“As the classic teaches”, “I’ll go read the classics” - these turns can be heard in everyday speech. However, it is unlikely that we are fully aware of which writers have the right to be included in the golden fund of elegant literature, and what this phenomenon in general is a classic of world literature. This article will answer such questions.
Terminology issues
It is rather difficult to outline the concept of the classic, because this definition is used in a variety of meanings. For an ordinary native speaker of the language, it is akin to an ideal, a standard, to what it is necessary to strive for. However, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, as applied to literature, the framework of these parameters is mobile and changes depending on a particular era. So, for Cornell and Racine, the classic of world literature is primarily works of the times of Antiquity, while the Middle Ages did not welcome them very much. And at the beginning of the XIX century there were even amateurs to say that all the best in Russia has already been written. Agree: fans of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, such hypotheses seem extremely funny.
Different point of view
Also, “classical literature” is sometimes understood as works created before modernism. Although now this view can be considered somewhat outdated, since the novels by Kafka, Joyce and Proust, the paintings of Dali and Malevich have long passed into the category of the golden fund of art, eliminating less talented contemporaries.
At the same time, despite historical modifications, the classics of world literature remain timeless, universal and talented. Even after hundreds of years, humanity turns to the works of Shakespeare, Goethe or Pushkin, interpreting them in various discourses. This becomes possible due to the depth of their content, relevance to each and every one.
So, to summarize: what does classical literature include? Classic books, whose works are read to this day.
Is classic and high literature the same thing?
The division of literature into three "floors" - high, fiction and mass - has appeared relatively recently. More precisely, when entertainment books began to be created specifically for the average reader. The classics of world literature largely correspond to "high" creations. They are intelligent, require considerable work on the part of the reader, his experience. However, the term “classical” is also applied to samples of the so-called mass literature, though in a slightly different meaning. Detectives Agatha Christie and fantasy Tolkien can serve as an example of this. When their fans claim that this is a classic of world literature, they mean that “Ten Little Indians” or “The Lord of the Rings” served as a successful model for subsequent writers who worked within these genres. It is difficult to judge how much these works will remain in the readers' memory; literary criticism does not give an exact answer to this question.
World Classics List
It has already become traditional to compile ratings of books that are required to be read by those who want to be considered a truly educated person. Such lists of creations of ancient Greek and Roman authors open: Homer ("Illiad"), Aeschylus ("Chained Prometheus") and Virgil ("Aeneid"). The named works have the unconditional right to bear the honorary title of "classic of world literature." The era of the Middle Ages became the cradle of the works of J. Chaucer and F. Villon, as well as an infinite number of literary monuments without an author.
The Renaissance gave us the creators of eternal images - Shakespeare and Cervantes. However, one must also remember Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, Francois Rabelais and some others. The 17th century was marked by baroque (Pedro Calderon, Gongora) and classic (Racine, Cornell, Moliere) art. Then came the Enlightenment, enriching literature with the names of Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe and Schiller.
The XIX century opens the romantic work of Byron, Scott, Hoffmann, Hugo, Poe. Somewhere in the middle of the century, romanticism is replaced by critical realism and the novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens.
The turn of the century is distinguished by the appearance of the first modernist movements - symbolism (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde), naturalism (Zola) and impressionism
(Knut Gamsun). At the same time, the so-called new drama (Ibsen, Shaw, Meterlink) is gaining popularity, striving to completely rethink outdated dramatic techniques. The twentieth century enriched literature with a modernist novel (the mentioned Kafka, Proust and Joyce), a large number of avant-garde movements - surrealism, Dadaism, expressionism. The second half of the last century was marked by the work of Brecht, Camus, Hemingway and Marquez. You can also talk about modern postmodern works that have become classic (Pavich, Suskind).
Russian classic writers
Russian classics is, of course, a separate conversation. The names of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Fet, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Blok, Gorky, Yesenin, Bulgakov, Sholokhov ... were discovered from their works. Classics of Russian and world literature are formed from them.