All the lost generation. Lost generation

"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, were rooted in a feeling of disappointment with the course and results of the First World War, which gripped writers in Western Europe and the United States, some of them being directly involved in the hostilities. The death of millions of people called into question the positivist doctrine of “benign progress” and undermined faith in the rationality of liberal democracy. The pessimistic tonality that made the prose writers of the “Lost Generation” similar to writers of a modernist bent did not mean the identity of their common ideological and aesthetic aspirations. The specificity of the realistic depiction of the war and its consequences did not require speculative schematism. Although the heroes of the books of the writers of the “Lost Generation” are convinced 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 bothers the psyche and interferes with the transition to a peaceful life. The Lost Generation books are not equivalent to the general stream of works about the First World War. Unlike “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk” (1921-23) by J. Hasek, there is no clearly expressed satirical grotesque and “front-line humor.” “The Lost” not only listen to the naturalistically reproduced horrors of war and nurture memories of it (Barbus A. Fire, 1916; Celine L.F. Journey to the End of the Night, 1932), but introduce the experience gained into the broader mainstream of human experiences, colored by a kind of romanticized bitterness. The “knocking out” of the heroes of these books did not mean a conscious choice in favor of “new” illiberal ideologies and regimes: socialism, fascism, Nazism. The heroes of “The Lost Generation” are completely apolitical and prefer to withdraw into the sphere of illusions, intimate, deeply personal experiences to participate in social struggle.

Chronologically The “Lost Generation” first announced itself with the novels “Three Soldiers”(1921) J. Dos Passos, “The Enormous Camera” (1922) by E.E. Cummings, “Soldier’s Award” (1926) by W. Faulkner. “lostness” in the environment of post-war rampant consumerism was sometimes reflected without a direct connection with the memory of the war in O. Huxley’s story “Crime Yellow” (1921), the novels of F. Sc. Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby” (1925), E. Hemingway “And He Rises” 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”: “Death of a Hero” by R. Aldington, “All Quiet on the Western Front” by E.M. Remarque, “Farewell, weapon!" Hemingway. With its frankness in conveying not so much the battle, but 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 similar topic - “The Return” (1931 ) and "Three Comrades" (1938). The mass of soldiers in the novels of Barbusse and Remarque, the poems of E. Toller, the plays of G. Kaiser and M. Anderson were opposed by the individualized images of Hemingway’s novel “A 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.” Hemingway’s acceptance of the principle of the artist’s ideological and political responsibility in the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940) marked not only a certain milestone in his own creativity, but also the exhaustion of the emotional and psychological message of “The Lost Generation”.

Tolmachev V.M. “The Lost Generation” and the work of E. Hemingway

Tolmachev V.M. – " Foreign literature XX century" - 2nd ed. - M., 2000

The 1920s are a period of “revolutionism” in US literature. It is marked both by a versatile understanding of the historical and cultural shift, and by the entry into the rights of a new literary generation, the idea of ​​which was somehow associated with the image of the “lost generation”. These words (spoken in French and then translated into English) are attributed to the writer G. Stein and were addressed to young people who visited the fronts of the First World War, were shocked by its cruelty and were unable to “get into the rut” in the post-war period on the same grounds. peaceful life. Stein’s maxim (“You are all a lost generation”) was glorified by E. Hemingway,

Who brought it out in the form of one of the epigraphs on title page his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926).

However, the meaning of this, as it turned out, epochal characteristic was destined to outgrow the “Hamletism” of restless young people. “Lostness” in a broad sense is a consequence of a break both with the system of values ​​going back to “puritanism”, the “tradition of decency”, etc., and with the pre-war idea of ​​​​what the theme and style of a work of art should be. Unlike the generation of B. Shaw and G. Wells, the “lost” showed a pronounced individualistic skepticism towards any manifestations of progressivism. At the same time, a painful understanding of the “decline of the West”, their own loneliness, as well as an awakened nostalgia for the organic integrity of the world, led them to a persistent search for a new ideality, which they formulated primarily in terms of artistic mastery. Hence the resonance that Eliot’s “The Waste Land” received in America. The cruelty and chaos of the world can be resisted by the “rage” of creative effort - this is the subtext of the textbook works of the “lost generation”, the common features of which are a tragic tone, an interest in the theme of self-knowledge, as well as lyrical tension.

The motifs of “lostness” manifested themselves in different ways in such novels as “Three Soldiers” (1921) by J. Dos Passos, “The Enormous Camera” (1922) by E. E. Cummings, “The Great Gatsby” (1925) by F. S. Fitzgerald, “Soldier's Award” (1926) W. Faulkner, “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), “A Farewell to Arms!” (1929) by E. Hemingway. These should also include novels published in Europe, but which had great success in the USA: “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1929) by E. M. Remarque, “Death of a Hero” (1929) by R. Aldington.

Not all of these writers took part in the war (in particular, Fitzgerald, Faulkner), but even for them, “being lost” is a more than significant fact: an indicator of a person’s abandonment in history, which has lost its usual contours, and heightened artistic sensitivity.

The cruelty of modernity could not help but be clothed in the metaphor of war. If at the beginning of the 1920s it was interpreted quite specifically, then by the end of the decade it became the personification of the most important dimension human existence at all. Such a combination of war and post-war experience under a common tragic sign is especially indicative of novels published in 1926-1929, that is, when the events of the past took place as an artistic event and received, in the words of one of his contemporaries, the status of a tragic “alibi.” “: a person is constantly in a state of “military” actions with a world that is hostile and indifferent to him, the main attributes of which are the army, bureaucracy, plutocracy. "I grew up with my peers under

The beat of the drums of the First World War, and our history since then has not ceased to be a history of murder, injustice or violence,” A. Camus later wrote, as if seeing in the American writers of the 1920s literary predecessors existentialism. Hemingway speaks most vividly about the protest against the “norms” of civilization in the light of the experience of the Somme and Verdun through the lips of Lieutenant Frederick Henry, the central character of the novel “A Farewell to Arms!”: “Abstract words such as “glory,” “feat,” “valor.” or “shrine,” were obscene next to specific village names, road numbers, river names, regimental numbers and dates.”

Expressing rejection of the value system that allowed the massacre, and the pomposity of those values literary dictionary Hemingway deliberately makes an apology for a kind of primitiveness and often declares himself to be anti-romantic. However, such a characterization should not cast doubt on his “anti-romantic romanticism.” The historical and literary contexts of his work speak in favor of this.

On the one hand, Hemingway, who equally successfully created the myth of a hero rejected by society both in his writings and in life, undoubtedly acts as a figure of Byronian scale and style. On the other hand, the tragic “search for the absolute”, which is discussed in Hemingway’s work, unfolds not in the situation of “two worlds” characteristic of classical romanticism, but in the post-Nietzschean this-worldly world.

Cognition through denial, the search for an ideal in disappointment, the illusion of the “nightingale song” through the “wild voice of catastrophes” (Khodasevich) - these are the romantic signs of the worldview of the “lost generation” that help to understand the creative dependence of US writers of the 1920s on their older English contemporaries (R. Kipling, J. Conrad). Recognition of debt to Conrad's ideas of “victory in defeat” and picturesque style is the leitmotif of the creative aesthetics of not only Hemingway, but also Fitzgerald.

A comparison of the novels of these writers allows us to understand how the dispute unfolded between two influential versions of romantic thinking.

In the perception of his contemporaries, Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) became one of the chroniclers of the “Jazz Age,” the era immediately preceding the times of the “Great Depression.” Almost all his life, Fitzgerald, who was born in St. Paul (the Catholic capital of the Midwest), retained a childishly naive and somewhat “carnival” idea of ​​success - that “anything is possible.” The motive of wealth is central to Fitzgerald’s works, but the writer’s attitude towards the two most

The symbols of prosperity that interest him (femme fatale, nouveau riche) are ambiguous, passed through the personal experience of a teenager who dreamed of fame, hopelessly in love with Ginevra King (a girl from a wealthy St. Paul family), then a young man whose marriage with the southern beauty Zelda Sayre became made possible by the sensational success of his first novel, Beyond Paradise (1920), but ultimately did not bring him happiness. By the end of the 1920s, Zelda developed mental illness.

In their best works- novels “The Great Gatsby” (1925), “Tender is the Night” (1934) - Fitzgerald strives to be a Flaubertian, but by temperament he is too lyrical, too fascinated by the poetry of the material excess of the world. Therefore, the character closest to the writer is himself, Fitzgerald, and the world of the rich is a world closely related to him. This also imbues the meaning of his statement: “We owe our birth to the welfare of society. The best things are created when the rich rule." Thus was born the romantic kinship that Fitzgerald's Dick Diver established between the writer's friend, wealthy expatriate Gerald Murphy, and the author of Tender is the Night.

In his attempt to be “not himself,” Fitzgerald always failed in his prose, which greatly outraged Hemingway with his slogan of “truthfulness of writing.” He believed that Murphy would never behave like Fitzgerald, and therefore even earlier he accused his friend of “cheap Irish love of defeat”, of “idiotic leaf romanticism.”

However, beauty realized in wealth (ragtime, a Packard sparkling with nickel, a fashionable bar) interests Fitzgerald not in itself, but in its fragility. The writer, through the prism of his idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe variability of success, is too attentive to beauty not to notice its duality: mystery, brilliance and fate, curse. Contrasts of beauty as the material of modern tragedy - Fitzgerald's discovery. His wealth is subject to the law of a kind of Spencerian equilibrium. Dick Diver and Nicole change places with the same immutability as Hurstwood and Kerry in Dreiser.

It is natural that Keats's odes touched the innermost strings of the writer's soul. He admitted that he could never read “Ode to a Nightingale” without tears in his eyes, and a line from this poem (“How tender the night!”) formed the title of the novel about the tragedy of the Divers. In turn, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was read by Fitzgerald in terms of an inexorable romantic question - as an attempt to explain the contradiction between reality, decay (transitory) and imperishability (the eternity of beauty and imagination). “You saw, you died!” - Fitzgerald could say along with lyrical hero Keats's ode. For the American writer, romantic skepticism about this takes on the image of “the beautiful and the damned” (the title of the second novel), “all the sad young people.”

The collision of statics and dynamics, the experience of life as a fatal destiny in the spirit of Wilde, the intention to see the “I” in the mirror of the “other” - all this makes creative method Fitzgerald is quite holistic. “I would like so much for readers to perceive my new novel as another variation on the theme of illusion (it will, perhaps, be the most important in my serious works), - a variation that is much more... thoughtful in a romantic way than the content that made up the content of "Po this side of paradise,” he wrote in connection with the publication of “The Great Gatsby.” In the prospectus for Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald further emphasizes the romantic emphasis by calling his protagonist an Idealist and a “Priest.”

Wealth, in this perspective, suddenly becomes Fitzgeradd's equivalent of Hemingway's Stoic code. His ambitious people, attracted by the opportunity to assert themselves in the “will to possess”, are a paradoxical analogy to Hemingway’s poor (matadors, gangsters, bartenders, etc.) - an example of the fact that the “quest for the Grail”, whatever form it takes on in rough form and an idealless era, always resonate with tragedy.

A comparison of the compositional principles of the story “Heart of Darkness” and “The Great Gatsby” (Nick Carraway performs the same function for Fitzgerald as the figure of Marlowe for Conrad) helps to understand in what ways the American writer is similar and in what ways he is strikingly different from the prose writers who gravitate , like the English neo-romantics, to a picturesque display of the world in the context of “here and now”. The core of Fitzgeradd's best novel is formed by the non-factual side of a fairly traditional American melodrama - a description of the attempt of the mysteriously rich Gatsby to return the past, to connect his fate with a woman, a union with whom was previously unthinkable due to social and material misalliance. What transforms the novel from vaudeville into tragedy are themes of self-discovery and history, primarily related to the fate of Nick Carraway.

Nick is not only a storyteller collecting information about his mysterious friend Gatsby, but also a writer who is gradually beginning to compose an autobiographical work in which Gatsby is the most reliable guide, or, in accordance with the G. James dictionary, “point of view.” Carraway's line (testing his own views on life, his honesty, as well as adherence to the traditionalist value system of the Midwest) develops in parallel with Gatsby's line, the collision of which

Roy reveals the insoluble contradiction between the Platonic dream - in pursuing it, Gatsby is truly outstanding, “great” - and the crudely materialistic, “great” only in a purely ironic sense, means of achieving it.

Thanks to this parallelism, it turns out that Nick is the only character in the novel whose character and views change during the course of the action. The cognitive quality of The Great Gatsby is, as it were, the lyrical ferment of this novel. Romantic dissatisfaction with the search for El Dorado, the fatal belatedness and disappointment of self-determination reveals in FitzGerald not so much a student of Conrad, but a successor to the tradition of G. James. It is the ability for deep understanding that ultimately makes Nick not an inquisitive “naturalist” (like the butterfly collector Stein from Conrad’s novel “Lord Jim”), but “the last Puritan.”

Carraway's path is from rigidity to flexibility, from too categorical judgments in the spirit of James's Winterbourne to vague regrets and warmth. He becomes an involuntary witness to the vulgarization of both the platonic principle in man and his desire for the ideal, and the magic of wealth, this only type of “religion” of which an affluent society is capable. Carraway's "Novel of Education" is gradually correlated by Fitzgeradd with the theme of America.

Gatsby’s “guilt” is the common, generic guilt of all Americans who have lost the childishness and purity that were generally characteristic of the first New England settlers. On last pages In the novel, the true face of the “dream” is represented by the narrator’s memories of celebrating Christmas in the snowy depths of America. Carraway and Gatsby and Daisy are all "prodigal children" of the Midwest, lost in the Babylon of the Northeast.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Learned to write from approximately the same literary mentors as Fitzgerald. In his work, he touched on approximately the same problems that his friend-rival touched upon, but he gave them a radically different interpretation. Accusing Fitzgerald of falling in love with rock and creative indiscipline, and also declaring his dislike of everything sublimely “romantic,” Hemingway created the concept of a fundamentally “unbookish” style. The Fitzgerald/Hemingway antithesis allows us to recall the situation in English literature at the turn of the century. The change of the hero - Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite artist to Kipling's colonial army soldier - indicated a decrease in interest in the relatively traditional type of romantic personality and attention to the symbolism of the practically formulated question “how to live?” This new mood is succinctly reflected in Kipling’s poem “The Queen” (1896): “Romance, farewell forever!”

Thematically, Hemingway owes a lot to Conrad. In both writers, the character is abandoned, as Hemingway says, in “another country” - placed, regardless of his will, in conditions where a person undergoes a test of strength on the stage of a certain space theater(depths of Africa, Civil War V Latin America, typhoon; bullring, the Latin Quarter in Paris, the Spanish Civil War), but is faced primarily in a duel with himself.

“Victory in defeat,” according to Conrad and Hemingway, is a stoic adherence to a personally formulated idea of ​​honor, which, by and large, cannot bring any practical advantages in a world that has lost the coordinates of universally meaningful meaning. A comparison of the works of Conrad and Hemingway indicates that the American prose writer, much more consistently than his predecessor, worked on the idea of ​​a style that would convey the idea of ​​​​the cruelty of the world not directly, but in a symbolist suggestive way. Hemingway, on the emotional side, knew deeply what he was writing about.

In 1917, without passing the military commission, he went to Italy, was the driver of an ambulance on the Italian-Austrian front, and was seriously wounded. After the war ended, Hemingway briefly served as the Toronto Star's Middle East correspondent. He spent the 1920s mainly in Paris among artistic bohemia (H. Stein, J. Joyce, E. Pound) and purposefully studied the art of prose. The writer experienced his father’s suicide extremely hard.

The theme of war forms the nerve of Hemingway’s first books of stories, “In Our Time” (1925), “Men Without Women” (1927). The composition of the book “In Our Time” indicates its author’s obvious acquaintance with “Winesburg, Ohio” by S. Anderson. However, the line of the “novel of education” was carried out by Hemingway much more decisively than by his mentor. The main discovery made by Nick Adams and similar young men who returned from the German war to the provincial quiet of America (Krebs in the story “At Home”) is the discovery that the war, for those who have been there, in a certain sense, never ends. The most famous Hemingway short stories (“Cat in the Rain”, “On the Big River”, “White Elephants”) are built on the same effect: the main thing in them is with emotional point vision is not spoken out, put out of brackets; this core of content either comes into conflict with the impressionistic description of current events, or corresponds to it. The presence of a “double vision” is ironically reflected in the title “In Our Time,” which consists of a fragment of a prayer for “the peace of the whole world.” The main lesson of Nick Adams's upbringing is that the fragility of existence and human cruelty characteristic of “our time” blur the line between “war” and “peace.”

Hemingway liked to compare the principles of expressive text to an iceberg that is only one-eighth above the surface of the water: if the writer really knows his topic, almost any fragment of the story can be omitted without compromising the overall emotional impact. Hemingway's illusionism is largely based on the idea of ​​​​the rejection of “rhetoric”, once proclaimed by the French symbolist poets. The writer prefers not to describe, but to name; he does not so much recreate reality as describe the conditions of its existence. The foundation of such a description is made up of verbs of motion, nouns, remarks of the same type, and repeated use of the connecting conjunction “and”. Hemingway creates, as it were, a scheme for the perception of elementary stimuli (the heat of the sun, the cold of water, the taste of wine, etc.), which only in the reader’s consciousness become a full-fledged fact of sensory experience. The writer’s fascination with Cezanne and other post-impressionists in this regard is natural.

As is known, the mature Cezanne strove to create canvases that would reveal, in a somewhat exaggerated flatness, not the impressionistic fluidity of life, but its “structures” that are not subject to change. Cezanne's artistic space (for example, "Bridge over the Créteille River") - a little heavy, almost deliberately compressed - is in motionless peace. This impression is not created thematically. The natural colors of nature (green, yellow, blue), as if outlining the volume with a strict pattern, “stop the moment” - begin to symbolize Form, a kind of light heavy thing, but not ephemeral, but closed in itself, coldly shiny, crystalline, Cezanne’s special thing , which he himself put into the formula “nature-in-depth,” turned out to be close to the creative intentions of the American prose writer: “Cezanne’s painting taught me that real simple phrases alone are not enough to give the story the volume and depth that I was trying to achieve. I learned a lot from him, but I couldn’t clearly explain what exactly.” It seems that another imperative of Cezanne is also important for Hemingway: “Impressionism should be given something... museum-like.”

Like Verdun's handwriting, Hemingway's style is sparse. To some extent, this is achieved due to the fact that Hemingway’s characters seem to have no soul. Their consciousness is presented decoratively, dissolving into the “patterns” of the external world (bar counter, city in the Rain, Parisian street grid). The stringing of facts, collecting them into a “landscape” is subject to a fairly rigid logic, which indicates the limitations of pleasures (the bar must be closed, Pernod must be drunk, and the trip to the mountains is over), which gives the somewhat monotonous, monochrome naturalization of Hemingway’s inner world a tragic character. The brightness of colors, the tangibility of forms (“Apollonian”) act as the reverse side of “nothing” (“Dionysian” beginning), which has no outlines, which can only be represented in reflected form and forms a kind of black lining for the pattern of word-pebbles.

In the suggestive description of death, in the recreation of the silhouette of the phenomenon against the background of a “black square” is one of the striking features of Hemingway’s primitivism as a style of modern tragedy.

In essence, in his interpretation of “nothing,” Hemingway acts as a writer “by contradiction,” approaching Christian issues in a parodic aspect. This did not escape the attention of J. Joyce: “Whether Hemingway shoots me or not, I will venture to say ... that I always considered him a deeply religious man.” Also, the famous American critic M. Cowley emphasized in the preface to the first edition of Hemingway’s “The Chosen” (1942) that his contemporary gives in the novel “The Sun Also Rises” an interpretation of the same problem that occupied T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.” .

Hemingway's equivalent of the "quest for the Grail" (the theme of The Waste Land) is paradoxical. Ways to overcome “blurring of contours” and “illness” (this is also the theme of T. Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”) are deliberately given by the American writer in a reduced, “everyday” series: professional training of a matador or reporter, relationships between a man and a woman, etc. .-in a series of facts, the right to real, and not “bookish” knowledge of which, according to the logic of Hemingway’s work, can provide only one thing: the experience of death as the main destiny of human existence, as a religious phenomenon.

“The Sun Also Rises” is a novel about the search for absolute meaning. This is indicated by two epigraphs arguing with each other. The author of one is G. Stein, the other is represented by a verse from Ecclesiastes about the ever-setting and rising sun.

Jake Barnes, the narrator and central character of the novel, acts as a principled “anti-romantic.” During the war he suffered a painful injury - Barnes was castrated by “weapons”. He tragically longs for love, which he is unable to share with the woman close to him. Striving for sobriety and fearing self-deception, Barnes tries to strictly control his emotions. Against the background of the stoic code of his behavior, which in the novel is consistently characterized as due, a position that is perceived as “impermissible” and “romantic” gradually becomes outlined.

The falseness, poses, and verbosity in the novel are represented by Robert Cohn. The subject of the application of what should and should not be done is the femme fatale Brett Ashley, and the arena of the collision is the “other country” of the Spanish fiesta. The height of Cohn's romanticism in Barnes's assessment is manifested in a tendency to self-dramatization, in dreams of fatal love. Cohn's unattractive traits for Barnes are emphasized by his inability to be ironic and respect the lifestyle of American expatriates in 1920s Paris: if a woman leaves a man, then demanding an explanation for this is not serious; if you conduct a conversation, it will certainly be restrained, in the language of taxi drivers or jockeys, etc. The right of Jake and his friends to a special code of conduct is earned through hard work. Unlike Kon, who has never faced serious life trials, they are crippled by the war, which to some extent saves them from the “celebration” of free life in its purely bourgeois version.

The tragic tone of the narrative is not hidden even in the second, seemingly pastoral part of the novel, which tells about Barnes's fishing trip with his friend Bill Gorton in the Spanish mountains. It is impossible not to notice that for Jake it is not so much the serenity of nature that is important, but the participation of a person in it - an initiate, an expert who enjoys being in the mountains not “naturally”, but according to a system of rules. Therefore, it is not the beauty of the streams, but the presence of a friend close to Barnes that grants temporary - carefully calculated by hours and minutes, the amount of food eaten and drunk - once or twice a year, overcoming loneliness.

Jake would have been able to become happy in Paris if he had always been near his desperately beloved Brett. His special sense of the aesthetic is capable of extracting the same pure pleasure from dining in a restaurant as from fishing: the essence of the matter is not in the influence of the environment - the environment does not have a decisive impact on the individualistic consciousness, although a person is biologically inseparable from it and suffers from his biological “inferiority” ”, - and in a purely personal solution to the question (“I don’t care what the world is. All I want to know is how to live in it”) about the “art of living.”

The beauty of nature in Burguet is somewhat out-of-date, too serene, and is unlikely to be able to fully satisfy a person who has been on the front line and faced there with the “revelry” of nature, with the elements, the quintessence of which is “nothing.” That is why the main value reference point of the novel is the reality of art, and not nature - the aesthetic principles of bullfighting. Bullfighting is the central symbol of the novel; it combines tradition, canon (absolute purity of technique) and innovation. The matador is constantly obliged to invent new moves, otherwise his fight will only begin to imitate danger (the story of the matador Belmonte).

The intensity of this meticulously ritualized action is given by the proximity of death. The matador fights in the “bull zone.” If he deviates for a moment from the rules of the performance - allowing the doomed animal to “charm”, hypnotize himself - and death cannot be avoided. Thus, bullfighting and the matador’s code of conduct symbolize in the novel all the main facets of overcoming lostness.

In this perspective, the brilliant matador Romero is not a folk hero at all, but a hero of art, the principles of which the narrator strives to comprehend and which is initially inaccessible to the understanding of Cohn, who is bored both in the mountains in the lap of nature and in a duel, but endlessly runs to the hairdresser. Varnay clearly brings something to his perception of bullfighting that ordinary Spaniards, lovers of the intricacies of bullfighting, are unlikely to understand.

Jake considers himself a mystic in light of his close brush with death in war. In contrast to the advanced, death in the stadium arena is enclosed within the framework of a “theater”, where the absurd cruelty of life is denied by a system of rules and conditionally defeated by art. It is important to note that bullfighting for the residents of Pamplona is not valuable in itself, but is an integral part of a seven-day Catholic holiday. The narrator is only interested in the “carnival” aspects of the festive events. In other words, the narrator intends to distinguish between what is happening not traditionally (a ritual of a church holiday, which Barnes partly associates with public hypocrisy), but unconventional - a situation of revaluation of values. Bringing bullfighting to a religious model becomes obvious in the novel when it comes to Christianity, which is attractive to Barnes primarily as a “form” filled with purely personal content.

The Spanish experience therefore hardly changed anything in the life of the narrator. Being at the “holiday within a holiday” (of which Bret Ashley is the priestess) only roots him in the “art” of suffering. Barnes's stoic code is tested once again in increasingly brutal "love-torment." Having sacrificed Brett Ashley to the matador Romeo in accordance with the artistic spirit of Dionysian-carnival fun, Varnay cannot help but realize that he is able to gain only by constantly tragically losing. Accordingly, Bret Ashley sacrifices his passion for the “master of beauty” for the sake of his “cruel” love for Jake Barnes. The final lines of the novel (Varne and Ashley, who have met again, are circling in a car around the square) hint at the “eternal return” - the inexhaustible suffering of physical existence, on the depth of awareness of which the emergence of the beauty of despair depends.

Barnes’s “choice” is, of course, a free choice according to existentialist concepts, the “hopeless” optimism of which anticipates the concept of action that was philosophically and aesthetically justified in France only at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s. Far from being arbitrary, J.-P. Sartre (the refusal of love at the end of “Nausea” and the figure of the Self-Taught Man allow us to recall the final chapters of “The Sun Also Rises” and the figure of Cohn), analyzing Camus’ “The Stranger,” found it possible to name Hemingway among the predecessors of his fellow writer.

Novel "A Farewell to Arms!" can be considered a prologue to the situation depicted in “The Sun Also Rises.” And in this work, Hemingway used a quote in the title of his book. It is taken from a poem by the English playwright and poet late XVI V. George Peale, written on the occasion of the retirement of the famous warrior. Hemingway's irony is obvious: his novel depicts not the glory of guns, but tragic defeat. What kind of “weapon” are we talking about? First of all, about the romantic idea of ​​war associated with the figure of Napoleon, a war of systematic offensives and retreats, with the solemn surrender of cities, consecrated by ritual - in a word, about an idea, the content of which was brilliantly played out by L. N. Tolstoy in “War and Peace”. The illogic, the cruel absurdity of a modern massacre (the execution at Caporeto) destroys Lieutenant Frederick Henry's illusion of duty in relation to a system of military and social relations that allows the triumph of chaos, but at the same time is sanctified by loud but insignificant slogans about “heroism.”

According to the author, “Farewell to Arms!” is not an anti-militaristic novel like “Fire” by A. Barbusse. Lieutenant Henry is not against war as such - war, in his opinion, is the courageous craft of a real man. However, as Hemingway shows, this ritual completely loses its universal meaning against the backdrop of battles that are deadly illogical and play with people like puppets. The front line in this “new” war, where in essence there are neither friends nor foes (the Austrians are practically not personified in the novel), is purely conventional. The discovery of this dimension of war occurs both under the influence of injury and as a result of the lieutenant’s conversations with ordinary people who, as often happens in Hemingway, act as experts in the most reliable truths (“War is not won by victories”). It gives Frederick nothing but a lesson in self-knowledge: the war becomes an undeniable, existential event of his inner world. From this war, of course, it is no longer possible to desert, which once again emphasizes the ironic ambiguity of the novel’s title.

As war begins to be identified with the absolute cruelty of the world, love comes to the forefront of the narrative, which was previously considered a biological trap for a real man, in contrast to “glorious military deeds.” Rinaldi, Frederic's friend, for example, has syphilis. As a result of the development of the theme of love, the novel could rightfully be called “Farewell, Love!” That is, goodbye to “romantic”, sublime love, as impossible in the modern world as romantic war. Frederick and Catherine recognize this when they discuss how the impersonal war machine (“they”) kills the most worthy. Without creating any illusions about their future, Hemingway’s heroes are doomed, as in the novel “The Sun Also Rises,” to love-torment, love-loss.

The scenery changes, the gloomy mountain (rising above the front line) and the storm give way to sun-drenched Switzerland, but this does not abolish the tragic pattern: Catherine dies while performing an exclusively peaceful duty, in childbirth. Following the drama of rock turns Hemingway's characters into seekers of revelation, the essence of which they can only determine by contradiction. “By losing, I gain” - this paradox, traditional for the works of the American writer, indicates Hemingway’s intention to make meaning the very absence of meaning: the bitter the defeat, the more persistently a person’s desire to assert his dignity at all costs manifests itself.

Hemingway's best works are about metaphysical hunger. This theme in the first two novels is placed in the context of problems of art and love. In the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway's traditional individualist is tested by politics.

Hemingway's book about Spain may not be so perfect from a creative point of view (elements of self-repetition are noticeable in it), but this is compensated by the capacity of its generalizations. If the characters of early Hemingway felt the impossibility of escaping the obsession of war even in peaceful life, then the heroes of “The Bell” would probably agree with the words of T. S. Eliot from an essay on Milton: “The civil war never ends...” As an eyewitness to the Spanish events, Hemingway considered it possible to put as an epigraph to the novel a fragment from John Donne’s sermon similar in content to Eliot’s formula. “...I am one with all Humanity, and therefore never ask for whom the Bell tolls: it tolls for You” - in this statement of the poet Hemingway found confirmation of his observations about the Spanish Civil War: the human in a person is more important than his political affiliation. The writer seemed to have foreseen criticism of Soviet propaganda for the impartial portrayal of Spanish communists and leaders of the International Brigades in the novel, when through the mouth of his character, the Soviet journalist Karkov (his prototype was M. Koltsov), he accused Robert Jordan of being “weak.” political development" In the 1960s, D. Ibarruri sent a special letter to the Politburo of the CPSU, where she spoke about the undesirability of publishing Hemingway’s novel in the USSR. As a result, domestic readers are still, by inertia, getting acquainted with a translation that is full of censorship omissions.

The depth of “The Bell” is that it is both an anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian novel. Anti-fascism in it is, first of all, not a political position, but a manifestation of personal courage and a category of personal freedom. Hemingway makes the contrast between the Francoists and the Republicans conditional at times: both are distinguished by cruelty. The writer quite habitually confronts demagoguery, cowardice, and propaganda falsehood with the stoic courage of ordinary people (El Sordo, Anselmo), who fight as they plow the land, and kill, hating murder. The attentive reader cannot ignore the double paradox of the final pages of the story. From the standpoint of military strategy, Jordan’s death - he single-handedly covers the retreat of the partisans - does not make much sense, but, as in similar novels by A. Malraux (“Human Lot”), which are dedicated to “strange” civil wars, the hero wins when he refuses from any form of “self-interest” and sacrifices himself for the sake of others. But two worthy people, to varying degrees, must die at the bridge: both the “Republican” Jordan, and the first who, by tragic irony, falls into the crosshairs of his machine gun, the royalist Lieutenant Berrendo.

The central theme of the novel, as the author saw it, should therefore be formulated as a person’s knowledge of himself in spite of society, which offers him only the appearance of a solution to the problem of freedom. In “The Bell” we are actually talking about two wars: the war of ideologies (on the plain) and the partisan war (in the mountains). It is the double sacrifice - the “mountain” test of death, as well as the love of a Spanish girl - that shows the price of true courage, allows the American dreamer-intellectual, who came to Spain as a volunteer, to escape from beautiful-minded (“bookish”) idealism and to establish himself, as Malraux would say, in the idealism of “anti-fate”. Hemingway was not alone in his artistic vision of Spanish events. Somewhat similar accents are characteristic of the work of J. Orwell (“Tribute to Catalonia”, 1938), and the poetry of W. H. Auden at the turn of the 1930s-1940s.

Hemingway's post-war work (the novel "Across the River, in the Shade of the Trees", 1950; the story "The Old Man and the Sea", 1952) is inferior in level to his works of the 1920-1930s. However, this circumstance could no longer change Hemingway’s reputation (Nobel Prize 1954) as one of the main creators of the artistic mythology of modern individualism.

The theme of war in the works of E. Hemingway

“Lost Generation” “Lost Generation” is a definition applied to a group of foreign writers who published a series of books in the 20s of the twentieth century, expressing disappointment in capitalist civilization, aggravated by the tragic experience of World War I. The expression “lost generation” was first used by the American writer Gertrude Stein in a conversation with E. Hemingway. Then the “lost generation” began to be called people who went through the First World War, were spiritually traumatized, lost faith in the jingoistic ideals that once captivated them, sometimes internally empty, acutely aware of their restlessness and alienation from society. “The Lost Generation” is so named because, having gone through the circles of an unnecessary, senseless war, they lost faith in the natural need to continue their family, they lost faith in their life and the future. [29;17]

Democratic-minded intellectuals in America, France, England, Germany, Russia and other countries drawn into the war were internally convinced: the war was wrong, unnecessary, not their own. This was felt by many, which is where this spiritual closeness between people who stood by during the war came from. different sides barricades

People who went through the meat grinder of war, those who managed to survive it, returned home, leaving on the battlefields not only an arm or a leg - physical health - but also something more. Ideals, faith in life, in the future were lost. What seemed strong and unshakable - culture, humanism, reason, individual freedom - fell apart like a house of cards and turned into emptiness.

The chain of times was broken and one of the most significant and profound changes in the moral and psychological atmosphere was the emergence of the “lost generation” - a generation that had lost faith in those lofty concepts and feelings in which it was raised to respect, and that rejected devalued values. For this generation, “all the gods died, all the battles” were left behind, all “faith in man was undermined.”

Hemingway took the words “You are all a lost generation!” as the epigraph to his novel “Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises)”, and the formula went around the world, gradually losing its real content and becoming a universal designation of the time and people of this time. But There was a sharp line between people who had experienced the same life experiences. Outwardly, everyone looked the same: demonstrative cynicism, faces twisted in an ironic grin, disappointed, tired intonations. But what for some was a true tragedy, for others became a mask, game, a common style of behavior.

They were traumatized, truly experienced the loss of the ideals in which they first of all sacredly believed, as personal, unabating pain, they experienced disorder, discord modern world. But they were not going to carefully cherish this state of mind; they wanted to work, and not idly talk about losses and unrealized plans.

The general meaning of the creative efforts of representatives of the “lost generation” - writers - can be defined as the desire to remove a person from the power of ethical dogma, which requires total conformism and practically destroys value human personality. To do this, it was necessary to find, develop, and create a new moral principle, a new ethical standard, and even a new philosophy of existence. They were united by a fierce disgust for the war itself and for those foundations and principles (social, economic, political, ideological, moral), which in their development inevitably led to a universal tragedy. They simply hated them and swept them away. In the minds of the writers of the “lost generation,” the idea of ​​the need to isolate oneself from these principles, to bring a person out of a herd state, so that he could realize himself as an individual and develop his own life principles, not subordinated to the “established values” of an antagonistic society. The heroes of these writers never resemble puppets submissive to someone else's will - living, independent characters, with their own characteristics, with their own intonations, most often supposedly indifferent and supposedly ironic. What are the characteristics of those called the "lost generation"? Representatives of the “lost generation” are, in the overwhelming majority, young people who have just graduated from school, and sometimes did not have time to finish it. [ 20; 65]

Honest and slightly naive young men, having believed in the loud words of their teachers about progress and civilization, having read the corrupt press and listened to a lot of chauvinistic speeches, went to the front with the consciousness that they were fulfilling a high and noble mission. Many went to war voluntarily. The epiphany was terrible; Faced with naked reality, fragile youthful ideals were shattered. The cruel and senseless war immediately dispelled their illusions and showed the emptiness and falsehood of pompous words about duty, justice, and humanism. But refusing to believe chauvinistic propaganda, yesterday’s schoolchildren do not understand the meaning of what is happening. They don’t understand why people of different nationalities should kill each other. They begin to gradually free themselves from nationalistic hatred of soldiers of other armies, seeing in them the same unfortunate ordinary people, workers, peasants, as they themselves were. The spirit of internationalism awakens in the boys. Post-war meetings with former enemies further strengthen the internationalism of the “lost generation”. [ 18; 37]

As a result of long discussions, the soldiers begin to understand that war serves as a means of enriching some people, they understand its unjust nature and come to deny war . The experience of those who went through the meat grinder of the First World War determined for the rest of their lives their common hatred of militarism, of cruel, senseless violence, contempt for the state structure, which gives rise to and blesses murderous massacres. Writers of the “Lost Generation” created their anti-war works, considering this work their moral duty not only to the fallen and survivors, but also to future generations. [ 18; 43]

The best representatives of the “lost generation” show firmness and courage in all life’s trials, be it everyday life in war with terrible shelling, mine explosions, cold and hunger, the death of comrades in the trenches and hospitals, or the difficult post-war years, when there is no work, no money, no self. life. The heroes face all difficulties in silence, supporting each other, fighting with all their might for their lives. The combination of “lostness” and personal courage in resisting hostile circumstances constitutes the grain of the attitude that underlies their character. The “fulcrum” of people crippled by war is front-line camaraderie, friendship. Camaraderie is the only value generated by war. In the face of mortal danger and hardship, camaraderie remains a strong force. The soldiers cling to this camaraderie as the only thread connecting them with the pre-war past, with peaceful life.

After returning to peaceful life, where former front-line soldiers are looking for the “road to a new life” in different ways and where class and other differences between them are revealed, the entire illusory nature of this concept is gradually revealed.

But those who remained faithful to front-line friendship strengthened and enriched it during the difficult years of peaceful and pre-war life. Comrades at the first call rushed to help their friends in the fight against emerging fascism.

After returning from war, former soldiers feel confused. Many of them went to the front from school, they have no profession, it is difficult for them to find work, they cannot get a job in life. Nobody needs former soldiers. Evil reigns in the world and its reign has no end. Once deceived, they are no longer able to believe in goodness. The surrounding reality is perceived by former soldiers as a mosaic of large and small human tragedies, which embodied man’s fruitless pursuit of happiness, a hopeless search for harmony within himself, man’s attempts to find some enduring spiritual values, doomed to failure, moral ideal. [ 20; 57]

Realizing that nothing had changed in the world, that all the beautiful slogans calling on them to die for “democracy”, “homeland” were lies, that they had been deceived, they became confused, lost faith in anything, lost old illusions and they found new ones, and, devastated, began to waste their lives, exchanging it for endless drunkenness, debauchery, and the search for more and more new sensations. All this gave rise to the loneliness of the individual among people, loneliness as a consequence of the unconscious desire to go beyond the world of conformists who accept the modern order of things as the norm or universal inevitability. Loneliness is tragic, it is not just living alone, but the inability to understand another and be understood. Lonely people seem to be surrounded by a blank wall through which it is impossible to reach them either from the inside or from the outside. Many of the “lost” could not stand the struggle for life, some committed suicide, some ended up in an insane asylum, others adapted and became accomplices of the revenge-seekers.

In 1929, E.M. Remarque’s novel (Erich Maria Remarque June 22, 1898, Osnabrück - September 25, 1970) “All Quiet on the Western Front” was published, in which the author sincerely and excitedly told the truth about the war. And to this day this is one of the most striking anti-war books. Remarque showed the war in all its terrible manifestations: pictures of attacks, artillery duels, many killed and maimed in this hellish meat grinder. This book is woven from the writer's personal life experience. Together with other young men born in 1898, Remarque was drafted into the army in 1916 from school. Remarque, who took part in battles in France and other parts of the Western Front, was wounded several times. [ eleven; 9] In August 1917, he ended up in the infirmary in Duisburg and in letters sent from there to his front-line comrades, he captured gloomy pictures that prepared the ground for the creation of such memorable episodes of the novel ten years later. This novel contains a strong and unequivocal condemnation of the spirit of militarism that reigned in the Kaiser's Germany and contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. This book is about the recent past, but it is directed to the future: life itself turned it into a warning, because the revolution of 1918, which overthrew the Kaiser’s regime, did not eradicate the spirit of militarism. Moreover, nationalist and other reactionary forces used Germany's defeat in World War I to promote revanchism.

Closely linked to the anti-war spirit of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front is its internationalism. The soldiers, the heroes of the novel, are increasingly thinking about what (or who) makes them kill people of a different nationality. Many scenes in the novel are about the camaraderie and friendship of the soldiers. Seven classmates went to the front, they fight in the same company, together they spend rare hours of rest, together they train recruits in order to protect them from inevitable death in the very first minutes of battle, together they experience the horrors of war, together they go into attacks, sit in the trenches during artillery shelling, they bury their fallen comrades together. And out of seven classmates, the hero remains alone. [ 18; 56]

Its meaning is revealed in the first lines of the epilogue: when the main character was killed, it was so quiet and calm on the entire front that military reports consisted of only one phrase: “All Quiet on the Western Front.” With the light hand of Remarque, this formula, imbued with bitter sarcasm, acquired the character of a phraseological turn. The capacious title of the novel, with deep subtext, allows the reader to expand the scope of the narrative and speculate on the author’s ideas: if in the days when, from the “high” point of view of the main command, everything at the front remains unchanged, so many terrible things happen, then what can we say about the periods of violent , bloody battles? [ 19; 12]

Remarque's main novels are internally interconnected. This is, as it were, a continuing chronicle of a single human destiny in a tragic era; the chronicle is largely autobiographical. Like his heroes, Remarque went through the meat grinder of the First World War, and this experience for the rest of his life determined their common hatred of militarism, of cruel, senseless violence, contempt for the state structure, which gives rise to and blesses murderous massacres.

Richard Aldington (Richard Aldington July 8, 1892 - July 27, 1962) belonged to the post-war or “lost” generation of writers, since the heyday of his work dates back to the 20s and 30s. XX century Poet, short story writer, novelist, biographer, translator, literary critic, Aldington was a spokesman for the sentiments of the “lost generation” and the spiritual turmoil caused by the war. played a role in Aldington's work First World War. [ thirty; 2] “Death of a Hero” (1929) is the writer’s first novel, which immediately gained fame far beyond England. Externally, according to the plot concept, the novel fits into the framework of a biographical novel (this is the story of the life of an individual from birth to death), and in terms of its problems it belongs to an anti-war novel. At the same time, the novel breaks the framework of all the usual genre definitions. Thus, considering the problem of a military catastrophe, getting to the bottom of its cause, one can notice that less than half of the space is allocated to front-line scenes themselves. The author examines the life story of his hero in fragments, groping his way through disparate influences, but traces it from beginning to end, warning in advance about the tragic outcome. However, individual history appears as a typical history, as the fate of a generation. The main stages of this development, the complex process of character formation, the path of individual destiny taken in interconnections, are presented as an example of a by no means special case. [ 9; 34]

The hero of the novel is a young man, George Winterborn, who at the age of 16 read all the poets, starting with Chaucer, an individualist and an esthete who sees around him the hypocrisy of “family morality,” garish social contrasts, and decadent art. Once at the front, he becomes serial number 31819 and becomes convinced of the criminal nature of the war. At the front, personalities are not needed, talents are not 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 completely differently, acutely feeling his loneliness: neither his parents, nor his wife, nor his girlfriend could comprehend the extent of his despair, understand his poetic soul, or at least not traumatize it with calculation and efficiency. The war has broken him, the desire to live has disappeared, and in one of the attacks, he exposes himself to a bullet. The motives for George’s “strange” and completely unheroic death are unclear to those around him: few people knew about his personal tragedy. His death was more likely a suicide, a voluntary exit from the hell of cruelty and dishonesty, an honest choice of an uncompromising talent that did not fit into the war. Aldington strives to analyze as deeply as possible the psychological state of the hero at the main moments of his life in order to show how he gives up illusions and hopes. Family and school, founded on lies, tried to mold Winterbhorn into the spirit of the warlike singer of imperialism. Military theme and the consequences of the war run like a red thread through all of Aldington’s novels and stories. All their heroes are connected with the war, all of them reflect its harmful effects.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories depicting the so-called American Jazz Age of the 1920s. The work of F. S. Fitzgerald is one of the most remarkable pages of American literature of the 20th century during its peak period. His contemporaries were Dreiser and Faulkner, Forest and Hemingway, Sandburg and T. Wolfe. In this brilliant galaxy, through whose efforts American literature in the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century turned into one of the largest literatures in the world, Fitzgerald plays a prominent role. A writer of extraordinary subtlety, he chronologically discovered new era in the development of Russian literature, being the first to speak on behalf of the generation entering life after the global catastrophe of the First World War, capturing in deeply poetic, at the same time highly expressive images not only its dreams and disappointments, but also the inevitability of the collapse of ideals that are far from genuine humanistic values.[ 31; 8]

Fitzgerald's literary success was indeed early and noisy. He wrote his first novel, “This Side of Paradise” (1920), immediately after finishing his army service in Alabama. The novel expressed the sentiments of those who, not having time to get to the front, nevertheless experienced the war as a turning point in history, affecting everyone who had the chance to to live in these years when the usual order of things and the traditional system of values ​​were undermined. The book told about the “lost generation”, for which “all gods died, all wars died down, all faith disappeared.” Realizing that after the historical catastrophe the previous forms of human relationships became impossible, the characters of Fitzgerald’s first novels and stories feel a spiritual vacuum around them and they are conveyed the thirst for intense emotional life, freedom from traditional moral restrictions and taboos, characteristic of the “Jazz Age,” but also spiritual vulnerability , uncertainty about the future, the outlines of which are lost due to the rapidity of changes taking place in the world. [ 31; 23]

John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896, Chicago - September 28, 1970, Baltimore) - American writer. He was a nurse during the First World War. He took part in the war of 1914-1918 in the French, Italian and American armies, where he revealed himself as a pacifist. In his work “Three Soldiers” (1921), the author acts as a major realist artist. He provides an in-depth analysis of the psychology of Americans during the war era, depicting with particular persuasiveness the state of social crisis that became typical of the advanced elements of the army towards the end of the war. His heroes were a musician, a farmer and a lens salesman - people from different social strata, with different views and concepts, living in different parts of the country and united by the terrible everyday life of the army. Each of them in one way or another rebelled against their destiny, against violent death, lawlessness and humiliation, against the suppression of individual will by a powerful army machine. An entire generation suffered through them. The tragic “I” that sounded from the pages of the books of Dos Passos’ contemporaries turned into a tragic “we” for the writer. [ 18; 22]

The best representatives of the “lost generation” have not lost their humanistic feelings: conscience, human dignity, a heightened sense of justice, compassion, loyalty to loved ones, self-sacrifice. These features of the “lost generation” manifested themselves in society at all critical moments of history: during World War II and after it, during “local wars.” The value of works about the “lost generation” is enormous. The writers told the truth about this generation, showed their heroes as they really were with all their positive and negative traits. Writers influenced the worldview of readers, they condemned the foundations of an antagonistic society, resolutely and unconditionally condemned militarism, and called for internationalism. With their works they wanted to prevent new wars and warn people about their exceptional danger to humanity. At the same time, the work of the writers of the “lost generation” is full of humanistic aspirations, they call on a person in any conditions to remain a person with high moral qualities: faith in the power of courage, honesty, in the value of stoicism, in the nobility of spirit, in the power of a high idea, true friendship, immutable ethical standards. [ 22; 102]

Ernest Hemingway as a representative of the "Lost Generation"

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899 – 1961) - American writer, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. Ernest Hemingway repeatedly took part in military operations. Ernest Hemingway participated in World War I, which he volunteered for. In those years when Europe was already engulfed in war, in the United States the consciousness of its power and invulnerability gave rise to a mood of smug isolationism and hypocritical pacifism. On the other hand, conscious anti-militarism was also growing among workers and intellectuals. [ 16; 7] However, the United States has already become an imperialist and even colonial power since the beginning of the century. Both the government and the largest monopolies were interested in markets and jealously monitored the redistribution of colonies, spheres of influence, etc. The largest capitalists carried out intensive exports of capital. The House of Morgan was quite openly a banker for the Entente. But official propaganda, this mouthpiece of the monopolies, influencing public opinion, screamed louder and louder about German atrocities: the attack on little Serbia, the destruction of Louvain, and finally, submarine warfare and the sinking of the Lusitania. The newspapers increasingly demanded that the United States take part in the “war to save democracy,” in the “war to end wars.” Hemingway, like many of his peers, was eager to go to the front. But in American army he was stubbornly not accepted, and therefore, together with a friend, in April 1918 he enlisted in one of the sanitary detachments that the United States sent to the Italian army. [ 33; 10]

This was one of the most unreliable areas western front. And since the movement of American troops was slow, these volunteer ambulance columns were also meant to display American uniforms and thereby lift the spirits of reluctant Italian soldiers. Soon Hemingway's convoy arrived at a site near Fosse Alta, on the Piave River. But he strove to go to the front line, and he was assigned to distribute gifts in the trenches - tobacco, mail, brochures. On the night of July 9, Hemingway climbed to a forward observation post. There he was hit by an Austrian mortar shell, which caused severe concussion and many minor wounds. Two Italians next to him were killed. Having regained consciousness, Hemingway dragged the third, who was seriously wounded, to the trenches. He was discovered by a searchlight and hit by a machine gun burst, injuring his knee and lower leg. The wounded Italian was killed. During the inspection, twenty-eight fragments were removed from Hemingway, and a total of two hundred and thirty-seven were counted. In Milan, where he was treated, Hemingway experienced his first serious feelings for Agnes von Kurowski, a tall, black-haired nurse, a native of New York. Agnes von Kurowski was largely the model for nurse Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms! After leaving the hospital, Hemingway achieved an appointment as a lieutenant in an infantry shock unit, but it was already October, and a truce was soon concluded - Hemingway was awarded the Italian Military Cross and a silver medal for valor. Then, in Italy in 1918, Hemingway was not yet a writer, but a soldier, but there is no doubt that the impressions and experiences of this six months at the front not only left an indelible mark on his entire future path, but were also directly reflected in a number of his works. In 1918 year, Hemingway returned home to the United States in the aura of a hero, one of the first wounded, one of the first awarded. Perhaps this flattered the young veteran’s pride for some time, but very soon he got rid of this illusion. [ 33; eleven]

Later, he returned to the war more than once, recalling the sensations he had experienced. The experience at the front left an unhealed wound in the writer’s memory and in his very perception of the world. Hemingway was always drawn to depicting people in extreme situations, when their true colors emerge. human character, at the “moment of truth,” as he liked to say, the highest physical and spiritual tension, a collision with mortal danger, when the true essence of a person is highlighted with particular relief.

He argued that war is the most fertile topic, because it concentrates. The idea that military experience is extremely important for a writer, that a few days at the front can be more significant than many “peaceful” years, was repeated to him more than once. However, the process of gaining clarity of understanding of the true nature and nature of the catastrophe that broke out was not quick and simple for him. It happened gradually, throughout the first post-war decade, and was largely stimulated by reflections on the fate of front-line soldiers, those who would be called the “lost generation.” He constantly thought about his experience at the front, assessed, weighed, allowed his impressions to “cool down,” and tried to be as objective as possible. [ 16; 38] Further, the theme of the First World War can be traced in his work - he works a lot in Germany, France, Lausanne. He writes about the unrest caused by the fascist regime, about a resigned France. Later, the author of the novels “A Farewell to Arms!” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” will take part in the Second World War, in the British aviation, fighting against the pilots of the FAU-1 “suicide planes”, will lead the movement of the French partisans and will actively fight against Germany, for which in 1947 he was awarded a bronze medal medal. Thus, a journalist with such rich military experience was able to delve into the international problem much more deeply than many of his contemporaries.

A brave reporter, better known as a talented writer, Ernest Hemingway wrote his reports from a hot spot - Spain, engulfed in civil war. Often he surprisingly accurately noted all the features of the course of the war and even predicted its possible development. He proved himself not only as the author of impressive landscapes, but also as a capable analyst.

The problem of the “lost generation” is developed in full force in E. Hemingway’s novel “Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises)”, published in 1926. It was possible to write a novel in such a deadline only with Hemingway’s incredible ability to work. But there was another circumstance, even more significant - he was writing a novel about his generation, about people whom he knew to the last line of their character, whom he observed for several years, living next to them, drinking with them, arguing, having fun, going to a bullfight together in Spain. He also wrote about himself, putting into the character of Jake Barnes his personal experience, a lot of what he himself had experienced. At one time, Hemingway decided to abandon the title of the novel "Fiesta" and decided to call it "The Lost Generation", but then he changed his mind, put the words about the "lost generation" as an epigraph, and next to it he put another - a quote from Ecclesiastes about the earth that endures forever. [ 17; 62]

While working on the novel, Hemingway was guided by life, by living characters, so the heroes of his novel are not one-dimensional, not smeared with the same paint - pink or black, these are living people who have both positive and negative character traits. Hemingway's novel captures the characteristic features of the famous part " "lost generation", that part of it that was truly morally destroyed by the war. But Hemingway did not want to classify himself, and many people close to him in spirit, as a "lost generation". But the "lost generation" is not homogeneous.

On the pages of the novel, characters appear - named and unnamed - who are indisputable and definable at first glance. Those same ones are fashionable with their “lostness”, flaunting “courageous” lack of ideality, “soldier’s” directness, even though they know about the war only by hearsay. The heroes of Hemingway’s novel absorbed the features of many people he knew; in the novel a multifaceted and beautiful image land, the image of the Spain he knew and loved. [ 14; 76]

All of Hemingway's work is autobiographical and his own experiences, worries, thoughts and views on events in the world are expressed in his works. Thus, the novel “A Farewell to Arms!” is dedicated to the events of the First World War, in which the main character deserts, but not because of his human qualities, but because the war is disgusting to him, all he wants is to live with his beloved woman, and in the war he only cripples himself. Lieutenant Frederick Henry is a largely autobiographical person. While creating this novel, Hemingway was extremely self-critical, constantly correcting and redoing what he had written. He made 32 versions of the novel's ending until he settled on a happy ending. It was, he admits, painful work. A lot of effort went into coming up with the name. [ 15; 17]

Immediately after its release, the novel topped the bestseller list. The novel marked the beginning of Hemingway's world fame. This is one of the most widely read works of literature of the 20th century. Novel "A Farewell to Arms!" People of all generations read with equal interest. War occupied a significant place in Hemingway's work. The writer's attitude towards imperialist wars was unambiguous. In his novel, Hemingway shows all the horrors of war, which is a mosaic of large and small human tragedies. The narration is told from Henry's point of view and begins with descriptions of front-line life in the days of calm. There is a lot of personal, experienced and experienced by Hemingway in this image. Lieutenant Henry is not against war as such. Moreover, in his opinion, this is the courageous craft of a real man. Once at the front, he experiences a loss of illusions and deep disappointment in the war. Personal experience and friendly communication with Italian soldiers and officers awaken him from his chauvinistic frenzy and lead him to the understanding that war is a senseless, cruel massacre. The disorderly retreat of the Italian army symbolizes the lack of harmony in the world. To avoid execution based on a ridiculous sentence scribbled in a pocket notebook by an indifferent hand, Frederick attempts to escape. He succeeds. Henry's flight is a decision to leave the game, to break his absurd ties with society. He breaks his oath, but his military duty is portrayed in the book as a duty to his subordinates. But neither Frederick himself nor his subordinates realized their own duty in relation to the war in general, did not see the meaning in it. They are united only by a sense of comradeship and genuine mutual respect. Whatever Hemingway wrote about, he always returned to his main problem - to a person in the tragic trials that befell him. Hemingway professed the philosophy of Stoicism, paying tribute to human courage in the most disastrous circumstances.[ 21; 16]

The theme of the Civil War in Hemingway’s work did not arise by chance. It grew out of reports about Italy, motivated by the author’s hatred of the fascist regime and the desire to resist it in any way possible. It is surprising that an American, at first glance an outside observer, so deeply and sincerely perceived the mentalities of completely different peoples. The danger of the nationalist ideas of fascist Italy and Germany became clear to him from the very beginning. The desire for the liberation of their territory by the patriots of Spain became close, and the lesser threat to humanity from communism became obvious.

Spain unusual country. It represents the fragmentation known throughout the world - Catalonia, Valencia, Andalusia - all the inhabitants of the provinces have been competing with each other over the course of a long history and in every possible way emphasize their own independence. But during the Civil War, as Hemingway writes, it played a significant role. It would seem that such a division should have a negative impact on the course of military operations; the inability to contact neighboring provinces usually frightens and reduces the enthusiasm of the fighters. But in Spain, this fact played a diametrically opposite role - even in war, representatives of different provinces compete with each other, and this leads to the fact that the isolation of regions from each other only gave strength to the fighting spirit - everyone wanted to show their heroism, which has no equal among the heroism of their neighbors. Ernest Hemingway mentions this fact in a series of Spanish reports dedicated to Madrid. He writes about the enthusiasm that arose among the officers after the enemy cut them off from neighboring sectors of the front. The Spanish Civil War began as a conflict between the Communist Party, supported by the two great powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and the party led by General Franco, which had the support of Germany and Italy. And in fact, this became the first open opposition to the fascist regime. Hemingway, who fiercely hated this ideology and fought against it, instantly took the side of his like-minded people. Even then, the writer understood that these actions would not subsequently turn into a “small victorious war”, the fight against fascism would not end on the territory of Spain, and much larger military actions would unfold. [ 25; 31]

In the play "The Fifth Column" and the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" the author openly criticizes fascism. Hemingway criticizes everything about a dictator - from decisions in appearance to decisive actions taken in governing the people. He makes of him a person who reads a French-English dictionary upside down, acting as a duelist in front of peasant women. In his articles, the writer repeatedly called on the world to pay attention to the phenomenon that had arisen in order to cut it off in the bud. After all, the American understood that the fascist regime would not disappear in a year and a half, as many of his contemporaries believed. The writer was able to adequately assess the policies of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. He hated fascism and fought against it in every possible way - both as a journalist and as a voluntary participant in hostilities. In his struggle against fascism, he even went so far as to join the Communist Party, without sharing its views. Since communism was seen as the only equivalent opposition to the aggressor, taking his side meant greatest success in such a battle. In this, the civil war was of a dramatic nature for him - he was forced to take the side of other people's views, moving away from his own. The writer transfers the same conflicting feelings to Robert Jordan, the main character of the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” His hero receives the task of crossing the front line and, when the offensive of the Republican army begins, with the help of a partisan detachment, blow up a bridge in the rear of the Nazis in order to prevent them from sending up reinforcements. It would seem that the plot is too simple and uncomplicated for a great novel, but Hemingway solved a number of problems in this novel moral problems, solved them for myself in a new way. And first of all, it was the problem of the value of human life in relation to the moral duty voluntarily assumed in the name of a high idea. The novel is permeated with a sense of tragedy. His hero Robert Jordan lives with this feeling. The threat of death hovers over the entire partisan detachment, either in the form of fascist planes or in the guise of fascist patrols appearing at the detachment’s location. But this is not the tragedy of helplessness and doom in the face of death, as it was in the novel “A Farewell to Arms!”

Realizing that completing the task could end in death, Jordan, nevertheless, argues that everyone must fulfill their duty and much depends on the fulfillment of duty - the fate of the war, and maybe even more. “So instead of the individualism of Frederick Henry, who thinks only about preserving his life and his love, Hemingway’s new hero, in the conditions of a willow war, not imperialist, but revolutionary, has a sense of duty to humanity, to the high idea of ​​the struggle for freedom. And love in the novel rises to other heights, intertwined with the idea of ​​public duty. [33; 30]

The idea of ​​duty to people permeates the entire work. And if in the novel "A Farewell to Arms!" Hemingway, through the mouth of his city, denied “lofty” words, then when applied to the war in Spain, these words again acquire their original value. The tragic sound of the novel reaches its conclusion in the epilogue - Jordan completes the task, the bridge is blown up, but he himself is seriously wounded.

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In my line of work, as a psychologist, I have to work with people’s difficulties and problems. When working with any specific problem, you don’t think about this generation as a whole and the time from which they come. But I couldn’t help but notice one recurring situation. Moreover, it concerned the generation from which I myself am. This is the generation born in the late 70s and early 80s.

Why did I call the article the lost generation and what exactly was lost?

Let's go in order.
These citizens of ours were born in the late 70s and early 80s. They went to school in 1985-1990. That is, the period of growth, maturation, puberty, formation and formation of personality took place in the dashing 90s.

What are these years? And what did I notice as a psychologist and experience myself?

During these years, crime was the norm. Moreover, it was considered very cool, and many teenagers strove for a criminal lifestyle. This lifestyle came at a price. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and not so remote places “mowed down” (I’m not afraid of this word) many of my peers. Some died at that time, while still teenagers (from overdose, violence in the army, criminal disputes). Others later from alcohol and drugs.

Until recently, I thought that these were our only losses (of our generation). Until I realized the next thing. In the 90s, Western culture very powerfully burst into our information field. And it’s far from the best part of it. And she promoted a “cool” life. Expensive cars, sex, alcohol, beautiful restaurants and hotels. Money became paramount. And being a “hard worker” has become a disgrace. At the same time, our traditional values ​​were completely devalued.

This process of depreciation of our values ​​began earlier and became one of the elements of the collapse of the USSR. And he destroyed not only the USSR, but also the lives of specific people and continues to do so to this day.
The substitution of values ​​that took place left a negative imprint on this entire generation.
If some fell under the skating rink of crime, alcohol and drugs. Those others who were good girls and boys, came under information processing.

What kind of information processing is this, and what harm does it still cause?

These are destroyed and distorted family values. These people do not know, do not know how and do not value family relationships. They grew up knowing that it doesn't matter who you are, it's what you have that matters. The cult of consumption has come to the forefront, and spirituality has faded into the background.
Many of these people may look gorgeous, but have several divorces behind them. They can make money, but the atmosphere in the house leaves much to be desired. In many families, it is not clear who is doing what, what the distribution of roles is in the family. A woman has ceased to be a wife and mother, and a man has ceased to be a father and husband.
They grew up knowing that what's cool is a white Mercedes. But the reality is that only a few can afford it. And as a result, many of them experience a feeling of inadequacy and inferiority. And at the same time they devalue their partner.
Having been in societies where people consciously work on family values ​​and culture family relations(various Christian, Muslim, Vedic, etc.), you understand how much my generation has missed. And how much their roots are pruned.
Blurred family values ​​lead to unhappy families. If the value of the role of the family decreases, then the entire human family, for the person himself, becomes less important. If you don’t value your family, you don’t value your small homeland, and then your big homeland. Many of them dream of Las Vegas, Paris, etc. The I-Family-Kin-Homeland connection was seriously disrupted. And by devaluing any element from this bundle, a person devalues ​​himself.

For such people, the “to be” mode of existence is replaced by the “have” mode of existence.
But that's not the whole problem. And the fact is that their children grow up in this environment. And the imprint received by their children will still manifest itself.
This is how the events of the distant 90s ruin lives in the 10s and will continue to do so in the 20s.
Of course, it's not all bad. The situation is improving. And it is in our power to change ourselves and our lives. And our changes, of course, will affect our loved ones. But this will not happen by itself. This must be done purposefully, responsibly and constantly.

The creative experiment begun by Parisian expatriates, modernists of the pre-war generation 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. Throughout the twentieth century, their names were firmly 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, mainly modernist writers.

At the same time, American modernism differs from European modernism in its more obvious involvement in social and political events era: the shock war experience of most authors could not be silenced or circumvented; it required artistic embodiment. This invariably misled Soviet researchers, who declared these writers to be “critical realists.” American criticism 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 are all a lost generation, all the youth who were in the war. You have no respect for anything. You will all get drunk.” This saying was accidentally heard by E. Hemingway and he put it into use. He put the words “You are all a lost generation” as one of two epigraphs to his first novel “The Sun Also Rises” (“Fiesta”, 1926). With time this definition, accurate and succinct, has 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 humanity. One can imagine what she became for the boys, full of optimism, hope 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 with the climax, with the maximum overstrain of mental and physical strength, with the most difficult test for which they were absolutely unprepared. Of course, it was a breakdown. The war knocked them out of their usual rut forever and determined their worldview—an acutely tragic one. A striking illustration of this is the beginning of the expatriate Thomas Stearns Eliot's (1888-1965) poem "Ash Wednesday" (1930).

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 argued that the “lost” had “no respect for anything,” turned out to be too categorical in her judgment. The rich experience of suffering, death and overcoming beyond their years not only made this generation very resilient (not one of the writing brethren “drunk to death”, as was predicted for them), but also taught them to unmistakably 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 formed any literary group and did not have a single theoretical platform, but the common destinies and impressions shaped their similar life positions: disappointment in social ideals, the search for enduring values, stoic individualism. Coupled with the same, acutely tragic worldview, this determined the presence in the prose of a number of “lost” common features, obvious, despite the diversity of individual artistic styles of individual authors.

The commonality is evident in everything, from the theme to the form of their works. The main themes of the writers of this generation are war, everyday life at the front ("A Farewell to Arms" (1929) by Hemingway, "Three Soldiers" (1921) by Dos Passos, the collection of 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), short story collections "Stories from 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 connection is of a cause-and-effect nature. The “war” works show the origins of the lost generation: front-line episodes are presented by all authors harshly and unembellished - contrary to the tendency to romanticize the First World War in official literature. Works about the “world after the war” show the consequences - the convulsive fun of the “jazz age”, reminiscent of dancing on the edge of an abyss or a feast during the plague. This is a world of destinies crippled by war and broken human relationships.

The issues that occupy the “lost” gravitate 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 being “lost” not at all in a mythopoetic or abstract philosophical sense, but in an extremely concrete and more or less socially definite manner.

All the heroes of "war" works feel that they were fooled and then betrayed. Lieutenant of the Italian army, American Frederick Henry (“A Farewell to Arms!” by E. Hemingway) directly says that he no longer believes the rattling phrases about “glory,” “sacred duty,” and “the greatness of the nation.” All the heroes of the writers of the “lost generation” lose faith in a society that sacrificed their children to “merchant calculations” and demonstratively break with it. Lieutenant Henry concludes a “separate peace” (that is, deserts from the army), plunges headlong into drinking, carousing and intimate experiences Jacob Barnes ("The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway), Jay Gatsby ("The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald) and "all the sad young men" 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 life? 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 value system. Love, understood as a perfect, harmonious union with a woman, is creativity, camaraderie (human warmth 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 unchallenged dominance of the private world.

All the heroes of the “lost” are building their own, alternative world, where there should be no place for “mercantile calculations”, political ambitions, wars and deaths, all the madness that is happening around. "I was not made to fight. I was made to eat, drink and sleep with Catherine," says Frederick Henry. This is the credo of all the “lost”. They, however, themselves feel the fragility and vulnerability of their position. It is impossible to completely isolate yourself 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 fused with death: it is almost always stopped by death. Catherine, Frederick Henry's lover, dies ("A Farewell to Arms!"), the accidental death of an unknown woman leads to 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, which at first glance have nothing to do with the war, turn out to be tightly connected with it. These untimely and senseless deaths appear in the “lost” novels as a kind of artistic expression of the thought about the unreasonableness and cruelty of the world, about the impossibility of escaping from it, about the fragility of happiness. And this idea, in turn, is a direct consequence of the authors’ war experience, their mental breakdown, their trauma. Death for them is synonymous with war, and both of them - war and death - appear 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 unmistakable poetics. This is lyrical prose, where the facts of reality are passed through the prism of the perception of a confused hero, very close to the author. It is no coincidence that the favorite form of “lost” is a first-person narrative, which, instead of an epically detailed description of events, involves 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, condenses and condenses the action. It is characterized by a short period of time, usually a crisis in the fate of the hero; it can also include memories of the past, due to which the themes are expanded and the circumstances are clarified, 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 “pillars” European modernism(along with M. Proust and F. Kafka).

One cannot help but notice a certain similarity in the plot solutions of the works of the writers of the “lost generation”. Among the most frequently repeated motifs (elementary units of the plot) are the short-term but complete happiness of love (“A 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, "A Soldier's Award" by Faulkner, "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway), the absurd and untimely death of one of the heroes ("The Great Gatsby", "A Farewell to Arms!").

All these motifs were later replicated by the “lost” themselves (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), and most importantly, by their imitators who did not smell gunpowder and did not live at the turn of the era. As a result, they are sometimes perceived as some kind of cliché. However, similar plot solutions were suggested to the writers of the “lost generation” by life itself: 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 separated people and ruined their destinies. And the heightened sense of tragedy and artistic flair characteristic of the “lost generation” dictated their appeal to the extreme situations of human life.

The "lost" style is also recognizable. Their typical prose is a seemingly impartial account with deep lyrical overtones. The works of E. Hemingway are especially distinguished by extreme laconicism, sometimes lapidary phrases, simplicity of vocabulary and enormous restraint of emotions. Even the love scenes, which obviously excludes any falsehood in the relationships between the characters and, ultimately, has an extremely strong impact on the reader.

Most of the writers of the “lost generation” were destined to still have years, and some (Hemingway, Faulkner, Wilder) decades of creativity, but only Faulkner managed to break out of the circle of themes, problematics, poetics and stylistics defined in the 20s, from the magic circle of aching sadness and the doom of the "lost generation". The community of the “lost”, their spiritual brotherhood, mixed with young hot blood, turned out to be stronger than the thoughtful calculations of various literary groups, which disintegrated without leaving a trace in the work of their participants.