Vera Muromtseva biography Sturm Vsevolod Nikolaevich. Great love story

Evgeny SHKLOVSKY

At the turn of the era: A. Kuprin and L. Andreev

These two names - Alexander Kuprin and Leonid Andreev - were considered perhaps the most famous at the beginning of the twentieth century. K. Chukovsky in his Diary tells how passionately jealous I. Bunin was of the success of his friend L. Andreev, who at that time was a star of the first magnitude and enjoyed such undoubted fame that Bunin was insultingly not noticed next to him.

Now the table of ranks has changed somewhat, and it is I. Bunin who is listed among the classics - A. Kuprin and L. Andreev have moved into the background. Nevertheless, it was they who were both the rulers of thoughts and the trendsetters of literary fashion in that memorable era when Russian art flourished, now known as “ silver Age”, gave the world so many famous names and artistic discoveries, which in many ways became Starting point for the aesthetic quest of the entire twentieth century.

True, at that time both A. Kuprin and L. Andreev suffered from criticism, and quite strongly. Re-read D. Merezhkovsky’s brilliant article “In the Monkey’s Paws”, and you will see that there were grounds for such criticism. Examples of L. Andreev’s style, his “flowers of eloquence”, given by Merezhkovsky, remain quite convincing today: “an eternally mysterious and alluring garden”, “sharp melancholy”, “burning memory”, “silent creative thought”, “spontaneous immense thought” and so on - this writer really has a lot of such rhetoric. L. Tolstoy’s phrase that L. Andreev scares, but he is not afraid, has also become popular.

However, the same Merezhkovsky, trying to unravel the mystery of L. Andreev’s popularity, his subjugation of the reader, even the most demanding, power, notes: “L. Andreev’s works resemble letters from suicides: “Under lies there is truth, like fire under ashes; You can’t see the fire, but if you touch it, it will burn.”

L. Andreev’s works still burn today - evidence of the truth of the writer’s experience and something else that goes beyond the scope of art. L. Andreev touched on some general pain points, some nerve nodes of a person’s sense of self at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was full of catastrophic premonitions and knew how to express this in such a way that people who decided to commit suicide sent him their suicide letters.

As for A. Kuprin, whom criticism strictly reprimanded for everyday life and down-to-earthness, melodrama and imitation, his works continue to captivate with their authenticity, taste for life and amazing knowledge of reality in its smallest details, so that even today they seem to be an example of honest and good realistic art. letters.

Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870–1938) was born in the city of Narovchatov, Penza province, into a poor family; His father, a minor official, died when his son was in his second year. The mother, from a Tatar princely family, became poor after the death of her husband and was forced to send her son to an orphan school for minors, then a gymnasium, later transformed into a cadet school, in preparation for a military career. However, without entering the military academy (this was prevented by a scandal associated with the violent, especially drunk, temper of a cadet who threw a policeman into the water), A. Kuprin resigned and, greedy for impressions, began to lead a wandering lifestyle, trying out different professions - from a loader to a dentist. Autobiographical life material formed the basis of many of his works.

Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev (1871–1918) came from the family of an Oryol land surveyor and the daughter of a Polish landowner. Already in his student years, studying to become a lawyer in St. Petersburg, from where he was expelled for non-payment, and then at Moscow University, he worked in the newspaper field, earning extra money by reporting court reports and feuilletons. He considered the experience of working in a newspaper to be extremely useful for artistic creativity, his own first prose works, dedicated to the life of the lower social classes, were published in newspapers, bringing him, like A. Kuprin, closer to writers realistic direction, grouped around M. Gorky. It was the latter who contributed to the publication of the first book of stories by L. Andreev (1901) in the publishing house “Znanie”, which received favorable responses from critics and contemporary writers (L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov and others), and for a long time remained his closest friend, although later they sharply separated.

The figures of A. Kuprin and L. Andreev were extremely colorful.

Here are a few touches to their appearance.

I. Bunin about A. Kuprin:

“...Alexander Ivanovich was very proud of his Tatar blood. At one time (during his greatest glory) he even wore a colored skullcap, wore it on visits and in restaurants, where he sat as widely and importantly as befitted a real khan, and squinted his eyes especially narrowly. It was the time when publishers of newspapers, magazines and collections chased him in reckless driving around these restaurants, where he spent days and nights with his casual and regular drinking companions...”

K. Chukovsky about L. Andreev:

“...He was a nobleman in every gesture. His beautiful, chiseled, decorative face, slender, slightly corpulent figure, dignified, light gait - all this was very much in harmony with the role of the stately duke, which he had recently played so excellently. This was his signature role; he organically grew together with her. He was one of those talented, ambitious, pompous people who long to be captains on every ship, bishops in every cathedral. He couldn’t stand second roles in everything, even in playing small towns; he wanted to be first and only.”

The playful, artistic principle was inherent in both of them and was expressed in their own way in their work.

If A. Kuprin, who had remarkable physical strength and explosive temperament, greedily rushed towards any new life experience, then L. Andreev, endowed with a rich imagination, only needed an insignificant detail to build an entire plot on it. One knew life thoroughly, approached it as a researcher, seeking the most complete and detailed knowledge possible, acutely felt the world in all its sensory diversity; for another, knowledge of reality served mainly as an impetus for philosophical generalizations and the posing of “damned questions” about life and death, loneliness and alienation, love and hate, feeling and reason.

In addition to literature, L. Andreev, for example, drew wonderfully, was fond of color photography, gramophones, and loved everything huge; the castle house that he built on the crest of literary success own project in the remote Finnish village of Raivola and where he lived until last day, visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg from time to time, it amazed me with its enormity and exoticism. There were always a lot of people hanging around in it - big family, children (the writer’s sons - both later writers: Vadim, 1902-1976, poet, memoirist; Daniil, 1906-1959, famous poet-thinker), newspapermen, guests, and among this noisy gyration - Andreev in a black velvet jacket, internally lonely , living his dark fantasies and dreams.

A. Kuprin went underwater in a diving suit, flew in an airplane (this flight ended in a disaster that almost cost Kuprin his life), organized an athletic society... During the First World War, a private hospital organized by him and his wife was set up in his Gatchina house . The writer was interested in people of various professions: engineers, organ grinders, fishermen, card sharpers, beggars, monks, businessmen, spies... In order to get to know the person he was interested in more reliably, to feel the air he breathed, he was ready, without sparing himself, to go into the most unimaginable adventure.

There were legends about the turbulent life of Kuprin and Andreev, reporters pursued them, surrounding the already big names with the most incredible rumors and fables.

Dissatisfaction with the existing order of things pulled both writers towards revolution, so they paid tribute to revolutionary sentiments, both were sympathetic to the revolutionaries and actively helped them. L. Andreev, in whose apartment the Central Committee of the RSDLP at one time met, even spent a short time in prison. However, after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, their hopes for democratic changes in the country greatly weakened, and artistic interests, like most of the intelligentsia of that troubled time, shifted from social protest and criticism to the study of the contradictions of the person himself, his ideas and passions. At first they were part of the circle of writers of the realistic trend “Sreda” (N. Teleshov, I. Bunin, E. Chirikov, Skitalets and others), they gradually broke away from it, moving in independent ways.

In addition to his own creativity, L. Andreev was actively involved in journalistic and publishing activities. The “Rosehip”, which he led, published books by well-known writers of that time, and not only of a realistic orientation. Kuprin also practiced journalism, publishing articles and reports in various newspapers, and traveled a lot, living in Moscow, near Ryazan, in Balaklava, and in Gatchina, where he decided to settle for a long time...

Greeted February revolution, to the Bolshevik revolution and to the power of the Bolsheviks both famous writer reacted strongly negatively. True, A. Kuprin initially tried to cooperate with them and even intended to publish a peasant newspaper “Earth,” for which he met with Lenin. But soon he unexpectedly switches sides White movement, and after his defeat he left first for Finland and then for France, where he settled in Paris until 1937. There he actively participated in the anti-Bolshevik press, continued his literary work (novels “The Wheel of Time”, “Junker”, “Zhaneta”, articles and stories), suffering from lack of demand, isolation from his native soil and poverty, and shortly before his death, sick, tired , believing Soviet propaganda, returned with his wife to Russia.

L. Andreev remained in Finland until his death (he died of heart disease). Alone in his huge, suddenly empty, cold and slowly collapsing house, having lost touch with the country, he watched with pain and anxiety the massacres in Bolshevik Russia (articles “S.O.S.” and “Europe in Danger”).

A. Kuprin and L. Andreev’s acute feeling of the injustice of the world began with the traditional for Russian literature sympathetic portrayal of the “little” man and the inert, wretched environment in which he has to drag out his miserable fate. In A. Kuprin, this sympathy was expressed not only in the depiction of the bottom of society (the novel about the life of prostitutes “The Pit” and others), but also in the images of his intelligent, suffering heroes.

Engineer Bobrov (the story “Moloch”), endowed with a trembling soul, responsive to the pain of others, worries about the workers wasting their lives in backbreaking factory work, while the rich are fattening on ill-gotten money. This may seem surprising, but A. Kuprin, with his passionate, carnal (it is no coincidence that the naturalistic tendency is strong in his work) love of life, was inclined precisely to such reflective, nervous to the point of hysteria, not devoid of sentimentality heroes.

Even his characters from a military environment, like Romashov or Nazansky (the story “The Duel”), have a very high pain threshold and a small margin of safety to withstand the vulgarity, cynicism and mustiness of their environment. Just as Bobrov is disturbed by the erupting self-interest and vulgarity of his beloved, so Romashov is sick of stupidity military service, debauchery of officers, downtrodden soldiers. Perhaps none of the writers made such a passionate accusation against the army environment as A. Kuprin.

True, in his portrayal of ordinary people, A. Kuprin differed from the populist-oriented writers inclined to people-worship (although he received the approval of the venerable populist critic N. Mikhailovsky). His democracy was not limited to a tearful demonstration of their “humiliation and insult.” Kuprin’s simple man turned out to be not only weak, but also capable of standing up for himself, possessing an enviable inner strength. Folk life appeared in his works in its free, spontaneous, natural flow, with its own circle of ordinary worries - not only sorrows, but also joys and consolations.

At the same time, the writer saw not only its bright sides and healthy beginnings, but also outbursts of aggressiveness and cruelty, easily guided by dark, bloodthirsty instincts (the famous description of the Jewish pogrom in the story “Gambrinus”).

And, perhaps, few people in the literature of that time, like A. Kuprin, so persistently tried to free the love of a man and a woman from the shackles of vulgarity and cynicism, to romanticize it, to return its humanity and poetry. “The Garnet Bracelet” has become for many readers just such a work, where a pure, selfless, selfless, ideal feeling is glorified.

In many of A. Kuprin’s works, the presence of this ideal, romantic principle is clearly felt - it is both in his craving for heroic plots, and in his desire to see the highest manifestations of the human spirit - in love, creativity, kindness... It is no coincidence that he often chose heroes falling out, breaking out of the usual rut of life, seeking truth and seeking some other, more complete and living being, freedom, beauty, grace...

A brilliant depicter of the morals of various strata of society, A. Kuprin vividly, with particular attention, described the environment and everyday life. From his works one can imagine in detail the style of life of that time.

At the same time, like no one else, he knew how to feel from the inside the flow of natural, natural life - his stories “Barbos and Zhulka”, “Emerald” were included in the golden fund of works about animals. The ideal of natural life (the story “Olesya”) is very important for A. Kuprin as a kind of desired norm; he often highlights modern life with it, finding in it sad deviations from this ideal.

For many critics, it was precisely this natural, organic perception of A. Kuprin’s life, the healthy joy of being, that was the main distinguishing quality of his prose with its harmonious fusion of lyricism and romance, plot-compositional proportionality, dramatic action and accuracy in descriptions.

Alexander Kuprin is an excellent master not only literary landscape and everything related to the external, visual and olfactory perception of life (I. Bunin and A. Kuprin competed to see who could more accurately determine the smell of a particular phenomenon), but also of a literary nature: portrait, psychology, speech - everything has been worked out by this writer down to the smallest nuances. Moreover, he chooses very different heroes - from a reflective intellectual to a circus athlete or a racehorse. And every time we, as readers, feel not just the individual law of this particular character, but also the warmth of his inner life, the organics of its life.

It is also significant that even the most seemingly primitive creatures reveal complexity and depth in A. Kuprin, and the narrative, as a rule, is very spectacular, often addressed - unobtrusively and without false speculativeness - specifically to problems of an existential nature. He reflects on love, hatred, the will to live, despair, strength and weakness of man.

It is no coincidence that L. Tolstoy, who followed the “new” Russian literature, singled out the author of “The Duel.” “A. Kuprin - a real artist, an enormous talent,” he said. “Raises questions of life that are deeper than those of his brothers...”

No matter what negative aspects of life A. Kuprin portrays, the joy of life and greed for its “classical gifts” are so strong in his works that even the darkest of his works still leave a bright impression and carry a charge of cheerfulness. As one of Kuprin’s heroic reasoners, the drunken Lieutenant Nazansky, says, “the main thing is don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid of life: it’s a fun, entertaining, wonderful thing - this life...”

Unlike A. Kuprin, the first and main motive of L. Andreev’s work was the motive of fear of life. In the story “At the Window” small man, a petty official Andrei Nikolaevich, with horror in his voice, complains to his beloved, “what a strange and terrible thing life is, in which there are so many unexpected and incomprehensible things. People live and die and do not know today that they will die tomorrow.” In his lamentations there is also a social motive - that the strong and rude go straight ahead, trampling the weak. Over time, it is precisely the motive of metaphysical horror before the accidents of life and inexorable death in L. Andreev that almost completely replaces the social one.

The melancholy of everyday life described by L. Andreev, which initially had a social connotation, turns into metaphysical melancholy. The horror of existence, existential fears and anxieties of a person in a godless world, in a world of total silence, become the main theme of the writer.

To enhance the sound of this theme, L. Andreev in a number of stories makes the main character a priest (“Silence”, “The Life of Basil of Thebes”), upon whom all sorts of troubles and misfortunes befall, as if testing not only his faith, but also human nature itself.

At the heart of each such story is a dispute with the biblical myth about the righteous Job, who suffered terrible misfortunes and was rewarded for his humility. First, Vasily of Fiveysky’s son drowns, then another son is born - an idiot, his wife becomes an alcoholic and dies in a fire, but he tries, despite all these misfortunes, to maintain faith and in his persistence reaches the messianic feeling that he can perform miracles with his will, and even tries to revive the dead . However, defeat awaits him. Overwhelmed by his failure, he goes crazy and dies.

The total fiasco of a deeply religious person, whom even faith cannot save, is a variation of the same theme - the horror of life-to-death, devoid of any transpersonal meaning. In the fate of Vasily of Thebes, misfortunes are forced one after another, but the strength of Andreev’s writing here is not even in this, but in those narrative angles and techniques that he finds to express the horror of the absurdity of existence.

Here, for example, is one of them, acquiring an almost cosmic scale: “Another year passed in a heavy stupor of grief, and when people woke up and looked around them, a terrible image of an idiot dominated all their thoughts and lives. As before, the stoves were heated, and the household was carried on, and people talked about their affairs, but there was something new and terrible: no one had the desire to live, and from this everything fell into disorder.”

The particular is not simply generalized, but grows into a symbol. The image of grief takes on more and more tragic, gloomy tones, and L. Andreev does not know the extent of this. His idiot child turns into a kind of incarnation of hell: a small skull with a huge, motionless and wide face, looking like a terrible mask, hands with predatorily curled fingers, he screams with an angry, animal cry, bares his teeth like a dog and bites...

L. Andreev is closely within the realistic framework, he intensifies expression, uses naturalistic details, sometimes falling into obvious literaryism, or even bad taste.

However, he also finds some forms that foreshadow future discoveries of Russian literature (I. Babel, A. Platonov) with its romantic cosmic nature and the tongue-tied inner speech of the character dissolved in the narrative. “And he thought that if someone dug a grave, threw this woman there with his own hands and covered her alive with earth, he would have done well,” This is how Fiveysky thinks about his wife who is drinking too much.

Realistically oriented criticism associated such trends with the decadent, decadent moods of the turn of the century; in fact, L. Andreev not only moved in line with the artistic searches of Western European literature (E. Poe, E. Verhaerne, M. Maeterlinck, A. Strindberg and others) , but also anticipated some future trends in world art (expressionism, philosophical prose and the drama of existentialism).

There was also a premonition in his work of those catastrophic events that befell Russia in the twentieth century.

Death becomes one of the main characters of L. Andreev, she stands in the corner of every house, her ghost strangles his heroes with “impenetrable darkness of horror,” like the minister from “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men,” who learned about the terrorist attempt on his life.

Under the influence of this horror, the human body itself becomes a threat and a burden, since it is still filled with the same “mortal moisture.” L. Andreev’s flesh is “evil meat” precisely because of its frailty and defenselessness in front of “some thin, stupid aorta that suddenly cannot stand it and bursts, like a tightly stretched glove on chubby fingers.”

However, L. Andreev contrasts the “evil meat” with the same body, but enlightened by a love impulse and ennobled by spiritual warmth: for example, in “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men,” one of the condemned, Musya, kisses the robber Gypsy, and the unbending terrorist Werner squeezes his limp hand with his hot palms the killer of Janson, paralyzed by the terror of death. These touches of hands and lips become for the writer a sign of a higher human community, which knows no social barriers and is capable of warming human soul even in the face of nothingness.

Eonid Andreev is a poet of confusion and fear. Childish, spontaneous, unaccountable fear, which he tries to give “adulthood” with his favorite words like “crazy”, “tormenting”, “immense” and the like. There is some hysteria and lack of motivation in his descriptions of these threshold psychological states.

What is new in his method is the separation from social and everyday motivations. Man himself turns out to be a toy in the hands of dark forces - from external to internal, a toy of his own uncontrollable passions. This is how the poor man Janson acts in “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men,” who stabbed his owner to death for money and attempted to rape his owner. Subject to instinct, he does not even realize the immorality of his actions. The same thing happens in the sensational story “The Abyss,” where a student, following the hooligans, rapes his own beloved.

The man depicted by L. Andreev is defenseless against these faceless dark forces: he is terrible in his unpredictability, he is pitiful in his weakness. Pessimistic moods take over in the writer’s work, presenting life as chaos and an uncontrollable element. The irrationality of existence, the loneliness of a person who is unable to find harmony and uses reason to harm himself, are L. Andreev’s main motives.

Leonid Andreev works in contrasts: impenetrable darkness and blinding light, dirt and purity, beauty and ugliness, warmth and cold, inconsolable grief and sparkling joy, rise and fall, rebellion and meekness - everything is nearby, hand in hand. The writer exaggerates the colors, taking them to extremes, like human conditions. He often depicts the eyes of his characters - “black, bottomless pupils”, in which “an abyss of horror and madness.” His images are condensed into allegories and symbols: “red laughter”, “abyss”, “Someone in gray” and the like. For his works, he chooses human crisis states: anticipation of death, illness, death, and so on. As a writer, L. Andreev does not recognize average states; the basis of his artistic world is precisely extremity; “madness” is one of the main keywords.

However, the more allegorical and abstract L. Andreev’s prose becomes, the more it loses its power and persuasiveness. The early L. Andreev in this regard outperforms the later, although it is the later who tries to push the boundaries of the realistic canon - not so much to reflect as to express, capturing the reader with his subjective vision and subordinating him to his emotions.

The repulsion from everyday life, the desire for philosophical problems attracted L. Andreev to other genres, and above all to drama, where the conventions are more organic. His plays, as well as his prose, combined realistic tendencies (“Days of Our Lives”, “Anfisa”, “Professor Storitsyn”, “Ekaterina Ivanovna”, “The One Who Gets Slapped”) with symbolic-allegorical ones, based on artistic experience ancient tragedy and medieval mystery, highlighting the problems of good and evil, harmony and chaos, fate and individual will, rebellion and obedience, reason and feeling (“Human Life”, “Tsar Famine”, “Anatema”, “Thought” and others ). L. Andreev combines godless motives with anti-bourgeois pathos; he also had a negative attitude towards individualistic morality, considering it a manifestation of intellectual philistinism.

As K. Chukovsky noted, L. Andreev was “a tragedian by his very essence,” and his “purely theatrical talent, attracted... to traditional exaggerated forms, was best suited for metaphysical-tragic plots.”

despite their differences art worlds and manners, both writers - A. Kuprin and L. Andreev - remained in the history of Russian literature as deep exponents of the alarming mentality of the early twentieth century, as well as the ideological, philosophical and artistic quest of literature itself, its tragic forebodings and omens, its moral and social sensitivity. Many of their works continue to be read today - not only as a talented depiction of the then Russian life, but also as a reproduction of the complex spiritual world of man at the turn of eras.

These two names - Alexander Kuprin and Leonid Andreev - at the beginning of the twentieth century were considered perhaps the loudest. K. Chukovsky in his Diary tells how passionately jealous I. Bunin was of the success of his friend L. Andreev, who at that time was a star of the first magnitude and enjoyed such undoubted fame that Bunin was insultingly not noticed next to him.

Now the table of ranks has changed somewhat, and it is I. Bunin who is listed among the classics - A. Kuprin and L. Andreev have moved into the background. Nevertheless, it was they who were both the rulers of thought and the trendsetters of literary fashion in that memorable era when the flowering of Russian art, now known as the “Silver Age,” gave the world so many famous names and artistic discoveries, which in many ways became the starting point for the aesthetic quest of everything XX century.

True, at that time both A. Kuprin and L. Andreev suffered from criticism, and quite strongly. Re-read D. Merezhkovsky’s brilliant article “In the Monkey’s Paws”, and you will see that there were grounds for such criticism. Examples of L. Andreev’s style, his “flowers of eloquence”, given by Merezhkovsky, remain quite convincing today: “an eternally mysterious and alluring garden”, “sharp melancholy”, “burning memory”, “silent creative thought”, “spontaneous immense thought” and so on - this writer really has a lot of similar rhetoric. L. Tolstoy’s phrase that L. Andreev scares, but he is not afraid, has also become popular.

L. Andreev’s works still burn today - evidence of the truth of the writer’s experience and something else that goes beyond the scope of art. L. Andreev touched on some common pain points, some nerve nodes of a person’s sense of self at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was full of catastrophic premonitions and knew how to express this in such a way that people who decided to take their own lives sent him their suicide letters.

Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938) was born in the city of Narovchatov, Penza province, into a poor family; His father, a minor official, died when his son was in his second year. The mother, from a Tatar princely family, became poor after the death of her husband and was forced to send her son to an orphan school for minors, then a gymnasium, later transformed into a cadet school, in preparation for a military career. However, without entering military academy(this was prevented by a scandal associated with the violent temper of a cadet, especially when drunk, who threw a policeman into the water), A. Kuprin resigned and, greedy for impressions, began to lead a wandering lifestyle, trying different professions - from a loader to a dentist. Autobiographical life material formed the basis of many of his works.

Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev (1871-1918) came from the family of an Oryol land surveyor and the daughter of a Polish landowner. Already in his student years, studying to become a lawyer in St. Petersburg, from where he was expelled for non-payment, and then at Moscow University, he worked in the newspaper field, earning extra money by reporting court reports and feuilletons. He considered the experience of working in a newspaper to be extremely useful for artistic creativity; the newspapers also published his own first prose works, dedicated to the life of the lower social classes, which brought him, like A. Kuprin, closer to the writers of the realistic movement grouped around M. Gorky. It was the latter who contributed to the publication of the first book of stories by L. Andreev (1901) in the publishing house “Znanie”, which received favorable responses from critics and contemporary writers (L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov and others), and for a long time remained his closest friend, although later they sharply separated.

The figures of A. Kuprin and L. Andreev were extremely colorful.

Here are a few touches to their appearance.

I. Bunin about A. Kuprin:

K. Chukovsky about L. Andreev:

The playful, artistic principle was inherent in both of them and was expressed in their own way in their work.

If A. Kuprin, who possessed remarkable physical strength and explosive temperament, greedily rushed towards any new life experience, then for L. Andreev, endowed with a rich imagination, an insignificant detail was enough to build a whole plot on it. One knew life thoroughly, approached it as a researcher, seeking the most complete and detailed knowledge possible, acutely felt the world in all its sensory diversity; for another, knowledge of reality served mainly as an impetus for philosophical generalizations and the posing of “damned questions” about life and death, loneliness and alienation, love and hate, feeling and reason.

In addition to literature, L. Andreev, for example, drew wonderfully, was fond of color photography, gramophones, and loved everything huge; The castle house, which he built on the crest of literary success according to his own design in the remote Finnish village of Raivola and where he lived until his last day, occasionally visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg, amazed with its enormity and exoticism. There were always a lot of people hanging around in it - a large family, children (the writer’s sons - both later writers: Vadim, 1902-1976, poet, memoirist; Daniil, 1906-1959, famous poet-thinker), newspapermen, guests, and among this noisy movement - Andreev in a black velvet jacket, internally lonely, living his dark fantasies and dreams.

There were legends about the turbulent life of Kuprin and Andreev, reporters pursued them, surrounding the already big names with the most incredible rumors and fables.

Dissatisfaction with the existing order of things pulled both writers towards revolution, so they paid tribute to revolutionary sentiments, both were sympathetic to the revolutionaries and actively helped them. L. Andreev, in whose apartment the Central Committee of the RSDLP at one time met, even spent a short time in prison. However, after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, their hopes for democratic changes in the country greatly weakened, and the artistic interests, like those of a large part of the intelligentsia of that troubled time, shifted from social protest and criticism to the study of the contradictions of the person himself, his ideas and passions. At first they were part of the circle of writers of the realistic trend “Sreda” (N. Teleshov, I. Bunin, E. Chirikov, Skitalets and others), they gradually broke away from it, moving in independent ways.

Having welcomed the February Revolution, both famous writers reacted sharply negatively to the Bolshevik revolution and the power of the Bolsheviks. True, A. Kuprin initially tried to cooperate with them and even intended to publish a peasant newspaper “Earth,” for which he met with Lenin. But soon he unexpectedly went over to the side of the White movement, and after its defeat he left first for Finland and then for France, where he settled in Paris until 1937. There he actively participated in the anti-Bolshevik press, continued his literary work (novels “The Wheel of Time”, “Junker”, “Zhaneta”, articles and stories), suffering from lack of demand, isolation from his native soil and poverty, and shortly before his death, sick, tired , believing Soviet propaganda, returned with his wife to Russia.

Even his characters from a military environment, like Romashov or Nazansky (the story “The Duel”), have a very high pain threshold and a small margin of safety to withstand the vulgarity, cynicism and mustiness of their environment. Just as Bobrov is disturbed by the erupting selfishness and vulgarity of his beloved, so Romashov is sickened by the stupidity of military service, the depravity of the officers, and the downtroddenness of the soldiers. Perhaps none of the writers made such a passionate accusation army environment, like A. Kuprin.

True, in his portrayal of ordinary people, A. Kuprin differed from the populist-oriented writers inclined to people-worship (although he received the approval of the venerable populist critic N. Mikhailovsky). His democracy was not limited to a tearful demonstration of their “humiliation and insult.” Kuprin’s simple man turned out to be not only weak, but also capable of standing up for himself, possessing an enviable inner strength. People's life appeared in his works in its free, spontaneous, natural flow, with its own circle of ordinary worries - not only sorrows, but also joys and consolations.

At the same time, like no one else, he knew how to feel from within the flow of natural, natural life- his stories “Barbos and Zhulka”, “Emerald” were included in the golden fund of works about animals. The ideal of natural life (the story “Olesya”) is very important for A. Kuprin as a kind of desired norm; he often highlights modern life with it, finding in it sad deviations from this ideal.

Alexander Kuprin is an excellent master not only of literary landscape and everything related to the external, visual and olfactory perception of life (I. Bunin and A. Kuprin competed to see who could more accurately determine the smell of a particular phenomenon), but also of a literary nature: portrait, psychology, speech - everything from this writer is worked out to the smallest nuances. Moreover, he chooses very different heroes - from a reflective intellectual to a circus athlete or a racehorse. And every time we, as readers, feel not just the individual law of this particular character, but also the warmth of his inner life, the organic nature of his life.

It is also significant that even the most seemingly primitive creatures reveal complexity and depth in A. Kuprin, and the narrative, as a rule, is very spectacular, often addressed - unobtrusively and without false speculativeness - precisely to problems of an existential nature. He reflects on love, hatred, the will to live, despair, strength and weakness of man.

It is no coincidence that L. Tolstoy, who followed the “new” Russian literature, singled out the author of “The Duel.” “A. Kuprin is a real artist, a tremendous talent,” he said. “Raises questions of life that are deeper than those of his fellows...”

Unlike A. Kuprin, the first and main motive of L. Andreev’s work was the motive of fear of life. In the story “At the Window,” a small man, a petty official Andrei Nikolaevich, with horror in his voice, complains to his beloved, “what a strange and terrible thing life is, in which there is so much that is unexpected and incomprehensible. People live and die and do not know today that they will die tomorrow.” In his lamentations there is also a social motive - that the strong and rude go straight ahead, trampling the weak. Over time, it is precisely the motive of metaphysical horror before the accidents of life and inexorable death in L. Andreev that almost completely replaces the social one.

At the heart of each such story is a dispute with the biblical myth about the righteous Job, who suffered terrible misfortunes and was rewarded for his humility. Vasily of Fiveysky's son first drowns, then another son is born - an idiot, his wife becomes an alcoholic and dies in a fire, but he tries, despite all these misfortunes, to maintain faith and in his persistence reaches the messianic feeling that he can perform miracles with his will, and even tries to revive the dead . However, defeat awaits him. Overwhelmed by his failure, he goes crazy and dies.

The particular is not simply generalized, but grows into a symbol. The image of grief takes on more and more tragic, gloomy tones, and L. Andreev does not know the extent of this. His idiot child turns into a kind of fiend of hell: a small skull with a huge, motionless and wide face, like a terrible mask, hands with predatorily curled fingers, he screams with an angry, animal cry, bares his teeth like a dog and bites...

L. Andreev is closely within the realistic framework, he intensifies expression, uses naturalistic details, sometimes falling into obvious literaryism, or even bad taste.

There was also a premonition in his work of those catastrophic events that befell Russia in the twentieth century.

Under the influence of this horror itself human body becomes a threat and a burden, since it is still filled with the same “mortal moisture”. L. Andreev’s flesh is “evil meat” precisely because of its frailty and defenselessness in front of “some thin, stupid aorta that suddenly cannot stand it and bursts, like a tightly stretched glove on chubby fingers.”

However, L. Andreev contrasts the “evil meat” with the same body, but enlightened by a love impulse and ennobled by spiritual warmth: for example, in “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men,” one of the condemned, Musya, kisses the robber Gypsy, and the unbending terrorist Werner squeezes his limp hand with his hot palms the killer of Janson, paralyzed by the terror of death. These touches of hands and lips become for the writer a sign of a higher human community that knows no social barriers, capable of warming the human soul even in the face of oblivion.

The repulsion from everyday life, the desire for philosophical problems attracted L. Andreev to other genres, and above all to drama, where the conventions are more organic. His plays, as well as his prose, combined realistic tendencies (“Days of Our Lives”, “Anfisa”, “Professor Storitsyn”, “Ekaterina Ivanovna”, “The One Who Gets Slapped”) with symbolic-allegorical ones, based on artistic experience ancient tragedy and medieval mystery, highlighting the problems of good and evil, harmony and chaos, fate and individual will, rebellion and obedience, reason and feeling (“Human Life”, “Tsar Famine”, “Anatema”, “Thought” and others). L. Andreev combines godless motives with anti-bourgeois pathos; he also had a negative attitude towards individualistic morality, considering it a manifestation of intellectual philistinism.

Despite the difference in their artistic worlds and manners, both writers - A. Kuprin and L. Andreev - remained in the history of Russian literature as deep exponents of the alarming mentality of the early twentieth century, as well as the ideological, philosophical and artistic quest of literature itself, its tragic premonitions and foreshadowing, her moral and social sensitivity. Many of their works continue to be read today - not only as a talented depiction of Russian life at that time, but also as a reproduction of the complex spiritual world of man at the turn of eras.

Turning point The character of the era left its mark on the life of art at the turn of the century. During this period, he became a realist. l-re occurrence. intensive search for a new theme, a new hero, something perfect. experiments and discoveries. R-zm at the turn of the century changed: its problems and some of them changed. thin pr-py. The fundamental change concerned the problem of “h-ka and the environment.” Hero beginning opposition to it and this phenomenon is no longer isolated. To the foreground in real life. l-re has come to the fore, awakening people's self-awareness, thirst is active. activities, social and pestilence updates. For lit. the process of the turn of the century was characterized by heated debate between representatives of the real. and modernistic l-r and separate current modern inside direction Among realists there is a debate about Russian. national har-re and about sp-ti rus. Let's get to the update. Basic Real's dispute with Gorky was Gorky's concept of h-ka as a creator and active. life builder. Hood. folding method Gorky TV, received. called a socialist. r-zma.

A.I. Kuprin (1870-1938) b. in the family of a minor official, orphaned early, in 1880 he entered. to Moscow military academic Since 1891 service. in the provinces, and in 1894 he retired with the rank of lieutenant. In 1889 b. published 1st part “About the suicide of a provincial actress”, “1st debut”. From 1894-99 retried. lots of activities. With 94 employees in Kyiv newspapers, where they are published. everyday life sketches and essays, combined. then in 2 books. "Kyiv Types" (1896) and "Miniatures" (1897). The news of the letter was brought by the public. in 1896 "Moloch". Basic its theme is criticism of the bourgeoisie. civilization, devouring. people life destruction morals foundations of society. "Moloch" - allegory, expression. the thought of the inhumanity of industry. coup, almost until the end of the turn. workers are depicted as victims of Moloch. Small, but significant nonetheless. The place was taken by theme pov. slave. movement at its early spontaneous stage. Protrusion slave. remains only an episode, and the end of the p.v. tragic. Before the evil of capitalism, the spontaneous protest of the masses and the rebellion of a lonely intellectual truth-seeker are equally powerless. Means. place occupied theme of love in capital. about-ve, cat. like everything in it, it is bought and sold. Hero pov. "Olesya" (1898) - beginner. The writer went into the wilderness for six months, hoping to enrich his life. experience. In the image of Olesya, K. gives his ideal of the cat. dies on contact. with civ. Tender, generous. the love of the Polesie sorceress is shown in contrast with the timidity and uncertainty of Yugorod. civiliz. huh. One of the beams. his production pov "The Duel" (1905) has its roots in the military. p-zy, but it has a qualitatively different meaning of life. "Duel" - pov. about the crisis that has engulfed diff. spheres of growth action. In it there is a picture of a cat laid out. It was not the army that was struck, but the entire state. syst. Ch. accusation against the Tsar. army was the death of Lieutenant Georgy Rolgashov, title p. them. general meaning: throughout. pov There is a duel between the piers. h-com, cat. strive for something new and diverse. by the forces of the old. The image of the life of an infantry regiment has been raised to level. large typical generalizations. Addressing the topic is all-consuming. love with staying in the area "Gran. Bracelet" (1910). K. put his views on love into the mouth of the old gentleman Anosov, cat. I am convinced that great love exists, but it is always a tragedy. In 1911 K. wrote. a series of essays about Balaklasvsk. fishermen "Listrigons", where poetry. everyday life natural. h-ka, and people. life of the representative as the sphere of beauty, not ugly. civil. From ser. In the 10s, there was a decline in television in K., and he abandoned social services. problems, he has an el-you natural-zma, write. fantastic prod.

L.N. Andreev (1871-1919) b. in the family of a land surveyor, 82-91 studying in Olovsk. anthem., from 91-97 at law faculties in Pitersk. and Moscow un-ov. Worldview A. complex. under strong air philosopher. Schopenhauer and the revolutionary populist. ideas. Tragic. A.’s attitude towards the world is oozing with an interest in social life. problem 1901 publ. his 1st book. "R-call." His details are revealed. everyday tragedy life, b. penetrating feeling deep. compassion for disadvantaged people. In the wound. r-zakh A. raise. age. alienated and alone modern. huh. Among the realists, A. ranks. special place. For him, it is typical to aggravate oppressive motives and moods, the search for the unreal in the real use of expressionistic elements. poetics. In "Red Laughter" (1904) A. refuses to describe it specifically. Russian-Japanese events war, but the image. people psyche, crippled. and killed by the war. Striving for philosophy. generalized, to reveal. depths essence of the image priv. A. to use conv. thin Wed. Since 1905, A. turned to dramaturgy, and he was attracted. military issues about life and death, about the meaning of life, about the struggle between good and evil. His first play "To the Stars" is realistic. with naked revol. subject. According to A., a person’s movement forward is determined by 2 factors: roar. struggle and expansion of scientific knowledge of the world. Socialism is established in the play. significance as a revolutionary. and scientific feats. In the play "The Life of a Bitch" is wide. use of grotesque and hyperbole, created. schematized, generalized picture of life from birth. to death. Happy birthday doomed to death. Ch-ku is accompanied throughout his life by someone in gray, reminding him that everything in life comes. But A. did not abandon the concept of a rebellious ch-ka. In the beginning. plays hero challenge. to fight someone in gray. In the end, having grown old, the hero is deprived. strength and abandoned by everyone, I remember again. about fighting and dying. rebellious. In connection with A.’s turn to unreal poetics arose. problem thin method A. In criticism it is often close. A. with symbols, but you don’t count the symbols themselves. to his loved ones, he b. alien to their worldview. and aesthetic installations. Now critics def. Andreevsk method as r-zm with el-mi expr-zma and called. its ancestor of the expr theater. In his prosaic TV-ve A. cont. Cass is a burning issue. social vopr., one of the cats. problem terrorism in Russia In pov. "Governor" main attention an-zu social-aesthetic. psycho. center. hero, cat Prigov terrorists. to death executions. Expecting retribution, the hero himself condemned. We expect ourselves and not against it. executions. In the story “About the 7 Hanged Men” (Seryozha Golovin, Vasya Kashirin, Werner, Musya, Tanya Kovalchuk, Estonian Janson, Misha) A. was subjected to the test of death. rev-ov-ter-stov, criminals and dignitary, on the cat. an assassination attempt was being prepared. A. display. morals superior to people dying for an idea. Lastly years of life of A. slave. above the area "Satan's Diary". Thomas Magnus, who wished to become earthly. Satan completely rejects the idea of gum-snake, main. the impulse of his life is the will to power. Possessing a second, capable. to pacify a person, he is ready to completely destroy him. A. from the 1st to Russian. l-re started talking about weapons of the masses. defeat.

I. Bunin. Start literary activity Bunin coincides with the first steps on Russian soil of representatives of what was born at the end of the 19th century. symbolist, decadent direction. Having come into contact with this trend in the second half of the 90s and initially showing some interest in it, Bunin very soon became disillusioned with it and in all subsequent years of his life acted as a decisive opponent of decadence, a convinced supporter of the great realistic traditions of Russian literature.

As a continuer of these traditions, he declared himself already in his first works. In subsequent years, these traditions were not only preserved, but also received further development in Bunin's works.

The desire for maximum conciseness was one of the manifestations of the innovative aspirations of young Bunin. Closely related to this was the trend that was reflected in “ Antonov apples"and other Bunin works of the early 20th century - to the rejection of the traditional, complete, rounded plot, to embodiment. life in its natural course, outside of any limiting plot framework. It was of great importance already in early works Bunin's theme of nature. Nature in Bunin’s work is not a background, not a dispassionate, although perhaps skillfully drawn, picture, but an active, effective principle, powerfully intruding into a person’s existence, determining his views on life, his actions and actions. In works late period, such as “Mitya’s Love” and “The Life of Arsenyev”, this function is especially noticeable.

Bunin was a subtle and deep connoisseur and master of Russian speech. Bunin's language strikingly combines purity and rigor with exceptional picturesqueness and musicality, rhythmic organization with amazing laconicism and vivid metaphor.

With all the complexity figurative language mature Bunin, despite the unusualness of many of his epithets, one cannot, as a rule, fail to see a realistic basis in them. Bunin's prose has always been based on a musical, rhythmic principle. The rhythmic orderliness is especially noticeable in the writer’s mature works, in particular in his story “The Mister from San Francisco.”

Bunin's mature prose provides many examples of a bold writer's search for new means artistic expression. In the pre-revolutionary years, Bunin became more stingy and laconic in his descriptions, and less and less delved into detailed reproduction inner world their heroes; he embodies psychological condition character in his actions and actions, leaving the reader to guess for himself what remains unsaid, unrevealed to the end

After the dry land, Bunin essentially departed from the genre of the story for a long time, and his story, at the beginning of the 10s, was still densely populated actors, by 1915-1916 turns into a work where most often one person acts (“Looped Ears”, “Otto Stein”, “Kazimir Stanislavovich”). In these works Bunin appears as an artist whose realism, organically absorbing the achievements of literature of the previous century , is enriched with new features. Thus, what was new to Bunin’s prose during the war years was the principle of understatement that the writer consistently implemented in some of his works. Deliberate reticence has long attracted the attention of critics. In the 10s, Bunin was at the peak of his talent, but at the same time, a certain limitation of his creativity was evident.

In 1915-1916, depressed by the spectacle of the world imperialist war, increasingly acutely aware of the death of the capitalist world, but not clearly imagining it. what will replace this world. Bunin sometimes comes to depressing and bleak conclusions. All the world It seems to him that he is controlled by a blind, merciless man. But a force that defies rational explanation. Hence not only the notes of pessimism, but also the elements of mysticism increasingly clearly felt in Bunin’s works during the World War. They are woven into the seemingly dense realistic fabric of such works as “The Mister from San Francisco”, “Loopy Ears”, in the stories “Compatriot” and especially in “Chang’s Dreams”.

But despite the intrusion of mystical notes into Bunin’s work of this period, in the main and fundamentally he remained a realist. In his best pre-October works, the writer painted such a picture of his contemporary reality, which testified with irrefutable conviction that it was impossible to live like this any longer, and seemed to predict the future revolution.

However, the conclusion about the need for a revolutionary reorganization of life, which naturally followed from the best works of the writer, was categorically denied by him. A principled opponent of the revolution, who sees in it only revelry destructive forces, Bunin did not accept the Great October Revolution

24. Modernist movements k. 19 – n. 20 centuries. Poetry of A. Blok as the “Trilogy of Incarnation.” Poem “12”.

For litas pr-sa rub. centuries har-na ost. polemics between representatives of realism. and modernist. literature and individual movements within the modernist. liters. Among realists, there is controversy about Russian. national har-re, about the ability of Russian. man for the update.

Along with realism in RL there is an ideologically thin. direction, rejection of realistic aesthetics - MODERNISM. Within the framework of the agreement, def. type of consciousness, relation to the world and people, reflective spirit. crisis of society con. 19th century

1st flow – symbolism. In the beginning. 20th century – naturalism.

Naturally you disconnect from social media problems, and the difference between the world and the people. nature. The consequence is the rejection of typification (a fundamental feature of realism). In the 10th, a new one appeared. current - acmeism And futurism.

Acmeists– reforming the poetics of symbolism and abandoning its mysticism. aspirations. Several groups announced themselves futurists, who declared freedom from content and revolution in the region. poetic language

General features of a modernist. directions: 1. Refusal of realism. aesthetics. 2. Transferring the object of art from reality to the consciousness of the artist. 3. Priority attention to spirit. the world is writing and thin. experts, for example, on changing traditions. poetics.

Symbolism(originated in the rubles of the 80-90s of the 19th century) - a kind of aesthetic. an attempt to escape from the contradictions of real life in the field of general eternal ideas.

3 stages of Russian s-zma : decadence, property-zm, young-zm.

1.Decembers (Minsky, Merezhkovsky, Gillius, Sologub) connect art with God-seeking ideas and ideas of religions. society In the work of the decadents, the perception of the world of art becomes the object and content of art, and not the action in its social. manifestations. 1st aesthetic Declaration of D-va in Russia --- Merezhkovsky’s book “On the Causes of Decline and the New. tech-x modern rus. literature" (1893). Refusal from social the role of literature, from its citizens. lines, 3 chapters el-mi new Is-va Merezhkovsky is called “mystic.” code, symbols, expanded art. Impressed."

2. Sobstvennos-zm (Bryusov is the most prominent representative, his 3 collections “Russian s-ty”, Balmont, Anensky). They considered something new. lit. flows like pure lit. flow as natural. zak-t in admission. developed and used words and strived for thinness. Russian update poetry. They transformed trad. poetics, each The element of the verse is a symbol (meaning overcoming the barrier between the phenomenon and its essence).

Bryusov: 3 new individuals. flow in the letter - “extent thin. subtle moods, the ability to hypnotize a reader, to evoke a certain feeling in him. moods and the use of strange, unusual. tropes and figures."

Symbolism-poetry of allusions. She doesn't deny the action. but puts thoughts into images.

3.Mlados-zm (Ivanov. Blok, Bely). They looked at symbol-zm not as lit. flow, and as a way of understanding the world, they advocated theurgy (the combination of TV and religion, art and mysticism).

Young people did not accept Bryusov’s directives. Art for them is not just aesthetic. phenomenon, but the transformation and change of life.

Bely: “The purpose of the is-door of creating life is hidden in the is-ve. religious essence." (The idea of the religious basis of TV is set out by Bely in the article “On Theurgy”. The symbol of the Young One was considered not as a literary device, but as an expression of some eternal otherworldly entities. (The theory of the Young One is set out Bely in “Symv-zm as a worldview”).

All 3 school rus. The symbols were not separated from each other. There was a kinship between them in the perception and development of similarities. techniques, in creation and art. images, in the foreground of the poetic. Wed.

MODERNISM OF THE 10'S. 20V. In 1911 The “Workshop of Poets” arose in St. Petersburg - lit. association mol. authors, close to s-zm, but looking for new ones. paths in l-re. The name “TSEKH” demonstrated their view of poetry as a craft with high demands. verse techniques. At the head of the workshop were Gumilyov and Gorodetsky. In 1913 6 members of the “Workshop” called themselves Acmeists: Gumilyov, Gorodetsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Narbut, Zenkevich. In zh. "Apollo" for 1913 b. 2 articles have been published, outlining new trials. lit. current “legacy of sim-zma and acmeism” Gumilyov and some. flow in modern times rus. poetry of Gorodetsky.

Acmeists immediately opposed oneself to the symbol in the choice of water. object, which should become the world of ideas. Continuity of the saint with the symbol in terms of the poet. technology, they diverge in worldview. installations. If in the representation the symbol is in the world, the subject of phenomena b. a reflection of a higher being, then the Acmeists accepted it as truth. reality, they argued its 3-dimensionality.

Gumilyov and Gorodetsky called for unconditional acceptance of real peace after duty. non-acceptance of it by symbolic artists. However, the work of the Acmeist poets remained in the mainstream of modernism. directions. Rejecting the realist. the aspirations of the symbols, the acts of you have abandoned the broad perception of reality.

The Acmeists declaimed whether they were poets. is-va from other spheres of life: watered. ideologies, realities, mystics. Ak-zm suggested the path of the river. poetry, not a saint from a citizen. quests, but only fixed phenomena of action and in diversity. its aspects.

The 3rd manifesto is considered to be Mandelstam’s article “The Morning of Acmeism,” where the poet presented his end of the word. The word is included in a series of shapes. techniques of poetics and used in all the acquisitions of them for history. Existence I know. And you didn’t abandon the symbol, but you used it along with other poets. Wed. To the beginning 20s a-zm as a poet. the school ceased to exist.

Among the modernist gr., there were also futurists who actively opposed s-zma. Foot. flow was presented several times. rival gr-mi:

1. Petersburg. egofoot-ty “Egofoot-v Association” (I. Severyanin).

2. Moscow. egofut-ty “Mezzanine of Poetry” (V. Sherlinevich., Ivnev).

3. Cube feet “Gilea” (Burliuk brothers, V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, V. Mayakovsky.).

4. Cube feet “Centrifuge” (I. Akeenov, B. Pasternak).

Program manifesto of the egofs - “Prologue of the egof-zma” by I. Severyanin, 1911.

Preface to Sat. kubof-ov- “Slap in the face common.” taste" - manifesto. kubof-ma 1912 Egof-zm and kubof-zm together, but in different ways, the design of the future.

Egof-you understood poetry as a path to self-esteem. Kubof-you tore it off from the lit. trad-ey, negated s-zm and ak-zm, were formally proclaimed. innovative, emphasized. pay attention to the topics of the city and technical industry.

In relation to social action egof-you demonstrate the association, and kubof-you demonstrate the poetry of social. action Egof-you used the technique of stylization, and Kubof-you sought to create new poetry. Hood. The TV of the future should not be an imitation of nature, the Cuban poets abandoned the classics. verse, expert with tonic. verse and inaccurate. rhyme, brought words to the forefront. Egof, you have aestheticized your surroundings. For Kubofs, aesthetics are not forbidden. region, the preference for moving away from reality has not yet been affected. practice, used is abnormal. vocabulary. East f-zma ended by the 20s.