Художественные приемы и реальность

Abstract

This article deals with literary devices that, due to an author’s discretion, arise out of the simple description of a real object or an event. Alexandre Dumas used a technique of this kind in the central novel of his trilogy Queen Margot, La Dame de Monsoreau and The Forty-Five Guardsmen (1845—1848). In La Dame de Monsoreau, Dumas details a hunt, one of the favorite amusements of the royal court of Henry III of France and of the upper nobility. He describes it from the beginning of the exciting action to the end: first, the flushing out of a wild animal, then its pursuit, and, eventually, the kill. The author also describes hunting in the other two novels, but only in La Dame de Monsoreau he turns the description into a lengthy, detailed metaphor with which he persistently correlates the motifs of different storylines. As a result, aside from the plot-event connection (and, as it were, in addition to it), the writer ties his motley, dynamic story together with one allegory, which is reflected in the personalities, actions and fortunes of many characters. Having observed this device in Dumas’s novel, Leo Tolstoy used it in his novel Anna Karenina (1875—1877). There the horse racing scene corresponds to the hunting scenes in La Dame de Monsoreau. Tolstoy attaches importance to the expanded metaphor in his work, and the original and spectacular solution of purely artistic problems becomes a means of embodying a deep social and philosophical concept. The article also refers to a distant echo of the same Dumas trilogy in the last novel by Dostoevsky. Whereas in Dumas’s text we see a description of a real fact, in Dostoevsky’s work it becomes a foundation for a literary device.