Most people are familiar with such words as "pathetic", "pathetic", "pathetic", "pathetic." However, not everyone knows their exact meaning. All these words - a lot of transformations, derived from the word "pathos". And their synonyms are "high-flown", "bombast", "empty meaningfulness," "hypocrisy."
In its origin, the word "pathos" is Greek and literally means "feeling, suffering, passion." More usual for us is the concept of recovery, enthusiasm, inspiration. Pathos is a creative, inspiring source (or idea), the main tone of something. Pathos means, although sometimes producing a false impression, but still expressing enthusiasm, albeit external. The game for the public without any embarrassment, making personal for everyone to see, life in the game - it's pathos. The meaning of this word describes the way of perception, as well as the display of one's own attitude to various things, with partial estrangement and ostentatious bombast.
At the very beginning, the word "pathos" in literature was defined as a high passion that inflamed the creative imagination of the author and was transmitted to the public in the process of aesthetic experiences of the artist. In the old-fashion textbooks continue to meet the definition of pathos as patriotic, moral-educational, optimistic, international, anti-petty and humanistic. However, critics, qualified readers and publishers say more and more about the fact that pathos is more of a mawkishness, sugaryness, "lollipopsiness", which must be diluted, softened, shaded, balanced, supplemented, necessarily with sincerity, and ironic and belittled. And it is absolutely natural to mention irony and sincerity as antonyms and opponents of pathos. After all, in modern art there are not, or almost not, those who set a goal to evoke high feelings in the reader, noble thoughts, spiritual uplifting, enthusiasm. But this is exactly what the original concept of "pathos" demands. As Dmitry Prigov notes: "Any frankly pathetic statement now immediately discards the author in the pop culture zone, if not completely kitsch."
And yet the need for a modern reader in the exalted and sublime remains, and the mass literature does a little coping with the provision of pathos to the unqualified reader majority. Although, of course, qualified have to be content with a low-calorie and meager emotional diet. Deep suffering and struggle with it, the concept of "catharsis" is no longer found in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the dictionary of world culture. Therefore, more and more often the authors are in defense of pathos and pathos as not just synonyms of verbal bombast, but as a desire to overcome, overcome postmodernism. In other words, they want to show that pathos is an integral part of the literature of great ideas, vulnerable and meaningful, much higher than irony. And although the pathos in the work can be funny, you should not avoid it.
Unfortunately, worthy artistic practice so far does not support these and similar statements. But it is expected that the prophetic, preaching, enlightening, messianic, expository, sarcastic, any other pathos will return to Russian literature again. This is a well-grounded prospect.