The meaning of the concept of "lost generation" in the novels of E.M. remark

"Lost generation" (English Lost generation) is the concept got its name from a phrase allegedly uttered by G. Stein and taken by E. Hemingway as an epigraph to the novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). The origins of the worldview that united this informal literary community was rooted in a sense of disappointment with the course and results of the First World War, which gripped the writers of Western Europe and the United States, some of whom were directly involved in hostilities. The death of millions of people called into question the positivist doctrine of "beneficial progress" and undermined faith in the rationality of liberal democracy. The pessimistic tone that made the prose writers of The Lost Generation related to writers of the modernist type did not signify the identity of the general ideological and aesthetic aspirations. The specifics of the realistic depiction of the war and its consequences did not need speculative schematism. Although the heroes of the books of the writers of The Lost Generation are staunch individualists, they are not alien to front-line camaraderie, mutual assistance, and empathy. The highest values ​​they profess are sincere love and devoted friendship. The war appears in the works of The Lost Generation either as a direct reality with an abundance of repulsive details, or as an annoying reminder that stirs the psyche and interferes with the transition to a peaceful life. The books of The Lost Generation are not equal to the general stream of works about the First World War. Unlike "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik" (1921-23) by J. Hasek, they do not have a pronounced satirical grotesque and "front-line humor". The “Lost” not only listen to the naturalistically reproduced horrors of war and cherish the memories of it (Barbusse A. Fire, 1916; Celine L.F. Journey to the End of the Night, 1932), but introduce the experience gained into a wider channel of human experiences, colored by a kind romanticized bitterness. The “beaten-out” of the heroes of these books did not mean a conscious choice in favor of the “new” anti-liberal ideologies and regimes: socialism, fascism, Nazism. The heroes of The Lost Generation are completely apolitical and prefer to enter the sphere of illusions, intimate, deeply personal experiences to participate in the public struggle.

Chronologically "The Lost Generation" first made itself known with the novels "Three Soldiers"(1921) J. Dos Passos, "The Huge Camera" (1922) by E. E. Cummings, "Soldier's Award" (1926) by W. Faulkner. "Lostness" in the environment of post-war violent consumerism sometimes affected the memory of the war in O. Huxley's story "Yellow Chrome" (1921), F. Sk. Fitzgerald's novels "The Great Gatsby" (1925), E. Hemingway "And Rising sun" (1926). The culmination of the corresponding mentality came in 1929, when almost simultaneously the most artistically perfect works were published, embodying the spirit of “lostness”: “The Death of a Hero” by R. Aldington, “All Quiet on the Western Front” by E. M. Remarque, “Farewell, weapon!" Hemingway. By its frankness in conveying not so much the battle-like as the “trench” truth, the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” echoed the book by A. Barbusse, distinguished by greater emotional warmth and humanity - qualities inherited by Remarque’s subsequent novels on a related topic - “Return” (1931 ) and Three Comrades (1938). The mass of soldiers in the novels of Barbusse and Remarque, poems by E. Toller, plays by G. Kaiser and M. Anderson were opposed by the individualized images of Hemingway's novel Farewell to Arms! Participating along with Dos Passos, M. Cowley and other Americans in operations on the European front, the writer largely summed up the “military theme”, immersed in an atmosphere of “lostness”. The adoption by Hemingway in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) of the principle of the ideological and political responsibility of the artist marked not only a certain milestone in his own work, but also the exhaustion of the emotional and psychological message of The Lost Generation.

In his new novel Fiesta, which was very important to him, Hemingway as an epigraph, as mentioned above, used the recent statement of the famous writer, his friend Gertrude Stein: "You are all a lost generation." For a while, he even considered calling the novel The Lost Generation. Different versions of Hemingway's account of the episode that brought to life Gertrude Stein's remark shed some light on the change in their relationship. In an unpublished preface, written in September 1925, when he had just finished editing the manuscript, he talks about this episode in a rather straightforward way. Gertrude Stein traveled in the summer in the department of Ain and parked her car in a garage in a small village. One young mechanic seemed to her especially diligent. She complimented him on the garage owner and asked how he managed to find such good workers. The owner of the garage replied that he taught him himself; guys this age learn with alacrity. These are those who are now from twenty-two to thirty, those who went through the war - you can’t teach them anything. They are "une generation perdue", so the owner of the garage said. In his preface, Hemingway made it clear that his generation was "lost" in a different way than the "lost generations" of yesteryear.

The second version of the incident, given by Hemingway thirty years later in "A Holiday That Is Always With You," is told with a different mood, and the definition itself is perceived very ironically. According to this later version, the young mechanic is a representative of the "lost generation" who spent a year at the front. He wasn't "experienced" enough in his business, and Gertrude Stein complained about him to the owner of the garage, perhaps, Hemingway suggests, because the mechanic simply did not want to serve her out of turn. The patron reprimanded him, saying: "All of you are generation perdue!" According to this version, Gertrude Stein accused the entire "lost generation" - including Hemingway - of having no respect for anything and that they would all inevitably get drunk.

Gertrude Stein's account of the "lost generation" story is less detailed than Hemingway's. She first heard this expression from the owner of the Pernollet Hotel in Belle, a city in the department of Ain: “He said that every man becomes a civilized being between eighteen and twenty-five years old. If he does not go through the necessary experience at this age, he will not become a civilized person. Men who went to war at the age of eighteen have missed this period and can never become civilized. They are the Lost Generation.

After the end of the First World War, a whole literary trend developed in European and American literatures associated with the description of the tragedy of the “lost generation”. Its appearance was recorded in 1929, when three novels were published: “The Death of a Hero” by the Englishman Aldington, “All Quiet on the Western Front” by the German Remarque and “Farewell to Arms!” American Hemingway. In literature, the lost generation was defined, named so with the light hand of Hemingway, who put the epigraph to his first novel Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises" (1926) words by Gertrude Stein "You are all a lost generation." These words turned out to be an accurate definition of the general feeling of loss and longing that the authors of these books brought with them, having gone through the war. There was so much despair and pain in their novels that they were defined as a mournful cry for those killed in the war, even if the heroes were fleeing from bullets. This is a requiem for a whole generation that did not take place because of the war, on which the ideals and values ​​that were taught from childhood crumbled like fake castles. The war exposed the lies of many familiar dogmas and state institutions, such as the family and the school, turned false moral values ​​inside out and plunged young men who grew old into an abyss of unbelief and loneliness Foreign literature of the twentieth century. M., 1997, p.76.

The heroes of the books of the writers of the “lost generation”, as a rule, are very young, one might say, from the school bench and belong to the intelligentsia. For them, the path of Barbusse and his "clarity" seem unattainable. They are individualists and, like the heroes of Hemingway, rely only on themselves, on their own will, and if they are capable of a decisive social act, then separately concluding a “treaty with the war” and deserting. Remarque's heroes find solace in love and friendship without giving up Calvados. This is their peculiar form of protection from the world, which accepts war as a way to resolve political conflicts. The heroes of the literature of the “lost generation” are inaccessible to unity with the people, the state, the class, as was observed in Barbusse. The Lost Generation countered the world that deceived them with bitter irony, rage, uncompromising and all-encompassing criticism of the foundations of a false civilization, which determined the place of this literature in realism, despite the pessimism that it has in common with the literature of modernism.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898 - 1970) belongs to a generation of writers whose views were formed under the influence of the First World War, which for many years determined the range of topics, the characters of his characters, their worldview and life path. Right from the school bench, Remarque stepped into the trenches. Returning from the front, he could not find himself for a long time: he was a journalist, a small trader, a school teacher, and worked in a car repair shop.

From a deep inner need to tell what shocked and horrified him, what turned his ideas about good and evil upside down, his first novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) was born, which brought him success.

In the epigraph to the novel, he writes: "This book is neither an accusation nor a confession, it is only an attempt to tell about the generation that was destroyed by the war, about those who became its victims, even if they escaped the shells." But the novel went beyond these limits, becoming both a confession and an accusation.

The young heroes of the novel, yesterday's schoolchildren who fell into the heat of war, are only nineteen years old. Everything that seemed holy and unshakable, in the face of a hurricane of fire and mass graves, is insignificant and worthless. They have no life experience, what they learned at school cannot help alleviate the last torment of the dying, teach them to crawl under fire, drag the wounded, sit in a funnel.

The novel became an accusatory document that Remarque so vividly revealed the tragedy of a whole generation. Remarque stigmatizes war, showing its cruel bestial face. His hero dies not in an attack, not in a battle, he is killed on one of the days of calm. A human life, once given and unique, perished. Paul Bäumer always says “we”, he has the right to do so: there were many like him. He speaks on behalf of a whole generation - the living, but spiritually killed by the war, and the dead, left on the fields of Russia and France. They would later be called the "lost generation". “The war has made us worthless people ... We are cut off from rational activity, from human aspirations, from progress. We don't believe in them anymore,” says E.M. Remarque Boymer. No change on the western front. M., 1989, p.92.

Remarque's continuation of the front-line theme will be the novels "Return" (1931) and "Three Comrades" (1938) - true stories about war victims who were bypassed by shells. Tired, devastated, having lost hope, they will not be able to take root in the post-war everyday life, although they profess the morality of survival - friendship and brotherhood.

The scene of the novel "Three Comrades" (1938) is Germany in the 20-30s: unemployment, inflation, suicides, hungry, pale shadows in front of the sparkling windows of grocery stores. Against this gray, bleak background, the story of three comrades unfolds - representatives of the "lost generation", whose hopes are killed by the war, incapable of resistance and struggle. Friends who are ready to go through fire and water for each other are powerless to change anything because they are convinced that nothing can be changed. “And what, in fact, prevents us from living, Otto?” Lokamp asks, but gets no answer. Remarque E.M. Three comrades does not answer this question either. M., 1997. With. 70.

Remarque rejected the war, was an anti-fascist, but his anti-fascism, unlike, say, the position of Barbusse, did not include collective resistance.

In 1946, Remarque published the Arc de Triomphe novel about Paris in 1938, in which again anti-fascist resistance appears as an individual act of revenge. In Remarque's novel, the idea that human life is meaningless sounds more and more insistently. The image of Ravik, who entered the novel, fell apart, a completely different person acts in the novel. This is one of the people of the "lost generation" without faith in life, in man, in progress, even without faith in friends.

Pacifist individualism prevails in Remarque over open anti-fascism. In the novel "A Time to Live and a Time to Die" (1954), we first get acquainted with Remarque's new hero - this is a person who thinks and looks for an answer, aware of his responsibility for what is happening.

Graeber from the first day of the war on the front of France, Africa, Russia. He goes on vacation, and there, in the terrified, shaking city, a great selfless love for Elizabeth is born. "A little happiness was drowning in a bottomless quagmire of common disasters and despair."

Graeber begins to wonder if he is guilty of crimes against humanity, should he return to the front in order to increase the number of crimes with his participation than to atone for his guilt. At the end of the novel, Graeber guards the captured partisans and finally, after painful reflections, decides to let them out of the basement to freedom. But the Russian partisan kills him with the rifle that Graeber killed the Nazi with a minute before. Such is Remarque's sentence to a man who has decided to take the path of active struggle. In all his novels, Remarque claims that for everyone who follows the path of political struggle, the “time to die” will come.

The hero of the novel is a young man, George Winterbourne, who at the age of 16 read all the poets, starting with Chaucer, an individualist and esthete, who sees around him the hypocrisy of “family morality”, flashy social contrasts, and decadent art.

Once on the front, he becomes serial number 31819, convinced of the criminal nature of the war. At the front, no personalities are needed, no talents are needed, only obedient soldiers are needed there. The hero could not and did not want to adapt, did not learn to lie and kill. Arriving on vacation, he looks at life and society in a completely different way, acutely feeling his loneliness: neither his parents, nor his wife, nor his girlfriend could comprehend the measure of his despair, understand his poetic soul, or at least not injure her with calculation and efficiency. The war broke him, the desire to live was gone, and in one of the attacks, he exposes himself to a bullet. The motives of George's "strange" and completely unheroic death are obscure to those around him: few people knew about his personal tragedy. His death was rather a suicide, a voluntary exit from the hell of cruelty and shamelessness, an honest choice of an uncompromising talent. His suicide is a recognition of his inability to change the world, a recognition of weakness and hopelessness.

Aldington's novel is a "tomb lament" Foreign literature of the twentieth century. M., 1997, p.79. Despair overwhelms the author so much that neither compassion, nor sympathy, nor even love, so saving for the heroes of Remarque and Hemingway, can help. Even among other books of the "lost generation", uncompromising and harsh, Aldington's novel has no equal in terms of the power of denying the notorious Victorian values.

The difference between Hemingway and other writers who covered the topic of the “lost generation” is that Hemingway, belonging to the “lost generation”, unlike Aldington and Remarque, not only does not resign himself to his lot - he argues with the very concept of the “lost generation” as a synonym doom. Heroes of Hemingway courageously resist fate, stoically overcome alienation. Such is the core of the writer's moral quest - the famous Hemingway code or canon of stoic opposition to the tragedy of being. He is followed by Jake Barnes, Frederick Henry, Harry Morgan, Robert Jordan, old man Santiago, the colonel - all the real heroes of Hemingway.

This type of literature has developed in the USA and Europe. Writers of this trend were active in this subject for 10 years after the First World War.

1929 - the appearance of Aldington's novels "Death of a Hero", Remarque's "On the West French .." and Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms".

"You are all a lost generation" - Hemingway's epigraph then became lit. term.

"Writers lost their generations" - an accurate definition of the mood of people who went through the First World War; pessimists deceived by propaganda; lost the ideals that were instilled in them in the world of life; the war destroyed many dogmas, state institutions; the war found them in unbelief and loneliness. The heroes of PPP are deprived of much, they are not capable of uniting with the people, the state, the class, as a result of the war they oppose themselves to the world that deceived them, they carry bitter irony, criticism of the foundations of a false civilization. The literature of PPP is seen as part of the litas of realism, despite the pessimism that brings it closer to the litas of modernism.

“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? Everything collapsed, falsified and forgotten. 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 rejoiced. Corruption. Poverty".

With these words of one of his heroes, E. M. Remarque expressed the essence of the worldview of his peers - people of the “lost generation”, - those who went straight from school to the trenches of the First World War. Then they childishly clearly and unconditionally believed everything they were taught, heard, read about progress, civilization, humanism; they believed ringing phrases of conservative or liberal, nationalist or social-democratic slogans and programs, everything that they were taught in their parents' house, from pulpits, from the pages of newspapers ...

But what could any words, any speeches mean in the roar and stench of a hurricane fire, in the fetid mud of trenches flooded with a mist of suffocating gases, in the cramped dugouts and infirmary wards, in front of endless rows of soldiers' graves or heaps of mangled corpses - in front of all the terrible, ugly variety daily, monthly, senseless deaths, mutilations, suffering and animal fear of people - men, youths, boys ...

All ideals shattered into dust under the inevitable blows of reality. They were incinerated by the fiery everyday life of the war, they were drowned in the mud by the everyday life of the post-war years. Then, after several short outbreaks and a long extinction of the German revolution, volleys of punishers crackled on the working outskirts, shooting the defenders of the last barricades, and in the quarters of the “shibers” - the new rich people who had profited from the war - orgies did not stop. Then in public life and in the whole life of German cities and towns, which until recently had been so proud of impeccable tidiness, strict order and burgher integrity, poverty and debauchery reigned, devastation and turmoil grew, family piggy banks and human souls were devastated.

It suddenly turned out that the war and the first post-war years destroyed not only millions of lives, but also ideas, concepts; not only industry and transport were destroyed, but also the simplest ideas about what is good and what is bad; the economy was shaken, money and moral principles depreciated.

Those Germans who understood the real reasons and the real meaning of the war and the disasters caused by it and were courageous enough, followed Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Ernest Thalmann. But they were also in the minority. And this was one of the reasons for the subsequent tragic fate of Germany. However, many of the Germans did not support and could not even understand the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Some sincerely, but inactively, sympathized and sympathized, others hated or feared, and the vast majority looked in confusion and bewilderment from the sidelines at what seemed to them a continuation of the fratricidal bloodshed of the great war, they did not distinguish between right and wrong. When detachments of Spartacists and Red Guards fought desperate battles for the right to live, for work and happiness for the entire German people, fighting against the forces of reaction many times superior, many Germans, together with the hero of Remarque's novel, only mournfully noted: "Soldiers fight against soldiers, comrades against comrades."

Aldington, in search of solutions to old and new issues, took up mainly journalism. Remarque tried longer than others to stay in line, outlined already at the very beginning of his creative life, and to maintain in the years of new great upheavals the unstable balance of the tragic worldview of his youth.

This tragic neutralism is especially acute and painful in the consciousness and worldview of those thinking and honest former soldiers who, after the terrible experience of the war and the first post-war years, have already lost confidence in the very concepts of “politics”, “idea”, “civilization”, without even imagining that there is an honest policy, that there are noble ideas, that a civilization is possible that is not hostile to man.

They grew old, not knowing their youth, and it was very difficult for them to live later: in the years of inflation, “stabilization” and a new economic crisis with its mass unemployment and mass poverty. It was difficult for them everywhere - both in Europe and in America, in the big cities of noisy, colorful, hectic, feverishly active and indifferent to the suffering of millions of little people who teemed in these reinforced concrete, brick and asphalt labyrinths. It was no easier in the villages or on the farms, where life was slower, more monotonous, primitive, but just as indifferent to the troubles and sufferings of man.

And many of these thoughtful and honest ex-soldiers turned away with contemptuous disbelief from all the great and complex social problems of our time, but they did not want to be neither slaves, nor slave owners, nor martyrs, nor tormentors. They went through life mentally devastated, but stubborn in observing their simple, severe principles; cynical, rude, they were devoted to the few truths in which they retained confidence: male friendship, soldier camaraderie, simple humanity.

Mockingly putting aside the pathos of abstract general concepts, they recognized and honored only concrete goodness. They were disgusted by high-flown words about the nation, the fatherland, the state, and they never grew up to the concept of class. They greedily seized on any work and worked hard and conscientiously - the war and years of unemployment brought up in them an extraordinary greed for productive work. They mindlessly debauched, but they also knew how to be sternly tender husbands and fathers; they could cripple a random opponent in a tavern brawl, but they could, without further ado, risk their lives, blood, last property for the sake of a comrade and simply for the sake of a person who aroused an instant feeling of affection or compassion.

They were all called the "lost generation". However, these were different people - their social status and personal destinies were different. And the literature of the “lost generation”, which arose in the twenties, was also created by the work of various writers - such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Aldington, Remarque. Common to these writers was a worldview determined by a passionate denial of war and militarism. But in this denial, sincere and noble, there was a complete misunderstanding of the socio-historical nature, the nature of the misfortunes and deformities of reality: they denounced severely and irreconcilably, but without any hope for the possibility of a better one, in a tone of bitter, bleak pessimism.

However, the differences in the ideological and creative development of these literary "peers" were very significant. They affected the subsequent destinies of the writers of the “lost generation”. Hemingway broke out of the tragically hopeless circle of his problems and his heroes by participating in the heroic battle of the Spanish people against fascism. Despite all the writer's hesitations and doubts, the lively, hot breath of the people's struggle for freedom gave new strength, a new scope to his work, brought him beyond the limits of one generation. On the contrary, Dos Passos, having fallen under the influence of the reaction, now and then opposing himself to the progressive social forces, was hopelessly aging, creatively smaller. He not only failed to outgrow his unfortunate generation, but sank below it. Everything of any significance in his former work is connected with the problems that worried the soldiers of the First World War.

1. To the concept of "lost generation". In the 1820s a new group enters literature, the idea of ​​which is associated with the image of the “lost generation”. These are young people who visited the fronts of the First World War, shocked by cruelty, unable to enter the rut of life in the post-war period. They got their name from the phrase attributed to G. Stein "You are all a lost generation." The origins of the attitude of this informal literary group lie in a sense of disappointment with the course and results of the First World War. The death of millions called into question the idea of ​​positivism about "beneficial progress", undermined faith in the rationality of democracy.

In a broad sense, “lostness” is a consequence of a break both with the system of values ​​dating back to Puritanism and with the pre-war idea of ​​the subject matter and style of the work. Writers of the Lost Generation are distinguished by:

Skepticism about progress, pessimism, which made the “lost” related to the modernists, but did not mean the identity of ideological and aesthetic aspirations.

The depiction of war from the positions of naturalism is combined with the inclusion of the experience gained in the mainstream of human experiences. The war appears either as a given, replete with repulsive details, or as an annoying memory, disturbing the psyche, preventing the transition to peaceful life.

Painful comprehension of loneliness

The search for a new ideal is primarily in terms of artistic mastery: a tragic mood, the theme of self-knowledge, lyrical tension.

The ideal is in disappointment, the illusion of "a nightingale's song through the wild voice of catastrophes" in other words - "victory - in defeat").

Picturesque style.

The heroes of the works are individualists who are not alien to the highest values ​​(sincere love, devoted friendship). The experiences of the heroes are the bitterness of realizing their own "beaten out", which, however, does not mean a choice in favor of other ideologies. Heroes are apolitical: participation in the public struggle prefer to withdraw into the sphere of illusions, intimate, deeply personal experiences"(A.S. Mulyarchik).

2. Literature of the "lost generation". Chronologically, the group announced itself with the novels Three Soldiers (1921) J. dos Passosa, "Great Camera" (1922) E. Cummings, "Soldier's Award" (1926) W. Faulkner. The motif of "lostness" in an environment of violent post-war consumerism seemed at first glance out of direct connection with the memory of the war in novels. F.S. Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) and E. Hemingway"The Sun Also Rises" (1926). The peak of the mentality of "lostness" came in 1929, when almost simultaneously the works of R. Aldington("Death of a Hero") EM. remark("All Quiet on the Western Front"), E. Hemingway("A Farewell to Arms").

By the end of the decade (1920s), the main idea of ​​the work of the lost was that a person is constantly in a state of hostilities with a hostile and indifferent world, the main attributes of which are the army and bureaucracy.

Ernest Miller Hemingway(1899 - 1961) - American journalist, Nobel laureate, participant in the First World War. He wrote little about America: the action of the novel The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) takes place in Spain and France; "A Farewell to Arms!" - in Italy; "The Old Man and the Sea" - in Cuba. The main motive of creativity is loneliness. Hemingway the writer is distinguished by the following features:

Non-bookish style (influenced by journalistic experience): conciseness, precision of detail, lack of embellishment of the text

Careful work on the composition - an event that is insignificant at first glance, behind which stands a human drama, is considered. Often a piece of life is taken "without beginning and end" (influence of impressionism)

Creation of a realistic picture of the post-war period: the description of the conditions of reality is given with the help of verbs of motion, full detonation, appeal to the sensory perception of reality.

The use of a Chekhov-like manner of emotional impact on the reader: the author's intonation combined with subtext, what Hemingway himself called the "iceberg principle" - “if the writer knows well what he is writing about, he can omit much of what he knows, and if he writes truthfully, the reader will feel everything omitted as much as if the writer had said it”(E. Hemingway). Each word has a hidden meaning, so any piece of text can be omitted, but the overall emotional impact will remain. Sample - short story "Cat in the rain."

Dialogues are external and internal, when the characters exchange insignificant phrases, broken and random, but the reader feels behind these words hidden deep in the minds of the characters (something that cannot always be expressed directly).

Hero - in a duel with himself: a stoic code.

Novel "Fiesta"- pessimistic, it is also called the manifesto of the early Hemingway. The main idea of ​​the novel is the superiority of man in his striving for life, despite his uselessness at the celebration of life. The thirst for love and the rejection of love - the code of the stoic. The main issue is the "art of living" in the new conditions. Life is a carnival. The main symbol is bullfighting, and the art of the matador is the answer to the question - “how to live?”.

Anti-war novel "Farewell to Arms!" depicts the path of insight of a hero who runs away from the war without thinking, without thinking, because he simply wants to live. The philosophy of "gaining is in losses" is shown on the example of the fate of one person.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald(1896 - 1940) a writer who announced to the world the beginning of the "jazz age", embodied the values ​​of the younger generation, where youth, pleasure and carefree fun were brought to the fore. The heroes of early works were largely identified by the reader and critics with the author himself (as the embodiment of the American dream), so the serious novels The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934) remained misunderstood, as they became a kind of debunking the myth of the American dream in the country equal opportunities.

Although in general the writer's work fits into the framework of classical literature, Fitzgerald was one of the first in American literature to develop the principles of lyrical prose. Lyrical prose involves romantic symbols, the universal meaning of works, attention to the movements of the human soul. Since the writer himself was under the influence of the myth of the American dream for a long time, therefore, the motive of wealth is central in the novels.

Fitzgerald's style suggests the following features:

The artistic technique of "double vision" - in the process of narration, a contrast is revealed, a combination of opposites. One and: the poles of double vision - irony, mockery. (The very nickname Great).

Using the technique of comedy of manners: the hero is absurd, a little unreal

The motive of loneliness, alienation (largely dating back to romanticism, which existed until the end of the 19th century) is Gatsby. does not fit into the environment, both externally (habits, language) and internally (preserves love, moral values)

Unusual composition. The novel begins with a climax. Although at first it was supposed to refer to the childhood of the hero

He held the idea that a person of the 20th century, with his fragmented consciousness and chaos of being, must live in harmony with moral truth.

The creative experiment begun by Parisian expatriates, the pre-war modernists Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, was continued by young prose writers and poets, who came to American literature in the 1920s and subsequently brought it 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 required artistic embodiment. This invariably misled Soviet scholars, who declared these writers "critical realists." American critics labeled them as "lost generation".

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

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

Other programmatic poetic works of the "lost generation" - T. Eliot's poems "The Waste Land" (1922) and "The Hollow Men" (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 enduring values ​​of life: 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, the search for enduring values, stoic individualism. Together with the same, exacerbated tragic worldview, this determined the presence in prose of a number of "lost" common features that are obvious, despite the diversity of individual artistic styles of individual authors.

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

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

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

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

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

All the heroes of the "lost" are building their own, alternative 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 meaningless deaths appear in the novels of the "lost" as a kind of artistic expression of the thought 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 in their works as a kind of apocalyptic metaphor for the 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 commonality of the "lost", their spiritual brotherhood, mixed with young hot blood, turned out to be stronger than the thoughtful calculations of various literary groups that disintegrated, leaving no trace in the work of their members.