Author of 33 novels. His style combined elements of romanticism and enlightenment. For a long time, Cooper's work was the personification of American adventure literature. Of course, similar works were written before him. But Fenimore became the first writer to be recognized by a European audience. And his novels have firmly entered the circle of interests of a huge number of children. This article will present a brief biography of the writer, as well as describe his key works.

Childhood

James Fenimore Cooper was born in 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey. The boy's father was a large landowner. The childhood of the future writer passed in the village of Cooperstown, located in the state of New York, on the lake. He was so named after his father James. Of course, the origin left its mark on the formation of the political views of the hero of this article. Fenimore preferred the way of life of "country gentlemen" and remained an adherent of large landownership. And he connected democratic land reforms only with rampant demagogy and bourgeois money-grubbing.

Study and travel

First, Cooper James Fenimore was educated at a local school, and then entered Yale College. After graduation, the young man had no desire to continue his studies. Seventeen-year-old James became a sailor in the merchant navy and later in the navy. The future writer crossed the Atlantic Ocean, traveled a lot. Fenimore also studied the Great Lakes region well, where the action of his works will soon unfold. In those years, he accumulated a lot of material for his literary work in the form of a variety of life experiences.

Carier start

In 1810, after his father's funeral, Cooper James Fenimore married and settled with his family in the small town of Scarsdale. Ten years later, he wrote his first novel called "Precaution". James later recalled that he created this work "on a bet." Fenimore's wife was fond of. Therefore, the hero of this article half-jokingly, half-seriously took up writing such a book.

"Spy"

The War of Independence was a topic that James Fenimore Cooper was very interested in at that time. The Spy, written by him in 1821, was entirely devoted to this problem. The patriotic novel brought the author great fame. It can be said that with this work, Cooper filled the void that had formed in national literature and showed the guidelines for its future development. From that moment on, Fenimore decided to devote himself entirely to literary creativity. In the next six years, he wrote several more novels, including three works that were included in the future Leather Stocking pentalogy. But we will talk about them separately.

Europe

In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper, whose books were already quite popular, went to Europe. He lived for a long time in Italy, France. The writer also traveled to other countries. New impressions forced him to turn to the history of both the Old and New Worlds. In Europe, the hero of this article wrote two marine novels ("Sea Witch", "Red Corsair") and a trilogy about the Middle Ages ("The Executioner", "Heidenmauer", "Bravo").

Return to America

Seven years later, Cooper James Fenimore came home. During his absence, America has changed a lot. The heroic time of the revolution was in the past, and the principles were forgotten. In the United States, a period of industrial revolution began, which destroyed the remnants of patriarchy both in human relations and in life. "Great moral eclipse" - so Cooper dubbed the disease that has penetrated American society. Money has become the highest interest and priority for people.

A call to fellow citizens

James Fenimore Cooper, whose books were known far beyond America, decided to try to "reason" his fellow citizens. He still believed in the advantages of the socio-political system of his own country, considering bad phenomena superficial, external perversion of initially healthy and reasonable foundations. And Fenimore published Letters to Compatriots. In them, he called for a rise in the fight against the "distortions" that had appeared.

But it didn't end with success. On the contrary, much secret slander and open hatred fell upon James. Bourgeois America did not ignore his call. She accused Fenimore of arrogance, quarrelsomeness, lack of patriotism and lack of literary talent. After that, the writer retired to Cooperstown. There he continued to create journalistic works and novels.

The last period of creativity

During this period of time, James Fenimore Cooper, whose complete works are now in almost any library, completed the last two novels of the Leather Stocking pentalogy ("Deerslayer", "Pathfinder"). In 1835, he published the satirical novel The Monokins about the naked vices of the socio-political system in the United States and England. In the book, they are bred under the names Low-jump and High-jump. Also noteworthy is his trilogy on land rent ("Surveyor", "Devil's Finger", "Redskins"), published in the forties. In ideological and artistic terms, Cooper's latest works are very unequal. In addition to criticizing the bourgeois system, they contain components of a conservative utopia that give readers false ideas about the "landed aristocracy". But, despite this, the writer always adhered to critical anti-bourgeois positions.

Leather Stocking Pentalogy

This series of books is the pinnacle of Cooper's work. It includes five novels: The Pioneers, The Prairie, The Last of the Mohicans, Deerslayer, and The Pathfinder. All of them are united by the image of the main character named Nathaniel Bumpo. He is a hunter with many nicknames: Long Carbine, Leatherstocking, Hawkeye, Tracker, Deerslayer.

The pentalogy represents the whole life of Bampo - from youth to death. But the stages of Nathaniel's life do not coincide with the order in which the novels are written. James Fenimore Cooper, whose collected works are available to all admirers of his work, began to describe the life of Bumpo from an advanced age. The epic continued with a story about Natty's mature age, then there was old age. And only after a thirteen-year break, Cooper again took up the story of the Leather Stocking and described his youth. Below we list the works of the pentalogy in the order of the main character's growing up.

"St. John's wort"

Here Nathaniel Bumpo is in his early twenties. The young man's enemies are the Indians from the Huron tribe. Fighting them, Natty meets Chingachgook on his way. With this Indian from the Mohican tribe, Bumpo will make friends and will maintain relations until the end of his life. The situation in the work is complicated by the fact that Natty's white allies are unfair and cruel to foreign people. They themselves provoke bloodshed and violence. Dramatic adventures - captivity, escape, battles, ambushes - unfold against the backdrop of a very picturesque nature - the wooded shores of the Glimmering Lake and its mirror-like surface.

"Last of the Mohicans"

Perhaps Fenimore's most famous novel. Here the antipode of Bampo is the insidious and cruel leader Magua. He kidnapped Alice and Cora, the daughters of Colonel Munro. Bumpo led a small detachment and went to free the captives. Natty also accompanies Chingachgook along with her son Uncas. The latter is in love with one of the kidnapped girls (Cora), although Cooper does not really develop this line. Chingachgook's son dies in battle while trying to save his beloved. The novel ends with the funeral scene of Cora and Uncas (the last of the Mohicans). After Chingachgook and Natty go on new journeys.

Pathfinder

The plot of this novel is based on the Anglo-French war of 1750-1760. Its members try to trick or bribe the Indians to their side. Natty and Chingachgook fight to help their brethren. However, Cooper, through Bumpo, sharply condemns the war unleashed by the colonialists. He emphasizes the senselessness of the death in this battle of both Indians and whites. A significant place in the work is given to the lyrical line. Leatherstocking is in love with Mabel Dunham. The girl appreciates the nobility and courage of a scout, but still goes to Jasper, who is close to her in character and age. Frustrated, Natty leaves for the west.

"Pioneers"

This is the most troubled novel that James Fenimore Cooper wrote. "Pioneers" describes the life of Leatherstocking at the age of seventy. But despite this, Bumpo has not yet lost his vigilance, and his hand is still firm. Chingachgook is still nearby, only from a mighty and wise leader he turned into a drunken decrepit old man. Both heroes are in the village of colonists, where the laws of a "civilized" society apply. The central conflict of the novel lies in the opposition of far-fetched social orders and natural laws of nature. At the end of the novel, Chingachgook dies. Bumpo leaves the settlement and hides in the forest.

"Prairie"

The final part of the pentalogy written by James Fenimore Cooper. "Prairie" tells the story of Nathaniel's life in old age. Bumpo has made new friends. But now he helps them not with a well-aimed shot, but with great life experience, the ability to talk with a stern Indian leader and hide from a natural disaster. Natty and his friends confront the Bush family and the Sioux Indians. But the adventurous plot ends quite well - a double wedding. At the end of the work, a heartfelt and solemn scene of the last moments of Bampo's life and his death is described.

Conclusion

James Fenimore Cooper, whose biography was presented above, left behind an extensive literary heritage. He wrote 33 novels, as well as several volumes of travel writing, journalism, historical research and pamphlets. Cooper played a huge role in the development of the American novel, inventing several of its subgenres: utopian, satiric-fiction, social, nautical, historical. The writer's works were characterized by an epic reflection of the world. This is what contributed to the unification of a number of his novels into cycles: a dilogy, a trilogy, a pentalogy.

In his work, James Fenimore Cooper covered three main themes: frontier life, the sea, and the Revolutionary War. This choice reveals the romantic basis of his method. To American society, overwhelmed by the thirst for profit, he opposes the freedom of the sea element and soldier's heroism. This gap between reality and the romantic ideal is at the heart of the artistic and ideological design of any work by Cooper.

Imagine how it happens! Sometimes they become writers on a dare. Maybe this is an isolated case in world literature, but this is how it happened. Fenimore once read a book with his wife and said in his hearts that he could compose better than what he and his wife read. To which the wife ironically remarked: "write ...", which encouraged or inspired her husband to write. In the end, Fenimore simply had no choice but to start writing a novel. This was his first attempt at writing, and the novel was called "Precaution". This is the answer for the quiz.

For those who haven't watched this TV quiz yet, I'll say that the question was for 3 million, but the players failed to guess Cooper's work, they chose "the last of the magicans" and, alas, lost the final question. I note that the idea of ​​such an answer belonged to Burkovsky, inspired by the success in the question about the Nobel laureate, Andrei overestimated his luck and led Victor astray, who was more sympathetic to the answer "precaution".

• The question was taken with a hint.

James Fenimore Cooper (James Fenimore Cooper, 1789-1851) began to write already quite an adult, an established person who had time to experience a lot, go through and change his mind. He was proud of his knowledge of America, and, speaking of his mature novels, he repeatedly stated that he wrote only what he knew from his own observations, although he gave free rein to his imagination. Of course, my descriptions are somewhat poetic, as they should be, but for the most part they are quite accurate., he wrote to his French publisher.

Fenimore Cooper grew up on his father's estate, Cooperstown, on the shores of picturesque Otsego Lake, sixty-two miles west of Albany, the capital of New York State. During the childhood of the future writer, here, in the wilderness, lay the border between civilized settlements and lands not yet developed, overgrown with virgin forest. As a child, Cooper could observe here that world of complex and mobile human relations, which later came to life on the pages of his novels. He saw the Indians - the original owners of the land taken from them by deceit or violence, dying out or being forcibly driven farther to the West; pioneers - squatters, capturing areas of virgin lands, in order to, having collected several rich harvests on clearings, move on. Law large property, whose representative was his father, Judge William Cooper, who was proud that forty thousand souls tenants, invaded the existence of many people accustomed to a free, wandering lifestyle - both Indians and white hunters, trappers, itinerant pedlars, squatters ... The American Revolutionary War ended just six years before the birth of Cooper; her legends, which he later used in his novels Spy, Lionel Lincoln, or the Siege of Boston(1825) and others were still fresh; and the results of the victory, wrested from the British by the heroic efforts of American farmers and artisans, have proved controversial and doubtful. Federalists, to which Cooper's father belonged, considered the democratization of the US socio-political system dangerous and harmful. And the people grumbled at high taxes, at the sale of property confiscated for debts, demanded land and freedom, promised to them by the Declaration of Independence. Unrest arose; the uprising of farmers led by Daniel Shays, which stirred up the country, broke out two years before the birth of Cooper, in 1786-1787.

The contradictions that were not resolved by the Revolutionary War and deepened in the 19th century were reflected in Cooper's novels, although in most cases not in a direct, but in a romantically transformed, symbolic form. For the time being, vivid impressions of life on the border colonization was imperceptibly postponed in the mind of a lively, frisky, playful boy - this was remembered by his contemporaries in his school years James Cooper, the penultimate of thirteen children of a Cooperstown judge.

Cooper's years at Yale University, where he entered as a fourteen-year-old teenager, were marked mainly by desperate pranks; pondering them, the future novelist showed inexhaustible ingenuity. After he blew up a locked door by planting a charge of gunpowder in the keyhole, he was expelled from the university. As one of his teachers recalled, James Cooper he was rather capricious, could not stand serious learning, especially abstract sciences, and without memory he loved to read novels and funny stories. The first real life university for Cooper was the maritime service. At the age of seventeen, his father sent him as a sailor on a year-long voyage on a merchant ship that sailed between America and Spain. He then became a midshipman in the navy. For some time he was seconded to the Great Lakes region, to oversee the construction of military ships. The impressions of these months were revived in the novel The Pathfinder (1840), written thirty years later, which takes place on Lake Ontario.

In 1811, after the death of his father, Cooper married, left the naval service and tried to settle down on land. Judge Cooper failed to secure his claim to the territory he had seized; his heirs had to be content with the crumbs of their father's fortune. Actively engaged in agriculture, even becoming a member of the Agronomic Society, Cooper does not neglect other profitable enterprises: he starts a shop in one of the deep, border settlements of New York State, buys and equips a whaling ship for sailing ... According to his biographer Beard, the most quixotic of all his experiments of this period, however, turned out to be writing.

Cooper's first attempt at writing, a novel Precaution(1820) has long been deservedly forgotten and is now only of purely bibliographic interest. It was a pale imitation of English moralizing everyday novels; neither the setting (the English province), nor the ordinary characters Precautions were not marked by the stamp of originality, so characteristic of Cooper the artist. But this experience was not in vain: he showed Cooper how not to write. In his novel The Spy, or the Tale of No Man's Land(1821) he turned to the most dramatic period of national history - to the turning point of the War of Independence, choosing the scene of action well known to him, as well as to many of his readers, the district of the state of New York. As he later recalled in the preface to the 1831 edition, having half finished the novel, he suspended work for a long time: it seemed too doubtful to him to try to interest readers who were accustomed to eating English fiction to the patriotic American plot. Success Spy dispelled these doubts, inspired Cooper and became an important milestone in the history of the American novel.

In 1823 they were published Pioneers, or Origins of Susqueganna - the first work of a wonderful pentalogy, known under the common name Leather Stocking Stories (named after the protagonist). Cooper worked on this pentalogy at different periods of his life, from the early 1920s to 1841. Novel Last of the Mohicans , is one of the parts of the epic, which is rightfully considered Cooper's masterpiece.

Behind Pioneers followed by the first maritime novels Fenimore Cooper - Pilot (1824), whose action, as in Spy, unfolded during the War of Independence, and the main character was the famous commander of the American Navy, Paul Jones, who inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the British and was sung at one time by the American Democratic poet Philip Freno.

Cooper was on the rise. He writes one book after another, experiments, trying his hand at various genres; his novels win a wide readership in Europe, reprinted in England and translated into most European languages.

Cooper was glad that his novels retained their vitality even in translation; let me tell you, madam, that if a book continues to hold its head high after it has been at the mercy of a French translator, then this means that it has bones and muscles he jokingly wrote to his friend Mrs. Jay.

Throughout Cooper's first decade as a writer, he was inspired by the belief in his unity with American public opinion. Reflecting on the responsible mission of the writer, he saw his task in awaken the dormant talents of the nation(letter to Richard Henry Dane, April 14, 1823). My goal,” he later wrote, “is spiritual independence… America; and if I can go down to my grave with the thought that I contributed at least a little to this goal, I will take comfort in the knowledge that I was not useless among my peers.(letter to Samuel Carter Hall dated May 21, 1831).

The lively response that his novels, inspired by the ideals of the war of liberation of 1775-1783, met in his homeland, strengthened his hopes that America was on the right historical path. He was proud to be connected by birthright with this glorious country, which will soon be - I might say, which has already become - a model for wise and kind people in any region .

These lines were written in France, where Cooper served as American consul in Lyon from 1826 to 1833. This position was nominal. The writer lived with his family in Paris, at the center of the political storms of the early 1930s. He traveled extensively in other European countries, closely following the events, comparing the socio-historical experience of the Old World with the experience of his own country. The first literary result of these reflections was the cycle European Cooper novels: Bravo (1831), Heidenmauer (1832) and Executioner (1833). The first of them evoked an enthusiastic response from Belinsky: … what faces, what characters! how my soul became related to them, with what sweet longing I dream of them!.. The insidious, gloomy, dagger policy of the Venetian aristocracy; the manners of Venice; regatta, or competition of gondoliers; the murder of Antonio - all this is beyond description, beyond all praise .

Together, these books contained a critique of the feudal order and customs from the point of view of democracy. But although their action was relegated to the past, perceptive readers easily caught topical allusions to the present in these historical novels. In the preface to a later edition Bravo written in 1833, Cooper recalled: This work was written mainly in Paris, where there were enough opportunities ... to watch how hypocrites and intriguers mock the just hopes of the masses, abusing their trust and using the fruits of popular energy in the interests of selfish and hucksters.. Cooper hinted primarily at the outcome of the July Revolution of 1830 in France. But he was soon to be convinced that what he said here about the monarchy shopkeeper king Louis Philippe was applicable to his own country. Cooper begins to feel his discord with America while still abroad; he returns to the US with gloomy forebodings. In a letter to the artist Dunlap, he confesses: One thing is indisputable - I broke up with my country - the gap between us is huge - who is ahead, time will tell. To another friend, the sculptor Greenough, he writes that he is returning home to take a closer look at America. and make sure whether I will have a homeland in the rest of my life or not .

The immediate cause for this sharp change in the views and moods of Fenimore Cooper was the outraged reaction of a significant part of the American press and public figures to his journalistic articles, where he argued the economic advantages of the democratic republican system of the United States compared to the French monarchy. To Cooper's indignation, the American Whigs not only did not support him, but also ridiculed his arguments and questioned his right to speak to the European public on behalf of the United States. This was the prologue of new and much more dramatic clashes with the public opinion of bourgeois America, including an angry journalistic Letters to compatriots (1834), satires Monikins (1835), a number of other later works by Cooper. The current political struggle in our country seems to be a conflict between people and dollars. he exclaims in a letter to Bedford Brown (March 24, 1838).

Monikins - comic-serio-romantic-ironic story, as Cooper announced to his publishers as early as 1832, was a Swiftian satire that denounced both the ways of the Old World (especially England) and the ways of the United States. The reader easily recognized in the country of Low Jump - the USA, and in the rival High Jump - England. The little men inhabiting them - monikins - differ, in essence, only in the length of their tails. The stubby inhabitants of Low-Jumping are proud of their taillessness - an imaginary guarantee of universal equality; the citizens of High Jump, on the contrary, boast of their long tails (an allusion to the aristocratic privileges and titles retained in England). However, Low-Jumping statesmen, when they appear abroad, willingly attach the longest tails to themselves - this is exactly what the Ambassador of Low-Jumping does, to whom Cooper gives the expressive name Judas Friend of the People. Political wisdom in Low Jump is determined by the art of the dizzying leap; representatives of both rival parties compete with equal success in it. The Low-Jumping Constitution - the subject of eloquent praise - is, in Cooper's caustic definition, nothing more than a Grand National Allegory. And the social and economic life of this country is characterized by periodic Moral Eclipses: during the period of the greatest prosperity of Low Jump, the luminary of the Moral Principle, with all its companions - Truth, Honesty, Selflessness and Patriotism, is obscured by the Great Monetary Interest and hides in its shadow. The end of the eclipse is heralded by the approach of the Tribulation phase and ends with the entry into the Calamity phase. Only here moral truths become clear again...

A disappointing forecast for the future of capitalist America expressed by Cooper in an allegorical utopian novel Crater (1848). Settled on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, the settlers create a prosperous colony. But predatory passions and strife gradually undermine her well-being. At the end of the novel, the colony dies, destroyed by an earthquake. The author suggested to readers an analogy between this gloomy robinsonade and US history.

In the last years of his life, Fenimore Cooper, not being an abolitionist, followed with alarm the deepening contradictions between the slave-owning South and the industrial North. Attempts to compromise appeasement they were rated as amazing quackery. A year before his death, he predicted the inevitability of civil war. Every week knocks another link out of the chain of the Union- he wrote to a friend of his youth, Commodore Shubrik.

More than once he bitterly mentions in his letters that he is accused of anti-Americanism. From the very moment he returned to his homeland, he found himself under fire from the unprincipled and demagogic press. Grotesque and satirical depiction of the morals of American newspapermen in the memorable chapters of Dickensian The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit pales in comparison to the corpus of genuine newspaper attacks on Cooper. He was announced as devoid of ordinary human feelings as the reddest of his Indians, compared with a tiger in the menagerie, which growls at the approach of every passerby, or even just with a rabid dog ... At a meeting of the inhabitants of his native Cooperstown, it was decided to withdraw his works from the local library. However, Cooper did not give up. Year after year, he methodically sued his defamators for libel and, to their indignation, won several of these suits. But small victories could not, of course, assuage the bitter consciousness of their alienation from their own country. Cooper's loneliness in the last years of his life was aggravated by the fact that, while condemning the power of dollars, he took up arms against the socialist ideas that penetrated into US public life at that time, mainly in the form of social utopian experiments, and against mass democratic movements (in particular, the struggle for abolition of land rent). Hence the unevenness of many of Cooper's later novels - his dulogies Home (1838) and At home (1838), a trilogy known as Chronicle of the Littlepages (or Trilogy in defense of land rent ), his dying novel Trends of the times and others; sharp satirical observations, wise generalizations are combined here with conservative prejudices and social myopia. The most integral and significant in the artistic heritage of Cooper remained his epic about Leather Stocking, Spy , Pilot .

US Literature

James Fenimore Cooper

Biography

COOPER, James Fenimore (1789-1851), American writer. Combined elements of enlightenment and romanticism. Historical and adventure novels about the War of Independence in the North. America, the era of the frontier, sea voyages ("Spy", 1821; pentalogy about the Leather Stocking, including "The Last of the Mohicans", 1826, "Deerslayer", 1841; "Pilot", 1823). Socio-political satire (the novel The Monikins, 1835) and journalism (the pamphlet treatise The American Democrat, 1838).

COOPER (Cooper) James Fenimore (September 15, 1789, Burlington, New Jersey - September 14, 1851, Cooperstown, New York), American writer.

First steps in literature

The author of 33 novels, Fenimore Cooper became the first American writer who was unconditionally and widely recognized by the cultural environment of the Old World, including Russia. Balzac, reading his novels, by his own admission, growled with pleasure. Thackeray put Cooper above Walter Scott, repeating in this case the reviews of Lermontov and Belinsky, who generally likened him to Cervantes and even Homer. Pushkin noted Cooper's rich poetic imagination.

He took up professional literary activity relatively late, already at the age of 30, and in general, as if by accident. If you believe the legends that inevitably surround the life of a major personality, he wrote his first novel (Precaution, 1820) in a dispute with his wife. And before that, the biography developed quite routinely. The son of a landowner who became rich during the years of the struggle for independence, who managed to become a judge, and then a congressman, James Fenimore Cooper grew up on the shores of Lake Otsego, a hundred miles northwest of New York, where at that time the "frontier" - the concept in The New World is not only geographical, but to a large extent socio-psychological - between the already developed territories and the wild, pristine lands of the natives. Thus, from an early age, he became a living witness to the dramatic, if not bloody, growth of American civilization, cutting its way further and further west. The heroes of his future books - pioneer squatters, Indians, farmers who suddenly became large planters, he knew firsthand. In 1803, at the age of 14, Cooper entered Yale University, from where, however, he was expelled for some disciplinary offenses. This was followed by a seven-year service in the navy - first merchant, then military. Cooper and further, having already made a big name for himself as a writer, did not leave practical activity. In the years 1826-1833 he served as the American consul in Lyon, however, rather nominally. In any case, during these years he traveled a considerable part of Europe, settling for a long time, in addition to France, in England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In the summer of 1828 he was going to Russia, but this plan was never to be realized. All this colorful life experience, one way or another, was reflected in his work, however, with a different degree of artistic persuasiveness.

Natty Bumpo

Cooper owes his worldwide fame not to the so-called land rent trilogy (The Devil's Finger, 1845, The Land Surveyor, 1845, The Redskins, 1846), where old barons, landed aristocrats, are opposed to greedy businessmen who are not shackled by any moral prohibitions, and not another trilogy inspired by the legends and reality of the European Middle Ages (Bravo, 1831, Heidenmauer, 1832, The Executioner, 1833), and not numerous marine novels (The Red Corsair, 1828, The Sea Sorceress, 1830 , etc.), and even more so not satires, like "Monicons" (1835), as well as two journalistic novels adjoining them in terms of issues, "Home" (1838) and "House" (1838). This is generally a topical debate on domestic American topics, the writer's response to critics who accused him of a lack of patriotism, which really should have hurt him painfully - after all, The Spy (1821) was left behind - a clearly patriotic novel from the time of the American Revolution. "Monikins" are even compared with "Gulliver's Travels", but Cooper clearly lacks neither Swift's imagination, nor Swift's wit, a tendency that kills all artistry is too clearly visible here. In general, oddly enough, Cooper more successfully resisted his enemies not as a writer, but simply as a citizen who, on occasion, could apply to the courts. Indeed, he won more than one process, defending his honor and dignity in court against illegible newspaper pamphleteers and even fellow countrymen, who decided at a meeting to withdraw his books from the library of his native Cooperstown. The reputation of Cooper, a classic of national and world literature, is firmly based on the pentalogy of Natty Bumpo - Leather Stocking (it is called, however, in different ways - St. John's Wort, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Long Carbine). With all the cursiveness of the author, the work on this work stretched out, although with long breaks, for seventeen years. Against a rich historical background, it traces the fate of a man who paves the paths and highways of American civilization and at the same time tragically experiences the great moral costs of this path. As Gorky astutely noted in his time, Cooper's hero "unconsciously served the great cause ... the spread of material culture in the country of wild people and - turned out to be unable to live in the conditions of this culture ...".

Pentalogy

The sequence of events in this first epic on American soil is broken. In the novel The Pioneers (1823), which opens it, the action takes place in 1793, and Natti Bumpo appears as a hunter already declining in his life, who does not understand the language and customs of modern times. In the next novel in the cycle, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the action is moved back forty years. Behind him - "Prairie" (1827), chronologically directly adjacent to the "Pioneers". On the pages of this novel, the hero dies, but continues to live in the creative imagination of the author, and after many years he returns to the years of his youth. The novels Pathfinder (1840) and Deerslayer (1841) present pure pastoral, pure poetry, which the author discovers in human types, and mainly in the very appearance of virgin nature, still almost untouched by the colonist's axe. As Belinsky wrote, "Cooper cannot be surpassed when he introduces you to the beauties of American nature."

In the critical essay Enlightenment and Literature in America (1828), in the form of a letter to the fictitious abbot Giromachi, Cooper complained that the printer in America appeared before the writer, while the romantic writer was deprived of chronicles and dark traditions. He himself made up for this deficiency. Under his pen, the characters and manners of the frontier acquire an inexpressible poetic charm. Of course, Pushkin was right when he noted in the article "John Tanner" that Cooper's Indians are fanned with a romantic veil that deprives them of pronounced individual properties. But the novelist, it seems, did not strive for the accuracy of the portrait, preferring poetic fiction to the truth of the fact, which, by the way, Mark Twain later wrote ironically in the famous pamphlet The Literary Sins of Fenimore Cooper.

Nevertheless, he felt obligations to historical reality, which he himself spoke about in the preface to The Pioneers. The acute internal conflict between a lofty dream and reality, between nature, embodying the highest truth, and progress is a conflict of a characteristically romantic nature and constitutes the main dramatic interest of the pentalogy.

With piercing sharpness, this conflict reveals itself in the pages of "Leather Stocking", clearly the most powerful thing in the pentalogy, and in the entire legacy of Cooper. Having placed one of the episodes of the so-called Seven Years' War (1757−1763) between the British and French over possessions in Canada at the center of the narrative, the author leads it swiftly, saturating it with a mass of adventures, partly of a detective nature, which made the novel a favorite children's reading for many generations. But this is not children's literature.

Chingachgook

Perhaps that is why the images of the Indians, in this case Chingachgook, one of the two main characters of the novel, turned out to be lyrically blurry for Cooper, because the common concepts were more important for him - tribe, clan, history with its mythology, way of life, language. It is this powerful layer of human culture, which is based on kinship to nature, that is leaving, as evidenced by the death of Chingachgook's son Uncas, the last of the Mohicans. This loss is catastrophic. But it is not hopeless, which is generally not characteristic of American romanticism. Cooper translates tragedy into a mythological plane, and myth, in fact, does not know a clear boundary between life and death, it is not for nothing that Leather Stocking, also not just a person, but the hero of a myth - a myth of early American history, solemnly and confidently says that the young man Uncas leaves only for time.

Writer's Pain

Man before the court of nature is the inner theme of The Last of the Moquigans. It is not given to a person to reach out to her greatness, albeit sometimes unkind, but he is constantly forced to solve this unsolvable task. Everything else - the fights of the Indians with the pale-faced, the battles of the British with the French, colorful clothes, ritual dances, ambushes, caves, etc. - this is just the entourage.

It was painful for Cooper to see how the root America, which is embodied by his beloved hero, is leaving before our eyes, being replaced by a completely different America, where speculators and rogues rule the ball. That is probably why the writer once dropped with bitterness: "I parted ways with my country." But over time, it became clear that contemporaries-compatriots, who reproached the writer for anti-patriotic moods, did not notice, the discrepancy is a form of moral self-esteem, and longing for the departed is a secret faith in a continuation that has no end.

Fenimore Cooper is a famous American writer and publicist, born in 1789. He was brought up in the family of a fairly wealthy judge. When James was born, the family moved to New York State. Soon they settled down and founded a small village called Cooperstown. Later, it gradually develops into a city. In his youth, he entered Yale University, but soon he dropped out and went to the naval service.

1811 is a prosperous year for the future writer. He meets a beautiful girl, besides she is French, and soon proposes to her. This event had a rather strong influence on Cooper's literary activity. It is known that he wrote his first work, thanks to his beloved wife. He argued with her that he could write a work, and it would be no worse than all modern authors at that time. Already in 1820 the world saw "Precaution", which received a floor of negative criticism.

It is known that Fenimore Cooper rarely visited England, therefore, the traditions and social values ​​\u200b\u200bof this country were little known to him, which cannot be said from his work. After that, a period of active creativity begins in the life of the writer, he works a lot on creating stories, novels, whole series of books. Throughout life, Cooper was a versatile person, he never did what he did not like or did not need at all. Cooper travels quite a lot in Europe, gets acquainted with numerous peoples and their traditions.

COOPER James Fenimore(1789-1851), American writer. Combined elements of enlightenment and romanticism. Historical and adventure novels about the War of Independence in the North. America, the era of the frontier, sea voyages ("Spy", 1821; pentalogy about the Leather Stocking, including "The Last of the Mohicans", 1826, "Deerslayer", 1841; "Pilot", 1823). Socio-political satire (the novel The Monikins, 1835) and journalism (the pamphlet treatise The American Democrat, 1838).
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COOPER (Cooper) James Fenimore (September 15, 1789, Burlington, New Jersey - September 14, 1851, Cooperstown, New York), American writer.
First steps in literature
The author of 33 novels, Fenimore Cooper became the first American writer who was unconditionally and widely recognized by the cultural environment of the Old World, including Russia. Balzac, reading his novels, by his own admission, growled with pleasure. Thackeray put Cooper above Walter Scott, repeating in this case the reviews of Lermontov and Belinsky, who generally likened him to Cervantes and even Homer. Pushkin noted Cooper's rich poetic imagination.
He took up professional literary activity relatively late, already at the age of 30, and in general, as if by accident. If you believe the legends that inevitably surround the life of a major personality, he wrote his first novel (Precaution, 1820) in a dispute with his wife. And before that, the biography developed quite routinely. The son of a landowner who became rich during the years of the struggle for independence, who managed to become a judge, and then a congressman, James Fenimore Cooper grew up on the shores of Lake Otsego, a hundred miles northwest of New York, where at that time the "frontier" - the concept in The New World is not only geographical, but to a large extent socio-psychological - between the already developed territories and the wild, pristine lands of the natives. Thus, from an early age, he became a living witness to the dramatic, if not bloody, growth of American civilization, cutting its way further and further west. The heroes of his future books - pioneer squatters, Indians, farmers who suddenly became large planters, he knew firsthand. In 1803, at the age of 14, Cooper entered Yale University, from where, however, he was expelled for some disciplinary offenses. This was followed by a seven-year service in the navy - first merchant, then military. Cooper and further, having already made a big name for himself as a writer, did not leave practical activity. In the years 1826-1833 he served as the American consul in Lyon, however, rather nominally. In any case, during these years he traveled a considerable part of Europe, settling for a long time, in addition to France, in England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In the summer of 1828 he was going to Russia, but this plan was never to be realized. All this colorful life experience, one way or another, was reflected in his work, however, with a different degree of artistic persuasiveness.
Natty Bumpo
Cooper owes his worldwide fame not to the so-called land rent trilogy (The Devil's Finger, 1845, The Land Surveyor, 1845, The Redskins, 1846), where old barons, landed aristocrats, are opposed to greedy businessmen who are not shackled by any moral prohibitions, and not another trilogy inspired by the legends and reality of the European Middle Ages (Bravo, 1831, Heidenmauer, 1832, The Executioner, 1833), and not numerous marine novels (The Red Corsair, 1828, The Sea Sorceress, 1830 , etc.), and even more so not satires, like "Monicons" (1835), as well as two journalistic novels adjoining them in terms of issues, "Home" (1838) and "House" (1838). This is generally a topical debate on domestic American topics, the writer's response to critics who accused him of a lack of patriotism, which really should have hurt him painfully - after all, The Spy (1821) was left behind - a clearly patriotic novel from the time of the American Revolution. "Monikins" are even compared with "Gulliver's Travels", but Cooper clearly lacks neither Swift's imagination, nor Swift's wit, a tendency that kills all artistry is too clearly visible here. In general, oddly enough, Cooper more successfully resisted his enemies not as a writer, but simply as a citizen who, on occasion, could apply to the courts. Indeed, he won more than one process, defending his honor and dignity in court against illegible newspaper pamphleteers and even fellow countrymen, who decided at a meeting to withdraw his books from the library of his native Cooperstown. The reputation of Cooper, a classic of national and world literature, is firmly based on the pentalogy of Natty Bumpo - Leather Stocking (it is called, however, in different ways - St. John's Wort, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Long Carbine). With all the cursiveness of the author, the work on this work stretched out, although with long breaks, for seventeen years. Against a rich historical background, it traces the fate of a man who paves the paths and highways of American civilization and at the same time tragically experiences the great moral costs of this path. As Gorky astutely noted in his time, Cooper's hero "unconsciously served a great cause ... the spread of material culture in the country of wild people and - turned out to be unable to live in the conditions of this culture ...".
Pentalogy
The sequence of events in this first epic on American soil is broken. In the novel The Pioneers (1823), which opens it, the action takes place in 1793, and Natti Bumpo appears as a hunter already declining in his life, who does not understand the language and customs of modern times. In the next novel in the cycle, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the action is moved back forty years. Behind him - "Prairie" (1827), chronologically directly adjacent to the "Pioneers". On the pages of this novel, the hero dies, but continues to live in the creative imagination of the author, and after many years he returns to the years of his youth. The novels Pathfinder (1840) and Deerslayer (1841) present pure pastoral, pure poetry, which the author discovers in human types, and mainly in the very appearance of virgin nature, still almost untouched by the colonist's axe. As Belinsky wrote, "Cooper cannot be surpassed when he introduces you to the beauties of American nature."
In the critical essay Enlightenment and Literature in America (1828), in the form of a letter to the fictitious abbot Giromachi, Cooper complained that the printer in America appeared before the writer, while the romantic writer was deprived of chronicles and dark traditions. He himself made up for this deficiency. Under his pen, the characters and manners of the frontier acquire an inexpressible poetic charm. Of course, Pushkin was right when he noted in the article "John Tanner" that Cooper's Indians are fanned with a romantic veil that deprives them of pronounced individual properties. But the novelist, it seems, did not strive for the accuracy of the portrait, preferring poetic fiction to the truth of the fact, which, by the way, Mark Twain later wrote ironically in the famous pamphlet The Literary Sins of Fenimore Cooper.
Nevertheless, he felt obligations to historical reality, which he himself spoke about in the preface to The Pioneers. The acute internal conflict between a lofty dream and reality, between nature, embodying the highest truth, and progress is a conflict of a characteristically romantic nature and constitutes the main dramatic interest of the pentalogy.
With piercing sharpness, this conflict reveals itself in the pages of "Leather Stocking", clearly the most powerful thing in the pentalogy, and in the entire legacy of Cooper. Having placed one of the episodes of the so-called Seven Years' War (1757-1763) between the British and French over possessions in Canada at the center of the narrative, the author leads it swiftly, saturates it with a mass of adventures of a partly detective nature, which made the novel a favorite children's reading for many generations. But this is not children's literature.
Chingachgook
Perhaps that is why the images of the Indians, in this case Chingachgook, one of the two main characters of the novel, turned out to be lyrically blurry for Cooper, because the common concepts were more important for him - tribe, clan, history with its mythology, way of life, language. It is this powerful layer of human culture, which is based on kinship to nature, that is leaving, as evidenced by the death of Chingachgook's son Uncas, the last of the Mohicans. This loss is catastrophic. But it is not hopeless, which is generally not characteristic of American romanticism. Cooper translates tragedy into a mythological plane, and myth, in fact, does not know a clear boundary between life and death, it is not for nothing that Leather Stocking, also not just a person, but the hero of a myth - a myth of early American history, solemnly and confidently says that the young man Uncas leaves only for time.
Writer's Pain
Man before the court of nature is the inner theme of The Last of the Moquigans. It is not given to a person to reach out to her greatness, albeit sometimes unkind, but he is constantly forced to solve this unsolvable task. Everything else - the fights of the Indians with the pale-faced, the battles of the British with the French, colorful clothes, ritual dances, ambushes, caves, etc. - this is just the entourage.
It was painful for Cooper to see how the root America, which is embodied by his beloved hero, is leaving before our eyes, being replaced by a completely different America, where speculators and rogues rule the ball. That is probably why the writer once dropped with bitterness: "I parted ways with my country." But over time, it became clear that contemporaries-compatriots, who reproached the writer for anti-patriotic moods, did not notice, the discrepancy is a form of moral self-esteem, and longing for the departed is a secret faith in a continuation that has no end.