Completion and incompleteness of the literary work

In his "Prolegomena ad Homerum" published in 1795, Friedrich Wolff, while denying the sole authorship of the "Iliad", notes that in this form the poem is unfinished and that it could be continued with a description of the subsequent events of the "Trojan cycle". Among the many protests and objections that met this idea, Hegel's rebuff was particularly sharp and categorical: "Then... the third question arises about the unity of the completeness of the epic work. I have already pointed out that this thesis becomes very important, since in recent times the notion has begun to be considered permissible that the epic can be arbitrarily completed or continue to develop further, as long as it pleases. Although this view is supported by sound-minded scholars-researchers, e.g. F. A. Wolf, it remains crude and barbaric, since this view actually amounts to denying the best epic poems the true properties of works of art" (Hegel's quote). One hundred and fifty years later, in his study "The Origin of the Novel-Epic," A. V. Chicherin 3 argued that works belonging to the great epic types (e.g., Tolstoy's "War and Peace") were not completed and could not be completed, since the wide scope of artistic reality, the large number of characters, the large number of problems