Thomas Eliot short biography. barren land

Sisters Dorothea and Celia, left without parents, lived in the house of their uncle-guardian Mr. Brooke. The sisters were almost equally beautiful, but differed in character: Dorothea was serious and pious, Celia was sweet and moderately frivolous. Frequent guests at Mr. Brooke's house were two gentlemen who had the clear intention of soon proposing marriage to Dorothea. One is the young baronet Sir James Chettam, the other is the scientist and, we add, a very wealthy priest, Mr. Casaubon. Dorothea chose the latter, although at fifty years old he looked like, as they used to say, gossips, on a dried mummy; The girl was inspired with respect by the education and depth of mind of the reverend father, who was preparing to make the world happy with a multi-volume treatise, in which he proved, using vast material, that all the mythologies in the world are distortions of a single source given from above. Dorothea responded to the formal proposal sent by Mr. Casaubon the same day with consent; a month and a half later they had a wedding, and the newlyweds went to Honeymoon to Rome, because Casaubon needed to work with manuscripts in the Vatican library. Young Sir James, becoming a little despondent, turned all his ardor to younger sister, and soon she began to be called Mrs. Celia Chet-tem.

In Rome, Dorothea was disappointed: what she so admired in her husband, deep knowledge, increasingly seemed to her like a dead, cumbersome burden that brought neither sublime joy nor inspiration to life. Her only consolation was a meeting with Will Ladislaw, a poor distant relative of Mr. Casaubon, who was visiting Rome with an artist friend. Due to his youth, Will had not yet chosen a career in life and lived on the money given to him out of mercy by Dorothea’s husband.

When the Casaubons returned to Middlemarch, main theme There was talk in the city about the construction of a new hospital. The money for it was given by the banker Mr. Bulstrode, a newcomer to Middlemarch, but who had already gained a strong position thanks to his money, as well as his marriage, which connected him by ties of property with the original Middlemarchians - the Vinceys, the Garths, the Featherstones. The hospital was to be run by Mr. Lydgate, a young doctor who had come to the city from somewhere in the north; At first he was met with hostility by both colleagues and potential patients who were suspicious of Mr. Lydgate's advanced medical theories, but it didn't take long before his patients included the most respected ordinary people.

So, it was Lydgate who was called when there was a fever with young Fred Vincey. This young man, the son of wealthy, respected parents in Middlemarch, did not live up to the family’s expectations: his father invested a lot of money in his education so that he could devote himself to the profession of a priest, befitting a gentleman, but Fred was in no hurry to take the exam, preferring hunting and billiards to everything else in the world. pleasant company of “life-lovers”. Such a pastime requires money, and therefore he has one very large debt.

Fred's illness did not threaten anything serious, but Mr. Lydgate regularly visited the patient, drawn to his bed partly by duty, partly by the desire to be in the company of Fred's sister, the charming blond Rosamond Vincey. Rosamond also had a liking for the promising, determined young man, endowed with a pleasant appearance, intelligence and, as they said, some capital. Enjoying the presence of Rosamond, in the evenings while studying academically, Lydgate completely forgot about her and did not intend to marry in the next few years. Not so Rosamond. After the first meetings, she began to think about the situation family home and about everything that the bride is supposed to take care of. Seeing that Lydgate was powerless before her charms, Rosamond easily achieved her goal, and soon the Lydgates were already living in a beautiful spacious house, exactly what the young girl dreamed of.

So far everything has been going well for Rosamond, but the situation her brother found himself in cannot be called pleasant. There was no question of asking his father for money, but out of his kindness, Caleb Garth, the father of Mary, to whom Fred was deeply partial, acted as a guarantor for Fred. Mr. Garth was a land surveyor and, as an honest and disinterested man, did not have significant funds, but immediately agreed to pay Fred's debt, which doomed him. own family to deprivation. However, poverty and deprivation are not something that could seriously darken the life of the Garths.

Even the savings that Mary Garth made, being something of a housekeeper for a wealthy relative of the Garths and Vincey, old man Featherstone, went into paying off the debt of the frivolous young man. Fred, in fact, was counting on the inheritance of his rich uncle when issuing the bill, because he was almost sure that it was to him after Featherstone’s death that his land holdings would go. However, all Fred’s hopes turned out to be in vain, as, indeed, were the hopes of numerous other relatives who flocked to the old man’s deathbed. The deceased gave up all his property to a certain unknown Joshua Rigg, his illegitimate son, who immediately hastened to sell the estate to Bulstrode and disappear from Middlemarch forever.

Meanwhile, the years have not been kind to Mr. Casaubon. He began to feel much worse, became weaker, and suffered from palpitations. In this situation, the Reverend Father was especially irritated by the presence in his and Dorothea’s life of Will Ladislaw, who was quite obviously in love with Mrs. Casaubon; in the end he even refused Will the house.

Will was just about ready to leave Middlemarch, where previously only his affection for Dorothea had kept him, when the election campaign began. This, it would seem, has not the slightest connection to life normal people circumstance played famous role in the choice of field not only by Will, but also by Fred Vincey. The fact is that Mr. Brooke intended to run for Parliament, and then it turned out that he was full of ill-wishers in the city and county. In order to adequately respond to their attacks, the elderly gentleman purchased one of the Middlemarch newspapers and invited Will Ladislaw to the post of editor; there are enough others educated people could not be found in the city. The bulk of the attacks boiled down to the fact that Mr. Brooke is a useless landowner, because the business on the farms he owns is very bad. In an effort to deflect the accusations of ill-wishers, Mr. Brooke invited Caleb Garth to manage. Some other landowners followed his example, so the specter of poverty retreated from the Garth family, but its head became overwhelmed with business. Mr. Caleb needed an assistant, and he decided to make Fred, who was still hanging around with nothing to do, as such.

Fred Vincey, meanwhile, had already begun to seriously think about taking ordination, which would give him at least some fixed income and the opportunity to gradually pay off the Garths. What stopped him, in addition to his own reluctance, was Mary’s reaction, with vehemence, generally unusual for her, declaring that if he indulged in such profanity, she would end all relations with him. Caleb Garth's offer could not have come at a better time, and Fred, happily accepting it, tried not to lose face.

Mr. Casaubon was unable to prevent Will's appointment and seemed to accept that the young man remained in Middlemarch. As for Mr. Casaubon's health, it had not improved at all. During one of Dr. Lydgate's visits, the priest asked him to be extremely frank, and Lydgate said that with such a heart disease he could live another fifteen years, or he could die suddenly much earlier. After this conversation, Casaubon became even more thoughtful and finally began to systematize the materials collected for the book that was intended to be the summary of his entire life. However, the very next morning Dorothea found her husband dead on a bench in the garden. Casaubon left his entire fortune to her, but at the end of the will he made a note that it was valid only if Dorothea did not marry Will Ladislaw. While offensive in itself, this note also cast a shadow on Mrs. Casaubon's impeccable reputation. One way or another, Dorothea did not even think about remarriage, and directed all her energy and income to charitable activities, in particular to helping the new hospital, where Lydgate was in charge of the medical department.

Lydgate's practice was all right, but family life was not going well. in the best possible way. Very soon it turned out that his vital interests had nothing in common with the interests of Rosamond, who was talking about the fact that Lydgate should leave the hospital, where he enthusiastically and successfully, but completely free of charge, applied advanced methods of treatment, and, having moved to another place, start a more profitable practice than he had in Middlemarch. The grief they experienced when Rosamond had a miscarriage, and even more so the financial difficulties that are natural for a novice doctor when he lives on such a grand scale, did not bring the spouses closer together. Unexpected help came in the form of a check for a thousand pounds - this was exactly the huge amount Lydgate needed to pay off creditors - offered by Bulstrode.

The banker was generous for a reason - he, a pious man in his own way, needed to do something to calm his conscience, awakened by a certain story. This story was not entirely disinterestedly reminded to Bulstrode by a subject named Raffles.

The fact is that Raffles served in an enterprise that flourished thanks to not entirely legal operations, a co-owner, and later the sole owner of which Bulstrode was once. Bulstrode became the owner after the death of his senior partner, from whom he inherited not only the business, but also his wife. Only daughter His wife, Bulstrode's stepdaughter Sarah, ran away from home and became an actress. When Bulstrode was widowed, Sarah should have shared the huge capital with him, but they could not find her, and everything went to him alone. There was one man who finally found the fugitive, but he was generously paid to leave for America forever. Now Raffles returned from there and wanted money. It remains to add that Sarah married the son of a Polish emigrant Ladislav and that they had a son, Will.

Bulstrode sent Rafls away, handing over the sum he demanded, and, having told Will about everything, he offered him a fortune, but the young man, poor as he was, indignantly refused the ill-gotten money. Bulstrode had almost calmed down when Caleb Garth suddenly appeared to him and brought the completely ill Raffles; it was clear from Garth that he had managed to tell him everything. Lydgate, summoned by Bulstrode, prescribed opium to the patient and left him in the care of the banker and his housekeeper. Going to bed, Bulstrode somehow forgot to tell the housekeeper how much opium to give the patient, and she drank the entire bottle for him overnight, and in the morning Raffles died.

Rumors spread throughout the city that Bulstrode deliberately killed the sick man, and Lydgate helped him in this, for which he received a thousand pounds. Both were subjected to severe obstruction, which could only be ended by Dorothea, who believed the doctor and convinced many others of his innocence.

Dorothea herself, meanwhile, became increasingly imbued with tender feelings to Will, and finally an explanation took place: the young people decided to get married, despite the fact that Dorothea would lose the rights to Casaubon’s money. Over time, Will became a prominent figure in political circles, but was by no means a politician; Dorothea found herself as a wife and mother, because, with all her talents, what other field could a woman show herself in at that time.

Fred and Mary, of course, also became husband and wife; They never got rich, but lived a long, bright life, decorated with the birth of three glorious sons.

Lydgate died at the age of fifty at one of the fashionable resorts where he lived, specializing in gout, a disease of the rich, to Rosamond's delight.

The events of the poem take place in Great Britain, in the period after the end of the First World War. The work is based on the legend of the search for the Grail and the myth of the poor fisherman. The book is divided into 5 parts that have no connection with each other.

At the beginning there is an epigraph that mentions the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl. About how she, wanting to live forever, forgot to ask for unfading youth. Over time, having grown old, Sibyl lived for centuries in the body of an old woman and she had only one desire - to die.

Part 1. Burial of the dead

April has arrived, forcing nature to wake up from hibernation. It is raining heavily in a town near Lake Stanbergersee. A woman named Marie is talking to a friend while sitting in a cafe. She talks about the trip to her cousin, about how she rode a sleigh down the mountain.

In Part 1, Sibyl takes on the guise of the fortune teller Madame Sozotris. She has a cold, but agrees to tell fortunes to the man who came to her. A woman predicts that her visitor will die from water.

A sailor meeting an acquaintance calls out to him and asks about the dead man who was buried last year. “Will he flourish…” the man wonders, but never receives an answer.

Part 2. Playing chess

The couple decides to play chess while waiting for guests. The game takes place in complete silence, as they cannot find a topic for conversation. The author also describes the interior of the room: an empty aquarium and a painting that depicts the transformation of Philomela into a bird.

A woman named Lil, a friend of the owner of the house, arrives. The owner advises her to take care of her own appearance and insert new teeth. After all, if she doesn’t do this, then there is a high probability that her husband will leave her. Lil is still young, she is only 31 years old. However, she already has 5 children. The last birth was very difficult, the woman was on the verge of death.

After several days, Lil's husband returns. On this occasion, they invite their neighbor to visit them.

Part 3. Fire Sermon

In the dead of night, a fisherman sits on the banks of the Thames. He is immersed in thoughts about King Tereus, who violated his wife Philomela. A one-eyed merchant named Eugenides, mentioned in Madame Sozortris' fortune telling, invites a fisherman to the Cannon Street Hotel.

Now the Sibyl appears in the role of the prophet Tiresias, who awaits the meeting of the sailor and the typist. Once together, the sailor begins to caress the girl, but she does not react. Then the sailor leaves. The typist, left alone, does not immediately notice the absence of the sailor. She decides to turn on the gramophone and begins to remember her past relationships with men.

Part 4. Death by water

A Phoenician named Phlebus dies in the water two weeks later. The author calls to honor his memory, because he was handsome and full of strength.

Part 5. What the thunder said

The final part of the poem describes a barren land: there is no water, the earth is riddled with cracks, and there are only mountains around.

Two people walk together. A third person is walking not far from them, but people do not see his face, they only feel someone’s presence nearby. Thunderclaps are heard. People see a city over the mountains and then pass over Jerusalem, Athens and London. They want to find the blood of Jesus to gain eternal life. However, they will not be able to get what they want.

The author's main message is that humanity is dooming itself to exist in barren lands. And this will not stop as long as wars take place all around, taking the lives of innocent people, while trees die, because the ground around them is soaked in blood.

Picture or drawing Eliot The Waste Land

Other retellings for the reader's diary

Summary A time to live and a time to die Remarque
Spring. One of the Russian villages is occupied by German soldiers. The snow slowly melts, and corpses mixed with water and mud begin to appear. Early in the morning the Germans will lead the partisans captured the day before to be executed. There is a woman among those captured.

Eliot Thomas Stearns (September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri - January 4, 1965, London), Anglo-American poet, critic, cultural historian, playwright.

Across the Atlantic

Eliot was born and lived in the USA until 1914, then moved to London, was a bank employee, taught, and acted as a reviewer. In 1922-39, Eliot headed the journal Criterion, which published his programmatic articles philosophical nature, as well as the main works characterizing his understanding of the essence and purpose of culture. Major Event Eliot's life takes place in 1927, when he converted to Anglo-Catholicism (i.e., became an adherent of " High Church") and at the same time became a British subject.

Eliot was driven to expatriate by his sense of alienation. American culture, which, in his opinion, due to its historical youth, is devoid of deep spiritual roots. The dominance of utilitarianism and practicalism, which form the social psychology compatriots, forced him to speak of America as a kingdom of “vulgarity,” which was the most visible manifestation of the “barbarism” that he considered the essence of his era. Fear of "barbarism" and growing disgust for modern life, which rejected culture as living tradition, largely predetermined the entire character of Eliot’s work.

His move across the Atlantic did not mean, however, a complete break with the cultural soil on which he grew up. Pupil Harvard University, Eliot attended seminars of major American philosophers J. Santayana and I. Babbitt. Eliot's master's thesis (published in 1964) is devoted to the concept of knowledge and experience in the philosophy of the neo-Hegelian F. G. Bradley, whose main work, “Appearance and Reality,” is considered one of the main sources of the poet’s cultural views.

Early creativity

They were revealed already in Eliot’s first significant work addressed to the problems of aesthetics and culture - the book “The Sacred Forest” (1920), which contained a polemic with romantic looks on the essence of artistic creativity. Rejecting the idea of poetry as a spontaneous act in which a vital role belongs to the imagination and lyrical confession, Eliot substantiated the doctrine of “depersonalization” of artistic expression, which implies strict orderliness, and not a surge of emotions, the rejection of the “random” in the name of the “universal”, the suppression of “partiality” and the expulsion of “declamation”, whatever they may be neither showed up. Eliot contrasted the romantic apology of personality with the idea of uninterrupted cultural tradition, which is not only present in any new text, but must be used consciously by the artist. Innovation is possible only as an enrichment of tradition, since everyone new text is in certain relationships with the entire set of already created texts (they form a “tradition”). At the same time, the new text, if it really is a phenomenon high art, to one degree or another changes the internal proportions of this unity. This is how literary evolution occurs, according to Eliot.

Eliot resolutely rejected attempts to perceive the poetic word as an equivalent or substitute for religious, ethical, philosophical concepts and consistently defended the idea of the autonomy and intrinsic value of art. Originated in the 1930s. Anglo-American school new criticism“dogmatized these provisions, using them for a purely formalistic interpretation of the phenomena of art without their correlation with real life experience.

Criticism of humanism

Eliot himself, however, was never a supporter of “pure poetry,” recognizing art not only as an opportunity, but also as an obligation “to influence the nature of the perception of reality... to destroy existing norms of consciousness and assessment, forcing us to see the world in a new way.” This idea forms the basis of the treatise “The Purpose of Poetry and the Purpose of Criticism” (1933), where Eliot formulated the basic concepts of his philosophy of art. Eliot drew arguments to support his theories from studying the history of poetry - from Dante and the English “metaphysical poets” of the 18th century discovered by him. to Baudelaire, where the flowering of the tradition practically ended for him.

Eliot's assessments of a number of literary phenomena are openly biased. He was particularly hostile to authors who shared a romantic understanding of poetry, as well as advocates of humanism as a prerequisite for artistic creativity of high ethical significance. The philosophy of humanism was rejected by Eliot, since he believed that the idea of a free and self-affirming individuality had lost ground.

Eliot understood the poet’s purpose unambiguously: “His direct duty lies in the sphere native language: firstly, preserve it, secondly, develop and improve it.” In his literary critical works, Eliot demanded that the poet master and consciously follow the centuries-old cultural and literary tradition, avoidance of subjective arbitrariness in the interpretation of poetic themes, strict discipline of thought and feeling. He criticized the romantics for the cult of individualism and the disorder of poetic “passions” and, on the contrary, highly regarded Dante, the poets of the era of Queen Elizabeth I and especially John Donne, considering their work a model poetic art. Eliot even made an interesting, if unpromising, attempt to update it in the 20th century. Elizabethan genre - drama in verse: “Murder in the Cathedral” (1935), “Cocktail Reception” (1950), etc. Ideas about the poet’s mission - to preserve, increase and pass on to new generations the heritage of national and world culture embodied in words - equally nourished and his complex philosophical poetry, and the grotesques of the “suinade”, and elegant and humorous stylizations in the spirit of English children's poetry - the cycle “Popular Science of Cats, Written by Old Possum” (1939), which formed the basis for the libretto of the famous musical by E. Lloyd Webber “Cats” "(1981).

At the same time, the reading of the classics proposed in his works is innovative character. In fact, the very idea of the history of literature, which was first presented as holistic process, the logic of which is understood as the development of aesthetic ideas, although they are based on a changing comprehension of the essence of the world and historically determined forms of spiritual and moral orientation. Of particular importance was Eliot's interpretation of the essence of art, which is intended to express “the consciousness of the eternal as well as the consciousness of today - the eternal and the present in their unity.” Great development in works on the theory of literature, the idea of an “objective correlate”, expressed by Eliot in his work on “Hamlet”, was also discussed: it was about the need to strictly coordinate the emotional beginning and the specific recreation of psychological reality, about “formulas of experience” correlated with a certain “sequence” of objects, a situation , a chain of events."

Poet of "The Waste Land"

In your own artistic creativity Eliot sought to eliminate the discrepancy between the sensory and intellectual principles, achieving a synthesis in order to restore weight poetic word, devalued due to romantic “declamation”.

Declaring himself a supporter of classicism in literature, just as he was a supporter of royalism in politics, and a supporter of the “High Church” in religion (collection of essays “In Defense of Lancelot Andrews”, 1928), Eliot as a poet (and in to a lesser extent as a playwright who achieved the most significant heights in the genre of verse drama with complex ethical conflicts - “Murder in the Cathedral”, 1935) appears as an artist who embodied the typical features of the worldview and mentality of his “catastrophic” era. In Eliot's mind, this era was marked by a deep crisis of faith and the collapse of values of a liberal-humanistic nature.

The search for the “exact word” to which Eliot devoted his creative efforts, starting with his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917; the poem that gave the book its title, first used the idea of a mask character, partly a parodic self-portrait), was guided by the consciousness of exhaustion not only stylistics and poetics, which have a romantic origin, but the emptiness of words, and thereby concepts, expressing the doctrine of the progressive course of history, the power of reason, the irreversibility of progress. Eliot contrasted the beliefs that dominated until the disaster of the First World War with ideas that later became the foundation of the philosophical and aesthetic doctrine of modernism. Time was interpreted by him, following the philosophy of A. Bergson, as “real extension”, which had nothing to do with the progression of development; the concept of determinism was opposed by the concept of the chaos of reality. The moment of experience was understood not as orderliness, but as an “amalgam of disparate impressions” that find unity only within the boundaries of “myth”, interpreted by Eliot in an article on “Ulysses” by J. Joyce (1922) as a connection of the logically incompatible in order to give unity to the seemingly incoherent flow of being .

All these ideas are creatively and most fully embodied in the poem “The Waste Land” (1922). Perceived as a manifesto " lost generation", the poem, which consists of several formally unrelated fragments, was, however, not a declaration of "rebellion", but an accurate evidence of the scale and significance of the historical turning point, which for Eliot marked, first of all, the tragic conclusion of a great cultural era, which lasted from the Renaissance and was cut short by the collapse of 1914. The sequence of “masks” (a certain Tiresias observing a crowd of dead on London Bridge after the war, “a blind old man with a wrinkled female breasts", etc.) not only conveys a feeling of deadness and cruel chaos of life, but embodies an important idea for Eliot about the disappearance of the very concept of personality in the world of total alienation, as the poet’s consciousness perceives modernity. Myth becomes the only opportunity to give integrity to the “heap of defeated images”, which are united by the motifs of infertility, the spell cast on the country of the physically weak Fisher King, etc. (these motifs are borrowed from the works of major ethnographers and folklorists J. Fraser and J. Weston). The poem remained an example of intellectual poetry, requiring extensive commentary, which began with the author himself, who wrote the notes.

Breadth of emotional range

Philosophical complexity distinguishes other poetic works Eliot, especially those written before his conversion, heralded by the poem "Ash Wednesday" (1930), where the clash of religious and humanistic principles forms the main "plot". The poem is structured as a prayer for death, intended to become a renewal of life on the path of the sought transcendental harmony. The lyrical intensity of this farewell to a world that has rejected God and yet retains an irresistible appeal for the poet is shaded by direct and hidden reminiscences from Dante: in Eliot’s opinion, “ The Divine Comedy”contains a lesson in the unsurpassed versatility and “breadth of emotional range” that he himself strived for.

The closest he came to it was in “Four Quartets” (1935-42), a cycle compositionally modeled on Beethoven’s quartets and marked by exceptional tension lyrical theme, developed in the context of a story that is experiencing one of its terrible climaxes; Echoes of the Second World War are directly introduced. The tragedy of time deepens and sharpens the poet’s thoughts about the values of earthly existence, death and immortality, removing the touch of metaphysics that distinguished the poems of an earlier period.

In 1915 he married the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer, Vivian Hay-Wood. In the early thirties she fell ill with a mental disorder and was eventually placed in psychiatric clinic. In 1947 she died, Eliot inherited her entire fortune. In 1957 Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, and this marriage was successful.

In 1948 Eliot was awarded Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit. He died in London in January 1965 and was buried in a village in Somersetshire, from where his ancestor E. Eliot emigrated to America in the 17th century.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was American by birth (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant). The Eliot family moved from England to America in the 17th century, which by American standards means belonging to the aristocracy. The poet himself was not exactly burdened by America, but in England, and even in continental Europe, he could breathe much easier, so he moved to London at a young age, subsequently accepted English citizenship and changed his confession to traditional (although not without some opposition) Anglo-Catholicism. AND literary fame Eliot's work began - after the First World War - within the framework of the so-called "lost generation", predominantly English (although such a 100% American as Hemingway also belonged to it). That is, Eliot wrote about the loss of all humanity, all Western civilization- but at first it was perceived precisely as the tragedy of a lost generation.

Eliot was engaged not only in literature, but also in literary construction, or, as we recently began to say, literary construction. He published two literary magazines with a tiny circulation. He grouped around himself extremely few followers and simply admirers in the early years. Served at the same time - until the first literary success- bank clerk. The will to action, intelligence, sarcasm - all of this influenced the public no less than poems and poems, and in combination with them they acted with particular irresistibility. Kipling thundered - Kipling is a bad poet, writing good poems, Eliot said about him. There has been renewed interest in the visionary poet William Blake, who created (like ours Daniil Andreev) an individual cosmogony. In Blake's world, Eliot sarcastically noted, you feel like you're in a kitchen where the table and stools have been put together by the owner of the house - cleverly, of course, but why not buy them at a furniture store and do something more meaningful yourself?

Eliot himself used the “furniture store” constantly: Dante, Shakespeare, the minor Elizabethans, the famous playwrights of antiquity, French poet Laforgue (or Valerie), the American prose writer Henry James, the ancient Indian “Upanishads” and, of course, the Bible (and far from the most “quoted” of its books) - everything was used, mixed and matched. Hence the myth about the extreme complexity, extreme encrypted nature of Eliot's poetry (especially the early one); a myth that in our time, sick with postmodernism and full of all sorts of centons, should be approached with a smile.

Eliot was an innovator, but he was not a pioneer. That honor belongs to Ezra Pound ("a greater master than I," in Eliot's perhaps sincere assessment). Eliot "diluted" Pound's overly concentrated poetics - and achieved relatively widespread success, which fate denied him. It is appropriate for the domestic reader to offer a parallel: Khlebnikov - Pound and Mayakovsky - Eliot, and Eliot’s creative will (which was already discussed above) was, perhaps, no weaker than Mayakovsky’s. And many coinciding themes and motives - anti-bourgeois, anti-clericalism, militant atheism - make the early Eliot similar to the early Mayakovsky. And they came to poetry, even if they were not the same age, almost simultaneously. At the same time, an existential crisis emerged: only they came out of it in different ways - Mayakovsky, who had lost faith in socialism, committed suicide, and Eliot, who had lost faith in his own (imbued with skepticism) creativity, came to God.

This turn was indicated in the poems “Ash Wednesday” and “Four Quartets”: Eliot turned into a Catholic poet... and practically stopped writing poetry. Having remained until the end of his days an extremely revered writer, a living classic, having married seven years before his death - like Goethe - to his own housekeeper - I want to believe, having found peace... But I have ceased to be a poet. Having only composed the comic “Popular Science of Cats” (which served as the libretto for the famous musical), writing several poems for the occasion and four verse dramas, in which - in the newfound Catholic way - he polemicized with Freud. The first poetic drama, or rather tragedy - "Murder in the Cathedral" - is still filled with truly poetic inspiration. And although it is “Ash Wednesday” and especially “The Four Quartets” that are considered in academic literary criticism (and now even more so in our intellectual environment, seized by the New Orthodox fervor) as the peaks of his work, Eliot owes his fame and the enduring relevance of his poems to “Prufrock” and “Sweeney” , “Hollow People” and “The Waste Land” - things against God and mankind. (And here again a parallel with Mayakovsky arises: in the Soviet school they taught “Good” and “Lenin”, and they taught “Cloud in Pants” and “Spine Flute” by heart). True, it should be recognized that Catholicism (unlike Orthodoxy) is immanently characterized by internal restlessness, inescapable internal tension, - and in “Four Quartets” it is also present.

Eliot's poetry is not very translatable: firstly, as noted above, many allusions are not read or simply disappear; secondly, being translated literally (or, more precisely, not radically enough), some of Eliot’s findings look banal in Russian; finally, English poetry as a whole is emotionally poorer and more restrained than Russian - and where the Englishman seems as if he is shouting “at the top of his voice” (another quote from Mayakovsky), it seems to us as if he is just politely asking again, having not understood the first time question asked to him. Fortunately, in this edition it is possible to present a lot of things in two or three translations, which somewhat neutralizes the forced compromise and inferiority of each of them, taken separately. Among the translators of the book are the late Andrei Sergeev (1933-1998), who was the first to publish “his” Eliot as a separate book back in the 60s and revised this edition in 1997, poet, prose writer and memoirist Nina Berberova, experienced translators Sergei Stepanov and Jan Probshtein, and also the compiler of the book. Each of us - like the translators, not included in the book for one reason or another (and in general Eliot was translated relatively little) - has his own Eliot, not similar or not too similar to the Eliot of the others. Dissimilar also rhythmically: Eliot’s original rhythm leaves room for many interpretations. His rhymes can be conveyed in different ways - exact rhyme, inaccurate rhyme, assonance, rhyme. You can save or change the stanza slightly. All this is within the limits of what is theoretically, or rather, traditionally permissible. It’s more difficult with Eliot’s multi-layered vocabulary, variety of intonations, aphorisms or semi-aphorisms: here the reader must rely solely on his own taste, just as each of the translators relied on it when working on poetry. Eliot's poems, both in the original and in translation, require a certain amount of intellectual effort: let us hope that the reader is rewarded for this effort.

The action takes place in England after the First World War. The poem is based on the myth of the search for the Holy Grail and the legend of the poor fisherman. The parts of the poem are fragmentary and do not form a unity.

The poem begins with an epigraph - the myth of the Sibyl. She wished herself eternal life, forgetting to wish for eternal youth: “Otherwise I saw the Cumaean Sibyl in a bottle. The children asked her: “Sibyl, what do you want?”, and she answered: “I want to die.”

Part I. Burial of the dead

The cruel month of April forces nature to awaken from winter sleep: flowers and trees grow from dead earth. It's raining in the city of Starnbergersee. Marie and her friend are sitting in a cafe and talking. Marie talks about how she went sledding in the mountains with her cousin.

In Part I, Sibyl turns into the fortune teller Madame Sosostris. She has a bad cold, but, nevertheless, she makes a prediction on the cards to the person who came to her. He must die from the water: “Here,” she says, “here is your card - a drowned man, a Phoenician sailor... / But I don’t see the Hanged Man. Your death is by water."

The image of London - a ghostly city where the war took place. The sailor calls out to Stetson's acquaintance and asks him whether the dead man who was buried in the garden a year ago has sprouted: “Will he flourish this year - / Or perhaps an unexpected frost has struck his bed?” The sailor receives no answer.

Part II. Game of chess

The couple plays chess in complete silence, waiting for a knock on the door. They have nothing to talk about with each other. The room is described: an aquarium without fish, a painting depicting the transformation of Philomela into a nightingale, scolded by the rapist king. Finally, Lil’s acquaintance comes in, and the hostess advises her that before her husband Albert arrives from the front, she should put herself in order and put her jaw back in place, otherwise he will leave for someone else:

Lil, take everything out and make plug-ins.
He said: I can’t look at you.
And I can't, I say, think about Albert,
He wasted three years in the trenches, he wants to live,
If not with you, there will be others.

Lil is 31 years old, she gave birth to five children, and in last time was near death. Albert returns on Sunday.

Part III. Fire sermon.

At night, a fisherman fishes from the bank of the Thames. He thinks about King Tireus, who dishonored Philomela.

Mr. Eugenides - the "one-eyed merchant" from Madame Sozostris' fortune telling - invites a man to the Cannon Street Hotel.

The third part ends with a call to God to free the burning man from asceticism.

Part I. Burial of the dead

The cruel month of April forces nature to awaken from its winter sleep: flowers and trees grow from the dead earth. It's raining in the city of Starnbergersee. Marie and her friend are sitting in a cafe and talking. Marie talks about how she went sledding in the mountains with her cousin.

Part II. Game of chess

Lil, take everything out and make plug-ins.

He said: I can’t look at you.

And I can't, I say, think about Albert,

He wasted three years in the trenches, he wants to live,

If not with you, there will be others.

Lil was 31 years old, had given birth to five children, and was last close to death. Albert returns on Sunday.

Part III. Fire sermon.

At night, a fisherman fishes from the bank of the Thames. He thinks about King Tireus, who dishonored Philomela.

Mr. Eugenides - the "one-eyed merchant" from Madame Sozostris' fortune telling - invites a man to the Cannon Street Hotel.

In this part of the poem, the Sibyl is the female hypostasis of the blind soothsayer Tiresias: “I, Tiresias, am a prophet trembling between the sexes / A blind old man with a wrinkled female breast. / In the purple hour, I see how people / Having finished with their affairs, are drawn to their houses...” Tiresias predicts the meeting between the typist and the sailor: he caresses her, she dispassionately endures his caresses. When the sailor leaves, the typist sighs with relief and turns on the gramophone. The typist recalls the facts of her biography. She was subjected to debauchery in Richmond, in Moorgate, on Moorgate beach. The third part ends with a call to God to free the burning man from asceticism. Part IV. Death by water. Phlebus the Phoenician dies in the water after two weeks. His body is gnawed by the sea current. The author calls on everyone to honor the deceased Phlebus: “Remember Phlebus: he was full of strength and beauty.” Part V What did the thunder say? The last part of the poem begins with a description of the barren land: thunderclaps in dead mountains, there is no water here, only rocks, stones, sand underfoot, dry grass, cracks in the soil. Someone else is walking next to the two heroes across the barren land. But they don't know him, they don't see his face. They hear thunder in the purple sky, see an incomprehensible city over the mountains, pass Jerusalem, Athens, and ghostly London. They see in a crevice of rocks an empty chapel with broken windows and a cemetery: In this putrefactive depression between the mountains, the grass sings in the weak moonlight to the drooping graves near the chapel - This is an empty chapel, a dwelling of the wind, The windows are broken, the door is swinging. And only here the grass grows and the rain begins. And then the thunder says: “Yes. What have we given? - the blood of Jesus Christ, “the blood of a trembling heart,” which no one will find. But many are looking for it, considering the blood of Jesus the key to life. The poem ends with the fisherman sitting by the canal, fishing and wondering if he will restore order to his lands and the fact that London Bridge is collapsing.