The theme of the lost generation in the novel. Lost generation

« Lost generation»

Nostalgia for wholeness

The “Lost Generation” is an image proposed by the American writer G. Stein to refer to a new literary generation that clearly marked its own special path in art in the 1920s, after the First World War. One of the most famous writers of this generation, E. Hemingway, put G. Stein's phrase on the cover of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Representatives of the "lost generation" showed in their works a pronounced skepticism in relation to the traditional system of values, to the traditions of "decency". The emerging nostalgia for wholeness, human unity led to the search for a new ideal. Many writers of this trend were participants in the war, they felt the cruelty and chaos of the world in their own lives, the tragic inability to find themselves, to "get into the groove" of peaceful life.

The linkage of military and post-war experience is especially characteristic of works published in the second half of the 1920s. The events of the past received the “status of a tragic alibi”: a person is constantly in a state of hostilities with a hostile and indifferent world, the main attributes of which are bureaucracy and vulgarity: “We wanted to fight against everything, everything that determined our past, against lies and selfishness , self-interest and heartlessness; we hardened and did not trust anyone except our closest comrade, did not believe in anything except such forces that never deceived us, like heaven, tobacco, trees, bread and earth; but what came of it? ... And for those who did not know how to forget, there were only impotence, despair, indifference and vodka. The time of great human and courageous dreams has passed. Dealers were celebrating. Corruption. Poverty".

Cognition through denial, the search for an ideal in disappointment, the illusion of a “nightingale song” through the “wild voice of catastrophes” (V. F. Khodasevich) - all these are signs of the worldview of the “lost generation” (E. Hemingway, F. S. Fitzgerald, E. M. Remarque, R. Aldington).

The experience of insight (E M Remarque)

The motives of courageous opposition to the cruelty of life, the strength of front-line comradeship, and love are heard in the novels of the outstanding German writer Erich Maria Remarque (real name Erich Paul Remarque), full of sad irony: Three Comrades (1938), Arc de Triomphe (1946), Black Obelisk » (1956). In the book "A Time to Live and a Time to Die" (1954), the writer comprehends the repetition of the tragic experience of "epiphany" by the new generation during the Second World War on the Eastern Front.

Remarque was born on June 22, 1898 in the city of Osnabrück, in the family of a bookbinder. Still at school future writer decided to connect his life with art: he was seriously engaged in drawing and music. But the first World War interfered with his plans. At the age of 17, Remarque was called to the front. On the front line, he was seriously injured and worked as a teacher in a rural school for several post-war years.

After the war, Remarque moved to Berlin and tried to arrange his life: he tried to become a professional race car driver, worked as an organist in a church at a psychiatric hospital, and from time to time wrote reports for various newspapers and magazines. In 1919, his story "The Woman with Golden Eyes" was published, and the following year his first novel, "Attic of Dreams", was published. But these works went unnoticed, could not stand out from the flow of tabloid literature that flooded the German bookstores in the postwar years.

Since 1924, the novice writer traveled around Europe as a correspondent for the Hanoverian newspaper Echo Continental. In 1928, the Berlin newspaper Vozzische Zeitung published Remarque’s novel “On Western front no change." Released soon as a separate book, he brought his creator worldwide fame. The success of this book is comparable in history German literature with "The Suffering of Young Werther" - Goethe's first novel. The novel was immediately translated into all European languages and everywhere was unheard of popular. The writer's agents succeeded in favorable conditions sell the film rights to the novel in Hollywood.

In 1931, Remarque released his second significant novel, The Return, which tells about the problems his generation faced. In the same year, fearing persecution by the National Socialists, the writer was forced to leave Germany. He moved to Switzerland. The last work of Remarque, published before the outbreak of World War II, was the famous novel "Three Comrades", published in 1938, first in America in English and only then in Holland in German. By that time, his books were banned in the writer's homeland as "undermining the German spirit" and belittling the "heroism of the German soldier." The Nazi government stripped Remarque of German citizenship. He was forced to flee from Switzerland to France, and from there to the United States. During the difficult war years, Remarque helped, sometimes anonymously, many of his compatriots - cultural figures who, like him, fled from the Nazi regime, but whose financial position was depressing.

After the war, having received German citizenship again, Remarque returned to Europe. From 1947 he lived in Switzerland, where he spent most of the last 16 years of his life. Erich Maria Remarque died on September 25, 1970. A year later, his last novel, Shadows in Paradise, was published.

"And after the war there is no peace"

The novel "Three Comrades", containing many autobiographical details, was completed by Remarque in 1937.

The main characters, friends Otto Kester, Gottfried Lenz and Robert Lokamp, ​​having gone through the war, were disappointed in the aspirations of youth, lost faith in the false sermons of official propaganda about humanism, justice, civilization and the notorious "defence of the fatherland". The attitude of friends is very tragic. They do not see a future for themselves, they do not accept the present, the past is fraught with terrible memories of the death of comrades, the torment of those poisoned by poisonous gas, and the abuse of recruits.

Former front-line soldiers involuntarily compare the horrors of the past and "peaceful" times. Looking at Lenz, who was killed by fascist thugs, Robert recalls the events of 1917. It turns out that even after the war there is no peace and tranquility for man, evil still reigns, innocent people die. The salvation of the heroes is in their friendship, loyalty to brotherhood, indifference to meanness, in the ability to sympathize. They buy an old wrecked car at auction just to help its owner in distress.

Remarque's narrative, despite its apparent dryness, is permeated with deep lyricism. In "Three Comrades" the story is told in the first person. This literary device reflects the true attitude of the artist to the events and characters. Robert Lokamp sees the world and perceives people much like the author himself. Remarque's special gift is to create laconic, but very expressive ironic dialogues. The position of a moralist is alien to him. He does not condemn the constant drunkenness of the heroes, their easy, even cynical attitude towards love. At the same time, in their internal monologues, Remarque creates a pathetic elation of severe and bashful male tenderness, rude, but genuine chastity.

At first glance, only hopelessness and despair are embodied in the last chapters of the book. But already in the very essence of the human characters of the heroes of the novel, in their rude cordiality, which was not shaken by all the bitter experience, all the dirt and all the ugliness of their lives, there is a timid but living hope for the power of true friendship, good camaraderie, true love.

Life as an adventure novel (E. Hemingway)

A kaleidoscope of amazing fate

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, a privileged suburb of Chicago. He grew up in a cultured, wealthy family. His father, a doctor by profession and an amateur ethnographer by spiritual inclination, was fond of hunting, took his eldest son with him into the forest, trying to teach him to observe nature, to get accustomed to the unusual life of the Indians. mother received musical education debuted with the New York Philharmonic.

The eldest of six children, Ernest attended the Oak Park schools, publishing stories and poems in school newspapers. After graduating in 1917, the future writer worked as a correspondent for the Kansas Star newspaper, where he received many useful professional skills: conciseness, objective presentation. Six months later, he volunteered for the front, serving as a driver for the American Red Cross detachment on the Italo-Austrian front. In July 1918 he was seriously wounded in the leg. For military prowess, Hemingway was twice awarded Italian orders. While recovering in the hospital, the future writer fell in love with an American nurse. Ten years later this love story, as well as military experience, will form the basis of his novel A Farewell to Arms! (1929).

Returning from the war, Hemingway went to work at the editorial office of a Chicago magazine, where he met the writer S. Anderson, who convinced him to go to Paris.

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) - an outstanding American writer, one of the founders of the new concept of style, author of the collection of short stories Weinsburg, Ohio (1919), called the "book of grotesques".

Living abroad, Hemingway traveled a lot, wrote articles on a variety of topics for the Toronto Star (Toronto Star), met American writers who lived in Paris at that time - G. Stein, E. Pound, S. Fitzgerald and others. Hemingway's first books were published in Paris: "Three stories and ten poems" (1923), written under the influence of S. Anderson, as well as a collection of short stories "In Our Time" (1924). In October 1926, The Sun Also Rises was published, which was favorably received by critics and gave Hemingway a strong reputation as a promising young writer.

After the publication of another collection of short stories, Men Without Women (1927), Hemingway returned to the United States and, settling in Key West (Florida), completed his second novel, A Farewell to Arms!, which was a huge success as critics and a wide range of readers. Many literary scholars consider this novel, along with For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway's best work, in which his style, clear, concise, capacious, reaches perfection.

However, in the 1930s there is a certain decline in the writer's work. It was during this period that he fell ill with “star disease”, pretending to be a “real man” (interest in Spanish bullfighting, African hunting for predators, defiant behavior), which was perceived by many as posturing, which had the most detrimental effect on his work. During this time he wrote Death in the Afternoon (1932), a well-documented account of a Spanish bullfight; The Green Hills of Africa (1935), diary of the first safari writer; "To have and not to have" (1937), a story about how main character forced by the hardships of the Great Depression to become a smuggler. Only two masterfully written short stories set in Africa have received critical acclaim: The Short Happiness of Francis Macomber and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Hemingway's personality was fully revealed during the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, after raising money for the Republicans, the writer went to Spain as a war correspondent and screenwriter. documentary film"Land of Spain" (directed by Joris Ivens). The novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls", whose title contains the words of the English poet John Donne ("...Never ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for you"), is an appeal to the brotherhood of man. The novel was a huge success. According to the well-known critic K. Baker, this book still remains an unsurpassed masterpiece among all the works devoted to the Spanish tragedy of those years.

In the 1940s Hemingway continues to be actively involved in political events: he writes military correspondence about the Sino-Japanese war; participates in RAF flights, describing the Allied landings in Normandy. After several years of hard work, he completes Across the River in the Shade of the Trees (1950), set during World War II in Italy. Critics unanimously recognized this novel as unsuccessful: mannered, sentimental, self-satisfied. In 1952 Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea in Life magazine, a lyrical story about an old fisherman who caught and then big fish In my life. The story was a huge success both with critics, who saw in this work a hymn to the moral victory that a defeated person wins, and with readers. In 1953, the writer received the Pulitzer Prize for the story, and in 1954, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1960, Hemingway suffered a serious nervous illness. After leaving the hospital and convinced that he was no longer able to write, he returned to his home in Ketcham (Idaho), and June 2, 1961, putting a gun to his temple, committed suicide.

"Papa Ham"

Some of Hemingway's works ("Islands in the Ocean", "A Holiday That Is Always with You") were published posthumously. Among literary critics there are many who believe that Hemingway's work does not have a great artistic value. Thus, Robert P. Wicks, in the preface to the book "Collected Critical Essays on the Work of Hemingway" (1962), writes that Hemingway's characters are silent and insensitive.

But, despite this kind of criticism, Hemingway remains one of the most important American writers, whose books have been translated into many languages ​​of the world. More than 40 films and animation films have been created based on his works.

For Russian culture Ernest Hemingway means more than a writer. He became a cult figure of the “sixties” generation, creating a pronounced style both in prose and in his personal life, which began to be imitated all over the world, including in the Soviet Union, where the corresponding epidemic began after the publication of his two-volume book in 1959.

Describing the phenomenon of “Papa Ham” in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, modern culturologists and literary critics P. L. Weil and A. A. Genis note: “Hemingway did not exist for reading. The forms of perception of life built by the writer were important.”

A portrait of Hemingway with a pipe and in a coarse-knit sweater stood in a place of honor in almost every "intellectual home." This image was consistent with the idea of courageous man, true to the code of honor that went through four wars, preferred hunting, fishing and sports to the cabinet. Heroes of Hemingway amazed Soviet people unprecedented inner freedom and wonderful ability to "hear" another person. The apparent lack of a plot, despite the enormous internal tension of the text, also evoked admiration. The writer's works were perceived in many ways as deep philosophical parables.

Many of the greatest Soviet writers sincerely confessed their love for Hemingway's work. Thus, Yu. V. Trifonov noted in his “Memories of the Torments of Silence, or the Fedinsky Seminar of the 1940s” that he was “infected” with love for Hemingway. The obvious influence of the stylistic manner of Hemingway's prose is also felt in the stories of S. D. Dovlatov.

Text like "iceberg"

Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in 1954 with the wording "for narrative skill, in Once again demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and the influence on modern prose. The influence of this writer on modern prose is, without exaggeration, enormous. Declaring his dislike for everything sublimely romantic, Hemingway created the concept of a fundamentally "non-bookish" style.

The writer liked to compare the expressiveness of the text with an iceberg, rising only one eighth above the surface of the water. In his works, he refuses rhetoric, preferring not to "describe", but to "call". The foundation of such a narrative is made up of verbs of motion, nouns, remarks of the same type, and the repeated use of the connecting union “and”. The writer creates only a scheme of perception (the heat of the sun, the cold of water, the taste of wine, etc.), only in the reader's mind is all this embodied in a full-fledged sensory experience.

Hemingway's style was greatly influenced by the paintings of P. Cezanne, who sought to convey in his canvases, as he himself said, "nature-in-depth", not ephemeral, but self-contained, crystal objectivity. Hemingway admitted that it was from Cezanne that he learned to give the story "voluminousness and depth." Hemingway's characters seem to have no soul. Their consciousness dissolves in the outside world (city in the rain, Parisian streets). The writer strings the facts, collecting them into a landscape, subject to a rather rigid logic and having in general tragic character. Sadness dissolves on the pages of almost all of Hemingway's works. Even being on a "holiday within a holiday" roots the hero in his "art of suffering" ("The Sun Also Rises").

Hemingway's heroes are doomed, as if rock is gravitating over them from the very beginning (“Farewell to arms!”).

Hemingway considered it his main goal to write only about what he knew and to write the truth. The paradox “losing - I gain”, traditional for the writer’s works, indicates the intention to make meaning the very absence of meaning. The bitterer the defeat, the more persistently the desire of a person to assert his dignity at all costs declares itself.

Chronicler of the Jazz Age (F. S. Fitzgerald)

Shine " sweet life»

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) believed that genuine culture is tested by the ability to simultaneously hold in the mind two directly opposite ideas. Indeed, dualism is the most characteristic attitude of this remarkable American writer, the famous chronicler of the "Jazz Age", the era of the 1920s.

The central motives of Fitzgerald's work are wealth, success, brilliant life, turned into "the most expensive orgy in history", "noisy carnival", etc. The writer creates poetic, exciting images of luxurious beauties - Daisy Buchanan ("The Great Gatsby" (1925)), Nicole Warren, in which "everything was calculated for flight, for movement” (“Tender is the Night” (1934)). At the same time, the glint of wealth in the best works Fitzgerald strikes, first of all, with its fragility, duality of connection with mystery, fate, even damnation.

So, in the novel “Tender is the Night”, the brilliance of the “sweet life” is likened to “dead meat”: Nicole sunbathes, “substituting her back suspended from a pearl necklace for the sun.” In the short story "Diamond Mountain" (1922), fabulous wealth turns into extremely repulsive features.

Fitzgerald gained his first great success by publishing the novel This Side of Paradise at the age of 24, in which the spirit of the times, its rhythm, and style are fairly accurately conveyed. But, almost completely merging with his "jazz" hero, Princeton University student Emory Blaine, the author lost the possibility of an objective view of the world. Therefore, the "Jazz Age" was reflected in the novel mainly by external features. Emory Blaine lived in an atmosphere of myth, with almost no resistance to unimagined reality.

IN mature works Fitzgerald's heroes, while maintaining faith in "the light of incredible future happiness", find themselves on the ground of reality, where you cannot live with "fairy tales of the Jazz Age". Such multidimensionality determines the outstanding artistic power Fitzgerald's works, the meaning of the word he made in the art.

The "great" Jay Gatsby turns out to be an unscrupulous bootlegger. He is pathetic and ridiculous in his pursuit of the "girl from good company» Daisy, but he is truly great as the bearer of a disinterested illusion, a belief in the possibility of building a paradise on earth. The writer, together with the narrator (Nick Carraway plays this role in the novel), gradually reveals a very important idea that a person, striving for the ideal, gave his extraordinary powers a false direction and doomed himself to spiritual death.

Writer's confession

The novel "Tender is the Night" (1934), which required ten years of exhausting work, Fitzgerald considered his confession. The name of the novel was given by a line from "Ode to a Nightingale" by J. Keats. At first, the future book was seen by the author grave monument the Jazz Age, which came to an abrupt end in October 1929, when panic broke out on the New York Stock Exchange and America felt the semblance of its traditional prosperity. During the creation of the novel, the chronological boundaries of the action (1924-1929) remained unchanged, but its character itself deepened significantly.

The novel turned into an artistic study of national mythology, which required the intersection of points of view, the clash of opposites. The plot was introduced to the young film actress Rosemary Hoyt, the embodiment of "American innocence". In her eyes, the company of Divers and their surroundings seem to be the epitome of elegance, "style", she warmly responds to wasteful pranks, "not realizing that all this is carefully selected at the fair of life ..."

In the center of the novel is the story of a young talented psychiatrist Dick Diver, who married his patient Nicole Warren, the heiress of a million-dollar fortune. The idyllic plot turns, however, into a tragedy: Dick Diver is increasingly dependent on his wife's millions. Carnival fuss, continuous entertainment distract him from truly serious pursuits, the natural richness of the soul and mind is gradually replaced by external brilliance. Dick seeks to compensate for the emptiness of life by resorting to a proven method - a bottle. After parting with Nicole, he returns to America, where, moving from hospital to hospital, he does not find a stable support in life.

Fitzgerald's last, unfinished work was the novel The Last Tycoon, in which the writer again refers to the relationship between "dreams" and reality, thinking about the extent of a person's personal responsibility for his own destiny and the fate of culture.

Notes

62. Remark E. M. Three comrades//http://znaj.ru/kratkoe/remark/tritovarischa/page3/

63. Quoted from: Paramonov E. The teenager turned one hundred//http://www.svoboda.org/programs/RQ/1999/RQ21asp.

He lived in an unstable era. Why try to build something if soon everything will inevitably collapse?
E.M. Remark

In Western European and American literature of the first half of the 20th century, one of the central topics was the First World War (1914 - 1918) and its consequences - both for the individual and for all mankind. This war in its scale, cruelty surpassed all previous wars. In addition, during the World War it was very difficult to determine on whose side the truth was, for what purpose thousands of people died every day. It remained unclear how the war of "all against all" was to end. In a word, the world war set a whole series of the toughest questions, forced to reevaluate the ideas about the compatibility of the concepts of war and justice, politics and humanism, the interests of the state and the fate of the individual.

To the works of writers that reflected the tragic experience of the First World War, they began to apply the definition literature of the "lost generation" . The expression "lost generation" was first used by an American writer Gertrude Stein, which most lived her life in France, and in 1926 Ernest Hemingway quoted this expression in the epigraph to the novel "The Sun Also Rises", after which it became commonly used.

The "lost generation" are those who did not return from the front or returned spiritually and physically crippled. The literature of the "lost generation" includes the works of American writers Ernest Hemingway(“The Sun Also Rises”, “Farewell to Arms!”), William Faulkner("The Sound and the Fury") Francis Scott Fitzgerald("The Great Gatsby", "Tender is the Night"), John Dos Passos("Three Soldiers"), German writer Erich Maria Remarque("All Quiet on the Western Front", "Three Comrades", "Love thy neighbor", "Arc de Triomphe", "Time to live and time to die", "Life on loan"), an English writer Richard Aldington("Death of a Hero", "All people are enemies"). The literature of the "lost generation" is a very heterogeneous phenomenon, but its characteristic features can be distinguished.

1. The main character of this literature is, as a rule, a person who came from the war and does not find a place for himself in civilian life. His return turns into an awareness of the gulf between him and those who did not fight.

2. The hero cannot live in a calm, safe environment and chooses a profession that involves risk or leads an "extreme" lifestyle.

3. The heroes of the writers of the “lost generation” often live outside their homeland, the very concept of a home does not exist for them: these are people who have lost a sense of stability, attachment to anything.

4. Since the leading genre of literature of the "lost generation" is a novel, the characters necessarily go through a test of love, but the relationship of lovers is doomed: the world is unstable, unstable, and therefore love does not give the characters a sense of harmonious being. The theme of love is also connected with the motive of the doom of mankind: the heroes do not have children, because either the woman is barren, or the lovers do not want to let the child into a cruel and unpredictable world, or one of the heroes dies.

5. The moral and moral convictions of the hero, as a rule, are not impeccable, but the writer does not condemn him for this, because for a person who has gone through the horrors of war or exile, many values ​​lose their traditional meaning.

The literature of the "lost generation" was very popular in the 1920s, but in the second half of the 30s it loses its sharpness and takes on a rebirth after the Second World War (1939 - 1945). Its traditions were inherited by the writers of the so-called "broken generation", better known in the United States as the "beat generation" (from the English beat generation), as well as a group of English writers who spoke in
50s under the banner of the Angry Young Men association.

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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Subtitles

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.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), laureate Nobel Prize in the field of literature, a "citizen of the world" and a writer of the widest range has forever retained a certain mark, the stigma of "lost", which sometimes manifests itself in a recognizable compositional construction, a recognizable plot twist or character trait of a hero.

Hemingway's work represents a new step forward in the development of American and world realistic art. The theme of the tragedy of the fate of the ordinary American remained the main theme of Hemingway's work throughout his life.

The basis of his novels are action, struggle, zeal to go forward and striving for the best. The author admires the strength of the human spirit, those who could remain human in the most difficult situations, in the face of danger and death. But still, some of them are irrevocably doomed to despair, loneliness and, consequently, disappointment.

E. Hemingway's prose, refined, extremely economical in visual means, was largely prepared by the school of journalism. This prose of the master, whose virtuoso simplicity only emphasized the complexity of his artistic world, always relied on personal experience writer.

Real biographical facts (service in the Red Cross detachment on the Italo-Austrian front, being seriously wounded and staying in a Milan hospital, stormy, but Hemingway only brought bitterness and disappointment, love for the nurse Agnes von Kurowski) are artistically transformed in his works and transferred into a distinct and poignant a true picture of the suffering and courageous stoicism of the "lost generation".

Always in the thick of the events of his time - as a correspondent, a direct participant and as a writer - Hemingway responded to them with his journalism and works of art. Thus, the atmosphere of the "Angry Decade" and Civil War in Spain were recreated in the short stories of the collection "The Winner Gets Nothing" (1935), the novel "To Have and Not to Have" (1937), "Spanish Journalism", the play "The Fifth Column" (1938) and the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" ( 1940). The events of the 1940s, when Hemingway, who settled in Cuba, hunted German submarines in the Caribbean on his yacht Pilar, were reflected in the posthumously published novel Islands in the Ocean (1979). At the end of World War II, the writer participated as a war correspondent in the liberation of Paris.

"God forbid you live in times of change" - has nothing to do with journalists. When everything is quiet, calm and "stable", we get bored. Hemingway was never bored. He was young and full of energy during the first world war and was in the prime of life during the second. He never wrote about what he did not see, did not know, did not understand. In this sense, he aspired to be a contemporary reporter. Hemingway tried to implement the old trick "about simple things write simply", he brilliantly mastered the telegraphic language of reporting. But the world around him, life in Europe was far from simple.

If the people of the lost generation were inwardly devastated victims of war, acting wreckage, then the young Hemingway felt neither devastated nor wrecked. He was a searching and thinking writer who deeply perceived the tragedy of his associates and chose it as his theme. But he described his contemporaries.

Reading Hemingway - no matter what he writes about, seemingly very different - you invariably feel his hatred for human loneliness, his desire to get out, to get out of this loneliness to friends, to a woman, to a cause that connects people together, even when this case is a war and somewhere in the final promises you death.

Hemingway tries to write without any prejudice and as specifically as possible, about what he really feels; write, fixing in themselves the acts, things and phenomena that evoke the experienced feeling, and do it in such a way that, paraphrasing the words of Hemingway himself, the essence of the phenomena, the sequence of facts and actions that evoke certain feelings, remain effective for the reader even after a year, and in ten years, and with luck and fixation quite clear - even forever.

"If the author of a novel puts his own speculation into the mouth of his artificially sculpted characters ... then this is not literature," Hemingway wrote. The writer seeks to convey the inner state of the hero, his feelings and moods, using an internal monologue for this. He seeks to show the spiritual world of the hero, subtly and accurately describing the actions of the hero, revealing external manifestations inner world. Therefore, he refuses to talk about internal state their heroes.

One of the researchers of his work writes that a chain of short, unrelated phrases performs the main task - to show the disintegrating connections of a displaced and disunited world in the way it is directly perceived by a confused consciousness, and not in the way that it is then organized by a cold mind and fits into traditional forms.

The very way of expression, without any explanation of the author, shows the emptiness and meaninglessness of the existence of his heroes and at the same time the tragic significance of life. And restrained, concise, clear and capacious descriptions of phenomena, events, external actions only emphasize the helpless doom of people, the researcher emphasizes.

Extreme conciseness, laconic narration, intolerance to high-sounding words, rhetoric and sentimentality, the masterful introduction of a repeatedly repeated leitmotif (whether it is a separate phrase or a whole image), naturally, in all its ordinary roughness, the sounding dialogue, lyrical subtext, the "background" of the depicted - these features of Hemingway's style are firmly established both in his short stories and in stories and novels.

Hemingway proclaimed the so-called "iceberg principle". “If this can clarify anything,” the writer pointed out, “I would like to say that literary creativity reminds me of an iceberg. Only an eighth of what is in the water is visible. Everything that can be thrown away should be thrown out. This strengthens your iceberg; what is thrown out goes under the water."

Colossal persuasiveness, freshness and effective power are inherent in the writer's work. But here it should be noted that this brevity of the narrative and accuracy limited the possible literary devices that could be used. It is precisely because of this simplicity and factuality that much, much is brought into the subtext. Hemingway's literature is not for everyone, it needs to be studied and felt.

Hemingway brilliantly mastered the telegraphic language of reporting, he liked the abrupt brevity, clarity and capacity of the code, he even flaunted deliberate simplification and coarsening. However, he already felt like a writer. Newspaper blanks developed into literary worked out sketches.

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 subsequently brought her worldwide 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 demanded artistic expression. 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). With 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 climax, with the maximum overstrain of mental and physical strength, from the hardest test, for which they turned out to be 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 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 constituted 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, search for enduring values, stoic individualism. Together with the same, aggravated tragic worldview, this determined the presence in the prose of the "lost" series common features 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 the life of each individual person, and, above all, in love. It is love that occupies a dominant place in their system of values. Love, understood as perfect, harmonious union with a woman - this is both creativity, and camaraderie (human warmth is nearby), and a natural beginning. 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 unfold human destinies in time and space, but, on the contrary, 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 community of the "lost", their spiritual brotherhood, mixed with young hot blood, turned out to be stronger than the thoughtful calculations of various literary groups, which disintegrated, leaving no trace in the work of their participants.