The ideological problematics of B. Brecht's anti-fascist drama "Mother Courage". The embodiment of the principles of "epic" theater in a play

The epic theater theory of Bertolt Brecht, which had a huge impact on the dramaturgy and theater of the 20th century, is a very difficult material for students. Conducting a practical lesson on the play "Mother Courage and Her Children" (1939) will help make this material accessible for assimilation.

The theory of epic theater began to take shape in Brecht's aesthetics as early as the 1920s, at a time when the writer was close to left-wing expressionism. The first, still naive, idea was Brecht's proposal to bring theater closer to sports. “A theater without an audience is nonsense,” he wrote in the article “More Good Sports!”.

In 1926, Brecht finished work on the play "What is that soldier, what is that", which he later considered the first example of epic theater. Elisabeth Hauptmann recalls: “After staging the play “What is that soldier, what is that,” Brecht acquires books on socialism and Marxism ... Somewhat later, while on vacation, he writes: “I am up to my ears in Capital. I now need to know all this for sure ... ".

Brecht's theatrical system takes shape simultaneously and in close connection with the formation of the method of socialist realism in his work. The basis of the system - the "alienation effect" - is the aesthetic form of the famous position of K. Marx from the "Theses on Feuerbach": "Philosophers have only explained the world in various ways, but the point is to change it."

The first work that deeply embodied such an understanding of alienation was the play "Mother" (1931) based on the novel by A. M. Gorky.

Describing his system, Brecht sometimes used the term "non-Aristotelian theater" and sometimes "epic theater". There is some difference between these terms. The term "non-Aristotelian theater" is associated primarily with the denial of old systems, "epic theater" - with the approval of a new one.

The "non-Aristotelian" theater is based on the criticism of the central concept, which, according to Aristotle, is the essence of tragedy - catharsis. The social meaning of this protest was explained by Brecht in the article “On the theatricality of fascism” (1939): “The most remarkable property of a person is his ability to criticize ... The one who gets used to the image of another person, and moreover without a trace, thereby refuses critical attitude towards him and himself.<...>Therefore, the method of theatrical acting, adopted by fascism, cannot be regarded as a positive model for the theatre, if we expect from it pictures that will give the audience the key to solving the problems of social life ”(Book 2, p. 337).

And Brecht connects his epic theater with an appeal to reason, without denying feelings. Back in 1927, in the article “Reflections on the Difficulties of the Epic Theater,” he explained: “The essential ... in the epic theater is probably that it appeals not so much to the feeling as to the mind of the viewer. The viewer should not empathize, but argue. At the same time, it would be completely wrong to reject feeling from this theater” (Book 2, p. 41).

Brecht's epic theater is the embodiment of the method of socialist realism, the desire to tear away the mystical veils from reality, to reveal the true laws of social life in the name of its revolutionary change (see B. Brecht's articles "On Socialist Realism", "Socialist Realism in the Theater").

Among the ideas of the epic theater, we recommend focusing on four main provisions: “the theater must be philosophical”, “the theater must be epic”, “the theater must be phenomenal”, “the theater must give an alienated picture of reality” - and analyze their implementation in the play “Mother Courage and her children.

The philosophical side of the play is revealed in the peculiarities of its ideological content. Brecht uses the principle of parabola (“the narrative moves away from the world contemporary to the author, sometimes even from a specific time, a specific situation, and then, as if moving along a curve, again returns to the abandoned subject and gives its philosophical and ethical comprehension and assessment ...”.

Thus, the play-parabola has two planes. The first is B. Brecht's reflections on contemporary reality, on the blazing flames of the Second World War. The playwright formulated the idea of ​​the play expressing this plan in the following way: “What should the production of “Mother Courage” show first of all? That big things in wars are not done by small people. That war, which is a continuation of business life by other means, makes the best human qualities disastrous for their possessors. That the struggle against war is worth any sacrifice” (Book 1, p. 386). Thus, "Mother Courage" is not a historical chronicle, but a warning play, it is turned not into the distant past, but into the near future.

The historical chronicle constitutes the second (parabolic) plan of the play. Brecht turned to the novel by the 17th-century writer X. Grimmelshausen "In defiance of a simpleton, that is, an outlandish description of a hardened liar and a vagabond Courage" (1670). In the novel, against the backdrop of the events of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the adventures of the cannery Courage (that is, brave, brave), the girlfriend of Simplicius Simplicissimus (the famous hero from Grimmelshausen's novel Simplicissimus) were depicted. Brecht's chronicle presents 12 years of life (1624-1636) of Anna Fierling, nicknamed Mother Courage, her travels in Poland, Moravia, Bavaria, Italy, Saxony. “Comparison of the initial episode, in which Courage with three children goes to war, not expecting the worst, with faith in profit and luck, with the final episode, in which the candidate who has lost her children in the war, in essence, has already lost everything in her life, with stupid persistence pulls his van along the beaten track into darkness and emptiness - this comparison contains the parabolically expressed general idea of ​​the play about the incompatibility of motherhood (and more broadly: life, joy, happiness) with military commerce. It should be noted that the depicted period is only a fragment in the Thirty Years' War, the beginning and end of which are lost in the stream of years.

The image of war is one of the central philosophically rich images of the play.

Analyzing the text, students must reveal the causes of the war, the need for war for businessmen, the understanding of war as "order", using the text of the play. The whole life of mother Courage is connected with the war, she gave her this name, children, prosperity (see picture 1). Courage chose the "great compromise" as a way of subsistence in the war. But a compromise cannot hide the internal conflict between the mother and the canteen (mother - Courage).

The other side of the war is revealed in the images of the Courage children. All three die: the Swiss because of his honesty (picture 3), Eilif - "because he did one more feat than required" (picture 8), Catherine - warning the city of Halle about the attack of enemies (picture 11). Human virtues are either perverted in the course of war, or lead the good and honest to death. This is how the grandiose tragic image of war as “the world in reverse” arises.

Revealing the epic features of the play, it is necessary to refer to the structure of the work. Students should study not only the text, but also the principles of the Brechtian setting. To do this, they must become familiar with Brecht's Courage Model. Notes for the 1949 production" (Book 1. S. 382-443). “As for the epic beginning in the production of the German Theater, it was reflected in the mise-en-scenes, and in the drawing of images, and in the careful finishing of details, and in the continuity of the action,” wrote Brecht (Book 1, p. 439). Epic elements are also: the presentation of the content at the beginning of each picture, the introduction of zongs commenting on the action, the widespread use of the story (one of the most dynamic pictures can be analyzed from this point of view - the third, in which there is a bargain for the life of the Swiss). The means of epic theater also include montage, that is, the connection of parts, episodes without their merging, without the desire to hide the junction, but on the contrary, with a tendency to highlight it, thereby causing a stream of associations in the viewer. Brecht in the article "Theater of Pleasure or Theater of Instruction?" (1936) writes: “The epic author Deblin gave an excellent definition of the epic, saying that, unlike a dramatic work, an epic work can, relatively speaking, be cut into pieces, and each piece will retain its viability” (Book 2, p. 66 ).

If students learn the principle of epization, they will be able to give a number of specific examples from Brecht's play.

The principle of "phenomenal theater" can only be analyzed using Brecht's "Courage Model". What is the essence of phenomenality, the meaning of which the writer revealed in the work "Purchase of Copper"? In the old, "Aristotelian" theater, only the performance of the actor was truly artistic. The rest of the components, as it were, played along with him, duplicated his work. In the epic theater, each component of the performance (not only the work of the actor and director, but also light, music, design) should be an artistic phenomenon (phenomenon), each should have an independent role in revealing the philosophical content of the work, and not duplicate other components.

In the Courage Model, Brecht reveals the use of music based on the principle of phenomenality (see: Book 1, pp. 383-384), the same applies to scenery. Everything superfluous is removed from the stage, not a copy of the world is reproduced, but its image. For this, few, but reliable details are used. “If a certain approximation is allowed in the big, then in the small it is unacceptable. For a realistic image, it is important to carefully develop the details of costumes and props, because here the viewer’s imagination cannot add anything, ”wrote Brecht (Book 1, p. 386).

The effect of alienation, as it were, unites all the main features of the epic theater, gives them purposefulness. The figurative basis of alienation is a metaphor. Alienation is one of the forms of theatrical convention, the acceptance of the conditions of the game without the illusion of plausibility. The effect of alienation is designed to highlight the image, to show it from an unusual side. At the same time, the actor should not merge with his hero. Thus, Brecht warns that in scene 4 (in which Mother Courage sings “The Song of Great Humility”) acting without alienation “conceals a social danger if the performer of the role of Courage, hypnotizing the viewer with her acting, calls him to get used to this heroine.<...>He will not be able to feel the beauty and attractive force of the social problem” (Book 1, p. 411).

Using the effect of alienation with a goal different from that of B. Brecht, the modernists depicted on the stage an absurd world in which death reigns. Brecht, with the help of alienation, sought to show the world in such a way that the viewer would have a desire to change it.

There were great disputes around the finale of the play (see Brecht's dialogue with F. Wolf. - Book 1, pp. 443–447). Brecht answered Wolf: “In this play, as you rightly noted, it is shown that Courage has learned nothing from the catastrophes that befell it.<...>Dear Friedrich Wolf, it is you who confirm that the author was a realist. Even if Courage has not learned anything, the public, in my opinion, can still learn something by looking at it” (Book 1, p. 447).

Bertolt Brecht(1898-1956) was born in Augsburg, the son of a factory director, studied at the gymnasium, studied medicine in Munich and was drafted into the army as a nurse. The songs and poems of the young orderly attracted attention with the spirit of hatred for the war, for the Prussian military, for German imperialism. In the revolutionary days of November 1918, Brecht was elected a member of the Augsburg Soldiers' Council, which testified to the authority of a still young poet.

Already in Brecht's earliest poems, we see a combination of catchy slogans designed for instant memorization and complex imagery that evokes associations with classical German literature. These associations are not imitations, but an unexpected rethinking of old situations and techniques. Brecht seems to move them into modern life, makes them look at them in a new way, "alienated". Thus already in the earliest lyric Brecht gropes for his famous (*224) dramatic device of "alienation". In the poem "The Legend of the Dead Soldier," satirical devices are reminiscent of romanticism: a soldier going into battle against the enemy has long been only a ghost, the people who see him off are philistines, whom German literature has long depicted in the guise of animals. And at the same time, Brecht's poem is topical - it contains intonations, pictures, and hatred of the times of the First World War. Brecht stigmatizes German militarism and war in the 1924 poem "The Ballad of a Mother and a Soldier"; the poet understands that the Weimar Republic is far from eradicating militant Pan-Germanism.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, Brecht's poetic world expanded. Reality appears in the sharpest class upheavals. But Brecht is not content with merely recreating pictures of oppression. His poems are always a revolutionary appeal: such are "The Song of the United Front", "The Faded Glory of New York, the Giant City", "The Song of the Class Enemy". These poems clearly show how, at the end of the 1920s, Brecht comes to a communist worldview, how his spontaneous youthful rebellion grows into proletarian revolutionism.

Brecht calls his aesthetics and dramaturgy "epic", "non-Aristotelian" theater; by this naming, he emphasizes his disagreement with the most important, according to Aristotle, principle of ancient tragedy, which was later adopted to a greater or lesser extent by the entire world theatrical tradition. The playwright opposes the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Catharsis is an extraordinary, supreme emotional tension. This side of the catharsis Brecht recognized and retained for his theatre; emotional strength, pathos, open manifestation of passions we see in his plays. But the purification of feelings in catharsis, according to Brecht, led to reconciliation with tragedy, life's horror became theatrical and therefore attractive, the viewer would not even mind experiencing something like that. Brecht constantly tried to dispel the legends about the beauty of suffering and patience. In the Life of Galileo, he writes that the hungry have no right to endure hunger, that "starving" is simply not eating, and not showing patience, pleasing to heaven. " Brecht wanted tragedy to stimulate reflection on ways to prevent tragedy. Therefore he considered Shakespeare's shortcoming that in the performances of his tragedies it is unthinkable, for example, "a discussion about the behavior of King Lear" and it seems that Lear's grief is inevitable: "it has always been like that, it is natural."

The idea of ​​catharsis, generated by the ancient drama, was closely connected with the concept of the fatal predestination of human destiny. Playwrights, by the power of their talent, revealed all the motivations of human behavior, in moments of catharsis, like lightning, they illuminated all the reasons for human actions, and the power of these reasons turned out to be absolute. That is why Brecht called the Aristotelian theater fatalistic.

Brecht believed that a person retains the ability of free choice and responsible decision in the most difficult circumstances. This conviction of the playwright manifested faith in man, a deep conviction that bourgeois society, with all the power of its corrupting influence, cannot reshape humanity in the spirit of its principles. Brecht writes that the task of the "epic theater" is to force the audience "to give up ... the illusion that everyone in the place of the depicted hero would act in the same way." The playwright deeply comprehends the dialectics of the development of society and therefore crushingly smashes the vulgar sociology associated with positivism. Brecht always chooses complex, "non-ideal" ways of exposing capitalist society. "Political primitive", according to the playwright, is unacceptable on stage. Brecht wanted the life and actions of the characters in the plays from the life (*227) of a possessive society to always give the impression of unnaturalness. He poses a very difficult task for the theatrical performance: he compares the viewer with a hydraulic builder who "is able to see the river at the same time both in its actual course and in the imaginary one along which it could flow if the slope of the plateau and the water level were different" .

Brecht believed that a true depiction of reality is not limited only to the reproduction of the social circumstances of life, that there are universal categories that social determinism cannot fully explain (the love of the heroine of the "Caucasian Chalk Circle" Grusha for a defenseless abandoned child, Shen De's irresistible impulse for good) . Their depiction is possible in the form of a myth, a symbol, in the genre of parable plays or parabolic plays. But in terms of socio-psychological realism, Brecht's dramaturgy can be put on a par with the greatest achievements of the world theater. The playwright carefully observed the basic law of realism of the 19th century - the historical concreteness of social and psychological motivations. Comprehension of the qualitative diversity of the world has always been a paramount task for him. Summing up his path as a playwright, Brecht wrote: "We must strive for an ever more accurate description of reality, and this, from an aesthetic point of view, is an ever more subtle and more effective understanding of description."

Brecht's innovation was also manifested in the fact that he managed to fuse into an indissoluble harmonic whole traditional, mediated methods of revealing aesthetic content (characters, conflicts, plot) with an abstract reflective beginning. What gives amazing artistic integrity to the seemingly contradictory combination of plot and commentary? famous Brechtian the principle of "alienation"- it permeates not only the commentary itself, but the entire plot. "Alienation" in Brecht is both an instrument of logic and poetry itself, full of surprises and brilliance. Brecht makes "alienation" the most important principle of philosophical knowledge of the world, the most important condition for realistic creativity. Getting used to the role, to the circumstances does not break through the "objective appearance" and therefore serves realism less than "alienation". Brecht did not agree that getting used to and reincarnated is the way to the truth. K.S. Stanislavsky, who asserted this, was, in his opinion, "impatient." For getting used to does not distinguish between truth and "objective appearance."

Epic theater - is a story, puts the viewer in the position of an observer, stimulates the activity of the viewer, makes the viewer make decisions, shows the viewer another stop, arouses the viewer's interest in the course of action, appeals to the mind of the viewer, not to the heart and feelings!!!

In exile, in the struggle against fascism, Brecht's dramatic work blossomed. It was exceptionally rich in content and varied in form. Among the most famous plays of emigration - "Mother Courage and her children" (1939). The sharper and more tragic the conflict, the more critical, according to Brecht, a person's thought should be. Under the conditions of the 1930s, "Mother Courage" sounded, of course, as a protest against the demagogic propaganda of the war by the Nazis and was addressed to that part of the German population that succumbed to this demagogy. War is depicted in the play as an element organically hostile to human existence.

The essence of "epic theater" becomes especially clear in connection with "Mother Courage". Theoretical commentary is combined in the play with a realistic manner, merciless in its consistency. Brecht believes that it is realism that is the most reliable way of influence. Therefore, in "Mother Courage" the "genuine" face of life is so consistent and sustained even in small details. But one should keep in mind the duality of this play - the aesthetic content of the characters, i.e. a reproduction of life, where good and evil are mixed regardless of our desires, and the voice of Brecht himself, not satisfied with such a picture, trying to affirm good. Brecht's position is directly evident in the Zongs. In addition, as follows from Brecht's directorial instructions to the play, the playwright provides theaters with ample opportunities to demonstrate the author's thought with the help of various "alienations" (photographs, film projections, direct appeal of actors to the audience).

The characters of the characters in "Mother Courage" are depicted in all their complex inconsistency. The most interesting is the image of Anna Firling, nicknamed Mother Courage. The versatility of this character causes a variety of feelings of the audience. The heroine attracts with a sober understanding of life. But she is a product of the mercantile, cruel and cynical spirit of the Thirty Years' War. Courage is indifferent to the causes of this war. Depending on the vicissitudes of fate, she hoists either a Lutheran or a Catholic banner over her van. Courage goes to war in the hope of big profits.

The conflict between practical wisdom and ethical impulses that excites Brecht infects the whole play with the passion of the dispute and the energy of the sermon. In the image of Catherine, the playwright drew the antipode of Mother Courage. Neither threats, nor promises, nor death forced Katrin to abandon the decision dictated by her desire to at least somehow help people. The talkative Courage is opposed by the mute Katrin, the girl's silent feat, as it were, crosses out all the lengthy arguments of her mother.

Brecht's realism is manifested in the play not only in the depiction of the main characters and in the historicism of the conflict, but also in the life authenticity of episodic persons, in Shakespeare's multicolor, reminiscent of the "Falstaff background". Each character, drawn into the dramatic conflict of the play, lives his own life, we guess about his fate, past and future life, and as if we hear every voice in the discordant choir of war.

In addition to revealing the conflict through a clash of characters, Brecht complements the picture of life in the play with zongs, which give a direct understanding of the conflict. The most significant zong is the "Song of Great Humility". This is a complex kind of "alienation", when the author acts as if on behalf of his heroine, sharpens her erroneous positions and thereby argues with her, inspiring the reader to doubt the wisdom of "great humility". To the cynical irony of Mother Courage, Brecht responds with his own irony. And Brecht's irony leads the viewer, who has already succumbed to the philosophy of accepting life as it is, to a completely different view of the world, to an understanding of the vulnerability and fatality of compromises. The song about humility is a kind of foreign counteragent that allows us to understand the true wisdom of Brecht, which is opposite to it. The entire play, critical of the heroine's practical, compromising "wisdom," is an ongoing argument with the "Song of Great Humility." Mother Courage does not see clearly in the play, having survived the shock, she learns "about its nature no more than an experimental rabbit about the law of biology." The tragic (personal and historical) experience, while enriching the viewer, taught Mother Courage nothing and did not enrich her in the least. The catharsis she experienced turned out to be completely fruitless. So Brecht argues that the perception of the tragedy of reality only at the level of emotional reactions is not in itself knowledge of the world, it is not much different from complete ignorance.

Question No. 13 E.M. Remarque "All Quiet on the Western Front"

"All Quiet on the Western Front"- the famous novel by Erich Maria Remarque, published in 1929. In the preface, the author says: “This book is neither an accusation nor a confession. This is just an attempt to tell about the generation that was destroyed by the war, about those who became its victims, even if they escaped the shells.

The anti-war novel tells about what a young soldier Paul Bäumer and his front-line comrades experienced and saw at the front in the First World War. Like Ernest Hemingway, Remarque used the concept of the “lost generation” to describe young people who, because of the trauma they received in the war, were unable to settle into civilian life. Remarque's work thus stood in sharp contrast to the right-wing conservative military literature that prevailed in the era of the Weimar Republic and which, as a rule, tried to justify the war lost by Germany and glorify its soldiers.

Remarque describes the events of the war from the perspective of a simple soldier. The writer offered his manuscript "All Quiet on the Western Front" to the most authoritative and well-known publisher in the Weimar Republic, Samuel Fischer. Fischer acknowledged the high literary quality of the text, but declined publication on the grounds that in 1928 no one would want to read a book about the First World War. Fischer later admitted that this was one of the biggest mistakes of his career.

Following the advice of his friend, Remarque brought the text of the novel to the Haus Ullstein publishing house, where it was accepted for publication by order of the company's management. On August 29, 1928, a contract was signed. But the publisher was also not entirely sure that such a specific novel about the First World War would be a success. The contract contained a clause according to which, in the event of the failure of the novel, the author must work off the costs of publication as a journalist. For reinsurance, the publisher provided advance copies of the novel to various categories of readers, including veterans of the First World War. As a result of criticism from readers and literary scholars, Remarque is urged to revise the text, especially some particularly critical statements about the war.

Finally, in the fall of 1928, the final version of the manuscript appears. November 8, 1928, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the armistice, Berlin newspaper "Vossische Zeitung", part of the Haus Ullstein concern, publishes a "preliminary text" of the novel. The author of “All Quiet on the Western Front” appears to the reader as an ordinary soldier without any literary experience, who describes his experiences of the war in order to “speak out”, free himself from mental trauma.

So there was a legend about the origin of the text of the novel and its author. On November 10, 1928, excerpts from the novel began to appear in the newspaper. The success exceeded the boldest expectations of the Haus Ullstein concern - the circulation of the newspaper increased several times, the editorial office received a huge number of letters from readers admiring such a "bare image of the war."

At the time of the book's release on January 29, 1929, there were approximately 30,000 pre-orders, which forced the concern to print the novel in several printing houses at once. All Quiet on the Western Front became Germany's best-selling book of all time. On May 7, 1929, 500 thousand copies of the book were published. In the book version, the novel was published in 1929, after which it was translated into 26 languages ​​the same year, including Russian.

Question No. 14 G. Mann "Doctor Faustus"

The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend, is a novel by Thomas Mann (1947).

This novel combines extraordinary tragedy in content and cold detachment in form: the tragic life of a German genius, fictional, of course (one of the main prototypes of Leverkühn was Friedrich Nietzsche), is told based on documents from his archive and on the personal memoirs of his friend, a professor of classical the philology of Serenus Zeitblom, a man who, although well-versed in music and quite intelligent, is hardly capable of fully appreciating the tragedy of his great friend as he himself felt it. At this pragmatic distance (see pragmatics) between the style of a naive bourgeois intellectual (the image of a simpleton-simplicissimus, which is characteristic of German literature) and the tragic events of the life of a genius that do not quite fit into the framework of ordinary common sense, the plot of D.F.

Let us recall it briefly.

The future composer and his future biographer were born and raised in the small fictional German town of Kaisersashern. Adrian's first musical mentor was the provincial music critic and composer, the handsome lame stutterer Wendel Kretschmar. One of his lectures on the history of music, read in a half-empty hall for a narrow circle of amateurs and dedicated to Beethoven's last sonata op. 111 in C minor, No 32, is given in full in the novel (see below for the importance of Beethoven's role). In general, the reader soon gets used to the fact that the novel contains a lot of long and quite professional-boring discussions about music, in particular about the music of Leverkühn himself invented by Thomas Mann (cf. the philosophy of fiction).

As a young man, Adrian, who surprised all his relatives, enters the theological faculty of the University of Gaale, but a year later he leaves him and devotes himself completely to composing music.

Leverkühn moves to Leipzig, friends part for a while. From Leipzig, the narrator receives a letter from Leverkün, where he tells him an incident that played a fatal role in his entire later life. Some semi-tramp, pretending to be a guide, unexpectedly brings Adrian to a brothel, where he falls in love with a prostitute, but at first he runs away from shyness. Then, from the further presentation, we learn that Adrian found the girl and she infected him with syphilis. He tried to be treated, but both attempts ended in a strange way. He found the first doctor dead, having come to him once again for an appointment, and the second - under the same circumstances - in front of Leverkün, it is not known why he was arrested by the police. It is clear that for some reason fate did not like the future brilliant composer to be cured of a bad disease.

Leverkühn invents a new system of musical language, and this time Thomas Mann passes off the real thing as a fictional one - dodecaphony, "a composition based on twelve correlated tones", developed by Arnold Schoenberg, a contemporary of Mann, a great composer and theorist (by the way, Schoenberg was quite outraged , after reading the novel by Thomas Mann, that he appropriated his intellectual property, so that Mann even had to make a corresponding postscript at the end of the novel in the second edition that the twelve-tone system did not belong to him, but to Schoenberg).

One day, Adrian goes on vacation to Italy, and here a second fatal event happens to him, about which Zeitblom, and after him the reader, learns from a diary entry (made by Adrian immediately after the incident and found after his death in his papers). This description is dedicated to the fact that one day, in broad daylight, the devil came to Leverkün and, after a long discussion, concluded an agreement with him, the meaning of which was that the composer with syphilis (and the devil’s henchmen infected him, and they also removed the doctors) is given 24 years ( by the number of keys in a tempered scale, as if by a year for a key - a hint at the "Well-Tempered Clavier" by J. - S. Bach: 24 preludes and fugues written in 24 keys) to the fact that he wrote brilliant music. At the same time, the forces of hell forbid him the feeling of love, he must be cold until the end of his days, and after the expiration of the term, the devil will take him to hell.

It is not clear from the above entry whether it is the nonsense of a seriously ill and nervous composer (this is exactly what Adrian himself passionately wants to think) or whether it happened in reality (in some of the realities - cf. the semantics of possible worlds).

So, the devil leaves, and the newly minted doctor Faust really begins to write brilliant works one after another. He retires to a lonely house in the suburbs of Munich, where he is cared for by the owner's family and occasionally visited by friends. He withdraws into himself (by nature, Leverkün, of course, is an autistic schizoid, like his creator - see characterology, autistic thinking) and tries not to love anyone. However, two related stories still happen to him, which end tragically. An intimate relationship seems to take place between him and his young friend, the violinist Rudolf Schwerdfeger, which is only hinted at by the old-fashioned Zeitbl. Then Leverkün meets a beautiful woman, Marie Godot, whom he wants to marry. However, out of embarrassment, he does not go to explain himself, but sends his friend the violinist. As a result, he himself falls in love with Marie and marries her, after which his former lover kills him. The intrigue of this story repeats the plot of Shakespeare's comedy "Love's Labour's Lost", on the basis of which, a few years before the incident, Leverkühn wrote the opera of the same name, so it involuntarily comes to mind that he unconsciously (see the unconscious) adjusts, provokes his failure. He himself, of course, is sure that all these are the tricks of the devil, who removed two beloved people from his life path (as doctors once did), since Leverkün tried to violate the contract in which it was said: "Do not love!"

Before the final, a beautiful boy, the son of his dead sister, appears in Adrian's house. The composer becomes very attached to him, but the child falls ill and dies. Then, completely convinced of the force of the contract, the composer gradually begins to go crazy.

At the end of the novel, Leverkühn composes the oratorio Lament of Doctor Faustus. He gathers his acquaintances and tells them about the deal between him and the devil. The guests leave indignantly: someone took it for a bad joke, someone decided that they were insane, and Leverkün, sitting down at the piano and only having time to play the first chord of his opus, loses consciousness, and with it - for the rest of his life - reason.

D. F. is the brightest work of European neo-mythologism, where legends about Dr. Johann Faust, a magician and sorcerer, who allegedly lived in the 16th century, act as a myth. in Germany and sold his soul to the devil, for which he gained magical abilities, for example, necromancy - he could resurrect the dead and even married Helen of Troy herself. The legends end with the fact that the devil strangles Faust and takes him to hell.

The rebellious figure of Dr. Faust for several centuries after the Reformation became more and more symbolic, until it was finally exalted by Goethe, who was the first in his version of this legend to wrest Faust from the claws of the devil, and the famous culturologist of the 20th century. Oswald Spengler did not call the entire post-Reformation culture Faustian.

Post-Renaissance Faust was a figure alternative to the medieval ideal - Jesus Christ, since Faust personified the secularization of public and individual life, he became a symbol of the New Age.

Doctor Faust himself, as his folk books depict, gave full grounds for co-opposing his person and the Savior. So, it is said about him: "In miracles, he was ready to compete with Christ himself and arrogantly said that he was taken at any time and as many times as he wanted to do what the Savior did."

At first glance, it is surprising that Thomas Mann seems to be turning back the tradition of exalting the figure of Faust, returning to a medieval image (Goethe is not mentioned even once in the novel). Time explains everything here - the time in which the novel was written, and the time in which its action takes place. This latter is divided into the time of Zeitblom's biography of Leverkühn and the time of Leverkühn's life itself. Zeitblom describes the life of the great German composer (who had already died by that time), being in Munich from 1943 to 1945, under the bombings of the British and Americans; the story of a composer who, in delirium, made a deal with the devil, is being written on the stage of the end of the Second World War and the collapse of Hitlerism. Thomas Mann, referring to the tradition of the medieval - condemning - attitude towards Faust, wants to say that he denies the voluntarism of such minds as Nietzsche and Wagner, whose thoughts and creativity were abused by Hitler and his associates.

Nevertheless, D.F. is not a novel about politics, but about creativity. Why should Adrian Leverkühn, who did no harm to anyone, as follows from the logic of the narrative, be responsible for the atrocities of Nazism? The meaning of this reckoning is that the artist should not withdraw into himself, break away from the culture of his people. This is the second and derivative. The first and most important thing is that, possessed by the pride of his genius, the artist (and pride is the only undoubted mortal sin of Adrian Leverkün) attaches too much importance to his creativity, he considers creativity as Creation, usurping the function of God and thereby taking the place of Lucifer. In the novel, there is a play with the meanings of the word Werk all the time, which means work, opus, creativity, work and Creation.

This is the meaning of the long intertextual reference to Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" (see intertext) - Leverkühn's conversation with the devil and Ivan Karamazov's conversation with the devil. Ivan Karamazov is the author of the voluntaristic and Nietzschean slogan most remembered in culture: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted." It is in the usurpation of Creation that the great writer accuses his brilliant hero and, in part, apparently, himself.

From the point of view of the obvious opposition of pride / humility, one can see a hidden (however, not too deep) opposition of Leverkühn to Beethoven, who created in his last, Ninth Symphony a choir to words from Schiller's ode "To Joy". Leverkühn says, when his beloved nephew dies (this is also a kind of intertextual reminiscence - Beethoven had a nephew Karl, whom he loved very much), that the Ninth Symphony should be taken away from people:

Question No. 15 Heinrich Belle "Billiards at half past nine"

In Doctor Faustus, Kretschmar's reasoning is, of course, "musical judgment", but the theme itself - the late Beethoven - was chosen by T. Mann also because it recreates the atmosphere of the mindset of that era.

An interesting method of teaching, which Kretschmar adhered to in his studies with Leverkühn. In Kaisersäschern, Leverkühn had just begun to master the basics of music. But already at this initial stage, Krechmar cared first of all about the broad musical and humanitarian education of the young man. "His music lessons (...) consisted of a good half of conversations about philosophy and poetry." What was Leverkühn's repertoire like? "In the scales, he practiced conscientiously, but the school of piano playing (..) remained neglected." "Kretschmar simply forced him to play simple chorales and (...) Palestrina's four-voice psalms (...), then, a little later, Bach's small preludes and fughettas, his two-part inventions, Mozart's "Sonata facile", Scarlatti's one-part sonatas. In addition Moreover, Kretschmar himself wrote little things for him, marches and dances, both for solo performance and for four hands.

The final touch - Kretschmar's writing especially for the student - is especially noteworthy. This is the ancient ("baroque") musical pedagogy: learning to play an instrument was the teaching of all music - and the performing arts and composition.

Having accepted the "conditions of the game" of T. Mann, who wanted to create the most plausible image of the composer, let us now turn to the imaginary creative heritage of Leverkün. The writer mentions his early works rather briefly, thus making it clear that they are immature opuses of a novice composer and they are of only "historical" interest. moreover, Leverkün himself set himself a purely technical task in it - to explore the coloristic possibilities of the orchestra.

The most important, turning point in the fate of Leverkün is a cycle of 13 songs to poems by Clemens Brentano. This work was preceded by a mysterious, enigmatic and full of significant consequences Leverkühn's acquaintance with a woman whose name Mann does not name and who Leverkün himself called Hetaera esmeralda - Hetera Esmeralda.

Many of Leverkün's subsequent compositions will also be connected with the text, and what at one period of Leverkün's life seems to be an end in itself - the composition of vocal miniatures, is differently illuminated in retrospect, when it becomes clear that he conceived a great verbal and musical creation - the opera "The Barren efforts of love" based on Shakespeare's comedy and on Brentan's miniatures honed his vocal technique.

No less detailed, with a mass of symbolic allusions and allusions, Leverkün's last work, The Lament of Doctor Faustus, is described. Chapter XIV of the novel is dedicated to him. This, according to the description of T. Mann, is a synthetic "collective" work.

The polyphony of the novel is felt not only in the combination of its many leitmotifs, but also in the combination of several time layers: the events of the composer's life, coinciding with the beginning of the First World War and the defeat of Germany in it, are set against the backdrop of the impending defeat of Germany in the Second World War. “My story,” Zeitblom writes, “is in a hurry to the end, like everything around. Our thousand-year history has reached the point of absurdity, has shown itself to be untenable, it has long gone the wrong way, and now it has fallen into nothingness, into despair, into an unprecedented catastrophe, into a pitch-black darkness, where tongues of hellish flames dance..." For Zeitblom (equal to Mann), the story about the composer and "everything around", that is, Germany, hurries to the end. And aren’t we right to see in the rise and fall of the main theme of Leverkün’s last work a hint at the curve of the composer’s life itself (already in the first phrase of the novel, the writer talks about how fate mercilessly treated the hero, “lifting him high and then overthrowing him into the abyss) And if "Germany" is read behind the "Leverkün" symbol, then isn't it about the path of its historical ascent and deepest fall with the advent of fascism? such, culture, more than that - man and human genius in our deeply critical era. A novel about a musician? Yes. But it was conceived as a novel about culture and about an entire era ... "

So, in the novel “Doctor Faustus”, which analyzes the crisis of culture, a deal with four is interpreted by Thomas Mann as “an escape from a severe crisis of culture, a passionate thirst for a prouder spirit, facing the danger of sterility, to unleash its forces at any cost and a comparison of a destructive euphoria leading to ultimately to collapse with the fascist intoxication of the people”, and the idea of ​​“correlating the plot with German affairs, with German loneliness in the world” seems to be very fruitful. But whatever the chapters of the novel "Doctor Faustus" are devoted to, it is, in essence, not about objects brought to the fore, but about reflecting in different planes all the same several important topics. The same is true when the novel touches upon the nature of music. Using the history of music as an example, ideas about the crisis of European humanism, which has nourished culture since the Renaissance, are woven into the fabric of the work.

The figure of the protagonist of the novel, the composer Adrian Leverkün, is connected with the problem of the fate of a creative person in an era of crisis of cultural foundations, looking for true authenticity and the ability to overcome this crisis. Mann chooses Faust as the prototype of the creative personality.

Faust is an iconic figure in German culture. The legend about him is based on the life of a philosopher and theologian who turned to magic, and subsequently stooped to making horoscopes and predictions for money. This plot is used constantly (accents are different): the Renaissance glorified in Faust the activity of a man who dared to rebel against the divine order. Individualistic rebellion, the desire for personal freedom connects Faust's sin with the original sin of mankind and with pride and is the prototype of a romantic rebellion against authority. This story is pessimistic (in medieval legends, the sinner repented and was saved).

World literature reacts to the fact that with the end of the war, the modern era begins. He was the first to sum up. The life story of Adrian Leverkühn is a metaphor for important, rather abstract things. First, Adrian is perceived as the incarnation of Faust (who sold his soul to the devil). If we take a closer look, we will see that all the canons are observed. Mann speaks of Faust in a different way, by no means like that of Goethe. He is driven by pride and coldness of soul. Mann is the master of the leitmotif. The coldness of the soul, and whoever is cold - he became the prey of the devil. Here is a set of associations, Dante recalls. Meeting with hetero Esmeralda (there is a butterfly that mimics - changes color). She rewards Leverkühn with a disease that hides in his body in the same way. Esmeraada warned that she was ill. He is testing himself to see how far he can go. This is egocentrum, admiration. Fate gives him a chance. Last chance - echo - a boy who gets meningitis. He loved this boy. If this world allows suffering, then this world stands on evil, and I will worship this evil. And here comes the devil. The story is kept in a certain way. Leverkühn paid with his own disintegration, but when this music is played, it plunges the listener into horror.

Along with the theme of Faust, the educated German reader sees that Leverkühn's biography is a paraphrase on the theme of Friedrich Beggars. Years of life: 1885-1940. The stages of life are the same. Leverkühn speaks in quotations from Nietzsche (especially the meeting where he talks about art). But the Faustian motif expands the image of Leverkün. Mann in 1943 Gola began to write notes about Leverkün, finished - in 1945. Faustian layer (the time of the addition of these legends - - 15-1 bvv.) Thus. the chain of length of the novel is very long, from the 15th century to 1940. New time in history is counted from the beginning of the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries (end of the 15th - I shake the 16th century). The 16th century is the century in which the Reformation movement began. Faust's motive is not just a fairy tale, it is one of the first attempts to comprehend the new that appears in a person's character when the world changes and the person himself changes. 1945 is a milestone in modern history. Thomas Mann began writing the novel in 1943. it time matches. Zeitblanc (?) ends his story in 1945. "God have mercy on my friend, my country!"- the last words in Zeitblan's notes. The temporal regime of the novel clearly shows that Mann does not consider the outcome of 1945. 1885 - the year of birth of Leverkün - the year of the beginning of the formation of the empire. The Faustian motif extends the time frame of the novel to the 16th century, when a new attitude to the world and to oneself is formed, when the development of bourgeois society begins.

The religious question is the mood, the ideology of the 3rd estate. Mann writes about these aspects. What is this: "My I" can be established in this world. This is the selection of a person, a somewhat self-sufficient individual. FROM it all starts and everything comes to a crash in 1945. In essence, Mann assesses the fate of civilization. The final catastrophe is the evaluation of an era. According to Mann, this is natural.

The self-sufficiency of the individual began to move the progress of this world, but at the same time began to lay a mine of selfishness. Where is the line between self-love and indifference to others? Leverkün's coldness is selfishness. Mann evaluates one of the realized options for life. Leverkün could not overcome this coldness. Leverkühn's love for music, nephew, etc. sometimes overpowered by his love for himself. It was this point of view that led to his downfall. Selfishness has given society great opportunities and it has also led to its collapse. Art, philosophy led to the "ossification" of the world, to its collapse.

Nietzsche just created philosophy, incl. and philosophy of art, cat. also worked to destroy harmony. From Nietzsche's point of view, different eras give rise to different types of art. And now comes the era (Dionysian art) - p. (?) Leverkühn and the Devil meet, they talk not only with quotes from Nietzsche, Leverkühn is reading a book by the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (?). "Mozart, Don Giovanni". And Kierkegaard is one of the founders of the philosophy of existentialism - the philosophy of existence, the foundations of which are chaos, the uncertainty of being, uncontrollability. Kirkigor is also present here, Mann mentions here everyone who contributed to the destruction of the harmonious worldview.

Accordingly, the catastrophe of 1943-1945. - the result of a long development. No wonder this novel is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century, one of the most important. With this novel, Mann drew a line not only in his work (after that he created a number of works), he draws a line on the development of German art. This novel is incredibly large-scale, as a result, comprehends a colossal period in the history of mankind).

After 1945, a new era begins from all points of view in social, political, economic, philosophical, cultural terms. Thomas Mann understood this before others. In 1947, the novel is published. And then the question arose: what will happen? After the war, this question occupied everyone and everything. There were many answers. On the one hand - optimism, and on the other - - pessimism, straight pessimism is not straightforward. Mankind began to behave and feel "more modest", primarily because, in connection with discoveries in science and technology, a means is opened to man how to kill his own kind. Therefore, in the second half of the 1940s and 1950s, a new star flared up in philosophy - existentialism. This philosophy, which took shape quite a long time ago, at the turn of the 19 and 20 centuries, gains wide popularity after the war for 2 reasons: 1) basic ideas: the world of being is chaos, absurdity, something that has neither causes nor effects, something that cannot be known and, accordingly, cannot be controlled, and man is powerless in the face of this existence, he is only a particle that weakly controls himself and therefore does not have the ability to control the world at all. Talk about the fact that the world is controlled is all the talk of past philosophical systems. The only thing that a person can count on in this new capacity is humanism. For them, humanism is a person's ability to engage in self-knowledge. To know the outer world, other people are not given to man. The only thing is to know yourself. Turn to yourself, and when you accept this picture of the world, you will find that a person actually has tremendous opportunities when he realizes that he is alone. that there are no connections, and then we will lose the need to follow all the rules, principles, attitudes, laws, what needs to be done is ... or something else. You are told that you have to cross the street in the right place, but the existentialists do not see this connection. The car is on its own, you are on your own, the street is on its own, i.e. no rules need to be taken into account, therefore, a person is free from all rules, attitudes, a cat. mankind has been cultivating for centuries. Consequently, a person who adopts an existentialist view acquires an incredible inner freedom of his existence. 2) 2 category - the category of chance: everything happens because it happens. These are all classical postulates of early existentialism.

"Life- it is not a problem (a big one consisting of a chain of small ones) that needs to be solved, but a reality that needs to be experienced"(Kirkegaard). This reality is made up of moments. You have to relive every one of these moments.

Question No. 16 Heinrich Belle "The Glass Bead Game"

Hermann Hesse was close to T. Mann in many ways. But Hesse's "intellectual novel" is a unique artistic world built according to its own special laws. Hesse is characterized by a lively perception of romanticism - Hölderlin, Nvalis, Eichendroff. But he became the successor of romanticism when his work indirectly reflected the tragic events of our time. The First World War changed his perception of reality.

"The Glass Bead Game" is a work in which Hesse painted a reality that practically did not exist, about which people only guessed from each other's facial expressions.

The action of the work is related to the future, leaving the era of world wars far behind. On the ruins of culture, from the indestructible ability of the spirit to be reborn, the Republic of Castalia arises, keeping out of reach for the storms of history the wealth of culture accumulated by mankind. Roman Hesse posed the most urgent question of the 20th century: should the riches of the spirit be kept in all purity and inviolability in at least one single place in the world, because in their practical use they often lose their purity, turning into anti-culture and anti-spirituality. It is on the clash of these two ideas that the main plot core of the novel is built - disputes between two friends-opponents. Joseph Knecht, a humble student, and then a student who, over the years, became the chief master of the Game in Castalia, and the offspring of a noble patrician family, representing the sea of ​​\u200b\u200blife - Plinio Designori. If you follow the logic of the plot, victory is on the side of Plinio. Knecht leaves castalia, having come to the conclusion about the transparency of its existence outside world history, he goes to people and dies, trying to save his only student. But in the biographies of Knecht attached to the main text, other possible versions of his life, the protagonist of one of them, Dasa, that is, the same Knecht, leaves the world forever and sees the meaning of his existence in the solitary service of the forest yoga.

The profound tragedy of this harmonious book, reflecting reality, lies in the fact that none of the truths affirmed in the novel was absolute, that none of them, according to Hesse, could be surrendered forever. The absolute truth was neither the idea of ​​a contemplative life, proclaimed by the forest yogi, nor the idea of ​​creative activity, behind which stood the centuries-old tradition of European humanism.

The name of the hero is Knecht - servant. Hesse's idea of ​​service is far from simple. It is no coincidence that Knecht ceases to be a servant of Castalia and goes to the people. Man was faced with the task of clearly seeing the changing outlines of the whole and its moving center. In order to embody the idea of ​​service, the hero of Hesse had to bring his desire, the law of his own personality, into line with the productive development of society.

Hesse's novels provide no lessons, no definitive answers and solutions to conflicts. The conflict in the Glass Bead Game does not consist in the bollard's break with the Castalian reality, the bollard breaks and does not break with the republic of the spirit, remaining a Castalian beyond its borders. The real conflict lies in the courageous assertion of the individual's right to a dynamic correlation of himself and the world, the right for the obligation to independently comprehend the contours and tasks of the whole and subordinate his destiny to them.

"The Bead Game"(published in 1943), which, as it were, summed up all his work and raised the question of the harmony of spiritual and worldly life to an unprecedented height. In this novel, Hesse tries to solve the problem that has always disturbed him - how to combine the existence of art with the existence of an inhuman civilization, how to save the high world of artistic creativity from the destructive influence of the so-called mass culture. The writer comes to the conclusion that an attempt to place art outside of society turns art into an aimless, pointless game. The symbolism of the novel, many names and terms from various areas of culture require the reader to have great erudition to understand the depth of the content of Hesse's book. Hesse died at the age of 85 in 1962 in Montagnola.

Question #18 Joyce "Ulysses"

Ulysses is one of the largest books of the 20th century. It can be called both the bible of modernism - and rightly so, and the peak of modern literature in general, which is also right. Joyce's book "Ulysses" brought him worldwide fame, causing the most controversial responses, and turned the idea of ​​literature upside down. Too much in "Ulysses" remained incomprehensible. However, Joyce preferred to leave questions unanswered. Jokingly he said:

"I have come up with so many riddles and puzzles that it will take centuries for scientists to figure out what I mean, and this is the only way to ensure immortality."

"Ulysses" is a modern "Odyssey", where the main characters are ordinary people who wander around Dublin all day and do nothing heroic; this is a new epic in which the idea of ​​universal art is embodied; This is a book that has turned the world's view of literature.

Ulysses" by Joyce was banned from importation and sale in the writer's homeland of Ireland, but some secretly managed to smuggle the book from abroad.

After Joyce's Ulysses was printed in 1922, many readers and critics were discouraged by the complexity of the book. Joyce, realizing this very well, began to give clarifications and interpretations to his friends - mostly in letters. Charting became an attempt to give an orderly, structured explanation of his "monster book". However, Joyce did not intend to disseminate these schemes too widely.

James Joyce's book "Ulysses" is one of the most unusual in world literature. It is quite a large work (more than 260 thousand words) and traditionally "Ulysses" is considered a difficult book to read. "Ulysses" Joyce immediately after the appearance caused a lot of conflicting responses and disputes.

Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1914 and 1921, just during the First World War.

In "Ulysses" Joyce described one day (from 8 am to 2 am) in the life of the Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom and the young writer Stephen Daedalus. The day on which the events of the book take place is June 16, 1904. It was on this day that Joyce had his first date with Nora Barnacle, who later became his faithful life partner.

The book is set in Joyce's hometown of Dublin. Each episode takes place in a certain place in the city, and the scene always has a detailed description. The details of the city described in the book are so true that Joyce once said: "If the city disappears from the face of the earth, it can be restored from my book." Many of the events mentioned in the book are also real, such as the races for the Gold Cup at Ascot. It is noteworthy that Joyce wrote "Ulysses" away from Dublin, however, to describe the details he used the reference book "All Dublin for 1904" and newspapers for June 16, 1904, including the Evening Telegraph.

One of the key features of Ulysses is its connection with Homer's Odyssey. "Ulysses" consists of 18 episodes, each episode of "Ulysses" corresponds to an episode from "The Odyssey"

"I took from the Odyssey the general scheme - the "plan", in the architectural sense, or, perhaps, more precisely, the way the story unfolds. And I followed it exactly.

Despite Joyce's schemes for "Ulysses", which also indicate the correspondence of the heroes of "Ulysses" and "Odyssey", the parallels with the Homeric epic are not literal. Odysseus striving home is different from Bloom wandering in confusion around the city, just as Telemachus and Stephen, Penelope and Molly are different ... Joyce, who initially gave the title to each episode, later abandoned them and divided the text into three parts.

The text of "Ulysses" is stylistically heterogeneous. Joyce chose the lead style of writing for a particular episode. So, "Aeolus" is written in the form of newspaper news, "Sirens" - in the form of a fugue with a canon, in "Bulls of the Sun" one can trace the language changes from Old English to modern forms, "Ithaca" is written in the form of a catechism, and the last episode is written without any single punctuation mark and features Molly Bloom's famous interior monologue, beginning and ending with the life-affirming "Yes". Joyce wrote:

"The challenge I set myself technically is to write a book from eighteen points of view and in as many styles..."

The main characters of "Ulysses" are the advertising agent Leopold Bloom and the young writer Stephen Daedalus. Stephen is the subject of Joyce's previous novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We can say that "Ulysses" is a continuation of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". However, Ulysses is less autobiographical. The idea for "Ulysses" originated with Joyce during the writing of the stories "The Dubliners". From "Dubliners" to "Ulysses" the situation was also transferred.

Stephen's key leitmotifs, which run through the whole novel, are the death of his mother, the break, exile (break with his family, leaving the Martello tower, break with Catholicism, with Ireland). Bloom's keynotes are Molly's betrayal, father's suicide, son's death. Both outsiders - Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus are internally connected with each other, as well as with the figure of the author, and throughout the novel their meeting is being prepared as the meeting of "father" and "son" in the 15th episode.

Stephen is twenty-two, a Dublin schoolteacher, scholar and poet, crushed in his years of study by the discipline of a Jesuit upbringing and now violently rebelling against it, but at the same time retaining a penchant for metaphysics. He is a theoretician, a dogmatist, even when drunk, a freethinker, an egocentric, an excellent minter of caustic aphorisms, physically fragile, neglecting hygiene like a saint (the last time he washed in October, and now June), a bitter and bilious young man - difficult for the reader to perceive, rather a projection author's intellect, rather than a warm concrete being created by the artist's imagination.

Marion (Molly) Bloom, Bloom's wife, is Irish by her father and Spanish Jewish by her mother. Concert singer. If Steven is an intellectual and Bloom is a half-intellectual, then Molly Bloom is definitely not an intellectual and at the same time a very vulgar person. But all three characters are not alien to the beautiful.

Molly Bloom, in spite of her banality, in spite of the ordinary nature of her thoughts, in spite of her vulgarity, is emotionally responsive to the simple pleasures of existence, as we shall see in the last part of her extraordinary monologue with which the book ends.

In creating the image of Bloom, Joyce's intention was to place among the native Irish of his native Dublin someone who, being Irish, like Joyce himself, would also be a black sheep, an outcast, like the same Joyce. Therefore, he deliberately chose for his hero the type of outsider, the type of the Wandering Jew, the type of outcast.

So what are the main themes of the book? They are very simple.

1. Sad past. Bloom's little son died a long time ago, but his image lives on in the blood and in the mind of the hero.

2. Ridiculous and tragic present. Bloom still loves his wife Molly, but gives herself up to Fate. He knows that at 4:30 this afternoon in June, Boylan, her pushy impresario, will visit Molly - and Bloom does nothing to prevent it. He tries his best not to stand in the way of Fate, but during the day he constantly bumps into Boylan.

3. Pathetic future. Bloom runs into a young man - Stephen Daedalus. Gradually, he realizes that perhaps this is a small sign of attention from Fate. If his wife is to have a lover, then the sensitive, sophisticated Stephen is more suited to the role than the vulgar Boylan. Stephen could have given Molly lessons, could have helped her with the Italian pronunciation needed in her profession as a singer - in short, as Bloom touchingly thinks, could have had an ennobling effect on her.

This is the main theme: Bloom and Fate.

In its early stages, English modernism was associated with experimentation, the most characteristic features of which were embodied in the novel James Jones(1882 - 1941) "Ulysses" (was banned from publication in England and the USA).

Modernists rejected traditional types of storytelling. They recognized the technique of the stream of consciousness as the only true way of cognition: in the novel, 2 states are taken in which PS will be let out: wandering around the city (collision with reality) and a state of rest in a state of drowsiness - there is no contact with reality. The voice of the author is absent (because the subconscious does not need a leader). The stream of consciousness is an internal monologue, brought to the point of absurdity, an attempt to photograph all the apparent chaos of human thinking.

Streams of consciousness are maximally individualized (conditioned by the level of consciousness). Paradox - in an effort to convey the most reliable, writers destroy the realism of the image

Genre - lyrical novel: “Poetic consciousness collects disparate experience: the consciousness of an ordinary check is chaotic, incorrect, fragmented. In the mind of the poet, all TYPES of experience form new wholes ”(G. Eliot) Reality is the conjugation of several layers (everyday life, politics, culture, work),

There is no plot. There is something that, in Proust's view, constitutes human existence (the work is mentioned in passing). Myth becomes one of the structure-forming elements; Wanderings of Ulysses - many years, Bloom. - 1 day. The idea of ​​the novel is 2 layers of narration. Bloom - Odysseus travels through Dublin in search of the lost Son. Steven - Telemachus, sad about his spiritual father and wishing to find a spiritual father. And Marion is Penelope waiting for Dot's husband. The idea is not limited to similarity. The world is Dublin, Bloom is a man in general, Marion is the eternal mother nature.

Fiction here is a way of using myth to restore reality. The episode "Eol's Cave" corresponds to the 10th song of the Odyssey on the island of the wind god Eol. The vocabulary of the episode is associated with wind, draft. The text, without author's intervention, recreates both the atmosphere and newspaper rhetoric, as well as the subject matter of the Irish press on June 16, 1904.

The composition reflects the path of dehumanization, the wandering of a person in the chaos of life. Three parts, each of episodes 3, 12, 3). The first episodes are connected with the figure of Stephen. Then Steven's theme dissolves into Bloom's stream of thoughts. The novel ends with Marion's monologue (the narrow life experience of a woman focused on herself).

There is no cultural-historical continuity. The history of mankind is a stream of subconscious life: in one day we learn more about heroes than about all the heroes of classical literature. Here there is a rejection of the unilinear dependence of cause and effect. The cult of relativity and disintegration.

The creative process proclaims a departure from imitation. The author focuses on the very process of recreating reality.

Man - at the level of a dirty and low animal (naturalistic descriptions of uncleanliness, physiological processes are used). In the center - Everyman (everyone and everyone). His wife is the epitome of vulgarity and base sexual desires, Stephen Dedalus is an intellectual pessimist, a restless philosopher.

The external world is created through the huge, torn, introverted world of the individual. Reality arises from the depths of the subconscious, it is fixed under the influence of external stimuli; the epic is created by the lyrical, matter - by the spirit).

The technique of internal monologue is composed of several techniques:

2) Parallel deployment of 2 rows of thoughts (passing by the window of a fabric store, Bloom recalls that poplin was brought to England by the Huguenots. And in the internal monologue, 2 themes unfold: reflections on the quality of the fabric and a melody from the opera "Huguenots").

3) Interruption of thought - another thought is wedged into the development of one thought ( "Pen, what's next? Pendennis?"). Only at the end of the episode does he interrupt his speech with the exclamation: "Penrose! That's what his name was!").

4) Breaking off the phrase and words, allowing the reader to finish the thought (the fragmentary thoughts are transmitted).

5) Literary allusions, associations, analogies and parodies (especially the style of other times).

6) The transmission of thought without punctuation marks.

In the very contrast between the wanderings of Bloom and Odysseus, there is a symbolic meaning. The episodes are united in one modernist theme of the regression of human civilization - the theme of the waning of the soul.

Question #19 Joyce "Ulysses"

The same can ultimately be said for Molly. And in the end, when they meet, when Stephen and Leopold meet, it seems to each of them that this feeling appears somewhere in the deepest levels of consciousness that this world order has been restored. Restored because they found each other. Here is their concrete, real life, filled with some particulars, it came into contact with something so fundamental, with what can be called the basis of the world order. This foundation of the world order is simple, like all the foundations of the world order - they need each other, like father and son. And you can interpret it in a purely concrete sense - the older one needs the younger one, the younger one needs the older one, you can interpret it in a symbolic sense, you can interpret it in a universal sense. Father and Son - this also exists in the Holy Trinity, and this is one of those permanent dominants, one of those permanent foundations of the world order. In their actual existence, this was violated. This real existence has made such an accidental or, perhaps, not an accidental turn, hence all this geography, when they walk around the city, and collide in a lot, and their private meeting, and it is a private meeting, but at the same time this private meeting is some realization of universals, one of the main universals.

To characterize this universal there is one term Archetype. There is this picture, such a static picture of the world, when there are some fundamental principles, some fundamental principles, fundamental constants that do not change throughout a person's life. But they are constantly implemented in some specific situations. Actually, this is how psychological life is presented, so everyone knows that this concept of the Archetype is rigidly connected with all sorts of units, so to speak, mythological, connected with the ancient Greek epic. This does not mean that these archetypes are presented in the epic, as such, as some primary elements of human existence, this means that in the ancient Greek epic, in the Bible, these Archetypes were also, in turn, realized in images.

The archetype - he himself does not have a figure at all. An archetype, as Jung said, is not an image, but the structure of an image. This is a kind of genetic code, according to which certain situations, images, structures, and so on unfold. But since the first of the realizations of images, the realizations of archetypes, have come down to us - these are ancient myths, then, accordingly, we designate these archetypes by the name of myths, by one or another mythologeme, pieces. Hence the archetypes and myths, they are, as it were. interconnected. Myth is the realization of an archetype. And accordingly, at the level of the same mythologeme, the figurative is also indicated. what happens to Steven and Bloom. Here is the Archetype of the search and acquisition by the Son of the Father and the Father of the Son, with all this load that is in the Bible. - this Archetype is consistently realized in different situations and in different works. In its purest form, in the very first form that has come down to us, it was realized from the point of view of the same Joyce in the history of loss and search, and the meeting of Odysseus with his son Ptelemak in Odyssey. And now, stepping back from all the saturation of the book, you can easily see, and Joyce himself tells you this, that what happens to Leopold and Stephen is, in fact, the same thing that happens to Ptelemak and Odysseus when they meet each other , they do not know that they are biological father and son, they have never seen each other in adulthood, and even they are both forced to hide their real names, but when they meet, they feel each other, and this is the very feeling of the Father and the Son arises in its great purpose, and only then, already at the end, it turns out that Odysseus is his father, and Ptelemak is his own son. And so, they seem to be strangers, but there is a sense of kinship.

For Joyce, as well as in general for all supporters and followers of this idea, this is, as it were, one of those literary and artistically described situations in which the same story is repeated each time, realized in a concrete form, when the Father and the Son find each other. Therefore, Joyce lets in his works a hint, an association with Odysseus, it is not for nothing that Odysseus becomes Ulysses in his works, it is all the same. Ulysses is Roman mythology, it is in Roman mythology that Odysseus became Ulysses, but Ulysses is a less familiar name for this hero, it already creates some kind of distance. If desired, and it is very simple, because it is quite obvious, we can see that each of the 18 episodes is built on some kind of mythology, on some associations, with some of the situations from the Odyssey. And when Joyce wrote this novel of his, in general, he gave the name to each of these episodes: "Ptelemakos", "Place", "Proteus", "Calypso", "Eov's Cave", "Estregomes", "Scyla and Charybdis" and plus the whole thing was to be called "Ulysses." When Joyce was finally preparing his novel for publication, he removed all these titles, because he understood that if he left them, he would push his readers to simply perceive his text, this or that situation, as a kind of direct paraphrase of what was in the Odyssey, that is, a parophrase of one work of art to another. Joyce didn't need that. Therefore, wherever possible, he even laughs at these direct associations, let's say with "Scyla and Charybdis" at the level of the text itself, the pants of one of the heroes are tied: thick and wide legs - here they are "Scyla and Charybdis". A lot of other episodes in which such direct associations with the "Odyssey" are debunked, ridiculed, but this does not eliminate the fact that the story of Stephen's life is already on a different level, it is the same as the "Odyssey" version of a concrete, figurative realization of this general a universal archetype that exists always and everywhere. These are the very foundations of human existence. Everything else is different figurative realizations of different phenomena.

And in this sense, there is no difference between Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, although if we look, we will see that these are completely different, but specific images of personalities: Odysseus is cunning, he is a hero, because he was able to laugh at the gods, and Leopold - life did not allow him to laugh at the gods, he is not a king, not such a significant person. On a concrete level, there is no difference between them. But there is a huge difference between them. Moreover, Joyce always uses these fundamental differences as a source of ironic meaning to give ironic meaning to a particular event. It reaches its climax at that most pathetic moment when the Father meets the Son. As we know, at the end of the novel they meet in a brothel, drunk as hell. And a slightly less drunk Bloom saves a completely already drunk Stephen from a company of drunk but strong sailors, when this stunted intellectual decided to argue with them. This is one of those situations for which this work was considered immoral. The situation is more than unsuitable for doing something heroic, great. But it is Great, in the sense that it is the basis of the foundations. It happens where it needs it, no matter what.

One of the main tasks of this book by Joyce is to remove all pathos in relation to life. Joyce does her best to take care of it. This book can be characterized in different ways: pathetic, ironic, cynical, whoever wanted to characterize it that way. But, the fact is that there is both one and the other, and three. And it is in this way, and only in this way, from the point of view of Joyce and the modernists of this period, that it is possible to solve what is the task of literature - to reflect human life in its entirety. This task is carried out by modern literature. Realists also claim this, but they reproduce it in part.

Luck, the greatness of "Ulysses" lies in the fact that he is in this book. striving to approach infinity, multi-variance, multi-layered reality, it still keeps within some certain boundaries, although they, of course, are very widely blurred.

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“Mother Courage and Her Children” is a play by B. Brecht. The play was written in 1939 on the eve of World War II. The premiere took place in Zurich in 1941, on January 11, 1949 the play was staged at the Berliner Ensemble Theatre. In "Mother Courage" Brecht almost completely embodied the theoretical principles of the "epic theater", which he created as an alternative to the dramatic theater ("Aristotelian"). The new artistic ideas of the writer were born from his passionate desire to transform the old theater and turn it from a "hotbed of illusion" and a "factory of dreams" into a theater that educates the viewer in class consciousness, causing him to strive for a revolutionary change in the world.

According to Brecht's theory, epic theater should tell about the event, and not embody it, appeal not to feelings, but to reason. To do this, it is necessary to create a distance between the viewer and the stage so that he understands further and more than the stage character. At the heart of this relationship lies a technique created by Brecht, called the “alienation effect”. Its essence is to show life phenomena and human types from some unexpected side for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, to awaken a critical and analytical position in the viewer, as opposed to the compassion of traditional dramatic theater.

In Mother Courage, Brecht refers to the events of the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century. The reproduction of the past was supposed to warn against the terrible consequences of the coming future. Brecht appeals to a man from the "crowd" who does not object to war, since he believes that the indifference and position of non-interference of the "little" man in the political games of the powerful is the main cause of social disasters at all times.

The protagonist of the play is Anna Fierling, nicknamed "Mother Courage", a candienne. She and her children - the sons Eilif and the Swiss and the mute daughter Katrin - with a van loaded with salable goods, roam the roads of war, "thinking to live through the war." The very image of a woman is written out by Brecht in a completely unexpected perspective. The drama of the mother, who said “yes” to the war, for whom human slaughter is a boon, money, gain, enhances the destructive and destroying all human impact of war. Twelve years pass between the beginning of the play and its end, they changed the appearance and well-being of Mother Courage (she grew old, lost all her children, almost went bankrupt), but her essence and her attitude to the war did not change. She keeps pulling her wagon, hoping for better days, so long as the war doesn't end, her nurse.

Brecht's philosophical idea of ​​the incompatibility of motherhood (and more broadly: life, joy, happiness) with military commerce is expressed in the form of a parabola (the narrative moves away from the modern world, and then, as if moving along a curve, again returns to the abandoned subject and gives its philosophical and ethical understanding and evaluation). The plot is parabolic, separate situations, episodes connected with the successive loss of mother Courage of her children: each of them embodies the collision of a tradeswoman and mother, human and war.

Brecht in "Mother Courage", as in other plays, uses a number of techniques necessary to create an "alienation effect". This is editing, connecting parts, episodes without merging them. These are zongs (songs) performed by the characters, in a generalized form representing their worldview, life positions, and also designed to reveal the attitude of the author and actors towards these characters. Brecht warned the actors about the distant, "alienated" performance of these songs, as they should feel the accusation and criticism of the characters by the author and performers.

The image of mother Courage caused a heated discussion in German literary criticism. The main reproach to Brecht is that a mother who has not learned anything and has not changed can cause a pessimistic mood. Brecht answered very briefly: whether mother Courage will see or not is not so important, the author must achieve insight into the viewer. According to Brecht, a negative example is more convincing for a person who is able to see his double in Mother Courage and draw the appropriate conclusions.

The famous performer of the role of Courage was the actress Elena Weigel, the wife of B. Brecht. On the Soviet stage, the play was staged by directors M.M. Strauch, M.A. Zakharov, television adaptation was carried out by S.N. Kolosov.

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2. The image of mother Courage

Literature

1. Bertolt Brecht and his "epic theater"

Bertolt Brecht is the largest representative of German literature of the 20th century, an artist of great and multifaceted talent. He wrote plays, poems, novels. He is a theatrical figure, director and theorist of the art of socialist realism. Brecht's plays, truly innovative in their content and form, have bypassed the theaters of many countries of the world, and everywhere they find recognition among the widest circles of spectators.

Brecht was born in Augsburg, into a wealthy family of a paper mill director. Here he studied at the gymnasium, then studied medicine and natural sciences at the University of Munich. Brecht began writing while still in high school. Beginning in 1914, his poems, stories, and theater reviews began to appear in the Augsburg newspaper Volksvile.

In 1918 Brecht was drafted into the army and served for about a year as a nurse in a military hospital. In the hospital, Brecht heard stories about the horrors of war and wrote his first anti-war poems and songs. He himself composed simple melodies for them and, with a guitar, clearly pronouncing the words, performed in the wards in front of the wounded. Among these works, especially stood out "Bal-fret about a dead soldier” condemning the German military, which imposed war on the working people.

When the revolution began in Germany in 1918, Brecht took an active part in it, although and did not quite clearly imagine its goals and objectives. He was elected a member of the Augsburg Soldiers' Council. But the news of the proletarian revolution made the greatest impression on the poet. in Russia, on the formation of the world's first state of workers and peasants.

It was during this period that the young poet finally broke with his family, their class and "joined the ranks of the poor".

The result of the first decade of poetic creativity was Brecht's collection of poems "Home Sermons" (1926). Most of the poems in the collection are characterized by deliberate rudeness in depicting the ugly morality of the bourgeoisie, as well as hopelessness and pessimism caused by the defeat of the November Revolution of 1918

These ideological and political features of Brecht's early poetry characteristic and for his first dramatic works -- "Baal","Drums in the Night" and others. The strength of these plays is in sincere contempt and condemnation of bourgeois society. Recalling these plays in his mature years, Brecht wrote that in them he "without regrets showed how the great flood fills the bourgeois world".

In 1924, the famous director Max Reinhardt invites Brecht as a playwright in his theater in Berlin. Here Brecht converges With progressive writers F. Wolf, I. Becher, with the creator of the workers' revolutionary theater E. Piscator, actor E. Bush, composer G. Eisler and others close to him on spirit of artists. In this setting, Brecht gradually overcomes his pessimism, more courageous intonations appear in his works. The young dramaturg creates topical satirical works in which he sharply criticizes the social and political practices of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Such is the anti-war comedy "What is that soldier, what is that" (1926). She is written at a time when German imperialism, after the suppression of the revolution, began vigorously to restore industry with the help of American bankers. reactionary ele-cops together with the Nazis, they united in various "bunds" and "fereyns", propagated revanchist ideas. Theatrical stages were more and more filled with sugary didactic dramas and action films.

Under these conditions, Brecht consciously strives for art that is close to the people, art that awakens the consciousness of people, activates their will. Rejecting the decadent drama that leads the viewer away from the most important problems of our time, Brecht advocates a new theater designed to become an educator of the people, a conductor of advanced ideas.

In the works "On the Way to the Modern Theatre", "Dialectics in the Theatre", "On the Non-Aristotelian Drama" and others, published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brecht criticizes contemporary modernist art and sets out the main provisions of his theory "epic theater." These provisions relate to acting, building dramatic works, theatrical music, scenery, the use of cinema, etc. Brecht calls his dramaturgy "non-Aristotelian", "epic". This name is due to the fact that the usual drama is built according to the laws formulated by Aristotle in his work “Poetics” and requiring the actor to get used to the character emotionally.

Brecht makes reason the cornerstone of his theory. "Epic theater," says Brecht, "appeals not so much to feeling as to the mind of the spectator." The theater should become a school of thought, show life from a truly scientific standpoint, in a broad historical perspective, promote advanced ideas, help the viewer understand the changing world and change himself. Brecht emphasized that his theater should become a theater “for people who have decided to take their fate into their own hands”, that he should not only reflect events, but also actively influence them, stimulate, awaken the viewer’s activity, make him not to empathize, but to argue, to take a critical position in the dispute. At the same time, Brecht by no means abandons the desire to influence feelings and emotions as well.

To implement the provisions of the "epic theater", Brecht uses in his creative practice the "effect of alienation", that is, an artistic technique, the purpose of which is to show the phenomena of life from an unusual side, to make people look differently rub on them, critically evaluate everything that happens on the stage. To this end, Brecht often introduces choirs and solo songs into his plays, explaining and evaluating the events of the performance, revealing the ordinary from an unexpected side. The “alienation effect” is also achieved by the acting system, stage design, and music. However, Brecht never considered his theory finally formulated and until the end of his life he worked on its improvement.

Acting as a bold innovator, Brecht at the same time used all the best that had been created by the German and world theater in the past.

Despite the controversy of some of his theoretical positions, Brecht created a truly innovative, combative dramaturgy, which has a sharp ideological orientation and great artistic merit. By means of art, Brecht fought for the liberation of his homeland, for its socialist future, and in his best works he appeared as the largest representative of socialist realism in German and world literature.

In the late 20's - early 30's. Brecht created a series of "instructive plays" that continued the best traditions of the working theater and were intended to agitate and propagate progressive ideas. These include "The Baden Instructive Play", "The Supreme Measure", "The Saying "Yes" and the Saying "No", etc. The most successful of them are "Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouse" and the staging of Gorky's "Mother".

During the years of emigration, Brecht's artistic skill reaches its peak. He creates his best works, which were a great contribution to the development of German and world literature of socialist realism.

The satirical play-pamphlet Round-Headed and Sharp-Headed is a vicious parody of the Hitler Reich; it exposes nationalist demagogy. Nor does Brecht spare the German philistines who allowed the fascists to fool themselves with false promises.

In the same sharply satirical manner, the play "Arthur Wee's career, which could not have been" was written.

The play allegorically recreates the history of the rise of the fascist dictatorship. Both plays constituted a kind of anti-fascist dilogy. They abounded with techniques of the "alienation effect", fantasy and grotesque in the spirit of the theoretical provisions of the "epic theater".

It should be noted that, speaking out against the traditional "Aristotelian" drama, Brecht in his practice did not completely deny it. So, in the spirit of traditional drama, 24 one-act anti-fascist plays were written, which were included in the collection Fear and Despair in the Third Empire (1935-1938). In them, Brecht abandons his favorite conventional background and in the most direct, realistic manner paints a tragic picture of the life of the German people in a country enslaved by the Nazis.

The play of this collection "Rifles Teresa Carrar" in the ideological relation continues the line outlined in a dramatization"Mothers" of Gorky. In the center of the play are the current events of the civil war in Spain and the debunking of pernicious illusions of apoliticality and non-intervention at the time of the historical trials of the nation. A simple Spanish woman from Andalusia fisherman Carrar lost her husband in the war and now, afraid of losing her son, in every possible way prevents him from volunteering to fight against the Nazis. She naively believes in the assurances of the rebellious generals, What do you want not touched by neutral civilians. She even refuses to hand over to the Republicans rifles, hidden by the dog. Meanwhile, the son, who was fishing peacefully, is shot by the Nazis from the ship with a machine gun. It is then that enlightenment occurs in the consciousness of Carrar. The heroine is freed from the pernicious principle: "my hut is on the edge" - and comes to the conclusion about the need to defend the happiness of the people with arms in hand.

Brecht distinguishes between two types of theater: dramatic (or "Aristotelian") and epic. The dramatic seeks to conquer the emotions of the viewer, so that he experiences catharsis through fear and compassion, so that he gives himself up to what is happening on the stage with all his being, empathizes, worries, having lost the sense of the difference between theatrical action and real life, and would feel like not a spectator of the performance , but by a person involved in actual events. The epic theater, on the contrary, must appeal to reason and teach, must, while telling the viewer about certain life situations and problems, at the same time observe the conditions under which he would maintain, if not calmness, then at least control over his feelings and in fully armed with a clear consciousness and critical thought, without succumbing to the illusions of stage action, he would observe, think, determine his principled position and make decisions.

To visually highlight the differences between dramatic and epic theater, Brecht outlined two sets of features.

No less expressive is the comparative characteristic of the dramatic and epic theater, formulated by Brecht in 1936: “The spectator of the drama theater says: yes, I already have that feeling too. will always be.--The suffering of this person shocks me, because there is no way out for him.--This is a great art: everything is self-evident in it.--I cry with the crying, I laugh with the laughing.

The spectator of the epic theater says: I would never have thought of this.--It should not be done.-- It is most amazing, almost un-probable.-- This must be stopped.-- The suffering of this man shocks me, for a way out is still possible for him. - This is a great art: nothing in it is self-evident. - I laugh at the crying, I cry at the laughing.

To create a distance between the viewer and the stage, necessary for the viewer to be able to observe and conclude, as it were, “from the outside”, that he would “laugh at the crying and cry at the laughing”, that is, so that he sees further and understands more, than the characters on the stage, so that his attitude towards the action is one of spiritual superiority and active decision. This is the task which, according to the theory of epic theater, playwright, director and actor must jointly solve. For the latter, this requirement is of a particularly binding nature. Therefore, the actor must show a certain person in certain circumstances, and not just be him. He must, at some moments of his stay on stage, stand next to the image he creates, that is, be not only its embodiment, but also its judge. This does not mean that Brecht completely denies "feeling" in theatrical practice, that is, the merging of the actor with the image. But he believes that such a state can only occur in moments and, in general, should be subject to a rationally thought-out and consciousness-defined interpretation of the role.

Brecht theoretically substantiates and introduces into his creative practice the so-called "alienation effect" as a fundamentally obligatory moment. He considers it as the main way to create a distance between the viewer and the stage, to create the atmosphere envisaged by the theory of epic theater in relation to the audience to the stage action; In essence, the "alienation effect" is a certain form of objectification of the depicted phenomena, it is designed to disenchant the thoughtless automatism of the viewer's perception. The viewer recognizes the subject of the image, but at the same time perceives its image as something unusual, “alienated” ... In other words, with the help of the “alienation effect”, a playwright, director, actor show certain life phenomena and human types not in their usual, familiar and familiar form, but from some unexpected and new side, forcing the viewer to be surprised, to look at it in a new way, it would seem. old and already known things, more actively interested in them. delve into and understand them more deeply. "The meaning of this technique of the 'alienation effect'," explains Brecht, "is to suggest to the viewer an analytical, critical position in relation to the events depicted" 19 > /

In Brecht's Art, in all its fields (drama, directing, etc.), "alienation" is used extremely widely and in the most diverse forms.

The ataman of the band of robbers - a traditional romantic figure of old literature - is depicted leaning over the income and expense book, in which, according to all the rules of Italian accounting, the financial operations of his "company" are written. Even in the last hours before the execution, he balances the debit with the credit. Such an unexpected and unusually "alienated" perspective in the depiction of the underworld rapidly activates the viewer's consciousness, leads him to a thought that might not have occurred to him before: a bandit is the same bourgeois, so who is a bourgeois is not a bandit whether?

In the stage performance of his plays, Brecht also resorts to "alienation effects". He introduces, for example, choirs and solo songs, the so-called "songs", into plays. These songs are not always performed as if "in the course of action", naturally fitting into what is happening on stage. On the contrary, they often expressly fall out of the action, interrupt and "alienate" it, being performed on the proscenium and facing directly into the auditorium. Brecht even specifically emphasizes this moment of breaking the action and transferring the performance to another plane: during the performance of the songs, a special emblem descends from the grate or a special “honeycomb” lighting is turned on on the stage. Songs, on the one hand, are designed to destroy the hypnotic effect of the theater, to prevent the emergence of stage illusions, and, on the other hand, they comment on events on stage, evaluate them, and contribute to the development of critical judgments of the public.

All staging techniques in Brecht's theater are replete with "alienation effects". Rearrangements on the stage are often made with the curtain parted; the decoration is "hinting" in nature - it is extremely sparingly, contains "only the necessary", that is, a minimum of scenery that conveys the characteristic features of the place and time and minimum props used and participating in the action; masks are applied; the action is sometimes accompanied by inscriptions projected onto a curtain or backdrop and transmitting in an extremely pointed aphoristic or paradoxical form social meaning plots, etc.

Brecht did not see the "alienation effect" as a feature unique to his creative method. On the contrary, he proceeds from the fact that this technique is inherent in the nature of all art to a greater or lesser extent, since it is not reality itself, but only its image, which, no matter how close to life it may be, still cannot to be identical to her and therefore, it contains one or another measure conventions, i.e. remoteness, "alienation" from the subject of the image. Brecht found and demonstrated various “alienation effects” in the ancient and Asian theater, in the paintings of Brueghel the Elder and Cezanne, in the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Feuchtwanger, Joyce, etc. But unlike other artists, who "alienation" may be present spontaneously Brecht - the artist of socialist realism - consciously brought this technique into close connection with the social tasks that he pursued with his work.

To copy reality in order to achieve the greatest external similarity, in order to preserve its directly sensual appearance as close as possible, or to “organize” reality in the process of its artistic representation in order to fully and truthfully convey its essential features (of course, in a concrete-figurative embodied), - these are the two poles in the aesthetic problems of contemporary world art. Brecht takes a very definite, distinct position in relation to this alternative. “The usual opinion is that,” he writes in one of the notes, “that a work of art is the more realistic, the easier it is to recognize reality in it. I contrast this with the definition that a work of art is the more realistic, the more convenient it is for cognition that reality is mastered in it. Brecht considered the most convenient for the knowledge of reality conditional, "alienated", containing a high degree of generalization of the form of realistic art.

Being artist thought and attaching exceptional importance to the rationalistic principle in the creative process, Brecht always, however, rejected schematic, resonant, insensitive art. He is a mighty poet of the stage p. addressing reason spectator, looking for and finds an echo in his feelings. The impression produced by Brecht's plays and productions can be defined as "intellectual agitation", that is, such a state of the human soul in which the sharp and intense work of thought excites, as if by induction, an equally strong emotional reaction.

The theory of "epic theater" and the theory of "alienation" are the key to all of Brecht's literary work in all genres. They help to understand and explain the most essential and fundamentally important features of both his poetry and prose, not to mention dramaturgy.

If the individual originality of Brecht’s early work was largely reflected in his attitude towards expressionism, then in the second half of the 1920s, many of the most important features of Brecht’s worldview and style acquire special clarity and certainty, confronting the “new efficiency”. Much undoubtedly connected the writer with this trend - a greedy predilection for the signs of modern life, an active interest in sports, a denial of sentimental daydreaming, archaic "beauty" and psychological "depths" in the name of the principles of practicality, concreteness, organization, etc. And at the same time, much separated Brecht from the "new efficiency", starting with his sharply critical attitude towards the American way of life. More and more imbued with the Marxist worldview, the writer entered into an inevitable conflict with one from the main philosophical postulates of the "new efficiency" -- with the religion of technism. He rebelled against the tendency to assert the primacy of technology fell on social and humanistic principles life: the perfection of modern technology did not blind him so much that he did not interweave the imperfections of modern society. Before the writer's mind's eye, the ominous outlines of an impending catastrophe were already looming.

2. The image of mother Courage

The play unfolds in the form of a dramatic chronicle, allowing Brecht to draw a broad and diverse picture of the life of Germany in all its complexity and inconsistency, and against this background to show his heroine. War for Courage is a source of income, a "golden time". She does not even understand that she herself was the culprit in the death of all her children. Only once, in the sixth scene, after her daughter was abused, did she exclaim: "Damn the war!" But already in the next picture, she again walks with a confident gait and sings "a song about the war - the great nurse." But the most unbearable thing about Courage's behavior is her transition from Courage the mother to Courage the covetous tradeswoman. She checks the coin for a tooth - is it not counterfeit, and

In the late 30's - early 40's. Brecht creates plays that are on a par with the best works of world dramaturgy. These are "Mother Courage" and "The Life of Galileo".

The historical drama Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) is based on the story of a German satirist and publicist of the 17th century. Grimmelshausen "A detailed and outlandish biography of the great deceiver and vagabond Courage", in which the author, a participant in the Thirty Years' War, created a wonderful chronicle of this darkest period in the history of Germany.

The protagonist of Brecht's play is Anna Firliig, a marketeer, nicknamed "Courage" for her courageous character. After loading a wagon with salable goods, she, along with her two sons and daughter, follows the troops to the war zone in the hope of making commercial profit from the war.

Although the action of the play takes place in the era of the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, tragic for the fate of Germany, it is organically connected with the most pressing problems of our time. With all its content, the play forced the reader and viewer on the eve of the Second World War to think about its consequences, about who benefits from it and who will suffer from it. But there was more than just one anti-war theme in the play. Brecht was deeply disturbed by the political immaturity of ordinary working people in Germany, their inability to correctly understand the true meaning of the events taking place around them, thanks to which they became the mainstay and victims of fascism. The main critical arrows in the play are directed not at the ruling classes, but at everything that is bad, morally distorted, that is in the working people. Brechtian criticism is imbued with both indignation and sympathy.

Courage is a woman who loves her children, lives for them, striving to save them from war - at the same time goes to war in the hope of cashing in on her and in fact becomes the culprit of the death of children, because each time the thirst for profit turns out to be stronger than maternal feeling. And this terrible moral and human fall of Courage is shown in all its terrible essence.

The play unfolds in the form of a dramatic chronicle, allowing Brecht to paint a broad and varied picture of German life. in all its complexity and inconsistencies, and on the this background to show your heroine. War for Courage is a source of income, a "golden time". She does not even understand that she herself was the culprit in the death of all her children. Only once, in the sixth scene, after her daughter was abused, did she exclaim: "Damn the war!" But already in the next picture, she again walks with a confident gait and sings "a song about the war - the great nurse." But the most unbearable thing about Courage's behavior is her transition from Courage the mother to Courage the covetous tradeswoman. She checks the coin for a tooth - is it not counterfeit, and does not notice how at this moment the recruiter takes her son Eilif to the soldiers of the prince's army. The tragic lessons of the war taught the greedy canteen girl nothing. But to show the heroine's insight was not part of the author's task. For the playwright, the main thing is that the viewer draws a lesson for himself from her life experience.

disposition-natural

There are many songs in the play "Mother Courage and Her Children", as, indeed, in many other Brecht's plays. But a special place is given to the "Song of the Great Surrender", which Courage sings. This pe-removal is one of the artistic devices of the “alienation effect”. According to the author's intention, it is intended to interrupt the action for a short time in order to enable the viewer to think and analyze the actions of the unfortunate and criminal merchant, to explain the reasons for her "great surrender", to show why she did not find the strength and will to say "no". principle: "to live with wolves - howl like a wolf." Her "great capitulation" consisted in a naive belief that one could make a lot of money at the expense of the war. So the fate of Courage grows to a grandiose disposition-natural tragedy of the "little man" in capitalist society. But in a world that morally deforms ordinary workers, there are still people who are able to overcome humility and commit a heroic deed. Such is the daughter of Courage, the downtrodden mute Catherine, who, according to her mother, is afraid of war and cannot see the suffering of a single living being. Catherine is the personification of the living, natural power of love and kindness. At the cost of her life, she saves the peacefully sleeping inhabitants of the city from a sudden attack by the enemy. The weakest of all, Catherine proves capable of active action against the world of profit and war, from which her mother cannot escape. Katherine's feat makes you think about Courage's behavior even more and condemn him. Sentencing Courage, perverted by bourgeois morality, to terrible loneliness, Brecht leads the viewer to the idea of ​​the need to break up such a social order, in which bestial morality prevails, and everything honest is doomed to death.

Literature

1. History of German literature, v5 / ed. Litvak S.A. - M., 1994

1. History of foreign literature, - M .: Education, 1987.

2. Masters of modern prose.- M.: Progress 1974.

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The play is built in the form of a chain of paintings that depict individual episodes from the life of a canteen girl of the second Finnish regiment. Marketers were called merchants who accompanied troops on campaigns. Mother Courage has no illusions about the ideological background of the war and treats it extremely pragmatically - as a way of enrichment. It is completely indifferent to her under which flag to trade in her road shop, the main thing is that the trade is successful. Courage also teaches commerce to his children, who grew up in an endless war. Like any caring mother, she makes sure that the war does not hook them. However, against her will, the war inexorably takes away her two sons and daughter. But, even having lost all the children, the candienne does not change anything in her life. As in the beginning of the drama, in the finale she stubbornly drags her shop.

The eldest son - Eilif, embodies courage, the youngest son Schweitzerkas - honesty, the mute daughter Katrin - kindness. And each of them is ruined by their best features. Thus, Brecht leads the viewer to the conclusion that in conditions of war, human virtues lead to the death of their bearers. The picture of Catherine's execution is one of the most powerful in the play.

On the example of the fate of Courage's children, the playwright shows the "wrong side" of human virtues, which opens up in the conditions of war. When Eilif takes the cattle from people, it becomes clear that courage has turned into cruelty. When Schweitzerkas hides money behind his own life, it is impossible not to be surprised at his stupidity. Katherine's dumbness is perceived as an allegory of helpless kindness. The playwright encourages you to think about the fact that in the modern world, virtues must change.

The idea of ​​children's tragic doom Courage in the play is summarized by an ironic "zong" about the legendary figures of human history, who, allegedly, also became victims of their own virtues.

Most of the blame for the broken fates of Eilif, Schweitzerkas and Katrin, the author places on their mother. It is no coincidence that in the drama their death is mounted with the commercial affairs of Courage. Trying, as a "business person" to win money, she loses children every time. However, it would be a mistake to think that Courage is only greedy for profit. She is a very colorful personality, even attractive in some ways. Cynicism, characteristic of Brecht's early works, combined in it with the spirit of defiance, pragmatism - with ingenuity and "courage", trading passion - with the power of motherly love.

Its main mistake lies in the "commercial" approach to war freed from moral feelings. The canteen hopes to feed herself on the war, but it turns out that, according to the sergeant major, she herself feeds the war with her "offspring." The divination scene (the first picture) contains a deep symbolic meaning, when the heroine draws black crosses on scraps of parchment for her own children with her own hands, and then mixes these scraps in a helmet (another “alienation” effect), jokingly comparing it with a mother’s womb.

The play "Mother Courage and Her Children" is one of the most important achievements of Brecht's "epic theater". Mother Courage acts as a symbol of crippled Germany. However, the content of the play goes far beyond the German history of the 20th century: the fate of Mother Courage and the stern warning embodied in her image concerns not only the Germans of the late 1930s. - the beginning of the 40s, but also all those who look at the war as commerce.