Pathos

Pathos is the leading emotional tone, the inspiration, the impassioned feeling that permeates a literary work and expresses the author's attitude toward what is depicted — the ideational-emotional charge of the whole. Pathos gives a work emotional unity, determines its general resonance and the force of its impact on the reader. One distinguishes varieties of pathos: heroic (the affirmation of the grandeur of a feat, of struggle), tragic (the experience of irreparable loss, of the destruction of the lofty), dramatic, satirical (wrathful exposure), romantic, sentimental, and humorous. Pathos should be distinguished from cold rhetoric: genuine pathos follows organically from the content and the author's conviction. For example, the poetry of Taras Shevchenko is full of a heroic and at the same time tragic pathos of the struggle for the freedom of Ukraine and of pain for the fate of the people; the work of Lesia Ukrainka is imbued with the heroic pathos of the unbreakability of the spirit. Pathos is an important aesthetic category that characterizes the emotional-evaluative attitude of art toward reality and ensures its powerful impact on human feeling.