The transitional era in literature and the term realism (1840–1850s)

Abstract

The article describes main milestones of the emergence and approval of the literary term realism. The term was filled with new content in French literature and criticism in the 1840s, and in 1849 first appeared in Russia in the article by Pavel Annenkov. The appearance of the term contributed to the transfer to Russian soil of the entire associative halo of the Realistic school, as it was understood in France at that time. The study of lagging autoreflection allows one to put forward the thesis about the atheoretical nature of realism. The means of realistic self-knowledge were not treatises, but critical articles on modern literature, where the concept of realism served as a means of journalistic polemics. The writers ranked among the great realists today did not classify themselves as such. Realists were considered anti-romantic-minded authors of low origin (raznochintsy), depicting familiar details of low reality. Subsequently, the fundamental thesis of the social determination of characters and artistic typification as asign of realistic art, which was subsequently consolidated, remained peripheral to the autoreflection of realism at the first stage of its development. All this determines the complexity of the conceptualization of this literary trend. In Russia the situation is more complicated because of the still-persisting influence of Soviet literary criticism, which sought to extend the unhistorically understood realism to the entire history of literature and turn it into a telos of literary development. Overcoming this approach and returning to the historical comprehension of realism is one of the urgent tasks of the history of literature.