How to Think about French Classicism: To Concretize the Methodological Basis

The article proves the need to change the interpretative perspective of the vision of French classicism as a cultural, historical and literary phenomenon. The disadvantage of the traditional approach to its research is revealed: it is traced how a concise, relatively complete, conditional scheme is fixed, stable in its basic organizing principles, which imposes rigid simplifying symbolic and semantic boundaries on a particular artistic discourse, thereby preventing the discovery of its cardinally significant variability and incompleteness. It is proved that the texts of poets and playwrights are analyzed based on a certain set of common, simplifying characteristics, so that the very concept of “classicism” in relation to their work becomes a cliche, an obstacle to the discovery of independence by these authors, so that the creative manner in all its volume, versatility remains undefined and underestimated. The article defines the conditions under which the concept of “classicism” can acquire the necessary functionality: the refusal to consolidate the author’s manner for poetological norms, the identification of exclusivity, the fundamental activity of literary writing, emphasizing how the author overcomes the inertia of laws and rules, successfully adapts them to solve his own artistic problems, when setting up an experiment, a break with the tradition implements the original idea. It is established that the return to the classical author of the right to freedom, which was assigned by the romantic author and as such is fixed in the theory and history of literature, allows us to raise the question of the mobility of classicism in all its changing multiplicity, to transfer classicism from the ideological plan to the historical plan, thereby giving it the necessary procedural ambiguity and at the same time establish a dynamic connection between The 17th century and our modernity, endowing “classicism” with relevant meanings.