ABSTRACT
In fact, perhaps it's not worth bothering with a precise definition of all the terms in current use and elevating them to the rank of scientific
Pushkin wrote:
The concept of size is primarily an energy concept: we tend to call a form on whose construction we have expended more energy a 'large form'. A 'large form', a poema, may be presented in a small quantity of lines (see Pushkin's 'The Prisoner in the Caucasus'). In its spatial extent, a 'large form' is the result of energy. But in certain historical periods it is indeed energy that determines the laws of
It then becomes obvious that a static definition of a genre, one which would cover all its manifestations, is impossible: the genre dislocates itself; we see before us the broken line, not a straight line, of its evolution - and this evolution takes place precisely at the expense of the 'fundamental' features of the genre: of the epic as narrative, of the lyric as the art of the emotions, etc. The sufficient and necessary condition for the unity of a genre from epoch to epoch are the 'secondary' features such as the size of the construction.
