4. Story or description? attacks on expressionism. Literary Debates The liberal tendencies that were reflected in the fight against vulgar sociologism during the discussion of the novel were balanced in the second half of the 1930s by a much more rigid literary canon. About it

Expressionism was a broad ideological trend that took place in various areas of culture: in literature, painting, theater, music, and sculpture. It was a product of the violent social upheavals experienced by Germany in the first quarter of the 20th century. As a direction, expressionism arose before the First World War and left the literary arena in the mid-1920s. 10-20s our century is called the "expressionist decade".

Expressionism became a kind of creative response of the German petty-bourgeois intelligentsia to the most acute problems that were raised by the World War, the October Revolution in Russia and the November Revolution in Germany. Before the eyes of the expressionists, the old world collapsed and a new one was born. Writers increasingly began to realize the failure of the capitalist system and the impossibility of social progress within the framework of this system. The art of the expressionists was anti-bourgeois, rebellious in nature. However, denouncing the capitalist way of life, the expressionists countered it with an abstract, vague socio-political program and the idea of ​​the spiritual rebirth of mankind.

Far from a true proletarian ideology, the expressionists looked at reality pessimistically. The collapse of the bourgeois world order was perceived by them as the last point in world history, as the end of the world. The crisis of bourgeois consciousness, the feeling of an impending catastrophe that brings death to mankind, is reflected in many works of the expressionists, especially on the eve of the world war. This is clearly felt in the lyrics of F. Werfel, G. Trakl and G. Game. “The End of the World” is the title of one poem by J. Van Goddis. These sentiments also permeated the sharply satirical drama of the Austrian writer K. Kraus "The Last Days of Mankind", created after the war.

The idealistic teachings of Husserl and Bergson, which had a tangible impact on the philosophical and aesthetic views of expressionist writers, became the general philosophical basis of expressionism.

“Not concreteness, but an abstract idea of ​​it, not reality, but spirit - this is the main thesis of the aesthetics of expressionism” 1. Expressionists considered art primarily as a self-disclosure of the “creative spirit” of the artist, who is indifferent to individual facts, details, signs of concrete reality. The author acted as an interpreter of events, he sought, first of all, to express his own attitude to the depicted in a passionate, excited form. Hence the deep lyricism and subjectivity characteristic of all genres of expressionist literature.

The aesthetics of expressionism was built on the consistent rejection of all previous literary traditions, especially naturalism and impressionism - its immediate predecessors. Arguing with the supporters of naturalism, E. Toller wrote: "Expressionism wanted more than photography ... Reality had to be permeated with the light of an idea." In contrast to the Impressionists, who directly recorded their subjective observations and impressions of reality, the Expressionists sought to draw the image of time, era, and humanity. Therefore, they rejected plausibility, everything empirical, striving for the cosmic, universal. Their typification method was abstract: the work revealed the general patterns of life phenomena, everything private, individual was omitted. The genre of drama, for example, sometimes turned into a kind of philosophical treatise. In contrast to the naturalistic drama, a person in the dramaturgy of the Expressionists was free from the determining influence of the environment. The drama lacked the real diversity of life's contradictions and everything that is connected with a unique individuality. The heroes of dramas often did not have a name, but had only class or professional characteristics.

But resolutely rejecting in their declarations all traditional artistic forms and motifs, the expressionists actually continued some of the traditions of the preceding literature (Sturm und Drang, Buchner, Whitman, Strindberg).

Expressionist literature is characterized by intense dynamism, sharp dissonances, pathos and grotesque.

The common aesthetic platform of expressionism united writers who were very different in their political convictions and artistic tastes: from J. Becher and F. Wolf, who later connected their fate with the revolutionary proletariat, to G. Jost, who later became the court poet of the Third Reich.

Within expressionism, two directions can be outlined, opposite in their ideological and aesthetic positions. Writers who demonstratively emphasized their apoliticality and indifference to topical social problems were grouped around the journal Der Sturm. Left expressionists ("activists"), associated with the magazine "Action" (Aktiop), declared and consistently defended the slogan of the social mission of the artist. The theater was considered by them as a tribune, a pulpit, and poetry as a political appeal. Social aspiration and emphasized publicism are a characteristic feature of the "activists", the most significant artists of expressionism: I. Becher, F. Wolf, L. Rubiner, G. Kaiser, V. Hasenklever, E. Toller, L. Frank, F. Werfel, F .Unruh. The demarcation between these two groups of Expressionists was at first imperceptible, it became more clear during the World War and the Revolution. The paths of many left-wing expressionists later diverged. Becher and Wolf became the founders of the literature of socialist realism in Germany. G. Kaiser, Gazenklever, Werfel departed from the revolutionary aspirations characteristic of the early stage of their work.

The war was perceived by expressionists as a worldwide catastrophe, as a disaster that revealed the moral decline of mankind.

Defending human values, the expressionists opposed militarism and chauvinism, Leonhard Frank, for example, in the collection of short stories "The Good Man" (Der Mensch ist gut, 1917), whose title became the slogan-slogan of many expressionist works, passionately condemned the war and called for action. Equally resolutely branded the imperialist massacre in the drama "Rod" (Ein Geschlecht, 1918-1922) F. Unruh. At the same time, he tried to give his humanistic idea of ​​the future of mankind. But the ideas of Unruh, like those of other expressionists, were utopian and abstract. The rebellion was individualistic in nature, and the writer felt like a loner.

In the works of most expressionists, war is presented as a universal horror, it is recreated in abstract allegorical paintings. Vague grandiose images testify to the fact that the expressionists did not understand the true class causes of the outbreak of war. But gradually, among the most radical expressionists, the anti-war theme is associated with the theme of revolution and the struggle of the masses against capitalist slavery for their liberation. It is no coincidence that these poets enthusiastically welcomed the October Revolution. Becher writes the poem "Greetings of the German poet to the Russian Socialist Federative Republic." Rubiner's "Message" echoes Becher's poem.

The expressionists greeted the November Revolution in Germany with enthusiasm, although they did not understand the need for revolutionary violence in the fight against counter-revolution. In the works of the Expressionists, the poet, the intellectual plays a greater role than the insurgent revolutionary people.

In 1923-1926. there is a gradual disintegration of expressionism as a direction. He is leaving the literary arena, which he dominated for a decade and a half.

At all stages of the development of expressionism, social drama was considered by its theorists as the leading genre, which corresponded to the socio-political and literary-philosophical ideas of the new direction.

One of the pioneers of expressionist drama was Walter Hasenclever (1890-1940), who published in 1914 the drama "Son" (Der Sohn). The playwright chooses the expressionist theme of the struggle between father and son. This conflict was interpreted by R. Sorge in the drama "The Beggar", by A. Bronnen in the play "Paricide", etc. Gazenklever gives the conflict a generalized character, expressing the typical ideas of left expressionism.

The hero of the drama is portrayed as a representative of progressive humanity, opposing the old reactionary world, which is personified by the tyrant father.

An idealistic understanding of reality did not give Hasenclever the opportunity to reveal the main social conflicts of the era. The author's ideas are embodied in abstract images-symbols illustrating pre-formulated theses. The drama "Son", written on the eve of the World War, conveyed the disturbing thoughts characteristic of the progressive intelligentsia of those years.

The anti-war theme sounds in the drama Antigone (Antigona, 1917), written based on the Sophocles tragedy. Gazenklever saturates the ancient Greek plot with acutely topical issues. The cruel ruler Creon is reminiscent of Wilhelm II, and Thebes is reminiscent of imperialist Germany. Antigone, with her preaching of humanism, sharply opposes the tyrant Creon. The people are depicted in the play as an inert, passive force, unable to crush the reactionary regime.

After the defeat of the November Revolution, tragically perceived by Hasenclever, social themes disappear from his work.

One of the most significant figures of expressionism was Georg Kaiser (Georg Kaiser, 1878-1945), in whose work the main features of the expressionist drama were most clearly reflected. His plays are distinguished by naked tendentiousness, sharp dramatic conflict, and strict symmetry of construction. First of all, these are dramas of thought, reflecting Kaiser's intense thoughts about the "new man" and the bourgeois-proprietary world, which the playwright sharply condemns. In the emphatically abstract images of his plays, one can feel a pronounced anti-bourgeoisness. The heroes of Kaiser's dramas, like the heroes of other expressionist dramas, are devoid of individual signs, they are abstract, but convey the author's cherished thoughts with passionate force.

G. Kaiser was a very productive writer and created about 70 plays. After the First World War, he became perhaps the most popular playwright in Germany, whose works were staged on the German stage and abroad.

Great fame was brought to G. Kaiser by the drama Citizens from Calais (Die Bürger von Calais, 1914), the plot of which is taken from the history of the Hundred Years War between France and England. However, historical events and historical heroes do not interest the author. The expressionist playwright focuses primarily on the clash of ideas and the depiction of an abstract person reflecting the author's point of view.

The dramatic action develops not through the actions of the characters or the disclosure of their spiritual world, but through extended monologue speeches, tense ecstatic dialogues. Oratorical intonations and pathos predominate in the speech of the characters. G. Kaiser makes extensive use of antitheses (for example, "Come out - to the light - out of the night. The light gushed - the darkness dissipated"). A characteristic feature of the language of the play is laconism and dynamism, due to the almost complete absence of subordinate clauses.

More fully and consistently, the problems of G. Kaiser's work were reflected in his dramatic trilogy "Coral" (Die Koralle, 1917), "Gas I" (Gas I, 1918) and "Gas II" (Gas II, 1920), which became a classic work of the German expressionism. Written during a period of acute social upheaval caused by the imperialist war and the defeat of the November Revolution in Germany, The Gas Trilogy is full of social problems. First of all, its anti-bourgeois pathos should be noted.

G. Kaiser denounces the capitalist system in the trilogy, crippling a person and turning him into an automaton. This is a very characteristic motif of expressionist literature, which saw in technology a terrible force that brings death to man.

"Coral" is a kind of exposition of the whole trilogy. The protagonist of the drama is the Billionaire, the owner of the mines, who mercilessly exploits the workers. Once he tasted bitter need and wants his children to know nothing about the world of the poor. However, the son and daughter accidentally get acquainted with the hard need of the workers and rebel against social injustice. The son joins the miners who went on strike after a collapse in the mine. But the furious rebellion of the son - this "new man" - is of an abstract nature. The hero of the play, like the author himself, is far from a class, socio-historical understanding of social relations. His ideas about the social reorganization of the world are abstract and utopian: “The task is grandiose. There is no room for doubt. It is about the fate of mankind. We will unite in hot work...” he declares.

In the second part of the trilogy, the protagonist is the son of a Billionaire, who inherited his father's giant gas-producing enterprises. He wants to become a social reformer and save humanity from the enslaving power of technology, which has ceased to obey man. The Billionaire's son calls on workers and employees to become free farmers. But the utopian call for a return to the bosom of nature did not inspire anyone. In the finale, the lone hero expresses the hope that this “new man” will still appear. The daughter's remark at the end of the play reinforces this belief: “He will be born! And I will be his mother."

In the last part of the trilogy, the action takes place in the same factory. In the center of the play is again the "new man", looking for a way out of the impasse of social contradictions. This is the great-grandson of the Billionaire, who became a worker. He calls for universal brotherhood, the solidarity of working people and proposes to stop the production of poisonous gas. Together with him, everyone is chanting with pathos: “No need for gas!” But there is a war, and the Chief Engineer convinces the workers to resume gas production. Then the tragically lonely hero, seeing the impotence of his sermons, produces an explosion, as a result of which everyone perishes.

Kaiser's trilogy is built on the clash of the "man of the idea", the "new man", with the "mechanical man", the "man-function". The conflict is direct and acute. Heroes are the personification of ideas and are devoid of individuality. The author does not endow them with a name, but designates: Billionaire, Son, Worker, Man in Gray, Man in Blue, Captain, etc. The language of positive characters is distinguished by oratorical intonations, pathetic rhetoric. The speech of the "human-function" is characterized by "telegraphic", "mechanical style".

Creativity Ernst Toller (Ernst Toller, 1893-1939) belongs to the period of the highest rise of expressionism (1914-1923). War and revolution shaped him as a writer and determined the nature of his dramaturgy. Hatred of the imperialist war and Prussian militarism led Toller to the ranks of the Independent Social Democratic Party and made him an active participant in the revolutionary battles. In 1918-1919. Toller was one of the leaders of the government of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. He consistently defended the idea of ​​political art and regarded his dramas as an instrument of political struggle. Hence the saturation of his dramas with topical problems, their socio-philosophical orientation, and openly expressed tendentiousness.

Toller's dramatic debut The Metamorphosis (Die Wandlung, 1919) was a passionate condemnation of the war, an appeal to the young people of Germany to oppose the imperialist carnage. Separate scenes of Toller's play were printed as anti-militarist leaflets. The name of the play conveys its main content - this is an internal transformation that happened to the main character, who moved from jingoistic moods to anti-militarist views.

Unlike other expressionists, Toller was convinced that only a proletarian revolution could protect humanity and save it from social disasters. The writer pinned his hopes on the proletariat, which, in his opinion, should become the creator of the future. However, Toller understands the class struggle in a subjectivist-idealistic way and sees in society not antagonistic classes, but the mass and the individual, between whom the politician is in a tragic contradiction. Ethics and politics are in Toller's irreconcilable contradiction. This was especially vividly reflected in the play "Man - Mass" (Masse - Mensch, 1921)

The drama dedicated to the "proletarians" portrays the revolutionary Sophia Irene L. (Woman); she is selflessly devoted to the revolution and sincerely wishes to give her life to the liberation of the people. But she rejects violence as a means of struggle, because, in her opinion, it denigrates the bright cause of the revolution. The woman is in jail and faces the death penalty. The people led by the Nameless want to free her, but she refuses, because in order to free her, one of the jailers must be killed. And they shoot her.

Through the mouth of the Woman, Toller angrily condemns the counter-revolution, the world of violence. However, the specific depiction of the class conflict is replaced by the clash of the ideas of the Woman and the beliefs of the Nameless One, personifying the harsh and unyielding will of the insurgent people.

“Man is a Mass” is a typical expressionist drama-sermon, the characters of which are sketchy, poster-like; they are the mouthpieces of the author's idea. But such is Toller's conscious artistic attitude.

In the best works of the Left Expressionists there was a lot of genuine pain and anger, a violent revolt against imperialism and petty-bourgeois satiety. The expressionists tried to capture and convey the main conflict of the era and be the heralds of their time.

Some of the artistic achievements of expressionism were used by the art of socialist realism. According to F. Wolf, the German theater of the XX century. goes from "expressionist-pacifist drama to epic-political theater". It was also important that the expressionists in the face of the "new man" asserted the image of a positive hero who sought to actively influence the world. Expressionism activated susceptibility to moral and social problems. And yet in expressionist works there remains a gap between art and concrete social life.

The creative achievements of the Left Expressionists influenced the development of German and other literatures after the Second World War. Pronounced contrast, the nakedness of ideological problems, the art of editing, the strengthening of the role of pantomime - all these expressive means are creatively used in their artistic practice by M. Walser, P. Weiss, R. Kiephardt, M. Frisch, F. Dürrenmatt and other contemporary writers.

Notes.

1 Pavlova N. S. Expressionism. - In the book: History of German Literature, vol. 4, p. 537.

EXPRESSIONISM

One of the most significant phenomena in German culture in the first quarter of the 20th century. - expressionism. Now expressionism has been studied, comprehended, classified. Returned to the public, with the exception of the irretrievably dead, expressionist painting, graphics, sculpture, declared by the Nazis "degenerate art" and thrown out of museums in Germany. The books that burned at the stake in May 1933 have been republished. Texts have been republished, including the famous anthologies of expressionist poetry - The Twilight of Humanity and Comrades of Humanity (both were published in 1919).

Reading today the books of the expressionists, leafing through their albums of paintings and drawings, we perceive the manner they have developed with due calmness and preparedness. But it’s not so much the frenzy of this art that deforms images, distorts real proportions in painting and graphics, turns expressionist plays into a “drama of screaming”, and many poems of poets into pamphlets and appeals, but ascetic self-restraint, the inability to see life in its multicolored complexity, to think about anything other than what seemed to be the only important thing - the fate of the human in the inhuman world. Such concentration gave birth to a new artistic language, which possessed great expressive power among a number of expressionists.

Expressionism emerged in the mid-900s. Germany was his homeland, although he received some distribution in Austria-Hungary, and partly in Belgium, Romania, and Poland. In Russia, it is customary to associate the work of Leonid Andreev with expressionist aesthetics, but its similarity with Russian futurism is much more noticeable. The expressionists saw their predecessors in Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rouault, Munch (Norway). In Belgium, Ensor's painting is close to them.

Rejecting the passivity and aestheticism of the 900s, expressionism began by considering itself responsible for reality. He pushed aside everything private, neglected the details, halftones and nuances, because he saw his duty in discovering the main thing, the essence and essence of life, hidden by the surface layer of "appearances".

Among all the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the century, expressionism is distinguished by the earnest seriousness of its intentions. It has the least of that buffoonery, formal trickery, outrageousness, which are characteristic, for example, of Dadaism. Behind the layers of bourgeois civilization, which did not interfere with the world war that soon began with nationwide rejoicing in Germany, the expressionists tried to see the primary meaning of things.

Here the meaning of the attraction to abstraction, which is inherent in the current as a whole, becomes clear. The worldview, and hence the aesthetics of the expressionists, was significantly influenced by philosophers of different schools and trends. The expressionists were receptive to the intuitionism of A. Bergson, who taught to perceive the world without analysis, entirely and immediately. Some of their ideas seem to be borrowed from the theory of knowledge of E. Husserl, who spoke in his "Logical Investigations" (1900) with the idea of ​​reduction, abstraction, exposure of the law and "ideal essences". Some expressionists are also close to the vitalism of the "philosophy of life", but these and many other teachings were perceived by the expressionists incompletely, partially and, so to speak, in their own interests. Something else was much more important.

Before the eyes of the expressionists, the old time collapsed and the new time began. The new vital material demanded reflection. Expressionists tried to express their ideas about reality in generalized abstract images. "Not a falling stone, but the law of gravity!" - this is the formulation of one of the main aesthetic principles of expressionism.

Another feature of expressionism is also rooted in the nature of time - intense subjectivity. Long before the birth of the term denoting a new trend, the words “intensity”, “ecstasy”, “radicalism”, “excessiveness of feeling” are repeated under the pen of its adherents. Aesthetic programs and manifestos are full of expressions that are more appropriate in a religious sermon, a philosophical treatise or a political article: we are talking about the transformation of the world by the power of the human spirit. In contrast to surrealism, which declared only the area of ​​the unconscious common to all, expressionism wanted to break down all sorts of (including social) barriers between people, to find something common for everyone in the sphere of spiritual and social life. “Not individual, but characteristic of all people, not dividing, but uniting, not reality, but spirit,” wrote Kurt Pinthus in the preface to the anthology The Twilight of Humanity.

The formation of expressionism began with associations of artists. In 1905, the group "Most" appeared in Dresden. It included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, and later Emil Nolde, Otto Müller and Max Pechstein. In 1911, the second association of expressionists was created in Munich - the Blue Rider group (Franz Marc, August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, Lionel Feininger, Paul Klee and others). The most important document of this group is the almanac The Blue Rider (1912). In the almanac, Mark wrote about the French Fauvists and about the spiritual essence of the new German painting; August Macke in the article "Masks" spoke about what art turns into an understandable and comprehensible innermost content of life. Composer Schoenberg presented an article on new music. In accordance with the international interests of the Blue Rider, French cubism and new trends in Russian art were characterized (Burliuk's article). On the cover - the image of the Blue Rider by Kandinsky; he also owned a programmatic article for the group on new forms in painting.

Since 1911, the magazine Aktion (Action) began to appear in Berlin, rallying the forces of left-wing expressionism, the so-called "activism" (Johannes Becher, Ernst Toller, Rudolf Leonhard, Alfred Wolfenstein and others. The magazine's publisher is Franz Pfemfsrt). It was here that the social and rebellious spirit of the direction was most clearly expressed.

The Sturm magazine, which brought together many writers and artists (August Stramm, Rudolf Blumner, and others; the magazine appeared in Berlin since 1910; publisher Gerhart Walden) was focused primarily on artistic problems. It was on this important issue that the magazine was in polemic with Aktion. However, especially in the early years, the same writers appeared on the pages of both editions - A. Deblin, A. Erenstein, P. Tsekh. Shortly before the war, other expressionist journals sprang up, as well as numerous associations that called themselves "enterists", "poets of the storm", etc.

Literary expressionism began with the work of several great poets. Two of them - Georg Trakl and Ernst Stadler, as well as the artists Franz Marc, August Macke and many others, became victims of the world war. The war wiped them off the face of the earth. Having opened the way to expressionism, the name created, they were participants in the general movement only on a small part of the path.

Each of these poets is original, just as the poetess Else Lasker-Schüler (1876-1945), who was beginning at the same time, is also original. Her first collections (Styx, 1902, The Seventh Day, 1905) are more or less connected with the art of the turn of the century. In Elsa Lasker-Schüler, this connection is noticeable in the cohesion of lines woven together, as if reproducing the endless bends of floral ornaments in the art of the 900s.

In the Austrian Trakl, in the German Geim, the same connection is noticeable in the sweet-languid melody, reminiscent of the musicality of some of Blok's poems.

Important for Game, Trakl and Stadler was the experience of French symbolism - Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud. A brilliant translator of Mallarme was the poetic priest of the previous era, Stefan George. But not George, but Trakl and Heim introduced into Austrian and German poetry what can be called "absolute metaphor". These poets were no longer engaged in figurative reflection of reality - they created a "second reality". She could be (which is typical for Trakl and Geim) concrete and yet created in order to tear away the verses from the boiling of life, to visually recreate in them her invisible being, her hidden processes, her secrets that were about to reveal themselves. not only in the existence of the individual, but also in social and political reality. In the poem by Georg Trakl (1887-1914) "Peace and Silence" it is not about sunset, but about the funeral of the sun, about the world in which the sun is buried. They bury him where everything has died before - in the bare forest. Death and ruin are approaching inevitably, for they have been committed more than once. The sun is buried by those who are called to nurture, protect life - shepherds, shepherds. Trakl's metaphor embraces the whole world, recreates its state; essence and essence are brought out, presented visibly.

All of Trakl's poetry, two thin books of his poems - "Poems" (1913), "Sebastian's Dreams" (1915) - is built on fluctuations between unthinkable purity, transparency, silence, light (in this he is Hölderlin's grateful heir) and petrification, scorched , horror. Each of these states is utterly intensified in verse, brought to the limit of what is possible. What could be more gentle, lighter, more transparent than the line: “The sun sounds softly in a cloud of roses on a hill ...” (verse “Spring of the soul”)? What could be harder, more terrible, more apocalyptic than the stone embrace of loving, dead orphans lying near the walls of the garden, unborn descendants, a dead man painting a grin of silence on the wall with a white hand? Each of the two contrasting sides of life is still trying to maintain its independence. But the main content of these verses is that the barriers have collapsed, that light and silence are ambiguous.

Of course, Trakl's poetry absorbed the experience of his fate. Researchers discovered the realities and initial stimuli of his poems in his life in Salzburg, and then on the front of the First World War ("Grodek"). But under the pen of Trakl, poetry immediately broke through narrow boundaries, his poetic reality was of a different composition - it saw the image of a world catastrophe. In 1913, in a poem entitled "Humanity," Trakl depicted the war that had not yet begun as an all-devouring death in a flurry of fire, as a shame and betrayal.

In the comparatively quiet pre-war years, the Expressionists saw an approaching catastrophe. Back in 1902, Lasker-Schüler's poem "The End of the World" was written. Ludwig Meidner painted his apocalyptic urban landscapes with houses falling from tremors. In 1911, the poem "The End of the Century" by Jacob van Goddis, a poet who later became a victim of fascism, was published. Not only Trakl, but also Ernst Stadler, as if drawing a drawing from an extraordinary object - from the future, in 1913, in the then famous poem "Speech", the world war had already begun.

But the power of Expressionist poetry is not only in foresight. This poetry prophesied even where the future war was not mentioned.

Georg Heim (1887-1912) wrote at this time "of great cities that have fallen to their knees" (verse "God of Cities"). He wrote how crowds of people (read: humanity) stand motionless, leaving their houses, on the streets and look at the sky. His poetry, which did not know large forms, is distinguished by monumental epicness even in small ones. Sometimes he sees the land, as it were, from an unthinkable height, with houses crowded into cities, crossed by rivers, along one of which the drowned Ophelia, who has also become a huge one, swims with rats that have settled in tangled hair.

Poems about the city are considered a conquest of expressionist lyrics. Johannes Becher (1891-1958) wrote extensively about the city ("De Profundis Domine", 1913). All representative anthologies of German poetry included Geim's poems "Berlin", "Demons of cities", "Suburbs". Cities were portrayed by expressionists differently than naturalists, for example, who were also attentive to urban life, did. Expressionists were not interested in urban life - they showed the expansion of the city into the sphere of inner life, the human psyche, they captured it as a landscape of the soul. This soul is sensitive to pain, and therefore in the expressionist city wealth, brilliance and poverty, poverty with its “basement face” (L. Rubiner) collide so sharply. This trend is completely alien to the admiration for the "motorized century", airplanes, balloons, airships, which was so characteristic of Italian futurism. And although the well-known poem by Ernst Stadler “Crossing the Rhine at night in Cologne” conveys the swiftness of a rushing train, these writers and artists were not interested in technology or speed, but in mobility, conflict, the “non-stiffness” of being.

Following Rimbaud, expressionists identified any kind of immobility with deadness (Rimbaud, "Seated"). The old world was perceived as a frozen immobility. A forced immobility was threatened by the industrial city squeezing him. The order established by nature did not take place here by itself. In Geim's poems, even the sea is covered with dead immobility, and the ships hung on the waves (verse "Umbra vitae"). Movement includes not only life, but also death. The boundaries of human existence were infinitely pushed apart. Death sometimes seemed more alive than the dead mechanics of everyday life, and brighter than the torments taken on earth by man. Life was opposed not by the conventional image “death is a dream”, but by decay itself, decay itself: a person disintegrated into “dust and light” (G. Geim, “Sleeping in the Forest”).

In early expressionist poetry, graphics and painting, the landscape occupies a large place. However, nature is no longer perceived as a safe haven for humans. In expressionism, more than in any other art, it is derived from the position of seeming isolation from the world of people. Back in the early 900s, Georg Geim wrote about clouds as “the gliding of the gray dead” (verse “Evening Clouds”, 1905). This comparison will take root. In the air he will see chains, flocks, schools of the dead. And in Trakl: the birds disappear into the air, like a "funeral procession" (verse "Crow"). However, the feeling of internal tragedy is not only “transferred” to nature from outside, not only attributed to it by the poet’s imagination: tragedy is also found in nature itself.

The world was perceived by expressionists in two ways: both as obsolete, decrepit, and as capable of renewal. This ambivalence is evident even in the title of an anthology of expressionist lyrics: "The Twilight of Humanity" is both the twilight and the dawn before which humanity stands. Modern life was understood as an unnatural and therefore not the only, optional form of human existence. It was possible to re-create life, new paths of evolution that not only human society, but also nature itself will find for itself, “Sleeping Forms”, “Fighting Forms”, “Playing Forms” - this is how the artist Frans Marc signed the last drawings he made in the front notebook shortly before his death. If we judge expressionism, delving into the meaning of its search, we must admit that Mark, who tragically perceived the war, was not occupied with formal delights, but with the idea of ​​the multiplicity of paths that life could pave for itself, the idea of ​​the possibility of recreating the world. (In the same far from formal sense, Paul Klee “played with forms”: his drawings, much more abstract than those of Mark, depict “forms”, each time reminiscent of real ones, but somehow different, new.) Depicted on many In Mark's canvases, horses of unheard-of beauty, painted in orange, red, green, blue tones, are part of the pristine, beautiful world, similar to the fabulous one from which the red horse of Petrov-Vodkin appeared. The expressionists enthusiastically continued the revolution in the field of color, which was started by the French Fauvists (Matisse, Derain, Marquet, etc.). It was from the Fauvists that the Expressionists adopted the orgiastic brightness of color combinations. Following the Fauvists, color replaced chiaroscuro as the basis of artistic space on their canvases. The intensity of color naturally combined with the simplification of forms and the flatness of the image. Often outlined with a thick and rough outline (on the canvases of the artists from the "Bridge" group - M. Pechstein, K. Schmidt-Rotluff), figures and things are indicated "in rough" - large strokes, bright color spots. Paint is perceived on their canvases, in their prose and poetry, as in the drawings of children, as something more primary than form, ahead of its emergence. In the poetry of expressionism, color often replaces the description of an object: it seems to exist before concepts, at a time when they were not yet born:

Purple fish will clog in a green pond,
Under the rounded sky
Silently a fisherman in a blue boat swims.

It is to this world - the world of naturalness and beauty - that the world of capitalism and its offspring, the world war, opposes. In 1913 Fr. Mark painted the apocalyptic picture "The Fate of Animals" depicting their death. One of the last poems of Georg Geim can serve as a commentary on it - "But suddenly a great dying comes."

To appreciate the anti-war pathos of the expressionists, one must remember the general enthusiasm with which the world war was greeted in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Writers, artists, scientists, who had just shared the long-held belief in Germany about the incompatibility of politics and culture, turned into enthusiastic patriots. This is exactly what was expressed in the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, published in October 1914, under which were the signatures of T. Mann and G. Hauptmann, artists Kringer and Lieberman, directed by Reinhardt.

On the pages of the expressionist magazine "Action", the thoughts of Heinrich Mann, expressed by him back in 1910 in the famous essay "Spirit and Action", were developed. Not sharing the artistic concepts of expressionism (although he anticipated some methods of expressionist writing), G. Mann was perceived by the left wing of expressionism as the spiritual leader of German democracy, as a writer who, with his work, proved the inseparable connection between spirit and action, culture and democracy. In the first decade of its existence, the Aktion magazine was not only a platform for expressionism, but also a platform for democratic public life.

However, their works spoke most clearly about the relation of the expressionists to the war. Everything was determined in them by that piercing pain for a person, which has always been the soul of this art.

"Man is the center of the world, he must become the center of the world!" - wrote in 1917 the poet, playwright, theorist of left expressionism Ludwig Rubiner (1881-1920) in the book "The Man in the Center!" and desired. If classical, measured rhythms prevailed in the pre-war poetry of Trakl, Stadler, Heim, if the words there are sometimes almost as simple as in a folk song, if the difficulty in perceiving this poetry was not so much in the words, but in their juxtaposition, in the created new imagery , then during the years of war and revolutionary upheavals, in political lyrics, journalism, expressionist dramaturgy, intonation is convulsive, speech is full of neologisms, the laws of grammar break down, their own syntax is created - about which, as a requirement for new poetics, I. Becher wrote before the war (verse . "New Syntax").

In 1910, in the poem "To the Reader", Franz Werfel exclaimed: "My only desire is to be close to you, man!" As Ernst Stadler rightly remarked, more than sympathy was expressed here: following Whitman and Verhaarn, Werfel felt life in its inclusiveness, where everyone is connected, must be connected, with everyone. In 1914, Werfel wrote a despairing poem "We are all strangers on earth." The loss of a person in the world is raised by war to such a degree that he loses himself - his mind, his soul. In Reinhard Goering's play "Sea Battle" (1918), the process of physical and spiritual destruction in the war was shown with grotesque clarity: the sailors on the dying battleship pulled on gas masks by order of the command, the mask hid the last thing that distinguished a person - his face.

Many expressionists had to become soldiers; many were not destined to return. And yet the concreteness of the war disappeared in the works of these writers, condensing into fantastic, grandiose images. “Even the war,” wrote Kurt Pintus, an anthology writer in the preface to the anthology Twilight of Humanity, “is not told in a material-realistic way: it is always present as a vision, swells like universal horror, stretches like inhuman evil.”

A monstrously fantastic parade of half-dead soldiers; pitiful fragments of people lined up in a hospital under the blinding spotlight to receive a certificate of full fitness for the front; rising from the graves near the abandoned trenches, somewhere in the neutral zone, the dead. Enemies and allies, officers and privates - they are now indistinguishable. Only one skeleton hides in the shadows. This is a girl who was once raped by soldiers. "Down with shame! .. - the dead are screaming. - You were raped. Lord, so are we!” A common dance began - one of the countless dances of death in the works of the expressionists. This is how Ernst Toller (1893-1939) wrote about the war in his first play, The Metamorphosis (1917-1919), begun in the trenches. The play ended with a scene of general revolutionary outburst. The young hero, addressing the crowd around him, urged everyone to remember that he is a man. This thought shocked people so much that in a minute Toller's hero saw himself at the head of a powerful procession - a procession of awakened humanity. Shouts were heard: “Revolution! Revolution!"

Transformation is one of the most common situations in late Expressionist literature. The heroes of L. Rubiner's play "People Without Violence" (1919) turned into new people who realized the obsolescence of the old world. A grandiose procession of those who realized their guilt moved in G. Kaiser's dramaturgic trilogy "Hell - Path - Earth" (1919). In the short story by Leonhard Frank "Father" from the book "A man is kind!" (1916), it became clear to the people gathered by chance that they were responsible for the horrors of the war: they did not teach their children who became soldiers to love and did not love enough themselves.

There is nothing easier than to accuse all these works of distorting reality, declarativeness, unconvincing momentary epiphany in the epilogue. But the plays of Toller, Rubiner, Kaiser, and Frank's short story are not a realistic depiction of the era: they are an unprecedentedly condensed reflection of it. In literary works devoted to war and revolution (as in expressionist graphics and painting), to a certain extent, the same thing happened as in early expressionist poetry: not so much reality was fixed as its experience, which received an independent objectified embodiment.

Expressionism did not idealize man. He saw his spiritual dullness, his miserable dependence on circumstances, his susceptibility to dark impulses. "The crown of creation, pig, man!" - exclaimed mockingly Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) in the poem "Doctor", citing the dependence of each on his physiological nature as justification. But, perhaps, only Benn among the expressionists did not recognize the opportunity for people to rise and soar in soul. The fundamental principle of his poetry was the denial of movement, the assertion of immobility, static (“Static Poems”, 1948, as his late collection is called). At the language level, this was expressed by the absolute predominance of nouns. Some of Benn's poems seem to be a register of subjects and titles. But it wasn't the editing technique that occupied Benn. His poems from different periods of creativity are paintings. They are shockingly harsh in the expressionist collection The Mortuary (1912).

In the 1920s, his poetry seemed to convey the fullness of being. Modernity and antiquity; East and West; Benn's favorite Mediterranean - the point of intersection of different cultures and different eras; geographical, zoological, botanical realities; the big city and the myth—the “geology” of culture, the “geology” of mankind—everything is enclosed within the frame of a clearly demarcated space, fixed, rounded, presented as a movement that has exhausted itself. In German poetry, Gottfried Benn, who denied any possibility of positive development for humanity, is one of the biggest, tragic figures of modernism. Only once, for a short time, Benn, closed in loneliness, was seduced by the “grand popular movement”, for which he took fascism.

Yet Benn's skeptical attitude toward man was no exception in Expressionism. The state of the human race is assessed by the expressionists as a whole quite soberly. "The man is kind!" - these writers asserted, without fail putting an exclamation mark at the end and thereby admitting that for them, too, this is not a statement, but an appeal, a slogan.

Since the pre-war years, religious motifs have varied in expressionism. The series "Religious Engravings" was created in 1918 by Schmidt-Rotluff. In 1912, Pechstein depicted the prayer "Our Father" on twelve graphic sheets. But the attention of expressionists is focused on man. People and God are equal in rights, united by a common misfortune. On the engravings from the series "The Transformation of God" (1912), the artist, sculptor, writer Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) showed God as a heavy, burdened earthly weight. Most of Barlakhov's soaring figures, including the famous angel, horizontally suspended on chains in the cathedral of the city of Gustrow in memory of the victims of the First World War, are deprived of an indispensable attribute of flight - wings. On the other hand, people - the heroes of his sculptural groups often barely touch the ground, it seems that they can be blown away by the wind, they are ready to soar upwards (“Woman in the Wind”, 1931; some figures from the “Listening” frieze, 1930-1935). Barlach often portrayed weak people, unstable on the ground, capable, it seems, of being only victims, but not able to withstand the coming storms and fascism that was established in Germany in 1933.

The end of the World War coincides with the rise of expressionist dramaturgy, which occupies the leading position that belonged to poetry before. Plays are staged and published that were created earlier, but could not reach the reader and viewer because of the prohibitions of military censorship. Only in 1919 were Georg Kaiser's Gas, Fritz Unruh's Rod, Walter Hazenklewer's Antigone (his first play, The Son, began on the threshold of the war, when expressionist drama began to enter the stage), Ernst Toller's The Metamorphosis, etc. In the same year, the Tribune experimental theater, founded by director Karl Heinz Martin and writer Rudolf Longhard, opened in Berlin with a production of this play by Toller. The theater was specially adapted for productions of expressionistic dramaturgy. “Not a stage, but a pulpit,” says the manifesto dedicated to its opening.

The very construction of the plays, their very structure indirectly reflect the expressionistic conception of modernity. There is still a detachment from the concrete circumstances in Germany. “The time is today. The place is the world,” Gazenklever wrote in the introductory remark to the drama “People” (1918). As before, this art does not go into the subtleties of human psychology. The most resolute denial of psychologism was expressed precisely by the playwright. “There are moments,” wrote Paul Kornfeld in his article “The Spiritualized and Psychological Man” (1918), “when we feel how indifferent everything that we can say about this or that person.” Character was considered by expressionists as an attribute of everyday life. In moments of upheaval, the particular characteristics of a person did not matter or acquired a different meaning. A person could have excellent qualities that did not turn out to be such in a “star moment”. Man interested expressionists at the moment of the highest tension of spiritual forces. Like a husk, the shell of the ordinary fell from him. A chain of swift actions unfolded before the viewer. An actor who performed in performances based on the plays of Toller or Unruh faced a difficult task: he had to kill his characteristic character in himself. Dressed in gray shapeless clothes, not similar to the costumes of any era, he became a compressed spring, ready to rapidly straighten in the only possible direction - the direction of the idea that owned the hero.

The conquest of Expressionism was the impressive mass scenes. In the theatre, graphics, and poetry, the expressionists were able to convey the greatness of the impulse that united thousands of people, the expressive general formula for the transformation of the world gave unexpected results.

Literature

Twilight of humanity. Lyrics of German Expressionism. M., 1990.

Expressionism. M., 1966.

Expressionists strive for the utmost expressiveness of emotions in their works. Translated from Latin expressio means "expression", "expressiveness".

But this characteristic is not enough to understand the essence of expressionism, because. the expression of feelings is the prerogative not only of expressionism, but also of other artistic movements: sentimentalism, romanticism, fauvism, post-impressionism, etc. The expressionists wanted not only to depict life, but also to express it, to creatively influence it. Expressionism is an expression that fills the soul, capturing the whole feelings of a person at the highest moment of his experience. But the most important thing that distinguishes expressionists from artists of other directions is the desire to express the inner essence of phenomena. Such a creative attitude is initially doomed to subjectivism and extreme hyperbolization. But, expressing feelings, expressionism strives for the purifying fire of all-encompassing and all-human love.
I would like to cite in this connection the lines of the poet S. Nadson, which were written in 1882 and which express the essence of expressionism.

Believe in the great power of love!
Holy believe in her victorious cross,
In her light, radiantly saving
A world mired in mud and blood
Believe in the great power of love!

The emergence and development of expressionism

Expressionism was most developed in the first decades of the 20th century. mainly in Germany and Austria. It arose as a sharp and painful reaction to the First World War and revolutionary movements. The reality of the artists of that time was perceived extremely subjectively, through the prism of disappointment, anxiety, fear. Therefore, in their works, expression prevails over the image.
If we start from the characteristics of expressionism as an artistic method, then the concept of "expressionism" can be interpreted much broader: it is an artistic expression of strong emotions, and this very expression of emotions becomes the main goal of creating a work. And in this sense, expressionism is not limited to time - it has always existed. Take a look at El Greco's "View of Toledo", painted in the 17th century.

El Greco "View of Toledo" (1604-1614). Metropolitan Museum (New York)
This is an example of 21st century expressionism.

Painting by contemporary French expressionist Laurent Parcelier

Expressionism in literature

Expressionism became the dominant literary trend in German-speaking countries: Germany and Austria (Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, Leo Perutz, Alfred Kubin, Paul Adler). But individual expressionist writers also worked in other European countries: in Russia - L. Andreev, E. Zamyatin, in Czechoslovakia - K. Chapek, in Poland - T. Michinsky and others.
The works of early expressionism were influenced by French and German symbolism, especially Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. Some were inspired by the Baroque and Romanticism. Common to all was the attention to real life in terms of philosophical foundations. The legendary slogan of the Expressionists: "Not a falling stone, but the law of gravity."
One of the characteristic features of early expressionism is its prophetic pathos, which was embodied to the greatest extent in the works of Georg Geim who died in an accident two years before the outbreak of the First World War.

In the poems "War" and "A great dying is coming ..." later, many saw predictions of a future European war.

In Austria, the largest figure was Georg Trakl. Trakl's poetic heritage is small in scope, but it had a significant impact on the development of German-language poetry. The tragic worldview, the symbolic complexity of the images, the emotional richness make it possible to classify Trakl as an expressionist, although he himself did not formally belong to any poetic group.
The heyday of literary expressionism is considered 1914-1924. (Gottfried Benn, Franz Werfel, Albert Ehrenstein and others). The mass death of people during the First World War led to pacifist tendencies in Expressionism (Kurt Hiller, Albert Ehrenstein). In 1919, the famous anthology The Twilight of Humanity was published, which collected the best works of this trend.
The new style in European lyrics very quickly spread to other types of literature: dramaturgy (B. Brecht and S. Beckett), prose (F. Kafka and G. Meyrink). At the beginning of the XX century. Russian authors also created their works in this style: the story “Red Laughter”, the story “The Wall” by L. Andreev, early poems and poems by V. V. Mayakovsky.
L. Andreev is considered the founder of Russian expressionism.

Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev (1871-1919)

The first works of Leonid Andreev are imbued with a critical analysis of the modern world ("Bargamot and Garaska", "City"). But already in the early period of his work, the main motives appeared: extreme skepticism, disbelief in the human mind (“The Wall”, “The Life of Basil of Thebes”). There was a time of passion for spiritualism and religion ("Judas Iscariot"). At first, the writer reacted to the revolution with sympathy, but after the reaction of 1907, he abandoned any revolutionary views, believing that a revolt of the masses could only lead to great sacrifices and great suffering (“The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men”). In his story "Red Laughter" Andreev painted a picture of the horrors of modern war. The dissatisfaction of his heroes with the surrounding world and orders results in passivity or an anarchic rebellion. The writer's dying writings are imbued with depression, the idea of ​​the triumph of irrational forces.
Andreev's literary language is also full of expression, symbolic.

B. Kustodiev "Portrait of E. Zamyatin" (1923)
Expressionist tendencies manifested themselves in the work Evgenia Zamyatina. Although his style was close to surrealistic. The most famous work of E. Zamyatin is the dystopian novel “We”, which describes a society of strict totalitarian control over the individual (names and surnames are replaced by letters and numbers, the state controls even intimate life), ideologically based on Taylorism (control theory), scientism ( an ideological position that represents scientific knowledge as the highest cultural value and a fundamental factor in human interaction with the world) and the denial of fantasy, controlled by the "Benefactor" "elected" on an uncontested basis.

Expressionism in painting

The forerunners of expressionism was the art group "Most". Its participants developed their own "group style", in which the paintings were so similar in their subjects and way of writing that it was not always possible to immediately distinguish who the author was. A feature of the artists of the "Bridge" is their deliberately simplified aesthetic vocabulary with short, abbreviated forms; deformed bodies; luminous paints applied with a wide brush in flat strokes and often outlined with a hard contour line. The contrast of various colors was widely used to increase their "glow", enhancing the effect on the viewer. This was their similarity with the Fauvists. Like the Fauvists, the expressionists from the Bridge wanted to build their compositions on pure color and form, rejecting stylization and any symbolism.

O. Muller "Lovers"
The main goal of their work was not to display the external world, which seemed to be only a lifeless shell of truth, but that "real Reality" that cannot be seen, but which the artist can feel. This trend in art, Herwart Walden, a Berlin art gallery owner and propagandist of avant-garde art, in 1911 gives the name "expressionism", which initially united both cubism and futurism.
The German Expressionists considered the Post-Impressionists to be their forerunners. The dramatic canvases of Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and James Ensor are overflowing with emotions of delight, indignation, horror.

Edvard Munch(1863-1944) - Norwegian painter and graphic artist, theater artist, art theorist. One of the first representatives of expressionism. His work is covered by the motives of death, loneliness, but at the same time, the thirst for life.
Munch's most famous work is The Scream. The terrified man in this picture cannot leave anyone indifferent.

E. Munch "Scream" (1893). Cardboard, oil, tempera, pastel. 91 x 73.5 cm. National Gallery (Oslo)
A possible reading of the picture: a person is agonizing over the “cry of nature”, as the artist himself put it, resounding from everywhere.
The banality, ugliness and contradictions of modern life gave expressionists feelings of irritation, disgust, anxiety, which they conveyed with the help of twisted lines, fast and rough strokes, screaming color. Preference was given to extremely contrasting colors in order to enhance the impact on the viewer, not to leave him indifferent.

"Blue Rider"

In 1912, the Blue Rider group was formed in Munich, whose ideologists were Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Mark. This is a creative association of representatives of expressionism at the beginning of the 20th century. in Germany. The association published an almanac of the same name.
In addition to Kandinsky and Mark, the association included August Macke, Marianna Verevkina, Alexei Yavlensky and Paul Klee. Dancers and composers also participated in the work of this artistic group. They were united by an interest in medieval and primitive art and the movements of that time, Fauvism and Cubism.
August Macke and Franz Marc were of the opinion that each person has an internal and external perception of reality, which should be combined through art. This idea was substantiated theoretically by Kandinsky. The group sought to achieve equality in all forms of art.

M. Veryovkina “Autumn. School"

Expressionism in architecture

Architects found new technical possibilities for self-expression using brick, steel and glass.

- Lutheran Church in Copenhagen. Named after the Danish theologian, church leader and writer N.-F.-S. Grundtvig. It is one of the most famous churches in the city and a rare example of a religious building built in the style of expressionism. Its construction lasted from 1921 to 1940. The architecture of the temple intertwines features of traditional Danish village churches, Gothic, Baroque and various modernist trends. The building material is yellow brick.

Chilihaus (Hamburg)– An 11-storey warehouse building for goods imported from Chile. The building was built in 1922-1924. designed by the German architect Fritz Höger and is one of the most significant monuments of expressionism in world architecture. Also known as the "bow of the ship".

Einstein Tower (Potsdam)- Astrophysical observatory in the territory of the Albert Einstein Science Park on the Telegrafenberg mountain in Potsdam. Revolutionary for its time by the creation of the architect Erich Mendelssohn. It was built in 1924. It was planned to conduct experiments in the tower proving Einstein's theory of relativity. The tower telescope belongs to the Potsdam Astrophysical Institute.

Expressionism in other art forms

Arnold Schoenberg "Blue self-portrait" (1910)
Here, first of all, we should talk about the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Expressionist music was difficult to perceive and caused a controversial attitude of criticism. Here is how the Russian music critic V. Karatygin spoke about Schoenberg's music: “Dostoevsky created Notes from the Underground. Schoenberg composes music from the underground of his strange, amazing soul. It's terrible, this music. It irresistibly attracts, self-willed, deep, mystical. But she's terrible. Until now, no composer in the world has composed more terrible music.

Jacques-Emile Blanche "Portrait of Igor Stravinsky" (1915)
The music of Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky was close to the expressionist style.
In 1920-1925. Expressionism also dominated German cinema and theater.
The beginning of film expressionism was the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which became famous not only in Germany, but also abroad. He transmitted on the screen the altered states of human consciousness.
Developing the main idea of ​​Caligari, expressionist directors reveal the duality of each person, the bottomless evil lurking in him, and in this regard, foresee the inevitability of a social apocalypse. This film was actually the beginning of the creation of horror films.
The films “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” directed by Robert Wiene (1920), “The Golem” directed by K. Boese and P. Wegener (1920), “Weary Death” directed by Fritz Lang (1921), “Nosferatu. Symphony of Horror" by German film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1922), "Cabinet of Wax" directed by P. Leni (1924), "The Last Man" directed by W. Murnau (1924).

- (from lat. expressio expression), a direction that developed in European art and literature in the mid-1900s and 20s. Arising as a response to the most acute social crisis of the first quarter of the 20th century. (including World War I 1914 18 and ... ... Art Encyclopedia

Expressionism (architecture)- Expressionism architecture of the First World War and the 1920s in Germany (“brick expressionism”), the Netherlands (Amsterdam school) and neighboring countries, which is characterized by the distortion of traditional architectural forms with the aim of ... ... Wikipedia

LITERATURE AND MYTHS- The constant interaction of L. and m. proceeds directly, in the form of a “transfusion” of myth into literature, and indirectly: through fine arts, rituals, folk festivals, religious mysteries, and in recent centuries through scientific ... ... Encyclopedia of mythology

Literature and Expressionism- The new system of means of expression developed by expressionism, due to its heterogeneity, from the very beginning eluded clear definitions (I. Goll *: “Not style, but the coloring of the soul, which has not yet succumbed to literary technicians ... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary of Expressionism

Expressionism- (from Latin expressio expression) a trend that developed in European art and literature from about 1905 to the 1920s. It arose as a response to the most acute social crisis of the first quarter of the 20th century. (including World War 1 and subsequent ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Expressionism (film)- Frame from the film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920) Expressionism is the dominant artistic movement in German cinema 1920-25. The main representatives are F. W. Murnau, F. Lang, P. Wegener, P. Leni. In modern ... ... Wikipedia

Expressionism- (from lat. expressio expression, identification) direction to Europe. the lawsuit of weight and litre, which arose in the 1st decades of the 20th century. in Austria and Germany and then spread partially to other countries. The formation of E. in painting and literature led to ... ... Music Encyclopedia

expressionism- (lat. expressio - expression), an artistic style in the art of modernism, which came in the 1910s. to replace impressionism and became widespread in the literature of avant-garde. The emergence of style is associated with the appearance in German-speaking culture ... ... Literary Encyclopedia

Expressionism- (from lat. expressio expression, revelation), an artistic direction in Western art. Expressionism arose and was most developed in German cinema in 191525. The emergence of expressionism is associated with the aggravation of social ... ... Cinema: Encyclopedic Dictionary

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