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20одновременно комментирует события и собственную реакцию на них (в тексте это передается через авторский курсив). Такое повествование не сходно с припоминанием. У Р.П.Уоррена память - знание пережитого, это и страдание, которые требуют исчерпывающего ответа. Уоррен показывает, что Адам находит себя на метафизических пределах мира - «след человека имеется везде». Самоидентификация Адама, обретение метафизики своего «Я» завершается, когда ему пришлось отказаться от себя прежнего, своего ботинка и надеть чужие, не раз переходившие от одного мертвеца к другому: «И он с грустью подумал о том, что даже имен их не знает. Он никогда не узнает их имена. Потом, смирясь понял, что даже в этом есть благо. Он постарается стать достойным и этой их безымянности, и того, что им пришлось пережить - им, людям, совершившим ошибку» [Уоррен 2001: 219].
'Подробнее о жанровых модификациях исторического романа в литературе XIX в. писал А.А.Бельский (см.: Вельский A.A. Типология исторического романа и романы А.Дюма конца 40-х - начала 50-х годов // Проблемы прогрессивной литературы Запада XVIII-XX веков. Пермь, 1972).
2 Термин Н.О.Лосского.
Список литературы
Бельский A.A. Типология исторического романа и романы А.Дюма конца 40-х - начала 50-х годов // Проблемы прогрессивной литературы Запада XVIII-XX веков. Пермь, 1972.
Лосский Н.О. Избранное. М., 1991.
Мулярчик A.C. Человек и история в романах Уоррена. Предисловие / Уоррен Р.П. Воинство ангелов. М., 2001.
Скотт В. Уэверли // Собр. соч.: В 20 т. М., 1960. T.I.
Скотт В. а) Пуритане // Собр. соч.: В 20 т. М., 1961. Т.IV.
Скотт В. б) Роб Рой // Собр. соч.: В 20 т. М., 1961. T.V.
Уоррен Роберт Пенн. Дебри. Цирк на чердаке. М., 2001 ь
Уоррен Роберт Пенн. Воинство ангелов. М., 2001.
Anna Podgajec (Perm) GENESIS OF TOWN CULTURE IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN (CANTERBURY TALES BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER)
Medium Aevum is regarded as a historic period between the antique civilisation and the epoch of Renaissance, the term itself being introduced by the Italian humanists in XV century. It has been lasting for many centuries but “classic feudalism” in Europe is confined to XI-XV centuries with highly developed economic relations, growth of towns, socially structured population - the two privileged groups of the clerics and knights, the third one embracing townsfolk and rurals, i.e. those who pray, protect and feed. Church was the strongest uniting force in XI century West Europe which was gradually sloping down to feudal conflicts of XIV-XV centuries, religious people made up two per cent of the English. Mooreman wrote that reading the Bible was pretty popular in XIII century Britain as the usual pastime both for the clerics and the civilians under Catholic
© A.Podgajec, 2007
predominance of the Roman Church (Doctor of Physic from Chaucer’s “Canterbury tales” among the books on medicine “his studie was litel on the Bible”). Theology course was taught in three biggest Universities - Padua, Oxford, Cambridge, most schools in middle size town were at the Cathedrals, or attached to secular churches and monasteries. Monasteries played a significant role in Europe as centres of learning with rich libraries of books and manusripts. Education in Britain has been spreading intensively since XII century up to XIV century, strange as it may seem the church was liberal enough and among the teachers were the secular clercs not necessarily the monks. Small size and islandish location of Britain soon finalised the process of turning the country into a strong feudal state with the monarch’s power supported loyally by the military elite. In XI-XII centuries Britain has developed really feudal relations (senior, vassal, beneficiary) of the homogenious socio-economic forms having overcome the greatest national disasters: the Norman invasion and the Black Death. Norman Duke William the Conqueror has united the country by issuing in 1086 a unique in its deep-rooted consequences document - Doomsday Book. Centuries afterwards the historians and scholars refer now and then to this source of social history, which descibed in full details 34 Britain’s shires out of 38. Doomsday Book stated that the towns appeared in England in X century, that in a 100 of them there lived five per cent of the total polulation, then in XII-XIV there were 170 towns (120 in England and 30 in Wales), 40.000 people dwelt in London, 20.000 people inhabited York, the second town in size. Most of towns had the granted charts or gilda mercatoria, but there didn’t exist the type of a town’s folk, a burger, a citizen - a member of a free-governing community. The concept of “town” included the cathedral, the university, the hospital, public baths, eating place like an inn, brothel - opposed to the village or the castle, but it was not the source of progress in any way. The association, or partnership, or administrative centre of any guild bore a European name Hansa and Hansahus, uniting the traders, the manor owners, and the clergymen.
The origin of the English town, its evolution in particular, is hardly reflected in Russian historical literature. A feudal town is the result of social - labour division: crafts and agriculture, where random exchange of products and goods bears irregular disorderly character. The regular systematic trading develops into a significant sphere of country economy, the merchants turning into a professional social layer. In England the process of goods exchange do not go through town centres - trading “circulates” via villages, settlements, local fairs, e.g. Winchester Fair, the capital of pre-Norman England. The towns in the country emerged as completely new united entities having no connection either to old administrative, political or religious division all over Anglo-Saxon England. They were “villa, tun, wich, ham” in the villages of the rural community, or “portus, burg” of the craftsmen settlements, or former Roman towns’ locations “castrum, civitates, urbs”, or “castella, castrum” erected in the vicinity of the feudal castle, or the monasteries, “abbeys” built on the crossroads or by raw material mining fields. English toponymy reflects the geographical location and lifestyle of the Anglo-Saxons, the words defining “town” related to water, harbour - “vie, wic, wich” or
fortified settlement, “burg, burh”. Generally speaking our major source of information on the English medieval town comes from F. Maitland’s book “Doomsday Book and Beyond” printed in Cambridge in the XIX century, where the author admits that however obscure the history of the village was, the history of the town was much darker. There are some other reliable books, like Douglas D., the Social Structure of Medieval East Anglia, Tait J., The Medieval English Borough, and a number of other researches in political geography, social history but none of them proves so comprehensive and exhausting in listing both the common and specific traits.
The distinguished types of towns: artisans’ portus and burgs, ancient Roman locations or abbeys together with the towns built on the crossroads find their linguistic implementation in variety of names signifying the early town, “wic, burg, ceaster, civitas, urbs, oppidum, villa”. The inhabitants, “burgeneses” and “mercatores” employed in various civic activities and personal “servicia” were speaking different territorial dialects due to their birthplace. The literary monuments were created in virtually all of them presenting a wide range of genres, styles, cultural traditions though pretty universal in its core - lives of saints, interpretations of the Bible, ballads, legal documents in literature, magnificent cathedrals in architecture, sculptures on biblical motifs and subjects, icons in arts. No wonder Latin served a unified force as the language of education and science. But it is common knowledge that education remained the privilidge of the nobility and clerics of the higher ranks, while the greater part of the people were illiterate and unable to put their ideas and thoughts into the written words, so traditionally the texts were listened to in public rather than read to oneself. Thus the Host of the Tabard Inn where “the company of twenty nine” people stayed at on the way to Canterbury after having served them “the finest victuals and strong wine” proposed for their enjoyment to tell the “tales from the days of old” and “measure of good morality and general pleasure as there is little pleasure for their bones riding along and all as dumb as stones”. He himself would “ride at his own expense and serve as guide and judge to reward the winner this verbal tournament”. Chaucer wrote for the gathered audience who were in relation of each pilgrim to the group of pilgrims.
Canterbury where this company was going was 56 miles from London, no less than four days walk and not an easy jouney, so the pilgrims made up groups staying overnight in the regular sleeping places. Tabard Inn, the place Chaucer made his characters meet was still in existence in XV-XVI centuries. Migrations, regular and usual for this period were slow and dangerous so the people got together for safety when they changed the place of living or went to the sacred places. Pilgrimage though wide spread was perceived not only as a road to sanctuary but a spiritual way to God, thus implying in the concept of motion a religious motif of Christ. The idea of pilgrimage supposed to have come from William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” (the pilgrimage to Truth) though might occur without any suggestion, living in the age of pilgrimage, with pilgrims to Canterbury passing Chaucer’s house almost every week. The epoch of Geoffrey Chaucer is literally the beginning of Shakespeare’s Chronicles. The greatest
Englishman for centuries to come lived in the critical period for his country. When he was ten years old Ranulh Higden wrote in his famous Polychronican of the corrupted state of English, of how “boys construed their Latin into French”, how French was the language of nobility, how Old Saxon speech split into three dialects had the difficulty surviving among “a few rustic folk”. John de Trevisa translated the Polychronican and noted the change for Johan Comwal who “changede the love in gramer-scole and construction of Frenynsch into English”. They were Chaucer’s contemporaries, so this making language period was taking place during his youth and early manhood. In 1362 Edward III, at the request of the citizens, has allowed suits to be pleaded in the law court in English instead of French. By the time Chaucer was writing the earliest of the Canterbury tales the victory of English was already assured, and yet his contemporary J.Gower used French as a medium for his poems. French was the language all educated people had to be acquainted. Professor Skeat in the notes on etymology (1901) has given a list of 3000 English words which occur in Anglo-Saxon books of XIII-XIV centuries often in the exact forms used nowadays.
Born about 1339 in London, mixing all his life with the Court, Chaucer wrote the ordinary dialect of educated Londoners, which was practically East Midland, and with few modifications has become the standard English of our days. The methods of the two poets, Gower and Chaucer, were the same in grammar and pronunciation, both allowed themselves some freedom in their rhyme words, both were conservative in the tendencies, retaining inflections, which were rapidly being dropped in ordinary speech. Their successors Lydgate, Hawes, Skelton tried to improve on English of their day by ransacking the Latin vocabulary for ornate polysyllables, which they tranferred straight into English. Having lived under the reign of the three monarchs Chaucer experienced full of adventures life. First a page at the King’s Court, then as the soldier taken prisoner of war, ransomed for 16 pounds (less then the cost of a horse), got a pension and a daily decanter of good wine for the table, spent ten years abroad on diplomatic, commercial, secret services in Flanders, Italy (met Petrarch and brought three books of Dante and Boccaccio), Lombardy, France, was elected a Knight to the shire of Kent not yet 50, married, lost the wife, died 25 October 1400. The bones of Chaucer lie beneath the pavement of south transept of Westminster Abbey, a privileged position not ordinarily granted to a civil servant or poet. English literature burst out in mature Chaucer, then slided into the centuries of apprenticeship of his followers -Hoccleve, J.Lydgate, R.Ros, prose writers Th.Usk, John de Trevisa, famous John Wiclyf, printer William Caxton, popular till now Th.Malory. G.Chaucer, essentially a narrative poet, a story-teller in verse, with descriptive power, subtle humour, light satire, drawn characters to life, set the models in literature. The simplicity of his poetry is in fact complex and genuinely sophisticated by comparison with modem pretences and complicatedness. Modern English literature dates since XVI century, while Chaucer’s are developments from new works of art. The nearest equivalent is in late XVIII century, Crabbe, Th.Eliot, Jane Austin, Samuel Johnson. Chaucer’s poetry matured earlier than prose. “Canterbury Tales” inaugurates the English novel together with “Troilus and
Criseyde”, two dramatic poetic novels in which Chaucer explores the theme of the individual’s relations to the society, they are part of comedy of the clash of characters and conflict of interests. He shows the comic and ironic effects obtainable from the class distinctions felt by the newly emerged bourgeoisie associated with the growth of town life, trade, commerce, changes in manners and outlook between generations, describes feminine psychology, characterisation form. He is in debt to great Italians, French must have been his second mother tongue, he was well versed in French literature, among the classical writers Vergil and Ovid were his favourites. The idea of collection of tales may have been suggested by Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, but was pretty common at that time, only Chaucer hit on this simple device for securing the natural probability, psychological variety and a wide range of narrative interest. But Chaucer alone had a happy and brilliant thought of bringing his story tellers together for a common purpose that united “all sorts and conditiond of men and women in unstrained and unrestrained intercourse". In the “Canterbury Tales” the personages of Anglo Norman origin go together and speak one language. In all literature there is nothing that touches or resembles the Prologue to “Canterbury Tales”. It is a concise portrait of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and clerical, learned and ignorant, rogue and righteous, land and sea, town and country. The most significant thing about the characters is their normality, oddly individual, together they make a party, their lives and told stories though varied in style and language are closely intervowen, interdependent. Chaucer’s characters beginning with the Knight (supposedly future King Henry IV who spent twenty five years at wars), his son Squire “a fine young lover, a lad of fire who knew the way to sit at horse and ride”, Yeoman, a freeman “who bore a mighty bow and knew the whole of woodcraft up and down”, a big group of religious pilgrims (monks, nuns, a Prioresse who “studied at school at Stratford-atte-Bowe, French in the Paris style she didn’t know”, a Friar, “a festive fellow, a noble pillar to his order”, an Oxford Cleric, who like Chaucer himself visited Padua, and possessed the greatest treasure of “twenty books clad in red and gold”, Doctor, Serjeant at the law, “who paid his calls at St.Paul’s”, then a bunch of commoners like Merchant, Franklin, Reeve, Miller, Carpenter, Weaver, Cook, Skipper, Plowman, and others who left the villages and went to towns. The towns met and absorbed thousands of rural people from all across the country speaking variety of dialects driven to the new life, venturous and daring. They would shape the third layer of the future English society, the mighty power of post feudal Britain, that thick cultural soil which gave birth to blossomong literature in the following centuries. They will all make up the future third class of the townsfolk, profit making class, while at the moment they are on the road to Canterbury to pay tribute to Thomas a Becket, King Henry’s religious advisor, strong adept of the Church who resisted the King and was murdered in 1170, canonised three years later and whose body was then tranferred to a shrine. The pilgrims ride between the two levels, two areas of existence as a still episode of the dynamic life. Moreover, their Anglo Norman background does not interfere with the situation - it is the route, common for everyone, which they are riding along speaking one and the same language. The frame format employed
as a literary device in “Decameron” is not a realistic picture, it is like an ideal, dreamed of seclusion, far from the daily routine against the picturesque environment, a static world of the medieval concept. Out of the planned 58 stories Chaucer made less than a half, and the frame work he used is so original and impressive that it is impossible to tell what freedom of allusion he allowed himself or what facts may be mixed with its fictions. Chaucer is the first Englishman who is great both as an Englishman and European. He became consciously an English poet, a master of English through his work of translating, paraphrasing, adapting from other languages and thus assimilated essential European tradition. Chaucer demonstrated an enormous technical and imagimative effort of adaptation and recreation of French, Italian, Latin modes, themes, as well as used and developed his own English resources. English as Chaucer uses it show dramatic power, controlled in his poetry by art which implies a sure evaluation of life. His fundamental source, the English language itself, and the characters are recognisingly English members of the community - vivid, alive who move and talk in scenes and dialogues that are actually listened and witnessed. Chaucer’s subject is human nature observed as particular persons in a particular society. The stories his pilgrims tell come all over Europe, some from the ancient, some from the orient. They exemplify the whole range of European imagination, particularly addicted to the stories that have some sharp point and maxim, moral or idea. Almost every tale ends with a piece of proverbial wisdom - “Do evil and be done by as you did”, or “Be careful who you bring into the hall”, or “Throw out a rotten apple from the horde or it will rot the others”, or “Lost money is not lost beyond recall, the loss of time brings on the loss of all” etc. Chaucer’s collection of tales diversified in style to suit their tellers and unified in form by uniting them in a common purpose present high romances, grotesque stories, fabliaux, parodies, purely erotic narratives and reveal the social belonging of the personages intensified by the language every speaker is using. The XIV century English language having no standardised literary form offers a remarkable richness of vocabulary, syntax, morphological means. At the same time Chaucer’s masterpiece is rhythmically built with complete poetic accuracy, subordination to the rhyme chosen. The narrative metre, so called seven-line stanza, Royal ten\eleven syllabled couplet, vivid in colour and sense of the beauty entitles Chaucer to be ranked among the greatest English poets, and is known as Chaucerian stanza. It is worth mentioning that the poetic form of the novel does not interfere, on the contrary it helps to enjoy reading, carries away, draws you in to drink from this distant deep well which is surprisingly young and burning.
All these linguistic, literary and cultural speculations together with socio-historical panorama of medieval England allows to define now the genesis of the modem tendencies in literature, arts, music, that have fantastically manifested themselves in town subculture of the XX centuries. Chaucer and his characters live in a specified space - it is neither Village as they left it, nor Town as they are on the way to it. They are on the road where the new culture is being engendered, what is in Russian called prigorod, possad, sloboda, predmestje. All the characters present by themselves and in thier tales a boiling mixture of social levels: the lower
classes are moving upwards while the upper classes are moving downwards. Opposing the static perception of time in Middle Ages Geoffrey Chaucer chooses dynamics, Bakhtin’s chronotop, the way to Canterbury turns into the movement on the road of time. The two aspects of space and time are exposed through the language of the author and his personages, used by Master to perfection. The exquisite fusion of styles and literary genres are dragging the reader into the whirlpool, the turbulent stream of active life from which the numerous springs of modem culture take their origin. The unparalleled genius of Geoffrey Chaucer is highly evaluated by his countrymen today who wrote the following citation: “If we could take thirty per cent of Goldsmith, fifty per cent of Fielding, twenty per cent of Walter Scott, and vitalise this compound with the spirit of the fifteenth century, we could get, perhaps, fairly near to another Chaucer. But it would be a Chaucer whose right hand wrote in prose and only his left in verse, and our formula would still be defective, for the charm of his poetry remains personal and individual.”
Bibliography
Chaucer by Rev. Walter W. Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. By A.J. Wyatt Chaucer, The Prologue, ed. by Pollard Alfred W., 1924, London Chaucer the Maker, ed. by John Spiers, London, 1840 Chaucer and His England, ed. by G.G. Coulton, 1918, London
Quotations were taken from the edition 1952
Chaucer G., Canterbury Tales, translated by Nevill Coghill
ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ СТУДЕНТОВ
А.Адлиеанкина, Б.М.Проскурнин (Пермь) ОСОБЕННОСТИ ПОВЕСТВОВАНИЯ ТОМАСА ДЕ КВИНСИ В РОМАНЕ «ИСПОВЕДЬ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ОПИОМАНА»
Томас Де Квинси (Thomas De Quincey: 1785-1859) - писатель, которого некоторые литературоведы считают автором второго плана. Его творчество мало исследовано, но заслуживает пристального внимания. Томас Де Квинси - представитель английского романтизма, на чье творчество повлияли такие писатели, как Вордсворт и Кольридж. Он автор интереснейших произведений, например, «Recollections of the Lake Poets» («Воспоминания о Лейкистах»), 1834; «Susperia de Profundis», 1845 - собрание
автобиографических эссе, работы, в которой Де Квинси изложил занимательные размышления о психологии; и «Исповеди Английского опиомана» - «Confessions of an English Opium Eater», работы, которой и посвящено наше исследование.
«Исповедь...» - произведение, относящееся к романтической исповедальной литературе. В определенной степени эта своеобразная
О А.Адливанкина, Б.М.Проскурнин, 2007
