Educational portal. Russian literature at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Domestic literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

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The main trends in the development of literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries “... Silent and invisible spheres, in which a person became involved, distorted his image ... His self-consciousness disintegrated and disconnected, became abstract and ideal ... The image of a person became multi-layered and diverse ...” M.M. Bakhtin

Philosophy at the turn of the century Marxist F. Nietzsche and his theory of "will and freedom" God-seeking All three main areas of philosophy are moving away from the true faith - an act of apostasy.

Marxist philosophy V.I. Lenin 1910 The development of aesthetics will take place based only on the “materialistic understanding of history” “We know ... only one proletarian science - Marxism”

F. Nietzsche and his theory of "will and freedom" "... and the poor should be completely destroyed" "... pangs of conscience teach to bite others"

Searching for God Rebuild the forms of civil life and human existence on the basis of the renewal of Christianity. That is, an attempt to formulate universal laws that will restrain the aggressive forces of mankind.

"Milestones" (N. Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov) From the idea of ​​a social revolution to the idea of ​​a spiritual revolution The danger of fanatical service to any theoretical programs The moral inadmissibility of faith in the universal significance of certain social ideals Warned of the disastrous revolutionary path for Russia

Disputes about the name of the era Decadence - (from the French "decline") - a certain frame of mind, a crisis type of consciousness, which is expressed in a feeling of despair, impotence, mental fatigue. Modernism - "the newest, modern" "Silver" age of Russian poetry Russian literature, which previously had a high degree of ideological unity, at the turn of the century became aesthetically multilayered.

Its founders were writers and well-known religious publicists and philosophers of the Silver Age. V. Rozanov D. Merezhkovsky

Literary trends Realism: L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, L. Andreev, I. Bunin, V. Veresaev, A. Kuprin, I. Shmelev, M. Gorky Features: 1) Themes 2) Heroes 3) Genres 4) Style features (p.21-28 textbook) Modernism: Symbolism Acmeism Futurism G. Severini "The Blue Dancer" 1912

Modernism in painting

Modernism in architecture

Symbolism D.Merezhkovsky (1892 Lecture "On the Causes of the Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature") V.Bryusov V.Ivanov A.Blok F.Sologub A.Bely F.Sologub The main elements of the renewal of literature called "mystical content, symbols and expansion artistic impressionability" "a symbol is then a true symbol when it is inexhaustible in its meaning" "A symbol is a window to infinity" "The desire to depict life in its entirety, not only from its external side, not from the side of its particular phenomena, but figuratively through symbols ... depict what forms a connection with Eternity, with the universal, world process

Artistic features The symbol is a central aesthetic category; is ambiguous: it contains the prospect of an unlimited deployment of meanings, while the full significance of the subject plan of the image, its material texture. Music category. Not the rhythmic organization of sounds, but the universal metaphysical energy, the fundamental principle of all creativity. At the same time, this is the verbal texture of the verse, permeated with sound and rhythmic combinations, i.e. maximum use of musical compositional principles in poetry

“Every poem is a veil stretched out on the points of a few words. These words shine like stars. Because of them, the poem exists." A. Blok “Notebooks” The poem was supposed not so much to convey the thoughts and feelings of the author, but to awaken his own in the reader, help him in his spiritual ascent from “real” to “higher reality” Symbolist lyrics awakened the “sixth sense” in a person, sharpened , clarified his perception, developed a kindred artistic intuition

K. Balmont I am the sophistication of Russian slow speech, Before me are other poets - forerunners, For the first time I discovered deviations in this speech, Repetitive, angry, tender ringing. I am a sudden break, I am a playing thunder, I am a transparent stream, I am for everyone and no one. Multi-foam splash, torn-fused, Semi-precious stones of the original land, Forest green May roll calls - I will understand everything, I will take everything, taking it away from others. Forever young, like a dream. Strong in that I am in love And with myself and with others, I am an exquisite verse. 1901

Symbolism in painting V.E.Borisov-Musatov "Ghosts" 1903 Odilon Redon "The Eye Like a Ball" 1890

Futurism FUTURISM (from Latin futurum - future), avant-garde movement in European art of the 1910s - 20s, mainly in Italy and Russia. In an effort to create "the art of the future", he declared (in the manifestos of Russian Cubo-Futurists from "Gilea", members of the "Association of Egofuturists", "Mezzanine of Poetry", "Centrifuge") the denial of traditional culture (the legacy of the "past"), cultivated the aesthetics of urbanism and machine industry. Painting (in Italy - U. Boccioni, G. Severini) is characterized by shifts, influxes of forms, repeated repetitions of motives, as if summing up the impressions received in the process of rapid movement. For literature - the interweaving of documentary material and fiction, in poetry (V. V. Khlebnikov, V. V. Mayakovsky, A. E. Kruchenykh, I. Severyanin) - linguistic experimentation ("words at liberty" or "zaum").

Acmeism AKMEISM (from the Greek akme - the highest degree of something, blooming power), a trend in Russian poetry of the 1910s. (S. M. Gorodetsky, M. A. Kuzmin, early N. Gumilyov, A. A. Akhmatova, O. E. Mandelstam); proclaimed the liberation of poetry from symbolist impulses to the “ideal”, from the ambiguity and fluidity of images, complicated metaphor, a return to the material world, the object (or element of “nature”), the exact meaning of the word. The "earthly" poetry of acmeism is characterized by individual modernist motifs, a tendency to aestheticism, intimacy, or to the poeticization of the feelings of primitive man.

General characteristics. The turn of the century became a time of intense spiritual and artistic life in Russia, large-scale discoveries in the field of natural science, philosophy and psychology. This is a time when the signs of an unprecedented flourishing of culture paradoxically combined with a sense of crisis and degeneration, and the participants in the literary and cultural process themselves often felt that they were coming, in the words of A. Blok, before the “face of a world revolution”. Already in the 1930s. in criticism, the term “Silver Age” will arise and become widespread in literature and art. Today, this concept has acquired a broad interpretation and incorporates a wide range of phenomena of both realistic and modernist art, which predetermined the originality of this stage in the development of national culture.

The Silver Age radically rethought the former, which rested primarily on that period of development of domestic culture, again of a rationalistic worldview, ideas about the inner world of a person, about the nature of its conditionality by external, social factors. Such very different artists as I. Bunin and M. Gorky, V. Mayakovsky and L. Andreev, A. Kuprin and A. Bely, were attracted by those unconscious depths of the human "I", which lie outside the plane of the usual socio-psychological motivations and to the comprehension of which was approaching the classics of the nineteenth century. in her highest achievements. The experience of F. Dostoevsky, and of the poets - F. Tyutchev, A. Fet turned out to be especially relevant and in demand for representatives of the "new art". As D. Merezhkovsky wrote, it was Dostoevsky who first looked so deeply into the unexplored abyss of the human soul. Internally fragmented, painfully alienated from his environment and left alone with the age-old secrets of being, a person becomes the central subject of depiction and research in literature. It is no coincidence that lyric poetry, aimed at comprehending these elusive bends of the subjective "I", not only occupies a leading place in the literature of this period, but also influences its genre-generic system as a whole. The lyrical beginning actively penetrates into great and small prose (A. Chekhov, I. Bunin, A. Bely), into dramaturgy (A. Blok, M. Tsvetaeva, I. Annensky), etc. Intergeneric and intergenre interactions, the attraction to synthesis, the interpenetration of the verbal, musical, visual, and plastic arts constituted an essential part of the artistic thinking of this era. In this regard, the convergence of literature and philosophy at the turn of the century became noticeable, which manifested itself, for example, in a huge interest in individualistic constructions, the aesthetic theories of the German thinker F. Nietzsche; It also affected the work of Russian philosophers (V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov, N. Berdyaev), who themselves sometimes acted as writers, dressing their insights in a figurative form.

Growing catastrophic forebodings associated with the events of 1905, then 1914, predetermined new features of the artistic perception of history. This manifested itself in the need to comprehend the historical process beyond the traditional ideas of progress, progressive movement, taking into account its catastrophic discontinuity, relying on the irrational, mystical meanings of History. These trends are palpable in the pre-revolutionary prose of Bunin and Gorky, and in the poetry of Mayakovsky in the 10s, and in the work of the Symbolists, who were actively engaged in the search for mysterious “correspondences” between historical phenomena remote from each other (V. Bryusov, A. Blok, A. .Bely, D. Merezhkovsky).

The aesthetic diversity of literature at the turn of the century is largely due to the situation of intense dispute and the interaction of various, often internally polemical artistic systems, and above all, realism and modernism. This complex confrontation and at the same time mutual enrichment will run through the entire literary process of the 20th century, up to the literature of our days, but it has its roots in the Silver Age. Such a delimitation was sometimes not absolute, since in the work of one artist, realistic and modernist elements could intersect, enter into complex combinations. As L. Andreev wrote with irony, summing up the reviews of critics about his work, “for noble-born decadents - a contemptible realist; for hereditary realists, a suspicious symbolist.” The idea of ​​the inevitability and productivity of such interaction was very clearly expressed by A. Blok back in 1907: “Realists are drawn to symbolism, because they yearn for the plains of Russian reality and crave mystery and beauty. The Symbolists are moving towards realism because they are sick of the stale air of their cells, they want free air, broad reality.”

Realism. At the turn of the century, realism underwent significant changes, sometimes departing far from the precepts of the "Gogol" school, and at the same time continued to exert a powerful influence on literary life.

For the 1890s the final stage of the work of the titans of the realistic classics of the nineteenth century falls out. LN Tolstoy created at this time his last novel "Resurrection" (1899), working on later stories and novels ("Kreutzer Sonata", "Father Sergius", "Hadji Murat", etc.). This decade marks the flourishing of A.P. Chekhov’s creativity, whose prose and dramaturgy entered the context of the latest artistic searches and influenced the formation of young writers of this time.

In the 90s. a powerful young generation of artists appears on the literary arena, who, to one degree or another, were oriented towards a dialogue with the classical tradition. First of all, the names of I. Bunin, M. Gorky, L. Andreev, A. Kuprin should be mentioned here. In the 1900s, the Znanie publishing house organized by M. Gorky, which for a number of years published almanac of the same name. The problems of the evolution of the Russian national character in a crisis era, the paths of Russia's historical development in the light of the onset and future social upheavals came to the center of A. Kuprin's stories and stories about officers, about people of art (“Duel”, “At Retirement”), epic and dramatic works M. Gorky (“At the Bottom”, “Across Russia”), “peasant” works by I. Bunin (“The Village”, “Zakhar Vorobyov”), etc. In artistic terms, the realistic literature of that time was characterized by the predominance of small prose forms, active genre and stylistic experiments, the use of elements of artistic convention in order to see existential universals through everyday life. On these paths, regular intersections with modernist searches arose, which manifested itself in the neo-romantic tendencies characteristic of the early Gorky ("Old Woman Izergil", "Makar Chudra"), in Bunin's lyrical prose ("Antonov apples"), in the stories and plays of Andreev 1900 -s. the use of grotesque fantasy imagery. A little later, especially in the 10s, the "traditionalist" line will be continued in the work of "younger" realists: E. Zamyatin, M. Prishvin, B. Zaitsev, A. Tolstoy, I. Shmelev and others.

Modernism. Modernism at the beginning of the 20th century became a multidimensional artistic system, which was sometimes aimed at a radical rethinking of classical traditions, at the rejection of the realistic principle of lifelikeness and at the development of fundamentally new ways of creating an artistic picture of the world. Modernism in the literature of this period includes mainly three directions: symbolism, acmeism and futurism.

Symbolism was one of the most significant phenomena of the Silver Age and laid the foundations for the aesthetics of Russian modernism. The formation of symbolism took place at the beginning of the 1890s, when in the declarations of D. Merezhkovsky and V. Bryusov, and at the level of artistic practice - in the poetic collections and prose experiments of these authors, as well as K. Balmont, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub the contours of the symbolist world outlook were outlined. Among them are Merezhkovsky's ideas about the primary elements of the "new art", which should be "mystical content, symbols and the expansion of artistic impressionability"; Bryusov's program settings that the language of figurative allusions, symbols, the melody of the verse itself should contribute to the expression of secret, irrational movements of the soul. According to the views of the symbolists, the symbol becomes inexhaustible in its endlessly unfolding meanings in a way that connects the objective, earthly reality with the world of "higher beings", reveals mystical meanings in the manifest. Already for the "senior" symbolists, who began their career in literature in the 90s, it was characteristic of the desire to enrich the poetic word with the resources of musical expression, thereby significantly expanding its associative possibilities and spheres of emotional impact on the reader's consciousness. Experiments with metrics, stanza, and especially with color painting, sound instrumentation of verse acquire an unprecedented scope in the creative practice of the Symbolists, vivid examples of this are the work of V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, and later - A. Blok, A. Bely, I. Annensky. In the worldview of the "senior" symbolists, the experience of the crisis of the "frontier", distinctly individualistic aspirations associated with the assimilation of Nietzsche's philosophy, were often combined with hopes of gaining a holistic worldview, recognizing their time as a kind of "parade" and a synthesis of cultural traditions that were far from each other.

In the 1900s the second generation of symbolist writers, formed under the significant influence of the philosophy of V. Solovyov, comes to the fore. If for V. Bryusov, F. Sologub, K. Balmont symbolism was primarily a literary school, setting itself mainly aesthetic tasks, then for A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, symbolism also becomes a “world outlook”, which should go far beyond the limits of aesthetics proper and transform social, historical reality. The "Young Symbolists" vividly responded to the historical upheavals of the coming century, strove to mystically foresee in revolutionary explosions and popular unrest "the birth of a new man", "a man-artist".

Many poems by Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov (1873 - 1924), created in the 1890s - 1910s, sound like poetic manifestos of the "new art". The poem "To the Young Poet" affirms the need of a creative person "not to live in the present", but to turn their eyes to the unknown sphere of the "future". Here, an individualistic, “superhuman” principle is proclaimed in the essence of the poet, who now refuses to perceive art as a public service. The call to “worship art” emphasizes the priority of beauty over other life values. The "Sonnet to Form" figuratively formulated the aesthetic program of symbolism, associated with the search for a new figurative language for comprehending "changeable fantasies", "subtle powerful connections // Between the contour and the smell of a flower." The theme of creativity is also devoted to the poem "Mother tongue", which conveys a complex range of relations between the creator and the language. The latter, in the spirit of the new ideas of the 20th century, is understood not at all as passive material, but as a thinking and feeling being. Through cross-cutting antitheses in the characteristics of the language (“faithful slave”, “insidious enemy”, “king”, “slave”, “avenger”, “savior”), on the one hand, the superiority of the language over the poet himself is revealed (“You are in eternity , I - in short days"), and on the other - the audacity of the poet-"magician", who nevertheless strives to clothe his own creative fantasies in this language: "I'm coming - you be ready to fight!".

In his early poetry, Bryusov acted as a singer of a new, rapidly developing technical civilization, the culture of growing megacities. In his ode “Praise to Man”, imbued with the pathos of human deity, unlimited scientific knowledge of being, the spirit of the new age is capaciously conveyed; the conquest of the natural elements is here a powerful source of lyrical feeling: "Through the desert and over the abyss / You have made your own paths, // To braid the earth with a twitching, iron thread." And in the poem “In an unfinished building”, a project of a new model of the world is drawn through Bryusov’s favorite architectural image. The precariousness of the building, its gaping, "bottomless" abysses is opposed by the energy of "stubborn thoughts", the power of "reasonably calculated" fantasy. The whole picture of the world and the complex of emotional inclinations of the lyrical “I” are shifted to the area of ​​the future tense: “But the first dense stairs, // Leading to the beams, into the darkness, // Rise like silent messengers, // Rise like a mysterious sign.”

Draw semantic and figurative parallels between the poems "In an unfinished building" and "Bricklayer". How did the dialogue structure of the latter reveal the social conflicts characteristic of the world of modern civilization? Give examples of how Bryusov's poems combine mystical forebodings with a pronounced rational principle. Is it possible in this connection to speak of neoclassical elements in his work?

Symbolist aspirations to saturate the poetic language with musical sound found a consistent embodiment in the lyrics of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867 - 1942), who in one of the manifesto poems attested to himself as "the sophistication of Russian slow speech": "I first discovered deviations in this speech, // Singing, angry, gentle ringing.

The lyrical hero of Balmont's poems is an unworldly person who feels himself equal to the universe and rises even above the "heights of dormant mountains", as happens, for example, in the poem "I dreamed of catching the departing shadows ...". The superhuman "I" of the lyrical hero Balmont is revealed in the involvement of the Sun, which becomes a transparent image of creative energy, "burning" of the human soul for his poetry. In the poem “I came to this world to see the Sun…”, the hero, who “concluded the worlds in a single glance”, asserts the “solar” spirit of an active, creative life, which is complicated, however, by notes of deep drama: “I will sing… I will sing about the Sun // In the dying hour.” The poem "The Testament of Being" has a three-part song composition and represents the hero's repeated inquiring appeal to the elements of the natural cosmos with a desire to know "what is the great testament of being." From the wind he receives a covenant “to be airy”, from the sea - “to be full-sounding”, but the main commandment - from the sun - reaches the soul, bypassing the verbal expression: “The sun did not answer anything, / But the soul heard:“ Burn! ” .

The world of Balmont's poems is deserted, deserted, and at the same time subject to the superhuman aspirations of the hero to perceive his soul as a "godly temple", that is, to bow to all the gods at the same time, to feel in himself the crossroads of many cultural traditions. This cultural "insatiability" of the poet, who was a passionate translator-polyglot (the total volume of his translations amounted to more than ten thousand pages), corresponded to the most important creative principles of the art of the Silver Age. Balmont's poetic painting is characterized by scrupulous work with shades, halftones, muted colors, which are designed not so much to depict the phenomenon itself, but to convey the impression it makes. In the poems “I dreamed of catching the departing shadows…”, “Non-verb”, “Autumn joy”, the objective picture of the natural world is blurred in order to highlight the shades of elusive, random, changing perceptions of this picture by the lyrical “I”: “leaving shadows”, “extinguishing day”, “the outlines in the distance”, “the heights of the slumbering mountains”, “the red color flashed to me in the gentle silence”. To express the infinite multiplicity of shades, the poet resorts to the use of complex epithets (trees are "gloomy-strangely silent"), words with an abstract lexical meaning ("no way out", "voicelessness", "vastness", "voicelessness"), as well as exquisite sound instrumentation verse based on the dominance of melodious vowels and sonorant consonants.

Meet the landscape miniature "Autumn Joy". Trace the “dotted line” of the lyrical plot in it. On what motives is it built?

The experience of the disintegration of earthly reality and the world of "higher beings", characteristic of the symbolist worldview, was refracted in the lyrics of Fyodor Sologub (Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, 1863 - 1927). His lyrical hero often appears as a person suffering under the yoke of social and universal evil, who is “poor and small”, but whose soul, as it happens in the poem “In the field, you can’t see no zgi ...”, actively responds to disharmony that reigns in a gloomy world . Evil, perceived as the basis of this worldly existence, encroaches on the inner world of the Sologub hero, hence the motifs of duality that are widespread in the works of the Symbolists. In the poem “Under the gray…” the image of a double tormentor appears. In the very meaning of the word “nedotykomka”, in the association of this creature with an impersonal gray color, the fragmentation of the spiritual world of the hero is conveyed, tormented by the fact that he has “under-acquired” inner integrity, to which his soul, being ready even to say goodbye to earthly existence, all the same, she is striving: “So that she, at least in anguish of requiem // Do not swear at my ashes.” The hero’s need to separate from the world of evil, chaos, to preserve the “Divine nature” in himself is expressed in the figurative series of the poem “I am the god of the mysterious world ...” built on irreconcilable contrasts: “I work like a slave, but for freedom // I call the night, peace and darkness."

A noticeable feature of Sologub's poetic consciousness is the creation of an individual author's mythology - about Nedotykomka, about the promised land of Oil, about the Star Mair, which manifests the harmony of the upper world (the cycle "Star Mair"), about the reincarnations of the hero in various representatives of the created world (the cycle "When I was a dog" and etc.). The mythological perception of reality formed the basis of the lyrical plot of the poem “When I swam in a stormy sea ...”, where the tragic story of the hero’s involuntary service to the forces of evil, filled with a sense of hopelessness, is recreated. What stages in the development of the lyrical plot can be distinguished here? By what means does the poem reveal the personality of the lyrical "I"? What is the specificity of Sologub's interpretation of the eternal theme of evil in world literature?

On the verge of symbolism and acmeism, the poetic work of Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky (1855 - 1909), the author of two collections of poetry, four tragedies on ancient subjects and brilliant literary-critical works about the classics and contemporaries, collected in the Book of Reflections, developed.

The feeling of the fragility of the personal “I”, the motives of duality, duality, characteristic of the Symbolists, were complicated by Annensky, on the one hand, by relying on the traditions of high civil poetry in the spirit of the Nekrasov school, and on the other, by the desire for ultimate subjective accuracy, “material” specificity of the poetic image - principles, which already in the early 10-ies. will be inscribed on the banners of acmeism.

The lyrical hero of Annensky is a personality immersed in the "chaos of half-existences", the "longing" of everyday reality. It is no coincidence that the very word “longing” becomes a reference in the headings of a number of poems: “The longing of the transience”, “The longing of the pendulum”, “The longing of the station”, “My Longing”, etc. The poem “The longing of the fleeting” is a vivid example of Annensky’s psychological lyrics. In a landscape sketch woven from halftones, the image of a disappearing world is conveyed, which is filled with a sense of the illusory nature of a dream, the innermost spiritual aspirations of the hero: “I am sorry for the last evening moment: // Everything that is lived there is desire and longing, // Everything that is approaching is there, - despondency and oblivion. Think about the role that color characteristics play in the poem, as well as the negations that appear in the final stanza? Compare the landscape sketches in the poems "The Longing for Transience" and "The Bronze Poet". How does the latter reveal the theme of art, creative dreams?

The thirst of the hero Annensky to break through to the ideal of the fullness of being, to the “music of a dream” through the annoying, like the “aching mosquito”, deceptions of everyday life, the mirages erected by her, was captured in the poem “The Painful Sonnet”. The flickering possibility of such a breakthrough is connected here with a love experience in which hope and despair are closely intertwined: "Oh, give me just a moment, but in life, not in a dream, // So that I can become fire or burn in fire."

The remarkable phenomena of Annensky's civil lyrics, this, in his own words, "poetry of conscience", were the poems "Old Estonians" and "Petersburg". In the first, the lyrical plot was based on the brutally suppressed revolutionary uprisings in the Baltic states, which Annensky learned about from the book of the journalist V. Klimkov, published in 1906, "Massacres and executions." The images of the mothers of executed revolutionaries are associated here with ominous mythological old women who “knit their endless and gray stockings” and at the same time personify the internal moral suffering of the lyrical hero, become the voice of his troubled conscience, wounded civic feelings. This voice of conscience rejects hypocritical self-justifications (“there is a better place to blame me”) and sternly assesses inaction as indulgence in violence: “What is your pity, // If your fingers are thin // And it never clenched?”. What form is this poem in? What is the meaning of its subtitle? What role do the psychological and everyday details of the ongoing conversation play here? What are the features of the language of the poem?

A generalizing panorama of Russian history is drawn in the poem "Petersburg", where the image of the city is associated with the traditions of Gogol and Dostoevsky - artists to whose work Annensky dedicated a number of his profound articles ("The Problem of Gogol's Humor", "Dostoevsky before the Disaster", "Aesthetics of Dead Souls" and her heritage”, “Dostoevsky”, etc.). The ominous space filled with memory of historical upheavals (the “brown-yellow Neva”, “yellow steam of the St. Petersburg winter”, “deserts of silent squares where people were executed before dawn”) awakens painful thoughts in the hero about the moral cost of state experiments and social changes. . The technique of comic reduction conveys a feeling of the frequent absurdity of the cruel logic of the historical process: “How did our two-headed eagle ascend, // In dark laurels, a giant on a rock, // Tomorrow will become childish fun.” Identify the artistic means of recreating the urban landscape in the poem. What details convey the movement of time here?

Acmeism. Acmeism as a literary trend took shape in 1911, when the literary association "Workshop of Poets" was founded by N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. The most striking embodiment of the features of this new direction was received in the work of such poets as N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, M. Kuzmin. The very name of the association emphasized the idea of ​​handicraft, technical work of a master artist with a word and a verse. Inheriting many of the discoveries of the Symbolists (N. Gumilyov for many years considered himself a student of the symbolist master V. Bryusov), the Acmeists, at the same time, repelled from the experience of their predecessors, wished to return to the poetic image the subject accuracy, the reliability of the visual plan, to free themselves from the primacy of the mystical principle, which was characteristic of the aesthetics of symbolism. So, S. Gorodetsky in the manifesto "Some Trends in Modern Russian Poetry" wrote that acmeists are "fighting for this world, sounding, colorful, having shapes, weight and time, for our planet Earth." And O. Mandelstam, in the article “Morning of Acmeism”, contrasted the symbolist poetization of the elemental principle both in man and in public life with reflections on the poet as an “architect” who erects a building from the words: “To build means to fight with emptiness.” Affirming respect for the word as an integral organism, a living "logos", Mandelstam criticized the unrestrained experimentation with the word characteristic of the Symbolists, which, in his opinion, leads to the blurring of the meaning inherent in it.

The desire to fit into the poetic image the fullness of earthly existence dictated the artistic originality of many poems and poems by Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov (1886 - 1921). Being a passionate traveler who visited, in particular, distant Africa, Gumilyov sang in his poems daring, courageous people who assert themselves in situations of risk, in defiance of the elements. Here often appear characters that are not typical for lyrics as a whole as a kind of literature, completely independent in relation to the author's "I" and at the same time reflecting the essential aspects of the poet's worldview. In the poem "Captains", these people, who resist not only storms, but also fate itself, are drawn in the solemnly romantic structure of the author's speech: , // None of them will turn the sails. In the form of a "plot" narrative, the poem "The Old Conquistador" is constructed. By what poetic means is the image of the old warrior revealed here?

The poem "Me and You" presents a poetic self-portrait of a lyrical hero - a daring personality who accepts the entire primitive appearance of the earthly world in its by no means idealized form, draws inspiration from the "savage tune of the zurna" and dreams of ending his days "in some wild crack, / / drowned in thick ivy. The approach to such primitiveness is associated in Gumilyov's poetry with through African motifs - as, for example, in the poem "Giraffe", where an exotic, filled with major, festive colors ("slender palm trees", "smell of inconceivable herbs") imagery is recreated with generosity inherent in acmeists sensual details: “And his skin is adorned with a magical pattern, / With which only the moon dares to equal, / Shattering and swaying on the moisture of wide lakes.” In the poem “My Readers”, the poet, with the help of creative intuition, models the collective image of “his” reader-addressee - people “strong, evil and cheerful”, like brave captains and impudent conquistadors, involved in the flesh of this earthly world, “dying of thirst in desert, // Freezing on the edge of eternal ice, // Faithful to our planet, // Strong, cheerful and evil.

At the same time, contrary to many acmeist declarations, in the real creative practice of Gumilyov, especially later, there is a rapprochement with the symbolist interest in the mystical aspects of human existence, which leads to a significant complication of the imagery. This was manifested in Gumilyov's fascination with the occult doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the possibility of the simultaneous life of the soul in various astral spaces, which was reflected in the poem "The Lost Tram": "Where am I? So languidly and so anxious // My heart beats in response: // “Do you see the station where you can // Buy a ticket to the India of the Spirit?” Reflections on the mystical power of the poetic word involved in the higher worlds are expressed in the poem “The Word” (“The sun was stopped by a word, // Cities were destroyed by a word”). In The Sixth Sense, the comprehension of the secret of creativity takes place in a series of figurative parallels - with the birth of a love feeling, with the invisible maturation of the body and soul, with the laws of growth and development of the created world, and the core of the lyrical plot is the process of gradually investing a creative dream in the flesh of being, painful and the sweet secret of the artist's acquisition of his great gift: "Under the scalpel of nature and art // Our spirit screams, the flesh is exhausted, // Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense."

Futurism became one of the most influential and loudly declared literary movements of the 1910s. In 1910, the first futuristic collection "The Garden of Judges" was published, the authors of which were D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky. This young direction of poetry is represented by a wide range of groups, the most significant of which were cubo-futurists (V. Mayakovsky, D. Burlyuk, V. Khlebnikov, etc.), ego-futurists (I. Severyanin, I. Ignatiev, V. Gnedov, etc.), “ Mezzanine of poetry "(V. Shershenevich, R. Ivnev and others)," Centrifuge "(B. Pasternak, N. Aseev, S. Bobrov and others).

Proclaiming the creation of a new art - the art of the future, the futurists advocated the convergence of poetry with painting, it is no coincidence that many of them also showed themselves as avant-garde artists. For the Futurists, the diverse visual effects of a literary text were extremely important: poetry collections published in a lithographic way, experiments with fonts, color and size of letters, vignettes, illustrations, deliberate confusion of numbering, publication of books on wrapping paper, provocative appeals to the reader, and many others. etc. One can speak of a special cultural phenomenon of the futuristic book, which in itself often became a theater, a spectacle, a booth. Theatricalization, overt and covert shocking were also characteristic of the creative behavior of many futurists - from the titles of collections and manifestos ("Dead Moon", "Go to hell!"), Sharp, sometimes offensive assessments of classics and contemporaries to scandalous performances provoking the public in different cities , where, for example, Mayakovsky could easily appear in a yellow sweater or pink tuxedo, and Burliuk and Kruchenykh with bunches of carrots in their buttonholes ...

The Futurists felt themselves to be the vanguard of that new culture, which would abandon the old, decrepit, in their opinion, language and create a fundamentally new language, adequate for a rapidly developing urban, technical civilization. The artist in futuristic aesthetics is perceived as a rival of the Higher Providence, because his task is to re-create this world: “We – // each one – // keep driving belts in our five // ​​worlds” (V. Mayakovsky). The essence of this new language should lie in the abolition of the usual laws of cause and effect, in that “spontaneous”, “accidental” convergence of distant phenomena, the need for which was written by the leader of Italian futurism F. Marinetti. Some of the futurists (V. Khlebnikov, D. Burliuk and others) were fond of the idea of ​​word creation, denied spelling, punctuation, insisted on loosening the traditional forms of syntax, tried to extract semantic associations from the sounds themselves, bypassing the verbal form:

The sounds on a are wide and spacious,

Sounds on and high and agile,

Sounds like an empty pipe

Sounds on oh, like the roundness of a hump,

Sounds on e, like flattened stranded,

Vowel family laughing looked through.

(D. Burliuk) yuchen is to re-create the 86 - 1921) th conviction, to r

Such experiments were justified by the futurists by the fact that in the modern language there was a necrosis of the word, the depletion of its internal energy. Mayakovsky’s tragedy “Vladimir Mayakovsky” shows the rebellion of things against obsolete names that do not reflect their essence, and A. Kruchenykh in his “Declaration of the word as such” illustrated this idea of ​​“revision” of the language in this way: “Lily is beautiful, but the word “lily” is ugly, captured and "raped". Therefore, I call the lily "euy" - the original purity is restored.

Many aspirations of the Futurists were creatively embodied in the poetic world of Igor Severyanin (Igor Vasilievich Lotarev, 1887 - 1941). Severyanin's poems pretentiously called "poets" ("Poetry out of the subscription", "Poetry of last hope") convey the spirit of the artistic bohemia of the 10s, shocking self-affirmations of the lyrical "I" sound, and, most importantly, the atmosphere of the performances of the futurists is captured, who tried to create mass and at the same time purely elitist art of the “winged Russian youth”, which feels itself on the verge of impending storms. What are the features of the language of the two named poems?

In the poem "Overture" the pursuit of pretentious exoticism ("pineapples in champagne", "I am all in something Norwegian", "I am all in something Spanish") is combined with the poet's desire to find fresh sources of lyrical inspiration, contained in the latest achievements. civilizations that modernize language itself: “The sound of airplanes! Run cars! // Wind whistle expresses! The winglet of the buoys! A similar intoxication with technism was associated among the futurists with admiration for this new, not yet worn out layer of language, which allows you to create a vibrant color of modernity, giving birth to a “new man”. Various scientific and pseudo-scientific terms were sometimes part of the headlines of futuristic publications: “Centrifuge Thresher”, “turbo edition”, etc. The impact energy of Severyanin’s lines achieves the effect of “quickness” of figurative linkages and associations, a bold reversal of being, victory over space and time: “ I will turn the tragedy of life into a mud farce”, “From Moscow to Nagasaki! From New York to Mars! A similar experiment with a dynamic change of distant figurative plans, the transfer of the rhythms of the advancement of machine civilization in its “electric beat” also occurs in the poem “July Noon”: “And under the tires of the motor dust smoked, gravel jumped, // A bird on a road without roads coincided with the wind ". What is the subtitle of this poem? How would you define its meaning?

Read the poem "Spring". Is his figurative world characteristic of the futuristic principles of writing? Justify your answer with examples from the text.

1. Highlight the main features of symbolism, acmeism and futurism as literary movements of the early twentieth century.

2. What names and artistic phenomena at the turn of the nineteenth - twentieth centuries. was realism introduced?

3. What program settings of the "new art" were expressed in the early poems of V. Bryusov ("To the Young Poet", "Sonnet to Form", etc.)?

1. Describe the main features of the inner world of the lyrical hero K. Balmont and the means of artistic expression that reveal him. Give examples of the use of sound recording. As an additional source, it will be useful to rely on the material of the article by I. Annensky "Balmont-lyric".
2. What principles of the acmeistic vision of the world appeared in the poems of N. Gumilyov? Give examples.
3. What is the originality of civil motives in the lyrics of I. Annensky?
4. Compare artistic references to the achievements of the latest civilization in the poems of V. Bryusov and I. Severyanin.
5. Through what images and associations is the internal fragmentation of the lyrical "I" conveyed in the poems of F. Sologub? Give examples.

Literature

1. Bavin S., Semibratova I. The fate of the poets of the Silver Age. M., 1993.

2. Dolgopolov L.K. At the turn of the century: On Russian literature of the late 19th - early 20th century. L., 1985.

3. Kolobaeva L.A. Russian symbolism. M., 2000.

4. Anthology of acmeism: Poems. Manifests. Articles. Notes. Memoirs. M., 1997.

5. Russian futurism: theory, practice, criticism, memoirs. M., 1998.

6. Nichiporov I.B. Ways of creating the image of the poet in the "Tale of Balmont" by M. Tsvetaeva // Konstantin Balmont, Marina Tsvetaeva and artistic searches of the twentieth century. Ivanovo, 2006. Issue 7.

Literature of Russia at the turn of the century Main literary trends, currents

General characteristics of the period The last years of the 19th century became a turning point for Russian and Western cultures. Starting from the ths. and until the October Revolution of 1917, literally all aspects of Russian life changed, from the economy, politics and science, to technology, culture and art. The new stage of historical and cultural development was incredibly dynamic and, at the same time, extremely dramatic. It can be said that Russia, at a critical time for it, was ahead of other countries in terms of the pace and depth of changes, as well as the colossal nature of internal conflicts.

What major historical events took place in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century? Russia has gone through three revolutions: years; -February and October 1917, -Russian-Japanese war. - World War I, Civil War

Domestic political situation in Russia The end of the 19th century revealed the deepest crisis phenomena in the economy of the Russian Empire. Confrontation of three forces: defenders of monarchism, supporters of bourgeois reforms, ideologists of the proletarian revolution. Various ways of perestroika were put forward: "from above", by legal means, "from below" - through revolution.

Scientific discoveries of the 20th century The beginning of the 20th century was the time of global natural scientific discoveries, especially in the field of physics and mathematics. The most important of these were the invention of wireless communication, the discovery of X-rays, the determination of the mass of the electron, and the study of the phenomenon of radiation. The worldview of mankind was turned over by the creation of quantum theory (1900), special (1905) and general () theory of relativity. Previous ideas about the structure of the world were completely shaken. The idea of ​​the knowability of the world, which was previously an infallible truth, was questioned.

Philosophical foundations of culture at the turn of the century: The main question is the question of Man and God. Without faith in God, a person will never find the meaning of existence. (F.M. Dostoevsky) Poetization of the image of Man: “Man - it sounds proud!” (M. Gorky) Russian thought echoed with the "gloomy German genius." (Alexander Blok). The philosophy of F. Nietzsche about the superman is “the will to reevaluate.” (A. Bely) The superman is a common and incredibly distant perspective of humanity, which will find the meaning of its existence without God: “God is dead.”

Painting Strong positions were held by representatives of the Russian academic school and the heirs of the academic Wanderers The emergence of a new style - modern (followers of this style united in the creative society "World of Art") modern Symbolism in painting (the exhibition "Blue Rose", is closely connected with poetry; symbolism was not unified stylistic direction) Symbolism-medium The emergence of groupings representing the avant-garde trend in art (the exhibition "Jack of Diamonds"), the avant-garde favorite genre of avant-garde artists is still life Neo-primitivism (exhibition "Donkey's Tail") Neo-primitivism Author's style (synthesis of European avant-garde trends with Russian national traditions) Author's

The tragic history of literature of the 20th century 1. In the 20s, the writers who made up the color of Russian literature left or were expelled: I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, I. Shmelev and others. 2. The impact of censorship on literature: 1926 - the magazine " New World” with “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” by B. Pilnyak. In the 1930s, the writer was shot. I.A. Bunin

Literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Russian literature became aesthetically multilayered. Realism at the turn of the century remained a large-scale and influential literary movement. So, Tolstoy and Chekhov lived and worked in this era. (reflection of reality, life truth) A.P. Chekhov. Yalta

The transition from the era of classical Russian literature to the new literary time was accompanied by an unusually fast one. Russian poetry again entered the forefront of the country's general cultural life, unlike previous examples. Thus began a new poetic era, called the "poetic renaissance" or "silver age".

Modernism (from the French moderne - “newest”, “modern”) is a new phenomenon in literature and art. Its goal is the creation of a poetic culture that contributes to the spiritual revival of mankind, the transformation of the world by means of art. Symbolism (from the Greek symbolon - “sign, omen)” is a literary and artistic direction, which considered the goal of art to be an intuitive comprehension of world unity through symbols. Existentialism is a worldview that raised questions about how a person should live in the face of impending historical catastrophes, based on the principle of the opposition of subject and object.

The ideological foundations of realism and modernism The ideological foundation of realism The philosophy of modernism in the XX century. Truth is One, good overcomes evil, God overcomes the devil. The world is not cognizable, a person is not able to separate good from evil. Hero Seeking the path to higher, eternal values, carrying the ideals of goodness, love. Complex, contradictory, standing out from the rest of the world, often opposing it. Highest values ​​Spiritual, Christian ideals Personality in its diversity Purpose of art Harmonization of life Expression of oneself and one's understanding of the world and man.

The fundamental principles of the old realists adopted by the new ones Democracy is the rejection of elitist literature, understandable only to a "bunch" of the initiated. Taste for the public - awareness of the public role and responsibility of the writer. Historicism: art is a reflection of an era, its truthful mirror. Traditionalism is a spiritual and aesthetic connection with the precepts of the classics. Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich Chekhov Anton Pavlovich

Writers - realists Bunin Ivan Alekseevich Kuprin Alexander Ivanovich Zaitsev Boris Konstantinovich Veresaev Vikenty Vikentievich

Realist writers Maxim Gorky Korolenko Vladimir Galaktionovich Andreev Leonid Nikolaevich Zamyatin Evgeny Ivanovich

The Silver Age The Silver Age is part of the artistic culture of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, associated with symbolism, acmeism, "neo-peasant" literature, and partly futurism.

SYMBOLISM In March 1894, a collection entitled "Russian Symbolists" was published. After some time, two more issues with the same name appeared. The author of all three collections was the young poet Valery Bryusov, who used various pseudonyms in order to create the impression of the existence of a whole poetic movement.

SYMBOLISM Symbolism is the first and largest of the modernist movements that arose in Russia. The theoretical basis of Russian symbolism was laid in 1892 by D. S. Merezhkovsky's lecture "On the Causes of the Decline and on New Trends in Modern Russian Literature." The title of the lecture contained an assessment of the state of the literature. The hope for its revival was placed by the author on "new trends". Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky

The main provisions of the current Andrey Bely The symbol is the central aesthetic category of the new trend. The idea of ​​a symbol is that it is perceived as an allegory. The chain of symbols resembles a set of hieroglyphs, a kind of cipher for "initiates". Thus, the symbol turns out to be one of the varieties of tropes.

The main provisions of the current The symbol is polysemantic: it contains an infinite number of meanings. "A symbol is a window to infinity," said Fyodor Sologub.

The main provisions of the current were built in a new way in the symbolism of the relationship between the poet and his audience. The symbolist poet did not seek to be universally intelligible. He did not address everyone, but only the "initiates", not the reader-consumer, but the reader-creator, the reader-co-author. Symbolist lyrics awakened the "sixth sense" in a person, sharpened and refined his perception. To do this, the Symbolists sought to make the most of the associative possibilities of the word, turned to the motives and images of different cultures.

Senior Symbolists Gippius Zinaida Nikolaevna Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich Fyodor Sologub Kuzmin Mikhail Alekseevich

The Young Symbolists "The ultimate goal of art is the re-creation of life." (A. Blok) Andrey Bely Alexander Alexandrovich Blok Ivanov Vyacheslav Ivanovich

Acmeism The literary movement of acmeism arose in the early 1910s. (from the Greek acme - the highest degree of something, flourishing, peak, point). A narrower and aesthetically more cohesive group of acmeists stood out from a wide circle of participants in the "Workshop": N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, S. Gorodetsky, O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich and V. Narbut.

Acmeists Akhmatova Anna Andreevna Mandelstam Osip Emilievich Gumilyov Nikolay Stepanovich Sergey Gorodetsky

Futurism Futurism (from lat. futurum - future). He first announced himself in Italy. The time of birth of Russian futurism is considered to be 1910, when the first futuristic collection "The Garden of Judges" was published (its authors were D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky). Together with V. Mayakovsky and A. Kruchenykh, these poets soon formed a grouping of cubo-futurists, or poets of "Gilea"
The main provisions of the current As an artistic program, the futurists put forward a utopian dream of the birth of a super-art capable of turning the world upside down. The artist V. Tatlin seriously designed wings for humans, K. Malevich developed projects for satellite cities plying the earth's orbit, V. Khlebnikov tried to offer mankind a new universal language and discover the "laws of time".

In futurism, a kind of shocking repertoire has developed. Biting names were used: "Chukuryuk" - for the picture; "Dead Moon" - for a collection of works; "Go to hell!" - for a literary manifesto.

A slap in the face to public taste To abandon Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on and so forth. from the Steamboat of Modernity .... To all these Maxims Gorky, Kuprin, Blok, Sologub, Remizov, Averchenko, Cherny, Kuzmin, Bunin and so on. and so on. All you need is a cottage on the river. Such a reward is given by fate to tailors... From the height of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance! 2. An irresistible hatred for the language that existed before them. 3. With horror, remove from your proud brow a wreath of penny glory you made from bath brooms. 4. To stand on a block of the word "we" amid whistling and indignation. And if the dirty stigmas of your "Common Sense" and "Good Taste" still remain in our lines, then for the first time the Lightning Lightnings of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-valuable (self-sufficient) Word are already trembling on them. D. Burliuk, Alexei Kruchenykh, V. Mayakovsky, Viktor Khlebnikov Moscow, 1912 December

Neo-peasant poets We are early morning clouds, dewy spring dawns. N. Gumilyov Yesenin Sergey Alexandrovich Oreshin Pyotr Vasilyevich Klyuev Nikolai Alekseevich

Writers who were not members of literary groups Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin Boris Leonidovich Pasternak Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva

Let's draw conclusions At the turn of the century, Russian literature flourished, comparable in brightness and variety of talents with the brilliant beginning of the 19th century. This is a period of intensive development of philosophical thought, fine arts, stage skills. There are various trends in the literature. In the period from 1890 to 1917, three literary movements, symbolism, acmeism and futurism, were especially pronounced, which formed the basis of modernism as a literary movement. The literature of the Silver Age showed a brilliant constellation of bright poetic individuals, each of which was a huge creative layer that enriched not only Russian, but also world poetry of the 20th century.

Let's draw conclusions The last years of the 19th century became a turning point for Russian and Western cultures. Starting from the ths. and until the October Revolution of 1917, literally all aspects of Russian life changed, from the economy, politics and science, to technology, culture and art. The new stage of historical and cultural development was incredibly dynamic and, at the same time, extremely dramatic. It can be said that Russia, at a critical time for it, was ahead of other countries in terms of the pace and depth of changes, as well as the colossal nature of internal conflicts.

Questions: What major historical events took place in Russia at the turn of the century? What philosophical ideas occupied the minds of mankind? Who introduced the definition of "Silver Age"? What trends existed in the literature of the turn of the century? What traditions were developed by realist writers at the beginning of the 20th century? What does the term "modernism" mean? What is meant by the term "Party Literature"? Name the representatives of the Silver Age.

“By the beginning of the 20th century, Russia had become the focal point of the contradictions of the entire system of imperialism, its weakest link,” the first Russian revolution was “prepared for by the entire course of the socio-economic and political development of the country.”

Its global significance was quickly understood. On January 25, Jean Jaures wrote in the newspaper L'Humanité that the Russian people were fighting not only for themselves, but also for the cause of the international proletariat, and after the All-Russian October strike, Anatole France spoke at a rally in Paris with the words: "Whatever the outcome During this great and terrible struggle, the Russian revolutionaries had a decisive influence on the fate of their country and the fate of the whole world. The Russian revolution is a world revolution. The Russian proletariat entered the historical arena, becoming the vanguard of the world socialist movement.

The revolution was suppressed, but the heroism of the battles of the Russian people not only attracted the attention of the international community, but also had a great influence on the revival of the political struggle in Europe and the awakening of the social struggle of the East.

Writers of the second half of the 19th century complained about the difficulty of depicting the deep processes of life due to its rapid changes. But what was all this in comparison with the development of life in two decades of the twentieth century. Literature of the 90s spoke of awakening the consciousness of the masses. In 1905 the people had already loudly declared their forfeited rights.

Three revolutions in 13 years! No other country knows such a revolutionary upsurge, such rapid changes in political and social life, in the psychology of the people, which required an enormous effort of will, intelligence and courage.

During the years of the revolution, the innovation of M. Gorky's creativity was especially significant. The fact that it does not fit into the framework of the old realism, criticism wrote already at the very beginning of the 1900s. The novel "Mother" and the play "Enemies" impressively revealed the main trends in the development of revolutionary Russia and showed who is the true creator of modern history. It was realism inspired by the socialist ideal, realism calling for the construction of a new society on socialist foundations.

Literary critics have not yet come to a consensus about which work of Gorky laid the foundation for a new creative method, later called socialist realism. The fundamental features of this method are present both in the play "Petty Bourgeois" (the choice of the central character) and in the play "At the Bottom" (disclosure of Gorky's attitude to man and his idea of ​​false and true humanism).

One can also recall Foma Gordeev, where the innovative features of Gorky's psychologism were first displayed. However, Gorky spoke most clearly as a new type of realist, as a Marxist writer, precisely in Mother and Enemies. The revolution of 1905 was the stimulus that allowed Gorky the artist to fuse together what he had previously obtained. "Mother" opened a new page in the history of world literature.

For propaganda purposes, the revolutionaries widely used the works of foreign authors devoted to the working class in workers' circles. Now the Russian writer has created a novel that has become a reference book for the domestic and foreign proletariat. “Maxim Gorky,” wrote V. Lvov-Rogachevsky, who joined the Marxist camp of criticism, “is a symbol, this is the name of an entire era marked by Gorky’s mood.”

Significant events in the literary life of the revolutionary years include the appearance of V. I. Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature" (1905), which raised the question of modern literature.

Speaking about the impossibility of a writer to remain neutral in a class society (the myth of a free creator not subject to the pressure of this society collapsed), the article called on writers to openly take the side of the awakening people and give their pen to the service of party art, advocating high socialist ideals. At the same time, Lenin explained that the principle of party membership does not limit the creative possibilities and inclinations of the authors.

The article drew attention to the most urgent problem of the time - the growing number of readers from the people, "who make up the color of the country, its strength, its future", and the writer should have worked for them.

In the 19th century more than once there were disputes about "pure" and "tendentious" art, about the personal position of the artist, free or biased. Lenin's article continued this dispute in new historical conditions. Thus, it is organically connected with the tradition of revolutionary-democratic criticism, which has always advocated active art, inextricably linked with popular life and advanced social ideas.

Written on the eve of the December battles of the proletariat in Moscow, Lenin's article translated long-standing disputes into the field of judgments about the writer as a fighter of a certain socio-political camp, as a spokesman for the modern aspirations of the people, and thus gave this problem a different social orientation and scale.

Lenin's article caused a great resonance. Marxist criticism adopted it (see A. V. Lunacharsky's article "The Tasks of Social-Democratic Artistic Creativity"). In 1906, the newspaper Svoboda i Zhizn (Nos. 11-13) published conflicting responses from writers of dissimilar social orientations to the proposed questionnaire Literature and Revolution; these answers were essentially responses to Lenin's speech.

This performance was irritated by the Symbolists, who especially intensively glorified self-sufficing individualism in their early work. Bryusov immediately appeared in the journal Scales (1905, No. 11) with a polemical article aimed at defending the artist's independent position.

In an indirect form, such responses appeared in the critical articles of the same Libra; they argued that party art entails a decline in talent, that party spirit and aesthetics are incompatible concepts. And if A. V. Lunacharsky, relying on Gorky’s new works, says in 1907 that an innovative type of socialist literature has arisen, then D. Filosofov, a critic of the Symbolist camp, will publish the article “The End of Gorky” in the same year.

Responses to the questions raised in Lenin's article can also be found in a number of works of art ("The Last Martyrs" by Bryusov, "The Spirit of the Times" by A. Verbitskaya).

Pre-October realistic literature was not yet able to become an organic part of the proletarian cause (the only exception was the work of Gorky, Serafimovich, and proletarian poets), but many of its representatives were actively involved in the struggle against the autocracy and the bourgeoisie.

During the period of the revolution, the work of writers grouped around the Znanie publishing house, headed by Gorky, attracted general attention. The Znanievites wrote about the breaking of the old worldview, about the rebellion of a person and the growth of his social activity, about the aggravation of conflicts in all areas of life.

They were not only witnesses, but also chroniclers of the time when it was no longer individuals, but huge masses of people, who were beginning to see socially. The Znanievites were the first to depict this process, so complex and unusual for Russian reality.

Depending on their ideological positions, modern critics called Znanievsky realism, perceived by them as a special realist movement, as the "Gorky school" - "combatant", "red" or "directive".

Some noted the innovation of the Znanievites, emphasizing, however, the insufficient artistic depth of their discoveries; others believed that rhetoric and publicism obscure their artistic beginning. There were many who did not accept the ideological essence of Znaniew's creativity. But in general, criticism was forced to recognize the enormous popularity of the Collections of the Knowledge Association.

Other realists also turned their attention to the phenomena born of the revolution, but they paid their attention mainly to the negative phenomena that accompanied the revolutionary process.

The revolution of 1905 brought to life a mass of sharp satirical magazines. For the first time in the history of Russian satirical periodicals, a kind of “pictorial journalism” (political drawings and illustrations) appeared on their pages.

After the revolution, the "turmoil" of the era became even more aggravated. The reigning reaction again causes a wave of disappointment, pessimism, disbelief in the strength of the people, in the possibility of an early change in the fate of Russia. Again, with even greater force, a passion for idealistic philosophy flares up, religious quests come to life. There is an outbreak of neo-populist ideas, which penetrated, in particular, into the circle of symbolists, and neo-Slavophilism.

History of Russian literature: in 4 volumes / Edited by N.I. Prutskov and others - L., 1980-1983

General characteristics of the era

The first question that arises when referring to the topic "Russian literature of the 20th century" is from what moment to count the 20th century. According to the calendar, from 1900 - 1901? But it is obvious that a purely chronological boundary, although significant in itself, gives almost nothing in the sense of delimiting epochs. The first milestone of the new century is the revolution of 1905. But the revolution passed, there was some lull - until the First World War. Akhmatova recalled this time in "A Poem without a Hero":

And along the embankment of the legendary
Not a calendar one was approaching,
The real 20th century...

The "real twentieth century" began with the First World War and the two revolutions of 1917, with Russia's transition into a new phase of its existence. But the cataclysm was preceded by the "turn of the century" - a most difficult, turning point, which largely predetermined the subsequent history, but was itself the result and resolution of many contradictions that had been brewing in Russian society long before it. In Soviet times, it was customary to talk about the inevitability of a revolution that liberated the creative forces of the people and opened the way to a new life for them. At the end of this "new life" period, a reassessment of values ​​began. There was a temptation to a new and simple solution to the problem: simply change the signs to the opposite ones, declare everything that was considered white to be black, and vice versa. However, time shows the haste and immaturity of such reassessments. It is clear that it is impossible for a person who has not experienced it to judge this era, and one should judge it with great caution.
After a century, the Russian turn of the 19th-20th centuries seems to be a time of prosperity - in all areas. Literature, art, architecture, music - but not only that. The sciences, both positive and humanitarian (history, philology, philosophy, theology), are rapidly developing. The pace of industrial growth is no less rapid; factories, mills and railroads are being built. And yet Russia remains an agricultural country. Capitalist relations penetrate the life of the village, on the surface - the stratification of the former community, the ruin of noble estates, the impoverishment of the peasants, famine - but until the First World War, Russia feeds the whole of Europe with bread.

But what Tsvetaeva wrote about, referring to the children of emigration, brought up in a nostalgic spirit, is also true:

You, in orphan capes
Clothed from birth
Stop making excuses
By Eden, in which you
There was no ... ("Poems to the son")

What seems to be the heyday now, contemporaries seemed to decline. Not only descendants, but also the eyewitnesses of all subsequent events will only be surprised to what extent they did not notice the bright sides of the reality surrounding them. "The dull Chekhovian twilight", in which there is an acute shortage of bright, bold, strong - such is the feeling that preceded the first Russian revolution. But this view is inherent, first of all, to the intelligentsia. In the mass of the population back in the 80-90s. lived confidence in the inviolability of the foundations and fortress of "Holy Russia".

Bunin in "The Life of Arsenyev" draws attention to the mindset of the bourgeois Rostovtsev, whose high school student Alyosha Arsenyev, Bunin's "lyrical hero", lives as a "freeloader" - a mindset very characteristic of the era of Alexander III: "Pride in the words of Rostovtsev sounded quite often in general. Pride By the fact, of course, that we, the Rostovtsevs, are Russians, genuine Russians, that we live that very special, simple, apparently modest life, which is the real Russian life and which is not and cannot be better, because it is modest it is only in appearance, but in fact it is plentiful, as nowhere else, it is a legitimate offspring of the primordial spirit of Russia, and Russia is richer, stronger, more righteous and more glorious than all countries in the world. And was this pride inherent in Rostovtsev alone? and very many, but now I see something else: the fact that she was then even a certain sign of the times was felt at that time especially and not only in our city. Are we all that we so proudly called Russian, in the strength and truth of which we seemed to be so sure? Be that as it may, I know for sure that I grew up at the time of the greatest Russian power and its enormous consciousness. "Further, Arseniev - or Bunin - recalls how Rostovtsev listened to the reading of Nikitin's famous "Rus" "And when I reached the proud and joyful end , until the resolution of this description: “This is you, my sovereign Russia, my Orthodox homeland” - Rostovtsev clenched his jaw and turned pale. S. 62).

Approximately the same mood is recalled in his memoirs by the famous spiritual writer, Metropolitan Veniamin (Fedchenkov) (1880 - 1961): "As for social views, they were also essentially based on religion. It was the humble upbringing that the Christian Church gave us that taught us about power, that it is from God, and it must not only be recognized, obey it, but also loved and honored. The king is a person especially blessed by God, the anointed of God. He is anointed at the coronation to serve the state. He is the ruler over the whole country We were brought up to him and his family not only in fear and obedience, but also in deep love and reverence, as persons sacred, inviolable, truly "highest", "autocratic", "great"; all this was not subject to any doubt among our parents and the people. So it was in my childhood "(Veniamin (Fedchenkov), metropolitan. At the turn of two eras. M., 1994, p. 95). Metropolitan Benjamin recalls the sincere grief among the people on the occasion of the death of Emperor Alexander III. Under the emperor in his last days, the revered shepherd throughout Russia, the holy righteous John of Kronstadt, was inseparable. “It was the death of a saint,” the heir to the crown prince, the future Emperor Nicholas II, writes in his diary (Diary of Emperor Nicholas II. 1890 - 1906, M., 1991., P. 87).
What happened next? What kind of demons have taken root in the Russian people - "God-bearer", that he went to destroy his own shrines? Another temptation: to find a specific culprit, to explain the fall by someone's pernicious external influence. Someone invaded us from the outside and destroyed our life - aliens? Gentiles? But such a solution to the problem is not an option. Berdyaev once wrote in his "Philosophy of Freedom": a slave is always looking for someone to blame, a free person is responsible for his own actions. The contradictions of Russian life have been noticed for a long time - at least what Nekrasov wrote about:

You are wretched, you are abundant,
You are powerful, you are powerless,
Mother Russia.

Part of the contradictions are rooted in the reforms of Peter the Great: the split of the nation into an apex aspiring to Europe and a mass of people alien to Europeanization. If the cultural level of a part of the privileged strata of society has reached the highest European standards, then among the common people it has undoubtedly become lower than before, in the era of the Muscovite state - in any case, literacy has sharply decreased. The antinomies of Russian reality are also reflected in the well-known comic poem by V.A. Gilyarovsky:
There are two misfortunes in Russia
Below is the power of darkness,
And above - the darkness of power.

European influence, gradually penetrating deeper and deeper into Russian life, itself sometimes transformed and refracted in the most unexpected way. The ideas of the liberation movement became a kind of new religion for the emerging Russian intelligentsia. ON THE. Berdyaev subtly noticed a parallel between her and the schismatics of the 17th century. "So the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia of the 19th century will be schismatic and will think that an evil force holds power. Both in the Russian people and in the Russian intelligentsia there will be a search for a kingdom based on truth" (Berdyaev N.A. The origins and meaning of Russian communism. M ., 1990, p. 11). The Russian revolutionary movement had its martyrs and "saints" who were ready to sacrifice their lives for an idea. The revolutionary "religion" was a kind of near-Christian heresy: denying the Church, it itself borrowed a lot from the moral teachings of Christ - it is enough to recall Nekrasov's poem "N.G. Chernyshevsky":

He has not yet been crucified,
But the hour will come - he will be on the cross;
Sent by the God of Wrath and Sorrow
Remind the kings of the earth about Christ.

Zinaida Gippius wrote about the peculiar religiosity of Russian democrats in her memoirs: "Only a thin film of unconsciousness separated them from true religiosity. Therefore, they were, in most cases, carriers of high morality"<...>Therefore, at that time, people of an amazing spiritual fortress (Chernyshevsky), capable of a feat and a sacrifice, could appear at that time. Real materialism extinguishes the spirit of chivalry. "(Gippius Z.N. Memoirs. M. 2001. P. 200.)

It should be noted that the actions of the authorities were far from always reasonable and their consequences often turned out to be opposite to those expected. The archaic and clumsy bureaucratic apparatus, over time, less and less met the urgent needs of managing a gigantic country. The dispersion of the population, the multinationality of the Russian Empire presented additional difficulties. The intelligentsia was also irritated by the excessive police zeal, although the rights of opposition-minded public figures to express their civic position were incomparably wider than in the future "free" Soviet Union.

A kind of milestone on the path to revolution was the Khodynka disaster, which happened on May 18, 1896, during the days of the celebrations for the coronation of the new emperor, Nicholas II. Due to the negligence of the administration, a stampede occurred during a festivities on the Khodynka field in Moscow. According to official figures, about 2,000 people died. The sovereign was advised to cancel the celebrations, but he did not agree: "This catastrophe is the greatest misfortune, but a misfortune that should not overshadow the coronation holiday. The Khodynka catastrophe should be ignored in this sense" (Diary of Emperor Nicholas II. 1890 - 1906. M., 1991 ., S. 129). This attitude outraged many, many thought it was a bad omen.

Metropolitan Veniamin recalled the impact that "Bloody Sunday" had on the people on January 9, 1905. “The first revolution of 1905 began for me with the well-known action of workers in St. Petersburg on January 9. Under the leadership of Father Gapon, thousands of workers, with crosses and banners, moved from behind the Nevsky Zastava to the royal palace with a request, as they said then. I was a student at that time academy. The people went with sincere faith in the tsar, the defender of truth and the offended. But the tsar did not accept him, instead he was shot. I do not know the behind-the-scenes history of events and therefore do not enter into their assessment. Only one thing is certain that there was shot (but not yet shot) faith in the tsar. I, a man of monarchical sentiments, not only did not rejoice at this victory of the government, but felt a wound in my heart: the father of the people could not but accept his children, no matter what happened later ... "(Veniamin (Fedchenkov) , metropolitan At the turn of two eras. M., 1994, p. 122) And the emperor wrote in his diary that day: "A hard day! Serious unrest occurred in St. Petersburg due to the desire of the workers to reach the Winter Palace. The troops should b They were shooting in different parts of the city, there were many killed and wounded. Lord, how painful and hard! "(Diary of Emperor Nicholas II. 1890 - 1906. M., 1991., S. 209). But it is clear that he did not have anyone in his mind to accept. It is difficult to talk about this event to say: it is only clear that this is a tragedy of mutual misunderstanding between the authorities and the people. He who was labeled "Nicholas the Bloody", who was considered a nonentity and a tyrant of his country, was in fact a man of high moral qualities, faithful to his duty, ready to give his life for Russia, - which he later proved by the feat of a passion-bearer, while many of the "freedom fighters" who condemned him saved themselves by compromise with power alien to them or flight outside the country. No one can be condemned, but this fact should be stated.
Metropolitan Veniamin does not deny the responsibility of the Church for everything that happened to Russia: “I must admit that the influence of the Church on the masses of the people was weakening and weakening, the authority of the clergy was falling. There are many reasons. One of them is in ourselves: we have ceased to be “salty salt "and therefore they could not salt others" (Veniamin (Fedchenkov), metropolitan. At the turn of two eras. M., 1994, p. 122). Recalling his student years at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, he wonders over the years: why did it never occur to them, future theologians, to go to Kronstadt to see Fr. John. “Our religious appearance continued to be still brilliant, but the spirit weakened. And the “spiritual” became worldly.<...>Student life went past religious interests. It is absolutely not necessary to think that theological schools were nurseries of apostates, atheists, renegades. There were also a few of those.<...>But much more dangerous was the internal enemy: religious indifference<...>What a shame now! And now how weeping from our poverty and from petrified insensitivity. No, not all was well in the Church. We became those of whom it is said in the Apocalypse: “Since you are neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you from My mouth ... ” The time soon came and we, many, were vomited even from the Motherland ... We did not appreciate its shrines. What they sowed, they reaped" (Veniamin (Fedchenkov), Metropolitan. God's people. My spiritual meetings. M., 1997, pp. 197 - 199). Nevertheless, the very ability for such repentance testifies that the Church was alive and soon proved its viability.

All these aggravated contradictions were reflected in the literature in one way or another. According to the already established tradition, the “turn of the century” covers the last decade of the 19th century and the period before the 1917 revolution. But the 1890s are also the 19th century, the time of Tolstoy and Chekhov in prose, Fet, Maikov and Polonsky in poetry. It is impossible to separate the outgoing 19th century from the emerging 20th, there is no strict border. The authors of the nineteenth century and the authors of the twentieth century are people of the same circle, they are familiar with each other, they meet in literary circles and editorial offices of magazines. Between them there is both mutual attraction and repulsion, the eternal conflict of "fathers and children."

The generation of writers born in the 60s - 70s. 19th century and who made an outstanding contribution to Russian culture, in his aspirations was somewhat different from the still dominant "sixties" and seventies. More precisely, it split, and the event that they experienced in childhood or early adolescence, but which, perhaps, had a decisive influence on it, was the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881. For some, it awakened the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe fragility of autocracy (the murder of the "anointed of God" happened, but the world did not collapse) and the desire to more actively continue the work of the revolutionary intelligentsia (these were people like Lenin and Gorky), others shuddered at the cruelty of the "fighters for the people's happiness" and thought more carefully about eternal questions - from these came mystics, religious philosophers, poets, alien to social themes. But the traditional Orthodox clergy, in which many were brought up, seemed to them too mundane, rooted in everyday life and not in keeping with the spirit of their ideal aspirations. They were looking for spirituality, but often they were looking for on roundabout and dead-end paths. Some eventually returned to the Church, some remained in eternal opposition to it.

Behind the literature of the turn of the century, the name "Silver Age" was established. For some, this concept is colored negatively. What does it include? Approaching the common European tradition - and to some extent neglecting the national one, "opening new horizons" in the field of form - and narrowing the content, attempts at intuitive insights and moral blindness, the search for beauty - and a certain morbidity, damage, the spirit of hidden danger and the sweetness of sin. Bunin described his contemporaries as follows: “In the late nineties, he had not yet arrived, but a “big wind from the desert” was already felt.<...>The new people of this new literature were already emerging at that time in the front ranks of it and were surprisingly unlike the former, still so recent "rulers of thoughts and feelings," as they used to say then. Some of the old ones still ruled, but the number of their adherents was decreasing, and the glory of the new ones was growing.<...>And almost all of those new people who were at the head of the new, from Gorky to Sologub, were naturally gifted people, endowed with rare energy, great strength and great abilities. But here is what is extremely significant for those days when the “wind from the desert” was already approaching: the strength and abilities of almost all innovators were of a rather low quality, vicious by nature, mixed with vulgar, deceitful, speculative, with street-serving, with a shameless thirst for success, scandals ... "(Bunin. Collected works. Vol. 9. P. 309).
The temptation for the educator: to ban this literature, not to let the poisonous spirit of the Silver Age "poison" the younger generation. It was this impulse that was followed in the Soviet period, when the pernicious "Silver Age" was opposed by the "life-affirming romanticism" of Gorky and Mayakovsky. Meanwhile, Gorky and Mayakovsky are the most typical representatives of the same Silver Age (which is also confirmed by Bunin). Forbidden fruit attracts, official recognition repels. That is why in the Soviet period it was precisely Gorky and Mayakovsky that many, while reading, did not read, but absorbed the forbidden symbolists and acmeists with all their hearts - and in some ways, indeed, they were morally damaged, losing a sense of the border between good and evil. The ban on reading is not a way to protect morality. It is necessary to read the literature of the Silver Age, but it must be read with reason. “Everything is possible for me, but not everything is good for me,” said the apostle Paul.

In the 19th century, Russian literature performed in society a function close to religious, prophetic: Russian writers considered it their duty to awaken conscience in a person. The literature of the 20th century partly continues this tradition, partly protests against it; continuing, protests, and protesting, nevertheless continues. Starting from his fathers, he tries to return to his grandfathers and great-grandfathers. B.K. Zaitsev, a witness and chronicler of the Silver Age of Russian literature, comparing it with the previous, Golden Age, passes the following verdict to his time: “The Golden Age of our literature was the age of the Christian spirit, goodness, pity, compassion, conscience and repentance - this gave life to it.<...>Our Golden Age is the harvest of genius. Silver is a harvest of talents.<...>That's what was not enough in this literature: love and faith in Truth "(Zaitsev B.K. The Silver Age. - Collected works in 11 vols. vol. 4., S. 478). But still, such a judgment cannot be accepted clearly.