Character (as Personality)

Character (as personality) in literary studies is an artistically convincing, internally motivated depiction of a personage's personality in the unity of its individual and typical traits, in development and in connection with circumstances. Unlike the 'character' (persona) as a formal unit and the 'type' as a generalization, this sense of 'character' emphasizes the psychological fullness, integrity, and uniqueness of the depicted personality. The problem of the artistic character was sharply posed by 19th-century realism with its attention to the social and psychological conditioning of the human being ('the human and the milieu'). Classical aesthetics (Georg Hegel) saw in character the concentration of the general in an individual form. Mastery of characterization is a criterion of the artistic worth of prose and drama. In Ukrainian literature, deep, psychologically motivated characters were created by Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, Panas Myrny, Ivan Franko, and Valerian Pidmohylny.