The authors of literature of the lost generation include: "lost generation" in literature

In my line of work, as a psychologist, I have to work with people’s difficulties and problems. Working with any specific problem, you don’t think about this generation in general and the time from which they come. But I couldn’t help but notice one recurring situation. Moreover, it concerned the generation from which I myself am. This is the generation born in the late 70s and early 80s.

Why did I call the article the lost generation and what exactly was lost?

Let's go in order.
These citizens of ours were born in the late 70s and early 80s. They went to school in 1985-1990. That is, the period of growth, maturation, puberty, formation and formation of personality took place in the dashing 90s.

What are these years? And what did I notice as a psychologist and experience myself?

During these years, crime was the norm. Moreover, it was considered very cool, and many teenagers strove for a criminal lifestyle. This lifestyle came at a price. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and not so remote places “mowed down” (I’m not afraid of this word) many of my peers. Some died at that time, while still teenagers (from overdose, violence in the army, criminal disputes). Others later from alcohol and drugs.

Until recently, I thought that these were our only losses (of our generation). Until I realized the next thing. In the 90s, a very powerful force burst into our information field. western culture. And it’s far from the best part of it. And she promoted a “cool” life. Expensive cars, sex, alcohol, beautiful restaurants and hotels. Money became paramount. And being a “hard worker” has become a disgrace. At the same time, our traditional values ​​were completely devalued.

This process of depreciation of our values ​​began earlier and became one of the elements of the collapse of the USSR. And he destroyed not only the USSR, but also the lives of specific people and continues to do so to this day.
The substitution of values ​​that took place left a negative imprint on this entire generation.
If some fell under the skating rink of crime, alcohol and drugs. Then others, who were good girls and boys, came under information processing.

What kind of information processing is this, and what harm does it still cause?

These are destroyed and distorted family values. These people do not know, do not know how and do not value family relationships. They grew up knowing that it doesn't matter who you are, it's what you have that matters. The cult of consumption has come to the forefront, and spirituality has faded into the background.
Many of these people may look gorgeous, but have several divorces behind them. They can make money, but the atmosphere in the house leaves much to be desired. In many families, it is not clear who is doing what, what the distribution of roles is in the family. A woman has ceased to be a wife and mother, and a man has ceased to be a father and husband.
They grew up knowing that what's cool is a white Mercedes. But the reality is that only a few can afford it. And as a result, many of them experience a feeling of inadequacy and inferiority. And at the same time they devalue their partner.
Having been in societies in which people consciously work on family values ​​and the culture of family relationships (various Christian, Muslim, Vedic, etc.), you understand how much has been missed by my generation. And how much their roots are pruned.
Blurred family values ​​lead to unhappy families. If the value of the role of the family decreases, then the entire human family, for the person himself, becomes less important. If you don’t value gender, you don’t value it. small homeland, and then a larger homeland. Many of them dream of Las Vegas, Paris, etc. The I-Family-Kin-Homeland connection was seriously disrupted. And by devaluing any element from this bundle, a person devalues ​​himself.

For such people, the “to be” mode of existence is replaced by the “have” mode of existence.
But that's not the whole problem. And the fact is that their children grow up in this environment. And the imprint received by their children will still manifest itself.
This is how the events of the distant 90s ruin lives in the 10s and will continue to do so in the 20s.
Of course, it's not all bad. The situation is improving. And it is in our power to change ourselves and our lives. And our changes, of course, will affect our loved ones. But this will not happen by itself. This must be done purposefully, responsibly and constantly.

First World War left an indelible mark on the destinies of many generations, changed the moral foundation of many countries and nationalities, but did not bypass those lands that were far from the focus of hostilities. The war that broke out overseas shocked the younger generation of Americans with thousands of deaths and horrific destruction, striking with its senselessness and barbaric weapons that were used against all living things. The post-war country, which they previously considered their home, a reliable bastion built on a sense of patriotism and faith, collapsed like House of cards. Only a handful of young people remained, so useless and scattered, living aimlessly through the days allotted to them.

Such sentiments pervaded many cultural aspects of life in the 1920s, including literature. Many writers have realized that the old norms are no longer relevant, and the old criteria for writing have become completely obsolete. They criticized the country and the government, having lost hope in the war among other values, and ended up feeling lost themselves. Finding meaning in anything has become an insoluble problem for them.

The term lost generation

The concept of “lost generation” belongs to the author of Gertrude Stein, a representative of American modernism who lived in Paris. It is believed that a certain auto mechanic was extremely dissatisfied with his young assistant, who was repairing Gertrude Stein's car. At the moment of reprimand, he said the following: “You are all a lost generation,” thereby explaining the inability of his assistant to do his job well.

Ernest Hemingway, a close friend of Gertrude Stein, adopted this expression, including it in the epigraph of his novel "". In fact, the term lost generation refers to those young people who grew up during the era, and subsequently became disillusioned with such an alien post-war world.

In terms of literature, the Lost Generation is considered a group of American writers, most of whom emigrated to Europe and worked there between the end of World War I and. As a result, America raised a generation of cynical people who could hardly imagine their future in this country. But what finally prompted them to move overseas? The answer is quite simple: many of these writers realized that their home and life were unlikely to be restored, and the United States they had known had disappeared without a trace.

The bohemian lifestyle among intellectuals turned out to be much closer and more pleasant than a miserable existence in a society devoid of faith, and the presence of morality was in great doubt. Thus, emigrant writers living in Europe wrote about the trials and tribulations of this most lost generation, being, most interestingly, an integral part of this generation.

Prominent figures of the Lost Generation

Among the most famous representatives of the lost generation it is worth noting such as Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and. The entire list is not limited to these names; one can also mention Sherwood Anderson and others who belong to the lost generation, but to a lesser extent than their comrades. To get a more detailed understanding of this phenomenon, let's take a closer look at some of these writers.

Gertrude Stein born and raised in the United States, but moved to Paris in 1903. She was
a great connoisseur and lover of painting and literature, she was considered by many (including herself) to be a real expert in this art. She began holding meetings in her home in Paris, mentoring young writers and critiquing their work. Contrary to her established authority among modernist figures, she was not one of the most influential writers of that time. At the same time, many writers considered it a great success to become part of her club.

Ernest Hemingway served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during the First World War, where he was wounded. He married and moved to Paris, where he soon became part of the expatriate community. He is best known for his in an unusual way letters, being the first to depart from the standard norms of storytelling. Sparing with eloquence but skilled in the use of dialogue, Hemingway made a conscious choice to abandon the colorful speech patterns that had dominated the literature before him. Of course, his mentor was Gertrude Stein.

Scott Fitzgerald was a junior lieutenant; but no matter how strange it may sound, he never served
in a foreign land. Instead, he married a rich girl from Alabama whom he met during his service. Fitzgerald, as a writer, was struck by the post-war culture of America, eventually becoming the basis of his work, which so attracted the new young generation. Having achieved fame, he constantly travels between Europe and America and becomes an important component of the literary community led by Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. In many ways, Fitzgerald repeated the fate of the people described in his works: his life was filled with money, partying, aimlessness and alcohol, which destroyed the great writer. Hemingway, in his memoirs “A Feast That Always Be With You,” speaks with incredible warmth about Fitzgerald’s works, although it is known that at a certain period their friendship acquired a tinge of hostility.

Against the background of the above figures, the figure stands out somewhat Erich Maria Remarque. His story is different in that, being a German, he suffered greatly from the consequences of the First World War, personally experiencing the burden and meaninglessness of the horrific events of those times. Remarque's military experience is incomparable to any of the writers already mentioned, and his novels remain forever the best illustration of anti-fascist literature. Persecuted in his homeland for his Political Views, Remarque was forced to emigrate, but this did not force him to abandon his language in a foreign land, where he continued to create.

Theme of the lost generation

The literary style of the writers of the lost generation is in fact very individual, although common features can be traced both in content and in the form of expression. Stories of times full of hope and love victorian era gone without a trace. The tone and mood of the letter changed dramatically.

Now the reader can feel all the cynicism of life through the text and those feelings that fill the structureless world, devoid of faith and purpose. The past is painted with bright and happy colors, creating an almost ideal world. While the present looks like a kind of gray environment, devoid of traditions and faith, and everyone is trying to find their own individuality in this new world.

Many writers, like Scott Fitzgerald in his work, have illuminated the superficial aspects of life along with the dark feelings hidden beneath the surface. younger generation. They are often characterized by a spoiled style of behavior, a materialistic outlook on life and a complete lack of restrictions and self-control. In Fitzgerald's works, you can see how the writer criticizes the nature of this lifestyle, how excess and irresponsibility lead to destruction (for example, the novel Tender is the Night).

As a result, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the traditional model of storytelling took hold of the entire literary community. For example, Hemingway rejected the need to use descriptive prose to convey emotions and concepts. In support of this, he chose to write in a more complex and dry manner, paying great attention to dialogue and silence as meaningful techniques. Other writers, such as John Dos Passos, have experimented with the use of stream-of-consciousness paragraphs. Such writing techniques were used for the first time, largely reflecting the influence of the First World War on the younger generation.

The theme of the First World War is often used in the works of writers of the lost generation who directly visited its battlefields. Sometimes a work literally reflects the character of a participant in the War (for example, “Three Soldiers” by Dos Passos or “Hemingway”), or conveys abstract painting what America and its citizens became after the war (Thomas Eliot's The Waste Land or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio). Often the actions are fraught with despair and inner doubt, with rare sparks of hope on the part of the main characters.

To summarize, it should be noted that the term lost generation refers to those young writers who came of age during the First World War, which thereby, directly or indirectly, influenced the formation of their creative ideals. Realizing that the United States could no longer be the safe home it once was, many of them moved to Europe, forming a literary community of expatriate writers led, if somewhat controversially, by Gertrude Stein. Like something poignant from the past, their work is filled with heavy losses, and the main idea was a critique of the materialism and immorality that flooded post-war America.

The innovation of the established community was a break with traditional literary forms: Many writers have experimented with sentence structure, dialogue, and storytelling in general. The fact that the writers of the lost generation were themselves part of the changes they experienced and the search for the meaning of life in a new world for them qualitatively sets them apart from many others literary movements. Having lost the meaning of life after the war and being in constant search for it, these writers showed the world unique masterpieces of word-creating art, and we, in turn, can turn to their legacy at any moment and not repeat the mistakes of the past, because history is cyclical, and in such a fickle and in a changing world, we need to try not to become another lost generation.

Tolmachev V.M. “The Lost Generation” and the work of E. Hemingway

Tolmachev V.M. – " Foreign literature XX century" - 2nd ed. - M., 2000

The 1920s are a period of “revolutionism” in US literature. It is marked both by a versatile understanding of the historical and cultural shift, and by the entry into the rights of a new literary generation, the idea of ​​which was somehow associated with the image of the “lost generation”. These words (spoken in French and then translated into English) are attributed to the writer G. Stein and were addressed to young people who visited the fronts of the First World War, were shocked by its cruelty and were unable to “get into the rut” in the post-war period on the same grounds. peaceful life. Stein’s maxim (“You are all a lost generation”) was glorified by E. Hemingway,

Who brought it out in the form of one of the epigraphs on title page his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926).

However, the meaning of this, as it turned out, epochal characteristic was destined to outgrow the “Hamletism” of restless young people. "Lost" in in a broad sense- this is a consequence of a break both with the system of values ​​going back to “puritanism”, the “tradition of decency”, etc., and with the pre-war idea of ​​​​what the theme and style of a work of art should be. Unlike the generation of B. Shaw and G. Wells, the “lost” showed a pronounced individualistic skepticism towards any manifestations of progressivism. At the same time, the painful comprehension of the “decline of the West”, their own loneliness, as well as the awakened nostalgia for the organic integrity of the world, led them to a persistent search for a new ideality, which they formulated primarily in terms artistic skill. Hence the resonance that Eliot’s “The Waste Land” received in America. The cruelty and chaos of the world can be resisted by the “rage” of creative effort - this is the subtext of the textbook works of the “lost generation”, the common features of which are a tragic tone, an interest in the theme of self-knowledge, as well as lyrical tension.

The motifs of “lostness” manifested themselves in different ways in such novels as “Three Soldiers” (1921) by J. Dos Passos, “The Enormous Camera” (1922) by E. E. Cummings, “The Great Gatsby” (1925) by F. S. Fitzgerald, “Soldier's Award” (1926) W. Faulkner, “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), “A Farewell to Arms!” (1929) by E. Hemingway. These should also include novels published in Europe, but which had great success in the USA: “On western front without change" (1929) by E. M. Remarque, "Death of a Hero" (1929) by R. Aldington.

Not all of these writers took part in the war (in particular, Fitzgerald, Faulkner), but even for them, “being lost” is a more than significant fact: an indicator of a person’s abandonment in history, which has lost its usual contours, and heightened artistic sensitivity.

The cruelty of modernity could not help but be clothed in the metaphor of war. If at the beginning of the 1920s it was interpreted quite specifically, then by the end of the decade it became the personification of the most important dimension of human existence in general. Such a combination of war and post-war experience under a common tragic sign is especially indicative of novels published in 1926-1929, that is, when the events of the past took place as an artistic event and received, in the words of one of his contemporaries, the status of a tragic “alibi” “: a person is constantly in a state of “military” actions with a world that is hostile and indifferent to him, the main attributes of which are the army, bureaucracy, plutocracy. "I grew up with my peers under

The drums of the First World War are beating, and our history since then has not ceased to be a history of murder, injustice or violence,” A. Camus later wrote, as if seeing in the American writers of the 1920s the literary predecessors of existentialism. Hemingway speaks most vividly about the protest against the “norms” of civilization in the light of the experience of the Somme and Verdun through the lips of Lieutenant Frederick Henry, central character novel “A Farewell to Arms!”: “Abstract words such as “glory,” “feat,” “valor,” or “shrine” were obscene next to specific village names, road numbers, river names, regimental numbers and dates.” .

Expressing rejection of the value system that allowed the massacre, and the pomposity of those values literary dictionary Hemingway deliberately makes an apology for a kind of primitiveness and often declares himself to be anti-romantic. However, such a characterization should not cast doubt on his “anti-romantic romanticism.” The historical and literary contexts of his work speak in favor of this.

On the one hand, Hemingway, who equally successfully created the myth of a hero rejected by society both in his writings and in life, undoubtedly acts as a figure of Byronian scale and style. On the other hand, the tragic “search for the absolute”, which is discussed in Hemingway’s work, unfolds not in the situation of “two worlds” characteristic of classical romanticism, but in the post-Nietzschean this-worldly world.

Cognition through denial, the search for an ideal in disappointment, the illusion of the “nightingale song” through the “wild voice of catastrophes” (Khodasevich) - these are the romantic signs of the worldview of the “lost generation” that help to understand the creative dependence of US writers of the 1920s on their older English contemporaries (R. Kipling, J. Conrad). Recognition of debt to Conrad's ideas of “victory in defeat” and picturesque style is the leitmotif of the creative aesthetics of not only Hemingway, but also Fitzgerald.

A comparison of the novels of these writers allows us to understand how the dispute unfolded between two influential versions of romantic thinking.

In the perception of his contemporaries, Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) became one of the chroniclers of the “Jazz Age,” the era immediately preceding the times of the “Great Depression.” Almost all his life, Fitzgerald, who was born in St. Paul (the Catholic capital of the Midwest), retained a childishly naive and somewhat “carnival” idea of ​​success - that “anything is possible.” The motive of wealth is central to Fitzgerald’s works, but the writer’s attitude towards the two most

Symbols of welfare that interest him ( femme fatale, nouveau riche) is ambiguous, passed through the own experience of a teenager who dreamed of fame, hopelessly in love with Ginevra King (a girl from a wealthy St. Paul family), then young man, whose marriage to Southern belle Zelda Sayre was made possible by the sensational success of his first novel, Beyond Paradise (1920), but ultimately did not bring him happiness. By the end of the 1920s, Zelda developed mental illness.

In his best works - the novels The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender is the Night (1934) - Fitzgerald strives to be a Flaubertian, but by temperament he is too lyrical, too fascinated by the poetry of the material excess of the world. Therefore, the character closest to the writer is himself, Fitzgerald, and the world of the rich is a world closely related to him. This also imbues the meaning of his statement: “We owe our birth to the welfare of society. The best things are created when the rich rule." Thus was born the romantic kinship that Fitzgerald's Dick Diver established between the writer's friend, wealthy expatriate Gerald Murphy, and the author of Tender is the Night.

In his attempt to be “not himself,” Fitzgerald always failed in his prose, which greatly outraged Hemingway with his slogan of “truthfulness of writing.” He believed that Murphy would never behave like Fitzgerald, and therefore even earlier he accused his friend of “cheap Irish love of defeat”, of “idiotic leaf romanticism.”

However, beauty realized in wealth (ragtime, a Packard sparkling with nickel, a fashionable bar) interests Fitzgerald not in itself, but in its fragility. The writer, through the prism of his idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe variability of success, is too attentive to beauty not to notice its duality: mystery, brilliance and fate, curse. Contrasts of beauty as the material of modern tragedy - Fitzgerald's discovery. His wealth is subject to the law of a kind of Spencerian equilibrium. Dick Diver and Nicole change places with the same immutability as Hurstwood and Kerry in Dreiser.

It is natural that Keats's odes touched the innermost strings of the writer's soul. He admitted that he could never read “Ode to a Nightingale” without tears in his eyes, and a line from this poem (“How tender the night!”) formed the title of the novel about the tragedy of the Divers. In turn, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was read by Fitzgerald in terms of an inexorable romantic question - as an attempt to explain the contradiction between reality, decay (transitory) and imperishability (the eternity of beauty and imagination). “You saw, you died!” - Fitzgerald could say along with lyrical hero Keats's ode. U American writer Romantic skepticism about this takes on the image of “the beautiful and the damned” (the title of the second novel), “all the sad young people.”

The collision of statics and dynamics, the experience of life as a fatal destiny in the spirit of Wilde, the intention to see the “I” in the mirror of the “other” - all this makes creative method Fitzgerald is quite holistic. “I would so much like readers to accept my new novel as another variation on the theme of illusion (perhaps it will be the most important in my serious things) - a variation that is much more... thoughtful in a romantic way than that that formed the content of “This Side of Paradise,” he wrote in connection with release of The Great Gatsby. In the prospectus for Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald further emphasizes the romantic emphasis by calling his protagonist an Idealist and a “Priest.”

Wealth, in this perspective, suddenly becomes Fitzgeradd's equivalent of Hemingway's Stoic code. His ambitious people, attracted by the opportunity to assert themselves in the “will to possess”, are a paradoxical analogy to Hemingway’s poor (matadors, gangsters, bartenders, etc.) - an example of the fact that the “quest for the Grail”, whatever form it takes on in rough form and an idealless era, always resonate with tragedy.

A comparison of the compositional principles of the story “Heart of Darkness” and “The Great Gatsby” (Nick Carraway performs the same function for Fitzgerald as the figure of Marlowe for Conrad) helps to understand in what ways the American writer is similar and in what ways he is strikingly different from the prose writers who gravitate , like the English neo-romantics, to a picturesque display of the world in the context of “here and now”. The core of Fitzgeradd's best novel is formed by the non-factual side of a fairly traditional American melodrama - a description of the attempt of the mysteriously rich Gatsby to return the past, to connect his fate with a woman, a union with whom was previously unthinkable due to social and material misalliance. What turns the novel from vaudeville into a tragedy are themes of self-knowledge and history, primarily related to the fate of Nick Carraway.

Nick is not only a storyteller collecting information about his mysterious friend Gatsby, but also a writer who is gradually beginning to compose autobiographical work, in which Gatsby is the most reliable guide, or, in accordance with the dictionary of G. James, “point of view.” Carraway's line (testing his own views on life, his honesty, as well as adherence to the traditionalist value system of the Midwest) develops in parallel with Gatsby's line, the collision of which

Roy reveals the insoluble contradiction between the Platonic dream - in pursuing it, Gatsby is truly outstanding, “great” - and the crudely materialistic, “great” only in a purely ironic sense, means of achieving it.

Thanks to this parallelism, it turns out that Nick is the only character in the novel whose character and views change during the course of the action. The cognitive quality of The Great Gatsby is, as it were, the lyrical ferment of this novel. Romantic dissatisfaction with the search for El Dorado, the fatal belatedness and disappointment of self-determination reveals in FitzGerald not so much a student of Conrad, but a successor to the tradition of G. James. It is the ability for deep understanding that ultimately makes Nick not an inquisitive “naturalist” (like the butterfly collector Stein from Conrad’s novel “Lord Jim”), but “the last Puritan.”

Carraway's path is from rigidity to flexibility, from too categorical judgments in the spirit of James's Winterbourne to vague regrets and warmth. He becomes an involuntary witness to the vulgarization of both the platonic principle in man and his desire for the ideal, and the magic of wealth, this only type of “religion” of which an affluent society is capable. Carraway's "Novel of Education" is gradually correlated by Fitzgeradd with the theme of America.

Gatsby’s “guilt” is the common, generic guilt of all Americans who have lost the childishness and purity that were generally characteristic of the first New England settlers. On the last pages of the novel true face“dreams” is represented by the narrator’s memories of celebrating Christmas in the snowy depths of America. Carraway and Gatsby and Daisy are all "prodigal children" of the Midwest, lost in the Babylon of the Northeast.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Learned to write from approximately the same literary mentors as Fitzgerald. In his work, he touched on approximately the same problems that his friend-rival touched upon, but he gave them a radically different interpretation. Accusing Fitzgerald of falling in love with rock and creative indiscipline, and also declaring his dislike of everything sublimely “romantic,” Hemingway created the concept of a fundamentally “unbookish” style. The Fitzgerald/Hemingway antithesis allows us to recall the situation in English literature turn of the century. The change of the hero - Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite artist to Kipling's colonial army soldier - indicated a decrease in interest in the relatively traditional type of romantic personality and attention to the symbolism of the practically formulated question “how to live?” This new mood is succinctly reflected in Kipling’s poem “The Queen” (1896): “Romance, farewell forever!”

Thematically, Hemingway owes a lot to Conrad. In both writers, the character is abandoned, as Hemingway puts it, in “another country” - placed, regardless of his will, in conditions where a person is tested for strength on the stage of some kind of cosmic theater (the depths of Africa, Civil War in Latin America, typhoon; bullring, the Latin Quarter in Paris, the Spanish Civil War), but is faced primarily in a duel with himself.

“Victory in defeat,” according to Conrad and Hemingway, is a stoic adherence to a personally formulated idea of ​​honor, which, by and large, cannot bring any practical advantages in a world that has lost the coordinates of universally meaningful meaning. A comparison of the works of Conrad and Hemingway indicates that the American prose writer, much more consistently than his predecessor, worked on the idea of ​​a style that would convey the idea of ​​​​the cruelty of the world not directly, but in a symbolist suggestive way. Hemingway, on the emotional side, knew deeply what he was writing about.

In 1917, without passing the military commission, he went to Italy, was the driver of an ambulance on the Italian-Austrian front, and was seriously wounded. After the war ended, Hemingway briefly served as the Toronto Star's Middle East correspondent. He spent the 1920s mainly in Paris among artistic bohemia (H. Stein, J. Joyce, E. Pound) and purposefully studied the art of prose. The writer experienced his father’s suicide extremely hard.

The theme of war forms the nerve of Hemingway’s first books of stories, “In Our Time” (1925), “Men Without Women” (1927). The composition of the book “In Our Time” indicates its author’s obvious acquaintance with “Winesburg, Ohio” by S. Anderson. However, the line of the “novel of education” was carried out by Hemingway much more decisively than by his mentor. The main discovery made by Nick Adams and similar young men who returned from the German war to the provincial quiet of America (Krebs in the story “At Home”) is the discovery that the war, for those who have been there, in a certain sense, never ends. The most famous Hemingway short stories (“Cat in the Rain”, “On the Big River”, “White Elephants”) are built on the same effect: the main thing in them from an emotional point of view is not expressed, it is taken out of brackets; this core of content either comes into conflict with the impressionistic description of current events, or corresponds to it. The presence of a “double vision” is ironically reflected in the title “In Our Time,” which consists of a fragment of a prayer for “the peace of the whole world.” Main lesson Nick Adams's upbringing boils down to the fact that the fragility of existence and human cruelty, characteristic of “our time,” blurs the line between “war” and “peace.”

Hemingway liked to compare the principles of expressive text to an iceberg that is only one-eighth above the surface of the water: if the writer really knows his topic, almost any fragment of the story can be omitted without compromising the overall emotional impact. Hemingway's illusionism is largely based on the idea of ​​​​the rejection of “rhetoric”, once proclaimed by the French symbolist poets. The writer prefers not to describe, but to name; he does not so much recreate reality as describe the conditions of its existence. The foundation of such a description is made up of verbs of motion, nouns, remarks of the same type, and repeated use of the connecting conjunction “and”. Hemingway creates, as it were, a scheme for the perception of elementary stimuli (the heat of the sun, the cold of water, the taste of wine, etc.), which only in the reader’s consciousness become a full-fledged fact of sensory experience. The writer’s fascination with Cezanne and other post-impressionists in this regard is natural.

As is known, the mature Cezanne strove to create canvases that would reveal, in a somewhat exaggerated flatness, not the impressionistic fluidity of life, but its “structures” that are not subject to change. Cezanne's artistic space (for example, "Bridge over the Créteille River") - a little heavy, almost deliberately compressed - is in motionless peace. This impression is not created thematically. The natural colors of nature (green, yellow, blue), as if having outlined the volume with a strict pattern, “stop the moment” - they begin to symbolize Form, a kind of light heavy thing, but not ephemeral, but closed in itself, coldly shiny, crystalline, Cezanne’s special thing , which he himself put into the formula “nature-in-depth,” turned out to be close to the creative intentions of the American prose writer: “Cezanne’s painting taught me that real simple phrases alone are not enough to give the story the volume and depth that I was trying to achieve. I learned a lot from him, but I couldn’t clearly explain what exactly.” It seems that another imperative of Cezanne is also important for Hemingway: “Impressionism should be given something... museum-like.”

Like Verdun's handwriting, Hemingway's style is sparse. To some extent, this is achieved due to the fact that Hemingway’s characters seem to have no soul. Their consciousness is presented decoratively, dissolving into the “patterns” of the external world (bar counter, city in the Rain, Parisian street grid). The stringing of facts, collecting them into a “landscape” is subject to a fairly rigid logic, which indicates the limitations of pleasures (the bar must be closed, Pernod must be drunk, and the trip to the mountains is over), which gives the somewhat monotonous, monochrome naturalization of Hemingway’s inner world a tragic character. The brightness of colors, the tangibility of forms (“Apollonian”) appear reverse side“nothing” (“Dionysian” beginning), which has no outline, which can only be represented in reflected form and forms a kind of black lining for the pattern of word-pebbles.

In the suggestive description of death, in the recreation of the silhouette of the phenomenon against the background of a “black square” is one of the striking features of Hemingway’s primitivism as a style of modern tragedy.

In essence, in his interpretation of “nothing,” Hemingway acts as a writer “by contradiction,” approaching Christian issues in a parodic aspect. This did not escape the attention of J. Joyce: “Whether Hemingway shoots me or not, I will venture to say ... that I always considered him a deeply religious man.” Also, the famous American critic M. Cowley emphasized in the preface to the first edition of Hemingway’s “The Chosen” (1942) that his contemporary gives in the novel “The Sun Also Rises” an interpretation of the same problem that occupied T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.” .

Hemingway's equivalent of the "quest for the Grail" (the theme of The Waste Land) is paradoxical. Ways to overcome “blurring of contours” and “illness” (this is also the topic of “ Magic Mountain"T. Mann) are deliberately given by the American writer in a reduced, “everyday” series: the professional training of a matador or reporter, relationships between a man and a woman, etc. - in a series of facts, the right to real, and not “bookish” knowledge of which is capable according to the logic of Hemingway’s work, provide only one thing: the experience of death as the main destiny of human existence, as a religious phenomenon.

“The Sun Also Rises” is a novel about the search for absolute meaning. This is indicated by two epigraphs arguing with each other. The author of one is G. Stein, the other is represented by a verse from Ecclesiastes about the ever-setting and rising sun.

Jake Barnes, Narrator and Central actor novel, acts as a principled “anti-romantic”. During the war he suffered a painful injury - Barnes was castrated by “weapons”. He tragically longs for love, which he is unable to share with the woman close to him. Striving for sobriety and fearing self-deception, Barnes tries to strictly control his emotions. Against the background of the stoic code of his behavior, which in the novel is consistently characterized as due, a position that is perceived as “impermissible” and “romantic” gradually becomes outlined.

The falseness, poses, and verbosity in the novel are represented by Robert Cohn. The subject of the application of what should and should not be done is the femme fatale Brett Ashley, and the arena of the collision is the “other country” of the Spanish fiesta. The height of Cohn's romanticism in Barnes's assessment is manifested in a tendency to self-dramatization, in dreams of fatal love. Cohn's unattractive traits for Barnes are emphasized by his inability to be ironic and respect the lifestyle of American expatriates in 1920s Paris: if a woman leaves a man, then demanding an explanation for this is not serious; if you conduct a conversation, it will certainly be restrained, in the language of taxi drivers or jockeys, etc. The right of Jake and his friends to a special code of conduct is earned through hard work. Unlike Kon, who has never faced serious life's trials, they are crippled by the war, which to some extent saves them from the “celebration” of free life in its purely bourgeois version.

The tragic tone of the narrative is not hidden even in the second, seemingly pastoral part of the novel, which tells about Barnes's fishing trip with his friend Bill Gorton in the Spanish mountains. It is impossible not to notice that for Jake it is not so much the serenity of nature that is important, but the participation of a person in it - an initiate, an expert who enjoys being in the mountains not “naturally”, but according to a system of rules. Therefore, it is not the beauty of the streams, but the presence of a friend close to Barnes that grants temporary - carefully calculated by hours and minutes, the amount of food eaten and drunk - once or twice a year, overcoming loneliness.

Jake would have been able to become happy in Paris if he had always been near his desperately beloved Brett. His special sense of the aesthetic is capable of extracting the same pure pleasure from dining in a restaurant as from fishing: the essence of the matter is not in the influence of the environment - the environment does not have a decisive impact on the individualistic consciousness, although a person is biologically inseparable from it and suffers from his biological “inferiority” ”, - and in a purely personal solution to the question (“I don’t care what the world is. All I want to know is how to live in it”) about the “art of living.”

The beauty of nature in Burguet is somewhat out-of-date, too serene, and is unlikely to be able to fully satisfy a person who has been on the front line and faced there with the “revelry” of nature, with the elements, the quintessence of which is “nothing.” That is why the main thing value guide the novel is the reality of art, not nature - aesthetic principles bullfight Bullfighting is the central symbol of the novel; it combines tradition, canon (absolute purity of technique) and innovation. The matador is constantly obliged to invent new moves, otherwise his fight will only begin to imitate danger (the story of the matador Belmonte).

The intensity of this meticulously ritualized action is given by the proximity of death. The matador fights in the “bull zone.” If he deviates for a moment from the rules of the performance - allowing the doomed animal to “charm”, hypnotize himself - and death cannot be avoided. Thus, bullfighting and the matador’s code of conduct symbolize in the novel all the main facets of overcoming lostness.

From this angle, the brilliant matador Romero is not at all folk hero, but a hero of art, the principles of which the narrator strives to comprehend and which is initially inaccessible to the understanding of Kon, who is bored both in the mountains in the lap of nature and in a duel, but endlessly runs to the hairdresser. Varnay clearly brings something to his perception of bullfighting that ordinary Spaniards, lovers of the intricacies of bullfighting, are unlikely to understand.

Jake considers himself a mystic in light of his close brush with death in war. In contrast to the advanced, death in the stadium arena is enclosed within the framework of a “theater”, where the absurd cruelty of life is denied by a system of rules and conditionally defeated by art. It is important to note that bullfighting for the residents of Pamplona is not valuable in itself, but is an integral part of a seven-day Catholic holiday. The narrator is only interested in the “carnival” aspects of the festive events. In other words, the narrator intends to distinguish what is not traditional in what is happening (rite church holiday, which Barnes partly associates with public hypocrisy), and the unconventional - a situation of revaluation of values. Bringing bullfighting to a religious model becomes obvious in the novel when it comes to Christianity, which is attractive to Barnes primarily as a “form” filled with purely personal content.

The Spanish experience therefore hardly changed anything in the life of the narrator. Being at the “holiday within a holiday” (of which Bret Ashley is the priestess) only roots him in the “art” of suffering. Barnes's stoic code is tested once again in increasingly brutal "love-torment." Having sacrificed Brett Ashley to the matador Romeo in accordance with the artistic spirit of Dionysian-carnival fun, Varnay cannot help but realize that he is able to gain only by constantly tragically losing. Accordingly, Bret Ashley sacrifices his passion for the “master of beauty” for the sake of his “cruel” love for Jake Barnes. The final lines of the novel (Varne and Ashley, who have met again, are circling in a car around the square) hint at the “eternal return” - the inexhaustible suffering of physical existence, on the depth of awareness of which the emergence of the beauty of despair depends.

Barnes’s “choice” is, of course, a free choice according to existentialist concepts, the “hopeless” optimism of which anticipates the concept of action that was philosophically and aesthetically justified in France only at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s. Far from being arbitrary, J.-P. Sartre (the refusal of love at the end of “Nausea” and the figure of the Self-Taught Man allow us to recall the final chapters of “The Sun Also Rises” and the figure of Cohn), analyzing Camus’ “The Stranger,” found it possible to name Hemingway among the predecessors of his fellow writer.

Novel "A Farewell to Arms!" can be considered a prologue to the situation depicted in “The Sun Also Rises.” And in this work, Hemingway used a quote in the title of his book. It is taken from a poem by an English playwright and poet of the late 16th century. George Peale, written on the occasion of the retirement of the famous warrior. Hemingway's irony is obvious: his novel depicts not the glory of guns, but tragic defeat. What kind of “weapon” are we talking about? First of all, about the romantic idea of ​​war associated with the figure of Napoleon, a war of systematic offensives and retreats, with the solemn surrender of cities, consecrated by ritual - in a word, about an idea, the content of which was brilliantly played out by L. N. Tolstoy in “War and Peace”. The illogicality, the cruel absurdity of a modern massacre (the shooting at Caporeto) destroys the illusion of Lieutenant Frederick Henry about duty in relation to the military system and social relations, allowing the triumph of chaos, but at the same time sanctified by loud but insignificant slogans about “heroism.”

According to the author, “Farewell to Arms!” is not an anti-militaristic novel like “Fire” by A. Barbusse. Lieutenant Henry is not against war as such - war, in his opinion, is the courageous craft of a real man. However, as Hemingway shows, this ritual completely loses its universal meaning against the backdrop of battles that are deadly illogical and play with people like puppets. The front line in this “new” war, where in essence there are neither friends nor foes (the Austrians are practically not personified in the novel), is purely conventional. The discovery of this dimension of war occurs both under the influence of injury and as a result of the lieutenant’s conversations with ordinary people who, as often happens in Hemingway, act as experts in the most reliable truths (“War is not won by victories”). It gives Frederick nothing but a lesson in self-knowledge: the war becomes an undeniable, existential event in his inner world. From this war, of course, it is no longer possible to desert, which once again emphasizes the ironic ambiguity of the novel’s title.

As war begins to be identified with the absolute cruelty of the world, love comes to the forefront of the narrative, which was previously considered a biological trap for a real man, in contrast to “glorious military deeds.” Rinaldi, Frederic's friend, for example, has syphilis. As a result of the development of the theme of love, the novel could rightfully be called “Farewell, Love!” That is, goodbye to “romantic”, sublime love, as impossible in the modern world as romantic war. Frederick and Catherine recognize this when they discuss how the impersonal war machine (“they”) kills the most worthy. Without creating any illusions about their future, Hemingway’s heroes are doomed, as in the novel “The Sun Also Rises,” to love-torment, love-loss.

The scenery changes, the gloomy mountain (rising above the front line) and the storm give way to sun-drenched Switzerland, but this does not abolish the tragic pattern: Catherine dies while performing an exclusively peaceful duty, in childbirth. Following the drama of rock turns Hemingway's characters into seekers of revelation, the essence of which they can only determine by contradiction. “By losing, I gain” - this paradox, traditional for the works of the American writer, indicates Hemingway’s intention to make meaning the very absence of meaning: the bitter the defeat, the more persistently a person’s desire to assert his dignity at all costs manifests itself.

Hemingway's best works are about metaphysical hunger. This theme in the first two novels is placed in the context of problems of art and love. In the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway's traditional individualist is tested by politics.

Hemingway's book about Spain may not be so perfect from a creative point of view (elements of self-repetition are noticeable in it), but this is compensated by the capacity of its generalizations. If the characters of early Hemingway felt the impossibility of escaping the obsession of war even in peaceful life, then the heroes of “The Bell” would probably agree with the words of T. S. Eliot from an essay on Milton: “The civil war never ends...” As an eyewitness to the Spanish events, Hemingway considered it possible to put as an epigraph to the novel a fragment from John Donne’s sermon similar in content to Eliot’s formula. “...I am one with all Humanity, and therefore never ask for whom the Bell tolls: it tolls for You” - in this statement of the poet Hemingway found confirmation of his observations about the Spanish Civil War: the human in a person is more important than his political affiliation. The writer seemed to have foreseen criticism of Soviet propaganda for the impartial portrayal of Spanish communists and leaders of the International Brigades in the novel, when through the mouth of his character, the Soviet journalist Karkov (his prototype was M. Koltsov), he accused Robert Jordan of being “weak.” political development" In the 1960s, D. Ibarruri sent a special letter to the Politburo of the CPSU, where she spoke about the undesirability of publishing Hemingway’s novel in the USSR. As a result, domestic readers are still, by inertia, getting acquainted with a translation that is full of censorship omissions.

The depth of “The Bell” is that it is both an anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian novel. Anti-fascism in it is, first of all, not a political position, but a manifestation of personal courage and a category of personal freedom. Hemingway makes the contrast between the Francoists and the Republicans conditional at times: both are distinguished by cruelty. The writer quite habitually confronts demagoguery, cowardice, and propaganda falsehood with the stoic courage of ordinary people (El Sordo, Anselmo), who fight as they plow the land, and kill, hating murder. The attentive reader cannot ignore the double paradox of the final pages of the story. From the standpoint of military strategy, Jordan’s death - he single-handedly covers the retreat of the partisans - does not make much sense, but, as in similar novels by A. Malraux (“Human Lot”), which are dedicated to “strange” civil wars, the hero wins when he refuses from any form of “self-interest” and sacrifices himself for the sake of others. But two worthy people, to varying degrees, must die at the bridge: both the “Republican” Jordan, and the first who, by tragic irony, falls into the crosshairs of his machine gun, the royalist Lieutenant Berrendo.

The central theme of the novel, as the author saw it, should therefore be formulated as a person’s knowledge of himself in spite of society, which offers him only the appearance of a solution to the problem of freedom. In "Bell" we're talking about in fact, about two wars: the war of ideologies (on the plain) and the partisan war (in the mountains). It is the double sacrifice - the “mountain” test of death, as well as the love of a Spanish girl - that shows the price of true courage, allows the American dreamer-intellectual, who came to Spain as a volunteer, to escape from beautiful-minded (“bookish”) idealism and to establish himself, as Malraux would say, in the idealism of “anti-fate”. Hemingway was not alone in his artistic vision of Spanish events. Somewhat similar accents are characteristic of the work of J. Orwell (“Tribute to Catalonia”, 1938), and the poetry of W. H. Auden at the turn of the 1930s-1940s.

Hemingway's post-war work (the novel "Across the River, in the Shade of the Trees", 1950; the story "The Old Man and the Sea", 1952) is inferior in level to his works of the 1920-1930s. However, this circumstance could no longer change Hemingway’s reputation (Nobel Prize 1954) as one of the main creators of the artistic mythology of modern individualism.

The creative experiment begun by Parisian expatriates, modernists of the pre-war generation Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, was continued by young prose writers and poets who came to American literature and brought it to her later worldwide fame. Throughout the twentieth century, their names were firmly associated in the minds of foreign readers with the idea of ​​US literature as a whole. These are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder and others, mainly modernist writers.

At the same time, American modernism differs from European modernism in its more obvious involvement in the social and political events of the era: the shock war experience of most authors could not be silenced or avoided; it demanded artistic embodiment. This invariably misled Soviet researchers, who declared these writers to be “critical realists.” American criticism labeled them as "lost generation".

The very definition of “lost generation” was casually dropped by G. Stein in a conversation with her driver. She said: “You are all a lost generation, all the youth who were in the war. You have no respect for anything. You will all get drunk.” This saying was accidentally heard by E. Hemingway and he put it into use. He put the words “You are all a lost generation” as one of two epigraphs to his first novel “The Sun Also Rises” (“Fiesta”, 1926). With time this definition, accurate and succinct, has received the status of a literary term.

What are the origins of the “lostness” of an entire generation? The First World War was a test for all humanity. One can imagine what she became for the boys, full of optimism, hope and patriotic illusions. In addition to the fact that they directly fell into the “meat grinder,” as this war was called, their biography began immediately with the climax, with the maximum overstrain of mental and physical strength, with the most difficult test for which they were absolutely unprepared. Of course, it was a breakdown. The war knocked them out of their usual rut forever and determined their worldview—an acutely tragic one. A striking illustration of this is the beginning of the expatriate Thomas Stearns Eliot's (1888-1965) poem "Ash Wednesday" (1930).

Other programmatic poetic works of the "Lost Generation" - T. Eliot's poems "The Waste Land" (1922) and "The Hollow Men" (1925) - are characterized by the same feeling of emptiness and hopelessness and the same stylistic virtuosity.

However, Gertrude Stein, who argued that the “lost” had “no respect for anything,” turned out to be too categorical in her judgment. The rich experience of suffering, death and overcoming beyond their years not only made this generation very resilient (not one of the writing brethren “drunk to death”, as was predicted for them), but also taught them to unmistakably distinguish and highly honor the enduring values ​​of life: communication with nature , love for a woman, male friendship and creativity.

The writers of the “lost generation” never formed any literary group and did not have a single theoretical platform, but the common destinies and impressions shaped their similar life positions: disappointment in social ideals, the search for enduring values, stoic individualism. Coupled with the same, acutely tragic worldview, this determined the presence in the prose of a number of “lost” common features, obvious, despite the diversity of individual artistic styles of individual authors.

The commonality is evident in everything, from the theme to the form of their works. The main themes of the writers of this generation are war, everyday life at the front ("A Farewell to Arms" (1929) by Hemingway, "Three Soldiers" (1921) by Dos Passos, the collection of stories "These Thirteen" (1926) by Faulkner, etc.) and post-war reality - "the century jazz" ("The Sun Also Rises" (1926) by Hemingway, "Soldier's Award" (1926) and "Mosquitoes" (1927) by Faulkner, novels "Beautiful but Doomed" (1922) and "The Great Gatsby" (1925), short story collections "Stories from the Jazz Age" (1922) and "All the Sad Young Men" (1926) by Scott Fitzgerald).

Both themes in the works of the “lost” are interconnected, and this connection is of a cause-and-effect nature. The “war” works show the origins of the lost generation: front-line episodes are presented by all authors harshly and unembellished - contrary to the tendency to romanticize the First World War in official literature. Works about the “world after the war” show the consequences - the convulsive fun of the “jazz age”, reminiscent of dancing on the edge of an abyss or a feast during the plague. This is a world of destinies crippled by war and broken human relationships.

The issues that occupy the “lost” gravitate towards the original mythological oppositions of human thinking: war and peace, life and death, love and death. It is symptomatic that death (and war as its synonym) is certainly one of the elements of these oppositions. It is also symptomatic that these questions are resolved “lost” not in a mythopoetic or abstract philosophical sense, but in an extremely concrete and more or less socially definite manner.

All the heroes of "war" works feel that they were fooled and then betrayed. Lieutenant of the Italian army, American Frederick Henry (“A Farewell to Arms!” by E. Hemingway) directly says that he no longer believes the rattling phrases about “glory,” “sacred duty,” and “the greatness of the nation.” All the heroes of the writers of the “lost generation” lose faith in a society that sacrificed their children to “merchant calculations” and demonstratively break with it. Lieutenant Henry concludes a “separate peace” (that is, deserts the army), Jacob Barnes (“The Sun Also Rises” by Hemingway), Jay Gatsby (“The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald) and “all the sad young people" of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and other prose writers of the "Lost Generation".

What do the heroes of their works who survived the war see the meaning of life? In life itself as it is, in the life of each individual person, and, above all, in love. It is love that occupies a dominant place in their value system. Love, understood as a perfect, harmonious union with a woman, is creativity, camaraderie (human warmth nearby), and a natural principle. This is the concentrated joy of being, a kind of quintessence of everything that is worthwhile in life, the quintessence of life itself. In addition, love is the most individual, the most personal, the only experience that belongs to you, which is very important for the “lost.” In fact, the dominant idea of ​​their works is the idea of ​​​​the unchallenged dominance of the private world.

All the heroes of the “lost” are building their own, alternative world, where there should be no place for “mercantile calculations”, political ambitions, wars and deaths, all the madness that is happening around. "I was not made to fight. I was made to eat, drink and sleep with Catherine," says Frederick Henry. This is the credo of all the “lost”. They, however, themselves feel the fragility and vulnerability of their position. It is impossible to completely isolate yourself from the big hostile world: it constantly invades their lives. It is no coincidence that love in the works of the writers of the “lost generation” is fused with death: it is almost always stopped by death. Catherine, Frederick Henry's lover, dies (A Farewell to Arms!) accidental death an unknown woman entails the death of Jay Gatsby (“The Great Gatsby”), etc.

Not only the death of the hero on the front line, but also the death of Catherine from childbirth, and the death of a woman under the wheels of a car in The Great Gatsby, and the death of Jay Gatsby himself, which at first glance have nothing to do with the war, turn out to be tightly connected with it. These untimely and senseless deaths appear in the “lost” novels as a kind of artistic expression of the thought about the unreasonableness and cruelty of the world, about the impossibility of escaping from it, about the fragility of happiness. And this idea, in turn, is a direct consequence of the authors’ war experience, their mental breakdown, their trauma. Death for them is synonymous with war, and both of them - war and death - appear in their works as a kind of apocalyptic metaphor for the modern world. The world of the works of young writers of the twenties is a world cut off by the First World War from the past, changed, gloomy, doomed.

The prose of the "lost generation" is characterized by an unmistakable poetics. This is lyrical prose, where the facts of reality are passed through the prism of the perception of a confused hero, very close to the author. It is no coincidence that the favorite form of “lost” is a first-person narrative, which, instead of an epically detailed description of events, involves an excited, emotional response to them.

The prose of the “lost” is centripetal: it does not unfold human destinies in time and space, but, on the contrary, condenses and condenses the action. It is characterized by a short period of time, usually a crisis in the fate of the hero; it can also include memories of the past, due to which the themes are expanded and the circumstances are clarified, which distinguishes the works of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Leading compositional principle American prose twenties - the principle of "compressed time", the discovery English writer James Joyce, one of the three “pillars” of European modernism (along with M. Proust and F. Kafka).

One cannot help but notice a certain similarity in the plot solutions of the works of the writers of the “lost generation”. Among the most frequently repeated motifs (elementary units of the plot) are the short-term but complete happiness of love (“A Farewell to Arms!” by Hemingway, “The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald), the futile search by a former front-line soldier for his place in post-war life (“The Great Gatsby” and “Night”) tender" by Fitzgerald, "A Soldier's Award" by Faulkner, "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway), the absurd and untimely death of one of the heroes ("The Great Gatsby", "A Farewell to Arms!").

All these motifs were later replicated by the “lost” themselves (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), and most importantly, by their imitators who did not smell gunpowder and did not live at the turn of the era. As a result, they are sometimes perceived as some kind of cliché. However, similar plot solutions were suggested to the writers of the “lost generation” by life itself: at the front they saw senseless and untimely death every day, they themselves painfully felt the lack of solid ground under their feet in the post-war period, and they, like no one else, knew how to be happy, but their happiness often was fleeting, because the war separated people and ruined their destinies. And the heightened sense of tragedy and artistic flair characteristic of the “lost generation” dictated their appeal to the extreme situations of human life.

The "lost" style is also recognizable. Their typical prose is a seemingly impartial account with deep lyrical overtones. The works of E. Hemingway are especially distinguished by extreme laconicism, sometimes lapidary phrases, simplicity of vocabulary and enormous restraint of emotions. Even the love scenes in his novels are laconically and almost dryly resolved, which obviously excludes any falsehood in the relationships between the characters and, ultimately, has an extremely strong impact on the reader.

Most of the writers of the “lost generation” were destined to still have years, and some (Hemingway, Faulkner, Wilder) decades of creativity, but only Faulkner managed to break out of the circle of themes, problematics, poetics and stylistics defined in the 20s, from the magic circle of aching sadness and the doom of the "lost generation". The community of the “lost”, their spiritual brotherhood, mixed with young hot blood, turned out to be stronger than the thoughtful calculations of various literary groups, which disintegrated without leaving a trace in the work of their participants.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), laureate Nobel Prize in the field of literature, a “citizen of the world” and a writer of the widest range has forever retained a certain mark, the stigma of “lost”, which sometimes manifests itself in a recognizable compositional design, a recognizable plot twist or character trait of the hero.

Hemingway's work represents new step forward in the development of American and world realistic art. The main theme of Hemingway's work throughout his life remained the theme of the tragic fate of the ordinary American.

The basis of his novels is action, struggle, zeal to move forward and the desire for the best. The author admires the strength of the human spirit, those who were able to remain human in the most difficult situations, in the face of danger and death. But still, some of them are irrevocably doomed to despair, loneliness and, consequently, disappointment.

E. Hemingway's prose, polished and extremely economical in visual means, was largely prepared by the school of journalism. This prose of the master, the virtuoso simplicity of which only emphasized the complexity of his artistic world, was always based on personal experience writer.

Real biographical facts(service in the Red Cross detachment on the Italian-Austrian front, serious injury and stay in a Milan hospital, a stormy love for the nurse Agnes von Kurowski that brought Hemingway only bitterness and disappointment) are artistically transformed in his works and transferred into a clear and piercing true picture of suffering and the courageous stoicism of the "lost generation".

Always in the thick of the events of his time - as a correspondent, a direct participant and as a writer - Hemingway responded to them with his journalism and works of art. Thus, the atmosphere of the “angry decade” and the civil war in Spain were recreated in the short stories in the collection “The Winner Gets Nothing” (1935), the novel “To Have and Have Not” (1937), “Spanish journalism”, and the play “The Fifth Column” (1938). ) and the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). The events of the 1940s, when Hemingway, who settled in Cuba, hunted German submarines in the Caribbean on his yacht Pilar, were reflected in the posthumously published novel Islands in the Ocean (1979). At the end of World War II, the writer, as a war correspondent, participated in the liberation of Paris.

“God forbid you live in times of change” has nothing to do with journalists. When everything is quiet, calm and “stable”, we become bored. Hemingway was never bored. He was young and vigorous during the first world war and was in the prime of his life during the second. He never wrote about what he himself did not see, did not know, did not understand. In this sense, he strived to be a modern reporter. Hemingway tried to achieve old trick“It’s easy to write about simple things,” he brilliantly mastered the telegraphic language of reporting. But the world around him, life in Europe was far from simple.

If the people of the lost generation were internally devastated victims of war, active wrecks, then the young Hemingway felt neither devastated nor castaway. He was a searching and thinking writer who deeply perceived the tragedy of his comrades and chose it as his theme. But he described his contemporaries.

Reading Hemingway - no matter what he wrote about, about the most seemingly different things - you invariably feel his hatred of human loneliness, his desire to get out, to get out of this loneliness to friends, to a woman, to a cause that connects people with each other, even when this matter is war and somewhere in the final it promises you death.

Hemingway tries to write without any bias and as specifically as possible about what he really feels; write, consolidating in themselves the acts, things and phenomena that cause the feeling being experienced, and do it in such a way that, to paraphrase the words of Hemingway himself, the essence of the phenomena, the sequence of facts and actions that evoke certain feelings, remains effective for the reader both a year later and in ten years, and with luck and clear enough consolidation - even forever.

“If the author of a novel puts his own thoughts into the mouths of his artificially sculpted characters ... then this is not literature,” Hemingway wrote. The writer strives to convey the inner state of the hero, his experiences and moods, using an internal monologue for this. He strives to show the hero’s spiritual world, subtly and accurately describing the hero’s actions, revealing the external manifestations of the inner world. Therefore, he refuses to talk about internal state their heroes.

One of the researchers of his work writes that a chain of short, unrelated phrases fulfills the main task - to show the disintegrating connections of a displaced and disconnected world as it is directly perceived by a confused consciousness, and not as it is later organized by a cold mind and fits into traditional forms.

The very way of expression, without any explanation from the author, shows the emptiness and meaninglessness of the existence of his heroes and at the same time the tragic significance of life. And restrained, concise, clear and succinct descriptions of phenomena, events, external actions only emphasize the helpless doom of people, the researcher emphasizes.

Extreme conciseness, lapidary narration, intolerance to pompous words, to rhetoric and sentimentality, masterful introduction of a repeatedly repeated leitmotif (whether it is a separate phrase or an entire image), naturally, in all its everyday roughness, the sounding dialogue, lyrical subtext, the “background” of the depicted - These features of Hemingway's style are firmly established both in his short stories and in his stories and novels.

Hemingway proclaimed the so-called “iceberg principle.” “If this can clarify anything,” the writer pointed out, “I would like to say that literary creativity reminds me of an iceberg. Only an eighth of what is in the water is visible. You must throw away everything that can be thrown away. This strengthens your iceberg; what is thrown out goes under the water.”

The writer’s work is characterized by colossal persuasiveness, freshness and effective force. But here it should be noted that this brevity of the narrative and accuracy limited the possible literary devices that could be used. It is precisely because of this simplicity and factuality that much, very much is brought into the subtext. Hemingway's literature is not for everyone, it needs to be studied and experienced.

Hemingway brilliantly mastered the telegraphic language of reporting; he liked the cool brevity, clarity and capacity of the code, he even flaunted deliberate simplification and coarsening. However, he already felt like a writer. Newspaper blanks grew into well-developed literary sketches.