20th century modernism acts as a new model of artistic creativity. Modernism is the general name of heterogeneous movements, united by their opposition to the realistic and romantic models (as well as naturalism, symbolism, neo-romanticism associated with them), and the desire to destroy the forms of art perceived at the beginning of the 20th century. as too traditional, conservative, dead, and create a new artistic language to reflect a total revaluation of the values of humanity. Its character is closely connected with the general cultural situation at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. - a transitional period marked by multiplicity and diversity of approaches, mosaic scientific knowledge and cultural phenomena in general, the destruction of old systems that seemed unshakable, the openness of new scientific and artistic systems, allowing them to connect in various combinations (from eclecticism to synthesis), revaluation of cultural values, a sense of instability, illusory nature of the world and a passionate desire to find the origins of both the universe and the human being. In put forward in the first years of the 20th century. Einstein's theory of relativity, the ideas of Freud's psychoanalysis, attempts to revise all world laws and redefine the principles are clearly visible. This trend can be traced in various fields of science and art: it is enough to recall Rutherford’s planetary model of the atom (1911), the dodecaphonic music of A. Webern (1913), in particular, five pieces for orchestra, one of which lasts only 19 seconds, the famous painting “Black square" by K. S. Malevich (1913). The search for primary elements in art gives deep meaning to the theatrical experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold and the teaching of montage by Sergei Eisenstein. A similar process occurs in literature (the parables of Franz Kafka, the “stream of consciousness” of Marcel Proust and James Joyce). Modernists throughout the 20th century. they look for the beginning, either in life itself (first of all, in man), or in art. For existentialists, the primary elements of life (existence) are more important; for abstractionists, the primary elements of artistic language are more important. In some cases, searches are conducted in two directions at once. Here lies the deepest reason for the confrontation between modernism and realism of the 20th century: modernists are trying to find fundamental principles, while realists are inspired by the desire to create a general, integral picture of existence. In modernism, the part (primary element) becomes larger and more important than the whole, which is usually replaced by myth. In 20th-century realism, on the contrary, the whole (picture of reality) is more significant than any part, which can often be replaced by myth. For modernists in the field of poetics, the micro level is important, therefore the artistic language belonging to this level is revised, while the macro level (genre, type) is little affected. So, Proust writes an unusual, but novel; Kafka - unconventional, but parables and short stories; Sartre, Camus, Anouilh are tragedies, etc., just as “Black Square” remains a painting, “The Rite of Spring” by I. Stravinsky is a ballet, “Woyzeck” by A. Berg is an opera, “Un Chien Andalou” by L. Buñuel is feature film. Realists are more attentive to genres, but the leading tendency for them is to identify in the chosen genre its ability to convey the whole. The birth and development of modernism in the literature of the 20th century. prepared by many factors, among which a special place is occupied by philosophy and, more broadly, the tradition of philosophizing, as well as new psychology. Philosophical and psychological foundations of modernism. These foundations primarily include the intuitionism of A. Bergson and B. Croce, psychoanalysis of 3. Freud, analytical psychology of C. G. Jung, existentialism of M. Unamuno, N. Berdyaev, K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, J. P. Sartre , A. Camus, phenomenology of E. Husserl, etc. The problem of myth and myth-making in artistic culture XX century In the 20th century, there was a kind of renaissance of myth as a form of worldview. This began back in the 19th century. musical dramas of Richard Wagner, especially his tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung”. Largely inspired by Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche in his work “Thus Spake Zarathustra” laid the foundations for subsequent myth-making, i.e. creating new myths. Myths of the 20th century differ from ancient myths in that belief in them (unless we are talking about a primitive, naive perception of literature) is just a game. And in form it is an imitation in accordance with the invariant models of antiquity, which also corresponds to the game. "Game" concept of creativity. The “game” nature of culture is one of the leading themes of our time. Play as a non-utilitarian, frivolous human activity with a purpose that is not external, but in the process of play itself, with the ability to suspend it at any time without damage, is perceived not only as a source of special aesthetic pleasure, but also as a previously underestimated source of new truths: “ ... Play is a process in which a person discovers the possibility of overcoming his one-dimensionality, as well as the elementary nature of surrounding objects, the simplicity and “linearity” of interactions with them”35. The publication in 1938 of the work of the Dutchman Johan Huizinga “Homo ludens” (“Man Playing”) marked the beginning of close interest in the game as a cultural phenomenon (L. S. Vygotsky’s works on the game at that time were considered only as, in fact, psychological), and starting in the second half of the 1960s, after the publication of M. M. Bakhtin’s work “François Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” and its translation into foreign languages, a real boom in this issue arose, a kind of “panigrism” - the representation of any literary work like games. Carnivalization, dialogization, playfulness are the motives of a huge number of literary and cultural works of recent decades. The origins of the modern understanding of the play aspect of culture are in Plato’s characterization of play as a sacred activity, and in the “state of play” as an aesthetic category in Kant. Proponents of game theory often cite Schiller's remarkable statement from Letters on aesthetic education person": "...A person plays only when he is in full meaning words are a man, and he is fully human only when he plays.” In literary criticism, the term “game principle” appeared, which means the conscious construction of a literary text according to certain rules, similar to the laws of various games - from children's to theatrical (for example, in the novels of G. Hesse, V. Nabokov, A. Murdoch, D. Fowles and etc.). Modeling reality and constructing new worlds. The game principle, for all its significance, acts as a special case of a more general principles - modeling reality and constructing new worlds. Modeling and construction are opposed to tradition, embodied in the Aristotelian concept of mimesis (imitation). Modeling is embodied in the creation of a generalized image of reality, devoid of detail, a “picture of the world” that retains its orienting function, adequacy and viability. This model resembles a model airplane that can fly. Using such a simplified model, you can study the modeling object itself. The construction of worlds, on the contrary, may contain a lot of details, but this is the creation of other worlds that do not coincide in basic parameters with reality. This design is speculative in nature (figuratively speaking, a design of this kind will not be able to fly, and is not intended to do so). The design of worlds allows us to move from romantic two-worlds to “many-worlds.” However, this departure from the real world into unprecedented worlds (escapism characteristic of modernism), a deliberate break with the traditions of art, the destruction of the norms of language and the logic of utterance are called upon to gain a deeper understanding of a person, his psyche: in literature a situation of defamiliarization is created, allowing one to look at the known and familiar in a new way. In modernism, the principle of constructing worlds is more noticeable and developed, which is completely compatible with the priority of the private, the individual. In the realism of the 20th century, with its desire to overcome particulars in the name of the whole, the principle of modeling reality is more noticeable. These principles appeared in the 20th century in the works of such writers as Kafka, Hesse, Camus, Ionesco, Beckett, Nabokov, Brecht, Borges, Fowles, Eco and others. Poetics. Modernism did not develop a unified poetics and, moreover, never set itself such a goal. Thus, in the works of M. Proust (the novel “In Search of Lost Time”), a complication of the forms of narration and psychological writing is revealed; D. Joyce (novel "Ulysses") - a combination of mythology with special detail. The “stream of consciousness” technique is different between Proust and Joyce. In F. Kafka's prose (the novels “The Missing Man,” “The Trial,” “The Castle,” short stories and parables), the poetics are determined by the aesthetics of dreams and absurdity, the style is directed towards simplicity and laconicism, which sharply distinguishes Kafka from Proust and Joyce. The poetics of modernism must be characterized in relation to various directions, movements, schools, and authors. Avant-garde movements of the 1910-1920s. The word "avant-garde" is French. Avant means “ahead”, garde means “military detachment”. The original meaning of the word avant-garde is a military detachment that follows in front of the main forces. In 1853, the word was first used to designate a literary movement that sought to renew art. In the 20th century it was this second meaning that was used to name various unrealistic movements in different types art and became especially popular. At the same time, a more precise term is used - avant-garde. Avant-gardeism covers only part of the phenomena defined by the concept of “modernism”. Such modernists as M. Proust, A. Gide, G. Hesse can hardly be characterized as avant-garde. Obviously, in avant-gardeism the main role is played by the problem of language, the desire to destroy the traditional linguistic design of the text. IN different countries Avant-gardeism acquired various forms of expression. Dadaism developed in Switzerland. In Germany, cavangardism should be attributed to its origin in turn of XIX-XX centuries expressionism. Futurism is being formed in Italy and Russia. Surrealism emerges in France. Dadaism One of the earliest manifestations of avant-gardeism in European literature is Dadaism (from the French dada - wooden horse, as small children call it, in a figurative sense - incoherent baby babble). Dadaism arose in Switzerland in 1916, at the height of the First World War, and was a kind of anarchist protest. In irrationalism, nihilistic anti-aestheticism, shocking paradoxes, meaningless, random combinations of sounds, words, objects, lines, one can see an ironic, parodic reflection of the meaninglessness of life, revealed in the fire of world war. The Dadaists first gathered on February 8, 1916 in Zurich, in the Voltaire cabaret, opened by the German writer Hugo Ball (1886-1927). The music of Schoenberg was heard here, the poems of Apollinaire, Rimbaud, and Alfred Jarry's drama “King Jubus” (1896) were read. The founder of Dada literature was the Romanian by birth Tristan Tzara (or Tzara, pseudonym of Sami Rosenstock, 1896 - 1963). In his most famous collection, “Twenty-five Poems” (1918), there is a poem “White Peacock, Leper by the Landscape,” in which the poet, challenging the reader, clearly demonstrates the transition from coherent to incoherent speech. He deliberately destroys “language as a means that cemented the social system”, strives for “the complete fragmentation of language”: Here the reader begins to scream, Starts to scream, starts to scream; in ("erike" flutes appear, colored with corals. The reader wants to die, maybe dance, but begins to scream, He is a dirty, skinny idiot, he does not understand My poems and screams. He is crooked. In his soul there are zigzags and a lot of rrrrrr Nbaz, baz , look at the underwater tiara, spread with golden algae. Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Wassily Kandinsky. After the shocking manifestations in Paris in 1920-1921, Dadaism quickly faded away, Breton, Soupault, Aragon, Eluard became prominent figures of surrealism, while the German Dadaists joined the ranks of the Expressionists. Expressionism This modernist movement is most characteristic of German literature, although his influence is also noticeable in the literature of the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Hungary, etc. In Germany, expressionism arose around 1905 and actively developed until the end of the 1920s. The term (from the French expression - expression) was introduced in 1911 by the founder of the expressionist magazine “Storm” H. Walden. In contrast to impressionism with its focus on primary feelings and sensations, the expressionists insisted on the principle of an all-encompassing subjective interpretation of reality. Basic principles of expressionism. Expressionists opposed the negative aspects of the way of life, marked by the enslavement of the individual, mechanization, and alienation. The first slogan of expressionism: reality in existing forms must be rejected. To change reality, art must reinterpret it in a new way (the principle of “activating art”). Special role in this case poetry and drama can play a role. Thus, the hero of Reinhardt Sorge’s drama “The Beggar” (1912) views the theater as a platform. Instead of the slogan of commercial art “Art as an object of profit”, the slogan “Art as an expression of a certain tendency” appears. To implement the principle of “activating art,” expressionists use a variety of means. This is, for example, schematicism, a sharp highlighting of some sides to the detriment of others, so that readers and viewers come to the given solution needed by the author. This is the principle of “demonstration” in everything, be it deliberately sharp deviations from tradition in poetry, shocking design of performances, posturing of the characters and the authors themselves. A striking example of “activation” through “demonstration” is the inclusion of particularly harsh music in performances in order to drive the audience crazy. Here, for example, is a remark from Franz Jung’s expressionist play “The Plebeians”: “The music begins... Next is a wild march on crude instruments. Circus music... Just not so sentimental - the audience in the stalls should jump. It is necessary that they cannot whisper dirty things to each other.” To fulfill the tasks of exposing reality and changing it, art must be ideological, immediate, substantial, the expressionists believed. The term “substantiality” requires comment here. The expressionists rejected the dialectical connection between the concepts of “appearance” and “essence”, sharply contrasting them. They intended to talk not about phenomena, but only about essences. That is why there is so much abstraction in the works of the Expressionists; it is not life-like characters that act, but stereotypes: capitalist, worker, etc., situations are also extremely generalized. Thus, in R. Sorge’s play “The Beggar,” the main character is divided into four “substances”: he is a poet, a son, a brother, and a lover. These substances play in the play different actors. Futurism At the beginning of the 20th century. A movement of avant-gardeism close to expressionism was formed - futurism (from the Latin futurum - future), which became most widespread in Italy. Unlike expressionism, which pessimistically depicted urbanization and mechanization of life, futurism glorifies these processes, connecting the future with them. Futurism is characterized by anti-humanism (a person acts as a “pin” in the mechanism of “universal happiness”, similar to a machine part - “the only teacher of the simultaneity of actions”), anti-psychologism (“hot metal and ... a wooden block worry us now more than smiles and tears women"), anti-rationalism (a call to “cause disgust for reason”), anti-philosophy, anti-aestheticism, anti-morality (“we want to destroy museums, libraries, fight moralism”), aggressiveness (“a work devoid of aggressiveness cannot be a masterpiece”), refusal from cultural traditions (the call to “don’t give a damn about the altar of art”), from the literary heritage (“we need to sweep away all already used plots in order to express our whirlwind life of steel, pride, fever and speed”), from verbal forms of expression (the call to “revolt against words "). Futurists celebrate movement, dynamism modern life. Their ideal is a man on a motorcycle, a “new centaur.” This movement, which developed for no more than two decades and then faded away, became one of the main sources of pop art. Marinetti. All of the above statements are taken from the manifestos of the founder of futurism, the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). In 1909, his “First Manifesto of Futurism” was published. It stated, in particular: “We want to glorify the love of danger, the habit of daring. We want to glorify aggressiveness, feverish insomnia and fist fighting... We affirm the new Beauty of speed... We want to glorify war - the only hygiene in the world...” After the first manifesto, many others appeared, up to the manifesto “New Futurist Painting” (1930). In the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912), Marinetti, in order to adequately reflect the changed reality, demands that we abandon the arrangement of nouns in a logical order and connect them by analogy, without grammatical connections; use verbs only in an indefinite form (as the most expansive in meaning); destroy adjectives and adverbs, as they give Additional information(there is no time to stop on it in a whirlwind of movement, with dynamic vision); remove all punctuation marks that interfere with the principle of continuity; use mathematical and musical signs to indicate the direction of movement, etc. Among the works that embody Marinetti's principles is the novel Mafarka the Futurist (1910). Mafarka, an eastern despot, is similar to Zarathustra from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by F. Nietzsche, but is deliberately devoid of intellectuality. An even more characteristic work of futurism is the poem “Zaig tumb tumb” (1914), which has the subtitle “The Siege of Constantinople” (it reproduces an episode from the Italo-Turkish War of 1913). Verbal imagery is replaced by collage, the game of pins, arbitrary arrangement of numbers and symbols of mathematical operations, onomatopoeic exclamations to imitate shots and explosions. After Mussolini, with whom Marinetti became close during the First World War, came to power, the futurist poet received various awards, became an academician (1929), and futurism became the official artistic movement of fascist Italy. His revolutionary spirit and anarchism gave way to officialdom.
Modernist trends in the literature of the 20s expressed very significant facets of the worldview of the people of this era - that worldview that was in certain opposition to the prevailing political, social, and philosophical attitudes.
Modernism creates a different concept of man than in realism, designates the coordinates of his character differently and perceives reality differently. It is wrong to see in it only formal devices - non-life-like poetics, alogism of images, “absent mind”, etc. Behind the form lies new content: modernism offers different character motivations, perceives reality as fantastic and illogical. “In our days, the only fiction is yesterday’s life on solid whales,” wrote Evgeniy Zamyatin, one of the few writers who, in the literary situation of the 20s, managed to substantiate the theoretical principles of the new art, which he called “synthetism.” - Today - The Apocalypse can be published as a daily newspaper; tomorrow - we will quite calmly buy a place in a sleeping car to Mars. Einstein tore the very space and time from their anchors. And art that has grown out of this, today’s reality, how can it not be fantastic, like a dream?”
Zamyatin saw the origins of the crisis of realistic art and the emergence next to it of modernism as a new artistic worldview not only in the fantastic nature of everyday life, but also in the new philosophical coordinate system in which the person of the 20th century found himself. “After the geometric-philosophical earthquake produced by Einstein, the old space and time finally perished,” the writer states. “We, read through Schopenhauer, Kant, Einstein, symbolism, know: the world, the thing in itself, reality is not at all what is seen.”
Having rejected the strict cause-and-effect conditionality of realistic aesthetics, the literature of modernism also rejected the fatal dependence of man on the environment, social or historical, affirmed by realism. This, if you like, was one of the attempts to preserve the sovereignty of the human person, its right to freedom from the circumstances of historical times, the aggressiveness of which in the 20th century in relation to a person’s private life became especially obvious. This need to defend the natural rights of the hero (and, therefore, real person) forced the non-realist artist to turn to the dystopian genre. E. Zamyatin’s novel “We” (1921) is one of the most famous dystopias of the 20th century. It shows what will happen to society if it destroys the personal, individual principle in people and turns them into absolutely interchangeable “numbers”. A community that has subjected its individuals to complete biological identification is depicted in Zamyatin’s novel.
In the literature of the 20s, two main trends are distinguishable: on the one hand, reckless acceptance of social transformations, on the other, doubt about their humanism and expediency. One of the most prominent “doubting” writers in the 20s was B. Pilnyak. In the novel “The Naked Year” (1921-1923), which became a milestone for new literature in the early 20s, Pilnyak pointedly abandoned realistic poetics. As a result, the plot of his work lost its traditional organizing role for realism. Its function in Pilnyak is performed by leitmotifs, and different fragments narratives are held together by associative connections. The reader is presented with a series of such disparate descriptions of reality. The deliberate lack of structure of the composition is emphasized by the writer even in the titles of the chapters, which seem to be of a draft nature: “Chapter VII (last, untitled),” or “Last triptych (material, in essence).” Scattered pictures of reality, endlessly alternating, are designed to convey an existence that has not yet taken shape - broken by the revolution, but not settled, not having acquired internal logic, and therefore chaotic, absurd and random.
The “brokenness” and fragmentation of the composition of “The Naked Year” is due to the absence in the novel of such a point of view on what is happening that could connect the incompatible for Pilnyak: the leather jackets of the Bolsheviks (a household name for the literature of the 20s) and the revelry of the Russian freemen; China Town and village bathhouse; a heated carriage and a provincial merchant's house. Only the presence of such a compositional point of view, in which the “ideological center” of the work would be expressed, would be able to unite and explain the phenomena scattered by Pilnyak in the epic space of his novel.
Such an ideological center is suggested by the literature of socialist realism. Pilnyak in the 20s could not or did not want to find him. The absence of such an ideological center is, as it were, compensated by the presence in the novel of many points of view on what is happening, which are not possible to reduce and combine. Their abundance emphasizes the destruction big picture world, presented in "The Naked Year". The “Necessary Note” to the “Introduction” directly formulates the desire to connect the reality that is disintegrating before our eyes with several points of view - and the objective impossibility of doing this. “The Whites left in March - and it’s March for the plant. For the city (the city of Ordynin) - July, and for villages and villages - all year round. However, to everyone - through his eyes, his instrumentation and his month. The city of Ordynin and the Taezhevsky factories are nearby and a thousand miles away from everywhere. - Donat Ratchin - killed by whites: everything about him."
The short and seemingly completely meaningless “Necessary Note” expresses the essence of the writer’s concept of the world and man. The world is destroyed and contradictory: spatial relations reveal their inconsistency or, at best, relativity (the city and factories are nearby and a thousand miles away from everywhere); traditional logic, built on cause-and-effect relationships, is deliberately blown up. The solution is to offer each hero his own point of view on this crumpled and illogical world: “To each - through his eyes, his instrumentation and his month.” However, disparate points of view are not able to connect fragments of reality into a coherent picture. Many positions incompatible with each other in the artistic world of “The Naked Year” make up an insoluble compositional equation.
Therefore, the novel declares a rejection of realistic principles of typification, a rejection of conditioned patterns. Circumstances are no longer capable of shaping character. They appear as not connected by any logical connection, as disparate fragments of reality.
Therefore, Pilnyak seeks character motivation not in the sphere of the hero’s social and interpersonal connections, but in his very personality. This explains the writer’s attraction to elements of naturalism. The rejection of the eschatological scale of the vision of the world (it was in such a globalist perspective that the revolution was understood in the early 20s) shakes off cultural, moral and other guidelines from a person, revealing “natural principles”, mainly gender. These are physiological instincts in the most obvious and undisguised form: they are the ones that practically cannot be curbed by a person’s social status, culture, and upbringing. Such instincts motivate Pilnyak’s behavior both of the hero and of entire masses of people.
And yet, in The Naked Year, Boris Pilnyak outlines at least a hypothetical possibility of synthesizing the fragments of reality split by the revolution. The point of view that provides such a perspective is the position of the Bolsheviks, although it is clearly incomprehensible to the writer. “In the Ordynins’ house, in the executive committee (there were no geraniums on the windows) - people in leather jackets, Bolsheviks, gathered upstairs. These here, in leather jackets, each one is tall, handsome leather, each one is strong, and the curls under the cap are ringed at the back of the head, each one has tightly drawn cheekbones, the folds of the lips, each one has ironed movements. From the loose, clumsy Russian people - selection. You won't get wet in leather jackets. So we know, so we want, so we set it - and that’s it.”
But Pilnyak’s famous “leather jackets” were also only an abstract image. The collective nature of the portrait, its deliberate, fundamental emphasis on appearance, emphasizing determination as the only dominant character could not make the point of view of the “leather jackets” the ideological center that would consolidate the narrative and synthesize disparate pictures of reality. If their point of view became dominant, then the conflict between them and ordinary people (private residents, men and women) would be covered in the same way as in Yu. Libedinsky’s “Week”. The absence of this ideological center in Pilnyak’s novel becomes the fundamental line that separates the aesthetics of socialist realism from modernism.
It is characteristic that admiration and fear of the unbending will of the Bolsheviks will appear not only in “The Naked Year”, but also in “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (1927), which played fatal role in the life of a writer. Its plot is based on the real story of the death of the Civil War hero Frunze on the operating table: the operation to remove a long-healed stomach ulcer was performed, according to rumors that were actively circulating at the time, on the orders of Stalin. Contemporaries easily recognized him in the image of a non-hunched Man, and in the unfortunate army commander Gavrilov they found features of the late Frunze. The powers that be were so frightened by the appearance of this story that the edition of Novy Mir, where it was published, was confiscated, and Voronsky, to whom Pilnyak dedicated his work, publicly refused the dedication.
It can be assumed that in “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” Pilnyak makes an attempt to go beyond the boundaries of modernist aesthetics. This can be done by placing fragments of reality into a single outline, plot, system of events, that is, creating a kind of semantic center that explains reality. The image of a non-hunched Man appears as such an ideological center in the story. It is he, sitting in his office at night, who confronts living and natural life, “when thousands of people crowded into the cinema, theaters, variety shows, taverns and pubs, when crazy cars ate up street puddles with their lanterns, carving out crowds of bizarre people with these lanterns on the sidewalks.” in the lantern light of people - when in the theaters, confusing time, space and countries, unprecedented Greeks, Assyrians, Russian and Chinese workers, Republicans of America and the USSR, the actors in every way forced the audience to go wild and applaud.
This picture, painted with bright strokes superimposed on each other, is opposed to the world of sober affairs and calculation, the world of a non-hunching Man. Everything in this world is subject to a strict outline: “The milestones of his speech were the USSR, America, England, the globe and the USSR, English sterling and Russian pounds of wheat, American heavy industry and Chinese workers. The man spoke loudly and firmly, and his every phrase was a formula.”
Let us note that in the two quotes given, Pilnyak deliberately juxtaposes the impressionistic and “contour” pictures of reality, living life and solid, sober calculation. The last one wins. Trying to introduce into his artistic world some kind of organizing principle, capable of collecting disparate pictures of existence into something holistic, Pilnyak almost fatally from leather jackets, in the affairs and plans of which he saw the prospect of overcoming chaos, comes to the image of a non-hunching Man. This hero, as if rising above the artistic world of the story, imposes a rigid outline on living life, as if immobilizing it, depriving it of internal, albeit chaotic, freedom. This conflict is expressed not only at the level of the plot, in the terrible fate of the commander Gavrilov - Frunze, but also at other levels of poetics: modernist incompleteness collides with the plot-scheme, multi-colored floating strokes - with a gray outline. Having found an organizing ideological center, Pilnyak was horrified by it, did not accept it, pushed it away, remaining in his subsequent works within the framework of modernism. Art world B. Pilnyak, with all its external amorphousness, fragmentation, and randomness, was a reflection of the flow of living life, disrupted by the tragic historical vicissitudes of Russian reality of the 10-20s.
Pilnyak was in principle unable to model reality, to show it not as it is, but as it should be - therefore, the introduction of any ideological center into the compositional structure of the work was in principle impossible. The idea of obligation and normativity, characteristic of socialist realism, an orientation towards a certain ideal that will someday be realized, was interpreted by him in art as false and contrary to artistic truth.
Pilnyak did not organically tolerate lies. “I take newspapers and books, and the first thing that strikes me is lies everywhere, in work, in public life, in family relationships. Everyone lies: the communists, the bourgeois, the workers, and even the enemies of the revolution, the entire Russian nation.” The words spoken by one of the writer’s heroes accurately characterize the position of the author himself, who in the story “Spattered Time” (1924) defined both his place in art and the place of literature in the life of society: “I have had the bitter glory of being a person who goes to trouble. And I also had bitter glory - my duty is to be a Russian writer and to be honest with myself and with Russia.”
Etc.), therefore it is necessary to distinguish between these two concepts in order to avoid confusion.
Modernism in the visual arts
Modernism- a set of artistic movements in the art of the second half of the 19th - mid-20th centuries. The most significant modernist trends were impressionism, expressionism, neo- and post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and futurism. As well as later movements - abstract art, Dadaism, surrealism. In a narrow sense, modernism is seen as an early stage of avant-gardeism, the beginning of a revision classical traditions. The date of the birth of modernism is often called 1863 - the year of the opening of the “Salon of the Rejected” in Paris, where the works of artists were accepted. In a broad sense, modernism is “another art”, the main goal of which is to create original works based on internal freedom and a special vision of the world by the author and carrying new expressive means of visual language, often accompanied by shockingness and a certain challenge to established canons.
Modernism in literature
In literature, modernism replaced the classical novel. Instead of biography, the reader began to be offered literary interpretations of various philosophical, psychological and historical concepts (not to be confused with the psychological, historical and philosophical novel, which are classic), a style called Stream of Consciousness (English) appeared. Stream of consciousness), characterized by deep penetration into inner world heroes. The theme of understanding the war and the lost generation occupies an important place in the literature of modernism.
The main forerunners of modernism were: Dostoevsky (1821-81) ( Crime and Punishment (1866), Brothers Karamazov(1880); Whitman (1819-92) ( grass leaves) (1855-91); Baudelaire (1821-67) ( The flowers of Evil), A. Rimbaud (1854-91) ( Insights, 1874); Strindberg (1849-1912), especially his later plays.
Modernism did away with the old style in the first three decades of the 20th century and radically redefined possible literary forms. The main writers of this period:
Modernism in architecture
The expression “modernism in architecture” is often used as a synonym for the term “modern architecture,” but the latter term is still broader. Modernism in architecture embraces the work of pioneers modern architecture and their followers in the time period from the early 1920s to the 1970s-1980s (in Europe), when new trends emerged in architecture.
In the specialized literature, the term “architectural modernism” corresponds to the English terms “ modern architecture», « modern movement" or " modern", used in the same context. The expression “modernism” is sometimes used as a synonym for the concept “modern architecture”; or as the name of the style (in English literature - “ modern»).
Architectural modernism includes such architectural movements as European functionalism of the 1920s and 1930s, constructivism and rationalism in the 1920s in Russia, the Bauhaus movement in Germany, architectural art deco style, international style, brutalism, organic architecture. Thus, each of these phenomena is one of the branches of a common tree, architectural modernism.
The main representatives of architectural modernism are the pioneers of modern architecture Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, as well as several others.
Modernist movements in art
Criticism
Opponents of modernism were Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Lifshits.
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Notes
Literature
- Nilsson Nils Åke. Archaism and modernism // Poetry and painting: Collection of works in memory of N. I. Khardzhiev / Compilation and general editing by M. B. Meilakh and D. V. Sarabyanov. - M.: Languages of Russian culture, 2000. - P. 75-82. - ISBN 5-7859-0074-2.
Links
- Lifshits M. A.
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An excerpt characterizing Modernism
Pierre was led into the large, illuminated dining room; a few minutes later steps were heard, and the princess and Natasha entered the room. Natasha was calm, although a stern, without a smile, expression was now again established on her face. Princess Marya, Natasha and Pierre equally experienced that feeling of awkwardness that usually follows the end of a serious and intimate conversation. It is impossible to continue the same conversation; It’s shameful to talk about trifles, but it’s unpleasant to remain silent, because you want to talk, but with this silence you seem to be pretending. They silently approached the table. The waiters pushed back and pulled up chairs. Pierre unfolded the cold napkin and, deciding to break the silence, looked at Natasha and Princess Marya. Both, obviously, at the same time decided to do the same: contentment with life and recognition that, in addition to grief, there are also joys, shone in their eyes.- Do you drink vodka, Count? - said Princess Marya, and these words suddenly dispersed the shadows of the past.
“Tell me about yourself,” said Princess Marya. “They tell such incredible miracles about you.”
“Yes,” Pierre answered with his now familiar smile of gentle mockery. “They even tell me about such miracles as I have never seen in my dreams.” Marya Abramovna invited me to her place and kept telling me what had happened to me, or was about to happen. Stepan Stepanych also taught me how to tell things. In general, I noticed that it is very peaceful to be an interesting person (I am an interesting person now); they call me and they tell me.
Natasha smiled and wanted to say something.
“We were told,” Princess Marya interrupted her, “that you lost two million in Moscow.” Is this true?
“And I became three times richer,” said Pierre. Pierre, despite the fact that his wife’s debts and the need for buildings changed his affairs, continued to say that he had become three times richer.
“What I have undoubtedly won,” he said, “is freedom...” he began seriously; but decided against continuing, noticing that this was too selfish a subject of conversation.
-Are you building?
- Yes, Savelich orders.
– Tell me, did you not know about the death of the Countess when you stayed in Moscow? - said Princess Marya and immediately blushed, noticing that by making this question after his words that he was free, she ascribed to his words a meaning that they, perhaps, did not have.
“No,” answered Pierre, obviously not finding the interpretation that Princess Marya gave to his mention of her freedom awkward. “I learned this in Orel, and you can’t imagine how it struck me.” “We were not exemplary spouses,” he said quickly, looking at Natasha and noticing in her face the curiosity about how he would respond to his wife. “But this death struck me terribly.” When two people quarrel, both are always to blame. And one’s own guilt suddenly becomes terribly heavy in front of a person who no longer exists. And then such death... without friends, without consolation. “I’m very, very sorry for her,” he finished and was pleased to notice the joyful approval on Natasha’s face.
“Yes, here you are again, a bachelor and a groom,” said Princess Marya.
Pierre suddenly blushed crimson and tried for a long time not to look at Natasha. When he decided to look at her, her face was cold, stern and even contemptuous, as it seemed to him.
– But did you really see and talk with Napoleon, as we were told? - said Princess Marya.
Pierre laughed.
- Never, never. It always seems to everyone that being a prisoner means being a guest of Napoleon. Not only have I not seen him, but I have also not heard of him. I was in much worse company.
Dinner ended, and Pierre, who at first refused to talk about his captivity, gradually became involved in this story.
- But is it true that you stayed to kill Napoleon? – Natasha asked him, smiling slightly. “I guessed it when we met you at the Sukharev Tower; remember?
Pierre admitted that it was true, and from this question, gradually guided by the questions of Princess Marya and especially Natasha, he became involved in a detailed story about his adventures.
At first he spoke with that mocking, meek look that he now had at people and especially at himself; but then, when he came to the story of the horrors and suffering that he had seen, he, without noticing it, became carried away and began to speak with the restrained excitement of a person experiencing strong impressions in his memory.
Princess Marya looked at Pierre and Natasha with a gentle smile. In this whole story she saw only Pierre and his kindness. Natasha, leaning on her arm, with a constantly changing expression on her face along with the story, watched Pierre without looking away for a minute, apparently experiencing with him what he was telling. Not only her look, but exclamations and short questions, which she did, showed Pierre that from what he was saying, she understood exactly what he wanted to convey. It was clear that she understood not only what he was saying, but also what he would like and could not express in words. Pierre told about his episode with the child and the woman for whose protection he was taken in the following way:
“It was a terrible sight, children were abandoned, some were on fire... In front of me they pulled out a child... women, from whom they pulled things off, tore out earrings...
Pierre blushed and hesitated.
“Then a patrol arrived, and all those who were not robbed, all the men were taken away. And me.
– You probably don’t tell everything; “You must have done something…” Natasha said and paused, “good.”
Pierre continued to talk further. When he talked about the execution, he wanted to avoid the terrible details; but Natasha demanded that he not miss anything.
Pierre began to talk about Karataev (he had already gotten up from the table and was walking around, Natasha was watching him with her eyes) and stopped.
- No, you cannot understand what I learned from this illiterate man - a fool.
“No, no, speak up,” said Natasha. - Where is he?
“He was killed almost in front of me.” - And Pierre began to tell the last time of their retreat, Karataev’s illness (his voice trembled incessantly) and his death.
Pierre told his adventures as he had never told them to anyone before, as he had never recalled them to himself. He now saw, as it were, a new meaning in everything that he had experienced. Now, when he was telling all this to Natasha, he experienced that rare pleasure that women give when listening to a man - not smart women who, while listening, try to either remember what they are told in order to enrich their mind and, on occasion, retell the same or adapt what is being told to their own and quickly communicate their clever speeches developed in their small mental economy; but the pleasure that real women give, gifted with the ability to select and absorb into themselves all the best that exists in the manifestations of a man. Natasha, without knowing it herself, was all attention: she did not miss a word, a hesitation in her voice, a glance, a twitch of a facial muscle, or a gesture from Pierre. She caught the unspoken word on the fly and brought it directly into her open heart, guessing the secret meaning of all Pierre’s spiritual work.
Princess Marya understood the story, sympathized with it, but now she saw something else that absorbed all her attention; she saw the possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre. And for the first time this thought came to her, filling her soul with joy.
It was three o'clock in the morning. Waiters with sad and stern faces came to change the candles, but no one noticed them.
Pierre finished his story. Natasha, with sparkling, animated eyes, continued to look persistently and attentively at Pierre, as if wanting to understand something else that he might not have expressed. Pierre, in bashful and happy embarrassment, occasionally glanced at her and thought of what to say now in order to shift the conversation to another subject. Princess Marya was silent. It didn’t occur to anyone that it was three o’clock in the morning and that it was time to sleep.
“They say: misfortune, suffering,” said Pierre. - Yes, if now, this minute they told me: do you want to remain what you were before captivity, or first go through all this? For God's sake, once again captivity and horse meat. We think how we will be thrown out of our usual path, that everything is lost; and here something new and good is just beginning. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a lot, a lot ahead. “I’m telling you this,” he said, turning to Natasha.
The concept of modernism. Currents of modernism, their characteristics
Disappointment in life reality and the artistic realistic way of reproducing it led to interest in the latest philosophical theories and the emergence of new artistic movements, called decadent, avant-garde and modernist. The French word "decadence" means decline, "avant-garde" means advanced protection, and "modern" means modern, the most. These terms began to denote qualitatively new phenomena in the literary process, which stood at the forefront, avant-garde positions and were associated with the decline and crisis of public opinion and culture, with the search for positive ideals, turning in these searches to God and faith, to the mystical and irrational.
Modernism- the general name of the movements of art and literature of the late XIX - early. XX century, reflected the crisis of bourgeois culture and characterized the break with the traditions of realism and the aesthetics of the past. Modernism emerged in France at the end of the 19th century. (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud) and spread to Europe, Russia, and Ukraine. Modernists believed that there was no need to look for any logic or rational thought in a work of art. Therefore, the art of modernism was predominantly irrational in nature.
Protesting against outdated ideas and forms, modernists looked for new ways and means artistic display In reality, they found new artistic forms and sought to radically update literature. In this regard, modernism became a real artistic revolution and could be proud of such epoch-making discoveries in literature as internal monologue and images of the human psyche in the form of a “stream of consciousness”, the discovery of distant associations, the theory of polyphony, the universalization of a specific artistic technique and its transformation into a general aesthetic principle, enrichment of artistic creativity through the discovery of the hidden content of life phenomena, the discovery of the surreal and unknown.
Modernism is a social rebellion, and not just a revolution in the field of artistic form, because it caused protests against the cruelties of social reality and the absurdity of the world, against the oppression of man, defending his right to be a free individual. Modernism protested against crude materialism, against spiritual degeneration and poverty, dull, self-satisfied satiety. However, while protesting against realism, modernism did not exclude all of its achievements, but also used them, developed and enriched them in its search for new paths in art.
General features of modernism:
o Special attention to the inner world of the individual;
o invited self-values of man and art;
o preference for creative intuition;
o understanding literature as the highest knowledge is capable of penetrating into the most intimate niches of the depths of a person’s existence and spiritualizing the world;
o search for new means in art (metalanguage, symbolism, myth-making, etc.);
o the desire to discover new ideas that transform the world according to the laws of beauty and art. Such extreme, radical modernist movements as Dadaism or Futurism received
Name avant-garde(from the French avant - forward, garde - watchman, vanguard) - a direction in the artistic culture of the 20th century, which consisted in the rejection of existing norms and traditions, the transformation of new artistic means into an end in itself; displaying crisis, painful phenomena in life and culture in a perverted form. Avant-garde is inherently rebellious.
Avant-garde movements and movements (futurism, dadaism, surrealism, “new novel”, “drama of the absurd”, “stream of consciousness” etc.) enriched and diversified the literary process, leaving many masterpieces of artistic creativity to world literature. They also significantly influenced writers who did not abandon the artistic principles of realism: complex interweavings of realism, symbolism, neo-romanticism and “stream of consciousness” arose. Realists also used the ideas of S. Freud in their works, conducted formalistic searches in the field of artistic form, widely used the “stream of consciousness”, internal monologue, and combined different time layers in one work.
Modernism as an artistic movement was an internally heterogeneous conglomerate of artistic phenomena that were based on common ideological, philosophical and artistic principles. At the end of the 19th century. arose impressionism, symbolism and aestheticism. At the beginning of the 20th century. expressionism, futurism, cubism were added to them, and during and after the First World War - Dadaism, surrealism, the school of “stream of consciousness”, and literature, which included anti-novel, "theater of the absurd."
Impressionism(from the French "Impression") began in the second half of the 19th century and flourished in the 20th century. It arose as a reaction to salon art and naturalism, first in painting (C. Monet, E. Manet, A. Renoir, E. Degas), from where it spread to other arts (A. Rodin in sculpture, M. Ravel, C. Debussy, I. Stravinsky in music) and literature. Here the founders of impressionism were the Goncourt brothers and Paul Verlaine. Pronounced manifestations of impressionism were in the works of Guy de Maupassant and Marcel Proust; Knut Hamsun, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and J. Tuwim belonged to the impressionists.
Protesting against excessive dependence on real life, against copying reality, the impressionists described their impressions of what they saw - visual and sensory, which were changeable, like the world itself, as well as shades of impressions and colors, their ideas and associations were often fantastic and always sub" objective. The work of an impressionist is not an objective picture of the world, but a system of complex subjective impressions of it, brightly colored by the creative individuality of the artist. Impressionists were especially vulnerable to the sensual beauty of the world; they perfectly reproduced nature, its beauty, the diversity and variability of life, the unity of nature with humanity. soul.
Most among the decadent movements of the late XIX - early XX centuries. became symbolism. The symbol was used as a means of expressing the incomprehensible essence of life phenomena and secret or even mystical personal ideas, creative insights, and irrational insights of the artist. Symbols were considered the most perfect embodiment of ideas. The symbolic images reproduced the mysterious and irrational essence of the human soul and its life, the majestic progress of an inevitable fate, depicted the afterlife, the metaphysical world of “other existence,” and hinted at the mystical essence of the phenomena of life.
For the Symbolists, poetry, like music, was the highest form of knowledge of secrets - the search and discovery of “other existence.” The symbol gave rise to numerous associations, captivated by its polysemy, deep hidden meaning, which was difficult or even impossible to understand. The symbolists attached great importance to the internal sound, melody and rhythm of words, euphony and melody of language, emotional excitement that gripped the reader thanks to the rhythm and melody of the verse, and the play of various associations. Symbolism was started by the French poets Paul Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud. Having “conquered” France, symbolism quickly spread throughout Europe. In its various countries, symbolism was represented by Gabrielle diAnnunzio (Italy), Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Austria), Stefan George (Germany), Oscar Wilde (England), Emile Verhaerne and Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgium), Gen-god Ibsen (Norway), Stanislaw Przybyszewski (Poland).
Aestheticism originated in last decade XIX century in England. He gave birth to a cult of refined beauty. The creators of aestheticism believed that realism was doomed to complete collapse, that social problems do not concern real art at all, and put forward the slogans “art for art’s sake”, “beauty for beauty’s sake”. The most outstanding representative of English aestheticism was Oscar Wilde.
Expressionism(from the French “Expressiveness, expression”) was also founded in the 19th century. This avant-garde movement received its full sound and weight in the first quarter of the 20th century. and became a significant contribution to the development of world literature. The Expressionists were closely connected with reality - it was this that shaped and deeply worried them. They condemned the ugly phenomena of life, the cruelty of the world, protested against war and bloodshed, were full of humanity, and affirmed positive ideals.
But the expressionists’ vision of the world was unique: the world seemed to them to be a chaotic system, guided by incomprehensible forces, incomprehensible, unknowable, mysterious, and from them there was no salvation. The only real thing was the inner world of man and artist, their feelings and thoughts. It was he who should have been the focus of the writer’s attention. And it should be reproduced clearly, vividly, using grandiose conventional images, with disturbed proportions, excessively tense, with the clearest intonations, that is, depicted using expressive images using paradoxical grotesque and from a fantastic perspective. Or perhaps not the most outstanding expressionist Johannes Becher considered the poetic image of “tension, the mouth open in ecstasy” to be characteristic of expressionism. So, in the works of the Expressionists there is a lot of satire, grotesque, a lot of horror, excessive cruelty, generalizations and subjective assessments of reality. Expressionism first appeared in painting (E. Munch, W. Van Gogh, P. Gauguin, P. Cezanne, etc.) and in music (Richard Strauss), and soon moved into literature. Among the most expressionists are G. Trakl and F. Kafka in Austria; I. Becher and A. France in Germany; L. Andreev in Russia.
Imagism(from the French "Image") - a movement that led to the emergence of Russian imagism. It appeared in England on the eve of the First World War and existed until the mid-20s. Imagists first made their presence known in Russia in 1919. The image of the Imagists and the Imagists proclaimed it to be the end in itself of creativity. “A poem is not an organism, but a wave of images, from it you can extract one image and insert ten more,” argued the theorist of Russian imagism V. Shershenevich. So, representatives of this movement considered the poem a “catalogue of an image,” an exquisite interweaving of metaphors, metonymies, epithets, comparisons and other tropes - a kind of capricious accumulation of colors, shades, images, rhythms and melodies. The imagists relegated content to the background: it “eats the image.” Of course, imagism could not, even if it wanted to, completely neglect the content. The work of S. Yesenin is the best confirmation of this idea. Representatives of imagism in England and the USA are T.S. Eliot, R. Aldington, E. Pound, E. Lowell, etc.
The concept of avant-garde. Avant-garde movements in world literature
Futurism(from Latin “Future”) arose in 1909 in Italy, its founder was F. Marinetti. From there it spread throughout Europe, receiving the name of cubism in France (M. Jacob, B. Cendrars), its futurism and cubo-futurism in Russia (I. Severyanin, take fur, V. Khlebnikov, V. Makhnovsky, etc.), Avant-garde in Poland (J. Przybos and others). Ukrainian futurism, founded by M. Semenko, which later received the name “panfuturism”.
The Futurists proclaimed that they had created the art of the future, which was in tune with the rhythms new era"skyscraper-machine-automobile" culture, and called for discarding the traditions of the old culture, which they disparagingly called "spittoon". Futurists sang hymns to technical progress, the city, cars, motors, propellers, “mechanical” beauty, and noted the need to create a new man, worthy of his time of technology, a man of a new soul. They rejected tradition realistic literature, her language, poetic technique. Introducing their own language, new words and phrases, the futurists even reached the point of absurdity: time they invented words without any meaning.
The French Cubists and Russian Cubo-Futurists were closely associated with the Cubist painters, who tried to shock, to amaze ordinary people with the sharpness of their colors and the unusual content: they decomposed what they depicted into the simplest geometric elements- cubes (hence the name), squares, rectangles, lines, cylinders, circles, etc. Having proclaimed the cult of form, the Cubists pushed content into the background and elevated it into form. Writers puzzled the average person not only “in a language that no one had ever heard,” but also by moving away from euphony towards cacophony, dissonance, and the accumulation of consonants that were difficult to pronounce.
Surrealism from fr. "sur" - above, that is, overrealism), which arose in France in the 1920s. Its founder and main theoretician was the French writer Andre Breton, who called for “destroying the contradiction between dreams and reality that exists to this day.” He stated that the only area where a person can fully express himself is in subconscious acts: sleep, delirium, etc., and demanded “automatic writing” from surrealist writers, that is, at the subconscious level.
School "stream of consciousness"- this is a means of depicting the human psyche directly, “from the inside,” as a complex and ongoing process, deepening into the inner world. Such works were characterized by the use of memories, internal monologues, associations, lyrical digressions and other artistic techniques. Representatives: D. Joyce, M. Proust, W. Wulf and others.
IN "drama of the absurd" reality was portrayed through the prism of pessimism. Dead end, constant premonition of collapse, isolation from real world- characteristic features of the work. The behavior and speech of the characters is illogical, the plot is destroyed. Creators - S. Beckett, E. Ionesco.
Questions for self-control
1. How literature is on the brink XIX-XX centuries is closely connected with all the vicissitudes of its time?
2. Name the most noticeable factors literary development in the first half of the 20th century.
3. Give a general description of modernist literature.
4. What movements and trends are considered avant-garde? Give their general characteristics.
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Introduction
1. Literature of the first half of the 20th century
2. Modernism as a direction in literature
3. “Stream of Consciousness” technique
Conclusion
List of used literature
Introduction
The main direction of literature of the twentieth century is modernism, covering not only the sphere of literature, but also art and culture of the past century. Within the framework of modernism, such literary schools as surrealism, dadaism, and expressionism are formed, which have a significant influence on novelism, drama, and poetry.
The innovative reform of the novel genre is expressed in the emergence of “stream of consciousness” literature, which changes the very concept of genre, the categories of time and space in the novel, the interaction of the hero and the author, and the style of narration.
D. Joyce, W. Wolfe and M. Proust are the creators and theorists of this literature, but the narrative strategy of the “stream of consciousness” influences the entire literary process as a whole.
Philosophical prose at the beginning of the twentieth century acquired the features of a “novel of culture”; such novels combine essayism, the history of personality development, confession, and journalism in their genre modifications. T. Mann will define this type of prose as an “intellectual novel.”
The aestheticization of artistic consciousness in the modernist and intellectual novel speaks of the formation of “elite literature”, where the writer’s goal becomes the problem of spiritual search, a “super task”, the impossibility of solving which leads to the abandonment of the annoying, straightforward didactics of the 19th century novel.
The literature of the “lost generation” and psychological prose retain relevant historical and social themes. This literature poses a research problem modern society and a modern hero. In general, the literary process of the first half of the twentieth century is characterized by the diversity and breadth of innovative phenomena, bright names, and represents rich material for study.
1. Literature of the first halfXXcentury
The advent of the 21st century makes the 20th century the previous one, just as the 19th century was the past in relation to the 20th century. The change of centuries has always produced summing up and the emergence of predictive assumptions about the future. The assumption that the 20th century would be something different from the 19th began even before it began. The crisis of civilization, which the romantics intuitively foresaw, was fully realized by the passing century: it opens with the Boer War, then plunges into two world wars, the threat of atomic entropy, great amount military local conflicts.
The belief that the flourishing of natural sciences and new discoveries will certainly change people's lives for the better is destroyed by historical practice. The chronology of the 20th century has revealed a bitter truth: on the way to improving technology, the humanistic content is lost human existence. This idea is already becoming tautological at the end of the twentieth century. But philosophers and artists had a premonition of the wrong path taken even earlier, when the 19th century was ending and the new century was beginning. F. Nietzsche wrote that civilization is a thin layer of gilding on the animal essence of man, and O. Spengler in his work “Causality and Fate. The Decline of Europe” (1923) spoke about the fatal and inevitable death of European culture.
First World War, having destroyed fairly stable social and state relations of the 19th century, confronted people with the inexorable urgency of revising previous values, searching for their own place in a changed reality, and understanding that the outside world is hostile and aggressive. The result of rethinking the phenomenon of modern life was that most European writers, especially the younger generation who came to literature after the First World War, were skeptical about the primacy of social practice over the spiritual microcosm of man. Having lost illusions in assessing the world that nurtured them and recoiling from the well-fed philistinism, the intelligentsia perceived the crisis state of society as the collapse of European civilization in general. This gave rise to pessimism and mistrust of young authors (O. Huxley, D. Lawrence, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway). The same loss of stable guidelines shook the optimistic perception of writers of the older generation (H. Wells, D. Galsworthy, A. France).
The First World War, which the young generation of writers went through, became for them a difficult test and an insight into the falsity of false patriotic slogans, which further strengthened the need to search for new authorities and moral values and led many of them to flee into the world of intimate experiences. This was a kind of escape from the influence of external realities. At the same time, writers who knew fear and pain, the horror of close violent death, could not remain the same aesthetes who looked down on the repulsive aspects of life. The dead and returning authors (R. Aldington, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway, Z. Sassoon, F.S. Fitzgerald) were classified by critics as the so-called " lost generation Although the term does not do justice to the significant imprint these artists left on national literatures, literary scholars nevertheless continue to emphasize their heightened understanding of man in war and after war. It can be said that the "Lost Worship" writers were the first authors to attract attention readers to that phenomenon, which in the second half of the twentieth century was called the “war syndrome”.
The most powerful aesthetic system, emerging in the first half of the century, was modernism, which analyzed the private life of a person, the intrinsic value of his individual destiny in the process of “moments of being” (W. Wolfe, M. Proust, T. S. Eliot, D. Joyce, F. Kafka).
From the point of view of modernists, external reality is hostile to the individual; it produces the tragedy of his existence. Writers believed that the study of spirituality is a kind of return to origins and the discovery of the true “I”, because a person first realizes himself as a subject and then creates subject-object relationships with the world.
M. Proust's psychological novel, focused on the analysis of different personality states at different stages of life, had an undoubted influence on the development of prose of the twentieth century. D. Joyce's experiment in the field of the novel, his attempt to create a modern odyssey gave rise to a lot of discussions and imitations. In poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, the same processes took place as in prose. Just like prose, poetry is characterized by a critical attitude towards technogenic civilization and its results.
Poetic experiments by T. Tzar, A. Breton, G. Lorca, P. Eluard, T.S. Eliot contributed to the transformation of poetic language. The changes concerned both the artistic form, which became more sophisticated (a synthesis of different types of art was obviously evident) and the essential side, when poets sought to penetrate the subconscious. Poetry, more than before, gravitates toward subjectivism, symbolism, and encrypted nature; free form of verse (free verse) is actively used.
The realistic trend in literature expanded the boundaries of traditional experience artistic research world founded in the 19th century. B. Brecht questioned the thesis about “life-likeness,” that is, the imitation of realistic art as its indispensable and immutable property. Balzac's and Tolstoy's experience was important from the point of view of preserving tradition and understanding intertextual connections. But the writer believed that any aesthetic phenomenon, even the pinnacle, cannot be artificially “canned,” otherwise it turns into a dogma that interferes with the organic development of literature.
It should be especially emphasized that realism quite freely used the principles of non-realistic aesthetics. Realistic art of the twentieth century is so different from the classical versions of the previous century that most often it is necessary to study the work of each individual writer.
The problems of humanistic development of man and society, the search for truth, which, in the words of the British author of the second half of the century, W. Golding, is “always the same,” worried both modernists and non-modernists equally. The 20th century was so complex and contradictory, so multi-dimensional, that modernist and non-modernist writers, understanding the global nature of the processes taking place in the world and often solving the same problems, drew directly opposite conclusions. The analytical fragmentation of phenomena undertaken by modernists in search of hidden meanings is combined in the general flow of literature of the first half of the century with the quest of realists seeking to synthesize efforts to understand the general principles of artistic reflection of the world in order to stop the decay of values and the destruction of tradition, so as not to interrupt the connection of times.
2. Modernism as a direction in literature
Modernism is a general term applied in retrospect to a broad area of experimental and avant-garde movements in literature and other arts in the early twentieth century. This includes such movements as symbolism, futurism, expressionism, imagism, vorticism, dadaism and surrealism, as well as other innovations of the masters of their craft.
Modernism (Italian modernismo - “modern movement”; from Latin modernus - “modern, recent”) is a direction in the art and literature of the 20th century, characterized by a break with the previous historical experience of artistic creativity, the desire to establish new non-traditional principles in art , continuous renewal of artistic forms, as well as the conventionality (schematization, abstraction) of style.
If we approach the description of modernism seriously and thoughtfully, it will become clear that the authors classified as modernism actually set themselves completely different goals and objectives, wrote in different manners, saw people differently, and often what united them was that they simply lived and wrote at the same time. For example, modernism includes Joseph Conrad and David Gerberg Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Stearns Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Paul Eluard, futurists and dadaists, surrealists and symbolists, without thinking about whether there is anything between them. something in common, except for the era in which they lived. The literary critics who are most honest with themselves and with their readers admit the fact that the very term “modernism” is vague. modernism literature conscious unconscious
Modernist literature is characterized, first of all, by the rejection of the traditions of the nineteenth century, their consensus between the author and the reader. The conventions of realism, for example, were rejected by Franz Kafka and other novelists, including expressionist drama, and poets abandoned the traditional metric system in favor of free verse.
Modernist writers saw themselves as an avant-garde that challenged bourgeois values and challenged the reader to think through challenging new literary forms and styles. IN fiction accepted current chronological development events were turned on their heads by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf introduced new ways of tracking the flow of their characters' thoughts using a stream-of-consciousness style.
The beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by both social changes and the development of scientific thought; the old world was changing before our eyes, and the changes often outpaced the possibility of their rational explanation, which led to disappointment in rationalism. To understand them, new techniques and principles for generalizing the perception of reality, a new understanding of man’s place in the universe (or “Cosmos”) were needed. It is no coincidence that the majority of representatives of modernism looked for ideological substratum in popular philosophical and psychological concepts that paid attention to the problems of individuality: in Freudianism and Nietzscheanism. The diversity of initial concepts of worldview, by the way, largely determined the very diversity of movements and literary manifestos: from surrealism to Dada, from symbolism to futurism, etc. But the glorification of art as a type of secret mystical knowledge, which is opposed to the absurdity of the world, and the question of the place of the individual with his individual consciousness in the Cosmos, the tendency to create his own new myths allow us to consider modernism as a single literary movement.
The favorite character of modern prose writers is “ small man", most often the image of an average employee (typical are the broker Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses or Gregor in Kafka's Reincarnation), since the one who suffers is an unprotected person, a toy higher powers. The life path of the characters is a series of situations, personal behavior is a series of acts of choice, and the real choice is realized in “borderline”, often unrealistic situations. Modernist heroes live as if outside of real time; society, government or the state for them are some kind of enemy phenomena of an irrational, if not downright mystical nature. Camus equates, for example, between life and plague. In general, in the depiction of modern prose writers, evil, as usual, surrounds the heroes on all sides. But despite the external unreality of the plots and circumstances that are depicted, through the authenticity of the details, a feeling of reality or even the everyday life of these mythical situations is created. Authors often experience the loneliness of these heroes in front of the enemy light as their own. Refusal of the position of “omniscience” allows writers to get closer to the characters they depict, and sometimes to identify themselves with them. Special attention should be paid to the discovery of such a new method of presenting an internal monologue as a “stream of consciousness”, in which both the feeling of the hero, and what he sees, and thoughts with associations caused by the images that arise, along with the very process of their emergence, are mixed, as if in "unedited" form.
3. “Stream of Consciousness” Technique
Stream of consciousness is a technique in the literature of the 20th century, predominantly of the modernist direction, directly reproducing mental life, experiences, associations, claiming to directly reproduce the mental life of consciousness through the cohesion of all of the above, as well as often non-linearity and brokenness of syntax.
The term “stream of consciousness” belongs to the American idealist philosopher William James: consciousness is a stream, a river in which thoughts, sensations, memories, sudden associations constantly interrupt each other and intertwine in a bizarre, “illogical” way (“Foundations of Psychology”, 1890) . “Stream of consciousness” often represents an extreme degree, an extreme form of “internal monologue”; in it, objective connections with the real environment are often difficult to restore.
Stream of consciousness creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on his experience in the minds of the characters, which gives him direct intimate access to their thoughts. Also includes the representation in written text of that which is neither purely verbal nor purely textual.
This is achieved mainly through two ways of narration and quotation, and internal monologue. At the same time, sensations, experiences, and associations often interrupt and intertwine each other, just as this happens in a dream, which is often what our life actually is, according to the author - after waking up from sleep, we are still sleeping.
The possibilities of this technique were truly revealed in the novels of M. Proust, W. Woolf and J. Joyce. It is from them light hand, in the novel the concept of a “central image” disappeared and was replaced by the concept of a “central consciousness”.
J. Joyce was the first to use the total “stream of consciousness”. The central work of the “stream of consciousness” is rightly considered to be “Ulysses,” which demonstrated both the peak and exhaustion of the possibilities of this method: the study of a person’s inner life is combined with the blurring of the boundaries of character.
Stephen Dedalus is a cold intellectual whose mind is constantly occupied with unusual thoughts:
...The irrevocable modality of the visible. At least this, if not more, is what my eyes say to my thoughts. I'm here to read the marks of the essence of things: all this algae, the fry, the rising tide, that rusty boot over there. Snot green, silver blue, rusty: colored markings. Limits of transparency. But he adds: in bodies. This means that he learned that bodies were earlier than that they were colored. How? And hitting your head on them, how else. Carefully. He was bald and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno [teacher of those who know (Italian: Dante. Inferno, IV, 131)].
Limit of transparent... Why...? Transparent, opaque. Where all five fingers can fit through, this is a gate, where not, it is a door. Close your eyes and look.
Leopold Bloom - everyman, average person, whose ideas about the world are contently limited:
Mr. Bloom looked with good-natured interest at the black flexible creature.
Looks good: the fur is smooth and shiny, there is a white button under the tail, the eyes are green and glowing. He bent over to her, resting his palms on his knees. “Milk to the pussy!”
Mrrau! - she meowed loudly.
They say they are stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. This one will understand everything she wants. And vindictive. I wonder what I seem like to her. As tall as a tower? No, she can jump on me.” “But she’s afraid of chickens,” he teased her.
Afraid of chicks. I've never seen such a stupid pussy in my life. Cruel. It's in their nature. It's strange that the mice don't squeak. It's like they like it.
Mgrrau! - she meowed louder. Her eyes, greedy, half-lidded with shame, blinked, and, mewing pitifully and protractedly, she exposed her milky-white teeth. He saw how the black slits of her pupils narrowed with greed, turning her eyes into green pebbles. Going to the cupboard, he took the jug freshly filled by the Hanlon delivery man, poured the warm, bubbly milk into the saucer, and carefully placed the saucer on the floor.
Meow! - she squealed, rushing towards the food.
He watched how her mustache gleamed metallic in the dim light and how, after trying it on three times, she easily began to lap. Is it true or not that if you trim your mustache, you won't be able to hunt. Why? Maybe the tips glow in the dark. Or serve as palps, perhaps.
Now let’s enjoy the female “stream of consciousness” of Molly Bloom, in which Joyce, according to many, revealed the true essence of the female soul:
...it’s for you that the sun shines,” he said that day when we were lying among the rhododendrons on Cape Howth; he is in a gray tweed suit and a straw hat, on the day when I got him to propose to me, and first I gave him a piece of caraway biscuit from my lips - it was a leap year like now and 16 years ago. My God, after that long kiss I almost suffocated, yes he said - I am a mountain flower, yes it is true, we are flowers, the whole female body, yes this is the only truth that he said in his entire life and the sun is shining for you today , and that’s why I liked him, because I saw that he understood or felt what a woman was, and I knew that I could always do what I wanted with him, and I gave him as much pleasure as I could, and kept getting started turned him on until he asked me to say yes, and I didn’t answer first, just looked at the sea and the sky and remembered everything he didn’t know: Mulvey, and Mr. Stanhope, and Hester, and father, and old Captain Grove , and sailors on the pier playing birds in flight, and standing still and washing dishes, as they called it, and a sentry in front of the governor's house in a white helmet with a band - the poor fellow almost melted, and laughing Spanish girls in shawls with high combs in the hair, and the morning market of Greeks, Jews, Arabs and the devil himself can’t tell who else from all over Europe, and Duke Street, and the clucking bird market not far from Sharon’s Larbi, and poor donkeys trudged half-asleep, and unknown tramps in raincoats , dozing on the steps in the shade, and the huge wheels of oxcarts, and the ancient thousand-year-old castle, and the handsome Moors in white robes and turbans, like kings inviting you to sit down in their tiny shops, and Ronda where the posadas [inns (Spanish) )] with ancient windows where the fan hid the flashing glance, and the gentleman kisses the window bars, and wine cellars half open at night and castanets and the night when we missed the ship in Algeciras, and the night watchman walked calmly with his lantern, and... Oh that terrible stream boiling below, Oh and the sea, the sea scarlet like fire, and luxurious sunsets, and fig trees in the gardens of Alameda, and all the quaint streets, and pink yellow blue houses, rose alleys, and jasmine, geraniums, cacti, and Gibraltar, where I was a girl, and the Mountain Flower, and when I pinned a rose in my hair, as Andalusian girls do, or pinned a scarlet..., yes..., and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall, and I wondered if he cared or another, and then I told him with my eyes that he should ask again... and then he asked me, - would I like... yes... to say yes, my mountain flower... and first I wrapped my arms around him, yes... and drew him to me so he felt my breasts, their scent... yes, and his heart was beating madly and... yes... I said yes... I want... Yes.
As you can see, we learned the essence of the characters not because the author told us about it - the author is dead - we learned this because we ourselves penetrated into their thoughts.
Of course, the “stream of consciousness” is the best of known methods transfer of psychologism, but it is by no means ideal, as Vladimir Nabokov notes:
“The “stream of consciousness” technique undeservedly shakes the imagination of readers. I would like to present the following thoughts. First, this technique is no more “realistic” or more “scientific” than any other. The fact is that the “stream of consciousness” is a stylistic convention, since, obviously, we do not think only in words - we also think in images, but the transition from words to images can be recorded directly in words only if there is no description. Secondly, some of our thoughts come and go, others remain; they sort of settle, sloppy and sluggish, and it takes some time for the current thoughts and thoughts to go around these reefs. The disadvantage of the written reproduction of thoughts is the blurring of the temporary element and the too large role assigned to the typographic sign.”
Conclusion
The literature of the 20th century in its stylistic and ideological diversity is incomparable with the literature of the 19th century, where only three or four leading trends could be distinguished. At the same time modern literature gave no more great talents than literature XIX centuries.
European literature of the first half of the 20th century was influenced by modernism, which, first of all, manifests itself in poetry. Thus, the French poets P. Eluard (1895-1952) and L. Aragon (1897-1982) were leading figures of surrealism.
However, the most significant in the Art Nouveau style was not poetry, but prose - the novels of M. Proust (“In Search of Lost Time”), J. Joyce (“Ulysses”), F. Kafka (“The Castle”). These novels were a response to the events of the First World War, which gave birth to a generation that was called “lost” in literature. They analyze the spiritual, mental, and pathological manifestations of a person. What they have in common is a methodological technique - the use of the method of analyzing the “stream of consciousness”, discovered by the French philosopher, representative of intuitionism and “philosophy of life” Henri Bergson (1859-1941), which consists in describing the continuous flow of human thoughts, impressions and feelings. He described human consciousness as a continuously changing creative reality, as a flow in which thinking is only a superficial layer, subject to the needs of practice and social life.
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