2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
Allegory (ἀλληγορία) is an artistic technique that allows you to express an abstract idea through an image. Allegories in narrative art appeared long before literature in its modern sense. In all religions and beliefs, it was customary to personify the forces of nature. Each element had its own incarnation - a deity. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the epic about Keret, Gilgamesh and others are allegorical through and through. Allegories gave the narrative expressiveness and clarity.
What is allegory in literature at an early stage can be seen in the example of the Gospel. The disciples of Christ are uneducated people, fishermen and artisans, far from abstract ideas. To convey to them the essence of the teaching, Christ uses the form of a parable, accessible understandable images: a shepherd, a sheep, a sower.
In ancient Greece, art in all its forms flourished much earlier and was primarily the prerogative of educated people. Here the allegorical presentation of information acquires artistry. What is allegory in the literature of the ancient period can be seen in the example of Aesop's fables. Using comparisons of people with animals, the fabulist generalizes the vice of a particular character to a whole category of people like him and at the same time ridicules the prototype, reduces it to the level of an animal. And at the same time, it slightly masks a personal attack, thus avoiding an open conflict.
Middle Ages. Europe lives under the unbearable yoke of the Inquisition, it is dangerous to express thoughts openly. Here the task is not to convey the idea in a visual form, on the contrary, to disguise it, to make it accessible only to the initiates. Aesopian language for writers becomes the only possible form of expression of ideas. Allegories of the Middle Ages are gloomy, filled with fear, a sense of hopelessness and hopelessness of existence. What is an allegory in the literature of the Middle Ages can be seen in the example of Dante's poem "The Divine Comedy".
Thaw begins in the Renaissance, closer to the new time. Its echoes are clearly visible on the example of the most famous allegorical poem in the world culture - Goethe's Faust. From the darkness of scholasticism, from the throwings of a hobbled spirit, from the feeling of his own powerlessness, the hero comes to the realization of the need for light, freedom and happiness for everyone. The most revealing is the "Classical Walpurgis Night": in this chapter, the longing for a free and natural existence is read in the most common symbolicincarnation - ancient classicism.
What is an allegory in the literature of the East is best seen from Chinese and Japanese samples: if the ancient Indian texts are closer in spirit to the Asia Minor and ancient ones (figurativeness and clarity), then in neighboring cultures poetic allegories come first. Here it is customary to poeticize everything: everyday life, dullness - thanks to condensed images.
Soviet Union. Severe nomenklatura pressure prevails in the country; one can openly glorify the system and pour mud on ideological enemies. Writers who do not fall into the ideological trend switch to Aesopian language. That is, again an allegory. Examples from fiction are The Master and Margarita, the prose of Pasternak and Platonov. The strongest allegorical solution is the finale of the poem “Moscow-Petushki” by V. Erofeev: four incarnated symbols of the infernal regime stick an awl “in the very throat” of the hero.
The postmodern era has come. And again, allegory is held in high esteem. Examples from literature are the works of Pelevin and Sorokin. For a while, the pendulum swung back: what matters is not the disguise of the idea, but the expressiveness of the presentation.
The works of A. and B. Strugatsky became a bridge between the Soviet era and the present. Fantasists tend to foresee the future. Written a long time ago, "It's Hard to Be a God" and "Inhabited Island" are the brightest allegory of today's Russia.
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