Modernist movements 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 inappropriate to see in it only formal devices - non-life-like poetics, alogism of images, “abstractness”, 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,” states the writer. “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 time, the aggressiveness of which in the 20th century in relation to privacy person 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. In Pilnyak, its function is performed by leitmotifs, and different fragments of the narrative 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 rough 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 it. 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 of the overall picture of the 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 towns - all year. 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 they discover 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 refusal realistic principles typification, 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 practically uncontrollable social status person, culture, 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 unextinguished moon"(1927), which played a fatal role in the life of the writer. Its plot is based on true story killing the hero Civil War Frunze on the operating table: the operation to remove a long-healed stomach ulcer was performed, according to the rumors that were actively circulating at the time, on Stalin’s orders. Contemporaries easily recognized him in the image of a non-hunched Man, and in the unfortunate army commander Gavrilov they found traits 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 landmarks 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 impressionistic and “outline” pictures of reality, living life and firm, 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. The artistic world of 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 compositional structure the work was basically 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.”
Modernism in literature originates on the eve of the First World War and reaches its peak in the twenties simultaneously in all countries Western Europe and in America. Modernism is an international phenomenon, consisting of different schools(Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.). This is a revolution in literature, the participants of which announced a break not only with the tradition of realistic verisimilitude, but also with the Western cultural and literary tradition in general. Any previous direction in literature defined itself through its attitude to classical tradition: one could directly proclaim antiquity as a model of artistic creativity, like the classicists, or prefer the Middle Ages to antiquity, like the romantics, but all cultural eras before modernism are today increasingly called “classical” because they developed in line with classical heritage European thought. Modernism is the first cultural and literary era, which put an end to this legacy and gave new answers to “eternal” questions. As the English poet S. Spender wrote in 1930: “It seems to me that the modernists are consciously striving to create a completely new literature. This is a consequence of their feeling that our era is in many respects unprecedented and stands outside any conventions of past art and literature."
The generation of the first modernists acutely felt the exhaustion of the forms of realistic storytelling, their aesthetic fatigue. For modernists, the concept of “realism” meant the absence of effort to independently comprehend the world, the mechanical nature of creativity, superficiality, the boredom of vague descriptions - interest in the button on a character’s coat, and not in his state of mind. Modernists place above all else the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; created by them art worlds uniquely different from each other, each bears the stamp of a bright creative individuality.
They happened to live in a period when the values of traditional humanistic culture collapsed - “freedom” meant very different things in Western democracies and in totalitarian states; The carnage of the First World War, in which weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time, revealed the true cost human life for the modern world; The humanistic ban on pain and physical and spiritual violence was replaced by the practice of mass executions and concentration camps. Modernism is the art of a dehumanized era (the term of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset); the attitude towards humanistic values in modernism is ambiguous, but the world of modernists appears in a harsh, cold light. Using the metaphor of J. Conrad, we can say that the hero of the modernist work seemed to be staying overnight in an uncomfortable hotel at the end of the world, with very suspicious owners, in a shabby room, illuminated by the merciless light of a light bulb without a lampshade.
Modernists conceptualize human existence as a short, fragile moment; the subject may or may not be aware of the tragedy, the frailty of our absurd world, and the artist’s job is to show the horror, greatness and beauty contained, despite everything, in the moments of earthly existence. Social issues, which played such an important role in the realism of the 19th century, are given indirectly in modernism, as an inseparable part of the holistic portrait of the individual. The main area of interest of modernists is the depiction of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious in a person, the mechanisms of his perceptions, and the whimsical work of memory. The modernist hero is, as a rule, taken in the entirety of his experiences, his subjective existence, although the very scale of his life may be small and insignificant. In modernism, the main line of development of modern literature continues, towards a constant decline in the social status of the hero; the modernist hero is an “everyman,” any and every person. Modernists learned to describe such states of mind people who literature had not noticed before, and did it with such conviction that it seemed to bourgeois critics an insult to morality and a profanation of the art of words. Not only the content - the large role of intimate and sexual issues, the relativity of moral assessments, the emphasized apoliticality - but, first of all, the unusual forms of modernist storytelling caused especially sharp rejection. Today, when most masterpieces modernist literature entered into school and university curricula, it is difficult for us to sense the rebellious, anti-bourgeois character of early modernism, the harshness of the accusations and challenges posed to it.
Three major writers of modernism- Irishman James Joyce (1882-1943), Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Each of them, in his own direction, reformed the art of speech of the twentieth century, each is considered a great pioneer of modernism. Let's look at James Joyce's novel Ulysses as an example.
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The 20th century went down in cultural history as a century of experimentation, which later often became the norm. This is the time of the appearance of various declarations and schools, which often encroached on world traditions. So, let’s say, the inevitability of imitation of the beautiful, which G. Lessing wrote about in his work “Laocoon, or On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry,” was criticized. On the contrary, the artist began to imitate the disgusting, which in ancient times was prohibited under pain of punishment.
The starting point of aesthetics was the ugly; the rejection of harmonious proportions violated the appearance of art, in which the emphasis is on deformation and geometric figures.
The term “modernism” appears at the end of the 19th century and is assigned, as a rule, to unrealistic phenomena in art following decadence. However, the ideas that gave it content had been encountered before. Suffice it to recall “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire.
Modernism (French modernisme - from moderne - the newest, modo - just) as a philosophical and aesthetic movement has the following stages (we highlight them conditionally):
Avant-garde, located in time between wars;
Neo-avant-garde (50–60s);
Postmodernism (70–80s).
Speaking about avant-garde as a part of modernism, we note that Western criticism often does not use these terms, preferring “avant-garde”.
Modernism continues the unrealistic trend in the literature of the past and moves into the literature of the second half of the twentieth century.
Modernism is both a creative method and an aesthetic system, which is reflected in the literary activities of a number of schools, often very different in their programmatic statements.
General features:
1) loss of a support point;
2) a break with the traditional worldview of Christian Europe;
3) subjectivism, deformation of the world or literary text;
4) the loss of an integral model of the world, the creation of a model of the world anew each time at the discretion of the artist;
5) formalism.
Modernism is motley in its composition, political aspirations and manifestos literary movement, which includes many different schools, groupings, united by a pessimistic worldview, the artist’s desire not to reflect objective reality, but to express himself, an attitude toward subjectivism and deformation.
The philosophical origins of modernism can be found in the works of S. Freud, A. Bergson, W. James.
Modernism can be decisive in a writer’s work as a whole (F. Kafka, D. Joyce) or can be felt as one of the techniques that had a significant influence on the artist’s style (M. Proust, W. Wolfe).
Modernism as a literary movement that swept Europe at the beginning of the century has the following national varieties:
French and Czech surrealism;
Italian and Russian futurism;
English imagism and the “stream of consciousness” school;
German expressionism;
American and Italian Hermeticism;
Swedish primitivism;
French unanimism and constructivism;
Spanish ultraism;
Latin American creationism.
What is characteristic of avant-gardeism as a stage of modernism? The word avant-garde itself (from the French avant-garde - advanced detachment) comes from military vocabulary, where it denotes a small elite detachment breaking into enemy territory ahead of the main army and paving the way for it, and the art historical meaning of this term, as a neologism, was used by Alexander Benois (1910), acquired in the first decades of the 20th century. Since then, the classical avant-garde has been called a collection of heterogeneous and differently significant artistic movements, movements and schools.
The outlines of avant-gardeism, which historically unites various directions– from symbolism and cubism to surrealism and pop art; They are characterized by a psychological atmosphere of rebellion, a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, and an orientation toward the future, which is not always clearly represented.
As the Czech scientist Jan Mukarzovsky notes, “the avant-garde strives to get rid of the imperfections of the past and traditions.”
It is significant that the avant-garde art that rapidly developed in the tens and twenties turned out to be enriched with a revolutionary idea (sometimes only conditionally symbolic, as was the case with the expressionists, who wrote about revolution in the sphere of spirit, revolution in general). This gave optimism to the avant-garde, painting its canvases red, and attracted the attention of revolutionary artists who saw in avant-gardeism an example of anti-bourgeois protest (B. Brecht, L. Aragon, V. Nezval, P. Eluard). Avant-gardeism does not simply cross out reality - it moves towards its reality, relying on the immanent laws of art. The avant-garde rejected the stereotypical forms of mass consciousness, did not accept war, the madness of technocracy, or the enslavement of man. The avant-garde contrasted the mediocrity and bourgeois order, the canonized logic of the realists with rebellion, chaos and deformation, and the morality of the philistines with freedom of feelings and unlimited imagination. Ahead of its time, the avant-garde updated the art of the 20th century, introduced urban themes and new techniques into poetry, new principles of composition and various functional styles of speech, graphic design (ideograms, refusal of punctuation), free verse and its variations.
3. The main artistic and aesthetic movements of the first half of the twentieth century
Let's consider Dadaism, surrealism, expressionism, futurism and imagism as the most prominent avant-garde movements in foreign literature in the first third of the 20th century.
DADAISM (from the French dada - baby talk without meaning) is the immediate predecessor of surrealism. It took shape in Zurich, the capital of neutral Switzerland, through the efforts of emigrant poets from the warring countries (T. Tzara, R. Gulsenbeck), who published the magazine “Cabaret Voltaire” (1916–1917). The Dadaists declared absurdity and an atmosphere of scandal, desertion, expressing protest against the First World War, and a desire to bring the public out of complacency. The aesthetic form of their protest was illogical and irrational art, often meaningless sets of words and sounds, compiled using the Dada collage method. “These two syllables have reached their goal, they have reached “ringing meaninglessness,” absolute insignificance,” wrote Andre Gide in the article “Dada.” “The highest gratitude towards the art of the past and its perfect masterpieces,” reflects French writer, - is to leave any claims to their renewal. The perfect is something that can no longer be reproduced, and putting the past in front of you means blocking the path to the future.”
The most notable among the Dadaists is the Swiss poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), the author of the books “Seven Manifestos of Dada” (1924), “The Approximate Man” (1931), the famous “Songs of Dada”, which plays on random images, unexpected associations and at the same time At the same time, there is an element of parody of the pulp novel and naturalistic poetry. To some extent, the meaning of Tzara’s poetry and the Dadaists in general is conveyed by his words: “I am writing a manifesto, and I don’t want anything, meanwhile I am saying something, and I, in principle, am against manifestos, just as I am against principles.” In these words there is a negation that will find its further development in French surrealism and German expressionism, whose programs the Dadaists will join.
SURREALISM (from the French sure?alite - super-reality) developed in France; his program is set out in the “Manifesto of Surrealism,” written by A. Breton with the participation of L. Aragon in 1924, and the manifesto that appeared in January 1925. Instead of depicting objective reality, the purpose of art in them is declared to be a supersensible supra-reality and the world of the subconscious, and as the main method of creation, “automatic writing,” a method of uncontrolled expressiveness and the combination of incompatible things.
Surrealism sought to liberate the essence of man, suppressed by civilization, and to communicate by influencing subconscious impulses. The “Manifesto of Surrealism” paid tribute to S. Freud’s discoveries in the field of the human psyche and drew attention to dreams as an important aspect of mental activity. A. Breton noted in his work: “Surrealism... Pure mental automatism, with the goal of expressing either orally, or in writing, or in any other way the real functioning of thought. The dictation of thought is beyond any control of reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral considerations.” The word “surrealism” itself was first used by G. Apollinaire in the preface to his drama “The Breasts of Tiresias,” where the author asked for forgiveness for the neologism he had invented. He needed it to renew the theater, to return it to nature itself, without repeating it: “When a person decided to imitate walking, he created a wheel - an object unlike a leg. It was unconscious surrealism." The components of a surreal image are deformation, a combination of incompatible things, and free associativity. The word was used by surrealists in a gaming function.
The poetics of surrealism is characterized by: the separation of an object into its component parts and “rearrangement” of them, conventional outer space, timelessness and the statics of collage. All this is easy to see in the paintings of S. Dali, in the poetry of F. Soupault, J. Cocteau. Here is the poem “From a Fairy Tale” by the Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval, which creates a surreal impression based on ordinary realities, whimsically combined contrary to logic and meaning, but according to the law of fantasy:
Someone on the old piano
The rumor is tormented by falsehood.
And I'm in a glass castle
I hit fire-winged flies.
Alabaster handle
Didn't hug.
The princess is getting old.
She became an old woman...
The piano mourns dully:
I feel sorry for her...
And my heart sleepily sings:
It was - no,
It was - no,
Bim - Bam.
(Translated by V. Ivanov)
The history of the school of surrealism turned out to be short-lived. The French school, like the Czech, Polish, and even earlier Spanish and many others that arose in different countries Europe, felt its inadequacy in the face of the threat of fascism and the impending World War II and dissolved itself. However, surrealism influenced the art of the 20th century: the poetry of P. Eluard, L. Aragon, V. Nezval, F. Lorca, painting and decorative arts, cinema, everything around modern man space.
EXPRESSIONISM (French expression - expression). In the pre-war years and during the First World War, expressionism, the art of expression, experienced a short but bright flourishing. The main aesthetic postulate of the expressionists is not to imitate reality, but to express their negative attitude towards it. Poet and expressionist theorist Casimir Edschmid argued: “The world exists. There is no point in repeating it." In doing so, he and his followers challenged realism and naturalism. Artists, musicians and poets, grouped around the Russian painter V. Kandinsky, published the almanac “The Blue Horseman” in Munich. They set themselves the task of freeing themselves from subject and plot dependence, appealing directly with color or sound to spiritual world person. In literature, the ideas of expressionism were taken up by poets who sought to express the experiences of the lyrical hero in a state of passion. Hence the exaggerated imagery of the verse, the confusion of vocabulary and arbitrariness of syntax, and the hysterical rhythm. Poets, playwrights and artists close to expressionism were rebels in art and in life. They were looking for new, scandalous forms of self-expression; the world in their works was presented in a grotesque guise, bourgeois reality - in the form of caricatures.
Thus, having proclaimed the thesis about the priority of the artist himself, and not reality, expressionism placed emphasis on the expression of the artist’s soul, his inner self. Expression instead of image, intuition instead of logic - these principles, naturally, could not but influence the appearance of literature and art.
Representatives of expressionism: in art (E. Barlach, E. Kirchner, O. Kokoschka, A. Schoenberg, B. Bartok), in literature (F. Werfel, G. Grackl, G. Heim, etc.).
The style of expressionist poetry is marked by pathos, hyperbole, and symbolism.
The work of expressionist artists was banned in Nazi Germany as painful, decadent, and unable to serve the policies of Nazism. Meanwhile, the experience of expressionism is productive for many artists, not to mention those who were directly influenced by its program (F. Kafka, J. Becher, B. Kellerman, L. Frank, G. Hesse). The works of the latter reflected an essential feature of expressionism - thinking in philosophical categories. One of the most important themes of 20th-century art—alienation as a result of bourgeois civilization that suppressed man in the state, a philosophical theme central to Kafka’s worldview—received detailed development from the Expressionists.
FUTURISM (Italian futurismo from Latin futurum - future) is an avant-garde artistic movement of the 1910s - early 1920s of the twentieth century, most fully manifested in Italy (the birthplace of futurism) and Russia. There were futurists in other European countries - Germany, England, France, Poland. Futurism made itself known in literature, painting, sculpture, and to a lesser extent in music.
Italian futurism. The birthday of futurism is considered to be February 20, 1909, when the “Futurist Manifesto” written by T. F. Marinetti appeared in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. It was T. Marinetti who became the theorist and leader of the first Milanese group of futurists.
It is no coincidence that futurism arose in Italy, a country-museum. “We have no life, but only memories of a more glorious past... We live in a magnificent sarcophagus, in which the lid is screwed tightly so that fresh air does not penetrate,” T. Marinetti complained. Bringing your compatriots to the Olympus of modern European culture is what undoubtedly stood behind the shockingly loud tone of the manifesto. A group of young artists from Milan, and then from other cities, immediately responded to Marinetti’s call - both with their creativity and their own manifestos. On February 11, 1910, the “Manifesto of Futurist Artists” appears, and on April 11 of the same year - the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting”, signed by U. Boccioni, G. Balla, C. Carr, L. Russolo, G. Severeni by the most prominent artists - futurists. In all his works, both theoretical and artistic (poems, the novel “Mafarka the Futurist”) T. Marinetti, like his associates, denied not only the artistic, but also the ethical values of the past.
Pity, respect for the human person, romantic love. Intoxicated by the latest achievements of technology, the futurists sought to cut out the “cancerous tumor” of the old culture with the knife of technicalism and the latest achievements of science. Futurists argued that new technology also changes the human psyche, and this requires a change in all visual and expressive means of art. In the modern world, they were especially fascinated by speed, mobility, dynamics, and energy. They dedicated their poems and paintings to the car, train, and electricity. “The heat emanating from a piece of wood or iron excites us more than the smile and tears of a woman,” “New art can only be violence, cruelty,” Marinetti declared.
The worldview of the futurists was strongly influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche with his cult of the “superman”; Bergson's philosophy, which asserts that the mind is capable of comprehending only everything ossified and dead; rebellious slogans of anarchists. A hymn to strength and heroism - in almost all the works of Italian futurists. The man of the future, in their view, is a “mechanical man with replaceable parts,” omnipotent, but soulless, cynical and cruel.
They saw the cleansing of the world from “junk” in wars and revolutions. “War is the only hygiene of the world,” “The word “freedom” must submit to the word Italy,” Marinetti proclaimed. Even the names of the poetry collections - “Pistol Shots” by Lucini, “Electric Poems” by Govoni, “Bayonets” by A. D. Alba, “Airplanes” by Buzzi, “Song of Motors” by L. Folgore, “The Arsonist” by Palazzeschi - speak for themselves.
The key slogan of the Italian futurists in literature was the slogan - “Words are free!” - do not express the meaning in words, but let the word itself control the meaning (or nonsense) of the poem. In painting and sculpture, Italian Futurism became the forerunner of many subsequent artistic discoveries and currents. Thus, Boccioni, who used a variety of materials in one sculpture (glass, wood, cardboard, iron, leather, horsehair, clothes, mirrors, light bulbs, etc.), became the harbinger of pop art.
IMAGISM arose as a movement in 1908 in the bowels of the London “Poets Club”. The fossilization of familiar poetic forms forced young writers to look for new paths in poetry. The first Imagists were Thomas Ernest Hume and Francis Flint. In 1908, Hume’s famous poem “Autumn” was published, surprising everyone with unexpected comparisons: “The moon stood by the fence, // Like a red-faced farmer,” “Piny stars crowded around, // Similar to city children” (translated by I. Romanovich) . In 1909, the American poet Ezra Pound joined the group.
The leader and unquestioned authority in the group was Thomas Ernest Hume. By that time, he had formed firm convictions: “Images in poetry are not just decoration, but the very essence of intuitive language,” and the poet’s purpose is to look for “suddenness, unexpected perspective.” According to Hume, “the new poems are more like sculpture than music, and are addressed more to the sight than to the ear.” The rhythmic experiments of the imagists are interesting. Hume called for “shattering canonical rhyme” and abandoning correct metrical constructions. It was in the “Poets Club” that the traditions of English blank verse and free verse arose. However, by 1910, the meetings of the “Poets Club” gradually became increasingly rare, and then it ceased to exist. Hume died a few years later on one of the fronts of the First World War.
The second group of Imagists gathered around Ezra Pound. In October 1912, Ezra Pound received from the young American poet Hilda Doolittle, who had moved to England a year earlier, a selection of her poems that struck him with their “imaginist laconicism.” Hilda Doolittle brought her lover and future husband into the group. This was the later famous English novelist Richard Aldington. A sign of the second stage of Imagism was an appeal to antiquity (R. Aldington was also a translator of ancient Greek poetry). During these years, Pound formulated his famous “Several Prohibitions” - the commandment of imagism, explaining how one should, or rather, how one should not write poetry. He emphasized that “figurative poetry is like sculpture frozen in words” (remember: Hume wrote about the same thing).
The result of the second stage in the history of Imagism was the poetic anthology “Des Imagistes” collected by Pound (1915), after which Pound left the group and went to France. The war began, and the center of imagism began to move from warring England to America.
The third stage in the development of imagism is American. The leader of the group of imagists was the American poet Amy Lowell (1874–1925) from the prominent Boston Lowell family, which already gave birth to famous poet James Russell Lowell. The main theme of Amy Lowell's poems is admiring nature. The merit of the poetess is the three imagist anthologies she prepared one after another.
Imagist anthologies featured poems by famous novelists David Herbert Lawrence, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), and there were poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot, as well as two other future pillars of American poetry, Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). .) and the very young William Carlos Williams (1883–1963).
The compiler of the “Anthology of Imagism” published in Russia in 2001, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, wrote in the preface to it:
“In the poetry of English-speaking countries, almost a decade and a half passed under the sign of imagism - almost the entire beginning of the century. Imagist poets fought to renew the poetic language, liberated poetry from the cage of regular verse, enriched literature with new poetic forms, with a wide rhythmic range, variety of stanza and line sizes, and unexpected images.”
Having examined several avant-garde movements and the work of major writers, it can be argued that avant-gardeism as an artistic movement is characterized by subjectivism and a generally pessimistic view of progress and history, a non-social attitude towards man, a violation of the holistic concept of personality, the harmony of external and internal life, social and biological her. In terms of worldview, modernism argued with the apologetic picture of the world and was anti-bourgeois; at the same time, he was alarmed by the inhumanity of revolutionary practical activity. Modernism defended the individual, proclaimed its intrinsic value and sovereignty, the immanent nature of art. In poetics, he tested unconventional techniques and forms, opposed to realism, focused on the free expression of the creator, and thereby influenced realistic art. The border between modernism and realism in a number of specific examples from the works of modern authors is quite problematic, because, according to the observation of the famous literary critic D. Zatonsky, “modernism... does not occur in a chemically pure form.” It is an integral part of the artistic panorama of the 20th century.
Modernism is an ideological movement in literature and art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is characterized by a departure from classical standards and the search for new, radical ones. literary forms and the creation of a completely new style of writing. This direction replaced realism and became the predecessor of postmodernism, the final stage of its development dates back to the 30s of the twentieth century.
The main feature of this direction is a complete change in the classical perception of the picture of the world: the authors are no longer bearers of absolute truth and ready-made concepts, but, on the contrary, demonstrate their relativity. The linearity of the narrative disappears, replaced by a chaotic, fragmentary plot, fragmented into parts and episodes, often presented on behalf of several characters at once, who may have completely opposite views on the events taking place.
Directions of modernism in literature
Modernism, in turn, branched into several directions, such as:
Symbolism
(Somov Konstantin Andreevich "Two ladies in the park")
It originated in France in the 70-80s of the 19th century and reached the peak of its development at the beginning of the 20th century, and was most widespread in France. Belgium and Russia. Symbolist authors embodied the main ideas of their works, using the multifaceted and polysemantic associative aesthetics of symbols and images; they were often full of mystery, enigma and understatement. Prominent representatives of this trend: Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautreamont (France), Maurice Maeterlinck, Emile Verhaerne (Belgium), Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Maximilian Voloshin, Andrei Bely, Konstantin Balmont (Russia).. .
Acmeism
(Alexander Bogomazov "Flour peddlers")
It emerged as a separate movement of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, Acmeist authors, in contrast to the symbolists, insisted on clear materiality and objectivity of the themes and images described, defended the use of precise and clear words, and advocated distinct and definite images. Central figures Russian acmeism: Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, Sergei Gorodetsky...
Futurism
(Fortunato Depero "Me and my wife")
An avant-garde movement that emerged in the 10-20s of the 20th century and developed in Russia and Italy. Main feature Futurist authors: interest is not so much in the content of the works, but more in the form of versification. For this purpose, new word forms were invented, vulgar, common vocabulary, professional jargon, and the language of documents, posters and posters were used. The founder of futurism is considered to be the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, who wrote the poem “Red Sugar,” and his associates Balla, Boccioni, Carra, Severini and others. Russian futurists: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak...
Imagism
(Georgy Bogdanovich Yakulov - set design for J. Offenbach's operetta "The Beautiful Helen")
It emerged as a literary movement of Russian poetry in 1918, its founders were Anatoly Mariengof, Vadim Shershenevich and Sergei Yesenin. The goal of the Imagists’ creativity was to create images, and the main means of expression was declared to be metaphor and metaphorical chains, with the help of which direct and figurative images were compared...
Expressionism
(Erich Heckel "Street Scene at the Bridge")
The movement of modernism, which developed in Germany and Austria in the first decade of the twentieth century, as a painful reaction of society to the horrors of current events (revolutions, World War I). This direction sought not so much to reproduce reality as to convey the emotional state of the author; images of pain and screams are very common in works. The following people worked in the style of expressionism: Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn, Ivan Goll, Albert Ehrenstein (Germany), Franz Kafka, Paul Adler (Czech Republic), T. Michinsky (Poland), L. Andreev (Russia)...
Surrealism
(Salvador Dali "The Persistence of Memory")
It emerged as a movement in literature and art in the 20s of the twentieth century. Surrealist works are distinguished by the use of allusions (stylistic figures that give a hint or indication of specific historical or mythological cult events) and the paradoxical combination of various forms. The founder of surrealism is the French writer and poet Andre Breton, famous writers of this movement are Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon...
Modernism in Russian literature of the twentieth century
The last decade of the 19th century was marked by the emergence of new trends in Russian literature, the task of which was a complete rethinking of old means of expression and the revival of poetic art. This period (1982-1922) went down in the history of literature under the name “Silver Age” of Russian poetry. Writers and poets united in various modernist groups and movements, which played a huge role in the artistic culture of that time.
(Kandinsky Vasily Vasilievich "Winter Landscape")
Russian symbolism appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, its founders were the poets Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Fyodor Sologub, Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, later they were joined by Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov. They publish the artistic and journalistic organ of the Symbolists, the magazine “Scales (1904-1909), and support idealistic philosophy Vladimir Solovyov about the Third Testament and the coming of Eternal Femininity. The works of symbolist poets are filled with complex, mystical images and associations, mystery and understatement, abstraction and irrationality.
Symbolism is being replaced by acmeism, which appeared in Russian literature in 1910, the founders of the trend: Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Gorodetsky, this group of poets also included O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich, M. Kuzmin, M. Voloshin. The Acmeists, unlike the Symbolists, proclaimed the cult of real earthly life, a clear and confident view of reality, the affirmation of the aesthetic-hedonistic function of art, without affecting social problems. The poetry collection “Hyperborea”, released in 1912, announced the emergence of a new literary movement called acmeism (from “acme” - the highest degree of something, the time to flourish). The Acmeists tried to make the images concrete and objective, to get rid of the mystical confusion inherent in the Symbolist movement.
(Vladimir Mayakovsky "Roulette")
Futurism in Russian literature arose simultaneously with Acmeism in 1910-1912, like other literary movements in modernism, it was full of internal contradictions. One of the most significant futurist groups called Cubo-Futurists included such outstanding poets Silver Age like V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, I. Severyanin, A. Kruchenykh, V. Kamensky and others. Futurists proclaimed a revolution of forms, absolutely independent of content, freedom of poetic speech and rejection of old literary traditions. Interesting experiments were carried out in the field of words, new forms were created and outdated literary norms and rules were exposed. The first collection of futurist poets, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” declared the basic concepts of futurism and established it as the only truthful exponent of its era.
(Kazimir Malevich "The Lady at the Tram Stop")
In the early 20s of the twentieth century, on the basis of futurism, a new modernist direction was formed - imagism. Its founders were the poets S. Yesenin, A. Mariengof, V. Shershenevich, R. Ivnev. In 1919, they held the first Imagist evening and created a declaration that proclaimed the main principles of Imagism: the primacy of the image “as such”, poetic expression through the use of metaphors and epithets, a poetic work should be a “catalog of images”, read the same as from the beginning, so from the end. Creative differences between the Imagists led to the division of the movement into left and right wings; after Sergei Yesenin left its ranks in 1924, the group gradually disintegrated.
Modernism in foreign literature of the twentieth century
(Gino Severini "Still Life")
Modernism as literary direction fell in the late 19th early 19th century on the eve of the First World War, its heyday was in the 20-30s of the 20th century, it developed almost simultaneously in the countries of Europe and America and is an international phenomenon consisting of various literary movements, such as Imagism, Dadaism, expressionism, surrealism, etc.
Modernism arose in France, its prominent representatives belonging to the Symbolist movement were the poets Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire. Symbolism quickly became popular in other European countries, in England it was represented by Oscar Wilde, in Germany by Stefan George, in Belgium by Emil Verhaeren and Maurice Metterlinck, in Norway by Henrik Ibsen.
(Umberto Boccioni "The street enters the house")
Among the expressionists were G. Trakl and F. Kafka in Belgium, the French school - A. France, the German school - J. Becher. The founders of such a modernist movement in literature as Imagism, which existed since the beginning of the 20th century in English-speaking European countries, were the English poets Thomas Hume and Ezra Pound, they were later joined by the American poet Amy Lowell, the young English poet Herbert Read, and the American John Fletcher.
The most famous writers The modernists of the early twentieth century are considered to be the Irish prose writer James Joyce, who created the immortal stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses (1922), the French author of the seven-volume epic novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, and the German-speaking master of modernism Franz Kafka, wrote the story “Metamorphosis” (1912), which became a classic of the absurdity of all world literature.
Modernism in the characteristics of Western literature of the twentieth century
Despite the fact that modernism is divided into a large number of movements, their common feature is the search for new forms and the definition of man’s place in the world. The literature of modernism, which arose at the junction of two eras and between two world wars, in a society tired and exhausted of old ideas, is distinguished by its cosmopolitanism and expresses the feelings of authors lost in an ever-evolving, growing urban environment.
(Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi "Airportrait of the Duce")
Writers and poets who worked in in this direction, constantly experimented with new words, forms, techniques and techniques in order to create a new, fresh sound, although the themes remained old and eternal. Usually this was a theme about the loneliness of a person in a huge and colorful world, about the discrepancy between the rhythms of his life and the surrounding reality.
Modernism is a kind of literary revolution; writers and poets participated in it, declaring their complete denial of realistic verisimilitude and all cultural and literary traditions in general. They had to live and create in difficult times, when the values of traditional humanistic culture were outdated, when the concept of freedom in different countries had a very ambiguous meaning, when the blood and horrors of the First World War devalued human life, and the world around us appeared before people in all its cruelty and coldness . Early modernism symbolized the time when faith in the power of reason was destroyed, and the time came for the triumph of irrationality, mysticism and the absurdity of all existence.
The 20th century went down in cultural history as a century of experimentation, which later often became the norm. This is the time of the appearance of various declarations, manifestos and schools, often encroaching on centuries-old traditions and immutable canons. For example, the inevitability of imitation of the beautiful, which Lessing wrote about in famous work"Laocoon, or on the boundaries of painting and poetry." The starting point of aesthetics was the ugly.
The term modernism appears at the end of the century and is assigned, as a rule, to unrealistic phenomena in art following decadence. However, the search for modernism is preceded by both precision and mannerism, the surrealist frescoes of Hieronymus Bosch, “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire, and the programs of “pure art.”
Modernism as a philosophical and aesthetic phenomenon has the following stages: avant-garde (between the wars), neo-avant-garde (50-60s), which is quite controversial, but has grounds, postmodernism (70-80s)
Modernism continues the unrealistic trend in the literature of the past and moves into the second half of the twentieth century.
Modernism is both a creative method and an aesthetic system, which is reflected in the literary activities of a number of schools, often very different in their programmatic statements. Common features: loss of a fulcrum, a break with both the positivism of the century and the traditional worldview of Christian Europe, subjectivism, deformation of the world or artistic text, loss of a holistic model of the world, creation of a model of the world each time anew at the will of the artist, formalism.
It was at the end of the century. Formalistic movements appear in literature and art - formalism, naturalism . Naturalists base it on the philosophy of positivism, which refuses generalizing knowledge, establishing the laws of reality, and sets the task only of describing reality.
Post-war devastation, and then a period of stabilization in the 20s. became the social soil on which modernist art of the 20s and 30s grew. The collapse of the usual foundations of life in the first world war entailed the desire to update and remake old art, because it could no longer meet the needs of society. This is how formalist movements in literature and art arise: futurism, dadaism and surrealism, etc. They grow from a common social soil, objectively reflecting the confusion of a person knocked out of his usual rut by the events of the First World War. He ceased to understand the world, which was previously so stable and explainable. Some unknown forces threw him into a bloody chaos of nations, into a seething whirlpool of events. He emerged from this massacre alive, but confused; he managed to hate these forces without realizing that they were governed by objective laws. He just realized that everything in the world is not stable.
In the face of an unknown danger, many people have a feeling of uncertainty and at the same time a desire to rebel, to protest in the face of society.
All these directions of the beginning of the 20th century, in which the features of a deep spiritual crisis and decline, the spirit of doubt, nihilism, despondency, appeared, starting from those that arose in the 19th century impressionism and symbolism, act under the flag of innovation, which most fully expresses the innermost spirit of the new era.
Criticism, supporting claims to novelty, began to call these trends 20th century. modernism. During the First World War, modernist movements ( cubism, suprematism, surrealism) appear in large quantities in literature and art. Modernism as a literary movement that swept Europe at the beginning of the century had the following national varieties: French and Czech surrealism, Italian and Russian futurism, English imagism and the “stream of consciousness” school, German expressionism, Swedish primitivism, etc.
As a rule, all modernist movements proclaimed “art for art’s sake,” rejecting ideology and realism.
The method of their creativity is formalism: instead of images of the objective world, subjective associations arise, a play of subconscious impulses.
During the period of stabilization, wide sections of the intelligentsia find satisfaction in the revival of philosophical theories subjective idealism. They are tired of reason and crude realism; they are impressed by the teaching about the subconscious impulses of man, about a world not controlled by reason. They crave complete personal freedom.
This is how they become fashionable theories of Bergsonianism and Freudianism.
The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, based on his many years of experience, creates the theory of psychoanalysis, which had a significant impact on the concept of personality in the literature of the twentieth century. Freud transformed the theory of psychoanalysis from a method of treating neuroses into a universal method of understanding the human personality at a deep level. But Freud the philosopher is a consistent subjective idealist. He argues that human actions are based on the dark forces of instinct. Freud contrasted Homo sapiens with Instinctive and Unconscious Man.
Turning to the analysis of human mental experiences, Freud considers the main task to be penetration into the world of the subconscious and the world of instincts, for he is convinced that only the study of these principles of human existence can explain human behavior.
Studying all kinds of mental deviations in the clinic, Freud came to the conclusion that “consciousness is not the master in own home”, that most often it is absent, and the human “I” strives to avoid trouble and get pleasure. At the same time, Freud claims that the dominant beginning of all human actions is his subconscious, where he attributes fear, hunger, that is, Freud seeks to explain social phenomena with the categories of the subconscious, denying the influence social reasons on human behavior and psyche. Freud studied the mechanisms of pathological behavior of people, examined slips of the tongue, slips of the tongue, dreams, proving that mental disorders differ from mental health not qualitatively, but quantitatively. Freud expressed the idea of a special mission of art: occupying an intermediate stage between health and neurosis, art, according to Freud, performs a psychotherapeutic function, compensating in spiritual and artistic activity something that is unattainable in reality.
Modernism took psychoanalysis and free association from Freud as a way of exploring the unconscious, took the concept of an autonomous creator who is the final authority.
In realistic literature, the influence of Freud's ideas is easy to see in the attention to the ambivalence (antagonism) of feelings as a phenomenon mental life(love - hate, attraction - repulsion, friendship - envy), in the rehabilitation of sexuality, which, thanks to psychoanalysis, entered into cultural paradigm century, in increased attention to the instinctive and subconscious in human behavior.
Freud's student and follower, Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), introduced the concept of an archetype - a stable and almost unchanged stereotype of human behavior. It is revealed at the subconscious level, in the psychic layer where the archaic is preserved ancient myths, fragments of primitive magical rites, artistic images and atavistic fears. Widely included in artistic culture century, the concept of the unconscious introduced by Jung, which absorbed the experience of previous generations, the experience with which a person is born and exists, even without knowing anything about it. The collective unconscious appears in the form of symbols and archetypes as a universal language, cipher and code of the entire history of human culture.
Productive for fiction It also turned out that the idea of a mask proposed by Jung, which continued the ideas of the American psychologist William James (1842-1910), who believed that in the mind of a normal person there can be several hypostases, that in practice a person has as many different social personalities as there are different groups of people, the opinion whom he values.
The philosophy of intuitionism of the French idealist philosopher Henri Bergson is closely related to Freud's theory.
Henri Bergson, who published his works back in the 19th century, teaches that the determining factor in human life is not objective consciousness, but the subconscious, which can only be grasped intuitively. The stream of consciousness, into which various involuntary associations and memories flow like rivulets, only gradually realized - this is what, according to Bergson, should become the object of study for both the philosopher and the scientist. Only intuition can make it possible to directly know the truth, and this knowledge occurs outside the process of sensory and rational perception of the environment. Bergson's teaching stems from a distrust of the intellect, which has purely practical significance. The intellect cannot explain the deep processes of the psyche; only intuition is capable of this. Language, according to Bergson, is also unable to express all shades inner experiences, in literature the analysis of reality is replaced artistic description mental states.
Widespread literary school, which was based on the theory of S. Freud, which attracted writers with its wide possibilities for revealing the human psyche.
Freud's “psychoanalysis” became the basis for the depiction of man in the works of M. Proust, Andre Gide, and in the dramas of T. Williams.
The ideas of modernism in the work of individual artists and schools, in each specific work, often receive a different interpretation. Modernism can be decisive in a writer’s work as a whole (F, Kafka, D. Joyce) or can be felt as one of the techniques that has a significant impact on the artist’s style (M. Proust, W. Wolfe). Modernism helped to draw attention to the uniqueness of man’s inner world, to unchain the creator’s imagination as a phenomenon of the real world surrounding man. The artist is no less important than what he depicts, said Picasso, who liked to repeat that he knew what apples looked like, and in Cezanne’s painting he was interested in something else.
IN English literature in the field of the modernist novel, the most characteristic figures are James Joyce, Aldous Huxley and representatives of the psychological school Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson.
The name of the Anglo-Irish writer James Joyce is associated with the school of “stream of consciousness”. “Stream of consciousness” as a writing technique is an illogical internal monologue that reproduces the chaos of thoughts and experiences, the smallest movements of consciousness. This is a free associative flow of thoughts in the sequence in which they arise, interrupt each other and are crowded with illogical piles. For the first time this term - “stream of consciousness” - appeared in the works of William James, where he developed the idea that consciousness “is not a chain where all the links are connected in series, but a river.”
Joyce's novel Ulysses has been hailed as the pinnacle of narrative art. This is a monumental work in which the author seeks to penetrate the subconscious of his characters, to restore the flow of their thoughts, feelings, and associations. Ancient world about Odysseus and his wanderings is translated by Joyce into the story of the Dublin bourgeois Bloom, wandering around Dublin for one day, his wife Marion and the restless artist Dedalus (Daedalus). Ulysses contains 18 episodes similar to Homer's Odyssey. The novel was called " greatest work of our days", "a magnificent, fantastic, one-of-a-kind work, a heroic experiment of an eccentric genius" (S. Zweig), "an expression of the collective unconscious" and the meaninglessness of the era (C. Jung), "a play with language in the spirit of pop art ( H. Kenner), “the gospel of modernist aesthetics” (E. Genieva). The vast space of the novel, one and a half thousand pages, tells the story of just one day, June 16, 1904, typical of the characters: history teacher, intellectual Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, a baptized Jew, an advertising agent, and his wife, singer Marion (Molly). Exploring the labyrinths of the consciousness of his heroes, Joyce subjects his heroes to almost X-ray scanning with the help of various modifications of the stream of consciousness.
Joyce describes in great detail what the characters were doing, what they were thinking about, conveys the stream of their consciousness, their internal monologues, seeks to trace the impulses independent of consciousness that drive them, tries to reveal the complexity of the erotic complexes inherent in each of the heroes. Dozens of pages reproduce the chaotic train of thought of Bloom, Marion and Dedalus. Joyce refuses punctuation, does not use capital letters in places, and uses sound recording techniques. Sometimes conveying the fragmentation and uncertainty of Bloom's thoughts, Joyce simply breaks off phrases and words, leaving the reader to figure it out for themselves.
“...the stockings wrinkle at the ankles. I can't stand it, it's so tasteless. These writers, they all have their head in the clouds. Foggy, sleepy, symbolic. Aesthetes, that’s who they are. I would not be surprised if it turns out that such food produces these same poetic thoughts in the brain. Just take any of these policemen, sweating stew in their shirts, and you can’t squeeze a line of poetry out of him. They don’t even know what poetry is. You need a special mood.
Misty gull flapping its wings
With a piercing scream flies over the waves...
... Or go to old Harris and chat with young Sinclair? A well-mannered person. Must be having breakfast. I need to get my old binoculars repaired. Hertz lenses, six guineas. The Germans will get through everywhere. They sell it cheap just to conquer the market. At a loss. You could buy it for the occasion at the lost property office at the station. It's amazing what people don't forget in trains and dressing rooms. And what are they thinking about? Women too. Incredible... there's a little clock on the roof of the bank that you can use to check your binoculars." This passage is very characteristic of Joyce’s manner and at the same time it is one of the most accessible passages in the novel.
Used in the novel greek mythology, but the novel itself is also a myth, modern and ancient. The main symbolism of the novel is the meeting of father and son, Odysseus and Telemachus (Bloom takes the drunken Dedalus to him, saving him from the police, and imagines that this is his dead son Rudy). The setting of the novel, Dublin, which is reproduced on the pages of the novel with extraordinary care: diagrams, plans of districts, streets, houses, also becomes a unique symbol. The novel contains a lot of interpolated materials: newspaper reports, autobiographical data, quotes from scientific treatises, historical opuses and political manifestos.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was recognized as the head of the “psychological school,” who in her work demonstrated the diversity of possibilities of the psychological novel. Representatives of the “psychological school” considered the main task of their art to be the study of human psychological life, which they isolated from the social environment. The world around them interested them only to the extent that it was reflected in the minds of the heroes.
All of Woolf's novels are a kind of journey into the depths of personality, which the reader may or may not accept, but which he has no right to dictate. Wulf persistently searched, being a bold experimenter, for new paths in art, striving for extreme depth psychological analysis, to reveal the boundless depths of the spiritual principle in man. Hence the free form of dialogues and monologues, the impressionistic manner of describing the situation and landscape, the original composition of novels, which is based on the reproduction of the flow of feelings, experiences, and emotions of the characters, rather than the transfer of events.
Arguing with realists who followed the typical or the general, Woolf convinced of the need to pay attention to what is considered small - to the world of the soul. All her novels are about this inner life, in which she finds more meaning than in social processes. She explained the peculiarities of a person’s inner world by the eternal qualities of human nature, but she sympathized with people. She perceived life as a bizarre but natural interweaving of light and darkness, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, youth and old age, flourishing and fading.
Her most famous novels are Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931).
Modernism as an artistic movement is characterized by subjectivism and a generally pessimistic view of progress and history, a non-social attitude towards man, a violation of the holistic concept of personality, the harmony of external and internal life, the social and biological in it. In terms of worldview, modernism argued with the apologetic picture of the world and was anti-bourgeois; at the same time, he was clearly alarmed by the inhumanity of revolutionary practical activity.
Modernism defended the individual, proclaimed its self-purpose and sovereignty, the immanent nature of art.
The border between modernism and realism in a number of specific examples from the work of modern authors is quite problematic, because, according to the observation of the Kyiv literary critic D. Zatonsky, “modernism... does not occur in a chemically pure form.” It is an integral part of the artistic panorama of the twentieth century.
Schools such as Dadaism, surrealism and expressionism most expressed themselves in the vein of modernism of the 20-30s. We'll talk about them.
Disputes with realists, at least theoretical ones, can be considered fundamental for modernism as a method. Marxist literary criticism (P. Lafargue, G. Plekhanov) since the end of the last century has taken a negative position towards modernism, seeing in it a manifestation of the crisis and collapse of bourgeois culture. At the same time, in Soviet Russia At first, avant-garde artists were exhibited, poets and prose writers so far from realistic aesthetics were translated, such as J. Cocteau, J. Joyce, M. Proust; in those years one could read Freud and Nietzsche. The turn to dictatorship and totalitarianism, with its suspicious attitude towards the individual, doomed art to decades of unfreedom.
What is characteristic of avant-gardeism as a stage of modernism? Avant-garde (French avant-garde - vanguard) is a term that has a wider semantic field in foreign science, often acting as a synonym for modernism in our understanding. The outlines of avant-gardeism, which historically unites various directions - from symbolism and cubism to surrealism and pop art, are also elusive; They are characterized by a psychological atmosphere of rebellion, a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, and an orientation towards a future that is not always clearly represented.
It is significant that the avant-garde art that was rapidly developing in the 10-20s turned out to be enriched with a revolutionary idea (sometimes only conditionally symbolic, as with the expressionists who wrote about revolution in the sphere of the spirit, that is, in general). This gave optimism to the avant-garde, painting its canvases red, and attracted revolutionary-minded artists to it, who saw avant-gardeism as an example of anti-bourgeois protest (Brecht, Aragon, Eluard).
The twentieth century was the century of destruction of the old world and its art. The rebellion was dissolved in everything: it was no coincidence that the word “wild” appeared as the name of the theater in which Brecht performed with songs, as an integral part and concept of the school of painting (Fauvism). Avant-garde art resorted to masquerade and caricature. The breakdown of traditional forms was accompanied by the revival of new genres - circus, music hall, pantomime, black jazz - and a simplification of forms. The sophistication of the Impressionists’ colors did not correspond to the spirit of the times: “scream” and disharmony settled in the paintings of their “heirs” - the Expressionists.
Outwardly, it seemed that the avant-garde rejected traditions, but its protest was primarily directed against canons and established forms. Speaking about the desire of art to break out of three-dimensional space, Cocteau compared Picasso to an escaped convict, striving for freedom beyond the boundaries of his own “I”.
Avant-garde artists believed that art did not have to be recognizable and liked at first sight. They refused to deceive the public and called for understanding the world, which is more difficult than recognizing the familiar. True, Aristotle also noted that the public experiences joy when it sees something familiar to it.
Avant-gardeism does not simply cross out reality - it moves towards its reality, relying on the immanent laws of art. The avant-garde rejected the stereotypical forms of mass consciousness, did not accept war, the madness of technocracy, or the enslavement of man.
In general, the apolitical avant-garde was united by the idea of freedom, although the surrealists considered the Russian revolution a “ministerial crisis.” The avant-garde contrasted the mediocrity and bourgeois order, the canonized logic of the realists with rebellion, chaos and deformation, and the morality of the bourgeois with freedom of feelings and unlimited imagination.
Ahead of its time, the avant-garde updated the art of the twentieth century, introduced urban themes and new techniques into poetry, new principles of composition and various functional styles of speech, graphic design (refusal of punctuation, ideograms), free verse and its variations, and updated European versification.
