Lost Generation Literature

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

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

At the center of his first novel is a collective hero - an entire class of a German school that volunteers to go to war. All these students succumbed to patriotic propaganda, orienting them towards the defense of the fatherland, calling for those feelings that for centuries, and millennia, were recognized by mankind as the most sacred. “It is an honor to die for your homeland” is a well-known Latin dictum. The main pathos of the novel boils down to refuting this thesis, oddly enough it sounds to us today, since the sanctity of these words today is beyond doubt.

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

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

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

This is how the very idea of ​​patriotism in the form presented by national propaganda is destroyed in the romance. It is in this novel, as in other works of the “lost generation,” that the concept of the national as antecedent to nationalism becomes especially dangerous for any kind of generalization of a political nature.

When the most sacred was destroyed, then the whole system was cast down to dust. moral values... Those who could survive were left in a destroyed world, devoid of affection for their parents - mothers themselves sent their children to war, and to the fatherland, which destroyed their ideals. But not everyone managed to survive. Paul is the last of his class to die. On the day of his death, the press reports: "Quiet on the Western Front." The death of a unique personality, because each of us is unique and was born for this uniqueness, does not matter for high politics, which condemns to the sacrificial slaughter as many uniqueness as it needs for the day.

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

The plot is built like a love story. In the final analysis, there are not so many works in world literature where love is described so artlessly and so sublimely beautifully. Once upon a time

A.S. Pushkin wrote amazing lines: "I feel sad and easy, my sorrow is light." The same light sadness is the main content of the book. Sadness because they are all doomed. Pat dies of tuberculosis, Lenz is killed by the "guys in high boots", the workshop is ruined, and we do not know how much more suffering is destined for Robert and Kester. It is light because the victorious energy of the noble human spirit, which is in all these people.

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

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

Pat is ill, and again there is no room for irony in the scenes where the author traces his slow death. But even here soft humor sometimes slips. In the last days and nights, Robert tries to distract Pat from suffering and tells funny stories from his childhood, and we smile as we read how the night nurse on duty was surprised to find Robert putting on Pat's cape, pulling on his hat, impersonating the headmaster. a severely scolding student. The smile before death speaks of the courage of these people, which the philosophers of that time defined by a simple and great formula - "the courage to be." It became the meaning of all the literature of the “lost generation”.

Ernest Heminqway (1899-1961) - Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954). His romance "The sun also rises" ("The Sun Also Rises", 1926, published in England in 1927 under the name "Fiesta" - "Fiesta"), becomes the first obvious evidence of the emergence of literature of the "lost generation". The very life of this man is one of the legends of the 20th century. The main motives of both the life and work of Hemingway were the ideas of inner honesty and invincibility.

In 1917, he volunteered for Italy, was a driver of an ambulance on the Italian-Austrian front, where he was seriously wounded. But at the end of the war he was a correspondent for the Toronto Star in the Middle East, spent the 20s in Paris, covered international conferences in Genoa (1922), Rapallo (1923), events in Germany after World War II. He was one of the first journalists to give a publicistic portrait of a fascist and condemn Italian fascism. In the 30s, Hemingway wrote essays about the events in Abyssinia, accused the US authorities of criminal indifference to former front-line soldiers (the famous essay "Who Killed Veterans in Florida?"). During the civil war in Spain, Hemingway took the side of the republican anti-fascists and, as a war correspondent for the ANAS telegraph agency, came to this country four times, spent the spring of 1937 in besieged Madrid, took part in the battles of 37-39 years. This is another war, against fascism, "lies uttered by bandits." Participation in it leads the author to the conclusion that everyone is personally responsible for what is happening in the world. The epigraph to the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is the words from John Donne's sermon: "... I am one with all Humanity, and therefore never ask for whom the Bell tolls: it tolls for You." The hero who appears in this and other Hemingway's works is called the "hero of the code", and he begins his journey in the first novel of the writer.

The novel "Fiesta" largely determines the main parameters of the literature of the "lost generation": the disintegration of value orientations as a certain system; idleness and the burning of life by those who survived, but can no longer use the gift of life; the wounding of Jake Barnes, the main character of the novel, on whose behalf the narration is being conducted (as a symbol will also become a certain tradition of the literature of the "lost": an injury is the only soldier's award, an injury that carries sterility and does not give prospects in the literal sense of the word); a certain disintegration of the personality, endowed with both intellect and high spiritual qualities, and the search for a new meaning of existence.

As far as the novel turned out to be in tune with the mood of the minds of modern Hemingway readers and several subsequent generations, today it is often not fully understood by our contemporaries and requires a certain mental effort when reading. To some extent, this is due to the manner of writing, the theory of Hemingway's style, called the "theory of the iceberg." “If a writer knows well what he is writing about, he can omit a lot from what he knows, and if he writes truthfully, the reader will feel everything that is omitted as much as if the author had said about it. The greatness of the iceberg's movement is that it rises only one-eighth above the water, "- says Hemingway about his style. A. Startsev, the author of works about Hemingway, writes: “Many of Hemingway's stories are built on the interaction of the said and the implied; these elements of the narrative are closely connected, and the invisible "underwater" flow of the plot conveys the power and meaning to the visible ... - these are the “conditions of the game”, - however, the balance of text and subtext is nowhere violated by the author, and the psychological characteristics of the characters remain highly convincing ”1. As an important element of a special world vision, the preference for everything concrete, unambiguous and simple should be considered over the abstract and sophisticated, behind which the hero of Hemingway always sees falsity and deception. On this division of feelings and objects of the external world, he builds not only his concept of morality, but also his aesthetics.

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

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

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

The title of his autobiographical book about Paris - "Feast that is always with you" - published many decades later, after other grandiose social cataclysms, is already embedded in the subtext of "Fiesta". Paris for the author is a life of intellect and creative enlightenment at the same time, a symbol of resistance to “being lost”, which is expressed in the active life of the creative principle in a person.

In Spain, where the heroes will go to attend the fiesta, they continue their painful search for opportunities for internal resistance. Outside of the Iceberg - the story of how Jake and his friend Bill go fishing to a mountain river, then go down to the plain and participate with others in a fiesta, a festival accompanied by a bullfight. The lightest part of the novel is associated with paintings fishing... A person here returns to the original values ​​of being. This return and enjoyment of the feeling of merging with nature - important point not only for understanding the novel, but also for Hemingway's entire work and his life. Nature bestows the highest pleasure - a sense of the fullness of being, obviously temporary, but also necessary for everyone. It is no coincidence that part of the legend about the author is the image of Hemingway as a hunter and fisherman. The fullness of life experienced in the very original sense of the word is conveyed in a special, Hemingway style. He seeks “not to describe, but to name, he does not so much recreate reality as describes the conditions of this existence. The basis of such a description is made up of verbs of movement, nouns, remarks of the same type, multiple use of the conjunction "and". Hemingway creates, as it were, a scheme of perception of elementary stimuli (heat of the sun, cold water, taste of wine), which only in the reader's perception become a full-fledged fact of sensory experience. " The author himself notes on this: “If the spiritual qualities have a smell, then the courage of the day smells of tanned skin, frozen in the frost road or the sea, when the wind tears the foam from the wave” (“Death in the afternoon”). In "Fiesta" he writes: "The road came out of the forest shadow into the hot sun. There was a river ahead. A steep mountain slope rose up beyond the river. Buckwheat grew along the slope, there were several trees, and we saw a white house with them. It was very hot and we stopped in the shade of trees near the dam.

Bill leaned the bag against the tree, we unscrewed the rods, put on the reels, tied the leads and got ready to fish ...

There was a deep place under the dam, where the water was foaming. When I began to bait, a trout jumped from the white foam onto the slope, and it was carried down. I still hadn’t managed to make money, when the second trout, describing the same beautiful arc, jumped onto the rapids and disappeared into the rumbling stream. I put on a sinker and threw it into the frothy water near the dam. "

Hemingway absolutely excludes any evaluative comments, refuses all kinds of romantic "prettiness" in the depiction of nature. At the same time, the Khsminguesvian text acquires its own "taste" qualities, which largely determine its uniqueness. All of his books have the taste and transparent cold clarity of a mountain river, which is why there is so much associated with the episode of fishing in the mountains of Spain for everyone who truly loves to read Hemingway. Nostalgia for the organic integrity of the world and the search for a new ideality are characteristic of this generation of writers. For Hemingway, the achievement of such integrity is possible only by creating in oneself a sense of a certain artistry in relation to the world, and deeply hidden and in no way manifested in any words, monologues, and arrogance. Compare this to the thought of T. Eliot, author of The Waste Land, who wrote that the brutality and chaos of the world can be resisted by the “fury of creative effort”. The correlation of this position with the basic principles of the philosophy of existentialism is obvious.

Another quote from this part of the text: “It was a little after noon, and there was not enough shadow, but I was sitting, leaning against the trunk of two grown together trees, and reading. I read A.E. Mason - wonderful story about how one man froze to death in the Alps and fell into the glacier and how his bride decided to wait exactly twenty-four years until his body appears among the moraines, and her lover was also waiting, and they were still waiting for Bill to come. " Here, in the best possible way, the fundamental anti-romanticism of Jake Barnes, his ironic attitude to the philosophy of life that is already impossible for him, is manifested. The man of the "lost generation" is afraid of self-deception, he builds up for himself new canon... This canon requires a distinctly clear understanding of the relationship between life and death. Accordingly, in the center of the novel is the story of a bullfight, which is perceived as an honest duel with death. A matador should not imitate danger with the help of techniques known to him, he should always be in the “bull's zone”, and if he succeeds in winning, this should happen with the help of the absolute purity of his techniques, the absolute form of his art. Understanding the thinnest line between imitation and the true art of fighting death is the basis of the stoicism of Hemingway's "hero of the code."

The confrontation with death begins. What does it mean to have and not to have, what does it mean to live, and, finally, the ultimate “courage to be”? This confrontation is only sketched in "Fiesta" in order to be much more complete in the next novel. "Farewell to Arms" ("A Farewell to Arms!", 1929). It is not by chance that this, one more, hymn of love appears (remember "Three comrades" by Remarque). Let us not be afraid of banality, just as the authors of the "lost generation" were not afraid of it. They take pure essence these words, not clouded by the many layers that the bad taste of the crowd can add. The pure sense of the story of "Romeo and Juliet", which cannot be vulgar. Purity of meaning is especially necessary for Hemingway. This is part of his moral program of “courage to be”. They are not at all afraid to be moral, his heroes, although they go down in history just as people deprived of an idea of ​​ethics. The meaninglessness of existence, drunkenness, casual relationships. You can read it this way, if you do not force yourself to do all this work of the soul, and do not constantly remember that behind them is the horror of the massacre, which they experienced when they were still quite children.

Lieutenant Henry, the main character novel, says: “I am always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, sacrifice ... We heard them sometimes, standing in the rain, at such a distance that only isolated shouts reached us ... but I didn’t see anything sacred, and what was considered glorious did not deserve glory, and the victims were very similar to the Chicago massacre, only the meat was simply buried in the ground. " It is therefore understandable that he considers such "abstract words" as feat, valor or shrine to be unreliable and even offensive "next to specific village names, road numbers, river names, regiment numbers and dates." Being at war for Lieutenant Henry gradually becomes false from what is necessary for a real man, since he is oppressed by the realization of the meaninglessness of mutual destruction, the idea that they are all just puppets in someone's ruthless hands. Henry enters into a "separate peace", leaves the field of senseless battle, i.e. formally deserts from the army. “Separate peace” is becoming another parameter for defining the hero of the “lost generation”. A person is constantly in a state of "military action" with a hostile, indifferent world to him, the main attributes of which are the army, bureaucracy, plutocracy. Is it possible in this case to leave the battlefield and, if not, is it possible to win this battle? Or "victory in defeat" - "is it stoic adherence to a personally formulated concept of honor, which, by and large, cannot bring any practical advantages in a world that has lost the coordinates of universally meaningful meaning?"

The core idea of ​​Hemingway's moral quest is courage, stoicism in the face of hostile circumstances, heavy blows of fate. Having taken this position, Hemingway begins to develop a vital, moral, aesthetic system behavior of his hero, which came to be known as the Hemingway Code, or canon. It is already developed in the first novel. “Hero of the Code” is a courageous, laconic, cold-blooded person in the most extreme situations.

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

Richard Aldington (1892-1962) during his creative youth he was engaged in literary work, collaborated in newspapers and magazines, was a supporter of imagism (the head of this literary group was Ezra Pound, close to her TS Eliot). The Imagists were characterized by absolutization poetic image, the dark age of barbarism, the commercial spirit, they opposed the "islands of culture, preserved by the elite" (the images of the ancient world as the antithesis of "commercial civilization"). In 1919, Aldington published a collection of "Images of War" in a different poetic system.

In the 1920s, he served as a reviewer for the French Literature section of the Times Literature Supplement. During this period, Aldington was active as a critic, translator, and poet. In 1925 he published a book about the free-thinker Voltaire. In all his works he opposes the narrow snobbish idea of ​​poetry as something that is created "for one hypothetical intellectual reader", such poetry runs the risk of "turning into something full of dark hints, refined, incomprehensible."

And his own literary-critical practice (Eddington, and the environment of the "highbrow", to which he belonged, predetermined the qualities of his main novel "Death of a Hero" ("Death of Him",

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

The war has highlighted the face of England. “Undoubtedly, from the time French revolution there has never been such a collapse of values. " The family is "prostitution, sanctified by the law," "under a thin film of piety and conjugal consent, as if linking the dearest mother and the kindest dad, indomitable hatred is seething with a key." Let us recall, as it was said by Galsworthy: "The era that canonized the pharisaism so much that in order to be respectable, it was enough to seem to them." Everything that was important turned out to be false and not having the right to exist, but just very viable. The comparison with Galsworthy is not accidental, since most aspects of the Victorian era are given with the help of literary associations. The family teaches George to be courageous. This is an ideal, which at the turn of the century was expressed with particular force in the work of Kipling, the bard of the Empire (in any case, this is how the bourgeois understood him). It is Kipling who is opposed by the author when he says: “There is no Truth, no Justice - there is only British truth and British justice. Vile sacrilege! You are a servant of the Empire; no matter if you are rich or poor, do as the Empire tells you - and as long as the Empire is rich and powerful, you must be happy. "

V morally George is trying to find support in the canons of Beauty modeled on the Pre-Raphaelites, Wilde, etc. Aldington writes his novel in a manner very characteristic of the intellectual elite of his time - like Huxley, like Wells (the author of social novels that we often forget, knowing him only as a science fiction writer), like Milne, etc. Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish the pages (Ellington from the pages of the named writers. At the same time, like them, he is critical of his environment. his huge novel Jean-Christophe) Journalism in his perception of “mental prostitution”, “a humiliating kind of humiliating vice.” Many of the novel's characters have real prototypes from the literary environment (Mr. Ezra Pound, Mr. Tobb - TS Eliot, Mr. Bobb-Lawrence) And they are all subject to the same vices as other Victorians. They try to overcome the wall, which is insurmountable, and they perish. This is the pathos of the great tragedy of man.

LITERATURE

Gribanov 5. Hemingway. M., 1970.

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

Startsev A. From Whitman to Hemingway M. 1972.

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

• Andreev L.G. " Lost generation"And the work of E. Hemingway // History of foreign literature of the XX century. M., 2000.S. 349.
• Andreev L.G. The Lost Generation and the Works of E. Hemingway. P. 348.

After the First World War, special people returned to their hometowns from the front. When the war began, they were still boys, but duty forced them to defend their homeland. The Lost Generation was what they were called. What, however, is the reason for this loss? This concept is used even today when we are talking about the writers who created in the interval between the First and Second World Wars, which became a test for all mankind and knocked almost everyone out of their usual, peaceful rut.

The expression "lost generation" once sounded out of the mouth. Later, the incident during which this happened was described in one of Hemingway's books ("The holiday that is always with you"). He and other writers of the lost generation raise in their works the problem of young people who returned from the war and did not find their home, their relatives. Questions about how to live on, how to remain human, how to learn to enjoy life again - that is what is paramount in this literary movement. Let's talk about it in more detail.

The lost generation literature is not only about similarities. It is also a recognizable style. At first glance, this is an impartial account of what is happening - be it the war or the post-war period. However, if you read it carefully, you can see both a very deep lyrical subtext and the severity of emotional throwing. For many authors, it has proven difficult to break out of this thematic framework: it is too difficult to forget the horrors of war.

Tolmachev V.M. The Lost Generation and the Works of E. Hemingway

Tolmachev V.M. - "Foreign Literature of the XX century" - 2nd ed. - M., 2000

1920s - the period of "change of the veneers" in the literature of the United States. It is marked both by a versatile understanding of the historical and cultural shift, and by the entry into the rights of a new literary generation, the idea of ​​which was in one way or another associated with the image of the “lost generation”. These words (spoken in French and then translated into English) are attributed to the writer G. Stein and were addressed to young people who had been to the fronts of the First World War, shocked by its cruelty and who, in the post-war period, on the previous grounds could not "get on track" peaceful life... Glorified the same maxim Stein ("You are all a lost generation") E. Hemingway,

Carrying it out in the form of one of the epigraphs on title page his first novel The Sun Also Rises (1926).

However, the meaning of this, as it turned out, an epoch-making characterization was destined to outgrow the "Hamletism" of restless young people. “Loss” in a broad sense is a consequence of a break with both the system of values ​​that go back to “Puritanism”, “the tradition of decency”, etc., and with the pre-war idea of ​​what the theme and style of a work of art should be. In contrast to the generation of B. Shaw and H. Wells, the "lost" showed a pronounced individualistic skepticism about any manifestations of progressivism. At the same time, the painful comprehension of the “decline of the West”, their own loneliness, as well as the awakened nostalgia for the organic wholeness of the world, led them to persistent searches for a new ideality, which they formulated primarily in terms of artistic mastery. Hence the resonance that Eliot's "Waste Land" received in America. The cruelty and chaos of the world is able to withstand the "rage" of creative effort - this is the subtext of the textbook works of the "lost generation", the common features of which are tragic tonality, interest in the topic of self-knowledge, as well as lyrical tension.

The motives of “being lost” were expressed in different ways in such novels as The Three Soldiers (1921) by J. Dos Passos, The Huge Chamber (1922) by E. E. Cummings, The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. S Fitzgerald, "Soldier's Award" (1926) by W. Faulkner, "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "Farewell to Arms!" (1929) E. Hemingway. These include novels published in Europe, but having great success in the United States: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by E. M. Remarque, The Death of a Hero (1929) by R. Aldington.

Not all of these writers took part in the war (in particular, Fitzgerald, Faulkner), but even for them “being lost” is a more than weighty fact: an indicator of a person's abandonment into a history that has lost its usual contours, and heightened artistic sensitivity.

The cruelty of modernity could not but clothe itself in a metaphor of war. If at the beginning of the 1920s it was interpreted quite specifically, then by the end of the decade it became the personification critical dimension human existence in general. Such a cohesion of the military and post-war experience under a common tragic sign is especially indicative of novels published in 1926-1929, that is, when the events of the past took place as an artistic event and received, in the words of one of his contemporaries, the status of a tragic "alibi ": A person is constantly in a state of" military "actions with a hostile, indifferent world to him, the main attributes of which are the army, bureaucracy, plutocracy. “I grew up with my peers under

The beat of the drums of the First World War, and since then our history has never ceased to be a history of murder, injustice or violence, ”A. Camus later wrote, as if seeing in the American writers of the 1920s the literary predecessors of existentialism. Hemingway speaks most vividly about the protest against the "norms" of civilization in the light of the experience of the Somme and Verdun through the lips of Lieutenant Frederick Henry, central character the novel Farewell to Arms: "Abstract words such as" glory "," feat "," valor "or" shrine "were obscene next to specific village names, road numbers, river names, regiment numbers and dates." ...

Expressing his rejection of the system of values ​​that allowed the slaughter, and the arrogance of a literary vocabulary corresponding to these values, Hemingway deliberately apologizes for a kind of primitiveness and often declares it to himself as anti-romanticism. However, such a characterization should not cast doubt on his "anti-romantic romanticism." This is supported by the historical and literary contexts of his work.

On the one hand, Hemingway, who with equal success created the myth of a hero rejected by society both in his writings and in life, is undoubtedly a figure of Byron's scale and style. On the other hand, the tragic "search for the absolute", which is discussed in Hemingway's work, unfolds not in the "double world" situation characteristic of classical romanticism, but in the post-Nitzsche world of this world.

Cognition through denial, the search for the ideal in disappointment, the illusion of a "nightingale song" through the "wild voice of catastrophes" (Khodasevich) - these are the romantic signs of the "lost generation" worldview that help to understand the creative dependence of 1920s US writers on their elders in England. contemporaries (R. Kipling, J. Conrad). Recognition of the debt to Conrad's ideas of "victory in defeat" and the picturesque style is the leitmotif of the creative aesthetics of not only Hemingway, but also Fitzgerald.

A comparison of the novels of these writers reveals how the controversy unfolded between two influential versions of romantic thought.

Perceived by his contemporaries Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) Became one of the chroniclers of the "Jazz Age", an era immediately preceding the "Great Depression". For almost his entire life, Fitzgerald, who was born in St. Paul (the Catholic capital of the Midwest), retained a childishly naive and partly "carnival" idea of ​​success - that "anything is possible." The motive of wealth is central to Fitzgerald's works, but the writer's attitude to the two most

The symbols of welfare that interest him (femme fatale, nouveau riche) are ambiguous, passed through own experience dreamed of fame as a teenager, hopelessly in love with Ginevra King (a girl from a wealthy Saint Paul family), then young man whose marriage to the southern beauty Zel-doa Sayr was made possible by the sensational success of his first novel, On the Other Side of Paradise (1920), but ultimately did not bring him happiness. By the late 1920s, Zelda developed a mental illness.

In his best works - the novels "The Great Gatsby" (1925), "Tender is the Night" (1934) - Fitzgerald strives to be a Flauberian, but by temperament he is too lyric, too fascinated by the poetry of the material excess of the world. Therefore, the character closest to the writer is himself, Fitzgerald, and the world of the rich is a closely related world to him. This also permeates the meaning of his statement: “We owe our birth to the welfare of society. All the best is created when the rich rule. " Thus was born the romantic relationship that Fitzgerald's Dick Diver established between the writer’s friend, wealthy expatriate Gerald Murphy, and the author of Tender is the Night.

In an attempt to be "not himself" Fitzgerald always suffered defeat in his prose, which greatly outraged Hemingway with his slogan of "the veracity of the letter." He believed that Murphy would never behave like Fitzgerald, and therefore even earlier accused his friend of "cheap Irish falling in love with defeat", of "idiotic leafy romanticism."

However, beauty realized in wealth (ragtime, a sparkling packard with nickel, a fashionable bar) interests Fitzgerald not in itself, but in its fragility. The writer, through the prism of his idea of ​​the variability of success, is too attentive to beauty so as not to notice its duality: mystery, brilliance and fate, curse. The contrasts of beauty as the material of modern tragedy are Fitzgerald's find. His wealth is subject to the law of a kind of Spencer's equilibrium. Dick Diver and Nicole switch places with the same immutability as Hurstwood and Kerry at Dreiser's.

Naturally, Keats's odes touched the innermost strings of the writer's soul. He confessed that he could never read "Ode to the Nightingale" without tears in his eyes, and a line from this poem ("How tender the night!") Was the title of the novel about the tragedy of the Divers couple. In turn, Fitzgerald read Ode to a Greek Vase in terms of an inexorable romantic question - as an attempt to explain the contradiction between reality, fading (transitory) and imperishable (the eternity of beauty and imagination). "You saw, you died!" Fitzgerald might have said, along with the lyrical hero of Keets's ode. Have American writer romantic skepticism about this takes on the image of "the beautiful and damned" (the title of the second novel), "all sad young people."

The collision of statics and dynamics, the experience of life as a fateful destiny in the spirit of Wilde, the intention to see the “I” in the mirror of the “other” - all this makes Fitzgerald's creative method quite complete. “I so would like readers to perceive my new romance as another variation on the theme of illusion (it will, perhaps, be the most important in my serious things), a variation that is much more thoughtful ... in a romantic vein than that constituted the content of "This Side of Paradise", "he wrote in connection with the publication of The Great Gatsby. In the brochure to the novel Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald further emphasizes the romantic accent, calling his protagonist the Idealist and the “Priest”.

Wealth in this perspective suddenly becomes the Fitzgeraddian equivalent of Hemingway's Stoic code. His ambitious, attracted by the opportunity to assert themselves in the "will to possess" - a paradoxical analogy to Hemingway's poor (matadors, gangsters, bartenders, etc.) and an idealless era, always resonate with tragedy.

Comparison of the compositional principles of the story "Heart of Darkness" and "The Great Gatsby" (Nick Carraway performs the same function in Fitzgerald as in Conrad - the figure of Marlowe) helps to understand in what exactly the American writer is similar, and in what strikingly differs from prose writers who weigh , like the English neo-romanticists, to a picturesque display of the world in the context of "here and now." The core of FitzGeradd's best novel is not the factual side of the rather traditional American melodrama - the description of the mysteriously rich Gatsby's attempt to return the past, to link his fate with a woman, an alliance with whom was previously unthinkable due to social and material misalliance. The themes of self-knowledge and history, primarily associated with the fate of Nick Carraway, turn the novel from a vaudeville into a tragedy.

Nick is not only a storyteller who collects information about his mysterious friend Gatsby, but also a writer who gradually begins to compose an autobiographical work, in which Gatsby is the most reliable reference, or, in accordance with the dictionary of H. James, "point of view." The Carraway line (testing one's own outlook on life, one's honesty, as well as adherence to the traditionalist system of values ​​of the Midwest) develops in parallel with the Gatsby line, the collisions of which

Roy reveals an insoluble contradiction between the platonic dream - in following it, Gatsby is truly uncommon, "great" - and grossly materialistic, "great", perhaps in a purely ironic sense, means of achieving it.

Thanks to this parallelism, it turns out that Nick is the only character in the novel whose character and views change in the course of the action. The cognitive quality of The Great Gatsby is, as it were, the lyrical ferment of this novel. Romantic dissatisfaction with the search for Eldorado, the fatal belatedness and disappointment of self-determination betrays in Fitz Gerald not so much a student of Conrad as a continuer of the tradition of G. James. It is the ability to deep understanding that ultimately makes Nick not an inquisitive "naturalist" (like the butterfly gatherer Stein from Conrad's novel "Lord Jim"), but "the last Puritan."

Carraway's path - from toughness to flexibility, from overly categorical judgments in the spirit of James Winterbourne to obscure regrets and warmth... He becomes an unwitting witness to the vulgarization of both the platonic principle in man and his striving for the ideal, and the magic of wealth, this only kind of "religion" that a society of abundance is capable of. Fitzgeradd's "Novel of Education" is subtly related to the theme of America by Fitzgeradd.

Gatsby's "guilt" is a common, ancestral guilt of all Americans who have lost the childishness and purity that were generally characteristic of the first New England settlers. On last pages In the novel, the true face of the "dream" is represented by the narrator's recollections of celebrating Christmas in the snowy depths of America. Carraway, Gatsby, and Daisy are all "prodigal children" of the Midwest, lost in Northeast Babylon.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Studied writing with approximately the same literary mentors as Fitzgerald. In his work, he touched on about the same problems that his friend-rival also touched upon, but gave them a radically different reading. Accusing Fitzgerald of falling in love with rock and creative indiscipline, as well as declaring his dislike for everything sublimely "romantic", Hemingway created the concept of a fundamentally "non-book" style. The Fitzgerald / Hemingway antithesis allows us to recall the situation in English literature at the turn of the century. The change of the hero - Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite artist for a soldier of the colonial army at Kipling's - spoke of a decrease in interest in the relatively traditional type of romantic personality and attention to the symbolism of the practically formulated question "how to live?" This new mood is succinctly reflected in Kipling's poem "The Queen" (1896): "Romance, goodbye forever!"

Thematically, Hemingway owes a lot to Konrad. In both writers, the character is abandoned, as Hemingway says, in "another country" - placed, regardless of his will, in conditions where a person is tested for strength on the stage of a certain cosmic theater (depths of Africa, civil war in Latin America, typhoon; bullfighting arena, Latin Quarter in Paris, civil war in Spain), but collides primarily in a duel with himself.

“Victory in defeat,” according to Konrad and Hemingway, is a stoic adherence to a personally formulated concept of honor, which, by and large, cannot bring any practical advantages in a world that has lost the coordinates of universally meaningful meaning. A comparison of the works of Konrad and Hemingway indicates that the American prose writer was much more consistent than his predecessor on the idea of ​​a style that would convey the idea of ​​the cruelty of the world not directly, but in a symbolist suggestive way. Hemingway, emotionally, knew deeply what he was writing about.

In 1917, without passing the military commission, he went to Italy, was a driver of an ambulance on the Italian-Austrian front, and was seriously wounded. After the end of the war, Hemingway briefly served as Toronto Star's correspondent in the Middle East. He spent the 1920s mainly in Paris among the artistic bohemians (G. Stein, J. Joyce, E. Pound) and purposefully studied the art of prose. The writer suffered extremely hard from his father's suicide.

The theme of war forms the nerve of Hemingway's first books of short stories "In Our Time" (1925), "Men Without Women" (1927). The composition of the book "In Our Time" indicates a clear acquaintance of its author with "Winesburg, Ohio" by S. Anderson. However, the line of the "parenting romance" was drawn by Hemingway much more decisively than by his mentor. The main discovery made by Nick Adams and young men like him, who returned from the German war to the provincial quiet of America (Krebs in the story "Home"), is the discovery that the war never ends for those who have visited it. The most famous Hemingway novellas ("Cat in the Rain", "On the Big River", "White Elephants") are based on the same effect: the main thing in them from an emotional point of view is not spoken out; this core of content sometimes contradicts the impressionistic description of current events, sometimes corresponds to it. The presence of "double vision" is ironically reflected in the title "In Our Time", which consists of a fragment of the prayer for "the peace of the whole world." The main lesson of Nick Adams's upbringing comes down to the fact that the fragility of being and human cruelty, inherent in "our time", blur the line between "war" and "peace."

Hemingway liked to compare the principles of expressiveness of the text with an iceberg, only one-eighth towering above the surface of the water: with the real knowledge of the writer of his topic, almost any fragment of the narrative can be omitted without prejudice to the overall emotional impact. Hemingway's illusionism is largely based on the idea of ​​abandoning "rhetoric", once proclaimed by the French symbolist poets. The writer prefers not to describe, but to name; he does not so much recreate reality as describes the conditions of its existence. The basis of such a description is made up of verbs of movement, nouns, remarks of the same type, and the repeated use of the conjunctive conjunction "and". Hemingway creates, as it were, a scheme of perception of elementary stimuli (heat of the sun, cold water, taste of wine, etc.), which only in the reader's mind become a full-fledged fact of sensory experience. The writer's enthusiasm for this Cézanne and other post-impressionists is natural.

As you know, the mature Cezanne strove to create canvases that would reveal in a somewhat exaggerated flatness not the impressionistic fluidity of life, but its “structures” not subject to change. Cezanne's art space (for example, "The Bridge over the Creteil River") - a little heavy, almost deliberately compressed - is in motionless rest. This impression is not created thematically. The natural colors of nature (green, yellow, blue), as if drawing the volume with a strict pattern, "stop the moment" - they begin to symbolize the Form, a kind of light heavy thingness, but not ephemeral, but self-contained, coldish-shiny, crystal, Cezanne's special thingness , which he himself put on the formula “nature-in-depth”, turned out to be close to the creative intentions of the American prose writer: “Cezanne's painting taught me that real simple phrases are not enough to give the story the volume and depth that I was trying to achieve. I learned a lot from him, but I could not clearly explain what exactly ”. It seems important for Hemingway and another imperative of Cezanne: "Impressionism should be given something ... museum."

Like Verdun's handwriting, Hemingway's style is sparse. To some extent, this is achieved due to the fact that Hemingway's characters do not seem to have a soul. Their consciousness is presented decoratively, dissolving in the "patterns" of the outside world (bar, city under the Rain, grid of Parisian streets). The stringing of facts, collecting them into a "landscape" is subordinated to a rather rigid logic, which indicates the limited pleasure (the bar must be closed, the pernod is drunk, and the trip to the mountains is over), which informs Hemingway's somewhat monotonous, monochrome naturalization of the inner world of a tragic character. Brightness of colors, tangibility of forms ("Apollonian") are the reverse side of "nothing" ("Dionysian" beginning), which has no outlines - which can only be presented in a reflected form and forms a kind of black lining for the pattern of words-pebbles.

In the suggestive description of death, in the recreation of the silhouette of the phenomenon against the background of the "black square" - one of the catchy features of Hemingway's primitivism as the style of modern tragedy.

In essence, in the interpretation of "nothing", Hemingway acts as a writer "by contradiction", in a parodic aspect, approaches Christian problems. This did not escape the attention of J. Joyce: "Whether Hemingway shoots me or not, I would venture to say ... that I have always considered him a deeply religious person." Also, the famous American critic M. Cowley emphasized in the preface to the first edition of Hemingway's "The Chosen" (1942) that his contemporary gives in the novel "The Sun Also Rises" an interpretation of the same problem that occupied TS Eliot in "The Waste Land." ...

The Hemingway equivalent of "Quest for the Grail" (the theme song of The Waste Land) is paradoxical. Methods for overcoming the "erosion of contours" and "illness" (this is also the theme of "The Magic Mountain" by T. Mann) are deliberately given by the American writer in a series of reduced, "everyday": the professional training of a matador or a reporter, relations between a man and a woman, etc. - in a number of facts, the right to real, and not "bookish" knowledge of which, according to the logic of Hemingway's work, is capable of providing only one thing: the experience of death as the main destiny of human existence, as a religious phenomenon.

The Sun Also Rises is a novel about the search for the absolute meaning. This is indicated by two arguing epigraphs. The author of one is G. Stein, the other is represented by a verse from Ecclesiastes about the eternally setting and rising sun.

Jake Barnes, the novel's narrator and protagonist, is a principled "anti-romance". During the war, he was severely mutilated - Barnes was emasculated by "weapons". He tragically longs for love, which he is unable to share with a woman close to him. Striving for sobriety and fearing self-deception, Barnes tries to control his emotions as tightly as possible. Against the background of the stoic code of his behavior, which is consistently characterized in the novel for granted, the position that is perceived as "improper", "romantic" gradually becomes outlined.

Falsity, posture, verbosity in the novel is represented by Robert Cohn. The subject of the application of the right and wrong is the fateful lady Bret Ashley, and the scene of the collision is the "other country" of the Spanish fiesta. The height of Cohn's romanticism in Barnes's assessment is manifested in a tendency to self-dramatization, in dreams of fatal love. Cohn's unattractive features for Barnes are underlined by his inability to be ironic and observe the lifestyle of American expatriates in Paris in the 1920s: if a woman leaves a man, then it is not serious to demand an explanation; if you carry on the conversation, then certainly with restraint, in the language of taxi drivers or jockeys, etc. The right of Jake and his friends to a special code of conduct has been achieved through suffering. Unlike Cohn, who has never faced serious life trials, they are crippled by the war, which to some extent saves them from the "holiday" of free life in its purely bourgeois version.

The tragic tone of the story is not concealed even in the second, seemingly pastoral part of the novel, which tells about Barnes' trip with his friend Bill Gorton on a fishing trip in the Spanish mountains. It is impossible not to notice that for Jake, it is not so much the serenity of nature that is important as the participation of a person in it - an initiate, an expert who enjoys being in the mountains not "naturally", but according to a system of rules. Therefore, it is not the beauty of the streams, but the presence of a friend close to Barnes that bestows a temporary - carefully calculated by the hour and minute, the amount of eaten and drunk - once or twice a year, overcoming loneliness.

Jake would have been able to become happy in Paris if he had always been near his desperately beloved Bret. His special sense of the aesthetic is able to extract the same pure pleasure from dining in a restaurant as from fishing: the point is not in the influence of the environment - the environment does not have a decisive influence on the individualistic consciousness, although a person is biologically inseparable from it and suffers from his biological “inferiority” ", - but in a purely personal solution of the question (" I don't care what the world is. All I want to know is how to live in it ") about the" art of living ".

The beauty of nature in Burguete is somewhat outdated, too serene, hardly capable of satisfying to the end a person who has been on the front line and faced there with the "riot" of nature, with the elements, the quintessence of which is "nothing". That is why the main value reference of the novel is the reality of art, not nature - the aesthetic principles of bullfighting. Bullfighting is the central symbol of the novel, it combines tradition, canon (absolute purity of reception) and innovation. The matador is constantly obliged to invent new moves, otherwise his duel will only begin to imitate danger (the story of the matador Belmonte).

The intensity of this ritualized action to the smallest detail is given by the proximity of death. The matador is fighting in the "bull zone". Should he for a moment deviate from the rules of the performance - to allow the doomed animal to "charm", hypnotize itself - and death cannot be avoided. Thus, the bullfight and the code of conduct of the matador symbolize in the novel all the main facets of overcoming the loss.

In this perspective, the brilliant matador Romero is not at all folk hero, but the hero of art, the narrator seeks to comprehend the principles of which the narrator is striving for and which is initially inaccessible to Cohn, who is bored both in the mountains in the bosom of nature, and in a duel, but runs endlessly to the hairdresser's. Varna clearly brings into his perception of bullfighting something that ordinary Spaniards, lovers of the subtleties of bullfighting, hardly understand.

Jake considers himself a mystic in light of his close encounter with death in war. Unlike the frontline, death in the stadium arena is confined within the framework of the “theater”, where the absurd cruelty of life is denied by the system of rules and is conventionally conquered by art. It is important to note that bullfighting for the inhabitants of Pamplona is not valuable in itself, but is part of seven-day Catholic holiday. The narrator, on the other hand, is only interested in the "carnival" aspects of the festive events. In other words, the narrator intends to distinguish in what is happening not the traditional (the rite of a church holiday, which Barnes partly associates with public hypocrisy), but the non-traditional - a situation of revaluation of values. Bringing bullfighting to a religious model becomes evident in the novel when it comes to Christianity, which is attractive to Barnes primarily as a "form" filled with purely personal content.

The Spanish experience, therefore, hardly changed anything in the life of the narrator. Being at the “feast in feast” (of which Bret Ashley is the priestess) only rooted him in the “art” of suffering. Barnes's Stoic Code is being tested once again in an increasingly brutal "love-torment." Having donated Bret Ashley to the matador Romeo in accordance with the artistic spirit of Dionysian-carnival fun, Varna cannot but realize that he is able to gain, only constantly losing tragically. Accordingly, Bret Ashley sacrifices his passion for the "master of beauty" for the sake of "cruel" love for Jake Barnes. The final lines of the novel (Varna and Ashley, who have met again, are circling in the car around the square) hint at the "eternal return" - the inexhaustible suffering of physical existence, on the depth of awareness of which the shoots of the beauty of despair depend.

Barnes's “choice” is undoubtedly a free choice according to existentialist concepts, whose “hopeless” optimism anticipates the concept of action that was philosophically and aesthetically justified in France only at the turn of the 1930s-1940s. Far from arbitrary J.-P. Sartre (the refusal of love in the ending of Nausea and the figure of the Self-Taught Man make it possible to recall the final chapters of The Sun Also Rises and the figure of Cohn), analyzing Camus's The Outsider, considered it possible to name Hemingway among the predecessors of his fellow writer.

The novel "Farewell to Arms!" can be considered a prologue to the situation that is deduced in "The Sun Also Rises." And in this work, Hemingway used a quote in the title of his book. It is taken from a poem by an English playwright and poet of the late 16th century. George Peel, written on the occasion of the retirement of the illustrious warrior. Hemingway's irony is obvious: in his novel, it is not the glory of arms that is shown, but a tragic defeat. What kind of "weapon" are we talking about? First of all, about the romantic idea of ​​war associated with the figure of Napoleon, the war of planned offensives and waste, with the solemn surrender of cities, consecrated by the ritual - in a word, about the idea, the content of which was brilliantly played out by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. The illogical, cruel absurdity of the modern massacre (shooting at Caporeto) destroys Lieutenant Frederick Henry's illusion of duty in relation to the military and social relations, allowing the triumph of chaos, but at the same time sanctified by loud, but insignificant slogans about "heroism".

As conceived by the author, "Farewell to arms!" is not an anti-militarist novel like "Fire" by A. Barbusse. Lieutenant Henry is not against war as such - in his view, war is the courageous craft of a real man. However, as Hemingway shows, this ritual completely loses its general meaning amid battles that are murderously illogical and played by people like puppets. The front line in this "new" war, where in fact there are neither friends nor foes (the Austrians are practically not personified in the novel), is purely conditional. The discovery of this dimension of war takes place both under the influence of injury and as a result of the lieutenant's conversations with ordinary people, who, as often happens with Hemingway, are experts on the most reliable truths ("War cannot be won by victories"). It gives Frederick nothing but a lesson in self-knowledge: war becomes an undeniable, existential event in his inner world. Of course, it is no longer possible to defect from this war, which once again underlines the ironic ambiguity of the novel's title.

As war begins to be identified with the absolute cruelty of the world, love is brought to the forefront of the narrative, which was previously considered a biological trap for a real man, in contrast to the "glorious deeds of war". Rinaldi, Frederick's friend, for example, has syphilis. As a result of the development of the theme of love, the novel could rightfully be called Farewell, Love! That is, goodbye to "romantic", sublime love, as impossible in the modern world as a romantic war. Frederick and Catherine are aware of this when they discuss how an impersonal war machine ("they") kills the most worthy. Without building any illusions about their future, Hemingway's heroes are doomed, as in The Sun Also Rises, to love-torment, love-loss.

The scenery changes, the gloomy mountain (towering over the front line) and the storm give way to the sun-drenched Switzerland, but this does not eliminate the tragic pattern: Catherine dies while fulfilling an exclusively peaceful duty, in childbirth. Following the drama of rock turns Hemingway's characters into seekers of revelation, the essence of which they can only define "by contradiction." “Losing - I gain” - this paradox, traditional for the works of the American writer, indicates Hemingway's intention to make sense of the absence of meaning: the more bitter the defeat, the more insistently a person's desire to assert his dignity at all costs.

Hemingway's best writings are about metaphysical hunger. In the first two novels, this topic is placed in the context of the problems of art and love. In For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the traditional Hemingway maverick is put to the test of politics.

Hemingway's book on Spain, perhaps, is not so perfect from a creative point of view (there are elements of self-repetition in it), but this is compensated by the capacity of its generalizations. If the characters of early Hemingway felt the impossibility of escaping the glamor of war even in a peaceful life, then the heroes of The Bell would probably agree with the words of TS Eliot from his essay about Milton: “The civil war never ends ...” As an eyewitness to the Spanish events, Hemingway considered it possible to put an epigraph to the novel, a fragment from the sermon of John Donne, similar in content to the Eliot formula. "... I am one with all Humanity, and therefore never ask for whom the Bell tolls: it tolls for You" - in this statement of the poet Hemingway found confirmation of his observations about the Spanish Civil War: the human in a person is more important than his political affiliation. The writer seemed to have foreseen the criticism of Soviet propaganda for the impartial portrayal of the Spanish communists and the leaders of the International Brigades in the novel, when through the lips of his character, the Soviet journalist Karkov (his prototype was M. Koltsov), he accused Robert Jordan of "weak political development." In the 1960s, D. Ibarruri sent a special letter to the Politburo of the CPSU, where she spoke about the undesirability of publishing Hemingway's novel in the USSR. As a result, Russian readers still by inertia get acquainted with the translation, which is full of censorship gaps.

The depth of The Bell is that it is a novel that is both anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian. Anti-fascism in him, first of all, is not a political position, but a manifestation of personal courage and a category of personal freedom. The contrast between Francoists and Republicans Hemingway makes it conventional at times: both are distinguished by their cruelty. The writer is familiar enough with the stoic courage of ordinary people (El Sordo, Anselmo) who fight like plowing the land and kill, hating murder, demagogy, cowardice, propaganda falsehood. The attentive reader cannot ignore the double paradox of the final pages of the narrative. From the standpoint of military strategy, the death of Jordan - he alone covers the retreat of the partisans - does not make much sense, but, as in similar novels by A. Malraux ("The Lot of Man"), which are dedicated to the "strange" civil wars, the hero wins when he refuses any form of "greed" and sacrifices himself for the sake of others. But at the bridge two differently worthy people must die: both the "Republican" Jordan, and the first who, by tragic irony, falls into the sight of his machine gun, the royalist lieutenant Berrendo.

The central theme of the novel, as the author saw it, should therefore be formulated as a person's knowledge of himself in spite of society, which offers him only the semblance of a solution to the problem of freedom. In the "Bell" it comes in fact, about two wars: the war of ideologies (on the plain) and the partisan war (in the mountains). It is the double sacrifice - the "high" test of death, as well as the love of a Spanish girl, that shows the price of true courage, allows the American intellectual dreamer, who came to Spain as a volunteer, to get away from the beautiful ("bookish") idealism and assert himself, as Malraux would say, in the idealism of "anti-destiny". Hemingway was not alone in his artistic vision of Spanish events. Somewhat similar accents are characteristic of the work of J. Orwell ("A Tribute to Catalonia", 1938), poetry of W. H. Auden at the turn of the 1930-1940s.

Hemingway's post-war work (the novel Beyond the River, in the Shade of the Trees, 1950; the story The Old Man and the Sea, 1952) is inferior in level to his works of the 1920s and 1930s. However, this circumstance could no longer change Hemingway's reputation ( Nobel Prize 1954) as one of the main creators of the artistic mythology of modern individualism.

The creative experiment begun by Parisian expatriates, pre-war modernists Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, was continued by young prose writers and poets who came to American literature in the 1920s and subsequently brought it worldwide fame. Throughout the twentieth century, their names have been firmly associated in the minds of foreign readers with the idea of ​​US literature in general. These are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder and others, mostly modernist writers.

At the same time, modernism in the American U-turn differs from the European one in its more obvious involvement in the social and political events of the era: the shock military experience of most authors could not be silenced or bypassed, it demanded artistic embodiment. This invariably misled Soviet scholars, who denounced these writers as "critical realists." American critics have labeled them as "lost generation".

The very definition of "lost generation" was casually dropped by G. Stein in a conversation with her chauffeur. She said: "You are all a lost generation, all young people who have been in the war. You have no respect for anything. You all get drunk." This saying was accidentally heard by E. Hemingway and put into use by him. He put the words "All of you is a lost generation" as one of two epigraphs to his first novel "The Sun Also Rises" ("Fiesta", 1926). Over time, this definition, precise and capacious, acquired the status of a literary term.

What are the origins of the "lost" of an entire generation? The First World War was a test for all mankind. You can imagine what she became for boys full of optimism, hope and patriotic illusions. In addition to the fact that they directly fell into the "meat grinder", as this war was called, their biography began immediately from the climax, from the maximum overstrain of mental and physical forces, from the hardest test, for which they were absolutely unprepared. Of course it was a breakdown. The war forever knocked them out of their usual rut, determined the warehouse of their worldview - an acutely tragic one. A vivid illustration of this is the beginning of the poem by expatriate Thomas Sterns Eliot (1888-1965) "Ash Wednesday" (1930).

Other programmed poetic works of the "lost generation" - T. Eliot's poems "The Barren Land" (1922) and "Hollow People" (1925) are characterized by the same feeling of emptiness and hopelessness and the same stylistic virtuosity.

However, Gertrude Stein, who argued that the "lost" had no respect for "nothing," turned out to be too categorical in her judgments. Over the years, the rich experience of suffering, death and overcoming not only made this generation very persistent (none of the writing fraternity "got drunk" as it was predicted to them), but also taught them to accurately distinguish and highly respect the intrinsic values ​​of life: communication with nature , love for a woman, male friendship and creativity.

The writers of the "lost generation" never constituted any literary group and did not have a single theoretical platform, but the common destinies and impressions formed their similar life positions: disillusionment with social ideals, the search for enduring values, stoic individualism. Coupled with the same, sharply tragic outlook, this determined the presence in prose of "lost" a number of common features, obvious, despite the diversity of individual artistic handwritings of individual authors.

The commonality is manifested in everything, from the subject matter to the form of their works. The main themes of the writers of this generation are war, everyday life at the front (A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Hemingway, The Three Soldiers (1921) by Dos Passos, the collection of stories These Thirteen (1926) by Faulkner, etc.) and post-war reality - the century jazz "(" The Sun Also Rises "(1926) by Hemingway," Soldier's Award "(1926) and" Mosquitoes "(1927) by Faulkner, novels" Beautiful but Doomed "(1922) and" The Great Gatsby "(1925), short stories Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and All Sad Young Men (1926) by Scott Fitzgerald).

Both themes in the work of the "lost" are interconnected, and this connection has a causal nature. The "war" works show the origins of the lost generation: front-line episodes are presented by all authors harshly and unadorned - contrary to the tendency to romanticize the First World War in official literature. In works about the "world after the war," the consequences are shown - the convulsive fun of the "jazz age", reminiscent of a dance on the edge of an abyss or a feast during a plague. This is a world of war-crippled destinies and broken human relationships.

The problematic that occupies the "lost" gravitates towards the original mythological oppositions of human thinking: war and peace, life and death, love and death. It is symptomatic that death (and war as its synonym) certainly appears as one of the elements of these oppositions. It is also symptomatic that these issues are resolved by the "lost" not in the mythopoetic and not in the abstract philosophical plane, but extremely concretely and, to a greater or lesser extent, socially definite.

All the heroes of "war" fictions feel that they have been fooled and then betrayed. The lieutenant of the Italian army, the American Frederick Henry ("Farewell to arms!" By E. Hemingway), says bluntly that he no longer believes in loud phrases about "glory", "sacred duty" and "greatness of the nation." All the heroes of the writers of the "lost generation" are losing faith in a society that has sacrificed their children to "mercenary calculations" and demonstratively break with it. Concludes a "separate peace" (that is, deserts from the army) Lieutenant Henry, plunging headlong into drinking, revelry and intimate experiences Jacob Barnes ("The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway), Jay Gatsby ("The Great Gatsby" Fitzgerald) and "all the sad young the people of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other Lost Generation prose writers.

What do the heroes of their works, who survived the war, see the meaning of being? In life itself as it is, in the life of each individual person, and, above all, in love. It is love that takes the leading place in the system of their values. Love, understood as a perfect, harmonious union with a woman, is both creativity, and partnership (human warmth is near), and a natural principle. This is the concentrated joy of being, a kind of quintessence of everything that is worthwhile in life, the quintessence of life itself. Besides, love is the most individual, the most personal, the only experience that belongs to you, which is very important for the "lost". In fact, the dominant idea of ​​their works is the idea of ​​the undivided domination of the private world.

All the heroes of the "lost" are building their own, alternative world, where there should be no place for "mercenary calculations", political ambitions, wars and deaths, all that madness that is happening around. "I am not made to fight. I am made to eat, drink and sleep with Catherine," says Frederick Henry. This is the credo of all the "lost". They, however, themselves feel the fragility and vulnerability of their position. It is impossible to completely isolate oneself from a large hostile world: it invades their lives every now and then. It is no coincidence that love in the works of the writers of the "lost generation" is welded to death: it is almost always suppressed by death. Catherine, Frederick Henry's beloved ("Farewell to Arms!") Dies, the accidental death of an unknown woman leads to the death of Jay Gatsby ("The Great Gatsby"), and so on.

Not only the death of the hero on the front line, but also the death of Catherine from childbirth, and the death of a woman under the wheels of a car in The Great Gatsby, and the death of Jay Gatsby himself, at first glance, having nothing to do with the war, are firmly connected with her. These untimely and senseless deaths appear in the novels "lost" as a kind of artistic expression of the thought about the unreasonableness and cruelty of the world, about the impossibility of leaving it, about the fragility of happiness. And this thought, in turn, is a direct consequence of the military experience of the authors, their mental breakdown, their trauma. Death for them is a synonym for war, and both of them - war and death - appear in their works as a kind of apocalyptic metaphor of the modern world. The world of the works of young writers of the twenties is a world cut off by the First World War from the past, changed, gloomy, doomed.

The prose of the "lost generation" is characterized by unmistakable poetics. This is lyrical prose, where the facts of reality are passed through the prism of the perception of a confused hero who is very close to the author. It is no coincidence that the favorite form of the "lost" is first-person narration, which, instead of an epic detailed description of events, involves an agitated, emotional response to them.

The prose of the "lost" is centripetal: it does not unfold human destinies in time and space, on the contrary, it thickens, condenses the action. It is characterized by a short time period, as a rule, a crisis in the fate of the hero; it can also include memories of the past, due to which there is an expansion of themes and clarification of circumstances, which distinguishes the works of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. The leading compositional principle of American prose of the twenties is the principle of "compressed time", the discovery of the English writer James Joyce, one of the three "whales" of European modernism (along with M. Proust and F. Kafka).

It is impossible not to notice a certain similarity in the plot solutions of the works of the writers of the "lost generation". Among the most frequently recurring motifs (elementary plot units) are the short-term but complete happiness of love ("Farewell to Arms!" gentle "Fitzgerald," Soldier's Award "Faulkner," The Sun Also Rises "by Hemingway), the absurd and untimely death of one of the heroes (" The Great Gatsby "," Farewell to Arms! ").

All these motives were later replicated by the "lost" themselves (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), and most importantly - by their imitators, who did not smell gunpowder and did not live at the turn of the era. As a result, they are sometimes perceived as a kind of cliché. However, similar plot decisions were prompted by the writers of the "lost generation" by life itself: at the front, they saw a senseless and untimely death every day, they themselves painfully felt the absence of solid ground under their feet in the post-war period, and they, like no one else, knew how to be happy, but their happiness is often was fleeting, because the war divorced people and ruined destinies. And the heightened sense of the tragic and artistic flair characteristic of the "lost generation" dictated their appeal to the extreme situations of human life.

The style of the "lost" is also recognizable. Their typical prose is an outwardly impartial account with deep lyrical overtones. The works of E. Hemingway are especially distinguished by extreme laconicism, sometimes lapidary phrases, simplicity of vocabulary and tremendous restraint of emotions. Even love scenes are laconically and almost dryly resolved in his novels, which deliberately excludes any falsity in the relationship between the heroes and, ultimately, has an exceptionally strong effect on the reader.

Most of the writers of the "lost generation" were destined to have years, and some (Hemingway, Faulkner, Wilder) and decades of creativity, but only Faulkner managed to break out of the circle of topics, problems, poetics and stylistics, certain in the 20s, from the magic circle of aching sadness and the doom of the "lost generation". The community of the "lost", their spiritual brotherhood, mixed with young hot blood, turned out to be stronger than the thoughtful calculations of various literary groups, which disintegrated, leaving no trace in the work of their participants.

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

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

In the European and American literature of the 1920s and 1930s, the tragedy of the "lost generation" - young people who passed through the trenches of Verdun and the Somme - became one of the central themes of the work of a number of authors (it is especially worth noting 1929, when the books of frontline writers Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Aldington).

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

Erich Maria Remarque

The famous novel by Remarque, which became one of the most popular works German literature of the XX century. All Quiet on the Western Front sold millions of copies around the world, and the writer himself was even nominated for the Nobel Prize.

This is a story about boys whose lives were broken (or rather swept away) by the war. Yesterday they were ordinary schoolchildren, but today they are warriors of imperial Germany, doomed to death, who were thrown into the meat grinder of total war: dirty trenches, rats, lice, many hours of shelling, gas attacks, wounds, death, death and death again ... They are killed and maimed, they themselves have to kill. They live in hell, and reports from the front line again and again dryly read: "All quiet on the Western Front."

We distinguish skewed faces, flat helmets. These are the French. They got to the remnants of the barbed wire and already suffered noticeable losses. One of their chains is beveled by a machine gun standing next to us; then he starts to give delays in loading, and the French come closer. I see one of them fall into the slingshot, face lifted high. The torso sinks down, his hands assume such a position as if he was about to pray. Then the body falls off completely, and only the arms torn off to the elbow hang on the wire.

Ernest Hemingway

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

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

He was lying with his feet to me, and in short flashes of light I could see that both of his legs were shattered above the knees. One was torn off completely, and the other was hanging on the tendons and rags of the trouser leg, and the stump writhed and twitched, as if by itself. He bit his hand and moaned: "Oh mamma mia, mamma mia!"

Death of a hero. Richard Aldington

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

In the words of Aldington himself: "This book is a funeral lamentation, a monument, perhaps unskilful, to a generation that fervently hoped, fought honestly and suffered deeply."

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

Fire. Henri Barbusse

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

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

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

Three soldiers. John Dos Passos

Like Ernest Hemingway, during the First World War, John Dos Passos served as a volunteer in the medical unit stationed in Italy. Published shortly after the end of the conflict, in 1921, Three Soldiers was one of the first works about the “lost generation”. Unlike other books included in this collection, in this novel, the first place comes not a description of military operations and front-line everyday life, but a story about how a ruthless war machine destroys a person's individuality.

Damn her, that damn infantry! I'm ready for anything to get out of it. What kind of life is it for a man when he is treated like a Negro?
- Yes, for a person this is not life ...