Modernists of the 20th century in literature. The concept of avant-garde

The task this lesson is to understand how different branches of modernism differed from each other.
The main content of the movement of symbolism is an attempt to find new expressions of language, the creation of a new philosophy in literature. The symbolists believed that the world is not simple and understandable, but is filled with meaning, the depth of which is impossible to find.
Acmeism arose as a way to drag poetry from the heavens of symbolism to earth. The teacher invites students to compare the works of the Symbolists and Acmeists.
The main theme of the next direction of modernism - futurism - is the desire to discern the future in modernity, to identify the gap between them.
All these trends of modernism introduced radical updates to the language, marked the break of eras, and emphasized that old literature cannot express the spirit of modernity.

Topic: Russian literature late XIX– beginning of the 20th century.

Lesson: The main movements of Russian modernism: symbolism, acmeism, futurism

Modernism is a single artistic stream. The branches of modernism: symbolism, acmeism and futurism - had their own characteristics.

Symbolism as a literary movement originated in France in the 80s. 19th century The basis of the artistic method of French symbolism is sharply subjective sensualism (sensuality). The symbolists reproduced reality as a flow of sensations. Poetry avoids generalizations and seeks not the typical, but the individual, the one of a kind.

Poetry takes on the character of improvisation, recording “pure impressions.” The object loses its clear outlines, dissolves in a stream of disparate sensations and qualities; The dominant role is played by the epithet, a colorful spot. The emotion becomes pointless and “inexpressible.” Poetry strives to enhance sensory richness and emotional impact. A self-sufficient form is cultivated. Representatives of French symbolism are P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud, J. Laforgue.

The dominant genre of symbolism was “pure” lyrics; the novel, short story, and drama became lyrical.

In Russia, symbolism arose in the 90s. 19th century and at its initial stage (K. D. Balmont, early V. Ya. Bryusov and A. Dobrolyubov, and later B. Zaitsev, I. F. Annensky, Remizov) developed a style of decadent impressionism, similar to French symbolism.

Russian symbolists of the 1900s. (V. Ivanov, A. Bely, A. A. Blok, as well as D. S. Merezhkovsky, S. Solovyov and others), trying to overcome pessimism and passivity, proclaimed the slogan of effective art, the predominance of creativity over knowledge.

The material world is depicted by symbolists as a mask through which the otherworldly shines through. Dualism finds expression in the two-plane composition of novels, dramas and “symphonies”. The world of real phenomena, everyday life or conventional fiction is depicted grotesquely, discredited in the light of “transcendental irony”. Situations, images, their movement receive a double meaning: in terms of what is depicted and in terms of what is commemorated.

A symbol is a bundle of meanings that diverge in different directions. The symbol's task is to present matches.

The poem (Baudelaire, “Correspondences” translated by K. Balmont) shows an example of traditional semantic connections that give rise to symbols.

Nature is a strict temple, where there is a row of living columns

Sometimes a slightly intelligible sound will be dropped furtively;

Wanders through forests of symbols, drowns in their thickets

An embarrassed man is touched by their gaze.

Like an echo of echoes in one unclear chord,

Where everything is one, light and night darkness,

Fragrances and sounds and colors

It combines consonants in harmony.

There is a virgin smell; like a meadow, it is pure and holy,

Like a child's body, the high sound of the oboe;

And there is a solemn, depraved aroma -

A fusion of incense and amber and benzoin:

In it the infinite is suddenly available to us,

It contains the highest thoughts of delight and the best feelings of ecstasy!

Symbolism also creates its own words - symbols. First, high values are used for such symbols poetic words, then simple ones. Symbolists believed that it was impossible to exhaust the meaning of a symbol.

Symbolism avoids the logical disclosure of the topic, turning to the symbolism of sensual forms, the elements of which receive a special semantic richness. Logically inexpressible “secret” meanings “shine through” the material world of art. By putting forward sensory elements, symbolism moves away at the same time from the impressionistic contemplation of scattered and self-sufficient sensory impressions, into the motley stream of which symbolization introduces a certain integrity, unity and continuity.

The task of the symbolists is to show that the world is full of secrets that cannot be discovered.

The lyrics of symbolism are often dramatized or acquire epic features, revealing the structure of “generally significant” symbols, rethinking the images of ancient and Christian mythology. The genre of religious poem, symbolically interpreted legend is being created (S. Solovyov, D. S. Merezhkovsky). The poem loses its intimacy and becomes like a sermon, a prophecy (V. Ivanov, A. Bely).

German symbolism of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. (S. Gheorghe and his Group, R. Demel and other poets) was the ideological mouthpiece of the reactionary bloc of the Junkers and the big industrial bourgeoisie. In German symbolism, aggressive and tonic aspirations, attempts to combat one’s own decadence, and the desire to dissociate ourselves from decadence and impressionism stand out in relief. German symbolism tries to resolve the consciousness of decadence, the end of culture, in a tragic affirmation of life, in a kind of “heroics” of decline. In the fight against materialism, resorting to symbolism and myth, German symbolism does not come to a sharply expressed metaphysical dualism, but retains the Nietzschean “loyalty to the earth” (Nietzsche, George, Demel).

New modernist movement acmeism, appeared in Russian poetry in the 1910s. as a contrast to extreme symbolism. Translated from Greek, the word "akme" means highest degree something, blossoming, maturity. The Acmeists advocated the return of images and words to their original meaning, for art for art's sake, for the poeticization of human feelings. Refusal of mysticism - this is what happened main feature Acmeists.

For the Symbolists, the main thing is rhythm and music, the sound of the word, while for the Acmeists it is form and eternity, objectivity.

In 1912, poets S. Gorodetsky, N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, V. Narbut, A. Akhmatova, M. Zenkevich and some others united in the “Workshop of Poets” circle.

The founders of Acmeism were N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. Acmeists called their work highest point achieving artistic truth. They did not deny symbolism, but were against the fact that the symbolists paid so much attention to the world of the mysterious and unknown. The Acmeists pointed out that the unknowable, by the very meaning of the word, cannot be known. Hence the desire of the Acmeists to free literature from those obscurities that were cultivated by the symbolists, and to restore clarity and accessibility to it. The Acmeists tried with all their might to return literature to life, to things, to man, to nature. Thus, Gumilev turned to the description of exotic animals and nature, Zenkevich - to the prehistoric life of the earth and man, Narbut - to everyday life, Anna Akhmatova - to in-depth love experiences.

The desire for nature, for the “earth” led the Acmeists to a naturalistic style, to concrete imagery, objective realism, which determined whole line artistic techniques. In the poetry of the Acmeists, “heavy, weighty words” predominate; the number of nouns significantly exceeds the number of verbs.

Having carried out this reform, the Acmeists otherwise agreed with the Symbolists, declaring themselves their students. Otherworld for Acmeists remains true; only they do not make it the center of their poetry, although the latter is sometimes not alien to mystical elements. Gumilyov’s works “The Lost Tram” and “At the Gypsies” are completely permeated with mysticism, and in Akhmatova’s collections, like “The Rosary,” love-religious experiences predominate.

A. Akhmatova’s poem “Song of the Last Meeting”:

My chest was so helplessly cold,

But my steps were light.

I'm on right hand put it on

Glove from the left hand.

It seemed like there were a lot of steps,

And I knew - there are only three of them!

The Acmeists returned everyday scenes.

The Acmeists were by no means revolutionaries in relation to symbolism, and never considered themselves as such; They set as their main task only the smoothing out of contradictions and the introduction of amendments.

In the part where the Acmeists rebelled against the mysticism of symbolism, they did not oppose the latter with real real life. Having rejected mysticism as the main leitmotif of creativity, the Acmeists began to fetishize things as such, unable to approach reality synthetically and understand its dynamics. For Acmeists, things in reality have meaning in themselves, in a static state. They admire individual objects of existence, and perceive them as they are, without criticism, without attempts to understand them in relationship, but directly, in an animal way.

Basic principles of Acmeism:

Refusal of symbolist calls for the ideal, mystical nebula;

Acceptance of the earthly world as it is, in all its color and diversity;

Returning a word to its original meaning;

A depiction of a person with his true feelings;

Poeticization of the world;

Incorporating associations with previous eras into poetry.

Rice. 6. Umberto Boccioni. The street goes into the house ()

Acmeism did not last very long, but made a great contribution to the development of poetry.

Futurism(translated as future) is one of the movements of modernism that originated in the 1910s. It is most clearly represented in the literature of Italy and Russia. On February 20, 1909, the article “Manifesto of Futurism” by T. F. Marinetti appeared in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Marinetti in his manifesto called for abandoning the spiritual and cultural values of the past and building a new art. The main task of futurists is to identify the gap between the present and the future, to destroy everything old and build a new one. Provocations were part of their lives. They opposed bourgeois society.

In Russia, Marinetti's article was published on March 8, 1909 and marked the beginning of the development of its own futurism. The founders of the new trend in Russian literature were the brothers D. and N. Burliuk, M. Larionov, N. Goncharova, A. Ekster, N. Kulbin. In 1910, one of the first futuristic poems by V. Khlebnikov, “The Spell of Laughter,” appeared in the collection “Impressionist Studio.” In the same year, a collection of futurist poets, “The Judges’ Tank,” was published. It contained poems by D. Burliuk, N. Burliuk, E. Guro, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky.

Futurists also invented new words.

Evening. Shadows.

Canopy. Leni.

We sat, drinking in the evening.

In each eye there is a running deer.

Futurists experience a deformation of language and grammar. Words pile on top of each other, rushing to convey the author’s momentary feelings, so the work looks like a telegraph text. Futurists abandoned syntax and stanzas and came up with new words that, in their opinion, better and more fully reflected reality.

The futurists gave the seemingly meaningless title of the collection special meaning. For them, the fish tank symbolized the cage into which the poets were driven, and they called themselves the judges.

In 1910, the Cubo-Futurists united into a group. It included the Burliuk brothers, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, E. Guro, A. E. Kruchenykh. Cubo-futurists defended the word as such, “words are higher than meaning,” “ abstruse word" Cubo-futurists destroyed Russian grammar, replacing phrases with combinations of sounds. They believed that the more disorder in a sentence, the better.

In 1911, I. Severyanin was one of the first in Russia to proclaim himself an ego-futurist. He added the word “ego” to the term “futurism.” Egofuturism can literally be translated as “I am the future.” A circle of followers of egofuturism rallied around I. Severyanin; in January 1912 they proclaimed themselves the “Academy of Ego Poetry.” Egofuturists enriched lexicon a large number of foreign words and new formations.

In 1912, the futurists united around the publishing house “Petersburg Herald”. The group included: D. Kryuchkov, I. Severyanin, K. Olimpov, P. Shirokov, R. Ivnev, V. Gnedov, V. Shershenevich.

In Russia, futurists called themselves “Budetlyans,” poets of the future. Futurists, captured by dynamism, were no longer satisfied with the syntax and vocabulary of the previous era, when there were no cars, no telephones, no phonographs, no cinemas, no airplanes, no electric railways, no skyscrapers, no subways. The poet, filled with a new sense of the world, has a wireless imagination. The poet puts fleeting sensations into the accumulation of words.

Futurists were passionate about politics.

All these directions radically renew the language, the feeling that old literature cannot express the spirit of modernity.

Bibliography

1. Chalmaev V.A., Zinin S.A. Russian literature of the twentieth century.: Textbook for grade 11: In 2 hours - 5th ed. – M.: LLC 2TID “ Russian word- RS", 2008.

2. Agenosov V.V. . Russian literature of the 20th century. Toolkit M. “Bustard”, 2002

3. Russian literature of the 20th century. Textbook for applicants to universities M. academic-scientific. Center "Moscow Lyceum", 1995.

Tables and presentations

Literature in tables and diagrams ().

Modernism is a new movement that came to Russia from Europe, mainly covering poetry, but some prose writers also work within the framework of modernism. Modernism, trying to isolate itself from all previous literary movements, proclaimed the rejection of any literary traditions and from following patterns. All writers and poets of the beginning of the century considered themselves modernists, who thought and believed that they were writing in a new way. As a contrast to realism, modernism in literature first of all tried to get away from the principle of a plausible depiction of reality. Hence the desire of modernist writers for fantastic elements and plots, the desire to embellish existing reality, change it, transform it.

Futurism (from Latin futurum - future) is a literary movement that arose in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century as a protest against existing social principles. The creativity of the futurists was distinguished by the search for new means artistic expression, new forms, images.

Modernism, understood as "post-realism", united symbolism and existentialism within a single movement in art and literature of the 20th century. At the same time, while coinciding in some ways, they mostly turned out to be diametrically opposed to each other.

What united the symbolists and existentialists was their attitude to time as a fulfilled and completed whole, in which the future, present and past merge into one. Thus, according to Heidegger, “time manifestation” does not mean a “change” of ecstatic states: the future is not later than the past, and the latter is not earlier than the present: “Time-possibility,” in his words, “reveals itself as a future that resides in the past and present.” “The fourth coordinate - time,” wrote P. Florensky, “became so alive that time lost its character of bad infinity, became cozy and closed, approached eternity.” It is no coincidence that symbolism and existentialism, having revived interest in myth following Nietzsche, gave rise to unique creative, individual interpretations of it, actualized the very principle of mythopoetic thinking and, in connection with this, interest in the roots, the “source” - in the forgotten beginning of what has always is assumed as something self-evident, always already given.

Thus, the existentialist myth, which arose in the bosom of the philosophy of life, was built on the conviction that man is truly (“existentially”) given existence “from within” (and not “from without”) as his own natural attraction and experience. The truth of human existence (more precisely, of being in general) was thus sought at the very bottom of individuality - in “the individuality of everything individual, the finitude of everything finite in man.” Since the individual was not taken in relation to the universal (generic), but was considered as existing in itself, the search for truth could not lead to anything other than the correlation of individuality with its non-existence, and the human individual with death.

For the symbolists, in particular for V. Solovyov, “movement to the source” meant movement towards that model of the world, according to which being is not exhausted by physical reality, but presupposes the presence of another world (the world of Platonic ideas - “eidos”) and spiritual-physical ( mental-intelligent) person who must penetrate into the supersensible world and, like the immortal Christ-Logos, become a new stage in the history of the cosmos. (R. Steiner even tried to develop a method for such penetration). In this regard, the Young Symbolists, who considered themselves life-builders, theurgists, and not representatives of a literary school, despite the fact that they were eschatologically inclined, perceived the approaching end of the world not so much as an end, but as a beginning (“new heaven” and “new earth” ) and overcoming death. At the same time, V. Solovyov spoke about the superpersonal (although not impersonal) nature of the moral process, and S. Trubetskoy proceeded from the understanding of its “conciliarity”, since consciousness, he noted, can be neither impersonal nor individual, for it is more than personally – it is “conciliar”.

Nevertheless, both of them were characterized by a catastrophic feeling of the world, the culmination of which was universal The First World War became a catastrophic sensation. At that time, Kandinsky wrote about the “darkened spiritual sky”, the disintegration of worlds, the expression of which for him, as for many others (in particular, Andrei Bely) was the discovery of the disintegration of the atom. The processes of increasing the activity of form and dissonance as the basis of thinking produced a new artistic vision of the world and man: Dadaism proclaimed attention to the “random object”, cubism and futurism were busy searching for methods of expressing new thinking. The most remarkable phenomena in art were such movements as surrealism and suprematism.

Like existentialism, surrealism arose in the “womb of the philosophy of life.” Like existentialism, it proceeded from the fact that man is adequately given being (nature) not “from the outside,” but “from within.” But surrealism recognized that what is true in man is that he is an individual bearer of the generic principle - the principle of universality and universality. In this regard, the source of surreal art was, on the one hand, the sphere of the unconscious, on the other, the severance of logical connections, associations, apparent authenticity, and the “supernaturalness” of the image. At the same time, surrealism does not distort, like expressionism, a thing taken separately, “it distorts the system of things, proportions, volumes, styles; in surrealism there are Chimeras, juxtapositions of incomparables. It is the art of breaking systemic connections by combining objects that would not normally be combined.” (Vadim Rudnev). (S. Dali, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, M. Horkheimer, TADORNO, G. Marcuse).

The deep source of “suprematism” associated with the name of Malevich (or “mystical avant-gardeism” associated with the name of Kandinsky) was symbolism in painting, music, literature and philosophy. The main task for artists was the search for a new unity of the world based on a still unclear new spirituality. Thus, Kandinsky perceived painting as “a thundering collision of different worlds, called upon to create a new world, which is called a work, through struggle and among this struggle of worlds among themselves. Each work also arises technically in the same way that the cosmos arose - it passes through catastrophes, similar to the chaotic roar of an orchestra, which ultimately results in a symphony, whose name is the music of the spheres. The creation of a work is the creation of the universe.” – In the cosmic scale of thinking, the symbolic interconnectedness of all things in the world, the prophetic mission of his art, Kandinsky’s echo of the German romantics is visible.

To realize any particular event as included in a universal system, to see and embody the invisible, which opens to “spiritual vision” - the essence of Malevich’s quest. At the same time, the basis for the expression of the new reason, based on higher intuition, became alogism: an absurd, from the point of view of common sense, convergence of heterogeneous things proclaimed the implicit universal connection of phenomena. Thus, in the easel works of the Suprematists, the idea of “top” and “bottom”, “left” and “right” disappeared - all directions turned out to be equal (as in outer space). The space of the picture ceased to be geocentric (a special case of the universe), an independent world arose, closed in itself, possessing its own field of cohesion-gravity and at the same time correlated as an equal with the universal world harmony. (In this Malevich came into contact with the position of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov).

The search for the possibility of entering into a direct connection with the Universe was associated with liberation from the mediation of objectivity and the movement towards “non-objective”, “non-figurative” art. At the same time, “escaping from the subject” did not mean escaping from nature as such (everything was subject to its laws) - it was not about new methods of expression, but about new thinking, which has a structure and meaning. Thus, alogism in the word (“zaumi”), Kruchenykh believed, should destroy the outdated movement of thought according to the law of causality. Therefore, “zaum” was sharply different, for example, from the “words in freedom” of the Italian futurist Marinetti with his demands for the destruction of syntax, the use of verbs in the indefinite mood, the abolition of adjectives and adverbs, and the abandonment of punctuation marks - the so-called “telegraphic style.” The Suprematists were busy searching for the “language of the universe” and creating a “grammar of art” - beyond the boundaries of its various types: Continuing the work of the German romantic Philipp Otto Runge (the first to talk about abstract art, not bound by the framework of the tradition of the plot) in compiling a “symbolarium” of colors and linear forms (and, first of all, the triangle and the circle), Kandinsky thought through the path from the linear arabesque to the painting. The point and line became the main ones for him, but he considered the circle as a sign of the universe - as the only form capable of reproducing the “fourth dimension”, like “ice with a raging fire inside of it.” (A. Bely was busy bringing the meaning of rhythm in poetry to geometric figures). For Kandinsky (as well as for Khlebnikov), color had sound and the ability to transform into sound. (It is noteworthy that in the early 20s, Pavel Florensky began creating a “Dictionary of Symbols,” which was supposed to contain the signs of all symbolic forms - the entire universe). But the work of the Suprematists in this direction turned out to be unfinished, interrupted, however, alogism (as a method) permeated the work of Filonov and Chagall, was especially prominent in Meyerhold’s theater, and took root in the poetry of the Oberiuts (Kharms, Vvedensky, Zabolotsky), in the prose of Platonov, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko.

Symbolism, with its search for meaning, continued to influence the art of the second half of the 20th century: Until the 1980s, “Russian Conceptualism,” uniting artists and writers, according to Grace, was an attempt “to identify the conditions that make it possible for art to go beyond its boundaries, that is, an attempt to consciously return and preserve that which establishes art as an event in the History of the Spirit and makes its own history incomplete.” (E. Bulatov,

O. Vasiliev, I. Chuikov. And Kabakov, A Kosolapov. L. Sokov. V. Komar, A. Melamid, R. and V. Gorlovin, E. Gorokhovsky, V. Pivovarov. Y. Satunovsky, G. Aigi, S. Shablavin, V. Skersis, M. Roginsky, B. Orlov, I. Shelkovsky, F. Infanta, etc.) The focus on culture remained relevant for conceptual writers of the mid-second half of the 20 centuries, in the works of which the main character becomes a character, whose searches and experiences are determined not so much by the problems of “real” life”, but by the topography of artistic space, the laws of aesthetics (I. Kholin, Vs. Nekrasov, G. Sapgir, then E. Limonov, D. .Prigov, V.Sorokin, etc.). The tradition continued to affect the work of conceptualist (“avant-garde”) writers of the late 20th century (Rubenstein, V. Druk, T. Kibirov, etc.), who were influenced by the structuralist ideas of R. Barthes, who proclaimed the “death of the author.” So, according to D. Prigov, the avant-garde artist has only a hero, the author in the usual sense is absent: the role of the author-director is that he brings together different heroes and is just a stenographer. But at the same time. D. Prigov notes that “the writer reproduces the mentality of various literatures - classical, everyday, Soviet,” as a result of which “multi-layered stylization” arises.

At the same time, the processes of increasing individualism in existentialism, the displacement of religious and idealistic ideas by scientific ones, running parallel to the processes of increasing the activity of the form, which takes on the functions of a metaphorical statement, lead to the implementation in the art of modernism of ideas about it as a system of fonts reflecting non-external the world, but a general schematic of consciousness or its particular states. At the same time, myth begins to be thought of as a panacea for the rationalistic troubles of our time, not as a way of uniting people (monomythologism, Marquader believes, is as harmful as monotheism), but as a form of affirmation of the unique. This is how a special myth-novel becomes widespread, in which various mythological traditions are used syncretically as material for the poetic reconstruction of certain original mythological archetypes.

The concept of a subject endowed with conscious goal-setting and will begins to disappear. The unconscious components of spiritual life come to the fore (as in surrealism).

The end of modernism, therefore, means the end of faith in reason (we are talking about the will to its destruction), the end of the possibility of thinking the idea of unity and universality (totality), the rejection of the principles of subjectivity, a return to the stage of prehistoric religiosity, deifying nature, and the rehabilitation of myth in as a source of collective consciousness (Sinn). The result was the irrationalization of all processes of ethos and culture in the art of postmodernism.

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Introduction

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

2. Modernism as a direction in literature

3. “Stream of Consciousness” technique

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

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

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

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

Philosophical prose at the beginning of the twentieth century acquired the features of a “novel of culture”; such novels combine essayism, the history of personality development, confession, and journalism in their genre modifications. T. Mann will define this type of prose as an “intellectual novel.”

Aestheticization of artistic consciousness in modernist and intellectual novel talks about the formation of “elite literature”, where the writer’s goal becomes a problem spiritual search, a “supertask”, the impossibility of solving which leads to the abandonment of the annoying, straightforward didactics of the 19th century novel.

The literature of the “lost generation” and psychological prose retain relevant historical and social themes. This literature poses a research problem modern society And modern hero. In general, the literary process of the first half of the twentieth century is characterized by the diversity and breadth of innovative phenomena, bright names, and represents rich material for study.

1. Literature of the first halfXXcentury

The advent of the 21st century makes the 20th century the previous one, just as the 19th century was the past in relation to the 20th century. The change of centuries has always produced summing up and the emergence of predictive assumptions about the future. The assumption that the 20th century would be something different from the 19th began even before it began. The crisis of civilization, which the romantics intuitively foresaw, was fully realized by the passing century: it opens with the Boer War, then plunges into two world wars, the threat of atomic entropy, great amount military local conflicts.

The belief that the flowering of natural sciences and new discoveries will certainly change people's lives for the better is destroyed by historical practice. The chronology of the 20th century has revealed a bitter truth: in the process of improving technology, the humanistic content of human existence is being lost. This idea is already becoming tautological at the end of the twentieth century. But philosophers and artists had a premonition of the wrong path taken even earlier, when the 19th century was ending and new Age. F. Nietzsche wrote that civilization is a thin layer of gilding on the animal essence of man, and O. Spengler in his work “Causality and Fate. The Decline of Europe” (1923) spoke about the fatal and inevitable death of European culture.

The First World War, having destroyed fairly stable social and state relations of the 19th century, confronted people with the inexorable urgency of revising previous values, searching for their own place in a changed reality, and understanding that the outside world is hostile and aggressive. The result of rethinking the phenomenon modern life it became that the majority European writers, especially the younger generation who came to literature after the First World War, were skeptical about the primacy of social practice over the spiritual microcosm of man. Having lost illusions in assessing the world that nurtured them and recoiling from the well-fed philistinism, the intelligentsia perceived the crisis state of society as a collapse European civilization at all. This gave rise to pessimism and mistrust of young authors (O. Huxley, D. Lawrence, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway). The same loss of stable guidelines shook the optimistic perception of writers of the older generation (H. Wells, D. Galsworthy, A. France).

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

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

From the point of view of modernists, external reality is hostile to the individual; it produces the tragedy of his existence. Writers believed that the study of spirituality is a kind of return to origins and the discovery of the true “I”, because a person first realizes himself as a subject and then creates subject-object relationships with the world.

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

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

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

It should be especially emphasized that realism quite freely used the principles of non-realistic aesthetics. Realistic art of the twentieth century is so different from classic options the previous century, that most often it is necessary to study the work of each individual writer.

The problems of humanistic development of man and society, the search for truth, which, in the words of the British author of the second half of the century, W. Golding, is “always the same,” worried both modernists and non-modernists equally. The 20th century was so complex and contradictory, so multi-dimensional, that modernist and non-modernist writers, understanding the global nature of the processes taking place in the world and often solving the same problems, drew directly opposite conclusions. Analytical fragmentation of phenomena undertaken by modernists in search of hidden meanings, is combined in the general flow of literature of the first half of the century with the quest of realists seeking to synthesize efforts to comprehend general principles artistic reflection peace, to stop the decay of values and the destruction of tradition, so as not to interrupt the connection of times.

2. Modernism as a direction in literature

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

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

If we approach the description of modernism seriously and thoughtfully, it will become clear that the authors classified as modernism actually set themselves completely different goals and objectives, wrote in different manners, saw people differently, and often what united them was that they simply lived and wrote at the same time. For example, modernism includes Joseph Conrad and David Gerberg Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Stearns Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Paul Eluard, futurists and dadaists, surrealists and symbolists, without thinking about whether there is anything between them. something in common, except for the era in which they lived. The literary critics who are most honest with themselves and with their readers admit the fact that the very term “modernism” is vague. modernism literature conscious unconscious

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

Modernist writers saw themselves as an avant-garde that had abandoned bourgeois values, and forced the reader to think by using complex new literary forms and styles. IN fiction The conventional flow of chronological events was turned on its head by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf introduced new ways of tracking the flow of their characters' thoughts using a stream-of-consciousness style.

The beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by both social changes and the development of scientific thought; the old world was changing before our eyes, and the changes often outpaced the possibility of their rational explanation, which led to disappointment in rationalism. To understand them, new techniques and principles for generalizing the perception of reality, a new understanding of man’s place in the universe (or “Cosmos”) were needed. It is no coincidence that the majority of representatives of modernism looked for ideological substratum in popular philosophical and psychological concepts that paid attention to the problems of individuality: in Freudianism and Nietzscheanism. The variety of initial concepts of worldview, by the way, largely determined the diversity of movements and literary manifestos: from surrealism to Dada, from symbolism to futurism, etc. But the glorification of art as a type of secret mystical knowledge, which is opposed to the absurdity of the world, and the question of the place of the individual with his individual consciousness in the Cosmos, the tendency to create his own new myths allow us to consider modernism as a single literary movement.

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

3. “Stream of Consciousness” Technique

Stream of consciousness - a technique in the literature of the 20th century mainly modernist direction, directly reproducing mental life, experiences, associations, claiming to directly reproduce the mental life of consciousness through the cohesion of all of the above, as well as often non-linearity and brokenness of syntax.

The term “stream of consciousness” belongs to the American idealist philosopher William James: consciousness is a stream, a river in which thoughts, sensations, memories, sudden associations constantly interrupt each other and intertwine in a bizarre, “illogical” way (“Foundations of Psychology”, 1890) . “Stream of consciousness” often represents an extreme degree, an extreme form of “internal monologue”; in it, objective connections with the real environment are often difficult to restore.

Stream of consciousness creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on his experience in the minds of the characters, which gives him direct intimate access to their thoughts. Also includes the representation in written text of that which is neither purely verbal nor purely textual.

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

The possibilities of this technique were truly revealed in the novels of M. Proust, W. Woolf and J. Joyce. It is from them light hand, the concept “ central image" and was replaced by the concept of "central consciousness".

J. Joyce was the first to use the total “stream of consciousness”. Central work“stream of consciousness” is rightly considered to be “Ulysses”, which demonstrated both the pinnacle and exhaustion of the possibilities of this method: research inner life of a person is combined in it with a blurring of the boundaries of character.

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

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

Limit of transparent... Why...? Transparent, opaque. Where all five fingers can fit through, this is a gate, where not, it is a door. Close your eyes and look.

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

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

Looks good: the fur is smooth and shiny, there is a white button under the tail, the eyes are green and glowing. He bent over to her, resting his palms on his knees. “Milk to the pussy!”

Mrrau! - she meowed loudly.

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

Afraid of chicks. I've never seen such a stupid pussy in my life. Cruel. It's in their nature. It's strange that the mice don't squeak. It's like they like it.

Mgrrau! - she meowed louder. Her eyes, greedy, half-lidded with shame, blinked, and, mewing pitifully and protractedly, she exposed her milky-white teeth. He saw how the black slits of her pupils narrowed with greed, turning her eyes into green pebbles. Going to the cupboard, he took the jug freshly filled by the Hanlon delivery man, poured the warm, bubbly milk into the saucer, and carefully placed the saucer on the floor.

Meow! - she squealed, rushing towards the food.

He watched how her mustache gleamed metallic in the dim light and how, after trying it on three times, she easily began to lap. Is it true or not that if you trim your mustache, you won't be able to hunt. Why? Maybe the tips glow in the dark. Or serve as palps, perhaps.

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

...it’s for you that the sun shines,” he said that day when we were lying among the rhododendrons on Cape Howth; he is wearing a gray tweed suit and straw hat, on the day when I got him to propose to me, and first I let him bite off a piece of cumin cookies from my lips - it was leap year like now and 16 years ago. My God, after that long kiss I almost suffocated, yes he said - I am a mountain flower, yes it is true, we are flowers, the whole female body, yes this is the only truth that he said in his entire life and the sun is shining for you today , and that’s why I liked him, because I saw that he understood or felt what a woman was, and I knew that I could always do what I wanted with him, and I gave him as much pleasure as I could, and kept getting started turned him on until he asked me to say yes, and I didn’t answer first, just looked at the sea and the sky and remembered everything he didn’t know: Mulvey, and Mr. Stanhope, and Hester, and father, and old Captain Grove , and sailors on the pier playing birds in flight, and standing still and washing dishes, as they called it, and a sentry in front of the governor's house in a white helmet with a band - the poor fellow almost melted, and laughing Spanish girls in shawls with high combs in the hair, and the morning market of Greeks, Jews, Arabs and the devil himself can’t tell who else from all over Europe, and Duke Street, and the clucking bird market not far from Sharon’s Larbi, and poor donkeys trudged half-asleep, and unknown tramps in raincoats , dozing on the steps in the shade, and the huge wheels of oxcarts, and the ancient thousand-year-old castle, and the handsome Moors in white robes and turbans, like kings inviting you to sit down in their tiny shops, and Ronda where the posadas [inns (Spanish) )] with ancient windows where the fan hid the flashing glance, and the gentleman kisses the window bars, and wine cellars half open at night and castanets and the night when we missed the ship in Algeciras, and the night watchman walked calmly with his lantern, and... Oh that terrible stream boiling below, Oh and the sea, the sea scarlet like fire, and luxurious sunsets, and fig trees in the gardens of Alameda, and all the quaint streets, and pink yellow blue houses, rose alleys, and jasmine, geraniums, cacti, and Gibraltar, where I was a girl, and the Mountain Flower, and when I pinned a rose in my hair, as Andalusian girls do, or pinned a scarlet to me..., yes..., and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall, and I wondered if he cared or another, and then I told him with my eyes to ask again... and then he asked me, - would I like... yes... to say yes, my mountain flower... and first I wrapped my arms around him, yes... and pulled him to me so he felt my breasts, their scent... yes, and his heart was beating madly and... yes... I said yes... I want... Yes.

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

Of course, the “stream of consciousness” is the best known method of conveying psychologism, but it is by no means ideal, as Vladimir Nabokov notes:

“The “stream of consciousness” technique undeservedly shakes the imagination of readers. I would like to present the following thoughts. First, this technique is no more “realistic” or more “scientific” than any other. The fact is that the “stream of consciousness” is a stylistic convention, since, obviously, we do not think only in words - we also think in images, but the transition from words to images can be recorded directly in words only if there is no description. Secondly, some of our thoughts come and go, others remain; they sort of settle, sloppy and sluggish, and it takes some time for the current thoughts and thoughts to go around these reefs. The disadvantage of written reproduction of thoughts is that the temporary element is blurred and that big role allocated to the typographic sign."

Conclusion

The literature of the 20th century in its stylistic and ideological diversity is incomparable with the literature of the 19th century, where only three or four leading trends could be identified. At the same time, modern literature has produced no more great talents than the literature of the 19th century.

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

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

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Modernists of the 20th century in literature. The concept of avant-garde

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