The history of the 20th century is marked by the deepest social upheavals: two world wars, which brought huge casualties and destruction, many other "local" wars, revolutions, the formation and collapse of totalitarian regimes, the crimes of Hitlerism and Stalinism, the genocide of entire nations, the mass extermination of people in concentration camps and the creation of an atomic and hydrogen weapons, a period of "cold war", political repression and an exhausting arms race; the collapse of colonial empires, the entry into the political arena of new independent states, the defeat of the socialist system in the confrontation with " free world”, finally outlined since the 1980s. a decisive turn towards peaceful coexistence and cooperation, the beginning of a general movement of many states in the mainstream of democracy and reforms.
Inside this historical period the chronological boundary is clearly drawn: the end of the Second World War. There are two periods: literature 1918-1945. and literature after 1945. Social conflicts unfolded against the backdrop of greatest discoveries in the field of science, in particular in medicine, genetics, cybernetics, computer science, which significantly influenced the mentality, lifestyle, and the very conditions of human existence. All this has received a complex, ambiguous reflection in literature, which is characterized by an exceptional variety of writers' personalities, richness artistic styles, fruitful innovative searches in the field of form, means of expression, content. It is significant that many new (African, Asian, Latin American) literatures have been added to the "traditional" Western European literatures, whose representatives have become world famous. Among these phenomena: the Latin American novel, created in the spirit of the so-called "magical realism" (Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis, Borges, etc.); Japanese philosophical novel (Abe Kobo, Yasunari Kawabata, Oe Kenzabure, etc.); Icelandic novel (X. Laxness); the poetry of Nazim Hikmet (Turkey) and Pablo Neruda (Chile); "drama of the absurd" by Samuel Beckett (Ireland) and other winners Nobel Prize Literature has become in our century representatives of many countries, all continents. Contacts of writers deepened, interconnections and mutual enrichment of various national literatures. Russia ranks first in the world in terms of the quantity and quality of translations by foreign writers.
In a multicolored panorama literary process in the 20th century several leading currents and trends are drawn. First of all, it is modernism, a philosophical and aesthetic trend both in literature and in art, which entered a new phase after the First World War, inheriting and continuing the traditions of decadence and avant-garde that preceded it at the turn of the century. Modernism, as the name implies, declared itself contemporary art, using new forms and means of expression, corresponding to the new realities of the 20th century, as opposed to the "old-fashioned" art, focused on the realism of the last century. Modernism in its own way vividly and impressively reflected the crisis phenomena in life. modern society, the process of its deep dehumanization, conveyed a feeling of a person’s powerlessness in the face of forces that are difficult to explain and hostile to him, the confrontation between a person and the environment, the exclusion of an individual, doomed, lonely, from social ties. The personification of such a total impotence of a person, his doom was Gregor Samza from Kafka's short story "The Metamorphosis". Modernists placed special emphasis on the image inner peace person as self-sufficient. At the same time, they relied on the achievements of modern science, in particular psychology, on the latest psychological and philosophical theories of Freud, Bergson, and on the philosophy of existentialism. They introduced a number of new techniques into everyday life, such as, for example, the “stream of consciousness”, widely used the genre of parable, allegory, and philosophical allegory. Among the modernists were the largest, most talented artists, such as Franz Kafka, author of the novels "The Trial", "The Castle", world-famous short stories-parables; Marcel Proust, author of the epic In Search of Lost Time; James Joyce, author of the philosophical-allegorical novel Ulysses, one of the greatest works of verbal art of our century; poet T. S. Eliot and others. In the mainstream of modernism there are such interesting phenomena in the literature of the 20th century, mainly in the second half of it, as “ new novel"(or" anti-novel "), which was developed in France in the 1950s-1970s. (Natalie Sarrot and others), as a "drama of the absurd" (in the work of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett).
Russian literature of the early 20th century. Basic historical and literary information
Socio - political features of the era and culture. Science, culture, literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
By the end of the 19th century, the crisis phenomena in the Russian economy intensified. The failure of the reform of 1861, which did not decide the fate of the peasantry, led to the emergence of Marxism in Russia, which staked on the development of industry and a new revolutionary class - the proletariat.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of a person who is not only rebellious, but also capable of remaking the era, creating history, is being developed not only in the philosophy of Marxism, but also in the work of M. Gorky and his followers, who persistently brought to the fore the Man with great letters, master of the land, revolutionary.
Another group of cultural figures, convinced after the tragic events of 1881 (the assassination of the liberator Tsar Alexander II), and especially after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, in the inhumanity of revolutionary paths, came to the idea of a spiritual revolution. Philosophers and artists of this trend considered the improvement of the inner world of man to be the main thing.
It was at this time that the heyday of Russian religious and philosophical thought fell. Russia's entry into the world war brought the country to the brink of disaster. And not only because it undermined its fragile economy. The anarchy generated by the unsuccessful course of the war for Russia at the beginning of 1917 led to October revolution, after which the country turned into a fundamentally different public education.
At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the main background literary development there were not only socio-political circumstances of life, but revolutionary changes also took place in science, philosophical ideas about the world and man changed, and arts adjacent to literature developed rapidly. Scientific and philosophical views are always an important component of a cultural era, but at certain stages in the history of culture they have a particularly serious influence on word artists. The silver age of Russian literature also belongs to such epochs.
The beginning of the new century was the time of fundamental natural-scientific discoveries, primarily in the field of physics and mathematics.
At the turn of the century, the conditions for the existence of art also changed rapidly. The growth of the urban population in Russia, the shifts in the field of public education and, finally, the renewal of technical means serving the arts - all this led to a rapid growth in the audience and readership. In 1885, a private Opera theatre S. I. Mamontova; rapidly developed since 1895 the new kind arts - cinema; in the 1890s, activities began accessible to a democratic audience Tretyakov Gallery and Moscow art theater. These and many other facts of the cultural life of Russia testify to the main thing - the dynamic growth of the audience attached to art, the increasing resonance of events cultural life. New theaters are opening, much more often than before, they are held art exhibitions new publishing houses are organized. A stormy heyday is going through at this time theatrical art. Art receives unprecedented opportunities to influence the spiritual life of the country.
A specific sign of culture at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries is the active interaction of different arts. Cases of creative universalism are not uncommon: for example, M. Kuzmin combined poetry with composing, the futurist poets D. Burliuk, V. Mayakovsky were engaged in fine arts. Even genre designations were sometimes borrowed at that time from related arts: A. Scriabin called his symphonic works "poems"; Andrei Bely, on the contrary, gave his literary opuses the genre definition of "symphonies".
Another noticeable feature of the art of the beginning of the century was the strengthening of contacts with world culture, the more active use of the experience of not only domestic, but also foreign art. By the end of the 19th century, Russian culture naturally fit into the context of the world: F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, P. Tchaikovsky became unconditional international authorities. By the beginning of the 20th century, any noticeable phenomenon of, say, French culture immediately became the property of Russian. And vice versa: for example, thanks to the efforts of S. Diaghilev, Russian ballet quickly gained the highest European reputation. Such a wide interchange of Russian and European cultures contributed to the active translation activities of writers and patronage of Russian industrialists.
The rapidly changing life at the beginning of the 20th century required new forms of reflection of reality. Therefore, along with the realism that reigned at that time, a new literary direction- modernism. Realism and modernism developed in parallel and, as a rule, in struggle with each other.
At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, Russian literature becomes multilayered. The delimitation of realism and modernism and the intermediate phenomena located between them is explained not so much by the struggle of literary groups and schools, but by the emergence in literature of opposite ideas about the tasks of art and, accordingly, different views on the place of man in the world. It is a different assessment of the possibilities and destiny of a person that separates realism and modernism into different channels of a single literature.
Realism.
Realism at the turn of the century continued to be a large-scale and influential literary movement. Suffice it to say that L. Tolstoy and A. Chekhov still lived and worked in the 1900s. The most striking talents among the new realists belonged to the writers who united in the Moscow circle "Sreda" in the 1890s, and in the early 1900s they formed the circle of permanent authors of the "Knowledge" publishing house (M. Gorky was one of its owners and the de facto leader) . In addition to the leader of the association, in different years it included L. Andreev, I. Bunin, V. Veresaev, N. Garin-Mikhailovsky, A. Kuprin, I. Shmelev and other writers. With the exception of I. Bunin, there were no major poets among the realists; they showed themselves primarily in prose and, less noticeably, in dramaturgy. The influence of this group of writers was largely due to the fact that it was she who inherited the traditions of the great Russian literature XIX century.
However, the immediate predecessors of the new generation of realists already in the 1880s seriously updated the look of the trend. The creative searches of the late L. Tolstoy, V. Korolenko, A. Chekhov contributed to artistic practice a lot of unusual by the standards of classical realism. A. Chekhov's experience turned out to be especially important for the next generation of realists. The generation of realist writers of the early 20th century inherited from Chekhov new principles of writing - with much greater freedom of the author than before; with a much broader arsenal artistic expressiveness; with a sense of proportion, obligatory for the artist, which was provided by increased internal self-criticism. The generation of realists at the beginning of the 20th century inherited from Chekhov constant attention to the personality of a person, his individuality.
The typology of characters has been noticeably updated in realism. Outwardly, the writers followed the tradition: in their works one could find recognizable types of a “little man” or an intellectual who experienced a spiritual drama, but in essence these types were completely different. The peasant remained one of the central figures in their prose. But even the traditional "peasant" characterology has changed: more and more often in stories and novels appeared new type"thinking" man.
Significantly updated at the beginning of the 20th century genre system and style of realistic prose. Breaking habitual foundations, the collapse of old traditions, the relationship between generations of fathers and children, the search for a new ideological core of life attracts the attention of writers. The lack of stability in the relationship between man and society, between man and the environment affected the genre restructuring of realistic prose. The central place in the genre hierarchy at that time was occupied by the most mobile forms: the story and the essay. The novel practically disappeared from the genre repertoire of realism: the story became the largest epic genre. Not a single novel in the exact meaning of this term was written by the most significant realists of the early 20th century - I. Bunin and M. Gorky.
Having lost the epic scale and integrity of their vision of the world compared to the classics of the 19th century, the realists of the beginning of the century compensated for these losses with a sharper perception of life and greater expression in expression. author's position. The general logic of the development of realism at the beginning of the century was to strengthen the role of heightened expressive forms. What mattered to the writer now was not so much the proportionality of the proportions of the reproduced fragment of life as the intensity of the expression of the author's emotions. This was achieved by sharpening the plot situations, when extremely dramatic, “borderline” states in the lives of the characters were described in close-up.
Modernism was characterized by extreme internal instability: various currents and groups were continuously transformed, emerged and disintegrated and united.
In literary criticism, it is customary to call modernist, first of all, three literary movements that declared themselves in the period from 1890 to 1917. These are symbolism, acmeism and futurism, which formed the basis of modernism as a literary movement. On the periphery of it, other, not so aesthetically distinct and less significant phenomena of the “new” literature arose.
The deep aspirations of those in conflict with each other modernist movements turned out to be very similar, despite the sometimes striking stylistic dissimilarity, the difference in tastes and literary tactics. That is why the best poets of the era rarely closed themselves within a certain literary school or currents. Therefore, the real picture of the literary process at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries is determined to a much greater extent by the creative personalities of writers and poets than by the history of trends and trends.
31. The interaction of realism and modernism in the "neorealist" prose of the 1910s. (E. Zamyatin "County" / A. Remizov "Indefatigable tambourine" / I. Bunin "Mr. from San Francisco")
Sources:
1. Realism and neorealism // Russian literature of the turn of the century (1890s - early 1920s) M., 2000.
2. Eichenbaum B. Terrible way; Leskov and modern prose // Eikhenbaum B. On Literature. M., 1987.
Beginning in the 40s of the 19th century, Russian literature developed under the predominant influence of one artistic direction(meaning his sovereignty in prose - the dominant literary genre of his time) - realism, and many confrontations, even the most decisive ones - creative, ideological - played out within him. But with the gradual approval in the 1890s. new, modernist art, the literary movement becomes a field of rivalry between two special systems artistic thinking, whose adherents at first were very passionate and intolerant of each other.
At the turn of the century, the modernists opposed themselves to the "realists", the writers of the "Knowledge" community (led by M. Gorky). Sharp verbal battles between the two sides testified, of course, to the real differences between the parties, but did not reflect the full complexity of their relationship. A gradual rapprochement was planned between the Symbolists and the "Znanevtsy". Symptomatic contacts arose during the years of the First Russian Revolution (1905) on the basis of a general opposition to the existing political regime.
Later, from the second half of the 1900s to the beginning of the 1910s, contacts expanded and changed, increasingly affecting the deep, actually creative layers - world-contemplative and artistic, stimulating interest in the exchange of experience. Bryusov's statement in his review of Gumilyov's "Pearls" in 1910 is symptomatic: "Today, 'idealistic' art is forced to clear positions taken too hastily. The future clearly belongs to some as yet unfound synthesis between 'realism' and 'idealism'." In those same years, the idea of a unifying word, which should reconcile all schools, was also born among the adherents of realism. But they approached her from the other side. If Bryusov complained about the excess of "idealism" in the work of like-minded people, then a different literary-critical environment - just about the lack of it in previous realistic literature.
It was at this time (late 1900s - early 1910s) that the term "recent realism" (or "neorealism" or "new realism") was widely used. But different meanings were invested in this concept:
one). On the one hand, in the "new realism" they saw the processes that took place within the realist movement: dissociation from naturalism late XIX century, a return to the tradition of classical realism and updating it at the expense of individual "technical" achievements of the modernists.
2). On the other hand, the interpretation of the concept of "neorealism" in the modernist circle went in the opposite direction and, however, contained special meanings. M. Voloshin, for example, in the article "Henri de Regnier" (1910) writes that the mother bosom of "neorealism" is still symbolism, and the transition from symbolism to new realism is, in fact, a collision within the modernist movement
From Bely and Sologub to Bunin and Kuprin - such is the range of names attached to the "new realism", if we keep in mind the general picture of the judgments and opinions of that time.
The birth of “neorealism” in Russia took place against the backdrop of a process of transformation of realism in world literature in general, which proceeded on the verge of centuries under the influence of general historical reasons (the need to comprehend a fundamentally new state of the world) and internal literary reasons (the feeling of the exhaustion of the former art forms and the search for a new language).
The same reasons were at work in Russian literature. In addition, the historical reality of our country also had a significant impact on the course of the literary process. Primarily, we are talking about the political reaction that followed the First Russian Revolution. At the same time, for both modernists and realists, the universally contemplative lessons of what happened turned out to be more important than its direct socio-political essence. Hence such a feature of "neorealism": a narrative, directly or veiled, turned to events political history attracts "neorealists" less than element of life . "Longing for everyday life" - this is how Marietta Shaginyan's article is characteristically titled. Shaginyan writes about the polemical predilection of the "neorealists" for dense, material life as opposed to the symbolist "other worlds". At the same time, Keldysh (whose article, by the way, I have been retelling all this time) distinguishes two types of everyday writing:
one). "History through everyday life" - "everyday" is opposed to "historical". The work of the “bytoviki”, although it retains the constant presence of history, moves away from the historical arena as a direct “object”. A wide range of problems is extracted from everyday everyday material. Adherents of such life writing Keldysh refers to "sociological realism".
2). “Being through life” is a special synthesis of the existential and socially concrete worldview with the rise of the first over the second.
It is noteworthy that the everyday theme is often associated with the image of a vast Russian outback. In the Russian social and spiritual life of that time, there was a growing interest in everything "district". It was from there that they waited for answers to painful questions about the future of Russia. The image of the county wilderness, overwhelmed by the philistine elements, we also see in the stories of Remizov "The indefatigable tambourine" (1909) and Zamyatin's "County" (1913). The action in both works takes place in the wilderness: a specific place is not named: in Zamyatin it is simply “district”, “our places”, in Remizov it is “our city”. The narrator's attention is focused exclusively on everyday life. In detail, in every detail is described everyday life heroes: their activities, everyday habits, things that surround them, for some reason important or not at all important for them.
The question of evolution literary hero in the works of neorealists. If in the realism of the late 90s the idea of the proper type of a person was associated with a strong-willed impulse, a directly effective beginning, with thoughts of a heroic individuality, then the realists new wave committed to the order of ordinary, everyday existence, in which there is nothing heroic. Their hero is not just “not a hero”, but a person “not thinking” at all. This definition can be attributed to the characters of all three works: to the gentleman from San Francisco, to Anfim Baryba ("County") and to Ivan Semenovich Stratilatov ("The indefatigable tambourine"). They are not just "non-thinking", they are downright compared to inanimate objects. So, "Uyezdnoye" ends with words related to the main character: "As if not a man was walking, but an old resurrected kurgan woman, an absurd Russian stone woman." “The indefatigable tambourine” is also understandable - the name of the story is the nickname given to Stratilatov by his colleagues, and the author, calling the story so, reinforces this characterization of the hero. As for Bunin's "master", he is not only nameless, but also dies and not allegorically, but truly turns into an inanimate object, so to speak.
All three works under consideration are characterized by the desire to think not only in terms of today, but also in much broader ones. The wilderness depicted by Zamyatin and Remizov is far from exceptional; it immediately reminds the reader of the well-known remote province from the works of Ostrovsky, Gogol, Leskov, with its “household, pious, sedate people”, who “sleep sweetly after dinner with a full womb”, which ""gates on iron bolts", and "overhead the water is muddy and sleepy." And the heroes, both Zamyatin and Remizov, are generalized images. They are connected with the previous literary tradition (Remiz's Stratilatov resembles Gogol's Bashmachkin - rewriting the story about " little man”), and in addition are shown as types, as the embodiment of the Russian people as a whole (the image of Baryba embodies blind spontaneity, animal, “unthinking” folk principle). As for Bunin, he shows the deadness and inertness of the Western, "civilized" world, and not the Russian wilderness, which does not, however, cancel the depth of the generalization, but simply directs the generalization in a slightly different direction.
Another important issue regarding "neo-realism" is the type of storytelling. In the renewed realist movement (this is what I call “neorealism” for a change), the lyrical narration, characteristic of symbolism, gives way to a subject-pictorial, and even generously descriptive. It is interesting, however, that the growing descriptiveness did not supplant subjectivity, but transformed it. The elements most alienated from the personal principle are now closely intertwined with it, while maintaining an objective intrinsic value. In turn, the author's lyrical voice increasingly loses its isolation, dissolves in the "picture", enters the structure of the external "object". Thus, two counter tendencies are revealed: on the one hand, the "taming" of the lyrical element; on the other hand, the expansion of the empirical boundaries of the objective image, which in a number of cases acquires a widely symbolized meaning. In this sense, the example of Bunin is typical, in which, from a multitude of small and fractional, mosaic scattering of facts, every now and then arises - through a mosaic selection of "dispassionate" details - a broadly generalized, intensely emotional image of almost symbolic meaning. In the figurative symbolism of "The Gentleman from San Francisco" there is also a purely conditional one: the image of the Devil that appears at the end of the story is a symbolic imprint of the "satanic" essence modern writer peace. However, even here, contrary to the seemingly genre nature of the narrative, the main semantic load falls on the descriptive element. Purely everyday - in appearance - situations of the work are equally included in its general parable and allegorical system. So in Bunin, the generalized expressive beginning is organically combined with elements of the traditionally descriptive style.
And finally, the last important feature of "neorealism" is an increased interest in fairy tale form . (Let me remind you that a tale is a form of narration that, in its vocabulary, syntax, and selection of intonations, reveals an orientation to oral speech narrator - B. Eikhenbaum's definition). The author's narration becomes oral speech told in a "foreign" language. This path was suggested by both Gogol and Leskov, and in the literary modernity of that time, above all by Remizov. Both "The indefatigable tambourine" and "County" are vivid examples of the tale. The narrator adapts to the language of the inhabitants of the very outback where the action takes place. (I will not give examples - you will not memorize them by heart). It is interesting that the skaz style is maintained inconsistently. The narrator from time to time switches to "intelligent" speech. Thus, the conditionality of the narrator's "self-alienation" is revealed, the illusory nature of this appearance. This convention is also manifested in the fact that, for example, the "narrator" is often occupied with such questions that would hardly be of interest to a commoner. This is how the conjugation of the personal and the objectified beginning is manifested, as already discussed above.
That is all I have to say on this matter.
Although, perhaps it is worth mentioning a couple of facts:
"Neorealists" of the 1910s were distributed over two platforms, so to speak, these are: “Book Publishing House of Writers in Moscow” (founded in 1912, Bunin belonged to it, Veresaev was the ideologist) and the St. Petersburg magazine “Zavety” (in the same year it appeared, around it, among other , Remizov and Zamyatin were grouped).
Modernism is an ideological trend in literature and art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is characterized by a departure from classical standards, the search for new, radical literary forms and the creation of a completely new style of writing. This direction replaced realism and became the forerunner of postmodernism, the final stage of its development dates back to the 30s of the twentieth century.
The main feature of this trend is a complete change in the classical perception of the worldview: the authors are no longer carriers of absolute truth and ready-made concepts, but rather demonstrate their relativity. The linearity of the narrative disappears, giving way to a chaotic, fragmented plot, fragmented into parts and episodes, often presented on behalf of several characters at once, who may have completely opposite views on current events.
Directions of modernism in literature
Modernism, in turn, branched into several directions, such as:
Symbolism
(Somov Konstantin Andreevich "Two ladies in the park")
Originated in France in the 70-80s of the 19th century and reached its peak in the early twentieth century, it was most common in France. Belgium and Russia. Symbolist authors embodied the main ideas of the works, using the many-sided and multi-valued associative aesthetics of symbols and images, they were often full of mystery, mystery and understatement. Outstanding representatives of this trend: Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautreamont (France), Maurice Maeterlinck, Emile Verhaern (Belgium), Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Fedor Sologub, Maximilian Voloshin, Andrey Bely, Konstantin Balmont (Russia) .. .
Acmeism
(Alexander Bogomazov "Pedlars of flour")
It emerged as a separate trend of modernism in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, acmeist authors, in opposition to the symbolists, insisted on a clear materiality and objectivity of the topics and images described, defended the use of precise and clear words, advocated distinct and definite images. The central figures of Russian acmeism: Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, Sergei Gorodetsky...
Futurism
(Fortunato Depero "Me and my wife")
An avant-garde movement that emerged in the 10-20s of the 20th century and developed in Russia and Italy. main feature futurologists: interest not so much in the content of works, but more in the form of versification. For this, new word forms were invented, they used vulgar, common folk vocabulary, professional jargon, the language of documents, posters and posters. The founder of futurism is the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, who composed the poem "Red Sugar", his associates Balla, Boccioni, Carra, Severini and others. Russian futurists: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak...
Imagism
(Georgy Bogdanovich Yakulov - sketch of the scenery for the operetta "Beautiful Elena" by J. Offenbach)
It emerged as a literary direction of Russian poetry in 1918, its founders were Anatoly Mariengof, Vadim Shershenevich and Sergei Yesenin. The purpose of the Imagists' creativity was to create images, and the main means of expression was declared to be metaphor and metaphorical chains, with the help of which direct and figurative images were compared ...
Expressionism
(Erich Heckel "Street Scene at the Bridge")
The current of modernism, which developed in Germany and Austria in the first decade of the twentieth century, as a painful reaction of society to the horrors of ongoing events (revolutions, First World War). This direction sought not so much to reproduce reality as to convey the emotional state of the author; images of pain and screams are very common in the works. In the style of expressionism worked: Alfred Deblin, Gottfried Benn, Ivan Goll, Albert Ehrenstein (Germany), Franz Kafka, Paul Adler (Czech Republic), T. Michinsky (Poland), L. Andreev (Russia)...
Surrealism
(Salvador Dali "The Persistence of Memory")
It emerged as a trend in literature and art in the 1920s. Surrealist works are distinguished by the use of allusions (stylistic figures that give a hint or indication of specific historical or mythological cult events) and a paradoxical combination of various forms. Founder of Surrealism French writer and poet Andre Breton, famous writers of this direction - Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon ...
Modernism in Russian Literature of the 20th Century
The last decade of the 19th century was marked by the emergence of new trends in Russian literature, the task of which was a complete rethinking of the old means of expression and the revival of poetic art. This period(1982-1922) entered the history of literature under the name "Silver Age" of Russian poetry. Writers and poets united in various modernist groups and trends that played in artistic culture that time a huge role.
(Kandinsky Vasily Vasilievich "Winter Landscape")
Russian symbolism appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, its founders were the poets Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Fyodor Sologub, Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, later they were joined by Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov. They publish an artistic and journalistic organ of the Symbolists - the journal "Balance (1904-1909)," they support the idealistic philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov about the Third Testament and the advent of Eternal Femininity. The works of symbolist poets are filled with complex, mystical images and associations, mystery and innuendo, abstractness and irrationality.
Symbolism is being replaced by acmeism, which appeared in Russian literature in 1910, the founders of the direction: Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Sergey Gorodetsky, also O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich, M. Kuzmin, M. Voloshin. Acmeists, unlike the Symbolists, proclaimed the cult of real earthly life, a clear and confident view of reality, the assertion of the aesthetic and hedonistic function of art, without affecting social problems. The poetry collection "Hyperborea", released in 1912, announced the emergence of a new literary trend called acmeism (from "acme" - the highest degree of something, it's time to flourish). Acmeists tried to make the images concrete and objective, to get rid of the mystical confusion inherent in the Symbolist movement.
(Vladimir Mayakovsky "Roulette")
Futurism in Russian literature arose simultaneously with acmeism in 1910-1912, like other literary trends in modernism, it was full of internal contradictions. One of the most significant futuristic groupings called Cubo-Futurists included such outstanding poets of the Silver Age as V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, I. Severyanin, A. Kruchenykh, V. Kamensky and others. The Futurists proclaimed a revolution of forms, absolutely independent of content, freedom poetic word and the rejection of old literary traditions. Interesting experiments were carried out in the field of the word, new forms were created and outdated literary norms and rules were denounced. The first collection of futurist poets, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, declared the basic concepts of futurism and asserted it as the only truthful spokesman of its era.
(Kazimir Malevich "Lady at the Tram Stop")
In the early 1920s, on the basis of futurism, a new modernist trend, imaginism, was formed. Its founders were the poets S. Yesenin, A. Mariengof, V. Shershenevich, R. Ivnev. In 1919, they held the first Imagist evening and created a declaration proclaiming the main principles of Imagism: the primacy of the image “as such”, poetic expression through the use of metaphors and epithets, a poetic work should be a “catalogue of images”, read the same as from the beginning, so from the end. Creative disagreements between the Imagists led to the division of the direction into the left and right wings, after Sergei Yesenin left its ranks in 1924, the group gradually disintegrated.
Modernism in Foreign Literature of the 20th Century
(Gino Severini "Still Life")
Modernism, as a literary trend, fell to the ground in the late 19th and early 19th centuries on the eve of the First World War, its heyday falls on the 20-30s of the 20th century, it develops almost simultaneously in the countries of Europe and America and is an international phenomenon, consisting of various literary movements, such as Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism, etc.
Modernism arose in France prominent representatives related to the symbolist movement were the poets Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire. Symbolism quickly became popular in other European countries, in England it was represented by Oscar Wilde, in Germany by Stefan George, in Belgium by Emil Verhaarn and Maurice Metterlinck, in Norway by Henrik Ibsen.
(Umberto Boccioni "The street enters the house")
The Expressionists included G. Trakl and F. Kafka in Belgium, french school- A. Frans, German - I. Becher. The founders of such a modernist trend in literature as Imagism, which has existed since the beginning of the 20th century in English-speaking European countries, were the English poets Thomas Hume and Ezra Pound, they were later joined by the American poetess Amy Lowell, the young English poet Herbert Read, and the American John Fletcher.
by the most famous writers Irish prose writer James Joyce, who created the immortal stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses (1922), French author of the seven-volume epic novel In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust, and the German-speaking master of modernism Franz Kafka, are considered modernists of the early twentieth century. who wrote the story "Transformation" (1912), which became a classic of the absurdity of all world literature.
Modernism in the Characteristics of Western Literature of the 20th Century
Despite the fact that modernism is divided into a large number of currents, their common feature is the search for new forms and the determination of man's place in the world. The literature of modernism, which arose at the turn of two eras and between the two world wars, in a society tired and exhausted from old ideas, is distinguished by cosmopolitanism and expresses the feelings of authors lost in an ever-evolving, growing urban environment.
(Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi "Duce Airport")
Writers and poets who worked in this direction constantly experimented with new words, forms, techniques and techniques in order to create a new, fresh sound, although the themes remained old and eternal. Usually it was a theme about the loneliness of a person in a vast and colorful world, about the discrepancy between the rhythms of his life and the surrounding reality.
Modernism is a kind of literary revolution, writers and poets participated in it, declaring their complete denial of realistic plausibility and all cultural and literary traditions in general. It fell to them to live and create in a difficult time, when the values of traditional humanistic culture are outdated, when the concept of freedom in different countries had a highly ambiguous meaning when the blood and horrors of the First World War devalued human life, and the world appeared before the man in all his cruelty and coldness. Early modernism symbolized the time when faith in the power of reason collapsed, the time came for the triumph of irrationality, mysticism and the absurdity of all existence.