What are the modernist literary groups of the early 20th century. Modernist trends of the late XIX - XX centuries. The purpose of this work is to study Russian poetry of the late XIX - early XX century and determine its main directions.

Modernism is a generalized name for a whole range of unrealistic constructive literary and artistic styles that developed at the beginning of the 20th century. This literary movement got its name from the French word, which in translation means the latest, modern. This name seems to emphasize the break with the artistic traditions of the 19th century.

After the war and the 1917 revolution, the world split into two camps. The time has come for social upheavals that humanity has not yet encountered: mass genocide, reprisals for the sake of asserting political ideas (USSR, Germany, Italy).

The end of the era of modernism is considered 1945.g. Partly because after Hiroshima and the Nuremberg trials, humanity finally got rid of illusions about itself; partly because after the Second World War, literature really becomes different.

Modernism recreated the world as a realm of chaos, absurdity, cruelty, lack of freedom of a person even in private life, not to mention his impotence in the face of history, which develops catastrophically.

During the First World War, modernist movements (cubism, suprematism, surrealism) appeared in large numbers in literature and art. Modernism, as a literary movement that swept Europe at the beginning of the century, had the following national varieties:

1. French and Czech surrealism,

2.Italian and Russian futurism,

3. English imagism and the "stream of consciousness" school,

4. German expressionism,

5. Swedish primitivism, etc.

As a rule, all modernist movements proclaimed "art for art's sake", rejecting ideology and realism.

During the period of stabilization, broad sections of the intelligentsia find satisfaction in the revival of the philosophical theories of subjective idealism. They are tired of reason and rough realism, they are impressed by the doctrine of the subconscious impulses of man, of a world that is not controlled by the mind. They yearn for complete individual freedom.

The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, based on his many years of experience, creates the theory of psychoanalysis, which had a significant impact on the concept of personality in the literature of the twentieth century. Freud turned the theory of psychoanalysis from a method of treating neuroses into a universal method of understanding the human personality at a deep level. He argues that the dark forces of instinct lie at the heart of human actions - sexual desires, horror of death, a thirst for destruction. Freud contrasted the rational man with the instinctive and unconscious man.

Modernism borrowed psychoanalysis from Freud.

Modernism helped to draw attention to the uniqueness of the inner world of a person, to unchain the imagination of the creator as a phenomenon of the real world surrounding a person. In English literature in the field of the modernist novel, the most characteristic figures are James Joyce, Aldous Huxley and representatives of the psychological school Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson.

The favorite character of modernist prose writers is the “little man”, most often the image of an average employee (typical is broker Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses or Gregor in Kafka’s Reincarnation), since the one who suffers is an unprotected person, a toy of higher powers. “To live in full awareness of the aimlessness of life is the terrible fate of man and at the same time the basis of its greatness,” writes A. Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus”. These words could become an epigraph to almost any work of modernists. Their heroes exist in a world where “there are no indications either on earth or in heaven” (Sartre), where a person creates personal moral norms by exercising an act of free choice. Modernist heroes seem to live outside of real time; Camus puts an equal sign, for example, between life and the plague. In general, in the image of modernist prose writers, evil, as usual, surrounds the heroes from all sides.

Most modernists proclaimed a fundamental “anti-psychologism”, since, in their opinion, traditional methods seem to make a person an object of study, but certain aspects of the psychology of heroes in many works are sometimes revealed or no deeper than in writers who approached the study of the secrets of the human soul from rational positions. Probably, the main reason for this is sympathy for the "man without properties", the authors often experience the loneliness of these heroes in front of the enemy light as their own. Special attention deserves the discovery of such a new method of presenting an internal monologue as a “stream of consciousness”, in which both the feeling of the hero, and what he sees, and thoughts with associations caused by images that arise, along with the very process of their occurrence, are mixed, as if in "unedited" form.

In terms of worldview, modernism was anti-bourgeois; at the same time, he was clearly alarmed by the inhumanity of revolutionary practical activity.

Literary movement, focused on the search for new forms.

Manifestations of modernism in literature are diverse. But all have common features. Such a common feature is pessimism in understanding the world and the role of man. The absurdity of life, the complete helplessness and abandonment of a person, his doom. Man is trying to overcome this eternal tragedy of his existence.

Psychological analysis, subject to the principle of the stream of consciousness, ceases to serve modernists its former goal - penetration into the depths of human thoughts and feelings. They take pictures quickly, which destroys the picture of psychological life.

Modernism in literature originates on the eve of the First World War and reaches its peak in the twenties simultaneously in all countries of Western Europe and in America. Modernism is an international phenomenon, consisting of different schools (Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.). This is a revolution in literature, the participants of which announced a break not only with the tradition of realistic plausibility, but also with the Western cultural and literary tradition in general. Any previous trend in literature defined itself through its relation to the classical tradition: one could directly proclaim antiquity as a model of artistic creativity, like the classicists, or prefer the Middle Ages to antiquity, like romantics, but all cultural epochs before modernism are called today more and more often "classical", because developed in line with the classical heritage of European thought. Modernism is the first cultural and literary epoch that did away with this heritage and provided new answers to "eternal" questions. As the English poet S. Spender wrote in 1930: "It seems to me that modernists are consciously striving to create a completely new literature. This is a consequence of their feeling that our era is in many respects unprecedented and stands outside any conventions of past art and literature" .

The generation of the first modernists keenly felt the exhaustion of the forms of realistic narrative, their aesthetic fatigue. For modernists, the concept of "realism" meant the absence of an effort to independently comprehend the world, the mechanistic nature of creativity, superficiality, the boredom of vague descriptions - an interest in a button on a character's coat, and not in his state of mind. Modernists above all put the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; the artistic worlds they create are uniquely dissimilar to each other, each one bears the stamp of a bright creative individuality.

They had to live in a period when the values ​​of traditional humanistic culture collapsed - "freedom" meant very different things in Western democracies and in totalitarian states; the bloody massacre of the First World War, in which weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time, showed the true price of human life for the modern world; the humanistic ban on pain, on physical and spiritual violence was replaced by the practice of mass executions and concentration camps. Modernism is the art of a dehumanized era (the term of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset); the attitude to humanistic values ​​in modernism is ambiguous, but the world of modernists appears in a hard, cold light. Using the metaphor of J. Conrad, one can say that the hero of the modernist work seemed to stop for the night in an uncomfortable hotel at the end of the world, with very suspicious owners, in a shabby room, lit by the pitiless light of a lamp without a lampshade.

Modernists conceive of human existence as a brief, fragile moment; the subject may or may not be aware of the tragedy, the frailty of our absurd world, and the artist's job is to show the horror, grandeur and beauty that are contained in spite of everything in the moments of earthly existence. Social problems, which played such an important role in the realism of the 19th century, are given indirectly in modernism, as an inseparable part of a holistic portrait of the individual. The main sphere of interest of modernists is the image of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in a person, the mechanisms of his perceptions, and the whimsical work of memory. The modernist hero is taken, as a rule, in the whole integrity of his experiences, his subjective being, although the very scale of his life can be small, insignificant. In modernism, the main line of development of the literature of the New Age continues to the constant decline in the social status of the hero; the modernist hero is a "everymenus," any and every person. Modernists have learned to describe such spiritual states of a person that literature had not noticed before, and they did it with such persuasiveness that it seemed to bourgeois critics an insult to morality and a profanation of the art of the word. Not only the content - the big role of intimate and sexual issues, the relativity of moral assessments, the emphasized apoliticality - but first of all, the unusual forms of modernist narrative caused a particularly sharp rejection. Today, when most of the masterpieces of modernist literature have entered school and university curricula, it is difficult for us to feel the rebellious, anti-bourgeois character of early modernism, the sharpness of the accusations and challenges thrown by it.

Three major writers of modernism- Irishman James Joyce (1882-1943), Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Each of them in his own direction reformed the art of the word of the twentieth century, each is considered the great pioneer of modernism. Let's take Ulysses as an example.

The twentieth century, like no other, passed under the sign of the competition of many trends in art. These directions are completely different, they compete with each other, replace each other, take into account each other's achievements. The only thing that unites them is the opposition to classical realistic art, attempts to find their own ways of reflecting reality. These directions are united by the conditional term "modernism". The term "modernism" itself (from "modern" - modern) arose in the romantic aesthetics of A. Schlegel, but then it did not take root. But it came into use a hundred years later, at the end of the 19th century, and began to designate at first strange, unusual aesthetic systems. Today “modernism” is a term with an extremely broad meaning, in fact, standing in two oppositions: on the one hand, it is “everything that is not realism”, on the other (in recent years) it is something that is not “postmodernism”. Thus, the concept of modernism reveals itself negatively - by the method of "contradiction". Naturally, with this approach, there is no question of any structural clarity.

There are a lot of modernist trends, we will focus only on the most significant:

Impressionism (from the French "impression" - impression) - a trend in art of the last third of the 19th - early 20th centuries, which originated in France and then spread throughout the world. Representatives of impressionism sought to capturethe real world in its mobility and variability, convey their fleeting impressions. The Impressionists themselves called themselves “new realists”, the term appeared later, after 1874, when the now famous work of C. Monet “Sunrise. Impression". At first, the term "impressionism" had a negative connotation, expressing bewilderment and even neglect of critics, but the artists themselves "in defiance of critics" accepted it, and over time, the negative connotations disappeared.

In painting, impressionism had a huge impact on the entire subsequent development of art.

In literature, the role of impressionism was more modest, as it did not develop as an independent movement. However, the aesthetics of impressionism influenced the work of many authors, including those in Russia. Many poems by K. Balmont, I. Annensky and others are marked by trust in “transiency”. In addition, impressionism has affected the coloring of many writers, for example, its features are noticeable in the palette of B. Zaitsev.

However, as a holistic direction, impressionism did not manifest itself in literature, becoming a characteristic background of symbolism and neorealism.

Symbolism - one of the most powerful areas of modernism, rather diffuse in its attitudes and searches. Symbolism began to take shape in France in the 70s of the XIX century and quickly spread throughout Europe.

By the 90s, symbolism had become a pan-European trend, with the exception of Italy, where, for reasons that are not entirely clear, it did not take root.

In Russia, symbolism began to manifest itself in the late 80s, and as a conscious trend, it took shape by the mid-90s.

By the time of formation and by the peculiarities of the worldview in Russian symbolism, it is customary to distinguish two main stages. The poets who made their debut in the 1890s are called “senior symbolists” (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub, and others).

In the 1900s, a number of new names appeared that markedly changed the face of symbolism: A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov and others. The accepted designation of the “second wave” of symbolism is “young symbolism”. It is important to bear in mind that the “senior” and “junior” symbolists were separated not so much by age (for example, Vyach. Ivanov tends to be “older” by age), but by the difference in worldviews and the direction of creativity.

The work of the older symbolists more fits into the canon of neo-romanticism. Characteristic motives are loneliness, the chosenness of the poet, the imperfection of the world. In the verses of K. Balmont, the influence of impressionist technique is noticeable, early Bryusov has many technical experiments, verbal exoticism.

The Young Symbolists created a more holistic and original concept, which was based on the fusion of life and art, on the idea of ​​improving the world according to aesthetic laws. The mystery of being cannot be expressed by an ordinary word, it is only guessed in the system of symbols intuitively found by the poet. The concept of mystery, the non-manifestation of meanings became the basis of symbolist aesthetics. Poetry, according to Vyach. Ivanov, there is a "secret writing of the inexpressible". The socio-aesthetic illusion of young symbolism was that through the "prophetic word" it is possible to change the world. Therefore, they saw themselves not only as poets, but also as demiurges, that is, the creators of the world. The unfulfilled utopia led in the early 1910s to a total crisis of symbolism, to its collapse as an integral system, although the “echoes” of symbolist aesthetics are heard for a long time.

Regardless of the realization of social utopia, symbolism has greatly enriched Russian and world poetry. The names of A. Blok, I. Annensky, Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely and other prominent symbolist poets - the pride of Russian literature.

Acmeism(from the Greek "akme" - "highest degree, peak, flowering, flowering time") - a literary movement that arose in the early tenth years of the 20th century in Russia. Historically, acmeism was a reaction to the crisis of symbolism. Unlike the "secret" word of the Symbolists, the Acmeists proclaimed the value of the material, the plastic objectivity of images, the accuracy and sophistication of the word.

The formation of acmeism is closely connected with the activities of the organization "Workshop of Poets", the central figures of which were N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. O. Mandelstam, the early A. Akhmatova, V. Narbut and others also joined acmeism. Later, however, Akhmatova questioned the aesthetic unity of acmeism and even the legitimacy of the term itself. But one can hardly agree with her on this: the aesthetic unity of the acmeist poets, at least in the early years, is beyond doubt. And the point is not only in the program articles of N. Gumilyov and O. Mandelstam, where the aesthetic credo of the new trend is formulated, but above all in the practice itself. Acmeism in a strange way combined a romantic craving for the exotic, for wanderings with the sophistication of the word, which made it related to the baroque culture.

Favorite images of acmeism - exotic beauty (for example, at any period of his work, Gumilyov has poems about exotic animals: giraffe, jaguar, rhinoceros, kangaroo, etc.), images of culture(with Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam), the love theme is solved very plastically. Often a substantive detail becomes a psychological sign(for example, a glove at Gumilyov or Akhmatova).

At first the world appears to the acmeists as refined, but "toy", emphatically unreal. For example, the famous early poem by O. Mandelstam sounds like this:

Burning with gold leaf

There are Christmas trees in the woods;

Toy wolves in the bushes

They look with terrible eyes.

Oh, my sadness,

Oh my quiet freedom

And the inanimate sky

Always laughing crystal!

Later, the paths of the Acmeists diverged, little was left of the former unity, although the loyalty to the ideals of high culture, the cult of poetic mastery, was preserved by most poets to the end. Many major word artists came out of acmeism. Russian literature has the right to be proud of the names of Gumilyov, Mandelstam and Akhmatova.

Futurism(from Latin "futurus" "- future). If symbolism, as mentioned above, did not take root in Italy, then futurism, on the contrary, is of Italian origin. The "father" of futurism is considered to be the Italian poet and art theorist F. Marinetti, who proposed a shocking and harsh theory of the new art. In fact, Marinetti was talking about the mechanization of art, about depriving him of spirituality. Art should become akin to a "play on a mechanical piano", all verbal delights are superfluous, spirituality is an obsolete myth.

Marinetti's ideas exposed the crisis of classical art and were picked up by "rebellious" aesthetic groups in different countries.

In Russia, the first futurists were the artists brothers Burliuks. David Burliuk founded the colony of futurists "Gilea" in his estate. He managed to rally around himself different, unlike any other poets and artists: Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Elena Guro and others.

The first manifestos of the Russian futurists were frankly shocking in nature (even the name of the manifesto “Slapping the Public Taste” speaks for itself), but even so, the Russian futurists did not accept Marinetti’s mechanism from the very beginning, setting themselves other tasks. Marinetti's arrival in Russia caused disappointment among Russian poets and further emphasized the differences.

The Futurists set out to create a new poetics, a new system of aesthetic values. The virtuoso play with the word, the aestheticization of everyday objects, the speech of the street - all this excited, shocked, caused a resonance. The catchy, visible nature of the image annoyed some, delighted others:

Every word,

even a joke

which he vomits with a burning mouth,

thrown out like a naked prostitute

from a burning brothel.

(V. Mayakovsky, "A Cloud in Pants")

Today it can be recognized that much of the work of the Futurists did not stand the test of time, is only of historical interest, but in general, the influence of the experiments of the Futurists on the entire subsequent development of art (and not only verbal, but also pictorial, musical) turned out to be colossal.

Futurism had several currents within itself, either converging or conflicting: cubo-futurism, ego-futurism (Igor Severyanin), the Centrifuga group (N. Aseev, B. Pasternak).

Very different from each other, these groups converged in a new understanding of the essence of poetry, in a craving for verbal experiments. Russian futurism gave the world several poets of enormous scale: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Velimir Khlebnikov.

Existentialism (from Latin "exsistentia" - existence). Existentialism cannot be called a literary trend in the full sense of the word, it is rather a philosophical movement, a concept of man, which has manifested itself in many works of literature. The origins of this trend can be found in the 19th century in the mystical philosophy of S. Kierkegaard, but existentialism received its real development already in the 20th century. Of the most significant existentialist philosophers, one can name G. Marcel, K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre and others. Existentialism is a very diffuse system, with many variations and varieties. However, the common features that allow us to talk about some unity are the following:

1. Recognition of the personal meaning of being . In other words, the world and man in their primary essence are personal principles. The error of the traditional view, according to existentialists, lies in the fact that human life is considered as if "from the outside", objectively, and the uniqueness of human life lies precisely in the fact that it there is and that she my. That is why G. Marcel proposed to consider the relationship of man and the world not according to the scheme "He is the World", but according to the scheme "I - You". My relationship to another person is just a special case of this all-encompassing scheme.

M. Heidegger said the same thing a little differently. In his opinion, it is necessary to change the basic question about a person. We're trying to answer, what there is a person", but it is necessary to ask " who there is a person." This radically changes the entire coordinate system, since in the familiar world we will not see the grounds for a unique “self” for each person.

2. Recognition of the so-called "border situation" when this "self" becomes directly accessible. In ordinary life, this “I” is not directly accessible, but in the face of death, against the background of non-existence, it manifests itself. The concept of the boundary situation had a huge impact on the literature of the 20th century - both among writers directly associated with the theory of existentialism (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre), and authors who are generally far from this theory, for example, on the idea of ​​a boundary situation almost all the plots of Vasil Bykov's military stories are built.

3. Recognition of a person as a project . In other words, the original "I" given to us forces us to make the only possible choice every time. And if a person's choice turns out to be unworthy, the person begins to crumble, no matter what external reasons he may justify.

Existentialism, we repeat, did not take shape as a literary trend, but it had a huge impact on modern world culture. In this sense, it can be considered an aesthetic and philosophical trend of the 20th century.

Surrealism(French "surrealisme", lit. - "superrealism") - a powerful trend in painting and literature of the 20th century, however, which left the greatest mark in painting, primarily due to the authority of the famous artist Salvador Dali. Dali's infamous phrase about his disagreements with other leaders of the “surrealist is me” trend, with all its outrageousness, clearly sets the accents. Without the figure of Salvador Dali, surrealism probably would not have had such an impact on the culture of the 20th century.

At the same time, the founder of this trend is not Dali at all, and not even an artist, but just the writer Andre Breton. Surrealism took shape in the 1920s as a left-wing movement, but markedly different from futurism. Surrealism reflected the social, philosophical, psychological and aesthetic paradoxes of European consciousness. Europe is tired of social tensions, of traditional forms of art, of hypocrisy in ethics. This "protest" wave gave rise to surrealism.

The authors of the first declarations and works of surrealism (Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, etc.) set the goal of "liberating" creativity from all conventions. Great importance was attached to unconscious impulses, random images, which, however, were then subjected to careful artistic processing.

Freudianism, which actualized the erotic instincts of man, had a serious influence on the aesthetics of surrealism.

In the late 20s and 30s, surrealism played a very prominent role in European culture, but the literary component of this trend gradually weakened. Major writers and poets departed from surrealism, in particular, Eluard and Aragon. André Breton's attempts to revive the movement after the war were unsuccessful, while Surrealism gave rise to a much more powerful tradition in painting.

Postmodernism - a powerful literary trend of our time, very motley, contradictory and fundamentally open to any innovations. The philosophy of postmodernism was formed mainly in the school of French aesthetic thought (J. Derrida, R. Barthes, J. Kristeva, and others), but today it has spread far beyond France.

At the same time, many philosophical origins and first works refer to the American tradition, and the term “postmodernism” itself was first used in relation to literature by the American literary critic of Arab origin, Ihab Hasan (1971).

The most important feature of postmodernism is the fundamental rejection of any centricity and any value hierarchy. All texts are fundamentally equal in rights and able to come into contact with each other. There is no art high and low, modern and outdated. From the point of view of culture, they all exist in a certain "now", and since the value chain is fundamentally destroyed, no text has any advantages over another.

Almost any text of any era comes into play in the works of postmodernists. The boundary of one's own and another's word is also destroyed, so texts of famous authors may be interspersed in a new work. This principle has been called centonality principle» (centon - a game genre when a poem is made up of different lines of other authors).

Postmodernism is radically different from all other aesthetic systems. In various schemes (for example, in the well-known schemes of Ihab Hassan, V. Brainin-Passek, etc.), dozens of distinctive signs of postmodernism are noted. This is a setting for the game, conformism, recognition of the equality of cultures, a setting for secondary (i.e., postmodernism does not aim to say something new about the world), orientation for commercial success, recognition of the infinity of the aesthetic (i.e., everything can be art) etc.

The attitude towards postmodernism both among writers and literary critics is ambiguous: from complete acceptance to categorical denial.

In the last decade, more and more often they talk about the crisis of postmodernism, remind about the responsibility and spirituality of culture.

For example, P. Bourdieu considers postmodernism a variant of “radical chic”, spectacular and comfortable at the same time, and calls not to destroy science (and, in the context, art, too) “in the fireworks of nihilism” .

Sharp attacks against postmodern nihilism are also undertaken by many American theorists. In particular, the book Against Deconstruction by J. M. Ellis, which contains a critical analysis of postmodernist attitudes, caused a resonance.

"Clarissa, or The Story of a Young Lady, Containing the Most Important Questions of Private Life and Showing, in Particular, the Disasters Which May Be the Result of the Misconduct of Both Parents and Children in Relation to Marriage." Now, however, this scheme is much more complicated. It is customary to talk about pre-symbolism, early symbolism, mystical symbolism, post-symbolism, etc. However, this does not cancel the naturally formed division into older and younger ones.

Modernism in literature originates on the eve of the First World War and reaches its peak in the twenties simultaneously in all countries of Western Europe and in America. Modernism is an international phenomenon, consisting of different schools (Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.). This is a revolution in literature, the participants of which announced a break not only with the tradition of realistic plausibility, but also with the Western cultural and literary tradition in general. Any previous trend in literature defined itself through its relation to the classical tradition: one could directly proclaim antiquity as a model of artistic creativity, like the classicists, or prefer the Middle Ages to antiquity, like romantics, but all cultural epochs before modernism are called today more and more often "classical", because developed in line with the classical heritage of European thought. Modernism is the first cultural and literary epoch that did away with this heritage and provided new answers to "eternal" questions. As the English poet S. Spender wrote in 1930: "It seems to me that modernists are consciously striving to create a completely new literature. This is a consequence of their feeling that our era is in many respects unprecedented and stands outside any conventions of past art and literature" .

The generation of the first modernists keenly felt the exhaustion of the forms of realistic narrative, their aesthetic fatigue. For modernists, the concept of "realism" meant the absence of an effort to independently comprehend the world, the mechanistic nature of creativity, superficiality, the boredom of vague descriptions - an interest in a button on a character's coat, and not in his state of mind. Modernists above all put the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; the artistic worlds they create are uniquely dissimilar to each other, each one bears the stamp of a bright creative individuality.

They had to live in a period when the values ​​of traditional humanistic culture collapsed - "freedom" meant very different things in Western democracies and in totalitarian states; the bloody massacre of the First World War, in which weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time, showed the true price of human life for the modern world; the humanistic ban on pain, on physical and spiritual violence was replaced by the practice of mass executions and concentration camps. Modernism is the art of a dehumanized era (the term of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset); the attitude to humanistic values ​​in modernism is ambiguous, but the world of modernists appears in a hard, cold light. Using the metaphor of J. Conrad, one can say that the hero of the modernist work seemed to stop for the night in an uncomfortable hotel at the end of the world, with very suspicious owners, in a shabby room, lit by the pitiless light of a lamp without a lampshade.

Modernists conceive of human existence as a brief, fragile moment; the subject may or may not be aware of the tragedy, the frailty of our absurd world, and the artist's job is to show the horror, grandeur and beauty that are contained in spite of everything in the moments of earthly existence. Social problems, which played such an important role in the realism of the 19th century, are given indirectly in modernism, as an inseparable part of a holistic portrait of the individual. The main sphere of interest of modernists is the image of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in a person, the mechanisms of his perceptions, and the whimsical work of memory. The modernist hero is taken, as a rule, in the whole integrity of his experiences, his subjective being, although the very scale of his life can be small, insignificant. In modernism, the main line of development of the literature of the New Age continues to the constant decline in the social status of the hero; the modernist hero is a "everymenus," any and every person. Modernists have learned to describe such spiritual states of a person that literature had not noticed before, and they did it with such persuasiveness that it seemed to bourgeois critics an insult to morality and a profanation of the art of the word. Not only the content - the big role of intimate and sexual issues, the relativity of moral assessments, the emphasized apoliticality - but first of all, the unusual forms of modernist narrative caused a particularly sharp rejection. Today, when most of the masterpieces of modernist literature have entered school and university curricula, it is difficult for us to feel the rebellious, anti-bourgeois character of early modernism, the sharpness of the accusations and challenges thrown by it.

Three major writers of modernism- Irishman James Joyce (1882-1943), Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Each of them in his own direction reformed the art of the word of the twentieth century, each is considered the great pioneer of modernism. Let's take Ulysses as an example.