Modernism, a new trend that came to Russia from Europe, mainly covers poetry, but some prose writers also work within the framework of modernism. Modernism, trying to separate itself from all previous literary trends, proclaimed a rejection of any literary traditions and of following patterns. All writers and poets of the beginning of the century, who thought and believed that they were writing in a new way, considered themselves modernists. As an opposition to realism, modernism in literature first of all tried to get away from the principle of a plausible depiction of reality. Hence the desire of modernist writers for fantastic elements and plots, the desire to embellish the existing reality, change it, transform it.
Futurism (from Latin futurum - future) is a literary movement that arose in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century as a protest against existing social principles. The creativity of the futurists was distinguished by the search for new means of artistic expression, new forms, images.
The purpose of this lesson is to understand how different branches of modernism differed from each other.
The main content of the current of symbolism is an attempt to find new expressions of language, the creation of a new philosophy in literature. Symbolists considered to remind that the world is not simple and understandable, but filled with meaning, the depth of which is impossible to find.
Acmeism arose as a way to drag poetry from the heavens of symbolism to earth. The teacher invites students to compare the work of the symbolists and acmeists.
The main theme of the next direction of modernism - futurism - is the desire to see the future in modernity, to mark the gap between them.
All these areas of modernism introduced radical updates to the language, marked the collapse of eras, and emphasized that the old literature could not express the spirit of modernity.
Topic: Russian literature of the late XIX - early XX centuries.
Lesson: The main currents of Russian modernism: symbolism, acmeism, futurism
Modernism is a single artistic stream. The branches of modernism: symbolism, acmeism and futurism - had their own characteristics.
Symbolism as a literary movement originated in France in the 80s. 19th century The basis of the artistic method of French symbolism is sharply subjective sensationalism (sensuality). The Symbolists reproduced reality as a stream of sensations. Poetry avoids generalizations, looking not for the typical, but for the individual, the only one of its kind.
Poetry takes on the character of improvisation, fixing "pure impressions". The object loses its clear outline, dissolves in a stream of disparate sensations, qualities; the dominant role is played by the epithet, a colorful spot. Emotion becomes objectless and "inexpressible". Poetry strives to enhance sensual richness and emotional impact. A self-sustaining form is cultivated. Representatives of French symbolism are P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud, J. Laforgue.
The dominant genre of symbolism was "pure" lyrics, the novel, short story, drama become lyrical.
In Russia, symbolism arose in the 90s. 19th century and at its initial stage (K. D. Balmont, early V. Ya. Bryusov and A. Dobrolyubov, and later - B. Zaitsev, I. F. Annensky, Remizov) develops a style of decadent impressionism, similar to French symbolism.
Russian Symbolists of the 1900s (V. Ivanov, A. Bely, A. A. Blok, as well as D. S. Merezhkovsky, S. Solovyov and others), trying to overcome pessimism, passivity, proclaimed the slogan of effective art, the predominance of creativity over knowledge.
The material world is drawn by the symbolists as a mask through which the otherworldly shines through. Dualism finds expression in the two-dimensional composition of novels, dramas and "symphonies". The world of real phenomena, everyday life or conditional fantasy is depicted grotesquely, discredited in the light of "transcendental irony". Situations, images, their movement acquire a double meaning: in terms of what is depicted and in terms of what is marked.
A symbol is a bundle of meanings that diverge in different directions. The task of the symbol_ is to present correspondences.
The poem (Baudelaire, "Correspondences" translated by K. Balmont) shows an example of traditional semantic connections that give rise to symbols.
Nature is a strict temple, where the system of living columns
Sometimes a slightly intelligible sound stealthily drops;
He wanders through the forests of symbols, drowns in their thickets
An embarrassed person, touched by their gaze.
Like an echo of echoes in one unclear chord,
Where everything is one, light and darkness at night,
Fragrances and sounds and colors
It combines in harmony with a consonant.
There is a virgin smell; like a meadow, it is pure and holy,
Like a child's body, the high sound of an oboe;
And there is a solemn, depraved aroma -
Fusion of incense and amber and benzoic:
In it, the infinite is suddenly available to us,
It contains the highest thoughts of delight and the best feelings of ecstasy!
Symbolism also creates its own words - symbols. First, high poetic words are used for such symbols, then simple ones. Symbolists believed that it was impossible to exhaust the meaning of a symbol.
Symbolism avoids the logical disclosure of the topic, referring to the symbolism of sensual forms, the elements of which receive a special semantic richness. Logically inexpressible "secret" meanings "shine" through the material world of art. Putting forward sensory elements, symbolism departs at the same time from the impressionistic contemplation of disparate and self-contained sensory impressions, into the motley stream of which symbolization introduces a certain integrity, unity and continuity.
The task of the symbolists is to show that the world is full of secrets that cannot be discovered.
The lyrics of symbolism are often dramatized or acquire epic features, revealing the structure of "generally significant" symbols, rethinking the images of ancient and Christian mythology. The genre of a religious poem, a symbolically interpreted legend, was created (S. Solovyov, D. S. Merezhkovsky). The poem loses its intimacy, becomes like a sermon, a prophecy (V. Ivanov, A. Bely).
German symbolism of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. (S. Gheorghe and his Group, R. Demel and other poets) was the ideological mouthpiece of the reactionary bloc of the Junkers and the big industrial bourgeoisie. In German symbolism, aggressive and tonic aspirations, attempts to combat their own decadence, a desire to dissociate themselves from decadence and impressionism stand out in relief. The consciousness of decadence, the end of culture, German symbolism tries to resolve in a tragic life-affirmation, in a kind of "heroics" of decline. In the struggle against materialism, resorting to symbolism, myth, German symbolism does not come to a sharply pronounced metaphysical dualism, it retains Nietzsche's "loyalty to the earth" (Nietzsche, George, Demel).
New modernist movement acmeism, appeared in Russian poetry in the 1910s. as opposed to extreme symbolism. Translated from Greek, the word "akme" means the highest degree of something, flourishing, maturity. Acmeists advocated returning images and words to their original meaning, for art for the sake of art, for the poeticization of human feelings. The rejection of mysticism - this was the main feature of the acmeists.
For symbolists, the main thing is rhythm and music, the sound of a word, then for acmeists it is form and eternity, objectivity.
In 1912, the poets S. Gorodetsky, N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, V. Narbut, A. Akhmatova, M. Zenkevich and some others united in the "Poets' Workshop" circle.
The founders of acmeism were N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. Acmeists called their work the highest point of achieving artistic truth. They did not deny symbolism, but were against the fact that the symbolists paid so much attention to the world of the mysterious and unknown. Acmeists pointed out that the unknowable, in the very meaning of the word, cannot be known. Hence the desire of the Acmeists to free literature from those obscurities that were cultivated by the Symbolists, and to restore its clarity and accessibility. Acmeists tried with all their might to bring literature back to life, to things, to man, to nature. So, Gumilyov turned to the description of exotic animals and nature, Zenkevich - to the prehistoric life of the earth and man, Narbut - to everyday life, Anna Akhmatova - to in-depth love experiences.
The desire for nature, for the "earth" led the acmeists to a naturalistic style, to concrete imagery, objective realism, which determined a number of artistic techniques. In the poetry of acmeists, “heavy, weighty words” prevail, the number of nouns significantly exceeds the number of verbs.
Having made this reform, the Acmeists otherwise agreed with the Symbolists, declaring themselves to be their students. The other world for acmeists remains true; only they do not make it the center of their poetry, although the latter is sometimes not alien to mystical elements. Gumilyov's works "The Lost Tram" and "At the Gypsies" are completely permeated with mysticism, and in Akhmatova's collections, like "The Rosary", love-religious experiences predominate.
A. Akhmatova's poem "The Song of the Last Meeting":
So helplessly my chest went cold,
But my steps were light.
I put on my right hand
Left hand glove.
It seemed that many steps
And I knew there were only three of them!
Acmeists returned everyday scenes.
Acmeists were by no means revolutionaries in relation to symbolism, they never considered themselves as such; they set as their main task only smoothing out contradictions, introducing amendments.
In the part where the acmeists rebelled against the mysticism of symbolism, they did not oppose the latter to real real life. Rejecting mysticism as the main leitmotif of creativity, acmeists began to fetishize things as such, not being able to synthetically approach reality, to understand its dynamics. For acmeists, the things of reality matter in themselves, in a static state. They admire individual objects of being, and perceive them as they are, without criticism, without trying to understand them in a relationship, but directly, in an animal way.
Basic principles of acmeism:
Rejection of symbolist appeals to the ideal, mystical nebula;
Acceptance of the earthly world as it is, in all its beauty and diversity;
Returning the word to its original meaning;
Image of a person with his true feelings;
Poeticization of the world;
Inclusion in poetry of associations with previous eras.
Rice. 6. Umberto Boccioni. The street goes into the house ()
Acmeism did not last very long, but made a great contribution to the development of poetry.
Futurism(in translation means the future) - one of the currents of modernism, which originated in the 1910s. It is most clearly represented in the literature of Italy and Russia. On February 20, 1909, an article by T. F. Marinetti "Manifesto of Futurism" appeared in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Marinetti in his manifesto called for abandoning the spiritual and cultural values of the past and building a new art. The main task of the futurists is to mark the gap between the present and the future, to destroy everything old and build a new one. Provocations entered their lives. They opposed bourgeois society.
In Russia, Marinetti's article was already published on March 8, 1909 and marked the beginning of the development of their own futurism. The founders of the new trend in Russian literature were the brothers D. and N. Burliuk, M. Larionov, N. Goncharova, A. Exter, N. Kulbin. In 1910, one of the first futuristic poems by V. Khlebnikov, The Spell of Laughter, appeared in the collection The Impressionist Studio. In the same year, a collection of futurist poets, The Garden of Judges, was published. It contained poems by D. Burliuk, N. Burliuk, E. Guro, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky.
Futurists also invented new words.
Evening. Shadows.
Canopy. Leni.
We sat, drinking in the evening.
In each eye is a running deer.
Futurists are deforming their language and grammar. Words are piled on top of each other, hurrying to convey the momentary feelings of the author, so the work looks like a telegraphic text. Futurists abandoned syntax and strophics, invented new words, which, in their opinion, better and more fully reflected reality.
The futurists attached special importance to the seemingly meaningless title of the collection. The cage for them symbolized the cage into which the poets were driven, and they called themselves judges.
In 1910, the Cubo-Futurists formed a group. It consisted of the Burliuk brothers, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, E. Guro, A. E. Kruchenykh. Cubo-futurists came out in defense of the word as such, "words are higher than meaning", "abstruse words". Cubo-futurists destroyed Russian grammar, replaced phrases with a combination of sounds. They believed that the more clutter in a sentence, the better.
In 1911, I. Severyanin was one of the first in Russia to proclaim himself an ego-futurist. To the term "futurism" he added the word "ego". Egofuturism can literally be translated as "I am the future." A circle of followers of ego-futurism rallied around I. Severyanin, in January 1912 they proclaimed themselves the "Academy of Ego Poetry." Egofuturists have enriched their vocabulary with a large number of foreign words and neoplasms.
In 1912, the Futurists united around the publishing house "Petersburg Herald". The group included: D. Kryuchkov, I. Severyanin, K. Olimpov, P. Shirokov, R. Ivnev, V. Gnedov, V. Shershenevich.
In Russia, the futurists called themselves "budetlyans", poets of the future. The futurists, captured by dynamism, were no longer satisfied with the syntax and vocabulary of the previous era, when there were no cars, no telephones, no phonographs, no cinemas, no airplanes, no electric railways, no skyscrapers, no subways. A poet filled with a new sense of the world has a wireless imagination. The poet puts fleeting sensations into the heap of words.
Futurists were passionate about politics.
All these directions radically renew the language, the feeling that the old literature cannot express the spirit of modernity.
Bibliography
1. Chalmaev V.A., Zinin S.A. Russian literature of the twentieth century.: Textbook for grade 11: In 2 hours - 5th ed. - M .: OOO 2TID "Russian Word - RS", 2008.
2. Agenosov V.V. . Russian literature of the 20th century. Methodical manual M. "Buddy Bustard", 2002
3. Russian literature of the 20th century. Textbook for applicants to universities M. uch.-scient. Center "Moscow Lyceum", 1995.
Spreadsheets and presentations
Literature in tables and diagrams ().
Modernism is a characteristic feature of the aesthetics of the 20th century, independent of social strata, countries and peoples.
In its best examples, the art of modernism enriches world culture through new means of expression.
In the literary process of the XX century. there have been changes due to socio-economic and political reasons. Among the main features of the literature of this time can be identified:
politicization, strengthening the connection of literary movements with various political movements,
strengthening mutual influence and interpenetration of national literatures, internationalization,
rejection of literary traditions,
intellectualization, the influence of philosophical ideas, the desire for scientific and philosophical analysis,
fusion and mixing of genres, variety of forms and styles.
In the history of literature of the XX century. It is customary to distinguish two major periods:
1) 1917-1945
2) after 1945
Literature in the 20th century developed in line with two main directions - realism and modernism.
Realism allowed bold experiments, the use of new artistic techniques with one goal: a deeper understanding of reality (B. Brecht, W. Faulkner, T. Mann).
Kafkas, who are characterized by the idea of the world as an absurd beginning, hostile to man, disbelief in man, rejection of the idea of progress in all its forms, pessimism.
Of the leading literary movements of the mid-twentieth century. should be called existentialism, which as a literary trend arose in France (J-P. Sartre, A Camus).
The features of this direction are:
assertion of a "pure" unmotivated action,
assertion of individualism
a reflection of the loneliness of a person in an absurd world hostile to him.
Avant-garde literature was the product of an emerging era of social change and cataclysms. It was based on a categorical rejection of reality, the denial of bourgeois values and an energetic breaking of traditions. To fully characterize avant-garde literature, one should dwell on such trends as expressionism, futurism and surrealism.
For aesthetics expressionism and the priority of expression over the image is characteristic, the screaming “I” of the artist comes to the fore, which displaces the object of the image.
Futurists they completely denied all previous art, proclaimed vulgarity, the soulless ideal of a technocratic society. The aesthetic principles of the Futurists were based on the breaking of syntax, the denial of logic, word creation, free association, and the rejection of punctuation.
Surrealism the leading aesthetic principle was automatic writing, based on the theory of 3. Freud. Automatic writing - creativity without mind control, recording free associations, daydreams, dreams. A favorite technique of the surrealists is a "stunning image" consisting of disparate elements.
Modernism developed in several stages and manifested itself in many currents. Beginning in the 1960s, modernism enters the stage of postmodernism.
2. P. Suskind's novel "Perfumer": the historicism of the novel, themes and problems, intertext
The action of the novel takes place in France in the middle of the 18th century, during the Age of Enlightenment.
The technique used by the author in "Perfume" is the principle of pseudo-historicism. He seems to convince the reader that what is described really once happened, giving the events of the novel chronological accuracy. The text is full of dates. So, between two dates, the whole life of the hero passes (all events are dated: meeting with a girl with plums, Grenouille's sentence, death, his birth).
Referring to the characters that Grenouille encounters, Suskind notes the time and circumstances of their death. So the reader, watching in real time the novel for the death of the tanner Grimal and the perfumer Baldini, learns that Madame Gaillard will die of old age in 1799, and the Marquis Taillade-Espinasse will disappear in the mountains in 1764.
In Grenouille's imagination, marked with dates, like bottles of aged wine, the aromas that he smelled are stored: "a glass of aroma of 1752", "a bottle of 1744".
The dates that the novel is full of create a tangible feeling that we are facing France on the eve of the Great Revolution. Suskind remembers that the France of the depicted era is a country not only of future revolutionaries, vagabonds and beggars, but also magicians, sorcerers, poisoners, hypnotists and other charlatans, adventurers, criminals.
Parallel with creativity (?)
Intertext: 1) Hoffmann's quotations are read in the same way unexpectedly in the general context of The Story of a Murderer. The associations between Grenouille and little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober, from the story of the same name by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1819) are quite obvious. The word grenouille, similar to the surname of the central character of the "Perfumer", is translated from French as "frog". 2) Suskind fills with literal content the metaphorical phrase of Jesus, which he said to his disciples during the legendary dinner: “And taking bread and giving thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying: this is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me. Likewise the cup after supper, saying, This is the New Testament in my blood, which is shed for you (Luke 22:19-20). The Christian sacrament of communion - the Eucharist - is literalized and interpreted on the pages of the novel as a kind of cannibalistic act staged by Grenouille himself.
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The twentieth century entered the history of culture as a century of experiment, which then often became the norm. This is the time of the emergence of various declarations, schools, often infringing on world traditions. So, let's say, the inevitability of imitation of the beautiful, about which G. Lessing wrote in his work "Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry", was criticized. On the contrary, the artist began to imitate the disgusting, which in ancient times was forbidden under pain of punishment.
The starting point of aesthetics was the ugly; the rejection of harmonic proportions violated the image of art, in which the emphasis is on deformation, geometric shapes.
The term "modernism" appears at the end of the 19th century and is usually assigned to non-realistic phenomena in art that follow decadence. However, the ideas that gave it content were met earlier. Suffice it to recall the "Flowers of Evil" by Charles Baudelaire.
Modernism (fr. modernisme - from moderne - the latest, modo - just) as a philosophical and aesthetic movement has the following stages (we select conditionally):
Avant-gardism, located in time between the wars;
Neo-avant-gardism (50s-60s);
Postmodernism (70s–80s).
Speaking of avant-garde as a part of modernism, we note that Western criticism often does not use these terms, preferring "avant-garde".
Modernism continues the unrealistic trend in the literature of the past and moves into the literature of the second half of the twentieth century.
Modernism is both a creative method and an aesthetic system, which is reflected in the literary activity of a number of schools, often very different in their program statements.
Common features:
1) loss of a fulcrum;
2) a break with the traditional worldview of Christian Europe;
3) subjectivism, deformation of the world or literary text;
4) the loss of an integral model of the world, the creation of a model of the world every time anew at the arbitrariness of the artist;
5) formalism.
Modernism is a literary movement, diverse in its composition, political aspirations and manifestos, which includes many different schools, groupings, united by a pessimistic worldview, the artist’s desire not to reflect objective reality, but to express himself, setting on subjectivism, deformation.
The philosophical origins of modernism can be found in the works of Z. Freud, A. Bergson, W. James.
Modernism can be decisive in the work of the writer as a whole (F. Kafka, D. Joyce) or can be felt as one of the techniques that had a significant impact on the style of the artist (M. Proust, W. Wolfe).
Modernism as a literary movement that swept Europe at the beginning of the century has the following national varieties:
French and Czech surrealism;
Italian and Russian futurism;
English Imagism and the “stream of consciousness” school;
German expressionism;
American and Italian Hermeticism;
Swedish primitivism;
French unanimism and constructivism;
Spanish ultraism;
Latin American creationism.
What is characteristic of avant-garde as a stage of modernism? The word avant-garde itself (from the French avant-garde - advanced detachment) came from the military vocabulary, where it denotes a small elite detachment that breaks into enemy territory in front of the main army and paves the way for it, and the art historical meaning of this term, as a neologism, was used by Alexander Benois (1910), acquired in the first decades of the 20th century. Since then, the classical avant-garde has been called the totality of heterogeneous and differently significant artistic movements, trends and schools.
The outlines of avant-gardism are also elusive, historically uniting various trends - from symbolism and cubism to surrealism and pop art; they are characterized by a psychological atmosphere of rebellion, a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, an orientation towards the future, which is not always clearly presented.
As noted by the Czech scholar Jan Mukařovski, "the avant-garde strives to get rid of the past and traditions".
It is significant that the avant-garde art, which was rapidly developing in the tenth and twenties, turned out to be enriched with a revolutionary idea (sometimes only conditionally symbolic, as was the case with the expressionists who wrote about the revolution in the sphere of the spirit, the revolution in general). This gave optimism to the avant-garde, painting its canvases red, and attracted the attention of revolutionary-minded artists who saw avant-gardism as an example of anti-bourgeois protest (B. Brecht, L. Aragon, V. Nezval, P. Eluard). Avant-gardism not only crosses out reality - it moves towards its own reality, relying on the immanent laws of art. The avant-garde rejected the stereotypical forms of mass consciousness, did not accept war, the madness of technocracy, the enslavement of man. The avant-garde opposed rebellion, chaos and deformation to mediocrity and the bourgeois order, to the canonized logic of the realists, to the morality of the philistines - freedom of feelings and unlimited imagination. Ahead of time, the avant-garde updated the art of the 20th century, introduced urban themes and new techniques into poetry, new principles of composition and various functional styles of speech, graphic design (ideograms, the rejection of punctuation), free verse and its variations.
3. The main artistic and aesthetic trends of the first half of the twentieth century
Let us consider Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism and Imagism as the most pronounced avant-garde trends in foreign literature of the first third of the 20th century.
DADAISM (from the French dada - baby talk without meaning) is the immediate predecessor of surrealism. It took shape in Zurich, the capital of neutral Switzerland, through the efforts of emigrant poets from the warring countries (T. Tzara, R. Gulzenbeck), who published the magazine Cabaret Voltaire (1916–1917). Dadaists declared absurdity and an atmosphere of scandal, desertion, protesting against the First World War, the desire to bring the public out of self-satisfied complacency. The aesthetic form of their protest was illogical and irrational art, often meaningless sets of words and sounds, compiled using the Dada collage method. “These two syllables have reached their goal, they have reached the “resonant nonsense”, absolute insignificance, wrote André Gide in the Dada article. - The highest gratitude in relation to the art of the past and its perfect masterpieces, - the French writer reflects, - consists in abandoning all pretensions to their renewal. The perfect is that which can no longer be reproduced, while putting the past before oneself means blocking the path to the future.
The most notable among the Dadaists is the Swiss poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), the author of the books The Seven Dada Manifestoes (1924), The Approximate Man (1931), the famous Dada Songs, in which random images, unexpected associations and At the same time, there is an element of parody of the boulevard novel and naturalistic poetry. To some extent, the meaning of the poetry of Tzara and the Dadaists as a whole is conveyed by his words: "I write a manifesto, and I do not want anything, I say something in the meantime, and I, in principle, am against manifestos, just as I am against principles." In these words is negation, which will find its further development in French surrealism and German expressionism, to whose programs the Dadaists will join.
SURREALISM (from the French sure?alite - super-reality) developed in France; his program is outlined in the "Manifesto of Surrealism", written by A. Breton with the participation of L. Aragon in 1924, and the manifesto, which appeared in January 1925. Instead of depicting objective reality, the aim of art in them is proclaimed supersensible supreality and the world of the subconscious, and “automatic writing”, the method of uncontrolled expressiveness and the combination of the incompatible as the main method of creation.
Surrealism sought to liberate the essence of man, suppressed by civilization, and to communicate by influencing subconscious impulses. The "Manifesto of Surrealism" paid tribute to Freud's discoveries in the field of the human psyche and drew attention to dreams as an important aspect of mental activity. A. Breton noted in his work: “Surrealism ... Pure mental automatism, which aims to express either orally, or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. The dictation of thought is beyond any control on the part of the mind, beyond any aesthetic or moral considerations. The very word "surrealism" was first used by G. Apollinaire in the preface to his drama "Breasts of Tiresias", where the author apologized for the neologism he had invented. He needed one to renew the theater, to return it to nature itself, without repeating it: “When a person decided to imitate walking, he created a wheel - an object unlike a foot. It was unconscious surrealism." The components of a surrealistic image are deformation, a combination of the incongruous, free associativity. The word was used by the Surrealists in a game function.
The poetics of surrealism is characterized by: disintegration of an object into its component parts and their “rearrangement”, conditional outer space, timelessness and collage statics. All this is easy to see in the paintings of S. Dali, in the poetry of F. Soupo, J. Cocteau. Here is a poem "From a fairy tale" by the Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval, which creates an surreal impression based on ordinary realities, whimsically combined contrary to logic and meaning, but according to the law of fantasy:
Someone on an old piano
Falsehood torments the ear.
And I'm in a glass castle
I beat fire-winged flies.
alabaster handle
Didn't hug.
The princess is getting old.
Became an old woman...
The piano mourns deafly:
I'm sorry, sorry..
And my heart sleepily sings:
It was - no
It was - no
Bim - Bam.
(Translated by V. Ivanov)
The history of the school of surrealism was short-lived. The French school, like the Czech, Polish, and even earlier Spanish and many others that arose in different countries of Europe, felt its failure in the face of the threat of fascism and the impending World War II and dissolved itself. However, surrealism influenced the art of the 20th century: the poetry of P. Eluard, L. Aragon, V. Nezval, F. Lorca, painting and arts and crafts, cinema, and the entire space surrounding modern man.
EXPRESSIONISM (fr. expression - expression). In the pre-war years and during the First World War, expressionism, the art of expression, experienced a short but bright heyday. The main aesthetic postulate of expressionists is not to imitate reality, but to express their negative attitude towards it. Poet and expressionist theorist Casimir Edschmid argued: “The world exists. There is no point in repeating it." In doing so, he and his followers challenged realism and naturalism. Artists, musicians and poets, grouped around the Russian painter V. Kandinsky, published the Blue Rider almanac in Munich. They set themselves the task of freeing themselves from object and plot dependence, appealing directly to the spiritual world of man with color or sound. In literature, the ideas of expressionism were picked up by poets who sought to express the experiences of a lyrical hero in a state of passion. Hence the hypertrophied figurativeness of the verse, the confusion of vocabulary and the arbitrariness of syntax, the hysterical rhythm. Poets, playwrights and artists close to expressionism were rebels in art and in life. They were looking for new, scandalous forms of self-expression, the world in their works appeared in a grotesque guise, bourgeois reality - in the form of caricatures.
Thus, proclaiming the thesis about the priority of the artist himself, and not reality, expressionism emphasized the expression of the soul of the artist, his inner "I". Expression instead of image, intuition instead of logic - these principles, of course, could not but affect the appearance of literature and art.
Representatives of expressionism: in art (E. Barlach, E. Kirchner, O. Kokoschka, A. Schoenberg, B. Bartok), in literature (F. Werfel, G. Grakl, G. Game, etc.).
The style of expressionist poetry is marked by pathos, hyperbole, and symbolism.
The work of expressionist artists was banned in Nazi Germany as painful, decadent, incapable of serving the policy of Nazism. Meanwhile, the experience of expressionism is productive for many artists, not to mention those who were directly influenced by his program (F. Kafka, I. Becher, B. Kellerman, L. Frank, G. Hesse). In the work of the latter, an essential feature of expressionism was reflected - to think in philosophical categories. One of the most important themes of the art of the 20th century - alienation as a result of bourgeois civilization that suppressed man in the state, a philosophical theme and central to Kafka's worldview - received a detailed development from the expressionists.
FUTURISM (Italian futurismo from Latin futurum - future) is an avant-garde art movement of the 1910s - early 1920s of the 20th century, most fully manifested in Italy (the birthplace of futurism) and Russia. Futurists were also in other European countries - Germany, England, France, Poland. Futurism declared itself in literature, painting, sculpture, and to a lesser extent in music.
Italian Futurism. February 20, 1909, is considered the birthday of futurism, when the Futurist Manifesto written by T. F. Marinetti appeared in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. It was T. Marinetti who became the theorist and leader of the first, Milanese, group of futurists.
It is no coincidence that futurism originated in Italy, a country-museum. “We have no life, but only memories of a more glorious past ... We live in a magnificent sarcophagus in which the lid is tightly screwed so that fresh air does not enter,” complained T. Marinetti. Bringing your compatriots to the Olympus of modern European culture - that's what, undoubtedly, was behind the outrageous and loud tone of the manifesto. A group of young artists from Milan, and then from other cities, immediately responded to Marinetti's call - both with their work and their own manifestos. On February 11, 1910, the “Manifesto of Futurist Artists” appears, and on April 11 of the same year, the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting”, signed by U. Boccioni, J. Balla, C. Carra, L. Russolo, J. Severeni, by the largest artists - futurists. In all his works, both theoretical and artistic (poetry, the novel Mafarka the Futurist), T. Marinetti, like his associates, denied not only the artistic, but also the ethical values of the past.
Pity, respect for the human person, romantic love were declared obsolete. Intoxicated with the latest advances in technology, the futurists sought to cut out the "cancer" of the old culture with the knife of technism and the latest achievements of science. Futurists argued that the new technique also changes the human psyche, and this requires a change in all the visual and expressive means of art. In the modern world, they were especially fascinated by speed, mobility, dynamics, and energy. They dedicated their poems and paintings to automobiles, trains, and electricity. “The heat emanating from a piece of wood or iron excites us more than the smile and tears of a woman,” “New art can only be violence, cruelty,” Marinetti said.
The worldview of the Futurists was strongly influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche with his cult of the "superman"; Bergson's philosophy, which asserts that the mind is capable of comprehending only everything that is ossified and dead; rebellious slogans of the anarchists. A hymn to strength and heroism - in almost all the works of Italian futurists. The man of the future, in their view, is a "mechanical man with replaceable parts", omnipotent, but soulless, cynical and cruel.
They saw the cleansing of the world from "junk" in wars and revolutions. “War is the only hygiene of the world”, “The word “freedom” must obey the word Italy,” Marinetti proclaimed. Even the titles of poetry collections - "Pistol Shots" by Luchini, "Electric Poems" by Govoni, "Bayonets" by A. D. Alba, "Airplanes" by Buzzi, "Song of Motors" by L. Folgore, "Pyro" by Palazzeschi - speak for themselves.
The key slogan of the Italian futurists in literature was the slogan - "Words on the loose!" - not to express the meaning in words, but to let the word itself control the meaning (or nonsense) of the poem. In painting and sculpture, Italian Futurism became the forerunner of many subsequent artistic discoveries and trends. So, Boccioni, who used a variety of materials in one sculpture (glass, wood, cardboard, iron, leather, horsehair, clothes, mirrors, light bulbs, etc.), became a harbinger of pop art.
IMAGISM emerged as a trend in 1908 in the bowels of the London Poets' Club. The fossilization of familiar poetic forms forced young writers to look for new ways in poetry. The first Imagists were Thomas Ernest Hume and Francis Flint. In 1908, Hume's famous poem "Autumn" was published, which surprised everyone with unexpected comparisons: "The moon stood by the wattle fence, // Like a red-faced farmer", "Feeling stars crowded around, // Similar to city children" (translated by I. Romanovich) . In 1909, the American poet Ezra Pound joined the group.
The leader and indisputable authority in the group was Thomas Ernest Hume. By that time, he had strong convictions: “Images in verse are not just decoration, but the very essence of intuitive language,” while the poet’s purpose is to look for “suddenness, unexpectedness of angle.” According to Hume, "the new poems are more like sculpture than music, and are more directed towards sight than towards hearing." The rhythmic experiments of the Imagists are interesting. Hume called for "shattering the canonical rhyme", abandoning the correct metrical constructions. It was in the "Poets' Club" that the traditions of English blank verse and free verse were born. However, by 1910 meetings of the "Poets' Club" gradually became more and more rare, then it ceased to exist. Hume died a few years later on one of the fronts of the First World War.
A second group of Imagists gathered around Ezra Pound. In October 1912, Ezra Pound received from the young American poetess Hilda Doolittle, who had moved to England a year ago, a selection of her poems, which struck him with "Imagist conciseness." Hilda Doolittle attracted her lover and future husband to the group. It was the later famous English novelist Richard Aldington. A sign of the second stage of Imagism was the appeal to antiquity (R. Aldington was also a translator of ancient Greek poetry). Pound during these years formulated his famous "Several Prohibitions" - the commandment of Imagism, explaining how one should, or rather how one should not write poetry. He emphasized that “figurative poetry is like a sculpture frozen in the word” (remember: Hume wrote about the same thing).
The result of the second stage in the history of Imagism was the poetic anthology Des Imagistes (1915) collected by Pound, after which Pound left the group and went to France. The war began, and the center of Imagism began to move from warring England to America.
The third stage in the development of Imagism is American. The leader of the group of Imagists was the American poetess Amy Lowell (1874-1925) from the prominent Lowell family in Boston, which already in the 19th century produced the famous poet James Russell Lowell. The main theme of Amy Lowell's poems is admiring nature. The merit of the poetess is the three Imagist anthologies prepared by her one after another.
Famous novelists David Herbert Lawrence, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) appeared with poems in Imagist anthologies, there are also poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot, as well as two other future pillars of American poetry - Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). .) and the very young William Carlos Williams (1883–1963).
The compiler of the Anthology of Imagism published in Russia in 2001, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, wrote in the preface to it:
“In the poetry of the English-speaking countries, almost a decade and a half passed under the sign of Imagism - almost the entire beginning of the century. Imagist poets struggled to renew the poetic language, freed poetry from the cage of regular verse, enriched literature with new poetic forms, with a wide rhythmic range, a variety of stanza and line sizes, and unexpected images.
Having considered several avant-garde trends and the work of major writers, it can be argued that avant-garde art as an artistic movement is characterized by subjectivism and, in general, a pessimistic view of progress and history, an extra-social attitude towards a person, a violation of the holistic concept of personality, harmony of external and internal life, social and biological in her. In terms of worldview, modernism argued with the apologetic picture of the world, was anti-bourgeois; at the same time, he was alarmed by the inhumanity of revolutionary practical activity. Modernism defended the personality, proclaimed its self-worth and sovereignty, the immanent nature of art. In poetics, he tested non-traditional methods and forms opposed to realism, focused on the free will of the creator, and thus influenced realistic art. The boundary between modernism and realism in a number of specific examples from the work of contemporary authors is quite problematic, because, according to the observation of the well-known literary critic D. Zatonsky, "modernism ... does not occur in a chemically pure form." It is an integral part of the artistic panorama of the 20th century.
When they talk about Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they first of all remember the three trends that were the most striking: symbolism, acmeism and futurism. What unites them is that they belonged to modernism. Modernist currents arose as an opposition to traditional art, the ideologists of these currents denied the classical heritage, opposed their directions to realism and proclaimed the search for new ways of depicting reality. In these searches, each of the directions went its own way.
Symbolism
Symbolists considered their goal the art of intuitive comprehension of world unity through symbols. The very name of the current comes from the Greek Symbolon, which translates as a conventional sign. Spiritual life cannot be comprehended in a rational way, only art can penetrate into its sphere. Therefore, the Symbolists understood the creative process as a subconscious, intuitive penetration into secret meanings, which only the artist-creator can do. And these secret meanings can not be conveyed directly, but only with the help of a symbol, because the secret of being cannot be conveyed by an ordinary word.
The theoretical basis of Russian symbolism is considered to be D. Merezhkovsky's article "On the Causes of the Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature."
In Russian symbolism, two stages are usually distinguished: the work of older and younger symbolists.
Symbolism has enriched Russian literature with many artistic discoveries. The poetic word received bright semantic nuances, became unusually ambiguous. The "Young Symbolists" were convinced that through the "prophetic word" it was possible to change the world, that the poet was a "demiurge", the creator of the world. This utopia could not come true, so in the 1910s there was a crisis of symbolism, its collapse as a system.
Acmeism
Such a direction of modernism in literature as acmeism arose in opposition to symbolism and proclaimed the desire for a clear view of the world, which is valuable in itself. They declared a return to the original word, and not its symbolic meaning. The birth of acmeism is associated with the activities of the literary association "Workshop of Poets", whose leaders were N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. And the theoretical basis of this trend was the article by N. Gumilyov "The legacy of symbolism and acmeism." The name of the current comes from the Greek word acme - the highest degree, flourishing, peak. According to the theorists of acmeism, the main task of poetry is the poetic understanding of the diverse and vibrant earthly world. Its adherents adhered to certain principles:
- give the word accuracy and certainty;
- abandon mystical meanings and come to the clarity of the word;
- clarity of images and refined details of objects;
- echoes of bygone eras. Many consider the poetry of the acmeists to be the revival of the "golden age" of Baratynsky and Pushkin.
The most significant poets of this trend were N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam.
Futurism
In Latin, futurum means future. The emergence of Russian futurism is considered to be from 1910, when the first futuristic collection "The Garden of Judges" was published. Its creators were D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov and V. Kamensky. Futurists dreamed of the emergence of super-art, which would radically change the world. This avant-garde movement was distinguished by a categorical rejection of previous and contemporary art, bold experiments in the field of form, and outrageous behavior of its representatives.
Futurism, like other currents of modernism, was heterogeneous and included several groupings that fought furiously with each other.
- The Cubo-Futurists (or "Gilea") also called themselves "Budetlyane" - the most influential of the groups. They are the creators of the scandalous manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, and also thanks to their high word creation, the theory of “abstruse language” - zaumi was created. These included D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, A. Kruchenykh.
- Ego-futurists who are members of the "Ego" circle. Man was proclaimed an egoist, a fraction of God. They supported selfish views, because of which they could not exist as a group, and the current quickly ended its existence. The most prominent representatives of the ego-futurists are: I. Severyanin, I. Ignatiev, V. Gnedov and others.
- Poetry Mezzanine is an association organized by several ego-futurists headed by V. Shershnevich. During their short existence (about a year), the authors published three almanacs: "The Crematorium of Sanity", "Feast during the Plague" and "Vernissage", and several collections of poems. In addition to V. Shershnevich, the association included R. Ivnev, S. Tretyakov, L. Zak and others.
- Centrifuge is a literary group that formed in early 1914. Its organizer was S. Bobrov. The first edition is the collection "Rukonog". Active members of the group from the first days of its existence were B. Pasternak, N. Aseev, I. Zdanevich. Later they were joined by some ego-futurists (Olympov, Kryuchkov, Shirokov), as well as Tretyakov, Ivnev and Bolshakov, members of the Mezzanine of Poetry that had collapsed at that time.
Modernism in Russian literature gave the world a whole galaxy of great poets: A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, V. Mayakovsky, B. Pasternak.
