The Lost Generation in Literature. The meaning of the concept of “lost generation” in the novels of E.M.

The 20th century truly began in 1914, when one of the most terrible and bloody conflicts in human history broke out. First world war forever changed the course of time: four empires ceased to exist, territories and colonies were divided, new states arose, and huge reparations and indemnities were demanded from the losing countries. Many nations felt humiliated and trampled into the dirt. All this served as prerequisites for the policy of revanchism, which led to the outbreak new war, even more bloody and terrible.

But let’s return to the First World War: according to official data, human losses in killed alone amounted to about 10 million, not to mention the wounded, missing and homeless. The front-line soldiers who survived this hell returned home (sometimes to a completely different state) with a whole range of physical and psychological injuries. And mental wounds were often worse than physical wounds. These people, most of whom were not even thirty years old, could not adapt to peaceful life: many of them became drunkards, some went crazy, and some even committed suicide. They were dryly called “unaccounted victims of war.”

In European and American literature of the 1920s and 30s, the tragedy of the “lost generation” - young people who passed through the trenches of Verdun and the Somme - became one of the central themes in the work of a number of authors (it is especially worth noting the year 1929, when books by front-line writers were published Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Aldington).

We have chosen the most famous novels about the First World War.

Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque's famous novel, which has become one of the most popular works German literature of the 20th century. "On Western Front Without Change" sold millions of copies all over the world, and the writer himself was even nominated for a Nobel Prize for it.

This is a story about boys whose lives were broken (or rather, swept away) by the war. Just yesterday they were simple schoolchildren, today they are doomed to death soldiers of the Kaiser's Germany, who were thrown into the meat grinder of total war: dirty trenches, rats, lice, hours of artillery shelling, gas attacks, wounds, death, death and death again... They are killed and maimed, they themselves have to kill. They live in hell, and reports from the front lines dryly say again and again: “No change on the Western Front.”

We distinguish distorted faces, flat helmets. These are the French. They reached the remains of the wire fences and had already suffered noticeable losses. One of their chains is mowed down by a machine gun standing next to us; then it begins to exhibit delays when loading, and the French come closer. I see one of them fall into the slingshot with his face held high. The torso sinks down, the arms take a position as if he were about to pray. Then the body falls off completely, and only the arms, torn off at the elbows, hang on the wire.

Ernest Hemingway

"Farewell to arms!" - a cult novel that made Hemingway famous and brought him substantial fees. In 1918, the future author of “The Old Man and the Sea” joined the ranks of Red Cross volunteers. He served in Italy, where he was seriously wounded during a mortar attack on the front lines. In a Milan hospital he met his first love, Agnes von Kurowski. The story of their acquaintance formed the basis of the book.

The plot, as is often the case with old Khem, is quite simple: a soldier who falls in love with a nurse decides to desert the army at all costs and move with his beloved away from this massacre. But you can run away from war, but from death?..

He lay with his feet facing me, and in short flashes of light I could see that both of his legs were crushed above the knees. One was completely torn off, and the other hung on the sinew and rags of his trouser leg, and the stump writhed and twitched as if by itself. He bit his hand and moaned: “Oh mamma mia, mamma mia!”

Death of a hero. Richard Aldington

“The Death of a Hero” is a manifesto of the “lost generation”, permeated with severe bitterness and hopelessness, standing on a par with “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “A Farewell to Arms!” This is history young artist, who fled to the trench hell of the First World War from the indifference and misunderstanding of his parents and beloved women. In addition to the horrors of the front, the book also describes post-Victorian English society, whose patriotic pathos and hypocrisy contributed to the outbreak of one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.

In Aldington's own words: "This book is a lament, a monument, perhaps inartfully, to a generation that hoped fervently, fought honorably, and suffered deeply."

He lived among mangled corpses, among remains and ashes, in some kind of hellish cemetery. Absentmindedly picking at the wall of the trench with a stick, he touched the ribs of a human skeleton. He ordered a new pit to be dug behind the trench for a latrine - and three times he had to quit work, because every time under the shovels there was a terrible black mess of decomposing corpses.

Fire. Henri Barbusse

“Fire (Diary of a Platoon)” was perhaps the first novel dedicated to the tragedy of the First World War. French writer Henri Barbusse enlisted as volunteers immediately after the conflict began. He served on the front line, taking part in fierce battles with the German army on the Western Front. In 1915, the prose writer was wounded and taken to the hospital, where he began work on a novel based on real events (as evidenced by published diary entries and letters to his wife). Separate edition“Fire” was published in 1916, at the same time the writer was awarded the Goncourt Prize for it.

Barbusse's book is extremely naturalistic. Perhaps it can be called the most cruel work included in this collection. In it, the author described in detail (and very atmospheric!) everything that he had to go through in the war: from tedious trench everyday life in mud and sewage, under the whistling of bullets and shells, to suicidal bayonet attacks, terrible injuries and death of colleagues.

Through the gap in the embankment the bottom is visible; there, on their knees, as if begging for something, are the corpses of soldiers of the Prussian Guard; they have bloody holes punched in their backs. From the pile of these corpses they pulled the body of a huge Senegalese rifleman to the edge; he is petrified in the position in which death overtook him, he is crouched, wants to lean on the void, cling to it with his feet, and looks intently at his hands, probably cut off by the exploding grenade he was holding; his whole face is moving, swarming with worms, as if he is chewing them.

Three soldiers. John Dos Passos

Like Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos served as a volunteer in a medical unit stationed in Italy during World War I. Three Soldiers was published shortly after the end of the conflict - in 1921 - and became one of the first works about the Lost Generation. Unlike other books included in this collection, in this novel the first place comes not from the description of military operations and everyday life at the front, but from the story of how a ruthless military machine destroys a person’s individuality.

Damn this damn infantry! I'm ready to do anything to get out of it. What is this life for a person when they treat him as a black man.
- Yes, this is not life for a person...

What is the “lost generation”?

Lost Generation- a concept that arose in the period between two wars (World War I and World War II).

This is what they call in the West young front-line soldiers who fought between 1914 and 1918, regardless of the country for which they fought, and returned home morally or physically crippled. They are also called “unaccounted casualties of war.” Returning from the front, these people could not live again normal life. After experiencing the horrors of war, everything else seemed petty and unworthy of attention to them.

The meaning of the concept of “lost generation” in the novels of E.M. Remarque

The term "Lost Generation" originates between the two world wars. It becomes the leitmotif of the work of many writers of that time, but it manifests itself most forcefully in the work of the famous German anti-fascist writer Erich Maria Remarque. The term, by the way, is attributed to the American writer Gertrude Stein, whom Remarque described in several of his novels.

• - That's who you are! And all of you are like that! said Miss Stein. - All young people who were in the war. You are a lost generation.
• -- Ernest Hemingway. "A holiday that is always with you"

“We wanted to fight against everything, everything that determined our past - against lies and selfishness, self-interest and heartlessness; we became embittered and did not trust anyone except our closest comrade, did not believe in anything except such forces as the sky, tobacco, trees, bread and earth that had never deceived us; but what came of it? Everything collapsed, was falsified and forgotten. And for those who did not know how to forget, all that was left was powerlessness, despair, indifference and vodka. The time for great human and courageous dreams has passed. The businessmen celebrated. Corruption. Poverty".

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

In Remarque's novels, behind the simple, even voice of an impartial describer, there is such an intensity of despair and pain for these people that some defined his style as a mournful mourning for those killed in the war, even if the characters in his books did not die from bullets. Each of his works is a novel-requiem for an entire generation that was not formed because of the war, which, like houses of cards, scattered their ideals and failed values, which they seemed to have been taught in childhood, but were not given the opportunity to use. The war with the utmost frankness exposed the cynical lies of imaginary authorities and pillars of state, turned the generally accepted morality inside out and plunged prematurely aged youth into the abyss of disbelief and loneliness, from which there is no chance of returning. But these young men are the main characters of the writer, tragically young and in many ways not yet becoming men.

The war and the difficult post-war years destroyed not only agriculture, industry, but also the moral ideas of people. The concepts of “good” and “bad” are mixed up, moral principles depreciated.

Some young Germans supported the revolutionary struggle, but most were simply confused. They had compassion, sympathy, fear and hatred, and almost all of them did not know what to do next.

It was especially difficult for former soldiers who fought honestly, risking their lives every day to maintain neutrality. They lost confidence in everything that surrounded them; they no longer knew what to fight for next.

Now they walked through life with an empty soul and a hardened heart. The only values ​​to which they remained true were soldier solidarity and male friendship.

"No change on the Western Front."

Having published the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 1929, Remarque laid the foundation for all his subsequent work. Here he described with complete accuracy the seamy side of the war, with all its dirt, cruelty and complete lack of romantic gloss, and daily life young front-line soldiers surrounded by horror, blood and fear of death. They have not yet become the “lost generation,” but very soon they will, and Remarque, with all his piercing objectivity and imaginary detachment, tells us exactly how this will happen.

In the preface, the author says: “This book is neither an accusation nor a confession. This is only an attempt to tell about the generation that was destroyed by the First World War, about those who became its victims, even if they escaped from the shells.”

All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel about the First World War. It claimed millions of lives, mutilated destinies and bodies more people, the existence of such powerful powers as the Russian, Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian empires ceased to exist. The entire experience of Europe, created over many hundreds of years, was destroyed. Life needed to be rebuilt. The consciousness of people was infected with the horror of war.

In the work “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Remarque describes everything that he himself experienced. The writer served as a sapper during the First World War. During the battle, his comrade Christian Kranzbüchler was wounded by a shell. Remarque saves his life. In the novel, Christian receives the name Franz Kemerich. On the pages of the book, he dies in the hospital. There is no more romance and solemnity of parades. Everything was filled with bloody red war. Remarque is wounded. Hospital. End of the war. But the scar on the heart, mind and soul remains for life.

The meaninglessness of trench existence ends with the equally meaningless death of Paul Bäumer. The result of the novel is its title. When the hero of the novel dies, the standard report is broadcast on the radio: “All quiet on the Western Front.” The anti-militaristic pathos of the novel as a whole was so obvious and convincing that the fascists burned Remarque’s book in 1930.

"Return".

In the early thirties, Remarque published his next novel, “The Return,” dedicated to the first post-war months. In it in yet to a greater extent hopeless despair appeared, the hopeless melancholy of people who did not know, did not see a way to escape from the inhuman, senselessly cruel reality; At the same time, it revealed Remarque’s aversion to all politics, including revolutionary ones.

In the novel “The Return,” Remarque talks about the fate of the “lost generation” after the end of the war. Main character In the novel, Ernst Brickholz continues the line of Paul Bäumer, the main character of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel “Return” tells how former front-line soldiers “get accustomed.” And in many ways similar to the author, the hero-narrator Erns Birkholz and his front-line friends, who returned home after the war, are dropout schoolchildren who became soldiers. But although the volleys of weapons have already been fired, in the souls of many of them the war continues its devastating work, and they rush to seek shelter when they hear the screech of a tram, or while walking in open areas.

“We no longer see nature, for us there is only terrain suitable for attack or defense, an old mill on a hill is not a mill, but a stronghold, a forest is not a forest, but artillery cover. Everywhere, everywhere this is an obsession...”

But this is not the worst thing. It's scary that they can't get settled in life or find a means of subsistence. Some still need to finish their studies at school, and those who worked before the war have their places filled, and others cannot be found.

The reader is greatly impressed by the demonstration of war invalids who ask on their posters: “Where is the gratitude of the fatherland?” and "Disabled war veterans are starving!" They are walking one-armed, blind, one-eyed, wounded in the head, crippled with amputated legs, trembling shell-shocked; they wheel disabled people in wheelchairs, who from now on can only live in a chair, on wheels. Nobody cares about them. Ernest Birkholz and his friends take part in a workers' demonstration opposed by Reichswehr troops; They witness how the former commander of their company kills his former soldier - their friend. The novel "Return" reveals the story of the collapse of front-line comradeship.

For Remarque's heroes, friendship has a certain extra-social, philosophical meaning. This is the only anchor of salvation for the heroes, and they continue to keep it after the war. The collapse of “front-line friendship” in the novel is shown as a tragedy. The Return, like All Quiet on the Western Front, is an anti-war work, and both are warning novels. Less than two years after the publication of “Return”, an event occurred in Germany that became not only a national, but also a global catastrophe: Hitler came to power. Both anti-war novels by Remarque were included in the blacklists of books banned in Nazi Germany, and abandoned on May 10, 1933 along with many others disliked by the Nazis outstanding works German and world literature into a huge bonfire lit in the heart of Berlin.

"Three Comrades"

In “Three Comrades” - the last of the novels written before the Second World War - he talks about the fate of his peers during the global economic crisis of 1929-1933.

In the novel “Three Comrades,” Remarque again, with even greater conviction, predicts complete hopelessness and the absence of any future for the lost generation. They suffered from one war, and the next one will simply swallow them up. Here he also gives full description the characters of the members of the “lost generation”. Remarque shows them as tough and decisive people, not taking anyone’s word for anything, recognizing only the concrete help of their own comrades, ironic and cautious in their relationships with women. Sensuality comes before their real feelings.

In this novel he still retains his originally chosen position. Still wants to be only an artist-chronicler. Don't judge anyone. Do not participate in the struggle of social forces, look from the outside and honestly and impartially capture images of people and events. In “Three Comrades” this is especially felt. Describing Berlin during the years of intense political battles, on the eve of Hitler's coup, the author diligently avoids showing any political sympathies or antipathies. He does not even name the parties whose meetings his heroes attend, although he gives vivid sketches of some episodes; he does not indicate who exactly the “guys in high boots” were who killed the sloth. It is quite obvious that these were Hitler’s stormtroopers, but the writer seems to be deliberately emphasizing his self-removal from the political issues of the day. And for him, the revenge of his friends for Lenz is not reprisal against political enemies, but simply personal retribution that overtakes a specific, direct killer.

Remarque's heroes find short-lived, illusory consolation in friendship and love, without giving up alcohol, which, by the way, has also become one of the indispensable heroes of the writer's novels. Surely they know how to drink in his novels. Drinking, which provides temporary calm, has replaced the cultural leisure of heroes who are not interested in art, music and literature. Love, friendship and drinking turned for them into a unique form of protection from the outside world, which accepted war as a way to solve political problems and subdued all official culture and the ideology of the cult promoting militarism and violence.

Three front-line friends are trying to jointly cope with the hardships of life during the economic crisis. Although ten years have passed since the last shots were fired, life is still saturated with the memory of the war, the consequences of which were felt at every step. It is not for nothing that these memories, and the author himself, led to the creation of this famous anti-war novel.

The memory of front-line life is firmly embedded in the current existence of the three main characters of the novel, Robert Lokamp, ​​Otto Kester and Gottfried Lenz, and, as it were, continues in it. This is felt at every step - not only in the big, but also in the small, in the countless details of their life, their behavior, their conversations. Smoking asphalt cauldrons remind them of camping field kitchens, the headlights of the car are a spotlight clinging to the plane during its night flight, and the rooms of one of the patients of the tuberculosis sanatorium are a front-line dugout. On the contrary, this novel by Remarque about peaceful life is the same anti-war work as the previous two. “Too much blood has been shed on this land! "says Lokamp.

But thoughts about war relate not only to the past: they also give rise to fear of the future, and Robert, looking at the baby from the orphanage, bitterly ironizes: “I would like to know what kind of war it will be for which he will be in time.” Remarque put these words into the mouth of the hero-storyteller a year before the start of the Second World War. “Three Comrades” is a novel with a broad social background; it is densely “populated” with episodic and semi-episodic characters representing various circles and strata of the German people.

The novel ends very sadly. Pat dies, Robert is left alone, his only support is his selfless friendship with Otto Koester, gained in the trenches. The future of the heroes seems completely hopeless. Remarque's main novels are internally interconnected.

This is like a continuing chronicle of a single human destiny in tragic era, the chronicle is largely autobiographical. Like his heroes, Remarque went through the meat grinder of the 1st World War, and this experience for the rest of his life determined their common hatred of militarism, cruel, senseless violence, contempt for the state structure, which gives rise to and blesses murderous massacres.

"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 the feeling of disappointment with the course and results of the First World War, which gripped the writers Western Europe and the United States, some of which were directly involved in hostilities. The death of millions of people called into question the positivist doctrine of “benign progress” and undermined faith in rationality 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. Specifics realistic image the war and its consequences did not need 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 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” in them. “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” anti-liberal 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 advanced artistically works that embodied the spirit of “lostness”: “Death of a Hero” by R. Aldington, “All Quiet on the Western Front” by E.M. Remarque, “A Farewell to Arms!” 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 related topic- “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 work, but also the exhaustion of the emotional and psychological message of “The Lost Generation.”

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 and subsequently brought her 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 demanded artistic embodiment. This invariably misled Soviet researchers who declared these writers " critical realists". American criticism designated 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 set the words “You are all a lost generation” as one of two epigraphs to his first novel “The Sun Also Rises” (“Fiesta”, 1926). Over 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, from a difficult test for which they were completely 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 constituted any literary group and did not have a single theoretical platform, but the common destinies and impressions formed their similar life positions: disappointment in social ideals, 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 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. “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 the army), Jacob Barnes (“The Sun Also Rises” by Hemingway), Jay Gatsby (“The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald) and “all the sad young people" of 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, alternate world, where there should be no place for “merchant 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: He intrudes into their lives every now and then. 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 novels of the "lost" of a kind. artistic expression thoughts 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 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 expand human destinies in time and space, but on the contrary, it thickens and condenses the action. It is characterized by a short period of time, usually a crisis in the fate of the hero; it may 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 English writer James Joyce, one of the three “pillars” of 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 "Tender is the Night" by Fitzgerald, "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 in his novels are laconically and almost dryly resolved, 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.

The lost generation is the generation that matured during the war, who survived, but could not find decent work after the war.

The main features of the “literature of the lost generation”:

1. Arose 10-11 years after the First World War (during this time a revaluation of values ​​had already occurred)

3. All works of this literature belong to the lyric-epic genre of literature (includes a story about an event, colored with emotions)

4. One and the same genre: novel (allows both storytelling and emotional coloring) The authors have developed a special composition for the novel. Centripetal way of constructing a composition.

5. Special motivic structure.

A motif is both a theme and an image and a component of content and a technique in literature. It could also be a mood.

The following motives were formed in the “Literature of the Lost Generation”:

· The motive of war - the motive of death - the motive of the first battle

· Family motive

· Vacation motive

· Motif of love

· The “entrenched” motif

· Motive of front-line brotherhood

In the 1820s. enters literature new group, the idea of ​​which is associated with the image of the “lost generation”. These are young people who visited the fronts of the First World War, were shocked by the cruelty, and were unable to get back into the groove of life in the post-war period. They got their name from the phrase attributed to G. Stein “You are all a lost generation.” The origins of the worldview of this informal literary group lie in a feeling of disappointment with the course and results of the First World War. They were all called the “lost generation.” However these were different people- they were different social status and personal destinies. And the literature of the “lost generation” that arose in the twenties was also created by creativity different writers- such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Aldington, Remarque.

The socio-political origins of the literature of the “lost generation” are not difficult to determine - the bloody imperialist war, which turned many ideals and illusions into dust, giving rise to the deepest disappointment, a feeling of loss, loneliness, and doom.

"Finest hour"the literature of the lost generation is 1929. After the war, 10 years passed when the most famous works about her, these are “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Remarque, “Death of a Hero” by Aldington and “A Pardon of Arms” by Hemingway. Distance is needed, time is needed for this experience to be experienced and embodied in an artistic and high-quality work, and not some sketches, stories and journalistic works.

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

Everyone was looking for their own artistic media and techniques.

These writers showed how psychology and a person’s attitude towards his life changes. We will not find lengthy descriptions of battles in them, only individual features, episodes, touches; they mainly describe the life of war. And this is the most difficult thing for a person - war is like everyday life, like everyday life, and everyday life smoothly develops into being.

Remarque. His works are imbued primarily with stories about front-line brotherhood, about how fragile weak ties are the only thing that helps a person survive in this cruel reality, about how vulnerable front-line brotherhood is, and in this it is similar to love, which is most often doomed to death.

Compared to other writers of the “lost generation,” Remarque’s combat experience was much more serious: he spent almost a year on the front line in France and Flanders, received five wounds, after one of which he survived only by a miracle. The war is spoken about in the first person - simply, restrained and to the point, sometimes with humor, sometimes with irritation, and very rarely the narrator breaks down into hysterics. The best thing about the novel is the details - not only how they attack and sit under bombing, but also how they sleep, eat, loiter, talk.

Aldington was a participant in the First World War (from 1916): he began serving as a private, and was later promoted to officer in the British army and served on the Western Front. The war dramatically changed Aldington's worldview, leaving an imprint of severe bitterness and hopelessness on all of his further work. His novel Death of a Hero, as well as his stories, are imbued with a rejection of militarism; in them he revealed the deceitful essence of the jingoists.

This is the most detailed story about what war is in general from the point of view of the lost generation, about how this lost generation is formed. This work differs from the works of Remarque and Hemingway in its scale. The narrative begins at the end of the 19th century, showing that the war is only the result of what began much earlier, it is the result of politics. Therefore, the novel is of enormous importance in the literature of the lost generation, it is an accusatory critical pathos. On the other hand, this is a story about how a person loses himself in war. He traces his hero from childhood until his death. Richard Winterbourne turns out to be an extreme, as a result of the war he understands that life is meaningless not only in war, but also in a peaceful world that has learned nothing and understood nothing. His existence is so meaningless that he commits suicide on the last day of the war, on the first day of the truce. The essence of the worldview of a person of the lost generation is not only the shock of the war, it is also the shock of the fact that the world passed it by. The peaceful reality into which the lost return is unacceptable for them, since in this world there is no experience of war, it rejects them, they cannot enter this reality. This non-military world does not know the tragedies of this war, they do not want to know about the scale of the great things they experienced. Their front-line brotherhood cannot be compared with any friendly relations. War is a tragedy, a horror, but once inside the tragedy, a person loses the ability to lie, he opens up, you know who is worth what. Peaceful reality knows neither tragedies, nor victories, nor sincerity. That is, the lost generation not only has a horror of war, but also an attachment to war.