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p A. Bazhenova

p “The typical" is one of the traditional cardinal problems in art and aesthetics. A retrospective summary of research in this area would lead back into the distant past and take in the entire history of art and aesthetic thought, particularly the aesthetics of realism which occupied a central place in nineteenth century realistic art.

p Vissarion Belinsky, a representative of pre-Marxist materialist aesthetics, emphasised the significance of this problem when he defined “typification” as the basic law of creativity, the basis of the artist’s creative originality, and the hallmark certifying poetic talent. Engels defined realism as the truthful representation of typical characters in typical circumstances; this definition of realistic art, which has great theoretical and practical significance, became the general property of Marxist aesthetics and the cornerstone of socialist realist aesthetics.

p The clarity with which the Marxist-Leninist classics formulated and resolved this question does not, however, exclude the further development of Marxist theory in new historical circumstances. Whenever a specific historical situation changes and new social conflicts and social types appear, or whenever science and art develop to a higher degree and acquire a new character, this traditional problem is posed anew and new essential elements in its resolution and the distribution of accents are revealed.

p An accurate and historically concrete analysis of “the typical"is organically linked to the most fundamental problems in aesthetics, and therefore this question has been consistently important throughout the history of Soviet aesthetics. The related problems are: the essence and special characteristics of art, art’s social and aesthetic nature, the peculiarities of the reflection of reality in art, 245 the nature of imagery, the manner of artistic thought, and the artistic vision of the world.

p A great amount of research related to this problem appeared in the 1950’s and early 1%0’s. It was perhaps somewhat one-sided in its emphasis on such questions as the objective basis of typification as a creative method, in defining the social and class nature of typical phenomena in real life, and the manner of reflecting these phenomena (events, characters, etc.) in art. Seeking to define artistic typification, these studies proceeded from the assumption that a clear distinction, even an opposition, existed between science and art as methods of cognition of surrounding world, comparing the artistic image with the logical concepts advanced by science. Their most important contribution was that they formulated a number of problems based on the contrast and differentiation between the results of artistic and scientific cognition. All the studies very correctly pointed out that typification allows the artist or scientist to discover what is essential and significant in reality, while at the same time they criticised the conception of “the typical" as a statistical average or mechanical sum of similarities and the reducing of the artistic “type” to nothing more than the social essence of the object represented.

p This question, however, has by no means been exhausted and the controversy around it continues. In the last few years interest in the question has abated somewhat and fewer studies on the subject have appeared, but it has nevertheless become possible to resolve this problem more profoundly and more flexibly. Its resolution is above all a result of the revolution in science and technology, of the broader nature of research being carried out into the nature of the creative process for both the scientist and the artist, of the appearance of new types of artistic generalisation, and of the recognition that scientific and artistic means of cognition are not mutually exclusive. In general, then, recent studies have concluded that a solid link exists between artistic generalisation and contemporary science and philosophy.

p Like all the other human sciences, aesthetics has benefited from new and more precise research methods. Scholars in both science and art are taking a stand against placing their disciplines in opposition to each other and now stress that in principle there is no distinction to be made.  [245•1 

p In fact, the contrast between the “exact” and “inexact” sciences and the arguments over “physicists” and “lyricists” were not very 246 productive. The only positive result of the discussion was that it drew the attention of natural scientists to principles of aesthetics.

p The fact that art and science have been shown by experiment to have the same gnosiological basis as two varieties of human cognition does not in the slightest detract from the specific characteristics of art, which is unique and irreplaceable as a form of social consciousness. Contemporary aesthetics must inevitably take as its starting point the fact that art, the object of aesthetic research, is unique. Therefore, as Academician Yegorov has correctly observed, to speak of “the exhaustive character of ‘technical’ and ‘instrumental’ methods of research into aesthetic phenomena, or of the total identification of aesthetic research methods with those of natural science" means to ignore the essential, specific characteristics of art as the object of aesthetic research in contemporary conditions.  [246•1 

p A novel by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, “The Magellan Cloud”, tells of a distant future in which the main character, Zmur, a mathematician of genius who is able to solve any problem in the application of mathematics to all spheres of knowledge, stumbles over the problem of a precise definition of the essence of art and is unable to discover an all-embracing but specific formula by means of which technology could explain and classify works of art, explain the nature of talent and, most important of all, be able to create new works of art by purely technical means. Zmur spends long nights in front of his three-dimensional trion screen staring at Goya’s seething linear compositions, Vermeer’s spacious and airy paintings, Titian’s dynamic nudes, Rembrandt’s figures caught in mid-breath, and Nefertiti’s exquisitely sculptured head. However, his long and strenuous labour does not bear fruit: “the mystery of art" remains unrevealed and the formula which Zmur has worked out only establishes the rhythm of a repeated artistic design and hundreds of minor details in a still-born composition with a perfect white circle in the centre.

p Art’s fundamental secret—its beauty and uniqueness—eluded the grasp of the great mathematician. It proved impossible to translate Nefertiti into mathematical terms without eliminating her very essence: “she was, after all, only rough stone hewn by some Egyptian craftsman forty-five centuries ago.” The thoughts of the author and his hero are consonant with the questions which have arisen in contemporary aesthetics about research methodology, the 247 application of models in aesthetic theory, etc. Lem warns against the dangers of an excessively mechanistic, superficial approach to a subject as delicate as art.

p The questions which have arisen in contemporary aesthetics make it necessary to re-examine aesthetics as a whole, i.e. its fundamental and “eternal” problems, taking into consideration the present level of development in science and in art. Primary among these problems is that of imagery in art; examination of the nature of the artistic image from all aspects is certain to lead to a better understanding of the specific nature of art as well as of the general principles on which art and other forms of cognition are based.  [247•1 

p Given current scientific knowledge about the creative process,  [247•2  we now know more about the underlying principles in the artistic reflection of reality which are important in typification and individualisation.

p What is universal, essential and typical in art as reflected in what is individual and concrete: this was shown clearly even by preMarxist aesthetics. (In idealist aesthetics it was shown best by Hegel and in pre-Marxist materialist aesthetics, by the revolutionary democrats Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.)

p The individual and unique traits in a work of art are the most important manifestation of the artist’s originality, world-outlook, and ability to give art “a living soul”. This is the key to art’s “mystery”.

p The concept of “what is individual" in art is applicable to all the phenomena, events, situations, and details in a work of art, as well as to its unique, concretely historical material. The artist’s originality manifests itself particularly in his portrayal of human character and in his recognition of the uniqueness of the individual personality.

p Characterisation in art and literature is a reflection of real people in life, each person being uniquely individual. This individual uniqueness is preserved in art. However a man’s character in real lite, while serving as the basis for a “typical” character in art, is still not entirely identical to the latter. If this were the case, 248 art and literature would only imitate life and therefore be useless. In life each and every character exists as a separate entity. In art the individual character acquires the traits of a type and becomes a typical character. The typical character is always the artist’s creation, his generalisation of life’s variety and of the wealth of individual human traits, his blend of reality and creative thought, the fruit of his artistic imagination. It would therefore be unthinkable to show correctly the nature of individual traits in art without reference to typical traits; i.e. character cannot be shown without referring to type and also without disclosing the gnosiological and social roots of artistic generalisation.

p A definition of what makes a character typical may be approached from several directions: either from that of the creation of types at various times in the. history of art, or from that of an individual artist’s work, or from that of the particular types characteristic of various artistic trends or styles or, most important of all, from an objective point of view, i.e. comparing typical characters in art with their counterparts in reality and with the very concept of types as defined by science.

p In each of the above instances the concepts of “the type" combines certain characteristic aspects and qualities held in common by a group of phenomena, events, personalities, etc. These general, fundamental characteristics of a given phenomenon are the object of study in various areas of specialised knowledge and are also of great importance to the artist. This, however, exhausts what is common to “the typical" as used in different spheres of life.

p It is important here not only to emphasise the common ground between these spheres but also to distinguish “the type" in literature from “the type" in other spheres of human knowledge.

p The object of our examination will be the concept of the type only as it relates to the human personality as the main source for the creation of artistic types. Man is a many-sided being and is bound to the surrounding world in many different ways. Therefore the traits that people have in common may also be revealed in the process of studying man’s various relationships with the world, in this way clarifying different facets of the human personality. One of the major achievements of Marxist-Leninist philosophy is that it gives a scientific definition of man as a totality of his social relationships.

p Sociology explains people’s common social traits in terms of social and class types. Different social types embody the essence of their class or of a given social group. The appearance of new social types in life is tied in with concrete circumstances and class relations.

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p Lenin often spoke of the existence of various types corresponding to their given group or class.  [249•1 

p Man as a social entity is many-sided but his dominant characteristic is his class nature. In addition to this, as a member of society man lives in a given country and belongs to a given national group. This also engenders certain common traits which condition man’s spirit, culture, etc. One must remember, however, that man is an object of study not only for the social sciences, but also for the natural sciences. Physiology, for instance, studies different physiological types distinguished one from the other according to their types of higher nervous activity. Psychology, in close alliance with physiology, establishes different emotional and psychological types. Man’s physiological and psychological nature and the differences in human temperament and character, etc. are linked to social milieu and are to a great extent even determined by it, but nevertheless they are not entirely determined by social and class factors.

p Pavlov’s definition of the four basic types of higher nervous activity, representing all of an individual’s traits acquired by the activity of the cerebral hemispheres together with those he inherits, is of particular interest in this connection. Pavlov showed in a great number of experiments how the relations between the two signalling systems vary from one individual to another and thus create individual traits in perception and thought-processes in different people.  [249•2 

p In some people the first signalling system is highly developed (a type which perceives reality predominantly through emotions and images), while in others the second signalling system prevails (a predominantly verbal-logical type). Generalising these qualities, physiology and psychology have established different types of memory, imagination, temperament, etc., i.e. typical traits in the human personality.

p Thus, there are many different general personality traits. These traits are also in evidence in art. But then, one might ask, what distinguishes social, national, emotional and other types from “the type" in art?

p Let us take, for example, “the typical" in art as compared with “the typical" in sociology. Lenin offers a political and social analysis of an example from the latter category in his essay, In the 250 Servants’ Quarters, considering “the servant" as a distinct social type arising as a result of given social conditions:

p “The necessity to combine a very moderate dose of love for the people with a very big dose of obedience and of protection of the master’s interests that is specific to the position of the lackey, inevitably produces the hypocrisy that is typical of the lackey as a social type. Here it is a case of a social type and not of the qualities possessed by individuals. A lackey may be the most honest of men, an exemplary member of his family, an excellent citizen but he is fatally doomed to hypocrisy because the main feature of his trade is the combination of the interests of the master whom he is ’pledged to serve truly and faithfully’ and those of the milieu from which servants are recruited."  [250•1 

p Lenin analyses the servant here from the point of view of a sociologist or politician, consciously ignoring the servant’s traits as an individual and focusing attention on his political essence as a given social type.

p An artist, on the other hand, sees the same phenomena in his own way. He cannot and indeed must not ignore individual traits of character. It is not the “social type" as an object of scientific analysis that interests him but the “typical character" as a unique, whole individual. (We might recall, for instance, such different portrayals of “the servant" in Russian literature as the devoted and honest Savelich in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, the elderly, touching figure of Firs in Cheknov’s The Cherry Orchard, and the ominous, envious Smerdyakov in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

p It would be unfair to place the social type and the typical character in art in complete opposition to each other, but one must be able to distinguish between them. They are concepts of the same order but are not identical. The common clement is that both the social type studied by the sociologist and the artistic type created by the artist are generalisations; in both instances it is the most essential traits of character in people from given classes or groups that are brought to our attention. The nature of the generalisation in each instance is, however, different.

p In studying a given artist’s body of work and the “types” he has created, Marxist-Leninist aesthetics always seeks to reveal the social and historical significance of this work, i.e. to reveal what is universal in the realm of the uniquely individual. When evaluating typical characters in realist literature and art, the Marxist classics 251 always emphasised art’s capacity for creating socially significant generalisations.

p Marx and Engels condemned any attempt to interpret typical characters in realist art in terms of “eternal” and universal human qualities alone, unrelated to concrete historical and social conditions. Thus, Engels criticised Karl Griin who had rejected concrete historical analysis of Goethe and his work in preference of a “universally human" point of view. Engels showed that Grun did not give a “universally human" evaluation of Goethe, but a petty bourgeois, narrow-minded one.  [251•1  The typical characters of Ibsen’s plays were seen by Engels as embodying the typical traits of bourgeois Norway at that particular time. Dante’s characters showed (according to Engels) the decline of the old feudal order and the birth of the new capitalist order, while Balzac’s characters expressed the social relations of his time with profound penetration.

p Marxist-Leninist aesthetics emphasises that man’s character is a concrete historical concept. Social relations place an ineradicable stamp on all aspects of a personality: a man’s social and class nature are expressed in all aspects of his life, from his social position, world outlook, goals and ideals, to his individual psychological traits, moral principles, habits, etc.

p Plekhanov’s ideas of human character in reality and in art are particularly relevant here, deriving as they do from Marxist historical teachings on the social, national, psychological, and ethical bases of character.  [251•2  Plekhanov considered the guiding principle in art to be the psychological development of character, the psychological justification and convincingness of the main character’s behaviour and feelings which must arise naturally from the situation. An individual’s psychology is inextricably linked to his social nature. For the realistic artist psychological portrayal of the individual is the major means of revealing that character’s social nature. “The dialectic of the soul" is therefore both the means and the end in art.

p However, this question must not be over-simplified by assuming that psychological and social-class traits are in full agreement with each other. Life is more complex than that. It is not infrequent that strong, sincere people, honest in their own way but without any comprehension of the nature of social struggle (due to their social limitations or other reasons) side with reactionary forces and support elements in life that have outlived their time. We meet with such contrasts in life as well as in literature and art.

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p Thus, Sholokhov showed Grigory Melekhov And Quiet Flows the Don to be a sincere and intelligent man who possessed unusual strength of character but who fled headlong from revolution into counter-revolution, unable to side wholeheartedly with the revolutionary masses.

p It is very important to remember the complexity of a character’s social make-up, for there are no “pure” phenomena either in nature or in society.  [252•1  Realistic art seeks to reflect the complexity and contradiction in human character as it interacts with the world.

p Referring to the classics convinces us that while one may criticise the vulgarised point of view which would reduce the artistic type to the expression of a given social force, yet it would be a mistake to go to the other extreme by denying art the ability to reveal the social nature of the depicted subject through its own special means. This mistake would deprive art of its most valuable feature, its great social resonance and its ability to make social generalisations. Socialist realism has made a great contribution to world literature through its social content and affirmation of a new hero and a new concept of personality.

p In order to clarify the dialectical unity of the typical and the individual it might be worthwhile to examine here the very concept of “typical character”, not only in relation to “type” but also in relation to “character”.

p Psychology is the specialisation particularly concerned with human character and it defines “character” as the totality of a man’s most formative psychological traits, stamping his every action and deed and, finally, determining his entire behaviour. By analysing an individual’s attitude to the world, to other people, to his work, to himself, etc., a psychologist draws conclusions about the existence of other, more general traits of character in humanity as a whole which, in their different combinations, determine the direction a personality will take (e.g. his consistency, honesty, energy, courage, conviction, lack of principle, etc.). The psychologist’s generalisation is a result of abstracting separate facts into his study and therefore it eliminates the individual configuration. Thus one may posit, for example, the typical traits of character of Soviet man: his patriotism, team spirit, communist attitude to work, etc.

p In art these general characteristics of Soviet man are embodied in an individual figure and in his actions and deeds as the unique social and psychological qualities of a given man which belong only 253 to this “particular” personality. One example of this would be the figure of Chapayev in the Vasilyev brothers’ film. This typical character bears the imprint of his creator’s individuality and ability to give his characters broad general significance. Chapayev’s individual traits of character, actions, deeds, and all the details about him are based on a profound generalisation, the disclosure of a new type of talented Red Army leader who conies from among the people.

p A man’s individual traits reflect socially significant traits which belong to a given social type. This social nature manifests itself in character traits and in spiritual qualities. Man’s individuality in turn colours his social behaviour. Thus, the typical character in literature is a concrete and individual embodiment of a social, moral, and psychological type. The truth of an individual character derives from the fact that he embodies a universal human type as well as a universal social type. (Every man is honest in his own way, loves and hates in his own way, demonstrates his strength of will and courage in specific situations, and has a strongly individual mind.)

p The strength of genuine art lies in the depth and vividness of its portrayal of individual characters.

p A man’s social, class, national, moral, and psychological traits do not merely add together to form a sum: these aspects of his character intermingle and condition each other so as to create a unique individual, and furnish the specific basis for a type.

p Disturbed by theatrical melodramas and vaudevilles and their absence of typical characters, Gogol once wrote: “We need truthful representation of character without those same old cliches, characters true to their national mould and capable of stunning us with their true-to-life air, causing us to exclaim ’Yes, this seems to be a man 1 know’. Only character portrayal of this type can be truly useful.”  [253•1 

p Nevertheless the individual in realistic art is not identical to the individual in reality. Literature does not set itself the goal of reproducing each and every minor trait of the represented fact. Individual traits in a typical character fulfill a generalising function and make it possible to focus attention on certain aspects of the human personality. In art life’s complexity and the true nature of characters and their actions, which are hidden in reality, become more perceptible and more explicable. The artist reveals the true nature of a fact through its individuality. Individual traits in turn make the “essence” tangible and give it a visible face.

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p Individual traits in a typical character are not copied from any one individual, nor are general traits an abstraction. Individual traits are generalised and general traits are individualised. The general and the individual are organically fused and transformed into the characteristic and the particular. The very concept of a “typical character" is profoundly dialectical. The combination of words, “typical” and “character” is far from accidental. Together they express a new quality which is neither the same as any given individual fact in reality nor the same as any general social or psychological phenomenon. A typical character is thus the point at which the internal and external aspects of a work of art are so fused that, in Hegel’s words, the ideal and the universal shine “through the human eye, through the face, muscles, skin, through a man’s whole appearance".  [254•1  An individual’s thoughts, feelings, and deeds represent an entire class, people, nation, and society.

p An individual’s fate, a man’s very life in all its uniqueness is not only a means of characterising society or a group of people of the same type but is also the ultimate purpose and the specific content of the creative process. At no time should the typical character, as an expression of individuality, be reduced to a mere copy of a single, separate individual. However, differences do exist in ways of creating typical characters even within realistic art alone. The characters in both Dead Souls and War and Peace are typical characters. The character traits of Manilov, Plyushkin, and Sobakevich are revealed in real circumstances, in everyday life, just as are those of Andrey Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov and the other main figures of War and Peace.

p The ways used to create these characters are different, however. Gogol focuses attention on one identifiable trait of character and exaggerates it, subordinating all the other traits to this one, thus revealing the nature of these stable, fixed types. Tolstoy, on the other hand, communicates the very process of character formation, “the dialectic of the soul”, and reveals man’s reactions to the surrounding world from many points of view. Tolstoy spoke clearly about this characteristic of his creative process in his dispute with Korolenko. Considering the state of contemporary literature (i. e. in the 1880’s-1890’s), Korolenko remarked that “the reason for the lack of great writers is that we are now living in a transitional period when there is no equilibrium, everything is moving, nothing is stable and it is therefore difficult to grasp hold of something definite, to typify it".  [254•2  Tolstoy justifiably protested against this, saying:

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p “No, I don’t think this is true; people’s characters are always changing and while ordinary people may not notice their nuances, an artist is able to grasp typical traits and to help us understand people’s characters. This is the great significance of fiction."  [255•1 

p It is this movement in the formation and development of character, its psychological process, its laws, that Tolstoy succeeded in capturing particularly profoundly and skilfully in his work.

p The ability of realism to portray characters as they develop in concrete circumstances in life makes it possible to depict personality from many points of view and thus to reveal it thoroughly. Depending on the artist’s goal and on which aspects of character he emphasises, a typical character may generalise different aspects of personality with differing degrees of typification.

p Having said that character is portrayed from many points of view in realistic art, one must not, however, conclude that artistic types express all sides of human personality with equal force and depth. Each typical character possesses a special aspect, a particular perspective in lighting, so to speak. Each artist’s resolution of the dialectical relationship between the general and the individual in a given type is in direct relation to the degree of typification sought, as well as to the ways employed.

p In this connection the reasons for the degree and depth of typification in a character, and the extent to which this character is artistically successful, acquire great importance. If we examine the history of realistic art from this point of view, we see that the concept of “a typical character" is very broad.

p A wide variety of characters may be termed “typical”: Hamlet and Don Quixote, Plyushkin and the old Grandet, Julien Sorel and Frank Cowperwood, Martin Eden and Foma Gordeyev, Mine. Ranevskaya and Nina Zarechnaya, Chapayev and Davydov, Vassily Tyorkin and sergeant-major Vaskov, etc. Even the simple listing of these characters demonstrates the difference in their typification and the different ways employed. Some, like Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Plyushkin, despite their unique individuality and concretely historical configuration are nevertheless generalised to such a high degree that they have become nominally tragic or comic characters; others, like Julien Sorel or Frank Cowperwood, represent whole epochs and express the essential traits of their time and their class; yet others, like Mine. Ranevskaya or Nina Zarechnaya, embody only certain aspects, moments, or “elements” of a type.

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p Heroes in Soviet literature like the dedicated communist Pavel Korchagin, Davydov, a worker turned kolkhoz organiser, the fearlessly merry and wordly-wise soldier Vassily Tyorkin, and many others are a deeply rooted part of our culture, having stepped from the pages of books into our lives, so to speak. They are typical characters on a large scale with great power to affect people emotionally. The breadth and depth of a character’s typicalness and the degree of his generalisation depend on many factors, both objective and subjective. The significance of a typical character undoubtedly depends on the choice of subject and the way in which this character reveals the leading types and the most deeply rooted social conflicts of that moment in history. Typical characters of this kind, if profoundly portrayed, achieve great social resonance and show the typical characteristics of their entire society. The “superfluous men" of mid-nineteenth century Russian literature were significant types in this sense, as were the “men of the sixties" in the works of Chernyshevsky and Turgenev, and the workerrevolutionaries in Gorky’s works, etc. It follows from this that the breadth and depth of typical characters is connected with the portrayal of great historical events and decisive conflicts, for human character shows itself most clearly at turning points in history when leading historical types appear and require generalisation of the highest intensity. The resolution of great historical tasks requires characters of exceptional strength. Soviet literature and art contain such leading historical types who reflect decisive moments in the October Revolution, the Civil War, the Second World War, etc. Characters like Chapayev, Levinson, Pavel Korchagin, Davydov, and the young heroes of Krasnodon revealed themselves at historical turning points. The most essential and necessary condition for creating a typical character is to reveal this character through a particular conflict in life, to show him in typical circumstances.

p While speaking about the significance of the choice of subject for a “type”, we should turn our attention to the existence and degree of development shown by the subject in real life.

p The artist is by no means indifferent to exactly which aspects of character or which phenomena in life he portrays in his work: types which have only just appeared and are scarcely noticeable, or types which ha,ve already become stabilised and are naturally more perceptible and thus more easily transformed into artistic types. (Korolenko is therefore right up to a certain point in his disagreement with Tolstoy referred to above.) Remarking on the difficulties in creating a positive hero from among the people, Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote that a fully conscious type did not yet 257 exist in real life and that only separate and individual positive aspects, and not the essence, of the Russian national character had appeared. It is the most important task of literature, however, to discover these elements of a type still in the process of formation. Thus, artists are frequently the first discoverers of new types. Gorky, for instance, “discovered” the conscious workerrevolutionary type in his work.

p We must, however, take note of the fact that this type did not appear all at once in Gorky’s work. Before creating the classic character of Pavel Vlasov, Gorky created separate ‘elements’, or basic character traits of this type in the figures of Nil (The Petty Bourgeois), Levshin (Enemies) and others.

p The writer’s perspective in time and the degree to which the type had already established itself in reality are obviously very important for the writer. Nevertheless, or in fact fortunately, many writers do not wait for a given event or type to stabilise or to repeat itself many times before attempting to depict these new, still minor, traits in concrete and typical characters. (This is why Turgenev’s contemporaries said he was able to “catch the fleeting moment”. Konstantin Simonov’s work is always highly attuned to its time, too.)

p It would not be correct, however, to say that depth of character depends only on the significance of the subject chosen or on the degree to which it had already established itself in reality. The subject offers only the grounds for creating a typical character. The theme and conflict are also important in themselves but they do not determine the strength of the characters’ generalisation. The whole essence of art is its ability to reveal character and to elevate a real prototype into “the pearl of creation" in Gogol’s words.  [257•1  Often the depiction of highly important events and characters turns into only a superficial illustration of the events, untransformed by the creative power of the artist. The opposite is also often true: the history of art is full of examples when what seemed to be an insignificant fact made it possible to create a typical character generalising the fact with such power that it became a landmark in art. Therefore, it is not only the subject that is important but even more so the depth of the artist’s poetic conception, i.e. his ability to relate the phenomenon itself to its essence and to illuminate an individual concrete character with general significance and thus to show the dialectics of things and their irrevocability.

p The significance of Sholokhov’s short story The Fate of a Man is not only that the writer was one of the first to deal with a few highly 258 important moments in the Second World War and to show the courage of Soviet people cast by the whirlwind of war into fascist captivity. The lasting value of The Fate of a Man is that it created the typical character of an average Soviet man with great poetic depth and generalised his traits to such a high degree, with such social pathos, that this one concrete fate became “a pearl of creation”.

p In this story Sholokhov depicted with great conviction the hard fate of a Russian who bore on his shoulders the full weight of the war and the hellish torture of fascist captivity, who suffered the death of his beloved wife and children, buried his last son in foreign soil and yet remained a true Soviet man, capable of peaceful labour and tender affection for an orphaned child.

p The figure of Andrey Sokolov, a man of exceptional spiritual strength, beauty, and nobility, is portrayed with great clarity and mastery. In revealing Sokolov’s fate Sholokhov. achieved an amazingly organic fusion of the thoughts, feelings, psychological and moral qualities of Soviet man in the individual concrete figure of his hero. The character is not idealised or “prettied-up” in the slightest but is successful because of the poetic devices used and, not least, because of the narrator-hero’s highly individual and expressive speech-pattern.

p Andrey Sokolov embodies the best traits of the Russian national character, its optimism, patience and endurance, courage and firmness, spiritual purity, magnanimity and Russian humour, its love for the right word at the right moment. In this respect Andrey Sokolov is similar to Nekrasov’s characters and to other outstanding figures in Russian literature. Yet he remains our contemporary, an active, conscious defender of his Homeland.

p A typical character in art always bears the stamp of his time, of the particular qualities in his given historical period and in that particular moment. There can be no living characters without these qualities, for man always exists in time and in space. These characteristics of a given time and place, combined in one given character, are also the true embodiment of a new, sometimes an entire society, people, era, class, and group of people.

p We have emphasised the basic principles of Marxist aesthetics concerning the typical in art as a unique dialectical unity of the universal and the individual in an attempt to counter the resolution of this problem in contemporary bourgeois aesthetics and in modernist art.

p It would not be an exaggeration to say that there are no concepts from classical aesthetics that meet with such resistance in modernist art and aesthetics as “the typical”, “the hero”, and 259 “character”. These concepts are declared at the outset to be outmoded and in disagreement with the new artistic thinking required by our dynamic century.

p Contemporary theories of “the anti-novel”, “the anti-drama”, and “the anti-hero" are based in the first instance on negation of the typical character as the organising principle of artistic creation.

p The real situation in art and aesthetics disproves any attempt to bury an aesthetics based on characters. What is more, it would be no exaggeration to say that the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway, Lion Feuchtwanger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Friedrich Durrenmatt, and other realistic writers, especially the representatives of socialist realism, contributed something new to the concept of the typical character. The work of Gorky, Sholokhov, Mayakovsky, Brecht and other writers expresses a new concept of personality in the contemporary world and embodies an entirely new type of relationship between an individual personality and society. It is precisely these basic problems of man and his objective situation in society that are reflected in the new range of characters. The typical character has therefore remained a contemporary problem of burning importance, a criterion of humanism and anti-humanism in art, and the point of departure for setting the boundaries between realism and modernism.

p Nevertheless one must not focus exclusively on this methodological watershed, even if it is of first importance in formulating the differences between realism and modernism. It is no less important or difficult to observe genuinely new tendencies in twentieth century art and to clarify the real issues set by the art of our time. No matter how profoundly and diversely the problem of character has been treated in the aesthetic systems of the past, the twentieth century has advanced new, unresolved aspects of this fundamental problem and made it even more topical.

p The basic meaning of and primary relationship between the typical and the individual remain the same, but new artistic treatment of typical characters requires a new and contemporary interpretation from the point of view both of concrete historical content and of research into new forms and devices of artistic expressiveness.

The most fruitful prospects for the resolution of this problem are to be found in socialist realist art which follows in the great variety of formal and stylistic traditions inherited from the art of the past. Brecht’s audacious and profoundly innovative art, for example, was based on an extremely broad range of traditions and on a contemporary interpretation of types drawn from world classics. 260 Brecht’s creative path, given direction by his intellectual and artistic searchings, led from symbolical, highly abstract and generalised forms to realistic forms, from Der gute Mann von Sezuan to the profoundly realistic Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, and proves that the psychological form of realistic art which requires typical characters in typical situations has found a way to develop further. Soviet art is continuing to develop along this path, as shown by Sholokhov’s internationally known work and by the unique characters created by Vassily Shukshin, Vasil Bykov, Chinghiz Aitmatov and other writers.