In world literature in general, and in Russian literature in particular, the problem of the relationship of a person with the world around him occupies a large place. Personality and environment, individual and society - many Russian writers of the 19th century thought about this. The fruits of these reflections were reflected in many stable verbal formulas, for example, in the well-known phrase "Wednesday is jammed." Interest in this topic noticeably intensified in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in an era that was a turning point for Russia. In the spirit of humanistic traditions inherited from the past, such realist writers as I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, V. Korolenko consider this issue, using all the artistic means that became the achievement of the turn of the century.
The problem of man and the surrounding world Can be considered on the example of the works of A. Kuprin. The work of this writer was for a long time, as it were, in the shadows, he was obscured by the bright representatives of his contemporary prose. Today, the works of A. Kuprin are of great interest. They attract the reader with their simplicity, humanity, democracy in the noblest sense of the word. The world of A. Kuprin's heroes is colorful and diverse. He himself lived a bright life filled with rich impressions - he was a military man, a clerk, a land surveyor, and an actor in a traveling circus troupe. A. Kuprin said many times that he does not understand writers who do not find anything more interesting in nature and people than themselves.
The writer is very interested in human destinies, while the heroes of his works are most often not lucky, prosperous, satisfied with themselves and life people, but rather the opposite. But A. Kuprin treats his outwardly unsightly and unlucky heroes with the warmth of humanity that has always distinguished Russian writers. In the characters of the stories "White Poodle", "Taper", "Gambrinus" and many others, the features of a "little man" are guessed, but the writer does not just reproduce this image, but rethinks it. This line is characteristic of Kuprin's famous story "Garnet Bracelet", written in 1911. The plot is based on a real event - the love of the telegraph official Zheltkov for the wife of an important rank, member of the State Council Lyubimov. Lyubimova's son, the author of well-known memoirs, Lev Lyubimov recalls this story. In life, everything ended differently than in the story of A. Kuprin - the official stopped writing letters, nothing is known about him. In the Lyubimov family, this incident was remembered as strange and curious. Under the writer's pen, he appears as a sad and tragic story of the life of a little man, who was exalted and destroyed by love. The very story of extraordinary love, the story of the garnet bracelet, is told in such a way that we see it through the eyes of different people: Prince Vasily, who relates it as an anecdotal case, brother Nikolai, for whom everything in this story is seen as offensive and suspicious, Vera Nikolaevna herself
and, finally, General Anosov, who was the first to suggest that here, perhaps, lies true love, "which women dream about and which men are no longer capable of."
The circle to which Vera Nikolaevna belongs cannot admit that this is a real feeling, not so much because of Zheltkov's strange behavior, but because of the prejudices that rule them. Kuprin, wanting to convince us readers of the authenticity of Zheltkov's love, resorts to the most irrefutable argument - the hero's suicide. Thus, the right of the “little man” to happiness is affirmed and the motive of his moral superiority over the people who so cruelly offended him, who failed to understand the strength of the feeling that made up the whole meaning of his life, arises. Kuprin's story is both sad and bright. It is permeated with a musical beginning - a piece of music is indicated as an epigraph, and the story ends with a scene when the heroine listens to music at a tragic moment of moral enlightenment for her.
The text of the work includes the theme of the inevitability of the death of the protagonist - it is conveyed through the symbolism of light: at the moment of receiving the bracelet, Vera Nikolaevna sees red stones in it and thinks with alarm that they look like blood. Finally, the theme of the clash of different cultural traditions arises in the story: the theme of the East (the Mongolian blood of Vera and Anna's father, the Tatar prince) introduces into the story the theme of love - passion, recklessness; the mention that the sisters' mother is an Englishwoman introduces the theme of rationality, dispassion in the sphere of feelings, the power of reason over the heart.
In the final part of the story, a third line appears: it is no coincidence that the hero's landlady turns out to be a Catholic. This introduces into the work the theme of love-worship, which in Catholicism surrounds the Mother of God, love-self-sacrifice. The hero of A. Kuprin, a small man, faces the world of misunderstanding around him, the world of people for whom love is a kind of madness, and, having faced it, dies.
Akin to the telegraph operator Zheltkov, another Kuprin character is the hero of the story "The Duel", Lieutenant Romashov. Contemporaries, this story, in the first place, was perceived as a work, socially oriented; they discerned in it - some with interest, others with indignation - an anti-army theme. The story was associated with the defeat of the Russian army in the war with Japan. Contemporaries were struck by how truthfully and mercilessly the writer showed the degradation of officers, the life and customs of army servicemen.
Today, the work draws attention mainly to its moral issues. The very name "Duel" is ambiguous: it is the duel at the end of the story, and Lieutenant Romashov's clash with the mind-numbing way of officer life, and Romashov's internal duel with himself. Unlike Zheltkov, who is outlined in dotted lines, the main character of "Duel" is revealed psychologically in detail and convincingly. One can argue about who Lieutenant Romashov is - this image is ambiguous. The features of a small person are guessed in him - he is unsightly in appearance, sometimes even ridiculous.
At the beginning of the story, he lives with a dream, but his dream itself is somehow miserable - he sees himself as a "learned officer of the General Staff, who gives great promise", presents himself either as a brilliant military man, successfully suppressing a workers' revolt, or as a military spy in Germany, or as a hero. , dragging the whole army along with it (here one can guess the parodic rethought pages of the dreams of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky from War and Peace - dreams of “his own Toulon”). However, life makes its own adjustments to his dreams: an oversight during the show made them unrealizable, but it also played a huge and beneficial role - the hero is morally cleansed by suffering, his inner insight. He becomes able to sympathize with his neighbor, to feel someone else's grief as his own.
Having met the unfortunate, downtrodden soldier Khlebnikov, he addresses him with the biblical words: "My brother." In Romashov, the features of an “extra person” are more and more clearly drawn, his moral sense comes into conflict with the life around him. This is especially evident in the sphere of personal feelings, in his love for Shurochka Nikolaeva. Romashov's love, pure and touching, confronts him with the cruelty and inhumanity of people. The image of Shurochka Nikolaeva, a woman who indifferently dooms a man who loves her to death for the sake of her husband's career, can be called A. Kuprin's discovery, his prophecy.
Romashov agrees to a duel, the outcome of which is almost clear for him, a foregone conclusion not only because of the ability to love-worship, selfless and sacrificial love, like Zheltkov, but also because of the consciousness of his own uselessness, hopelessness. There is a collapse of the dream, and not only from the consciousness of its unfulfillment, but also from the understanding of its pettiness and vanity. The story ends with the death of the protagonist. But there is no hopelessness in the author's view of life - the very possibility of spiritualization, insight, moral purification leaves a feeling of enlightenment in the reader's soul. The psychological authenticity of the image of Romashov, the whole picture of Russian life at the beginning of the 20th century, makes the work consonant with the modern reader.
The story presents only one of the variants of the tragic collision of the individual with the outside world, his insight and death, but the death is not meaningless, but contains an element of purification and high meaning.
The work of A. I. Kuprin is peculiar and interesting, it strikes the author's observational ability and the amazing plausibility with which he describes people's lives. As a realist writer, Kuprin carefully peers into life and highlights the main, essential aspects in it.
1) Social problems, the theme of the capitalist development of bourgeois Russia
This gave Kuprin the opportunity to create in 1896 a major work "Moloch", dedicated to the most important topic of the capitalist development of Russia. Truthfully and without embellishment, the writer depicted the true face of bourgeois civilization. In this work he denounces hypocritical morality, venality and falseness in relations between people in a capitalist society.
Kuprin shows a large factory where the workers are brutally exploited. Main character, engineer Bobrov, an honest, humane person, shocked and outraged by this terrible picture. At the same time, the author depicts the workers as an uncomplaining crowd, powerless to take any active action. In Moloch, motifs were outlined that are characteristic of all subsequent work of Kuprin. Images of humanist truth-seekers will pass in a long line in many of his works. These heroes yearn for the beauty of life, rejecting the ugly bourgeois reality of their time.
-the theme of the awakening of public consciousness, the life of the tsarist army
Pages filled with tremendous revealing power were dedicated by Kuprin to the description of the tsarist army. The army was a stronghold of the autocracy, against which all the progressive forces of Russian society rose up in those years. That is why Kuprin's works "Night Shift", "Campaign", and then "Duel" had great public sound. The tsarist army, with its mediocre, morally degenerated command, appears on the pages of "Duel" in all its unsightly appearance. Before us is a whole gallery of stupid and geeks, devoid of any glimmer of humanity. They are opposed by the main character of the story, lieutenant Romashov. He wholeheartedly protests against this nightmare, but is unable to find a way to overcome it. Hence the name of the story - "Duel". The theme of the story is the drama of the "little man", his duel with an ignorant environment, which ends with the death of the hero.
But not in all his works Kuprin adheres to the framework of a strictly realistic direction. There are also romantic tendencies in his stories. He places romantic heroes in everyday life, in a real setting, next to ordinary people. And very often, therefore, the main conflict in his works becomes the conflict of a romantic hero with everyday life, dullness, and vulgarity.
- The theme of nature and man
- love theme
In the wonderful story "Olesya", imbued with genuine humanism, Kuprin sings of people living in the midst of nature, untouched by money-grubbing and corrupting bourgeois civilization. Against the backdrop of wild, majestic, beautiful nature, strong, original people live - “children of nature”. Such is Olesya, who is as simple, natural and beautiful as nature itself. The author clearly romanticizes the image of the "daughter of the forests". But her behavior, psychologically subtly motivated, allows you to see the real prospects of life. Endowed with unprecedented strength, the soul brings harmony into the obviously contradictory relations of people. Such a rare gift is expressed in love with Ivan Timofeevich. Olesya, as it were, returns the naturalness of experiences that he had briefly lost. Thus, the story describes the love of a realist man and a romantic heroine. Ivan Timofeevich falls into the romantic world of the heroine, and she - into his reality.
The theme of nature and man excites Kuprin throughout his life.. The power and beauty of nature, animals as an integral part of nature, a person who has not lost touch with it, living according to its laws - these are the facets of this topic. Kuprin admires the beauty of the horse ("Emerald"), the fidelity of the dog ("White Poodle", "Dog's Happiness"), female youth ("Shulamith"). Kuprin sings of the beautiful, harmonious, living world of nature.
Only where a person lives in harmony with nature, love is beautiful and natural.. In the artificial life of people, love, true love, which happens once in a hundred years, turns out to be unrecognized, misunderstood and persecuted. IN " Garnet bracelet" the poor official Zheltkov is endowed with this gift of love. Great love becomes the meaning and content of his life. The heroine - Princess Vera Sheina - not only does not respond to his feelings, but also perceives his letters, a gift - a garnet bracelet - as something unnecessary, disturbing her peace, her usual way of life. Only after Zheltkov's death does she realize that "the love that every woman dreams of" has passed by. Mutual, perfect love did not take place, but this high and poetic feeling, even if concentrated in one soul, opens the way to a beautiful rebirth of another. Here the author shows love as a phenomenon of life, as an unexpected gift - poetic, illuminating life in the midst of everyday life, sober reality and sustainable life.
Thinking about the individuality of the hero, his place among others, about the fate of Russia in a time of crisis, at the turn of two centuries, Kuprin studied the spiritual atmosphere of the era, portrayed "living pictures" of the environment.
Kuprin depicts true love as the highest value of the world, as an incomprehensible mystery. For such an all-consuming feeling, there is no question “to be or not to be?”, It is devoid of doubt, and therefore often fraught with tragedy. “Love is always a tragedy,” wrote Kuprin, “always struggle and achievement, always joy and fear, resurrection and death.”
Kuprin was deeply convinced that even an unrequited feeling can transform a person's life. He spoke about this wisely and touchingly in The Garnet Bracelet, a sad story about the modest telegraph official Zheltkov, who was so hopelessly and selflessly in love with Countess Vera Sheina.
Pathetic, romantic in character of the figurative embodiment, the central theme of love is combined in "Garnet Bracelet" with a carefully reproduced everyday background and embossed figures of people whose lives have not come into contact with a feeling of great love. Poor official Zheltkov, who has loved Princess Vera Nikolaevna for eight years, dying, thanks her for being "the only joy in life, the only consolation, the only thought" for him, and the assistant prosecutor, who thinks that love can be stopped by administrative measures - people of two different life dimensions. But Kuprin's living environment is not unambiguous. He especially highlights the figure of the old general Anosov, who is sure that high love exists, but it “must be a tragedy. The greatest secret in the world”, which knows no compromises.
Each person's love has its own light, its own sadness, its own happiness, its own fragrance. Favorite heroes of A. I. Kuprin strive for love and beauty, but they cannot find beauty in life, where vulgarity and spiritual slavery reign. Many of them do not find happiness or perish in a collision with a hostile world, but with all their existence, with all their dreams, they affirm the idea of the possibility of happiness on earth.
Love is a cherished theme for Kuprin. The pages of Olesya and Shulamith are filled with majestic and all-penetrating love, eternal tragedy and eternal mystery. Love, reviving a person, revealing all human abilities, penetrating into the most hidden corners of the soul, enters the reader's heart from the pages of the Garnet Bracelet. In this work, amazing in its poetry, the author sings the gift of unearthly love, equating it with high art.
The plot of the story is based on a curious incident from life. The only thing the author changed was the ending. But it is surprising that the anecdotal situation turns under the writer's pen into a hymn of love. Kuprin believed that love is a gift from God. Not many people are capable of a wonderful, sublime feeling. The hero of the “Duel” Nazansky speaks of love like this:
“She is the lot of the elite. Here's an example for you: all people have hearing, but millions have it like fish, and one of that million is Beethoven. So in everything: in poetry, in art, in wisdom ... And love has its peaks, accessible only to a few out of millions. And such love illuminates the "little man", the telegraph operator Zheltkov. She becomes for him a great happiness and a great tragedy. He loves the beautiful Princess Vera, not hoping for reciprocity. As General Anosov accurately notes, “love must be a tragedy. The greatest secret in the world! No comforts of life, calculations and compromises should concern her.” For Zheltkov, there is nothing but love, which "contains the whole meaning of life - the whole Universe!" But the tragedy of the story is not only in the fact that Zheltkov and Princess Vera belong to different classes, and not even in the fact that he is in love with a married woman, but in the fact that those around them get along well in life without true love and see everything in this feeling. anything but holy and pure affection.
There is an opinion, repeatedly expressed by critics, that there is some inferiority in the image of Zheltkov, because for him the whole world has narrowed down to love for a woman. Kuprin, with his story, confirms that for his hero, it is not the world that narrows down to love, but love expands to the size of the whole world. It is so great that it obscures everything, it no longer becomes a part of life, even the biggest one, but life itself. Therefore, without a beloved woman, Zheltkov has nothing else to live with. But Zheltkov decided to go to his death in the name of his beloved, so as not to disturb her with his existence. He sacrifices himself for the sake of her happiness, and does not die of hopelessness, having lost the only meaning of life. Zheltkov was never closely acquainted with Vera Sheina, and therefore the “absentee” loss of Vera would not be the end of love and life for him. After all, love, wherever he was, was always with him and instilled in him vitality. He did not see Vera so often that, having ceased to follow her, he would lose his great feeling. Such love can overcome any distance. But if love can call into question the honor of the beloved woman, and love is life, then there is no higher joy and bliss than sacrificing one's life.
However, the terrible thing is that Vera herself “is in a sweet slumber” and is not yet able to understand that “her life path was crossed by exactly the kind of love that women dream of and that men are no longer capable of.” Kuprin created a story not about the birth of Vera's love, but about her awakening from sleep. The very appearance of a garnet bracelet with Zheltkov's letter brings an excited expectation into the life of the heroine. At the sight of "five scarlet bloody fires trembling inside five grenades", so unlike the usual expensive gifts from her husband and sister, she feels uneasy. Everything that happens further sharpens the consciousness of the exclusivity of love that has passed by, and when the denouement comes, the princess sees on Zheltkov’s dead face “that very peaceful expression”, as “on the masks of the great sufferers - Pushkin and Napoleon”. The greatness of the feeling experienced by a simple person is comprehended by her to the sounds of Beethoven's sonata, as if conveying to the heroine his shock, his pain and happiness, and unexpectedly displaces all vain things from the soul, instilling reciprocal ennobling suffering. Zheltkov's last letter raises the theme of love to the point of high tragedy. It is dying, so each of its lines is filled with a particularly deep meaning. But more importantly, the sound of pathetic motifs of omnipotent love does not end with the death of the hero. Zheltkov, dying, bequeaths his love to the world and Vera. The great love of an unknown person enters her life and will exist in her mind as an indelible memory of the sacrament with which she came into contact and whose meaning she failed to understand in time.
The name of the heroine Kuprin is not chosen by chance - Vera. Vera remains in this vain world, when Zheltkov dies, she knows what true love is. But the belief remains in the world that Zheltkov was not the only person endowed with such an unearthly feeling.
The emotional wave, growing throughout the story, reaches its maximum intensity in the final chapter, where the theme of great and purifying love is fully revealed in the majestic chords of Beethoven's brilliant sonata. Music powerfully takes possession of the heroine, and words are composed in her soul, which, as it were, are whispered by a person who loved her more than life: “Hallowed be thy name! ..” In these last words there is both a prayer for love and deep sorrow for its unattainability. This is where that great contact of souls takes place, of which one understood the other too late.
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin is a very bright and original writer of the late XIX - early XX century. In his talent, contemporaries saw the primordial power of the Russian people, something mighty and strong. Such are his best works - they reflected the life of various classes and estates of Russian society.
In his work, Kuprin continued the democratic and humanistic traditions of Russian literature, especially L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov. He always tried to touch on the current events of his time.
Kuprin began to study literature when he was still in the cadet corps. Then he wrote poetry. In 1889, a graduate of the cadet school, Kuprin, published his first short story in the Russian satirical leaflet, which is called The Last Debut. For this act, he was arrested and put in a guardhouse. In 1841, Kuprin retired, settled in Kyiv and began to write for newspapers.
Kuprin wrote a lot of stories, all of them are beautiful, unusual, raise topical issues of moral responsibility of the intelligentsia for the suffering and poor life of the people. I would like to dwell on two works by A.I. Kuprin - "Moloch" and "Gambrinuse".
"Moloch" was written after Kuprin visited Donetsk and saw the life of workers. I must say that the life of the workers of the steel plant was terrible. And Kuprin very colorfully and reliably reproduces it in his story. In it, Kuprin shows the contradictions between the rich and the poor, between those who work and those who profit from their work. We see the everyday life of a large capitalist factory, the wretched life of the workers, their poverty, as well as the unwillingness to live like this, which results in riots and robberies. The protagonist of the story is the engineer Bobrov, who sees all this and thinks about what is happening. He reacts very sharply and painfully to injustice, to suffering and pain. The writer compares the capitalist order with the evil and terrible god Moloch, who demands human sacrifices. In the story, the servant of this Moloch is the owner of the plant - Kvashnin. He makes money from everything, but he also wants to be the leader of his bourgeois party: "The future belongs to us," he says. At the factory, they are afraid of Kvashnin and do everything to please him and not anger him. They even give him the best girl - Bobrov's bride Nina Zinenko.
Nevertheless, Kuprin connects the future with the uprising of the people - the story ends with a revolt of the workers. They nevertheless set fire to the plant, Kvashnin ran away, and punishers were sent from Moscow to pacify the rebels. So the writer showed that only the people themselves can change life and the prevailing foundations.
I also really like the wonderful story "Gambrinus", which was written in 1907. Here again the theme of revolution arises - a very relevant topic for that time. Only here there are no revolutionaries, no conspiracies. "Gambrinus" is a story about a little man who dared to defy the authorities. This is a story that everyone should have their own position and it must be defended. The protagonist of the work is the Jewish musician Sashka, whom everyone loves. He has the talent of a violinist, and he gathers all ordinary people with his music. He plays different tunes, but most of all everyone likes the Marseillaise - revolutionary music. This music is needed because there is a revolution going on. However, soon there was a reaction, and Sasha refuses to play the anthem on the order of the police. Then they beat him, break his fingers, so that in the future it would be disrespectful.
But Sasha does not lose heart - he returned to the tavern and continued to play cheerful and provocative music. So Kuprin wanted to show that the power of art and the spirit of freedom are invincible. This theme will continue in other stories of the writer.
The story "Gambrinus" teaches us not to betray our ideals and not to lose heart under any circumstances.
The work of Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin was formed during the years of the revolutionary upsurge. All his life he was close to the theme of the insight of a simple Russian man who eagerly sought the truth of life. Kuprin devoted all his work to the development of this complex psychological topic. His art, according to contemporaries, was characterized by a special vigilance in seeing the world, concreteness, and a constant desire for knowledge. The cognitive pathos of Kuprin's creativity was combined with a passionate personal interest in the victory of good over all evil. Therefore, most of his works are characterized by dynamics, drama, excitement.
Kuprin's biography is similar to an adventure novel. In terms of the abundance of meetings with people and life observations, it was reminiscent of Gorky's biography. Kuprin traveled a lot, did various jobs: he served in a factory, worked as a loader, played on stage, sang in a church choir.
At an early stage of his work, Kuprin was strongly influenced by Dostoevsky. It manifested itself in the stories "In the Dark", "Moonlight Night", "Madness". He writes about fatal moments, the role of chance in a person's life, analyzes the psychology of human passions. Some stories of that period say that the human will is helpless in the face of elemental chance, that the mind cannot know the mysterious laws that govern a person. A decisive role in overcoming the literary cliches coming from Dostoevsky was played by direct acquaintance with the life of people, with real Russian reality.
He starts writing essays. Their peculiarity is that the writer usually had a leisurely conversation with the reader. They clearly showed clear storylines, a simple and detailed depiction of reality. G. Uspensky had the greatest influence on Kuprin the essayist.
The first creative searches of Kuprin ended with the largest thing that reflected reality. It was the story "Moloch". In it, the writer shows the contradictions between capital and human forced labor. He was able to capture the social characteristics of the latest forms of capitalist production. An angry protest against the monstrous violence against man, on which the industrial flourishing in the world of “Moloch” is based, a satirical demonstration of the new masters of life, the exposure of the shameless predation in the country of foreign capital - all this cast doubt on the theory of bourgeois progress. After essays and stories, the story was an important stage in the writer's work.
In search of moral and spiritual ideals of life, which the writer opposed to the ugliness of modern human relations, Kuprin turns to the life of vagabonds, beggars, drunken artists, starving unrecognized artists, children of the poor urban population. It is a world of nameless people who form the mass of society. Among them, Kuprin tried to find his positive heroes. He writes the stories “Lidochka”, “Lokon”, “Kindergarten”, “In the Circus” - in these works the heroes of Kuprin are free from the influence of bourgeois civilization.
In 1898, Kuprin wrote the story "Olesya". The scheme of the story is traditional: an intellectual, an ordinary and urban person, in a remote corner of Polissya meets a girl who grew up outside of society and civilization. Olesya is distinguished by spontaneity, integrity of nature, spiritual wealth. Poetizing life, unlimited by modern social cultural framework. Kuprin sought to show the clear advantages of the "natural man", in whom he saw the spiritual qualities lost in a civilized society.
In 1901, Kuprin came to St. Petersburg, where he became close to many writers. During this period, his story “The Night Shift” appears, where the main character is a simple soldier. The hero is not a detached person, not a forest Olesya, but a very real person. Threads stretch from the image of this soldier to other heroes. It was at this time that a new genre appeared in his work: the short story.
In 1902, Kuprin conceived the story "Duel". In this work, he shattered one of the main foundations of autocracy - the military caste, in the lines of decay and moral decline of which he showed signs of the decomposition of the entire social system. The story reflects the progressive aspects of Kuprin's work. The basis of the plot is the fate of an honest Russian officer, whom the conditions of army barracks life made him feel the illegality of people's social relations. Again, Kuprin is not talking about an outstanding personality, but about a simple Russian officer Romashov. The regimental atmosphere torments him, he does not want to be in the army garrison. He became disillusioned with the army. He begins to fight for himself and his love. And the death of Romashov is a protest against the social and moral inhumanity of the environment.
With the onset of reaction and the aggravation of public life in society, Kuprin's creative concepts also change. During these years, his interest in the world of ancient legends, history, and antiquity intensified. In creativity, an interesting fusion of poetry and prose, the real and the legendary, the real and the romance of feelings, arises. Kuprin gravitates toward the exotic, developing fantastic plots. He returns to the themes of his early novel. The motives of the inevitability of chance in the fate of a person sound again.
In 1909, the story "The Pit" was published from the pen of Kuprin. Here Kuprin pays tribute to naturalism. He shows the inhabitants of the brothel. The whole story consists of scenes, portraits and clearly breaks up into separate details of everyday life.
However, in a number of stories written in the same years, Kuprin tried to point out the real signs of high spiritual and moral values in reality itself. “Garnet Bracelet” is a story about love. This is how Paustovsky spoke about him: this is one of the most “fragrant” stories about love.
In 1919 Kuprin emigrated. In exile, he writes the novel "Janet". This is a work about the tragic loneliness of a man who lost his homeland. This is a story about the touching attachment of an old professor, who ended up in exile, to a little Parisian girl - the daughter of a street newspaper woman.
The emigrant period of Kuprin is characterized by withdrawal into himself. A major autobiographical work of that period is the novel "Junker".
In exile, the writer Kuprin did not lose faith in the future of his homeland. At the end of his life, he nevertheless returns to Russia. And his work rightfully belongs to Russian art, the Russian people.
Military career
Born in the family of a petty official who died when his son was in his second year. A mother from a Tatar princely family, after the death of her husband, was in poverty and was forced to send her son to an orphanage for minors (1876), then a military gymnasium, later transformed into a cadet corps, from which he graduated in 1888. In 1890 he graduated from the Alexander Military School. Then he served in the 46th Dnieper Infantry Regiment, preparing for a military career. Not enrolling in the Academy of the General Staff (this was prevented by a scandal associated with the violent, especially drunk, disposition of the cadet who threw a policeman into the water), Lieutenant Kuprin resigned in 1894.
Life style
The figure of Kuprin was extremely colorful. Greedy for impressions, he led a wandering life, trying different professions - from a loader to a dentist. Autobiographical life material formed the basis of many of his works.
Legends circulated about his turbulent life. Possessing remarkable physical strength and explosive temperament, Kuprin greedily rushed towards any new life experience: he went down under water in a diving suit, flew an airplane (this flight ended in a disaster that almost cost Kuprin his life), organized an athletic society ... During the First World war in his Gatchina house was arranged by him and his wife a private infirmary.
The writer was interested in people of various professions: engineers, organ grinders, fishermen, card sharpers, beggars, monks, merchants, spies ... In order to more reliably know the person who interested him, to feel the air that he breathes, he was ready, not sparing himself, the wildest adventure. According to his contemporaries, he approached life like a true researcher, seeking the fullest and most detailed knowledge possible.
Kuprin was willingly engaged in journalism, publishing articles and reports in various newspapers, traveled a lot, living either in Moscow, or near Ryazan, or in Balaklava, or in Gatchina.
Writer and revolution
Dissatisfaction with the existing social order attracted the writer to the revolution, so Kuprin, like many other writers of his contemporaries, paid tribute to revolutionary sentiments. However, he reacted sharply negatively to the Bolshevik coup and to the power of the Bolsheviks. At first, he nevertheless tried to cooperate with the Bolshevik authorities and even planned to publish the peasant newspaper Zemlya, for which he met with Lenin.
But soon he unexpectedly went over to the side of the White movement, and after its defeat, he left first for Finland, and then for France, where he settled in Paris (until 1937). There he actively participated in the anti-Bolshevik press, continued his literary activity (the novels The Wheel of Time, 1929; Junkers, 1928-32; Janet, 1932-33; articles and stories). But living in exile, the writer was terribly poor, suffering both from lack of demand and isolation from his native soil, and shortly before his death, believing in Soviet propaganda, in May 1937 he returned with his wife to Russia. By this time he was already seriously ill.
Sympathy for the common man
Almost all of Kuprin's work is imbued with the pathos of sympathy, traditional for Russian literature, for the "little" person, doomed to drag out a miserable lot in a stagnant, miserable environment. In Kuprin, this sympathy was expressed not only in the depiction of the "bottom" of society (the novel about the life of prostitutes "The Pit", 1909-15, etc.), but also in the images of his intelligent, suffering heroes. Kuprin was inclined precisely to such reflective, nervous to the point of hysteria, characters not devoid of sentimentality. Engineer Bobrov (the story "Moloch", 1896), endowed with a quivering soul responsive to someone else's pain, worries about the workers who waste their lives in overworking factory labor, while the rich live on ill-gotten money. Even characters from the military environment like Romashov or Nazansky (the story "Duel", 1905) have a very high pain threshold and a small margin of mental strength to withstand the vulgarity and cynicism of their environment. Romashov is tormented by the stupidity of military service, the debauchery of the officers, the downtroddenness of the soldiers. Perhaps none of the writers threw such a passionate accusation against the army environment as Kuprin. True, in the depiction of ordinary people, Kuprin differed from the populist writers prone to popular worship (although he received the approval of the venerable populist critic N. Mikhailovsky). His democratism was not limited to a tearful demonstration of their "humiliation and insult." A simple man in Kuprin turned out to be not only weak, but also able to stand up for himself, possessing an enviable inner strength. Folk life appeared in his works in its free, spontaneous, natural course, with its own circle of ordinary concerns - not only sorrows, but also joys and consolations (Listrigons, 1908-11).
At the same time, the writer saw not only its bright sides and healthy beginnings, but also outbursts of aggressiveness and cruelty, easily directed by dark instincts (the famous description of the Jewish pogrom in the story Gambrinus, 1907).
The Joy of Being In many of Kuprin's works, the presence of an ideal, romantic beginning is clearly felt: it is both in his craving for heroic plots and in his desire to see the highest manifestations of the human spirit - in love, creativity, kindness ... It is no coincidence that he often chose heroes that fell out, breaking out of the habitual rut of life, seeking the truth and seeking some other, more complete and living being, freedom, beauty, grace ... but who in the literature of that time, so poetically, like Kuprin, wrote about love, tried to restore her humanity and romance. "Garnet Bracelet" (1911) has become for many readers just such a work, where pure, disinterested, ideal feeling is sung.
A brilliant depicter of the mores of the most diverse strata of society, Kuprin described the environment, life in relief, with special intentness (for which he got criticized more than once). There was also a naturalistic tendency in his work.
At the same time, the writer, like no one else, knew how to feel the course of natural, natural life from the inside - his stories "Barbos and Zhulka" (1897), "Emerald" (1907) were included in the golden fund of works about animals. The ideal of natural life (the story "Olesya", 1898) is very important for Kuprin as a kind of desired norm, he often highlights modern life with it, finding in it sad deviations from this ideal.
For many critics, it was precisely this natural, organic perception of Kuprin's life, the healthy joy of being, that was the main distinguishing quality of his prose with its harmonious fusion of lyrics and romance, plot-compositional proportionality, dramatic action and accuracy in descriptions.
Literary skill Kuprin is an excellent master not only of the literary landscape and everything connected with the external, visual and olfactory perception of life (Bunin and Kuprin competed who would more accurately determine the smell of a particular phenomenon), but also of a literary nature: portrait, psychology, speech - everything is worked out to the smallest nuances. Even the animals that Kuprin liked to write about reveal complexity and depth in him.
The narration in Kuprin's works, as a rule, is very spectacular and is often turned - unobtrusively and without false speculation - precisely to existential problems. He reflects on love, hatred, the will to live, despair, the strength and weakness of man, recreates the complex spiritual world of man at the turn of epochs.
1. A word about the work of A. I. Kuprin.
2. Main themes and let's go creativity:
a) "Moloch" - an image of bourgeois society;
b) the image of the army ("Night shift", "Campaign", "Duel");
c) the conflict of a romantic hero with everyday reality (“Olesya”);
d) the theme of the harmony of nature, the beauty of man ("Emerald", "White Poodle", "Dog's Happiness", "Shulamith");
e) the theme of love ("Garnet bracelet").
3. The spiritual atmosphere of the era.
1. The work of A. I. Kuprin is peculiar and interesting, it strikes the author's observational ability and the amazing plausibility with which he describes people's lives. As a realist writer, Kuprin carefully peers into life and highlights the main, essential aspects in it.
2. a) This gave Kuprin the opportunity to create in 1896 a major work "Moloch", dedicated to the most important topic of the capitalist development of Russia. Truthfully and without embellishment, the writer depicted the true face of bourgeois civilization. In this work, he denounces hypocritical morality, corruption and falsehood in relations between people in a capitalist society.
Kuprin shows a large factory where the workers are brutally exploited. The main character, engineer Bobrov, an honest, humane person, is shocked and outraged by this terrible picture. At the same time, the author depicts the workers as an uncomplaining crowd, powerless to take any active action. In Moloch, motifs were outlined that are characteristic of all subsequent work of Kuprin. Images of humanist truth-seekers will pass in a long line in many of his works. These heroes yearn for the beauty of life, rejecting the ugly bourgeois reality of their time.
b) Pages full of great revealing power were dedicated by Kuprin to the description of the tsarist army. The army was the stronghold of the autocracy, against which all the progressive forces of Russian society rose up in those years. That is why Kuprin's works "Night Shift", "Campaign", and then "Duel" had a great public impact. The tsarist army, with its mediocre, morally degenerated command, appears on the pages of "Duel" in all its unsightly appearance. Before us is a whole gallery of stupid and geeks, devoid of any glimmer of humanity. They are opposed by the main character of the story, lieutenant Romashov. He wholeheartedly protests against this nightmare, but is unable to find a way to overcome it. Hence the name of the story - "Duel". The theme of the story is the drama of the "little man", his duel with an ignorant environment, which ends with the death of the hero.
c) But not in all his works Kuprin adheres to the framework of a strictly realistic direction. There are also romantic tendencies in his stories. He places romantic heroes in everyday life, in a real setting, next to ordinary people. And very often, therefore, the main conflict in his works becomes the conflict of a romantic hero with everyday life, dullness, and vulgarity.
In the wonderful story "Olesya", imbued with genuine humanism, Kuprin sings of people living in the midst of nature, untouched by money-grubbing and corrupting bourgeois civilization. Against the backdrop of wild, majestic, beautiful nature, strong, original people live - “children of nature”. Such is Olesya, who is as simple, natural and beautiful as nature itself. The author clearly romanticizes the image of the “daughter of the forests”. But her behavior, psychologically subtly motivated, allows you to see the real prospects of life. Endowed with unprecedented strength, the soul brings harmony into the obviously contradictory relations of people. Such a rare gift is expressed in love for Ivan Timofeevich. Olesya, as it were, returns the naturalness of experiences that he had briefly lost. Thus, the story describes the love of a realist man and a romantic heroine. Ivan Timofeevich falls into the romantic world of the heroine, and she - into his reality.
d) The theme of nature and man worries Kuprin throughout his life. The power and beauty of nature, animals as an integral part of nature, a person who has not lost touch with it, living according to its laws - these are the facets of this topic. Kuprin admires the beauty of the horse ("Emerald"), the fidelity of the dog ("White Poodle", "Dog's Happiness"), female youth ("Shulamith"). Kuprin sings of the beautiful, harmonious, living world of nature.
e) Only where a person lives in harmony with nature, love is beautiful and natural. In the artificial life of people, love, true love, which happens once in a hundred years, turns out to be unrecognized, misunderstood and persecuted. In The Pomegranate Bracelet, the poor official Zheltkov is endowed with this gift of love. Great love becomes the meaning and content of his life. The heroine - Princess Vera Sheina - not only does not respond to his feelings, but also perceives his letters, a gift - a garnet bracelet - as something unnecessary, disturbing her peace, her usual way of life. Only after Zheltkov's death does she realize that "the love that every woman dreams of" has passed by. Mutual, perfect love did not take place, but this high and poetic feeling, even if concentrated in one soul, opens the way to a beautiful rebirth of another. Here the author shows love as a phenomenon of life, as an unexpected gift - poetic, illuminating life in the midst of everyday life, sober reality and sustainable life.
3. Thinking about the individuality of the hero, his place among others, about the fate of Russia in a time of crisis, at the turn of two centuries, Kuprin studied the spiritual atmosphere of the era, portrayed "living pictures" of the environment.
3. Poetry of Russian symbolism (on the example of the work of one poet)
SYMBOLISM -
the first literary and artistic direction of European modernism, which arose at the end of the 19th century in France in connection with the crisis of the positivist artistic ideology of naturalism. The foundations of the aesthetics of symbolism were laid by Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stefan Mallarmé.
Symbolism was associated with contemporary idealistic philosophical currents, the basis of which was the idea of two worlds - the apparent world of everyday reality and the transcendent world of true values (compare: absolute idealism). In accordance with this, symbolism is engaged in the search for a higher reality that is beyond sensory perception. Here the poetic symbol turns out to be the most effective tool of creativity, allowing one to break through the veil of everyday life to transcendent Beauty.
The most general doctrine of symbolism was that art is an intuitive comprehension of world unity through the discovery of symbolic analogies between the earthly and the transcendental worlds (compare: the semantics of possible worlds).
Thus, the philosophical ideology of symbolism is always Platonism in the broadest sense, two worlds, and the aesthetic ideology is pan-aestheticism (compare: "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde).
Russian symbolism began at the turn of the century, absorbing the philosophy of the Russian thinker and poet Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov about the Soul of the World, Eternal Femininity, Beauty that will save the world (this mythology is taken from Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot").
Russian symbolists are traditionally divided into "senior" and "junior".
The elders - they were also called decadents - D.S. Merezhkovsky, Z.N. Gippius, V.Ya. Bryusov, K.D. Balmont, F.K. Sologub reflected in his work the features of pan-European pan-aestheticism.
The younger symbolists - Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Innokenty Annensky - in addition to aestheticism, embodied in their work the aesthetic utopia of the search for the mystical Eternal Femininity.
For Russian symbolism, the phenomenon of life-building is especially characteristic (see biography), erasing the boundaries between text and reality, living life as a text. The Symbolists were the first in Russian culture to build the concept of intertext. In their work, the notion of the Text with a capital letter generally plays a decisive role.
Symbolism did not perceive the text as a reflection of reality. For him it was the opposite. The properties of a literary text were attributed by them to reality itself. The world was presented as a hierarchy of texts. In an effort to recreate the Text-Myth located at the top of the world, the Symbolists interpret this Text as a global myth about the world. Such a hierarchy of world-texts was created with the help of the poetics of quotations and reminiscences, that is, the poetics of neomythologism, also first applied in Russian culture by the symbolists.
We will briefly show the features of Russian symbolism on the example of the poetry of its outstanding representative Alexander Alexandrovich Blok.
Blok came to literature under the direct influence of the works of Vladimir Solovyov. His early "Poems about the Beautiful Lady" directly reflect the ideology of the Soloviev-colored dual world, the search for the female ideal, which is impossible to achieve. The heroine of Blok's early poems, projected onto the image of the poet's wife Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, appears in the form of a vague image of the Eternal Femininity, the Princess, the Bride, the Virgin. The poet's love for the Beautiful Lady is not only platonic and colored with features of medieval courtesy, which was most evident in the drama "The Rose and the Cross", but it is something more than just love in the ordinary sense - it is a kind of mystical search for the Deity under the cover of the erotic start.
Since the world is doubled, the appearance of the Beautiful Lady can only be sought in the correspondences and analogies provided by the symbolist ideology. The very appearance of the Beautiful Lady, if one sees it, is not clear whether it is a genuine appearance or a false one, and if it is genuine, then whether it will change under the influence of the vulgar atmosphere of earthly perception - and this is the most terrible thing for the poet:
I anticipate you. The years are passing by
All in the guise of one I foresee You.
The whole horizon is on fire - and unbearably clear,
And silently I wait - longing and loving.
The whole horizon is on fire, and the appearance is near,
But I'm afraid: you will change your appearance,
And daringly arouse suspicion,
Replacing the usual features at the end.
In essence, this is exactly what happens in the further development of Blok's lyrics. But first, a few words about the compositional structure of his poetry as a whole. In his mature years, the poet divided the entire corpus of his poems into three volumes. It was something like the Hegelian triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The thesis was the first volume - "Poems about the Beautiful Lady". Antithesis - the second. This is the otherness of the heroine, who descended to earth and is about to "change her appearance."
She appears among the vulgar restaurant fuss in the form of a beautiful Stranger.
And slowly, passing among the drunk,
Always without companions, alone,
Breathing in spirits and mists,
She sits by the window.
And breathe ancient beliefs
Her elastic silks
And a hat with mourning feathers
And in the rings a narrow hand.
And chained by a strange closeness,
I look behind the dark veil,
And I see the enchanted shore
And the enchanted distance.
In the future, the worst happens: the poet is disappointed in the very idea of \u200b\u200bPlatonic love - the search for an ideal. This is especially evident in the poem "Over the Lake" from the cycle "Free Thoughts". The poet stands in the cemetery over the evening lake and sees a beautiful girl who, as usual, seems to him a beautiful stranger, Tekla, as he calls her. She is all alone, but some vulgar officer "with a wobbling backside and legs, / Wrapped in trouser tubes" is walking towards her. The poet is sure that the stranger will drive away the vulgar, but it turns out that this is just her husband:
He came up ... he shakes her hand! .. look
His peepers in clear eyes! ..
I even moved out from behind the crypt...
And suddenly... he smacks her lingeringly,
Gives her a hand and leads to the dacha!
I want! I run up. I'm throwing
In them, cones, sand, squeal, dance
Among the graves - invisible and high ...
I shout "Hey, Fekla, Fekla!" ...
So, Tekla turns into Thekla, and this, in essence, ends the negative part of the poet's sobering up from Solovyov's mysticism. The last complex of his lyrics is "Carmen", and the last parting with the "former" Beautiful Lady is the poem "The Nightingale Garden". Then follows a catastrophe - a series of revolutions, to which Blok responds with the brilliant poem "The Twelve", which is both the apotheosis and the end of Russian symbolism. Blok died in 1921, when his heirs, representatives of Russian acmeism, spoke about themselves already in full voice.
4. Poetry of Russian acmeism (on the example of the work of one poet)
ACMEISM -
(Ancient Greek akme - the highest degree of flourishing, maturity) is a direction of Russian modernism that was formed in the 1910s and in its poetic attitudes is based on its teacher, Russian symbolism.
The acmeists, who were members of the "Workshop of Poets" association (Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Kuzmin, Sergey Gorodetsky), were "overcoming symbolism", as they were called in the article of the same name by the critic and philologist, the future academician V.M. Zhirmunsky. Acmeism contrasted the transcendental two-worldliness of the Symbolists with the world of simple everyday feelings and everyday spiritual manifestations. Therefore, the Acmeists also called themselves "Adamists", representing themselves as the first man Adam, "a naked man on bare earth." Akhmatova wrote:
I don't need odic ratis
And the charm of elegiac undertakings.
For me, in poetry everything should be out of place,
Not like people do.
When would you know from what rubbish
Poems grow, not knowing shame,
Like a yellow dandelion by the fence
Like burdock and quinoa.
But the simplicity of acmeism from the very beginning was not the healthy sanguine simplicity that is found in rural people. It was an exquisite and undeniably autistic (see autistic consciousness, characterology) simplicity of the outer veil of verse, behind which lay the depths of intense cultural searches.
Akhmatova again:
So helplessly my chest went cold,
But my steps were light
I put on my right hand
Left hand glove.
An erroneous gesture, an "erroneous action," to use Freud's psychoanalytic terminology from his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which was already published in Russia at that time, conveys a strong inner experience. It can be conditionally said that all of Akhmatova's early poetry is a "psychopathology of everyday life":
I've lost my mind, oh strange boy
Wednesday at three o'clock!
Pricked ring finger
A ringing wasp for me.
I accidentally pressed her
And she seemed to die
But the end of the poisoned sting
Was sharper than the spindle.
Salvation from habitually unhappy love in one thing - creativity. Perhaps the best verses of acmeism are verses about verses, which the researcher of acmeism Roman Timenchik called auto-meta-description:
When I wait for her arrival at night,
Life seems to hang by a thread.
What honors, what youth, what freedom
In front of a nice guest with a pipe in her hand.
And so she entered. Throwing back the cover
She looked at me carefully.
I say to her: "Did you dictate to Dantu
Pages of Hell?" Answers: "Me".
The initially restrained, "clarified" (that is, proclaiming clarity) poetics of acmeism was also true to the great Russian poet of the twentieth century, Mandelstam. Already the first poem of his famous "Stone" speaks of this:
The sound is wary and muffled
The fruit that fell from the tree
In the midst of the silent chant
Deep silence of the forest...
The laconicism of this poem makes researchers recall the poetics of Japanese haiku (three lines) belonging to the Zen tradition (see Zen thinking) - external colorlessness, behind which lies a tense inner experience:
On a bare branch
Raven sits alone...
Autumn evening!
So it is with Mandelstam in the cited poem. It seems that this is just a household sketch. In fact, we are talking about an apple that fell from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, about the beginning of history, the beginning of the world (which is why the poem is the first in the collection). At the same time, it can be Newton's apple - the apple of discovery, that is, again, the beginning. The image of silence plays a very important role - it refers to Tyutchev and the poetics of Russian romanticism with its cult of the inexpressibility of feelings in words.
The second poem "Stone" also refers to Tyutchev. Strings
Oh, my sadness,
Oh my quiet freedom
resonate with Tyutchev's lines: O my prophetic soul!
O heart full of anxiety!
Gradually, the poetics of acmeism, especially its two main representatives, Akhmatova and Mandelstam, becomes extremely complicated. Akhmatova's largest and most famous work, A Poem without a Hero, is built like a box with a double bottom - the riddles of this text are still being solved by many commentators.
The same thing happened to Mandelstam: the overabundance of cultural information and the peculiarity of the poet's talent made his mature poetry the most complex in the 20th century, so complex that sometimes researchers in a separate work analyzed not the whole poem, but only one line of it. With the same analysis, we will finish our essay on acmeism. We will talk about a line from the poem "Swallow" (1920):
An empty boat floats in a dry river.
G.S. Pomeranz believes that this line should be understood as deliberately absurd, in the spirit of a Zen koan. It seems to us that, on the contrary, it is overloaded with meaning. Firstly, the word "shuttle" is found in Mandelstam two more times and both times in the meaning of part of the loom ("The shuttle is spinning, the spindle is buzzing"). For Mandelstam, the contextual meanings of words are extremely important, as studies of the school of Professor K.F. Taranovsky, who specialized in the study of the poetics of acmeism.
The shuttle, thus, moves across the river, crosses the river. Where is he sailing? This suggests the context of the poem itself:
I forgot what I wanted to say.
The blind swallow will return to the hall of shadows.
"The Hall of Shadows" is the realm of shadows, the realm of the dead Hades. The empty, dead boat of Charon (shuttle) floats to the "chamber of shadows" along the dry river of the dead Styx. This is an ancient interpretation.
There may be an Eastern interpretation: emptiness is one of the most important concepts of Tao philosophy. Tao is empty because it is the receptacle of everything, wrote Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. Chuang Tzu said: "Where can I find a person who has forgotten all the words to talk to him?" Hence, the forgetfulness of the word can be seen not as something tragic, but as a break with the European tradition of speaking and falling into the Oriental, as well as the traditional romantic concept of silence.
A psychoanalytic interpretation is also possible. Then forgetfulness of the word will be associated with poetic impotence, and an empty canoe in a dry river with a phallus and (unsuccessful) sexual intercourse. The context of the poem confirms this interpretation. A visit by a living person to the kingdom of the dead, which is undoubtedly referred to in this poem, can be associated with mythological death and resurrection in the spirit of the agrarian cycle as a campaign for fertility (see myth), which in a subtle sense can be interpreted as the campaign of Orpheus (the first poet) behind the lost Eurydice to the realm of shadows. I think that in this poem, in understanding this line, all three interpretations work simultaneously.
5. Russian futurism (on the example of the work of one poet)
Futurism (from Latin futurum - future) is the common name for the artistic avant-garde movements of the 1910s - early 1920s. XX century., First of all, in Italy and Russia.
Unlike acmeism, futurism as a trend in Russian poetry did not originate in Russia at all. This phenomenon is entirely introduced from the West, where it originated and was theoretically substantiated. Italy was the birthplace of the new modernist movement, and the famous writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) became the main ideologist of Italian and world futurism, who spoke on February 20, 1909 on the pages of the Saturday issue of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro with the first "Manifesto of Futurism", in which was its “anti-cultural, anti-aesthetic and anti-philosophical” orientation is declared.
In principle, any modernist trend in art asserted itself by rejecting the old norms, canons, and traditions. However, futurism was distinguished in this regard by an extremely extremist orientation. This trend claimed to build a new art - "the art of the future", speaking under the slogan of a nihilistic denial of all previous artistic experience. Marinetti proclaimed "the world-historical task of Futurism", which was to "spit daily on the altar of art".
The Futurists preached the destruction of the forms and conventions of art in order to merge it with the accelerated life process of the 20th century. They are characterized by admiration for action, movement, speed, strength and aggression; self-exaltation and contempt for the weak; the priority of force, the rapture of war and destruction were affirmed. In this regard, futurism in its ideology was very close to both right and left radicals: anarchists, fascists, communists, focused on the revolutionary overthrow of the past.
The Futurist Manifesto consisted of two parts: an introductory text and a program consisting of eleven points-theses of the futuristic idea. Milena Wagner notes that “in them, Marinetti asserts radical changes in the principle of constructing a literary text - “the destruction of the generally accepted syntax”; "the use of the verb in an indefinite mood" in order to convey the meaning of the continuity of life and the elasticity of intuition; the destruction of quality adjectives, adverbs, punctuation marks, the omission of conjunctions, the introduction of “perception by analogy” and “maximum disorder” into literature - in a word, everything aimed at conciseness and increasing the “speed of style” in order to create a “living style that creates itself according to himself, without meaningless pauses expressed by commas and periods. All this was proposed as a way to make a literary work a means of conveying the “life of matter”, a means of “grabbing everything that is elusive and elusive in matter”, “so that literature directly enters the universe and merges with it” ...
The words of futuristic works were completely freed from the rigid framework of syntactic periods, from the fetters of logical connections. They were freely located in the space of the page, rejecting the norms of linear writing and forming decorative arabesques or playing entire dramatic scenes built by analogy between the shape of a letter and some figure of reality: mountains, people, birds, etc. Thus, the words turned into visual signs...
The final, eleventh paragraph of the "Technical Manifesto of Italian Literature" proclaimed one of the most important postulates of the new poetic concept: "destroy the I in literature."
"A man completely corrupted by the library and museum<...>is no longer of absolutely no interest ... We are interested in the hardness of the steel plate itself, that is, the incomprehensible and inhuman union of its molecules and electrons ... The warmth of a piece of iron or wood now excites us more than a woman’s smile or tear.
The text of the manifesto caused a stormy reaction and laid the foundation for a new "genre", introducing an exciting element into artistic life - a fist strike. Now the poet rising on the stage began to shock the audience in every possible way: insult, provoke, call for rebellion and violence.
Futurists wrote manifestos, spent evenings where these manifestos were read from the stage and only then were they published. These evenings usually ended in heated arguments with the public, turning into fights. Thus, the trend received its scandalous, but very wide popularity.
Given the socio-political situation in Russia, the seeds of futurism fell on fertile ground. It was this component of the new trend that was, first of all, enthusiastically received by Russian Cubo-Futurists in the pre-revolutionary years. For most of them, "software opuses" were more important than creativity itself.
Although the outrageous technique was widely used by all modernist schools, for the futurists it was the most important, because, like any avant-garde phenomenon, futurism needed increased attention. Indifference was absolutely unacceptable for him, a necessary condition for existence was the atmosphere of a literary scandal. Deliberate extremes in the behavior of the futurists provoked aggressive rejection and a pronounced protest of the public. Which is exactly what was required.
Russian avant-garde artists of the beginning of the century entered the history of culture as innovators who made a revolution in world art - both in poetry and in other areas of creativity. In addition, many became famous as great brawlers. Futurists, Cubo-Futurists and Ego-Futurists, Scientists and Suprematists, Rayonists and Budutlyans, all and nothing struck the imagination of the public. “But in discussions about these artistic revolutionaries,” as A. Obukhova and N. Alekseev rightly noted, “a very important thing is often overlooked: many of them were brilliant figures of what is now called “promotion” and “public relations.” They turned out to be the forerunners of modern "artistic strategies" - that is, the ability not only to create talented works, but also to find the most successful ways to attract the attention of the public, patrons and buyers.
The Futurists were, of course, radicals. But they knew how to make money. It has already been said about attracting attention to oneself with the help of all kinds of scandals. However, this strategy worked well for quite material purposes. The heyday of the avant-garde, 1912-1916, is hundreds of exhibitions, poetry readings, performances, reports, debates. And then all these events were paid, you had to buy an entrance ticket. Prices ranged from 25 kopecks to 5 rubles - the money at that time was very considerable. [Given that a handyman then earned 20 rubles a month, and sometimes several thousand people came to exhibitions.] In addition, paintings were also sold; on average, things worth 5-6 thousand royal rubles left the exhibition.
Futurists were often accused in the press of greed. For example: “We must do justice to the futurists, cubists and other ists, they know how to get along. Recently, a Futurist married a wealthy Moscow merchant's wife, taking as a dowry two houses, a carriage establishment and ... three taverns. In general, decadents always somehow "fatally" fall into the company of moneybags and arrange their happiness near them ... ".
However, at its core, Russian futurism was still a predominantly poetic trend: in the manifestos of the futurists, it was about the reform of the word, poetry, and culture. And in the rebellion itself, shocking the public, in the scandalous cries of the futurists, there were more aesthetic emotions than revolutionary ones. Almost all of them were prone to both theorizing and advertising and theatrical propaganda gestures. This did not contradict their understanding of futurism as a direction in art that shapes the future of man, regardless of the styles and genres in which its creator works. There was no single style problem.
“Despite the apparent closeness of Russian and European futurists, traditions and mentality gave each of the national movements their own characteristics. One of the signs of Russian futurism was the perception of all kinds of styles and trends in art. "Allness" has become one of the most important futuristic artistic principles.
Russian futurism did not result in an integral artistic system; this term denoted a variety of trends in the Russian avant-garde. The avant-garde itself was the system. And it was dubbed futurism in Russia by analogy with Italian.” And this trend turned out to be much more heterogeneous than the symbolism and acmeism that preceded it.
The Futurists themselves understood this. One of the members of the Mezzanine of Poetry group, Sergei Tretyakov, wrote: “Everyone who wants to define futurism (in particular literary) as a school, as a literary movement, connected by a commonality of methods of processing material, a common style, finds itself in an extremely difficult situation. They usually have to stray helplessly between dissimilar factions.<...>and stop in bewilderment between the "archaic songwriter" Khlebnikov, the "tribune-urbanist" Mayakovsky, the "esthete-agitator" Burliuk, the "zaum-snarling" Kruchenykh. And if we add Pasternak's "specialist in indoor aeronautics on the syntax fokker" here, then the landscape will be full. Even more bewilderment will be introduced by those “falling off” from futurism - Severyanin, Shershenevich and others ... All these heterogeneous lines coexist under the common roof of futurism, tenaciously holding on to each other!<...>
The fact is that Futurism has never been a school, and the mutual coupling of the most heterogeneous people into a group was, of course, not kept up as a factional sign. Futurism would not be itself if it finally settled down on a few found patterns of artistic production and ceased to be a revolutionary ferment ferment, tirelessly impelling to invention, to the search for new and new forms.<...>The strong-assed bourgeois-petty-bourgeois life, into which past and modern art (symbolism) entered as solid parts, forming a stable taste of a serene and carefree, secure life, was the main stronghold from which Futurism pushed off and on which it collapsed. The blow to aesthetic taste was only a detail of the general planned blow to everyday life. Not a single outrageous stanza or manifesto of the futurists caused such a hubbub and squeal as painted faces, a yellow jacket and asymmetric suits. The brain of a bourgeois could endure any mockery of Pushkin, but to endure a mockery of the cut of trousers, a tie or a flower in a buttonhole was beyond his strength ... ".
The poetry of Russian futurism was closely connected with avant-gardism in painting. It is no coincidence that many Futurist poets were good artists - V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky, Elena Guro, V. Mayakovsky, A. Kruchenykh, the Burliuk brothers. At the same time, many avant-garde artists wrote poetry and prose, participated in futuristic publications not only as designers, but also as writers. Painting in many ways enriched futurism. K. Malevich, P. Filonov, N. Goncharova, M. Larionov almost created what the futurists were striving for.
However, Futurism also enriched avant-garde painting in some ways. At least in terms of scandalousness, the artists were not much inferior to their poetic counterparts. At the beginning of the new, 20th century, everyone wanted to be innovators. Especially artists who rushed to the only goal - to say the last word, and even better - to become the last cry of modernity. And our domestic innovators, as noted in the already cited article from the newspaper "Foreigner", began to use the scandal as a fully conscious artistic method. They arranged various scandals, ranging from mischievous theatrical antics to banal hooliganism. The painter Mikhail Larionov, for example, was repeatedly arrested and fined for outrages committed during the so-called “public disputes”, where he generously slapped opponents who disagreed with him, threw a music stand or a table lamp at them ...
In general, very soon the words "futurist" and "hooligan" for the modern moderate public became synonymous. The press enthusiastically followed the "exploits" of the creators of the new art. This contributed to their fame in the general population, aroused increased interest, attracted more and more attention.
The history of Russian futurism was a complex relationship between the four main groups, each of which considered itself an exponent of "true" futurism and led a fierce debate with other associations, challenging the dominant role in this literary movement. The struggle between them resulted in streams of mutual criticism, which by no means united the individual participants in the movement, but, on the contrary, increased their enmity and isolation. However, from time to time, members of different groups approached or moved from one to another.
+ We add information from the ticket about V. V. Mayakovsky to the answer
