In the world of the artistic word: who is a literary hero

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Any work of art is built according to certain laws and rules. If in the era of classicism they were quite strict, other directions in art allowed writers to feel more free in their creative flight, expressing their ideas in various ways. However, even the most non-standardized trends in literature impose certain requirements on the work. For example, a novel should contain a certain idea, and a lyrical poem should carry an emotional and aesthetic load. An important role in the work is given to the literary hero.

Meaning of term

Let's figure out who a literary hero is, what he is. In the broad sense of the term, this is the person who is depicted in a novel, short story or short story, in a dramatic work. This is a character that lives and acts on the pages of the book and not only. His literary hero was, for example, in ancient Russian epics, i.e. in pre-literate genres and types of artistic word. As an example, one can recall Ilya Muromets, NikitaKozhemyaku, Mikul Selyaninovich. Naturally, they are not images of specific people. This is the peculiarity of this term, that it denotes the totality, the collectiveness of a number of persons, united by some similar character traits and qualities. Melted in the author's creative laboratory, they represent a single monolith, unique and recognizable. So, if an ordinary person is asked what the literary hero of a Russian folk fairy tale should be like, in his descriptions he will rely on the images of Vasilisa and Baba Yaga, Koshchei and Ivan Tsarevich. And a social fairy tale, of course, cannot do without Ivanushka the Fool. The same well-established types exist in the folklore of any nation. In the mythology of ancient Greece, these are the gods, Hercules, Prometheus. Scandinavian storytellers have Odin, etc. Consequently, the concept of "literary hero" is international, intercultural, timeless. It exists within any creative process associated with the artistic word.

Hero and character, protagonist

The next question, which naturally arises, is this: "Is the character of the work, his protagonist always considered a literary hero?" Critics, researchers answer it negatively. In order for this or that image created by the author to turn into a hero, he must meet a number of requirements. First of all, the presence of his own, distinctive qualities and personality traits, thanks to which he will not get lost among his own kind. For example, the famous literary hero Munchausen (authorRaspe) is a witty inventor who himself believes in his fantastic stories. You can't confuse him with any other characters. Or Goethe's Faust, the personification of the eternal search for truth, the mind, thirsting for new higher knowledge. Usually such literary characters are also the main characters of literary texts.

On the issue of classification

Now let's look at the typology of the images we are interested in. What are literary heroes? Conventionally, they are divided into positive and negative, main and secondary, lyrical, epic, dramatic. Often they are also carriers of the main idea of the work. The more serious the image, the more significant it is, the larger it is, the more difficult it is to sum up some unambiguous assessment under it. So Pugachev in Pushkin's "The Captain's Daughter" is a villain, a cruel killer, but also a people's defender, fair, not devoid of his code of honor and nobility.

Thus, the hero in literature is a holistic, meaningful, complete phenomenon.