He wrote about everyday life and work. An essay on the topic of a novel about the everyday life of ordinary people

Task number 22. Look at the pictures and imagine that you have come to the museum, to the hall where the clothes are displayed. Museum employees have not yet had time to place signs with the names of the era and the time period to which these exhibits belong near the exhibits. Arrange the signs yourself; compose a text for the guide, which would reflect the reasons for the change in fashion

Fashion in the early 19th century was influenced by the French Revolution. The Rococo era left with the French monarchy. Women's outfits of simple cut made of light light fabrics and a minimum of jewelry are in fashion. Men's clothing shows a "military style", but the costume still bears the features of the 18th century. With the end of the Napoleonic era, fashion seems to remember the forgotten. Puffy women's dresses with crinolines and deep necklines are back. But the men's suit becomes more practical and finally moves to a tailcoat and an indispensable headdress - a top hat. Further, under the influence of changes in everyday life, women's clothing is narrowing, but, as before, corsets and crinolines are widely used. Men's clothing remains virtually unchanged. At the beginning of the 20th century, women's clothing began to get rid of corsets and crinolines, but the dress narrowed extremely. Men's suit finally turns into a classic "troika"

Task number 23. Russian physicist A. G. Stoletov wrote: “Never since the time of Galileo, the world has seen so many amazing and diverse discoveries that came out of one head, and it is unlikely that it will soon see another Faraday ...”

What discoveries did Stoletov have in mind? List them

1. Discovery of the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction

2. Discovery of liquefaction of gases

3. Establishment of the laws of electrolysis

4. Creation of the theory of polarization of dielectrics

What do you think was the reason for the high appraisal of Pasteur's work given by the Russian scientist K. A. Timiryazev?

“Future generations, of course, will complement Pasteur’s work, but ... no matter how far they go forward, they will follow the path laid by them, and even a genius cannot do more than this in science.” Write down your point of view

Pasteur is the founder of microbiology, one of the foundations of modern medicine. Pasteur discovered methods of sterilization and pasteurization, without which it is impossible to imagine not only modern medicine, but also the food industry. Pasteur formulated the basics of vaccination and is one of the founders of immunology.

The English physicist A. Schuster (1851-1934) wrote: “My laboratory was flooded with doctors who brought in patients who suspected that they had needles in different parts of the body”

What do you think, what discovery in the field of physics made it possible to detect foreign objects in the human body? Who is the author of this discovery? Write down the answer

The discovery by the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of rays, later named after him. Based on this discovery, an X-ray machine was created.

The European Academy of Natural Sciences established the Robert Koch medal. What do you think, what discovery of Koch immortalized his name?

The discovery of the causative agent of tuberculosis, named after the scientist "Koch's wand". In addition, the German bacteriologist developed drugs and preventive measures against tuberculosis, which was of great importance, because at that time this disease was one of the main causes of death.

The American philosopher and educator J. Dewey said: “A truly thinking person draws no less knowledge from his mistakes than from his successes”; "Every great success of science has its origin in a great audacity of the imagination"

Comment on the statements of J. Dewey

The first statement is consonant with the assertion that a negative result is also a result. Most of the discoveries and inventions were made through repeated experiments, most of which were unsuccessful, but gave researchers knowledge that ultimately led to success.

The philosopher calls the “great audacity of the imagination” the ability to imagine the impossible, to see what goes beyond the usual idea of ​​​​the world around

Task number 24. Vivid images of romantic heroes are embodied in the literature of the early 19th century. Read fragments from the works of romantics (remember the works of that time, familiar to you from literature lessons). Try to find something in common in the description of such different characters (appearance, character traits, behavior)

Excerpt from J. Byron. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"

An excerpt from J. Byron's "Corsair"

Excerpts from V. Hugo "Notre Dame Cathedral"

What reasons do you think can explain the fact that these literary heroes personified the era? Write down your reasoning

All these heroes are united by a rich inner world, hidden from others. The heroes go into themselves, they are guided more by the heart than by the mind, and they have no place among ordinary people with their "low" interests. They seem to be above society. These are typical features of romanticism that arose after the collapse of the ideas of enlightenment. In a society very far from justice, romanticism portrayed a beautiful dream, despising the world of rich shopkeepers.

Before you are illustrations for literary works created by romantics. Did you recognize the heroes? What helped you? Sign under each figure the name of the author and the title of the literary work for which the illustration was made. Come up with a name for each

Task number 25. In O. Balzac's story "Gobsek" (written in 1830, final edition - 1835), the hero, an incredibly rich usurer, sets out his view of life:

“What causes delight in Europe is punished in Asia. What is considered a vice in Paris is recognized as a necessity outside the Azores. There is nothing lasting on earth, there are only conventions, and they are different in every climate. For one who, willy-nilly, was applied to all social standards, all your moral rules and beliefs are empty words. Only one single feeling, embedded in us by nature itself, is unshakable: the instinct of self-preservation ... Here, live with me, you will find out that of all earthly blessings, there is only one that is reliable enough to make it worth a man to chase after him. Is this gold. All the forces of mankind are concentrated in gold... As for morals, man is the same everywhere: everywhere there is a struggle between the poor and the rich, everywhere. And it is inevitable. So it's better to push yourself than to let others push you»

Underline in the text the sentences that, in your opinion, most clearly characterize the personality of Gobsek.

A person devoid of sympathy, the concepts of goodness, alien to compassion in his desire for enrichment, is called a "liver". It is difficult to imagine what exactly could have made him so. A hint, perhaps, in the words of Gobseck himself, that the best teacher of a person is misfortune, only it helps a person learn the value of people and money. The difficulties, misfortunes of his own life and the society surrounding Gobsek, where gold was considered the main measure of everything and the greatest blessing, made Gobsek a "liver"

Based on your conclusions, write a short story - the story of Gobsek's life (childhood and youth, travels, meetings with people, historical events, sources of his wealth, etc.), told by himself

I was born in the family of a poor craftsman in Paris and lost my parents very early. Once on the street, I wanted one thing - to survive. Everything boiled in my soul when I saw the magnificent outfits of aristocrats, gilded carriages rushing along the pavements and forcing you to press against the wall so as not to be crushed. Why is the world so unfair? Then ... the revolution, the ideas of freedom and equality, which turned everyone's head. Needless to say, I joined the Jacobins. And with what delight I received Napoleon! He made the nation proud of himself. Then there was a restoration and everything that had been fought against for so long returned. And again gold ruled the world. They no longer remembered freedom and equality, and I went south, to Marseille ... After many years of deprivation, wandering, dangers, I managed to get rich and learn the main principle of today's life - it is better to crush yourself than to be crushed by others. And here I am in Paris, and those whose carriages once had to shy away come to me asking for money. Do you think I'm happy? Not at all, this confirmed me even more in the opinion that the main thing in life is gold, only it gives power over people

Task number 26. Here are reproductions of two paintings. Both artists wrote works mainly on everyday topics. Consider the illustrations, paying attention to the time they were created. Compare both works. Is there anything in common in the depiction of the characters, the attitude of the authors towards them? Maybe you've noticed something different? Record your observations in a notebook

General: Everyday scenes from the life of the third estate are depicted. We see the disposition of the artists towards their characters and their knowledge of the subject

Miscellaneous: Chardin depicted calm intimate scenes in his paintings, full of love, light and peace. In Mülle, we see endless fatigue, hopelessness and resignation to a difficult fate.

Task number 27. Read the fragments of the literary portrait of the famous writer of the 19th century. (author of the essay is K. Paustovsky). In the text, the writer's name is replaced by the letter N.
What writer did K. Paustovsky talk about? For an answer, you can use the text of § 6 of the textbook, which gives literary portraits of writers.

Underline the phrases in the text that, from your point of view, allow you to accurately determine the name of the writer

The stories and poems of N, the colonial correspondent, who himself stood under bullets and talked with the soldiers, and did not disdain the society of the colonial intelligentsia, were understandable and illustrative for wide literary circles.

About everyday life and work in the colonies, about the people of this world - English officials, soldiers and officers who create an empire far away from native farms and cities lying under the blessed sky of old England, N. narrated. He and writers close to him in general direction glorified the empire as a great Mother, never tired of sending new and new generations of her sons over the distant seas.

Children from different countries read the "Jungle Books" of this writer. His talent was inexhaustible, his language was precise and rich, his fiction was full of plausibility. All these properties are enough to be a genius, to belong to humanity.

About Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Task number 28. The French artist E. Delacroix traveled a lot in the countries of the East. He was fascinated by the opportunity to portray vivid exotic scenes that excited the imagination.

Come up with a few "oriental" stories that you think might be of interest to the artist. Write down the stories or their titles

The death of the Persian king Darius, Shahsey-Wahsey among the Shiites with self-torture to the point of blood, bride kidnapping, horse racing among nomadic peoples, falconry, hunting with cheetahs, armed Bedouins on camels.

Name the Delacroix paintings shown on p. 29-30

Try to find albums with reproductions of this artist's works. Compare the names you give with the real ones. Write down the names of other paintings by Delacroix about the East that interest you.

1. "Algerian women in their chambers", 1834

2. "Lion hunting in Morocco", 1854

3. Moroccan saddling a horse, 1855

Other paintings: "Cleopatra and the Peasant", 1834, "Massacre on Chios", 1824, "Death of Sardanapal" 1827, "Fight of the Giaur with the Pasha", 1827, "Fight of the Arabian Horses", 1860 ., "Fanatics of Tangier" 1837-1838.

Task number 29. Contemporaries rightly considered Daumier's caricatures to be illustrations for the works of Balzac

Consider a few of these works: The Little Clerk, Robert Macker the Stock Player, The Legislative Womb, Moonlight Action, The Representatives of Justice, The Lawyer

Make captions under the paintings (use quotes from Balzac's text for this). Write the names of the characters and the titles of the works of Balzac, illustrations for which could be the works of Daumier

1. "Little Clerk" - "There are people who look like zeros: they always need to have numbers in front of them"

2. "Robert Maker - stock player" - "The character of our era, when money is everything: laws, politics, mores"

3. "The Legislative Womb" - "Insolent hypocrisy inspires respect in people who are used to serving"

4. "Moonlight Action" - "People rarely flaunt flaws - most try to cover them with an attractive shell"

5. "Lawyers" - "The friendship of two saints does more evil than the open enmity of ten villains"

6. "Representatives of Justice" - "If you speak alone all the time, you will always be right"

They can serve as illustrations for the following works: "Officers", "The Case of Guardianship", "Dark Case", "The Banking House of Nucingen", "Lost Illusions", etc.

Task number 30. Artists of different eras sometimes turned to the same plot, but interpreted it differently

Consider in the 7th grade textbook reproductions of the famous painting by David "The Oath of the Horatii", created in the Age of Enlightenment. What do you think, could this story be of interest to a romantic artist who lived in the 30s and 40s? 19th century? What would the piece look like? Describe it

The plot could be of interest to romantics. They strove to depict heroes at the moments of the highest tension of spiritual and physical forces, when the inner spiritual world of a person is exposed, showing his essence. The product could look the same. You can replace the costumes, bringing them closer to the present

Task number 31. At the end of the 60s. 19th century the Impressionists burst into the artistic life of Europe, defending new views on art

In the book J.I. Volynsky "The Green Tree of Life" is a short story about how once K. Monet, as always in the open air, painted a picture. For a moment the sun hid behind a cloud, and the artist stopped working. At that moment, G. Courbet found him, wondering why he was not working. “Waiting for the sun,” Monet replied. “You could paint a background landscape for now,” Courbet shrugged.

What do you think the impressionist Monet answered him? Write down possible answers

1. Monet's paintings are permeated with light, they are bright, sparkling, joyful - "space needs light"

2. Probably waiting for inspiration - “I don’t have enough light”

Before you are two female portraits. Considering them, pay attention to the composition of the work, details, features of the image. Put under the illustrations the dates of creation of the works: 1779 or 1871.

What features of the portraits that you noticed allowed you to complete this task correctly?

By dress and writing style. "Portrait of the Duchess de Beaufort" Gainsborough - 1779 "Portrait of Jeanne Samary" Renoir - 1871 Gainsborough's portraits were made mainly to order. In a sophisticated manner, coldly detached aristocrats were portrayed. Renoir, on the other hand, portrayed ordinary French women, young cheerful and spontaneous, full of life and charm. The painting technique is also different.

Task number 32. The discoveries of the Impressionists paved the way for the Post-Impressionists - painters who sought to capture their own unique vision of the world with maximum expressiveness

Paul Gauguin's painting "Tahitian Pastorals" was created by the artist in 1893 during his stay in Polynesia. Try to write a story about the content of the picture (what happens on the canvas, how Gauguin relates to the world captured on canvas)

Considering civilization a disease, Gauguin gravitated towards exotic places, sought to merge with nature. This was reflected in his paintings, which depicted the life of the Polynesians, simple and measured. Emphasized the simplicity and manner of writing. On planar canvases, static and color-contrasting compositions were depicted, deeply emotional and at the same time decorative.

Examine and compare two still lifes. Each work tells about the time when it was created. Do these works have something in common?

The still lifes depict simple everyday things and unpretentious fruits. Both still lifes are distinguished by the simplicity and conciseness of the composition.

Have you noticed a difference in the image of the objects? What is she in?

Klas reproduces objects in detail, strictly maintains perspective and chiaroscuro, uses soft tones. Cezanne presents us with a picture as if from different points of view, using a clear outline to emphasize the volume of the subject, and bright saturated colors. The crumpled tablecloth does not look as soft as Klas's, but rather plays the role of a background and sharpens the composition

Think up and write down an imaginary conversation between the Dutch artist P. Klas and the French painter P. Cezanne, in which they would talk about their still lifes. What would they praise each other for? What would these two masters of still life criticize?

K .: "I used light, air and a single tone to express the unity of the objective world and the environment"

S.: “My method is hatred of the fantastic image. I write only the truth and I want to hit Paris with a carrot and an apple"

K .: “It seems to me that you are not detailed enough and depict objects incorrectly”

S.: “An artist should not be too scrupulous, or too sincere, or too dependent on nature; the artist is more or less master of his model, and above all of his means of expression.

K .: “But I like your work with color, I also consider this the most important element of painting”

S .: “Color is the point where our brain touches the universe”

Kipling P. The light went out: A novel; Brave Mariners: Adventure. story; stories; Mn.: Mast. lit., 1987. - 398 p. thelib. ru/books/samarin_r/redyard_kipling-read. html

For a Soviet person, Rudyard Kipling is the author of a number of stories, poems, and above all, fairy tales and the Jungle Books, which any of us remember well from childhood impressions.

"Kipling is very talented," Gorky also wrote, noting that "the Hindus cannot help but recognize his preaching of imperialism as harmful"4. And Kuprin in his article speaks of Kipling's originality, the "power of artistic means."

I. Bunin, who, like Kipling, was captivated by the exoticism of The Seven Seas, dropped a few very flattering words about him in his article Kuprin5. If we bring these statements together, we get a certain general conclusion: for all the negative features determined by the imperialist nature of his ideology, Kipling is a great talent, and this brought his works a long and wide success not only in England, but also in other countries of the world, and even in our country - the homeland of such demanding and sensitive readers, brought up in the traditions of humanism of great Russian and great Soviet literature.

But his talent is a bunch of complex contradictions, in which the high and human are intertwined with the low and inhuman.

Kipling was born in 1865 to an Englishman serving in India. Like many "natives" like him, that is, Englishmen born in the colonies and treated as second-class people in their homeland, Rudyard was sent to receive an education in the metropolis, from where he returned to India, where he spent his young years, mainly given to work in the colonial English press. In it appeared his first literary experiments. Kipling developed as a writer in a turbulent environment. It was heating up in India itself - the threat of large popular movements, wars and punitive expeditions; it was also restless because England was afraid of a blow to its colonial system from the outside - from tsarist Russia, which had long been preparing to jump on India and came close to the borders of Afghanistan. A rivalry was unfolding with France, which was stopped by the British colonists in Africa (the so-called Fashoda incident). A rivalry began with Kaiser Germany, which was already developing the Berlin-Baghdad plan, the implementation of which would have brought this power to the junction with the British eastern colonies. The "heroes of the day" in England were Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, the builders of the British colonial empire, which was nearing the highest point of its development.

This tense political situation created in England, as in other countries of the capitalist world that was creeping into the era of imperialism, an atmosphere unusually favorable for the emergence of militant colonialist literature. More and more writers came out with propaganda of aggressive, expansionist slogans. Increasingly, the “historical mission” of the white man, who imposed his will on other races, was praised in every way.

The image of a strong personality was cultivated. The humanistic morality of the writers of the 19th century was declared obsolete, but they sang the amoralism of the "dared men" who subjugated the millions of beings of the "lower race" or "lower classes". The whole world heard a sermon by the English sociologist Herbert Spencer, who tried to transfer the theory of natural selection discovered by Darwin to social relations, but what was the great truth of the brilliant naturalist turned out to be a grave error in the books of the bourgeois sociologist, who used his reasoning to cover up the monstrous social and racial injustice of the capitalist building. Friedrich Nietzsche was already entering the glory, and his "Zarathustra" marched from one European country to another, everywhere finding those who wanted to become "blonde beasts", regardless of hair color and nationality.

But both Spencer and Nietzsche, and many of their admirers and followers, were abstract, too scientific; this made them accessible only to a relatively narrow circle of the bourgeois elite.

The stories and poems of Kipling, the colonial correspondent, who himself stood under bullets and rubbed himself among the soldiers, and did not disdain the society of the Indian colonial intelligentsia, were much clearer and more illustrative for wide readership. Kipling knew how the restless colonial border lived, separating the kingdom of the British lion - then still a formidable beast and full of strength - from the kingdom of the Russian bear, about which Kipling spoke with hatred and shudder in those years.

Kipling narrated about everyday life and work in the colonies, about the people of this world - English officials, soldiers and officers who create an empire far away from their native farms and cities, lying under the blessed sky of Old England. He sang about it in his "Departmental Songs" (1886) and "Barracks Ballads" (1892), mocking the old-fashioned tastes of lovers of classical English poetry, for whom highly poetic concepts like a song or a ballad did not fit in any way with the bureaucracy of the departments or with the smell of the barracks; and Kipling was able to prove that in such songs and in such ballads, written in the jargon of small colonial bureaucrats and long-suffering soldiers, genuine poetry can live.

Along with work on poems in which everything was new - vital material, a peculiar combination of heroism and rudeness, and an unusually free, bold treatment of the rules of English prosody, resulting in a unique Kiplingian version, sensitively conveying the thought and feeling of the author - Kipling acted as the author equally original stories, first associated with the tradition of newspaper or magazine narration, involuntarily compressed and full of interesting facts, and then already advanced as an independent Kipling genre, marked by successive closeness to the press. In 1888, a new collection of Kipling's short stories, Simple Tales from the Mountains, appeared. Daring to argue with the glory of Dumas' musketeers, Kipling then prints the Three Soldiers series of stories, creating vividly outlined images of the three "empire builders", three privates of the colonial, so-called Anglo-Indian army - Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd, in whose ingenuous chatter there is so much terrible and funny interspersed, so much life experience of Tommy Atkins - and, moreover, according to the correct remark of Kuprin, "not a word about his cruelty to the vanquished."

Having found many of the most characteristic features of his writing style already in the late 1880s - the harsh accuracy of prose, the bold rudeness and novelty of life material in verse, Kipling in the 1890s showed amazing diligence. It was during this decade that almost all the books that made him famous were written. These were collections of stories about life in India and the talented novel The Lights Out (1891), these are both The Jungle Books (1894 and 1895) and the collection of poems The Seven Seas (1896), fanned with cruel Kiplingian romance, glorifying the exploits Anglo-Saxon race. In 1899, the novel "Sinks and the Campaign" was published, introducing the reader to the atmosphere of an English closed educational institution, where future officers and officials of the colonial empire are trained. During these years, Kipling lived for a long time in the United States, where he enthusiastically met the first glimpses of American imperialist ideology and became, along with President Theodore Roosevelt, one of its godfathers. Then he settled in England, where, together with the poets H. Newbolt and W. E. Henley, who had a strong influence on him, he led the imperialist trend in English literature, which was called "neo-romantic" in the then criticism. In those years when the young G. Wells expressed his dissatisfaction with the imperfection of the British system, when the young B. Shaw criticized it, when W. Morrissey and his fellow socialist writers predicted its imminent collapse, and even O. Wilde, far from politics, said a sonnet , which began with significant lines:

Empire on feet of clay - our island ... -

Kipling and writers who were close to him in general terms glorified this "island" as a mighty citadel, crowning the majestic panorama of the empire, as a great Mother, never tired of dispatching new and new generations of her sons over the distant seas. By the turn of the century, Kipling was one of the most popular English writers, having a strong influence on public opinion.

The children of his country - and not only his country - read the Jungle Books, young people listened to the emphatically masculine voice of his poems, which sharply and directly taught a difficult, dangerous life; the reader, accustomed to finding in "his" magazine or "his" newspaper a fascinating weekly story, found it signed by Kipling. I could not but like the unceremonious manner of Kipling's heroes in dealing with their superiors, the critical remarks thrown in the face of the administration and the rich, the witty mockery of the stupid bureaucrats and bad servants of England, the well-thought-out flattery of the "little man".

By the end of the century, Kipling had finally developed his style of narration. Closely associated with the essay, with the newspaper and magazine genre of the "short story" characteristic of the English and American press, Kipling's artistic style at that time represented a complex mixture of descriptiveness, naturalism, sometimes replacing the essence of the depicted details, and, at the same time, realistic tendencies, which forced Kipling to utter bitter truths, to admire the humiliated and insulted Indians without a grimace of contempt and without haughty European alienation.

In the 1890s, Kipling's skill as a storyteller also strengthened. He showed himself to be a connoisseur of the art of plot; along with material and situations drawn really "from life", he turned to the genre of "terrible story", full of mysteries and exotic horrors ("Ghost Rickshaw"), and to a fairy tale-parable, and to an unpretentious essay, and to a complex psychological study ("Provincial comedy"). Under his pen, all this acquired "Kiplingian" contours, captivated the reader.

But no matter what Kipling wrote about, the subject of his particular interest - which is most clearly seen in his poetry of those years - remained the armed forces of the British Empire. He sang them in puritanical biblical imagery, reminiscent of the fact that Cromwell's cuirassiers went on the attack with the singing of David's psalms, in courageous, mocking rhythms, imitating the march, the dashing soldier's song. There was so much sincere admiration and pride in Kipling's poems about the English soldier that they sometimes rose above the level of official patriotism of the English bourgeoisie. None of the armies of the old world could find such a faithful and zealous praiser as Kipling was for the English army. He wrote about sappers and marines, about mountain artillery and the Irish Guards, about Her Majesty's engineers and colonial troops - Sikhs and Gurkhas, who later proved their tragic loyalty to the British Sahibs in the swamps of Flanders and the sands of El Alamein. Kipling expressed with particular fullness the beginning of a new world phenomenon - the beginning of that wholesale cult of the military, which was established in the world along with the era of imperialism. It manifested itself in everything, starting with the hordes of tin soldiers who won the souls of future participants in countless wars of the 20th century, and ending with the cult of the soldier, which was proclaimed in Germany by Nietzsche, in France by J. Psicari and P. Adam, in Italy by D "Annunzio and Marinetti.Earlier and more talented than all of them, Kipling expressed this ominous tendency to militarize the philistine consciousness.

The apogee of his life and career was the Anglo-Boer War (1899 - 1902), which stirred up the whole world and became a harbinger of the terrible wars of the beginning century.

Kipling took the side of British imperialism. Together with the young war correspondent W. Churchill, he was indignant at the perpetrators of the defeats that fell upon the British in the first year of the war, who stumbled upon the heroic resistance of an entire people. Kipling devoted a number of poems to individual battles of this war, to units of the English army and even to the Boers, "magnanimously" recognizing in them rivals equal to the British in spirit. In his autobiography, which he wrote later, he spoke not without self-satisfaction about the special role of a supporter of the war, which he, in his opinion, played in those years. During the Anglo-Boer War in his work came the darkest period. In the novel "Kim" (1901), Kipling portrayed an English spy, a "native-born" boy who grew up among the Indians, skillfully imitating them and therefore invaluable for those who play the "big game" - for British military intelligence. With this, Kipling laid the foundation for the spy genre of imperialist literature of the 20th century, creating a model unattainable for Fleming and similar masters of "spy" literature. But the novel also shows the deepening of the writer's skill.

The mental world of Kim, who is increasingly getting used to the life and worldview of his Indian friends, the complex psychological conflict of a person in which the traditions of European civilization are fighting, depicted very skeptically, and the deeply philosophical, wise by centuries of social and cultural existence, the Eastern concept of reality, are revealed in its complex content. . The psychological aspect of the novel cannot be forgotten in the general evaluation of this work. Kipling's collection of poems The Five Nations (1903), which glorifies the old imperialist England and the new nations it spawned - the United States, South Africans, Canada, Australia, is replete with glorifications in honor of fighter cruisers and destroyers. Then, to these poems, in which there was still a strong feeling of love for the fleet and the army and for those who serve their hard service in them, without thinking about the question of who needs this service, later poems were added in honor of D. Chamberlain, S. Rhodes, H. Kitchener, F. Roberts and other figures in British imperialist politics. That's when he really became a bard of British imperialism - when, in smooth, no longer "Kiplingian" verses, he praised politicians, bankers, demagogues, patented murderers and executioners, the very top of English society, about which many heroes of his earlier works spoke with contempt and condemnation which contributed greatly to Kipling's success in the 1880s and 1890s. Yes, in those years when G. Wells, T. Hardy, even D. Galsworthy, who was far from politics, in one way or another condemned the policy of the British imperialists, Kipling found himself on the other side.

However, the climax of his creative development had already been passed. All the best has already been written. Ahead were only the adventurous novel Courageous Captains (1908), a cycle of stories from the history of the English people, uniting the epochs of their past within the framework of one work (Peck from the Pak Hills, 1906). Against this background, "Tales for Just So" (1902) stand out clearly.

Kipling lived for a long time. He survived the war of 1914-1918, to which he responded with official and pale verses, strikingly different from his temperamental style of early years. He met the October Revolution with fear, seeing in it the fall of one of the great kingdoms of the old world. Kipling anxiously asked the question - who is now the turn, which of the great states of Europe will collapse after Russia under the onslaught of the revolution? He predicted the collapse of British democracy, threatened her with the court of descendants. Kipling grew decrepit along with the British lion, fell into decline along with the growing decline of the empire, whose golden days he glorified and whose decline he no longer had time to mourn ...

He died in 1936.

Yes, but Gorky, Lunacharsky, Bunin, Kuprin... And the judgment of readers - Soviet readers - confirms that Kipling was a writer of great talent.

What was this talent?

Of course, there was talent in the way Kipling portrayed many situations and characters that are disgusting to us. His doxologies in honor of English soldiers and officers are often original both in style and in the manner of creating living images. In the warmth with which he speaks of a simple "little" man, suffering, perishing, but "building an empire" on his own and other people's foundations, deeply human sympathy sounds, unnaturally coexisting with insensitivity towards the victims of these people. Of course, Kipling's activity as a bold reformer of English verse, which opened up completely new possibilities, is talented. Of course, Kipling is talented as a tireless and amazingly diverse storyteller and as a deeply original artist.

But it is not these features of Kipling's talent that make him attractive to our reader.

And even more so not what was described above as Kipling's naturalism and which was rather a deviation, a perversion of his talent. The talent of a real, albeit deeply controversial artist, lies primarily in a greater or lesser degree of truthfulness. Although Kipling hid a lot from the terrible truth that he saw, although he hid from the blatant truth behind dry, businesslike descriptions, in a number of cases - and very important ones - he spoke this truth, although sometimes he did not finish it. In any case, he made her feel.

He told the truth about the terrible epidemics of famine and cholera, which became the lot of colonial India (the story "On the Hunger", the story "Without the blessing of the Church"), about rude and uncouth conquerors who imagined themselves to be masters over the ancient peoples who once had a great civilization. The secrets of the ancient East, so many times breaking into Kipling's stories and poems, rising like an insurmountable wall between the civilized white of the end of the 19th century and the illiterate fakir, is a forced recognition of the impotence that strikes the white man in the face of an ancient and incomprehensible culture for him, because he came to her as an enemy and a thief, because she withdrew from him in the soul of her creator - an enslaved, but not surrendered people ("Beyond the Line"). And in that feeling of anxiety that more than once seizes the white conqueror, the hero of Kipling, in the face of the East, does not the foreknowledge of defeat speak, the foreboding of the inevitable historical retribution that will fall upon the descendants of the "three soldiers", on Tommy Atkins and others? It will take decades for the people of the new generation to overcome these premonitions and fears. In Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, an old English journalist secretly helps the struggling Vietnamese people in their war of liberation and so becomes human again; in A. Sillitow's novel "The Key to the Door" a young soldier from the occupying British troops fighting in Malaya feels a strong desire to get away from this "dirty work", spares the partisan who fell into his hands - and also becomes a man, gains maturity. This is how questions are resolved that once unconsciously tormented Kipling and his heroes.

When it comes to Kipling, it is customary to recall his poems:

The West is the West, and the East is the East, and they will not leave their places until Heaven and Earth stand before God's terrible judgment...

The quotation usually ends here. But Kipling's verse goes further:

But there is no East, and there is no West, which is a tribe, a homeland, a clan, if a strong one stands face to face at the edge of the earth.

Translation by E. Polonskaya

Yes, in life the strong converge with the strong. And not only in this poem, but in many other works of Kipling, where the strength of a colored person is demonstrated as the same innate quality of him as the strength of a white man. "Strong" Indians are often Kipling's heroes, and this is also an important part of the truth that he showed in his works. No matter how jingoist Kipling may be, but his Indians are a great people with a great soul, and with such a characteristic they appeared in the literature of the late 19th century precisely in Kipling, depicted not in the prime of their statehood and strength, not under Ashak, Kalidas or Aurangzeb, but thrown into dust, trampled down by the colonialists - and yet irresistibly strong, invincible, only temporarily bearing his slavery. Too ancient not to outlive these gentlemen. The truth of Kipling's best pages lies in the sense of the temporality of that dominance won by bayonet and cannon, by the blood of Tommy Atkins. This sense of the doom of the great colonial powers is revealed in the poem "The Burden of the Whites", written back in 1890 and dedicated to the capture of the Philippines by America.

Of course, this is a tragic hymn to the imperialist forces. In Kipling, the bossing of conquerors and rapists is portrayed as the mission of cultural traders:

Bear the burden of the whites - be able to endure everything, be able to overcome even pride and shame; give the hardness of stone to all spoken words, give them everything that would serve you with benefit.

Translation by M. Froman

But Kipling warns that the colonialists will not wait for gratitude from those on whom they have imposed their civilization. From the enslaved peoples they will not make their friends. The colonial peoples feel like slaves in the ephemeral empires created by the whites, and will hasten to break out of them at the first opportunity. This poem tells the truth about the many tragic illusions inherent in those who, like the young Kipling, once believed in the civilizing mission of imperialism, in the educational character of the activity of the English colonial system, which dragged "savages" from their drowsy state to "culture" in British manners.

With great force, the foreboding of the doom of the seemingly mighty world of rapists and predators was expressed in the poem "Mary Gloucester", which to some extent puts the theme of generations in relation to the English social situation of the end of the century. Old Anthony Gloucester, millionaire and baronet, dies. And he suffers unspeakably before his death - there is no one to leave the accumulated wealth: his son Dick is a miserable offspring of British decadence, a refined esthete, an art lover. The old creators are leaving, leaving what they have created without a care, leaving their property to unreliable heirs, to a miserable generation that will destroy the good name of the robber dynasty of Gloucester ... Sometimes the cruel truth of great art broke through even where the poet speaks of himself: it sounds in a poem "galley slave". The hero sighs about his old bench, about his old oar - he was a galley slave, but how beautiful was this galley, with which he was connected by a convict's chain!

Even though the chains rubbed our legs, even though it was difficult for us to breathe, but there is no other such galley to be found on all the seas!

Friends, we were a gang of desperate people, we were servants of the oars, but the lords of the seas, we led our galley straight through the storms and darkness, warrior, maiden, god or devil - well, who were we afraid of?

Translation by M. Froman

The excitement of the accomplices of the "big game" - the same one that so amused the boy Kim - bitterly intoxicated Kipling as well, as this poem, written by him as if at the moment of sobering up, vividly speaks of. Yes, and he, the omnipotent, proud white man, incessantly repeating about his freedom and power, was only a galley, chained to the bench of a ship of pirates and merchants. But such is his lot; and, sighing about her, he consoles himself with the thought that whatever this galley was, it was his galley, nobody else's. Through all European poetry - from Alcaeus to the present day - the image of a ship-state in distress, relying only on those who can serve it at this hour, passes; Kipling's galley is one of the mightiest images in this long poetic tradition.

The bitter truth of life, breaking through in the best poems and stories of Kipling, sounded with the greatest force in the novel "The Light went out". This is a sad tale of Dick Heldar, an English martial artist who gave all the strength of his talent to people who did not appreciate him and quickly forgot about him.

There is much discussion about art in the novel. Dick - and behind him Kipling - is an opponent of the new art that emerged in Europe at the end of the century. Dick's quarrel with the girl he sincerely loves is largely due to the fact that she is a supporter of French impressionism, and Dick is his opponent. Dick is an adherent of laconic art, accurately reproducing reality. But this is not naturalism. "I'm not a fan of Vereshchagin," his friend, journalist Torpenhow, tells Dick after seeing his sketch of the dead on the battlefield. And there is a lot hidden in this judgment. The harsh truth of life - that's what Dick Heldar strives for, he fights for. Neither the refined girl nor the narrow-minded Torpenhow likes her. But she is liked by those for whom Heldar paints his paintings - the English soldiers. In the midst of another argument about art, Dick and the girl find themselves in front of a window of an art store, where his painting is displayed, depicting the departure of a battery to firing positions. Artillery soldiers are crowding in front of the window. They praise the artist for showing their hard work for what it really is. For Dick, this is a genuine confession, much more significant than the articles of critics from modernist magazines. And this, of course, is the dream of Kipling himself - to achieve recognition from Tommy Atkins!

But the writer showed not only the sweet moment of recognition, but also the bitter fate of the poor artist, forgotten by everyone and deprived of the opportunity to live that soldier's camp life, which seemed to him integral to his art. Therefore, it is impossible to read without excitement that page of the novel where the blinded Heldar hears on the street how a military unit is passing by him: he revels in the sound of soldiers' boots, the creak of ammunition, the smell of leather and cloth, the song that healthy young throats roar - and here Kipling too tells the truth about the feeling of blood connection of his hero with the soldiers, with the mass of ordinary people, deceived, like him, sacrificing themselves, as he will do it in a few months somewhere in the sands beyond Suez.

Kipling had the talent to find something exciting and significant in the events of an ordinary and even outwardly boring life, to capture in an ordinary person that great and lofty thing that makes him a representative of humanity and that is inherent at the same time to everyone. This peculiar poetry of the prose of life was especially widely revealed in Kipling's stories, in that area of ​​his work where he is truly inexhaustible as a master. Among them is the story "The Conference of the Powers", which expresses important features of the general poetry of Kipling the artist.

A friend of the author, the writer Cleaver, "an architect of style and a painter of the word," according to Kipling's sarcastic characterization, accidentally got into the company of young officers who had gathered in a London apartment near the person on whose behalf the narration is being conducted. Cleaver, who lives in a world of abstract ideas about the life and people of the British Empire, is shocked by the harsh truth of life, which is revealed to him in a conversation with young officers. Between him and these three youths, who have already gone through the hard school of war in the colonies, there is such an abyss that they speak completely different languages: Cleaver does not understand their military jargon, in which English words are mixed with Indian and Burmese and which is increasingly moving away from that refined style, which adheres to Cleaver. He listens with amazement to the conversation of young officers; he thought he knew them, but everything in them and in their stories was news to him; however, in reality, Cleaver treats them with insulting indifference, and Kipling emphasizes this by mocking the writer’s manner of expression: “Like many Englishmen living without a break in the metropolis, Cleaver was sincerely convinced that the stamped newspaper phrase he quoted the true way of life of the military, whose hard work allowed him to lead a quiet life, full of various interesting activities. Contrasting Cleaver with three young builders and defenders of the empire, Kipling seeks to oppose idleness - work, the harsh truth about a life full of dangers, the truth about those due to whose hardships and blood the Cleavers lead their elegant life. This motif of opposing lies about life and the truth about it runs through many of Kipling's stories, and the writer always finds himself on the side of the harsh truth. It is another matter whether he manages to achieve it himself, but he declares - and probably sincerely - about his desire for this. He writes differently than Cleaver, and not about what Cleaver writes about. His focus is on real life situations, his language is the one spoken by ordinary people, and not the mannered admirers of the English decadents.

Kipling's Stories is an encyclopedia of the story experiences of the remarkable English and American storytellers of the 19th century. Among them we will find "terrible" stories of mysterious content, all the more exciting because they are played out in an ordinary setting ("Ghost Rickshaw") - and, reading them, we remember Edgar Allan Poe; anecdotal short stories, attractive not only for their shades of humor, but also for the clarity of images ("Cupid's Arrows", "False Dawn"), original portrait stories in the tradition of an old English essay ("Resley from the Department of Foreign Affairs"), psychological love stories ( "beyond"). However, speaking of following certain traditions, one should not forget that Kipling acted as an innovative storyteller, not only fluent in the art of storytelling, but also opening up new possibilities in it, introducing new layers of life into English literature. This is especially felt in dozens of stories about life in India, about that "damned Anglo-Indian life" ("Rejected"), which he knew better than the life of the metropolis, and which he treated in the same way as one of his favorite heroes - a soldier Mulvaney, who returned to India after he lived in England, where he left after receiving a well-deserved retirement ("The Spooky Crew"). The stories "In the House of Sudhu", "Beyond the Line", "Lispet" and many others testify to the deep interest with which Kipling studied the life of the people of India, sought to capture the originality of their characters.

The depiction of Gurkhas, Afghans, Bengalis, Tamils, and other peoples in Kipling's stories is not just a tribute to the exotic; Kipling recreated a living variety of traditions, beliefs, characters. He caught and showed in his stories both disastrous caste strife and social differences between the Indian nobility serving the metropolis and the downtrodden, starving and overworking common people of Indian villages and cities. If Kipling often speaks of the peoples of India and Afghanistan in the words of English soldiers, rude and cruel, then on behalf of the same characters he pays tribute to the courage and implacable hatred of the invaders ("The Lost Legion", "On Guard"). Kipling boldly touched on the forbidden themes of love connecting a white man to an Indian woman, a feeling that breaks down racial barriers ("Without the blessing of the church").

Kipling's innovation is most fully revealed in his stories about the colonial war in India. In The Lost Legion, Kipling sets out a characteristic "frontier" story - one can speak of a whole cycle of the writer's frontier stories, where East and West not only converge in constant battles and compete in courage, but also carry out relationships in a more peaceful way, exchanging not only blows , horses, weapons and booty, but also views: this is the story of the dead regiment of rebellious sepoys, destroyed by the Afghans in the border region, taken for granted not only by the highlanders, but also by the Anglo-Indian soldiers, and it unites both sides in a fit of a kind of soldier's superstition. The story "Discarded" is a psychological study, interesting not only as an analysis of the events that led a young man ill with colonial nostalgia to commit suicide, but also revealing the views of his comrades.

The stories from the cycle "Three Soldiers" are especially rich and varied. It must be remembered that by the time Kipling chose three ordinary English soldiers as his heroes and tried to tell about life in India, in English literature and in general in all world literature, except Russian, from the aspect of their perception, no one dared to write about a simple person in a soldier's uniform. Kipling did it. Moreover, he showed that his privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd, despite their completely democratic origin, deserve no less interest than Dumas's vaunted musketeers. Yes, these are just simple soldiers, rude, full of national and religious prejudices, lovers of drink, sometimes cruel; their hands are covered in blood, they have more than one human life on their conscience. But behind the dirt imposed on these souls by the barracks and poverty, behind all the terrible and bloody that the colonial war brought to them, real human dignity lives. Kipling's soldiers are true friends who will not leave a comrade in trouble. They are good soldiers, not because they are self-satisfied artisans of war, but because in battle you have to help out a comrade, and you yourself should not yawn. War is labor for them, with the help of which they are forced to earn their bread. Sometimes they rise to call their existence "a damned soldier's life" ("The Madness of Private Ortheris"), to realize that they are "lost drunken tommies" sent to die far from their homeland for the interests of others, people they despise - those who cashing in on soldiers' blood and suffering. Ortheris is not capable of more than a drunken rebellion, and his escape, in which he was ready to help and the author, who feels like a friend of Ortheris, did not take place. But even those pages depicting Ortheris's fit, evoking the author's sympathy and presented in such a way that it looks like an explosion of long-accumulating protest against humiliation and resentment, sounded extraordinarily bold and defiant against the general background of English literature of that time.

Sometimes Kipling's characters, especially in the "Three Soldiers" cycle, as happens in the works of truly talented artists, seem to break free from the author's control and begin to live their own lives, to say words that the reader will not hear from their creator: for example , Mulvaney, in the story of the massacre at the Silver Theater ("On Guard"), speaks with disgust of himself and his comrades - English soldiers, intoxicated by a terrible massacre - as butchers.

In the aspect in which this series of stories shows the life of the colonies, it is the soldiers and the few officers who can step over the barrier that separates them from the rank and file (like the old captain, nicknamed Hook), who turn out to be real people. A large society of careerists, officials and businessmen, which is guarded with bayonets from the fury of the enslaved population, is depicted through the perception of the ordinary as a crowd of arrogant and useless creatures, busy with their incomprehensible and, from the soldier's point of view, unnecessary deeds, causing contempt and ridicule in the soldier. There are exceptions - Strickland, the "empire builder", Kipling's ideal character ("Sais Miss Yol"), but even he is pale next to the full-blooded images of soldiers. To the masters of the country - the peoples of India - the soldiers are fierce if they encounter them on the battlefield - however, they are ready to respect the courage of the Indian and Afghan warriors and with full respect - about the Indian soldiers and officers serving next to the "red uniforms "- soldiers from the British units. The work of a peasant or coolie, who is overworked in the construction of bridges, railways and other benefits of civilization, introduced into Indian life, arouses sympathy and understanding in them - after all, they were once people of labor. Kipling does not hide the racial prejudices of his heroes - that's why they are simple, semi-literate guys. He speaks about them not without irony, emphasizing to what extent the soldiers repeat in such cases words and opinions that are not always clear to them, to what extent they are alien barbarians who do not understand the complex world of Asia surrounding them. The repeated praise uttered by Kipling's heroes about the courage of the Indian peoples in defending their independence brings to mind some of Kipling's poems, in particular his poems about the courage of the Sudanese freedom fighters, written in the same soldier's slang used by the three soldiers.

And next to stories about the hard life of a soldier, we find subtle and poetic examples of an animalistic story ("Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"), which attract with a description of the life of the Indian fauna, or stories about old and new cars and their role in people's lives - "007" , an ode to the locomotive, in which there was a place for warm words about those who lead them; they are like three soldiers in their habits, and in their manner of expression. And how miserable and insignificant it looks next to their life, full of work and dangers, the life of English officials, high-ranking officers, rich people, nobles, the details of which are depicted in the stories "Cupid's Arrows", "On the Edge of the Abyss". The world of Kipling's stories is complex and rich, and his talent as an artist, who knows life and loves to write only about what he knows well, shines especially brightly in them.

A special place in Kipling's stories is occupied by the problem of the narrator - that "I" on behalf of whom the speech is being made. Sometimes this "I" is elusive, it is obscured by another narrator, who is given the floor by the author, who uttered only a certain beginning, a preface. Most often, this is Kipling himself, a participant in the daily events taking place in British settlements and military posts, his own man both in the officers' assembly and in the company of ordinary soldiers who value him for his cordiality and ease of treatment. Only occasionally is this not a double of Kipling, but someone else, but this is always an experienced person with a skeptical and at the same time stoic worldview, proud of his objectivity (in fact, it is far from flawless), his vigilant observation, his willingness to help and , if necessary, even help to desert Private Orteris, who was no longer able to bear the red uniform.

One could find many more examples of the veracity of Kipling's talent, breaking through his characteristic manner of laconic naturalistic writing.

Another side of Kipling's talent is his deep originality, his ability to make wonderful artistic discoveries. Of course, this ability to discover something new was already reflected in the fact that Kipling's heroes were ordinary soldiers and officials, in whom no one before him had seen heroes. But the real discovery was the life of the East, whose poet was Kipling. Who, before Kipling, among the writers of the West, felt and told about the colors, smells, sounds of the life of the ancient cities of India, their bazaars, their palaces, about the fate of the starving and yet proud Indian, about his beliefs and customs, about the nature of his country? All this was told by one of those who considered himself "bearing the burden of the white man," but the tone of superiority often gave way to a tone of admiration and respect. Without this, such pearls of Kipling's poetry as "Mandale" and many others would not have been written. Without this artistic discovery of the East, there would be no wonderful "Jungle Books".

There is no doubt, and in many places in The Jungle Book Kipling's ideology breaks through - just remember his song "Law of the Jungle", which sounds more like a scout anthem than like a choir of free voices of the jungle population, and the good bear Baloo sometimes speaks completely in the spirit of those mentors who trained future officers of Her Majesty from the cadets of the military school where Stokes and Company studied. But, blocking these notes and tendencies, another voice sounds imperiously in The Jungle Books, the voice of Indian folklore and - more broadly - the folklore of the ancient East, the melodies of a folk tale, picked up and in their own way comprehended by Kipling.

Without this powerful influence of the Indian, Eastern elements on the English writer, there could not have been the Jungle Books, and without them there would have been no world fame for Kipling. In essence, we must evaluate what Kipling owes to the country where he was born. "The Jungle Book" is another reminder of the inseparable connection between the cultures of the West and the East, which has always enriched both interacting parties. Where does Kipling's conciseness, naturalistic descriptiveness go? In these books - especially in the first - everything shines with the colors and sounds of great poetry, in which the folk basis, combined with the talent of the master, created a unique artistic effect. That is why the poetic prose of these books is inextricably linked with those verse passages that so organically complement the individual chapters of the Jungle Books.

Everything changes in The Jungle Books. Their hero is not the predator Shere Khan, hated by the whole world of animals and birds, but the boy Mowgli, wise with the experience of a large wolf family and his good friends - the bear and the wise snake Kaa. The struggle with Shere Khan and his defeat - the defeat of the Strong and Lonely, it would seem, Kipling's favorite hero - becomes the center of the composition of the first "Jungle Book". The brave little mongoose Ricky, protector of the Big Man's home and his family, triumphs over the mighty cobra. The wisdom of the folk tale makes Kipling accept the law of the victory of good over force, if this force is evil. No matter how close The Jungle Book is to the views of Kipling the imperialist, they diverge from these views more often than they express them. And this is also a manifestation of the artist's talent - to be able to obey the highest law of artistry, embodied in the folk fairy tale tradition, if you already become its follower and student, as Kipling, the author of The Jungle Books, became for a while.

In The Jungle, Kipling began to develop that amazing way of talking to children, the masterpiece of which was his later Fairy Tales. A conversation about Kipling's talent would be incomplete if he were not mentioned as a wonderful children's writer, able to speak to his audience in a confident tone of a storyteller who respects his listeners and knows that he leads them towards interests and exciting events.

Rudyard Kipling died over thirty years ago. He did not live to see the collapse of the colonial British Empire, although the premonition of this tormented him as early as the 1890s. Increasingly, newspapers mention states in which the old "Union Jack" - the British royal flag - descends; frames and photos are increasingly flashing, which depict how the Tommy Atkins leave forever from foreign territories; more and more often, in the squares of the now free states of Asia and Africa, the equestrian monuments of the old British warriors who once flooded these countries with blood are being overthrown. Figuratively speaking, the Kipling monument was also overthrown. But Kipling's talent lives on. And it affects not only the work of D. Conrad, R. L. Stevenson, D. London, E. Hemingway, S. Maugham, but also in the works of some Soviet writers.

Soviet schoolchildren in the 1920s memorized the young N. Tikhonov's poem "Themselves", in which one can feel the influence of Kipling's vocabulary and metrics, a poem that predicted the worldwide triumph of Lenin's ideas. N. Tikhonov's stories about India contain a kind of polemic with Kipling. The poem "The Commandment" translated by M. Lozinsky is widely known, glorifying the courage and valor of a person and often performed by readers from the stage.

Who has not remembered Kipling while reading N. Tikhonov's "Twelve Ballads", and not because the poet could be reproached for imitating the rhythmic features of Kipling's poems. There was something else, much more complex. And don't some of the best poems by K. Simonov remind of Kipling, who, by the way, perfectly translated Kipling's poem "The Vampire"? There is something that allows us to say that our poets did not pass by the great creative experience contained in the volumes of his poems. This desire to be a modern poet, a keen sense of time, a sense of the romance of the current day, which is stronger than other Western European poets at the turn of the century, was expressed by Kipling in the poem "The Queen".

This poem (translated by A. Onoshkovich-Yatsyn) expresses Kipling's peculiar poetic credo. The Queen is Romance; poets of all times complain that she left with yesterday - with a flint arrow, and then with knightly armor, and then - with the last sailboat and the last carriage. "We saw her yesterday," the romantic poet repeats, turning away from modernity.

Meanwhile, romance, says Kipling, is running another train, and running it right on time, and this is the new romance of the machine and space that man has mastered: one of the aspects of modern romance. The poet did not have time to add to this poem words about the romance of an airplane, about the romance of astronautics, about all the romance that our modern poetry breathes. But our romance is obedient to other feelings, to which it is impossible for Kipling to rise, for he was a genuine and talented singer of the departing old world, who only vaguely caught the rumble of the approaching great events in which his empire collapsed and in which the whole world of violence and lies, called capitalist, would fall. society.

R. Samarin

1. Kuprin A. I. Sobr. cit.: In 6 t. M.: 1958. T. VI. S. 609

2. Gorky M. Sobr. cit.: V 30 t. M.: 1953. T. 24. S. 66.

3. Lunacharsky A. The history of Western European literature in its most important moments. Moscow: Gosizdat. 1924. Part II. S. 224.

4. Gorky M. Decree cit.: S. 155.

5. See Bunin I. A. Sobr. cit.: In 9 t. M.: Khudozh. lit. 1967. T. 9. S. 394.

6. The article was written in the late 60s.

The problem of everyday life of a person originated in antiquity - in fact, when a person made the first attempts to realize himself and his place in the world around him.

However, ideas about everyday life in antiquity and the Middle Ages were predominantly mythological and religious in color.

So, the everyday life of an ancient person is saturated with mythology, and mythology, in turn, is endowed with many features of people's everyday life. The gods are improved people living the same passions, only endowed with greater abilities and opportunities. The gods easily come into contact with people, and people, if necessary, turn to the gods. Good deeds are rewarded right there on earth, and bad deeds are immediately punished. Belief in retribution and fear of punishment form the mysticism of consciousness and, accordingly, the daily existence of a person, manifested both in elementary rituals and in the specifics of perception and comprehension of the surrounding world.

It can be argued that the everyday existence of an ancient person is two-fold: it is conceivable and empirically comprehended, that is, there is a division of being into the sensual-empirical world and the ideal world - the world of ideas. The predominance of one or another ideological attitude had a significant impact on the way of life of a person of antiquity. Everyday life is only beginning to be considered as an area for the manifestation of a person's abilities and capabilities.

It is conceived as an existence focused on self-improvement of the individual, implying the harmonious development of physical, intellectual and spiritual capabilities. At the same time, the material side of life is given a secondary place. One of the highest values ​​of the era of antiquity is moderation, which is manifested in a rather modest lifestyle.

At the same time, the daily life of an individual is not conceived outside of society and is almost completely determined by it. Knowing and fulfilling one's civic obligations is of paramount importance for a polis citizen.

The mystical nature of the everyday life of an ancient person, coupled with a person’s understanding of his unity with the surrounding world, nature and the Cosmos, makes the everyday life of an ancient person sufficiently ordered, giving him a sense of security and confidence.

In the Middle Ages, the world is seen through the prism of God, and religiosity becomes the dominant moment of life, manifesting itself in all spheres of human life. This leads to the formation of a peculiar worldview, in which everyday life appears as a chain of a person's religious experience, while religious rites, commandments, canons are intertwined in the individual's lifestyle. The whole range of emotions and feelings of a person is religious (faith in God, love for God, hope for salvation, fear of God's wrath, hatred of the devil-tempter, etc.).

Earthly life is saturated with spiritual content, due to which there is a fusion of spiritual and sensual-empirical being. Life provokes a person to commit sinful deeds, “throwing” him all sorts of temptations, but it also makes it possible to atone for his sins by moral deeds.

In the Renaissance, ideas about the purpose of a person, about his way of life, undergo significant changes. During this period, both the person and his daily life appear in a new light. A person is presented as a creative person, a co-creator of God, who is able to change himself and his life, who has become less dependent on external circumstances, and much more on his own potential.

The term “everyday” itself appears in the era of the New Age thanks to M. Montaigne, who uses it to designate ordinary, standard, convenient moments of existence for a person, repeated at every moment of an everyday performance. As he rightly remarks, everyday troubles are never small. The will to live is the basis of wisdom. Life is given to us as something that does not depend on us. To dwell on its negative aspects (death, sorrows, illnesses) means to suppress and deny life. The sage must strive to suppress and reject any argument against life and must say an unconditional yes to life and to all that life is, sorrow, sickness and death.

In the 19th century from an attempt to rationally comprehend everyday life, they move on to considering its irrational component: fears, hopes, deep human needs. Human suffering, according to S. Kierkegaard, is rooted in the constant fear that haunts him at every moment of his life. The one who is mired in sin is afraid of possible punishment, the one who is freed from sin is gnawed by the fear of a new fall into sin. However, man himself chooses his being.

A gloomy, pessimistic view of human life is presented in the works of A. Schopenhauer. The essence of human being is will, a blind onslaught that excites and reveals the universe. Man is driven by an insatiable thirst, accompanied by constant anxiety, want and suffering. According to Schopenhauer, six of the seven days of the week we suffer and lust, and on the seventh we die of boredom. In addition, a person is characterized by a narrow perception of the world around him. He notes that it is human nature to penetrate beyond the boundaries of the universe.

In the XX century. the main object of scientific knowledge is the man himself in his uniqueness and originality. W. Dilthey, M. Heidegger, N. A. Berdyaev and others point to the inconsistency and ambiguity of human nature.

During this period, the “ontological” problematics of human life fulfillment comes to the fore, and the phenomenological method becomes a special “prism” through which vision, comprehension and cognition of reality, including social reality, are carried out.

The philosophy of life (A. Bergson, W. Dilthey, G. Simmel) focuses on the irrational structures of consciousness in human life, takes into account his nature, instincts, that is, a person returns his right to spontaneity and naturalness. So, A. Bergson writes that of all things we are most sure and best of all know our own existence.

In the works of G. Simmel, there is a negative assessment of everyday life. For him, the routine of everyday life is opposed to adventure as a period of the highest tension of forces and sharpness of experience, the moment of adventure exists, as it were, independently of everyday life, it is a separate fragment of space-time, where other laws and evaluation criteria apply.

Appeal to everyday life as an independent problem was carried out by E. Husserl within the framework of phenomenology. For him, the vital, everyday world becomes a universe of meanings. The everyday world has an internal orderliness, it has a peculiar cognitive meaning. Thanks to E. Husserl, everyday life acquired in the eyes of philosophers the status of an independent reality of fundamental importance. Everyday life of E. Husserl is distinguished by the simplicity of understanding what is "visible" to him. All people proceed from a natural attitude that unites objects and phenomena, things and living beings, factors of a socio-historical nature. Based on a natural attitude, a person perceives the world as the only true reality. The whole daily life of people is based on a natural attitude. The life world is given directly. This is an area known to all. The life world always refers to the subject. This is his own everyday world. It is subjective and presented in the form of practical goals, life practice.

M. Heidegger made a great contribution to the study of the problems of everyday life. He already categorically separates scientific being from everyday life. Everyday life is an extra-scientific space of its own existence. Everyday life of a person is filled with worries about reproducing oneself in the world as a living being, and not a thinking one. The world of everyday life requires the tireless repetition of the necessary worries (M. Heidegger called it an unworthy level of existence), which suppress the creative impulses of the individual. Heidegger's everyday life is presented in the form of the following modes: "chatter", "ambiguity", "curiosity", "preoccupied dispensation", etc. Thus, for example, "chatter" is presented in the form of empty groundless speech. These modes are far from genuine human, and therefore everyday life is somewhat negative, and the everyday world as a whole appears as a world of inauthenticity, groundlessness, loss and publicity. Heidegger notes that a person is constantly accompanied by preoccupation with the present, which turns human life into fearful chores, into the vegetative life of everyday life. This care is aimed at the objects at hand, at the transformation of the world. According to M. Heidegger, a person tries to give up his freedom, to become like everything, which leads to the averaging of individuality. Man no longer belongs to himself, others have taken away his being. However, despite these negative aspects of everyday life, a person constantly strives to stay in cash, to avoid death. He refuses to see death in his daily life, shielding himself from it by life itself.

This approach is aggravated and developed by pragmatists (C. Pierce, W. James), according to whom consciousness is the experience of a person being in the world. Most of the practical affairs of people are aimed at extracting personal benefits. According to W. James, everyday life is expressed in the elements of the individual's life pragmatics.

In D. Dewey's instrumentalism, the concept of experience, nature and existence is far from idyllic. The world is unstable, and existence is risky and unstable. The actions of living beings are unpredictable, and therefore the maximum responsibility and exertion of spiritual and intellectual forces are required from any person.

Psychoanalysis also pays sufficient attention to the problems of everyday life. So, Z. Freud writes about the neuroses of everyday life, that is, the factors that cause them. Sexuality and aggression, suppressed due to social norms, lead a person to neurosis, which in everyday life manifests itself in the form of obsessive actions, rituals, slips of the tongue, slips of the tongue, and dreams that are understandable only to the person himself. Z. Freud called this "the psychopathology of everyday life." The stronger a person is forced to suppress his desires, the more protection techniques he uses in everyday life. Freud considers repression, projection, substitution, rationalization, reactive formation, regression, sublimation, denial to be the means by which nervous tension can be extinguished. Culture, according to Freud, gave a lot to a person, but took away the most important thing from him - the ability to satisfy his needs.

According to A. Adler, life cannot be imagined without continuous movement in the direction of growth and development. A person's lifestyle includes a unique combination of traits, behaviors, habits, which, taken together, determine a unique picture of a person's existence. From Adler's point of view, lifestyle is firmly fixed at the age of four or five years and subsequently almost does not lend itself to total changes. This style becomes the main core of behavior in the future. It depends on him which aspects of life we ​​will pay attention to, and which we will ignore. Ultimately, only the person himself is responsible for his lifestyle.

Within the framework of postmodernism, it was shown that the life of a modern person has not become more stable and reliable. During this period, it became especially noticeable that human activity is carried out not so much on the basis of the principle of expediency, but on the randomness of expedient reactions in the context of specific changes. Within the framework of postmodernism (J.-F. Lyotard, J. Baudrillard, J. Bataille), an opinion is defended on the legitimacy of considering everyday life from any position in order to obtain a complete picture. Everyday life is not the subject of philosophical analysis of this direction, capturing only certain moments of human existence. The mosaic nature of the picture of everyday life in postmodernism testifies to the equivalence of the most diverse phenomena of human existence. Human behavior is largely determined by the function of consumption. At the same time, human needs are not the basis for the production of goods, but, on the contrary, the machine of production and consumption produces needs. Outside the system of exchange and consumption, there is neither a subject nor objects. The language of things classifies the world even before it is represented in ordinary language, the paradigmization of objects sets the paradigm of communication, interaction in the market serves as the basic matrix of linguistic interaction. There are no individual needs and desires, desires are produced. All-accessibility and permissiveness dull sensations, and a person can only reproduce ideals, values, etc., pretending that this has not happened yet.

However, there are also positives. A post-modern man is oriented towards communication and goal-setting aspiration, that is, the main task of a postmodern man, who is in a chaotic, inappropriate, sometimes dangerous world, is the need to reveal himself at all costs.

Existentialists believe that problems are born in the course of the daily life of each individual. Everyday life is not only a "knurled" existence, repeating stereotypical rituals, but also shocks, disappointments, passions. They exist in the everyday world. Death, shame, fear, love, the search for meaning, being the most important existential problems, are also problems of the existence of the individual. Among existentialists, the most common pessimistic view of everyday life.

So, J.P. Sartre put forward the idea of ​​absolute freedom and absolute loneliness of a person among other people. He believes that it is a person who is responsible for the fundamental project of his life. Any failure and failure is a consequence of a freely chosen path, and it is in vain to look for the guilty. Even if a man finds himself in a war, that war is his, since he could well have avoided it by suicide or desertion.

A. Camus endows everyday life with the following characteristics: absurdity, meaninglessness, disbelief in God and individual immortality, while placing enormous responsibility on the person himself for his life.

A more optimistic point of view was held by E. Fromm, who endowed human life with an unconditional meaning, A. Schweitzer and X. Ortega y Gasset, who wrote that life is cosmic altruism, it exists as a constant movement from the vital Self to the Other. These philosophers preached admiration for life and love for it, altruism as a life principle, emphasizing the brightest sides of human nature. E. Fromm also speaks of two main ways of human existence - possession and being. The principle of possession is a setting for the mastery of material objects, people, one's own Self, ideas and habits. Being is opposed to possession and means genuine involvement in the existing and the embodiment in reality of all one's abilities.

The implementation of the principles of being and possession is observed on the examples of everyday life: conversations, memory, power, faith, love, etc. Signs of possession are inertness, stereotyping, superficiality. E. Fromm refers to the signs of being activity, creativity, interest. The possessive mindset is more characteristic of the modern world. This is due to the existence of private property. Existence is not conceived outside of struggle and suffering, and a person never realizes himself in a perfect way.

The leading representative of hermeneutics, G. G. Gadamer, pays great attention to the life experience of a person. He believes that the natural desire of parents is the desire to pass on their experience to children in the hope of protecting them from their own mistakes. However, life experience is the experience that a person must acquire on his own. We constantly come to new experience by refuting old experience, because it is, first of all, a painful and unpleasant experience that goes against our expectations. Nevertheless, true experience prepares a person to realize his own limitations, that is, the limits of human existence. The conviction that everything can be redone, that there is a time for everything, and that everything repeats itself in one way or another, turns out to be just an appearance. Rather, the opposite is true: a living and acting person is constantly convinced by history from his own experience that nothing is repeated. All expectations and plans of finite beings are themselves finite and limited. Genuine experience is thus the experience of one's own historicity.

Historical and philosophical analysis of everyday life allows us to draw the following conclusions regarding the development of problems of everyday life. Firstly, the problem of everyday life is posed quite clearly, but a huge number of definitions does not give a holistic view of the essence of this phenomenon.

Second, most philosophers emphasize the negative aspects of everyday life. Thirdly, within the framework of modern science and in line with such disciplines as sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, etc., the studies of everyday life are primarily concerned with its applied aspects, while its essential content remains out of sight of most researchers.

It is the socio-philosophical approach that makes it possible to systematize the historical analysis of everyday life, to determine its essence, system-structural content and integrity. We note right away that all the basic concepts that reveal everyday life, its basic foundations, one way or another, in one form or another, are present in historical analysis in disparate versions, in various terms. We have only tried in the historical part to consider the essential, meaningful and integral being of everyday life. Without delving into the analysis of such a complex formation as the concept of life, we emphasize that the appeal to it as the initial one is dictated not only by philosophical directions such as pragmatism, philosophy of life, fundamental ontology, but also by the semantics of the words of everyday life themselves: for all days of life with its eternal and temporal features.

It is possible to single out the main spheres of a person's life: his professional work, activities within the framework of everyday life and the sphere of recreation (unfortunately, often understood only as inactivity). Obviously, the essence of life is movement, activity. It is all the features of social and individual activity in a dialectical relationship that determine the essence of everyday life. But it is clear that the pace and nature of the activity, its effectiveness, success or failure are determined by inclinations, skills and, mainly, abilities (the everyday life of an artist, poet, scientist, musician, etc. varies significantly).

If activity is considered as a fundamental attribute of being from the point of view of self-movement of reality, then in each specific case we will deal with a relatively independent system functioning on the basis of self-regulation and self-government. But this presupposes, of course, not only the existence of methods of activity (capabilities), but also the necessity of sources of movement and activity. These sources are most often (and mainly) determined by contradictions between the subject and the object of activity. The subject can also act as an object of a particular activity. This contradiction boils down to the fact that the subject seeks to master the object or part of it that he needs. These contradictions are defined as needs: the need of an individual, a group of people or society as a whole. It is the needs in various altered, transformed forms (interests, motives, goals, etc.) that bring the subject into action. Self-organization and self-management of the system activity presupposes as necessary a sufficiently developed understanding, awareness, adequate knowledge (that is, the presence of consciousness and self-consciousness) of the activity itself, and abilities, and needs, and awareness of consciousness and self-consciousness itself. All this is transformed into adequate and definite ends, organizes the necessary means and enables the subject to foresee the corresponding results.

So, all this allows us to consider everyday life from these four positions (activity, need, consciousness, ability): the defining sphere of everyday life is professional activity; human activity in domestic conditions; recreation as a kind of sphere of activity in which these four elements are freely, spontaneously, intuitively outside of purely practical interests, effortlessly (based on gaming activity), movably combined.

We can draw some conclusion. It follows from the previous analysis that everyday life must be defined on the basis of the concept of life, the essence of which (including everyday life) is hidden in activity, and the content of everyday life (for all days!) Is revealed in a detailed analysis of the specifics of the social and individual characteristics of the identified four elements. The integrity of everyday life is hidden in the harmonization, on the one hand, of all its spheres (professional activity, activities in everyday life and leisure), and on the other hand, within each of the spheres based on the originality of the four identified elements. And, finally, we note that all these four elements have been identified, singled out and are already present in the historical-social-philosophical analysis. The category of life is present among representatives of the philosophy of life (M. Montaigne, A. Schopenhauer, V. Dilthey, E. Husserl); the concept of "activity" is present in the currents of pragmatism, instrumentalism (by C. Pierce, W. James, D. Dewey); the concept of "need" dominates among K. Marx, Z. Freud, postmodernists, etc.; V. Dilthey, G. Simmel, K. Marx and others refer to the concept of “ability”, and, finally, we find consciousness as a synthesizing organ in K. Marx, E. Husserl, representatives of pragmatism and existentialism.

Thus, it is this approach that allows us to define the phenomenon of everyday life as a socio-philosophical category, to reveal the essence, content and integrity of this phenomenon.

Simmel, G. Selected Works. - M., 2006.

Sartre, J.P. Existentialism is humanism // Twilight of the Gods / ed. A. A. Yakovleva. - M., 1990.

Camus, A. A rebellious man / A. Camus // A rebellious man. Philosophy. Politics. Art. - M., 1990.

Ecology of life: Do you know what is one of the highest paid professions in Switzerland? Teacher. The average salary of a teacher is about 115 thousand francs a year, and the vacation during the year is 12 weeks!

This text is not about the fact that the watch with the largest dial is located in Zurich, but there are more mountain peaks in Switzerland than in any other European country. For such facts, please visit the travel portals. Here I have put together a collection of facts that I came across in conversations with the Swiss, which are relevant to daily life in the country and may be useful to you when visiting or moving there.

house with a secret

Only a quarter of Swiss people live in their own home, most rent property, since the average cost of a small house can easily reach 1 million euros. Previously, by law, every private or apartment building had to have its own bomb shelter so that there was somewhere to hide in the event of a nuclear attack. For example, the bad&breakfast we looked after shares a shelter with a neighbor farmer, and in the 4-unit building opposite, the entrance to the bomb shelter is next to the laundry room on the back floor. But according to the latest report from the Swiss authorities, even though they have not been built for a long time, there are now about 300,000 private bomb shelters and 5,000 public shelters in the country that can accommodate the entire population in case of danger.

To serve or not to serve?

Despite a long and successful history of maintaining military neutrality (and Switzerland has managed to be neutral since 1815), the Swiss army is always ready. All men are required to serve in the army, and draft dodgers are few and far between. Not least because the passage of the service is very well organized. Men leave for regular weekly training, which in total for 10 years (from 19 to 30) is 260 days. Although, if a man does not want to serve, he has an alternative: to pay 3% of his salary to the state until he turns 30 years old.

Employees are people too

The rights of employees in Swiss companies are often more important than customer service. Most shops, including supermarkets, close for lunch from 12:00 to 14:00, and close at 18:00-19:00. Of course, not all cantons adhere to such a schedule. Some shops and restaurants even fight (!) for the right to work on Sunday or late. But not everyone and not everywhere is allowed to violate the rights of their employees in this way. It is almost impossible to find a working grocery store on Sunday, with the exception of airports and train stations.

Teachers are millionaires

Do you know what is one of the highest paid professions in Switzerland? Teacher. The average salary of a teacher is about 115 thousand francs a year, and the vacation during the year is 12 weeks! Ok, “millionaire” is a hyperbole, but the way the system of attracting teachers and charging their work is set up will do honor to any state. In this country, the overall unemployment rate is a miserable 2%.

Asphalt with diamond chips

Traffic rules are sacredly observed by everyone: kids run to the garden in reflective capes, cyclists buy special insurance in order to ride on public roads, and the Bern authorities thought of decorating a walking zebra with Swarovski crystal dust to improve its visibility at night. Now about 500 grams of crystal dust is used per square meter of a pedestrian crossing.

Lawyer for Bobik

If you thought that in Switzerland they only care about people, you are mistaken. Animal rights here, in many respects, are equated with human rights. Animals can even be represented in court. Adrian Getschel, a well-known lawyer throughout the country, works in Zurich, among whose clients there were more than two hundred dogs, cats, farm animals and birds. Although the citizens of Switzerland voted against the introduction of animal advocates in a national referendum in 2010, the current animal rights law governs the keeping and treatment of animals, both domestic and wild, to the smallest detail.

Even if not for Bobik's lawyer, but for Bobik himself, money will have to be allocated. The dog tax is 120 francs per year. And if you have two of them, then the second will go at a double rate - 240 francs. Isn't it worth it to continue about three?

And the Dalai Lama is no stranger...

Switzerland is home to the smallest vineyard in the world, now owned by the Dalai Lama. It occupies only 1.67m2 where three vines grow. The vineyard is surrounded by a fence of stones brought from around the world, including a 600-kilogram block of marble, nicknamed the "Stone of Liberty".

golden chocolate

It was here that chocolatiers developed a new breed of chocolate - golden chocolate. Eight golden chocolate truffles from DeLafée confectioners cost 114 francs. How they managed to achieve this, they carefully hide, telling tales about the best Ecuadorian cocoa beans mixed with cocoa butter and gold dust. But, gold or not, chocolate makers in Switzerland are a serious professional community, only members of which have the right to make and sell chocolate.

Starbucks wins

Continuing the theme of food, there are now more Starbucks coffee shops in the country than banks. A large mocha at Starbucks costs about 5-6 francs, which is about the cost of a mug of draft beer.

The main thing is not to confuse

Remember what the Like button on Facebook looks like? So, in Switzerland it has a completely different meaning. Thus they denote the number "1". For example, at home or on a bus. But they write “7” like we do: with a horizontal dash in the middle. This spelling has been preserved, mostly in small towns and villages, so if you see it, consider yourself lucky.

Eating cheap?

Do you think that Asian and Mexican food is from the category of "cheap food"? Just not in Switzerland. Here it is an exotic cuisine that falls into the category of expensive pleasures. Want to eat cheap? You go to an Italian or French restaurant. Although, the concept of "inexpensive" is not about this country at all :). published

The history of everyday life today is a very popular area of ​​historical and humanitarian knowledge in general. As a separate branch of historical knowledge, it was designated relatively recently. Although the main plots of the history of everyday life, such as life, clothing, work, recreation, customs, have been studied in some aspects for a long time, at present, an unprecedented interest in the problems of everyday life is noted in historical science. Everyday life is the subject of a whole complex of scientific disciplines: sociology, psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, art theory, literary theory and, finally, philosophy. This theme often dominates in philosophical treatises and scientific studies, the authors of which address certain aspects of life, history, culture and politics.

The history of everyday life is a branch of historical knowledge, the subject of which is the sphere of human everyday life in its historical, cultural, political, eventful, ethnic and confessional contexts. The focus of the history of everyday life, according to the modern researcher N. L. Pushkareva, is a reality that is interpreted by people and has subjective significance for them as an integral life world, a comprehensive study of this reality (the life world) of people of different social strata, their behavior and emotional reactions to events.

The history of everyday life originated in the middle of the 19th century, and as an independent branch of the study of the past in the humanities, it arose in the late 60s. 20th century During these years, there was an interest in research related to the study of man, and in connection with this, German scientists were the first to begin to study the history of everyday life. The slogan was sounded: "Let's turn from the study of state policy and the analysis of global social structures and processes to small worlds of life, to the everyday life of ordinary people." The direction "history of everyday life" or "history from below" arose.

It can also be noted that the surge of interest in the study of everyday life coincided with the so-called "anthropological revolution" in philosophy. M. Weber, E. Husserl, S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, A. Schopenhauer and others proved that it is impossible to describe many phenomena of the human world and nature, remaining on the positions of classical rationalism. For the first time, philosophers drew attention to the internal relationships between the various spheres of human life, which ensure the development of society, its integrity and originality at each time stage. Hence, studies of the diversity of consciousness, the inner experience of experiences, and various forms of everyday life are becoming increasingly important.

We are interested in what was and is understood by everyday life and how do scientists interpret it?

To do this, it makes sense to name the most important German historians of everyday life. The sociologist-historian Norbert Elias is considered a classic in this field with his works On the Concept of Everyday Life, On the Process of Civilization, and Court Society. N. Elias says that a person in the process of life absorbs social norms of behavior, thinking and as a result they become the mental image of his personality, as well as that how the form of human behavior changes in the course of social development.

Elias also tried to define the "history of everyday life". He noted that there is no exact, clear definition of everyday life, but he tried to give a certain concept through the opposition of non-everyday life. To do this, he compiled lists of some of the uses of this concept that are found in the scientific literature. The result of his work was the conclusion that in the early 80s. the history of everyday life is so far "neither fish nor fowl."

Another scientist who worked in this direction was Edmund Husserl, a philosopher who formed a new attitude towards the "ordinary". He became the founder of the phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches to the study of everyday life and was the first to draw attention to the significance of the "sphere of human everyday life", everyday life, which he called the "life world". It was his approach that was the impetus for scientists from other areas of the humanities to study the problem of defining everyday life.

Among the followers of Husserl, one can pay attention to Alfred Schutz, who proposed to focus on the analysis of the "world of human immediacy", i.e. on those feelings, fantasies, desires, doubts and reactions to immediate private events.

From the point of view of social feminology, Schutz defines everyday life as "a sphere of human experience characterized by a special form of perception and understanding of the world that arises on the basis of labor activity, which has a number of characteristics, including confidence in the objectivity and self-evidence of the world and social interactions, which, in fact, and there is a natural setting."

Thus, the followers of social feminology come to the conclusion that everyday life is that sphere of human experience, orientations and actions, thanks to which a person carries out plans, deeds and interests.

The next step towards separating everyday life into a branch of science was the appearance in the 60s of the 20th century of modernist sociological concepts. For example, the theories of P. Berger and T. Lukman. The peculiarity of their views was that they called for studying "face-to-face meetings of people", believing that such meetings "(social interactions) are" the main content of everyday life.

In the future, within the framework of sociology, other theories began to appear, the authors of which tried to give an analysis of everyday life. Thus, this led to its transformation into an independent direction in the social sciences. This change, of course, was reflected in the historical sciences.

A huge contribution to the study of everyday life was made by the representatives of the Annales school - Mark Blok, Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel. "Annals" in the 30s. 20th century turned to the study of the working man, the subject of their study becomes the "history of the masses" as opposed to the "history of the stars", history visible not "from above", but "from below". According to N. L. Pushkareva, they proposed to see in the reconstruction of the "everyday" an element of recreating history and its integrity. They studied the peculiarities of consciousness not of outstanding historical figures, but of the mass "silent majority" and its influence on the development of history and society. Representatives of this trend explored the mentality of ordinary people, their experiences, and the material side of everyday life. A. Ya. Gurevich noted that this task was successfully carried out by their supporters and successors, grouped around the Annaly magazine created in the 1950s. The history of everyday life acted in their works as part of the macrocontext of the life of the past.

The representative of this trend, Mark Blok, turns to the history of culture, social psychology and studies it, based not on the analysis of the thoughts of individual individuals, but in direct mass manifestations. The focus of the historian is a person. Blok hurries to clarify: "not a person, but people - people organized into classes, social groups. In Blok's field of vision are typical, mostly mass-like phenomena in which repetition can be found."

One of Blok's main ideas was that the historian's research begins not with the collection of material, but with the formulation of a problem and questions to the source. He believed that "the historian, by analyzing the terminology and vocabulary of the surviving written sources, is able to make these monuments say much more."

The French historian Fernand Braudel studied the problem of everyday life. He wrote that it is possible to know everyday life through material life - "these are people and things, things and people." The only way to experience the daily existence of man is to study things - food, dwellings, clothing, luxury goods, tools, money, plans of villages and cities - in a word, everything that serves man.

French historians of the second generation of the School of Annales, who continued the "Braudel line", scrupulously studied the relationship between people's way of life and their mentalities, everyday social psychology. The use of the Brodelian approach in the historiographies of a number of Central European countries (Poland, Hungary, Austria), which began in the mid-second half of the 70s, was comprehended as an integrative method of understanding a person in history and the "zeitgeist". According to N. L. Pushkareva, it has received the greatest recognition from medievalists and specialists in the history of the early modern period and is practiced to a lesser extent by specialists studying the recent past or the present.

Another approach to understanding the history of everyday life arose and to this day prevails in German and Italian historiography.

In the face of the German history of everyday life, for the first time, an attempt was made to define the history of everyday life as a kind of new research program. This is evidenced by the book "The History of Everyday Life. Reconstruction of Historical Experience and Way of Life", published in Germany in the late 1980s.

According to S. V. Obolenskaya, German researchers called for studying the "microhistory" of ordinary, ordinary, inconspicuous people. They believed that a detailed description of all the poor and destitute, as well as their emotional experiences, was important. For example, one of the most common research topics is the life of workers and the labor movement, as well as working families.

An extensive part of the history of everyday life is the study of everyday life of women. In Germany, many works are published on the women's issue, women's work, the role of women in public life in different historical eras. A center for research on women's issues has been established here. Particular attention is paid to the life of women in the post-war period.

In addition to the German "historians of everyday life", a number of researchers in Italy turned out to be inclined to interpret it as a synonym for "microhistory". In the 1970s, a small group of such scientists (K. Ginzburg, D. Levy, and others) rallied around the journal they created, starting the publication of the scientific series "Microhistory". These scientists made worthy of the attention of science not only the common, but also the only, accidental and particular in history, whether it be an individual, an event or an incident. The study of chance - argued supporters of the microhistorical approach - should be the starting point for the work of recreating multiple and flexible social identities that arise and collapse in the process of functioning of the network of relationships (competition, solidarity, association, etc.). In doing so, they sought to understand the relationship between individual rationality and collective identity.

The German-Italian school of microhistorians expanded in the 1980s and 1990s. It was supplemented by American researchers of the past, who a little later joined the study of the history of mentalities and unraveling the symbols and meanings of everyday life.

Common to the two approaches to the study of the history of everyday life - both outlined by F. Braudel and microhistorians - was a new understanding of the past as "history from below" or "from within", which gave voice to the "little man", the victim of modernization processes: both unusual and most ordinary . The two approaches in the study of everyday life are also connected with other sciences (sociology, psychology and ethnology). They equally contributed to the recognition that the man of the past is different from the man of today, they equally recognize that the study of this "otherness" is the way to comprehend the mechanism of sociopsychological changes. In world science, both understandings of the history of everyday life continue to coexist - both as an event history reconstructing the mental macrocontext and as an implementation of microhistorical analysis techniques.

In the late 80s - early 90s of the 20th century, following Western and domestic historical science, there was a surge of interest in everyday life. The first works appear, where everyday life is mentioned. A series of articles is published in the almanac "Odyssey", where an attempt is made to theoretically comprehend everyday life. These are articles by G. S. Knabe, A. Ya. Gurevich, G. I. Zvereva.

N. L. Pushkareva made a significant contribution to the development of the history of everyday life. The main result of Pushkareva's research work is the recognition of the direction of gender studies and the history of women (historical feminology) in the domestic humanities.

Most of the books and articles written by Pushkareva N.L. are devoted to the history of women in Russia and Europe. The Association of American Slavists recommended N. L. Pushkareva's book as a textbook in US universities. The works of N. L. Pushkareva have a high citation index among historians, sociologists, psychologists, and culturologists.

The works of this researcher revealed and comprehensively analyzed a wide range of problems in the "history of women" both in pre-Petrine Russia (X-XVII centuries) and in Russia in the 18th-early 19th centuries.

N. L. Pushkareva pays direct attention to the study of issues of private life and everyday life of representatives of various classes of Russian society in the 18th - early 19th centuries, including the nobility. She established, along with the universal features of the "female ethos", specific differences, for example, in the upbringing and lifestyle of provincial and metropolitan noblewomen. Paying special attention to the ratio of "general" and "individual" when studying the emotional world of Russian women, N. L. Pushkareva emphasizes the importance of the transition "to the study of private life as to the history of specific individuals, sometimes not at all eminent and not exceptional. This approach makes it possible" get acquainted" with them through literature, office documents, correspondence.

The last decade has demonstrated the growing interest of Russian historians in everyday history. The main directions of scientific research are formed, well-known sources are analyzed from a new point of view, and new documents are introduced into scientific circulation. According to M. M. Krom, in Russia the history of everyday life is now experiencing a real boom. An example is the series "Living History. Everyday Life of Mankind" published by the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house. Along with translations, this series includes books by A. I. Begunova, E. V. Romanenko, E. V. Lavrent’eva, S. D. Okhlyabinin, and other Russian authors. Many studies are based on memoirs and archival sources, they describe in detail the life and customs of the heroes of the story.

Entering a fundamentally new scientific level in the study of the everyday history of Russia, which has long been in demand by researchers and readers, is associated with the intensification of work on the preparation and publication of documentary collections, memoirs, the reprinting of previously published works with detailed scientific comments and reference apparatus.

Today we can talk about the formation of separate directions in the study of the daily history of Russia - this is the study of the everyday life of the period of the empire (XVIII - early XX centuries), the Russian nobility, peasants, townspeople, officers, students, the clergy, etc.

In the 1990s - early 2000s. The scientific problem of "everyday Russia" is gradually mastered by university historians, who have begun to use new knowledge in the process of teaching historical disciplines. Historians of Moscow State University M.V. Lomonosov even prepared a textbook "Russian everyday life: from the origins to the middle of the 19th century", which, according to the authors, "allows you to supplement, expand and deepen knowledge about the real life of people in Russia." Sections 4-5 of this edition are devoted to the daily life of Russian society in the 18th - first half of the 19th century. and cover a fairly wide range of issues of almost all segments of the population: from the urban lower classes to the secular society of the empire. One cannot but agree with the recommendation of the authors to use this edition as an addition to existing textbooks, which will expand the understanding of the world of Russian life.

The prospects for studying the historical past of Russia from the perspective of everyday life are obvious and promising. Evidence of this is the research activity of historians, philologists, sociologists, culturologists, and ethnologists. Due to its "global responsiveness" everyday life is recognized as a sphere of interdisciplinary research, but at the same time it requires methodological accuracy in approaches to the problem. As culturologist I. A. Mankevich noted, “in the space of everyday life, the “lines of life” of all spheres of human existence converge ..., everyday life is “everything of ours interspersed with not at all ours ...”