Әдеби портрет жанрының тарихы мен ерекшеліктері

The portrait, as a literary genre, is a written description or analysis of a person or thing. A written portrait often gives deep insight, and offers an analysis that goes far beyond the superficial. It is considered a parallel to pictorial portraiture. The imitation of painting is apparent in the name of the genre itself, which is a painting term. Historians of antiquity recognised the task of the portrait as representation; we find the beginnings of the narrative portrait in Livy and Tacitus. However, the portrait began to emerge from the need to describe yourself (self portrait) or one's contemporaries, as in the Essays of Montaigne. This latter work develops a line of questioning around the movement of the representation of the individual (or of a society) from the pictorial mode to the discursive mode. The portrait can be realised in prose or in verse. Its objectives vary according to context: sociocultural, sociopolitical, historical, or again according to the subjectivity of the portraitist (the writer). Thus one can speak of a fictional portrait (corresponding to the characters who populate the fictional universe of each author) as much as a realist one (representing real life people). The portrait oscillates between reality and fiction, between eulogy and satire, between one portrait which imitates its original and another which moves away from it (such as the caricatures found in newspapers or in Molière). Nevertheless, the objective portrait which describes the flaws and qualities of the individual represented (or equally the object or the idea) is quite widespread. The literary portrait evolved through the centuries and its development has been shaped by writers as well as literary critics and theorists.

It is from the 1650s that the portrait began to be defined as a literary genre. It is through the social innovations of the précieuses such as La Grande Mademoiselle who, influenced by the portrait laden works of Madeleine de Scudéry, gathered around her (as a salonnière or ‘salon hostess’) men of letters that the portrait was transformed into a ‘diversion of society’. The literary portrait held to the essential aesthetic rules of the pictorial mode that is, it had to describe the individual (model) faithfully in order to distinguish it as a type apart. Nevertheless, it was not to be inferred from the recognition of the individual represented, but rather from the portraitist's style. This narrative representation had the function of highlighting fixed and timeless physical and mental features, as one sees in the works of Molière or in the Caractères by Jean de La Bruyère. It had to be achieved through layers of successive description as in painting which were only distinct phrases describing the real model's features.

The evolution of the narrative portrait did not stop at the nineteenth century but, on the contrary, it became more refined and took on nuances through the intervention of Sainte Beuve in the works or the critiques of such literary portraits. In fact, the portrait found a true place in the novel where it represented not only real life individuals but also fictional individuals (who could also be symbolic). It is in this way that the portrait became a predominant and recurring theme in the work of Balzac.

The portrait continued its journey throughout the twentieth century with the modern novel. In Nathalie Sarraute (in the Portrait d'un inconnu) the features are not fixed, the temporality plays its role in the genre of the moving portrait, progressive, fragmented, as in the life of a human.