Modernism in culture and literature. Modernism in Russian poetry of the late 19th

Modernism in Russian poetry of the late 19th - early 20th centuries

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Introduction

1. Literature of the first half of the 20th century

2. Modernism as a direction in literature

3. “Stream of Consciousness” technique

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

The main direction of literature of the twentieth century is modernism, covering not only the sphere of literature, but also art and culture of the past century. Within the framework of modernism, such literary schools as surrealism, dadaism, and expressionism are formed, which have a significant influence on novelism, drama, and poetry.

The innovative reform of the novel genre is expressed in the formation of “stream of consciousness” literature, which changes the very concept of the genre, the categories of time and space in the novel, the interaction of the hero and the author, and the style of narration.

D. Joyce, W. Wolfe and M. Proust are the creators and theorists of this literature, but the narrative strategy of the “stream of consciousness” influences the entire literary process as a whole.

Philosophical prose at the beginning of the twentieth century acquired the features of a “novel of culture”; such novels combine essayism, the history of personality development, confession, and journalism in their genre modifications. T. Mann will define this type of prose as an “intellectual novel.”

The aestheticization of artistic consciousness in the modernist and intellectual novel speaks of the formation of “elite literature”, where the writer’s goal becomes the problem of spiritual search, a “super task”, the impossibility of solving which leads to the abandonment of the annoying, straightforward didactics of the 19th century novel.

The literature of the “lost generation” and psychological prose retain relevant historical and social themes. This literature sets the task of exploring modern society and the modern hero. In general, the literary process of the first half of the twentieth century is characterized by the diversity and breadth of innovative phenomena, bright names, and represents rich material for study.

1. Literature of the first halfXXcentury

The advent of the 21st century makes the 20th century the previous one, just as the 19th century was the past in relation to the 20th century. The change of centuries has always produced summing up and the emergence of predictive assumptions about the future. The assumption that the 20th century would be something different from the 19th began even before it began. The crisis of civilization, which the romantics intuitively foresaw, was fully realized by the passing century: it opens with the Anglo-Boer War, then plunges into two world wars, the threat of atomic entropy, and a huge number of military local conflicts.

The belief that the flowering of natural sciences and new discoveries will certainly change people's lives for the better is destroyed by historical practice. The chronology of the 20th century has revealed a bitter truth: in the process of improving technology, the humanistic content of human existence is being lost. This idea is already becoming tautological at the end of the twentieth century. But philosophers and artists had a premonition of the wrong path taken even earlier, when the 19th century was ending and the new century was beginning. F. Nietzsche wrote that civilization is a thin layer of gilding on the animal essence of man, and O. Spengler in his work “Causality and Fate. The Decline of Europe” (1923) spoke about the fatal and inevitable death of European culture.

The First World War, having destroyed fairly stable social and state relations of the 19th century, confronted people with the inexorable urgency of revising previous values, searching for their own place in a changed reality, and understanding that the outside world is hostile and aggressive. The result of rethinking the phenomenon of modern life was that most European writers, especially the younger generation who came to literature after the First World War, were skeptical about the primacy of social practice over the spiritual microcosm of man. Having lost illusions in assessing the world that nurtured them and recoiling from the well-fed philistinism, the intelligentsia perceived the crisis state of society as the collapse of European civilization in general. This gave rise to pessimism and mistrust of young authors (O. Huxley, D. Lawrence, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway). The same loss of stable guidelines shook the optimistic perception of writers of the older generation (H. Wells, D. Galsworthy, A. France).

The First World War, which the young generation of writers went through, became for them a difficult test and an insight into the falsity of false patriotic slogans, which further strengthened the need to search for new authorities and moral values and led many of them to flee into the world of intimate experiences. This was a kind of escape from the influence of external realities. At the same time, writers who knew fear and pain, the horror of close violent death, could not remain the same aesthetes who looked down on the repulsive aspects of life. The dead and returning authors (R. Aldington, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway, Z. Sassoon, F.S. Fitzgerald) were classified by critics as the so-called “lost generation”. Although the term does not do justice to the significant mark that these artists left on national literatures, literary scholars nonetheless continue to emphasize their heightened understanding of man in and after war. It can be said that the writers of “lost worship” were the first authors who drew the attention of readers to that phenomenon, which in the second half of the twentieth century was called the “war syndrome”.

The most powerful aesthetic system emerging in the first half of the century was modernism, which analyzed the private life of a person, the intrinsic value of his individual destiny in the process of “moments of being” (W. Wolfe, M. Proust, T. S. Eliot, D. Joyce, F. Kafka).

From the point of view of modernists, external reality is hostile to the individual; it produces the tragedy of his existence. Writers believed that the study of spirituality is a kind of return to origins and the discovery of the true “I”, because a person first realizes himself as a subject and then creates subject-object relationships with the world.

M. Proust's psychological novel, focused on the analysis of different personality states at different stages of life, had an undoubted influence on the development of prose of the twentieth century. D. Joyce's experiment in the field of the novel, his attempt to create a modern odyssey gave rise to a lot of discussions and imitations. In poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, the same processes took place as in prose. Just like prose, poetry is characterized by a critical attitude towards technogenic civilization and its results.

Poetic experiments by T. Tzar, A. Breton, G. Lorca, P. Eluard, T.S. Eliot contributed to the transformation of poetic language. The changes concerned both the artistic form, which became more sophisticated (a synthesis of different types of art was obviously evident) and the essential side, when poets sought to penetrate the subconscious. Poetry, more than before, gravitates toward subjectivism, symbolism, and encrypted nature; free form of verse (free verse) is actively used.

The realistic trend in literature expanded the boundaries of the traditional experience of artistic exploration of the world, established in the 19th century. B. Brecht questioned the thesis about “life-likeness,” that is, the imitation of realistic art as its indispensable and immutable property. Balzac's and Tolstoy's experience was important from the point of view of preserving tradition and understanding intertextual connections. But the writer believed that any aesthetic phenomenon, even the pinnacle, cannot be artificially “canned,” otherwise it turns into a dogma that interferes with the organic development of literature.

It should be especially emphasized that realism quite freely used the principles of non-realistic aesthetics. Realistic art of the twentieth century is so different from the classical versions of the previous century that most often it is necessary to study the work of each individual writer.

The problems of humanistic development of man and society, the search for truth, which, in the words of the British author of the second half of the century, W. Golding, is “always the same,” worried both modernists and non-modernists equally. The 20th century was so complex and contradictory, so multi-dimensional, that modernist and non-modernist writers, understanding the global nature of the processes taking place in the world and often solving the same problems, drew directly opposite conclusions. The analytical fragmentation of phenomena undertaken by modernists in search of hidden meanings is combined in the general flow of literature of the first half of the century with the quest of realists seeking to synthesize efforts to understand the general principles of the artistic reflection of the world in order to stop the decay of values and the destruction of tradition, so as not to interrupt the connection of times.

2. Modernism as a direction in literature

Modernism is a general term applied in retrospect to a broad area of experimental and avant-garde movements in literature and other arts in the early twentieth century. This includes such movements as symbolism, futurism, expressionism, imagism, vorticism, dadaism and surrealism, as well as other innovations of the masters of their craft.

Modernism (Italian modernismo - “modern movement”; from Latin modernus - “modern, recent”) is a direction in the art and literature of the 20th century, characterized by a break with the previous historical experience of artistic creativity, the desire to establish new non-traditional principles in art , continuous renewal of artistic forms, as well as the conventionality (schematization, abstraction) of style.

If we approach the description of modernism seriously and thoughtfully, it will become clear that the authors classified as modernism actually set themselves completely different goals and objectives, wrote in different manners, saw people differently, and often what united them was that they simply lived and wrote at the same time. For example, modernism includes Joseph Conrad and David Gerberg Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Stearns Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Paul Eluard, futurists and dadaists, surrealists and symbolists, without thinking about whether there is anything between them. something in common, except for the era in which they lived. The literary critics who are most honest with themselves and with their readers admit the fact that the very term “modernism” is vague. modernism literature conscious unconscious

Modernist literature is characterized, first of all, by the rejection of the traditions of the nineteenth century, their consensus between the author and the reader. The conventions of realism, for example, were rejected by Franz Kafka and other novelists, including expressionist drama, and poets abandoned the traditional metric system in favor of free verse.

Modernist writers saw themselves as an avant-garde that challenged bourgeois values and challenged the reader to think through challenging new literary forms and styles. In fiction, the conventional flow of chronological events was turned on its head by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf introduced new ways of tracking the flow of their characters' thoughts using the stream-of-consciousness style.

The beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by both social changes and the development of scientific thought; the old world was changing before our eyes, and the changes often outpaced the possibility of their rational explanation, which led to disappointment in rationalism. To understand them, new techniques and principles for generalizing the perception of reality, a new understanding of man’s place in the universe (or “Cosmos”) were needed. It is no coincidence that the majority of representatives of modernism looked for ideological substratum in popular philosophical and psychological concepts that paid attention to the problems of individuality: in Freudianism and Nietzscheanism. The variety of initial concepts of worldview, by the way, largely determined the diversity of movements and literary manifestos: from surrealism to Dada, from symbolism to futurism, etc. But the glorification of art as a type of secret mystical knowledge, which is opposed to the absurdity of the world, and the question of the place of the individual with his individual consciousness in the Cosmos, the tendency to create his own new myths allow us to consider modernism as a single literary movement.

The favorite character of modern prose writers is the “little man,” most often the image of an average employee (typical are the broker Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses or Gregor in Kafka’s Reincarnation), since the one who suffers is an unprotected person, a toy of higher powers. The life path of the characters is a series of situations, personal behavior is a series of acts of choice, and the real choice is realized in “borderline”, often unrealistic situations. Modernist heroes live as if outside of real time; society, government or the state for them are some kind of enemy phenomena of an irrational, if not downright mystical nature. Camus equates, for example, between life and plague. In general, in the depiction of modernist prose writers, evil, as usual, surrounds the heroes on all sides. But despite the external unreality of the plots and circumstances that are depicted, through the authenticity of the details, a feeling of reality or even the everydayness of these mythical situations is created. Authors often experience the loneliness of these heroes in front of the enemy light as their own. Refusal of the position of “omniscience” allows writers to get closer to the characters they depict, and sometimes to identify themselves with them. Special attention should be paid to the discovery of such a new method of presenting an internal monologue as a “stream of consciousness”, in which both the feeling of the hero, and what he sees, and thoughts with associations caused by the images that arise, along with the very process of their emergence, are mixed, as if in "unedited" form.

3. “Stream of Consciousness” Technique

Stream of consciousness is a technique in the literature of the 20th century, predominantly of the modernist direction, directly reproducing mental life, experiences, associations, claiming to directly reproduce the mental life of consciousness through the cohesion of all of the above, as well as often non-linearity and brokenness of syntax.

The term “stream of consciousness” belongs to the American idealist philosopher William James: consciousness is a stream, a river in which thoughts, sensations, memories, sudden associations constantly interrupt each other and intertwine in a bizarre, “illogical” way (“Foundations of Psychology”, 1890) . “Stream of consciousness” often represents an extreme degree, an extreme form of “internal monologue”; in it, objective connections with the real environment are often difficult to restore.

Stream of consciousness creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on his experience in the minds of the characters, which gives him direct intimate access to their thoughts. Also includes the representation in written text of that which is neither purely verbal nor purely textual.

This is achieved mainly through two ways of narration and quotation, and internal monologue. At the same time, sensations, experiences, and associations often interrupt and intertwine each other, just as this happens in a dream, which is often what our life actually is, according to the author - after waking up from sleep, we are still sleeping.

The possibilities of this technique were truly revealed in the novels of M. Proust, W. Woolf and J. Joyce. It was with their light hand that the concept of a “central image” disappeared in the novel and was replaced by the concept of “central consciousness.”

J. Joyce was the first to use the total “stream of consciousness”. The central work of the “stream of consciousness” is rightly considered to be “Ulysses,” which demonstrated both the peak and exhaustion of the possibilities of this method: the study of a person’s inner life is combined with the blurring of the boundaries of character.

Stephen Dedalus is a cold intellectual whose mind is constantly occupied with unusual thoughts:

...The irrevocable modality of the visible. At least this, if not more, is what my eyes say to my thoughts. I'm here to read the marks of the essence of things: all this algae, the fry, the rising tide, that rusty boot over there. Snot green, silver blue, rusty: colored markings. Limits of transparency. But he adds: in bodies. This means that he learned that bodies were earlier than that they were colored. How? And hitting your head on them, how else. Carefully. He was bald and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno [teacher of those who know (Italian Dante. Inferno, IV, 131)].

Limit of transparent... Why...? Transparent, opaque. Where all five fingers can fit through, this is a gate, where not, it is a door. Close your eyes and look.

Leopold Bloom - everyman, an average person whose ideas about the world are contently limited:

Mr. Bloom looked with good-natured interest at the black flexible creature.

Looks good: the fur is smooth and shiny, there is a white button under the tail, the eyes are green and glowing. He bent over to her, resting his palms on his knees. “Milk to the pussy!”

Mrrau! - she meowed loudly.

They say they are stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. This one will understand everything she wants. And vindictive. I wonder what I seem like to her. As tall as a tower? No, she can jump on me.” “But she’s afraid of chickens,” he teased her.

Afraid of chicks. I've never seen such a stupid pussy in my life. Cruel. It's in their nature. It's strange that the mice don't squeak. It's like they like it.

Mgrrau! - she meowed louder. Her eyes, greedy, half-lidded with shame, blinked, and, mewing pitifully and protractedly, she exposed her milky-white teeth. He saw how the black slits of her pupils narrowed with greed, turning her eyes into green pebbles. Going to the cupboard, he took the jug freshly filled by the Hanlon delivery man, poured the warm, bubbly milk into the saucer, and carefully placed the saucer on the floor.

Meow! - she squealed, rushing towards the food.

He watched how her mustache gleamed metallic in the dim light and how, after trying it on three times, she easily began to lap. Is it true or not that if you trim your mustache, you won't be able to hunt. Why? Maybe the tips glow in the dark. Or serve as palps, perhaps.

Now let’s enjoy the female “stream of consciousness” of Molly Bloom, in which Joyce, according to many, revealed the true essence of the female soul:

...it’s for you that the sun shines,” he said that day when we were lying among the rhododendrons on Cape Howth; he is in a gray tweed suit and a straw hat, on the day when I got him to propose to me, and first I let him bite a piece of cumin cookies from my lips - it was a leap year like now and 16 years ago. My God, after that long kiss I almost suffocated, yes he said - I am a mountain flower, yes it is true, we are flowers, the whole female body, yes this is the only truth that he said in his entire life and the sun is shining for you today , and that’s why I liked him, because I saw that he understood or felt what a woman was, and I knew that I could always do what I wanted with him, and I gave him as much pleasure as I could, and kept getting started turned him on until he asked me to say yes, and I didn’t answer first, just looked at the sea and the sky and remembered everything he didn’t know: Mulvey, and Mr. Stanhope, and Hester, and father, and old Captain Grove , and sailors on the pier playing birds in flight, and standing still and washing dishes, as they called it, and a sentry in front of the governor's house in a white helmet with a band - the poor fellow almost melted, and laughing Spanish girls in shawls with high combs in the hair, and the morning market of Greeks, Jews, Arabs and the devil himself can’t tell who else from all over Europe, and Duke Street, and the clucking bird market not far from Sharon’s Larbi, and poor donkeys trudged half-asleep, and unknown tramps in raincoats , dozing on the steps in the shade, and the huge wheels of oxcarts, and the ancient thousand-year-old castle, and the handsome Moors in white robes and turbans, like kings inviting you to sit down in their tiny shops, and Ronda where the posadas [inns (Spanish) )] with ancient windows where the fan hid the flashing glance, and the gentleman kisses the window bars, and wine cellars half open at night and castanets and the night when we missed the ship in Algeciras, and the night watchman walked calmly with his lantern, and... Oh that terrible stream boiling below, Oh and the sea, the sea scarlet like fire, and luxurious sunsets, and fig trees in the gardens of Alameda, and all the quaint streets, and pink yellow blue houses, rose alleys, and jasmine, geraniums, cacti, and Gibraltar, where I was a girl, and the Mountain Flower, and when I pinned a rose in my hair, as Andalusian girls do, or pinned a scarlet to me..., yes..., and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall, and I wondered if he cared or another, and then I told him with my eyes to ask again... and then he asked me, - would I like... yes... to say yes, my mountain flower... and first I wrapped my arms around him, yes... and pulled him to me so he felt my breasts, their scent... yes, and his heart was beating madly and... yes... I said yes... I want... Yes.

As you can see, we learned the essence of the characters not because the author told us about it - the author is dead - we learned this because we ourselves penetrated into their thoughts.

Of course, the “stream of consciousness” is the best known method of conveying psychologism, but it is by no means ideal, as Vladimir Nabokov notes:

“The “stream of consciousness” technique undeservedly shakes the imagination of readers. I would like to present the following thoughts. First, this technique is no more “realistic” or more “scientific” than any other. The fact is that the “stream of consciousness” is a stylistic convention, since, obviously, we do not think only in words - we also think in images, but the transition from words to images can be recorded directly in words only if there is no description. Secondly, some of our thoughts come and go, others remain; they sort of settle, sloppy and sluggish, and it takes some time for the current thoughts and thoughts to go around these reefs. The disadvantage of the written reproduction of thoughts is the blurring of the temporary element and the too large role assigned to the typographic sign.”

Conclusion

The literature of the 20th century in its stylistic and ideological diversity is incomparable with the literature of the 19th century, where only three or four leading trends could be identified. At the same time, modern literature has produced no more great talents than the literature of the 19th century.

European literature of the first half of the 20th century was influenced by modernism, which, first of all, manifests itself in poetry. Thus, the French poets P. Eluard (1895-1952) and L. Aragon (1897-1982) were leading figures of surrealism.

However, the most significant in the Art Nouveau style was not poetry, but prose - the novels of M. Proust (“In Search of Lost Time”), J. Joyce (“Ulysses”), F. Kafka (“The Castle”). These novels were a response to the events of the First World War, which gave birth to a generation that was called “lost” in literature. They analyze the spiritual, mental, and pathological manifestations of a person. What they have in common is a methodological technique - the use of the method of analyzing the “stream of consciousness”, discovered by the French philosopher, representative of intuitionism and “philosophy of life” Henri Bergson (1859-1941), which consists in describing the continuous flow of human thoughts, impressions and feelings. He described human consciousness as a continuously changing creative reality, as a flow in which thinking is only a superficial layer, subject to the needs of practice and social life.

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Features of modernist literature

Modernism in literature became a natural result of the development of artistic consciousness and the transition from the author’s classical perception of the world to a modernist one. Instead of creating its own world, offering the reader ready-made concepts, the literature of modernism becomes a pure reflection of reality or its complete opposite. The author ceases to be the bearer of absolute truth and begins to demonstrate its relativity. As a result, the integrity of the world of the work collapses: a linear narrative is replaced by a fragmentary one, fragmented into small episodes and presented through several characters who even have opposing views on the events and facts presented.

Modernism in literature manifested itself in new directions: symbolism, acmeism, futurism. At the same time, realistic literature was rethought. A style called “stream of consciousness” emerged, characterized by deep penetration into the inner world of the characters. An important place in the literature of modernism is occupied by the theme of understanding the war and the lost generation.

When they talk about Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they first of all remember three movements that were the brightest: symbolism, acmeism and futurism. What unites them is that they belonged to modernism. Modernist movements arose as a contrast to traditional art; the ideologists of these movements denied the classical heritage, contrasted their trends with realism and proclaimed the search for new ways of depicting reality. In these searches, each direction followed its own path.

Symbolism

The symbolists considered their goal to be the art of intuitive comprehension of world unity through symbols. The name of the current itself comes from the Greek Symbolon, which translates as a conventional sign. Spiritual life cannot be comprehended in a rational way; only art can penetrate into its sphere. Therefore, symbolists understood the creative process as a subconscious, intuitive penetration into secret meanings, which only an artist-creator can do. And these secret meanings can be conveyed not directly, but only with the help of a symbol, because the secret of existence cannot be conveyed in an ordinary word.

The theoretical basis of Russian symbolism is considered to be D. Merezhkovsky’s article “On the causes of decline and new trends in modern Russian literature.”
In Russian symbolism, two stages are usually distinguished: the work of senior and junior symbolists.

Symbolism enriched Russian literature with many artistic discoveries. The poetic word acquired bright semantic shades and became unusually polysemantic. The “Young Symbolists” were convinced that through the “prophetic word” one can change the world, that the poet is a “demiurge”, the creator of the world. This utopia could not come true, so in the 1910s there came a crisis of symbolism, its collapse as a system.

Acmeism

Such a direction of modernism in literature as Acmeism arose in opposition to symbolism and proclaimed the desire for a clear view of the world, which is valuable in itself. They declared a return to the original word, and not its symbolic meaning. The birth of Acmeism is associated with the activities of the literary association “The Workshop of Poets,” whose leaders were N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. And the theoretical basis of this movement was N. Gumilyov’s article “The Legacy of Symbolism and Acmeism.” The name of the movement comes from the Greek word acme - highest degree, blossoming, peak. According to theorists of Acmeism, the main task of poetry is the poetic understanding of the diverse and vibrant earthly world. Its adherents adhered to certain principles:

give the word precision and certainty;
abandon mystical meanings and come to clarity of words;
clarity of images and refined details of objects;
echoes of past eras. Many consider the poetry of the Acmeists to be a revival of the “golden age” of Baratynsky and Pushkin.

The most significant poets of this movement were N. Gumilev, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam.

Futurism

Translated from Latin, futurum means future. The emergence of Russian futurism is generally considered to date back to 1910, when the first futurist collection “Zadok Judges” was published. Its creators were D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov and V. Kamensky. Futurists dreamed of the emergence of super art that would radically change the world. This avant-garde movement was distinguished by its categorical rejection of previous and modern art, bold experiments in the field of form, and the shocking behavior of its representatives.

Futurism, like other movements of modernism, was heterogeneous and included several groups that engaged in fierce polemics among themselves.

The Cubo-Futurists (or “Gilea”) also called themselves “Budetlyans” - the most influential of the groups. They are the creators of the scandalous manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, and also thanks to their high word creativity, the theory of “abstruse language” - zaumi - was created. This included D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, A. Kruchenykh.
Egofuturists, members of the “Ego” circle. They proclaimed man to be an egoist, a fraction of God. They supported selfish views, because of which they could not exist as a group, and the movement quickly ended its existence. The most prominent representatives of egofuturists are: I. Severyanin, I. Ignatiev, V. Gnedov and others.
“Mezzanine of Poetry” is an association organized by several ego-futurists led by V. Shershnevich. During their short existence (about a year), the authors published three almanacs: “Crematorium of Sanity”, “Feast during the Plague” and “Vernissage”, and several collections of poetry. In addition to V. Shershnevich, the association included R. Ivnev, S. Tretyakov, L. Zak and others.
"Centrifuge" is a literary group that was formed at the beginning of 1914. Its organizer was S. Bobrov. The first edition is the collection “Rukonog”. Active members of the group from the first days of its existence were B. Pasternak, N. Aseev, I. Zdanevich. Later they were joined by some ego-futurists (Olimpov, Kryuchkov, Shirokov), as well as Tretyakov, Ivnev and Bolshakov, participants in the Mezzanine of Poetry, which had collapsed at that time.

Modernism in Russian literature gave the world a whole galaxy of great poets: A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, V. Mayakovsky, B. Pasternak.

Modernism is an aesthetic concept that emerged in the 1910s and developed especially intensively in the interwar twenty years. Some researchers associate the emergence of modernism with the work of the French “damned poets” of the 1870s (P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud) or even with the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s book “Flowers of Evil” (1857). However, the more accepted point of view is that modernism developed as a result of a revision of the philosophical foundations and creative principles of artistic culture of the 19th century, which occurred over several decades, until the First World War. This revision is evidenced by the history of such schools and movements in European culture as impressionism, symbolism, new drama, cubism, imagism, futurism and a number of other, less significant ones. Despite all the sometimes sharp differences in programs and manifestos, these schools are united by the perception of their era as a time of irreversible historical changes, accompanied by the collapse of the beliefs and spiritual values by which their predecessors lived. The conviction that arose on this basis in the need for a radical renewal of the artistic language of classical realism gave the main impetus to the formation of modernism as an aesthetic doctrine.

Modernism is being formed in the context of an approaching socio-historical crisis unprecedented scale, the apogee of which was the world war. This atmosphere reinforces the sense of groundlessness of the liberal-humanistic mentality and beliefs in steady social progress that lived through the 19th century. The bankruptcy of the positivist worldview that prevailed in those days is becoming increasingly obvious. New concepts in natural science and in the humanities lead to a significant change in the picture of the world, directly responding to modernism in art, the philosophical attitude of which is the movement “a realibus ad realiora” (“from the real to the most real”). The principle of comprehending the hidden meaning behind the empiricism of phenomena and things corresponded to the spirit of this culture, the artistic ideas of which are close to those philosophical teachings and scientific doctrines of the period of formation of modernism, where the search for the “most real” leads to a radical revision of positivist principles and provisions based only on the study of the “real”. Of particular importance for the creativity of the followers of modernism were the concept of the “stream of consciousness”, experimentally developed and then theoretically substantiated in the “Principles of Psychology” (1890) by the American philosopher W. James, the doctrine of intuition and the interpretation of life processes by analogy with the processes of consciousness, proposed in the works the French thinker A. Bergson (“Immediate Data of Consciousness”, 1889; “Creative Evolution”, 1907), the doctrine of psychoanalysis created by the Austrian psychologist Z. Freud (“I and It”, 1923). The theory of archetypes (images expressing the collective unconscious), which was developed by C. Jung, a Swiss follower (and then antagonist) of Freud, had a wide impact on the literature and art of modernism. Objectively, some features of the artistic vision of modernism (in particular, the interpretation of time and space) have commonality with the theory of relativity (1915) by A. Einstein.

Despite the absence of a program document that formulated the main starting premises and aesthetic aspirations of modernism, the development of this direction in the artistic culture of the West and Russia reveals the stability of its inherent features, allowing us to talk about a certain artistic system (in a number of works, preference is given to another term - artistic method). Modernism is always more or less consistent abandons the principle of representation, i.e. images of reality in a system of connections that are really inherent in it, which are recreated under the sign of authenticity and life-likeness, and invariably contrasts this principle with the emphasized conventionality of the picture, built on the idea of artistic deformation, alogism, and play with meanings: this emphasizes the impossibility of finite, indisputable truths about the world and man. The art of modernism perceives a fact of life not as a given, but necessarily as a problem. A state of “epistemological uncertainty” prevails and the completeness and authenticity of the reconstruction of the world in all the richness of its connections, which was the main creative task for the artistic culture of the 19th century, developing within the boundaries of the aesthetics of classical realism, is recognized as unfeasible. Modernism is characterized by a predilection for depicting reality as chaos and absurdity; a person is most often described in the context of his alienation from society, the laws of which are perceived by him as incomprehensible, illogical and irrational. The situation of alienation that a person faces in both public and private life, constantly being convinced of the impossibility of real mutual understanding and dialogue with others, gives rise to the complex of “unhappy consciousness”, recreated in many of the most significant works of modernism, starting with the work of F. Kafka.

This situation provokes both a radical rebellion against the tragic - due to its ontological nonsense - “human destiny” (a common problematic in the literature of existentialism), and philosophical reflection, the result of which is the image of reality as an ever-repeating cycle, when again and again it turns out that the lost personality in the “crowd of lonely people”, hopelessly lost the sense of meaningfulness and purposefulness of her existence (the novels of J. Joyce). Conscious of his own incompleteness, the hero of modernist literature reflects especially intensely on the problems of self-identity and comes to the conviction that a constructed, complete, internally organic image of himself has become impossible for him. The fragmentation and fragmentation of spiritual and emotional experience can be felt by him elegiacally, with a touch of drama (“subjective epic” by M. Proust, prose by V. Nabokov of the American period), but sometimes in modernism it acquires a tragic and farcical interpretation with a predominance of elements of “black humor” (theater of the absurd E. Ionesco and S. Beckett, novels by J. Barth and T. Pynchon).

The parody of some of the most deeply rooted philosophical and artistic beliefs that distinguished the era of classical realism constitutes an important element of many works of modernism, starting with the earliest (the drama and prose of A. Jarry), and is an integral part of the creative program of such schools belonging to the history of modernism as Dadaism and surrealism. At the same time, for the largest representatives of modernism characterized by the desire to rely on the phenomena of artistic culture of the 19th century that they reinterpreted, which in their interpretation, predetermined by the creative principles of the interpreters themselves, turn out to be taken beyond the framework of realistic aesthetics (this is how A. Bely reads N.V. Gogol, who had a strong influence on his prose, and Proust similarly learns the important lessons of G. Flaubert, from whom one adopts primarily, if not exclusively, the idea of a work free from any kind of ideology and didactics). In dialogue with the tradition of modernism, he pays special attention to the literature of romanticism, in which he discovers some motifs and artistic ideas that were widely developed in his own practice - the power of alienation, the disappeared integrity of life experience, and the “romantic irony” emerging on this basis.

Early modernism

Early modernism is distinguished by its desire to construct and artistically substantiate own concept of human experience “in our time” (this is how E. Hemingway, who was close to modernism in his youth, titled his first book). This concept, which requires overcoming the obsolete, in the view of adherents of modernism, principle of “mimetic referentiality” (i.e., the conscious correlation of a work of art with the range of phenomena of objective reality recognized as the most significant for its understanding), is intended to express the new self-awareness of literature, which is not concerned with the problems of authenticity. recreating reality, but from angles and levels of perception of life experience. However, it is also recognized that this experience has a certain kind of spiritual content (“metaphysics of reality”), and sometimes writers belonging to modernism even find in this experience, like T. S. Eliot, a certain transcendental meaning. But as modernism develops, this issue begins to play a less significant role, giving way to self-valued experiments with artistic language, which become increasingly formalistic (the French “new novel”, which ushered in a program to combat the “heresy of figurativeness”), and sometimes even destructive (the late S. Beckett, who came to the idea of a “literature of silence”, i.e. the rejection of creativity, replaced by blank pages as a gesture of rejection of the world). The American researcher of modernism and the subsequent stage of “postmodernity” I. Hassan writes that at this stage, in contrast to the “classical period” of modernism, everything becomes possible in literature, including the “ritual destruction of language”, and “metaphysics” and “transcendence” disappear ", "teleology" inherent in the artistic practice of modernism, if, without ignoring the fundamental differences between them, we talk about Joyce, Eliot or E. Pound. All of them, as well as the English writers who joined the Bloomsbury group that formed in the 1910s, led by W. Woolf, played an important role in developing the most significant provisions of the literary program of modernism, which assumed new principles for constructing the artistic universe (mythology, emphasized subjectivity individual perception and experience of reality, the multiplicity of appearances and the difficulty of self-identification of the hero, obligatory and extensive references to “cultural memory”, present directly in the text of the works, and often even constructing this text). Of significant importance for the writers who belonged to this circle (and subsequently for the aesthetics of modernism in general), the philosophical ideas that they intensively developed by J. Moore, whose work “Principles of Ethics” (1903) proved the impossibility of distinguishing between the criteria of good and evil on the basis of the doctrines of social evolution or natural, generally accepted norms, as well as the position of the neo-Hegelian F. G. Bradley, set out in the treatise “Appearance and Reality” (1893). This work criticized the concept of self-sufficiency of empirical knowledge of reality and declared unreliable or, in any case, inconclusive any knowledge about it that ignores the specificity of the refractions of reality in individual perception.

Eliot gave the necessary substantive precision to the concept of modernism. The feeling of a crisis of ideas and the exhaustion of artistic possibilities embodied in the art of classical realism among Eliot and artists close to his views (P. Valery, G. Benn) grew into the confidence that a certain era in culture, marked by the dominance of the humanistic doctrine, had ended. A new system of philosophical and aesthetic ideas, in which the search for pictorial forms authentic for the 20th century is carried out (i.e. the principle of “modern vision”, normative for modernism, is implemented), is emerging among writers of a similar orientation under the sign of a comprehensive critique of humanism, which is opposed to the apology of the transpersonal creativity, opposing the cult of the “reciting personality”, which is not given the ability to comprehend the highest meanings of existence. Conveying the confusion of the individual, together with the collapse of humanism, which has lost its spiritual support, authentically recreating the “unhappy consciousness” in which there is a “continuous amalgamation of heterogeneous experience”, creativity, according to Eliot, becomes a counteraction to despair, a way out of a dead end, an introduction to the world of enduring moral and cultural values. The “main plot” of works of modernism, focused on the principle of “transpersonal creativity,” is determined by the desire to discover behind the reconstructed chaos of “catastrophic” reality the presence of cultural tradition and the activity of spiritual principles, which give meaning and teleology to existence. Poetics, authentic for this “plot”, most often represents a fusion of tragedy, parody, lyricism, conceptual and visual associations, sharply specific for each major artist (it turned out to be especially organic in one of the programmatic works of modernism - Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”, 1922). This poetics is characterized by the widespread use of myth or mythological reminiscences (they emphasize the stability, the “eternity” of the main collisions that emerge through the seeming nonsense of the “real”), as well as the idea of the stream of consciousness, which replaced the previous idea of psychological stability and homogeneity of the individual’s reactions to external world.

A new system of depiction methods and artistic moves in literature of modernism is affirmed along with a new understanding of man, when everything that is personal, non-typical, and goes beyond the limits of social determinism turns out to be the most significant (in this regard, the experience of D.H. Lawrence was of particular importance). Introspection, marked by a particularly interested attention to the region of the subconscious, as well as to archetype images, becomes a way to penetrate into the innermost human motivations, approaching the truth about both the nature of man and the nature of his connections with the universe. The “fabric of ideas” in the art of modernism acquires a much more significant meaning than attempts to recreate the “fabric of reality” in a life-like form. Artistic convention in its most diverse manifestations dominates in this literature, committed to an emphatically subjective depiction of the world - often with pronounced elements of play, irony and travesty. Sometimes (for example, in surrealism) the parodic principle is combined with a clearly expressed ideological tendency: art is perceived as a powerful means of destroying the stereotypes and phobias of logical, flatly rationalistic thinking.

With the passage of time, the art of modernism intensifies its inherent perception of modernity. Like an era when connections between people weaken and alienation becomes all-encompassing, making the individual powerless in the face of the absurdity that has reigned in public life. This situation is accompanied by an increase in the literature of modernism of aspirations for hermeticity, the actual contentlessness of creativity, which widely affected poetry (the American school of objectivism), and drama (the theater of the absurd, especially at a late stage of development), and prose. Joyce's path from Dubliners (1914), a book that embodied some of the basic aesthetic ideas of modernism, but at the same time created a plastic image of a certain society, to Finnegans Wake (1939), completely closed in the sphere of experiments with composition, point of view and language , can be seen as an example of evolution typical of modernism as a whole.

For many years considered in Western aesthetics to be incorrect for describing the artistic process, the term modernism established itself in the 1980s not only in works on the history of literature and art, but also in historical works, where the concept of “modernist consciousness” is becoming increasingly accepted, defining the character of an entire era, the boundaries of which extend from the turn of the 19th-20th century to the last third of the 20th, when “postmodern times” in their own right. However, the view of modernism as a phenomenon essential for aesthetics and the history of artistic culture at the latest stage of development remains more accepted. The universality of modernism as the only aesthetic system that embodies the “spirit of modernity” is problematic, and the possibility of objectively recreating the picture of the movement of literature and art in the 20th century, based on the priority of modernism as an aesthetics and direction, seems only purely hypothetical to even the most convinced adherents of the doctrine associated with modernism all new features of artistic culture of the last century. In fact, modernism existed as an aesthetic concept and as a movement among other concepts and movements, entering into an interaction with them that often took on a complex and even dramatic character. This is evidenced by the legacy of many major artists of the 20th century (V. Nabokov, A. Camus, W. Faulkner, G. Hesse, O. Huxley, G. Garcia Marquez, S. Prokofiev, F. Fellini, etc.), in different periods in their creative life, they were closely in touch with the circle of ideas and beliefs of modernism, but on the whole did not belong to it, although one can note the undoubted kinship with the art of modernism, both of the problematics that remained dominant among them, and of a number of aesthetic means used by them. At the same time, the myth about the all-encompassing and overwhelming influence of modernism on modern artistic culture is refuted by the work of some of its most significant representatives, who have maintained a strong commitment to the tradition associated with classical realism or romanticism (I. Bunin, V. Khodasevich, A. Platonov, J. Steinbeck , P. Lagerkvist, G. Green).

The word modernism comes from French moderne, which means the newest

Modernism (fr. newest, modern) in literature is a direction, an aesthetic concept. Modernism is associated with the comprehension and embodiment of a certain supernaturalness, superreality. The starting point of modernism is the chaotic nature of the world, its absurdity. The indifference and hostile attitude of the outside world towards a person lead to the awareness of other spiritual values and bring a person to a transpersonal basis.

The modernists broke all traditions with classical literature, trying to create a completely new modern literature, placing above all else the value of the individual artistic vision of the world; the artistic worlds they create are unique. The most popular topic for modernists is the conscious and unconscious and the ways they interact. The hero of the works is typical. The modernists turned to the inner world of the average person: they described his most subtle feelings, pulled out the deepest experiences that literature had not previously described. They turned the hero inside out and showed everything that was indecently personal. The main technique in the work of modernists is the “stream of consciousness,” which allows one to capture the movement of thoughts, impressions, and feelings.

Modernism consists of different schools: imagism, dadaism, expressionism, constructivism, surrealism, etc.

Representatives of modernism in literature: V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, E. Guro, B. Livshits, A. Kruchenykh, early L. Andreev, S. Sokolov, V. Lavrenev, R. Ivnev.

Postmodernism initially appeared in Western art, arose as a contrast to modernism, which was open to understanding by a select few. A characteristic feature of Russian literary postmodernism is a frivolous attitude towards its past, history, folklore, and classical literature. Sometimes this unacceptability of traditions goes to extremes. The main techniques of postmodernists: paradoxes, wordplay, use of profanity. The main purpose of postmodern texts is to entertain and ridicule. These works, for the most part, do not carry deep ideas; they are based on word creation, i.e. text for text's sake. Russian postmodern creativity is a process of language games, the most common of which is the play on quotes from classical literature. The motive, the plot, and the myth can be quoted.

The most common genres of postmodernism: diaries, notes, collections of short fragments, letters, comments written by characters in novels.

Representatives of postmodernism: Ven. Erofeev, A. Bitov, E. Popov, M. Kharitonov, V. Pelevin.

Russian postmodernism is heterogeneous. It is represented by two movements: conceptualism and social art.

Conceptualism is aimed at debunking and critically understanding all ideological theories, ideas and beliefs. In modern Russian literature, the most prominent representatives of conceptualism are the poets Lev Rubinstein, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov.

Sots art in Russian literature can be understood as a variant of conceptualism, or pop art. All works of socialist art are built on the basis of socialist realism: ideas, symbols, ways of thinking, the ideology of the culture of the Soviet era.

Representatives of Sots Art: Z. Gareev, A. Sergeev, A. Platonova, V. Sorokin, A. Sergeev

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