Scientific discoveries in literary works. The influence of science on literature
10 most popular and interesting scientific books of the most different areas human knowledge, of course, will not make you a scientist immediately after reading them. But they will help you better understand how a person works, our whole world, and the rest of the universe.
"Big, Small, and the Human Mind". Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Abner Shimoni, Nancy Cartwright.
The book is based on the Tenner Lectures delivered in 1995 by the famous English astrophysicist Roger Penrose and the controversy they provoked with equally famous English scientists Abner Shimoni, Nancy Cartwright and Stephen Hawking. The range of problems discussed includes the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, issues of astrophysics, theory of knowledge, and artistic perception.
"Big Atlas of Anatomy". Johannes V. Roen, Chihiro Yokochi, Elke Lutyen - Drekoll.
This edition is a worldwide bestseller. The reader is offered: unique photographs of anatomical sections, most accurately conveying color and structural features organ structures; tutorials that complement and explain the gorgeous color photographs of anatomical sections; didactic material covering the functional aspects of the structure of organs and systems; the principle of studying sections "from external to internal", when parrying in the laboratory and in clinical work; introduction, devoted to the description of modern methods of visualization of structural features of organs and systems of the body. For the convenience of the professional reader, the names of organs and systems are given in Russian and Latin.
« Short story almost everything in the world." Bill Bryson.
This book is one of the major popular science bestsellers of our day, a classic of popular science. Fitted in it Big Bang and subatomic particles, primordial oceans and ancient continents, giant lizards roam under its cover and primitive hunters track down their prey ... But this book is not only about the distant past: it tells in an accessible and fascinating way about the cutting edge of science, about the incredible discoveries that scientists make about global threats and the future of our civilization.
"Hyperspace. Scientific odyssey through Parallel Worlds, holes in time and the tenth dimension". Michio Kaku.
Instinct tells us that our world is three-dimensional. Based on this idea, scientific hypotheses have been built for centuries. According to the eminent physicist Michio Kaku, this is the same prejudice as the belief of the ancient Egyptians that the Earth was flat. The book is devoted to the theory of hyperspace. The idea of multidimensionality of space caused skepticism, was ridiculed, but is now recognized by many authoritative scientists. The significance of this theory lies in the fact that it is able to combine all known physical phenomena into a simple structure and lead scientists to the so-called theory of everything. However, there is almost no serious and accessible literature for non-specialists. Michio Kaku fills this gap, explaining from a scientific point of view the origin of the Earth, the existence of parallel universes, time travel, and many other seemingly fantastic phenomena.
"Microcosm. E. coli and the new science of life. Carl Zimmer.
E. coli, or E. coli, is a microorganism that we encounter almost daily, but which is one of the most important tools of biological science. Many major events in the history of biology are associated with it, from the discovery of DNA to the latest achievements in genetic engineering. E. coli is the most studied living thing on Earth. Interestingly, E. coli is a social microbe. The author draws surprising and disturbing parallels between the life of E. coli and our own life. He shows how this microorganism is changing almost before the eyes of researchers, revealing to their astonished eyes the billions of years of evolution encoded in its genome.
"Earth. Illustrated Atlas. Michael Allaby.
A comprehensive picture of all processes occurring on the Earth, inside and around it. The publication contains: detailed maps of continents and oceans. Impressive colorful photos. Popularly stated complex concepts. Wide view environmental issues. An exciting story of life on Earth. Explanatory diagrams and drawings. Reconstruction of geological processes. Terminological dictionary and alphabetical index. The Atlas will become an indispensable reference tool and handbook for readers of all ages.
"History of the Earth. From stardust to a living planet. The first 4,500,000,000 years". Robert Hazen.
The book of the famous popularizer of science, Professor Robert Hazen, introduces us to a fundamentally new approach to the study of the Earth, in which the history of the origin and development of life on our planet and the history of the formation of minerals are intertwined. An excellent storyteller, Hazen from the first lines captivates the reader with a dynamic narrative about the joint and interdependent development of animate and inanimate nature. Together with the author, the reader takes a breathless journey through billions of years: the emergence of the Universe, the appearance of the first chemical elements, stars, solar system and finally, education and a detailed history of the Earth. The movement of entire continents through thousands of kilometers, the rise and fall of huge mountain ranges, the destruction of thousands of species of terrestrial life and full change landscapes under the influence of meteorites and volcanic eruptions - the reality turns out to be much more interesting than any myth.
"The evolution of man. In 2 books. Alexander Markov.
A new book Alexandra Markova is a fascinating story about the origins and structure of man, based on the latest research in anthropology, genetics and evolutionary psychology. The two-volume book "The Evolution of Man" answers many questions that have long interested Homo sapiens. What does it mean to be human? When and why did we become human? In what are we superior to our neighbors on the planet, and in what are we inferior to them? And how can we better use our main difference and dignity - a huge, complex brain? One way is to read this book thoughtfully. Alexander Markov - doctor of biological sciences, presenter Researcher Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His book on the evolution of living things, The Birth of Complexity (2010), became an event in popular science literature and received widespread recognition readers.
"The Selfish Gene". Richard Dawkins.
We are created by our genes. We animals exist to preserve them and serve only as machines to ensure their survival. The world of the selfish gene is a world of fierce competition, ruthless exploitation and deceit. But what about acts of altruism seen in nature: bees committing suicide when they sting an enemy to protect a hive, or birds risking their lives to warn a flock of a hawk's approach? Does this contradict the fundamental law of gene selfishness? In no case! Dawkins shows that the selfish gene is also the cunning gene. And he cherishes the hope that the Homo sapiens species - the only one on the entire globe - is able to rebel against the intentions of the selfish gene.
The translation is verified according to the anniversary English edition of 2006.
“Pseudoscience and the paranormal. critical eye". Jonathan Smith.
Confidently operating on the data of psychology, physics, logical analysis, history, Jonathan Smith leads the reader through the mysterious territories of the unknown, not letting him get lost among complex scientific concepts and helping to distinguish between incredible truth and plausible deception.
Science describes the phenomena and processes of the surrounding reality. It gives a person the opportunity to:
Observe and analyze processes and phenomena,
Find out at a qualitative level the mechanism of their flow,
Enter quantitative characteristics;
Predict the course of the process and its results
Art, which includes fiction, reflects the world in images - verbal, visual.
Both of these ways of reflecting the real world mutually complement and enrich each other. This is due to the fact that a person is naturally inherent in the relatively independent functioning of two channels for the transmission and processing of information - verbal and emotional-figurative. This is due to the properties of our brain.
Science and art reflect differently public consciousness. The language of science - concepts, formulas. The language of art is images. Artistic images evoke in the minds of people persistent, vivid, emotionally colored representations, which, complementing the content of concepts, form a personal attitude to reality, to the material being studied. Formulas, relationships, dependencies can be beautiful, but you need to be able to feel it, then studying, instead of a harsh necessity, can become a difficult but pleasant thing. In works of art, there are often pictures of physical phenomena in nature, descriptions of various technical processes, structures, materials, information about scientists. Science fiction reflects many scientific assumptions and hypotheses. A special vision of the world, mastery of the word and the ability to generalize allows writers to achieve surprisingly accurate, easily conceivable descriptions in their works.
The description of scientific knowledge is found both in classical literature and in modern literature. Such descriptions are especially in demand in the genre of science fiction, since in its essence it is based on the presentation of various scientific hypotheses expressed in the language of fiction.
Fantasy as a technique, as a means of expression, belongs entirely to the form of a work of art, or rather, to its plot. But to understand the arrangement and relations of social characters in their individual manifestation is possible only on the basis of the situation of the work, which is a category of content.
Science fiction, if considered in this respect, has the same subject matter as art - "an ideologically conscious characteristic social life people and in one way or another in connection with it, the characteristic of the life of nature ”, focusing mainly on the second part of this definition. Therefore, one cannot agree with the conclusions of T. A. Chernysheva, who believes that “the specifics ... (science fiction. - V. Ch.) is not that literature comes new hero- a scientist, and not in the fact that the social, “human” consequences of scientific discoveries become the content of science fiction works”, but in the fact that in “science fiction ... science fiction gradually stood out new topic: man and habitat habitat, and art is now interested in the physical properties of this environment, and it is perceived not only in the aesthetic aspect.
It is possible that the artist as a person may be interested in certain aspects of the physical phenomena of the environment or nature in general. Examples of such interest, when a writer, a poet is not limited to purely artistic field activity, in the historical and literary process a lot. It suffices to recall in this connection the names of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, etc.
However, the question is not so much about justifying or condemning such an interest, but about the nature of this interest: either the “physical properties of the environment” are of interest to the writer, primarily in their essential moments, as a manifestation of certain objective laws of nature, or they are realized through the prism features of human life, thereby receiving a certain understanding and emotional and ideological assessment. In the first case, if an artist tries to create a work of art on the basis of a system of knowledge that has been consolidated in his theoretical thinking, it will inevitably be illustrative, not reaching the degree of artistic generalization and expressiveness that is inherent in works of art.
If, however, the "physical properties of the environment" acquire one or another emotional and ideological orientation due to the writer's ideological worldview, it can become the subject of art in general and science fiction in particular. The complexity of differentiating modern science fiction in its substantive significance lies in the fact that it is able to act as a reflection of the prospects for the development of science and technology or the "physical properties of the environment", carrying out in a figurative form the popularization of certain problems or achievements of science and technology, moreover, "figurative form" in such a case does not go beyond illustrativeness. And at the same time, "science" fiction, which was born and fully formed at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries, is "interested" in the problems and themes of scientific achievements that bear the imprint of the social character of the life of people and society in their national-historical conditionality. In this case, we can conditionally single out two “branches” in science fiction, in terms of its content: science fiction, which cognizes and reflects the problems of the natural sciences in their social and ideological orientation, and science fiction, which is “interested” in the problems of social sciences.
However, modern "science" fiction is not limited to the genre of utopia. The data of the social and natural sciences, in addition to their objective cognitive value, more and more influence the social relationships of people, expressed both in changing and revising moral and ethical norms, and in the need to foresee the results of scientific discoveries for the benefit or to the detriment of all mankind. The industrial and technical revolution, which began in the 20th century, poses a number of social, ethical, philosophical, and not just technical problems for humanity. The changes taking place in this "changing" world and caused by the development of science are what science fiction is "dealing with", which since the time of Wells has been called social. The essence of this kind of "science" fiction was best expressed by the Strugatsky brothers. “Literature,” they write, “should try to explore typical societies, that is, practically consider the whole variety of connections between people, collectives and the second nature created by them. Modern world is so complex, there are so many connections and they are so tangled that literature can solve this task of its own by means of certain sociological generalizations, the construction of sociological models, necessarily simplified, but preserving the most characteristic tendencies and regularities. Of course, the most important trends of these models continue to be typical people, but acting in circumstances typified not along the line of concreteness, but along the line of trends. "An example of such fiction can be the works of the Strugatskys themselves ("It's hard to be a god", etc.), "Return from the Stars" by Stanislav Lem, etc.
A number of outdated opinions about science fiction, which boiled down mainly to the fact that its content should be a scientific hypothesis, the goal - a scientific forecast, and the purpose - the popularization and propaganda of scientific knowledge, has now been refuted not so much by the efforts of critics and literary critics, but by the science itself. literary practice. Most writers on science fiction now agree that it is a special branch of fiction with a specific area of creative interests and peculiar methods of depicting reality. But still most of works devoted to science fiction, is characterized by insufficient development of the positive part of the program, in particular, such a fundamental issue as the role and significance of the "principle of science", the solution of which could clarify whole line controversial points associated with the nature of science fiction and its artistic possibilities. It is essential for the student of modern science fiction to find out the nature of its connection with science, as well as the meaning and purpose of such a community.
The first and, perhaps, the most serious consequence of the "scientificization" of science fiction was its modernity. The emergence of science fiction in the second half of the XIX century. was to a certain extent predetermined by the enormous acceleration (compared with previous centuries) scientific and technological progress, the dissemination of scientific knowledge in society, the formation of a scientific, materialistic vision of the world. The scientific was accepted as a plausible justification for the fantastic then, the writer G. Gurevich notes, “when technology gained strength and miracles began to be done outside the fences of factories: steam chariots without horses, ships without sails sailing against the wind.”
However, science fiction is not just an ordinary sign of the times. The principle of science adopted by science fiction prepared and armed it for the development of the most complex modern problems.
Most science fiction writers agree with the idea that the criterion of science is necessary for fiction. “... The problem of the compass, the problem of the criterion cannot be removed,” notes A. F. Britikov, for whom the criterion of science in science fiction is equivalent to the criterion of a person. Sun. Revici obviously reduces the criterion of being scientific to the wish of a science fiction writer to know the area he has chosen well and not to make elementary errors against science: “It is ridiculous when a person who claims to be a soothsayer makes elementary scientific errors.” True, the critic immediately stipulates that scientific awareness for a science fiction writer is not the main and not the only necessary quality, and even an elementary scientific miscalculation made by him may not be reflected in the artistic merits of the work. To this we must also add that not every science fiction writer, as we know, claims to be a soothsayer. The question of scientific criteria in V. Mikhailov's article "Science Fiction" is complicated. The author of the article alternately claims that the one and only “scientific” word mentioned by the science fiction writer makes his work science fiction (like the word “rocket”) and agrees with the scientific nature of the Wells time machine, then criticizes modern science fiction writers who use the idea in their works photon rocket and flight at subluminal speeds, since "calculations were published" indicating the technical impossibility of both. Z. I. Fainburg expands the boundaries of science for science fiction as widely as possible, arguing that “in situations and decisions of science fiction, assumptions are made, as a rule, on the basis of at least an ideally possible, that is, at least fundamentally not contradicting the materiality of the world.”
In modern science fiction, there are many gradations, degrees of science. Some modern science fiction writers go much further than Wells on the path of turning scientific justification into a kind of artistic device that enhances credibility, or simply a sign of the times. Becoming more and more formal, scientific justification becomes more and more conditional.
The problem of the relationship between literature and science is not a new problem. She stood up more than once before art theorists, and before philosophers who develop the theory of knowledge, and before writers. However, she had never stood so sharply before. The gigantic advances made by science recent decades, have now an unprecedented impact on all aspects of human life, including literature. At the same time, the role of art in our society is immeasurably growing, its cognitive and educational functions are intensifying, and its possibilities in promoting scientific knowledge are expanding.
What is the influence of science on literature? What are the tasks of literature in connection with the increased role of science in the life of society? And what are the ways to solve these problems?
These and many other questions are now worrying our writers, critics and scientists. That is why the editors of the journal Voprosy Literature decided to dedicate a special selection to this topic.
The problem of "Literature and Science" is unusually multifaceted. The articles and notes published below touch upon various aspects of it. First of all, it arises as a "theme of science" in art, as a task of creating bright, interesting images of scientists. This is the subject of articles by D. Granin, V. Kaverin, A. Koptyaeva, I. Grekova, A. Sharov, reflecting on the ways of solving this problem, telling about their work on books about scientists. At the time of Balzac, scientists did not yet occupy any prominent place in the minds of society, and consequently, in literature. Now the situation has changed radically. The scientist is increasingly becoming the protagonist of works of art. And this is no coincidence.
“Communist society is built on the basis of science. Science is the main weapon of communism. I believe that the role of scientists will grow every year and the future belongs to them. All this makes me go here, to physicists who are conducting research at the very forefront of science,” Galina Nikolaeva, who has been working on a novel about physicists in recent years, explained her appeal to the “topic of science”.
D. Granin emphasizes that scientific creativity should become one of the most important themes of our literature, because here heroic characters, acute, often tragic conflicts. To reveal the poetry of creative work, to show people who are purposeful, convinced, passionately seeking the truth - the task is as responsible as it is fascinating.
Naturally, writers are primarily concerned with issues directly related to creative practice. So, A. Sharov, for example, speaks in detail about one of the main difficulties that an artist inevitably encounters when writing about scientists: whether to depict “science itself” with all its complexities, or is it enough to give everyone an understandable “model” of the scientific problem around which conflict unfolds? “... A writer who wants to portray a scientist and his work often finds himself in a dead end. modern science- is incomprehensible, and the model by its nature is conditional, approximate.
But is incomprehensibility really an insurmountable obstacle? the author asks and expresses interesting considerations about how, in his opinion, this contradiction should be resolved.
In a number of articles published below, a persistent thought shines through: the writer must know well what he is going to tell the reader, and science is no exception in this respect. I. Grekova writes about this. This is also stated in the article by A. Koptyaeva: “... in whatever genre the writer works, he must carefully, conscientiously study the foundations of science and the very problem that he describes. Not only in journalism, but also in the novel, the essence of the scientific problem, about which in question. Only then is it able to interest the reader, to involve him in the struggle that unfolds in the book, to make him worry about the outcome of this struggle and, thus, for the fate of the characters.
However, the task of the writer is not limited to studying the basics of science and the problem that he is going to describe. It is no less, and perhaps even more important, for a novelist to understand the psychology of a scientist.
V. Kaverin, recalling the work on " open book”, says: “While working on The Two Captains, I surrounded myself with books on aviation and the history of the Arctic. Now their place was taken by microbiological works, and they turned out to be much more complicated. First of all, it was necessary to learn how to read these works differently from the way scientists read them themselves. To restore the train of thought of a scientist, to read behind the dry, short lines of a scientific article what this person lived, to understand the history and meaning of the struggle against enemies (and sometimes friends), which is almost always present in scientific work - this is the task, without solving which there was nothing to take on such a topic. It is necessary to understand what the scientist throws out of brackets - the psychology of creativity.
Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences A. Kitaygorodsky devotes a significant part of his article to the same problem. It is the psychology of scientific creativity that often remains unknown and even distorted in books about scientists. The physicist's reflections on why this happens, although containing a lot of subjectivity, I think, will be of considerable interest to writers working in this field.
The range of issues related to popular science and science fiction literature is touched upon in an article by the Polish writer St. Lem, as well as in the speeches of our science fiction writers A. Dneprov, V. Saparin, A. and B. Strugatsky.
D. Danin's article is devoted to the "interaction" of the natural sciences and art. The author gives examples of such interaction, talks about how art attracts scientists, traces the ways in which science influences art and vice versa, reflects on the “probable patterns” of such mutual influence.
The question of the relationship between scientific and artistic thinking, about what unites scientific and artistic knowledge and what distinguishes them, about the prospects for their development is discussed in the article by B. Runin.
There is a lot of controversy in the materials published below.
Yes, this is understandable: after all, the problem posed has hardly been developed theoretically. The articles by D. Danin and B. Runin are debatable in a number of their provisions. Some of the theses found in other speeches, as well as subjective assessments of the works of certain artists, may also raise objections.
One cannot agree, for example, with the Strugatskys when they assert that “only a “short leg” with science, with a scientific worldview, with the philosophy of science allows now to push the boundaries of traditional literary plots, look into a new, hitherto unseen world of gigantic human capabilities, extraterrestrial tendencies , hopes and mistakes. So to speak, the “scientific writer” can do more in literature than the “ordinary” writer!”
The following thesis of their article is clearly one-sided: “ Modern literature of the highest class is philosophical literature. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann - these are gigantic examples of how every writer should approach his work today.
In this case, the authors of the article forget that the successful development of literature implies a variety of styles, forms, trends. It is impossible to declare one of its forms (in this case, "philosophical" literature) to be the most correct, the most fruitful and categorically declare that nowadays every writer should work in the traditions of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann. Are the traditions of Chekhov or Turgenev, Balzac and Hemingway, for example, bad?
There is no need to enumerate all those provisions that may cause controversy. In the published materials there is not, and cannot be, a complete unity of opinion, because each of the authors shares, first of all, his own experience.
However main pathos most speeches is very instructive and deserves unconditional support. Art and literature should not fence themselves off from science, but draw closer to it, propagandizing its achievements and setting new tasks before it.
An example for Soviet writers in this regard is M. Gorky, who was deeply interested in the problems of science, followed its development, and rejoiced at its successes. It is significant that the articles, speeches and letters of the remarkable Soviet writer devoted to science have made up a whole volume, which will soon be published by the Nauka publishing house. The reader will see for himself how wide was the circle scientific interests Alexei Maksimovich, how much strength and energy he gave to the rapprochement of science - with life, art - with science. In art and science, the writer saw not “antagonists”, but allies capable of working together miracles of transforming the world, awakening in a person his best qualities and aspirations. “I know of no force more fruitful, more capable of cultivating social instincts in man, than the forces of art and science,” he said in a speech he called “Science and Democracy.”
Many of Gorky's thoughts about the connection between literature and science, about the tasks and possibilities of a writer striving to be at the level of contemporary scientific knowledge, have not become outdated to this day. They help to better understand the problems now facing writers and other artists.
Science is now moving at such a pace that it is simply impossible to keep track of all its achievements. Even scientists themselves are not able to cover all branches of their science: there is an increasing differentiation and, accordingly, a narrower specialization. And if this is so, some writers conclude, then there is nothing to strive for mastering scientific knowledge. M. Gorky, faced with such conclusions, answered: “You say:“ It is almost impossible for a writer to be an encyclopedist. If this is your strong conviction- stop writing, because this conviction says that you are not able or do not want to learn. From a writer, unfortunately, they do not require that he be an encyclopedist - but they must be required. The writer must know as much as possible, must stand at the height of contemporary scientific knowledge. In our country, this is especially necessary and is achieved by many.”
“That is why Capital was such a tremendous success that this book by the “German economist” showed the reader the entire capitalist social formation as a living one - with its everyday aspects, with the actual social manifestation of the class antagonism inherent in production relations,” writes Lenin in the book “ What are friends of the people.
How alive! Anyone who reread the works of Marx could not help but be amazed at their artistic integrity, their imagery, their structure, which does honor to any work of so-called fiction. The architectonics of Capital is grandiose, where in the first volume we are in a factory, in the second - in the office of capitalism, and in the third - we cover the entire process of capitalist production. The dramatization of events is extremely dramatic, expressed in vivid, figurative language: “In the place of an individual machine, a mechanical monster appears here, whose body occupies entire factory buildings and whose demonic power, at first almost disguised, solemnly measured by the movement of its gigantic members, breaks through in the feverishly frenzied dance of its countless workers. organs in the proper sense of the word” (Vol. I, Ch. XIII). The irony is deadly: “the market is a true paradise of innate human rights. Only liberty, equality, property, and Bentham reign here!”
“...Newborn capital exudes blood and dirt from all its pores, from head to toe” (vol. I, ch. 24). These are quotations from the first volume of Capital.
Let's open at random "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" - a brilliant historical study and revolutionary pamphlet, designed extremely artistically. “The evil spells of Ciruen were not needed to turn an artistically beautiful bourgeois republic into an ugly monster. This republic has lost nothing but decent visibility. Modern France was ready-made in a parliamentary republic. One stab with a bayonet was enough for the bubble to burst, and the monster appeared to the eyes ”(Ch. 7). Or a phrase about the Napoleonic idea of Louis Bonaparte - the domination of priests as an instrument of government and the anti-religiousness of the impoverished peasants: “The sky was a good addition to the newly acquired piece of land, especially since it makes the weather; but the sky becomes an outrage, as soon as it is imposed as a gamen for a parcel, ”etc.
Marx always resolved the scientific conception with the help of means of artistic influence. A great connoisseur and lover of the finest examples of fiction, Marx mobilized his artistic skill for the best design of his economic, philosophical and historical works. The same applies to other great scientists. Engels' language is simple and artistic. What is Darwin's Voyage Around the World in the Beagle - a series of fictional essays or a scientific work? Everything, starting from the first phrase, is an artistic fabric and at the same time is a model of scientific creativity. Works by Timiryazev, acad. I. Pavlova - these are our contemporaries - testify that the combination of artistry with a truly scientific presentation is not only quite possible, but gives scientific works a special power, which consists in an emotional increase in the effectiveness of the work.
The matter is not limited to the mere use by the greatest scientists of means of artistic influence. History knows examples of the development of scientific problems by means of art.
The Roman horseman Lucretius Carus, who died in 51 BC, in his poem "On the Nature of Things" expounds the teachings of Epicurus, in the words of Marx, "the radical educator of ancient times." The poem interprets the physics of Epicurus, develops the theory of atoms, the theory of the structure of the world. For the development of philosophical questions, purely scientific questions, the form of a work of art was chosen, the means of art were used. And this is not just the popularization of science by means of poetry. Rhythm, imagery of the poem do not hinder, but contribute to the development of thought. Art, poetic creativity here is inseparable from scientific thinking. Lomonosov wrote a poem "On the Benefits of Glass", which had a great time cognitive value.
The circle of readers of so-called fiction is always much wider than the circle of readers of special technical questions. The cooperation of the artistic word and science mutually enrich each other, not to mention the enormous cultural and cognitive significance of the works born from this unity. Attempts to create this union were made at all times. Poets of the first class society(slaveholding) Geznod, Empedocles, Ovid, Virgil and /84/ the poets of the feudal formation of the Middle Ages - Dante, Jean de Maine - in artistic creativity treated the scientific questions of their era. Growing capitalism, whose youth went into battle with feudalism under the banner of science, gave Swift, Goethe, later Lecomte de Lisle, Victor Hugo, then Jules Verne, René Gil, Verhaeren, Flammarion. Wells in England, Valery Bryusov in Russia complete this list. But the "junction" of science and artistic and literary creativity is carried out in other ways. It can be said without exaggeration that every great writer is also a scientific researcher.
Pushkin had a library of 3000 volumes (the largest at that time) with a significant percentage of books of scientific content. There is a well-known entry by Pushkin that “one must be on a par with the century” - to stand at the heights of scientific knowledge of our time.
Dostoevsky's works are of unconditional interest to the psychiatrist. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is a kind of theory of military art.
The influence of the work of Goethe - the great naturalist, a great scientist of his time - on the scientific work of his contemporaries is well known. Engels writes in his famous letter to Margaret Harknes that from Balzac's The Human Comedy he, Engels, "even learned more about the meaning of economic details ... than from the books of all professional historians, economists, statisticians of this period taken together" .
The history of literature knows examples of absolutely exceptional scientific conjectures of people of great artistic emotion. Oridius and Virgil spoke about liquid air, the reality of our days. Examples are closer: the same Honoré Balzac in one of his novels foresaw the discovery of the endocrine glands in a few decades. Strindberg in the novel "Captain Kohl" pointed out the possibility of extracting nitrogen from the air. I am here deliberately not talking about scientific foresight in the works of Jules Verne - we will talk about it below. But I would like to mention greatest genius science and art, the greatest scientist, the first engineer of his time, a musician, brilliant artist about Leonardo da Vinci. A huge clot of artistic emotion inherent in this man made it possible to obtain a number of the deepest predictions Sciences.
The so-called inspiration is present in every creative work. M. Gorky in the article "Conversations about the craft" quotes the words of Laplace: "Impatiently striving to know the cause of phenomena, a scientist gifted with a vivid imagination often finds this cause before observations give him reason to see it." “The work of a writer is similar to the work of a scientist,” adds Gorky. Artistic emotion and its role in scientific work - the specificity of "inspiration" here and there - this issue has not yet been developed by psychologists.
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If we imagine the types scientific novel(tale, story, verse) - a work of art that develops problems sciences as topics, and not the background (scientific and technical), for the social biography of the hero, then the following types can be outlined: historical, geographical, industrial and fantastic novel.
The writers of historical novels, much more than the writers of any other genre, are tied to the scientific basis of their subject matter. Each author has his own historical concept depicted events. In this sense, the work of Alexei Tolstoy on the theme of Peter I is extremely characteristic, a theme to which, as is known, he returned for many years. And if in the first story, published even before the revolution, “The Day of Peter I”, Peter is interpreted in terms of a personality moving history in isolation from the masses, then in the romance written by Tolstoy today, the historical regularity and driving class forces of that era are artistically shown. There is no need to talk about the unconditional cognitive value of historical novels.
The writer in general has always willingly taken up historical topics (the chronicles of Shakespeare alone are worth something) - just as the chronicler contributed a share fiction in the event log. This is explained by the contiguity of two types of ideologies - literature and history. The specificity of history as a science lies in the fact that it is an ideology, like literature. That is why, recognizing the great positive significance of the works of Jules Verne, we resolutely reject historical novels such as Mordovtsev, Solovyov, etc. what happens when the author takes too much liberty with the concept of the thing, and with the facts, and with the calendar.
Much of what has been said can also be attributed to geographical novels. Some of the novels by Mine Reed and the same Jules Verne undoubtedly required a great deal of special preparation by the author, and their cognitive value is undeniable. On the other hand, such a geographical study as "Man and Earth" by the famous French scientist Elise Reclus contains many elements of artistic emotion. There is no need to talk /85/ about the artistic amusement and cognitive benefits of descriptions of all kinds of travels.
The mentioned types of scientific novel, of course, are far from exhausting all the possibilities. artistic interpretation ideas of science and technology. Any scientific discipline and any scientific problem can be the subject of a writer's development.
A special place belongs to science fiction. The book "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was fascinated not only by youth. The exploits of Captain Nemo were read by military specialists and ship engineers, and after a few decades, the Nautilus became a reality. Aerostat or airplane - this is the theme of "Airship". The scientific foresight of victory and the possibilities of developing devices heavier than air is the merit of Jules Verne, not only the merit of the historical and literary order. Jules Verne - a connoisseur of all the scientific and technological achievements of his time, a talented dreamer - organized young people to study technical issues. The books of Jules Verne are still a great driving force directing the interests of readers to effective work in science and technology.
The science fiction novel is the most established and widespread type of science novel. Even the poet Cyrano de Bergerac, a scientist and researcher, one of the most educated people of the 17th century, wrote about flying to the moon with the help of rockets. The artworks of the scientist Flammarion are known. The science fiction novel also includes novels, so to speak, social fiction like Thomas More's Utopia, which inspired many revolutionaries, and Bellamy's In a Hundred Years.
The greatest exponent of the science fiction novel is our recent guest, Herbert Wells. Some have calculated that Wells touched on over 1,600 scientific issues in his artwork. And he, like Jules Verne, is a man of great culture, a deep knowledge of scientific issues. In the story "In sea depth» Wells describes a diving device for diving into the ocean to a depth of 5 miles. Modern technology is similar to Wells' foresight. The moving sidewalks in the novel When the Sleeper Wakes (this novel, by the way, is an attempt to combine social and science fiction) are known to many.
However, it should be noted that the works of Jules Verne are closer to us than those of Wells. Jules Verne is a representative of the still healthy bourgeois class; the word "science" is still written in large letters on its banners. By the time of Wells, the time of decaying capitalism, when thousands of inventions fail to get patents due to marketing crises, when killing machines are invented, when the terrible slogan “moratorium on inventions!” is in use, by this time the science fiction novel of the capitalist world is losing its scientific clarity. Already in the "Struggle of the Worlds" the Martians conquering the earth are fighting with a heat beam - a device of a very foggy design.
Modern Western science fiction novels are very characteristic of the era when the philosophy of Spengler reigns, agitating against technology ("Man and Technology"). In 2000, Pierre McOrlan divided humanity into two groups: scientists and robots - mechanical people. The new world is beautiful, but six-armed iron robots disperse the gatherings of scientists. Jean Painleve, the author of Cupsill Currant, has robots destroying people.
In Aldous Huxley's The Magnificent new world The idea of "science for the few" is preached. The world is ruled by scientists (compare with the ideas of technocracy in the US), and the golden age dating back to the “Ford era” is being created at the cost of people losing their ability to live emotionally, abandoning art. Huxley - a scientist (nephew of the famous Julian Huxley) artistically developed a number of scientific problems in the novel in terms of recent achievements Sciences. But the picture of the world is given in such a way that a person of our era, falling into the "brilliant new world", ends up committing suicide. The artist of the West is afraid of the triumph of science, he represents science only in the hands of the bourgeois, and gloomy pictures future are drawn to science fiction. The new social order, which will take science and develop it in a way that the best science fiction novelists of the bourgeoisie never dreamed of, will force technology to serve man - some of the artists of the West do not see or do not want to see. Such a science fiction novel may scare the reader away from science rather than bring it closer.
But if the scientific fantasy of Western artists is fettered by their social blindness, then what boundless prospects for scientific foresight open up in the country of victorious young science - in the USSR! Let us recall the words of Engels that with the victory of the proletariat true story humanity in contrast to the prehistory of the time associated with the class struggle. Our greatest scientific future waiting for his descriptions. The country greedily absorbs everything scientific discoveries world, implements them. The splitting of the atom, the transfusion of the blood of corpses, the work of determining the sex of the embryo, the work of Michurin, Ioffe, Pavlov - hundreds and thousands interesting problems waiting for their artistic expression.
But the engineers of the Sevkabel plant write to our writers (Lit. Land, 26/VII, 1934): “We have /86/ a request to Soviet writers that is directly related to our specialty. There is no science fiction novel at all in Soviet literature. Bogdanov's novels, Belyaev's very boring and gray novels - that's all. True, there was also the “Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” (A. Tolstoy), but it can by no means be called a science fiction novel. Rather just fantastic. The trouble with Belyaev's novels, for example, is that he proceeds not from real achievements modern technology , continuing its possibilities into the future, but from some completely invented concepts. Meanwhile, we not just fiction on technical topics is needed, but, so to speak, a promising novel that would reveal the possibilities for the development of technology in a planned socialist economy. We need a Soviet Jules Verne or Wells."
However, Belyaev's novels, for all their technical and scientific imperfections, were read to holes by our youth. So great is the need for this genre. The demand for a science fiction novel is huge. This was insistently emphasized by the congress of writers in the speeches of the pioneers and adult readers, and finally by the writers themselves. Unfortunately, Alexei Tolstoy's novels "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin" and "Aelita" gained wide readership. Both novels are anti-scientific. The education of A. Tolstoy (he is a process engineer) did not serve the writer as much as one could hope for. Much has been written about the helplessness of these novels in terms of science fiction. I will only note the confession of A. Tolstoy himself (“The Struggle for Technology”, No. 17-18): “In the “Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” I wrote about a cannonball fired into the ground to a depth of 25 km. And only now, reworking my Garin, I found this error. After all, the core, falling 25 km, will be completely flattened. The device for the flight to Mars, engineer Los, described more than vaguely. Such carelessness is unacceptable for the author of a science fiction novel. But if the education of an engineer did not benefit A. Tolstoy in his work on science fiction, then the novel by engineer V. Nikolsky "After a thousand years" is of unconditional interest: hydrogen smelting, transparent iron, a metallurgical plant without blast furnaces - a number of valuable technical problems. Let us also mention A. A. Bogdanov - a mathematician, political economist, philosopher, director of the Institute of Blood Transfusion, a man who dreamed of creating a "single science", and the author of all famous novels"Engineer Manny" and "Red Star". And here - the combination of deep scientific knowledge with well-known artistic talent has brought positive results.
Science fiction certainly deserves the extraordinary attention of writers, engineers, and scientists. The prospects for this genre are huge. Eng. M. Ilyin - a writer who acquired world fame in his "Tale of the Grand Plan," writes: "We're having a hard time with a sci-fi book. What do the authors of such a book do? They arbitrarily, in every way combine already known facts... The Earth of 2000 looks like an exhibition of the latest inventions. This is not how a science fiction book should be! Genuine Science fiction should not be based on an arbitrary combination of the known, but on deriving the necessary consequences from new conditions.
"A genuine science fiction novel is an outpost of science in the unknown."
Let's return to Lucretius Carus and Lomonosov. Both "On the Nature of Things" and "On the Usefulness of Glass" are formally poems, i.e. poetic works. It became possible to develop scientific questions in the most constrained form of poetic creativity - in verse. Verse - the form of the purest artistic emotion in the realm of the word - can carry a cognitive load. The very specificity of verse - rhythm, sound organization - has, in comparison with artistic prose, a greater power of direct emotional impact on the reader. The use of scientific topics in this form promises, on the one hand, a great channel for the promotion of the ideas of science and technology, and on the other, it represents an interesting field of activity for the poet.
In the preface to the collection of poems “Dali” (Moscow, 1922), Bryusov wrote: “The poems collected in this collection can be reproached for the fact that they contain too often words that are not known to everyone: terms from mathematics, astronomy, biology, history and other sciences, as well as allusions to various scientific theories and historical events.
The author, of course, must recognize this fact, but he cannot agree that all this should be forbidden for poetry. He thinks that the poet should, if possible, stand at the level of modern scientific knowledge and have the right to dream of a reader with the same world outlook. It would be unfair if poetry forever had to be limited, on the one hand, to motives about love and nature, on the other - civic topics. Everything that interests and excites modern man has the right to be reflected in poetry "...
The meaning is where the snakes of the integral
Between numbers and letters, between d and f. /87/
In the next collection "Mea" (1924), Bryusov places the well-known poem "The World of the Electron" among the scientific poems:
Perhaps these electrons
Worlds with five continents.
Arts, knowledge, wars, thrones
And the memory of forty centuries.
Maybe every atom
Universe with a hundred planets.
There everything that is here, in a compressed volume,
But also what is not here.
To the collection "Mea" Bryusov makes a special note, which has a cultural and educational value. Bryusov will forever have the merit of the man who paved the way new topic verse.
From Soviet poets in the field of scientific poetry, Vl. Narbut and Zenkevich. Narbut's poems "Malaria", "Sharopoezd" and even "Microscope" are interesting both cognitively and genre-wise, although they suffer from some mechanism. The poets Selvinsky and Antokolsky approach scientific poetry in a number of poems. The experience of Selvinsky's poem "How a light bulb is made" - a poem undeservedly little appreciated by our critics - is very interesting. Nowhere does poetry lag behind so much as on one of the main fronts of our reality - on the front of science and technology. More than 100 years ago, the poet Oznobishin wrote a poem about his contemporary, the famous naturalist Cuvier. Has the life and work of such scientists of world significance as Ioffe, Bach, Michurin become the property of poetry? No.
The technical and scientific illiteracy of our poets is even greater than that of prose writers. Take any work of our poets - their cognitive value in terms of scientific and technical issues is negligible, if not completely absent. Poets write about the plant in the most general terms. They write about the earth as they wrote hundreds of years ago. I take this opportunity to recall the correct idea of Marietta Shaginyan that “the writer (and poet), describing nature, does not take into account the development of agriculture, and the “popularization” of virgin forests, for example, is a reactionary demonstration of a thing. It is simply amazing that not a single poet (and writer) has artistically ignited such an issue as the collision of classical physics with new discoveries, the collision of Newton and Einstein. Both the poet and the writer, at best, think of Zinger and Kraevich. And for poets, like thousands of years ago, the sun continues to rise in the east and set in the west. Here Copernicus has not yet broken Ptolemy.
In the article "On the Poet's Library" M. Gorky cites the following verses:
According to Capital
(In the first volume, in the fifth chapter)
A new home comes first
In the human head
Though dwarfed,
But already finished
It will be born in the brain of engineers
And on their tracing paper drawing.
And then the author poetically develops Marx's idea about the preliminary, ideal representation of the result of labor in a person who changes the form of what is given by nature, fulfilling a conscious goal - about labor as an expedient activity ( famous example the architect and the bee is taken by the author in the epigraph of the poem):
Well, and you, to the tunes of harmonicas
From the village who came with a saw,
Who will you be, comrade seasoner,
An architect or a bee?
The poem is large. Gorky writes: “I read these verses several times different people, listeners met the poems with indifferent silence or superficial criticism of their technical weakness ... But no one noted the fact that one of the most valuable ideas of the founder of true revolutionary philosophy became the property of poetry. By the way, the question of the architect and the bee also applies to our writers and poets. “Science, its discoveries and conquests, its workers and heroes - all this should be the property of poetry. This - scientific - area human activity perhaps more than any other, worthy of admiration, amazement, pathos. - These words of Maxim Gorky have not yet found a sufficient creative response.
The development of scientific themes in poetry promises an undeniable formal renewal of the verse, and brings with it a change in the methods of verbal transmission of the verse. It is difficult now to catch the type of reader of scientific poetry. In any case, this is not a reader of the "Mkhatov" type and not a chanting reciter-poet.
***
The question of the union of the artistic word and science, the union of art and science is not limited to science as the theme of the work.
The issue is that every work of art socialist realism should carry a cognitive load. And if science and technology are taken as the background of the social biography of the characters, then in this case, the accuracy of the description of production, place and working conditions should be included in the artistic minimum required from the writer. /88/
The growing technology leads to the growth of scientific and engineering workers, who are becoming the main group of the intelligentsia of our country. This, firstly, creates a cadre of readers of fiction that is especially demanding in certain matters, and secondly, it obliges writers to show exactly the heroes of production, technology and science. Meanwhile, the technical illiteracy of writers is so widespread that it is not considered a sin. For the most part, the writer simply avoids touching on issues of science and technology.
Curiously, if we were to conduct a questionnaire on the value famous book All in. Ivanov "Armored Train 14-69", grouping reviewers by profession, then the least popular "Armored Train" would probably have been among railway workers. The writer D. Sverchkov informed the author of the article that when he worked as the director of the House of Technology of the NKPS, the opinion of railway workers about Ivanov's book was almost standard - "The book is good, but only ... the author does not know the railway at all." In a civil war, battle stripes - a combat unit - an armored train would never stop in front of a corpse on the rails. And this is the climax of the story. In addition, the locomotive of an armored train is placed not at the beginning, but in the middle of the train, and the driver could not see the corpse.
Oversight, negligence of the author in relation to the material reduces the artistic value of the thing. The reader Volkov (Literaturnaya Gazeta, October 5, 1933) formulated this correctly, pointing out that “the plot is the property of the author, while natural, historical and everyday features must be stated truthfully, otherwise the work loses its value.”
Another type of "approach" or, rather, circumvention of the technical and scientific side of the issue, extremely common, is Leonid Leonov in the novel "Skutarevsky". Its shortcomings were well formulated by Katanyan (“Literaturnaya Gazeta” of September 5, 1934): “The science, methodology and technology of Soviet scientific work are “classified” by our authors so much that Soviet scientists appear to readers almost like medieval alchemists: somewhere like this they boil something like that, pump it up, mix it up, use some kind of capacitors and rectifiers, suffer, worry, and then it suddenly turns out that the focus is brilliantly “not successful” or “successful”.
As an example of an extremely conscientious attitude to the material, I will cite Gladkov's Energia, about which Tochinsky, the chief engineer of the GUMP (Literaturnaya Gazeta, July 14, 1934) says: technical material, which is introduced by the writer into the novel, is presented mostly correctly and lively, and this is a significant and rare success. But "Energy" was the result of five years of Gladkov's stay at Dneprostroy and a thorough study of technological processes on the spot. “I systematically used,” Gladkov reports, “the advice of the most prominent and talented engineers and studied the literature on metallurgy, hydraulic engineering, etc.”
Complaints about their dilettantism in matters of science and technology are heard from most writers. But this is not the problem of the writers, but their fault. The unwillingness to work on material that requires lengthy and deep study, the view that has arisen for some reason of the scientific and technical side of a work of art as a matter of fifth and tenth outrageous neglect of this genre (scientific topics) by our publishing organizations - leads to that strange situation when a sharp demand for works of art on scientific topics is met only by a declarative, but by no means creative response from the majority of our writers. Not a single writer will object to the fact that it is necessary, the first priority is to show the hero of the second five-year plan - the five-year plan for mastering technology - a drummer, technician, engineer. But one must firmly understand that the teaching and demonstration of technology by people without studying and mastering knowledge about technology itself is completely impossible.
The novel, firstly, loses its cognitive value, and secondly, the writer is deprived of the opportunity to show the hero in the most full-blooded way. In addition, the influence of labor on the transformation of man is in itself differentiated, and metallurgy, for example, introduces into the character of man other traits than mechanical engineering. The influence of the profession on the character and behavior of a person is known. But to detail this issue in relation to, say, an industry - who, if not a writer, notices this? Here the writer could contact the psychotechnician. I do not know whether our writers have already become familiar with the fact that the city of Vitebsk becomes a city of continuous technical literacy. But this is a new, higher stage of the culture of the masses. What demands will these readers place on the writer?
***
It is not only literature itself that lags behind life, our reality, in its content (in the display of heroes, etc.). Fiction creation tool - language, lexicon, dictionary of literature, image system- too outdated. This is especially noticeable in our poetic practice. Take a look at the arsenal of our /89/ lyrics: five-petalled lilac, the moon and stars, the image of which does honor only to a man of the Stone Age. I do not want to be understood that some kind of poetic "taboo" should be imposed on the stars. I want to point out only that poets stubbornly refuse to get acquainted with cosmography and astronomy. The moon can be compared with the face of a beloved girl, as is customary with most poets, and with a seal on a mandate, as Lugovskoy does - in both cases the benefit to the reader is very doubtful.
In general, the coordination of images and metaphors is one of the most important and responsible tasks for a poet. Jean Giraudoux correctly noted that in general one can compare anyone with anyone. There are always moments for comparison. This means that the point is not in a vivid comparison, but in making the whole complex of comparisons best suited to the needs of the reader of today's and tomorrow. This need is connected with questions of culture, questions of propaganda of the ideas of science and technology. The literary vocabulary used is such that it can only serve as a brake on the development of human consciousness.
The most important task of the second five-year plan is to destroy the roots of capitalism in the economy and consciousness people - requires from workers of fiction such attention to questions of the word, to questions of metaphor, which no era has demanded from the writer. The system of images is reactionary in many of our contemporary poets. Here we are faced with the issue of ideological survivals in the language of modern poets and writers - with the phenomenon of so-called animism and anthropomorphism. The “sobbing” wind, the “weeping” sea - all this is still viewed as a sign of the artistry of the work, although this is rather anti-artistic and anti-scientific. The struggle for the purity of the language, raised by M. Gorky, must be connected with the struggle for the accuracy of the language. Communication with science will undoubtedly play a huge role in this regard. Science will enrich the language.
From what has been said, it is quite clear what paths, what prospects, in terms of the development of the culture of the masses and in the sense of mutual benefit, the union of the artistic word and science promises. First of all, the cultural horizon of the reader, the cultural horizon of the masses, is greatly expanded. Correctly pointed out by Prof. Lapirov-Skoblo that " fiction book more than any student can infect with love for science and technology, become a conductor of the greatest scientific ideas, discoveries and inventions. Through art, through works of art, the mass reader gets to know and connects with the most important problems of science and technology. IN fiction science and technology are acquiring a powerful lever for preparing the broad masses for the perception of science. “In our literature there should not be a sharp difference between fiction and popular science literature,” says Maxim Gorky. The cognitive value of a novel, short story, story, verse increases many times over. And more: the writer's fantasy, his artistic emotion, based on a deep study of scientific and technical problems, can serve as an essential factor in the movement of science forward and higher. Jules Verne is proof of that.
Joint work will enrich the language of scientific works, give them emotional charge, expand the contingent of consumers of scientific creativity, and make the latter more accessible to everyone. Until now, with regard to the language of scientific works, there has been (with a few exceptions) a well-known neglect of questions of verbal dress, a neglect that makes one recall the Laputians from Gulliver’s Travels by Swift or the theologians of Erasmus of Rotterdam: “They consider their indistinct muttering a sign of profundity, inaccessible to the understanding of the crowd. The laws of grammar seem to them incompatible with the virtues of sacred science” (Praise of Stupidity). Thought will be dressed in beautiful clothes, and the perception of scientific work will be much stronger than when “the sonorous titles of majestic doctors, sophisticated doctors, most sophisticated doctors, seraphic doctors, saintly doctors and undeniable doctors are heard in the ears of the listeners. This is followed by large and small syllogisms, conclusions, corollaries, suppositions and other scholastic rubbish. And Abbé Jérôme Coignard in Anatole France will not say that "the most learned among us differ from the ignoramuses only in the ability they have acquired to amuse themselves with complex and intricate reasoning."
Writers must help workers of science to come into fiction. Literature will be enriched by the creation of popular science books, so necessary for the mass reader. This is exactly what Gorky dreams of when he writes that “not everyone here understands why a small stone or a piece of wood thrown into the air falls to the ground, and huge airplanes can fly like a bird ... We need to organize close and friendly cooperation of literature and science."
Science, in turn, enriches the language, brings new forms of works, new heroes. Finally, communication with science and technology expands the cultural horizon of the writer himself. Communication is not a simple acquaintance with the achievements of various branches of science. Communication - in the study of methodology, ways of development, prospects of science, inclusion in its life. In addition, the very approach of people of science to the study of material, the very /90/ so to speak, the principles of scientific work - a great school for the writer. Suffice it to recall how Balzac worked.
In the specialty of a writer, you need to read everything. But in the development of scientific topics, it is necessary to limit, deepen due to the width, universality, which carries with it dilettantism. The writer must remember that there is no "just a scientific researcher, but there are mathematicians, mechanics, physicists, chemists, biologists, physicians, sociologists, historians, linguists, etc." (Academician V. Komarov). And in this respect, and in the promotion of science and technology, close cooperation between scientists and writers is necessary. "Paired riding" - a writer and a scientist, which Gorky spoke about at the congress of writers - is the main form of cooperation. A writer working on a scientific subject follows the progress of the work, he makes conjectures, he submits his work to the judgment of scientists. A scientist is arguing with a writer: what other compliment does a writer need? Imagine a job team writers and scientists (with specialization and “attachment” of a writer to a certain branch of science) over a big book about the future of our country, about the future of the world. Each writer and scientist contributes his imagination and his knowledge, builds his own part of the common monumental building. What a grandiose architecture! What a breathtaking and cultural work of art. What planning in the creation of scientific and artistic works designed to shape the scientific worldview of the reader! It is necessary to give the writer wide access to laboratories, museums, and archives, providing him with constant instruction from specialists. This is especially important for a young writer who does not yet have a name that can open doors for him to collaborate with figures in science and technology.
The importance of the organizational moment is clear here. Organization of a permanent consultation of scientific workers for the writer. Organization of public readings of scientific and artistic works. Valuable is the proposal put forward at a meeting of scientists and writers in the editorial office of the journal "October" prof. Levin and Associate Professor Apirin on the creation of a team of writers and scientists to review the fiction published in recent years on scientific topics. The results of this survey will no doubt be very instructive. This work should also be connected with viewing how writers show our scientists and technicians. I recall an essay by the writer Lidin about Acad. I. P. Pavlov. Lidin began by reporting Pavlov's repeated skepticism about the ability of a writer - an emotional nature par excellence - to understand the work of a scientist - par excellence a thinker. Unfortunately, neither Lidin himself nor other writers did anything to deprive this skepticism of grounds.
Organization readers' conferences on scientific literature, convened jointly by writers and scientists, is also one of the forms of joint work. We have never organized the response of readers to questions of science and technology in works of art. Organization of meetings, talks of scientists and artists, and finally public performances - evenings of scientific literature, carried out by writers and scientists. Evenings of scientific literature in scientific and technical institutions, universities, universities of culture.
Science and art in our country are not an end in themselves and not only a means of knowledge, but a means of changing, remaking the world. The task of Soviet fiction is the remaking of man, i.e. reader remake. This is achieved by showing the transformation of people, people who carry a new, socialist quality of personality - and by reflecting the disgustingness of the capitalist system, this is also achieved by showing the achievements of science and technology in their dynamics, in their prospects in the conditions of a socialist economy. Here - the writer's right to develop scientific topics. The focus is still on the individual. A person who masters the heights of science and technology, the study and demonstration of his psyche, the search for plot springs in the very solution of a scientific and technical problem - such a person has not yet been shown in our literature. All this work can be carried out only with a close union of the artistic word, science and technology.
***
The convergence of science and art is not limited to one area of the artistic word. Already now the question of the relationship between science and cinema can be practically raised. Here are historical, and geographical, and production and technical films.
Science fiction about cinema is also nothing new. Now the film "Space Flight" is being prepared - the basis of this film is the work of Tsiolkovsky. The possibilities of cinema are extremely great both in promoting the ideas of science and technology, and in the interaction of the specifics of science and cinematography. The question of creating a scientific and artistic theater can be resolved very interestingly. /91/
All rights to distribute and use the works of Varlam Shalamov belong to A.L. The use of materials is possible only with the consent of the editors of ed@site. The site was created in 2008-2009. funded by the grant of the Russian Humanitarian Foundation No. 08-03-12112v.
Scientific literature a special kind of literature that tells about science, about scientific research, the "drama of ideas" in science and the fate of its real creators; is born at the intersection of fiction, documentary-journalism and popular science literature. Developing in an independent look, N. - x. l. retains a close relationship with all three types of literature; understanding of its essence and aesthetics remains the subject of discussion. In contrast to popular science literature proper (See Popular Science Literature) ,
whose attention is focused on cognitive and educational tasks, N. - x. l. refers primarily to the human side of science, to the spiritual image of its creators, to the psychology of scientific creativity, to philosophical origins and consequences of scientific discoveries. It has not only intellectual and cognitive, but also aesthetic value; is designed to combine "general interest" with scientific reliability in the disclosure of problems, the imagery of narration with the documentary accuracy of life material. N.-x. l. originated in the 20th century; but some genres of didactic literature can be considered its early examples (See Didactic Literature)
(for example, "Works and Days" by Hesiod, "On the Nature of Things" by Lucretius Kara, "Metamorphosis of Plants" by Goethe), as well as autobiographies and biographies of a number of scientists of the 19th century. Soviet N. - x. l. began to take shape at the turn of the 20-30s; at the same time, M. Gorky spoke about the need for “... figurative scientific and artistic thinking” (Sobranie soch., vol. 27, 1953, p. 107). The works of M. Ilyin, B. S. Zhitkov, “Forest Newspaper” by V. V. Bianki, “Kara-Bugaz” by K. G. Paustovsky, essays by B. N. Agapov, M. M. Prishvin, M. S. Shahinyan. A special rise began at the turn of the 50-60s. (creativity of D. S. Danin, O. N. Pisarzhevsky, V. N. Orlov, B. N. Aganov, Yu. X. l. "Ways into the unknown" (Moscow). In most foreign literatures, a term that is adequate to the concept of “N.-x. l., no, and the literature corresponding to it is usually not distinguished from the public literature on science. However, many works undoubtedly refer to N. - x. l .: “Microbe Hunters” by P. de Craif, “Brighter than a Thousand Suns” by R. Jung, “A. Flemming" A. Morua and others. Lit.: Andreev K., On an equal footing, "Year thirty-seventh", 1954, No. 3; Danin D., Thirst for clarity, M., 1960; Formulas and images. Dispute about scientific topic in fiction, M., 1961; Ivic A., Poetry of Science, M., 1967. V. A. Revich.
Great Soviet Encyclopedia. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1969-1978 .
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A branch of literature that figuratively tells about real life scientists, their creative destinies and spiritual appearance, about the drama of scientific ideas. Combines features of fiction, non-fiction and popular science prose… Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
Scientific literature- artist lit., the actual basis of which are people and the problems of science ... Publishing Dictionary
Literature devoted to the description of the "human" in science: the psychology of the creator, the clash of representatives of different schools, the spiritual image of scientists, their work, the prerequisites and consequences of discoveries. In scientific fiction, scientific and ... ... Literary Encyclopedia
A branch of literature that figuratively tells about the real life of scientists, their creative destinies and spiritual appearance, about the “drama” of scientific ideas. Combines features of fiction, non-fiction and popular science prose (“The Inevitability strange world» D… encyclopedic Dictionary
SCIENTIFIC ART LITERATURE- SCIENTIFIC ART LITERATURE, a special kind of literature addressed primarily to the human aspect of science, to the spiritual image of its creators, to the psychology of scientific creativity, to the "drama of ideas" in science, to the philosophical origins and consequences ... ... Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary
SCIENTIFIC AND ART LITERATURE- a branch of literature that combines the main features of fiction, non-fiction and popular science prose, telling about the origin and development of science, the discoveries of scientists, inventions, ideas, etc. Professional education. Dictionary
Popular science literature- Literature devoted to the presentation of scientific ideas in the form, understandable a wide range of non-specialist readers. For the younger generation N. p.l. a source of knowledge of the diversity of the world, familiarization with the joy of the first independent scientific ... Pedagogical terminological dictionary
The data in this article are given as of the beginning of the 20th century. You can help by updating the information in the article... Wikipedia
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Fiction in Thai, created and being created in Thailand. Traditionally created under the influence of Indian literature. by the most famous monument Thai literature is the Ramakien, the Thai version of the Indian epic Ramayana. ... ... Wikipedia
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- Collecting minds. Scientific and journalistic essays, Evgeny Panov. Modern prose is not only fiction. It is also publicity. It wins more and more attention, our contemporaries read it more and more willingly. The secret is simple: publicity… eBook
