Herman Melville
Six months on the high seas! Yes, yes, reader, imagine: not seeing land for half a year, chasing sperm whales under the scorching rays of the equatorial sun along the widely rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean - only the sky above, only the sea and the waves below, and nothing more, nothing! It's been weeks since we've run out of fresh provisions. There was not a single sweet potato left, not a single yam. Magnificent bunches of bananas, which used to decorate our stern and poop, alas! disappeared, and there are no more sweet oranges hanging from our stays and yards. Everything is gone, and we have nothing left but corned beef and sea biscuits. Oh, you who travel in passenger cabins, you who raise so much noise because of some two-week voyage across the Atlantic and with such sincere horror talk about your ship's hardships - just think, after all, after a whole day of breakfasts, teas, dinners from five dishes, small talk, whist and punch, you poor things have to lock yourself up in your cabins trimmed with mahogany and bog oak and sleep for ten hours in a row, deep sleep, unless "those wretched sailors" suddenly decide to "yell and stomp over your head" - what would you say if you happened to spend six months at sea?!
To see at least one blade of grass that refreshes the eye! Inhale at least once the greasy aroma of the earth, mashed and fragrant in a handful! Is there really nothing fresh, nothing green around us?! The greenery, however, is. Our sides are painted green on the inside, but what a poisonous, sickly shade - as if nothing, even remotely similar to living vegetation, could endure this hard path leading away from solid ground. Even the bark that was kept on the wood has been peeled and devoured by the captain's pig, and that pig itself has already been eaten a long time ago.
And in the bird fence there was only one single inhabitant - the once cheerful dashing cockerel, proudly walking around surrounded by cutesy chickens. And now? Look at him: there he stands all day long, downcast, on his one tireless leg. And with disgust he turns away from the moldy grains scattered in front of him and from the rotten water in the trough. Without a doubt, he indulges in mourning for his dead girlfriends, who were literally torn from him one by one and disappeared forever. But the days of his mourning are numbered, for our black cook Mungo told me yesterday that the order had finally been received and the death of poor Pedro was a foregone conclusion. Next Sunday, his emaciated corpse will be laid out for farewell on the captain's table, and long before nightfall he will be buried with full honors under the waistcoat of this respectable gentleman. Who would have believed that such a cruel person could be found who would want the execution of the sufferer Pedro? However, selfish sailors day and night pray to God for the death of the ill-fated bird. They say that the captain will not turn ashore as long as he has at least one fresh meat meal in reserve. The poor feathered one is doomed to serve as his last such meal, and as soon as it is consumed, the captain must come to his senses. I do not wish you any harm, Peter, but since you are doomed anyway, sooner or later, to share the fate of your entire family, and since the end of your existence should at the same time serve as a sign of our liberation - yes, for me, I confess, even if your throat was cut right now; for, oh, how I long to see the living earth again! Even our old schooner herself longs to look at the land again with her round haws, and daredevil Jack Lewis correctly answered when the captain scolded him the other day for not keeping his course well:
You see, Captain Vangs, I'm as good a helmsman as anyone," he said, "but these days none of us can keep the old woman on course. She does not want to go either with the wind or badewind; no matter how you look at her, she keeps trying to get off course, and when I, sir, so gently put the rudder on board and kindly invite her not to evade work, she will buck and roll onto the other tack. And all because, sir, she smells dry land to windward and does not want to go further downwind.
You're right, Jack. And how could it be otherwise? Haven't her thick frames grown in their time on solid ground, and doesn't she, like us, have her own feelings and affections?
Poor old schooner! What more could she want? Yes, just look at her. Her appearance is so pitiful! The paint on the sides, scorched by the scorching sun, is blistering and peeling. And there the algae trail behind her with their tail, and under the stern, what an ugly outgrowth of ugly polyps and crustaceans! And every time, climbing a wave, she opens the world to torn, crumpled sheets of copper sheathing.
Poor old schooner! After all, she wears it for half a year without a break and shakes it on the waves. However, cheer up, old lady, I hope to see you soon in the green bay, peacefully swaying at anchor in a safe shelter from the violent winds and so close to the cheerful shores that it’s just a stone’s throw away or tossed with mossy crackers!
"Hurrah, brothers! It's decided: in a week we are heading for the Marquesas Islands!
Marquesas Islands! What strange, magical visions this name evokes! Naked houris, cannibal feasts, coconut palm groves, coral reefs, tattooed chiefs and bamboo temples; sunny valleys lined with breadfruit trees; carved shuttles dancing on clear blue waters; wild jungle and their terrible guardians - idols; pagan rites and human sacrifice.
Such were the strange, vague anticipations that tormented me all the time we sailed there. I was impatient to see as soon as possible the islands so colorfully described by navigators of the past.
The archipelago to which we were heading, although it belongs to the earliest discoveries of Europeans in the South Seas (they first visited there in 1595), remains to this day the abode of a wild and pagan tribe. The missionaries, setting out on a voyage for the cause of God, bypassed these picturesque shores, leaving them at the mercy of wooden and stone idols. And how extraordinary are the circumstances under which they were discovered! On the waterway of Mendaña, who scoured the ocean in search of a golden shore, they stood like some kind of enchanted land, and for a moment the Spaniard believed that his dream had come true. In honor of the Marquis de Mendoza - in those days the Viceroy of Peru - under whose patronage this voyage was launched, Mendanya gave the islands a name that glorifies the title of his patron, and upon his return enthusiastically and vaguely told the world about their splendor. But the islands, undisturbed by anyone for years, again seem to have sunk into the darkness of the unknown; all the information that we have about them has appeared only very recently. And once in half a century, some desperate sea tramp would surely stumble upon them, disturbing their peaceful slumber, and ready each time to ascribe to himself the honor of a new discovery.
Information about the group of these islands is scarce - there are only occasional mentions in books about voyages in the South Seas. Cook, during his repeated voyages around the world, hardly lingered along their coasts, and all that we know about them is gleaned from two or three narratives of a more general nature. Among them, two books deserve special attention: Porter's Logbook of the Voyage of the American Frigate Essex in the Pacific during the Past War, containing, as I heard, many interesting details about the islanders, although I have never had the good fortune to see this book myself; and "Sailing in the South Seas" by Stuart, chaplain of the American sloop-of-war "Vincent", where one of the sections is also devoted to this topic.
Over the past few years, American and English whaling ships in the Pacific, lacking food, have from time to time entered a convenient bay in one of the Marquesas Islands, but the fear of the natives, rooted in the memory of the terrible fate that befell many white people here , kept the teams from communicating with the local population, close enough to get acquainted with their peculiar customs.
The Protestant missionaries, apparently, despaired of ever wresting these islands from the tenacious fetters of paganism. The encounters they received on all occasions without exception from the islanders intimidated even the bravest of them. Ellis, in his Polynesian Studies, gives an interesting account of an unsuccessful attempt by the Tahitian Mission to set up a branch in one of the Marquesas Islands. In this connection, I cannot fail to relate a rather amusing incident that took place there shortly before my arrival.
One brave missionary, undeterred by the disastrous outcome of all previous efforts to pacify these savages and firmly believing in the beneficial power of female influence, brought to them a young and beautiful wife, the first white woman in those parts. At first, the islanders looked at this miracle with mute delight and, apparently, believed that some kind of deity was in front of them. But soon, getting used to the charming external appearance of this deity and indignant at the veils that obscure his true forms from them, they wished to pierce the sacred chintz folds with their eyes and, satisfying their curiosity, so unequivocally violated the rules of well-behaved behavior that they severely offended the sense of decency of this worthy lady. . But as soon as they established her gender, their silent adoration was replaced by frank contempt; and there was no count of the insults heaped upon her by these indignant savages, who imagined that they were shamelessly deceived. To the horror of her loving husband, they tore off her clothes and made it clear that she would no longer be able to lead them by the nose with impunity. The noble lady was not so exalted in soul as to endure all this, and, fearing further outrages, forced her husband to abandon his undertaking and return to Tahiti.
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American writer and sailor, author of the classic novel Moby Dick. He wrote not only prose, but also poetry.
Born in New York. When he was 12 years old, his father, a businessman, died, leaving behind debts and forcing Melville to part with the idea of obtaining a university education. From the age of 18 he sailed as a cabin boy on a packet boat, then worked as a teacher for some time; in 1841 he went on the whaling ship Akushnet to the South Seas. A year and a half later, due to a conflict with the Akushnet boatswain, Melville escaped from the ship near the Marquesas Islands and was captured by the natives, then was released by the crew of an American warship. After three years of wandering, he returned to his homeland to engage in literary activities.
His novels Taipi, or A Quick Look at Polynesian Life and Omu: A Tale of Adventure in the South Seas, based on his own experience, which immediately brought fame to the writer (the novel Taipi was Melville's most popular book during his lifetime), are characterized by the departure into the exotic, a complete rejection of reality familiar to the reader. Melville takes his hero to the primitive world, to the unspoiled by civilization savages of the South Seas. Behind the fascinating plots is a problem that worried not only Melville: is it possible, having abandoned civilization, to return to nature?
The allegorical novel about swimming as a philosophical search for the Absolute, Mardi and the Journey There, was not successful.
In the following works, still based on personal experience, Melville seeks to analyze the surrounding reality and social relations.
However, Melville abandons realistic marine novels and creates his main masterpiece, Moby Dick, or the White Whale. He proclaims the primacy of the irrational. In Moby Dick, Melville proves the irrationality of social relations; he paints a fantastically gloomy reality dominated by a mysterious white whale named Moby Dick, which almost no one has seen, but which reveals itself to be "the results of its actions." Moby Dick rules over everything, he is rumored to be omnipresent (perhaps he symbolizes a god or a devil).
Melville's last novel was The Tempter: His Masquerade, a scathing satire on human credulity set on the Mississippi ship Nonsense.
The money brought primarily by the works of the early period still remained, and in 1860 Melville made a trip around the world. However, from 1866 to 1885, he already served as an official at the customs.
Since the 1920s, a rethinking of Melville began, and he was recognized as a classic of world literature.
Books (6)
Collection of books
tower with bell
White pea coat
Benito Sereno
Billy Budd, Fore Mars sailor
Veranda
two temples
Jimmy Rose
Diary of a trip to Europe and the Levant
Moby Dick or White Whale
Omu
Scribe Bartleby
Paradise for Bachelors and Hell for Maidens
Violinist
Poems and poems
Happy failure. History on the Hudson River
Taipi
Lightning Rod Merchant
Encantadas, or the Enchanted Isles
me and my fireplace
White pea coat
The novel "White Pea Coat" by the American writer Herman Melville is dedicated to sailing on a US military frigate in the mid-19th century.
In 1843, the author enlisted on such a frigate as a simple sailor and served on it for more than a year. The novel (1850), which is only partly a chronicle, describes in detail the life and life of military sailors, their colorful figures, as well as the features of ships and naval service in that era. A number of philosophical, romantic and socio-political reflections are presented.
Israel Potter. Fifty years of his exile
A patriotic American novel, which, however, is not without a critical analysis of the essence of the United States; an artistic adaptation of the memoirs of the hero of the US Revolutionary War, a native of the mountains in Massachusetts, Israel Potter, who came from a family of pious Puritans (hence the name), forgotten already in the time of H. Melville.
The life of Israel Potter was full of adventures and hardships (farm laborer, hunter, farmer, whaler, soldier, sailor, etc.). During the war between the United States and England, he took part in battles on land and at sea, was captured, fled and went into hiding.
In the end, through the vicissitudes of fate, Potter settled in England and started a family there, having lived in poverty for about fifty years. At the end of his life, he returned to his native land, where he dictated his memoirs. Israel Potter received no award or pension from his homeland.
Moby Dick or White Whale
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1819-1891) is considered the greatest American novel of the 19th century.
At the center of this unique work, written contrary to all the laws of the genre, is the pursuit of the White Whale. A captivating plot, epic sea scenes, descriptions of vivid human characters in a harmonious combination with the most universal philosophical generalizations make this book a true masterpiece of world literature.
Omu
The novel "Omu" by the famous American writer Herman Melville (1819-1891), first published in 1847, tells about the further adventures of the hero of Melville's first book - "Typei".
Finding himself on board an English schooner, he, along with the rest of the sailors, was landed in Tahiti for refusing to continue sailing. A significant part of the book is devoted to the description of life in Tahiti and neighboring islands, the hosting of English missionaries on them, the behavior of the French, who had just taken possession of the islands of the Society.
The types of the English consul, the captain of the schooner and his chief assistant, the ship's doctor, sailors and a number of Polynesians, who have already experienced the harmful influence of the most negative aspects of European civilization, but partly retained their former virtues - honesty, good nature, hospitality, are clearly outlined.
Taipi
The first novel by the American writer Herman Melville tells about his stay in the Taipi, a Polynesian tribe of cannibals, on one of the Marquesas Islands, where the author fled from the hardships of sailor service from a whaling ship in 1842.
A number of observations are of an ethnographic nature. The philosophical and social aspects of the life of pagan cannibals are considered in comparison with the life of the civilized Christian world. The novel is considered entirely autobiographical.
"El Mundo", Spain, 03/04/2003
http://www.litwomen.ru/news.html?id=263
Formatting: Gauthier Sans Avoir. [email protected]
December 2005
The article presents little-known facts from the life of G. Melville. Translation, apparently, is not always accurate. So, about the characters created by G. Melville, there is the following phrase: "... wild gladiators, Captain Ahab and the White Whale." It should probably read "wild harpooners", since at least we are not aware of any "gladiators" at Melville. Unless the author of this article mentioned them in a figurative sense, but then - unsuccessfully.
I slightly corrected the punctuation, which in some places is typical for tracing paper from another language.
Having written one of the most famous works of world literature, Herman Melville never witnessed the recognition of his talent and lived his life holding a grudge against the whole world. His wife and children suffered the most, two of whom predeceased their father. A recently published biography of the American writer tells of his turbulent life.
He was supposed to get everything from life, but he was left empty-handed. His gift for writing was astounding, but recognition only came to him after his remains had been in a grave in a cemetery in the New York Bronx for more than thirty years. He could have been a happy husband and father of a family, but life surrounded him with grief and misfortune. Truly, he was a man who could have reigned, but he only came to the throne after his death.
Herman Melville was born August 1, 1819 in New York. He came from a wealthy, noble family, but all his life he lived practically in poverty. As Elizabeth Hardwick writes in her book Melville, the last of the published biographies of the author of Moby Dick, in the history of world literature, in fact, there were writers both poorer than Melville and dead younger than him. And if the story of this American writer looks so sad, it is not because a debt collector constantly knocked on his door with a receipt in his hand, and not because during his lifetime his creation did not find recognition among grateful readers. It's all about the impression that this person makes on you, who lived as if in the very center of a hurricane.
He was accused of corrupting beautiful young savages, of being gay, of desertion, and of defiling the moral values of the United States. His mother scolded him and subjected him to physical punishment when he was already quite an adult, married man. The gallery of characters he created - wild gladiators, Captain Ahab and the White Whale - became an integral part of one of the most famous and read books in the History of Mankind, but Melville's talent was recognized only many years after his death. So who was he really, this man named Herman Melville?
The future author of Moby Dick spent his childhood in Albany, New York. His father, Allan Melville, died when the boy was only 13 years old, and the debts left by Melville Sr. forced the writer's mother, Maria Melville Gansevoort, the daughter of the famous hero of the Revolutionary War, to move with their children to Lensigburg, where it was much cheaper to live.
There Melville graduated from high school and was educated as an engineer at a local college, but he could not achieve a good position in society. He began to write little notes for the town newspaper. At the time when the future writer first decided to go sailing, he was only 20 years old. In 1839 he entered as a cabin boy on the St. Lawrence, a merchant ship ready to begin a four-month voyage to Liverpool.
Returning from the voyage back to Lensigburg, Melville was faced with the depressing situation in which his family found themselves. Creditors constantly demanded to pay the amounts due to them, and the mother, struggling with poverty, wanted to receive at least some money from her brothers in debt.
Melville was forced to ask for help from his wealthy grandfather, and in order to pay off his debts, he went to work at a school located twenty kilometers from his home. But the school collapsed, and its management could not even pay the salaries of their teachers.
After the return of Melville from Liverpool, almost a year and a half passed, and the family's affairs did not improve. The writer began to look for work in New York, but could not find anything. At the age of 21, he again decides to set sail, but this time on a whaling ship, which was supposed to spend almost four years at sea.
Melville could have become a lawyer like his two brothers. His education and talent would have opened any door for him. But he didn't want to go that route. On the other hand, in the United States of 1840 the decision to set sail was commendable; many of the relatives of the future writer chose a similar career, only they served not as simple sailors, like Melville, but as officers.
On January 3, 1841, from the port of New Bedford, he set off on the whaling ship Akushnet, which was leaving on its maiden voyage. As Elizabeth Hardwick writes, Melville's life on the ship was extremely difficult, and after a year and a half Herman decided to desert. They saw whales from Akushnet, sometimes the sailors even managed to catch one of them, but all this seemed uninteresting to the writer. Together with the ship, he proceeded along the coasts of Brazil, Chile and Peru, and when they anchored in Nukuiev Bay, near the Marquesas Islands, Melville, by his own definition, “ran”.
Thanks to this step, we are now familiar with his first work - "Taipi", published in 1846. But the book, nevertheless, owed its success not so much to stories about whales and fascinating descriptions of the ocean, but to stories about beautiful women with tattoos on tanned bodies swimming in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, about a tribe of cannibals who own the island, and about magnificent sunsets, which Melville watched from under the coconut trees.
One of the critics said that in Typei, Melville, describing the complete calm that reigned on the ocean, the calm and peaceful life on the island that gave him shelter after deserting from the ship, alludes to his sexual relations with local women. It certainly was so, but these allusions, coupled with the writer's statements about religious morality and the conservative society of the United States, gave rise to a well-known newspaper editor named Horace Greeley for his eloquence to launch vicious attacks on Melville, accusing him of , for his own amusement, he took advantage of the naivete of the poor inhabitants of the island.
Apparently, Melville was having a great time in the Marquesas. There he remained until another whaler, the Lucky Ann, passed by, this time an Australian one. It took the writer another two years to return home.
Deserters were severely punished, but despite this, it seems that for the first time everything turned out well for Melville. As Laurie Robertson-Loran notes in a biography of the writer, almost half of the Obstetrician's crew defected, one sailor shot himself, and two more died of venereal diseases. When the ship came back to port, there were only 11 people on board. “In 1851, some time after the publication of Moby Dick, Melville learned that the Akushnet had run aground near St. Lawrence Island and was badly damaged in a storm,” writes Robertson-Laurent.
Meanwhile, Helen (Helen), the writer's sister, became best friends with Elizabeth Shaw (Elizabeth Shaw) - the daughter of a judge who acted as the patron and guarantor of the Melville family. The girl often visited the house when Herman was working on "Omu", his second work, and they eventually became engaged.
In an effort to improve his financial situation before starting a family, Melville went to Washington. He arrived there equipped with all kinds of letters of recommendation, desiring to get some place in the staff of the government apparatus. He was not hired; and it is not difficult to imagine that the experienced examiners who selected candidates for vacancies did not find in Melville itself a desire to emerge victorious.
The wedding between Hermann and Elisabeth took place on August 4, 1847. The groom at that time was already 28 years old, the bride - 25. Elizabeth was a very pretty, charming girl, but her life in marriage was not strewn with roses. She endured with stoic calm the vicissitudes of fate, the changeable mood of her husband, his depression and the economic difficulties of the family. She also had to live with her mother-in-law in the same house - a domineering and unbearable woman. Elizabeth bore all the hardships with humility.
Marriage torment
Hardwick claims that the marriage was more successful for Melville than for his wife. Herman stopped wandering around the world and turned into a writer obsessed with his work. For Elizabeth, life in marriage, on the contrary, turned out to be very difficult. She had endured her husband's rampage and his bad mood during drinking binges for more than twenty years before she decided to seriously consider divorce. In this, she was supported not only by her half-brother Sam Shaw, but also by a familiar priest: both advisers decided that Elizabeth not only needed to get a divorce, but also do it as soon as possible. But Lizzie was never able to take the last step: Herman Melville and his wife remained together until the very end - they had been married for 44 years.
Their first son was born in 1849 and was named Malcolm. He became the main participant in the most terrible tragedy experienced in the Melville house. At the age of 18, Malcolm locked himself in his room and shot himself. This happened in 1867; by that time, his father had already abandoned his career as a prose writer and turned to poetry.
The Melvilles' second son, Stanwix, was born in 1851, two years after Malcolm and only a few weeks after the publication of Moby Dick. When his older brother shot himself, he was at home; Around this time, Stanwix became deaf. Later, after leaving his parental home, he sailed on all kinds of ships, traveled, until he finally ended up in California, where he died at the age of 35 from tuberculosis.
In addition to sons, the Melvilles also had two daughters. The eldest, Bessie, suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis; she did not marry and spent her whole life in her parents' house, where her mother looked after her. The youngest daughter, Frances, was more fortunate in life. She married a decent man while still young, and her daughters and granddaughters took care of the preservation of the manuscripts and the legacy of the writer.
In 1866, Melville began working as a customs inspector - an occupation for him that was as unexpected as it was boring. According to Hardwick, who wrote a biography of the author of Moby Dick, that time was completely destructive for Melville. Family and friends of Elizabeth Melville saw that she was living in a real nightmare. They tried to take her away from home and start divorce proceedings through the courts: for that era, such an act was a very decisive step.
Melville was furious and behaved like a real despot. Some familiar families thought he was crazy. It was during that period that his son Malcolm shot himself - perhaps it was a way to break out of the vicious circle. Elizabeth Melville stayed at home, and her husband worked six days a week, receiving a beggarly wage of four dollars a day.
After working at customs for 19 years and three and a half weeks, he left the service. From that day until his death in 1891 (the writer was 72 years old by that time), he earned a living by literary work.
An obituary in The New York Times spelled the writer's name as Henry Melville. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In this world, he left a wife, two daughters, grandchildren and not a single extramarital affair or love letter. He died in his home, where his wife Elizabeth took care of him and endured all his whims. It seems that he even thanked her for all those years together lived when she bore the name of Mrs. Melville.
Herman Melville is an American writer and sailor.
Born in New York. When he was 12 years old, his father, a businessman, died, leaving behind debts and forcing Melville to part with the idea of obtaining a university education. From the age of 18 he sailed as a cabin boy on a packet boat, then worked as a teacher for some time; in 1841 he went on the whaling ship Akushnet to the South Seas. A year and a half later, due to a conflict with the Akushnet boatswain, Melville escaped from the ship near the Marquesas Islands and was captured by the natives, then was released by the crew of an American warship. After three years of wandering, he returned to his homeland to engage in literary activities.
His novels Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, based on his own experience, which immediately brought fame to the writer (Typee was Melville's most popular book during his lifetime), are characterized by a departure into the exotic, a complete rejection from reality familiar to the reader.
Melville takes his hero to the primitive world, to the unspoiled by civilization savages of the South Seas. Behind the fascinating plots is a problem that worried not only Melville: is it possible, having abandoned civilization, to return to nature?
An allegorical novel about sailing as a philosophical search for the Absolute Mardi: And a Voyage Thither was not successful.
In the following works, still based on personal experience, Melville seeks to analyze the surrounding reality and social relations. He writes Redburn: His First Voyage and White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. White-Jacket depicts the evil and cruelty of the author's contemporary military.
However, Melville abandons realistic marine novels and creates his main masterpiece Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. He proclaims the primacy of the irrational. In Moby-Dick, Melville argues for the irrationality of social relations; he paints a fantastically gloomy reality dominated by a mysterious white whale named Moby Dick, which almost no one has seen, but which reveals itself to be "the results of its actions." Moby Dick rules over everything, he is rumored to be omnipresent (perhaps he symbolizes God or the devil).
Moby-Dick was not appreciated by the vast majority of his contemporaries. After devastating criticism a year later, the gothic novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which depicts a writer feeling as alone in a noisy crowd as he does at a pole, Melville published anonymously as stories in magazines. Many of them were included in the collection The Piazza Tales. The year before, the historical novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile was released.
Melville's last novel was The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, a scathing satire on human gullibility. The action takes place on the ship "Nonsense", sailing along the Mississippi.
The money brought primarily by the works of the early period still remained, and in 1860 Melville made a trip around the world. However, from 1866 to 1885 he was already a customs official.
Melville continued to write, but died almost forgotten. Only an anonymous obituary wrote about an "exceptionally gifted author" who had a "powerful poetic imagination."
Even more daring than Poe, and not a "chamber", but an exceptionally large-scale researcher of the untrodden realm of the spirit was Herman Melville(1819-1891), the most complex and profound of the American romantics, a man of bright and unusual destiny. A brave sailor-whaler who sailed the South Seas - in his youth, a famous writer - by the age of thirty, later he fell out of favor with the American reader, who ceased to understand him, at times barely made ends meet and died in complete oblivion. An obituary in the newspaper announced the death of a customs official who had served twenty-five years.
It was "discovered" in the 1920s, after the First World War, which aggravated in people the feeling of unsatisfactory existence; Melville, with his tragic attitude and peculiar artistic manner, was perceived as a contemporary. Interest in him continued to grow and reached its peak in the 1950s; Moby Dick has been hailed as the most significant novel of the 19th century. Today, about a hundred monographs and five hundred articles are devoted to G. Melville's work, which, of course, testifies to his recognition, but by no means that it has been exhausted or at least fully understood.
Melville's life is the richest material for biographical research. The third of eight children of wealthy New York merchant Allan Melville, who went bankrupt when Herman was eleven years old, broke spiritually and physically, and died two years later, the future writer could not finish school and had to work to help his family. He changed several occupations, and in 1838 he entered as a sailor on the British merchant ship St. Lawrence. In 1841, he sailed from Massachusetts on the whaling ship Acushnet bound for Pacific waters.
Not getting along with the captain, Melville and a friend landed in the summer of 1842 on one of the Marquesas Islands and spent several weeks among the friendly natives, who, as it turned out, upon closer acquaintance with their customs, were cannibals. Melville was picked up by an Australian whaler passing by the island, where he took part in the sailors' rebellion, for which he spent some time in prison in Tahiti. From Tahiti, he sailed on a Nantucket whaler, but was landed in Honolulu, wandered in Hawaii for several months, then hired a sailor on the frigate "United States", which went around the entire Pacific Ocean and arrived in Boston in the autumn of 1844.
At home, twenty-five-year-old Herman Melville began to think about his adventures and his future fate. Melville took up self-education in earnest, seeking to catch up in his youth. He re-read all the world literature available to him, studied the works of philosophers of the past and the present. (Roll-call-controversy with the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, Emerson in the works of Melville is undeniable). Then G. Melville began to write. The result was the novels Taipi (1846) and Omu (1847), which delighted readers.
In 1847, Melville married and settled in the city of New York in the same house with his younger brother and his wife, mother and several unmarried sisters. If he continued to write adventure stories, he could have made a fortune, but Melville had his own way in literature. Beginning with his third novel, Mardi (1848), he began to irresistibly diverge from the readership. His next two books, "Redburn" (1849) and "White Pea Coat" (1850), were sold only thanks to his connections with European publishers.
The now-famous Moby Dick (1851) was written on a binge in western Massachusetts, where many writers traveled for the summer, and where Melville (in partnership with his father-in-law) bought the large Arrowhead farmhouse. There he worked until noon, and then in the evening and all night (food was brought to him on a tray and placed at the door). By winter, the novel was finished and marked a complete break between Melville and the American reading public.
Further novels of the writer "Pierre" (1852), "Israel Potter" (1855), "The Rogue" (1857), the story "Benito Sereno", a collection of short prose "Stories on the Veranda" (1856), which included the wonderful novella "Scribe Bartleby ", were considered either a complete or a partial failure. The financial situation of the Melville family, which already had several children, worsened. Influential friends (among them N. Hawthorne, who used his university friendship with President F. Pierce) unsuccessfully tried to help the writer find a profitable position.
In 1856, Melville sold his half of the Arrowhead and went abroad alone, hoping to restore his health and mental strength. He visited Scotland, England, traveled around the Mediterranean countries of Malta and Greece, then Egypt, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he began to write the philosophical poem Clareil, visited Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands on the way back and returned home through England.
For two years the Melvilles lived mainly on income from public lectures on subjects like "The State of Rome" or "The South Seas." The death in 1866 of his father-in-law, who left his half of Arrowhead as a legacy to his daughter's family, straightened things out somewhat, and Melville was able to publish his War Poems (1866). However, they did not attract much attention. The writer, it seemed, was doomed to enjoy fame only as "a man who lived among cannibals." In the same year, he finally received the position of Customs Inspector of the City of New York.
In the 1860s and 1870s, Melville worked on Clarail, an 18,000-line poem that no one understood. His last years were truly tragic; they brought the death of two of his sons, the severe illness of one daughter, and a break with another. Before his death, he completed the story "Billy Budd, Fore-Mars Sailor", which was published only in 1924 and is recognized as one of the main achievements of American literature.
Distinctive features of Melville's narrative are deep philosophical problems, complex artistic symbolism, and synthetism. Naturally, they open up space for a variety of interpretations of his work. Melville is declared either a forerunner of European modernism, or a fighter-denunciator of American imperialism, or a figure completely isolated, having neither points of contact with reality, nor analogues in world literature. Meanwhile, all this is equally false.
G. Melville is a romantic and an American, closely connected with public life, with the ideological and artistic thought of his country and his time - with romantic humanism. His work is absolutely romantic in style and method: the most complex images-symbols directly go back to the concepts of the romantic philosophy of being. As for the special universality of sound, the cosmism of his best works, these are, of course, the properties of a genius.
Read also other articles in the section "Literature of the 19th century. Romanticism. Realism":
Artistic discovery of America and other discoveries
Romantic nativism and romantic humanism
- Features of American Romanticism. Romantic nativism
- romantic humanism. Transcendentalism. Travel prose
National history and the history of the soul of the people
History and Modernity of America in Dialogues of Cultures
