(Samuel Beckett, 1906-1990)
We owe to Samuel Beckett perhaps the most impressive and most original dramatic works of our time.
Peter Brook
Samuel Beckett - Franco-Irish writer, playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1969). He wrote in English and French, he himself translated his plays from English into French. Beckett was born in Foxrock, County Dublin on April 13, 1906 to a Protestant middle-class family. In 1917 he entered the Portora Royal School. There he began to learn French. In 1923, at the age of 17, Beckett entered Trinty College, where he continued to study foreign languages, as well as literature, which he calls his first "passion", with preference given to French literature. He reads Pascal, Helinx, Vico, Schopenhauer. The ideas of these philosophers had a great influence on the formation of Beckett's spiritual world and subsequently found reflection in his work. In 1927, in the last semester before graduating from college, he met a Frenchman, Alfred Puron, who almost immediately became his friend. In 1928 (1929) Beckett went to Paris to lecture in English. There he began to drink, and the problem with alcohol, which greatly undermined his already poor health, remained with him for the rest of his life. In the same year he met James Joyce, his compatriot. Joyce's influence on Beckett's early work is undeniable. Beckett was greatly impressed by Joyce's "Ulysses", he was attracted by the artistic experiment carried out in this novel - the "stream of consciousness" method. In Paris, for about two years, Beckett was Joyce's secretary. However, Beckett, like, indeed, Joyce himself, had too independent a character to be under someone's influence for a long time, he soon begins to search for his own independent path in literature, breaks up with Joyce and returns to Dublin. Back in Dublin, Beckett began lecturing at Trinty College and writing short stories.
In 1929, Beckett's first significant work was published - a critical study of "Dante ... Bruno, Vico ... Joyce", in which the attraction to ontological issues characteristic of all Beckett's work was manifested. "Individuality is the concretization of universality, and every individual action is at the same time supra-individual," Beckett writes of Vico's philosophical system. The idea of the indissolubility of the individual and the universal (“the individual as universal”) becomes an element of Beckett’s own worldview; in his work, human experience is presented in the most universal form.
Hell (evil) - Paradise (good), both are static. Earth - Purgatory, i.e. movement that results from the union, the interaction of good and evil. In a real earthly existence, good and evil are inseparable.
1930 - Beckett's first independent book - the poem "Bloodoscope".
1931 essay "Proust". Beckett dreams of an "ideal real", and he finds an example of its realization in Proust. In the cycle “In Search of Lost Time”, Proust organically combined the ideal, spiritual and physical, material through memory, i.e. he connected real being in its momentary manifestation with the past, which exists only in consciousness and has thus become already ideal. In each of his phrases, Proust restores the integrity of the "I" - this is "I", as it exists at a given moment in time, and its essence lost in the course of time.
After several operations and the death of his father in June 1933, Beckett, fleeing depression, left for London in December of the same year to consult with psychoanalysts, since their practice in Dublin was banned. In 1934-36. Beckett is intensively studying German and even tries to write short stories in it.
1934 - Sat. short stories (novel) “More pricks than kicks”, another translation is “More barking than biting”. The stories are united by the figure of the central character Belacqua Shua. The name of the anti-hero is taken from the Divine Comedy (Fourth Canto of Purgatory) by Dante, who placed the Florentine Belacqua, who in earthly life was engaged in the manufacture of parts for musical stringed instruments, like a lazy person in purgatory. These are the "anti-history" of the "anti-hero". Beckett's Belacqua is even lazier than Dante's hero of the same name. He is a real anti-hero - any action is alien to him, he desperately fights for his niche in life, where he can comfortably exist for the prescribed period, and crawls out of it only for the sake of another marriage. With this flight from people and events, Belacqua Shua affirms the “right of a person to solitude”, but not just to solitude, but to lazily stay in himself: he runs away from familiar intellectuals, from girlfriends, brides and wives. All the other heroes of the novel are only engaged in chasing him "without sleep and rest." Both in flight and in pursuit, Beckett's characters reach the point of absurdity. Belacqua does not act, he "barks" at those who try to violate his "privacy". However, “it barks more than it bites.” Action is replaced by intellectual games.
Already in this early text, features inherent in Beckett's style appeared:
literary reminiscences (influenced by Joyce) and a synthesis of high and low culture tendencies. For example, Beckett uses various forms of the comic: from naive folk-style jokes to an ironic play with literary reminiscences and allusions (a parody of classical-romantic European literature of the 18th-19th centuries). He also introduces the "text within the text" technique, for example, his Belacqua reads the Second Ode of Dante's "Paradise";
undeveloped (rudimentary) plot, because there are no conflicts and conflicts in the work. The unity of the text is formed due to the consistent connection of small everyday episodes, as well as the unity of place and time;
fragmentation, which is directly related to the theme of human loneliness and isolation. The hero, or rather the "anti-hero", of Beckett is always lonely and aloof;
the unity of context in Beckett's works gives rise to numerous echoes between his works, reminiscences, repetitions, which form an intertextual space and create the effect of a single text, in relation to which individual works seem to be parts or variants;
versatility. Beckett conveys the experience of man XX in a universally generalized form.
In 1938, the novel "Murphy" was written, which on the whole still has a traditional form. The hero of this novel is trying to withdraw into himself and live in a world of pure consciousness, he is alienated and withdrawn. Murphy's escape from life is only possible thanks to an accident, as a result of which he literally passes away. Dylan Thomas on Murphy: "The Ostrich-Individual in the Desert of Mass Production". Beckett could not find a publisher who would agree to publish the novel for a long time. The publishers did not like the amorphous character of the hero and the structure of the novel, they demanded to redo all this. As a result, the novel was published with the help of Beckett's friends.
Difficulties with the publication of the novel only strengthened Beckett's decision to leave Ireland forever, along with its intolerance for artistic experiments and the dictates of the church. Since 1938, Beckett has been living permanently in France, in Paris. In early 1938, he met Suzanne Deschevaux-Dusmesnil, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. Samuel and Suzanne officially registered their relationship only in 1961, but the marriage ceremony was held in the strictest confidence. They say that Beckett, shortly before his death, went to a nursing home so as not to burden his wife with himself, and then every day he ran to her on a date.
During the war in occupied France, Beckett takes part in the resistance movement (he is a member of the group "The Gloria SMH") and miraculously escapes arrest in 1942. His friend, Alfred Puron, did not succeed, and he died in a concentration camp on May 1, 1945 After the failure of the group, Beckett is forced to hide in Roussillon, and he knows firsthand the feeling of fear, hopelessness, a state of forced inaction. The tragic experience of the world war confirmed for Beckett his idea of the world as a source of violence that man is powerless to resist. Man is mortal (finite). From this follows the meaninglessness of all human efforts, because they all end in failure. Beckett's understanding of being has something in common with the concepts of Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger and is connected with the ideas of the existentialists. However, Beckett does not have some provisions of existentialism - the category of responsibility of the individual and the situation of choice. The fate of a man doomed to defeat in a hostile world where he is thrown is presented by Beckett in a synthetic image that is universal in nature.
After the war, after a trip to Ireland to visit his mother, Beckett began to translate his previously written works from English into French, in particular, the novel "Murphy". Since 1946, he began to write directly in French, having managed to transfer the charm of a non-native language to his works, preferring the language of the street, which is spoken by the first comer.
From 1946 to 1950 Beckett writes exclusively in French a number of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. In 1947 (1951 - French edition, 1955 - English) he wrote the novel Molloy, which later became the first part of a trilogy. The second part is the novel “Malone (Malone) is dying” (“Malone meurt”; French ed. - 1951, English - 1956). The third part is the novel "Nameless" ("L" innommable"; 1953, 1958)., 1951). All three novels combine the image of the road, which is understood as the road of life, the road of self-knowledge, so the space in the novel gradually loses its specificity and becomes abstract, conventional, symbolic.
In 1953, the novel "Watt" was published, written in English. This novel was begun in Roussillon and completed in 1945. Beckett could not publish it for a long time. Characters Watt (What) and Nott (No), which together means - “what is not there”, “is not enough”. Strict logic, well-thought-out form and at the same time absurd grotesque-comic content.
Beckett turned to drama at the end of the forties. His first 3-act play "Eleftheria" (from Greek - freedom), written in 1947, remained unpublished. Beckett began working on the tragicomedy En attendant Godot, written in French in 1950 and staged in Paris at the Babylon Theater in January 1953, as early as 1948. The place of action is the road. Under a lonely tree in an open, empty space, two heroes are sitting - Vladimir and Estragon. Their meeting is only a point, a moment in the present between the no longer existing and the not yet existing. They do not know where they are coming from and have no idea of the real course of time. The heroes are powerless to change the course of time, and the helplessness of the heroes is emphasized by their weakness and sickness. Godot's name is similar to the German word for "God". Therefore, often Godot is identified with God or some hypostasis of God. The structure of Beckett's text suggests ambiguity, and such an interpretation is possible, but cannot be the only one. Regarding religion, Beckett was skeptical. Religion is present in his texts as a source of imagery, an element of the Christian culture in which Beckett lived, and not as a source of faith. Beckett said: “I am familiar with Christian mythology. Like all literary devices, I use it where it suits me. But to say that it had a profound effect on me through daily reading or otherwise is pure nonsense.” Godot is "Nothing", he symbolizes in the play the secret of being, the penetration into which is the meaning of the characters' path. But Vladimir and Estragon do not know Godot and do not know what he is. False messengers appear on the stage, filling the void of the present and in no way bringing the heroes closer to comprehending the mystery. One day, Beckett received a letter from prison: “Your Godot is our Godot... We are all waiting for Godot and we don't know if he has already arrived. Yes, he's already here. This is my neighbor in the next cell. We ought to do something to change his shoes, which are rubbing his feet.”
In almost all of Beckett's works, the same theme is repeated - the relationship between time and man, expressed either by expectation or by the search for something. All his characters seem to be motionless, their consciousness is confused, contradictory and constantly moving in a vicious circle. But the closed world in which they live is the whole Universe. Through the individual experience of an outwardly apathetic hero, Beckett showed the dependence of man on nature and the world of people. The author himself says: “There is no time in this obscured consciousness. Past, present, coming. All at once." The author portrays the characters with a considerable amount of irony and sarcasm, but at the same time does not hide sympathy and sympathy for them.
1957 - the play "Endgame", where the hero Hamm is not able to move independently and is chained to a wheelchair. The action of the play is limited to four walls of one room, which emphasizes the hopelessness of the situation.
1960 - play "Theatre 1".
1981 - play "Kachi-kach".
All these pieces are united by the image of “stationary movement”, which is transmitted, for example, with the help of a rocking chair (“Kachi-kach”), because it is constantly moving and at the same time remains in place, as a result, dynamics is equal to statics.
1961 - play "Oh happy days". The action of this play is placed on a completely deserted space (an empty stage). The heroine Winnie is literally chained to one point in this open space. In the first act, she is covered up to her waist with earth; in the second, only her head is visible. Critics wrote about Winnie - "a truncated creature." The basis of the image is a realized metaphor. The point to which the heroine is attached is a grave, death, which everyone carries in themselves from birth, not noticing her presence for the time being. Winnie is half consumed by her grave. She is always doing something: rummaging in her purse, looking around, but her freedom is only an appearance, an illusion. In the second act, Vinnie can only speak. The spiritual blindness of the heroine determines the comically pointed image of the image and the situation as a whole, but the grotesque is combined with tragedy. Winnie is not aware of what is happening, which makes her funny and pathetic, but this is what allows her to continue to live despite the evidence of death.
1964 - the play "Comedy" (in the English version "The Game", or "The Play"), where the characters are placed in vessels that look like coffin urns.
1972 - play "Not me". On an empty dark stage, the spotlight highlights only one mouth, which endlessly pronounces words. The idea - a life devoid of meaning, has finally lost even its material shell, its bodily beginning. The gap between the physical and the spiritual in Beckett's play becomes apparent. The speech flow conveys the state of mind of the hero at a certain moment in his life, and Beckett always correlates this moment with the idea of the nearness of death.
In the 1970s in the work of Beckett, both in drama and in prose, there is an increase in the lyrical beginning. His texts of this time are characterized by a special structure, gravitating by its nature to the lyrics. For the first time, such a poetic structure was realized in the play "The Last Tape of Krepp" (French version - "The Last Tape of the Tape Recorder", 1957, 1959). Beckett's plays of the 70-80s, in which the lyrical element is strengthened, are called monodramas. These are the plays "Communication" (1980), "Poorly seen, poorly said" (1981), "Kachi-kach" (1981) and others. In the 70-80s. in Beckett's works there is a movement of the hero towards the "Other", but, based on the general evolution of the writer, this movement was also a movement towards death. Beckett: “At the end of my work there is nothing but dust /…/, complete decay. There is neither "I", nor "being", nor "to have" /…/. Can't move on. In my work I strive towards impotence, towards ignorance. /…/ The experience of the not-knowing, not-powerful /…/”.
In the last years of his life, Beckett wrote a series of groundbreaking works for radio, television and film, in some cases acting as their director.
In 1964, Beckett travels to New York for a film festival. Marin Karmitz - producer, having met Beckett on the set of the film "Comedy" (1966), later recalled in his book "Separate Gang":
“Beckett never threw away manuscripts - he lived by selling them to an American university. ...He loved Closri de Lila; I used to go there on foot and order Irish whiskey. He spoke in broken sentences. The word was rare, but powerful. In his speech, he strove for silence. He complained that he was losing his sight ... The windows of his room overlooked the Sante prison. On the walls of the apartment are paintings by his friend Bram van Velde. The only artist he liked. He said that there could be no painting, that it was necessary to write in black and white paints. Brahm's best paintings were very picturesque. ... He seemed to have two streams of visitors: those who came to his wife, he did not see, and his guests never met her ... Passion - rugby. He was watching the Five Nations Cup competition on a small TV. Shouted, stamped his feet. And he kept a close eye on the ball. Sometimes very close to the screen. He said he was blind. On the set, where he came, exhausted, he sat in the front row with the words: “I don’t see.” ...He was friends with a rose saleswoman. Strange - close, very cordial relationship. Beckett was huge, magnificent ... And similar to the statues of Giacometti.
In 1966, doctors diagnosed Beckett with a double cataract, and in April 1968 he became seriously ill with pneumonia. In 1970-71. he underwent eye surgery twice, but his vision continued to deteriorate. Beckett's wife Suzanne died on June 17, 1989, Beckett died on December 22, 1989. Both were buried in Paris at the cemetery in Montparnasse.
Literature:
1. Beckett S. Molloy. Malone is dying. St. Petersburg, "Amphora", 2000.
2. Beckett S. Barks more than bites. Kyiv: RKHGI Publishing House, 1999.
3. Beckett S. Waiting for Godot // IL, 1966, No. 10.
4. Beckett S. Exile. Plays and stories. - M., 1989 ("Library "IL").
5. Esslin Martin. Poetry of moving images // Art of Cinema, 6/1998.
Samuel Beckett was awarded the prize for innovative works in prose and drama, in which the tragedy of modern man becomes his triumph. Beckett's deep pessimism contains a love for humanity that only grows as one goes deeper into the abyss of vileness and despair, and when despair seems limitless, it turns out that compassion has no limits.
Beckett agreed to accept the award only on the condition that Beckett's French publisher, the well-known Jerome Lindon, would receive it, which was done.
In recent years, Beckett has led an extremely secluded life, avoiding any comments about his work. Samuel Beckett died in Paris on December 22, 1989 at the age of 83, a few months after the death of his wife Suzanne.
Beckett and music
Barrett, Richard / Barrett, Richard (1959)- "Nothing Else" for viola (1987-2005)
- "I open and close" for string quartet (1983-1988)
- "Another Heavenly Day" for instruments and electronics (1990) based on plays by Beckett
- Sinfonia for 8 voices and orchestra (1968) based on the play "Nameless" / "Unnamable" (1953)
- Music for the play "The Game" / "Play" (1965) based on the play of the same name (1963)
- Quartet N2 (1984), based on Beckett's story "Interlocutor"/"Company" (1979)
- Ballet "Beckett short" (2007) based on the plots of Beckett's plays
- "Two French Poems by Beckett" / "Due poesie francesi di Beckett" for voice, bass flute, viola and percussion (1995)
- "Pas si"" for accordion and 2 voices (1998) to texts by Beckett
- "Waiting for Godot" for four soloists and chamber orchestra (1986) based on the play of the same name (1952)
- "Samuel Beckett: what is the word" / "Samuel Beckett: what is the word" op.30b on texts by Beckett for reciting alto, voices and chamber ensemble (1991)
- «…pas à pas - nulle part…» op.36 on texts by Beckett for baritone, string trio and percussion (1997)
- "Memo 2" for trombone solo (1973) based on the structure of "Not I"/"Not I" (1972)
- version of "Memo 2B" for trombone and female pantomime (1980)
- "Memo 2D" version for trombone, string quartet and female pantomime (1980)
- «…among the voices…» / «…among the voices…» by Beckett for choir and harp (1988)
- concert "Five Views of a Mouth" for flute and orchestra (2007) based on Beckett's play "Not I" / "Not I" (1972)
- "Your Lullaby"/"Your Rockbaby" for saxophone and orchestra (1993) using "rhythmic" elements from "Lullaby"/"Rockbaby" (1981)
- "anti-opera" "Neither ..." / "Neither" based on the libretto by Beckett (1977)
- music for the American version of Beckett's radio play "Words and Music" for two reciters, two flutes, vibraphone, piano and string trio (1987)
- "To Samuel Beckett" for orchestra (1987);
- unrealized idea for music for Beckett's radio play "Cascando" (1961)
- "Enough" / "Enough" for piano (2001) based on the text of the same name (1966)
- "anti-opera" in one act "Game" "Spiel" (1968) based on the play of the same name (1963)
- opera "Come and Go" / "Come and Go" for 9 voices and 9 instruments (1976) based on the play of the same name (1965)
- "Not I" / "Not I" for soprano and tape (1980) based on the play of the same name (1972)
- opera "What Where" / "What Where" (1988) based on the play of the same name (1983)
- opera based on the play "Endgame" / "Fin de partie" (1957) - Salzburg Festival, premiere scheduled for 2013
- opera based on the play "Waiting for Godot" / "En attendant Godot" (1952) - Alla Scala, Milan, premiere scheduled for 2015
Beckett, Samuel(Beckett, Samuel) (1906–1989), French philosopher and writer, novelist, playwright, poet and essayist. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1969.
Beckett is Irish by origin, born April 13, 1906 in Dublin, in a Protestant family of moderate means. Beckett's life began in the same way as the life of another famous literary native of Ireland - O. Wilde: he studied not only at the same school, but also at the same privileged Dublin Trinity College (Trinity College). Just like Wilde, Beckett was interested in literature and theater since childhood. But while studying at Trinity College, their main divergence appeared: Beckett's main area of interest was not English, but French literature. This determined his further creative life.
In 1929, having gone on his first trip abroad, Beckett chose Paris for this purpose, where he met the already well-known J. Joyce. Inspired by Joyce's literary experiments, Beckett becomes Joyce's literary secretary and helps Joyce work on the novel. Finnegans Wake. And in parallel, he begins to try his hand at independent work. Beckett's first literary experience was a major critical study Dante...Bruno, Vico...Joyce(1929). Here he examines the relationship of the general philosophical views of the writer with his aesthetics, direction and nature of creativity. The problems of the individual and the universal, the antithesis of good and evil, received in this (and the next - Proust, 1931) writing philosophical reflection, were later developed by Beckett in his artistic literary practice.
At the end of 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a teacher. However, the measured university life does not satisfy the writer, and he sets off to travel around Ireland, France, England and Germany. Writes and tries to publish prose and poetry (poem Curvoscope, 1930; storybook More swings than punches 1934; novel murphy, begun in 1934).
In 1937 he finally settled in Paris. In 1938, with great difficulty and thanks to the help of friends, he manages to publish the completed tragic-ironic novel. Murphy, which critics and readers meet with little enthusiasm. True, the novel was positively evaluated by Joyce, which favorably affected Beckett's reputation as a serious artist. And among the restrained critical reviews there is a visionary review by D. Thomas, who was able to appreciate the innovation of the author's intention. However, Beckett, frustrated by the novel's reception, experiences a writer's block. It is aggravated by the fact that Beckett was badly stabbed on the street. Treatment (which was accompanied by treatment by a psychoanalyst) took quite a long time.
In 1939 he came to Ireland to visit his mother, but after learning about the beginning of World War II, he returned to Paris. During the war, Beckett, who had consistently avoided politics throughout his life, took an active part in the resistance movement in occupied Paris. However, the failure of his group forced Beckett into hiding. In 1942, having narrowly escaped arrest, he and his girlfriend fled to the south of France to Roussillon, where, working as a land worker, he returned to literature. Here he began a romance Watt completed by the end of the war.
In 1945 Beckett returned to liberated Paris. A new period of his work began. During this time, he began to write in French. Difficulties with the publication of his works continued, but he wrote a lot and effectively: novels, plays, stories, poems. The first of this creative cycle was published by his novel Molloy(1951), which became the first part of the trilogy (hereinafter - Malone is dying 1951 and Nameless, 1953). The trilogy defined the contours of the "new novel", the founder of which Beckett was later unconditionally recognized. In it, the usual categories of space and time lose their content, chronology disappears, being is scattered into an endless series of separate moments, reproduced by the author in an arbitrary order. The transition to French helped to transfer experiments with the structure of the novel into its lexical system: verbal constructions lose their logic and concreteness; the meaning is destroyed, disassembled into its component parts, forming into a new, completely unusual wholeness.
The same experiments were continued by Beckett in dramaturgy, where, due to the specific features of theatrical art, they sounded especially radical. World fame brought Beckett his first play - Waiting for Godot, written in the late 1940s and staged in Paris in 1953 by director R. Blaine. The static, “hermetic” structure of the play, in which nothing happens, and the second act actually repeats the first, the absence of action, the tragic senselessness of human existence, strange meaningless dialogues brought to the stage the aesthetics and problems of existentialism, which was previously considered completely impossible. In this play, Beckett's characteristic symbolism was especially clearly manifested: the combination of the scene - the road (seemingly personifying movement) with the ultimate static. So the road in Beckett's aesthetics takes on a completely new meaning: an eternal stopped moment, a mysterious and incomprehensible path to death.
Immediately after the premiere, Beckett began to be considered a recognized classic and the founder of a new aesthetic trend - absurdism. The same new aesthetic principles, problems, author's technique were developed by Beckett in his subsequent plays: Endgame(1957), Krapp's last tape(1958), Happy Days(1961), A game(1963), Coming and leaving(1966), Not me (1973), Down with everything strange (1979),Kachi-kachi (1981), Ohio Improv(1981).
In the 1960s, in parallel with hard work for the theater, radio and television, Beckett writes a new novel Like this. The end of work on the novel coincided with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to him "for the totality of innovative works in prose and drama, in which the tragedy of modern man becomes his triumph." Beckett, by then already leading a secluded life, agreed to accept the award on the condition that he would not attend the award ceremony. Instead, the prize was awarded to his French publisher J. Lindon. Despite the fact that a huge number of books, articles and other cultural studies are devoted to Beckett's work, the writer himself consistently avoided any creative declarations, believing that his books and plays speak for him.
Tatyana Shabalina
Irish Beckett Samuel represents among the Nobel laureates the so-called literature of the absurd. Acquaintance with his work, in which he uses English and French, in Russian translation began with the play "Waiting for Godot". It was she who brought the first success to Beckett (in the 1952-1953 season). Currently, a fairly well-known playwright is Samuel Beckett. Plays of different years, created by him, are staged in many theaters of the world.
Features of the play "Waiting for Godot"
The first analogue that one tries to grasp when reading Beckett is the symbolic theater of Maeterlinck. Here, as in Maeterlinck, understanding the meaning of what is happening is possible only if one does not try to proceed from the categories of real life situations. Only with the translation of the action into the language of symbols do you begin to catch the author's thought in the scenes from Godot. However, the rules for such a translation are themselves so diverse and obscure that it is not possible to pick up simple keys. Beckett himself defiantly refused to explain the hidden meaning of tragicomedy.
How Beckett assessed his work
In one of the interviews, Samuel, touching upon the essence of his work, said that the material he works with is ignorance, impotence. He said that he was conducting reconnaissance in a zone that artists prefer to leave aside as something incompatible with art. On another occasion, Beckett said that he was not a philosopher and never read the works of philosophers because he did not understand anything they wrote about. He said that he was not interested in ideas, but only in the form in which they are expressed. Beckett is not interested in systems either. The task of the artist, in his opinion, is to find a form adequate to the confusion and mess that we call being. It is on the problems of form that the solution of the Swedish Academy is accentuated.
Origin of Beckett
What are the roots of Beckett's views, what led him to such extreme positions? Can the writer's inner world be clarified by his brief biography? Samuel Beckett, it must be said, was a difficult person. The facts of Samuel's life, according to the researchers of his work, do not shed too much light on the origins of the writer's worldview.
Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin, in a family of devout and wealthy Protestants. The writer's ancestors, French Huguenots, moved to Ireland back in the 17th century, hoping for a comfortable life and religious freedom. However, Samuel from the very beginning did not accept the centuries-old religious basis of the family worldview. "My parents," he recalled, "were given nothing by their faith."
Period of study, teaching activities
After studying at an elite school, and then at the same Jesuit Trinity College in Dublin, where Swift once studied, and then Wilde, Beckett spent two years teaching in Belfast, then moved to Paris and worked as a trainee teacher of English in Higher Normal School, and then at the Sorbonne. The young man read a lot, his favorite authors were Dante and Shakespeare, Socrates and Descartes. But knowledge did not bring peace to the restless soul. Of his youthful years, he recalled: "I was unhappy. I felt it with my whole being and resigned myself to it." Beckett admitted that he was increasingly moving away from people, did not take part in anything. And then came the time of Beckett's complete discord, both with himself and with others.
Causes of discord with the world
What is the root of Samuel Beckett's intransigent position? His biography does not really clarify this point. You can refer to the sanctimonious atmosphere in the family, the Jesuit dictates in college: "Ireland is a country of theocrats and censors, I could not live there." However, even in Paris, seething with subversives and rebels in art, Beckett did not get rid of the feeling of insurmountable loneliness. He met Paul Valery, Ezra Pound, and none of these talents became a spiritual authority for him. It was not until he became James Joyce's literary secretary that Beckett found a "moral ideal" in his boss and later spoke of Joyce that he helped him understand what the artist's purpose was. However, their paths diverged - and not only because of the everyday circumstances of Joyce's daughter to Beckett made it impossible to visit the Joyce house anymore, and he left for Ireland), but also in art.
This was followed by useless feuds with his mother, attempts to cut himself off from the outside world (he did not leave the house for days, hiding from annoying relatives and friends in a blindly drawn office), meaningless trips to European cities, treatment in a clinic for depression ...
Literary debut, first works
Beckett made his debut with the poem "Bloodoscope" (1930), followed by essays on Proust (1931) and Joyce (1936), a collection of short stories and a book of poems. However, these compositions, which were created by Samuel Beckett, were not successful. "Murphy" (the review of this novel was also unflattering) is a work about a young man who came to London from Ireland. The novel was rejected by 42 publishers. Only in 1938, when in despair, suffering from endless physical ailments, but even more so with the consciousness of his worthlessness and material dependence on his mother, Beckett Samuel left Ireland forever and settled again in Paris, one of the publishers accepted Murphy. However, this book was met with restraint. Success came later, Beckett Samuel did not immediately become famous, whose books are known and loved by many. Prior to this, Samuel had to endure wartime.
War time
The war caught Beckett in Paris and pulled him out of self-imposed isolation. Life has taken a different shape. Arrests and murders have become a daily routine. The worst thing for Beckett were reports that many former acquaintances began to work for the occupiers. For him, the question of choice did not arise. Beckett Samuel became an active member of the Resistance and worked for two years in the underground groups "Star" and "Glory", where he was known under the nickname Irishman. His duties included collecting information, translating it into English, microfilming. I had to visit the ports where the naval forces of the Germans were concentrated. When the Gestapo discovered these groups and the arrests began, Beckett went into hiding in a village in southern France. He then worked for several months as a Red Cross interpreter in a military hospital. After the war he was awarded The order of General de Gaulle noted: "Beckett, Sam: a man of the greatest courage ... he carried out tasks, even being in mortal danger."
The fighting years, however, did not change Beckett's gloomy attitude, which determined the course of his life and the evolution of his work. He himself once said that there is nothing worthwhile in the world except creativity.
long-awaited success
Success came to Beckett by the early 1950s. In the best theaters in Europe began to stage his play "Waiting for Godot". Between 1951 and 1953 he published a prose trilogy. The first part of it is the novel "Molloy", the second - "Malon dies" and the third - "Nameless". This trilogy made its author one of the most famous and influential wordsmiths of the 20th century. These novels, which were created using innovative approaches to prose, bear little resemblance to the usual literary forms. They are written in French, and a little later Beckett translated them into English.
Samuel, following the success of his play Waiting for Godot, decided to develop himself as a playwright. The play "About all those who fall" was created in 1956. In the late 1950s - early 1960s. the following works appeared: "The End Game", "Krapp's Last Tape" and "Happy Days". They laid the foundation for the theater of the absurd.
Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969. It must be said that Samuel did not tolerate the increased attention that always accompanies fame. He agreed to accept the Nobel Prize only on the condition that it was not he himself who received it, but the French publisher of Beckett and his longtime friend Jérôme Lindon. This condition has been fulfilled.
Features of Beckett's creativity
Beckett Samuel is the author of many novels and plays. All of them symbolize the impotence of a person before the power of circumstances and habits, before the all-consuming meaninglessness of life. In short, absurd! Well, let it be absurd. Most likely, such a view of human destinies is not superfluous.
Disputes around the literature of the absurd flared up, first of all, about whether such art is permissible and is it art at all? But let us remember the words of another Irishman, William Yeats, who said that humanity should be understood in any possible circumstances, that there is no such thing as too bitter laughter, too sharp irony, too terrible passion ... It is easy to imagine what would become of a society in which methods and the means of art are severely restricted. However, it is superfluous to resort to the imagination - history, especially ours, knows such examples. These Procrustean experiments end sadly: the army, in which the actions of intelligence officers are strictly limited by the standards born in the offices, loses its eyes and ears, and every new danger takes it by surprise. So there is nothing left but to accept the legitimacy of the methods of the literature of the absurd. As for formal skill, even opponents of Beckett's views do not deny him high professionalism - of course, within the framework of the method adopted by him. But Heinrich Bell, for example, in one of the conversations said: "Beckett, I think, is more exciting than any action-packed action movie."
Beckett Samuel died in 1989 at the age of 83. Poems and prose of his, presumably, will be relevant for many years to come.
Beckett's texts are not only iconic for the art of the twentieth century, but represent something like a historical chronicle of modernism: no other writer has demonstrated such a stunning and large-scale evolution from linguistic redundancy to silence. Starting with "multi-story" language constructions, Beckett gradually got rid of any signs of pretentiousness - the sophistication of meanings was replaced by incoherent fragments of allusions, and then was supplanted by a piercing sense of emptiness.
Among the writers concerned with the problem of the decay of language, Beckett is perhaps the only one who not only transferred the experience of the decline of culture into his own texts, but went along this line from beginning to end: “I realized my own path as impoverishment, impoverishment, lack of knowledge - as a way of subtraction rather than addition." Throughout his life, he seemed to cut off extra pieces from his body, until he finally got to the skeleton.
It is noteworthy, however, that in refusing to explain his plays, the playwright devoted much of his time to commenting on how they should be played on stage (in this sense, letters to directors Roger Blain and Alan Schneider are particularly interesting). In the case of Beckett, the subtitles "radio play" or "teleplay" are fundamental: he thought through every sound and every close-up in detail - in this sense, his opposition to the film adaptation of "Waiting for Godot" is quite understandable. Although rehearsals with the actors often entailed corrections in the scripts, this was usually due to the need to remove the potential for interpretation from the text as much as possible.
The reception of Beckett's works in Russia makes an ambiguous impression: translations of all his novels, most of his plays, poems, essays and several stories have been published, but at the same time, works devoted to the texts of the Nobel laureate and founder of the theater of the absurd can still be counted on the fingers. Surprisingly, in Russian there are not even any complete biographical studies about Beckett, which naturally leads to inaccuracies in the presentation of the events of his life and the formation of myths about him, which in turn affect the interpretation of literary texts.
However, when trying to write an essay on Beckett's life and highlighting individual events, it is worth remembering that he himself more than once mocked the genre of the writer's biography. And before giving the date of his birth, it is worth remembering one of the first phrases of the novel "Molloy": "I started from the beginning, can you imagine what an old asshole is." It would seem difficult to find an equally radical strategy aimed at creating self-referential texts and purifying them of any kind of events, especially the facts of the author's life. But despite this, knowledge of Beckett's biography not only makes it possible to clarify certain aspects of his texts, but also to trace the stages of their stylistic evolution: the famous "path of subtraction" becomes especially evident when looking at the chronology of the creation of works. Allusions to certain events seem to be carefully erased, but in a strange way they continue to be present in the texts, like fragments of photographs hanging on the wall - both generating memories and preventing them from approaching them.
Samuel Beckett wrote in Three Dialogues: “There is nothing to express, there is nothing to express, there is nothing to express, there is no power to express, there is no desire to express, as well as an obligation to express.”
These words fully illustrate the work of the great Irishman (or, after all, a Frenchman), who was in the prime of life (however, such an expression can hardly be applied in this particular case) precisely in the second half of the 40s, when he created the play “Waiting for Godot” and the trilogy “Molloy-Malon Dies-Nameless”.
So, Samuel Beckett was born on April 13, 1906 in the suburbs of Dublin - the village of Foxrock. His birthday fell on Good Friday, and he himself never forgot about this coincidence: “You were born in the darkness of the ninth hour, you let out the first cry at the hour when you proclaimed with a loud voice and gave up the spirit of the Savior.” Eighty-three years later, the analogy was completed by death on the eve of the Christmas holidays.
He was the younger of two sons to William and May Beckett. Subsequently, like Salvador Dali, he claimed that he remembers the blissfully prosperous period of being in the mother's womb. The event of birth in his texts was invariably presented as a tragedy, and one of the main metaphors was the motif of returning to the womb - reunion with the original emptiness. However, the son's relationship with his mother developed worse than with his father, with whom Beckett did not lose mutual understanding until the day of his death. One of the greatest pleasures of childhood was to communicate with him while walking - the image of a wandering adult and child is often repeated in later texts.
In primary and secondary school, Beckett, despite participating in sports, often preferred solitary reading to noisy companies, which contributed to the expansion of his literary erudition, which quickly came into conflict with a strict Protestant upbringing. In 1923, Beckett entered Trinity College Dublin, where he specialized in the study of European literature, as well as French and Italian (in addition, he independently studied German and Spanish). At the end of 1928, an event occurred in Beckett's life that, without fear of falling into exaggeration, can be called a turning point. After receiving a bachelor's degree, a talented student was given the opportunity to go to Paris for two years to teach English at the famous university - Ecole Normal. In France, he quickly fell into the “circle of Joyce”, having met a large number of writers and, above all, the author of Ulysses, to whom the twenty-three-year-old Beckett treated with reverence. In turn, Joyce praised the Dublin teacher as one of the most gifted young men he had ever met. Beckett participated in the translation into French of fragments of the novel "Finnegans Remember" and the search for all kinds of "sources" for this text. However, in relations with the Joyce family there was also an episode of a quarrel related to the fact that Beckett ignored the sympathy for him by Lucia, the writer's daughter.
In 1929, Beckett's first story, The Dormition, was published, and his poetic debut was a voluminous, full of allusions text about Descartes, which in 1930 won a poetry competition on the theme of time. Through this publication, he received an offer to write an essay on Proust, published in March 1931. It was during this period that Beckett, to the great disappointment of his parents, decided to quit his career as a university teacher in order to take up essay writing, translations and writing fiction texts (shortly before, having accidentally seen his son’s literary experiments, a pious mother kicked him out of the house for several months). However, after the first successes, a series of failures follows: publishing houses are reluctant to agree to publish deliberately complex and, moreover, abounding in obscene free verses of a novice author. But even less enthusiasm was met by his first novel, Dreams of Women, Beautiful and So-So, in which the publishers noticed only an attempt to imitate Joyce's style. The twenty-five-year-old prose writer chose a very complex form for his pen test: texts saturated with a large number of allusions and hidden quotations, showing through detailed metaphors and cipher-puns (only two fragments of the novel were published in March 1932, and it was published in full only 60 years later - already after the death of the author).
The only publications and the main source of income were translations of texts by Rimbaud, Montale, French surrealists. The plan for a writing career quickly failed, and, having spent the last of his savings, Beckett returned to his parents in Ireland ("crawled home with his tail between his legs," in his own words). In March 1933, Beckett's cousin and former lover, Peggy Sinclair, died of tuberculosis, and three months later, his father. These deaths, coupled with creative depression, endless health problems and excessive drinking led Beckett to an unexpected decision: to leave for London in order to undergo a long course of psychoanalytic treatment (paid for by his mother). He spent two years in England instead of the expected six months and returned home without any confidence in the effectiveness of the treatment. However, at the end of his life, Beckett claimed that this course helped him normalize relations with his mother - however, not to such an extent as to discuss his literature with her.
Now Beckett had no idea what he would do: teaching was abandoned, and a career as a literary reviewer under strict Irish censorship could not develop. At the same time, having virtually no income, Beckett bought expressionist paintings by Jack Yates on credit, exacerbating the bewilderment of his mother and brother Frank. Deciding to leave his native country again, Beckett went on a trip to Germany, for which there was still money bequeathed to him by his father. In seven months, he managed to travel around many German cities and, for all his lack of sociability, managed to get acquainted with a large number of writers, artists and art collectors. The impressions of this trip have been preserved in the form of six still unpublished "German diaries", containing detailed notes on painting and literature (judging by the volume of impressions in the letters, the German expressionists made no less strong impression on Beckett than the surrealists and dadaists in France), as well as reflections on the endless "Nazi litanies" and the intervention of ideology in culture - the madness behind rationalism. From the letters of acquaintances, he learned that his new novel "Murphy" did not meet with any enthusiasm from the publishers. It is not surprising that the idea of one of the publishers to reduce certain fragments of the text puzzled Beckett: "It is not clear to me how else this unfortunate book can be reduced after everything that I have already deleted from it." It was "Murphy" that became the first serious step on the "path of belittling."
Returning, Beckett did not stay at home for long: after another scandal with his mother, he decided to leave Ireland forever. In 1937, Beckett moved to Paris - a city that remained the main place of his stay until the end of his life. Literally a month after moving to France, he ended up in the hospital with a stab wound received on the street from an unfamiliar passerby. Later, at the entrance to the courthouse, this man, who turned out to be a pimp, made an absurd confession by answering “I don’t know” when asked about the purpose of the attack. In the hospital, Beckett was visited by all his Parisian acquaintances, Joyce paid for his transfer to a separate ward, his mother and brother came from Dublin, and he himself, lying in bed, made final corrections to the proofs of the novel Murphy, finally accepted by one of the publishers. Thanks to this injury, he restored his relationship with his mother - for the rest of her life, he invariably spent one month a year in Foxrock and took part in her daily activities, including church attendance. “This week I turned 33, I wonder if the remaining half of the bottle will seem better than the one that has already been drunk. At least I hope to be able to endure with taste,” he wrote to his closest friend, the poet Thomas McGreevy, in early 1939.
In Paris, Beckett communicated with a large number of artists and writers, lived for about a year with the famous gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim, and on the eve of World War II met his future wife, Suzanne Decheveaux-Dumesnil (however, they first met back in Ecole Normale). Suzanne was six years older than him, and according to some biographers, she became a “mother-wife” for the writer, but she was distinguished from May Beckett by the absence of doubt in the literary genius of Samuel. Events developed in such a way that a year later they became members of the resistance movement - first in Paris, then in the village of Roussillon in southern France. Beckett translated documents, assisted in hiding ammunition - his taciturnity and scrupulousness were ideally suited for this role. And after the end of the war, even close friends did not know that he was awarded two medals.
Despite the fact that the second half of the 1930s for Beckett, it turned out to be saturated with a mass of events, one cannot fail to notice an almost seven-year break in literary activity. Apart from diary entries and letters, he wrote only a few poems. In fact, serious work on literary texts resumed only in 1943, when most of the novel "Watt" was written, and three years later silence exploded with a cycle of short stories, four novels and the play "Waiting for Godot", created no longer in English, but in French . Paradoxically, the transition to a foreign language was not at all an excuse to take advantage of cultural multilingualism, but an opportunity to speak less - a step towards spoken silence.
After the war, Beckett worked for a short time in the Irish Red Cross hospital in the almost completely destroyed town of Saint-Lo, the ruins of which made a deadly impression on him: the essay “The Capital of Ruins” is perhaps his only text that is so strongly concentrated on socio-political topics. . Subsequently, Beckett's fictional prose began to be directly linked by many researchers with the experience of the Second World War (among the most famous names it is worth remembering Adorno and Eagleton). This interpretation can hardly be called erroneous, but at the same time, the emphasis on military trauma and the rigid binding of Becket's texts to time is undoubtedly a narrowing of their existential problems. The lone hero of the absurd was present in Beckett's texts as early as the 1930s.
If you imagine that among his works it is possible to choose the main thing, then, apparently, the “Trilogy” should be called such - created in 1947-1950. novels "Molloy", "Malon Dies" and "Nameless". Dwelling on autobiographical episodes, one cannot fail to notice that one of the obsessive themes of the first volume of the Trilogy was the search for a meeting with my mother: “I think that all my life I went to my mother in order to rebuild our relationship on a less shaky basis. But when I came to her, and I succeeded quite often, I left her without doing anything. And after leaving her, he again went to her, hoping that this time everything would turn out better. May Beckett died in the middle of 1950, a few months after the completion of The Nameless, without seeing Susanna, whom she had not wished to meet at the time. With the money from the inheritance, Beckett bought a small two-room house in Ussy-sur-Marne, a suburb of Paris. Samuel and Suzanne enjoyed their nephews for many years, but they both refused to have children.
At the end of the 40s. Beckett created the play "Waiting for Godot", which later became the most famous of his works, and acquaintance with the director Roger Blain turned out to be a prologue to the creation of the theater of the absurd. Beckett discovered a tremendous interest in the possibilities of presenting his images on stage. In the early 50s. The premieres of the performance staged by French, German, English and American directors caused a lot of conflicting emotions among the audience and journalists. At first, it was more likely to talk about scandalous fiascos than about recognition, but gradually the play brought world fame to the playwright, significantly changing the ideas of millions of people about the possibilities of the theater. By the mid 50s. the text of the drama had already been translated into many languages, and the number of theatrical performances was in the hundreds. But perhaps the main theatrical event for Beckett was the news that his play, on their own initiative, was staged by prisoners in one of the German prisons: what puzzled aesthetes and critics seemed extremely familiar to the prisoners.
Income from performances made it possible to forget about poverty, which, however, had almost no effect on the writer's lifestyle and did not reveal the slightest craving for luxury. What has really changed (and brought a lot of frustration) is the need to communicate with more people. Beckett constantly refused interviews, gave his phone number only to his closest friends and wrote almost no new works. The prospect of dissolving into the hustle and bustle made him feel frustrated. In connection with rehearsals, he often had to leave his house in the suburbs of Paris. Leaving Jussi, he wrote to friends that it was time to get rid of the country house; returning, he called it his only refuge. The depression was completed by the death of his older brother, who died of cancer at the end of 1954 - the writer spent the last four months of Frank's life next to him.
In the second half of the 50s. Beckett created a number of dramatic texts that were staged in the theaters of Paris and London (among them - the famous "Endgame" and "Act Without Words"). Having previously rejected any intention of adding music to the production of Godot, Beckett unexpectedly allowed a chamber opera based on Krapp's Last Tape to be written. In the future, music became a frequent element in many of Beckett's scripts, and its role was very different from the traditional accompaniment functions for the theater, and in 1977 Beckett wrote perhaps the shortest libretto in the history of Morton Feldman's anti-opera "Neither" ("Neither "). It should be noted that Beckett's musical tastes throughout his life were limited to symphonic and chamber works (jazz and even more so rock do not appear in the surviving memories of his audio preferences).
In 1959, for the radio play "Ash" Beckett received the prestigious award - "Prix Italia". And although his short speech at the presentation consisted of traditional gratitude ceremonies for such ceremonies, the letters sent to friends were overwhelmed with thoughts about the deadly bonus rituals and vows not to participate in them anymore. A few months earlier, Beckett had agreed to an offer from Trinity College to accept a Ph.D. This was his first official recognition in his native country, which practically coincided with the death of several close Irish friends.
By 1960, Beckett had completed As Is, his last major prose novel. However, the word "novel" itself is only a conditional definition of the genre. In As Is, the line between prose, poetry, dramatic monologue and author's remarks was almost destroyed. The heroes crawl across the ocean of mud, and the speech continues despite the loss of faith in the possibility of pronouncing the words: “My hand is numb, my speech is numb, I can’t find even dumb words, but how I need a word.”
Meanwhile, the writer's fame was just beginning to grow. In the early 60s. plays became the subject of interest for new publishers; Giacometti's sculpture was used in the scenography of the next production of "Waiting for Godot"; Arrabal, Albee and Pinter spoke of Beckett's influence; "Trilogy" was awarded the "Formentor" award; and one Italian actress went on a hunger strike due to the fact that the role in the play "Happy Days" was entrusted to another performer ...
According to biographers, written in the early 60s. The play The Game, which features a man and two women, reflected Beckett's relationship with BBC journalist Barbara Bray. At the same time, in 1961, after twenty years of marriage, they married Suzanne, which made it possible to alleviate a number of legal difficulties (not a single person was invited to the wedding). During the same period, they bought a new apartment in Paris with separate rooms, giving the spouses complete independence. Without abandoning the French language, Beckett again began to write artistic texts in English.
In 1964, Beckett traveled to New York to shoot the movie The Movie, based on his own script. It is symbolic that America, already embraced by the wave of the film industry and the roar of rock and roll, Beckett visited only once - to create a silent film. He was pleased with both the filming process and the result (the picture received several awards), but he did not make repeated attempts to cooperate with the cinema. However, the possibilities of the camera undoubtedly fascinated him: he began to write teleplays, and the first of them, “Huh, Joe?” at the same time was the beginning of many years of independent directing experience. The preference for teleplays over films was apparently dictated by the fact that the television genre, in comparison with the cinema, seemed to Beckett to be much less dependent on all sorts of tricks and effects.
At the end of the 60s. Several of the writer's closest friends also died. “From funeral to funeral” - this phrase from a play written a decade later accurately characterized the inner state of the playwright in the 60s-80s. At the same time, Beckett himself, who outlived many of his acquaintances, was never distinguished by good health: starting from the 30s. he underwent a huge number of mini-operations, and the end of the 60s. became a record for the number of injuries: a fracture of two ribs, a lung abscess and proximity to blindness. It was this period that was notable for the writer's short refusal to use cigarettes and whiskey. Beckett devoted his free time to playing piano, chess and reading. Several new texts became so non-communicative and emotionless that they did not even fit the definition of "gloomy".
In 1969, in a state of extreme disengagement from engagement, Beckett received the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Suzanne, who also disliked these forms of social recognition, called the event a "catastrophe." He was represented at the award ceremony by his publisher, and Beckett seems to have agreed to accept the award only on the grounds that a refusal would further draw public attention to his person (as Sartre had done a few years earlier). Most of the money Beckett transferred to support young authors and donated to the library of Trinity College. At the request of publishers to provide previously unpublished texts, Beckett decided to publish the novel "Mercier and Camier", written two decades earlier. By this time, Beckett's books had already been translated into dozens of languages, the number of texts about his works grew at an enormous rate, the reviewers were Bataille, Barthes, Blanchot, Marseille, Robbe-Grillet, and in 1970 Michel Foucault completed his inaugural lecture at the Collège de Frans, in a long quote from The Nameless One: "It is necessary to speak words while there are words, until they find me, until they tell me, strange pain, strange sin, it is necessary to continue, perhaps it's already over, perhaps they have already told me, perhaps they brought me to the threshold of my history, brought me to the door that will open to meet my history, it would surprise me if it opens "...
Beckett himself in the early 70s. wrote to acquaintances about the creative impasse for which he blamed the Nobel Prize. World recognition did not at all contribute to satisfaction in his own writing achievements. Nevertheless, it was during these years that he created many of his later masterpieces: painful monologue plays, mystical television scenarios, a collection of prose miniatures "Failures". In addition, Beckett continued many years of independent translation of his texts from French into English (and vice versa). Numerous directorial works of Beckett in European theaters belong to the same period. In addition, after seeing Lee Brewer's stage production of The Ravager with music by Philip Glass, Beckett acknowledged for the first time that his prose work could be adapted for the stage (although he was very selective in granting such permissions until the end of his life).
Meanwhile, the world fame of the writer did not subside. In America, an international conference dedicated to his work was held, the Samuel Beckett Theater opened, and the German premiere of the television play Nacht und Träume, directed by him, covered an audience of about two million viewers. In 1984, his merits in the field of drama were noted by the New York Society of Theater Critics, and in 1987 he received another award - the Common Wealth Awards, the entire amount of which he asked to be transferred to Rick Klachi, a former inmate of an American prison who became actor and co-director of many productions of Beckett.
By the mid 80s. almost all of the writer's close friends died. “Everyone is dead, I am the last,” said the writer on the eve of his eightieth birthday. At this time, the main of the later prose texts were written - the short stories "Unseen Untold" and "Course for the Worst" ("Worstward Ho"). Beckett led an increasingly solitary life, but often continued to take part in the production of his plays. In his old age, Beckett still avoided communicating with journalists, but still the opinion that he did not give a single interview in his entire life is an exaggeration. From time to time, he answered questions from reporters, not allowing them to take any notes during these conversations, but still opening the possibility of quoting his statements in the press. In the context of Beckett's "silence", a caveat is required that at the end of his life he satisfied the curiosity of biographers to the best of his ability.
In 1986, Beckett's health began to deteriorate rapidly, emphysema and the need for constant oxygen therapy made it impossible to leave for Jussi. In mid-1988, Beckett lost consciousness, suffering a head injury in a fall, and after that he spent most of his time in a house on the hospital grounds, striking his acquaintances who visited him with a deliberately ascetic lifestyle. A year later, Suzanne passed away, relations with which, towards the end of her life, became more and more far from mutual understanding. Beckett took her death hard and survived his wife by only a few months - he died on December 22, 1989. The writer's nephew and copyright holder of the literary heritage, Edward Beckett, categorically rejected the idea of turning his Parisian apartment into a museum.
In recent years, the theme of the impossibility of creativity, which has occupied Beckett for decades, has been supplemented by the painful feeling that he has already written absolutely everything that he considered necessary, and is only living out his life. The play "What's Where" and the story "Still Moving" became a kind of epitaph to the death of dramaturgy and prose - recorded silence. But the heroes of Beckett could not figure out whether it is possible to hear the missing word in the void or whether it will remain forever lost. And the last of the texts written by Beckett looks really stunning in this context. He wrote down the poem in the hospital, having regained consciousness after a fall and a head injury. "How to say" (translated from French by Mark Dadian):
"madness -
madness what from –
what from -
how to say -
madness that from this -
starting from -
madness from -
considering -
madness considering that from this -
seeing -
crazy to see this
This -
how to say -
this -
here it is -
this is -
it's all here -
madness considering all this -
seeing -
madness seeing all that's that's what from –
what from -
how to say -
see -
anticipate -
believe predict -
desire to believe to foresee -
madness that from the desire to believe to foresee that -
What -
how to say -
and where -
that from the desire to believe to foresee what where -
Where -
how to say -
there -
over there -
away -
far away over there -
barely -
in the distance there, barely there -
What -
how to say -
seeing all this
it's all here -
madness that from what to see what -
anticipate -
believe predict -
desire to believe to foresee -
in the distance there, barely there -
madness that is here from the desire to believe to foresee that -
What -
how to say -
how to say"
