What is the practical goal of artistic prose? Globally? Help people communicate on topics that concern them in everyday life, find mutual understanding with the interlocutor, that is, it unifies life experience. What is the purpose of documentary prose? All in all? Present every individual experience, each individually experienced event as a special, tested by an autonomous biological body, and thus show the inquiries around us. There are texts that you can’t immediately correlate either with artistic prose or documentary, with which it is unclear whether it is about typing or about radical exotization of experiments; texts that, thus, are very confused by the reader, but they just have the purpose of this provocation. This is an essay. It is correct to read them correctly, because they must be specially learned to read precisely as an essay.

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Any essay is based on a paradox: at the beginning, two contradictory thesis are declared, but by the end of the text one of the theses should be a justification for the second thesis. The opposites must unite.

The story of the genre itself was not without paradoxes, it is worth saying that it is still ironic.

The essay sounded in the literature in the XVI century, the father of the genre was appointed Michel de Montaeny, his essay - a sample of the style until now (three volumes of his “experiments” are in Ukrainian in a brilliant translation of Anatol of the Road). Moralist writer, very enlightened, very religious (but the church forbade his work), wrote short texts for decades, in which he grabbed a piece of living life and comprehended what he had now seen. In the end, he wrote a book about himself and did not hide it. What I see just now? What do I know about what I saw? What does it mean for me? - This is the structure and tasks of the classic Montean essay. In each question I am repeated, and this is not by chance, an essay - always about me, studying the world. In the essay, we see the world through the eyes of the author, move beyond his thought, he is a loving authority to which we obey or resist, this is the nature of the genre.

Say, “pure pleasure, so that something is not mixed with him, no” is one of the most famous Montaena essays, and its content is well reflected in the name, bright and provocative. Bliss emits a person, full of joy and happiness, a person seeks suffering. There will be a link to Plato and Tacitus, the author will re-read the poems of Katullae, he will come up with some completely happy person, remember the familiar talker, and then tells about his sufferings and close everything with an anecdot about synomide. He describes his experience, checks it with the imaginary experiments described before him and concludes: it is necessary to suffer to enjoy. Well, a very intimate text, honestly: a person is trying not to be happy with all his intellectual forces.

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Eurocentricity played a cruel joke with the essay, because in fact an essay is older than Montaenia for about fifteen centuries, and their “reference” palette is wider and more intimate than the one used by Montaine. The first book of the essay appeared in Japan, and the woman wrote (two factors, so that this book disappears from the Big Canon, as not to be) - the court lady Say Synagon and her “Notes at the head” (this book is also on Ukrainian, translated by Natalia Bortnik). This is a very literal name, so they say: the author was near the pillow, on the edge of the headstock kept her notes. In Japanese, this genre is called Dzuhitsa. In this genre, they record the current moment or the actual thought, not particularly worried about the aesthetic sophistication and imagery. A separate treasury " Among the lists of “Notes” there are several dozens of purely classifier lists-mountains, waterfalls, bridges, forests, ponds, herbs, etc.. All names clearly mean something for the author, but what exactly, we are already unknown. She streamlines the reality around, but we no longer know by what principle. “Things that make me happy”, “Things that make me be sad”, “What makes my heart beat”, “things that are dear like a memory” or something else. By the way, the words "

With essays continuous problems. Two birthdays of the genre - the smallest of them. The biggest lies in the fact that, probably, not a genre, metazhand, maybe, but not a genre in the strict meaning of the concept. There are theories in literary criticism, which claim that the genera of literature should be more than three. There is an epic where the action precedes psychological analysis. There is a lyrics where everything determines the movement of emotions. There is a drama where the content is subject to the active interaction between the heroes. It is clear that in its pure form now birth can be found, we mainly deal with transition and hybrid forms. But the essay does not fall under the signs of any of the births, it is not so much absorbing the elements of the lyrics, epic and drama, the essay is something completely different. In the essay, the content and meaning determine the movement of thought, and this thought can be an event, emotion or interaction. Therefore, they say that the essay is a separate genus of literature. Something like the kingdom of mushrooms in nature-it looks like a plant, but not a plant, but for some reason someone will definitely call a plant.

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A person who addresses us from an essay always says on behalf of I, declares his claim to the truth, but he speaks at that moment about unbelied experience. About appropriately designed life experience. There are ideas about experience as something that is increasing and has a goal. Each stage of our life teaches us something. Everything that happens to us is happening for something. We do not live from the bay-bary, but draw useful conclusions daily. (This is an erroneous, probably, but it is it that is realized in the essay. ) The essay is aimed at convincing the reader of something, lead him through the labyrinth to the correct answer about the meaning of being. (But we know that the maze has only one non -alternative exit, yes? ) The experience that becomes an essay is appropriate. Experience that becomes an essay is culturally determined. Someone suffer with Montean, someone to make a list of happy moments with Synagon.

Let's use an example? " We simply have no novels of such power about Chernobyl. The essay is written like a movie. The author analyzes three ways to talk about the end of the civilizational world: according to the versions of Dovzhenko, von Trier and Tarkovsky, she analyzes their cinema as a certificate of dying worlds. And the essay starts with private experience. Woman 26. 04. 86 leaves the trolleybus on Shulyavka and sees the shining sky and snow, reminiscent of as soon as ashes, but somehow very quickly melting in the air. She will tell about the deserted Kyiv in 1986 and about how that spring her relationship with her beloved, who will later become her husband got stronger. And suddenly there will be a random scene: some young woman rolls a stroller with a baby along the empty streets, the infrequent passers-by are scared by her negligence... And this essay is not about Trier. It is about that child. It is about the fact that the catastrophe like Chernobyl is invisible, like radiation, it does not leave traces visible to the culture, because it is “based” on losses that cannot be confirmed, which means that you cannot mourn. Here's what happened to that Kyiv baby born in 1986? He survived? Alive? And how many such were not born in 1986, because mothers were forced to have an abortion? And suddenly it becomes clear why there is no big novel: it should have confirmed the invisible and non -embodied.

The person who writes the essay consciously makes from his experience, realizing his restrictions, universal. This is how, in the essay, the involuntary observation of a young woman with one spring day turned into the memory of a surviving in a disaster, which has become a sign on which a way is based on what remains unpredictable, about the injury. It sounds difficult, because it is damn complex processes. And the essay does not look too complicated texts: this, at first glance, is a simple, almost in a conversational style, a description of impressions associated with a specific biographical case. This is also their paradoxicality: a simple form and a very serious mission.

There are two awards in Ukraine that, according to the protocol, note purely essays (not journalism, not documentary, but essays). This is the name of one of the nominations of the BBC year of the year, the Yuri Shevelev Award is guided by such books. In short lists of both awards from time to time are books that are not in principle.

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So, at one time, the Air Force Prize in essays received a collection of art stories " Although the scene with the dog, which pulls out the heart of the protagonist, or the scene where he will be arrested by two Gerillas and lead to the jungle to be shot, they would have to come across the idea that we have art prose. A comic case, without harmful consequences: the author who writes essays first wrote a novel collection and finally received a prize as an essayist.

But the second case, in which they entangled with the genre of the winner, or rather, ignored the specifics of the essay, more important and significant. Shevelev’s prize was received by Bakhmut Bakhmut Miroslava Layuka. This book is presented as an artistic report: the reporter arrives for three days to Bakhmut, which was then on the front line, to observe how the military celebrate Christmas, their team helps with the evacuation of the wounded local woman, who had so much helped them move around Bakhmut. A sort of story about Eurydice and all sorts of Dante moving along hell. Layuk reflects how much it is easier to interpret cliches and topos from literature than to perceive as an event in extra -artistic reality.

Reporting is a report on reliable events, a witness and a participant of which was an author, immersing the reader in the experience that he survived (through sounds, smells, through special storytellers). The essay may not be reliable, the essay is presented by the experience that is verified through other experiments, they do not conduct a fact of fact,. In the report, the accuracy of facts is infinitely important. In the essay, we believe the author, in the report - the fact and the documented testimony. You understand what the problem is when the prize for the essay celebrates the art report on the front?

The erosion of genre (or generic) boundaries of the essay will lead to the erosion of the boundaries between " And not all the true we experience directly, just as not everything we have experienced is true.

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The essay is fragmented. The essay consciously causes a strong emotional reaction. The essay appeals to the life experience and beliefs of the biographical author. The essays are aphoristic and paradoxical, they must certainly be like that, they scandalize and surprise. The essay is fundamentally subjective. The essay is advisable, but unproven. And at the same time, they are not an artistic prose, and from opponents you will not dismiss an easily piece with the inscription " Essay implies the author’s maximum responsibility for what has been said. Based on such generic signs, for example, I do not know the metazanra that would be more suitable for manipulating public opinion.

Essays become insanely popular during the time of social breaks. In our current history there were three powerful surges in essays: in the early 1990s, after 2014 and after 2022. Naturally, true?

Fine. But what to do with all this to the reader? Not fascinated, do not believe in the word. The essay, by its nature, needs a readel-skeptic, which every second resists the author’s opinion (even if it shares it). Read an essay is to bicker purely from the principle.

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