Most familiar with such words as "pathos," "pathos, " "pathetic," "pathetic." However, not everyone knows their exact meaning. All these words are many transformations, derived from the word "pathos". And their synonyms were "grandiloquence", "pomp", "empty polysemy", "hypocrisy".
By its origin, the word "pathos" is Greek and literally means "feeling, suffering, passion." More familiar to us is the concept of enthusiasm, enthusiasm. Paphos is a creative, inspiring source (or idea), the basic tone of something. Pathos - it means, although sometimes making the impression of falsehood, but still expressing enthusiasm, albeit external. The game to the public without any hesitation, making personal on public display, life in the game is pathos. The meaning of this word describes a way of perceiving, as well as displaying one’s own attitude to various things, with partial alienation and ostentatious pomp.
At the very beginning, the word “pathos” in literature was defined as a high passion that ignited the creative imagination of the author and was transmitted to the public in the process of the aesthetic experiences of the artist. In the old fashioned way, the definition of pathos as patriotic, moral-educational, optimistic, international, anti-philistine and humanistic continues to be found in textbooks.
However, critics, qualified readers and publishers are saying more and more that pathos is more like sugaryness, sweetness, “lollipop”, which should be diluted, softened, tinted, balanced, supplemented, necessarily sincerity, and irony downplayed and muffled. Moreover, it is absolutely natural to mention irony and sincerity as the antonyms and opponents of pathos. Indeed, in contemporary art there are, or almost none, those who set themselves the goal of evoking high feelings from the reader, noble thoughts, spiritual uplift, inspiration. But this is precisely what the original concept of "pathos" requires. As Dmitry Prigov notes: “Any frankly pathos statement now immediately throws the author into the zone of pop culture, if not at all kitsch.”
Nevertheless, the modern reader’s need for the sublime and the lofty remains, and the mass literature does a little to give the pathos to the unskilled reader majority. Although, of course, the skilled ones have to be content with a low-calorie and meager emotional diet. Deep suffering and the struggle against it, the concept of “catharsis” can no longer be found in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the dictionary of world culture. Therefore, more and more often, the authors advocate pathos and pathos as not just synonyms of empty verbose pomp, but as a desire to get rid of, to overcome postmodernism. In other words, they want to show that pathos is an
integral part of the literature of big ideas, vulnerable and meaningful, much higher than irony. And although the pathos in the work can be funny, you should not avoid it.
Unfortunately, decent artistic practice so far has little support for these and similar statements. But it is expected that prophetic, preaching, enlightening, messianic, revealing, sarcastic, any other pathos will return to Russian literature again. This is a well-grounded prospect.