Realism is a combination of individuality and typicality

Realism is an artistic method in which painters and writers strive to portray reality truthfully, objectively, in its typical manifestations.

The main features characterizing realism are historicism, social analysis, the interaction of typical characters with typical circumstances, the self-development of characters and self-movement of action, the desire to recreate the world as a complex unity and contradictory integrity. The same principles are followed by the fine art of realism.

Hero of Realism

One of the main features of each artistic method is the type of hero. Realism is a special relationship between the character and the world around him.

On the one hand, the hero of realism is a sovereign unique personality. This is the influence of humanism and the inheritance of romanticism: attention is drawn not to how good a person is, but to the fact that it is unique, it is a deep independent personality. Therefore, this character can not be identical to the author or the reader. A person, as realism sees it, is not a "second self" of a writer, like a romantics, and not a complex of some traits, but someone fundamentally different. He does not fit into the author's world outlook. The writer examines it. Therefore, quite often the hero in the plot behaves differently than the author originally planned.

Living by his own logic, another person, he builds his own destiny.

On the other hand, this unique hero can not be separated from the various connections with other characters. They form a unity. One hero can no longer be directly opposed to another, as in Romantic literature. Reality is portrayed both objectively and as an image of consciousness. Man in realism exists in reality and at the same time in the field of his understanding of reality. For example, take the landscape outside the window, which is given in the work. It is both a picture from nature, and at the same time - a person's attitude, a field of consciousness, and not a pure reality. The same concerns things, space and so on. The hero is inscribed in the surrounding world, in its context - cultural, social, political. Realism greatly complicates the image of man.

Author's position in the literature of realism

Artistic activity from the standpoint of realism is an activity of cognitive, but directed at the world of characters. Therefore, the writer becomes a historian of modern times, reconstructing its inner side, as well as the hidden causes of events. In the literature of classicism or romanticism, the drama of personality could be assessed from the standpoint of its positivity, to see the opposition of the "good" hero and the "bad" world around him. It was customary to describe a character who does not understand something in objective reality, but then gets some experience. In realism, the semantic whole of the work unites the world with the hero: the surrounding becomes the field of a new embodiment of those values that the character originally possesses. These values are corrected in the course of the ups and downs. The author at the same time is outside the work, above it, but his task is to overcome his own subjectivism. The reader is given only a certain experience, which he can not experience without reading books.