XX - BEGINNING OF XXI CENTURIES
The development of modernism in the literature of the XX century
Since the end of the 19th century, modernism has assumed a dominant role in the literary process. The main attention in the works of modernist literature of the XX century. focuses on the expression of the deep essence of man and the eternal problems of being, the search for ways to go beyond the concrete and historical, the possibilities of achieving "high omnipresence", that is, on the discovery of universal trends in the spiritual development of mankind.
The characteristic features of the literature of modernism are, first of all, special attention to the inner world of the individual; orientation to the eternal laws of being and art; giving the advantage of creative intuition; the perception of literature as the highest knowledge, which is able to penetrate into the most intimate depths of the existence of the individual; the desire to acquire eternal ideas that can transform the world according to the laws of beauty; creation of a new artistic reality and experiments with it; search for new formal means, etc.
The modernist work combines the conscious and the subconscious, the earthly and the cosmic, which is carried out primarily in the psychological plane. In the center of such a work is a person who is looking for the meaning of being, listening to his own experiences and becoming like "the naked nerve of the era."
The Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the founders of the modernist novel of a new type, whose poetics had a significant influence on the development of not only this genre, but the entire literary process of the 20th century. Joyce received worldwide fame as the author of the collection of short stories "Dubliners" (1914), the psychological essay "Giacomo" (1914), the novels "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916), "Ulysses" (1914-1921) and "Finnegan's Wake" ( 1922-1939).
In his famous novel Ulysses (1922), the writer used numerous memories, associations, an internal monologue, a “stream of consciousness” in which uniform elements of the thinking process are intricately intertwined to depict the spiritual life of a person. This work enriched the technique of the novel with multi-genre, in-depth intellectualization, the diversity of forms of subjective language, the use of mythological symbols, etc. It was thanks to the appearance of this work that the “stream of consciousness” school was formed and became very popular.
"Stream of consciousness" is a way of depicting the human psyche directly, "from the inside", as a complex and dynamic process. For example, J. Joyce's psychological essay "Giacomo" is built as a stream of consciousness of the protagonist, which combines observations, thoughts, memories, as well as fragments of overheard conversations, quotations from various works, ambiguous symbols, allusions, etc. Psychological concentration (the author himself is the literary hero of this work, because Giacomo is the Italian sound of the name James), the experience of strong feelings give the author an impetus to think about the surrounding reality and the place of creative individuality in it. All these reflections are given through the perception of the lyrical hero, who does not analyze reality, but feels it with all his soul, with all his heart, consciously and subconsciously.
In the novel Ulysses, Joyce also reproduces the inner world of a person in all its complexity, unpredictability, interweaving of the logical and alogical, which is difficult to comprehend with the mind, but can be felt, touched by the heart through the perception of various associations, sensory influences, visual and sound images, etc. . For this work, the combination (similar to a film montage technique) of the objectively existing and the absolutely subjective, connected with the consciousness of the characters, is decisive. The novel is built as a chronicle of one day in the life of two heroes, residents of Dublin - Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom - which correlates with Homer's Odyssey. The writer uses in "Ulysses" several streams of consciousness at the same time. Such an experiment gives the author the opportunity to reproduce the inner human time. consisting of the entire experience of life, and thus create a holistic epic image of the world.
The French writer Marcel Proust is also one of the classics of world literary modernism of the 20th century. The seven volumes of his main work, In Search of Lost Time, mark the emergence of a qualitatively new type of novel, different from that which was formed during the 19th century. thanks to the efforts of such word artists as Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert or Emile Zola. Marcel Proust refuses the principle of an objective attitude to the depiction of the environment and characters, which is the main principle in traditional romance. The works of Proust, on the contrary, are the embodiment of "subjectivism". For him, only one thing matters - the inner "I" of a person, the unconstrained, unpredictable life of consciousness, and not on a logical, but on an intuitive level.
This "subjectivism" of Proust's artistic worldview determines the whole originality of the structure of his novels. First of all, it is worth mentioning the so-called “plotlessness” of Proustian works, in which there are no life stories of characters presented in chronological order. Instead, the reader is literally overwhelmed by a chaos of impressions that are simply fixed as they exist in the subconscious. Time for M. Proust and his heroes consists of memory, sensations and experiences.
Proust unconventionally reveals the inner world of his characters: they seem to lack a single holistic psychology, their character and even appearance are very changeable and fluid. This effect is created due to the fact that they are depicted as they appear from within the “I”, for which there is only what it sees at this given moment in time. It also defines the subjective "I" and the meaning of events in personal and social life. The boundary between the significant and the insignificant disappears altogether. "Events" give way to small details, which the writer describes slowly, in detail and with unsurpassed skill.
The originality of Proust's cycle "In Search of Lost Time" lies in the fact that there are no large-scale historical and universal plans in it. This is an epic that fully reveals the life of a separate individual consciousness. This is the internal monologue of the narrator Marcel, who throughout the works, "remembering" what happened to him in the past, relives his life again.
The "memory" by which Marcel restores the meaning of what he has lived (and this is what it means to restore "lost time") has nothing to do with the traditional chronological experience of past events. Marcel Proust distinguishes between two types of memory: intellectual and intuitive. The first of these is either "recollection" of external events that influenced our choice to do something, or a reproduction of the past based on documents and historical research. Intuitive recollection is "use" in things, in people, in space. It is, at first glance, chaotic and inconsistent, requiring a person to be able to analyze and describe barely noticeable shades of feelings.
M. Proust created a subjective epic (as defined by Thomas Mann), which reflected not events, but primarily psychological processes that determine human behavior and, accordingly, the state of society. "The most important reality" for Proust was the personality with its unique moods, thoughts, feelings. their movement and constant turnover determined the originality of the novel "stream of consciousness" by M. Proust. The main attention is paid to the image of human consciousness, consisting of a number of associations, impressions, sensations, memories. The author looks at the world through the prism of the human soul, which is for him the object of the image and the angle of view at the same time.
An outstanding Austrian writer of the early 20th century. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) created an unreal, fantastic world in which the absurdity of a monotonous and gray life is especially clearly visible. In his works, a protest breaks out against the circumstances of the life of the most lonely writer that suffers. The "glass wall" that fenced off the writer from friends, loneliness created a special philosophy of his life, which became the philosophy of Kafka's work. The invasion of fantasy in his works is not accompanied by interesting and colorful plot twists, moreover, it is perceived by the characters as ordinary, without surprising them.
His works are considered as a certain “code” of human relations, as a kind of “model” of life, valid for all forms and types of social life, and the writer himself is considered as a “singer of alienation”, a myth-maker who forever fixed the eternal features of our world in the works of his imagination. . This is the world of disharmony of human existence. The writer sees the origins of this disharmony in the fragmentation of people, in the impossibility for them to overcome mutual alienation, which turns out to be stronger than anything - for family ties, love, friendship.
In the works of F. Kafka there is no connection between man and the world. The world is hostile to man, evil reigns in it, and its power is unlimited. The all-pervading force of evil separates people, it instills in a person a feeling of empathy, love for one's neighbor and a desire to help him, to meet halfway. Man in Kafka's world is a suffering being, and the origins of her suffering and torment are in herself, in her character. She is not the master of nature, the world, she is unprotected, weak, powerless. Evil in the form of fate, fate lies in wait for her everywhere.
The writer confirms his thoughts not so much by the psychology of the characters, because the characters of his heroes are always psychologically poor, but by the situation itself, the position in which they find themselves.
F. Kafka's short story "Reincarnation" (1904) begins simply and terribly - waking up one morning, the protagonist of the work, salesman Gregor Zamzam, found that he had turned into a disgusting insect. Gregorov wanted to fall asleep again in order to wake up and make sure that it seemed to him. And then he realized with horror that he overslept on the five o'clock train. Zamzam works hard and hard, delivering tissue samples around the country, gets tired, does not get enough sleep, eats poorly and untimely. He endures this work, hoping in the coming years to pay off his father's debt, and then it will be possible to think about his own life.
A loyal campaigner, disciplined and obliging, Gregor fears the consequences of being late for work, and the transformation that befell him is only an inconvenience. Reality puts pressure on the hero, preventing him from realizing the fantastic nature of his transformation. Gregor is afraid of the wrath of his superiors for being late, he is afraid to appear to his parents in this form, he is madly looking for a way out of the situation in which he has found himself - this is the essence of his experiences. He cannot realize that all this is vanity of vanities, and his misfortune is irreparable.
Gregor's conflict with the surrounding reality is growing. Relatives relate to his misfortune without compassion and understanding. His father treats him like a vile cockroach, using a stick and kicks, drives him into the room, causing numerous injuries. The mother is frightened by the unusual image of her son. Only the sister in the first days expressed some semblance of pity, but then she becomes indifferent. So Gregor, who was the breadwinner and support of the family, turns into a heavy burden for everyone: “We need to get rid of him - this is the only way out ... you just need to forget that this is Gregor.”
Gregor is trying not to disturb his loved ones, having made the following decision for himself: “... For the time being, he must remain calm and patient and with the greatest care to alleviate the family of the troubles that he was forced to inflict on her with his current condition.” However, the "intolerance of the situation" of his relatives is completely different - now they themselves have to look for means of subsistence.
Alone, suffering from a wound inflicted by his father, from hunger and remorse, Gregor dies. The fantastic plot used by the author highlights the conflict between the hero and the outside world. Kafka emphasizes that man is a small insect before the circumstances of life and cannot resist them. Other people, even relatives, will not help, they are connected to each other only by the need to live and eat together.
The finale of the novel sounds in contrast to Gregor's sad life. For many months of unbearable existence, the family decided to reward themselves with a country pleasure trip. There was no feeling of guilt in the people closest to Gregor that the “dead bug” was thrown away by the maid along with the garbage. They enjoy a warm sunny day in spring, rejoice at their beautiful daughter, who “has blossomed lately and has become a good, beautiful girl.”
The work of a brilliant artist reflects the complex world of human relations. He does not copy this world, but accumulates its burden in himself, experiences its evil and indifference, inventing a capacious and figurative metaphor to show what it is - a person. In this case, the name of this metaphor is "Reincarnation".
Pain and suffering, bitterness and fear permeate the work of Franz Kafka, and - not a drop of optimism or hope. The tragic worldview of the Austrian writer is the worldview of a person at the beginning of the 20th century, a stormy and cruel century. A worldview in which there is no place for the belief that the world can be rebuilt, to provide it with harmony.
Modernism in literature originates on the eve of the First World War and reaches its peak in the twenties simultaneously in all countries of Western Europe and in America. Modernism is an international phenomenon, consisting of different schools (Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.). This is a revolution in literature, the participants of which announced a break not only with the tradition of realistic plausibility, but also with the Western cultural and literary tradition in general. Any previous trend in literature defined itself through its relation to the classical tradition: one could directly proclaim antiquity as a model of artistic creativity, like the classicists, or prefer the Middle Ages to antiquity, like romantics, but all cultural epochs before modernism are called today more and more often "classical", because developed in line with the classical heritage of European thought. Modernism is the first cultural and literary epoch that did away with this heritage and provided new answers to "eternal" questions. As the English poet S. Spender wrote in 1930: "It seems to me that modernists are consciously striving to create a completely new literature. This is a consequence of their feeling that our era is in many respects unprecedented and stands outside any conventions of past art and literature" .
The generation of the first modernists keenly felt the exhaustion of the forms of realistic narrative, their aesthetic fatigue. For modernists, the concept of "realism" meant the absence of an effort to independently comprehend the world, the mechanistic nature of creativity, superficiality, the boredom of vague descriptions - an interest in a button on a character's coat, and not in his state of mind. Modernists above all put the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; the artistic worlds they create are uniquely dissimilar to each other, each one bears the stamp of a bright creative individuality.
It fell to them to live in a period when the values of traditional humanistic culture collapsed - "freedom" meant very different things in Western democracies and in totalitarian states; the bloody massacre of the First World War, in which weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time, showed the true price of human life for the modern world; the humanistic ban on pain, on physical and spiritual violence was replaced by the practice of mass executions and concentration camps. Modernism is the art of a dehumanized era (the term of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset); the attitude to humanistic values in modernism is ambiguous, but the world of modernists appears in a hard, cold light. Using the metaphor of J. Conrad, one can say that the hero of the modernist work seemed to stop for the night in an uncomfortable hotel at the end of the world, with very suspicious owners, in a shabby room, lit by the pitiless light of a lamp without a lampshade.
Modernists conceive of human existence as a brief, fragile moment; the subject may or may not be aware of the tragedy, the frailty of our absurd world, and the work of the artist is to show the horror, grandeur and beauty that are contained in spite of everything in the moments of earthly existence. Social problems, which played such an important role in the realism of the 19th century, are given indirectly in modernism, as an inseparable part of a holistic portrait of the individual. The main sphere of interest of modernists is the image of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in a person, the mechanisms of his perceptions, and the whimsical work of memory. The modernist hero is taken, as a rule, in the whole integrity of his experiences, his subjective being, although the very scale of his life can be small, insignificant. In modernism, the main line of development of the literature of the New Age continues to a constant decrease in the social status of the hero; the modernist hero is a "everymenus," any and every person. Modernists have learned to describe such mental states of a person that literature had not noticed before, and they did it with such persuasiveness that it seemed to bourgeois critics an insult to morality and a profanation of the art of the word. Not only the content - the big role of intimate and sexual issues, the relativity of moral assessments, the emphasized apoliticality - but first of all, the unusual forms of modernist narrative caused a particularly sharp rejection. Today, when most of the masterpieces of modernist literature have entered school and university curricula, it is difficult for us to feel the rebellious, anti-bourgeois character of early modernism, the sharpness of the accusations and challenges thrown by it.
Three major writers of modernism- Irishman James Joyce (1882-1943), Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Each of them in his own direction reformed the art of the word of the twentieth century, each is considered the great pioneer of modernism. Let's take Ulysses as an example.
The purpose of this lesson is to understand how different branches of modernism differed from each other.
The main content of the current of symbolism is an attempt to find new expressions of language, the creation of a new philosophy in literature. Symbolists considered to remind that the world is not simple and understandable, but filled with meaning, the depth of which is impossible to find.
Acmeism arose as a way to drag poetry from the heavens of symbolism to earth. The teacher invites students to compare the work of the symbolists and acmeists.
The main theme of the next direction of modernism - futurism - is the desire to see the future in modernity, to mark the gap between them.
All these areas of modernism introduced radical updates to the language, marked the collapse of eras, and emphasized that the old literature could not express the spirit of modernity.
Topic: Russian literature of the late XIX - early XX centuries.
Lesson: The main currents of Russian modernism: symbolism, acmeism, futurism
Modernism is a single artistic stream. The branches of modernism: symbolism, acmeism and futurism - had their own characteristics.
Symbolism as a literary movement originated in France in the 80s. 19th century The basis of the artistic method of French symbolism is sharply subjective sensationalism (sensuality). The Symbolists reproduced reality as a stream of sensations. Poetry avoids generalizations, looking not for the typical, but for the individual, the only one of its kind.
Poetry takes on the character of improvisation, fixing "pure impressions". The object loses its clear outline, dissolves in a stream of disparate sensations, qualities; the dominant role is played by the epithet, a colorful spot. Emotion becomes objectless and "inexpressible". Poetry strives to enhance sensual richness and emotional impact. A self-sustaining form is cultivated. Representatives of French symbolism are P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud, J. Laforgue.
The dominant genre of symbolism was "pure" lyrics, the novel, short story, drama become lyrical.
In Russia, symbolism arose in the 90s. 19th century and at its initial stage (K. D. Balmont, early V. Ya. Bryusov and A. Dobrolyubov, and later - B. Zaitsev, I. F. Annensky, Remizov) develops a style of decadent impressionism, similar to French symbolism.
Russian Symbolists of the 1900s (V. Ivanov, A. Bely, A. A. Blok, as well as D. S. Merezhkovsky, S. Solovyov and others), trying to overcome pessimism, passivity, proclaimed the slogan of effective art, the predominance of creativity over knowledge.
The material world is drawn by the symbolists as a mask through which the otherworldly shines through. Dualism finds expression in the two-dimensional composition of novels, dramas and "symphonies". The world of real phenomena, everyday life or conditional fantasy is depicted grotesquely, discredited in the light of "transcendental irony". Situations, images, their movement acquire a double meaning: in terms of what is depicted and in terms of what is marked.
A symbol is a bundle of meanings that diverge in different directions. The task of the symbol_ is to present correspondences.
The poem (Baudelaire, "Correspondences" translated by K. Balmont) shows an example of traditional semantic connections that give rise to symbols.
Nature is a strict temple, where the system of living columns
Sometimes a slightly intelligible sound stealthily drops;
He wanders through the forests of symbols, drowns in their thickets
An embarrassed person, touched by their gaze.
Like an echo of echoes in one unclear chord,
Where everything is one, light and darkness at night,
Fragrances and sounds and colors
It combines in harmony with a consonant.
There is a virgin smell; like a meadow, it is pure and holy,
Like a child's body, the high sound of an oboe;
And there is a solemn, depraved aroma -
Fusion of incense and amber and benzoic:
In it, the infinite is suddenly available to us,
It contains the highest thoughts of delight and the best feelings of ecstasy!
Symbolism also creates its own words - symbols. First, high poetic words are used for such symbols, then simple ones. Symbolists believed that it was impossible to exhaust the meaning of a symbol.
Symbolism avoids the logical disclosure of the topic, referring to the symbolism of sensual forms, the elements of which receive a special semantic richness. Logically inexpressible "secret" meanings "shine" through the material world of art. Putting forward sensory elements, symbolism departs at the same time from the impressionistic contemplation of disparate and self-contained sensory impressions, into the motley stream of which symbolization introduces a certain integrity, unity and continuity.
The task of the symbolists is to show that the world is full of secrets that cannot be discovered.
The lyrics of symbolism are often dramatized or acquire epic features, revealing the structure of "generally significant" symbols, rethinking the images of ancient and Christian mythology. The genre of a religious poem, a symbolically interpreted legend, was created (S. Solovyov, D. S. Merezhkovsky). The poem loses its intimacy, becomes like a sermon, a prophecy (V. Ivanov, A. Bely).
German symbolism of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. (S. Gheorghe and his Group, R. Demel and other poets) was the ideological mouthpiece of the reactionary bloc of the Junkers and the big industrial bourgeoisie. In German symbolism, aggressive and tonic aspirations, attempts to combat their own decadence, a desire to dissociate themselves from decadence and impressionism stand out in relief. The consciousness of decadence, the end of culture, German symbolism tries to resolve in a tragic life-affirmation, in a kind of "heroics" of decline. In the struggle against materialism, resorting to symbolism, myth, German symbolism does not come to a sharply pronounced metaphysical dualism, it retains Nietzsche's "loyalty to the earth" (Nietzsche, George, Demel).
New modernist movement acmeism, appeared in Russian poetry in the 1910s. as opposed to extreme symbolism. Translated from Greek, the word "akme" means the highest degree of something, flourishing, maturity. Acmeists advocated returning images and words to their original meaning, for art for the sake of art, for the poeticization of human feelings. The rejection of mysticism - this was the main feature of the acmeists.
For symbolists, the main thing is rhythm and music, the sound of a word, then for acmeists it is form and eternity, objectivity.
In 1912, the poets S. Gorodetsky, N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, V. Narbut, A. Akhmatova, M. Zenkevich and some others united in the "Poets' Workshop" circle.
The founders of acmeism were N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. Acmeists called their work the highest point of achieving artistic truth. They did not deny symbolism, but were against the fact that the symbolists paid so much attention to the world of the mysterious and unknown. Acmeists pointed out that the unknowable, in the very meaning of the word, cannot be known. Hence the desire of the Acmeists to free literature from those obscurities that were cultivated by the Symbolists, and to restore its clarity and accessibility. Acmeists tried with all their might to bring literature back to life, to things, to man, to nature. So, Gumilyov turned to the description of exotic animals and nature, Zenkevich - to the prehistoric life of the earth and man, Narbut - to everyday life, Anna Akhmatova - to in-depth love experiences.
The desire for nature, for the "earth" led the acmeists to a naturalistic style, to concrete imagery, objective realism, which determined a number of artistic techniques. In the poetry of acmeists, “heavy, weighty words” prevail, the number of nouns significantly exceeds the number of verbs.
Having made this reform, the Acmeists otherwise agreed with the Symbolists, declaring themselves to be their students. The other world for acmeists remains true; only they do not make it the center of their poetry, although the latter is sometimes not alien to mystical elements. Gumilyov's works "The Lost Tram" and "At the Gypsies" are completely permeated with mysticism, and in Akhmatova's collections, like "The Rosary", love-religious experiences predominate.
A. Akhmatova's poem "The Song of the Last Meeting":
So helplessly my chest went cold,
But my steps were light.
I put on my right hand
Left hand glove.
It seemed that many steps
And I knew there were only three of them!
Acmeists returned everyday scenes.
Acmeists were by no means revolutionaries in relation to symbolism, they never considered themselves as such; they set as their main task only smoothing out contradictions, introducing amendments.
In the part where the acmeists rebelled against the mysticism of symbolism, they did not oppose the latter to real real life. Rejecting mysticism as the main leitmotif of creativity, acmeists began to fetishize things as such, not being able to synthetically approach reality, to understand its dynamics. For acmeists, the things of reality matter in themselves, in a static state. They admire individual objects of being, and perceive them as they are, without criticism, without trying to understand them in a relationship, but directly, in an animal way.
Basic principles of acmeism:
Rejection of symbolist appeals to the ideal, mystical nebula;
Acceptance of the earthly world as it is, in all its beauty and diversity;
Returning the word to its original meaning;
Image of a person with his true feelings;
Poeticization of the world;
Inclusion in poetry of associations with previous eras.
Rice. 6. Umberto Boccioni. The street goes into the house ()
Acmeism did not last very long, but made a great contribution to the development of poetry.
Futurism(in translation means the future) - one of the currents of modernism, which originated in the 1910s. It is most clearly represented in the literature of Italy and Russia. On February 20, 1909, an article by T. F. Marinetti "Manifesto of Futurism" appeared in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Marinetti in his manifesto called for abandoning the spiritual and cultural values of the past and building a new art. The main task of the futurists is to mark the gap between the present and the future, to destroy everything old and build a new one. Provocations entered their life. They opposed bourgeois society.
In Russia, Marinetti's article was already published on March 8, 1909 and marked the beginning of the development of their own futurism. The founders of the new trend in Russian literature were the brothers D. and N. Burliuk, M. Larionov, N. Goncharova, A. Exter, N. Kulbin. In 1910, one of the first futuristic poems by V. Khlebnikov, The Spell of Laughter, appeared in the collection The Impressionist Studio. In the same year, a collection of futurist poets, The Garden of Judges, was published. It contained poems by D. Burliuk, N. Burliuk, E. Guro, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky.
Futurists also invented new words.
Evening. Shadows.
Canopy. Leni.
We sat, drinking in the evening.
In each eye is a running deer.
Futurists are deforming their language and grammar. Words are piled on top of each other, hurrying to convey the momentary feelings of the author, so the work looks like a telegraphic text. Futurists abandoned syntax and strophics, invented new words that, in their opinion, better and more fully reflected reality.
The futurists attached special importance to the seemingly meaningless title of the collection. The cage for them symbolized the cage into which the poets were driven, and they called themselves judges.
In 1910, the Cubo-Futurists formed a group. It consisted of the Burliuk brothers, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, E. Guro, A. E. Kruchenykh. Cubo-futurists came out in defense of the word as such, "words are higher than meaning", "abstruse words". Cubo-futurists destroyed Russian grammar, replaced phrases with a combination of sounds. They believed that the more clutter in a sentence, the better.
In 1911, I. Severyanin was one of the first in Russia to proclaim himself an ego-futurist. To the term "futurism" he added the word "ego". Egofuturism can literally be translated as "I am the future." A circle of followers of ego-futurism rallied around I. Severyanin, in January 1912 they proclaimed themselves the "Academy of Ego Poetry." Egofuturists have enriched their vocabulary with a large number of foreign words and neoplasms.
In 1912, the Futurists united around the publishing house "Petersburg Herald". The group included: D. Kryuchkov, I. Severyanin, K. Olimpov, P. Shirokov, R. Ivnev, V. Gnedov, V. Shershenevich.
In Russia, the futurists called themselves "budetlyans", poets of the future. The futurists, captured by dynamism, were no longer satisfied with the syntax and vocabulary of the previous era, when there were no cars, no telephones, no phonographs, no cinemas, no airplanes, no electric railways, no skyscrapers, no subways. A poet filled with a new sense of the world has a wireless imagination. The poet puts fleeting sensations into the heap of words.
Futurists were passionate about politics.
All these directions radically renew the language, the feeling that the old literature cannot express the spirit of modernity.
Bibliography
1. Chalmaev V.A., Zinin S.A. Russian literature of the twentieth century.: Textbook for grade 11: In 2 hours - 5th ed. - M .: OOO 2TID "Russian Word - RS", 2008.
2. Agenosov V.V. . Russian literature of the 20th century. Methodical manual M. "Buddy Bustard", 2002
3. Russian literature of the 20th century. Textbook for applicants to universities M. uch.-scient. Center "Moscow Lyceum", 1995.
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In literary criticism, it is customary to call modernist, first of all, three literary movements that declared themselves in the period from 1890 to 1917. These are symbolism, acmeism and futurism, which formed the basis of modernism as a literary movement. On the periphery of it, other, not so aesthetically distinct and less significant phenomena of the “new” literature arose.
Symbolism - the first and largest of the modernist movements that arose in Russia. The beginning of the theoretical self-determination of Russian symbolism was laid by D. S. Merezhkovsky, who in 1892 delivered a lecture “On the Causes of the Decline and on New Trends in Modern Russian Literature.” The title of the lecture, published in 1893, already contained an unambiguous assessment of the state of literature, the hope for the revival of which the author pinned on "new trends". The new generation of writers, he believed, had "an enormous transitional and preparatory work to do." Merezhkovsky called the main elements of this work "mystical content, symbols and the expansion of artistic impressionability." The central place in this triad of concepts was given to the symbol.
Already in March 1894, a small collection of poems with the program name "Russian Symbolists" was published in Moscow, and soon the next two issues with the same name appeared. Later it turned out that the author of most of the poems in these three collections was the novice poet Valery Bryusov, who resorted to several different pseudonyms to give the impression of the existence of a whole poetic movement. The hoax succeeded: the collections "Russian Symbolists" became aesthetic beacons, the light of which attracted new poets, different in their talents and creative aspirations, but united in their rejection of utilitarianism in art and longing for the renewal of poetry.
The social and civic themes important to realism were replaced by the first symbolists with declarations of the relativity of all values and the assertion of individualism as the only refuge of the artist. V. Bryusov, who became the leader of symbolism, wrote especially assertively about the absolute rights of the individual:
I don't know of other commitments
In addition to virgin faith in yourself.
However, from the very beginning of its existence, symbolism turned out to be a heterogeneous trend: several independent groups took shape in its depths. According to the time of formation and according to the peculiarities of the worldview position, it is customary to distinguish two main groups of poets in Russian symbolism. Adherents of the first group, who made their debut in the 1890s, are called "senior symbolists" (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub, and others). In the 1900s, new forces poured into symbolism, significantly updating the appearance of the current (A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, and others). The accepted designation for the "second wave" of symbolism is "young symbolism". The “senior” and “younger” symbolists were separated not so much by age, but by the difference in attitudes and the direction of creativity (Vyach. Ivanov, for example, is older than V. Bryusov in age, but showed himself as a symbolist of the second generation).
In the organizational and publishing life of the symbolist movement, the existence of two geographical poles was important: the St. Petersburg and Moscow symbolists at different stages of the movement not only collaborated, but also conflicted with each other. For example, the Moscow grouping of the 1890s, which developed around
V. Bryusova, limited the tasks of the new trend to the framework of literature itself: the main principle of their aesthetics is “art for art's sake”. On the contrary, the senior symbolists from St. Petersburg with D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius at the head defended the priority of religious and philosophical searches in symbolism, considering themselves to be genuine "symbolists", and their opponents - "decadents".
Disputes about "symbolism" and "decadentism" began from the very birth of a new trend. In the minds of most readers of that time, these two words were almost synonymous, and in the Soviet era, the term "decadent" began to be used as a generic designation for all modernist movements. Meanwhile, "decadentism" and "symbolism" were correlated in the minds of the new poets not as homogeneous concepts, but almost as antonyms.
Decadence, or decadence (French decline), is a certain mentality, a crisis type of consciousness, which is expressed in a feeling of despair, impotence, mental fatigue. It is associated with rejection of the surrounding world, pessimism, refined sophistication, awareness of oneself as the bearer of a high, but perishing culture. In works that are decadent in mood, extinction, a break with traditional morality, and the will to die are often aestheticized. In one way or another, decadent moods affected almost all symbolists. Decadent worldviews were characteristic at one stage or another of creativity and 3. Gippius, and K. Balmont, and V. Bryusov, and A. Blok, and A. Bely, and F. Sologub was the most consistent decadent.
At the same time, the symbolist worldview was by no means reduced to moods of decline and destruction. The philosophy and aesthetics of symbolism took shape under the influence of various teachings - from the ancient philosopher Plato to the modern symbolist philosophical systems of V. Solovyov, F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson.
The traditional idea of knowing the world in art was opposed by the Symbolists to the idea of constructing the world in the process of creativity. Creativity, they believed, is higher than knowledge. This conviction led them to a detailed discussion of the theoretical aspects of artistic creation.
For V. Bryusov, for example, art is "comprehension of the world in other, non-rational ways." After all, only phenomena that are subject to the law of linear causality can be rationally comprehended, and such causality operates only in the lower forms of life. Empirical reality, life - in the final analysis, the world of appearances, phantoms. The higher spheres of life (the area of "absolute ideas" in Plato's terms - or the "world soul", according to Vl. Solovyov) are not subject to rational knowledge. It is art that has the ability to penetrate into these spheres: it is able to capture moments of inspired insight, to capture the impulses of higher reality. Therefore, creativity in the understanding of the symbolists is a subconscious-intuitive contemplation of secret meanings, accessible only to the artist-creator.
Moreover, it is impossible to rationally convey the contemplated "secrets". According to the largest theorist among the Symbolists, Vyach. Ivanov, poetry is "the cryptography of the inexpressible". The artist needs not only super-rational sensitivity, but the finest mastery of the art of allusion: the value of poetic speech lies in “understatement”, “concealment of meaning”. The main means for conveying contemplated secret meanings was to be a symbol.
The symbol is the central aesthetic category of the new trend. It is not easy to understand him correctly. A common misconception about a symbol is that it is perceived as an allegory when one thing is said and something else is meant. In this interpretation, the chain of symbols is a kind of set of hieroglyphs, a message encryption system for "initiates". It is assumed that the literal, objective meaning of the image in itself is indifferent, does not contain any important artistic information, but serves only as a conditional shell for the otherworldly meaning. In a word, the symbol turns out to be one of the varieties of tropes.
Meanwhile, the Symbolists themselves believed that the symbol fundamentally opposes the tropes, because it is devoid of their main quality - “portability of meaning”. When it is necessary to solve the "mystery" given by the artist, we are dealing with a false symbolic image. The simplest example of a false symbolic image is an allegory. In allegory, the subject layer of the image really plays a subordinate role, acts as an illustration or personification of a certain idea or quality. The allegorical image is a kind of ingenious mask behind which the essence is guessed.
The allegory is easily deciphered by the "insightful" reader: it will not be difficult for him to guess who or what is hidden, for example, behind the images of I. Krylov's fables or M. Gorky's romantic "songs". One of the critics of the beginning of the century was too picky, ironically noting how inaccurate the author of the "Song of the Petrel" was when he placed the inhabitants of Antarctica - penguins - on the shores of the southern seas. It is especially important that the allegory presupposes an unambiguous understanding.
The symbol, on the contrary, is multi-valued: it contains the prospect of an unlimited deployment of meanings. Here is how I. Annensky, one of the finest poets of symbolism, wrote about the ambiguity of the symbol: “I do not at all need the obligatory nature of one common understanding. On the contrary, I consider the merit of a play (as he called the poems. - Auth.), If it can be understood in two or more ways, or, having misunderstood, only feel it and then finish it mentally yourself. Vyach agreed with him. Ivanov, arguing that "a symbol is only a true symbol when it is inexhaustible in its meaning." “A symbol is a window to infinity,” F. Sologub echoed him.
Another important difference between a symbol and a trope is the full significance of the subject plan of the image, its material texture. A symbol is a full-fledged image, and in addition to the potential inexhaustibility of its meaning. The story about the life of the Dragonfly and the Ant (or about the behavior of "loons and penguins") will lose its meaning if the reader fails to understand the moral or ideological allegory inherent in the plot. On the contrary, without even suspecting the symbolic potential of this or that image-symbol, we are able to read the text in which it occurs (when first reading, as a rule, not all symbols are recognized in their main quality and reveal to the reader the depth of their meanings). So, for example, Blok's "The Stranger" can be read as a story in verse about a meeting with a charming woman: the subject plan of the central image is perceived in addition to the symbolic possibilities contained in it.
But any symbolic image, starting from its literal, objective plan, seeks to go beyond its own limits and correlates with life as a whole. That is why the Stranger is both the author's anxiety about the fate of beauty in the world of earthly vulgarity, and disbelief in the possibility of a miraculous transformation of life, and a dream of other worlds, and a dramatic comprehension of the inseparability of "dirt" and "purity" in this world, and an endless chain of all new and new semantic possibilities. Infinite because the symbolist vision is the vision of the whole world, the universe.
According to the views of the symbolists, the symbol is the concentration of the absolute in the individual; in a concise form it reflects the comprehension of the unity of life. F. Sologub believed that symbolism as a literary movement “can be characterized in an effort to reflect life as a whole, not only from its external side, not from its particular phenomena, but in a figurative way of symbols, to depict, in essence, what, hiding behind random, disparate phenomena, forms a connection with Eternity, with the universal, world process.
Finally, about one more important aspect in understanding the nature of artistic symbols: it is fundamentally impossible to compile any dictionary of symbolic meanings or an exhaustive catalog of artistic symbols. The fact is that a word or an image is not born as symbols, but becomes them in the appropriate context - a specific artistic environment. Such a context, activating the symbolic potential of the word, is created by the author's conscious attitude towards reticence, rational vagueness of the statement; emphasis on the associative, rather than logical connection between images, - in a word, with the help of what the symbolists called "the musical potential of the word."
The category of music is the second most important (after the symbol) in the aesthetics and poetic practice of symbolism. This concept was used by symbolists in two different aspects - worldview and technical. In the first, general philosophical sense, music for them is not a rhythmically organized sequence of sounds, but a universal metaphysical energy, the fundamental principle of all creativity.
Following F. Nietzsche and the French symbolists, Russian symbolist poets considered music to be the highest form of creativity, because it gives maximum freedom of expression to the creator and, accordingly, maximum emancipation of perception to the listener. They inherited this understanding of music from F. Nietzsche, who in his work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music” gave the word “music” the status of a fundamental philosophical category. He contrasted the "Dionysian" (non-rational) musical principle of the human spirit with the ordered "Apollonian" principle. It is the "Dionysian" spirit of music, spontaneous and free, according to the Symbolists, that constitutes the essence of true art. In this sense, the word "music" should be understood in A. Blok's calls to "listen to the music of the revolution", in his metaphor of the "world orchestra".
In the second, technical sense, "music" for the Symbolists is the verbal texture of the verse, permeated with sound and rhythmic combinations, in other words, the maximum use of musical compositional principles in poetry. For many Symbolists, the appeal of their French predecessor Paul Verlaine, "Music first of all ...", turned out to be relevant. Symbolist poems are sometimes built as a bewitching stream of verbal-musical consonances and echoes. Sometimes, as, for example, with K. Balmont, the desire for musical smooth writing acquires a hypertrophied self-goal character:
The swan swam away in the semi-darkness,
In the distance, whitening under the moon.
The waves crash to the oar,
Lily caresses to the moisture...
In a new way, against the background of tradition, the relationship between the poet and his audience was built in symbolism. The symbolist poet did not strive to be generally intelligible, because such an understanding is based on ordinary logic. He did not appeal to everyone, but only to the "initiates", not to the reader-consumer, but to the reader-creator, the reader-co-author. The poem was supposed not so much to convey the thoughts and feelings of the author, but to awaken his own in the reader, to help him in his spiritual ascent from the “real” to the “most real”, i.e., in independent comprehension of the “higher reality”. Symbolist lyrics awakened the “sixth sense” in a person, sharpened and refined his perception, developed an intuition related to artistic.
To do this, the Symbolists tried to make the most of the associative possibilities of the word, turned to the motives and images of different cultures, widely used explicit and hidden quotations. Their favorite source of artistic reminiscences was the Greek and Roman mythological archaic. It was mythology that became in their work an arsenal of universal psychological and philosophical models, convenient both for comprehending the deep features of the human spirit in general, and for embodying modern spiritual problems. The Symbolists not only borrowed ready-made mythological plots, but also created their own myths. In this, the poets saw a means to bring together and even merge life and art into one, to transform reality along the paths of art. Myth-making was highly characteristic, for example, of F. Sologub, Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely.
Symbolism was not limited to purely literary tasks; he aspired to become not only a universal worldview, but even a form of life behavior and, as his supporters believed, a way of creative restructuring of the universe (the last of the noted areas of symbolist activity is usually called life-building). This striving of the literary movement towards universal omnipotence was especially manifested in the 1900s in the young symbolism, which seriously laid claim to universal spiritual transformation. The facts of non-literary life, social history, and even the details of personal relationships were aestheticized, that is, they were interpreted by the younger symbolists as a kind of elements of a grandiose work of art performed before their eyes. It was important, they believed, to take an active part in this cosmic process of creation. That is why some symbolists came out with politically sharp works, reacted to the facts of social disharmony, and treated the activities of political parties with sympathetic interest.
Symbolist universalism also manifested itself in the inclusiveness of the creative searches of artists. The ideal of personality was conceived in their environment as a "person-artist". There was not a single sphere of literary creativity in which the Symbolists did not make an innovative contribution: they updated artistic prose (especially significantly - F. Sologub and A. Bely), raised the art of literary translation to a new level, performed original dramatic works, actively showed themselves as literary critics, art theorists and literary scholars. And yet, poetry was the most organic and appropriate sphere for their talents.
The poetic style of the Symbolists tends to be intensely metaphorical. In the figurative structure of the works, not single metaphors were used, but whole chains of them, which acquired the significance of independent lyrical themes. The metaphor of the symbolists has always gravitated towards the semantic depth of the symbol. Passing from one semantic environment to another, turning out to be a cross-cutting not only for a single poem, but for the entire poetic cycle and even in some cases for the entire work of the poet, it acquired new meanings, acquired a flickering ambiguity and, as a result, gave rise to a wide field of possible associations.
Symbolism has enriched Russian poetic culture with many discoveries. The Symbolists gave the poetic word a previously unknown mobility and ambiguity, taught Russian poetry to discover additional shades and facets of meaning in the word. Their searches in the field of poetic phonetics turned out to be fruitful: K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, I. Annensky, A. Blok, A. Bely were masters of expressive assonance and spectacular alliteration. The rhythmic possibilities of Russian verse expanded, and the stanza became more diverse. However, the main merit of this literary trend is not associated with formal innovations.
Symbolism tried to create a new philosophy of culture, sought, after a painful period of reassessment of values, to develop a new universal worldview. Having overcome the extremes of individualism and subjectivism, at the dawn of the 20th century, the Symbolists raised the question of the social role of the artist in a new way, began to search for such forms of art, the comprehension of which could unite people again. The idea of "cathedral art" looked utopian from the outside, but the Symbolists did not count on its quick practical implementation. It was more important to regain a positive perspective, to revive faith in the high purpose of art. With external manifestations of elitism and formalism, symbolism managed in practice to fill the work with the art form with content and, most importantly, to make art more personal. That is why the heritage of symbolism has remained a true artistic treasury for modern Russian culture.
Acmeism. The literary current of acmeism arose in the early 1910s and was genetically associated with symbolism. Close to symbolism at the beginning of their creative path, young poets attended “Ivanovo environments” in the 1900s - meetings at the St. Petersburg apartment of Vyach. Ivanov, which received the name "tower" among them. In the bowels of the circle in 1906-1907, a group of poets gradually took shape, at first calling itself a "circle of young people." The impetus for their rapprochement was opposition (still timid) to symbolist poetic practice. On the one hand, the "young" sought to learn poetic technique from their older colleagues, but on the other hand, they would like to overcome the speculation and utopianism of symbolist theories.
In 1909, members of the "circle of young people", in which S. Gorodetsky stood out for his activity, asked Vyach. Ivanov, I. Annensky and M. Voloshin to give them a course of lectures on versification. N. Gumilyov and A. Tolstoy joined the classes that began in the Ivanov "tower", and soon the poetic studies were transferred to the editorial office of the new modernist magazine Apollo. Thus, the Society of Zealots of the Artistic Word was founded, or, as the poets who studied versification began to call it, the Poetic Academy.
In October 1911, students of the "Poetry Academy" founded a new literary association - the "Workshop of Poets". The name of the circle, formed on the model of the medieval names of craft associations, indicated the attitude of the participants to poetry as a purely professional field of activity. The "workshop" was a school of formal craftsmanship, indifferent to the peculiarities of the worldview of the participants. The leaders of the "Workshop" were no longer the masters of symbolism, but the poets of the next generation - N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. At first, they did not identify themselves with any of the currents in literature, and did not strive for a common aesthetic platform.
However, the situation gradually changed: in 1912, at one of the meetings of the "Workshop", its participants decided to announce the emergence of a new poetic movement. Of the various names proposed at first, a somewhat presumptuous “acmeism” took root (from the Greek acme - the highest degree of something, flourishing, peak, tip). A narrower and aesthetically more cohesive group of acmeists stood out from a wide circle of participants in the "Workshop". First of all, these are N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, S. Gorodetsky, O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich and V. Harbut. Other members of the "Workshop" (among them G. Adamovich, G. Ivanov, M. Lozinsky and others), not being orthodox acmeists, constituted the periphery of the current.
Being a new generation in relation to the symbolists, the acmeists were the same age as the futurists, therefore their creative principles were formed in the course of an aesthetic delimitation from both. The first sign of the aesthetic reform of acmeism is considered to be M. Kuzmin's article "On Beautiful Clarity", published in 1910. The views of this poet of the older generation, who was not an acmeist, had a noticeable impact on the emerging program of the new trend. The article declared the stylistic principles of "beautiful clarity": the consistency of the artistic conception, the harmony of the composition, the clarity of the organization of all elements of the art form. Kuzminskaya “beautiful clarity”, or “clarism” (with this word derived from the Latin clarus (clear) the author summarized his principles), in essence, called for greater normativity of creativity, rehabilitated the aesthetics of reason and harmony, and thereby opposed the extremes of symbolism - especially its worldview inclusiveness and absolutization of the irrational principles of creativity.
It is characteristic, however, that the most authoritative teachers for acmeists were poets who played a prominent role in symbolism - M. Kuzmin, I. Annensky, A. Blok. It is important to remember this in order not to exaggerate the sharpness of the differences between the acmeists and their predecessors. We can say that the acmeists inherited the achievements of symbolism, neutralizing some of its extremes. In the program article “The Legacy of Acmeism and Symbolism”, N. Gumilyov called symbolism “a worthy father”, but at the same time emphasized that the new generation had developed a different one - “a courageously firm and clear outlook on life”.
Acmeism, according to Gumilyov, is an attempt to rediscover the value of human life, abandoning the symbolist's "unchaste" desire to know the unknowable. Reality is valuable in itself and does not need metaphysical justifications. Therefore, one should stop flirting with the transcendent (unknowable): the simple material world must be rehabilitated, it is significant in itself, and not only in that it reveals higher entities.
According to the theoreticians of acmeism, the main importance in poetry acquires the artistic development of the diverse and vibrant earthly world. Supporting Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky spoke even more categorically: “The struggle between acmeism and symbolism ... is, first of all, the struggle for this world, sounding, colorful, having forms, weight and time ...” After any “rejection, the world is irrevocably accepted by acmeism, in the totality of beauty and ugliness. The preaching of the "earthly" worldview was at first one of the facets of the Acmeist program, which is why the current had another name "Adamism". The essence of this side of the program, which was shared, however, not by the largest poets of the current (M. Zenkevich and V. Narbut), can be illustrated by S. Gorodetsky's poem "Adam":
Spacious world and polyphonic,
And he is more colorful than rainbows,
And here he is entrusted to Adam,
Name Inventor.
Name, recognize, rip off the covers
And idle secrets, and decrepit haze -
Here is the first feat. New feat -
Sing praises to the living earth.
Acmeism never put forward a detailed philosophical and aesthetic program. Acmeist poets shared the views of the Symbolists on the nature of art, following them they absolutized the role of the artist. The "overcoming" of symbolism took place not so much in the sphere of general ideas as in the field of poetic style. For acmeists, the impressionistic variability and fluidity of the word in symbolism turned out to be unacceptable, and most importantly, the overly persistent tendency to perceive reality as a sign of the unknowable, as a distorted likeness of higher entities.
Such an attitude to reality, according to acmeists, led to a loss of taste for authenticity. “Let's take, for example, a rose and the sun, a dove and a girl,” suggests O. Mandelstam in the article “On the Nature of the Word.” - Isn't any of these images interesting in itself, and the rose is a likeness of the sun, the sun is a likeness of a rose, etc.? The images are disemboweled like stuffed animals and stuffed with other people's content.<...>Eternal wink. Not a single clear word, only hints, omissions. The rose nods at the girl, the girl at the rose. Nobody wants to be themselves."
The acmeist poet did not try to overcome the "close" earthly existence in the name of "distant" spiritual gains. The new trend brought with it not so much a novelty of worldview as a novelty of taste sensations: such elements of form as stylistic balance, picturesque clarity of images, precisely measured composition, and sharpness of details were valued.
This, however, did not mean the abandonment of spiritual quests. Culture occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of acmeist values. "Longing for world culture" called acmeism O. Mandelstam. Related to this is a special relationship to the category of memory. Memory is the most important ethical component in the work of the three most significant artists of the movement - A. Akhmatova, N. Gumilyov and O. Mandelstam. In the era of futuristic rebellion against traditions, acmeism advocated the preservation of cultural values, because world culture was for them identical to the common memory of mankind.
In contrast to the selective attitude of the Symbolists to the cultural epochs of the past, acmeism relied on a variety of cultural traditions. The objects of lyrical reflection in acmeism often became mythological plots, images and motifs of painting, graphics, architecture; literary quotations were actively used. In contrast to symbolism, imbued with the "spirit of music", acmeism was oriented towards the echo with the spatial arts - painting, architecture, sculpture. The attraction to the three-dimensional world was reflected in the acmeists' passion for objectivity: a colorful, sometimes even exotic detail could be used non-utilitarianly, in a purely pictorial function. Such are the vivid details of African exoticism in the early poems of N. Gumilyov. Festively decorated, in the play of color and light, is, for example, a giraffe “like the colored sails of a ship”:
Graceful harmony and bliss is given to him,
And his skin is decorated with a magic pattern,
With whom only the moon dares to equal,
Crushing and swaying on the moisture of wide lakes.
Having freed the subject detail from excessive metaphysical load, the acmeists developed subtle ways of conveying the inner world of the lyrical hero. Often the state of feelings was not revealed directly, it was conveyed by a psychologically significant gesture, movement, enumeration of things. Such a manner of "materialization" of experiences was typical, for example, for many poems by A. Akhmatova.
The new literary trend, which rallied great Russian poets, did not last long. By the beginning of the First World War, the framework of a single poetic school turned out to be cramped for them, and their individual creative aspirations led them beyond the limits of acmeism. Even N. Gumilyov - a poet of romanticized masculinity and a supporter of filigree finishing of verse - evolved towards "visionary", that is, a religious and mystical search, which was especially evident in his last collection of poems, Pillar of Fire (1921). The work of A. Akhmatova from the very beginning was distinguished by an organic connection with the traditions of Russian classics, and later on her orientation towards psychologism and moral quest became even stronger. The poetry of O. Mandelstam, imbued with "longing for world culture", was focused on the philosophical understanding of history and was distinguished by the increased associativity of the figurative word - a quality so valued by the symbolists.
The creative destinies of these three poets revealed, by the way, the underlying reason for the emergence of acmeism itself. The most important reason for the formation of this trend, as it turned out, was not at all the desire for formal stylistic novelty, but the thirst of the new generation of modernists to acquire a stable faith, to obtain a strong moral and religious support, to get rid of relativism. When the inconsistency of Symbolism's claims to update traditional religion was revealed, the new generation, who called themselves Acmeists, rejected as "unchaste" attempts to revise Christianity.
Over time, especially after the start of the war, the establishment of higher spiritual values became the basis of the work of the former acmeists. Motifs of conscience, doubt, mental anxiety and even self-condemnation persistently sounded in their works. The previously seemingly unconditional acceptance of the world was replaced by a “symbolist” thirst for communion with a higher reality. About this, in particular, N. Gumilyov's poem "The Word" (1921):
... Ho we forgot that it is radiant
Only a word amid earthly anxieties
And in the Gospel of John
The Word is said to be God.
Hut-hero,
carved kokoshnik,
Window like an eye socket
Summed up with antimony.
(N. Klyuev. “Hut-bogatyr...”)
Yesenin proclaimed himself the poet of the “golden log hut” (“The feather grass is sleeping. The plain is dear ...”). Klychkov poetizes the peasant hut in his "Home Songs".
For the peasant farmer and the peasant poet, such concepts as the mother of the land, the hut, the economy are the concepts of one ethical and aesthetic series, one moral root, and the highest moral value of life is peasant labor, the unhurried, natural course of uncomplicated village life. In the poem "Grandfather's Plowing", Klychkov, in accordance with the norms of folk morality, argues that many diseases also stem from idleness, laziness, that a healthy lifestyle is closely related to physical labor.
For Klychkov and his characters, who feel like a particle of a single mother nature, who are in a harmonious relationship with her, death is something not at all terrible, but natural, like a change, for example, of the seasons:
... escaping fate, like everyone else,
It is not surprising to meet death in the evening,
Like a reaper in a young oat
With a sickle slung over his shoulders.
(S. Klychkov. "Tired of the daily chores...")
The typological commonality of the philosophical and aesthetic concept of the world of the new peasant poets is manifested in their solution of the theme of nature. In their works, it carries the most important not only semantic, but conceptual load, revealing itself through the universal multi-aspect antithesis "nature - civilization" with its numerous specific oppositions: "people - intelligentsia", "village - city", "natural man - city dweller", " patriarchal past - modernity", "earth - iron", "feeling - reason", etc.
It is noteworthy that in Yesenin's work there are no urban landscapes. Shiryaevets acts as a consistent anti-urbanist in his work:
I will not stay in a stone lair!
I'm cold in the heat of his palaces!
To the fields! to Bryn! to the cursed tracts!
To the legends of grandfathers - wise simpletons!
(“I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra! ..”)
The demonic origin of the City is emphasized by Klyuev:
The city-devil beat with hooves,
Frightening us with a stone throat ...
("From cellars, from dark corners...")
It was the new peasant poets at the beginning of the 20th century who loudly proclaimed: nature in itself is the greatest aesthetic value. And if in the poems of Klyuev's collection "Lion's Bread" the attack of "iron" on wildlife is a premonition, a premonition that has not yet become a terrible reality ("Enlist from hearsay / About the iron restlessness!"), Then in the images of "Village", "Pogorelshchina" , "Songs about the Great Mother" - a reality that is already tragic for peasant poets. However, in the approach to this topic, the differentiation of their work is clearly visible. Yesenin and Oreshin, although painfully, through pain and blood, are ready to see the future of Russia, in Yesenin's words, "through stone and steel." For Klyuev, Klychkov, Shiryaevets, who were in the grip of the ideas of a "peasant's paradise", the main thing is the patriarchal past, the Russian gray-haired antiquity with its fairy tales, legends, beliefs.
At the end of the 20th century, it is destined to read in a new way into the works of new peasant writers - continuing the traditions of Russian literature of the Silver Age, they oppose the Iron Age: they contain true spiritual values and truly high morality, they have a breath of the spirit of high freedom - from power, from dogma, they affirm a careful attitude to the human person, defend the connection with national origins, folk art as the only fruitful path of the artist's creative evolution.
Modernism, a new trend that came to Russia from Europe, mainly covers poetry, but some prose writers also work within the framework of modernism. Modernism, trying to separate itself from all previous literary trends, proclaimed a rejection of any literary traditions and of following patterns. All writers and poets of the beginning of the century, who thought and believed that they were writing in a new way, considered themselves modernists. As an opposition to realism, modernism in literature first of all tried to get away from the principle of a plausible depiction of reality. Hence the desire of modernist writers for fantastic elements and plots, the desire to embellish the existing reality, change it, transform it.
Futurism (from Latin futurum - future) is a literary movement that arose in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century as a protest against existing social principles. The creativity of the futurists was distinguished by the search for new means of artistic expression, new forms, images.
