Introduction the world at the beginning

1.3 Features of cultural development in the early twentieth century

The spiritual and material culture of the twentieth century is a continuation of the sociocultural processes of the nineteenth century, which failed to meet the expectations of humanity and gave rise to a new crisis and upheaval: the contradictions accumulated within society could not be resolved by the course of natural historical changes. At the end of the 19th century, irreversible changes took place concerning a new understanding of man, his attitude to the world, and a new language of art. An example of such a new attitude was given by French painting, which became not only actively temperamental, but also colored by the subjective experiences of a person: impressionism appears, the main goal of which is to capture a moment of life.

A breakthrough beyond the boundaries of the usual art that developed in the XIX century occurs at the beginning of the XX century. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, fundamental changes took place: culture became international, integrating the spiritual values of almost all ethnic regional types and thereby becoming even more diverse. This diversity could not but reflect on art, literature, philosophy, i.e. on culture as a whole, which reflected both the cultural decline and degradation of man-made civilization at the turn of the last two centuries of the second millennium, and the metaphysical approach to solving global problems, the attempt to understand the new role of man in the world. In cultural studies, art history and science, this cultural process of the turn of the XIX — XX centuries was called "decadence", and art and literature — decadent. The main characteristic and feature of decadence is confusion in the face of a dramatically changing world: society was unable to rationally and scientifically explain the changes in politics and economics, new social relations, and a new picture of the world. There was a contradictory consciousness that affected the most important element of the worldview — the question of laws in natural and social reality. Therefore, there is a surge of irrationalism, mysticism, and new religious trends are emerging. At the beginning of the 20th century, philosophical, artistic and literary thought were closely linked (especially in Russia). This is explained by the fact that the development of both philosophy and art culture was based on a crisis of public consciousness. Decadence developed on this theoretical basis.
The art of decadence is a reflection of all social and ideological contradictions. In 1909 futurism appeared, its" godfather " - the Italian writer F. Marinetti. Later, a new expressionist society "Blue Rider" appeared, and adherents of Dadaism, Audism, etc. appeared. In 1915, the Fauvists — "the wild ones" - made their appearance in Paris, and in the same year the Most, a group of united expressionist artists, appeared in Dresden. Three years after the Bridge, Cubism was formed. In Russia, innovation processes in culture are similar to those in Western Europe: M. Nesterov and I. Levitan created in the lyrical spirit, and K. Korovin wrote in the spirit of impressionism. The figurative-romantic method of M. Vrubel and the complex symbolism of V. Borisov-Musatov are formed. The newly appeared magazine "Mir Iskusstva" focused on the non-traditional for Russia detachment from real life impressions, illusory, masquerade. Finally, the exhibition "Jack of Diamonds", held in Moscow, defined a new direction in the development of art. Similar processes took place in literature, theater, and music.
Culture in the XX century developed in several parallel directions. At the same time, none of the series of stylistic evolution of art and literature exhausts their entire development and does not cover it as a whole, only in their interaction they form a complete cultural history of the XX century.
In contrast to the roughly similar ideological and stylistic movements in the culture of the XIX century — romanticism, academism, realism, art culture of the XX century, breaking up into a number of trends, is a different attitude of artistic creativity to reality. The variety of styles and methods in the culture of the XX century, which moved away from the classical methods of artistic creativity, was called modernism. In French, modernism means "new, modern". In general, this is a set of aesthetic schools and trends of the late XIX-early XX centuries, characterized by a break with traditional realistic trends. Modernism combined various creative conceptualizations of the decadence period: a sense of the disharmony of the world, the instability of human existence, the rebellion against rationalistic art and the growing role of abstract thinking, transcendence and mysticism, and the desire for innovation at all costs.
In its extreme manifestations in art, literature, and theater, modernism renounces the meaningfulness and visual originality of images, harmony, and naturalness. The essence of the modernist trend is in the dehumanization of man, as X wrote in the Philosophy of Culture. Ortega y Gasset. Modernism often functions within the framework of realistic reflection, but in a peculiar form. In addition, one should distinguish between modernism as a method and modernism as a current. If modernism in a broad sense implies all the variety of unrealistic trends in artistic culture, then modernism in a narrow sense is an artistic system that has a certain unity, integrity, and commonality of artistic techniques.
The concept of "modernism" is closely related to another concept — "vanguard" (fr. vanguard), which unites the most radical variety of modernism.
Modernism is a characteristic feature of twentieth-century aesthetics, independent of social strata, countries, and peoples. In its best examples, the art of modernism enriches world culture through new means of expression.
Along with modernism, in parallel with it, realism existed and continued to develop. At the turn of the century, it underwent multidimensional changes, manifesting itself in various ways, but most vividly as neorealism, especially in cinema (L. Visconti, M. Antonioni, R. Rossellini, S. Kramer, A. Kurosawa, A. Vaida). Neorealism fulfilled the task of truthful reflection of social existence, the struggle for social justice and human dignity. The principle of neorealism has found its expression both in art (R. Guttuso, E. Wyeth) and in literature (A. Miller, E. Hemingway, A. Zegers, E. M. Remarque). Writers and artists such as J. Amadou, G. Marquez, and D. Siqueiros worked from the standpoint of neorealism.
Decadent literature of the turn of the century is also represented by symbolism, the formation of which is associated with the names of A. Rimbaud, P. Verlaine, O. Wilde.
The coming twenty-first century makes the twentieth century an antecedent, just as more recently the nineteenth century was the past in relation to the twentieth. The change of centuries has always produced a summing up of results and the appearance of predictive assumptions about the future. The assumption that the twentieth century will be something unusual in comparison with the nineteenth, arose even before it began. The crisis of civilization that the Romantics intuitively foresaw was fully realized by the passing century: it opens with the Anglo-Boer War, then plunges into two world wars, the threat of atomic entropy, and a huge number of local military conflicts.
The belief that the flourishing of natural sciences and new discoveries will certainly change people's lives for the better is being destroyed by historical practice. The chronology of the twentieth century has revealed a bitter truth: on the way to improving technology, the humanistic content of human existence is lost. This idea becomes tautological at the end of the twentieth century. But the premonition of the wrong road appeared among philosophers and artists even earlier, when the XIX century was ending and the new century was beginning. F. Nietzsche wrote that civilization is a thin layer of gilding on the animal essence of man, and O. Spengler in the work "Causality and Fate. The Decline of Europe "(1923) spoke about the fatal and inevitable death of European culture.
The First World War, having destroyed the fairly stable social and state relations of the XIX century, put people before the relentless urgency of revising their previous values, searching for their own place in the changed reality, and understanding that the outside world is hostile and aggressive. The result of rethinking the phenomenon of modern life was that most European writers, especially the younger generation that came to literature after the First World War, were skeptical about the primacy of social practice over the spiritual microcosm of man.
Having lost their illusions in assessing the world that nurtured them and recoiling from the well-fed philistinism, the intelligentsia perceived the crisis state of society as the collapse of European civilization in general. This gave rise to pessimism and distrust of young authors (O. Huxley, D. Lawrence, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway). The same loss of stable reference points has shaken the optimistic perception of older writers (G. Wells, D. Galsworthy, A. France).
The First World War, which the younger generation of writers went through, became for them the hardest test and insight into the falsity of false patriotic slogans, which further increased the need to search for new authorities and moral values and led many of them to escape to the world of intimate experiences. This was a kind of escape route from the impact of external realities. At the same time, writers who have experienced fear and pain, the horror of near violent death, could not remain the same aesthetes who looked down on the repulsive aspects of life.
The authors who died and returned (R. Aldington, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway, Z. Sassoon, F. S. Fitzgerald) were referred by critics to the so-called "lost generation". Although the term does not correspond to the significant footprint that these artists left in national literatures, nevertheless, literary studies continue to emphasize their sharpened understanding of man in war and after the war. It can be said that the writers of lost worship were the first authors to draw readers ' attention to the phenomenon that was called the "war syndrome"in the second half of the twentieth century.
The most powerful aesthetic system emerging in the first half of the century was modernism, which analyzed the private life of a person, the self-worth of his individual destiny in the process of" moments of being " (W. Wolfe, M. Proust, T. S. Eliot, D. Joyce, F. Kafka). From the modernist point of view, external reality is hostile to the individual, it produces the tragedy of his existence. Writers believed that the study of the spiritual principle is a kind of return to the original sources and finding the true "I", because a person first realizes himself as a subject and then creates a subject-object relationship with the world. M. Proust's psychological novel, focused on the analysis of different states of personality at different stages of life, had an undoubted influence on the development of twentieth-century prose. D. Joyce's experiment in the novel, his attempt to create a modern odyssey, generated a lot of discussion and imitation.
In poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, the same processes took place as in prose. Just like prose, poetry is characterized by a critical attitude towards man-made civilization and its results. The poetic experiments of T. Tzar, A. Breton, G. Lorca, P. Eluard, T. S. Eliot contributed to the transformation of the poetic language. The changes concerned both the art form, which became more sophisticated (obviously a synthesis of different types of art was revealed) and the essential side, when poets tried to penetrate the subconscious. Poetry tends more than ever to subjectivism, symbolism, encryption, and the free form of verse (verliebre) is actively used.
The realist trend in literature expanded the boundaries of the traditional experience of artistic research of the world, laid down in the XIX century. B. Brecht questioned the thesis of "lifelikeness", that is, the imitativeness of realistic art as an indispensable and immutable property of it. Balzac's and Tolstoy's experience was important from the point of view of preserving tradition and understanding intertextual connections. But the writer believed that any aesthetic phenomenon, even if it is a top one, cannot be artificially "preserved", otherwise it turns into a dogma that hinders the organic development of literature. It should be emphasized that realism quite freely used the principles of unrealistic aesthetics. Realistic art of the twentieth century is so different from the classical versions of the previous century that most often it is necessary to study the work of each individual writer.
The problems of humanistic development of man and society, the search for truth, which, in the words of the British author of the second half of the century, W. Golding, "is always one", worried both modernists and non-modernists alike. The twentieth century was so complex and contradictory, so heterogeneous, that writers of modernist and non-modernist orientation, understanding the global nature of the processes taking place in the world and often solving the same problems, drew directly opposite conclusions. The analytical fragmentation of phenomena undertaken by modernists in search of hidden meanings is combined in the general flow of literature of the first half of the century with the search for realists who seek to synthesize efforts to comprehend the general principles of artistic reflection of the world in order to stop the disintegration of values and the destruction of tradition, so as not to interrupt the
In the literary process of the XX century, changes occurred due to socio-economic and political reasons. Among the main features of the literature of this time, we can distinguish:
* politicization, strengthening the connection of literary trends with various political trends,
* strengthening the mutual influence and interpenetration of national literatures, internationalization,
* rejection 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,
* striving for the essay genre.
The First World War became a cardinal theme of the art of the first half of the century, determined the personal destinies and shaped the artistic personalities of such writers as Henri Barbusse, Richard Aldington, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque. During the war, Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet whose work opened the twentieth century, was mortally wounded. The conditions and consequences of this war were different for each of the countries. However, the artistic embodiment of the First World War in different literatures also has common, typological features, both in problematics and pathos, and in poetics.
Epic artistic interpretation of the war is typical for large-scale novels-chronicles by Roger Martin du Gard, Romain Rolland, etc. Books about the war show this war in very different ways: from the image of its revolutionizing influence in Henri Barbusse's novel " Fire "to the pessimism and despair caused by it in the books of writers of the"lost generation".
The literature of the "lost generation" developed in European and American literatures in the decade after the end of the First World War. Recorded its appearance in 1929, when three novels were published: "The Death of a Hero" by the Englishman Aldington," On the Western Front without change "by the German Remarque and" Farewell to arms! " by the American Hemingway. In literature, the lost generation was defined, so named with the light hand of Hemingway, who put the epigraph to his first novel " Fiesta. And the Sun Rises "(1926) the words of Gertrude Stein, an American woman who lived in Paris, "All of you are a lost generation." These words were an exact definition of the general feeling of loss and longing that the authors of these books who went through the war brought with them. There was so much despair and pain in their novels that they were defined as a mournful lament for those killed in war, even if the heroes were fleeing from bullets. This is a requiem for a whole generation that was not fulfilled because of the war, where the ideals and values that were taught from childhood fell apart like fake castles. The war exposed the lies of many familiar dogmas and State institutions, such as the family and the school, turned false moral values inside out, and plunged young men who grew old early into the abyss of disbelief and loneliness.
"We wanted to fight against everything, everything that determined our past - against lies and selfishness, self-interest and heartlessness; we became hardened and trusted no one but our closest comrade, did not believe in anything except such forces as the sky, tobacco, trees, bread and earth that never deceived us; but what did it turn out to be? Everything collapsed, was falsified and forgotten. And for those who could not forget, all that remained was impotence, despair, indifference, and vodka. The time of great human and courageous dreams has passed. Businessmen were triumphant. Venality. 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. At that time, they clearly and unconditionally believed everything that they were taught, what they heard, what they read about progress, civilization, and humanism; they believed the ringing phrases of conservative or liberal, nationalist or social-democratic slogans and programs, everything that was explained to them in their parents ' homes, from the pulpits, from the pages of newspapers...
But what could any words, any speeches, mean in the roar and stench of a hurricane of fire, in the stinking mud of trenches filled with a fog of suffocating gases, in the cramped dugouts and infirmaries, in front of endless rows of soldiers ' graves or piles of mangled corpses-in front of all the terrible, ugly variety of daily, monthly, senseless deaths, injuries, suffering and animal fear of people – men, boys, boys?
All ideals were shattered under the inevitable blows of reality. They were incinerated by the fiery everyday life of the war, they were drowned in mud by the everyday life of the post-war years. Then, after a few brief flashes and a long fading of the German revolution, volleys of punishers crackled on the working-class outskirts, shooting down the defenders of the last barricades, and in the quarters of the "schiebers" - the new rich who had profited from the war - orgies did not stop. At that time, poverty and debauchery reigned in the social life and in the entire everyday life of German cities and towns, which until recently had prided themselves on impeccable neatness, strict order and burgher integrity, ruin and confusion were growing, family piggy banks and human souls were being emptied...
Suddenly it turned out that the war and the first post-war years destroyed not only millions of lives, but also ideas and concepts; not only industry and transport were destroyed, but also the simplest ideas about what is good and what is bad; the economy was shaken, money and moral principles were devalued.
Those Germans who understood the real causes and real meaning of the war and the disasters it caused, and were courageous enough, followed Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luskembourg, followed Klara Zetkin and Ernest Thelmann.
But they were also outnumbered. And this was one of the reasons for the subsequent tragic fate of Germany. However, many of the Germans did not support or even understand the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Some sincerely, but inactivity sympathized and sympathized, others hated or feared, and the overwhelming majority looked at what seemed to them a continuation of the fratricidal bloodshed of the great war, they did not distinguish between the right and the guilty. When the detachments of the Spartacists and Red Guards fought desperate battles for the right to live, work and happiness for the entire German people, fighting against the vastly superior forces of reaction, many Germans, along with the hero of Remarque's novel, only mournfully noted: "Soldiers fight against soldiers, comrades against comrades."
This tragic neutrality is especially acute and painful in the minds and attitudes of those thinking and honest former soldiers who, after the terrible experience of war and the first post-war years, have already lost confidence in the very concepts of "politics", "idea", "civilization", without even imagining that there is an honest policy, that there are noble ideas, that a civilization that is not hostile to man is possible.
They aged without knowing their youth, and it was very difficult for them to live later: during the years of inflation, "stabilization" and a new economic crisis with its mass unemployment and mass poverty. It was difficult for them everywhere-both in Europe and in America, in the big cities noisy, colorful, bustling, feverishly active and indifferent to the suffering of millions of small people who swarmed in these reinforced concrete, brick and asphalt labyrinths. It was no easier in the villages or on farms, where life was more slow, monotonous, primitive, but just as indifferent to the troubles and sufferings of man.
And many of these thoughtful and honest former soldiers turned away from all the big and complex social problems of our time with disdainful distrust, but they did not want to be either slaves or slaveholders, or martyrs or tormentors.
They went through life mentally drained, but persistent in adhering to their simple, harsh principles; cynical, rude, they were devoted to the few truths in which they retained confidence: male friendship, soldier's comradeship, simple humanity.
Mockingly dismissing the pathos of abstract general concepts, they recognized and honored only the real good. They were disgusted by high-sounding words about the nation, the fatherland, the state, and they never grew up to the concept of class. They were greedy for any job and worked hard and conscientiously - the war and years of unemployment had bred in them an extraordinary greed for productive work. They were thoughtlessly profligate, but they could also be sternly affectionate husbands and fathers; they could maim a random opponent in a tavern brawl, but they could risk their lives, blood, and last possessions without further ado for a comrade or just for the sake of a person who aroused an instant feeling of affection or compassion.
They were all called the " lost generation." However, they were different people – their social status and personal destinies were different. And the literature of the" lost generation " that emerged in the twenties was also created by the work of various writers - such as Hemingway, Aldington, Remarque.
What these writers had in common was a worldview defined by a passionate rejection of war and militarism. But in this denial, sincere and noble, there was a complete lack of understanding of the socio-historical nature of the nature of the troubles and deformities of reality : they denounced it harshly and implacably, but without any hope of a better possibility, in a tone of bitter, bleak pessimism.
However, the differences in the ideological and creative development of these literary "peers" were very significant. They affected the subsequent fate of the writers of the "lost generation". Hemingway broke out of the tragically hopeless circle of his problems and his heroes by participating in the heroic battle of the Spanish people against fascism. Despite all the hesitation and doubts of the writer, the lively, hot breath of the people's struggle for freedom gave new strength, a new scope to his work, took him beyond the limits of one generation.
On the contrary, Don Passos, which had fallen under the influence of reaction and was constantly opposing itself to the advanced social forces, grew hopelessly old and creatively smaller. Not only did he fail to outgrow his ill-fated generation, but he fell below it. Everything of any significance in his previous work is connected with the problems that worried the soldiers of the First World War.
Aldington, in search of solutions to old and new issues, mainly engaged in journalism.
Remarque spent the longest time trying to keep in line with the course outlined at the very beginning of his creative life, and to preserve the unstable balance of the tragic worldview of his youth in the years of new great upheavals.
The characters in the books of the writers of the "lost generation" are usually very young, one might say, from school and belong to the intelligentsia. For them, the Barbousse path and its "clarity" seem unattainable. They are individualists and rely, like Hemingway's heroes, only on themselves, on their own will, and if they are capable of a decisive social act, then separately concluding a "contract with the war" and deserting. Remarque's characters find solace in love and friendship, without giving up on calvados. This is their unique form of defense against a world that accepts war as a way to resolve political conflicts. The heroes of the literature of the "lost generation" are not able to unite with the people, the state, and the class, as was observed in Barbusse. "The Lost Generation" contrasted the world that deceived them with bitter irony, rage, uncompromising and all-encompassing criticism of the foundations of a false civilization, which determined the place of this literature in realism, despite the pessimism it shares with the literature of modernism.

2.