Lost generation. Foreign literature. World Art. XX century Literature "The Lost Generation"

13.04.2019

This type of literature developed in the USA and Europe. Writers of this trend were active in this topic for 10 years after the First World War.

1929 - the appearance of Aldington’s novels “Death of a Hero”, Remarque’s “To the West of France” and Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”.

“You are all a lost generation” - Hemingway’s epigraph then became lit. term.

“Writers lost generations” is an accurate definition of the mood of people who went through the First World War; pessimists deceived by propaganda; lost the ideals that were instilled in them in the world of life; the war destroyed many dogmas and state institutions; The war left them in disbelief and loneliness. The heroes of “PPP” are deprived of much, they are not capable of unity with the people, the state, the class; as a result of the war, they oppose themselves to the world that deceived them, they carry bitter irony, criticism of the foundations of a false civilization. The literature of "PPP" is considered as part of literary realism, despite the pessimism that brings it closer to literary modernism.

“We wanted to fight against everything, everything that determined our past - against lies and selfishness, self-interest and heartlessness; we became embittered and did not trust anyone except our closest comrade, we did not believe in anything except such forces as the sky, tobacco, trees, bread and earth that had never deceived us; but what came of it? Everything collapsed, was falsified and forgotten. And for those who did not know how to forget, all that was left was powerlessness, despair, indifference and vodka. The time of great human and courageous dreams has passed. The businessmen celebrated. Corruption. Poverty".

With these words of one of his heroes, E.M. Remarque expressed the essence of the worldview of his peers - people of the “lost generation” - those who went straight from school to the trenches of the First World War. Then, childishly, they clearly and unconditionally believed everything that they were taught, that they heard, that they read about progress, civilization, humanism; they believed the sonorous phrases of conservative or liberal, nationalist or social-democratic slogans and programs, everything that was explained to them in their parents’ home, from pulpits, from the pages of newspapers...

But what could any words, any speech mean in the roar and stench of a hurricane fire, in the fetid mud of trenches filled with a fog of suffocating gases, in the cramped dugouts and hospital wards, in front of endless rows of soldiers’ graves or piles of mangled corpses - in front of all the terrible, ugly diversity daily, monthly, senseless deaths, injuries, suffering and animal fear of people - men, youths, boys...

All ideals crumbled to dust under the inevitable blows of reality. They were incinerated by the fiery everyday life of war, they were drowned in the mud by everyday life post-war years. Then, after several short outbreaks and a long fading of the German revolution, punitive volleys crackled on the working outskirts, shooting the defenders of the last barricades, and in the quarters of the “shibers” - the new rich who profited from the war - orgies did not stop. Then in public life and in the entire life of German cities and towns, which so recently prided themselves on impeccable neatness, strict order and burgher respectability, poverty and debauchery reigned, devastation and disorder grew, family piggy banks were emptied and human souls

Suddenly it turned out that the war and the first post-war years destroyed not only millions of lives, but also ideas and concepts; Not only industry and transport were destroyed, but also the simplest ideas about what is good and what is bad; the economy was shaken, money and moral principles depreciated.

Those Germans who understood the real reasons and the real meaning of the war and the disasters it caused and were courageous enough followed Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Ernest Thälmann. But they were also in the minority. And this was one of the reasons for the subsequent tragic fate of Germany. However, many of the Germans did not support and could not even understand the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Some sincerely, but inactively sympathized and had compassion, others hated or were afraid, and the overwhelming majority looked from the outside in confusion and bewilderment at what seemed to them a continuation of the fratricidal bloodshed of the great war; they did not distinguish between right and wrong. When detachments of Spartacists and Red Guards fought desperate battles for the right to live, work and happiness for the entire German people, fighting against many times superior forces of reaction, many Germans, together with the hero of Remarque’s novel, only mournfully noted: “Soldiers fight against soldiers, comrades against comrades.”

Aldington, in search of solutions to old and new issues, took up mainly journalism. Remarque tried longer than others to stay in the direction outlined at the very beginning of his creative life, and maintain the unstable balance of the tragic worldview of his youth in the years of new great upheavals.

This tragic neutralism is especially acute and painfully manifested in the consciousness and attitude of those thinking and honest former soldiers who, after the terrible experience of the war and the first post-war years, have lost confidence in the very concepts of “politics”, “idea”, “civilization”, without even imagining that there are honest policies, that there are noble ideas, that a civilization that is not hostile to man is possible.

They grew old without knowing their youth; life was very difficult for them even later: during the years of inflation, “stabilization” and the new economic crisis with its mass unemployment and mass poverty. It was difficult for them everywhere - both in Europe and in America, in big noisy, colorful, hectic cities, feverishly active and indifferent to the suffering of millions of little people swarming in these reinforced concrete, brick and asphalt labyrinths. It was no easier in villages or on farms, where life was slower, monotonous, primitive, but just as indifferent to the troubles and suffering of man.

And many of these thoughtful and honest former soldiers turned away with contemplative distrust from all the big and complex social problems of our time, but they did not want to be slaves, nor slave owners, nor martyrs, nor torturers. They walked through life mentally devastated, but persistent in adhering to their simple, stern principles; cynical, rude, they were devoted to those few truths in which they retained trust: male friendship, soldier's camaraderie, simple humanity.

Mockingly pushing aside the pathos of the abstract general concepts, they recognized and honored only concrete good. They were disgusted by pompous words about the nation, fatherland, state, and they never grew up to the concept of class. They greedily grabbed any job and worked hard and conscientiously - the war and years of unemployment instilled in them an extraordinary greed for productive work. They thoughtlessly debauched themselves, but they also knew how to be sternly gentle husbands and fathers; could cripple a random opponent in a tavern brawl, but they could without unnecessary words to risk your life, blood, last property for the sake of a comrade and simply for the sake of a person who aroused an instant feeling of affection or compassion.

They were all called the “lost generation.” However, these were different people - their social status and personal destinies were different. And the literature of the “lost generation” that arose in the twenties was also created by the work of various writers - such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Aldington, Remarque. What these writers had in common was a worldview defined by a passionate denial of war and militarism. But in this denial, sincere and noble, there was a complete lack of understanding of the socio-historical nature, the nature of the troubles and ugliness of reality: they denounced harshly and irreconcilably, but without any hope for the possibility of something better, in a tone of bitter, joyless pessimism.

However, the differences in the ideological and creative development of these literary “peers” were very significant. They affected the subsequent fates of the writers of the “lost generation.” Hemingway broke out beyond the tragically hopeless circle of his problems and his heroes thanks to his participation in heroic battle Spanish people against fascism. Despite all the writer’s hesitations and doubts, the living, hot breath of the people’s struggle for freedom gave new strength, a new scope to his creativity, and brought him beyond the boundaries of one generation. On the contrary, Dos Passos, having fallen under the influence of reaction, constantly opposing himself to advanced social forces, became hopelessly old and creatively diminished. He not only failed to outgrow his ill-fated generation, but sank below it. Everything of any significance in his previous work is connected with the problems that worried the soldiers of the First World War.

And World War II). It became the leitmotif of the works of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Henri Barbusse, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson , Thomas Wolfe, Nathaniel West, John O'Hara The lost generation are young people drafted to the front at the age of 18, often not yet finishing school, who began to kill early after the war, such people often could not adapt to. peaceful life, drank too much, committed suicide, some went crazy.

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The Lost Generation - Finding Yourself.

Problems of education: How to find the “lost” generation

Lecture “Lost Generation” and literature

Subtitles

History of the term

When we returned from Canada and settled on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and Miss Stein and I were still good friends, she uttered her phrase about the lost generation. The old Model T Ford that Miss Stein drove in those years had something wrong with the ignition, and the young mechanic, who had been at the front for the last year of the war and was now working in the garage, had not been able to fix it, or maybe Maybe he just didn’t want to fix her Ford out of turn. Be that as it may, he was not sérieux enough, and after Miss Stein's complaint, the owner severely reprimanded him. The owner told him: “You are all génération perdue!” - That's who you are! And all of you are like that! - said Miss Stein. - All young people who were in the war. You are a lost generation.

This is what they call in the West young front-line soldiers who fought between 1914 and 1918, regardless of the country for which they fought, and returned home morally or physically crippled. They are also called “unaccounted victims of war.” Returning from the front, these people could not live again normal life. After experiencing the horrors of war, everything else seemed petty and unworthy of attention to them.

In 1930-31, Remarque wrote the novel “The Return” (“Der Weg zurück”), in which he talks about the return to their homeland after the First World War of young soldiers who can no longer live normally, and, acutely feeling all the meaninglessness, cruelty, filth of life, Still trying to live somehow. The epigraph to the novel is the following lines:

Soldiers returned to their homeland
They want to find a way to a new life.

In the novel “Three Comrades” he predicts a sad fate for the lost generation. Remarque describes the situation in which these people found themselves. When they returned, many of them found craters instead of their previous homes; most lost their relatives and friends. In post-war Germany there is devastation, poverty, unemployment, instability, and a nervous atmosphere.

Remarque also characterizes the representatives of the “lost generation” themselves. These people are tough, decisive, accept only concrete help, and are ironic with women. Their sensuality comes before their feelings.

Literature of the "Lost Generation"

The phrase “lost generation” was first used by the American writer Gertrude Stein in one of her private conversations. E. Hemingway heard it and made it one of the epigraphs to his novel “Fiesta,” published in 1926 and which became one of the central ones in the group of works that were called the literature of the “lost generation.” This literature was created by writers who, in one way or another, went through the First World War and wrote about those who were at the fronts, died or survived to go through the trials prepared for them in the first post-war decade. The literature of the “lost generation” is international, since its main ideas became common to representatives of all countries who were involved in the war, comprehended the SS experience and came to the same conclusions, regardless of what position they occupied at the front, on which side they fought. The main names here were immediately named Erich Maria Remarque (Germany), Ernest Hemingway (USA), Richard Aldington (Great Britain).

Erich Maria Remarque (Remarque, Remark, 1898 -1970) enters literature with his novel "On Western Front no change" (1928), brought him world fame. He was born in 1898 in the town of Osnabrück in the family of a bookbinder. In 1915, upon reaching the age of seventeen, he was drafted to the front and took part in the battles of the First World War. After her he was a teacher primary school, sales clerk, reporter, tried to write pulp novels. By the end of the twenties, Remarque was already a well-established journalist, editor of a sports weekly.

At the center of his first novel is a collective hero - an entire class German school who voluntarily goes to war. All these students succumbed to patriotic propaganda, which oriented them to defend the fatherland, calling on those feelings that for centuries, but for millennia, have been recognized by humanity as the most sacred. “It is honorable to die for one’s country” is a famous Latin saying. The main pathos of the novel comes down to a refutation of this thesis, strange as it may sound to us today, since the holiness of these words is beyond doubt today.

Remarque describes the front: the front line, the resting places for soldiers, and hospitals. He was often reproached for naturalism, which was unnecessary, as it seemed to his contemporaries, and which violated the requirements of good literary taste, according to the critics of that time. It should be noted that in his work Remarque never adhered to the principles of naturalism as a literary movement, but here he resorts precisely to photographic and even physiological accuracy of details. The reader must learn about what war is really like. Let us recall that the First World War was the first extermination of people on such a scale in the history of mankind; for the first time, many achievements of science and technology were so widely used for such mass murder. Death from the air - people did not yet know it, since aviation was used for the first time, death carried in the terrible bulk of tanks, invisible and, perhaps, the most terrible death from gas attacks, death from thousands of shell explosions. The horror experienced on the fields of these battles was so great that the first novel describing it in detail did not appear immediately after the end of the war. People were not yet accustomed to killing on such a scale.

Remarque's pages make an indelible impression. The writer manages to maintain an amazing impartiality of the narrative - a style of chronicling that is clear and sparing of words, very precise in the choice of words. The first-person narrative technique is especially powerful here. The narrator is one student from the class, Paul Boimsr. He is at the front with everyone. We have already said that the hero is a collective. This interesting point, characteristic of the literature of the first third of the century - the eternal search for a solution to the dilemma - how to preserve individuality in the mass and whether it is possible to form a meaningful unity, rather than a crowd, from the chaos of individuals. But in this case we are dealing with a special perspective. Paul's consciousness was shaped by German culture with its rich traditions. Precisely as her heir, who stood only at the origins of the assimilation of this spiritual wealth, but who had already accepted it best ideas, Paul is a fairly defined individual, he is far from being part of the crowd, he is a personality, a special “I”, a special “microcosm”. And the same Germany first tries to dupe him by placing him in a barracks, where the only way to prepare yesterday’s schoolboy for the front is the desire to subject Paul, like the others, to such a number of humiliations that should destroy precisely his personal qualities, prepare him as part of the future unreasoning mass people who are called soldiers. This will be followed by all the tests at the front, which he describes with the impartiality of a chronicler. In this chronicle, no less powerful than the descriptions of the horrors of the front line are the descriptions of the truce. Here it is especially noticeable that in war a person turns into a creature that has only physiological instincts. Thus, murder is not only committed by soldiers of the enemy army. The systematic murder of a person is carried out primarily by that Germany, for which, as is supposed at the beginning, it is so honorable to die and so necessary to do so.

It is in this logic that a natural question arises - who needs this? Remarque finds here an exceptionally masterful move from the point of view of writing. He offers the answer to this question not in the form of lengthy philosophical or even journalistic arguments, he puts it into the mouths of dropout schoolchildren and finds the formulation crystal clear. Any war is beneficial to someone; it has nothing to do with the pathos of defending the fatherland that humanity has hitherto known. All countries participating in it are equally guilty, or rather, those who are in power and pursuing their private economic interests are guilty. For this private benefit, thousands of people die, being subjected to painful humiliation, suffering and, what is very important, being forced to become murderers themselves.

Thus, the romance destroys the very idea of patriotism in the form it was presented by national propaganda. It is in this novel, as in other works of the “lost generation”, that the concept of national as preceding nationalism becomes especially dangerous for any kind of generalizations of a political nature.

When the most sacred thing was destroyed, then the whole system was thrown into dust moral values. Those who were able to survive remained in a destroyed world, deprived of attachment to their parents - the mothers themselves sent their children to war - and to the fatherland, which destroyed their ideals. But not everyone managed to survive. Paul is the last of his class to die. On the day of his death, the press reported: “No change on the Western Front.” The death of a unique personality, for each of us is unique and was born for this uniqueness, does not matter for high politics, which condemns to sacrificial slaughter as many uniquenesses as are needed for the day.

Actually, the “lost generation”, i.e. those who managed to survive, appears in the next romance Remark "Three Comrades". This is a book about front-line brotherhood, which retained its significance even after the war, about friendship and the miracle of love. The novel is also surprising because in an era of fascination with the refined writing technique of modernism, Remarque does not use it and creates an honest book, beautiful in its simplicity and clarity. “Comradeship is the only good thing that war has given rise to,” says the hero of Remarque’s first novel, Paul Bäumer. This idea is continued by the author in “Three Comrades.” Robert, Gottfried and Otto were at the front and maintained a sense of friendship after the war. They find themselves in a world hostile to them, indifferent to their service to the fatherland during the war, and to the suffering they endured, and to the terrible memories of the tragedies of death they saw, and to their post-war problems. They miraculously manage to earn a living: in a country devastated by war, the main words are unemployment, inflation, need, and hunger. In practical terms, their lives are focused on trying to save the auto repair shop, purchased with Kester’s small funds, from imminent ruin. Spiritually, their existence is empty and meaningless. However, this emptiness, so obvious at first glance - the heroes seem to be most satisfied with the “dance of drinks in the stomach” - in fact turns into an intense spiritual life, allowing them to maintain nobility and a sense of honor in their partnership.

The plot is structured like a love story. In world literature, ultimately, there are not so many works where love would be described so artlessly and so sublimely beautiful. Once upon a time

A.S. Pushkin wrote amazing lines: “I am sad and light, my sadness is light.” The same bright sadness is the main content of the book. Sadness because they are all doomed. Pat dies from tuberculosis, Lenz is killed by the “guys in high boots,” the workshop is ruined, and we don’t know how much more suffering fate has in store for Robert and Kester. Light because the energy of the noble is victorious human spirit, which is in all these people.

Remarque's style of narration is characteristic. The author's irony, obvious from the first lines of the book (Robert enters the workshop early in the morning and finds a cleaning lady “scurrying around with the grace of a hippopotamus”), is maintained to the end. Three friends love their car, which they call human name“Karl” is perceived as another close friend. Remarkable in their elegant irony are the descriptions of trips on it - this strange combination of a “torn-up” body with an unusually powerful and lovingly assembled engine. Robert and his friends treat with irony all the negative manifestations of the world around them, and this helps them survive and maintain moral purity - not external, they are just rude in dealing with each other and others - but internal, which allows them to maintain an amazing trepidation of the soul.

Only a few pages are written without irony, those dedicated to Pat. Pat and Robert are in the theater listening to music and seem to be returning to a time when there was no war, and the Germans were proud of their passion for good music, and really knew how to create and feel it. Now they are no longer given this, since the most beautiful things are stained with the dirt of war and the post-war aggressive struggle for their own survival. How it is impossible to understand both painting and philosophy ( talented artist, another of the cohort who did not die during the fighting, but who is slowly dying in the darkness of hopelessness now, can only paint fake portraits from photographs of the dead; Robert was a student of the Faculty of Philosophy, but from this period only his business card remains). Yet Pat and Robert listen to music as they once did because they love each other. Their friends are happy just by contemplating their feelings, they are ready to make any sacrifice to save and preserve it.

Pat is sick, and again there is no room for irony in the scenes where the author traces her slow departure from life. But here, too, gentle humor sometimes creeps in. IN last days and nights Robert tries to distract Pat from her suffering and tells funny stories from our childhood, and we smile when we read about how surprised the night nurse on duty was to find Robert, who had thrown Pat’s cape over himself and pulled his hat down, depicting a school principal sternly reprimanding a student. A smile before death speaks of the courage of these people, which the philosophers of this time defined by a simple and great formula - “the courage to be.” It became the meaning of all the literature of the “lost generation”.

Ernest Hemingway (1899)-1961) - laureate Nobel Prize on literature (1954). His novel “The Sun Also Rises”, 1926, published in England in 1927 under the title "Fiesta" - "Fiesta"), becomes the first obvious evidence of the emergence of the literature of the "lost generation". The very life of this man is one of the legends of the 20th century. The main motives of both Hemingway’s life and work were the ideas of inner honesty and invincibility.

In 1917, he volunteered to go to Italy and was the driver of an ambulance on the Italian-Austrian front, where he was seriously wounded. But after the war, he was a correspondent for the Toronto Star in the Middle East, spent the 20s in Paris, covered international conferences in Genoa (1922), Rapallo (1923), and events in Germany after the World War. He will be one of the first journalists to give a journalistic portrait of a fascist and condemn Italian fascism. In the 30s, Hemingway wrote essays about the events in Abyssinia, accusing the US authorities of criminal indifference to former front-line soldiers (the famous essay “Who Killed the Veterans in Florida?”). During civil war In Spain, Hemingway takes the side of the anti-fascist republicans and, as a war correspondent for the ANAS telegraph agency, comes to this country four times, spends the spring of 1937 in besieged Madrid, and participates in the battles of 1937-39. This is another war, against fascism, “the lies told by bandits.” Participation in it leads the author to the conclusion that everyone is personally responsible for what happens in the world. The epigraph to the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940) is the words from John Donne’s sermon: “...I am one with all Mankind, and therefore never ask for whom the Bell tolls: it tolls for You.” The hero who appears in this and other works of Hemingway is called the “hero of the code,” and he begins his journey in the writer’s first novel.

The novel “Fiesta” largely determines the main parameters of the literature of the “lost generation”: the collapse of value guidelines as a certain system; idleness and wasting of life by those who survived, but can no longer use the gift of life; the wounding of Jake Barnes, the main character of the novel, on whose behalf the narrative is told (as a symbol it will also become a certain tradition of the literature of the “lost”: injury is the only soldier’s award, an injury that carries infertility and does not provide prospects in the literal sense of the word); a certain disintegration of the personality, endowed with both intelligence and high spiritual qualities, and the search for a new meaning of existence.

As much as the novel turned out to be in tune with the mood of the minds of Hemingway’s contemporary readers and several subsequent generations, today it is often not fully understood by our contemporaries and requires a certain mental effort when reading. To some extent, this is caused by the style of writing, Hemingway's theory of style, called the “iceberg theory.” “If a writer knows well what he is writing about, he can omit much of what he knows, and if he writes truthfully, the reader will feel everything that is omitted as strongly as if the author had said it. The majesty of the movement of the iceberg is that it rises only one-eighth above the water,” says Hemingway about his style. A. Startsev, the author of works on Hemingway, writes: “Many of Hemingway’s stories are built on the interaction of what is said and what is implied; these elements of the narrative are closely connected, and the invisible “underwater” flow of the plot imparts strength and meaning to the visible.... In “Fiesta” the heroes are silent about their difficulties, and sometimes it seems that the heavier their souls are, the more naturally the carefree dialogue flows - these are the “conditions of the game” - however, the balance of text and subtext is never violated by the author, and psychological characteristics characters remains highly convincing" 1 . As an important element of a special understanding of the world, one should consider the preference for everything concrete, unambiguous and simple over the abstract and sophisticated, behind which Hemingway’s hero always sees falsehood and deception. On this division of feelings and objects of the external world, he builds not only his concept of morality, but also his aesthetics.

The first chapters of Fiesta take place in Paris. The visible part of the iceberg is a completely unpretentious story about journalist Jake Barnes, his friend - writer Robert Cohn, a young woman named Bret Ashley and their entourage. In Fiesta, the routes of movement of the characters are precisely, even pedantically outlined, for example: “We walked along the Boulevard du Port-Royal until it turned into the Boulevard Montparnasse, and then past the Closerie de Lilas, the Lavigne restaurant, Damois and all small cafes, crossed the street opposite the Rotunda and past the lights and tables reached the Select cafe,” a list of their actions and seemingly insignificant dialogues is given.

1 Startsev L. From Whitman to Hemingway. M., 1972. P. 320.

To perceive the “underwater” part, you need to imagine Paris in the twenties, where hundreds of Americans came (the number of the American colony in France reached 50 thousand people and the highest density of their settlement was observed in the Montparnasse quarter, where the action of the novel takes place). Americans were attracted by the very favorable dollar exchange rate, and the opportunity to get away from Prohibition, which strengthened Puritanical hypocrisy in the United States, and some of them were attracted by the special atmosphere of the city, which concentrated European genius on a very limited piece of land. Hemingway himself, with his novel, becomes the creator of " wonderful fairy tale about Paris."

The title of his autobiographical book about Paris - “A Holiday that is Always With You” - published many decades later, after other grandiose social cataclysms, is already embedded in the subtext of “Fiesta”. Paris for the author is a life of intellect and creative insight at the same time, a symbol of resistance to “being lost”, expressed in an active life creativity in man.

In Spain, where the heroes will go to attend the fiesta, their painful search for possibilities of internal resistance continues. The outer part of the iceberg is a story about how Jake and his friend Bill go to a mountain river for fishing, then go down to the plain and, together with others, participate in a fiesta, a celebration accompanied by a bullfight. The brightest part of the novel is connected with the paintings fishing. Here a person returns to the original values of existence. This return and enjoyment of the feeling of merging with nature is an important moment not only for understanding the novel, but also for Hemingway’s entire work and his life. Nature gives the highest pleasure - a feeling of completeness of being, obviously temporary, but also necessary for everyone. It is no coincidence that part of the legend about the author is the image of Hemingway - a hunter and fisherman. The fullness of life, experienced in the most original sense of the word, is conveyed in a special, Hemingway style. He strives “not to describe, but to name; he does not so much recreate reality as describe the conditions of its existence. The foundation of such a description is made up of verbs of motion, nouns, remarks of the same type, and repeated use of the conjunction “and”. Hemingway creates, as it were, a scheme for the perception of elementary stimuli (the heat of the sun, the cold of water, the taste of wine), which only in the reader’s perception become a full-fledged fact of sensory experience.” The author himself remarks on this matter: “If spiritual qualities have a smell, then the bravery of the day smells like tanned leather, a road frozen in frost, or the sea when the wind tears the foam from the wave” (“Death in the Afternoon”). In “Fiesta” he writes: “The road emerged from the forest shadow into the hot sun. There was a river ahead. Across the river stood a steep mountain slope. Buckwheat grew along the slope, there were several trees, and among them we saw a white house. It was very hot, and we stopped in the shade of trees near the dam.

Bill leaned the bag against a tree, we screwed on the rods, put on the reels, tied the leaders and got ready to fish...

Below the dam, where the water foamed, there was a deep place. When I began to bait, a trout jumped from the white foam onto the water slide and was carried down. I had not yet managed to bait when the second trout, having described the same beautiful arc, jumped onto the slide and disappeared into the roaring stream. I attached a sinker and threw the line into the foamy water near the dam.”

Hemingway absolutely excludes any evaluative comments and refuses all types of romantic “beauty” when depicting nature. At the same time, the Hsmingues text acquires its own “taste” qualities, which largely determine its uniqueness. All his books have the taste and clear, cold clarity of a mountain river, which is why everyone who really loves reading Hemingway has so much in common with the episode of fishing in the mountains of Spain. Nostalgia for the organic integrity of the world and the search for a new ideality are characteristic of this generation of writers. For Hemingway, achieving such integrity is possible only by creating in oneself a feeling of some kind of artistry in relation to the world, which is deeply hidden and in no way manifested in any words, monologues, or pomposity. Let’s compare this with the thought of T. Eliot, the author of “The Waste Land,” who wrote that the cruelty and chaos of the world can be resisted by “the fury of creative effort.” The correlation of this position with the basic principles of the philosophy of existentialism is obvious.

Another quote from this part of the text: “It was a little after noon, and there was not enough shade, but I sat, leaning against the trunk of two fused trees, and read. I read A.E. Mason - a wonderful story about how one man froze in the Alps and fell into a glacier and how his bride decided to wait exactly twenty-four years until his body appeared among the moraines, and her lover was also waiting, and they were still waiting when Bill approached " Here, in the best possible way, Jake Barnes’s fundamental anti-romanticism is revealed, his ironic attitude towards a philosophy of life that is already impossible for him. A person of the “lost generation” is afraid of self-deception; he builds a new canon for himself. This canon requires a clearly clear understanding of the relationship between life and death. Accordingly, the center of the novel is a story about bullfighting, which is perceived as a fair duel with death. The matador must not feign danger with techniques known to him, he must always be in the “bull zone”, and if he succeeds in winning, it must be through the absolute purity of his techniques, the absolute form of his art. Understanding the fine line between imitation and true art The fight against death is the basis of the stoicism of Hemingway’s “hero of the code.”

The confrontation with death begins. What does it mean to have and not to have, what does it mean to live, and, finally, the ultimate “courage to be”? This confrontation is only outlined in "Fiesta" in order to be much more complete in the next novel “A Farewell to Arms!”, 1929). It is no coincidence that this, yet another, hymn of love appears (remember Remarque’s “Three Comrades”). Let us not be afraid of banality, just as the authors of the “lost generation” were not afraid of it. They take the pure essence of these words, unclouded by the multiple layers that the bad taste of the crowd can add. Pure meaning the story of Romeo and Juliet, which cannot be vulgar. Purity of meaning is especially necessary for Hemingway. This is part of his moral program of “courage to be.” They are not afraid to be moral at all, his heroes, although they go down in history precisely as people devoid of any idea of \u200b\u200bethics. The meaninglessness of existence, drunkenness, random relationships. You can read it this way, if you don’t force yourself to do all this labor of the soul, and don’t constantly remember that behind them is the horror of the massacre that they experienced when they were still just children.

Lieutenant Henry main character novel, says: “The words sacred, glorious, sacrifice always confuse me... We sometimes heard them, standing in the rain, at such a distance that only isolated cries reached us... but I saw nothing sacred, and what was considered glorious did not deserve glory, and the victims were very reminiscent of the Chicago slaughterhouses, only the meat here was simply buried in the ground.” It is understandable, therefore, that he considers such “abstract words” as feat, valor or shrine to be unreliable and even offensive “next to specific names of villages, road numbers, names of rivers, regimental numbers and dates.” Being in war for Lieutenant Henry gradually becomes false from being necessary for a real man, as he is oppressed by the awareness of the meaninglessness of mutual destruction, the idea that they are all just puppets in someone’s merciless hands. Henry concludes a “separate peace”, leaves the field of meaningless battle, i.e. formally deserts the army. “A separate world” becomes another parameter for defining the hero of the “lost generation.” Man is constantly in a state of “warfare” with a world that is hostile and indifferent to him, the main attributes of which are the army, bureaucracy, and plutocracy. Is it possible in this case to leave the battlefield and, if not, is it possible to win this battle? Or is “victory in defeat” “a stoic adherence to a personally formulated idea of honor, which, by and large, cannot bring any practical advantages in a world that has lost the coordinates of universally meaningful meaning?”

The core idea of Hemingway's moral quest is courage, stoicism in the face of hostile circumstances, severe blows of fate. Having taken such a position, Hemingway begins to develop a life, moral, aesthetic system behavior of his hero, which became known as the Hemingway code, or canon. It is already developed in the first novel. The “Hero of the Code” is a courageous man, taciturn, and cool-headed in the most extreme situations.

The positive active principle in a person finds its highest expression in Hemingway in the motive of invincibility, which is key in his further work.

Richard Aldington (1892)-1962) during the period of his creative youth he was engaged literary work, collaborated in newspapers and magazines, was a supporter of Imagism (the head of this literary group was Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot was close to it). Imagists were characterized by absolutization poetic image, they contrasted the dark age of barbarism and commercial spirit with “islands of culture preserved by the chosen few” (images ancient world as the antithesis of “mercantile civilization”). In 1919, Aldington published the collection “Images of War” in a different poetic system.

In the 1920s, he acted as a reviewer for the French literature department at the Times Literary Supply. During this period, Aldington was active as a critic, translator, and poet. In 1925 he published a book about the freethinker Voltaire. In all his works, he opposes the narrow snobbish idea of poetry as something created “for one hypothetical intellectual reader,” such poetry risks “turning into something full of dark hints, refined, incomprehensible.”

Both Eddington’s own literary critical practice and the “high-brow” milieu to which he belonged predetermined the qualities of his main novel "Death of Him"

1929), which became an outstanding work in the literature of the “lost generation”. Overall, it is a satire of bourgeois England. All the authors of this movement paid attention to the system that led to the war, but none of them gave such detailed and artistically convincing criticism as Aldington. The title itself is already part of the author’s protest against pathos false patriotism, vulgarizing the word “hero.” The epigraph - "Morte (Type his" - is taken from the title of the third movement of Beethoven's twelfth sonata - a funeral march for the death of a nameless hero. In this sense, the epigraph prepares the reader to perceive the novel as a requiem for people who died in vain in a senseless war. But the ironic subtext is also obvious: those who are not heroes who allowed themselves to be made into cannon fodder, the time of heroes has passed. The main character, George Winterbourne, is too passive, too convinced of the constant disgustingness of life to provide any effective resistance to the society that is persistently leading him to the tragic end of England. she doesn’t need his life, she needs his death, although he is not a criminal, but a person capable of being a completely worthy member of society. The problem is the internal depravity of society itself.

The war highlighted the face of England. "Certainly, since the time french revolution there has never been such a collapse of values.” The family is “prostitution, sanctified by the law,” “under the thin film of piety and marital harmony, as if connecting the dearest mother and the kindest father, indomitable hatred seethes in full swing.” Let us remember how it was said by Galsworthy: “An era that so canonized Pharisaism that in order to be respectable, it was enough to seem like one.” Everything that was important turned out to be false and not having the right to exist, but just very viable. The comparison with Galsworthy is not accidental, since most aspects of the Victorian era are given through literary associations. The family teaches George to be courageous. This is an ideal that, at the turn of the century, was expressed with particular force in the work of Kipling, the bard of the Empire (at least, this is how the bourgeois understood him). It is Kipling who the author opposes when he says: “There is no Truth, there is no Justice - there is only British truth and British justice. Vile sacrilege! You are a servant of the Empire; it doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor, do as the Empire tells you, and as long as the Empire is rich and powerful, you must be happy.”

IN morally George is trying to find support in the canons of Beauty along the lines of the Pre-Raphaelites, Wilde, etc. Aldington writes his novel in a manner very characteristic of the intellectual elite of his time - like Huxley, like Wells (author social novels, which we often forget about, knowing him only as a science fiction writer), like Milne, etc. Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish the pages (of Ellington from the pages of the named writers. At the same time, like them, he is critical of his environment. He paints the world of literature as a “fair in the square” (the image of the French writer Romain Rolland, who so called the part of his huge novel “Jean-Christophe”), journalism in his perception is “mental prostitution,” “a humiliating form of the most humiliating vice.” real prototypes from the literary environment (Mr. Shobb - editor of the English Review, artist Upjohn - Ezra Pound, Mr. Tobb - T. S. Eliot, Mr. Bobb-Lawrence). And they are all subject to the same vices as other Victorians. They try to overcome a wall that is insurmountable and die. This is the pathos of the great human tragedy.

LITERATURE

Gribanov 5. Hemingway. M., 1970.

Zhantieva D.G. English novel of the 20th century. M„ 1965.

Startsev A. From Whitman to Hemingway. M.. 1972.

Suchkov V.L. Faces of time. M., 1976.

Andreev L.G. “The Lost Generation” and the work of E. Hemingway // History of foreign literature of the 20th century. M., 2000. P. 349.
Andreev L.G. “The Lost Generation” and the work of E. Hemingway. P. 348.

The 20th century truly began in 1914, when one of the most terrible and bloody conflicts in human history broke out. The First World War forever changed the course of time: four empires ceased to exist, territories and colonies were divided, new states emerged, and huge reparations and indemnities were demanded from the losing countries. Many nations felt humiliated and trampled into the dirt. All this served as prerequisites for the policy of revanchism, which led to the outbreak new war, even more bloody and terrible.

But let’s return to the First World War: according to official data, human losses in killed alone amounted to about 10 million, not to mention the wounded, missing and homeless. The front-line soldiers who survived this hell returned home (sometimes to a completely different state) with a whole range of physical and psychological injuries. And mental wounds were often worse than physical wounds. These people, most of whom were not even thirty years old, could not adapt to peaceful life: many of them became drunkards, some went crazy, and some even committed suicide. They were dryly called “unaccounted victims of war.”

In European and American literature of the 1920s and 30s, the tragedy of the “lost generation” - young people who passed through the trenches of Verdun and the Somme - became one of the central themes in the work of a number of authors (it is especially worth noting the year 1929, when books by front-line writers were published Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Aldington).

We have chosen the most famous novels about the First World War.

Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque's famous novel, which has become one of the most popular works German literature of the 20th century. All Quiet on the Western Front sold millions of copies around the world, and the writer himself was even nominated for a Nobel Prize for it.

This is a story about boys whose lives were broken (or rather, swept away) by the war. Just yesterday they were simple schoolchildren, today they are doomed to death soldiers of the Kaiser's Germany, who were thrown into the meat grinder of total war: dirty trenches, rats, lice, hours of artillery shelling, gas attacks, wounds, death, death and death again... They are killed and maimed, they themselves have to kill. They live in hell, and reports from the front lines dryly say again and again: “No change on the Western Front.”

We distinguish distorted faces, flat helmets. These are the French. They reached the remains of the wire fences and had already suffered noticeable losses. One of their chains is mowed down by a machine gun standing next to us; then it begins to exhibit delays when loading, and the French come closer. I see one of them fall into the slingshot with his face held high. The torso sinks down, the arms take a position as if he were about to pray. Then the body falls off completely, and only the arms, torn off at the elbows, hang on the wire.

Ernest Hemingway

"A Farewell to Arms!" - a cult novel that made Hemingway famous and brought him substantial fees. In 1918, the future author of “The Old Man and the Sea” joined the ranks of Red Cross volunteers. He served in Italy, where he was seriously wounded during a mortar attack on the front lines. In a Milan hospital he met his first love, Agnes von Kurowski. The story of their acquaintance formed the basis of the book.

The plot, as is often the case with old Khem, is quite simple: a soldier who falls in love with a nurse decides to desert the army at all costs and move with his beloved away from this massacre. But you can run away from war, but from death?..

He lay with his feet facing me, and in short flashes of light I could see that both of his legs were crushed above the knees. One was completely torn off, and the other hung on the sinew and rags of his trouser leg, and the stump writhed and twitched as if by itself. He bit his hand and moaned: “Oh mamma mia, mamma mia!”

Death of a hero. Richard Aldington

“The Death of a Hero” is a manifesto of the “lost generation”, permeated with severe bitterness and hopelessness, standing on a par with “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “A Farewell to Arms!” This is history young artist, who fled to the trench hell of the First World War from the indifference and misunderstanding of his parents and beloved women. In addition to the horrors of the front, the book also describes post-Victorian English society, whose patriotic pathos and hypocrisy contributed to the outbreak of one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.

In Aldington's own words: "This book is a lament, a monument, perhaps inartfully, to a generation that hoped fervently, fought honorably, and suffered deeply."

He lived among mangled corpses, among remains and ashes, in some kind of hellish cemetery. Absentmindedly picking at the wall of the trench with a stick, he touched the ribs of a human skeleton. He ordered a new pit to be dug behind the trench for a latrine - and three times he had to quit work, because every time under the shovels there was a terrible black mess of decomposing corpses.

Fire. Henri Barbusse

“Fire (Diary of a Platoon)” was perhaps the first novel dedicated to the tragedy of the First World War. French writer Henri Barbusse enlisted as volunteers immediately after the conflict began. He served on the front line, taking part in fierce battles with the German army on the Western Front. In 1915, the prose writer was wounded and hospitalized, where he began work on a novel based on real events (as evidenced by published diary entries and letters to his wife). “Fire” was published as a separate edition in 1916, at which time the writer was awarded the Goncourt Prize for it.

Barbusse's book is extremely naturalistic. Perhaps it can be called the most cruel work included in this collection. In it, the author described in detail (and very atmospheric!) everything that he had to go through in the war: from tedious trench everyday life in mud and sewage, under the whistling of bullets and shells, to suicidal bayonet attacks, terrible injuries and death of colleagues.

Through the gap in the embankment the bottom is visible; there, on their knees, as if begging for something, are the corpses of soldiers of the Prussian Guard; they have bloody holes punched in their backs. From the pile of these corpses they pulled the body of a huge Senegalese rifleman to the edge; he is petrified in the position in which death overtook him, he is crouched, wants to lean on the void, cling to it with his feet, and looks intently at his hands, which were probably cut off by the exploding grenade he was holding; his whole face is moving, swarming with worms, as if he is chewing them.

Three soldiers. John Dos Passos

Like Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos served as a volunteer in a medical unit stationed in Italy during World War I. Three Soldiers was published shortly after the end of the conflict - in 1921 - and became one of the first works about the Lost Generation. Unlike other books included in this collection, in this novel what comes first is not the description of military operations and everyday life at the front, but the story of how the ruthless war machine destroys a person's individuality.

Damn this damn infantry! I'm ready to do anything to get out of it. What is this life for a person when they treat him as a black man.
- Yes, this is not life for a person...

, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Nathaniel West, John O'Hara. The Lost Generation are young people drafted to the front at the age of 18, often not yet graduated from school, who began to kill early. After the war, such people often do not could adapt to peaceful life, they became drunkards, committed suicide, and some went crazy.

History of the term

When we returned from Canada and settled on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and Miss Stein and I were still good friends, she uttered her phrase about the lost generation. The old Model T Ford that Miss Stein drove in those years had something wrong with the ignition, and the young mechanic, who had been at the front for the last year of the war and was now working in the garage, had not been able to fix it, or maybe Maybe he just didn’t want to fix her Ford out of turn. Be that as it may, he was not sérieux enough, and after Miss Stein's complaint, the owner severely reprimanded him. The owner told him: “You are all génération perdue!”
That's who you are! And all of you are like that! - said Miss Stein. - All young people who were in the war. You are a lost generation.

This is what they call in the West young front-line soldiers who fought between 1914 and 1918, regardless of the country for which they fought, and returned home morally or physically crippled. They are also called “unaccounted victims of war.” After returning from the front, these people could not live a normal life again. After experiencing the horrors of war, everything else seemed petty and unworthy of attention to them.

In the novel “Three Comrades,” he predicts a sad fate for the lost generation. Remarque describes the situation in which these people found themselves. When they returned, many of them found craters instead of their previous homes; most lost their relatives and friends. In post-war Germany there is devastation, poverty, unemployment, instability, and a nervous atmosphere.

Lost generation. Foreign literature. World Art. XX century Literature "The Lost Generation"

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Subtitles

History of the term

Literature of the "Lost Generation"

Erich Maria Remarque

Ernest Hemingway

Death of a hero. Richard Aldington

Fire. Henri Barbusse

Three soldiers. John Dos Passos

History of the term

see also

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