The concept of avant-garde. Avant-garde movements in world literature. Modernist movements of the late 19th – 20th centuries

In literary criticism, it is customary to call, first of all, three literary movements that declared themselves in the period from 1890 to 1917 as modernist. These are symbolism, acmeism and futurism, which formed the basis of modernism as a literary movement. On its periphery, other, less aesthetically distinct and less significant phenomena of “new” literature arose.

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 updating artistic forms, as well as the conventionality (schematization, abstraction) of the 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.

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 had abandoned bourgeois values, and forced the reader to think by using complex new literary forms and styles. In fiction, the conventional flow of chronological events was turned on its head 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 the 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.

Favorite character of modern prose writers - “ 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 seem to live 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 modernist 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 everydayness 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.

Modernism - characteristic aesthetics of the 20th century, independent of social strata, countries and peoples.

In their best examples the art of modernism enriches world culture through new expressive means.
IN literary process XX century changes have occurred due to socio-economic and political reasons. Among the main features of the literature of this time are:
politicization, strengthening the connection of literary trends with various political movements,
strengthening mutual influence and interpenetration of national literatures, internationalization,
negation literary traditions,
intellectualization, influence philosophical ideas, the desire for scientific and philosophical analysis,
fusion and mixing of genres, variety of forms and styles.

In the history of literature of the 20th century. it is customary to distinguish two major period:
1)1917-1945
2) after 1945
Literature in the 20th century. developed in line with two main directions - realism and modernism.
Realism allowed bold experiments, the use of new artistic techniques with one goal: a deeper comprehension of reality (B. Brecht, W. Faulkner, T. Mann).
Kafka, who are characterized by the idea of ​​the world as an absurd beginning, hostile to man, disbelief in man, rejection of the idea of ​​progress in all its forms, pessimism.
Of the leading literary movements of the mid-20th century. should be called existentialism, which is like literary direction originated in France (J-P. Sartre, A. Camus).
The features of this direction are:
approval of a “pure” unmotivated action,
assertion of individualism,
a reflection of a person’s loneliness in an absurd world hostile to him.
Avant-garde literature was a product of the dawning era of social change and cataclysm. It was based on a categorical rejection of reality, the denial of bourgeois values ​​and the energetic breaking of traditions. For full characteristics avant-garde literature should focus on such movements as expressionism, futurism and surrealism.
For aesthetics expressionism and the priority of expression over the image is characteristic; the screaming “I” of the artist comes to the fore, which displaces the object of the image.
Futurists They completely denied all previous art, vulgarity and the unspiritual ideal of a technocratic society were proclaimed. The aesthetic principles of the Futurists were based on the breaking of syntax, the denial of logic, word creation, free associations, and the rejection of punctuation.
Surrealism leading aesthetic principle there was automatic writing based on the theory of 3. Freud. Automatic writing - creativity without mind control, recording free associations, dreams, dreams. A favorite technique of the surrealists is the “stunning image”, consisting of disparate elements.

Modernism developed in several stages and manifested itself in many movements. Starting from the 60s, modernism entered the stage of postmodernism.
2. P. Suskind’s novel “Perfume”: the novel’s historicism, themes and issues, intertext

The novel takes place in France in the mid-18th century, during the Age of Enlightenment.

The technique that the author uses in “Perfume” is the principle of pseudo-historicism. He seems to convince the reader that what is described really once happened, giving chronological accuracy to the events of the novel. The text is full of dates. So, between the two dates, the hero’s entire life passes (all events are dated: the meeting with the girl with plums, Grenouille’s sentence, death, his birth).

Addressing the characters Grenouille encounters, Suskind notes the time and circumstances of their deaths. So the reader, watching in real time of the novel the death of the tanner Grimal and the perfumer Baldini, learns that Madame Gaillard will die of old age in 1799, and the Marquis Taillade-Espinasse will disappear in the mountains in 1764.

In Grenouille's imagination, marked with dates, like bottles of aged wine, the aromas he smelled are stored: “a glass of aroma from 1752,” “a bottle from 1744.”

The dates that pepper the novel create a tangible feeling that we are looking at France on the eve of the Great Revolution. Suskind remembers that France of the depicted era is a country not only of future revolutionaries, vagabonds and beggars, but also of magicians, sorcerers, poisoners, hypnotists and other charlatans, adventurers, criminals.

Parallel with creativity (?)

Intertext: 1) In the same way, Hoffmann’s quotes are unexpectedly read in the general context of “The Story of a Murderer.” The associations between Grenouille and little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober, from the story of the same name by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1819) are quite obvious. The word grenouille, similar to a surname central character"Perfumer" is translated from French as "frog". 2) Suskind fills with literal content the metaphorical phrase Jesus said to his disciples during the legendary dinner: “And taking bread and giving thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me. Likewise I took the cup after supper, saying: This is New Testament in My blood, which is shed for you (Luke 22:19-20). The Christian sacrament of communion - the Eucharist - is literalized and interpreted on the pages of the novel as a kind of cannibal act, orchestrated by Grenouille himself.

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, was able 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 system coordinates in which a 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 sovereignty human personality, her 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, a 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 landmark for new literature, Pilnyak demonstratively 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 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; heated car and 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 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 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, in best case scenario, 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 precisely in such a globalist perspective that the revolution was understood in the early 20s) shakes off cultural, moral and other guidelines from a person, exposing “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 of the Unextinguished Moon” (1927), which played fatal role in the life of a writer. Its plot is based on real story the killing 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 Stalin’s orders. 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, - Earth 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 contrasts the impressionistic and “contour” 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. 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.”

At the turn of the century realism began to lose its position, it turned out to be insufficiently expressive to depict reality, stormy and changeable. It is being replaced by modernism.

Modernism as a new direction in art emerged at the turn of the century. In France - Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud. In Scandinavia - Maeterlinck. In England - Oscar Wilde. In Lithuania - Ciurlionis, Sruoga. Later, the names of Kafka, Faulkner, and Nabokov shone among the major modernist writers.
Modernism is divided into a large number of currents, but they are all united by the search for new forms and a person’s view of his place in the world. Modernist literature is largely cosmopolitan and usually expresses a sense of being lost in an urban environment. The very essence of modernism, born between the world wars in a society depleted of the ideas of the past, is cosmopolitan. Writers working at this time experimented with forms, methods, methods, techniques to give the world a new sound, but their themes remained eternal. Most often it was the problem of a person’s loneliness in this colorful world, the discrepancy between his own pace and the pace of the surrounding reality.
It is modernism, unlike all previous movements, that focuses its attention on man, on his inner essence, discarding the external surroundings or modifying it so that it only emphasizes the main idea. Critics talk about the literature of modernism as a rather gloomy phenomenon, but this feeling is created mainly due to the fact that the reader views the world presented by the author through the prism of the latter’s perception, colored by disappointment and the eternal search for the meaning of existence.
From a historical point of view, modernism is closely related to the emergence of new regimes. More often we're talking about about the formation of fascism and communism, and the appeal of literary classics to them for new ideas. For this reason, the work of writers can sometimes be divided into two periods - passion for politics and disappointment with it. And yet, most modernists are apolitical; the only rules for them are their own imagination and worldview.

Modernism(from the French moderne - modern, newest) - a direction in art and literature that is opposed to realism and is characterized by a desire for unconventional forms, for the conventions of style. The main features of modernism:
1) disbelief in the rationality of the world order (the real world is hostile to man, full of rudeness and cruelty, and man in it is weak and helpless), denial of historical progress and affirmation of the absurdity of existence;
2) exclusive interest in the individual outside his social affiliation - lonely, alien to the world, a toy in the hands of the world's elements;
3) the myth-making method of perceiving and explaining the world (the world is unknowable, every artist has the right to create his own picture of the world, this will be an aesthetic victory over world chaos);
4) worship of art as the highest value in life (refusal traditional principle“art serves the people.” Art should not serve, this society should serve it. An artist is allowed everything, because he decorates life with his creations).

One of philosophical foundations Modernism became the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche declared “God is dead” and instead of God, everyone can put themselves in his place, i.e. formulate your own ideas about good and evil, breaking out of the narrow framework set by the human herd, which created slave ideas about the world. Nietzsche's superman is precisely such a being who creates his own ideas about good and evil, emanating from himself and not conditioned by any external authority. Nietzsche offers the highest level of subjectivism: everyone is his own god and law. A person’s world is determined only by the person himself, if he has enough strength for it. The main one driving force world and man is the will to power. It is to her that the entire universe moves.

Another important contribution to the development of modernism was Freud's psychoanalysis. According to Freud, man was not a rational entity, but a complex of unconscious impulses suppressed by an equally unconscious “superego” developed through socialization. In such a concept, all that remains is for the rational “I” to maintain a balance between the two manifestations of the unconscious. A person receives the freedom of God and the freedom of an animal, and it turns out, in full accordance with his desire to move away from the hated positivism, closer to an animal than to God, because people became superhumans, but neurotics and hysterics, incapable not only of divine, but simply to normal life– as much as you like.

In Schopenhauer, the essence of the world appears as an unreasonable will, a blind, aimless attraction to life. “Liberation” from the world, selfless aesthetic contemplation, and asceticism are achieved in a state close to Buddhist nirvana.

Based on the assertion that man is weak and helpless, modernists abandon the tradition of 19th century literature - to help one's neighbor, to serve people.
You can't see a thing in the field. // Someone is calling: help! // What I can?
I myself am poor and small, // I myself am mortally tired, // How can I help? (Sologub)

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 beauty, which Lessing wrote in his famous work “Laocoon, or on the limits of painting and poetry,” was criticized. 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 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 aesthetic system, which is reflected in literary activity a number of schools, often very different in their program statements. Common features: loss of a foothold, a break with both the positivism of the century and the traditional worldview of Christian Europe, subjectivism, deformation of the world or literary text, loss of a holistic model of the world, creation of a model of the world every time anew at the discretion 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 up. 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 develop a feeling of uncertainty and at the same time a desire to rebel, to protest in the face of society.

All these trends of the early 20th century, in which features of deep spiritual crisis and decline, the spirit of doubt, nihilism, despondency, dating back to 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, broad sections of the intelligentsia find satisfaction in the revival 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 universal method knowledge of 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 analysis mental experiences man, 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 and hunger, that is, Freud seeks to explain with the categories of the subconscious social phenomena, denying 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 the cultural paradigm of the 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.

The idea of ​​a mask proposed by Jung, which continued the ideas of the American psychologist William James (1842-1910), who believed that in consciousness, was also productive for fiction. normal person there may be several hypostases, that in practice a person has as many different social personalities, how many different groups of people whose opinions 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 the shades of internal experiences; in literature, the analysis of reality is replaced by an artistic description of 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.

Ideas of modernism in the work of individual artists and schools, in each specific work often receive different interpretations. 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 draw attention to the uniqueness inner world person, to unchain the imagination of the creator as a phenomenon of the surrounding person real world. 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 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. This term - “stream of consciousness” - first 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. The ancient world of 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 “the 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 game 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 heroes did, what they were thinking about, conveys the stream of their consciousness, their internal monologues, strives 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 to use punctuation marks and in some places does not use capital letters, 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. Take any of these cops sweating stew in his shirts, 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.

The novel uses 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 demonstrated a variety of possibilities in her work psychological novel. Representatives of the “psychological school” considered the main task of their art to be research psychological life a person whom they isolated from the social environment. The world 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 the utmost depth of 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, emotions of the characters, and not 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 artistic movement characterizes subjectivism and a generally pessimistic view of progress and history, a non-social attitude towards a person, 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 creativity modern authors is quite problematic, because, according to the observation of the Kyiv literary critic D. Zatonsky, “modernism... does not occur in its chemically pure form.” He is integral part artistic panorama of the twentieth century.

Schools such as Dadaism, surrealism and expressionism most expressed themselves in line with the 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 as J. Cocteau, J. Joyce, M. Proust were translated; 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 toward a future that is not always clearly represented.

It is significant that avant-garde art, which was rapidly developing in the 10-20s, turned out to be enriched revolutionary idea(sometimes only conditionally symbolic, as with the expressionists who wrote about the 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 component and the concept of a 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”.

The avant-garde believed that art does 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.