Lost generation

Lost generation

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There are things that are very difficult to understand if they are not part of your own experience. It is difficult to understand how in the Middle Ages a person was obsessed with religion, burned people alive at bonfires and lived in hopeless mud. It is difficult to understand how the travelers felt when they first set foot on uncharted land. It is difficult to understand how the soldier returned alive from the meat grinder of the first in the history of the world war and found the strength to live on. You need to have more than a rich imagination and, let's say, the ability to move into someone else's life in space and time.

There are things that are very difficult to understand if they are not part of your own experience. It is difficult to understand how in the Middle Ages a person was obsessed with religion, burned people alive at bonfires and lived in hopeless mud. It is difficult to understand how the travelers felt when they first set foot on uncharted land. It is difficult to understand how the soldier returned alive from the meat grinder of the first in the history of the world war and found the strength to live on. You need to have more than a rich imagination and, let's say, the ability to move into someone else's life in space and time.

Literature is to a large extent a "time machine". With imagination, you can use a book as a transport to another era. Then you can safely travel without visas and money to the Middle Ages, the age of great geographical discoveries, and so on. The transport will be the brightest books, and the guides will be the writers of the so-called “lost generation”.

After people returned from the first world war, they felt torn apart. The state of loss, disillusionment with the ideals imposed by society and the doom for the worst thing - memory - began to form a new thinking and worldview in people.

the term "lost generation"

Miss Gertrude Stein and Mr. Ernest Hemingway were driving one day. The old Ford suddenly started having ignition problems, it was handed over to a mechanic, a young man who had just returned from the front and got a job in a garage. The mechanic couldn't fix the car, or maybe he didn't want to. Miss Stein complained indignantly to the owner of the garage, and he, pronouncing the mechanic, dropped the phrase: "You are — génération perdue!»

Miss Stein said, “There you are! And you are all like that. All the youth who have been to the war. You are a lost generation! " First, Mr. Hemingway recorded this entire scene and added to his novel "The Holiday Which Is Always With You," and then literary scholars began to use it as a term.

Ernest Miller Hemingway

The life of writers in those years in itself symbolized the “lost generation”. But, in any case, their experience was passed on to the heroes of their books, and the character of the heroes is largely their own character. Let's start with how the "lost generation" lives in Hemingway's books.

Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque's attention is focused not on one person, but on several, he weaves the value of male friendship to the ideas of courage and faith. Many of Remarque's heroes appear so lofty and noble not so much because of courage and dedication in the struggle for their ideals, but because of the friendship that binds them, makes them stronger and allows them to survive pain. For Remarque, friendship becomes the foundation for the growth and salvation of a person from injustice and cruelty.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

This author decided to talk about a desperate “lost generation”. His hero, as a rule, is either rich or puts wealth at the forefront as a way to create his own microcosm, separated from the real, imperfect. This microcosm is full of fun, vibrant parties and beautiful people. It seems to Fitzgerald's hero that the outer gloss and wealth will save him from the gloomy reality. But in the end, this reality hits the microcosm like an avalanche and leaves a person face to face with his weakness.

You can read the literature of the "lost generation" for different purposes. Hemingway and Remarque will become brilliant "educators" for young men, teach them to be fearless fighters for their principles and true friends. Hesse will open up new possibilities of imagination and make you look deep inside your consciousness. Perhaps surprisingly, the rude Miller, when read correctly, will make the reader smarter and more cheerful. Fitzgerald, however, wrote exclusively for the contemplative. His prose is vivid and complete paintings of the era: novels are huge detailed canvases, stories are small laconic portraits. These authors have one thing in common - they sang their electrified era in a way that no historian can do. Time and people of the “lost generation” live and breathe deeply in their books.
It is not easy for a modern person to imagine much of the past, that which he did not experience himself. It seems especially impossible to understand how the people who lived between the two world wars felt themselves - in the memories of what they experienced and the premonition of a new round of horror, in one all-encompassing love for real life. But everyone has a "time machine" at their disposal in the form of a book. And the most knowledgeable captains are already at the helm.