People of the Lost Generation. The Lost Generation on TV

After World War I they returned to their hometowns from the front special people. When the war began, they were still boys, but duty forced them to defend their homeland. " Lost Generation" - that's what they were called. What, however, is the reason for this loss? This concept is still used today when we talk about writers who worked during the break between the First and Second World Wars, which became a test for all of humanity and knocked almost everyone out of their usual, peaceful rut.

The expression “lost generation” was once heard from the mouth. Later, the incident during which this happened was described in one of Hemingway’s books (“The Holiday That Always Be With You”). He and other writers of the lost generation raise in their works the problem of young people who returned from the war and did not find their home, their relatives. Questions about how to live on, how to remain human, how to learn to enjoy life again - this is what is paramount in this literary movement. Let's talk about it in more detail.

Literature about the Lost Generation is not only about similar themes. This is also recognizable style. At first glance, this is an impartial account of what is happening - be it war or post-war times. However, if you read carefully, you can see both a very deep lyrical subtext and the severity of mental tossing. For many authors it turned out to be difficult to break out of these thematic frameworks: it is too difficult to forget the horrors of war.

The creative experiment begun by Parisian expatriates, modernists of the pre-war generation Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, was continued by young prose writers and poets who came to American literature in the 1920s and subsequently brought it worldwide fame. Throughout the twentieth century, their names were firmly associated in the minds of foreign readers with the idea of ​​US literature as a whole. These are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder and others, mainly modernist writers.

At the same time, American modernism differs from European modernism in its more obvious involvement in social and political events era: the shock war experience of most authors could not be silenced or circumvented, it demanded artistic embodiment. This invariably misled Soviet researchers, who declared these writers to be “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 software poetic works"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 eternal life values: communication with nature, love for a woman, male friendship and creativity.

The writers of the “lost generation” never formed any literary group and did not have a single theoretical platform, but the common destinies and impressions formed their similar life positions: disappointment in social ideals, searches lasting 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. The “war” works show the origins of the lost generation: front-line episodes are presented by all authors harshly and unembellished - contrary to the tendency to romanticize the First World War in official literature. Works about the “world after the war” show the consequences - the convulsive fun of the “jazz age”, reminiscent of dancing on the edge of an abyss or a feast during the plague. This is a world of destinies crippled by war and broken human relationships.

The issues that occupy the “lost” gravitate towards the original mythological oppositions 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. Concludes " separate peace" (that is, he deserts from the army) Lieutenant Henry, plunges headlong into drinking, carousing and intimate experiences Jacob Barnes ("The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway), Jay Gatsby ("The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald) and "all the sad young men" by Fitzgerald, Hemingway and other prose writers of the "lost generation".

What do the heroes of their works who survived the war see the meaning of life? In life itself as it is, in everyone’s life 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: it constantly invades their lives. It is no coincidence that love in the works of the writers of the “lost generation” is fused with death: it is almost always stopped by death. Catherine, Frederick Henry's lover, dies (A Farewell to Arms!) accidental death an unknown woman entails 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 can also include memories of the past, due to which the themes are expanded and the circumstances are clarified, which distinguishes the works of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Leading compositional principle American prose twenties - 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, 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, involved in the 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.

"Lost generation" (English Lost generation) is the concept got its name from a phrase allegedly uttered by G. Stein and taken by E. Hemingway as an epigraph to the novel “The Sun Also Rises” (1926). The origins of the worldview that united this informal literary community, were rooted in a feeling of disappointment with the course and results of the First World War, which gripped 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 the rationality of liberal democracy. The pessimistic tonality that made the prose writers of the “Lost Generation” similar to writers of a modernist bent did not mean the identity of their common ideological and aesthetic aspirations. 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 a peaceful life. The Lost Generation books are not equivalent to the general stream of works about the First World War. Unlike "Adventures" good soldier Seamstress" (1921-23) by J. Hasek, there is no clearly expressed satirical grotesque and “front-line humor.” “The Lost” not only listen to the naturalistically reproduced horrors of war and nurture memories of it (Barbus A. Fire, 1916; Celine L.F. Journey to the Edge of the Night, 1932), but introduce the experience gained into the broader mainstream of human experiences, colored by a kind of romanticized bitterness. The “knocking out” of the heroes of these books did not mean a conscious choice in favor of “new” illiberal ideologies and regimes: socialism, fascism, Nazism. The heroes of “The Lost Generation” are completely apolitical and prefer to withdraw into the sphere of illusions, intimate, deeply personal experiences to participate in social struggle.

Chronologically The “Lost Generation” first announced itself with the novels “Three Soldiers”(1921) J. Dos Passos, “The Enormous Camera” (1922) by E.E. Cummings, “Soldier’s Award” (1926) by W. Faulkner. “lostness” in the atmosphere of post-war rampant consumerism was sometimes reflected without a direct connection with the memory of the war in O. Huxley’s story “Krome Yellow” (1921), the novels of F. Sc. Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby” (1925), E. Hemingway “And He Rises” sun" (1926). The culmination of the corresponding mentality came in 1929, when almost simultaneously the most artistically perfect works were published, embodying the spirit of “lostness”: “The Death of a Hero” by R. Aldington, “On Western Front no change" by E.M. Remarque, "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 similar 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 “ 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.”

, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Nathaniel West, John O'Hara. The Lost Generation are young people drafted to the front at the age of 18, often not yet graduated from school, who began to kill early. After the war, such people often do not could adapt to peaceful life, became drunkards, committed suicide, and some went crazy.

History of the term

When we returned from Canada and settled on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and Miss Stein and I were still good friends, she said her phrase about the lost generation. The old Model T Ford that Miss Stein drove in those years had something wrong with the ignition, and a young mechanic who had been at the front last year war and now worked in a garage, failed to fix it, or maybe he just didn’t want to fix her Ford out of turn. Be that as it may, he was not sérieux enough, and after Miss Stein's complaint, the owner severely reprimanded him. The owner told him: “You are all génération perdue!”

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.

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 victims 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.

In 1930-31, Remarque wrote the novel “The Return” (“Der Weg zurück”), in which he talks about the return to their homeland after the First World War of young soldiers who can no longer live normally, and, acutely feeling all the meaninglessness, cruelty, filth of life, Still trying to live somehow. The epigraph to the novel is the following lines:

In the novel "Three Comrades" he predicts sad fate to the lost generation. Remarque describes the situation in which these people found themselves. When they returned, many of them found craters instead of their previous homes; most lost their relatives and friends. In post-war Germany there is devastation, poverty, unemployment, instability, and a nervous atmosphere.

Remarque also characterizes the representatives of the “lost generation” themselves. These people are tough, decisive, accept only concrete help, and are ironic with women. Their sensuality comes before their feelings.

See also

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From French: Une generation perdue. Incorrectly attributed to American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899 1961). In fact, the author of this expression American writer Gertrude Stein (1874 1946). E. Hemingway only used it in... Dictionary winged words and expressions

Modern encyclopedia

"Lost Generation"- (English lost generation), definition applied to a group foreign writers who performed in the 1920s. with works that reflected disappointment in modern civilization and the loss of enlightenment ideals (belief in good power... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary

- (English lost generation) definition applied to a group of foreign writers who appeared in the 1920s. with works that reflected disappointment in modern civilization and the loss of enlightenment ideals, aggravated by the tragic... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

LOST, oh, oh; yang Dictionary Ozhegova. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949 1992 … Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary

- “LOST GENERATION” (eng. lost generation), a frequently used definition of the generation of writers who made their debut after the First World War and whose works reflected disappointment in civilization and the loss of educational ideals,... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary

- (“Lost generation”), American and European writers who worked after the 1st World War (E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner, J. Dos Passos, F. S. Fitzgerald, E. M. Remarque), whose works reflect the tragic experience of war, the loss of ideals,... ... Literary encyclopedia

- (“Lost Generation”) definition applied to Western European and American writers (E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner, J. Dos Passos, F. S. Fitzgerald, E. M. Remarque, O. T. Christensen, etc.) , who performed in the 20s. 20th century after… … Big Soviet encyclopedia

- (English lost generation), a definition applied to a group of foreign writers who appeared in the 1920s. with works that reflected disappointment in modern civilization and the loss of enlightenment ideals, aggravated by the tragic... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary

Book People of little use to society, formed during the years of socio-political decline in which century. country, prone to apoliticality and moral errors. /i> Tracing paper from the French génération perdue. BMS 1998, 457 ... Big dictionary Russian sayings

Books

• The damned city of Chisinau... Lost generation, . This book is about young writers of the mid-70s - early 90s, who were unfairly overlooked by critics in their time. And they themselves did not pursue widely accepted, and it did not follow in their footsteps...

The birth of the term "lost generation"

Ivashev’s book quotes the words of an Englishman: “The Great War broke hearts on a scale unseen before the Norman conquest and, thank God, unknown over the past millennium. It dealt a blow to the rational and liberal civilization of the European enlightenment and, thus, to the entire world civilization... In France, Germany and Britain there is neither a city nor a village where there would not be a monument to those who did not return from Great War. In this war, two million Russian soldiers, two million French, two million Germans, a million Englishmen and countless hundreds of thousands of the most different countries and corners of the earth - from New Zealand to Ireland, from South Africa to Finland. And the survivors became part of what would later be called the “lost generation” of Ivashev, V.V. Literature of Great Britain of the twentieth century / V.V. Ivasheva. - M., 1984. - P. 45-46. .

Having lost illusions in assessing the world that raised them and recoiling from the well-fed philistinism, the intelligentsia perceived the crisis state of society as a collapse European civilization at all. This gave rise to pessimism and mistrust of young authors (O. Huxley, D. Lawrence, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway). The same loss of stable guidelines shook the optimistic perception of writers of the older generation (G. Wells, D. Galsworthy, A. France).

Some researchers believe that the literature of the “lost generation” includes all works about the First World War that were published in the late 1920s - early 1930s, although the worldview of their authors and these books themselves are quite different. Others include in this category only works that reflect “a very specific state of mind, a certain complex of feelings and ideas” that “the world is cruel, that ideals have collapsed, that in post-war reality there is no place for truth and justice, and that those who went through the war , can no longer return to ordinary life". But in both cases we're talking about about literature dedicated specifically to the First World War. Therefore, literature about the First World War seems to fall into two groups:

1. One part of the works about the war is written by those who did not fight in this war themselves due to their age, these are Rolland, T. Mann, D. Galsworthy, who create rather detached narratives.

2. The second group of works are the works of writers whose life as a writer began with the war. These are its direct participants, people who came to literature to convey with the help of work of art your personal life experience, tell the life military experience of your generation. By the way, the second world war gave similar two groups of writers.

The most significant works about the war were written by representatives of the second group. But this group is also in turn divided into two subgroups:

1. The war led to the emergence of a number of radical movements, radical ideas, concepts, to a general radicalization public consciousness . The most visible result of such radicalization is the very revolutions with which this war ends. Shaw outlined not only the possibilities, but also the necessity of this radicalization back in 1914, when he wrote the article " Common sense and war": "The most reasonable thing for both belligerent armies would be to shoot their officers, go home and make a revolution" History foreign literature: Textbook. allowance / Edited by R.S. Oseeva - M.: Progress, 1993. - P. 154. . This happened, but only after 4 years.

2. The second part of the participants in this war came out of it, having lost faith in everything: in man, in the possibility of change for the better, they came out of the war traumatized by it. This part of the young people who came into contact with the war began to be called " lost generation". Literature reflects this division of worldviews. In some of the works we see stories about the radicalization that comes human consciousness, in the other - disappointment. Therefore, one cannot call all the literature about the First World War the literature of the lost generation; it is much more diverse. History of Foreign Literature: Textbook. allowance / Edited by R.S. Oseeva - M.: Progress, 1993. - P. 155. .

The First World War, which the young generation of writers went through, became for them the most important test and insight into the falsity of false patriotic slogans. At the same time, writers who knew fear and pain, the horror of close violent death, could not remain the same aesthetes who looked down on the repulsive aspects of life.

The dead and returning authors (R. Algnington, A. Barbusse, E. Hemingway, Z. Sassoon, F.S. Fitzgerald) were classified by critics as the “lost generation.” Although the term does not do justice to the significant mark these artists left on national literatures. It can be said that the writers of “lost worship” were the first authors who drew the attention of readers to that phenomenon, which in the second half of the twentieth century was called the “war syndrome”.

The literature of the "lost generation" developed in European and American literatures in the decade after the end of the First World War. Its appearance was recorded in 1929, when three novels were published: “Death of a Hero” by the Englishman Aldington, “All Quiet on the Western Front” by the German Remarque and “A Farewell to Arms!” American Hemingway. In literature, a lost generation has been identified, so named light hand Hemingway, who put the epigraph to his first novel “Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises” (1926) in the words of the American Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris, “You are all a lost generation.” History of Foreign Literature: Textbook. allowance / Edited by R.S. Oseeva - M.: Progress, 1993. - P. 167. . These words turned out to be precise definition the general feeling of loss and melancholy that the authors of these books brought with them after going through the war. There was so much despair and pain in their novels that they were defined as mournful laments for those killed in the war, even if the heroes escaped bullets. This is a requiem for an entire generation that failed because of the war, during which the ideals and values ​​that were taught from childhood crumbled like fake castles. The war exposed the lies of many habitual dogmas and state institutions, such as family and school, turned the false ones inside out moral values and plunged young men who grew old early into the abyss of unbelief and loneliness.

“We wanted to fight against everything, everything that defined our past - against lies and selfishness, selfishness and heartlessness; we became embittered and did not trust anyone except our closest comrade, did not believe in anything except such forces that had never deceived us like the sky, tobacco, trees, bread and earth; but what came of it? Everything collapsed, was falsified and forgotten. And for those who did not know how to forget, only powerlessness, despair, indifference and vodka passed. dreams. Businessmen triumphed. Corruption. Poverty" History of French Literature: In 4 volumes - Vol. 3. - M.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Foreign Literature of the 20th Century. - M., 1999. - P. 321. .

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.

But what could any words, any speech mean in the roar and stench of hurricane fire, in the fetid mud of trenches filled with a fog of suffocating gases, in the cramped dugouts and hospital wards, in front of endless rows of soldiers’ graves or piles of mangled corpses - in front of all the terrible, ugly diversity daily, monthly, senseless deaths, injuries, suffering and animal fear of people - men, youths, boys?

All ideals crumbled to dust under the inevitable blows of reality. They were incinerated by the fiery everyday life of war, they were drowned in the mud by the everyday life of the post-war years.

They grew old without knowing their youth; life was very difficult for them even later: during the years of inflation, “stabilization” and the new economic crisis with its mass unemployment and mass poverty. It was difficult for them everywhere - both in Europe and in America, in big noisy, colorful, hectic cities, feverishly active and indifferent to the suffering of millions of little people swarming in these reinforced concrete, brick and asphalt labyrinths. It was no easier in villages or on farms, where life was slower, monotonous, primitive, but just as indifferent to the troubles and suffering of man.

And many of these thoughtful and honest former soldiers turned away with contemptuous distrust from all big and complex social problems modernity, but they did not want to be either slaves, or slave owners, or martyrs, or torturers.

They walked through life mentally devastated, but persistent in adhering to their simple, stern principles; cynical, rude, they were devoted to those few truths in which they retained confidence: male friendship, soldier's camaraderie, simple humanity.

Mockingly pushing aside the pathos of the abstract general concepts, they recognized and honored only real goodness. They were disgusted by pompous words about the nation, fatherland, state, and they never grew up to the concept of class. They greedily grabbed any job and worked hard and conscientiously - the war and years of unemployment instilled in them an extraordinary greed for productive work. They thoughtlessly debauched themselves, but they also knew how to be sternly gentle husbands and fathers; could cripple a random opponent in a tavern brawl, but they could without unnecessary words risk your life, blood, last property for the sake of a comrade and simply for the sake of a person who aroused an instant feeling of affection or compassion.

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, Aldington, Remarque Kovaleva, T.V. History of foreign literature (second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries): Proc. allowance / T.V. Kovaleva. - Minsk: Zavigar, 1997. - P. 124-125. .

What these writers had in common was a worldview defined by a passionate denial of war and militarism. But in this denial, sincere and noble, there was a complete lack of understanding of the socio-historical nature, the nature of troubles and ugliness, in reality: they denounced harshly and irreconcilably, but without any hope for the possibility of something better, in a tone of bitter, joyless pessimism.

However, the differences between ideological and creative development these literary "peers" were very significant.

The heroes of books by writers of the “lost generation”, as a rule, are very young, one might say, from school, and belong to the intelligentsia. For them, Barbusse's path and its “clarity” seem unattainable. They are individualists and, like Hemingway’s heroes, rely only on themselves, on their own will, and if they are capable of decisive social action, then separately concluding a “contract with war” and deserting. Remarque's heroes find solace in love and friendship without giving up Calvados. This is their unique form of protection from a world that accepts war as a way to resolve political conflicts. The heroes of the literature of the “lost generation” do not have access to unity with the people, the state, 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 had in common with the literature of modernism.