The specifics of the development of the small epic genre in Russian and Uzbek prose at the beginning of the 20th century

Among the epic genres, journalism is leading at this moment. The full volume and true scale of this phenomenon can only be comprehended today, since until recently one part of the works of this kind was buried on the pages of inaccessible periodicals, the other, which came out in small print runs, turned into a bibliographic rarity, the third went on the lists or was published in the West ( then or later) and was also out of reach. Born of its time and trying to comprehend its root problems, post-October journalism was of great importance for contemporary readers and was an extraordinary genre and species diversity: it was both an essay (A. Serafimovich, L. Reisner, etc.), and a lyrical journalistic essay (“ A Word on the Destruction of the Russian Land” by A. Remizov, 1917), and “just in case” notes that, in the context of the cycle, acquire the character of a holistic treatise on the problems of our time (“Untimely Thoughts” by M. Gorky, 1917-1918); poetic by nature problematic articles by A. Blok (“Intelligentsia and Revolution”, 1918; “The Collapse of Humanism”, 1919; “Katilina”, 1919); diary entries 1918-1919 (diary-pamphlet by I. Bunin "Cursed Days"); correspondence (“Correspondence from Two Corners” (1920) by Vyach. Ivanov and M. Gershenzon); V.Korolenko's letters to the People's Commissar Lunacharsky, 1920; manifesto "On the tendencies of proletarian culture", 1919 A.Gasteva; collections of articles devoted to philosophical problems (“From the Depths. Collection of Articles on the Russian Revolution”, 1918; “Oswald Spengler and the Decline of Europe”, 1922), etc. The range of views on the revolution proclaimed by the authors of journalistic works ranges from the tragically enthusiastic. Blok to uncompromisingly rejecting I. Bunin or A. Remizov. Between these extreme poles are the positions of those who, renouncing the old world and believing in the creative meaning of the Russian revolution, could not accept the correctness and reality of Marxist plans and tried to find some third way - to combine the pathos of the material transformation of the world with the ideas of its moral transformation, as well as those who entered into polemics with the Bolsheviks, remaining on the basis of the social reorganization of life, but tried to correlate the ideas of Bolshevism with the real circumstances of Russian reality, and the goals -with the means, like M. Gorky and V. Korolenko. Revolution and organic development of Russia, politics and morality, the problem of national character, Russian mentality, the fate of the country in the aspect of the traditional West-Russia-East triad, personality and mass, the crisis of traditional humanism and the possibility of the birth of a "new man", technical civilization and the fate of the individual, prospects for the development of culture and the democratization of society - in the context of the discussion of these problems, many socio-political, cultural-historical, philosophical ideas were born, which later became the focus of literature. At the very beginning of the 1920s, significant phenomena appeared in the field of the great epic form. At its origins are figures and works representative of the literary era: “Walking through the torments” (1919-1921 - a magazine version, 1922 - a separate edition) by A. Tolstoy, “We” (1921) by Evg. Zamyatin, "The Naked Year" (1921) by B. Pilnyak, "The Iron Stream" (begun in 1922, published in 1924) by A. Serafimovich. The fates of these writers, the works they created at that moment are signs of different writers' biographies and different trends in the further development of prose. A. Tolstoy in the spring of 1919 will sail from Odessa, in 1919-1920. will create the first novel of the Russian diaspora - "Walking through the torments", which will be known to the Soviet reader in a later edition as the first part of a trilogy called "Sisters"; in 1923 he returned to Russia, where the socio-psychological novel of the realist Tolstoy will be included (after revision) in the composition of the epic novel - the most revered genre of socialist realism. Alexei Tolstoy will return to become the "Red Count", the second person after Gorky in the Soviet literary world. A. Tolstoy will continue the traditions of realism in their classical version, will act as the direct heir to the elder Tolstoy, and later on will create one of the most significant works of the 20th century - the novel "Peter the Great". Fueled by a common need to master a new state of the world in the forms of life itself, realism, associated with such figures as M. Gorky, L. Leonov, M.

Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy, will show amazing vitality in the 20th century; a realistic type of generalization will be able to expand the scope of a person's vision and update the traditional system of genres, correct the system of artistic coordinates, using the experience of "non-classical" prose. However, by the end of the literary era, K. Fedin will represent realism, whose prose, according to the fair remark of M. Chudakova, trying to inherit the great novelists of the second half of the 19th century and “demonstrating (let’s give it its due) an understanding of the narrative tradition and fidelity to samples”, will be “ gradually degenerate already under his pen into what soon became the epics of authors with tablets on the doors of their offices. The Naked Year by B. Pilnyak will be one of the first works of great epic form, picking up the conquests of Andrei Bely, who quickly went from symbolism to avant-garde. Pilnyak will set up a kind of artistic experiment that reveals the productivity of ornamentalism (in particular, motivation as a means of organizing an artistic whole), neo-mythologism and grotesque imagery.

One of the little-studied in the writer's work, as already noted, is the genre aspect. Meanwhile, attention to the problems of the genre is one of the fruitful tendencies of modern literary criticism. For genres as “forms of vision and comprehension of certain aspects of the world”5 fix the objective content of the material of a certain era, the originality of the author’s position, in which the “memory of the genre” and the transformative power of the writer’s creative talent are fused together. Here the genre acts as a "crystal through which life is analyzed"

The genre aspect of the analysis of A.I. Kuprin's work helps to identify typological, historically stable characteristics and features of the writer's essays, stories, short stories. The very choice of a genre by a writer reflects his attitude to the depicted and orientation to a certain literary tradition, at the same time, the writer’s innovation is also manifested through the genre, something that is the achievement of the author and his era, “clarifying the genre of a work of art is one of the main points in study of his poetic system, because the assignment of a work to any genre already presupposes, in part, an answer to the question of its artistic nature.

Of the works of recent years related to the study of the problem of the genre, the article by I.F. Kopystyanskaya seems to be of particular interest to us. Formulating the definition of the genre, she relies on the provisions of M. Bakhtin: “Genre is always the same and not the same, always old and new at the same time”, “genres retain their stability and canonicity; their variations in epochs, directions, schools are peripheral and do not touch the hardened genre backbone”13. In her work, the researcher comes to the conclusion that the genre is a dialectical set and the relationship of stable and changeable features.