Modernism - cheat sheets on foreign literature. Modernist movements of the late 19th – 20th centuries
At the turn of the century realism began to lose its position, it turned out to be insufficiently expressive to depict reality, stormy and changeable. It is being replaced by modernism.
Modernism as a new direction in art emerged at the turn of the century. In France - Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud. In Scandinavia - Maeterlinck. In England - Oscar Wilde. In Lithuania - Ciurlionis, Sruoga. Later, the names of Kafka, Faulkner, and Nabokov shone among the major modernist writers.
Modernism is divided into a large number of currents, but they are all united by the search for new forms and a person’s view of his place in the world. Modernist literature is largely cosmopolitan and usually expresses a sense of being lost in an urban environment. The very essence of modernism, born between the world wars in a society depleted of the ideas of the past, is cosmopolitan. Writers working at this time experimented with forms, methods, methods, techniques to give the world a new sound, but their themes remained eternal. Most often it was the problem of a person’s loneliness in this colorful world, the discrepancy between his own pace and the pace surrounding reality.
It is modernism, unlike everyone else previous movements focuses its attention on a person, on his inner essence, discarding the external surroundings or modifying it so that it only emphasizes the main idea. Critics talk about the literature of modernism as a rather gloomy phenomenon, but this feeling is created mainly due to the fact that the reader views the world presented by the author through the prism of the latter’s perception, colored by disappointment and the eternal search for the meaning of existence.
From a historical point of view, modernism is closely related to the emergence of new regimes. More often we're talking about about the formation of fascism and communism, and the appeal of literary classics to them for new ideas. For this reason, the work of writers can sometimes be divided into two periods - passion for politics and disappointment with it. And yet, most modernists are apolitical; the only rules for them are their own imagination and worldview.
Modernism(from the French moderne - modern, newest) - a direction in art and literature that is opposed to realism and is characterized by a desire for non-traditional forms, to the conventions of style. The main features of modernism:
1) disbelief in the rationality of the world order ( real world hostile to man, full of rudeness and cruelty, and man in him is weak and helpless), denial of historical progress and affirmation of the absurdity of existence;
2) exclusive interest in the individual outside his social affiliation - lonely, alien to the world, a toy in the hands of the world's elements;
3) the myth-making method of perceiving and explaining the world (the world is unknowable, every artist has the right to create his own picture of the world, this will be an aesthetic victory over world chaos);
4) worship of art as the highest value in life (rejection of the traditional principle “art serves the people.” Art should not serve, this society should serve it. The artist is allowed everything, because he decorates life with his creations).
One of philosophical foundations Modernism became the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche declared “God is dead” and instead of God, everyone can put themselves in his place, i.e. formulate your own ideas about good and evil, breaking out of the narrow framework set by the human herd, which created slave ideas about the world. Nietzsche's superman is precisely such a being who creates his own ideas about good and evil, emanating from himself and not conditioned by any external authority. Nietzsche offers the highest level of subjectivism: everyone is his own god and law. A person’s world is determined only by the person himself, if he has enough strength for it. The main driving force of the world and man is the will to power. It is to her that the entire universe moves.
Another important contribution to the development of modernism was Freud's psychoanalysis. According to Freud, man was not a rational entity, but a complex of unconscious impulses suppressed by an equally unconscious “superego” developed through socialization. In such a concept, all that remains is for the rational “I” to maintain a balance between the two manifestations of the unconscious. A person receives the freedom of God and the freedom of an animal, and it turns out, in full accordance with his desire to move away from the hated positivism, closer to an animal than to God, because people became superhumans, but they became neurotics and hysterics, incapable not only of divine, but simply to normal life– as much as you like.
In Schopenhauer, the essence of the world appears as an unreasonable will, a blind, aimless attraction to life. “Liberation” from the world, selfless aesthetic contemplation, and asceticism are achieved in a state close to Buddhist nirvana.
Based on the assertion that man is weak and helpless, modernists abandon the tradition of 19th century literature - to help one's neighbor, to serve people.
You can't see a thing in the field. // Someone is calling: help! // What I can?
I myself am poor and small, // I myself am mortally tired, // How can I help? (Sologub)
Modernism - characteristic aesthetics of the 20th century, independent of social strata, countries and peoples.
In its best examples, the art of modernism enriches world culture through new means of expression.
IN literary process XX century changes occurred due to socio-economic and political reasons. Among the main features of the literature of this time are:
politicization, strengthening the connection of literary trends with various political movements,
strengthening mutual influence and interpenetration of national literatures, internationalization,
denial of literary traditions,
intellectualization, the influence of philosophical ideas, the desire for scientific and philosophical analysis,
fusion and mixing of genres, variety of forms and styles.
In the history of literature of the 20th century. It is customary to distinguish two major periods:
1)1917-1945
2) after 1945
Literature in the 20th century. developed in line with two main directions - realism and modernism.
Realism allowed bold experiments, the use of new artistic techniques with one goal: a deeper comprehension of reality (B. Brecht, W. Faulkner, T. Mann).
Kafka, who are characterized by the idea of the world as an absurd beginning, hostile to man, disbelief in man, rejection of the idea of progress in all its forms, pessimism.
Of the leading literary movements of the mid-20th century. should be called existentialism, which is like literary direction originated in France (J-P. Sartre, A. Camus).
The features of this direction are:
approval of a “pure” unmotivated action,
assertion of individualism,
a reflection of a person’s loneliness in an absurd world hostile to him.
Avant-garde literature was a product of the emerging era of social change and cataclysm. It was based on a categorical rejection of reality, the denial of bourgeois values and the energetic breaking of traditions. For full characteristics avant-garde literature should focus on such movements as expressionism, futurism and surrealism.
For aesthetics expressionism and the priority of expression over the image is characteristic; the screaming “I” of the artist comes to the fore, which displaces the object of the image.
Futurists They completely denied all previous art, vulgarity and the unspiritual ideal of a technocratic society were proclaimed. The aesthetic principles of the futurists were based on the breaking of syntax, the denial of logic, word creation, free associations, and the rejection of punctuation.
Surrealism leading aesthetic principle there was automatic writing based on the theory of 3. Freud. Automatic writing - creativity without mind control, recording free associations, dreams, dreams. A favorite technique of the surrealists is the “stunning image”, consisting of disparate elements.
Modernism developed in several stages and manifested itself in many movements. Starting from the 60s, modernism entered the stage of postmodernism.
2. P. Suskind’s novel “Perfume”: the novel’s historicism, themes and issues, intertext
The novel takes place in France mid-18th century century, during the Age of Enlightenment.
The technique that the author uses in “Perfume” is the principle of pseudo-historicism. He seems to convince the reader that what is described really once happened, giving chronological accuracy to the events of the novel. The text is full of dates. So, between the two dates, the hero’s entire life passes (all events are dated: the meeting with the girl with plums, Grenouille’s sentence, death, his birth).
Addressing the characters Grenouille encounters, Suskind notes the time and circumstances of their deaths. So the reader, watching in real time of the novel the death of the tanner Grimal and the perfumer Baldini, learns that Madame Gaillard will die of old age in 1799, and the Marquis Taillade-Espinasse will disappear in the mountains in 1764.
In Grenouille's imagination, marked with dates, like bottles of aged wine, the aromas he smelled are stored: “a glass of aroma from 1752,” “a bottle from 1744.”
The dates that pepper the novel create a tangible feeling that we are looking at France on the eve of the Great Revolution. Suskind remembers that France of the depicted era is a country not only of future revolutionaries, vagabonds and beggars, but also of magicians, sorcerers, poisoners, hypnotists and other charlatans, adventurers, criminals.
Parallel with creativity (?)
Intertext: 1) In the same way, Hoffmann’s quotes are unexpectedly read in the general context of “The Story of a Murderer.” The associations between Grenouille and little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober, from the story of the same name by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1819) are quite obvious. The word grenouille, similar to a surname central character"Perfumer" is translated from French as "frog". 2) Suskind fills with literal content the metaphorical phrase Jesus said to his disciples during the legendary dinner: “And taking bread and giving thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me. Also the cup after supper, saying: This is the New Testament in My blood, which is shed for you (Luke 22: 19-20). The Christian sacrament of communion - the Eucharist - is literalized and interpreted on the pages of the novel as a kind of cannibal act, orchestrated by Grenouille himself.
Modernism is an ideological movement in literature and art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is characterized by a departure from classical standards and the search for new, radical ones. literary forms and the creation of a completely new style of writing. This direction replaced realism and became the predecessor of postmodernism, the final stage of its development dates back to the 30s of the twentieth century.
The main feature of this direction is a complete change in the classical perception of the picture of the world: the authors are no longer bearers of absolute truth and ready-made concepts, but, on the contrary, demonstrate their relativity. The linearity of the narrative disappears, replaced by a chaotic, fragmentary plot, fragmented into parts and episodes, often presented on behalf of several characters at once, who may have completely opposite views on the events taking place.
Directions of modernism in literature
Modernism, in turn, branched into several directions, such as:
Symbolism
(Somov Konstantin Andreevich "Two ladies in the park")
It originated in France in the 70-80s of the 19th century and reached the peak of its development at the beginning of the 20th century, and was most widespread in France. Belgium and Russia. Symbolist authors embodied the main ideas of their works, using the multifaceted and polysemantic associative aesthetics of symbols and images; they were often full of mystery, enigma and understatement. Prominent representatives of this trend: Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautreamont (France), Maurice Maeterlinck, Emile Verhaerne (Belgium), Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Maximilian Voloshin, Andrei Bely, Konstantin Balmont (Russia).. .
Acmeism
(Alexander Bogomazov "Flour peddlers")
It emerged as a separate movement of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, Acmeist authors, in contrast to the Symbolists, insisted on clear materiality and objectivity of the themes and images described, defended the use of precise and clear words, and advocated distinct and definite images. Central figures Russian acmeism: Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, Sergei Gorodetsky...
Futurism
(Fortunato Depero "Me and my wife")
An avant-garde movement that emerged in the 10-20s of the 20th century and developed in Russia and Italy. main feature Futurist authors: interest is not so much in the content of the works, but more in the form of versification. For this purpose, new word forms were invented, vulgar, common vocabulary, professional jargon, and the language of documents, posters and posters were used. The founder of futurism is considered to be the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, who wrote the poem “Red Sugar,” and his associates Balla, Boccioni, Carra, Severini and others. Russian futurists: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak...
Imagism
(Georgy Bogdanovich Yakulov - set design for J. Offenbach's operetta "The Beautiful Helen")
It emerged as a literary movement of Russian poetry in 1918, its founders were Anatoly Mariengof, Vadim Shershenevich and Sergei Yesenin. The goal of the Imagists’ creativity was to create images, and the main means of expression was declared to be metaphor and metaphorical chains, with the help of which direct and figurative images were compared...
Expressionism
(Erich Heckel" street scene at the bridge")
The current of modernism, which developed in Germany and Austria in the first decade of the twentieth century, as a painful reaction of society to the horrors of current events (revolutions, the First World War). This direction sought not so much to reproduce reality, but to convey the emotional state of the author; images are very common in works pain and screams. The following people worked in the style of expressionism: Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn, Ivan Goll, Albert Ehrenstein (Germany), Franz Kafka, Paul Adler (Czech Republic), T. Michinsky (Poland), L. Andreev (Russia)...
Surrealism
(Salvador Dali "The Persistence of Memory")
It emerged as a movement in literature and art in the 20s of the twentieth century. Surrealist works are distinguished by the use of allusions ( stylistic figures, giving a hint or indication of specific historical or mythological cult events) and a paradoxical combination various forms. Founder of surrealism - French writer and the poet Andre Breton, famous writers of this movement - Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon...
Modernism in Russian literature of the twentieth century
The last decade of the 19th century was marked by the emergence of new trends in Russian literature, the task of which was to completely rethink the old means of expression and revive the art of poetry. This period(1982-1922) entered the history of literature under the name “Silver Age” of Russian poetry. Writers and poets united in various modernist groups and movements that played artistic culture a huge role at that time.
(Kandinsky Vasily Vasilievich "Winter Landscape")
Russian symbolism appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, its founders were the poets Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Fyodor Sologub, Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, later they were joined by Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov. They publish the artistic and journalistic organ of the Symbolists, the magazine Libra (1904-1909), and support the idealistic philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov about the Third Testament and the coming of Eternal Femininity. The works of symbolist poets are filled with complex, mystical images and associations, mystery and understatement, abstraction and irrationality.
Symbolism is being replaced by acmeism, which appeared in Russian literature in 1910, the founders of the trend: Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Gorodetsky, this group of poets also included O. Mandelstam, M. Zenkevich, M. Kuzmin, M. Voloshin. The Acmeists, unlike the Symbolists, proclaimed the cult of real earthly life, a clear and confident view of reality, the affirmation of the aesthetic-hedonistic function of art, without affecting social problems. The poetry collection "Hyperborea", released in 1912, announced the emergence of a new literary movement called acmeism (from "acme" - highest degree something, it’s time to flourish). The Acmeists tried to make the images concrete and objective, to get rid of the mystical confusion inherent in the Symbolist movement.
(Vladimir Mayakovsky "Roulette")
Futurism in Russian literature arose simultaneously with Acmeism in 1910-1912, like other literary movements in modernism, it was full of internal contradictions. One of the most significant futurist groups called Cubo-Futurists included such outstanding poets of the Silver Age as V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, I. Severyanin, A. Kruchenykh, V. Kamensky and others. The Futurists proclaimed a revolution of forms, absolutely independent of content, freedom poetic word and rejection of old literary traditions. Interesting experiments were carried out in the field of words, new forms were created and outdated literary norms and rules were exposed. The first collection of futurist poets, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” declared the basic concepts of futurism and established it as the only truthful exponent of its era.
(Kazimir Malevich "The Lady at the Tram Stop")
In the early 20s of the twentieth century, on the basis of futurism, a new modernist direction was formed - imagism. Its founders were the poets S. Yesenin, A. Mariengof, V. Shershenevich, R. Ivnev. In 1919, they held the first Imagist evening and created a declaration that proclaimed the main principles of Imagism: the primacy of the image “as such”, poetic expression through the use of metaphors and epithets, a poetic work should be a “catalog of images”, read the same as from the beginning, so from the end. Creative differences between the Imagists led to the division of the movement into left and right wings; after Sergei Yesenin left its ranks in 1924, the group gradually disintegrated.
Modernism in foreign literature of the twentieth century
(Gino Severini "Still Life")
Modernism as a literary movement emerged in the late 19th and early 19th centuries on the eve of the First World War, its heyday occurred in the 20-30s of the 20th century, it developed almost simultaneously in the countries of Europe and America and is an international phenomenon consisting of various literary movements, such as imagism, dadaism, expressionism, surrealism, etc.
Modernism arose in France, its prominent representatives The poets who belonged to the Symbolist movement were Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire. Symbolism quickly became popular in other European countries, in England it was represented by Oscar Wilde, in Germany by Stefan George, in Belgium by Emil Verhaeren and Maurice Metterlinck, in Norway by Henrik Ibsen.
(Umberto Boccioni "The street enters the house")
Among the expressionists were G. Trakl and F. Kafka in Belgium, the French school - A. France, the German school - J. Becher. The founders of such a modernist movement in literature as Imagism, which existed since the beginning of the 20th century in English-speaking European countries, there were English poets Thomas Hume and Ezra Pound, they were later joined by the American poet Amy Lowell, the young English poet Herbert Read, and the American John Fletcher.
The most famous writers Irish prose writer James Joyce, who created the immortal stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses (1922), is considered a modernist of the early twentieth century. French author the seven-volume epic novel “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, and the German-speaking master of modernism Franz Kafka, who wrote the story “The Metamorphosis” (1912), which became a classic of the absurdity of all world literature.
Modernism in the characteristics of Western literature of the twentieth century
Despite the fact that modernism is divided into a large number of movements, their common feature is the search for new forms and the definition of man’s place in the world. The literature of modernism, which arose at the junction of two eras and between two world wars, in a society tired and exhausted of old ideas, is distinguished by its cosmopolitanism and expresses the feelings of authors lost in an ever-evolving, growing urban environment.
(Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi "Airportrait of the Duce")
Writers and poets who worked in in this direction, constantly experimented with new words, forms, techniques and techniques in order to create a new, fresh sound, although the themes remained old and eternal. Usually this was a theme about the loneliness of a person in a huge and colorful world, about the discrepancy between the rhythms of his life and the surrounding reality.
Modernism is a kind of literary revolution; writers and poets took part in it, declaring their complete denial of realistic verisimilitude and all cultural and literary traditions in general. They had to live and create in difficult times, when the values of traditional humanistic culture were outdated, when the concept of freedom in different countries had a very ambiguous meaning when the blood and horrors of the First World War devalued human life, and the world appeared before man in all his cruelty and coldness. Early modernism symbolized the time when faith in the power of reason was destroyed, and the time came for the triumph of irrationality, mysticism and the absurdity of all existence.
Modernism in literature originates on the eve of the First World War and reaches its peak in the twenties simultaneously in all countries Western Europe and in America. Modernism is an international phenomenon, consisting of different schools (Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.). This is a revolution in literature, the participants of which announced a break not only with the tradition of realistic verisimilitude, but also with the Western cultural and literary tradition in general. Any previous movement in literature defined itself through its relationship to the classical tradition: it was possible to directly proclaim antiquity as a model artistic creativity like the classicists, or prefer the Middle Ages to antiquity, like the romantics, but all cultural eras Before modernism, today they are increasingly called “classical” because they developed in line with the classical heritage of European thought. Modernism is the first cultural and literary era to put an end to this legacy and provide new answers to “eternal” questions. As the English poet S. Spender wrote in 1930: “It seems to me that the modernists are consciously striving to create an entirely new literature. This is a consequence of their feeling that our era is in many respects unprecedented and stands outside any conventions of past art and literature.” .
The generation of the first modernists acutely felt the exhaustion of the forms of realistic storytelling, their aesthetic fatigue. For modernists, the concept of “realism” meant the absence of effort to independently comprehend the world, the mechanical nature of creativity, superficiality, the boredom of vague descriptions - interest in the button on a character’s coat, and not in his state of mind. Modernists place above all else the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; the artistic worlds they create are uniquely different from each other, each bears the stamp of a bright creative individuality.
They happened to live in a period when the values of traditional humanistic culture collapsed - “freedom” meant very different things in Western democracies and in totalitarian states; The carnage of the First World War, in which weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time, revealed the true cost human life For modern world; The humanistic ban on pain and physical and spiritual violence was replaced by the practice of mass executions and concentration camps. Modernism is the art of a dehumanized era (the term of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset); the attitude towards humanistic values in modernism is ambiguous, but the world of modernists appears in a harsh, cold light. Using the metaphor of J. Conrad, we can say that the hero of the modernist work seemed to be staying overnight in an uncomfortable hotel at the end of the world, with very suspicious owners, in a shabby room, illuminated by the merciless light of a light bulb without a lampshade.
Modernists conceptualize human existence as a short, fragile moment; the subject may or may not be aware of the tragedy, the frailty of our absurd world, and the artist’s job is to show the horror, greatness and beauty contained, despite everything, in the moments of earthly existence. Social issues, which played such an important role in the realism of the 19th century, are given indirectly in modernism, as an inseparable part of the holistic portrait of the individual. The main area of interest of modernists is the depiction of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious in a person, the mechanisms of his perceptions, and the whimsical work of memory. The modernist hero is taken, as a rule, in the entire integrity of his experiences, his subjective existence, although the very scale of his life may be small and insignificant. In modernism, the main line of development of literature of the New Age continues with a constant decline social status hero; the modernist hero is an “everyman,” any and every person. Modernists learned to describe such states of mind people who literature had not noticed before, and did it with such conviction that it seemed to bourgeois critics an insult to morality and a profanation of the art of words. Not only the content - the large role of intimate and sexual issues, the relativity of moral assessments, the emphasized apoliticality - but, first of all, the unusual forms of modernist storytelling caused especially sharp rejection. Today, when most masterpieces modernist literature entered into school and university curricula, it is difficult for us to sense the rebellious, anti-bourgeois character of early modernism, the harshness of the accusations and challenges posed to it.
Three major writers of modernism- Irishman James Joyce (1882-1943), Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Each of them, in his own direction, reformed the art of speech of the twentieth century, each is considered a great pioneer of modernism. Let's look at James Joyce's novel Ulysses as an example.
Modernist trends in the literature of the 20s expressed very significant facets of the worldview of the people of this era - that worldview that was in certain opposition to the prevailing political, social, and philosophical attitudes.
Modernism creates a different concept of man than in realism, designates the coordinates of his character differently and perceives reality differently. It is wrong to see in it only formal devices - non-life-like poetics, alogism of images, “absent mind”, etc. Behind the form lies new content: modernism offers different character motivations, perceives reality as fantastic and illogical. “Nowadays, the only fiction is yesterday’s life on strong whales,” wrote Evgeniy Zamyatin, one of the few writers who managed to literary situation 20s to substantiate the theoretical principles of the new art, which he called “synthetism.” - Today - The Apocalypse can be published as a daily newspaper; tomorrow - we will quite calmly buy a place in a sleeping car to Mars. Einstein tore the very space and time from their anchors. And art that has grown out of this, today’s reality, how can it not be fantastic, like a dream?”
Zamyatin saw the origins of the crisis of realistic art and the emergence next to it of modernism as a new artistic worldview not only in the fantastic nature of everyday life, but also in the new philosophical system coordinates in which a person of the 20th century found himself. “After the geometric-philosophical earthquake produced by Einstein, the old space and time finally perished,” the writer states. “We, read through Schopenhauer, Kant, Einstein, symbolism, know: the world, the thing in itself, reality is not at all what is seen.”
Having rejected the strict cause-and-effect conditionality of realistic aesthetics, the literature of modernism also rejected the fatal dependence of man on the environment, social or historical, affirmed by realism. This, if you like, was one of the attempts to preserve sovereignty human personality, her right to freedom from the circumstances of historical time, the aggressiveness of which in the 20th century in relation to privacy person became especially obvious. This need to defend the natural rights of the hero (and, therefore, real person) forced the non-realist artist to turn to the dystopian genre. E. Zamyatin’s novel “We” (1921) is one of the most famous dystopias of the 20th century. It shows what will happen to society if it destroys the personal, individual principle in people and turns them into absolutely interchangeable “numbers”. A community that has subjected its individuals to complete biological identification is depicted in Zamyatin’s novel.
In the literature of the 20s, two main trends are distinguishable: on the one hand, reckless acceptance of social transformations, on the other, doubt about their humanism and expediency. One of the most prominent “doubting” writers in the 20s was B. Pilnyak. In the novel “The Naked Year” (1921-1923), which became a milestone for new literature in the early 20s, Pilnyak pointedly abandoned realistic poetics. As a result, the plot of his work lost its traditional organizing role for realism. In Pilnyak, its function is performed by leitmotifs, and different fragments of the narrative are held together by associative connections. The reader is presented with a series of such disparate descriptions of reality. The deliberate unstructured nature of the composition is emphasized by the writer even in the titles of the chapters, which seem to be of a draft nature: “Chapter VII (last, untitled),” or “Last triptych (material, in essence).” Scattered pictures of reality, endlessly alternating, are designed to convey an existence that has not yet taken shape - broken by the revolution, but not settled, not having acquired internal logic, and therefore chaotic, absurd and random.
The “brokenness” and fragmentation of the composition of “The Naked Year” is due to the absence in the novel of such a point of view on what is happening that could connect the incompatible for Pilnyak: the leather jackets of the Bolsheviks (a household name for the literature of the 20s) and the revelry of the Russian freemen; China Town and village bathhouse; a heated carriage and a provincial merchant's house. Only the presence of such a compositional point of view, in which the “ideological center” of the work would be expressed, would be able to unite and explain the phenomena scattered by Pilnyak in the epic space of his novel.
Such an ideological center is suggested by the literature of socialist realism. Pilnyak in the 20s could not or did not want to find it. The absence of such an ideological center is, as it were, compensated by the presence in the novel of many points of view on what is happening, which are not possible to reduce and combine. Their abundance emphasizes the destruction big picture world, presented in "The Naked Year". The “Necessary Note” to the “Introduction” directly formulates the desire to connect the reality that is disintegrating before our eyes with several points of view - and the objective impossibility of doing this. “The Whites left in March - and it’s March for the plant. For the city (the city of Ordynin) - July, and for villages and villages - all year round. However, to everyone - through his eyes, his instrumentation and his month. The city of Ordynin and the Taezhevsky factories are nearby and a thousand miles away from everywhere. “Donat Ratchin - killed by whites: everything about him.”
The short and seemingly completely meaningless “Necessary Note” expresses the essence of the writer’s concept of the world and man. The world is destroyed and contradictory: spatial relationships discover their inconsistency or, in best case scenario, relativity (city and factories nearby and a thousand miles away from everywhere); traditional logic, built on cause-and-effect relationships, is deliberately blown up. The solution is to offer each hero his own point of view on this crumpled and illogical world: “To each - through his eyes, his instrumentation and his month.” However, disparate points of view are not able to connect fragments of reality into a coherent picture. Many positions incompatible with each other in the artistic world of “The Naked Year” make up an insoluble compositional equation.
Therefore, the novel declares a refusal realistic principles typification, rejection of conditioned patterns. Circumstances are no longer capable of shaping character. They appear as not connected by any logical connection, as disparate fragments of reality.
Therefore, Pilnyak seeks character motivation not in the sphere of the hero’s social and interpersonal connections, but in his very personality. This explains the writer’s attraction to elements of naturalism. The rejection of the eschatological scale of the vision of the world (it was precisely in such a globalist perspective that the revolution was understood in the early 20s) shakes off cultural, moral and other guidelines from a person, exposing “natural principles”, mainly gender. These are physiological instincts in the most obvious and undisguised form: they are practically uncontrollable social status person, culture, upbringing. Such instincts motivate Pilnyak’s behavior both of the hero and of entire masses of people.
And yet, in The Naked Year, Boris Pilnyak outlines at least a hypothetical possibility of synthesizing the fragments of reality split by the revolution. The point of view that provides such a perspective is the position of the Bolsheviks, although it is clearly incomprehensible to the writer. “In the Ordynins’ house, in the executive committee (there were no geraniums on the windows) - people in leather jackets, Bolsheviks, gathered upstairs. These here, in leather jackets, each one is tall, handsome leather, each one is strong, and the curls under the cap are ringed at the back of the head, each one has tightly drawn cheekbones, the folds of the lips, each one has ironed movements. From the loose, clumsy Russian people - selection. You won't get wet in leather jackets. So we know, so we want, so we set it - and that’s it.”
But Pilnyak’s famous “leather jackets” were also only an abstract image. The collective nature of the portrait, its deliberate, fundamental emphasis on appearance, emphasizing determination as the only dominant character could not make the point of view of the “leather jackets” the ideological center that would consolidate the narrative and synthesize disparate pictures of reality. If their point of view became dominant, then the conflict between them and ordinary people (private residents, men and women) would be covered in the same way as in Yu. Libedinsky’s “Week”. The absence of this ideological center in Pilnyak’s novel becomes the fundamental line that separates the aesthetics of socialist realism from modernism.
It is characteristic that admiration and fear of the unbending will of the Bolsheviks will appear not only in “The Naked Year”, but also in “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (1927), which played fatal role in the life of a writer. Its plot is based on real story the killing of the Civil War hero Frunze on the operating table: the operation to remove a long-healed stomach ulcer was performed, according to rumors that were actively circulating at the time, on Stalin’s orders. Contemporaries easily recognized him in the image of a non-hunched Man, and in the unfortunate army commander Gavrilov they found features of the late Frunze. The powers that be were so frightened by the appearance of this story that the edition of Novy Mir, where it was published, was confiscated, and Voronsky, to whom Pilnyak dedicated his work, publicly refused the dedication.
It can be assumed that in “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” Pilnyak makes an attempt to go beyond the boundaries of modernist aesthetics. This can be done by placing fragments of reality into a single outline, plot, system of events, that is, creating a kind of semantic center that explains reality. The image of a non-hunched Man appears as such an ideological center in the story. It is he, sitting in his office at night, who confronts living and natural life, “when thousands of people crowded into the cinema, theaters, variety shows, taverns and pubs, when crazy cars ate up street puddles with their lanterns, carving out crowds of bizarre people with these lanterns on the sidewalks.” in the lantern light of people - when in the theaters, confusing time, space and countries, unprecedented Greeks, Assyrians, Russian and Chinese workers, Republicans of America and the USSR, the actors in every way forced the audience to go wild and applaud.
This picture, painted with bright strokes superimposed on each other, is opposed to the world of sober affairs and calculation, the world of a non-hunching Man. Everything in this world is subject to a strict outline: “The milestones of his speech were - the USSR, America, England, - Earth and the USSR, English sterling and Russian pounds of wheat, American heavy industry and Chinese workers. The man spoke loudly and firmly, and his every phrase was a formula.”
Let us note that in the two quotes given, Pilnyak deliberately juxtaposes the impressionistic and “contour” pictures of reality, living life and solid, sober calculation. The last one wins. Trying to introduce into his artistic world some kind of organizing principle, capable of collecting disparate pictures of existence into something holistic, Pilnyak almost fatally from leather jackets, in the affairs and plans of which he saw the prospect of overcoming chaos, comes to the image of a non-hunching Man. This hero, as if rising above the artistic world of the story, imposes a rigid outline on living life, as if immobilizing it, depriving it of internal, albeit chaotic, freedom. This conflict is expressed not only at the level of the plot, in the terrible fate of the commander Gavrilov - Frunze, but also at other levels of poetics: modernist incompleteness collides with the plot-scheme, multi-colored floating strokes - with a gray outline. Having found an organizing ideological center, Pilnyak was horrified by it, did not accept it, pushed it away, remaining in his subsequent works within the framework of modernism. Art world B. Pilnyak, with all its external amorphousness, fragmentation, and randomness, was a reflection of the flow of living life, disrupted by the tragic historical vicissitudes of Russian reality of the 10-20s.
Pilnyak was, in principle, unable to model reality, to show it not as it is, but as it should be - therefore, the introduction of any ideological center into compositional structure the work was basically impossible. The idea of obligation and normativity, characteristic of socialist realism, an orientation towards a certain ideal that will someday be realized, was interpreted by him in art as false and contrary to artistic truth.
Pilnyak did not organically tolerate lies. “I take newspapers and books, and the first thing that strikes me is lies everywhere, in work, in public life, V family relationships. Everyone lies: the communists, the bourgeois, the workers, and even the enemies of the revolution, the entire Russian nation.” The words spoken by one of the writer’s heroes accurately characterize the position of the author himself, who in the story “Spattered Time” (1924) defined both his place in art and the place of literature in the life of society: “I have had the bitter glory of being a person who goes to trouble. And I also had bitter glory - my duty is to be a Russian writer and to be honest with myself and with Russia.”
