Any work of art is built according to certain laws and rules. If in the era of classicism they were quite strict, other areas in art allowed writers to feel more freely in creative flight, expressing their purpose in various ways. However, even the most irregular trends in the literature impose certain requirements on the work. For example, a certain idea should be present in the novel, and a lyric poem should carry an emotional and aesthetic load. An important role in the work is assigned to the literary hero.
The meaning of the term
Let's see who such a
literary hero is, what he is. In a broad sense of the term, this is the person who is depicted in a novel, novel or story, in a dramatic work. This is a character who lives and acts on the pages of the book and not only. His literary hero was, for example, in Old Russian epics, i.e. in preliterate genres and types of artistic words. One can recall as an example Ilya Muromets, Nikita Kozhemyak, Mikul Selyaninovich. Naturally, they are not images of specific people. That is the peculiarity of this term, that it denotes the totality, collectivity of a number of individuals, united by some similar character traits and qualities. Remelted in the author’s creative laboratory, they represent a single monolith, unique and recognizable. So, if an ordinary person is asked what the literary hero of a Russian folk fairy tale should be, in his descriptions he will rely on the images of Vasilisa and Baba Yaga, Koshchei and Ivan Tsarevich. A social fairy tale, of course, can not do without Ivan the Fool. The same established types exist in the folklore of any people. In the mythology of ancient Greece, these are the gods, Hercules, Prometheus. The Scandinavian storytellers have One, etc. Consequently, the concept of “literary hero” is international, intercultural, timeless. It exists within the framework of any creative process associated with an artistic word.
Hero and character, character
The next question, which naturally arises, is: "Is the character of a work, his character, always considered a literary hero?" Critics, researchers respond negatively. In order for this or that image created by the author to turn into a hero, he must meet a number of requirements. First of all, the presence of their own, distinctive qualities and personality traits, thanks to which he does not get lost among his own kind. For example, the famous literary hero Munchausen (author of Raspe) is a witty inventor who himself believes in his fantastic stories. You will not confuse him with any other characters. Or Goethe's Faust, the personification of the eternal search for truth, the mind, thirsting for new higher knowledge. Usually such literary heroes are also the main characters of
literary texts.To the issue of classification
Now we will understand the typology of the images that interest us. What kind of literary heroes are there? Conventionally, they are divided into positive and negative, main and secondary, lyrical, epic, and dramatic. Often they are also carriers of the main idea of the work. The more serious the image, the more significant it is, the larger it is, the more difficult it is to bring some unambiguous assessment under it. So Pugachev in Pushkin's “Captain's Daughter” is a villain, a brutal killer, but also a public defender, fair, not devoid of his code of honor and nobility.
Thus, the hero in literature is a holistic, substantial, complete phenomenon.