The grotesque in literature first appears in the Renaissance, which was characterized by a "carnival" culture and the use of bizarre images, known since ancient times. At first, the plot of works with such elements was based on a combination of opposites - death and birth, low and high feelings, ugliness and beauty. And in the subsequently developed romantic grotesque, the screaming dissonance becomes the fundamental criterion, which expresses the tragic incompatibility of objective reality and ideal, the automation and necrosis of life, as well as the distortion of its most important features.
Often, the grotesque in literature becomes a special and unprecedented world, opposed to gray reality and everyday life. To a certain extent, it borders on science fiction, as writers and poets resort to the use of mythical and fairy-tale images, animating inanimate objects and giving animals human character traits. The grotesque in literature is observed in works of various genres - in fairy tales, novels, stories.
One of the most striking examples of this direction is the tale written by Saltykov-Shchedrin, “The Bear in the Voivodeship,” where an ignorant official is hiding under the image of an animal about to “ruin” universities and printing houses. Moreover, the phrase “stuffed head”, associated with the gluttony of a representative of the authorities, is applied to the mayor not shining with his mind. Similar techniques are used by Bulgakov in the sensational novel “Master and Margarita”, where readers notice a bizarre combination of Muscovites' life with the mystical image of Woland.
Gogol's creativity
Natural relations and connections in works become illogical, which is especially noticeable in Gogol’s story “The Nose”. So, the writer describes the disappearance of Kovalev’s nose, his flight from the “master” and his subsequent inexplicable return to the place. Analyzing the grotesque in literature, examples of which are inherent in other works of the writer, one can distinguish the contact of incompatible phenomena, and the contrast of high and low feelings is often painted in comic tones.
This is clearly seen in the work “Old World Landowners”, where he associates food with a natural way of life, and deep individualized feelings with higher human abilities. The “Overcoat” is characterized by the traditional motive of automation, where each person is forced to obey the instructions of the authorities. Such a situation is an integral part of the image of Akaky Akakievich, who, despite his comic nature, remains an unhappy person.
Creativity of Soviet writers
The works of literature written by Gogol influenced the work of other writers of the 60-70s of the XX century. A similar vision is characteristic of the prose of Daniel and Sinyavsky, which contains paraphrases of some Gogolian plots. In addition, in the work “Cap” written by Voinovich, the attentive reader will find almost direct quotation of the sayings that have already been mentioned in the novel “The Overcoat”.
Thanks to grotesque poetics, the late writers who lived in the middle of the twentieth century expressed the phantasmagoric, ugly and unnatural nature of the Soviet social system. In the 1970s, there was a significant gap between the socio-ideological language of party workers and real historical tragedies, which could not but affect the work of brave people. Grotesque was widely used in literature by V. Maramzin, I. Guberman, A. Zinoviev, V. Aksenov, Yu. Aleshkovsky, A. Galich, however, due to the inconsistency of the plots of their works with Soviet ideological principles, these authors were forced to emigrate.