Idyll is a return to genuine naturalness

Idyll is a certain poetic genre, for which a stable theme is characteristic, in particular, an idealized description of reality, where feelings, norms and customs are closest to the true nature of people. From Greek this term is translated as a "song" or "picture". This genre, although it has a steady theme, is very diverse.

He was born, mainly because of the ideological struggle of feudal-nobiliary culture and bourgeois-urban groups. At that time the reality was changing rapidly. More and more people moved from villages to cities. The structure of life and thinking became more complicated, and this could not but cause the corresponding reaction of certain groups.

Idyll is a return to genuine naturalness. Adherents of this genre advocate for maximum simplicity, for the revival of the old life, where nature and man are inextricably and harmoniously connected with each other. The stability of such subjects as idyll is due to the inviolability and immutability of certain socio-psychological processes that arise under certain social conditions.

Is this genre relevant today? Of course. However, it has significantly changed. The classical idyll is characterized by artificial naturalness. In it, simple workers, people below the middle class, talk in a refined language, surprise with their educational level. Some texts, glorifying a simple village life, contain elements of court reality. The classical idyll is a highly embellished being, where there is no place for realism. The village life appears here as an eternal holiday, where work and other hardships are substituted for contemplation of nature and unattainable harmony.

However, despite all the shortcomings of the genre, he was extremely popular among all strata of people. Books written in this subject attracted the attention of even those against whom they were directed. For example, at the court of Marie Antoinette, the imitation of village life and the great closeness to nature were extremely relevant.

In the 18th century, the petty and middle bourgeoisie began to struggle with the naturalness of the idyll. It was at that time that the genre underwent some changes, becoming more realistic. A new idyll is a glorification of a utopian philistine way of life, where fidelity to simplicity and closeness to nature intertwined with hatred of the class struggle and turmoil inherent in capitalist cities. The genre of the era of industrial upheavals is permeated with romanticism. For him, there is a plot in which the protagonist gets tired of the cruelty and deceit of large cities, and leaves for some distant countries, in which the utopian idea of idyll is embodied.

Once this genre was popular with Russian writers, mostly of noble origin. However, he, most often, was imitative. Soon the idyll began to lose its relevance. This happened, mainly because of the realization of the huge difference between ordinary peasants and the petty bourgeoisie. In the 19th century one can note isolated cases of creating works in this genre.

As already mentioned, the idyll (the dictionary gives this definition) is characterized by a great variety of its forms. Works in this genre were written both in verse and in prose, and sometimes with a mixture of both. Distinctive properties of this subject are the following: familiar vocabulary, plain plot, calm tone of the narration, happy ending, folklore material. An important idyll in the structure of the genre is the family idyll, praised by many writers. The size of the works written in this topic can range from a small poem to a voluminous story.