EXISTENTIALISM French existentialism occupies a special place in the development of world literature of the 20th century. Emerged in the 1940s, it existed as a philosophical and literary trend until the 1950s. At the heart of the existentialist worldview is awareness

Existentialism in Russian, or Suicide silver age: “Decomposition of the atom” by Georgy Ivanov Nature can be described either beautifully, like a sunny day, or ugly and terrible, like a fish that floated up belly up and began to smell bad. (From the introductory

Existentialism in 20th century literature

Existentialism is one of the darkest philosophical and aesthetic trends modernity. The man in the image of the existentialists is immensely burdened by his existence, he is the bearer of inner loneliness and fear of reality. Life is meaningless social activity fruitless, morality is untenable. There is no god in the world, there are no ideals, there is only existence, fate-calling, to which a person stoically and unquestioningly submits; existence is a concern that a person must accept, because the mind is not able to cope with the hostility of being: a person is doomed to absolute loneliness, no one will share his existence.

The practical conclusions of existentialism are monstrous: it makes no difference - to live or not to live, it makes no difference - who to become: an executioner or his victim, a hero or a coward, a conqueror or a slave.

Proclaiming absurdity human being, existentialism for the first time openly included "death" as a motive for proving mortality and an argument for the doom of a person and his "chosenness". Ethical problems are worked out in detail in existentialism: freedom and responsibility, conscience and sacrifice, the goals of existence and purpose, which are widely included in the lexicon of the art of the century. Existentialism attracts with the desire to understand a person, the tragedy of his destiny and existence.

Conventionally, existentialism is divided into two directions: atheistic - it would be more correct to say - secular, because feature their philosophy is not the denial of God, but agnosticism, the conviction of the impossibility of a rational proof of the existence of God and the refusal to resort to faith for such an assumption. The founder of German existentialism, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

The theme of effective humanism in the literature of the XX century. Roman A. de Saint-Exupery "Planet of people"

Effective humanism presupposes sympathy and complicity in the life of the one with whom one sympathizes.

A. De Saint - Exupery knew how to be moralistic without moralizing and sensitive without sentimentality, he strove for literature as a type of heroic personality and believed in the spiritual progress of mankind.

Exupery dedicated it to one of his fellow pilots, Henri Guillaume. A novel about pilots. main idea: a person reveals himself in the fight against obstacles.

A few moments that vividly illustrate humanism:

Nobody will replace the dead. And pilots experience the greatest happiness when the one who has already been mentally buried is suddenly resurrected. This happened to Guillaume, who disappeared during a voyage over the Andes. For five days, his comrades unsuccessfully searched for him, and there was no longer any doubt that he had died - either in a fall or from the cold. But Guillaume performed the miracle of his own salvation by passing through the snow and ice. He said later that he endured what no animal could endure - there is nothing nobler than these words, showing the measure of the greatness of man, determining his true place in nature.

Once Exupery managed to approach the very heart of the desert - this happened in 1935, when his plane crashed into the ground near the borders of Libya. Together with the mechanic Prevost, he spent three endless days among the sands. The pilots were saved by a Bedouin, who seemed to them an almighty deity.

On the Madrid front (apparently, there was a war), in third-class carriages, Exupery had a chance to see Polish workers being evicted from France. Whole people returned to his sorrows and poverty. These people were like ugly clods of clay - so compressed their life. But the face of the sleeping child was beautiful: he looked like a fairy-tale prince, like a baby Mozart, doomed to follow his parents through the same forging press.

“The truth of a man is what makes him a man. Whoever knows such nobility of human relations, such fidelity to the rules of the game, such respect for each other that is higher than life and death, will not equate these feelings with the miserable good nature of a demagogue who, as a sign of brotherly tenderness, would begin to pat the same Arabs on the shoulder, flattering them and at the same time humiliating them."

In 1939, the book "The Planet of the People" was awarded the French Academy Prize.

Writers of the existential genre philosophize in their novels on themes of uniqueness human existence, being and psychology of the individual. There are plenty of such speculations in the literature. Let's take a look at the top ten.

1. "Nausea" Jean-Paul Sartre

2. Happy Death by Albert Camus

3. "Notes from the underground" F. M. Dostoevsky

4. Boredom by Alberto Moravia

5. "Notes to Malte Laurids Brigge" Rainer Maria Rilke

The protagonist of the novel, a young representative of a noble family, turns out to be poor and lonely by the will of fate. Now he has to watch the life of his new environment, the poor people, their illnesses, thinking, death. The young man concludes that these people are not able to resist the framework and standards imposed on them by the public worldview. He decides that in order to break out of this framework, he must act. Finally, he manages to get out of his life stupor, and he takes up writing a diary. For him, these notes are a kind of spiritual growth, and the answer to questions: what is life and what is death.

6. "Escape from freedom" Erich Fromm

7. "On Madness" Leo Tolstoy

8. "Tangerines" Simone de Beauvoir

9. Blurred by Philip Dick

10. Diary of a Seducer, Søren Kierkegaard

Existentialism is direction in Western European (mainly French) and American literature 1940-60s, closely related to the philosophical school of the same name, which developed in Germany and France between the first and second world wars. The background of the philosophy of existentialism includes the names of S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, N. Berdyaev. For the literature of existentialism, of paramount importance were philosophical works F. Dostoevsky, especially Notes from the Underground (1864), Demons (1871-72) and The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (in The Brothers Karamazov, 1879-80). Echoes of the problems of these works are constantly felt in the work of the largest writers of French existentialism - A. Camus and J.P. Sartre.

The central idea of ​​both philosophy and literature of existentialism is the existence of man in the world without God, among irrationality and absurdity, in a state of fear and anxiety, outside of abstract moral laws and pre-established life principles. According to existentialism, both morality and social behavior, and the human essence itself are formed only in the sphere of being, into which a person is “thrown” and the meaning of which he tries - most often unsuccessfully - to understand. Being in the world for existentialism is synonymous with the concept of freedom, which is, first of all, freedom from everything impersonal. Sartre speaks of "being sentenced to freedom" because freedom is a burden placed on the individual as a person. The rejection of freedom means the absorption of the personal principle by the impersonal, and thus the inauthenticity of existence. By accepting freedom, a person thereby accepts responsibility for the moral results of his stay in the world - he is “concerned” with both the state of the world and his own destiny. The realization of freedom is the choice of the mead by authentic and non-authentic existence. The choice is comprehended as a decisive step in the process of "creating oneself", which is the main content human life.

The continuity of “creating oneself” and the endlessly renewed situation of choice, despite the total irrationality of the world, is the main plot of existentialist literature, usually unfolding in the context of recognizable historical circumstances that are associated with social upheavals, wars and revolutions of the 20th century. Existentialism proclaims the principle of the obligatory “engagement” of a person who is aware that each of his choices, while remaining an individual act, at the same time has significance for all of humanity, since it is primarily a choice between reconciliation with the absurd and rebellion against it. Rebellion is the main category understood in early works Camus (the novel "The Stranger", 1942, the drama "Caligula", 1944) and Sartre (the novel "Nausea", 1938, the drama "Flies", 1943), who wore programmatic character: this is a rebellion against the nonsense of being, against the aggression of inhumanity, and at the same time against the fate of the "man of the crowd", a depersonalized conformist who betrayed his freedom, requiring him to step over many ethical taboos. Knowing that “neither in himself nor outside he has nothing to rely on” (Sartre), the hero of the literature of existentialism nevertheless rejects the “quietism of despair”: he “acts without hope”, he is not allowed to change his tragic destiny, however he “ exists only in so far as it realizes itself. The essence of this concept, which is the foundation of the literature of existentialism, is revealed by the title of one of the most important philosophical works Sartre, Existentialism is Humanism (1946). Considering that “a man condemned to be free puts the weight of the whole world on his shoulders” (Sartre J.P. Being and Nothingness, 1943), existentialism builds its artistic doctrine on the basis of the principles of “historicity”, which requires direct correlation creative tasks with topical socio-historical issues, and authenticity, opposed to the concepts of “disinterested”, “disengaged”, “pure” art (in numerous essays by Sartre and Camus on aesthetics, the most authoritative adherent of these concepts, P. Valery, becomes a constant addressee of polemical attacks) . Existentialism rejected a number of fundamental provisions aesthetic theory modernism which, in Sartre's view, led to the "fetishization inner world personality” that exists outside the context modern history, although in reality this context powerfully asserts itself, no matter how consistent and persistent the desire to ignore it may be. The novel, which makes extensive use of mythological parallelism, the stream of consciousness, the principle of subjective vision, is charged with the inability to convey the real situation of a person in the world and the rejection of "historicity", without which literature is impossible. Existentialism declares its literary allies to be writers who proclaim the “engagement” of art and gravitate toward a reliable recreation of circumstances. real history: Dos Passos as a master of the factual novel that outlines the panorama historical life 20th century, Brecht as the creator of " epic theater with its undisguised ideological orientation and social relevance.

Camus's aesthetics is dominated by the idea of ​​an "endlessly renewed gap" between art and the world, against which it is a rebellion, but from which it cannot and should not be free. A look at the essence of art, he is in his " notebooks”(published 1966) seeks to substantiate, referring to F. Kafka, who “expresses tragedy through everyday life, absurdity through logic,” a principle preserved by Camus himself in the novel The Plague (1947), which contains an allegorical picture of the reality of Europe in the years fascist occupation, at the same time presenting itself as a philosophical parable built around the motives of the absurd prevailing in existentialism, "concerns", choices and rebellion against human lot. The same motifs dominate Camus' dramaturgy, where "the hell of the present" and "the absurdity opposite to hope" are depicted in allegorical form ("Misunderstanding", 1944, "State of Siege", 1948). Philosophical and journalistic treatise Camus "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942) describes the universe, where "there is one huge irrationality", and the collision of "human demand" (desire to comprehend some meaning and logic of life) with "total unreason of the world", which is one of the main conflicts in the literature of existentialism (for example, Sartre in the trilogy "Roads of Freedom", 1945-49). Sisyphus is interpreted as the personification of the absurdity of the lot prepared for man in this "unreasonable" world, but also as a symbol of rebellion against the evil will of the gods: agreement with this will, an act of surrender, according to Camus, would be suicide. These themes are developed in a new way by Camus in his treatise The Rebellious Man (1951), where, with numerous references to Dostoevsky, direct parallels are drawn between the irrationality of the world without God and the aggression of totalitarianism in the 20th century. Remaining an implacable opponent of the totalitarian idea and practice in any incarnation, Camus, after the publication of this book, entered into a sharp polemic with Sartre, who was ready to some extent to justify the communist version of a totalitarian society with political realities. post-war Europe. This controversy made the two largest representatives of the literature of existentialism antagonists. Considering it axiomatic that “every artist today is chained to the galley of his time” (“Swedish Speeches”, 1958), Camus at the same time interpreted the principle of historicity common to all existentialism more broadly than Sartre, and as an artist he preferred parable forms that made it possible to philosophical context to recreate the "adventure of human life", taking place in a universe "where contradictions, antinomies, dreary fears and weakness reign". The interpretation of the rebellion as an attempt to overcome the absurdity of history (Sartre) Camus opposed the idea of ​​"nonsense of history" and the nihilism of any revolution, ultimately crowned with the triumph of equality in slavery. Camus thought of his rebel hero as being in “exile” (that is, in conscious alienation from the beliefs, hopes, and living standards of the majority, those who make up the “kingdom”). The metaphysical rejection of the human condition, which determines the worldview and social behavior of the hero Camus, from his youth was the main characteristic feature of the personality of the writer himself, which became possible to judge with confidence after the posthumous publication of the unfinished autobiographical novel"First Man" (1994).

The works of writers close to existentialism are usually either parables and parables, or examples of "literature of ideas", in which a tense dispute of characters embodying fundamentally different spiritual and ethical positions unfolds, and the narration is organized in accordance with the principles of polyphony. Thus, in particular, The Plague was written, where the characters argue about the possibility or unreality of counteracting the absurd when it begins to threaten the very existence of mankind, and about the “habit of despair” as a moral position, the most typical of the era being recreated, but not receiving justification . The character in this literature usually remains psychologically undeveloped and is almost not endowed with signs of individuality, which corresponds to general principle existentialism. Stylistics of prose and dramaturgy existentialism does not imply a richness of shades and nuances of details, because it aims at the most logical and clear recreation philosophical conflict, which determines the action, composition, selection and placement of characters. At the same time, neither Camus nor Sartre perceived art as an illustration of their theoretical positions. According to Camus, art is irreplaceable, since it is the only way to convey in images what "does not make sense." First post-war decades existentialism has widely affected the literature of many European countries, as well as American (J. Baldwin, N. Mailer, W. Styron) and Japanese ( Abe Kobo) literature, each time correlating with the issues of greatest relevance and significance for a given culture, and with artistic tradition which dominated it. The exhaustion of existentialism in the 1960s was declared by its most serious literary opponents, in particular, by the adherents of the "new novel" and the theater of the absurd (cf.