Comparative Literature

The significant achievements of humanity in the field of culture are not the result of isolated creative processes among individual nations. Nations, even when they built walls like the Chinese, communicated with each other: they used and assimilated values ​​created by other nations, developed their own and borrowed ones further, and themselves offered their conquests in the field of culture to other nations. Thus, with joint efforts, the universal human culture was built and is being built. Nations create their literature in the same way: on the one hand, the tribal, folk, or national genius leaves its mark on it; on the other hand, however, the literary heritage of humanity and numerous manifestations of multilingual modernity are used and developed; creating their literature in this way, a nation makes its contribution to world literature, offering works to foreign readers and influencing foreign authors. We must note that the national peculiarity of individual literatures is not an obstacle to diverse influences in all directions. Literary interactions enrich literatures, contribute to their faster growth, contact with a foreign work is often a contact of flint to flint. Literary interactions are especially characteristic of our modernity due to the increased communication between peoples, the mass translations of literary works from one language to another, the study of foreign languages ​​as a necessary component of modern education. In this situation, literary studies could not and should not be limited to the facts and processes of only one separate literature. Even isolating these facts and processes, it could not present them in a full and truthful light, reach all their original sources and those streams that increase the flow of the general stream, and trace their entire meaning if they also pass into other literatures. The isolated consideration of literatures, their periods, authors and works does not allow for the discovery of a large number of phenomena, processes and patterns, which become apparent only if the phenomena, processes and patterns in several literatures are compared. Phenomena gain brightness, magnitude and relief when compared with similar phenomena.