmann) and other phenomena that lie, in essence, outside of art and literature. Studied, of course, and various manifestations of the humorous culture of antiquity (A. Dieterich, Reich, Cornford, etc.). A lot has been done by folklorists to elucidate the nature and genesis of individual motives and symbols that make up the folk culture of laughter (suffice it to mention Frazer's monumental work - “ Golden bough"). All in all, scientific literature related to folk culture of laughter is enormous. In the future, in the course of our work, we will refer to the relevant special works.

But all this huge literature, with rare exceptions, is devoid of theoretical pathos. It does not strive for any broad and principled theoretical generalizations. As a result, the almost boundless, carefully collected and often scrupulously studied material remains uncombined and meaningless. What we call a single world of folk laughter culture looks here like a collection of scattered curiosities, which, in spite of its enormous volume, cannot be included in the “serious” history of European culture and literature, in essence. It - this accumulation of curiosities and obscenities - remains outside the circle of those "serious" creative problems that were solved by European humanity. It is quite understandable that with such an approach, the powerful influence of the folk culture of laughter on all fiction, on the most "imaginative thinking" of mankind remains almost completely unexplored.

Here we will briefly touch on only two studies that pose just theoretical problems, moreover, those that come into contact with our problem of folk laughter culture from two different sides.

In 1903 G. Reich's voluminous work “Mime. An Experience of Historical Research of Literary Development ”(see footnote 5).

The subject of the Reich's research is, in essence, the laughter culture of antiquity and the Middle Ages. It provides a huge, very interesting and valuable material. He correctly reveals the unity of the tradition of laughter, passing through antiquity and the Middle Ages. He finally understands the primordial and essential connection between laughter and the images of the material-bodily bottom. All this allows the Reich to come pretty close to the correct and productive formulation of the problem of folk laughter culture.

Still, he did not pose the problem itself. It seems to us that this was prevented mainly by two reasons.

First, the Reich is trying to reduce the entire history of laughter culture to the history of the mime, that is, one genre of laughter, albeit quite characteristic, especially for late antiquity. Mime for the Reich turns out to be the center and even almost the only carrier of the culture of laughter. The Reich reduces to the influence of the antique mime all the folk-festive forms, and the laughter literature of the Middle Ages. In his quest for the influence of the antique mime, Reich goes even beyond the boundaries of European culture. All this leads to inevitable strains and to ignoring everything that does not fit into the Procrustean bed of the mime. It must be said that the Reich still sometimes does not stand up to his concept: the material overflows and forces the author to go beyond the narrow framework of the mime.

Secondly, the Reich somewhat modernizes and impoverishes both laughter and the materially bodily principle that is inextricably linked with it. In the concept of the Reich positive points laughter principle - its liberating and reviving power - sound somewhat muffled (although the Reich is well aware of the ancient philosophy of laughter). The universalism of popular laughter and its world-contemplative and utopian character also did not receive proper understanding and appreciation from the Reich. But the material-bodily principle looks especially impoverished in his concept: the Reich looks at it through the prism of abstract and differentiating thinking of the new time and therefore understands it narrowly, almost naturalistically.

These are the two main points that weaken, in our opinion, the concept of the Reich. Nevertheless, the Reich did a lot to prepare the correct formulation of the problem of folk laughter culture. It is a pity that Reich's book, rich in new material, original and bold in thought, did not have the due influence in its time.

In the future, we will have to repeatedly refer to the work of the Reich.

The second study that we will touch on here is Konrad Burdach's small book Reformation, Renaissance, Humanism (Burdax Konrad, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, Berlin, 1918). This book also somewhat approaches the formulation of the problem of folk culture, but in a completely different way than the book of the Reich. There is no talk in it about laughter and the material-bodily principle. Its only hero is the idea-image of "rebirth", "renewal", "reformation".

In his book, Burdach shows how this idea-image of rebirth (in its various variations), which originated initially in the ancient mythological thinking of Eastern and ancient peoples, continued to live and develop throughout the Middle Ages. It was preserved in the church cult (in the liturgy, in the rite of baptism, etc.), but here it was in a state of dogmatic ossification. Since the time of the religious upsurge of the 12th century (Joachim of Fiore, Francis of Assisi, spirituals) this figurative idea has come to life, penetrates into wider circles of the people, is colored with purely human emotions, awakens poetic and artistic imagination, becomes an expression of the growing thirst for rebirth and renewal in a purely earthly , the secular sphere, that is, the sphere of political, social and artistic life (see above, p. 55).

Burdach traces the slow and gradual process of secularization (secularization) of the idea-image of revival in Dante, in the ideas and activities of Rienzo, in Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others.

Burdach correctly believes that such a historical phenomenon as the Renaissance could not have arisen as a result of purely cognitive searches and intellectual efforts of individuals. He says this about it:

“Humanism and the Renaissance are not products of knowledge (Produkte des Wissens). They do not arise because scientists discover lost monuments of ancient literature and art and seek to bring them back to life. Humanism and the Renaissance were born out of a passionate and boundless expectation and aspiration of an aging era, whose soul, shaken in its very depths, yearned for a new youth ”(p. 138).

Burdach, of course, is absolutely right, refusing to deduce and explain the Renaissance from scholarly and book sources, from individual ideological searches, from "intellectual efforts." He is also right that the Renaissance was being prepared throughout the entire Middle Ages (and especially from the XII century). Finally, he is also right that the word “revival” did not at all mean “the revival of the sciences and arts of antiquity,” but behind it stood a huge and multifaceted semantic formation rooted in the very depths of the ritual-spectacular, imaginative and intellectual-ideological thinking of mankind ... But K. Burdakh did not see and did not understand the main sphere of being of the idea-image of revival - the folk culture of humor of the Middle Ages. The desire for renewal and a new birth, the "thirst for a new youth" permeated the carnival outlook and found diverse embodiment in the concrete-sensual forms of folk culture (both in ceremonial and spectacular, and in verbal). This was the second festive life of the Middle Ages.

Many of the phenomena that K. Burdakh considers in his book as preparing the Renaissance, themselves reflected the influence of the folk culture of laughter and, to the extent of this influence, anticipated the spirit of the Renaissance. Such were, for example, Joachim of Fiore and especially Francis of Assisi and the movement he created. It is not for nothing that Francis himself called himself and his supporters "Lord's buffoons" ("ioculatores Domini"). The peculiar worldview of Francis with his "spiritual gaiety" ("laetitia spiritualis"), with the blessing of the material-bodily principle, with specific Franciscan reductions and profanities can be called (with some exaggeration) carnivalized Catholicism... Elements of the carnival outlook were quite strong in all of Rienzo's activities. All these phenomena, which, according to Burdach, prepared the Renaissance, were characterized by a liberating and renewing laughter principle, although sometimes in an extremely reduced form. But Burdach completely ignores this beginning. For him there is only a serious tonality.

Thus, Burdach, in his striving to understand more correctly the attitude of the Renaissance to the Middle Ages, also - in his own way - prepares the formulation of the problem of the folk culture of laughter in the Middle Ages.

This is how our problem is posed. But the direct subject of our research is not folk laughter culture, but the work of François Rabelais. Folk laughter culture, in essence, is immense and, as we have seen, is extremely heterogeneous in its manifestations. In relation to it, our task is purely theoretical - to reveal the unity and meaning of this culture, its general ideological - world outlook - and aesthetic essence. This problem can be best solved there, that is, on such concrete material, where the folk culture of laughter is collected, concentrated and artistically conscious at its highest Renaissance stage - precisely in the work of Rabelais. Rabelais is indispensable for penetrating into the deepest essence of folk laughter culture. In his creative world, the inner unity of all the diverse elements of this culture is revealed with exceptional clarity. But his work is a whole encyclopedia of folk culture.

But, using Rabelais' creativity to reveal the essence of the folk culture of laughter, we do not at all turn it into only a means to achieve an objective outside of his. On the contrary, we are deeply convinced that only in this way, that is, only in the light of popular culture, can the true Rabelais be revealed, Rabelais can be shown in Rabelais. Until now, it has only been modernized: it has been read through the eyes of modern times (mainly through the eyes of the 19th century, the least vigilant to popular culture) and read from Rabelais only what for himself and his contemporaries - and objectively - was the least significant. Rabelais' exceptional charm (and everyone can feel this charm) still remains unexplained. For this, first of all, it is necessary to understand the special language of Rabelais, that is, the language of the folk culture of laughter.

This concludes our introduction. But to all of his main themes and statements, expressed here in a somewhat abstract and sometimes declarative form, we will return in the work itself and give them full concretization both on the material of Rabelais's work and on the material of other phenomena of the Middle Ages and antiquity that served for him. direct or indirect sources.

Book M.M. Bakhtin's "The Creativity of Francois Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" was conceived, most likely, at the very end of the 1920s, written in 1940, and published, with additions and changes that did not affect, however, the essence of the concept, in 1965 year. We do not have exact information about when the idea of "Rabelais" arose. The first sketches preserved in Bakhtin's archives date back to November-December 1938.

The work of M.M. Bakhtin is an outstanding phenomenon in all modern critical literature, and not only in Russian. The interest of this study is at least threefold.

First, it is a completely original and interesting monograph on Rabelais. M.M. Bakhtin with good reason insists on the monographic nature of the book, although there are no special chapters on the biography of the writer, on the worldview, humanism, language, etc. - all these questions are covered in different sections of the book, dedicated mainly to Rabelais' laughter.

To appreciate the significance of this work, one must take into account the exceptional position of Rabelais in European literature. Since the 17th century, Rabelais has enjoyed a reputation as a "strange" and even "monstrous" writer. Over the centuries, Rabelais's "mystery" only increased, and Anatole France called his book "the most bizarre in world literature" in his lectures on Rabelais. Modern French Rabelais is increasingly talking about Rabelais as a writer "not so much misunderstood, but simply incomprehensible" (Lefebvre), as a representative of "prelogical thinking" inaccessible to modern understanding (L. Febvre). It must be said that after hundreds of studies about Rabelais, he still remains a "mystery", some kind of "exception to the rule", and M.M. Bakhtin rightly notes that "about Rabelais, we know well what is of little importance." One of the most famous writers, Rabelais, it must be admitted, is perhaps the most "difficult" one for both the reader and the literary critic.

The peculiarity of the monograph under review is that the author found a new approach to the study of Rabelais. Before him, researchers proceeded from the main line of Western European literature since ancient times, understanding Rabelais as one of the leading figures of this line and using folklore traditions only as one of the sources of Rabelais' creativity - which always led to stretching, since the novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel" did not fit into the "high" line of European literature. MM Bakhtin, on the contrary, sees in Rabelais the pinnacle of the entire "unofficial" line of folk art, not so little studied as poorly understood, the role of which increases significantly in the study of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Boccaccio, but especially Rabelais. Rabelais's "ineradicable unofficiality" is the reason for Rabelais's mysteriousness, who was considered only against the backdrop of the mainstream of the literature of his century and subsequent centuries.

There is no need to present here the concept of “grotesque” realism of folk art, which is revealed in this book. It is enough to look at the table of contents to see a completely new circle of problems, which previously almost did not arise before researchers and make up the content of the book. Let's just say that thanks to this kind of lighting, everything in Rabelais's novel becomes surprisingly natural and understandable. According to the apt expression of the researcher, Rabelais finds himself "at home" in this folk tradition, which has its own special understanding of life, a special range of topics, a special poetic language. The term "grotesque", usually applied to Rabelais's creative style, ceases to be the "style" of a super-paradoxical writer, and one no longer has to talk about the willful play of thought and unbridled imagination of a bizarre artist. Rather, the term "grotesque" itself ceases to be a scapegoat and a "formal reply" for researchers who, in fact, were not able to explain the paradoxical nature of the creative method. The combination of the cosmic breadth of the myth with the acute topicality and concreteness of a satirical pamphlet, the fusion in the images of universalism with individualization, fantasy with amazing sobriety, etc. - find a completely natural explanation from M.M. Bakhtin. What was previously perceived as a curiosity acts as the usual norms of millennial art. No one has ever succeeded in giving such a convincing interpretation of Rabelais.

Secondly, we have before us a wonderful work dedicated to the folk poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the folk art of pre-bourgeois Europe. What is new in this book is not her material, about which there is a lot of carefully performed research - the author knows these sources and cites them - but the merit of the work is not in the discovered tradition. Just as in the study of Rabelais, a new illumination of this material is given here. The author proceeds from the Leninist concept of the existence of two cultures in each nation. In folk culture (which "broke through" into high literature with the greatest completeness precisely in Rabelais), he singles out the sphere of comic creativity, the "carnival" element with its special thinking and images, opposes it to the officially serious art of the ruling classes in the Middle Ages (not only the feudal , but also early bourgeois), as well as the later literature of bourgeois society. The characterization of "grotesque realism" is at the same time of exceptional interest (see, for example, the comparison of "grotesque body" and "new body").

The significance of the nationality for world art, with such an interpretation, grows in a new way and goes far beyond the question of Rabelais' work. What we have before us is essentially typological work: a juxtaposition of two types artistic creation- folklore-grotesque and literary-artistic. In grotesque realism, as M.M. Bakhtin shows, a popular sense of the passage of time is expressed. This is a "folk choir" accompanying the action of world history, and Rabelais is the "leading figure" of the folk choir of his time. The role of unofficial elements of society for truly realistic creativity is revealed in the work of M.M. Bakhtin in a completely new way and with remarkable force. In a few words, his thought boils down to the fact that in folk art for centuries and in a spontaneous form that materialistic and dialectical sense of life, which has taken on a scientific form in modern times, has been prepared. Bakhtin's main advantage over the typological schemes of formalists of 20th century art critics in the West (Wölflin, Worringer, Hamann, etc.) is in the consistently applied principle of historicism and in the “meaningfulness” of the typological contrast.

Third, this work is a valuable contribution to the general theory and history of the comic. Analyzing Rabelais' novel, Bakhtin explores the nature of the so-called "ambivalent" laughter, which is distinct from satire and humor in the usual sense of the word, as well as from other types of comic. This is a spontaneous dialectical laugh, in which emergence and disappearance, birth and death, denial and affirmation, abuse and praise are inextricably linked as two sides of the same process - the emergence of a new and living from the old and dying. In this regard, the researcher dwells on the nature of familiar laughter in the unofficial genres of the oral and written word, in particular, in swearing, revealing its roots, its meaning, which is currently not fully recognized. The study of this material, which is so important for Rabelais's novel, especially in connection with the established folklore basis of his work, is strictly scientific in nature, and it would be hypocrisy to doubt the need for such a study.

The role of laughter as a "midwife of a new seriousness", coverage of the "Herculean work" of laughter in cleansing the world of the monsters of the past is marked by a remarkable historicism in the understanding of the comic.

The more terrible and harsh the material and spiritual power of alienated forces (Bakhtin takes the example of the Rabelaisian world of absolutist monarchies and the Inquisition of the late European Middle Ages), the greater the potential energy of protest. The more formal and detached from real life this power, the more material the form of protest wants to become. The more hierarchical and tied by complex artificial rules-rituals official social life, the more simple, mundane, mundane alternative actions will be.

And they will begin with mockery, with buffoonery, with the search and display of the "other" truth, as it were, "for fun" - as in a child's play. Here everything will be possible: the images of the monstrous phallus will be not only decent, but holy; feces will be a legal continuation of food, and the cult of food-gluttony will be the highest form of spirituality; the jester will rule over the king and the Carnival will triumph.

So (or something like this) a primitive prologue to Bakhtin's theory of Carnival might sound. It is the prologue that is complex, rich and grotesquely pointed. And precisely to the theory - the Carnival theory, created by the method, language and according to the rules of the Carnival. Its presentation is not our subject. Another thing is important for us - to show that the world of Carnival is an outburst of the simplest form of mass Dialogue within the framework and under the dominance of the world of alienation.

Carnival is precisely the simplest form, because, firstly, it arises from below, spontaneously, without a complex cultural base and, secondly, is initially focused on simplification as the antithesis of a complex and sublime (in quotes and without) official life.

Carnival is the simplest form of Dialogue, because this action-relation can and do naked people in the direct (naked, half-dressed) and in the figurative (removed their social roles) sense of the individual, looking for the simplest, deliberately primitive and at the same time, the only possible forms unregulated, non-alienated communication - laughter, food, copulation, excrement ... but not as (or not only as) purely natural, material actions, but as alternative-cultural (for all primitiveness) acts. Carnival is the simplest form of a truly mass Dialogue, which is fundamentally important, because here there is not only the accessibility of all these forms (due to their primitiveness) to the masses, but also the original orientation - praised by Bakhtin - towards everyone.

Carnival is a mass dialogue and therefore action against the world of alienation, and against not only the power of the upper classes, but also the “rules” of the lower classes, the institutions of respectable philistines and their intellectual adherents (for which, note in parentheses, the Bakhtin idea of carnival is little welcomed by the conformist intellectuals, including "Bakhtinologists").

But carnival is a massive action against the world of alienation, which remains within the framework of this world and therefore does not destroy its real foundations. Here everything is "kind of", here everything is "pretend".

This is the essence and purpose of the carnival - to oppose the laughter and play of the carnival to the serious and real world of alienation. But this is the weakness of the carnival.

And now about some of the hypotheses that this world-idea-theory gives rise to.

The first hypothesis. Carnival as an imitation of mass social creativity or mass social creativity "make-believe" is at the same time a kind of make-believe mini-revolution. On the one hand, this is a valve that "releases steam" from an overheated boiler of social protest, but, on the other hand, it is also a process of forming the cultural prerequisites of a new society.

In this regard, the question arises: does any society generate the Carnival phenomenon (naturally, we are not talking about specific European carnivals) and if not, what substitutes can arise in this place?

Soviet Union in the cruelty of its political and ideological structures, the over-organization of the official spiritual life, it could well rival the late medieval monarchies. But did the Carnival phenomenon exist in our country?

Yes and no.

Yes, because in the USSR, the era of prosperity and progress of our Motherland, there was a kind of Carnival - popular Soviet culture. Moreover, folk in this case does not mean primitive, exclusively folkloric. Ulanova and Dunaevsky, Mayakovsky and Yevtushenko, Eisenstein and Tarkovsky were popular favorites.

No, because during the period of "stagnation" with its formal, but ubiquitous atmosphere of dominance of "socialist ideology" and a shortage of consumer goods in a "socialist consumer society" (a kind of "goulash-socialism", with a general and there was no dialogical holiday atmosphere. Moreover, the question naturally arises: was not the absence of this safety "valve" one of the reasons for such a quick and seemingly easy disintegration of this superpower?

These sketches on the themes of the USSR, especially the period of late stagnation - the late 70s - early 80s. can serve as a basis for posing an important problem. We know that in the society of the late Middle Ages the formal-official dictate of the "spirit" evoked a carnival antithesis in the image of the "body". We know that in the USSR in the era of its disintegration, two alternatives to the officially conservative artificial ideology developed - (1) the semi-underground cult of consumerism (hence the powerful conflict: striving for a consumer society - the economy of scarcity) and (2) "a fig in the pocket of the" spiritual life "of the elite intelligentsia "who despised Suslov and idolized Solzhenitsyn. But we do not know what could be a real grassroots antithesis to the consumer society existing now in the first world. Is there (and if not, how can it be) a carnival as a massive anti-alienation game that ridicules all the foundations of the current world of the market, representative democracy and the monstrous exploitation of the world by corporate capital? Or would another hypothesis (the second of the ones we put forward in this text) be more correct: the Western world is so permeated with the hegemony of global corporate capital that it is incapable of generating even carnival forms of protest?

And the third hypothesis concerning the allegedly carnival nature of the social system that has developed in our Fatherland after the collapse of the USSR. Outwardly, at first glance, this new system is a super-carnival. "Top" and "bottom" are monstrously mixed: "thieves in law" become respected statesmen and patronize art and science; members of the government participate in all sorts of fraudulent activities, which "for real", in fact, realize what they barely dared to show "pretend" in fancy shows; the president lies more cynically and frankly than any moron .. And most importantly: everyone has shifted and confused the concepts of good and evil, moral and immoral, “high” and “low.” Some kind of blatant super-, super-carnival.

But the fact of the matter is that "over", "super" ... The form of a carnival, crossing a certain line (namely, turning from an exception, alternative, protest into something universal and self-sufficient), destroys its positive foundation - social creativity masses.

We noted above that Carnival by its nature is a transformed form of social creativity, mixed with the exaltation of "anti". This is ridicule, belittling, inversion, parodying and caricature of the semi-official world of alienation. But the creative and creative social role of Carnival is narrow: a valve that releases the negative and destructive energy of social protest, and a caricatured and caricatured form of anti-systemic culture.

Carnival as an imitation of social creativity, an imitation of revolution, accentuating their negative and critical side, can (as the experience of the ex-USSR shows) turn into a universal form of social life. But by doing so, he destroys everything that is positive that he carries with him, turning criticism into criticism, turning the top and bottom into a cult of immutability, ridiculing outdated common sense into preaching immorality, parodying the destruction of the social hierarchy into universal lumpenism ... From the phenomenon of laughter criticism of society alienation such a "super" -carnival turns alienation inside out, becoming from this no less, but even more severe. Unlike carnival as an imitation of social creativity, pseudo-carnival becomes a parody of social creativity. And the reason for this is the absence of genuine mass social creativity.

This is what Russian society has become after the collapse of the USSR - a parody of a carnival, a parody of the grotesque. And this is no longer funny. This is no longer "other" (alternative, oppositional) truth, but a parody of it, i.e. Lying. Moreover, the lie is so obvious that it looks like an anecdote. (Note in parentheses: one of the leading Russian comedians from the stage read the transcript of one of the speeches of Chernomyrdin, then the prime minister of our country, with expression - the audience was dying with laughter).

These are the three hypotheses inspired by the image-theory of carnival.

Bakhtin's world, of course, is much wider and deeper than those three sketches. But for us, these sketches were important first of all because they allowed us to at least partially substantiate the thesis formulated at the beginning of the text: Bakhtin's world is a window open from the world of alienation (adequately reflected by materialistic dialectics, theories of class struggle, the exposure of people in goods, money, capitals, states) into the world of freedom (for which the methods of dialogical, polyphonic cognition-communication-activity, subject-subject, personal, non-alienated human relations in the process of social creativity will most likely be adequate). And the first necessary (but not sufficient!) Step in this direction is ridicule and carnival reversal of the official perverse forms of the present and past alienated world, purification and creation out of laughter and through laughter of the "other" (not transformed by perverse forms) truth. But woe to the society that turns the carnival from a step towards social transformations into the alpha and omega of its existence: lies, immorality, and unlimited arbitrariness will become its lot.

"THE WORKS OF FRANCOIS RABLE AND THE FOLK CULTURE OF THE MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE"(M., 1965) - monograph M.M. Bakhtina. There were several author's editions - 1940, 1949/50 (shortly after the defense in 1946 of the thesis "Rabelais in the history of realism") and the text published in 1965. The articles "Rabelais and Gogol (The Art of the Word and Popular Laughter Culture)" (1940 , 1970) and "Additions and changes to Rabelais" (1944). The theoretical provisions of the book are closely related to Bakhtin's ideas of the 1930s, dedicated to romance polyphony, parodying, and chronotope (the article “Forms of Time and Chronotope in a Novel”, 1937–38, the author intended to include in the monograph). Bakhtin also spoke about the "Rabelaisian cycle", which should have included articles "On the theory of verse," "On the philosophical foundations of the humanities," and others, as well as the article "Satire" written for the 10th volume of the "Literary encyclopedia" ...

Bakhtin considers Rabelais' novel in the context of not only the preceding millennial and ancient culture but also the subsequent European culture of modern times. There are three forms of folk laughter culture, to which the novel ascends: a) ceremonial-spectacular, b) verbal-laughter, oral and written, c) genres of familiar-areal speech. Laughter, according to Bakhtin, is world-contemplative, it seeks to embrace the existential whole and appears in three hypostases: 1) festive, 2) universal, in which the laughing person is not outside the ridiculed world, as it will become characteristic of the satire of the New time, but inside it, 3) ambivalent: it merges glee, acceptance of the inevitable change (birth - death) and mockery, mockery, praise and abuse; the carnival element of such laughter breaks down all social barriers, lowers and elevates at the same time. The concept of carnival, grotesque generic body, interconnection and mutual transitions of “top” and “bottom”, opposition of the aesthetics of the classical canon and the grotesque, “non-canonical canon”, ready and unfinished being, as well as laughter in its affirming, reviving and heuristic sense ( as opposed to the concept A. Bergson ). For Bakhtin, laughter is a zone of contact, communication.

The carnival laughter element, according to Bakhtin, is opposed, on the one hand, by an officially serious culture, and on the other, by the critically-denying beginning of satire of the last four centuries of European culture, in which grotesque, images of bogeymen, masks, motives of madness, etc. lose their ambivalent character, undergoing a tilt from sunny fearlessness to the night, gloomy tonality. It is clear from the text of the monograph that laughter is not opposed to any seriousness, but only to a threatening, authoritarian, dogmatic one. Genuine, open seriousness is purified, replenished through laughter, without fear of parody or irony, and reverence in it can coexist with gaiety.

The laughable aspect of being, as Bakhtin admits, can come into conflict with the Christian worldview: with Gogol, this conflict has acquired a tragic character. Bakhtin notes the complexity of such a conflict, records the historical attempts to overcome it, “realizing, at the same time, the utopian nature of the hopes for its final resolution both in the experience of religious life and in aesthetic experience” (Sobr. Soch., Vol. 5, p. 422; commentary by I.L. Popova).

Literature:

1. Collected. op. in 7 volumes, v. 5. Works of the 1940s - early. 1960s M., 1996;

See also lit. to Art. Bakhtin M.M .

Mikhail Bakhtin Francois Rabelais' creativity and folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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Introduction Formulation of the problem

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Mikhail Bakhtin
Francois Rabelais' creativity and folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Introduction
Formulation of the problem