XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

Any work of art, a poem, a novel, a song, is a versatile world. A work of art, like the writer's world, is a separate world, with its own internal laws and rules. The expressive side of the world of art includes two forms of expression: symbol and intonation. The symbol is a part of something expressive, non-material, which is a tool of emotional and aesthetic value. In his research L. Z. Zeltser defines the specificity of the symbol as a form of expressive world [1, p. 467].

The symbol in art is a universal aesthetic category, which is revealed through comparison with adjacent categories – an artistic image on the one hand, a sign and an allegory on the other. Any symbol is an image (but not all images are symbols), and we will address this question below. The category of the symbol indicates that the image goes beyond its own limits, and that there is the presence of some sense [1, p. 467].

According to S. S. Averintsev, the interpretation of the symbol has a dialogical character and confronts subjectivism and objectivism, at the same time, combining both. The symbol reveals sometimes incomprehensible at first sight idea of the image, as its distinctive feature is a powerful semantic saturation [1, p. 467].

E. V. Eroshkina carries out the research in which she defines a symbol as literary category, and says that it involves research on ways of its realization in the verbal text. The author emphasizes that the category of the symbol has many options of realization carried out at different levels of the work of art. At the same time, a thoroughly accurate analysis allows us to bring all these incarnations together and emphasize their categoricity [2, p. 162].

The concept of symbol is being considered by different adjacent sciences. So, literary studies consider the problem of the symbol from the point of view of its expression, while philosophy studies the problem of the essence of the symbol [2, p. 162].

However, the distinctive side of art as an understanding of life in its aesthetic properties determines the merger of the philosophical and aesthetic aspects of the phenomenon of the symbol. In the process of creating a work of art the interaction of factors responsible for the understanding reality and recreating it as an aesthetic object has a special place. These factors determine both the personality of the creator of the work and the personality of the viewer (listener, reader), as well as the world around them, i.e. they can be both objective and subjective. At the junction of these various relations, the category of symbol in art is formed [2, p. 162].

There is another aspect of the symbol category. Depending on the laws of the literary process, and stylistic traditions of the genre, sometimes social tendencies, the author's mood, a reader's perception the more or less pronounced symbol in the work of art can be defined, taking into consideration various degree of visual and artistic isolation. That is where we meet the manifestation of the category of symbol as a tool of artistic expression [2, p. 162].

E. V. Eroshkina emphasizes that the separation of philosophical, aesthetic, expressive (artistic) and, possibly, psychological aspects of the category of symbol in this case seems almost destructive. Therefore, the phenomenon of a symbol cannot be reduced to its one-dimensional expression in the form of a path. The symbol in the Humanities is depicted at least in three ways: as a philosophical category, as an aesthetic category and as a tool of artistic expression. In addition, the literary text in any form has a multi-level structure, and due to it the symbol can combine its various incarnations. It can be represented either as an element of local character, for example, in the literature of the trope, which influences only a small segment of the text, one or several phrases, or as a compositional technique, which organizes the text at the level of the structure of its sufficiently large parts, as a worldview element, etc. [2, p. 162].

The concept of a symbol is multifaceted and versatile. M. Lotman defined it as "one of the most significant concepts in the system of the semiotic sciences" [17], and A. Losev noted: "the concept of a symbol in literature and in art is one of the most vague, confusing and contradictory concepts". This is explained, first of all, by the fact that the symbol is one of the central categories of philosophy, aesthetics, cultural studies, literary criticism [3, p. 215].

S. S. Averintsev gives the following interpretation to the symbol: "Symbol (Greek. symbolon-a sign, an identification sign) - a universal aesthetic category, revealed through the comparison, on the one hand, with the adjacent categories of the artistic image, on the other – the sign and allegory. In a broad sense, we can say that a symbol is an image taken in the aspect of its signality, and that it is a sign endowed with all the organicity and inexhaustible ambiguity of the image [6, p. 352]

The definition of the symbol by A.F. Losev: "symbol is the principle of infinite formation with the indication of all the regularities, which are subject to all the individual points of formation". Every symbol, firstly, is a living reflection of reality, secondly, it is subjected to some kind of mental processing, and, thirdly, it becomes the sharpest tool for changing the reality itself" [3, p. 215].

According to Losev's theory, it is also very important that the symbol has meaning: "the fact is that every symbol points to some object that goes beyond its direct content. It always contains some kind of meaning, but not just the meaning of the things themselves, reflecting each other. Meaning always points to something else. However, here we are talking not just about something another, but about the consciousness and the mindset in which the thing is reflected. All languages that use the term “symbol” understand it as a certain kind of reflection, but in consciousness and thinking, and not just in the same physical or physiological reality. The meaning of a thing is something more general than its symbol; and in order to become a symbol, it must be developed and organized in a certain way" [16]. "Symbol - (from Greek. sign) a multi-valued object image that combines different perspectives of the reality reproduced by the artist on the basis of their essential community" [1, p. 467].

Symbols always expand the semantic perspective of the work, allow the readers to build a chain of associations connecting various phenomena of life on the basis of the author's "tips". Symbolization is used by writers in order to destroy the illusion of lifelike, which very often occurs to readers to emphasize the ambiguity, the greater semantic depth of the images created by them [3, p. 215].

The problem of distinguishing a symbol from an image is very interesting, because in some cases they are considered as synonyms, and in others they are contrasted. T. M. Fadeeva notes that unlike the image, the symbol is not self-sufficient and" serves" its denotate (subject), requiring not only experiencing, but also penetrating and interpreting it. In art, especially in its high achievements, the line between the image and the symbol is difficult to define, if we do not take into account that the artistic image acquires a symbolic meaning, while the symbol is initially associated with its subject [4, p.231].

Thus, the Literary Encyclopedia of terms and concepts offers the following definition:" an artistic image is a category of aesthetics that characterizes the result of the author's (artist's) understanding of a phenomenon, a process peculiar to a particular art form, objectified in the form of a work as a whole or its separate fragments and parts" [5, p.674].

In contrast to the concept, for which unambiguity is an advantage (compared, for example, with the word of natural language), the strength of the symbol in its ambiguity and the dynamics of the transition from meaning to meaning. The symbol is not an allegory, which is removed by substitution of its direct meaning: the meaning of the symbol does not have a simple existence, to which the interpretive consciousness could be sent. In contrast to the parable and myth, the symbol does not imply a detailed narrative (narrative form) and can have an arbitrarily compressed form of expression. Unlike metaphor, a symbol can carry the properties of objects and establish certain features not for its mutual description of things, but for references to "indescribable". In contrast to the sign, the symbol is not a sign of the temporal or spatial phenomenon of the supernatural reality, since it allows having an infinitely large distance between itself and its intentional object [4, p.231].

References:

Seltzer, L. Z. (2001). The world of Expressive Artwork. Moscow: Non-Profit Publishing Group of E. Rakitskaya "Era".

Eroshkina, E. V.(2004) The Category of Art of a Character in Russian literature of the XX century. Moscow.

Losev A.F. (1995). The Problem of the Symbol and the Realistic Art. Moscow.

Fadeeva, T. M. (2004) Image and Symbol. Moscow: NOVALIS.

Rodnyanskaya, I.B.(2001). Image: Literary Encyclopedia of terms and concepts. Moscow.

Averintsev, S. S. (1987). Symbol in Art : lit. encyclopedia. Moscow: Nauka.