a prose work of moderate length and unconstrained style expressing the author’s personal impressions and observations on a specific topic or question, without claiming to be a definitive or exhaustive treatment of the subject.
As a rule the essay proposes a novel and subjective view of something—whether it is an essay in philosophy, history, biography, current affairs, literary criticism, or popular science or whether it is of a purely literary nature. Stylistically, the essay’s distinctive features are its descriptive imagery, its aphoristic quality, and its conversational tone and vocabulary. The essay style has long been used in works where the author’s personality is in the foreground; for example, it was used by Plato, by the followers of Isocrates, and by Origen, Tertullian, Meister Eckhart, and Luther. A genre analogous to the European essay was developed in the East by such writers as Han Yü (eighth to ninth centuries, China) and Kamo Chomei (13th century, Japan).
The essay came into its own as a literary genre with the publication of Montaigne’s Essays (1580). Equally spontaneous and whimsical are the sermons of John Donne, with their paradoxically solemn tone. N. de Malebranche’s meditations and B. Fontenelle’s popular-science discourses are likewise infused with essayistic elements. The first English essayist was the metaphysical poet A. Cowley (1618–67), author of Several Discourses by Way of Essays. The essays of J. Dryden marked the beginning of English literary criticism.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the essay was one of the leading genres in French and English journalism. Important contributions to its development were made by J. Addison, R. Steele, H. Fielding, S. Johnson, Diderot, Voltaire, Lessing, and Herder. The essay was the predominant form used by the romantics—specifically, by Heine, Emerson, and Thoreau—in their polemical writings on philosophy and aesthetics. It was in English literature that the essay sank its deepest roots, as exemplified in the work of T. Carlyle, W. Hazlitt, and M. Arnold in the 19th century and M. Beerbohm, H. Belloc, and G. K. Chesterton in the 20th. In the best of their work, they improvise a covert dialogue with the general reader.
The essay has flourished in the 20th century; prominent prose writers, poets, and philosophers have turned to this genre in order to popularize the achievements of the natural sciences and humanities and to reach various types of readers. Among such writers are R. Rolland, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, H. Mann, T. Mann, J. Becher, A. Maurois, and J.-P. Sartre.
The essay is not a characteristic genre of Russian or Soviet literature; nevertheless, examples of essayistic writing can be found in A. S. Pushkin (“A Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg”), A. I. Herzen (From the Other Shore), and F. M. Dostoevsky (The Diary of a Writer). In the early 20th century the essay form was employed by V. Ivanov, D. Merezhkovskii, A. Belyi, L. Shestov, and V. Rozanov. Soviet writers who have produced work in this genre include I. Ehrenburg, Iu. Olesha, V. Shklovskii, and K. Paustovskii.
In the 1970’s the most productive branch of essay writing has been that of literary criticism.
V. S. MURAVEV