Romantic hero in American literature. Romanticism in the USA
American romanticism arose as a result of the American bourgeois revolution of 1776-1784, as a response to it. Revolutionary War - Formation of the USA The final formation of the American nation. America is a land of endless possibilities.
American romanticism has the same historical background and aesthetic basis as European:
1. attention to the inner world of a person;
2. the principle of romantic dual worlds - romantics affirm the idea of the imperfection of the real world and contrast the world with their fantasy. Both worlds are constantly compared and contrasted;
3. interest in folklore - one of the forms of protest against the practicality and prosaism of everyday bourgeois existence is the idealization of European antiquity, ancient cultural life;
The chronological framework of American romanticism differs from European. In the 30s in Europe there was already realism, and in America romanticism began in the 20s and 30s.
Early America. Romanticism: 20-30s of the 19th century. Cooper. Glorifying the War of Independence. The theme of the development of the continent is one of the main themes of literature. Appeared critical tendencies, the high ideals proclaimed at the birth of the republic are forgotten. An alternative to the bourgeois way of life is being sought. The theme is the idealized life of the American West, the sea element.
Mature American romanticism - 40-50s: Edgar Allan Poe. Dissatisfaction with the progress of the country's development (slavery is preserved, the indigenous population is being destroyed, there is an economic crisis). The literature contains dramatic and tragic moods, a feeling of imperfection of man and the world around him, a mood of sorrow and melancholy. In literature, a hero who bears the stamp of doom.
Late. 60s Critical crisis sentiments are growing. Romanticism is unable to reflect the changing modern reality. Realistic trends.
National characteristics of American romanticism.
1. Affirmation of national identity and independence, search for national character.
2. Consistently anti-capitalist character.
3. Popularity of the Indian theme
4. Three branches of American romanticism
1 New England (North-Eastern states) - philosophy, ethical issues
2 Middle States - search for a national hero, social issues
3 Southern States - Advantages of Slave Orders
F. Cooper and Irving occupy a prominent place in the literature of those years. Their TV reflected the characteristic features of American Rome at an early stage of development. Ir. and K. at the initial stage of their TV were inspired by the ideas of the American revolution and the struggle for independence. The images they created of strong, courageous people, contrasted with self-interested bourgeois businessmen, had a great positive significance. The poeticization of man living in the lap of nature, the poeticization of his courageous struggle against it, constitute one of the characteristic features of the early American Empire. In his early humorous essays, Irving opposed the extermination of Indian tribes. Characteristic is the contrast between the antiquity he idealizes and pictures of life in modern America. Also important is the interweaving of fantasy elements with folklore tradition.
COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE (Cooper, James Fenimore) (1789–1851), American writer, historian, critic of social order. In 1820 he composed a traditional novel of morals, Precaution, for his daughters. Having discovered his gift as a storyteller, he wrote the novel The Spy (1821), based on local legends. The novel received international recognition
The greatest American romantic writer who wrote about the merciless war of the colonists against the Indians.
Cooper in his youth was fascinated by all the events associated with the declaration of American independence. Cooper's work is associated with the early stage of the development of romanticism in the United States. He entered world literature as the creator of the American social novel. He wrote a large number of novels, several varieties: historical - “Spy”, “Bravo”, “Executioner”; Marine - “Pilot”, “Pirate”; novels written in the form of a family chronicle - “Redskins”, “Devil's Finger”
Cooper's main works, on which he worked for many years, are a series of leatherstocking novels, they are called Indian novels: “Deerslayer”, “The Last of the Mohicans”, “Pathfinder”, “Prairie”, “Pioneers”.
Cooper's works reflected the historical patterns of development of American civilization. He wrote about the events of the American Revolution, about sea voyages, and about the tragic fate of Indian tribes. The significance of the issues was combined in Cooper's novels with a pronounced adventure beginning and the fascination of the narrative, and the power of the romantic imagination with authenticity. In his pentalogy about the leather stocking, he describes the fate of the American pioneer Captain Bumpo; the writer captured the process of development of American lands by European colonists. In these novels, the reader lives and acts before an old man, illiterate, semi-savage, but possessing perfectly the best qualities of a truly cultured person: impeccable honesty towards people, love for them and a constant desire to help his neighbor, make his life easier, not sparing his strength. Many extraordinary adventures await Cooper's heroes; they will take part in a fierce struggle for their independence. Cooper was a supporter of American democracy, but seeing what was happening in Europe, he feared that America would fall under the rule of an oligarchy of financiers and industrialists. After his trip to Europe, he changed his view of American reality. European impressions helped him more deeply understand the phenomena of American life; many things made him disillusioned with the American democracy he had previously praised.
Cooper sharply criticized bourgeois America in the novels “Down,” “Home,” and especially in the novel “The Monikins,” which is a social and political satire on bourgeois states. Cooper's criticism of the bourgeois order was carried out from a conservative position; he leaned towards the civilization of patriarchal farm America.
Achievements of E.A. Poe in the development of lyrical and prose genres. Edgar Allan Poe(January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) - American writer, poet, literary critic and editor, is a representative of American romanticism. He received the greatest fame for his “dark” stories. Poe was one of the first American writers to write his works in the form of short stories, and is considered the creator of the detective fiction genre in literature. His work contributed to the emergence of the science fiction genre.
Poe began his literary career with poetry, publishing a volume of poems in Boston back in 1827 "Al-Aaraaf, Tamerlane and other poems"(“Al-Aaraaf, Tamerlane and other poems”). Poe appeared as a prose writer in 1833, writing “The Manuscript Found in a Bottle” ( “A manuscript found in a bottle”).
Poe's work was influenced by romanticism, which was already completing its path in the West. “Gloomy fantasy, which was gradually disappearing from European literature, flared up once again in an original and bright way in the “scary stories” But that was the epilogue of romanticism” (Fritsche). Poe's work was strongly influenced by the English and German romantics, especially Hoffmann (it was not for nothing that Poe was fond of German literature and idealistic philosophy); he is related to the ominously gloomy shade of Hoffmann’s fantasies, although he declared himself: “The horror of my stories is not from Germany, but from the soul.” Hoffmann’s words: “Life is a crazy nightmare that haunts us until it finally throws us into the arms of death” express the main idea of Poe’s “scary stories” - an idea that, together with the peculiar style of its expression, was born in the first stories of Poe and only deepened and processed with great skill in his further artistic work.
E. Poe and the “unity of impression” in the poem “The Raven”. Poe was perhaps the first in his homeland to try to comprehend the nature and purpose of art and develop a coherent system of aesthetic principles.
Poe outlined his theoretical views in various articles “Philosophy of Setting” (1840), “Philosophy of Creativity” (1846), “Poetic Principle” (published 1850), and numerous reviews. Like all romantics, he proceeds from the opposition of repulsive and brutal reality and the romantic ideal of Beauty. The desire for this ideal, according to the writer, is inherent in human nature. The task of art is to create beauty, giving people the highest pleasure.
One of the controversial aspects of Poe's aesthetics is the relationship between beauty and ethics. He pointedly contrasts poetry with truth and morality: “Its relationship with the intellect is of only secondary importance. She comes into contact with duty and truth only by chance.” It must be taken into account that in this case the “truth” for Poe is the disgusting reality of the surrounding everyday world. His position emphasizes the importance of aesthetic criteria and is polemically directed against didacticism and the utilitarian view of art. It is by no means reducible to the aesthetic principle of “art for art’s sake,” the authorship of which is attributed to Poe by American criticism.
Poe also argues that the creation of Beauty is not an instant insight of talent, but the result of purposeful reflection and precise calculation. Denying the spontaneity of the creative process, Poe, in The Philosophy of Creation, talks in detail about how he wrote the famous poem “The Raven.” He asserts that “not a single moment in its creation can be attributed to chance or intuition, that the work, step by step, proceeded to completion with the precision and rigid sequence with which mathematical problems are solved.” Of course, Poe did not deny the role of imagination and in this case he consciously chose only one - the rationalistic - side of the creative act. An emphasis on it is necessary in order to overcome the chaos and disorganization of contemporary romantic poetry and prose. Poe’s demand for aesthetic “finishment,” “completeness” of a work is innovative and bold. His aesthetic system can be called “rationalistic romanticism.”
This harmony is based on the main principle of composition, according to Poe: “the combination of events and intonations that would best contribute to the creation of the desired effect.” That is, everything in a poem or story should serve such an impact on the reader. Which is “planned” in advance by the artist.
Every letter, every word, every comma must work for the “effect of the whole.” From the principle of the “effect of the whole” comes the very important requirement for Poe to limit the volume of a work of art. The limit is “the ability to read them in one sitting,” since otherwise, with a fractional perception of what is being read, everyday affairs will interfere and the unity of the impression will be destroyed. Poe argues that "there are no great poems or poems at all," a "sheer contradiction in terms." He himself consistently adhered to the small form in both poetry and prose.
Poe considered the only legitimate sphere of poetry to be the realm of beauty. His definition of poetry is “the creation of beauty through rhythm.” Turning away from “life as it is,” Poe in his poems creates a different reality, unclear and foggy, the reality of dreams and dreams. Poe's poetic masterpieces - "The Raven", "Annabel Lee", "Ulalyum", "Bells", "Linor" and others - are plotless and cannot be interpreted logically in prose.
Content often gives way to mood. It is created not with the help of images of reality, but through various associations, vague, vague, arising “on the edge where reality and dream are mixed.” Poe's poems evoke a powerful emotional response. Semantic and sound structures in Poe's poems merge, forming a single whole, so that the music of the verse carries a semantic load.
Numerous repetitions of words and entire lines also resemble a variation of a musical phrase. At least these two lines from “The Raven” give an idea of the richness of Poe’s poems through the use of phonetic imagery: “The silken alarming rustle in the purple drapes and curtains / Filled me with vague horror and reminded me of everything...”
This famous poem is based on a series of appeals by the lyrical hero to a bird that flew into his room on a stormy night. The raven answers all questions with the same word “Nevermore” - “never”. At first it seems like a mechanical repetition of a rote word, but the repeated refrain sounds eerily appropriate in response to the words of the poem's hero grieving for his dead lover. Finally, he wants to find out whether he is destined, at least in heaven, to meet again with the one who left him on earth. But here, too, “Nevermore” sounds like a verdict. At the end of the poem, the black raven turns from a learned talking bird into a symbol of grief, melancholy and hopelessness: it is impossible to return a loved one or get rid of a painful memory.
And the Raven sits, sits above the door, straightening his feathers,
From now on the pale Pallas has not left the bust;
He looks in motionless flight, like a demon of darkness in slumber,
And under the gilded chandelier, he spread a shadow on the floor,
And my soul will not fly out of this shadow from now on.
Never, oh Nevermore.
17. Romanticism in German literature: periodization, names, ideological and artistic originality (using examples of works read)
Romantic movement in German literature began at the end of the century. New trends arose in the work of writers whose childhood was during the French Revolution of 1789, and whose youth was in the first post-revolutionary years. The romantics had a chance to acutely feel both the force of the pressure of historical development and the stubborn resistance of feudal-burgher Germany to such a course of history.
In post-revolutionary Europe Despite the opposition of the nobility and its dream of revenge, the class dominance of the bourgeoisie was strengthened and the contradictions of bourgeois relations were exposed. In Germany, the old feudal-monarchical order continued to dominate. The patriotic movement of the masses against Napoleon's invasion was used by monarchical governments to strengthen the existing system. The dead, which had long outlived its usefulness, pretended to be alive, but the living could not straighten up, entangled in the nets of the dead. Romantics could not yet comprehend the laws of historical development - they only saw that everything had moved from its place, everything was mixed up. That is why a feeling of fermentation of reality came into their work.
The problem of “freedom and necessity” which occupied Goethe and so worried Schiller, the romantics at first solved it surprisingly easily: they simply discounted objective necessity and “freed” freedom from it, without even suspecting how deceptive this ease was and how bitter the inevitable return to reality would soon turn out to be. The pathos of the creativity of the early romantics consisted in the affirmation of the limitless spiritual possibilities of the individual, not looking back at real circumstances. The romantics, like Schiller, felt the contradictions between the individual and society very acutely, but unlike the Enlightenment, they placed the individual above society and proclaimed its absolute independence - albeit only spiritual. The spirit could soar as high above the earth as it wanted; this, in fact, was the early romantic understanding of freedom. The awareness of the illusory nature of such ideas, which arose among the romantics later, at the beginning of the new century, was tragic for them.
Spiritual quest writers of that dramatic era attract keen interest in our time. Works appeared in literature, the heroes of which are Goethe’s “Faust” (for a description, see paragraph 20), Kleist, Hölderlin, and Hoffmann. The Soviet publishing house "Rainbow" published the collection "Meeting" (1983), compiled from such works. The early stage of German romanticism is represented by the creative activity of Friedrich Hölderlin and the writers who formed the circle of romantics in Jena: Friedrich and August Schlege, Novalis, Wilhelm Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck.
The romantics of the Jena school looked at the artist as a genius, creating the world according to his own will and, as it were, playing with images. A special kind of irony appeared in their work - romantic, designed to remind both poetry and life itself of the relativity of the achievements of both.
The functions of romantic irony are twofold. By resorting to it, the artist was also ironic at himself, admitting the futility of his attempts to enclose the infinity of the world within the finite framework of the work. At the same time, romantic irony exposed the contrast between the inspiring breadth of endless life and the depressing narrowness of many of its concrete manifestations. F. Schlegel believed that a romantic work should be built as “an amazing eternal alternation of enthusiasm with irony.”
The meaning of this alternation is well explained by the Soviet scientist N. Ya-Berkovsky in the book “Romanticism in Germany”: “Romantic irony is characterized by the problem of reality. It is constantly asked what truth is - in the creative chaos or in the ready-made things and facts that emerge from it. As soon as we support one of the contending forces, irony sues us on behalf of the other, irony sends us back and forth in search of truth, not allowing us to rest on anything single.” And further: “When it seems to us that we have mastered life along with its romantic essence, we will be reminded by irony that we have mastered only in thoughts, in imagination, but in real practice everything remains the same, and, thinking that we have solved everything "We haven't really decided anything."
The Jena romantics fundamentally avoided the certainty of concepts that the Enlightenment had. The images created by the romantics do not have the stability of outline that was inherent in the literature of the 18th century. But irony helped them capture different facets of life's contradictions. The Romantics came closer than the Enlightenmentists to a dialectical vision of the world and thereby took an important step in the development of artistic consciousness.
The early romantics loved the word chaos. Schelling wrote that the world originates from ancient chaos, that is, from the primary indivisibility, confusion of everything. Chaos precedes order (cosmos), it is life-giving and contains many different possibilities. F. Schlegel said that chaos is “confused abundance.” During periods of historical turning points and reorganizations, before a new order is established, chaos necessarily reigns for some time, from which a new one is born.
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Introduction
Romanticism became widespread in European countries. And the development of romanticism in the United States is associated with the assertion of national independence. American romanticism is characterized by great closeness to the traditions of the Enlightenment, especially among the early romantics (W. Irving, Cooper, W.K. Bryant), and optimistic illusions in anticipation of the future of America. Great complexity and ambiguity are characteristic of mature American romanticism: E. Poe, Hawthorne, G.W. Longfellow, G. Melville and others. Transcendentalism stands out as a special movement here - R.W. Emerson, G. Thoreau, Hawthorne, who sang the cult of nature and simple life, rejected urbanization and industrialization.
American Romanticism developed in the first half of the 19th century. It was a response to the events associated with the American Revolution of the 70s of the 18th century and the French Revolution of 1789-1794. In the history of the country, the first half of the 19th century is the period of formation of the young bourgeois republic - the United States of America, which won the war for independence. This victory was won thanks to the heroic efforts of the masses, but large landowners and industrialists took advantage of it to their advantage. Due to the fact that as a result of the American bourgeois revolution, the most important issues in the life of the country - questions about land and slavery - were not resolved, they continued to remain the center of attention of American society throughout the 19th century. The people were deceived in their expectations of land, freedom and equality. The country was witnessing a struggle between farmers and large landowners. The farmer movement for agrarian reform was a progressive phenomenon in American history in the first half of the 19th century. After the War of Independence and the formation of the United States, the country's development was carried out in two main directions: capitalist production developed rapidly in the North, and slavery was preserved and legalized in the South. The interests of the industrial North and the plantation-slave-owning South constantly clashed. Contradictions between the South and the North intensified due to the struggle for land. Farmers and large landowners in the northern states flocked to the lands of the western regions of the country, which were also claimed by southern planters. Associated with the struggle for land and the development of the West is the process of ousting Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. Colonization was accompanied by the extermination of the Indians. Throughout the 19th century, Indian wars were fought in the country. American literature of the first half of the 19th century reflected significant phenomena in the life of the country. American romanticism achieved significant success in the 20s and 30s of the 19th century. Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving occupied a prominent place in the literature of those years. The work of these writers reflected the characteristic features of American romanticism at the early stage of its development. Irving and Cooper in the initial period of their work were inspired by the ideas of the American Revolution and the struggle for independence; they shared optimistic illusions about the exceptional conditions for the development of the United States and believed in their limitless possibilities. This was due to the fact that in the first decades of the 19th century, the contradictions of American capitalism were not yet clear enough; the labor movement and the struggle against slavery were just beginning to develop.
At the same time, in the works of the early romantics there is already quite clearly a sense of discontent among the broad masses of the people, caused by the inhumanity and cruelty of the capitalist order, aimed at robbing the people, by the activities of large industrialists, financiers, and planters. The work of the early romantics echoes the democratic literature of the 18th century. The best works of Cooper and Irving are characterized by anti-capitalist tendencies. However, their criticism of bourgeois America is largely limited and is conducted from the position of American bourgeois democracy. This is precisely what explains the fact that contemporary America, with the capitalist order firmly established in its life, romantics seek to contrast the patriarchal forms of life, the morals and customs of former times that they idealize. Objectively, this revealed the conservative nature of their romantic criticism. But the images they created of strong, noble and courageous people, opposed to self-interested bourgeois businessmen and money-grubbers, had a great positive significance. The poeticization of a man living in the bosom of the virgin and mighty nature of America, the poeticization of his courageous struggle against it is one of the characteristic features of early American romanticism. One of the first representatives of romanticism in American literature was Washington Irving (1783-1859). In his early humorous short stories and essays, Irving criticized bourgeois acquisitiveness and the contradictions of bourgeois progress (“The Devil and Tom Walker,” “Treasure Diggers”); he spoke out against the extermination of Indian tribes. A remarkable master of humor, W. Irving, in his famous “History of New York from the Creation of the World, Written by Knickerbocker” (1809), in tones of soft irony, recreates pictures of life and everyday life in New York in the 18th century. Irving’s early work is characterized by the contrast between the antiquity he idealized and the pictures of life in modern America (“Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Valley”). An important place in Irving’s work belongs to the elements of fantasy, which is closely intertwined in his works with the folklore tradition. Irving’s later works (collection of stories “Astoria, or Anecdotes from the history of an enterprise on the other side of the Rocky Mountains”, 1836) are significantly inferior to his works early years. They revealed the writer's conservatism and anti-democratic sentiments. Late Irving glorified bourgeois entrepreneurship and the colonialist policies of the US ruling circles. A similar evolution was characteristic of the American romantics. Even in the works of the greatest novelist of the first half of the 19th century, Fenimore Cooper, who reflected in his novels the process of capitalization of the country, the history of colonization and extermination of Indian tribes (the cycle of novels about Leather Stocking), conservative tendencies appear in a number of cases. As capitalist relations developed in the country and class contradictions deepened, the failure of hopes for the implementation of the principles of equality and freedom in the conditions of a bourgeois republic became evident. In the works of romantic writers of the late period (30s-50s), the prevailing moods are disappointment and disbelief in the future (E. Poe).
The most significant and characteristic figures of American romanticism in the early and late stages of its development are James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe.
The center of the artistic system of romanticism is the individual, and its main conflict is the individual and society. The emergence of romanticism is associated with the anti-enlightenment movement, the reasons for which lie in disappointment in civilization, in social, industrial, political and scientific progress, the result of which was new contrasts and contradictions, leveling and spiritual devastation of the individual.
The romantic hero is a complex, passionate personality, whose inner world is unusually deep and endless; it is a whole universe full of contradictions. Romantics were interested in all passions, both high and low, which were opposed to each other. High passion is love in all its manifestations, low passion is greed, ambition, envy. The romantics contrasted the life of the spirit, especially religion, art, and philosophy, with the base material practice. Interest in strong and vivid feelings, all-consuming passions, and secret movements of the soul are characteristic features of romanticism.
1. Romantic hero
We can talk about romance as a special type of personality - a person of strong passions and high aspirations, incompatible with the everyday world. Exceptional circumstances accompany this nature. Fantasy, folk music, poetry, legends become attractive to romantics - everything that for a century and a half was considered as minor genres, not worthy of attention. Romanticism is characterized by the affirmation of freedom, the sovereignty of the individual, increased attention to the individual, the unique in man, and the cult of the individual. Confidence in a person’s self-worth turns into a protest against the fate of history. Often the hero of a romantic work becomes an artist who is capable of creatively perceiving reality. The classicist “imitation of nature” is contrasted with the creative energy of the artist who transforms reality. A special world is created, more beautiful and real than the empirically perceived reality. Romantics passionately defended the creative freedom of the artist, his imagination, believing that the genius of the artist does not obey the rules, but creates them.
2. Cooper's works
It is impossible not to note Cooper’s skill in constructing the plot of the work, creating vivid dramatic scenes, images that have become the personification of the national character and at the same time “eternal companions of humanity.” Such are Harvey Birch from The Spy, Natty Bumppo, Chingachgook, Uncas from the books about Leatherstocking.
Perhaps the best pages of the writer are those that depict the untouched, grandiose and amazing nature of the New World. Cooper is an outstanding master of literary landscape. He is especially attracted by colorful landscapes, either captivating the eye with their soft beauty (the Shimmering Lake in “St. John’s Wort”), or majestic and harsh, inspiring anxiety and awe. In his “sea” novels, Cooper equally vividly depicts the changeable, menacing and enchanting elements of the ocean.
Carefully written battle scenes occupy an important place in almost every Cooper novel. They often culminate in a duel between powerful opponents: Chingachgook and Magua, Hard Heart and Matori. The writer's artistic language is distinguished by emotionality, the range of shades of which is different - from solemn pathos to touching sentimentality.
"History of the American Navy", testifying to Cooper's excellent mastery of the material and love for seafaring.
Cooper is considered an early novelist. His works are similar to the works of Jack London.
romanticism literature cooper
3. “The Sea Wolf” by Jack London
One of the last works that I read in my free time was the novel by the great American writer Jack London, “The Sea Wolf.” Previously, I was already familiar with many of the works of this author. I read his novels such as “The Call of the Wild,” “White Fang,” “Smoke Belew,” as well as a large number of short stories. Now, it seems to me, without Jack London it is impossible to imagine the literature of our century, which means that he said his word in literature, over which time turned out to have no power. And this word was heard by both contemporaries and descendants. The novel "The Sea Wolf" was written in 1904.
This work tells the story of a young intelligent man, Humphrey Van Weylen, who, after a shipwreck, in order to get to the mainland, was forced to sail on another ship, surrounded by an ill-mannered and vulgar crew.
I think that Jack London put all his love for the sea elements into this book. His landscapes amaze the reader with the skill of their description, as well as with truth and magnificence: “then the schooner “Ghost”, rocking, diving, climbing on moving walls of water and sliding into seething abysses, made its way further and further - to the very heart of the Pacific Ocean . I heard the wind raging over the sea. His muffled howl reached here too.”
It seems to me that “The Sea Wolf” is a very unusual novel, and this unusualness lies in the fact that there are almost no dialogues, and instead of them the author, through the reflections of the characters, shows the reader what thoughts, experiences and “disputes” live in their souls. The author here pays more attention to the character - the captain of the schooner "Ghost". Wolf Larsen is an extremely complex character, strong and complete in his own way, and such a character was befitting of a drama.
The novel, I believe, was started brilliantly. But he “broke” somewhere in the middle. As soon as the narrator, Humphrey Van Weyden, escaped from the “Ghost,” he set off in a boat with the poetess Maude on a risky voyage that ended on a desert island. The action of a completely different book-Robinsonade of lovers began, for whom “heaven is in a hut.”
Jack London's skill remained intact: the seascapes were still magnificent, the adventure intrigue unfolded as quickly as ever.
As I learned, a few days before his death, Jack London wrote in his notebook: “The Sea Wolf” debunks Nietzschean philosophy, and even the socialists did not notice this. Creatively, the writer was not yet ready to replace the socialist hero; Larsen was opposed in the novel by the liberal-minded intellectual Van Weyden, and the captain of the “Ghost” more than once or twice refuted his speculative arguments with cruel truths drawn from practical life.
Life is a grueling struggle for a piece of bread, unemployment, slums and lack of rights. Larsen identifies the concept of “life” with the concept of “bourgeois civilization,” and after this it is not so difficult for him to prove its depravity. Only a person who understands the “nature” of social relations could argue reasonedly with the “wolf.” It seems to me that Wolf Larsen is a tragic hero because this philosophy itself was in many ways a natural result of his broken life. And, despite all the barbaric acts committed by this man, I sincerely feel sorry for him and his ruined life.
Overall, this book made a huge emotional impression on me. The captain of the schooner “Ghost”, Wolf Larsen, will “remain” in my memory for a particularly long time. I was simply amazed by the command of this hero, who, despite all the obstacles, remained true to his convictions.
In general, the novel “The Sea Wolf” is a very complex work. Only after reading the entire book did I realize that the author here touches on a huge number of “eternal” problems and disputes. I think Jack London has been classified as a classic for young people too hastily. It is much more complex - the writer’s artistic talent was, without exaggeration, generous, helping him rise above the entire era and step towards the reader of today.
4. The main motives of Poe’s short story
The vast majority of E. Poe's works are distinguished by a gloomy coloring; they tell of all kinds of crimes and horrors. The man in Poe's image becomes the plaything of inexplicable, supernatural forces. The writer persistently emphasizes the idea of human criminal and vicious inclinations. The plots of E. Poe's stories are most often based on descriptions of mysterious crimes and the history of their discovery. In America and beyond, E. Poe became famous as a master of the “scary” story. The intensification of all kinds of nightmares and horrors, the depiction of various degrees and shades of fear becomes possible in the stories of E. Poe, first of all, because he most often makes the heroes of his works not an ordinary person with a normal perception of the surrounding reality, but a person with a sick psyche and an abnormal perception of the environment. E. Poe's heroes live as if outside of time; the writer does not at all strive to explain their views and characters by social reasons. With unrelenting persistence, he tries to prove that criminal inclinations are inherent in human nature itself. The instinct of crime lives in a person, prompting him to do illegal things. The most famous and characteristic prose works of E. Poe are his stories “The Fall of the House of Escher”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, “Murder in the Rue Morgue”, “The Gold Bug”. In his stories Edgar Poe especially often addresses the theme of fear experienced by man before life. There are different shades and degrees of fear that engulf the heroes of E. Poe's short stories - people with a sick psyche.
The story “The Fall of the House of Esher” reveals the story of the degeneration and death of representatives of the noble family of Esher. The events described take place in an ancient castle located in a gloomy, deserted area. Roderick Asher and his sister Lady Madeleine are sick, completely unviable people. Lady Madeleine suffers from an illness that the writer himself explains as a decline in personality, persistent apathy. Roderick is a man on the verge of madness, suffering from “painful acuteness of sensations.” His sensitivity in the perception of his surroundings is brought to the limit. Escher cannot tolerate sunlight, sounds, or bright colors. He spends his days in the darkened hall of the castle, waiting for death. Fear grips him. He is completely inactive, passive. He is haunted by nightmares, memories, terrible visions.
In the description of Roderick Escher and his sister, E. Poe’s characteristic desire to portray the painful and repulsive as something refined and beautiful was manifested. It is no coincidence that Poe emphasizes the aristocratic beauty and grace of his heroes; these people have a special charm in his eyes. Their death throes attract the writer with its painful sophistication. The motif of the death of an ancient aristocratic family, the last representatives of which turn out to be unadapted to the reality of everyday life, acquires an elegiac sound in Poe. The aestheticization of death occupies a central place in the allegorical tale “The Mask of the Red Death.” Here the idea of the inevitability of the victory of death over life is affirmed. People hiding from the plague - the Red Death - become its victims. The Red Death extends its boundless dominion over everything and everyone. In this story, Poe describes in great detail the luxurious decoration of the palace, in the halls of which people die. With morbid relish he describes the poses and faces of the dead. But E. Poe’s creative heritage is far from being exhausted by works of this nature. The writer is attracted by the world of scientific and technological achievements, the inexhaustible ingenuity of human thought, which he contrasts with the greed and acquisitiveness of the bourgeois world. In this area, the peculiarities of E. Poe’s talent clearly manifested themselves.
In his short stories (“The Gold Bug”, “Murder in the Rue Morgue”, “The Mystery of Marie Roger”), and in science fiction stories, he strives to reproduce the complex process of the human mind working to uncover and comprehend various kinds of secrets, both in the field of science and and in people's daily life practices.
In Poe's work, for the first time in American literature, the image of a detective appears, which was later so widespread in works of a detective nature. In the short story “Murder in the Rue Morgue” one of the central characters is detective Dupin. Dupin is an aristocrat who received a solid education; he reads a lot and loves books. The detective's activities do not serve as a means of livelihood for him; they attract him, first of all, as a source of a kind of aesthetic pleasure.
The complex process of finding the criminal fascinates Dupin; it becomes for him a kind of puzzle, the solution of which is interesting to think about. The search for the criminal who committed the murder in the house on the Rue Morgue forms the plot of E. Poe's novel. Dupin is passionate about analyzing facts and comparing them. His extremely developed intuition, bold assumptions, combined with a flight of imagination, ensure his success.
The analytical principle of studying phenomena and facts was used by E. Poe as the basis for such detective stories as “The Mystery of Marie Roger” and “The Golden Bug”. The writer is not interested in analyzing the social causes of the crimes and secrets being solved. The question of this is not even raised in his stories. It is replaced by complex combinations of riddles, which his hero, an amateur detective, solves with success and brilliant skill. The human mind, his inquisitive, hard-working mind, the logic of his reasoning wins; and what previously seemed an inexplicable and insoluble riddle appears before us in a sequence of simple and irrefutable facts (“The Gold Bug”).
Poe's short stories are characterized by the impeccability of the logical constructions they contain, the tension of the narrative, and strict laconicism. A great master of plot construction, in his detective stories E. Poe is extremely economical in the use of artistic techniques and images. The style of narration is simple and concise, there is nothing superfluous. This strains the reader's attention and makes him believe in the authenticity of the events described.
In E. Poe's articles on issues of literature and art, the formalistic nature of his aesthetic views was revealed. The goal that Poe believes a writer should strive for is to produce an effect. To do this, one should first of all, Poe argues, take care of the form of the work. A prose work should be small in volume, with exciting intrigue; The reader will be able to read such a work with unflagging attention, and it will produce the desired effect.
Conclusion
Romanticism is a historical phenomenon. His influence was very wide, he subjugated all areas of artistic life, philosophy, historical and philological sciences, many branches of natural science, even medicine. Not confined exclusively to any one country, having conquered not only Europe but also America, romanticism ultimately turned out to be an entire era of culture, as it had been before with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and classicism.
The breadth of romanticism and the variety of its forms make it difficult for researchers. Historians of romanticism have not yet agreed on its definition, although entire histories of the term “romanticism” itself and attempts to reveal its content have already been written. We have a well-developed history of definitions of romanticism and do not have a definition of it that would meet the needs of modern thought. Quite arbitrarily, one or another of its aspects was placed at the head of romanticism. What is the main thing in it, what is secondary, can only be established in accordance with its historical era, its real soil.
The main interest of the romantics was in the non-embodied. For them, what is most important is what has barely been born or is just on the verge of birth, what is still devoid of form, what is in the making, what is being created and what has not yet been created. Romantic aesthetics created its own criterion of beauty. For romantics, new is also beautiful. The talent of an artist for romantics lies in the ability to grasp what is new in the human world, in the ability to feel new forces of life that have barely come into action.
The extraordinary, the strange, the unknown - this is the primary source of romantic poetry. What has not yet come into life, but is only asking to be brought into it, utopian expectations, unclear impulses of created life - all this is the area of beauty and poetry, in the understanding of the romantics.
The romantics left their stage at different times, in one country their influence ceased by the 20s, in another - these years were the time of their greatest successes, but by the middle of the century romanticism was already becoming a memory, not only was it by that time superseded, the displacement of high realism began.
Literature
1. Berkovsky N.Ya. Problems of Romanticism. M., 1971, pp. 5-8, 18.
2. Gulyaev N.A. Literary trends and methods in Russian and foreign literature of the 17th - 19th centuries: Book. for teachers M.: Education, 1983. - 144 p.
3. Evnin F.I. Realism of Dostoevsky. -In the collection: Problems of the typology of Russian realism. M.: 1969, p. 411.
4. Kuleshov V.I. History of Russian criticism of the 18th and early 20th centuries. Textbook For students of philology. specialist. un-tov and ped. Inst. 3rd ed., rev. and additional M.: Education, 1984.
5. Lenin V.I. Complete collection cit., vol. 20, p. 70.
7. Makogonenko G. From Fonvizin to Pushkin. From the history of Russian realism. Publishing house “Fiction”. - M., 1969.
8. Introduction to literary criticism. Reader: Textbook. Manual for high fur boots Nikolaev P.A., Rudcheva E.G., Khalshchev V.E., Chernets L.V.; Ed. P.A. Nikolaev, - M.: Higher School, 1979.
9. Plekhanov G.V. Art and literature. M., 1948.
10. Introduction to literary criticism: Textbook for philology. specialist. un-tov (Pospelov G.I., Nikolaev P.A., Volkov I.F., Khalizev V.E., etc.); Ed. G.N. Pospelov. 2nd ed., additional - M.: Higher School, 1983.
11. Sokolov A.G. History of Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Textbook. For philol. specialist. universities - 3rd ed., rev. and additional - M.: Higher School, 1988.
12. Literature: Reference. Materials: Student's Book of Ale /S.V. Turaev, L.I. Timofeev, K.D. Vishnevsky and others - M.: Education, 1989.
13. Berkovsky N.Ya. Problems of Romanticism. M., 1971, pp. 5-8, 18.
14. Gulyaev N.A. Literary trends and methods in Russian and foreign literature of the 17th - 19th centuries: Book. for teachers M.: Education, 1983. - 144 p.
15. Evnin F.I. Realism of Dostoevsky. -In the collection: Problems of the typology of Russian realism. M.: 1969, p. 411.
16. Kuleshov V.I. History of Russian criticism of the 18th and early 20th centuries. Textbook For students of philology. specialist. un-tov and ped. Inst. 3rd ed., rev. and additional M.: Education, 1984.
17. Lenin V.I. Complete collection cit., vol. 20, p. 70.
19. Makogonenko G. From Fonvizin to Pushkin. From the history of Russian realism. Publishing house “Fiction”. - M., 1969.
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Soviet literary criticism considers the history of any literature as a certain process that takes place in historical time and is closely connected with the material and spiritual life of the people. Determining the stages of this process associated with the evolution of social consciousness is not only a chronological problem, but primarily a methodological one. Its solution is complicated by the lack of necessary theoretical distinctions, the inaccuracy and sometimes dubiousness of existing terminology, and the uncertainty of many concepts with which one has to operate.
The problem of periodization as a systematizing principle in the history of American literature has existed for about fifty years. It arose in every attempt to create a major generalizing work covering the entire history of US literature or at least some part of it. Moses Tyler, Carl Van Doren, Van Wyck Brooks, V. L. Parrington and others, the groups of R. Spiller and A. G. Quinn, contributed to the study of this problem in America; in our country - A. A. Elistratova, A. I. Startsev, N. I. Samokhvalov, A. N. Nikolyukin. Of course, there were many other researchers who “touched” this problem in relation to the narrow tasks of their own research. Only those whose works form, so to speak, “milestones” in its history are named here.
In US American studies, two stages can be distinguished in this regard, one of which can be called the era of Parrington, and the other - the era of Spiller. The border between them is 1947, when the first edition of the “Literary History of the United States” 1, officially recognized as definitive, was published. In terms of scale and coverage of material, the works of Parrington and Spiller are approximately the same. However, there is “a huge distance between them.” Parrington created the three-volume monograph "Main Currents of American Thought" 2 alone; Spiller had three editors-in-chief and a team of fifty people—the flower of modern American studies. Parrington developed general criteria and created an original concept. You can argue with it, you can refute it, but the very fact of its existence is indisputable; Spiller did not create any concept. His main efforts were spent on “bringing” and “grinding” together the various views, positions, and ideas of the creators of “Literary History”; Among them we will find literary scholars who are so far from each other in methodological terms, such as F. O. Matthiesen, D. V. Kratch, M. Cowley, G. T. Levin, I. Hassan, M. Geismar. Was it possible to create a concept that would organically combine the principles of the cultural-historical school, classical Freudianism, Huegianism, new criticism, etc.? Hardly. Spiller took a different path. He developed an original and, for his purposes, quite successful structure of the book, within the framework of which methodological contradictions and “incompatibilities” somewhat lost their severity. But the structure of the work, no matter how successful it may be, cannot replace a single concept.
A. G. Quinn faced similar difficulties when he published The Literature of the American People four years after the publication of The Literary History of the United States. He tried to take into account Spiller's experience and reduced the number of co-authors to four (C. B. Murdoch, A. G. Quinn, C. Godes, D. Whicher) in the hope that in this way it would be possible to achieve “greater uniformity of critical position, impossible with a large number participants." However, Quinn was unable, or rather did not want, to achieve conceptual unity. In a special preface, he had to stipulate the presence of “obvious contradictions” and assign responsibility for them to the individual “critical views of the authors who agreed to take sole responsibility for the sections they wrote” 3.
This is probably why Parrington’s influence turned out to be much stronger, and not only in the United States, but also beyond its borders. Every ten years a new, expanded and revised edition of the definitive "Literary History of the United States" is published. Experts readily resort to the second (bibliographic) volume of “Literary History...” (the bibliography there, by the way, is excellent), but they turn to Parrington for ideas. Of course, today “Main Currents of American Thought” no longer makes the huge impression that it made in the 20s, but even in the “era of Spiller” Parrington, with whom they disagree and argue, continues to be an important source of various conceptual ideas.
The number of works written by Soviet literary scholars in which the general concept of the development of American literature from the War of Independence to the Civil War would be developed, even in a laconic form, is unfortunately small. Here we include the first volume of “The History of American Literature”, published by the Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1947, the work of N. I. Samokhvalov “American Literature of the 19th century” and a two-volume textbook on US literature edited by him, the monograph by A. N. Nikolyutin “American Romanticism and Modernity” and the book by M. N. Bobrova “Romanticism in American Literature of the 19th Century” 4.
As the listed works appeared, a modern understanding of the main trends in the phenomena that formed a broad picture of the process that we today call the literature of American romanticism began to gradually emerge. None of the mentioned works, however, contains this picture in full.
Let us refer as an example to the above-mentioned work of M. N. Bobrova. This book is a collection of essays about American poets and prose writers of the first half of the century. Conceptual points of a general nature are concentrated in the introduction and afterword. M. N. Bobrova does not create an original system of ideas about American romanticism, but in many ways repeats the main provisions of the concept that has developed in Soviet literary criticism over the course of decades. Unfortunately, the researcher was unable to avoid a number of obvious mistakes.
Thus, in the introduction, M. N. Bobrova states that “most romantics were not idealists; on the contrary, they stood firmly on the basis of materialist philosophy. These were Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville” (12-13), and in the afterword he offers the reader a very peculiar picture of the functional features of the romantic movement in the USA, designed to substantiate its imaginary transience: “American critical realism appeared two or three decades later than European, and the US romantics objectively performed the functions of realists (?)<...>Romanticism as a method became obsolete in the USA faster than in Europe: it was forced to work with “double traction” - for itself and for realism, which had not yet been formed, and thereby, “wearing out”, exposed its most vulnerable places” (?!) (271).
Thus, according to M. N. Bobrova, we are dealing with a creative method, which is based on materialist philosophy and which is capable of working “for realism.” It is easy to see that such ideas are hardly capable of deepening and clarifying our understanding. American romanticism neither in its functional aspects nor in terms of its philosophical and artistic nature.
Most Soviet Americanists, especially in the initial period, relied on the structures proposed by Parrington, although they entered into polemics with him on various issues, losing sight of the fact that Parrington is not a literary critic, and his work is not the history of literature. As a result, a confusion of ideological, aesthetic, socio-historical, philosophical and political concepts and terms arose, which prevented the construction of a strict, logically organized, scientifically based concept.
Take, for example, the first volume of the academic History of American Literature. Its second part (“From the victory of the bourgeois revolution to the civil war of the North and South”) is divided into four sections:
1. “Literature of early romanticism.”
2. "Transcendentalists".
3. “The Literature of American Romanticism.”
4. "Abolitionists."
It is easy to notice that the general title of the part is based on a purely historiographical principle, the title of the first section on methodological and chronological, the second on philosophical, the third on purely methodological, and the fourth on political. If you try to judge this part of the book from its table of contents, you can be misled and come to the conclusion that “early romanticism” has no relation to “American romanticism”, that Thoreau and Whittier are not romanticists, since the first of them is a transcendentalist, but the second is an abolitionist.
In “The History of American Literature,” edited by N. I. Samokhvalov, published a quarter of a century later, the same pattern is repeated with minor deviations. Here the distinction between “early” romanticism and simply romanticism is destroyed, and the Boston school is included in the number of phenomena “separate” from romanticism. The section on the Boston School opens with a characteristic phrase (“In the late 50s, when the activities of the Transcendentalists and Romantics began to decline...”), from which it is clear that in the eyes of the authors of the textbook, the Transcendentalists are not Romantics.
A number of objections are also raised by the concept set out in the book by A. N. Nikolyukin “American Romanticism and Modernity”.
The main idea of A. N. Nikolyukin is that the existing ideas about the periodization of the history of US literature, about the time and circumstances of the emergence of romanticism in American literature are erroneous, and therefore, the idea that “the emergence of romanticism as a special artistic movement in world art and literature is associated with the French revolution of 1789-1794, which destroyed the “old order” and established new social relations” (13). He objects to V. Vanslov, who claims that “the romantic trend spread between the years 1794 (when the upward movement of the French bourgeois revolution) and 1848 (when bourgeois-democratic revolutions flared up again) "5. A. N. Nikolyukin names a number of romantic works by American authors (Melville, Hawthorne, etc.) that appeared after 1848, thereby shaking the rigid boundaries established Vanslov for romanticism, and here he is, of course, right. We, for our part, can add that for Europe these frameworks are not very accurate. As you know, the 1840s and even to some extent the 1830s can no longer be considered the era of romanticism. This is the time of Dickens, Thackeray, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert.
The dispute between A. N. Nikolyukin and V. Vanslov, V. L. Parrington, A. A. Elistratova is not only chronological, but also methodological. “A study of the history of American romanticism,” he writes, “makes a clarification of the generally accepted starting date of romanticism in world literature. In the United States, this literary movement arose as a direct reaction to the American Revolution and the beginning of the country's rapid capitalist development. The events and ideas of the French Revolution certainly played an important role in this process, but the roots of the Romantic movement in America go back to the previous era of the Revolutionary War, when the work of the nation's first Romantic poet, Philippe Freneau, was formed.
Thus, the beginning of romanticism in world literature is delayed by at least a decade<.. .>And if we remember that Freneau created his patriotic and romantic poems back in the 70s, then the emergence of romanticism in US literature should be attributed to the era of the American Revolution" (13).
This is the starting point of A.N. Nikolyukin’s concept: American romanticism as a literary movement arose in the USA in the 70s of the 18th century. Logically, the emerging romantic movement had to develop somehow. A. N. Nikolyukin, however, believes that something completely different happened: “The spirit of private acquisition and speculation, which established itself after the War of Independence, came into conflict with the patriarchal individualism of small farming. Behind the prosperous picture of a new society that has begun to develop rapidly<...>such collisions of the American way of life were hidden that romantic writers began to guess about only many years later.
Several decades passed before American Romanticism<....>arose again - this time already during the period of developed European romanticism - in the work of young Irving (?), and then Cooper and other writers<.. .>
However, American literary historians<.. .>The era of romanticism began only in the 10s or even the 20s of the 19th century.” (15).
Thus, American Romanticism was born twice. The first time - in the 1770s, the second - the 1820s. A. N. Nikolukin repeatedly emphasizes this idea (16-17). It seems to him that if we do not recognize the existence of romanticism during the War of Independence and attribute its emergence to the second decade of the 19th century, then “with this approach... its national specificity and historical connection with the ideas of the War of Independence will be lost” (17 ).
In our opinion, A.N. Nikolukpn is mistaken here: dating the emergence of romanticism to the second decade of the 19th century. does not destroy either its national specificity or its connection with the ideas of the American Revolution.
The entire argument of A. N. Nikolyukin, in essence, rests on only two statements: Philip Freneau was “the first American romantic poet”, in “Freneau’s poems and in Brown’s novels the literary traditions of the 18th century (which ones? - Yu. K.) are melted down into romantic forms" (73). The only proof of Freneau's affiliation with romanticism is the author's assertion that the poet overcame the framework of classical aesthetics.
To avoid this kind of arbitrary movements and displacements, it is necessary to agree on some concepts, terms and definitions that are of fundamental importance.
The Enlightenment, like romanticism, is a broad, complex ideological system that covers almost all aspects of the activity of human consciousness and manifests itself in all spheres of the spiritual life of society. We rightly talk about the philosophy of the Enlightenment, about educational ethics, sociology, historiography, aesthetics, etc. However, this is a mobile system, developing, evolving over time. The early Enlightenment differs from the mature one, and the mature one differs from the later one. It must be emphasized that Enlightenment is not only an aesthetic concept, it is an ideology in the broadest sense of the word.
In the field of literary history, as well as art, the Enlightenment has certain equivalents and manifests itself through aesthetic and methodological systems. One of the most common misconceptions is this: the only aesthetic equivalent of the Enlightenment is seen in classicism, with its strict rationalism, a clearly developed system of laws and rules, with its rigid poetics that does not allow deviations.
Let us not forget, however, that the Enlightenment, as a system in which a “reasonable” study of nature, society and man was carried out, did not limit itself in this last part to an interest in the rational-logical possibilities of human consciousness. Let us note that the very concept of reason among the enlighteners has considerable breadth and cannot be reduced to reason, which socializes the thought process. The Enlightenmentists had a deep interest in various aspects of individual and social consciousness or, as they liked to say, human nature: moral, physical, emotional, psychological.
The Enlightenment “mind” mastered these areas, comparing them, pitting them against each other, trying to find application for them in solving general problems of socio-historical progress. Attempts acquired particular intensity when the rational and logical abilities of human consciousness turned out to be powerless to overcome (and sometimes even comprehend) certain obstacles that arose along the way.
These aspects of the Enlightenment received a certain refraction in the artistic activity of the era, leading to the emergence of a whole series of aesthetic, or rather philosophical-aesthetic systems, in their own way far from classicism. If we turn as an example to at least the history of English literature of the 18th century, we will see a great variety of forms, genres and methodological principles; adventure novel, comic epic, family drama, cemetery poetry, sentimental novel, moralizing and morally descriptive essays of “Chatterbox” and “Spectator”. Smollett was the author of not only Roderick Random, but also Humphrey Clinker; Goldsmith wrote Letters from a Chinaman, The Vicar of Wakefield and The Abandoned Village.
If we consider that classicism is the only and complete aesthetic equivalent of the Enlightenment, then inevitably, as A.N. Nikolukin does, American romanticism will have to be traced back to the War of Independence. and perhaps even to an earlier period. Everything that does not fit into the classicist framework, every manifestation of lyrical emotion, every sign of sensory perception of life will have to be designated as romanticism. Not only Freneau, but also Brackenridge, Brockden Brown, and young Irving will become romantics.
Let us note in passing that in some works of Soviet researchers lyrical emotion is presented not only as the main feature of any romantic creativity, but as a source, evidence and way of embodying the entire complex set of phenomena that form romantic ideology and aesthetics. One of the most striking examples is the reasoning in the already mentioned book by M. N. Bobrova: “The excited lyricism of the narrative makes the work of the romantics individualistically colored. Lyricism becomes evidence of a living, passionate attitude to life, the writer’s fiery conviction in the truth of the ideas he defends; it (lyricism - Yu. I.) also speaks of the social bias of romantic literature, is an echo of social upheavals - it contains all the feelings and passions caused by social disappointments and hopes: bitterness, indignation, rage, jubilation, sadness. And at the same time, lyricism often indicates immaturity of judgment: emotional perception is ahead of rational knowledge of the world” (6-7).
If we agree with the idea that the movement of American literature from the Enlightenment to romanticism cannot be considered only as a movement from classicism to other aesthetic systems (in this case, naturally, the distinction between the Enlightenment as an ideological concept and classicism as an aesthetic concept is lost), that the aesthetic aspects of the Enlightenment are not exhausted classicism, then we will act wisely if we do not attribute the work of Freneau, Barlo, Brockden Brown, Brackenridge, young Irving and young Paulding to romanticism, but preserve their place in the mainstream of educational ideology, taking into account the possible diversity of its aesthetic refractions.
This, of course, has its own difficulties. The European Enlightenment created new and diverse aesthetic systems slowly, thoughtfully, and with a certain consistency. Decades passed from the first experiments to the deployed system. The Americans did not create these systems. They used European models, applying them to their conditions and circumstances. They had little time: classicism, educational realism, educational satire, sentimentalism, political journalism - all this and much more turned out to be squeezed into about three decades without the accepted diachronic organization that we see in the European Enlightenment. In America, a kind of synchronic mixture of phenomena arose, in which patterns made their way through unthinkable philosophical and aesthetic zigzags. But she still punched through.
Related to all of the above is another complication that deserves mention. Romanticism, like the Enlightenment, is a multidimensional system of ideas with similar branches: romanticism in economics, historiography, philosophy, art, literature, etc. But if we can talk about the Enlightenment as an ideology that is artistically transformed into various, terminologically designated, methodologically identified aesthetic movements, then in relation to romanticism we will not find such clear distinctions. They have not been developed; Romanticism, like the Enlightenment, is a broad ideological movement. But any of its aesthetic equivalents are also called romanticism. Within the framework of romanticism or “romanticisms” as aesthetic phenomena, we operate either with the most general temporal categories (“early”, “late”), or with genre concepts (essay, poem, drama, story, story, adding the adjective “romantic”, since genre concepts are universal; the only exception is, perhaps, the song “romance”, which designates specifically a romantic novel, and not a novel in general), or philosophical and political concepts (transcendentalism, abolitionism).
Many difficulties arise from this lack of differentiation of concepts. Historians of American literature often talk and write about the extraordinary diversity of artistic phenomena in American romanticism, about the aesthetic incompatibility of the poetry of Whittier and Poe, the prose of Cooper and Hawthorne, etc., and at the same time try to squeeze them into the Procrustean bed of a single aesthetic system.
Development of the aesthetic multisystem of American romanticism. (and the Enlightenment) is obviously one of the immediate tasks of modern American studies.
In numerous works on the history of American literature (Soviet and, to a lesser extent, foreign), there are constantly statements that romanticism arose in the United States as a “reaction to” or as a “consequence of the American Revolution and the War of Independence.” At best, it speaks of the aftermath of the Revolutionary War and the Revolution as a source of romantic worldview. There are many things that confuse these formulas, but most of all, the merging of war and revolution into some indissoluble complex, into a single concept with which researchers operate. Meanwhile, these phenomena are fundamentally different in essence and in consequences, although, of course, no one will deny the closest historical connection between them. The war resulted in the colonies falling away from the metropolis and gaining complete independence; The revolution led to the creation of a bourgeois-democratic republic. We can imagine, at least in theory, a victorious conclusion to the Revolutionary War without the social reconstruction of American society. It is impossible to imagine a victorious revolution without such reconstruction.
This difference takes on special significance where we are talking about the so-called consequences of war and revolution, about events and processes in the economic, social, political and ideological life of the United States at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries. There are often cases when the speculative rush of the post-war years, which led, on the one hand, to the emergence of a group of nouveau riche who made their fortunes from speculation in government certificates, and on the other hand, to the violent, sometimes armed protest of the poor, who felt deceived and left out, is identified with the rapid capitalist development of American economy in the first decades of the 19th century. Meanwhile, the first phenomenon is connected entirely with the War of Independence, the second with the revolution. Although, of course, it is also indisputable that the War of Independence was a necessary condition for the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
A romantic attitude towards reality arises when, under the influence of certain historical processes and circumstances, the social and moral content of bourgeois progress is revealed with greater or less clarity. These historical processes and circumstances in different countries proceeded differently and had different emphasis. In France, they were associated primarily with the socio-political dynamics of the era of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the Bourbon restoration, in England - with the industrial revolution and the struggle for reform, in America - with rapid socio-economic development, which raised the country to the level of the most developed European powers and provided a springboard for subsequent vigorous capitalist progress. It was in this process that the ugly moral meaning of the pragmatic ethics of bourgeois-democratic America, which was entering a period of rapid capitalist growth, was revealed. Franklin once offered his contemporaries a reasoning about the immorality of idleness, couched in the simplest form of economic calculation: time is money, he said; If a person had fun for half a day instead of working, he lost not only the money that he spent on entertainment, but also the money that he could have earned, but did not earn. Americans of the next generation elevated this reasoning to a kind of fundamental principle. At the same time, they left only the first phrase from him: “Time is money!”, thereby turning it from an apology for the activity of a working person, opposed to the aristocratic principle of idleness, into an outright apology for enrichment.
By the end of the war of 1812–14, Parrington says, “a new America had emerged, restless and changing... It was eager to succeed, to find easier ways to wealth than the toil of natural accumulation. According to this America, the main characteristic of man was the desire to acquire property” 6.
A. A. Elistratova wrote that “early American romanticism arose as a result of social development, the starting point of which was the American Revolution of the 70s of the 18th century.” 7 A. N. Nikolyukin cites this quote to support his idea that romanticism in the USA arose in the 1770s and, therefore, is “the brainchild of the American Revolution” (14). Meanwhile, the words of A. A. Elistratova do not at all have the meaning that A. N. Nikolgokin puts into them. The social development she is talking about is post-revolutionary development. It is not for nothing that she names Irving and Cooper among the “early American romantics,” but not Freneau or Brockden Brown.
One can argue with Parrington on a number of aspects of his concept, but one cannot but agree with him when he says: “Indeed, one does not need to have any special insight to see in the rapid transformations taking place in America after the second war with England, the source of that fiery romanticism, which with inexpressible contempt turned away from the old-fashioned past...” 8. His idea is generally fair: rapid economic and social transformations in the second and third decades of the 19th century. were the soil on which the American romantic worldview arose.
Generated by rapid socio-economic progress, this worldview in its literary manifestations was initially characterized by an ambivalent attitude towards national reality. On the one hand, it was dominated by optimistic and patriotic tendencies, a tendency to see the pace of development of the country as confirmation of the successful great historical experiment undertaken at the end of the 18th century. The patriotic "spirit of Americanism" dominated the atmosphere of the 1820s. We find its political embodiment in the notorious doctrine of President Monroe, its literary embodiment in numerous poems, poems, essays, novels glorifying the past, present and future greatness of America. Most of them are hopelessly forgotten today, but some remain in the memory of posterity for a long time.
On the other hand, romantic consciousness, already at its inception, was marked by a spirit of disappointment, protest, and indignation, which formed the basis of the critical pathos of many works that emerged during the birth of the romantic movement. This protest arose on the basis of “sorrowful observations” of the mind and heart, regrettable reflections, which were prompted by unforeseen zigzags in the country’s social development and the moral evolution of American society.
This is where the dualism of romantic consciousness in the USA arises - a combination of patriotic pride for the young fatherland, embodied mainly in historical novels, addressed to the heroic pages of the American past, and the bitterness of disappointment caused by the degeneration of the democratic ideals of the revolution. In the course of the evolution of American romantic consciousness, the original balance of these elements of the dualistic system was disrupted. The first steadily decreased, the second increased. This process was recorded in all spheres of spiritual life in the United States in the first half of the 19th century.
This dualism can be observed not only as the opposition of the “early” romantics to the “late” ones, but also as an internal contradiction inherent in the work of many of them. It is enough to refer to the example of Cooper, who over the course of five or six years created three “patriotic” historical novels (“Spy”, “Pilot”, “Lionel Lincoln”) and three novels from his famous Leatherstocking series (“Pioneers”, “ Prairie”, “The Last of the Mohicans”), the pathos of which lies in exposing the inhumane essence of the laws of American bourgeois civilization.
All of the above leads to the conclusion that the chronological line separating the American Enlightenment from romanticism should apparently be considered the second decade of the 19th century. No one, of course, will demand that we name the exact date of the establishment of a new dominant trend in the history of US literature, although in this case we have very convenient guidelines. A number of significant events occurred in the economic, political, ideological and literary life of the United States, concentrated over two to three years: the economic crisis (1819), the Missouri Compromise (1820), the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the publication of the first major romantic works ( Irving's "Sketch Book" -1820, Cooper's "Spy" -1821). We will probably not be wrong if we take the period between the second and third decades of the 19th century as our starting point in the history of American romanticism.
One small difficulty arises here. There were writers whose creative career began long before the named date, whose works were already known to the reading public and were even popular, writers who took a leading place in American romanticism. What to do with them? Problems of this kind arise when studying methodological shifts in many literatures of the world, in particular in Russian literature of the 19th century. In most cases, resolving them does not cause difficulties. The concept of the internal methodological evolution of a writer, whose work at different stages of development cannot be reduced to a single aesthetic anamenator, has long been legitimized. It doesn’t bother us at all that there was, for example, Pushkin the romantic and Pushkin the realist. In relation to American literature, however, in many cases there is a dogmatic tendency to place the entire work of a writer in the Procrustean bed of a single methodological system. The most typical example is the work of Irving. His collections of stories from the 1820s (The Book of Sketches, Bracebridge Hall, The Alhambra) give every reason to classify them as romantic literature. Having established, however, the methodological nature of these collections, some researchers thoughtlessly extrapolate it to the writer’s early work, dooming themselves to a fruitless search for evidence of the romantic nature of the essays “Salmagundi” or “History of New York”. Since such evidence does not exist, stretches, arbitrary assumptions, etc. are used. Recently, in Soviet American studies, a fruitful idea has arisen to consider the evolution of Irving’s work as a development from the Enlightenment to the Romantics. From this point of view, "Salmagundi" and "History of New York" should be classified as educational literature. This, apparently, is also true regarding the creative evolution of Helleck, Paulding, Bryant and some others.
The periodization of American Romanticism does not present any particular difficulties. The end of this era is clearly correlated with the Civil War. When establishing the internal stages in the development of the romantic worldview and aesthetics, we can accept a three-stage model of the evolution of romanticism in the United States:
1) early stage (1820-1830s);
2) mature stage (late 1830 - late 1850s);
3) final stage (early 1$60s).
Early on, American romantic literature was caught up in a powerful current of "nativism" and began to "discover America" with great enthusiasm. The term “nativism” is not widely used in literary studies. Let's try to give it a precise definition: nativism is a cultural and literary movement within the framework of romanticism, the meaning and pathos of which lies in the artistic and philosophical exploration of America, its nature, history, social and political institutions, and its morals.
At the dawn of the formation of American national literature, nativism was inevitable and necessary. National literature could be formed and developed only on the basis of national self-awareness, the most important element of which should have been a certain general concept of America as a single complex of natural-geographical, ethnological, socio-historical, political and moral-psychological aspects that form the very concept of “America” in the mind Americans. And this was not at all the America that Columbus discovered or that the first colonists saw before them.
For a century, Americans, paradoxically, had a very vague idea of America. Great restless creatures, for a long time they had to be content with micro-movements within a relatively narrow strip along the Atlantic coast. And these movements were complicated by the lack of roads, bridges and river crossings. The rest of America: the great expanses of the continent, its mountain ranges, canyons, forests, deserts and prairies, rivers and waterfalls - remained for a long time a huge mystery, shrouded in smoky legend. They knew little about the Indians - the indigenous inhabitants of the country, with whom they waged a bloody war of extermination.
However, the citizens of the “young republic” had a vague idea not only of the distant times when the Mayflower and Arabella crossed the Atlantic, but also of their recent history. It is not surprising that not only prose writers, poets and painters, but also geographers, ethnologists, a whole group of historians (Prescott, Parkman, Bancroft) and even the visiting French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville, who explained to the Americans what American democracy is and what its purely American characteristics and how it differs from the plans of the Founding Fathers.
Chronologically, nativism does not fit into the framework of the romantic movement. Its roots go back to the Age of Enlightenment, the last surges date back to the end of the 19th century. In essence, it persists as long as the exploration of America continues. The last writer in whose work his traces are noticeable was probably Jack London, who painted the nature and life of Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands.
It is indisputable, however, that nativism received its most powerful development precisely in the era of romanticism. Its peak occurs in the 20s and 30s. But even in the next two decades, he does not completely leave the stage and clearly finds himself in the poetry of Longfellow and Whitman, in the novels of Hawthorne and Melville, in the essays of Thoreau and the literature of “local color.”
The first generation of romantics devoted themselves to the exploration of America with great enthusiasm. Here everything was not explored, not comprehended, not studied, and discoveries lay in wait at every step. In the gloomy landscapes of the Hudson Coast, in the sultry climate of South Carolina, in the endless prairies, in the roar of Niagara, in the calm tranquility of the Great Lakes, in the virgin forests of the American North there was no less exoticism and mysterious charm than in the mountains of Albania, on the islands of the Mediterranean Sea or in the possessions of the Baghdad caliph.
However, as mentioned above, nativism in American literature was inspired not only by national nature, but also by the extraordinary diversity of lifestyles and social mores. The life of Indian tribes, which existed in the European consciousness more as a romantic legend than reality, was for Americans a fact of national existence, a mysterious fact, self-contained, but quite real. Artistic penetration into the world of wise and naive, treacherous and straightforward, cruel and humane Indians was one of the important directions in the study of national life.
Another phenomenon that was not deeply understood at that time was the frontier - the moving border of civilization - with its unique specificity of social, economic, legal relations, where the very way of human existence, conditioned by the dynamics of continuous movement, collisions with wild nature, the harshness of everyday life, etc., established his own special hierarchy of values and contributed to the formation of a unique human type, which entered the consciousness of America under the name “pioneer”. The frontier and the pioneers were purely American phenomena.
The same can be said about life on the tobacco and cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, North and South Carolina. It was a peculiar and unique world, the owners of which had visions of ancient Greek democracy; the world of slaves and slave owners, aristocratic culture and semi-animal existence, a world of pseudo-patriarchal relations based on non-recognition of human dignity. This world had its own oddities and paradoxes, historically explainable, but no less paradoxical for that. Slave-owning Virginia was a generator of democratic ideas, and its richest planters were the leaders of the revolution, the leaders of the nation, the first presidents of the republic: Washington, Jefferson, Madison - what names!
Another area that offered extensive opportunities for the artistic development of national life was the element of navigation. The life of the overseas colonies, and then the United States, is inextricably linked with the sea. The sea was the “main road” connecting the cities of the Atlantic coast, different parts of the country and, finally, all of America with the Old World, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
By the time we are talking about, the United States had a powerful merchant and passenger fleet. The whaling fleet was no less important for the country's economy. America had not yet become a nation of pastoralists, and oil deposits had not yet been found on the American continent. Hence the intensive development of whaling. It is quite logical that the sea novel and sea story as literary genres organically entered the stream of nativism. The literary discovery of sea life is, in a sense, also the exploration of America...
The flow of nativism grew with extraordinary rapidity. Beginning with a kind of “letters”, “notes”, “sketches”, “travelers’ notes”, it penetrated into the main genres of fiction - poem, novel, short story and, to some extent, even drama.
In the first half of the 30s, southern writers (D. Kennedy, W. Simms, O. Longstreet, W. Snelling, A. Pike, M. Neville, etc.) joined this movement, and a little later - New England writers ( D. Whittier, young N. Hawthorne, G. Thoreau, W. Leggett, N. Ames, R. G. Dana Jr., G. Longfellow, etc.). Dozens of poets and writers across the country began to describe the nature of America, memorable and unnoticed events in its history, paint pictures of the life of frontier settlements, the way of life and ritual customs of Indian tribes, maritime life on ships of the merchant, military and whaling fleets, etc.
The founders and largest representatives of nativism in US romantic literature were Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Most of Irving's nativist writings are now firmly forgotten. Hardly anyone now reads A Prairie Trip, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, The Western Diaries, Astoria, or The Crayon Notes. But, of course, everyone remembers the excellent literary landscapes depicting the Hudson coast, the Catskill Mountains, ancient Manhattan, as well as pictures of the life of old Dutch settlements and poetic transcriptions of the legends of New Amsterdam. These moments form the unique atmosphere of Irving’s famous short stories, included in his collections of the 1820s, and give them a national flavor.
As for Cooper, he was undoubtedly a classic of American nativism, whose work influenced the subsequent development of romantic literature in the United States. He laid the foundations of the American historical novel (it was with his “Spy” that the development of national history in US literature began); he developed the ideological and aesthetic parameters of the American novel, and finally, he created his famous pentalogy about Leather Stocking - a special type of romantic narrative, which has no name in literary criticism to this day.
In the novels of this series, readers find a description of frontier life, monumental pictures of American nature, the exotic lyre of the “redskins,” the past and present of America. And the point here is not only in the objects and phenomena depicted by the writer, but also in the unusual style of the narrative, where the plot, plot, figurative system, the very method of presentation, interacting, create that unique quality of Cooper’s prose, which Balzac at one time keenly felt and characterized . 9
Nativism lies at the origins of national American literature. It is natural and logical that in its wake certain stable phenomena of an aesthetic order arose, surviving in the literature of the United States long after nativism itself, and all American romanticism, had sunk into the past.
Let's give just one example. The general task of nativism - the development of America - required that the hero move in space, coming into contact with different parts of the country, different ways of life. The hero was therefore, as a rule, a traveler. In fact, if you look around the entire mass of nativist literature, it is easy to notice that all its heroes are moving somewhere. They walk, ride on horseback and in carts, sail on boats, rafts and steamships along American rivers, make sea voyages from one part of America to another, etc. It was in nativism that a literary phenomenon arose, which already in the 20th century. critics dubbed it “The Great American Journey.”
The Civil War has passed. The commanding positions in American literature began to gradually move towards realism, and the era of Mark Twain, an ardent denier of romantic aesthetics, began. However, the “Great American Journey” continued: the “simpletons” went abroad, set sail on a raft down the Mississippi, Huck Finn, the Connecticut Yankee turned into a knight errant, the heroes of Henry James sailed to Europe... The twentieth century has come, and the heroes of American literature are still traveling. One of the relatively recent examples is John Steinbeck, traveling in the company of his French poodle Charlie “in search of America.”
Of course, the methods of travel, its goals and objectives changed. In addition to simple movement in space, movement in time was added, and a special type of “spiritual journey” arose. But whatever the modern forms of this phenomenon, their connection with romantic nativism is obvious. The early stage is the period of romantic exploration of national American reality, nature, history; an era of romantic exploration of American bourgeois civilization, its errors, mistakes, injustices, anomalies, but a study based generally on beliefs in the healthy basis of American democracy.
The mature stage, the onset of which was associated with the economic upheavals of the late 1830s, the powerful rise of radical democratic movements, and the crushing internal and external political conflicts of the 40s, is characterized by a number of tragic discoveries made by the Romantics, and primarily by the discovery that social evil is not some force acting from the outside on an ideal social structure.
Having sensed inhumane and anti-democratic tendencies in the institutions of bourgeois-democratic society, American romantics came face to face with two problems. The first was the need to establish the nature, origin and character of these trends, leading, as they saw it, to the degeneration of democracy. The other is to find ways to revive it and restore lost ideals.
Connected with this is a general reorientation of romantic consciousness, in which the pathos of exploring America began to be gradually replaced by new interests. Now it is no longer the greatness of nature or the unique way of life of various parts of the country, but the man who inhabits it - homo americanus - that becomes the center of attention of poets, prose writers, philosophers and publicists. In the “New Adam” they are now looking for the cause of all causes, including the origins of the tragic transformation of democratic society. They pin their hopes on him for a universal reform that could lead to the revival of “true democracy.”
All this is quite natural, given that the romantic worldview was based on the epistemology and ethics of German idealist philosophy, and primarily on the ideas of Kant. Fichte, Schelling. Romantic individualism, as a category not only moral, but also aesthetic, has long been thoroughly studied by historians of art and literature, and no one today doubts that interest in the human personality, in its internal capabilities, realized and unrealized, is a characteristic feature of creative consciousness romantics. This, in particular, is the basis for the great interest of the romantics in the culture of the Renaissance, and especially in the work of Shakespeare; an interest that manifested itself through the theoretical works of Coleridge, through the essays of Emerson, through the “Shakespeareanization” of Melville’s novels.
It is significant that one of the most profound researchers of American romanticism, F. O. Matthiesen, called his fundamental work “American Renaissance,” although he himself admitted that “the designation of American culture of the mid-19th century as a revival lacks the necessary accuracy, since there is no “revival” here. values that existed in America before" 10. Probably, Matthiesen was aware of a certain closeness between romanticism and the Renaissance, a closeness based on interest in the individual person, on the desire to place it at the center of the ideological system.
The mature stage in the history of American romanticism could be characterized by the term “romantic Gunanism,” while emphasizing its difference from Renaissance humanism. Romantic humanism lacks the breadth and universality of the latter. He is not so much interested in man in general and his central position in the system of the universe, but rather focused on the human personality, on its consciousness. The physical and physiological aspects of human existence are completely absent here. Even when studying the relationship between man and nature (and human nature as one of the elements of this relationship), only its spiritual aspects are taken into account. The main object of artistic development is now becoming human consciousness in its intellectual, moral and emotional manifestations. And it goes without saying that we are talking here not about consciousness in general, but primarily about the consciousness of Americans in the mid-19th century.
US researchers, as a rule, consider the works of Hawthorne, Poe, to be the largest artistic phenomena in mature American romanticism. Melville and Whitman. This choice of names is apparently fair, although it has long been noted that the named writers differ sharply from each other. The dissimilarity between them is so great that it has repeatedly raised doubts about the possibility of combining them on the basis of a common methodology. Whitman's work was "dragged" entirely into the critical realism of the late 19th century; Edgar Poe was taken outside the framework of not only American culture, but also American reality as a whole (at one time this idea was expressed in his characteristic paradoxical form by B. Shaw, who noted that “Edgar Poe did not live in America. He died there”). Meadville was presented as a 20th-century writer born by mistake in the 19th century. and therefore inaccessible to contemporaries. In Hawthorne alone they saw the embodiment of ideas and the spirit of the time, and even then within relatively narrow, local limits. The author of these lines must repent that he himself once expressed doubts about the existence of a single methodological basis in mature American romanticism.
Meanwhile, if you find the right point of view, you can see that the four writers named were busy with a common cause - the study of modern American. consciousness. Each of them had, so to speak, their own “narrow specialty.” Hawthorne was attracted by the “truths of the human heart,” that is, questions of moral consciousness, its nature, historical evolution and modern condition; Poe was absorbed in the study of that border region where intellect and emotion interact - in other words, the region of mental states; Melville's hero is an intellect breaking through to the basic, universal laws of existence and trying to figure out the position and place of man in the hierarchy of systems - from the microcosm of individual consciousness to the macrocosm of the universe; Whitman thought more broadly than others; he did not focus on any one area, but tried to synthesize the self-awareness of his contemporary and give it adequate poetic expression. The famous “I am Walt Whitman...” meant, in essence, “I am home americanus.” His individualism is painted in democratic tones and fits into the framework of romantic humanism.
It goes without saying that the “specialization” of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and others is not absolute. Melville was deeply interested in problems of morality, Hawthorne did not shy away from questions of psychology, Poe's attention was irresistibly attracted by the general foundations of epistemology and the activity of the human intellect in general. We are talking only about the dominant, about the predominant interest, about the fact that in this “special” area the artist’s talent has manifested itself more fully.
It is easy to see that all literary movements dating back to the time of mature romanticism in the United States have a philosophical and aesthetic basis in romantic humanism.
Take, for example, abolitionist literature, most vividly represented in poetry by John Whittier and in prose by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even the most superficial acquaintance with the works allows us to see that these writers were of little interest in the economic, political and even social aspects of the slave system. The focus was rather on the consciousness of slaves, slave owners and slave traders. They saw the evil of slavery not so much in its social injustice or in the economic disadvantage of slaves, but in the fact that this system contributed to the destruction of the moral foundations on which the free and harmonious consciousness of the contemporary rests or should rest. Since both Whittier and Beecher Stowe came from New England, all this was colored in religious tones and embodied in the categories of Christian (in particular, Unitarian and Quaker) ethics. As for transcendentalism, it is nothing more than the philosophical formula of romantic humanism, its theoretical embodiment. The entire teaching bears a deep imprint of the New England tradition, although it is a complex amalgam of various concepts: from the leading tenets of German philosophical idealism to romantic individualism.
The “Sages of Concord” had many opponents and subverters. The Young Americans treated them with distrust and suspicion. The New York Knickerbockers chuckled and wrote angry invective. Among the writers who dissociated themselves from transcendental ideology we find Poe, Melville and even Hawthorne, although the latter's personal connections with members of the transcendental club are widely known. The paradox, however, is that in their own work many aspects of transcendental ideology are visible with sufficient clarity and distinctness, although they appear in a disguised form. Is it possible to assume unconscious borrowing here? It is possible, of course, although it is known, for example, that Melvpll did not read Emersop. The point, apparently, is different. The ideas of romantic humanism, as they say, “were in the air.” Each writer discovered them for himself independently and gave them the appearance, the perspective that best suited his creative goals and objectives. But if you remove their individual coloring, it becomes clear that the ideas are similar.
The focus on individual consciousness did not mean a loss of interest in the life of society as a whole, in problems of a social, political, and economic nature. The antinomy “man - society”, traditional for modern literature, acquired complicated, ambivalent, internally contradictory shapes in romantic humanism: American romantics of the second generation were cruel critics of bourgeois reality. The object of their destruction; analysis included modern economic principles, political mores, social institutions, laws, public opinion, the bourgeois press and, finally, the very moral foundations of the so-called American democracy. In this case, man (homo americanus) and his individual consciousness were presented as a victim, as an object of destructive, disfiguring influence from reality.
Along with this, any attempt to establish the nature and source of social evil again led to man, his intellect, his moral consciousness, his psychology, and then the personality acted as the bearer and root cause of all Evil, no matter in what area it manifested itself. The idea of man as the source of Evil is repeatedly embodied in the works of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville. True, they interpreted the problem differently, looking for an answer in different spheres of consciousness: Hawthorne - in the purely moral ("Burnt of the Earth"), Poe - in the psychological ("Demon of Contradiction"), Melvpll - in the intellectual ("Moby Dick"). But the result was always the same.
Finally, when the question arose about ways to overcome Evil, about progress, about the reform of social reality, about revolution, if you like, romantic humanists again turned to human consciousness, to the hidden reserves of the individual. Emerson postulated a “divine presence” in human consciousness and built on this his famous theory of “self-trust”; Hawthorne created the concept of the human heart as the receptacle of the moral substance of “Good-and-Evil”; Poe relied on the instinct of beauty, supposedly inherent in human nature. It was necessary “only” for the individual, man, homo americanus, to reveal the Emersonian “divine presence” in himself, to break through the Hawthorne labyrinth of “Good and Evil” to pure Good, dwelling somewhere in the inaccessible depths of the heart, to realize and developed his innate instinct for beauty and harmony.
Henry Thoreau summarized these ideas in a universal formula: the only revolution capable of ending Evil and realizing democratic ideals can be a revolution of individual consciousness.
But whatever the subjective concepts and ideas that prompted the younger generation of romantics to explore the relationship between the individual and society, from whatever angle the research was carried out, in the process itself there was an accumulation of facts, observations and private conclusions that contradict the basic premises of romantic humanism.
Little by little, the suspicion began to creep into the minds of the romantics that the reasons for the sharp discrepancy between the ideal plans that formed the theoretical basis of the American socio-political system and real social practice could not be traced back to the individual consciousness of the individual or even to the collective consciousness of individual social groups. A vague assumption arose that the origins of social ill-being, manifested in all spheres of human life, are rooted in the very nature of American democracy, in its fundamental principles. The more weighty this idea became, the more confirmation it received, the more rapidly the general crisis of romantic methodology approached.
On the one hand, the many-sided Evil, which burst into human life at every step, began to acquire in the minds of the romantics the features of fatality and invincibility, and this inevitably led to an increase in the tragic element in their work. On the other hand, the collapse of the idealistic concept, which made it possible to elevate the laws of existence to the laws of consciousness, deprived the romantics of any hope for reform of society through the internal “revolution” of each individual person.
The above-mentioned facts, observations, and particular conclusions in the study of the relationship between the individual and society inevitably pushed the romantics to the idea that the dependence here is “reverse,” that it is existence that determines human consciousness, i.e., to a thought that required a complete philosophical, methodological, aesthetic reorientation. They were not ready for such a reorientation, and desperately resisted the said idea.
There was no uniformity in the development of romantic humanism in the United States. Its highest rise occurs in the first half. The 50s, when the greatest creations of American romantic art saw the light. However, most of these creations are marked by doubt and hopeless tragedy. They already contain a premonition of a methodological crisis, a latent understanding that, although the road did not lead to the top, there is no further way.
In the 60s, the influence of romanticism began to wane. American writers and thinkers are gradually coming to the realization that the romantic methodology is no longer able to cope with the material of social life, cannot explain its mysteries and indicate ways to resolve its contradictions. Many people, including Hawthorne, Melville, Longfellow, Kennedy, and Irving, went through a period of severe creative crisis, often ending in a complete abandonment of creative activity.
This periodization of American romanticism, however, has its pitfalls. One of them is regionalism. eleven
It is common knowledge that the American colonies originally arose as a conglomerate of provinces founded by groups of emigrants who came from different countries. But even between the English provinces, where there seemed to be a common language, historical and cultural traditions, there were fundamental differences due to the social origin and economic way of life of the colonists.
These are the historical origins of regionalism, which in many ways has proven to be one of the most enduring elements of American national history, especially in the realm of ideology and culture. We still talk today about the literature of the American South, about Boston morals, about writers of the Midwest, etc.
During the Romantic era, regionalism was many times stronger than it is today. Certain aspects of American romantic consciousness, aesthetics, ideology, etc. were associated with it. Moreover, the literary and artistic development of the regions was carried out at different rates, each of them was a leader in its own field, and often the dominant ideas of different regions found themselves in conflict with each other.
We cannot understand Poe's work from the Puritan traditions of New England any more than a study of the Virginia Renaissance gives us anything to understand Hawthorne. If we want to tackle the historical novel of the 1920s, we will have to turn first to New York; in the 1930s, the South will demand our attention; in the 1950s, New England. The centers of spiritual life shifted from one region to another, and they shifted far from peacefully.
Historians of American literature willingly write a lot about the dissimilarities in the cultural life of individual regions, which is quite natural, since in literary studies and criticism of the 19th century. this dissimilarity was often blurred, or even simply ignored. The literary process was built “according to the writers,” and regional differences acquired the features of individual originality of creative style. It is necessary, however, without discounting the regional uniqueness, to emphasize at the same time the national features in the literary development of individual parts of America. It is important to understand that the dynamics of the literary process were achieved not through “replacement” (the South instead of New York and Philadelphia, New England instead of the southern states), but through “inclusion” into national literary life. The very history of the romantic movement in US literature provides plenty of evidence of this.
Notes
1. Literary History of the United States/Ed. R. Spiller. N. Y., 1947.
2. Parrington V. L. Main Currents in American thought. N. Y., 1927—1930.
3 The Literature of the American People/Ed. Quinn A. II. N.Y., 1951, p. V.
4. Samokhvalov N. I. American literature of the 19th century. M., 1964; History of American Literature/Ed. N. I. Samokhvalova. M., 1971; Nikolyukin A. II. American Romanticism and Modernity. M., 1968 (links to the pages of this publication are given in the text); Bobrova M. N. Romanticism in American literature of the 19th century. M., 1972 (links to pages of this publication are provided in the text).
5. Vanslov V. Aesthetics of romanticism. M., 1960, p. 10-11,
6. Parripton V. L. Main currents of American thought. M., 1962. t. 2, p. 8.
7. History of American Literature, p. 107.
8. Parrington V. L. Decree. cit., p. 8.
9 See: Balzac O. Collection. cit.: In 15 volumes. M., 1955, T. 15, p. 289-290.
10 Matthiessen F. O. The American Renaissance. N.U., 1941, p. VII.
11 Problems of regionalism in US literature are discussed in the book; Problems of the formation of American literature. M., . 1981.
“America must finally gain literary independence, just as it gained political independence,” Noah Webster noted at the beginning of the 19th century.
J.K. Paulding, in his essay “National Literature,” wrote: “The American author must free himself from the habit of imitation, dare to think, feel and express his feelings in his own way, learn from nature, and not from those who distort it. Only this will lead to the creation of a national literature. This country is not destined to forever trail behind literary glory, and the time will certainly come when freedom of thought and action, which has given such a rise to the national genius in other areas, will produce the same miracles in literature."
All the basic conditions for the development of American literature were present: a young, energetic nation, well-versed writers, suitable topics, a growing publishing industry, bookstores, schools, libraries. All that remains is to create a truly original national literature that would not be perceived as a provincial branch of English literature. And for this, as it turned out, patriotism and ardent desire alone were not enough. An original idea was needed that could spiritualize the nation and direct the development of its literature in a new direction.
Such an inspiring “idea” was the romantic movement, which had long been unfolding in European countries, but came to America two decades late. The reason for this delay was not only and not so much the “cultural backwardness” of the United States; the fact is that only by the 1820s were the prerequisites for the emergence of romanticism formed here - a historical moment of crisis and uncertainty, hopes and disappointments. In Europe, it was associated with the results of the Great French Revolution of 1789-1793 and the formation of capitalist society. In the USA, as we remember, a powerful rush of inspiration after the tangible victories of the American Revolution and the country's gaining of independence began to gradually subside towards the end of the second decade of the 19th century and resulted in bewilderment regarding the fate of culture in a democratic state.
However, inspiration did not completely leave the nation for a very long time, as it was constantly fueled by a new impulse - the movement to the West and the exploration of vast spaces, which opened up new opportunities. Romanticism remained the leading trend in US literature until the Civil War between the North and the South, and only after it, when industrial capitalist society in its sharpest and most stable outlines was finally established in the US, did the breeding ground for all kinds of aspirations and doubts disappear, and therefore and for a romantic feeling. When the free fund of uninhabited lands in the West was exhausted and, as a result of Reconstruction, the remnants of both southern aristocracy and the Puritan spiritual culture of New England disappeared, the era of romanticism in the United States also ended.
The specificity of American romanticism consisted, firstly, in shifted chronological boundaries compared to European ones and an extremely long period of dominance - from 1820 to the end of the 1880s and, secondly, in a closer connection with Enlightenment rationalism. As in Europe, the connection between Romanticism and the Enlightenment had a negative-continuity character, but here the component of continuity was more clearly expressed: the work of some Romantics (W. Irving, J.C. Paulding) began in line with Enlightenment aesthetics, in addition, in the works of Romantics Americans, even such famous “irrationalists” as N. Hawthorne, E. Poe, G. Melville, had practically no moment of discrediting the human mind, denying its capabilities.
Throughout its development, romanticism in the United States underwent a certain evolution. Since the early 20s of the 19th century, a whole cohort of romantic writers acted as the founders of original American literature, which was an urgent need for the newly formed self-awareness of the nation. The front of work was outlined: the artistic and philosophical exploration of America - its nature, history, morals, social relations - a task partially begun by poets and prose writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the forerunners of American romantics, such as F. Freneau, H.G. Brackenridge, C. Brockden Brown.
Now the movement for the development of national heritage, now defined as romantic nativism (from the English “native” - “native”, “national”), has received an unprecedented scope. Romantics with unprecedented enthusiasm devoted themselves to exploring their native country, where nothing had yet been comprehended, and much was simply unknown, and discoveries lay in wait at every step. The country of America had a huge variety of climates and landscapes, cultures and lifestyles, and specific social institutions.
The pioneers of romantic nativism in the United States were W. Irving and J. Fenimore Cooper, and by the end of the decade, national literature could already boast of undoubted achievements, including “The Book of Sketches” (1820) by W. Irving, “Poems” by W.K. Bryant, three novels of the future Cooper pentalogy about Leatherstocking - “The Pioneers” (1823), “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826), “The Prairie” (1827), as well as “Tamerlane and Other Poems” (1827) by E. Poe.
In the early 1830s, writers from the Southwest (Kennedy, Sims, Longstreet, Snelling), and a little later writers from New England (young Hawthorne, Thoreau, Longfellow, Whittier) joined the rapidly growing romantic movement. By the 1840s, romanticism in the United States was gaining maturity and the initial nativist enthusiasm gave way to other sentiments, but nativism as such did not disappear altogether, but remained one of the important traditions of American literature.
Read also other articles in the section "Literature of the 19th century. Romanticism. Realism":
The artistic discovery of America and other discoveries
Romantic nativism and romantic humanism
- Specifics of American romanticism. Romantic nativism
- Romantic humanism. Transcendentalism. Travel prose
National history and history of the soul of the people
History and modernity of America in dialogues of cultures
1. General characteristics of American romanticism.
2. Life path. VIRvinga. Novels by an American writer.
3. F. Cooper - master of the adventure novel.
4. Myth and artistic creativity. Hawthorne. Problems of spirituality and morality in the novel "The Scarlet Letter" of literature.
1 General characteristics of American romanticism
The formation of American culture, in particular literature, occurred in parallel with rapid socio-economic development. United. States as an independent state. The young country constantly formed its own economy, trade, industry, finance, and developed new cities.
The creation of a national culture worthy of the young state was declared an urgent task. And it was at this time that the leading trend in literature. England. France,. Germany became romanticism; It was in him that American artists found consonance with their ideological and artistic quests, continuing to develop the traditions of European masters, in particular, in their unique national conditions. VScott and. E. Hoffmann.
A significant role in the formation of the philosophical foundations of romanticism. The USA played the works of French enlighteners and ideas. French Revolution. In the works of American writers, a certain synthesis of educational ideas and new romantic forms quite often occurred.
At intervals, American romanticism developed a little later than Western European romanticism and occupied leading positions from the late 10s to the early 60s of the 19th century. The starting point was the appearance of books of romantic short stories. Virving (1819), and the crisis of American romanticism is characteristic of a turning point in history. USA - years of civil war between. South and North. The final victory of capitalism. North over agricultural slaveholding. The South coincided with the total spread of the realistic trend in literature. However, this did not mean that romanticism completely disappeared from the works of American authors. It entered - as separate structures, characters, elements - into the work of many realist writers. Creativity became a complex combination of romanticism and realism. W. Whitman. Romantic motifs are organically woven into creativity. M. Twain. D. London and other writers. USA late XIX - early XX century.
There are three periods in the formation and development of American romanticism.
1. Early American Romanticism(1819-1830s), to which critics and scientists attributed creativity. V. Irving,. F. Cooper,. D. Kennedy and others. The immediate predecessor of this period was pre-romanticism, which developed within the framework of the early twentieth century literature. The work of writers of the early stage was of an optimistic nature, associated with a heroic time. Wars of independence.
2. Mature American Romanticism(1840-1850s) is creativity. NGawthorne,. EPO. GMelvilla and others. Most of the writers of this period experienced deep dissatisfaction with the course of the country's development, therefore dramatic ones prevailed in their works. Aviving tragic tones, a sense of the imperfection of the world and man, moods of melancholy, awareness of the tragedy of human existence. A new hero appeared - a man with a split psyche, who carried in his soul the stamp of devotion. At this stage, American romanticism received a philosophical orientation. Romantic symbolism and instructive allegorical symbolism began to penetrate into the works of writers, supernatural forces began to play a significant role, and mystical motifs intensified.
3. Late American Romanticism(60s of the XIX century). This is a period of crisis. At this stage, those writers of the previous stage worked who continued their path in literature. There was a sharp distinction between romantic literature. Uri nai na:
-literature of abolitionism which, within the framework of romantic aesthetics, protested against slavery from aesthetic and general humanistic positions.
- literature. East which romanticized and idealized "eastern chivalry", appeared in defense of the historically doomed movement and the reactionary way of life.
History, in particular the history of culture, posed several complex and important tasks for American romanticism:
Throughout the entire work of American writers there passed the affirmation of national identity and independence, the search for national identity and national character;
The main thing that attracted people in the works was history and the present, nature and customs, conflicts and processes, human types and characters.
Romantic writers in their books enthusiastically traveled with their heroes and readers to the sea, forests, rivers, and the nature untouched by civilization appeared immediately outside the threshold of the house. When the Herod of a little-known continent or exotic islands often became one of the characters.
Historical works about the recent past were intended to strengthen the feeling of attachment to one’s land and pride in it. In addition, in these works, history was often only a projection of the problems and conflicts of today.
New. England (north-eastern states) -. N. Hawthorne,. Emerson, Topo, etc.
Middle States -. VIRving,. FC Cooper,. GMelville et al.
East -. DKennedy. USimms,. EPO.Po.
Taking into account the ideological and aesthetic orientation of the writers’ creativity, literary scholars have identified the following main trends in American romanticism:
; (W. Simms).
In romantic literature. The USA has also developed a certain system of genres. The most widely used prose works are:
Travel in the form of novellas, short stories, essays; - romantic novel;
Autobiographies, conversations, sermons, lectures, essays, discussions;
The genre of the “short story” is a fantastic, detective, philosophical, psychological, allegorical story; an epic poem.
