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31EASTERN AND WESTERN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE COMPARATIVE
STUDY
Dilnoza Usmanovna Rakhmatullaeva
Teacher of the Department of "foreign language and literature", Denov Institute of entrepreneurship and pedagogy, socio-humanitarian faculty
ABSTRACT
The Western European literature overcomes difficulties in the name of a real, "earthly" goal, the hero of Eastern literature - in the name of a transcendental idea. In Western European literature, a linear perspective prevails in depicting the fate of the hero, who is shown in the process of his personal formation and development. Oriental literature is dominated by a cyclical model reflecting the concept of the immutability of human existence, generational change and the infinity of the flow of life, therefore, the depiction of the end of the hero's life is characteristic for oriental literature. Didactism, one of the methods of medieval literature both in the West and in the East, performed various functions: in the West - ornamental (especially during the late Middle Ages), in the East - moralizing.
Keywords: Greek world over Troy, Hercules, Cleopatra, Renaissance.
Very often, such a hero comes out victorious in a dispute with fate. In contrast to him, the hero of eastern literature is passive, he relies on chance in everything, his life credo is the contemplation of being. Such qualities of the hero as enterprise, initiative, and the ability to get out of a difficult situation with dignity (even with the help of cheating) are encouraged in Western European literature, while in Eastern literature they are interpreted negatively and condemned. The Renaissance (UK: /ri'neissns/ rin-AY-ssnss, US: /'rsnssains/ (About this soundlisten) REN-3-sahnss)is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. It occurred after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the Middle Ages. However, the beginnings of the period - the early Renaissance of the 15th century and the Italian Proto-Renaissance from around 1250 or 1300 - overlap considerably with the Late Middle Ages, conventionally dated to c. 1250-1500, and the Middle Ages themselves were a long period filled with gradual changes, like the
modern age; and as a transitional period between both, the Renaissance has close similarities to both, especially the late and early sub-periods of either.The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanities and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "man is the measure of all things". This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the revived knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual and social scientific pursuits, as well as the introduction of modern banking and the field of accounting, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".The Renaissance began in the Republic of Florence, one of the many states of Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Other major centers were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and Rome during the Renaissance Papacy or Belgian cities such as Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Leuven, or Antwerp.
The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual cultural heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation.Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras,which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".
Hercules
Aeneas' journey from east to west is inverted in Propertius 4.9 when the Virgilian Hercules, Aeneas' typological precursor in the Aeneid, sets out from Erythea, the mythical island of the far west, and travels east to Rome (4.9.1-3) : Amphitryoniades qua tempestate iuuencos
egerat a stabulis, o Erythea, tuis, uenit ad inuictos, pecorosa Palatia, montes
The son of Amphitryon, what time he had driven the oxen from your stalls, Erythea, came to the unconquerable mountains
This global setting provides a grand stage for the metapoetic drama to be played out within 4.9 in the intrusion of epic masculinity on the domain of female elegy. The geographical transition from west to east thus anticipates Propertius' transition from epic to elegiac narrative : Hercules' defeat of Cacus, narrated in Evander's epyllion at Aen. 8.190-275, is now compressed into a mere seven elegiac couplets (4.9.7-20), thereby making way for a Propertian sequel in which the epic hero becomes an elegiac-style exclusus amator (4.9.31-6) : huc ruit in siccam congesta puluere barbam,
et iacit ante fores uerba minora deo : 'uos precor, o luci sacro quae luditis antro,
pandite defessis hospita fana uiris. fontis egens erro circum antra sonantia lymphis,
et caua suscepto flumine palma sat est. Hercules now stands ante fores (a catchphrase of the paraclausithyron scenario) begging to be admitted to the female-only shrine of the Bona Dea so that he may quench his thirst (and perhaps his lust). Although translated to a distinctly elegiac scenario, the culture-hero nevertheless retains traces of his Virgilian provenance. Hercules' prayerful request for a palmful of water recalls the ritual act of Aeneas at the very moment of his immigration via the Tiber (Aen. 8.69-70) :
cauis undam de flumine_palmis
sustinet ac talis effundit ad aethera uoces
[Aeneas] uplifts water from the stream in his hollow palms as use ordains, and pours forth to Heaven this prayer.
Just as orientalism is an intensively politicised discourse, many readers of these texts have found themselves confronted by political allegory and the 'toils of historicism'. Such possibilities can be considered within the parameters of intertextuality broadly defined. Political intertexts will rise to the surface in 4.9 all the more promptly for any reader who had extracted political significance from (or imposed it upon) the duel of Hercules and Cacus in the corresponding passage of Aeneid 8, where Hercules' triumph over evil, however untidy, in some measure anticipates the culture-heroism within the
epic of Aeneas and, beyond the epic, of Augustus. In so doing, such a reader becomes entangled in a post-Actian reorganisation of allegorical appropriations, since it was Marc Antony (rather than Augustus) who had laid claim to Herculean intertextuality by virtue of familial descent. Paul Zanker has argued that the anti-Antonian faction was quick to capitalise on such associations, in this case by associating Hercules and Omphale with Antony and Cleopatra : iconographically, such an identification may have been implied in mass-produced Arretine ware, and more generally it would have been one among many associations potentially available to viewers of Augustan and Julio-Claudian images of Omphale such as have been excavated in abundance around the Bay of Naples (even if in themselves these are merely a symptom of Rome's contact with the East). Such an interpretation of Propertius 4.9 is encouraged by elegy 3.11 where, in a catalogue that culminates with Cleopatra, the myth of Hercules and Omphale provides one of several parallels for the poet's elegiac subservience (3.11.17 -20) :
Omphale in tantum formae processit honorem
Lydia Gygaeo tincta puella lacu ut qui pacato statuisset in orbe columnas tam dura traheret mollia pensa manu. There is, however, no need to be determinative with this, or any, intertext. Other readers of Propertius 4.9 have detected in the recollection of Hercules' transvestism at the Bona Dea shrine a countervailing reminiscence of Clodius' alleged desecration of the same cult in 62 BC. It might be seen as a function of orientalist discourse that Antony, Clodius, Hercules, and Propertius should be constructed in like manner. In an important contribution to the literature-versus-life debate, Jasper Griffin argued that Propertius and Antony engaged in a mutually reinforcing self-presentation as elegiac hedonists. Orientalism would ascribe less autonomy to its protagonists, such that the Propertian love-affair and the historical record of Antony are each products of, as well as participants in, orientalist discourse. It could be argued, further, that the strength of this discourse continues to manifest in representations of Antony and Cleopatra to this day. Cleopatra
Given the structural similarities between the elegiac love-affair and accounts of Cleopatra's interaction with Rome, it is hardly surprising that the celebration of the oriental queen's downfall in Propertius 4.6 is followed by the news of the mistress' death in Propertius 4.7 : according to this sequence, the end of Cynthia's regnum (4.7.50) corresponds to the end of Cleopatra's (cf. 4.6.58). A degree of tension here is inescapable since, as Alison Keith has argued, it was Roman militarism in the east which funded elegiac nequitia at Rome. Thus, if Amid the carnage, the Lord of Fire had fashioned her pale at the coming of death, borne on the waves and the wind of Iapyx ; while over against her was the mourning Nile, of massive
body, opening wide his folds and with all his raiment welcoming the vanquished to his azure lap and sheltering streams,
What is striking about this more obvious connection is that it pinpoints the precise moment at which Virgil's Cleopatra herself looks back to an elegiac and oriental queen within the Aeneid : fleeing to the Nile pallentem morte futura (709), Cleopatra cannot but evoke Dido, pallida morte futura (4.644) in the denouement of her tragedy four books earlier. By means of this intratextual echo, Virgil retroactively confirms the historical echo of Antony and Cleopatra in the affair of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid 4. Propertius, at any rate, would appear to have read Virgil in this way : in the context of the similarity in 63-4 to Cleopatra's getaway on Aeneas' shield, the future participle moritura does more than condense the phrase by which the Virgilian Cleopatra recalls her Sidonian analogue, for moritura is itself expressly applied to Dido four times in Aeneid 4 (308, 415, 519, 604). Propertius, therefore, advertises his awareness of the intratextual connection with Dido's death in the demise of Cleopatra in Aeneid 8 by applying to his own moribund Cleopatra a different future participle, but one which nonetheless directly connotes Dido. The connection is of particular interest to Propertius, given Dido's construction as an elegiac lover.
REFERENCES
1. Zhirmunsky V.M. Selected Works. Comparative Literature. East and West. - L .: Science, Leningrad. department, 1979. - 495 p.
2. Konrad N.I. West and East. Articles. - M .: Nauka, 1966 .-- 520 p.
3. Meletinsky E.M. Problems of the Comparative Study of Medieval Literature (West / East).
