Modernist literature of the early 20th century. The concept of avant-garde

Modernism is the second, along with realism, direction in the literature and art of the past century. The 20th century entered the history of culture as age of experiment which often became the norm; the century of the emergence of various declarations, manifestos and schools, often taking up arms against rooted traditions and unshakable canons.

The term "modernism" appeared at the end of the 19th century. and entrenched behind unrealistic trends and phenomena in literature and art. As an established system, modernism has been acting since the 1920s. Its philosophical and psychological origins were the ideas of F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, E. Husserl, the concepts of Z. Freud, K.-G. Jung, M. Heidegger and others. The main thing in the literature of modernism (J. Joyce, F. Kafka, M. Proust, V. Wolfe, G. Stein, J.-P. Sartre, A. Camus, E. Ionesco, S. Beckett and others) is the belief in a deep and irresistible a break in the spiritual experience of the individual and the dominant tendencies of social life, a feeling of forcible isolation of a person from the outside world, isolation, alienation and the ultimate absurdity of each individual existence and all reality. Constantly focusing on this concept, the greatest modernist writers (above all, J. Joyce and F. Kafka) nevertheless managed, thanks to their great talent, to give a thorough, albeit mystified, reflection of some features of the development of bourgeois society. Modernist literature is characterized by attempts to build aesthetic harmony by artificially impoverishing the picture of life, distorting or completely ignoring real processes. As a result - rise to elitism hermetic artistic constructions (V. Wolf, G. Stein and others). Image subject in the literature of modernism are ultimately not genuine contradictions of society, but their reflection in the crisis, even pathological consciousness of a person, his initially tragic worldview, associated with disbelief in the rationality of history, in the progressive course of its development and the ability to influence reality, choosing a certain position and bearing responsibility for it. For modernists man remains a victim of unknowable hostile forces, shaping his destiny. Controversy with the concept of man and with the entire worldview of modernism is the essence of such major works of realism of the 20th century as "Doctor Faustus" by T. Mann, "The Glass Bead Game" by G. Hesse, etc.

Modernism as a literary movement appears to be variegated in its composition with ideological and political aspirations and manifestos, it includes many different schools, groups, united by a pessimistic worldview, the aspiration of the artist do not reflect objective reality and express yourself installation on subjectivism, deformation. Modernism helped to draw attention to the uniqueness of the internal the world of man, to unchain the creator's fantasy as a phenomenon of the real world surrounding a person. The artist is no less important, argued P. Picasso, than what he depicts.

Literary modernism has two main varieties.

1. "Serious" or "problematic" modernism, developing the ideas of elitism and isolation of art, is convincingly presented "fathers of the modernist novel" J. Joyce, M. Proust, F. Kafka.

Anglo-Irish writer James Joyce(1882-1941) became famous as the creator of the "stream of consciousness" school. In the famous novel "Ulysses" (1922), he set out to show all sorts of variants of the named technique and carried out his plan so talentedly that his name became known to the whole world immediately after the release of the novel. Initially, Joyce's experimental book was published in Paris (1922), where the writer lived in exile. Ulysses remained banned for immorality in England and America until 1937, although fragments of the novel were printed in small American magazines. Today, Joyce's experience, as well as the "stream of consciousness" schools, is widely used by masters of the word different directions, schools and concepts.

How does the stream of consciousness writing technique represent illogical internal monologue, reproducing the chaos of thoughts and experiences, the slightest movements of consciousness. He is free associative stream of thoughts in the sequence in which they appear, they interrupt each other and are crowded into illogical heaps. The true essence of man, he argued, is not in external life and actions, but in the inner life emotional and irrational, does not obey the laws of logic. Many artists of the word from M. Proust to W. Faulkner and writers of Latin America tried to reveal the secret of consciousness in their work with the help of the "stream of consciousness".

Ulysses, which S. Zweig called "the greatest work of our days", and its author - "The Homer of our days", is characterized by a completely special genre, style and system of symbols.

There are many versions of reading "novel-myth", "novel-labyrinth". "Ulysses" contains 18 episodes similar to Homer's "Odyssey", although the order of their sequence does not always coincide. Its composition is three-part, similar to the Homeric epic: part 1 - "Telemakhida", part 2 - "The Wanderings of Odysseus", part 3 - "Return Home". The epicness sustained in the composition of the novel contradicts its content in the traditional sense. On the vast space novel (1500 pages) tells about only one day - June 16, 1904 day especially unremarkable for his heroes: a history teacher, an intellectual Stephen Dedalus, advertising agent Leopold Bloom and his singer wife Marion or Molly. Various events from eight in the morning until three at night, recreated in different episodes of the novel. It contains 18 different angles and as many diverse stylistic mannerisms, with their help the author sought to penetrate the secrets of the conscious.

Having an excellent knowledge of the world classics, Joyce abandoned the well-known descriptiveness in the novel and engaged in mythology. His "Ulysses" is not only a certain analogy with the "Odyssey", but also a parody of it. Exploring the labyrinths of consciousness, he exposes his heroes to "X-ray transmission" with the help of various modifications of the "stream of consciousness". Using ancient Greek mythology Joyce himself created the myth, modern and ancient, stylized and original. The main symbolism of the novel is the meeting of father and son, Odysseus and Telemachus, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Dublin is immortalized in Ulysses as artistic image as talented as E. Zola's Paris, W. Wolfe's London, F.M. Dostoevsky and A. Bely.

In Joyce's multifaceted novel quoted and parodied world classic, three main characters are deheroized, sometimes deliberately translated into a primitive biological plan, there are " Augean stables"of the inner world and human consciousness. In "Ulysses" there are many inserted materials: newspaper reports, autobiographical data, quotes from scientific treatises, historical opuses and political manifestos, in which beloved Ireland dominates, the theme of its independence and the thorny path to it. The novel testifies to Joyce's astonishing erudition.

1. Avant-garde (from fr. - forward detachment) - the second type of modernism. A wide semantic field leads to the elusive outlines of avant-garde, historically uniting various trends and trends - from Symbolism through Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism to Surrealism and Pop Art. They are characterized by psychological riot atmosphere, a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, orientation to a fuzzy future. "The avant-garde strives to get rid of the sediments of the past, traditions" (Y. Mukarzhovsky).

The avant-garde does not just cross out reality - it moves towards its own reality, relying on the immanent laws of art. For example, he rejected the stereotypical forms of mass consciousness, did not accept war, the madness of technocracy, the enslavement of man; the idea of ​​freedom brings the generally apolitical avant-garde closer to the revolution. The avant-garde introduced a new stream into the art of the 20th century: it introduced urban themes and new techniques, new principles of composition and various functional styles of speech, graphic design, free verse and its variations into poetry.

Modernism in Russian literature "Silver Age" of Russian culture of the XX century - relatively short
but incredibly saturated with public,
political and cultural events line segment
Russian history. This time is also called
"silver" age", comparing with the "golden age"
- the era of the highest flowering of Russian literature
and art - XIX century. On comparatively
a small geographical area of ​​Moscow and
Petersburg of that time, the density of various
artistic talent was so high
that she has no corresponding examples, not only in
Russian, but also in world history. Some poets -
great, large and simply significant - dozens.

Features of modernism in literature:

denial of classical art
heritage;
professed disagreement with theory and
the practice of realism;
orientation to the individual,
not social;
increased attention to the spiritual, not
social sphere of human life;
focus on form over content.

Representatives of modernism in literature in Russia:

Borii with Leonidovich Pasternai (January 29, 1890, Moscow - May 30, 1960,
Peredelkino, Moscow region) -
Russian writer, poet, translator; one of
major poets of the 20th century.
In 1955, Pasternak wrote a novel
"Doctor Zhivago". Three years later, the writer
was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature, after which he was
harassed and persecuted by
BLOCK
Alexander
Alexandrovich
Soviet
government.
, Russian poet.

Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (18701953), Russian writer and poet,
laureate Nobel Prize on
literature (1933).
AKHMATOVA (real name Gorenko)
Anna Andreevna (11 (23) June 1889
- March 5, 1966) Russian poetess,
translator and literary critic,
one of the most important figures
Russian literature of the XX century.
Nobel Prize nominee
on literature.

ESENIN Sergey Alexandrovich
(1895-1925), Russian poet,
representative of the new peasant
poetry and lyrics, and in more
late period of creativity -
imaginism.
MAYAKOVSKY Vladimir
Vladimirovich (7 (19) July 1893-
April 14, 1930), Russian poet,
one of the brightest representatives
avant-garde art of the 1910s-1920s. One of the biggest
poets of the 20th century.
In addition to poetry, he clearly showed himself
as a playwright, screenwriter,
film director, film actor,
artist, magazine editor.

Gumilyov treated them the same way,
Khlebnikov, Klyuev, Severyanin, Bely,
Sologub, Balmont, Bryusov, Voloshin,
Ivanovs (Vyacheslav and Georgy), Kuzmin,
Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Gippius,
Mandelstam is only the most
notable, but not all.

The birth of modernism.

The first modernist periodical in
Russia became the magazine "World of Art",
organized by young artists A.N. Benois,
K.A.Somov, L.S. Bakst, E.E. Lansere,
S.P. Diaghilev in 1899, writers (Zinaida
Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky) were
invited to lead the literary department of the journal,
whose main purpose was to promote the new
painting. On the pages of the magazine "World of Art"
published their first works Blok, Gippius,
Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Bryusov, Bely, Sologub. AT
Korney Chukovsky acted as a critic in it.

The split of modernism.

Russian literature after the revolution of 1917
divided tragic fate countries and
further developed in three directions:
Russian literature abroad - I. Bunin,
V. Nabokov, I. Shmelev; literature, not
recognized officially and at one time in the USSR
not published - M. Bulgakov, A. Akhmatova,
A. Platonov and others; Russian Soviet
literature (mainly
socialist realism) - M. Gorky,
V. Mayakovsky, M. Sholokhov.

Representatives of modernism in foreign literature:

Anne de Noailles (November 15, 1876-30
April 1933) - French
poetess, mistress of the literary
salon.
Paul Eluaire (December 14, 1895-
November 18, 1952) - French
poet who published more than a hundred
poetry collections.

Guillaume m Apollinei r (August 26, 1880
- November 9, 1918) - French
poet, one of the most
influential figures
European avant-garde of the early XX
century.
Jacques Prevert (February 4, 1900-11
April 1977) - French poet
and film writer.

Modernism in the visual arts.

Modernism is a set of artistic trends in
art second half of XIX- mid-twentieth century.
The most significant modernist trends were
impressionism, expressionism, neo- and post-impressionism,
Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism. As well as later currents -
abstract art, Dadaism, Surrealism. In a narrow sense
modernism is seen as an early stage of avant-garde,
the beginning of the revision of classical traditions. Date of birth
modernism is often called 1863 - the year of discovery in Paris
"Salon of the Outcasts", where the works of artists were accepted.
In a broad sense, modernism is "another art", the main
the purpose of which is to create original works,
based on inner freedom and a special vision of the world
the author and carrying new expressive means
pictorial language, often accompanied by outrageous
and a certain challenge to established canons.

trends of modernism.

Abstract expressionism is a special style of painting when the artist
spends the minimum amount of time on his creativity, scatters
on a canvas of paint, chaotically touches the painting with brushes, randomly
applies smears.
Dadaism - art works in collage style, layout on
canvas of several fragments of the same subject. Pictures usually
imbued with the idea of ​​denial, a cynical approach to the topic. Style arose
immediately after the end of the First World War and became a reflection of the feeling
hopelessness that prevails in society.
Cubism - randomly placed geometric figures. Style by myself
highly artistic, genuine masterpieces in the style of cubism created
Pablo Picasso. A slightly different approach to the work of the artist Paul
Cezanne - his canvases are also included in the treasury of world art.
Post-impressionism - the rejection of visible reality and the replacement of real
images with decorative stylization. Style with great potential
but only Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin realized it in full.

Representatives of modernism in art:

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich -
great Russian artist.
Painting styles: Avant-gardism,
Cubism, Suprematism, etc. (11
February 1878 - May 15, 1935).
Kazimir Malevich is
iconic figure not only in
Russian art, but also in
world history of painting. AT
in particular, he was
founder of a new species
art - Suprematism,
marking his arrival
picture that is known in
all over the world, like - Black
Square. Painting Black
Square was painted in 1915
year and caused a real
a sensation among connoisseurs and
critics. Existed

"Black square"
"Englishman in Moscow"

"Argentine Polka"
self-portrait

"Linen on the fence"
"Boulevard"

Fu "lla Ludovit Slovak painter
"Boy in a Hat"
M. Pasteka: Artist and
sitters.

M. A. Bazovsky: Farmers.
E. Shimerova: Still life with a newspaper.

Modernism in architecture.

Wide open spaces for modernist architecture
opened as a result of the Second World War.
Many European cities were destroyed. planned
the world of the new formation. There was a fundamental
the ability to design entire neighborhoods without much
binding to the "old" architectural ensemble of cities.
The largest building areas in the style of modernism
occurred in the cities with the greatest destruction -
Berlin and Le Havre. On these giant construction sites
large international teams worked
famous modernist architects - Hans Scharun,
Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer,
Pierre Luigi Nervi, Marcel Breuer, Auguste Perret, Bernard
Serfuss and many others.

Basic principles of architectural modernism:

use of the most modern
building materials and structures,
rational approach to solving
interior spaces (functional
an approach),
lack of embellishment trends,
fundamental rejection of historical
reminiscences in the appearance of buildings,
their international character.

House of Vicens (1883-1888) Barcelona.

House of Vicens (18831888) Barcelona.
Architect Antonio Gaudi
(1852-1926). House of Vicens
develops the theme of Arabic
Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.
Rounded towers, graceful
metal ornaments in
the form of palm leaves,
rhythmically alternating belts
arches, blind windows with forged
gratings… Creativity A.
Gaudi threw
kind of bridge from

House Batllo (1904-1906) Barcelona.

House Batllo (19041906) Barcelona.
Blue-green facade of the House
Batllo resembles something foamed
sea ​​wave then bursts
volcanic lava, then the skin
outlandish animals.

Sagrada Familia (1883-1926) Barcelona.

The main creation of Gaudí - the cathedral
Sagrada Familia (St.
family), which he did not have time
complete in life. by design
he was supposed to be
architectural embodiment
plots of the New Testament. Facade
The cathedral consists of three portals,
symbolizing Faith, Hope
and love. Medium Represents
a deep grotto of Bethlehem; he

House of Tassel (1892-1893) Luxembourg.

House of Tassel (18921893) Luxembourg.
Architect Victor Horta. (1861-1947). "The perfect architect
art modernism" is called the Belgian architect
Victor Horta. Tassel's house is considered to be the first example of "
pure modernism”, which brought worldwide fame and glory
budding architect.

Skyscrapers in Chicago, USA.

Architect Louis
Sullivan. (18561924).
The first skyscraper by Chicago architect Louis
Sullivan in the city of St. Louis produced
a real revolution in architecture. Steel
frames with vertical structures,
stuffed with high-speed elevators and other
technique, clearly challenged the classics.

Museum of Modern Art in New York (1943-1959).

Architect
Frank Lloyd
Wright.
Museum contemporary art in New York is one of
the first modern art museums in the world. Now this
museum, located in Manhattan, enjoys
deserved fame and is very popular with visitors.

Residential buildings in the style of modernism. France.

Architect Le
Corbusier (18871965)

House of the Singer company (1902-1904) St. Petersburg.

House of the Singer company (1902
-1904) St. Petersburg.
Architect Pavel Yulievich Syuzor. In Russia, one of the most
notable and typical monuments of Art Nouveau is the House of the Company
"Singer" (now the "House of the Book") on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg. On the one hand, the building is not connected with the surrounding
ensemble, which is considered an urban planning error, on the other
hand, this is an example of a successful layout in difficult conditions

The building of the Kazan railway station. Moscow. (1902-1904)

Kazansky building
station. Moscow. (19021904)
Architect A.V.
Shchusev

At the turn of the century realism began to lose its positions, it turned out to be insufficiently expressive for depicting reality, stormy, changeable. He is being replaced modernism.

Modernism as a new trend in art was born at the turn of the century. In France - Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud. In Scandinavia - Maeterlinck. In England, Oscar Wilde. In Lithuania - Čiurlionis, Sruoga. Later, the names of Kafka, Faulkner, and Nabokov shone among the greatest modernist writers.
Modernism is divided into a large number of currents, but they are all united by the search for new forms and a person's view of a place in the world. Modernist literature for the most part cosmopolitan and usually expresses a feeling of being lost in an urban environment. The very essence of modernism, born between the world wars in a society exhausted by the ideas of the past, is cosmopolitan. The writers who worked at that time experimented with forms, ways, techniques, techniques to give the world a new sound, but their themes remained eternal. Most often it was the problem of man's loneliness in this colorful world, the discrepancy between his own pace and the pace of the surrounding reality.
It is modernism, unlike all previous trends, that focuses its attention on a person, on his inner essence, discarding the external entourage or modifying it so that it only emphasizes the main idea. Critics talk about the literature of modernism as a rather gloomy phenomenon, but this feeling is created mainly due to the fact that the reader views the world presented by the author through the prism of perception of the latter, colored by disappointment and the eternal search for the meaning of being.
From a historical point of view, modernism is closely related to the emergence of new regimes. Most often, we are talking about the formation of fascism and communism, and the classics of literature turned to them for new ideas. For this reason, the work of writers can sometimes be divided into two periods - passion for politics and disappointment with it. And yet, most modernists are apolitical, the only regulation for them is their own imagination and worldview.

Modernism(from French moderne - modern, latest) - a trend in art and literature that opposes realism and is characterized by a desire for unconventional forms, for the conventionality of style. The main features of modernism:
1) disbelief in the rationality of the world order (the real world is hostile to man, full of rudeness and cruelty, and the person in it is weak and helpless), the denial of historical progress and the affirmation of the absurdity of being;
2) an exceptional interest in a person outside of his social affiliation - a lonely, alien to the world, a toy in the hands of the world's elements;
3) the myth-making method of perceiving and explaining the world (the world is unknowable, every artist has the right to create his own picture of the world, this will be an aesthetic victory over world chaos);
4) worship of art as the highest value in life (rejection of the traditional principle “art serves the people.” Art should not serve, this society should serve it. Everything is allowed for an artist, because he decorates life with his creations).

One of the philosophical foundations of modernism was the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche declared "God is dead" and instead of this God, everyone can put himself in his place, i.e. to formulate their own ideas about good and evil, breaking out of the narrow framework that the human herd puts, which created slavish ideas about the world. Nietzsche's superman is just such a being who creates his own ideas of good and evil, emanating from himself and not conditioned by any external authority. Nietzsche proposes the highest level of subjectivism: everyone is his own god and law. The world of a person is determined only by the person himself, if he has enough strength for this. The main driving force of the world and man is the will to power. It is to her that the whole universe moves.

Another important contribution to the development of modernism was Freud's psychoanalysis. According to Freud, a person was not a rational entity, but a complex of unconscious impulses suppressed by an equally unconscious “superego” developed with the help of socialization. In such a concept, it remains only for the rational "I" to maintain a balance between the two manifestations of the unconscious. A person receives the freedom of God and the freedom of an animal, and it turns out, in full accordance with his desire to get away from hateful positivism, closer to an animal than to God, because people became little Superhumans, but neurotics and hysterics, unable not only to divine, but simply to normal life - as much as you like.

In Schopenhauer, the essence of the world appears as an unreasonable will, a blind aimless attraction to life. "Liberation" from the world, disinterested aesthetic contemplation, asceticism is achieved in a state close to Buddhist nirvana.

On the basis of the assertion that a person is weak and helpless, modernists abandon the tradition of 19th century literature - to help one's neighbor, to serve people.
Nothing is visible in the field. // Someone is calling: help! // What I can?
I myself am both poor and small, // I myself am mortally tired, // How can I help? (Sologub)

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Introduction

1. Literature of the first half of the 20th century

2. Modernism as a trend in literature

3. Stream of Consciousness Technique

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

The main direction of the literature of the twentieth century is modernism, covering not only the sphere of literature, but also the art and culture of the past century. Within the framework of modernism, such literary schools as surrealism, dadaism, expressionism are being formed, which have a significant impact on romance, drama, and poetry.

The innovative reform of the novel genre finds its expression in the formation of “stream of consciousness” literature, which changes the very concept of genre, the categories of time and space in the novel, the interaction of the hero and the author, and the style of narration.

D. Joyce, W. Wolfe and M. Proust are the creators and theorists of this literature, but the narrative strategy of the "stream of consciousness" influences the entire literary process as a whole.

Philosophical prose at the beginning of the 20th century acquires the features of a "novel of culture", such novels combine in their genre modifications essayism, the history of the formation of a personality, confession, journalism. T. Mann will define this type of prose as an "intellectual novel".

Aestheticization of artistic consciousness in the modernist and intellectual novel speaks of the formation of "elite literature", where the writer's goal is the problem of spiritual search, the "super task", the impossibility of solving which leads to the rejection of the importunate, straightforward didactics of the nineteenth century novel.

The literature of the “lost generation” and psychological prose preserve the actual, historical and social themes. This literature sets the task of studying modern society and the modern hero. In general, the literary process of the first half of the 20th century is characterized by a variety and breadth of innovative phenomena, bright names, and is a rich material for study.

1. Literature of the first halfXXcentury

The 21st century that has arrived makes the 20th century a precursor, just as the 19th century was the past in relation to the 20th. The change of centuries has always produced summing up and the emergence of prognostic assumptions about the future. The suggestion that the 20th century would be something unusual compared to the 19th century arose before it even began. The crisis of civilization, which the Romantics intuitively foresaw, was fully realized in the outgoing century: it opens with the Anglo-Boer War, then plunges into two world wars, the threat of atomic entropy, and a huge number of local military conflicts.

The belief that the flourishing of the natural sciences, new discoveries will certainly change people's lives for the better, is destroyed by historical practice. The chronology of the 20th century revealed a bitter truth: the humanistic content of human existence is lost on the way of improving technologies. This idea becomes tautological at the end of the 20th century. But philosophers and artists had a premonition of an incorrectly chosen path even earlier, when the 19th century was ending and a new century was beginning. F. Nietzsche wrote that civilization is a thin layer of gilding on the animal essence of man, and O. Spengler in his work "Causality and Fate. The Decline of Europe" (1923) spoke of the fatal and inevitable death of European culture.

The First World War, destroying fairly stable social and state relations XIX century, put a person before the inexorable urgency of revising old values, searching for their own place in the changed reality, understanding that the outside world is hostile and aggressive. The result of rethinking the phenomenon modern life was that the majority of European writers, especially the younger generation who came to literature after the First World War, skeptically perceived the primacy of social practice over the spiritual microcosm of man. Having lost illusions in assessing the world that nurtured them and recoiling from well-fed philistinism, the intelligentsia perceived the crisis state of society as the collapse of European civilization in general. This gave rise to pessimism and distrust of young authors (O. Huxley, D. Lawrence, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway). The same loss of stable reference points shook the optimistic perception of writers of the older generation (H. Wells, D. Galsworthy, A. France).

The First World War, which the young generation of writers went through, became for them the most difficult test and insight into the falsity of false patriotic slogans, which further strengthened the need to search for new authorities and moral values ​​and led many of them to flee into the world of intimate experiences. It was a kind of way of salvation from the influence of external realities. At the same time, writers who knew fear and pain, the horror of close violent death, could not remain the same aesthetes, looking down on the repulsive aspects of life. The dead and returning authors (R. Aldington, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway, Z. Sassoon, F.S. Fitzgerald) were referred by criticism to the so-called "lost generation". Although the term does not correspond to the significant trace that these artists left in national literatures, nevertheless, literary critics continue to emphasize their heightened understanding of man in the war and after the war. It can be said that the writers of the "lost worship" were the first authors who drew the attention of readers to the phenomenon that received the name "war syndrome" in the second half of the 20th century.

The most powerful aesthetic system that emerged in the first half of the century was modernism, which analyzed the private life of a person, the inherent value of his individual destiny in the process of "moments of being" (W. Wolfe, M. Proust, T.S. Eliot, D. Joyce, F. Kafka).

From the point of view of modernists, external reality is hostile to the personality, it produces the tragedy of its existence. The writers believed that the study of the spiritual principle is a kind of return to the original sources and the acquisition of the true "I", because a person first realizes himself as a subject and then creates a subject-object relationship with the world.

The psychological novel by M. Proust, focused on the analysis of different states of the individual at different stages of life, had an undoubted influence on the development of the prose of the twentieth century. D. Joyce's experiment in the field of the novel, his attempt to create a modern odyssey, gave rise to a lot of discussions and imitations. In the poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, the same processes took place as in prose. Like prose, poetry is characterized by a critical attitude towards technogenic civilization and its results.

Poetic experiments by T. Tzar, A. Breton, G. Lorca, P. Eluard, T.S. Eliot contributed to the transformation of poetic language. The changes concerned art form, which became more sophisticated (obviously, a synthesis of different types of art appeared) and the essential side, when poets sought to penetrate into the subconscious. Poetry, more than before, gravitates toward subjectivism, symbolism, encryption, and the free form of verse (vers libre) is actively used.

The realistic trend in literature expanded the boundaries of the traditional experience of artistic exploration of the world, laid down in the 19th century. B. Brecht questioned the thesis of "life-likeness", that is, the imitation of realistic art as its indispensable and immutable property. Balzac and Tolstoy's experience was important from the point of view of preserving tradition and understanding intertextual connections. But the writer believed that any aesthetic phenomenon, even the apex one, cannot be artificially "conserved", otherwise it turns into a dogma that interferes with the organic development of literature.

It should be emphasized that realism quite freely used the principles of non-realistic aesthetics. The realist art of the 20th century is so different from the classical versions of the previous century that it is most often necessary to study the work of each individual writer.

The problems of the humanistic development of man and society, the search for truth, which, in the words of the British author of the second half of the century, W. Golding, "is always the same," worried both modernists and non-modernists in equal measure. The 20th century was so complex and contradictory, so non-one-dimensional that modernist and non-modernist writers, understanding the global nature of the processes taking place in the world and often solving the same problems, made diametrically opposed conclusions. The analytical fragmentation of phenomena undertaken by modernists in search of hidden meanings is combined in the general flow of literature of the first half of the century with the search for realists who seek to synthesize efforts to comprehend the general principles of the artistic reflection of the world in order to stop the decay of values ​​and the destruction of tradition, so as not to interrupt the connection of times.

2. Modernism as a trend in literature

Modernism is a general term applied in retrospect to a wide range of experimental and avant-garde movements in literature and other arts in the early twentieth century. This includes movements such as symbolism, futurism, expressionism, imageism, vorticism, dadaism and surrealism, as well as other innovations of the masters of their craft.

Modernism (Italian modernismo - “modern trend”; from Latin modernus - “modern, recent”) is a trend in art and literature of the 20th century, characterized by a break with previous historical experience artistic creativity, the desire to establish new non-traditional beginnings in art, the continuous renewal of artistic forms, as well as the conventionality (schematization, abstraction) of style.

If we approach the description of modernism seriously and thoughtfully, it will become clear that the authors classified as modernism actually set themselves completely different goals and objectives, wrote in different manners, saw a person in different ways, and often they were united by the fact that they just lived and wrote at the same time. For example, Joseph Conrad and David Gerberg Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Stearns Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Paul Eluard, Futurists and Dadaists, Surrealists and Symbolists are referred to modernism, without thinking about whether there is something between them. something common, except for the era in which they lived. The literary scholars who are most honest with themselves and with readers recognize the fact that the very term “modernism” is vague. modernism literature conscious unconscious

Modernist literature is characterized, first of all, by the rejection of the traditions of the nineteenth century, their consensus between the author and the reader. The conventions of realism, for example, were rejected by Franz Kafka and other novelists, including in expressionist drama, and poets abandoned the traditional metric system in favor of free verse.

Modernist writers saw themselves as the avant-garde who embraced bourgeois values ​​and forced the reader to think through complex new literary forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted chronological flow of events was turned on its head by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf introduced new ways to track the flow of their characters' thoughts with the stream-of-consciousness style.

The beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by both social shifts and the development of scientific thought, the old world was changing before our eyes, and the changes often outstripped the possibility of their rational explanation, which led to disappointments in rationalism. To comprehend them, new techniques and principles for generalizing the perception of reality, a new understanding of the place of man in the universe (or "Cosmos") were needed. It is no coincidence that most representatives of modernism were looking for an ideological subsoil in popular philosophical and psychological concepts that paid attention to the problems of individuality: in Freudianism and Nietzscheism. By the way, the diversity of the initial concepts of world perception, by the way, largely determined the very diversity of trends and literary manifestos: from surrealism to Dadaism, from symbolism to futurism, etc. But both the glorification of art as a kind of secret mystical knowledge, which is opposed to the absurdity of the world, and the question of the place of the individual with its individual consciousness in the Cosmos, the tendency to create their own new myths allow us to consider modernism as a single literary trend.

The favorite character of modernist prose writers is the “little man”, most often the image of an average employee (typical is broker Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses or Gregor in Kafka’s Reincarnation), since the one who suffers is an unprotected person, a toy higher powers. life path characters - a series of situations, personal behavior - a series of acts of choice, and real choice implemented in "borderline", often unrealistic situations. Heroes of the modernists live as if out of real time; society, power or the state for them are some kind of enemy phenomena of an irrational, if not frankly mystical nature. Camus puts an equal sign, for example, between life and the plague. In general, in the image of modernist prose writers, evil, as usual, surrounds the heroes from all sides. But despite the external unreality of the plots and circumstances that are depicted, through the reliability of the details, a feeling of reality or even everydayness of these mythical situations is created. The authors often experience the loneliness of these heroes in front of the enemy light as their own. The rejection of the position of "omniscience" allows writers to come close to the characters portrayed, sometimes to identify themselves with them. Special attention deserves the discovery of such a new method of presenting an internal monologue as a “stream of consciousness”, in which both the feeling of the hero, and what he sees, and thoughts with associations caused by images that arise, along with the very process of their occurrence, are mixed, as if in "unedited" form.

3. Stream of Consciousness Technique

The stream of consciousness is a technique in the literature of the 20th century of a predominantly modernist direction, directly reproducing mental life, experiences, associations, claiming to directly reproduce the mental life of consciousness through the combination of all of the above, as well as often non-linearity, brokenness of syntax.

The term "stream of consciousness" belongs to the American idealist philosopher William James: consciousness is a stream, a river in which thoughts, sensations, memories, sudden associations constantly interrupt each other and are bizarrely, "illogically" intertwined ("Foundations of Psychology", 1890) . The "stream of consciousness" often represents the ultimate degree, the extreme form of "internal monologue", in which objective connections with the real environment are often difficult to restore.

The stream of consciousness creates the impression that the reader, as it were, "eavesdrops" on his experience in the minds of the characters, which gives him direct intimate access to their thoughts. It also includes the representation in the written text of what is neither purely verbal nor purely textual.

This is achieved mainly in two ways of narration and quotation, an internal monologue. At the same time, sensations, experiences, associations often interrupt and intertwine each other, just as it happens in a dream, which often, according to the author, our life actually is - after waking up from sleep, we still still sleep.

The possibilities of this technique were truly revealed in the novels of M. Proust, W. Wolfe and J. Joyce. It was with their light hand that the concept of “central image” disappeared in the novel and was replaced by the concept of “central consciousness”.

J. Joyce was the first to use the total "stream of consciousness". Rightly, Ulysses is considered the central work of the “stream of consciousness”, demonstrating both the peak and the exhaustion of the possibilities of this method: the study of the inner life of a person is combined in it with the blurring of the boundaries of character.

Stephen Dedalus is a cold intellectual whose brain is constantly occupied with unusual thoughts:

… The irrevocable modality of the visible. At least this, if not more, my eyes tell my thoughts. I'm here to read the marks of the essence of things: all the seaweed, the fry, the rising tide, that rusty boot. Snot green, silver blue, rusty: colored markings. Limits of transparency. But he adds: in bodies. It means that he learned what the bodies are earlier than what the colors are. How? And banging your head against them, how else. Carefully. He was bald and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno [teacher of those who know (Italian Dante. Hell, IV, 131)].

The limit of transparency... Why...? Transparent, opaque. Where the whole five will crawl through, this is the gate, where there is no - the door. Close your eyes and see.

Leopold Bloom - everyman, an average person whose ideas about the world are contentedly limited:

Mr. Bloom looked with good-natured interest at the black flexible creature.

Good appearance: the coat is smooth and shiny, a white button under the tail, green eyes, glow. He bent down to her, resting his hands on his knees. - Milk kitty!

Mrrau! she meowed loudly.

They say they are stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. This one will understand everything he wants. And vindictive. I wonder what I look like to her. As high as a tower? No, she can jump on me. "And she's afraid of chickens," he teased her.

Afraid of chicks. I've never seen such a stupid pussy in my life. Cruel. It is in their nature. It is strange that the mice do not squeak at the same time. Like they like it.

Mgrau! she meowed louder. Her eyes, greedy, half-closed with shame, blinked, and, plaintively, with a long meow, she put out her milky white teeth. He saw the black slits of her pupils constrict with greed, turning her eyes into green pebbles. He went to the cupboard and took a jug freshly filled by Hanlon's peddler, poured warm bubble milk into a saucer, and set the saucer carefully on the floor.

Meow! she squealed, rushing towards her food.

He watched her mustache gleam metallic in the dim light, and how, having tried it on three times, she began to lap lightly. True or not, that if the mustache is trimmed, it will not be able to hunt. Why? Maybe the tips glow in the dark. Or serve as palps, perhaps.

Now let's enjoy Molly Bloom's female "stream of consciousness", in which Joyce, according to many, revealed the true essence of the female soul:

... it is for you that the sun shines, - he said that day when we lay among the rhododendrons at Cape Howth; he's in a gray tweed suit and a straw hat, the day I got him to propose to me, but first I gave him a bite of cumin biscuits from my lips - it was leap year as it is now 16 years ago. My God, after that long kiss I almost suffocated, yes he said - I am a mountain flower, yes it is true, we are flowers, the whole female body, yes this is the only truth that he said in his whole life and also the sun is shining for you today Yes, that's what I liked about him, because I saw he understands or feels - what a woman is, and I knew that I could always do with him what I want, and I gave him as much pleasure as I could, and started everything turned him on until he asked me to say yes, and I did not answer at first, only looked at the sea and the sky and remembered everything he did not know: Mulvey, and Mr. Stanhope, and Esther, and father, and old Captain Grove , and sailors flying on the pier playing birds, and freezing and washing dishes, as they called it, and the sentry in front of the governor's house in a white helmet with a band - the poor fellow almost melted, and laughing Spanish girls in shawls with high combs in the hair, and the morning market of the Greeks, Jews, Arabs, and the devil himself will not understand when from all over Europe, and Duke Street, and the clucking bird market near Larby Sharon, and poor donkeys trudging along half asleep, and unknown cloaked tramps dozing on the steps in the shade, and huge wheels of oxen carts, and an ancient thousand-year-old castle, and handsome Moors in white robes and turbans, like kings inviting you to sit down in their tiny shops, and Ronda where posadas [inns (Spanish)] with ancient windows, where a fan hid a flashing look, and a gentleman kisses the bars windows, and wine cellars half open at night, and castanets, and that night when we missed the steamer in Algeciras, and the night watchman walked calmly with his lantern, and ... Oh, that terrible stream boiling below, Oh, and the sea, the sea is scarlet like fire , and magnificent sunsets, and fig trees in the gardens of Alameda, and all the quaint streets, and pink yellow blue houses of rose alleys, and jasmine, geraniums, cacti, and Gibraltar, where I was a girl, and Mountain flower, yes, when I pinned in hair a rose, as Andalusian girls do, or a scarlet one to pin on me ..., yes ..., and how he kissed me under the Mauritanian wall, and I thought it didn’t matter if he or the other, and then I told him with my eyes to ask him again ..., yes and then he asked me if I would like ... yes ... say yes, my mountain flower ... and at first I wrapped my arms around him, yes ... and attracted him to me so that he felt my breasts, their aroma ... yes, and his heart thumped madly and... yes... I said yes... I want to... Yes.

As you can see, we learned the essence of the characters not because the author told us about it - the author is dead - we learned this because we ourselves penetrated into their thoughts.

Of course, stream of consciousness is the best known methods the transfer of psychologism, but it is by no means ideal, as Vladimir Nabokov notes:

“The stream of consciousness technique undeservedly shakes the imagination of readers. I would like to present the following considerations. First, this technique is no more "realistic" and no more "scientific" than any other. The fact is that the “stream of consciousness” is a stylistic convention, since, obviously, we do not think only in words - we also think in images, but the transition from words to images can be fixed directly in words only if there is no description. Secondly, some of our thoughts come and go, others remain; they seem to settle, slovenly and lethargic, and it takes some time for current thoughts and little thoughts to go around these reefs. The lack of a written reproduction of thoughts is in blurring the temporal element and in too big role allocated to the typographical mark.

Conclusion

The literature of the 20th century, in its stylistic and ideological diversity, is incomparable with the literature of the 19th century, where only three or four leading trends could be singled out. However, modern literature produced no more great talents than the literature of the nineteenth century.

European literature of the first half of the 20th century was influenced by modernism, which, first of all, manifests itself in poetry. Thus, the French poets P. Eluard (1895-1952) and L. Aragon (1897-1982) were the leading figures of surrealism.

However, the most significant in the Art Nouveau style was not poetry, but prose - the novels of M. Proust ("In Search of Lost Time"), J. Joyce ("Ulysses"), F. Kafka ("The Castle"). These novels were a response to the events of the First World War, which gave birth to a generation that received the name "lost" in literature. They analyze the spiritual, mental, pathological manifestations of a person. Common to them is the methodological technique - the use, discovered by the French philosopher, representative of intuitionism and the "philosophy of life" Henri Bergson (1859--1941), the method of analyzing the "stream of consciousness", which consists in describing the continuous flow of thoughts, impressions and feelings of a person. He described human consciousness as a continuously changing creative reality, as a stream in which thinking is only a surface layer, subject to the needs of practice and social life.

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Foreign literature and historical events of the twentieth century. Directions of foreign literature of the first half of the 20th century: modernism, expressionism and existentialism. Foreign writers of the twentieth century: Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka.

In literary criticism, it is customary to call modernist, first of all, three literary movements that declared themselves in the period from 1890 to 1917. These are symbolism, acmeism and futurism, which formed the basis of modernism as a literary movement. On the periphery of it, other, not so aesthetically distinct and less significant phenomena of the “new” literature arose.

Symbolism - the first and largest of the modernist movements that arose in Russia. The beginning of the theoretical self-determination of Russian symbolism was laid by D. S. Merezhkovsky, who in 1892 delivered a lecture “On the Causes of the Decline and on New Trends in Modern Russian Literature.” The title of the lecture, published in 1893, already contained an unambiguous assessment of the state of literature, the hope for the revival of which the author pinned on "new trends". The new generation of writers, he believed, had "an enormous transitional and preparatory work to do." Merezhkovsky called the main elements of this work "mystical content, symbols and the expansion of artistic impressionability." The central place in this triad of concepts was given to the symbol.

Already in March 1894 in Moscow was published small collection poems with the program name "Russian Symbolists", and soon two next issue with the same name. Later it turned out that the author of most of the poems in these three collections was the novice poet Valery Bryusov, who resorted to several different pseudonyms to give the impression of the existence of a whole poetic movement. The hoax was successful: the Russian Symbolists collections became aesthetic beacons, the light of which attracted new poets, different in their talents and creative aspirations, but united in their rejection of utilitarianism in art and longing for the renewal of poetry.

The social and civic themes important to realism were replaced by the first symbolists with declarations of the relativity of all values ​​and the assertion of individualism as the only refuge of the artist. V. Bryusov, who became the leader of symbolism, wrote especially assertively about the absolute rights of the individual:

I don't know of other commitments
In addition to virgin faith in yourself.

However, from the very beginning of its existence, symbolism turned out to be a heterogeneous trend: several independent groups took shape in its depths. According to the time of formation and according to the peculiarities of the worldview position, it is customary to distinguish two main groups of poets in Russian symbolism. Adherents of the first group, who made their debut in the 1890s, are called "senior symbolists" (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub, and others). In the 1900s, new forces poured into symbolism, significantly updating the appearance of the current (A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, and others). The accepted designation for the "second wave" of symbolism is "young symbolism". The “senior” and “younger” symbolists were separated not so much by age, but by the difference in attitudes and the direction of creativity (Vyach. Ivanov, for example, is older than V. Bryusov in age, but showed himself as a symbolist of the second generation).

In the organizational and publishing life of the symbolist movement, the existence of two geographical poles was important: the St. Petersburg and Moscow symbolists at different stages of the movement not only collaborated, but also conflicted with each other. For example, the Moscow grouping of the 1890s, which developed around

V. Bryusova, limited the tasks of the new trend to the framework of literature itself: main principle their aesthetics are "art for art's sake". On the contrary, the senior symbolists from St. Petersburg with D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius at the head defended the priority of religious and philosophical searches in symbolism, considering themselves to be genuine "symbolists", and their opponents - "decadents".

Disputes about "symbolism" and "decadentism" began from the very birth of a new trend. In the minds of most readers of that time, these two words were almost synonymous, and in the Soviet era, the term "decadent" began to be used as a generic designation for all modernist movements. Meanwhile, "decadentism" and "symbolism" were correlated in the minds of the new poets not as homogeneous concepts, but almost as antonyms.

Decadence, or decadence (French decline), is a certain mentality, a crisis type of consciousness, which is expressed in a feeling of despair, impotence, mental fatigue. It is associated with rejection of the surrounding world, pessimism, refined sophistication, awareness of oneself as the bearer of a high, but perishing culture. In works that are decadent in mood, extinction, a break with traditional morality, and the will to die are often aestheticized. In one way or another, decadent moods affected almost all symbolists. Decadent worldviews were characteristic at one stage or another of creativity and 3. Gippius, and K. Balmont, and V. Bryusov, and A. Blok, and A. Bely, and F. Sologub was the most consistent decadent.

At the same time, the symbolist worldview was by no means reduced to moods of decline and destruction. The philosophy and aesthetics of symbolism took shape under the influence of various teachings - from the ancient philosopher Plato to the modern symbolist philosophical systems of V. Solovyov, F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson.

The traditional idea of ​​knowing the world in art was opposed by the Symbolists to the idea of ​​constructing the world in the process of creativity. Creativity, they believed, is higher than knowledge. This conviction led them to a detailed discussion of the theoretical aspects of artistic creation.

For V. Bryusov, for example, art is "comprehension of the world in other, non-rational ways." After all, only phenomena that are subject to the law of linear causality can be rationally comprehended, and such causality operates only in the lower forms of life. Empirical reality, life - in the final analysis, the world of appearances, phantoms. The higher spheres of life (the area of ​​"absolute ideas" in Plato's terms - or the "world soul", according to Vl. Solovyov) are not subject to rational knowledge. It is art that has the ability to penetrate into these spheres: it is able to capture moments of inspired insight, to capture the impulses of higher reality. Therefore, creativity in the understanding of the symbolists is a subconscious-intuitive contemplation of secret meanings, accessible only to the artist-creator.

Moreover, it is impossible to rationally convey the contemplated "secrets". According to the largest theorist among the Symbolists, Vyach. Ivanov, poetry is "the cryptography of the inexpressible". The artist needs not only super-rational sensitivity, but the finest mastery of the art of allusion: the value of poetic speech lies in “understatement”, “concealment of meaning”. The main means for conveying contemplated secret meanings was to be a symbol.

The symbol is the central aesthetic category of the new trend. It is not easy to understand him correctly. A common misconception about a symbol is that it is perceived as an allegory when one thing is said and something else is meant. In this interpretation, the chain of symbols is a kind of set of hieroglyphs, a message encryption system for "initiates". It is assumed that the literal, objective meaning of the image in itself is indifferent, does not contain any important artistic information, but serves only as a conditional shell for the otherworldly meaning. In a word, the symbol turns out to be one of the varieties of tropes.

Meanwhile, the Symbolists themselves believed that the symbol fundamentally opposes the tropes, because it is devoid of their main quality - “portability of meaning”. When it is necessary to solve the "mystery" given by the artist, we are dealing with a false symbolic image. The simplest example of a false symbolic image is an allegory. In allegory, the subject layer of the image really plays a subordinate role, acts as an illustration or personification of a certain idea or quality. The allegorical image is a kind of ingenious mask behind which the essence is guessed.

The allegory is easily deciphered by the "insightful" reader: it will not be difficult for him to guess who or what is hidden, for example, behind the images of I. Krylov's fables or M. Gorky's romantic "songs". One of the critics of the beginning of the century was too picky, ironically noting how inaccurate the author of the "Song of the Petrel" was in placing the penguins, the inhabitants of Antarctica, on the shores of the southern seas. It is especially important that the allegory presupposes an unambiguous understanding.

The symbol, on the contrary, is multi-valued: it contains the prospect of an unlimited deployment of meanings. Here is how I. Annensky, one of the finest poets of symbolism, wrote about the ambiguity of the symbol: “I do not at all need the obligatory nature of one common understanding. On the contrary, I consider the merit of a play (as he called the poems. - Auth.), If it can be understood in two or more ways, or, having misunderstood, only feel it and then finish it mentally yourself. Vyach agreed with him. Ivanov, arguing that "a symbol is only a true symbol when it is inexhaustible in its meaning." “A symbol is a window to infinity,” F. Sologub echoed him.

Another important difference between a symbol and a trope is the full significance of the subject plan of the image, its material texture. A symbol is a full-fledged image, and in addition to the potential inexhaustibility of its meaning. The story about the life of the Dragonfly and the Ant (or about the behavior of "loons and penguins") will lose its meaning if the reader fails to understand the moral or ideological allegory inherent in the plot. On the contrary, without even suspecting the symbolic potential of this or that image-symbol, we are able to read the text in which it occurs (when first reading, as a rule, not all symbols are recognized in their main quality and reveal to the reader the depth of their meanings). So, for example, Blok's "The Stranger" can be read as a story in verse about a meeting with a charming woman: the subject plan of the central image is perceived in addition to the symbolic possibilities contained in it.

But any symbolic image, starting from its literal, objective plan, seeks to go beyond its own limits and correlates with life as a whole. That is why the Stranger is both the author's anxiety about the fate of beauty in the world of earthly vulgarity, and disbelief in the possibility of a miraculous transformation of life, and a dream of other worlds, and a dramatic comprehension of the inseparability of "dirt" and "purity" in this world, and an endless chain of all new and new semantic possibilities. Infinite because the symbolist vision is the vision of the whole world, the universe.

According to the views of the symbolists, the symbol is the concentration of the absolute in the individual; in a concise form it reflects the comprehension of the unity of life. F. Sologub believed that symbolism as a literary trend “can be characterized in an effort to reflect life as a whole, not only from its external side, not from its particular phenomena, but in a figurative way of symbols, to depict, in essence, what, hiding behind random, disparate phenomena, forms a connection with Eternity, with the universal, world process.

Finally, one more thing important aspect in understanding the nature of artistic symbolism: it is fundamentally impossible to compile any dictionary symbolic meanings or a comprehensive catalog of artistic symbols. The fact is that a word or an image is not born as symbols, but becomes them in the appropriate context - a specific artistic environment. Such a context, activating the symbolic potential of the word, is created by the author's conscious attitude towards reticence, rational vagueness of the statement; emphasis on the associative, rather than logical connection between images, - in a word, with the help of what the symbolists called "the musical potential of the word."

The category of music is the second most important (after the symbol) in the aesthetics and poetic practice of symbolism. This concept was used by symbolists in two different aspects- worldview and technical. In the first, general philosophical sense, music for them is not a rhythmically organized sequence of sounds, but a universal metaphysical energy, the fundamental principle of all creativity.

Following F. Nietzsche and the French symbolists, Russian symbolist poets considered music to be the highest form of creativity, because it gives maximum freedom of expression to the creator and, accordingly, maximum emancipation of perception to the listener. They inherited this understanding of music from F. Nietzsche, who in his work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music” gave the word “music” the status of a fundamental philosophical category. He contrasted the "Dionysian" (non-conceptual) musical beginning the human spirit - to an ordered "Apollonian" beginning. It is the "Dionysian" spirit of music, spontaneous and free, according to the Symbolists, that constitutes the essence of true art. In this sense, the word "music" should be understood in A. Blok's calls to "listen to the music of the revolution", in his metaphor of the "world orchestra".

In the second, technical sense, “music” for the Symbolists is the verbal texture of the verse, permeated with sound and rhythmic combinations, in other words, the maximum use of musical compositional principles in poetry. For many Symbolists, the appeal of their French predecessor Paul Verlaine, "Music first of all ...", turned out to be relevant. Symbolist poems are sometimes built as a bewitching stream of verbal-musical consonances and echoes. Sometimes, as, for example, with K. Balmont, the desire for musical smooth writing acquires a hypertrophied self-goal character:

The swan swam away in the semi-darkness,
In the distance, whitening under the moon.
The waves crash to the oar,
Lily caresses to the moisture...

In a new way, against the background of tradition, the relationship between the poet and his audience was built in symbolism. The symbolist poet did not strive to be generally intelligible, because such an understanding is based on ordinary logic. He did not appeal to everyone, but only to the "initiates", not to the reader-consumer, but to the reader-creator, the reader-co-author. The poem was supposed not so much to convey the thoughts and feelings of the author, but to awaken his own in the reader, to help him in his spiritual ascent from the “real” to the “most real”, i.e., in independent comprehension of the “higher reality”. Symbolist lyrics awakened the “sixth sense” in a person, sharpened and refined his perception, developed an intuition related to artistic.

To do this, the Symbolists tried to make the most of the associative possibilities of the word, turned to the motives and images of different cultures, widely used explicit and hidden quotations. Their favorite source of artistic reminiscences was the Greek and Roman mythological archaic. It was mythology that became in their work an arsenal of universal psychological and philosophical models, convenient both for comprehending the deep features of the human spirit in general, and for embodying modern spiritual problems. The Symbolists not only borrowed ready-made mythological plots, but also created their own myths. In this, the poets saw a means to bring together and even merge life and art into one, to transform reality along the paths of art. Myth-making was highly characteristic, for example, of F. Sologub, Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely.

Symbolism was not limited to purely literary tasks; he strove to become not only a universal worldview, but even a form of life behavior and, as his supporters believed, a way of creative restructuring of the universe (the last of the noted areas of symbolist activity is usually called life-building). This striving of the literary movement towards universal omnipotence was especially manifested in the 1900s in the young symbolism, which seriously laid claim to universal spiritual transformation. The facts of non-literary life, social history, and even the details of personal relationships were aestheticized, that is, they were interpreted by the younger symbolists as a kind of elements of a grandiose work of art performed before their eyes. It was important, they believed, to take an active part in this cosmic process of creation. That is why some symbolists came out with politically sharp works, reacted to the facts of social disharmony, and treated the activities of political parties with sympathetic interest.

Symbolist universalism also manifested itself in the inclusiveness of the creative searches of artists. The ideal of personality was conceived in their environment as a "person-artist". There was not a single sphere of literary creativity in which the Symbolists did not make an innovative contribution: they updated artistic prose (especially significantly - F. Sologub and A. Bely), raised the art of literary translation to a new level, performed with original dramatic works, actively showed yourself as literary critics, art theorists and literary critics. And yet, poetry was the most organic and appropriate sphere for their talents.

The poetic style of the Symbolists tends to be intensely metaphorical. In the figurative structure of the works, not single metaphors were used, but whole chains of them, which acquired the significance of independent lyrical themes. The metaphor of the symbolists has always gravitated towards the semantic depth of the symbol. Passing from one semantic environment to another, turning out to be a cross-cutting not only for a single poem, but for the entire poetic cycle and even in some cases for the entire work of the poet, it acquired new meanings, acquired a flickering ambiguity and, as a result, gave rise to a wide field of possible associations.

Symbolism has enriched Russian poetic culture with many discoveries. The Symbolists gave the poetic word a previously unknown mobility and ambiguity, taught Russian poetry to discover additional shades and facets of meaning in the word. Their searches in the field of poetic phonetics turned out to be fruitful: K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, I. Annensky, A. Blok, A. Bely were masters of expressive assonance and spectacular alliteration. The rhythmic possibilities of Russian verse expanded, and the stanza became more diverse. However, the main merit of this literary trend is not associated with formal innovations.

Symbolism tried to create a new philosophy of culture, sought, after going through a painful period of reassessment of values, to develop a new universal worldview. Having overcome the extremes of individualism and subjectivism, at the dawn of the 20th century, the Symbolists raised the question of the social role of the artist in a new way, began to search for such forms of art, the comprehension of which could unite people again. The idea of ​​"cathedral art" looked utopian from the outside, but the Symbolists did not count on its quick practical implementation. It was more important to regain a positive perspective, to revive faith in the high purpose of art. With external manifestations of elitism and formalism, symbolism managed in practice to fill the work with the art form with content and, most importantly, to make art more personal. That is why the heritage of symbolism has remained a true artistic treasury for contemporary Russian culture.

Acmeism. The literary current of acmeism arose in the early 1910s and was genetically associated with symbolism. Close to symbolism at the beginning of its creative way in the 1900s, young poets attended "Ivanovo environments" - meetings at the St. Petersburg apartment of Vyach. Ivanov, which received the name "tower" among them. In the bowels of the circle in 1906-1907, a group of poets gradually took shape, at first calling itself a "circle of young people." The impetus for their rapprochement was opposition (still timid) to symbolist poetic practice. On the one hand, the "young" sought to learn poetic technique from their older colleagues, but on the other hand, they would like to overcome the speculation and utopianism of symbolist theories.

In 1909, members of the "circle of young people", in which S. Gorodetsky stood out for his activity, asked Vyach. Ivanov, I. Annensky and M. Voloshin to give them a course of lectures on versification. N. Gumilyov and A. Tolstoy joined the classes that began in the Ivanov "tower", and soon the poetic studies were transferred to the editorial office of the new modernist magazine Apollo. So the "Society of Zealots" was founded. artistic word” or, as the poets who studied versification began to call it, the “Poetic Academy”.

In October 1911, students of the "Poetry Academy" founded a new literary association - the "Workshop of Poets". The name of the circle, formed on the model of the medieval names of craft associations, indicated the attitude of the participants to poetry as a purely professional field of activity. The "workshop" was a school of formal craftsmanship, indifferent to the peculiarities of the worldview of the participants. The leaders of the "Workshop" were no longer the masters of symbolism, but the poets of the next generation - N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. At first, they did not identify themselves with any of the currents in literature, and did not strive for a common aesthetic platform.

However, the situation gradually changed: in 1912, at one of the meetings of the "Workshop", its participants decided to announce the emergence of a new poetic movement. Of the various names proposed at first, a somewhat presumptuous “acmeism” took root (from the Greek acme - the highest degree of something, flourishing, peak, tip). A narrower and aesthetically more cohesive group of acmeists stood out from a wide circle of participants in the "Workshop". First of all, these are N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, S. Gorodetsky, O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich and V. Harbut. Other members of the "Workshop" (among them G. Adamovich, G. Ivanov, M. Lozinsky and others), not being orthodox acmeists, constituted the periphery of the current.

Being a new generation in relation to the symbolists, the acmeists were the same age as the futurists, therefore their creative principles were formed in the course of an aesthetic delimitation from both. The first sign of the aesthetic reform of acmeism is considered to be M. Kuzmin's article "On Beautiful Clarity", published in 1910. The views of this poet of the older generation, who was not an acmeist, had a noticeable impact on the emerging program of the new trend. The article declared the stylistic principles of "beautiful clarity": the consistency of the artistic conception, the harmony of the composition, the clarity of the organization of all elements of the art form. Kuzminskaya “beautiful clarity”, or “clarism” (with this word derived from the Latin clarus (clear) the author summarized his principles), in essence, called for greater normativity of creativity, rehabilitated the aesthetics of reason and harmony, and thereby opposed the extremes of symbolism - especially its worldview inclusiveness and absolutization of the irrational principles of creativity.

It is characteristic, however, that the most authoritative teachers for acmeists were poets who played a prominent role in symbolism - M. Kuzmin, I. Annensky, A. Blok. It is important to remember this in order not to exaggerate the sharpness of the differences between the acmeists and their predecessors. We can say that the acmeists inherited the achievements of symbolism, neutralizing some of its extremes. In the program article “The Legacy of Acmeism and Symbolism”, N. Gumilyov called symbolism “a worthy father”, but at the same time emphasized that the new generation had developed a different one - “a courageously firm and clear outlook on life”.

Acmeism, according to Gumilyov, is an attempt to rediscover the value of human life, abandoning the symbolist's "unchaste" desire to know the unknowable. Reality is valuable in itself and does not need metaphysical justifications. Therefore, one should stop flirting with the transcendent (unknowable): the simple material world must be rehabilitated, it is significant in itself, and not only in that it reveals higher entities.

According to the theoreticians of acmeism, the main importance in poetry acquires the artistic development of the diverse and vibrant earthly world. Supporting Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky spoke even more categorically: “The struggle between acmeism and symbolism ... is, first of all, the struggle for this world, sounding, colorful, having forms, weight and time ...” After any “rejection, the world is irrevocably accepted by acmeism, in the totality of beauty and ugliness. The preaching of the "earthly" worldview was at first one of the facets of the Acmeist program, which is why the current had another name "Adamism". The essence of this side of the program, which was shared, however, not by the largest poets of the current (M. Zenkevich and V. Narbut), can be illustrated by S. Gorodetsky's poem "Adam":

Spacious world and polyphonic,
And he is more colorful than rainbows,
And here he is entrusted to Adam,
Name Inventor.

Name, recognize, rip off the covers
And idle secrets, and decrepit haze -
Here is the first feat. New feat -
Sing praises to the living earth.

Acmeism never put forward a detailed philosophical and aesthetic program. Acmeist poets shared the views of the Symbolists on the nature of art, following them they absolutized the role of the artist. The “overcoming” of symbolism took place not so much in the sphere of common ideas how much in the field of poetic style. For acmeists, the impressionistic variability and fluidity of the word in symbolism turned out to be unacceptable, and most importantly, the overly persistent tendency to perceive reality as a sign of the unknowable, as a distorted likeness of higher entities.

Such an attitude to reality, according to acmeists, led to a loss of taste for authenticity. “Let's take, for example, a rose and the sun, a dove and a girl,” suggests O. Mandelstam in the article “On the Nature of the Word.” - Isn't any of these images interesting in itself, and the rose is a likeness of the sun, the sun is a likeness of a rose, etc.? The images are disemboweled like stuffed animals and stuffed with other people's content.<...>Eternal wink. Not a single clear word, only hints, omissions. The rose nods at the girl, the girl at the rose. Nobody wants to be themselves."

The acmeist poet did not try to overcome the "close" earthly existence in the name of "distant" spiritual gains. The new trend brought with it not so much a novelty of worldview as a novelty of taste sensations: such elements of form as stylistic balance, picturesque clarity of images, accurately measured composition, and sharpness of details were valued.

This, however, did not mean the abandonment of spiritual quests. Culture occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of acmeist values. "Longing for world culture" called acmeism O. Mandelstam. Related to this is a special relationship to the category of memory. Memory is the most important ethical component in the work of the three most significant artists of the movement - A. Akhmatova, N. Gumilyov and O. Mandelstam. In an era of futuristic rebellion against tradition, acmeism advocated the preservation of cultural values, because World culture was for them identical to the common memory of mankind.

In contrast to the selective attitude of the Symbolists to the cultural epochs of the past, acmeism relied on a variety of cultural traditions. The objects of lyrical reflection in acmeism often became mythological plots, images and motifs of painting, graphics, architecture; literary quotations were actively used. In contrast to symbolism, imbued with the "spirit of music", acmeism was focused on the roll call with spatial arts- painting, architecture, sculpture. The attraction to the three-dimensional world was reflected in the acmeists' passion for objectivity: a colorful, sometimes even exotic detail could be used non-utilitarian, in a purely pictorial function. Such are the vivid details of African exoticism in the early poems of N. Gumilyov. Festively decorated, in the play of color and light, is, for example, a giraffe “like the colored sails of a ship”:

Graceful harmony and bliss is given to him,
And his skin is decorated with a magic pattern,
With whom only the moon dares to equal,
Crushing and swaying on the moisture of wide lakes.

Having freed the subject detail from excessive metaphysical load, the acmeists developed subtle ways of conveying the inner world of the lyrical hero. Often the state of feelings was not revealed directly, it was conveyed by a psychologically significant gesture, movement, enumeration of things. Such a manner of "materialization" of experiences was typical, for example, for many poems by A. Akhmatova.

The new literary trend, which rallied great Russian poets, did not last long. By the beginning of the First World War, the framework of a single poetic school turned out to be cramped for them, and their individual creative aspirations led them beyond the limits of acmeism. Even N. Gumilyov - a poet of romanticized masculinity and a supporter of filigree finishing of verse - evolved towards "visionary", that is, a religious and mystical search, which was especially evident in his last collection of poems, Pillar of Fire (1921). The work of A. Akhmatova from the very beginning was distinguished by an organic connection with the traditions of Russian classics, and later her orientation towards psychologism and moral quest became even stronger. The poetry of O. Mandelstam, imbued with "longing for world culture", was focused on the philosophical understanding of history and was distinguished by the increased associativity of the figurative word - a quality so valued by the symbolists.

The creative destinies of these three poets revealed, by the way, the underlying reason for the emergence of acmeism itself. The most important reason for the formation of this trend, as it turned out, was not at all the desire for formal and stylistic novelty, but the thirst of the new generation of modernists to acquire a stable faith, to obtain a strong moral and religious support, to get rid of relativism. When the inconsistency of Symbolism's claims to update traditional religion was revealed, the new generation, who called themselves Acmeists, rejected as "unchaste" attempts to revise Christianity.

Over time, especially after the start of the war, the establishment of higher spiritual values ​​became the basis of the work of the former acmeists. Motifs of conscience, doubt, mental anxiety and even self-condemnation persistently sounded in their works. The previously seemingly unconditional acceptance of the world was replaced by a “symbolist” thirst for communion with a higher reality. About this, in particular, N. Gumilyov's poem "The Word" (1921):

... Ho we forgot that it is radiant
Only a word amid earthly anxieties
And in the Gospel of John
The Word is said to be God.

Hut-hero,
carved kokoshnik,
Window like an eye socket
Summed up with antimony.
(N. Klyuev. “Hut-bogatyr...”)

Yesenin proclaimed himself the poet of the “golden log hut” (“The feather grass is sleeping. The plain is dear ...”). Klychkov poetizes the peasant hut in his "Home Songs".

For the peasant farmer and the peasant poet, such concepts as the mother of the land, the hut, the economy are the concepts of one ethical and aesthetic series, one moral root, and the highest moral value life - peasant labor, unhurried, natural course of uncomplicated village life. In the poem "Grandfather's Plowing", Klychkov, in accordance with the norms of folk morality, claims that many diseases also stem from idleness, laziness, that a healthy lifestyle is closely related to physical labor.

For Klychkov and his characters, who feel like a particle of a single mother nature, who are in a harmonious relationship with her, death is something not at all terrible, but natural, like a change, for example, of the seasons:

... escaping fate, like everyone else,
It is not surprising to meet death in the evening,
Like a reaper in a young oat
With a sickle slung over his shoulders.
(S. Klychkov. "Tired of the daily chores...")

The typological commonality of the philosophical and aesthetic concept of the world of the new peasant poets is manifested in their solution of the theme of nature. In their works, it carries the most important not only semantic, but conceptual load, revealing itself through the universal multi-aspect antithesis "nature - civilization" with its numerous specific oppositions: "people - intelligentsia", "village - city", " natural man- city dweller", "patriarchal past - modernity", "earth - iron", "feeling - reason", etc.

It is noteworthy that in Esenin's work there are no urban landscapes. Shiryaevets acts as a consistent anti-urbanist in his work:

I will not stay in a stone lair!
I'm cold in the heat of his palaces!
To the fields! to Bryn! to the cursed tracts!
To the legends of grandfathers - wise simpletons!
(“I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra! ..”)

The demonic origin of the City is emphasized by Klyuev:

The city-devil beat with hooves,
Frightening us with a stone throat ...
("From cellars, from dark corners...")

It was the new peasant poets who at the beginning of the 20th century loudly proclaimed: nature in itself is the greatest aesthetic value. And if in the poems of the Klyuev collection "Lion's Bread" the attack of "iron" on wildlife- a premonition that has not yet become a terrible reality, a premonition (“Enlist from hearsay / About the iron restlessness!”), Then in the images of “The Village”, “The Burning Area”, “Songs of the Great Mother” - a reality that is already tragic for peasant poets. However, in the approach to this topic, the differentiation of their work is clearly visible. Yesenin and Oreshin, although painfully, through pain and blood, are ready to see the future of Russia, in Yesenin's words, "through stone and steel." For Klyuev, Klychkov, Shiryaevets, who were in the grip of the ideas of a "peasant's paradise", the main thing is the patriarchal past, the Russian gray-haired antiquity with its fairy tales, legends, beliefs.

At the end of the 20th century, it is destined to read in a new way into the works of new peasant writers - continuing the traditions of Russian literature silver age, they oppose the Iron Age: they contain true spiritual values ​​​​and truly high morality, they have a breath of the spirit of high freedom - from power, from dogma, they affirm careful attitude to the human personality, defends the connection with national origins, folk art as the only fruitful way creative evolution artist.