The creative experiment begun by the Parisian expatriates, the pre-war modernists Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, was continued by young prose writers and poets, who, precisely in the 1920s, came to American literature and brought to her afterwards world fame. Their names throughout the twentieth century were strongly associated in the minds of foreign readers with the idea of ​​US literature as a whole. These are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder and others, mostly modernist writers.

At the same time, modernism in the American turn differs from European in a more obvious involvement in the social and political events of the era: the shock military experience of most authors could not be hushed up or bypassed, it required artistic embodiment. This invariably misled Soviet scholars, who declared these writers "critical realists." American critics labeled them as "lost generation".

The very definition of "lost generation" was casually dropped by G. Stein in a conversation with her driver. She said, "You're all a lost generation, all the youth that's been in the war. You have no respect for anything. You'll all get drunk." This saying was accidentally heard by E. Hemingway and put into use by him. The words "You are all a lost generation" he put one of two epigraphs to his first novel "The Sun Also Rises" ("Fiesta", 1926). Over time, this definition, accurate and capacious, received the status of a literary term.

What are the origins of the "lostness" of an entire generation? The First World War was a test for all mankind. One can imagine what she has become for boys full of optimism, hopes and patriotic illusions. In addition to the fact that they directly fell into the "meat grinder", as this war was called, their biography began immediately from the culmination, from the maximum overstrain of mental and physical strength, from the most difficult test, for which they were absolutely unprepared. Of course, it was a breakdown. The war forever knocked them out of their usual rut, determined the warehouse of their worldview - an exacerbated tragic one. A vivid illustration of what has been said is the beginning of the poem Ash Wednesday (1930) by the expatriate Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965).

Other software poetry "lost generation"- T. Eliot's poems "The Waste Land" (1922) and "Hollow People" (1925) are characterized by the same feeling of emptiness and hopelessness and the same stylistic virtuosity.

However, Gertrude Stein, who claimed that the "lost" had no respect for "nothing", turned out to be too categorical in her judgments. The rich experience of suffering, death, and overcoming beyond their years not only made this generation very persistent (none of the writing brethren "drunk themselves" as they predicted), but also taught them to accurately distinguish and highly honor the imperishable life values: communication with nature, love for a woman, male friendship and creativity.

The writers of the "lost generation" never compiled any literary group and did not have a single theoretical platform, but the common destinies and impressions formed their similar life positions: disappointment in social ideals, the search for enduring values, stoic individualism. Together with the same, exacerbated tragic worldview, this determined the presence in prose of a number of "lost" common features that are obvious, despite the diversity of individual artistic styles of individual authors.

The commonality is manifested in everything, starting with the subject matter and ending with the form of their works. The main themes of the writers of this generation are war, everyday life at the front ("Farewell to Arms" (1929) by Hemingway, "Three Soldiers" (1921) by Dos Passos, a collection of short stories "These Thirteen" (1926) by Faulkner, etc.) and post-war reality - "the century jazz" ("The Sun Also Rises" (1926) by Hemingway, "Soldier's Award" (1926) and "Mosquitoes" (1927) by Faulkner, novels "Beautiful but Doomed" (1922) and "The Great Gatsby" (1925), novelistic collections "Tales of the Jazz Age" (1922) and "All the Sad Young Men" (1926) by Scott Fitzgerald).

Both themes in the works of the "lost" are interconnected, and this relationship has a causal nature. The "military" works show the origins of the loss of a generation: front-line episodes are presented by all authors harshly and unadorned - contrary to the trend of romanticizing the First World War in official literature. In the works about the "world after the war" the consequences are shown - the convulsive fun of the "jazz age", reminiscent of a dance on the edge of the abyss or a feast during the plague. This is a world of destinies crippled by war and broken human relationships.

The problem that occupies the "lost" gravitates towards the original mythological oppositions of human thinking: war and peace, life and death, love and death. It is symptomatic that death (and war as its synonym) is certainly one of the elements of these oppositions. It is also symptomatic that these questions are resolved by the "lost" not at all in a mythopoetic and not in an abstract-philosophical way, but in the most concrete and, to a greater or lesser extent, socially definite.

All the heroes of "military" works feel that they were fooled and then betrayed. The lieutenant of the Italian army, American Frederick Henry ("Farewell to Arms!" by E. Hemingway) bluntly says that he no longer believes the crackling phrases about "glory", "sacred duty" and "greatness of the nation". All the heroes of the writers of the "lost generation" are losing faith in a society that has sacrificed its children to "commercial calculations", and defiantly break with it. Concludes a "separate peace" (that is, deserts from the army) Lieutenant Henry, plunge headlong into drinking, revelry and intimate experiences Jacob Barnes ("The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway), Jay Gatsby ("The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald) and "all the sad young people" by Fitzgerald, Hemingway and other prose writers of the "lost generation".

What do the heroes of their works who survived the war see the meaning of being? In life itself as it is, in everyone's life individual person and, above all, in love. It is love that occupies a dominant place in their system of values. Love, understood as a perfect, harmonious union with a woman, is both creativity, camaraderie (human warmth is nearby), and a natural principle. This is the concentrated joy of being, a kind of quintessence of everything that is worthwhile in life, the quintessence of life itself. In addition, love is the most individual, the most personal, the only experience that belongs to you, which is very important for the "lost". In fact, the dominant idea of ​​their works is the idea of ​​the undivided domination of the private world.

All the heroes of the "lost" are building their own, alternate world where there should be no place for "commercial calculations", political ambitions, wars and deaths, all the madness that is going on around. "I'm not made to fight. I'm made to eat, drink and sleep with Katherine," says Frederick Henry. This is the creed of all the "lost". However, they themselves feel the fragility and vulnerability of their position. It is impossible to completely isolate themselves from the big hostile world: it constantly invades their lives. It is no coincidence that love in the works of the writers of the "lost generation" is soldered with death: it is almost always stopped by death. Catherine, beloved of Frederick Henry, dies ("Farewell to Arms!"), the accidental death of an unfamiliar woman entails the death of Jay Gatsby ("The Great Gatsby"), etc.

Not only the death of the hero on the front line, but also the death of Catherine from childbirth, and the death of a woman under the wheels of a car in The Great Gatsby, and the death of Jay Gatsby himself, at first glance, having nothing to do with the war, turn out to be firmly connected with it. These untimely and senseless deaths appear in the novels of the "lost" of a kind artistic expression thoughts about the unreasonableness and cruelty of the world, about the impossibility of getting away from it, about the fragility of happiness. And this idea, in turn, is a direct consequence of the military experience of the authors, their mental breakdown, their trauma. Death for them is a synonym for war, and both of them - war and death - act as a kind of apocalyptic metaphor in their works. modern world. The world of the works of young writers of the twenties is a world cut off by the First World War from the past, changed, gloomy, doomed.

The prose of the "lost generation" is characterized by an unmistakably recognizable poetics. This is lyrical prose, where the facts of reality are passed through the prism of perception of the confused hero, who is very close to the author. It is no coincidence that the favorite form of the "lost" is a first-person narrative, which suggests, instead of an epic detailed description of events, an excited, emotional response to them.

The prose of the "lost" is centripetal: it does not expand human fates in time and space, but on the contrary, it thickens and thickens the action. It is characterized by a short time period, as a rule, a crisis in the fate of the hero; it can also include memories of the past, due to which there is an expansion of the subject and clarification of circumstances, which distinguishes the works of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. The leading compositional principle of American prose of the twenties is the principle of "compressed time", the discovery of the English writer James Joyce, one of the three "whales" of European modernism (along with M. Proust and F. Kafka).

It is impossible not to notice a certain similarity in the plot solutions of the works of writers of the "lost generation". Among the most frequently recurring motifs (elementary plot units) are the short-term but complete happiness of love (“Farewell to Arms!” by Hemingway, “The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald), the futile search by a former front-line soldier for his place in post-war life (“The Great Gatsby” and “Night tender" by Fitzgerald, "The Soldier's Award" by Faulkner, "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway), the absurd and untimely death of one of the heroes ("The Great Gatsby", "Farewell to Arms!").

All these motives were later replicated by the "lost" themselves (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), and most importantly, by their imitators, who did not sniff gunpowder and did not live at the turn of the epochs. As a result, they are sometimes perceived as some kind of cliché. However, life itself prompted similar plot decisions to the writers of the “lost generation”: at the front they saw senseless and untimely death every day, they themselves painfully felt the lack of solid ground under their feet in the post-war period, and they, like no one else, knew how to be happy, but their happiness often was fleeting, because the war divorced people and broke destinies. A heightened sense of the tragic and artistic flair, characteristic of the "lost generation", dictated their appeal to the limiting situations of human life.

The style of the "lost" is also recognizable. Their typical prose is an outwardly impartial account with deep lyrical overtones. The works of E. Hemingway are especially distinguished by extreme conciseness, sometimes laconic phrases, simplicity of vocabulary and great restraint of emotions. Laconically and almost dryly resolved in his novels, even love scenes, which obviously excludes any falsehood in the relationship between the characters and, ultimately, has an exceptionally strong effect on the reader.

Most of the writers of the "lost generation" were destined for years, and some (Hemingway, Faulkner, Wilder) and decades of creativity, but only Faulkner managed to break out of the circle of topics, problems, poetics and style, defined in the 20s, from the magic circle of nagging sadness and the doom of the "lost generation". The commonality of the "lost", their spiritual brotherhood, mixed with young hot blood, turned out to be stronger than the thoughtful calculations of various literary groups that disintegrated, leaving no trace in the work of their members.

and World War II). It became the leitmotif of the work of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Henri Barbusse, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Cher Wood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Nathaniel West, John O'Hara The lost generation is young people who were called to the front at the age of 18, often not yet finished school, who started killing early.

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The history of the term

When we returned from Canada and settled in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and Miss Stein and I were still good friends, she said her phrase about the lost generation. The old Ford Model T, which Miss Stein drove in those years, had something wrong with the ignition, and a young mechanic who had been at the front Last year war and was now working in a garage, hadn't been able to fix it, or maybe he just didn't want to fix her Ford out of turn. Be that as it may, he proved insufficiently sérieux, and after Miss Stein's complaint, the host gave him a severe reprimand. The owner said to him: "All of you are génération perdue!" - That's who you are! And all of you are! said Miss Stein. - All the youth who have been in the war. You are a lost generation.

This is the name in the West of young front-line soldiers who fought between 1914 and 1918, regardless of the country for which they fought, and returned home mentally or physically crippled. They are also called "unrecorded victims of the war." After returning from the front, these people could not live a normal life again. After the horrors of the war they had experienced, everything else seemed to them petty and unworthy of attention.

In 1930-31, Remarque wrote the novel The Return (“Der Weg zurück”), in which he talks about returning to his homeland after the First World War, young soldiers who can no longer live normally, and, acutely feeling all the meaninglessness, cruelty, dirt of life, Still trying to make a living. The epigraph to the novel was the line:

Soldiers returned to their homeland
They want to find their way to a new life.

In the novel The Three Comrades, he predicts a sad fate for the lost generation. Remarque describes the situation in which these people found themselves. Returning, many of them found sinkholes instead of their former homes, most lost their relatives and friends. In post-war Germany, devastation, poverty, unemployment, instability, and a nervous atmosphere reign.

Remarque also gives a description of the representatives of the “lost generation” themselves. These people are tough, resolute, recognizing only concrete help, ironic with women. Sensuality is ahead of the senses.

Literature of the Lost Generation

The phrase "lost generation" was first used by the American writer Gertrude Stein in one of her private conversations. E. Hemingway heard it and made it one of the epigraphs for his novel "Fiesta", published in 1926 and which became one of the central ones in that group of works, which was called the literature of the "lost generation". This literature was created by writers who went through the First World War in one way or another and wrote about those who were at the fronts, died or survived, in order to go through the trials prepared for them in the first postwar decade. The literature of the “lost generation” is international, since its main ideas have become common to representatives of all countries that were related to the war, who comprehended their experience and came to the same conclusions, regardless of what position they occupied on the front, on which side they fought. The main names here were immediately named Erich Maria Remarque (Germany), Ernest Hemingway (USA), Richard Aldington (Great Britain).

Erich Maria Remarque (Remarque, Remark, 1898 -1970) enters literature with his novel "On Western front without change "(1928), brought him world fame. He was born in 1898 in the town of Osnabrück in the family of a bookbinder. In 1915, upon reaching the age of seventeen, he was called to the front and took part in the battles of the First World War. After her, he was an elementary school teacher, a salesman, a reporter, and tried to write tabloid novels. By the end of the twenties, Remarque was already a well-established journalist, editor of a sports weekly.

At the center of his first novel, the collective hero is an entire class of a German school that volunteers to go to war. All these students succumbed to patriotic propaganda, which oriented them to the defense of the fatherland, calling for those feelings that for centuries, and millennia, have been recognized by mankind as the most sacred. “It is honorable to die for the motherland” is a well-known Latin saying. The main pathos of the novel comes down to the refutation of this thesis, no matter how strange it sounds to us today, since the sanctity of these words is beyond doubt even today.

Remarque describes the front: both the front line, and the resting places for soldiers, and hospitals. He was often reproached for naturalism, which was superfluous, as it seemed to his contemporaries, and violated the requirements of good literary taste, according to the critics of that time. It should be noted that in his work Remarque never adhered to the principles of naturalism as literary direction, but here he resorts precisely to the photographic and even to the physiological accuracy of details. The reader must learn about what war really is. Recall that the First World War is the first in the history of mankind the destruction of people on such a scale, for the first time many achievements of science and technology were so widely used for such a massacre. Death from the air - people did not know it yet, since aviation was used for the first time, death carried in the terrible bulks of tanks, invisible and, perhaps, the most terrible death from gas attacks, death from thousands of shell explosions. The horror experienced on the fields of these battles was so great that the first novel describing it in detail does not appear immediately after the end of the war. People were not yet accustomed to killing on such a scale.

Remarque's pages make an indelible impression. The writer manages to maintain an amazing impartiality of the narrative - the manner of the chronicle, clear and stingy in words, very accurate in the selection of words. This is where the first-person narrative comes into play. The narrator is one student from the class, Paul Boimsr. He is with everyone at the front. We have already said that the hero is a collective. This interesting point, characteristic of the literature of the first third of the century - the eternal search for a solution to the dilemma - how to preserve individuality in the mass and whether it is possible to form a meaningful unity, and not a crowd, from the chaos of individuals. But in this case, we are dealing with a special perspective. Paul's consciousness was shaped by German culture with its richest traditions. Just as her heir, who stood only at the origins of the assimilation of this spiritual wealth, but already accepted it best ideas, Paul is a well-defined individuality, he is far from being part of the crowd, he is a personality, a special "I", a special "microcosm". And the same Germany at first tries to fool him by placing him in the barracks, where the only way to prepare yesterday's schoolboy for the front is to subject Paul, like the rest, to so many humiliations that should exterminate him just personal qualities, to prepare as part of the future unreasoning mass of people who are called soldiers. All the trials at the front will follow, which he describes with the impartiality of a chronicler. In this chronicle, descriptions of the truce are no less powerful than the descriptions of the horrors of the front line. Here it is especially noticeable that in war a person turns into a creature with only physiological instincts. Thus, the killing is not only carried out by the soldiers of the enemy army. The planned murder of a person is committed primarily by that Germany, for which, as it is supposed at the beginning, it is so honorable to die and so necessary to do it.

It is in this logic that a natural question arises - who needs it? Remarque finds here an exceptionally masterful move from the point of view of writing. He offers an answer to this question not in the form of lengthy philosophical or even journalistic reasoning, he puts it into the mouths of half-educated schoolchildren and finds a crystal clear formulation. Any war is beneficial to someone; it has nothing to do with the pathos of defending the fatherland that mankind has hitherto known. All countries participating in it are equally guilty, or rather, those who are in power and pursue their private economic interests are guilty. Thousands of people die for this private benefit, subjected to excruciating humiliation, suffering and, what is very important, they themselves are forced to become murderers.

Thus, the very idea of ​​patriotism in the form in which it was presented by national propaganda is destroyed in the romance. It is in this novel, as in other works of the “lost generation”, that the notion of the national as a precursor to nationalism becomes especially dangerous for any kind of generalizations of a political nature.

When the most sacred was destroyed, then the whole system turned out to be thrown into dust. moral values. Those who were able to survive remained in a ruined world, devoid of attachment to their parents - mothers themselves sent their children to war, and to the fatherland that destroyed their ideals. But not everyone managed to survive. Of his class, Paul is the last to die. On the day of his death, the press reports: "All Quiet on the Western Front." Doom unique personality, because each of us is unique and born for this uniqueness, it does not matter for high politics, condemning to the sacrificial slaughter as many uniquenesses as the day needs.

Actually the "lost generation", i.e. those who managed to survive, appears in the next romance Remarque "Three Comrades". This is a book about brotherhood at the front, which retained its significance even after the war, about friendship and about the miracle of love. The novel is also surprising in that in the era of passion for the refined writing technique of modernism, Remarque does not use it and creates an honest, beautiful book in its simplicity and clarity. “Companionship is the only good thing that the war gave rise to,” says the hero of Remarque's first novel, Paul Bäumer. This idea is continued by the author in Three Comrades. Robert, Gottfried and Otto were at the front and maintained a sense of friendship after the war. They find themselves in a world hostile to them, indifferent to their service to the fatherland during the war years, and to the suffering they endured, and to the terrible memories of the tragedies of death they saw, and to their post-war problems. They miraculously manage to earn their living: in a country devastated by war, the main words are unemployment, inflation, need, hunger. IN in practical terms their life is focused on trying to save from imminent ruin an auto repair shop acquired with little money from Kester. Spiritually, their existence is empty and meaningless. However, this lack of content, so obvious at first glance - the heroes seem to be satisfied most of all by the "dance of drinks in the stomach" - in fact, it turns into an intense spiritual life, allowing them to maintain nobility and a sense of honor in their camaraderie.

The plot is built like a love story. Ultimately, there are not so many works in world literature where love would be described so artlessly and so sublimely beautiful. Once upon a time

A.S. Pushkin wrote amazing lines: "I am sad and light, my sadness is bright." The same light sadness is the main content of the book. Sad because they are all doomed. Pat dies from tuberculosis, Lenz is killed by "guys in high boots", the workshop is devastated, and we do not know how much more suffering fate has in store for Robert and Kester. It is bright because the energy of the noble human spirit, which is in all these people, is victorious.

The Remarque style of narration is characteristic. The author's irony, evident from the very first lines of the book (Robert enters the workshop in the early morning and finds the cleaning lady "scurrying around with the grace of a hippopotamus"), is preserved to the end. Three comrades love their car, which they call human name"Karl" and perceived as another close friend. Remarkable in their elegant irony are the descriptions of trips on it - this strange combination of a “torn” body with an unusually powerful and lovingly assembled engine. Robert and his friends treat with irony all the negative manifestations of the world around them, and this helps to survive and preserve moral purity- not external, they are just rude in dealing with each other and the rest, - but internal, which allows you to preserve the amazing quivering of the soul.

Only a few pages are written without irony, these are those dedicated to Pat. Pat and Robert are listening to music in the theater and seem to be returning to a time when there was no war, and the Germans were proud of their passion for good music, and really knew how to create and feel it. Now they are not given this, since the most beautiful is stained with the dirt of war and the post-war aggressive struggle for their own survival. How impossible it is to understand both painting and philosophy (a talented artist, another of the cohort of those who did not die during the hostilities, but now slowly dying in the darkness of hopelessness, can only paint fake portraits from photographs of the dead; Robert was a student of the Faculty of Philosophy, but from this period, only his business card). Yet Pat and Robert listen to music like they used to because they love each other. Their friends are happy just contemplating their feelings, they are ready for any sacrifice to save and save him.

Pat is sick, and again there is no room for irony in the scenes where the author traces her slow death. But here, too, mild humor sometimes slips through. IN last days and nights Robert tries to distract Pat from suffering and tells funny stories from his childhood, and we smile as we read how surprised the night nurse was to find Robert throwing Pat's cape over himself, pulling his hat on, pretending to be the headmaster sternly chastising a student . A smile before death speaks of the courage of these people, which the philosophers of that time defined with a simple and great formula - "the courage to be." It became the meaning of all the literature of the “lost generation”.

Ernest Hemingway (1899)-1961) - Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954). His romance The Sun Also Rises (1926) published in England in 1927 under the title "Fiesta" - "Fiesta"), becomes the first obvious evidence of the appearance of the literature of the "lost generation". The very life of this man is one of the legends of the 20th century. The main motives of both life and Hemingway's work were the ideas of inner honesty and invincibility.

In 1917, he volunteered for Italy, was the driver of an ambulance on the Italo-Austrian front, where he was seriously wounded. But at the end of the war, he was a correspondent for the Toronto Star in the Middle East, spent the 20s in Paris, covered international conferences in Genoa (1922), Rapallo (1923), and events in Germany after the World War. He is one of the first journalists to give a journalistic portrait of a fascist and condemns Italian fascism. In the 1930s, Hemingway wrote essays on the events in Abyssinia, accusing the US authorities of criminal indifference to former front-line soldiers (the famous essay “Who Killed the Veterans in Florida?”). During civil war in Spain, Hemingway takes the side of the anti-fascist republicans and, as a war correspondent for the ANAS telegraph agency, comes to this country four times, spends the spring of 1937 in besieged Madrid, and participates in the battles of 37-39. This is another war, against fascism, "the lies uttered by bandits." Participation in it leads the author to the conclusion that everyone is personally responsible for what is happening in the world. The epigraph to the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is the words from John Donne's sermon: "... I am one with all Humanity, and therefore never ask for whom the Bell tolls: it tolls for You." The hero who appears in this and other works of Hemingway is called the "hero of the code", and he begins his journey in the first novel of the writer.

The novel "Fiesta" largely determines the main parameters of the literature of the "lost generation": the collapse of value orientations as a certain system; idleness and burning through life by those who survived, but can no longer use the gift of life; the wounding of Jake Barnes, the protagonist of the novel, on behalf of whom the story is being told (as a symbol it will also become a certain tradition of the literature of the “lost”: mutilation is the only soldier’s reward, mutilation that brings sterility and does not give prospects in the literal sense of the word); a certain disintegration of a personality endowed with both intellect and high spiritual qualities, and the search for a new meaning of existence.

As far as the novel turned out to be consonant with the mood of the minds of contemporary readers of Hemingway and several subsequent generations, today it is often not fully understood by our contemporaries and requires a certain mental effort when reading. To some extent, this is due to the manner of writing, Hemingway's theory of style, called the "iceberg theory". “If a writer knows well what he is writing about, he can omit much of what he knows, and if he writes truthfully, the reader will feel everything that is omitted as much as if the author had said it. The majesty of the movement of the iceberg is that it rises only one-eighth above the water, ”Hemingway says about his manner. A. Startsev, the author of works on Hemingway, writes: “Many of Hemingway's stories are built on the interaction of what was said and implied; these elements of the narrative are closely connected, and the invisible "underwater" flow of the plot gives strength and meaning to the visible .... In "Fiesta" the characters are silent about their difficulties, and sometimes it seems that the harder they are in their souls, the more naturally the carefree dialogue flows - these are the "conditions of the game", - however, the balance of text and subtext is nowhere violated by the author, and the psychological characteristics of the characters remain highly convincing" 1 . As an important element of a special knowledge of the world, one should consider the preference for everything concrete, unambiguous and simple over the abstract and tricky, behind which Hemingway's hero always sees falsehood and deceit. On this division of feelings and objects of the external world, he builds not only his concept of morality, but also his aesthetics.

The action of the first chapters of "Fiesta" takes place in Paris. The visible part of the iceberg is a rather unpretentious story about journalist Jake Barnes, his friend - writer Robert Cohn, a young woman named Bret Ashley and their entourage. In Fiesta, the routes of movement of the characters are precisely, even meticulously outlined, for example: “We walked along the Boulevard du Port-Royal until it crossed into the Montparnasse Boulevard, and further past the Closerie de Lila, Lavigne restaurant, Damois and all small cafes, crossed the street opposite the Rotunda and, past the lights and tables, reached the Select cafe”, a list of their actions and outwardly insignificant dialogues is given.

1 Startsev L. From Whitman to Hemingway. M., 1972. S. 320.

To perceive the “underwater” part, one must imagine Paris in the twenties, where hundreds of Americans come (the number of the American colony in France reached 50 thousand people and the highest density of their settlement was observed in the Montparnasse quarter, where the novel takes place). Americans were attracted by the very favorable dollar exchange rate, and the opportunity to get away from Prohibition, which increased the puritanical hypocrisy in the United States, and some of them - the special atmosphere of the city, which concentrated European genius on a very limited piece of land. Hemingway himself, with his novel, becomes the creator of the "beautiful tale of Paris."

The title of his autobiographical book about Paris - "A Feast that is always with you" - published many decades later, after other grandiose social cataclysms, is already embedded in the subtext of "Fiesta". Paris for the author is a life of intellect and creative insight at the same time, a symbol of resistance to "lostness", expressed in an active life. creativity in a person.

In Spain, where the heroes will go to attend the fiesta, their agonizing search for opportunities for internal resistance continues. The outer part of the iceberg is a story about how Jake and his friend Bill go to a mountain river to fish, then go down to the plain and, together with others, participate in a fiesta, a celebration accompanied by a bullfight. The lightest part of the novel is connected with the pictures of fishing. Man here returns to the original values ​​of being. This is the return and enjoyment of the feeling of merging with nature - important point not only for understanding the novel, but also for the whole work of Hemingway and his life. Nature bestows the highest pleasure - a sense of the fullness of being, obviously temporary, but also necessary for everyone. It is no coincidence that part of the legend about the author is the image of Hemingway - a hunter and fisherman. The fullness of life, experienced in the most original sense of the word, is conveyed in a special, Hemingway style. He strives “not to describe, but to name, he does not so much recreate reality as he describes the conditions of its existence. The foundation of such a description is made up of verbs of motion, nouns, remarks of the same type, repeated use of the union “and”. Hemingway creates, as it were, a scheme for the perception of elementary stimuli (the heat of the sun, the cold of water, the taste of wine), which only in the reader's perception become a full-fledged fact of sensory experience. The author himself remarks on this subject: “If spiritual qualities have a smell, then the courage of the day smells like tanned skin, a road frozen in frost or the sea, when the wind tears the foam from the wave ”(“ Death in the Afternoon ”). In "Fiesta" he writes: "The road left the forest shade into the hot sun. There was a river ahead. Behind the river stood a steep mountain slope. Buckwheat grew along the slope, there were several trees, and through them we saw a white house. It was very hot and we stopped in the shade of the trees near the dam.

Bill leaned the sack against a tree, we reeled in the rods, put on the reels, tied the leashes and got ready to fish...

Under the dam, where the water was foaming, there was a deep place. When I began to bait, a trout jumped out of the white foam onto the gutter and was carried down. I still had no time to bait, as the second trout, describing the same beautiful arc, jumped onto the gutter and disappeared into the roaring stream. I put on a sinker and threw the line into the foamy water at the very dam.

Hemingway absolutely excludes any evaluative comments, refuses all kinds of romantic "beauty" when depicting nature. At the same time, the Khsmingwes text acquires its own “gustatory” qualities, which largely determine its uniqueness. All of his books have the taste and clear cold clarity of a mountain river, which is why so much is connected with the episode of fishing in the mountains of Spain for everyone who truly loves to read Hemingway. Nostalgia for the organic integrity of the world and the search for a new ideality are characteristic of this generation of writers. For Hemingway, the achievement of such integrity is possible only by creating in oneself a sense of some kind of artistry in relation to the world, moreover, deeply hidden and in no way manifested in any words, monologues, pompousness. Compare this with the thought of T. Eliot, the author of The Waste Land, who wrote that the cruelty and chaos of the world can be resisted by the "fury of creative effort." The correlation of such a position with the basic principles of the philosophy of existentialism is obvious.

Another quote from this part of the text: “It was a little after noon, and there was not enough shade, but I sat leaning against the trunk of two fused trees and read. I read A.E. Mason - a wonderful story about how one man froze in the Alps and fell into a glacier and how his bride decided to wait exactly twenty-four years until his body appeared among the moraines, and her lover was also waiting, and they were still waiting, when Bill came up ". Here, as well as possible, the fundamental anti-romanticism of Jake Barnes, his ironic attitude to the philosophy of life that is already impossible for him, is manifested. The man of the “lost generation” is afraid of self-deception, he builds for himself new canon. In this canon, a distinctly clear understanding of the relationship between life and death is necessary. Accordingly, at the center of the novel is a story about bullfighting, which is perceived as an honest duel with death. The matador must not imitate danger with the help of techniques known to him, he must always be in the "bull zone", and if he succeeds in winning, this must happen with the help of the absolute purity of the techniques, the absolute form of his art. Understanding the finest line between imitation and true art the fight against death is the basis of Hemingway's "hero of the code" stoicism.

The fight against death begins. What does it mean to have and not to have, what does it mean to live, and, finally, the ultimate “courage to be”? This confrontation is only hinted at in "Fiesta" in order to be much more complete in the next novel. "Farewell to Arms" ("A Farewell to Arms!", 1929). It is no coincidence that this, yet another, hymn of love appears (remember Remarque's "Three Comrades"). Let's not be afraid of banality, just as its authors of the "lost generation" were not afraid. They take the pure essence of these words, unclouded by the multiple layers that the bad taste of the crowd can add. The pure meaning of the Romeo and Juliet story, which cannot be vulgar. Purity of meaning is especially necessary for Hemingway. It is included in his moral program"courage to be". They are not at all afraid to be moral, his heroes, although they go down in history just as people devoid of an idea of ​​ethics. The meaninglessness of existence, drunkenness, casual relationships. You can read it this way, if you don’t force yourself to do all this work of the soul, and don’t constantly remember that behind them is the horror of the massacre that they experienced when they were still children.

Lieutenant Henry, the protagonist of the novel, says: “The words sacred, glorious, sacrifice always confuse me ... We heard them sometimes, standing in the rain, at such a distance that only individual cries reached us ... but nothing sacred I didn’t see, and what was considered glorious didn’t deserve glory, and the victims were very reminiscent of the Chicago massacres, only the meat was simply buried in the ground here. It is understandable, therefore, that he considers such "abstract words" as feat, valor or shrine, unreliable and even offensive "next to the specific names of villages, road numbers, river names, regiment numbers and dates." Being at war for Lieutenant Henry gradually becomes false from what is necessary for a real man, as he is oppressed by the realization of the senselessness of mutual destruction, the idea that they are all just puppets in someone's ruthless hands. Henry concludes a "separate peace", leaves the field of senseless battle, i.e. formally deserts from the army. "Separate peace" becomes another parameter for defining the hero of the "lost generation". A person is constantly in a state of "warfare" with a hostile and indifferent world to him, the main attributes of which are the army, bureaucracy, plutocracy. Is it possible in this case to leave the battlefield and, if not, is it possible to win this battle? Or "victory in defeat" - "this is the stoic adherence to a personally formulated idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhonor, which, according to by and large cannot bring any practical advantages in a world that has lost the coordinates of a universally valid meaning?

The core idea of ​​Hemingway's moral quest is courage, stoicism in the face of hostile circumstances, heavy blows of fate. Having taken this position, Hemingway begins to develop a vital, moral, aesthetic system of behavior for his hero, which became known as the Hemingway code, or canon. It is developed already in the first novel. The "Hero of the Code" is a man of courage, laconic, cold-blooded in the most extreme situations.

The positive active principle in a person finds the highest expression in Hemingway in the motive of invincibility, the key to his further work.

Richard Aldington (1892)-1962) in the period of creative youth was engaged in literary work, collaborated in newspapers and magazines, was a supporter of Imagism (the head of this literary group was Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot was close to her). The Imagists were characterized by the absolutization of the poetic image, they opposed the dark age of barbarism, the commercial spirit “islands of culture preserved by the elect” (images ancient world as the antithesis of "commercial civilization"). In 1919, Aldington published the collection Images of War in a different poetic system.

In the 20s he acts as a reviewer of the department French literature in the Times Literary Supplement. During this period, Aldington leads vigorous activity as a critic, translator, poet. In 1925 he published a book about the freethinker Voltaire. In all his works, he opposes the narrow snobbish notion of poetry as being created "for one hypothetical intellectual reader", such poetry risks "turning into something full of dark allusions, refined, incomprehensible".

And Eddington's own literary-critical practice, and the environment of the "highbrows" to which he belonged, predetermined the qualities of his main novel "Death of a Hero" ("Death of Him",

1929), which became an outstanding work in the literature of the "lost generation". In general, this is a satire on bourgeois England. All authors of this trend paid attention to the system that led to the war, but none of them gave such a detailed and artistically convincing criticism as Aldington. The title itself is already part of the author's protest against pathos. false patriotism, vulgarizing the word "hero". The epigraph - "Morte (Type egoe" - taken from the title of the third movement of Beethoven's twelfth sonata - funeral march to the death of a nameless hero. In this sense, the epigraph prepares the reader for the perception of the novel as a requiem for people who died in vain in a senseless war. But the ironic subtext is also obvious: those who allowed themselves to be made cannon fodder are not heroes, the time of heroes has passed. The main character, George Winterbourne, is too passive, too convinced of life's unchanging disgustingness, to put up any effective resistance to a society that is persistently leading it to a tragic end. England does not need his life, she needs his death, although he is not a criminal, but a man capable of being a completely worthy member of society. The problem is the internal depravity of society itself.

The war highlighted the face of England. "Undoubtedly, since the French Revolution there has not been such a collapse of values." The family is “prostitution, consecrated by law”, “under a thin film of piety and conjugal consent, as if connecting the dearest mother and the kindest father, indomitable hatred is seething.” Let us remember how it was said by Galsworthy: "The era so canonized the Pharisees that in order to be respectable, it was enough to seem like them." Everything that was important turned out to be false and not having the right to exist, but just very viable. The comparison with Galsworthy is not accidental, since most of the aspects Victorian era given through literary associations. The family teaches George to be courageous. This is an ideal that at the turn of the century was expressed with particular force in the work of Kipling, the bard of the Empire (at least that is how the bourgeois understood him). It is Kipling that the author confronts when he says: “There is no Truth, there is no Justice - there is only British truth and British justice. Vile sacrilege! You are a servant of the Empire; no matter if you are rich or poor - do as the Empire tells you - and as long as the Empire is rich and powerful, you must be happy.

Morally, George tries to find support in the canons of Beauty along the lines of the Pre-Raphaelites, Wilde, and the like. Aldington writes his novel in a manner very characteristic of the intellectual elite of his time - like Huxley, like Wells (the author of social novels, which we often forget about, knowing him only as a science fiction writer), like Milne, etc. Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish the pages (of Ellington from the pages of the named writers. At the same time, like them, he is critical of his habitat. He draws the world of literature as a “fair on the square” (the image of the French writer Romain Rolland, of his huge novel "Jean-Christophe". Journalism in his perception is "mental prostitution", "a humiliating look of the most humiliating vice". Many characters in the novel have real prototypes from the literary environment (Mr. Schobb - editor of the English Review, artist Upjohn - Ezra Pound, Mr. Tobb - T. S. Eliot, Mr. Bobb-Lawrence) And they are all subject to the same vices as other Victorians. They try to overcome the wall, which is insurmountable, and die. This is pathos great tragedy person.

LITERATURE

Gribanov 5. Hemingway. M., 1970.

Zhantieva D.G. English novel of the 20th century. M „ 1965.

Startsev A. From Whitman to Hemingway. M.. 1972.

Suchkov V.L. Faces of time. M., 1976.

• Andreev L.G. "The Lost Generation" and the work of E. Hemingway // History foreign literature XX century. M., 2000. S. 349.
• Andreev L.G. "The Lost Generation" and the work of E. Hemingway. S. 348.

By occupation, as a psychologist, I have to work with the difficulties and problems of people. Working with any particular problem, you don't think in general about this generation and the time from which they are. But I could not fail to notice one recurring situation. Especially since it concerned the generation from which I myself am. This generation was born in the late 70's early 80's.

Why did I title the article the lost generation and what exactly was lost?

Let's go in order.
These our citizens were born in the late 70s and early 80s. They went to school in 1985-1990. That is, the period of growth, maturation, puberty, the formation and formation of personality took place in the dashing 90s.

What are these years? And what did I notice as a psychologist and experienced myself?

During these years, crime was the norm. Moreover, it was considered very cool, and many teenagers aspired to a criminal lifestyle. The price of this lifestyle was appropriate. Alcoholism, drug addiction, places not so remote "mowed down" (I'm not afraid of this word) many of my peers. Some died at that time, while still teenagers (from an overdose, violence in the army, criminal showdowns). Others later from alcohol and drugs.

Until recently, I thought that these were our only losses (of our generation). Until I realized next thing. In the 90s, a very powerful burst into our information field western culture. And not the best part of it. And she promoted the "cool" life. Expensive cars, sex, alcohol, beautiful restaurants and hotels. Money took center stage. And being a "hard worker" was a disgrace. At the same time, our traditional values ​​were completely devalued.

This process of devaluation of our values ​​began earlier and became one of the elements of the collapse of the USSR. And he ruined not only the USSR, but also life specific people and continues to do so to this day.
The resulting substitution of values ​​left a negative imprint on this entire generation.
If some fell under the rink of crime, alcohol and drugs. Then the others, who were good girls and boys, fell under the information processing.

What kind of information processing is this, and what harm does it still cause?

It's shattered and mangled family values. These people do not know, do not know how and do not value family relationships. They grew up in the fact that it doesn't matter who you are, what matters is what you have. The cult of consumption came out on top, and spirituality went by the wayside.
Many of these people can look chic, but have several divorces behind them. They can earn, but the atmosphere in the house leaves much to be desired. In many families it is not clear who does what, what is the distribution of roles in the family. The woman ceased to be a wife and mother, and the man ceased to be a father and husband.
They grew up in what's cool is a white Mercedes. But the reality is that only a few can afford it. And as a result, many of them experience a sense of their own inadequacy, inferiority. And at the same time they devalue their partner.
Having been in societies where people consciously work on family values ​​and culture family relations(various Christian, Muslim, Vedic, etc.), you understand how much my generation has missed. And how pruned their roots are.
Blurred family values ​​lead to unhappy families. If the value of the role of the family decreases, then the whole human race, for the person himself, becomes not so important. If you don't appreciate the family, you don't appreciate the small homeland, and then the big homeland. Many of them dream of Las Vegas, Paris, etc. The connection I-Family-Kin-Motherland was seriously broken. And devaluing any element from this bundle, a person devalues ​​himself.

For such people, the “to be” mode of existence has been replaced by the “have” mode of existence.
But that's not the whole problem. And the fact that their children grow up in this environment. And the imprint received by their children will still manifest itself.
This is how the events of the distant 90s break lives in the 10s and will continue in the 20s.
Of course, not everything is so bad. The situation is improving. And it is in our power to change ourselves and our lives. And our changes, of course, will be reflected in our loved ones. But it won't happen by itself. This must be done purposefully, responsibly and constantly.

First World War left an indelible mark on the destinies of many generations, changed the moral foundations of many countries and nationalities, but did not bypass those lands that were far from the center of hostilities. The war that broke out across the ocean shocked the younger generation of Americans with thousands of deaths and horrific destruction, struck with its senselessness and barbaric weapons that were used against all living things. The post-war country that they previously considered their home, a reliable bastion built on a sense of patriotism and faith, collapsed like a house of cards. Only a handful of young people remained, so unnecessary and scattered, living aimlessly allotted days.

Such sentiments flooded many cultural aspects of life in the 1920s, including literature. Many writers have realized that the old norms are no longer appropriate, and the old criteria for writing have become completely obsolete. They criticized the country and the government, having lost the remnants of hope in war among other values, and in the end they themselves felt lost. Finding meaning in anything has become an insoluble problem for them.

The term lost generation

The concept of the "lost generation" belongs to the authorship of Gertrude Stein, a representative of American modernism, who lived in Paris. It is believed that a certain auto mechanic was extremely dissatisfied with his young assistant, who repaired Gertrude Stein's car. At the moment of censure, he said the following: “You are all a lost generation,” thereby explaining the inability of his assistant to do his job well.

Ernest Hemingway, close friend Gertrude Stein, adopted this expression, including it in the epigraph of his novel "". In fact, the term “lost generation” refers to those young people who grew up in the times of , and later became disillusioned with such an alien post-war world.

In terms of literature, the lost generation is considered to be a group American writers, most of whom emigrated to Europe and worked there between the end of the First World War and. As a result, America brought up a generation of cynical people who could hardly imagine their future in this country. But what in the end prompted them to move across the ocean? The answer is quite simple: many of these writers realized that their home and life were unlikely to be restored, and the United States they knew before disappeared without a trace.

The bohemian way of life among intellectuals turned out to be much closer and more pleasant than a miserable existence in a society devoid of faith, and the existence of morality was in great doubt. Thus, emigre writers living in Europe wrote about the trials and tribulations of this most lost generation, being, most interestingly, an integral part of this generation.

Prominent figures of the Lost Generation

Among the most famous representatives of the lost generation, it is worth noting such as Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and. These names are not limited to the entire list, one can also mention Sherwood Anderson and others who belong to the lost generation, but to a lesser extent than their comrades. To get a better idea of ​​this phenomenon, let's take a closer look at some of these writers.

Gertrude Stein born and raised in the United States but moved to Paris in 1903. She was
a great connoisseur and lover of painting and literature, was considered by many (and herself personally) to be a real expert in this art. She began holding meetings at her home in Paris, mentoring young writers and critiquing their work. Contrary to her well-established authority among modernists, she was not among the most influential writers of the time. At the same time, many writers considered it a great fortune to be part of her club.

Ernest Hemingway served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during the First World War, where he was wounded. He married and moved to Paris, where he very soon became part of the expatriate community. He is best known for his unusual way letters, being the first to break away from the standard norms of storytelling. Sparing in eloquence, but skillful in his use of dialogue, Hemingway made a conscious choice, abandoning the colors of speech turns that prevailed in literature before him. Of course, his mentor was Gertrude Stein.

Scott Fitzgerald was a junior lieutenant; but no matter how strange it may sound, he never served
in a foreign land. On the contrary, he married a rich girl from Alabama, whom he met during his service. Fitzgerald, as a writer, was struck by the post-war culture of America, eventually becoming the basis of his work, which so attracted the new younger generation. Having achieved fame, he constantly travels between Europe and America and becomes an important part of the literary community led by Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. In many ways, Fitzgerald repeated the fate of the people described in his works: his life was filled with money, parties, aimlessness and alcohol, which ruined the great writer. Hemingway, in his memoirs A Holiday That Is Always With You, speaks with incredible warmth about the works of Fitzgerald, although it is known that at a certain period their friendship acquired a shade of hostility.

Against the background of the above figures, the figure stands out somewhat Erich Mary remark. His story is different in that, being a German, he was hard pressed by the consequences of the First World War, having personally experienced all the burden and senselessness of the horrifying events of those times. Remarque's military experience is incomparable with any of the writers already mentioned, and his novels will forever remain the best illustration of anti-fascist literature. Persecuted at home for his Political Views, Remarque was forced to emigrate, but this did not force him to abandon his language in a foreign land, where he continued to create.

Lost Generation Theme

The literary style of the writers of the lost generation is in fact very individual, although common features can be traced both in content and in the form of expression. Full of hope and love stories from the Victorian era are gone without a trace. The tone and mood of the letter changed dramatically.

Now the reader can feel the whole cynicism of life through the text and those feelings that fill the unstructured world, devoid of faith and purpose. The past is drawn in bright and happy colors, creating an almost ideal world. While the present looks like a kind of gray environment, devoid of traditions and faith, and everyone is trying to find their individuality in this new world.

Many writers, like Scott Fitzgerald in his work "", illuminated the superficial aspects of life along with hidden dark feelings. younger generation. They are characterized, often, by a spoiled style of behavior, a materialistic outlook on life and a complete lack of restrictions and self-control. In Fitzgerald's work, you can see how the writer criticizes the nature of this lifestyle, as excess and irresponsibility lead to destruction (an example of the novel "Tender is the Night").

As a result, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the traditional model of storytelling took possession of the entire literary community. For example, Hemingway denied the need to use descriptive prose to convey emotions and concepts. In support of this, he preferred to write in a more complex and dry manner, paying great attention to dialogue and silence as meaningful techniques. Other writers, such as John Dos Passos, have experimented with incorporating stream-of-consciousness paragraphs. Such writing techniques were used for the first time, largely reflecting the impact of the First World War on the younger generation.

The theme of the First World War often finds application in the works of writers of the lost generation, who directly visited its battlefields. Sometimes the work literally reflects the character of the participant in the War (for example, "Three Soldiers" by Dos Passos or "" Hemingway), or conveys an abstract picture of what America and its citizens have become after the war ("The Waste Land" by Thomas Eliot or "Winesburg, Ohio » Sherwood Anderson). Often the action is fraught with despair and inner doubts, with occasional sparks of hope from the main characters.

Summing up, it should be noted that the term lost generation refers to those young writers who matured during the First World War, which thereby, directly or indirectly, influenced the formation of their creative ideals. Realizing that the United States can no longer be the safe home it used to be, many of them move to Europe, forming a literary community of expatriate writers led, if somewhat controversially, by Gertrude Stein. Like something aching from the past, their work is filled with heavy losses, and the main idea was a critique of the materialism and immorality that flooded post-war America.

The innovation of the emerging community was a break with traditional literary forms: many writers experimented with the structure of sentences, dialogues and narrative in general. The fact that the writers of the Lost Generation were themselves part of the change they experienced and the search for meaning in life in a new world for them qualitatively sets them apart from many other literary movements. Having lost the meaning of life after the war and being in constant search for it, these writers showed the world unique masterpieces of word-creating art, and we, in turn, at any moment can turn to their heritage and not repeat the mistakes of the past, because history is cyclical, and in such a fickle In a changing world, we need to try not to become another lost generation.