Lawrence novels. David Herbert Lawrence. Biography. The general direction of his ideological and creative searches

Life story
David Herbert Lawrence wrote the most explicit novels of his time, which were banned for their vivid and detailed description of the sexual side of human life. Lawrence was forced to print and publish his novel Women in Love (1920) privately, and his most famous novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), was published unabridged for the first time only in 1960, when an equally famous court decision was made that allowed from now on, include in the novel previously forbidden passages describing sexual acts.
Lawrence was the beloved son of a proud and domineering mother who treated her husband, a rude and semi-literate miner, with undisguised contempt. Weak and sickly, "Bert" grew up surrounded by adoring women suffering from the inability to satisfy their "animal" feelings in the musty atmosphere of Victorian England. At the age of 16, he suffered a severe psychological trauma. It was followed by an attack of pneumonia after he was surrounded on the street by a noisy group of violent girls and young women from a local factory who tried to undress him.
After his mother's death in 1910, Lawrence confessed: "I loved my mother like a mistress." By day he worked as a school teacher, and by night he created his first masterpiece, Sons and Lovers (1913), a classic literary revelation of the Oedipus complex. In an attempt to banish the pervasive influence of his mother, which remained even after her death, Lawrence created his own philosophical theory about sex as the driving force of life. Always thin, not distinguished by particular activity and energy, with tousled hair and a fiery red beard, Lawrence managed to attract by the very strength of his outstanding personality a number of wealthy titled patronesses. He called these women "two-legged income" because they, having fallen under the influence of Lawrence's sexual mysticism, helped him lead his nomadic lifestyle. He repaid their loyalty by ridiculing such women in his novels, calling them "predators of culture."
Lawrence was a very sensitive and easily hurt person. He was irritated by the pace of life in the big city and traveled through the countryside of England and later southern Europe. He also visited Ceylon, Australia, the American Southwest and Mexico. He described his impressions of these travels in his literary works. Since 1928, Lawrence constantly moved from place to place, never staying anywhere for long, until he died of tuberculosis at the age of 44.
Lawrence's early life was spent in a constant struggle (masterfully described later in "Sons and Lovers") for his soul between his first love, Jessie Chambers, and his mother, each of whom tried to achieve complete control over his feelings. He was first initiated into the "mysteries of sex" at the age of 23 by Alice Dax, the wife of a local druggist. With Jesse Chambers, he also had an intimate relationship. They, however, could not get rid of some kind of internal stiffness and timidity in their sexual relations. Lawrence soon became close to a new (more sexually attractive partner) Louis Barrows. He met her at the age of 15, but her sexuality, for his taste, turned out to be too "church", as he put it. All three of these women had, of course, good reason to believe that Lawrence simply used them for some of his purposes, and then left them. Lawrence's influence on them, however, turned out to be so powerful that Jessie Chambers could not come to terms with his loss until the end of her days, Alice Dax forever refused sex in memory of him, and Louis Barrows married only after his death.
In 1912, Lawrence fell in love with Frieda Weekly, from the aristocratic German von Richthofen family. Frida was at this time married to one of Lawrence's teachers and had three children. She later said: "Lawrence awakened in me some new tenderness. I had no choice but to completely submit to him." Frida left her family and left with Lawrence, who was 6 years her junior. She later married him. Frida was a typical Aryan beauty. Lawrence called her "giantess". She was extremely sexy and never submitted to anyone or anything. Her relationship with Laurens was rife with quarrels and reconciliations. During the quarrels, the couple broke a lot of dishes. Lawrence, being downright the messiah of sexual liberation, was at the same time firmly convinced that a man should play a dominant role in relations with women. He once said to the writer Katherine Mansfield: “I really believe that a woman should give way to a man ... A man should always be the first in everything. A woman should follow him, and it’s better if she does it without doubts, disputes, and without asking questions. He even advised to beat the recalcitrant wives of Frida, however, she was physically stronger than her husband and refused to come to terms with such an attitude towards herself. The cause of frequent discord in the family was the sexual incompatibility of the spouses. Lawrence himself, for example, admitted that they almost never had orgasms at the same time. At the same time, the spouses, in all likelihood, met each other's deepest emotional needs. Frieda awakened memories of her mother in Lawrence. Even her long skirts and aprons looked like the clothes his mother had once worn. Frida flirted with Italian peasants and Prussian officers, while Lawrence, a working class-turned-sex guru, hung out with his wealthy patrons. These included, for example, the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrel, who, as was originally supposed, was to become the heroine of one of Lawrence's works, the mistress of the utopian colony Rananim, based on the principles of "full fulfillment of any desires of the flesh", and instead became the prototype of Hermione in "Women in love"; Cynthia Esquith, for whom Lawrence was able to express all his unsatisfied love and sexual passion only in literary works and in paintings, and Mabel Dodge Lewhan, an American writer and heiress of a huge fortune, who gave Lawrence a ranch in New Mexico, but never could " seduce his spirit." Lawrence was not very attracted to Mrs. Luhan as a man, but she still tried to establish regular sexual relations with him, because she was convinced that "the surest way to the soul is through the flesh."
Sometimes Lawrence behaved somewhat even hypocritically. He was insulted, for example, by obscene stories and anecdotes. He also believed that decent ladies should only have sex at night and in total darkness. Later, he apparently also suffered from impotence, which was aggravated by bursts of creative energy that completely exhausted him and increasing tuberculosis. Dorothy Brett, one of his most devoted fans, described how Lawrence ended up in her bed one day but was unable to have sexual intercourse.
Lawrence himself wrote: "If we cannot perform any sexual acts that will bring us complete satisfaction, let us at least think and reason sexually. That is the whole point of this work ("Lady Chatterley's Lover"). I want men and women could think clearly and fully about sex."
Lawrence always assured everyone that he was "shocked" by homosexuality, so widespread among the British intelligentsia, but he himself, at the same time, admitted: "I still think that I came closest to perfect love when I loved a young miner. I was then 16 years old. " From time to time, when Lawrence was especially unhappy with women, he suddenly began to exalt a certain mystical community of men, "brotherhood by blood", as he called it. He also really liked the structure of the male body, and he paid tribute to him in the scene of the struggle of naked men in "Women in Love". Lawrence in general, perhaps, inherited more from his mother than from his father: women may have idolized him, but men considered him too feminine and laughed at some of his domestic habits. Norman Douglas once remarked, not without malicious irony, that the sexual messiah felt extremely happy when he peeled potatoes or washed floors. And Richard Aldington, friend and biographer of Lawrence, put it more specifically: "I would say that D.H. Lawrence was 85% hetero and 15% homo."

David Herbert Lawrence

The work of David Herbert Lawrence was also associated with modernist art in the postwar years. This connection manifested itself primarily in his Freudian conception of the human person.

Unlike Joyce and Woolf with their experimentation in the field of the novel, Lawrence was not fond of formalistic quests. He did not abandon the traditional form of realistic storytelling; outwardly he did not break with her. Yet his break with the principles of critical realism became evident soon after his entry into literature. The Freudian scheme of human relationships created by Lawrence, which is obsessively repeated in each of his novels and presented as the only existing reality, obscures the truth of life and perverts the true meaning of relationships between people.

And yet the work of Lawrence is in its own way a bright and in many respects a peculiar page in the history of the English novel of modern times. He was one of the first to speak very boldly and directly about the issues of marriage and the relationship of the sexes, while rejecting the methods of silence so traditional for the bourgeois morality of Victorian times; he invaded the sphere of intimate life of people, breaking the ice of prejudices and hypocrisy, and sought to emancipate the possibilities of the human personality. Lawrence attracted contemporaries with his passionate protest against the inhumanity of bourgeois society, with his sincere and constant desire to help his contemporaries free themselves from the shackles of hypocrisy.

Cursing the soullessness of capitalist civilization, which enslaved and depersonalized man, Lawrence sought to oppose freedom of feelings and passions to it, for only in the instinctive immediacy of their manifestation lies, in his deep conviction, the true beauty of human existence. He dreamed of the revival of the "natural man" and of the beautiful relationships between people in their natural simplicity. In his article “Men Must Work and Women Also,” Lawrence wrote about the consequences to which the “benefits of a mechanical civilization” of the 20th century inevitably lead people: they give rise to deep dissatisfaction with life. The pursuit of false ideals - money, easy work, prosperity in the business world - and the complete rejection of physical labor so necessary for the human body - all this leaves an indelible mark on the fate of modern men and women, fetters their opportunities and strengthens the desire for such entertainment as cinema, dancing, playing golf and the like. Moving away from nature, imbued with the corrupting and corrupting spirit of the world of interlocutors with their thirst for enrichment and hypocritical morality, contrary to the natural needs of human nature, people lose their inherent strength of passions and immediacy of feelings. Man ceases to be a strong, proud and beautiful being, as he was created, and turns into an appendage of the “mechanical civilization” triumphant in the 20th century.

All of Lawrence's work is an ardent and passionate protest against such a transformation. He dreams of saving man and offers a utopian program for the revival of the "natural beginnings" of the human personality in defiance of the inhumane "mechanical civilization". It was no coincidence that he was called the prophet and creator of the "new religion". However, in his quest, Lawrence followed a deliberately false path. His starting position was deeply flawed, and as a result of his search, Lawrence found himself in the same hopeless and gloomy impasse as other contemporary modernist writers.

My great religion, - he wrote about himself, consists in the belief in blood and flesh, in the fact that they are wiser than the intellect. We may be wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels, says, and believes is always true. Mind is only a bridle. What do I care about knowledge? All I want is to answer the call of my blood - directly, without the idle intervention of reason, morals or anything. I imagine the body of a person to be like a flame, like a candle, eternally straight and burning, and the mind is just a reflection falling on what is around. These words of Lawrence, dating back to the time of his work on the novel "Sons and Lovers", became the program of his subsequent work.

Lawrence does not believe in the possibilities of the mind, does not trust the intellect and exaggerates the role of the physiological factor in people's lives. "Call of flesh and blood", by the dictates of the sexual instinct, he tries to explain the complexity of the relationship between people and the peculiarity of the behavior of each person in his personal and social life. “Lawrence could never forget, as most of us tend to forget, the hidden presence of something else that lies beyond the consciousness of man,” Aldous Huxley wrote about him. Moreover, Lawrence not only did not forget about the constant presence of the "subconscious principle", but he deified it in his own way, giving the "dark forces of the subconscious" an unreasonably large role in a person's life. In the very nature of man, Lawrence saw a bizarre combination of primitive, but at the same time beautiful in their natural simplicity, instinctive impulses with intractable mystically inexplicable beginnings associated with the dark world of the subconscious. He called for the revival of the “natural man”, for the rejection of those stratifications that bourgeois civilization had brought into his life, but he stopped before the incomprehensible mystery of the complex and mysterious processes that took place in the sphere of subconscious life inaccessible to the mind. An aura of mystical mystery surrounds Lawrence and that force of attraction, which forms the basis of the relationship between a man and a woman. For him, the concept of love, along with a frankly simplified interpretation of physiological problems, also includes an irrational moment. Richard Aldington is profoundly right when he noted that for Lawrence, questions of gender are connected with the idea of ​​a mystical mystery and an “unknown deity”, which, while inspiring a person, at the same time encourages him to become like a god himself. And the closer a person is to nature, to the natural principles of life, the more possible such an assimilation becomes. Lawrence considers love to be the main sphere of manifestation of the possibilities hidden in a person, and not only the main one, but the only one. Like other modernists, Lawrence isolates his heroes from life, and frees himself from the need to analyze the social conditions of their existence. Aldington's monograph on Lawrence states that in his treatment of the theme of love, "Lawrence differs both from the scientific point of view of Havelock Ellis's The Psychology of Sex, and from the social approach of H. D. Wells, in his Anna Veronica." And this is true, although a cursory acquaintance with the works of Lawrence may give the impression that in reproducing the environment in which the life of his heroes takes place, Lawrence does not deviate from the tradition of a realistic novel. However, this impression is one-sided and does not fully reflect the originality of the writer's work. A characteristic feature of the creative manner of David Herbert Lawrence lies in the fact that in his novels there are usually two beginnings: one of them is associated with the desire to truthfully reproduce the everyday side of the life of the characters, the other with the desire to convey the mystical impulses characteristic of them, living in the depths of their subconscious attraction , passions, intractable to the analysis of the mind of aspiration.

“Art performs two great functions,” Lawrence wrote in one of his articles on American literature. - First, it reproduces the emotional life. And then, if our feelings have the courage to do so, it becomes a source of ideas about the truth of everyday life.

Lawrence recreates a realistically truthful picture of the life of the inhabitants of a mining village on a grand scale (“Sons and Lovers”); there are beautiful pages in his novels, not inferior to the best examples of classical literature of critical realism (description of the school of St. Philip, where Ursula Branguin begins her working life in the novel "Rainbow", or pictures of nature full of charm in "The White Peacock"); with the skill of a great artist, he reproduces the stagnant atmosphere of the life of bourgeois families ("The Lost Girl"), without abandoning the smallest details and details of a domestic nature. However, this stream of Lawrence's creativity coexists, only in rare cases reaching an organic unity, with his predilection for far-fetched symbols, stretched and very vague reasoning of a philosophical nature. The concreteness of the vision and the reproduction of the real world are combined in Lawrence's novels with generalizations that claim a certain philosophical depth, which they, due to their inherent ambiguity, or rather, the narrowness of the writer's initial positions, do not reach. Graham Hof ​​notices this duality of Lawrence very correctly: “His work is characterized by a constant movement from naturalism to symbol, from reality to myth; and if the reader accepts his work, he must be ready to accept both.” The combination of these two principles is the originality of Lawrence's work. It developed gradually, becoming more and more definite from novel to novel. In Lawrence's early and best works before the First World War, his connections with critical realism are quite palpable; but, beginning with The Rainbow (1915), they break. There were already prerequisites for this in the early works of Lawrence. They were most clearly manifested in his interpretation of the human personality and the stimuli that prompt it to act. In 1906 Lawrence began work on his first novel; in 1911 the "White Peacock" was completed. This is a lyrical story about the years of the writer's youth, about the awakening of his first love and his first steps in the literary field. Lawrence does not deviate from the realistic manner, and if we talk about his immediate predecessors in the field of the novel, then in The White Peacock he follows first of all the tradition of Thomas Hardy, a writer whom he highly appreciated and whose work he devoted a thorough study. Hardy's "White Peacock" is closely related to the Wessex Novels by Hardy's true depiction of life in rural England and the ruin of farms and, most importantly, the ability to feel the deep dramatic conflicts brewing behind the outwardly serene idyll of rural existence. The light tone of the initial chapters of the novel, which is quite consistent with the serene course of life of its young heroes in their communion with nature, is replaced by harsh pictures of social contradictions and contrasts (portraits of exhausted teenagers descending into the mine for the night shift, homeless people sleeping under the bridge). The first hobbies of the heroes, their hopes for happiness, confidence in a bright future are replaced by bleak everyday life, disappointments and dissatisfaction.

But Lawrence is close to Hardy not only in this. There is something in common between the characters of the heroes of these writers. In his work on Hardy, Lawrence wrote that the tragedy of his (Hardy's) heroes lies in the fact that, carried away by the flow of passions that overwhelm them, they “break out” from an established life and go beyond the patriarchal life established for decades. They act impulsively, guided not by the dictates of the mind, but by blinding impulses of passion. These same traits are characteristic of Lawrence's heroes, especially in his subsequent novels. In the "White Peacock" they are only outlined. But even here a fundamental difference between him and Thomas Hardy is revealed. The tragedy of the position of Hardy's heroes stems from the irreconcilability of the contradictions that arise between their feelings and the law that suppresses the rights of the individual. Lawrence, as a rule, avoids the social aspect of the topic of interest to him, and for his heroes the main conflict lies not in the contradiction between “love and law”, as he himself defines it in relation to the heroes of Hardy’s novels, but in the peculiarities of human nature itself. Lawrence believes that if a writer attaches importance to social categories, then he cannot become the creator of a "genuine novel" and "truly living" human characters. This point of view gives rise to his sharply critical attitude towards the work of the greatest English realist writers - Wells and Galsworthy. Of the characters in The Forsyte Saga, Lawrence, for example, remarks: “None of them is truly a living human being. They are social beings." And in his article "The World of William Clissold" by H. D. Wells, he argues that this work cannot be called a novel, since it lacks the depiction of passions and emotions.

The exaggeration of the role of the physiological principle makes itself felt already in Lawrence's next novel, Sons and Lovers (1912), where the question of the possibility of achieving harmonious relationships between a man and a woman is brought to the fore. And although here the disclosure of the problem of interest to Lawrence does not reach the degree of nakedness that is characteristic of his later novels, nevertheless, the writer's Freudian approach to the question of the relationship of the sexes in Sons and Lovers is quite obvious. It manifested itself in the story of Paul Morel and his mother, in that complex set of experiences and feelings that determine Paul's attitude towards his parents - an innate dislike for his father and a painfully passionate attachment to his mother. Over the years, it grows, turning from childish tenderness into a strong and stable feeling, which turns out to be an insurmountable obstacle to the normal relations of Paul Morel with other women. The “oedipal complex” experienced by Field becomes fatal for him. He prevents him from marrying Miriam, who loves him, he becomes an obstacle to continuing his connection with Clara Dawson. The only woman who completely enslaved Paul is his mother, Gertrude Morel.

Lawrence reproduces the complex range of feelings that overwhelm this woman: her tender love for little Paul, her desire to protect him at all costs from the rudeness of her father and from hard work in the mine, her joys associated with Paul's success in teaching and jealousy engulfing her , which she is unable to suppress when she learns of Miriam's love for Paul. Gertrude is devoted to her son, for his sake she is ready for anything. She is proud of his success in the service, she dreams of seeing him as a famous artist, but her feelings are jealous, and she demands from her son the same strong attachment that she herself feels for him. However, Paul himself constantly feels the inextricable bond that exists between him and his mother. No other women - be it tender and faithful in her feelings Miriam or passionate and independent Clara - do not exist for him, cannot exist, his attachment to his mother turns out to be the strongest. And when Mrs. Morel dies, Paul realizes the depth of his loneliness and his doom. - “Everything that Paul was interested in before the death of his mother, died for him. He could not paint. The picture he finished on the day of Mrs. Morel's death was his last ... The world became somehow unreal for him. He did not understand why people walk the streets, why they build new houses ... Nothing held his attention. Often he would forget himself for whole hours and subsequently could not remember what he was doing during this time.

It is very characteristic that the story of Paul Morel, told in the novel, ends with the death of his mother. Further, in essence, there is nothing to talk about. Lawrence is mainly interested in only one aspect of the topic he has chosen - the relationship between son and mother - two people whose consciousness is weighed down by a complex complex of painful layers. And those truthful and for the most part skillfully executed sketches of the life and life of the inhabitants of the mining village, as well as the biographical facts contained in the novel, are secondary phenomena. It is not the living conditions of the Morel family that Lawrence explains the peculiarity of the behavior and peculiarities of the worldview of his hero. He substantiates them by hereditary factors, puts them in direct dependence on the temperament of his parents, and with the whole development of the action emphasizes the idea of ​​​​the irresistible power of instincts inherent in a person. The broad picture of the bleak existence of the inhabitants of the mining village that opens the novel remains unfinished. Life-true details and details of a domestic nature associated with the description of the Morel mining family, for the most part, hang in the air. And although they give a correct idea of ​​the environment of Paul Morel and the environment in which Lawrence's childhood and youth passed, it is still quite obvious that the fate of the hero of the novel is not determined by them. In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence breaks with one of the basic tenets of the realistic novel—essentially, he refuses to justify his character's character by the conditions of his life. The fate of Paul Morel is predetermined by the "oedipal complex" gravitating over him. And the fact that he grew up in a working-class settlement and was educated on the miserable pennies his mother accumulated with selfless labor is of little importance. Whoever Lawrence writes about - about a miner's son or a farmer's daughter, about a homeless gypsy or a girl from a respectable bourgeois family, about a writer or an Englishwoman traveling in Mexico - the fate of each of his heroes depends on moments of a physiological nature, is determined by the strength of the inherent in him from the nature of the sexual instinct. Starting with The Rainbow (1915), Lawrence already quite frankly declares his confidence in this and at the same time, like other modernists, he again and again turns to the theme of the hopeless loneliness of a person, the circle of which is not given to anyone, because in the end all people are victims of the eternal laws of life, weighing on each new generation no less than the previous generations were subject to it. This idea is clearly expressed in the novel "Rainbow", which opens with a colorful picture of the life of several generations of the Brenguen farming family. Lawrence emphasizes the Brangwen's connection with the earth, their closeness to nature, to a simple and natural life, filled with the joys of physical labor and everyday worries. “Their life was closely intertwined with the earth and nature: they felt a surge of vitality in the earth when it opened its bowels to them for sowing, becoming flexible and soft under their plow and covering their feet with light dust, as if seized by an irresistible impulse of desire ... Blood connected with earth, living one life and one breath with it, with its vegetation, with their cattle, with the sky spread wide above them, with the usual work of every day, they warmed themselves in motionless poses by the fire. Their brains froze, and the blood flowed thickly in their veins, echoing the slow flow of days. From generation to generation, the power of sensual passion inherent in the Brenguens is transmitted, which none of them can contain. And if over the years the appearance of the Iruash valley, where the Mersh farm is located, has noticeably changed - a canal has been built that connected the coal mines, the city of Ilkstown is growing, absorbing the surrounding villages - then in the life of new generations of a farming family, in essence, little changes. Lawrence narrates the fate of four generations of Brenguens, tells the life story of several married couples, but each time he operates with the categories of "he" and "she" to a much greater extent than reveals the originality of the individuality of his characters, determined by the specific conditions of their life. In essence, there is little that distinguishes Alfred Brangwan from Tom and Tom Brangwan from Willie. And although Lawrence notes that Willy Branguen had a penchant for painting, wood carving and music, nevertheless, the main thing in his nature, like his uncle or grandfather, was a pronounced sensuality and an unrestrained force of passions. In many ways, Lawrence’s words sound declarative that “the women in the Brangwan family were different” - “they raised their heads above this hot, stuffy and drowsy life of the farm and looked into the distance, into a different world that they heard about ... The woman longed for a different form life, something other than the primordial source in her life-giving blood. However, the aspirations of the heroines of the "Rainbow" are very vague, the impulses are unclear, and the "force of gravity" turns out to be just as irresistible for them as for men: "... their whole being was absorbed by the primordial instinct of life with such force that they were deprived of any ability break away and look around." And only Ursula Branguen begins a decisive struggle for her independence. The life of previous generations of Brenguens inspires her with disgust, she dreams of a different life. A protest is ripening in her soul, resulting in an anarchic rebellion against the stagnant atmosphere of thoughtless existence. “She was a free, unsubdued being and in her indignation openly declared that for her there were no rules, no laws. She considered only herself. From this arose her endless struggle with everyone, in which in the end she was defeated ... then, having passed this test, she understood what she should have understood earlier and continued on her way, wiser by experience and saddened by life. After graduating from college, Ursula gets a job as a teacher at the school and begins an independent life.

Many pages of "Rainbow" are imbued with an acutely critical attitude of Lawrence and his heroine to the capitalist civilization that disfigures people's lives. Ursula is sadly convinced that the school in which she will work is “just a training shop where everyone was taught to make money ... there was nothing like creativity and creation”; she is disgusted by the idea that she, too, should take part in the preparation of students for "the servile service to the deity of material gain." She talks with hatred about the soullessness of civilization and, with her characteristic vehemence, expresses her desire to destroy the machines that, in her opinion, suppress the person ... “The destruction of the machine would be the greatest joy for her. If she could destroy the mines and free all Wiggiston men from work, she would. Let them starve, let them search the fields for wild roots and herbs, it will be better for them than to serve Moloch.” In this protest of Ursula Branguen, there is that hatred for the "mechanical civilization" that was inherent in Lawrence himself. But at the same time, her reasoning reflected his characteristic impotence to understand the patterns of what was happening, his anarchic individualism. Lawrence puts angry tirades against the "old lifeless world" into the mouth of his heroine, but at the same time he makes her deliver diatribes directed against democracy and praise the cult of power and "born aristocrats." Lawrence contrasts the individual with society and ultimately dooms his characters, including Ursula Branguin, to loneliness. Her love for Skrebensky ends in a break. Her "thirst to fight", her desire "to fight the whole world" does not lead to any specific actions and actions. Her desire to "explore the world of man, the world of work and duties, to try the existence of a working member of society and win a place for herself in the world of male life" ends in disappointment. Ultimately, Ursula, like the other Brenguens, is one of the victims of the "dark element of instincts." The finale of the novel is symbolic: a rainbow rises above the earth; looking at her, Ursula reflects on the future of mankind: “She knew that unified people still lived in the sphere of decay, but the rainbow was already in their blood, she knew that they would throw off the hardened shell, that they would give out new pure shoots, full of strength, drawn to the light, air and moisture of the sky. In the rainbow, she saw a new creation of the earth, which would take the place of houses and factories infected with harmful breath. As is usually the case with Lawrence, the wide scope of the opening pages of the novel, characterized by the concreteness of the recreated picture, results in vague symbolism and vague reasoning of the most general nature. The story of Ursula and her search for an independent and harmonious existence is continued in the novel Women in Love (1921). Even more insistently than before, the idea of ​​the hostility of modern civilization to man sounds here. At the same time, Lawrence develops in this novel a well-defined program for the transformation of society and the improvement of relationships between people. One of the heroes of the novel, Berkin, the author's alter ego, reflects on these questions. He comes to the conclusion that the spiritual revival of society can be achieved only if new forms of relations are established between people, and above all between a man and a woman. He rejects the existing form of marriage as a suppressive person, and preaches freedom in the relationship of the sexes, based on a feeling of mutual love, respect and recognition of the complete independence of each of the parties. Only this can lead to a deep and lasting connection between two people. However, Lawrence is not limited to this. His anarchist protest against the "mechanical civilization" of the 20th century develops into a denial of not only all the achievements of the human mind, in which he is inclined to see one of the main sources of the misfortunes experienced by mankind. Lawrence opposes the cult of “pure feeling” and sensual perception of the world to reason and the rational principles of life. In them he sees the only way to escape from the cruelty of modern civilization. The declaration of “free” love is combined in Lawrence with the preaching of individualism, with the cult of an imperious and strong personality, to whom everything is permitted.

In 1919 Lawrence left England and spent the last decade of his life traveling around Europe, Australia and America. He visited Ceylon, New Zealand, Tahiti. For a number of years (1922–1925) he lived in Mexico.

Lawrence's novels of the 1920s - most notably Aaron's Rod (1921), The Kangaroo (1923) and The Feathered Serpent (1926) - reflected his quest for a hero who combined individualistic aspirations and mystical power to conquer others. , with the primitive simplicity and primitiveness of the "natural man". The Rod of Aaron is the first novel in a series of these works. His hero - Aaron Sisson - the secretary of the coal miners' union of his district leaves home on Christmas night, leaving his wife and two children. He leaves the family without any definite reason for this: "For no reason, except that I wanted to feel free." His wanderings begin. In the house of the owner of coal mines, Bricknell, Aaron finds himself in the company of rich people having fun. Writers, artists, beautiful women gathered here to celebrate Christmas. In their midst, for a moment, he forgets about the feeling of dissatisfaction that gnaws at his soul. But nevertheless, it awakens again in him, pushing him to wander around the world. Aaron ends up in London, then in Italy, where he lives for some time in the house of the marquis. The owner's wife falls in love with Aaron. The passion that flared up in her and the magnificent playing of Aaron on the flute return the marquise to her lost ability to sing. Meeting Aaron revives her. For him, the meeting with the writer Lilly is very important, who, talking with Aaron, introduces him to his views on life and people. In Aaron's most difficult moments, Lilly is by his side and helps him. The flute, which Aaron plays so skillfully, he calls "Aaron's rod" and says that the rod should blossom, put down roots and turn into a beautiful and powerful tree. During his travels, Aaron returns home twice, but not for long. Nothing can keep him here anymore. He longs for freedom, for him "the most precious thing is the opportunity to breathe fresh air."

This novel is devoid of the degree of vitality and concreteness of the reproduction of the situation of the action, which were inherent in the previous works of Lawrence. Its composition is vague, the plot is fuzzy, the characters' characters are indefinite. In essence, Lawrence abandons the principle of individualization of images. The events of the novel take place a year after the end of the First World War. “A war has swept over the earth, but nothing has changed. No, much has changed, but behind all the changes lay the same immobility of life, ”such remarks, distinguished by their uncertainty, are very characteristic of Lawrence. In separate remarks of the heroes, Lawrence conveys the dissatisfaction of the people with the orders established in the country, their dissatisfaction with the actions of the government. But these cursory, fragmentary remarks and fleeting signs of the era contained in the novel do not create a coherent and clear picture.

And yet, Lawrence managed to convey the fragmentation of the consciousness of his hero, the imbalance of his psyche and inner turmoil; he writes about a person who is dissatisfied with others, who sets off in search of some new life and at the same time is afraid of real life with its struggles and difficulties, about a person blinded by his individualism and ultimately doomed to loneliness. Aaron Sisson does not want to put up with the stagnant atmosphere of his existence, he is not satisfied with a life in which “everything is translated into money”, he believes that if there is a “healthy and valuable root” in the embryo of modern civilization, then “it is all overgrown with dead bark and poisonous shoots. But how to get rid of them? This question does not arise before him. Sisson does not believe in the labor movement: "I don't expect anything from it." He leaves the mine, breaks with the environment of the miners. “He did not like to move in the general human stream and tried to walk his own paths,” Lawrence remarks about his hero. From what follows, it becomes obvious that the paths chosen by Aaron lead him to a dead end of individualism and loneliness. However, he does not think of anything else, “The feeling of metaphysical loneliness was the true center of his spiritual existence. He instinctively knew that to disturb such a state of health would mean ruining his life. It seemed to him a disgusting and deceitful betrayal of himself to renounce himself in love, to unite with those around him, to serve the idea. - "Yes, Aaron is ready to submit, but not to a woman, not to an idea, and not to a crowd." The finale of the novel sounds like a frank apology for individualism and the cult of a strong personality:

“Outside of you there is no goal, no god ... above the only, true and undoubted property is your own personality! What an unnatural and anti-human desire - this thirst to dissolve it in something else and free yourself from the burden of this wealth! Your task is to help develop a chick from an egg, and from a chick that phoenix of personality, which is always the only one in the whole world - The uniqueness and uniqueness of a personality - this is the meaning, purpose and destiny of a person. Fate grows from within, from those forms in which the human personality is clothed ... And do not give in to the temptation to free yourself from responsibility, from yourself through love, self-sacrifice, immersion in nirvana, or playing anarchism and throwing bombs - which is essentially the same nirvana only with the opposite sign. Do not be tempted by this... Do not believe in the instructions coming from outside, duties, duty... Yes, man himself is the Tree of Life. He should know this, be proud of it and not look outside himself for this paradise tree, planted by the guardian hand of some god. These words are spoken by Lilly. Aaron Sisson is ready to accept them as his life program. However, he himself - a man who is restless and rushing about in life, who so easily adapts to the role of living with the rich, is very far from that strong individual, the image of which appears before him in Lilly's speeches. The image of a leader endowed with mystical power, dragging the masses with him, Lawrence creates in the novels Kangaroo and Feathered Serpent.

In his book Portrait of a Genius, but... Richard Aldington quotes David Herbert Lawrence as referring to 1921:

“If I knew how, I would now join the revolutionary socialists. I think it's time for the real fight. The only thing that worries me: decisive struggle. I don't care about politics. But I know that a merciless revolution must and will happen very soon, and I will take part in it if I know how to do it. However, Lawrence did not go beyond declarations of this kind. He really was very far from the socio-political struggle of his time. And if at times he expressed a desire to join the revolutionary forces, then he had the most wrong ideas about their true character. He looked for their origins not in the progressive movements of the era, not in the struggle of the proletariat, but in the primitive power of instincts with which the “chosen person” is endowed from birth.

"Kangaroo", and a little later "Plumed Serpent" reflected some of the trends associated with the emergence of fascism and fascist ideology in Western countries. The cult of "leadership" characteristic of these novels, combined with the preaching of strength, the overwhelming mass and blinding it, testified to the reactionary nature of Lawrence's views. There is no reason to assert that the writer acted as a conscious defender of the fascist ideology. His ideas about the nature of the political situation of those years were too superficial. Nevertheless, the idea he developed about the "innate right" of a strong personality to consider himself the chosen one, opposing it to the masses and glorifying its limitless possibilities - all this objectively served the interests of the reaction.

If in showing individual phenomena of Australian reality or the everyday side of the life and customs of the Mexican Indians, Lawrence was truthful, then he included these truthful sketches in a false concept and gave them a false assessment based on the idea of ​​the determining significance of physiological factors. While maintaining the plausibility of particulars, Lawrence remained far from the true truth of life and its realistic depiction. Kangaroo is set in Australia. But it would be in vain to look for correspondence between the events described by Lawrence and the political situation in this country that developed in the post-war years.

Writer Richard Somers and his wife Harriet come to Australia. They soon meet Jack and Victoria Colcourt, who live next door. The Colcourts are Australians and they help the Somers get to know Australian life and customs better. Jack Colcourt is concerned about political issues, the future of his country. He himself belongs to a quasi-fascist organization of former war veterans who call themselves "diggers". The Diggers are preparing to make a coup and seize power in their own hands. Colcourt seeks to draw Somers into the activities of his organization. He introduces him to the leader of the "diggers" - Sydney lawyer Ben Cooley, known as Kangaroo. The personality of Kangaroo makes an irresistible impression on Somers, but Somers refuses to become his like-minded and join the organization of "diggers", although for some time he hesitates between the desire to take part in the political struggle and the fear of losing his independence. Relations between Somers and Kangaroo become more complicated; there comes a moment when Somers is forced to resolutely reject Kangaroo's persistent attempts to establish intimacy with him that is unacceptable to Somers. Having rejected the claims of the Kangaroo, Somers cannot overcome the insurmountable fear that has arisen in him of the strong-willed and resolute leader of the "diggers" in his actions. However, the Kangaroo soon dies; he becomes a victim of riots provoked by the "diggers" during a rally organized by the socialists. Before dying, Kangaroo makes another attempt to bond with Somers. She remains unsuccessful. The kangaroo is dying. Somers and Harriet leave Australia.

Such is the external outline of events. The novel "Kangaroo" is characterized by an amorphous composition, largely dependent on the uncertainty and confusion of the ideas expressed in it. Everything is very conditional and unsteady. In the image of the Kangaroo, an unjustified attempt was made to combine the mutually exclusive features of a dictator and a supporter of autocracy based on the principles of love for one's neighbor. In the image of Lawrence, the leader of the fascist organization becomes a kind of embodiment of Christian virtues, a person who considers love to be the fundamental principle and driving force of the universe. However, the pathological tendencies of the Kangaroo, persistently emphasized in the novel, destroy the idea of ​​​​a whole and strong personality, the image of which the writer seeks to create.

In The Feathered Serpent and in his last work, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence addresses the question of ways and means of reviving modern man and modern England. He sees them in the resurrection of ancient civilizations, in the appeal to natural forms of life and in the rehabilitation of the true beauty and harmony of the relationship between the sexes, lost in the conditions of modern society with hypocritical bourgeois morality triumphing in it.

In the works that appeared as a result of Lawrence’s acquaintance with the life of Mexico, “The Feathered Serpent”, “Princess”, in the book of travel essays “Morning in Mexico”, etc., the idea is emphasized that the Indian tribes that have long inhabited America own the known only to them one is the secret of the vitality and beauty of existence. Only those who, behind the outer shell of Mexican primitives, can feel the greatness and significance of the ancient culture, which reflected the peculiar harsh and cruel beauty of the religious rites, beliefs and customs of the Aztecs, can join it. In one of his essays on Mexico, Lawrence wrote that familiarity with the ritual rites of the Indian tribes and their religion helped him free himself from the constantly experienced oppression of modern civilization.

The novel "The Feathered Serpent" Lawrence builds in two plans; one of them is everyday, associated with the reproduction of the life and customs of the Aztecs, the second is “mystical and prophetic”, used by the writer to develop his idea of ​​the fruitfulness of communion with nature, natural forms of life and the ancient culture of Indian tribes. The heroine of the novel is an Irish woman, Kate, who came to Mexico from England and travels around this country in the company of two Americans. She is tired of the civilization of the Western world, is burdened by it and finds a new life filled with deep meaning in "wild" Mexico, joining her fate with the Mexican Don Cipriano.

The events of Lawrence's latest novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, take place in England, on the estate of Sir Clifford Chatterley, a former war veteran who was seriously wounded and forced to lead the life of an invalid. He becomes a writer and achieves fame, but this does not make Clifford any happier. His wife, Connie, is also deeply dissatisfied. Subconsciously, she feels that the intellectual interests in which her husband lives and which, due to his illness, he is forced to limit himself, cannot fill her life. Nor does she enjoy an affair devoid of genuine love with one of her husband's friends, who belongs to the number of modern "cultured" people "of her circle." Connie Chatterley finds true happiness in love with the forester Mellors.

Written, unlike many of Lawrence's other works, very simply, without his usual pathos, the compositionally clear novel Lady Chatterley's Lover claims at the same time to quite definite generalizations. Lawrence seeks to create a kind of "religion of sex", which he contrasts with the "mortifying flesh of the mechanical civilization" of modern society. Lawrence again turns to the painfully obsessive thought that has become for him painfully obsessive that the whole life of a person and his place in society are directly dependent on his sexual life, obey it and are determined by it. In the unconditional recognition of the "rights of the flesh", in the revival in all its fullness of the life of the human body, Lawrence sees the only way to the revival of the "sick civilization" of the 20th century.

He sees the sources capable of reviving it in the natural simplicity that people who are not corrupted by this civilization are capable of in love. Such is Mellors. As for Clifford, according to the writer's intention, he should symbolize the birth of the "mechanical civilization" hated by Lawrence. In his essay On Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence wrote:

“So, in Lady Chatterley's Lover we have Sir Clifford - a person who has completely lost all contact with his male friends and with women, except for those with whom he communicates on a daily basis. And all the warmth left him, his heart cooled, his existence in the usual human sense ceased. It is the true product of our civilization, and at the same time it is the death of human nature.”

The appearance of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" marked the completion of the closed line along which Lawrence's work developed. The birth of the “religion of the flesh” and the assertion of the idea of ​​the all-conquering power of physiological principles in human life date back to the time of the creation of the novel “Sons and Lovers”. Lawrence's latest novel closes the circle of searches. In essence, he remains hopeless. The blatant eroticism of Lady Chatterley's Lover takes this novel beyond the bounds of true fiction.

One of the characteristic features of Lawrence is that he stubbornly seeks a way out of the impasse into which bourgeois civilization leads humanity. The persistence of Lawrence's search, seeking to find values ​​that could be opposed to the inhumane capitalist society, distinguishes him from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf with their hopelessness, hopeless pessimism, a statement of the inevitability of evil in the world and complete disbelief in the possibility of man. Lawrence is ready to defend the value of the human person and tries to indicate the means for its revival. However, the paths along which Lawrence wanders and along which he leads his heroes, lie not only away from the main roads of our time, but do not even intersect with them. The role of the prophet and creator of the "new religion" turned out to be beyond his strength.

The formal-experimental searches of modernist writers led to a dead end. The creative evolution of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, David Herbert Lawrence ended in an inevitable crisis. The modernist novel was destroyed, because it lost the main thing, without which its existence is impossible - a full-fledged artistic image of a person, a hero, standing in the center of the events depicted.

Rejection of faith in the possibilities of the mind, disbelief in man, psychological sophistication that replaces a truly deep analysis of the hero’s inner world, a painfully heightened interest in pathological phenomena - all this manifested the consistent anti-humanism of the modernists.

The human character in all its diversity and complexity of manifestation disappears from the novels of modernist writers; it is replaced by a conditional construction, the scheme of "man in general". The principles of typification are rejected, and besides, they cannot be implemented under the conditions of isolation of the hero from the social environment. Refusal to disclose the social essence of the character inevitably leads to the loss of his individual features. The subjectivist principle in the perception of reality prevails over everything else. The personality of the writer supersedes the hero. The characters in Woolf's novels speak in a refined, inexpressive, monotonous language. Pompous, filled with intense pathos, Lawrence's tirades replace lively natural speech. Joyce almost completely freed his characters from the need to speak, making the "stream of consciousness" the main device with which he seeks to reveal the complexity of human nature. However, in the depiction of Joyce, as well as other modernist writers, this "complexity" turns out to be imaginary. The versatility of personality is replaced by a simplified scheme. The dismemberment of consciousness is much more evidence of its disintegration than of its true complexity.

The refined sophistication of Virginia Woolf turns into indifference to a person. Her experimentation is futile.

The satirical principle in the work of James Joyce also turns out to be fruitless. His satire is characterized only by destructive aspirations, but pain for a person and interest in his fate are alien to her.

In his strenuous search, Lawrence proceeds from fundamentally vicious concepts, and not only does he not open up new horizons, but he throws a person back, making him a victim of blind instincts.

Those discoveries in the field of the novel, which were made by modernists, did not pass without a trace for its subsequent development. But, discovering new spheres in art, they themselves wandered in the labyrinths of formalism and came to a dead end. Their discoveries and "innovations" made their work original, but at the same time they destroyed it. And it is quite natural that the crisis in the work of English modernist writers emerged precisely in the 1930s - during the rise of the socio-political struggle in the country, the strengthening of the workers' and anti-fascist movement. Time itself put forward before everyone the task of determining their attitude to the events taking place in the world. And it was during these years that it became quite obvious how far writers like Joyce and Woolf were from the leading trend, how opposite their work was to the epoch. An advanced, truly humanistic position was taken by writers who realized the tasks of the time and responded to them. The struggle for the great values ​​of the present and the past, the struggle for man, as in previous years, is waged by realistic literature.

David Herbert Lawrence was the fourth child of a miner and a former school teacher. His tumultuous relationship with his abusive father and passionate attachment to his sophisticated, socially ambitious mother influenced his later work.

Creation

His first novel, The White Peacock ( The White Peacock), was published a year, a few weeks after the death of his mother, after which he became seriously ill. Lawrence left teaching and wrote "Treacher" ( The Trespasser, ). It was followed by the novel "Sons and Lovers" ( Sons and Lovers, ) - his first serious work, which was a semi-autobiographical account of youth and ambiguous relationships with parents.

Lawrence tried his hand as a poet from his youth. He started with quite traditional "Georgian" verses, but his creative search led him to develop his own, unique poetics, close to that used by poets from the Imagist group. Lawrence has published in anthologies of Imagism. The bright, sensual poetry of Lawrence did not immediately win the recognition of readers and critics. During his lifetime, his poetry was appreciated only by specialists. However, Lawrence is now considered one of the leading masters of verse in the twentieth century.

While abroad, Lawrence began working on the massive Sisters project. Over time, this project included two of his most famous novels: "Rainbow" ( The Rainbow, published in September of the year, but banned in November) and Women in Love ( women in love, completed in 1917, but privately published only in the year in New York).

Disappointed in England and unwilling to accept his work, Lawrence left his homeland forever with Frida in the year. "Lost Girl" The Lost Girl, ) earned him the J. T. Black Memorial Award; followed by The Staff of Aaron ( Aaron's Rod, ). After extensive travels, Lawrence published four descriptions of his travels, "Kangaroo" ( Kangaroo, ), a novel written in Australia (set there), and literary criticism Classical American Literature ( Studies in Classical American Literature). During his stay at the Villa Mirenda in Florence, he wrote his last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover ( Lady Chatterley's Lover), which was published by a private publishing house in the year. This novel, however, was not published in its entirety in England and the United States until thirty years after the shameful attempt to ban it on grounds of obscenity.

Lawrence's poor health took a turn for the worse in 1930, and in May of that year he died of tuberculosis in Vence, France.

Links

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010 .

See what "Lawrence D. G." in other dictionaries:

Lawrence, Laurens is a popular given name and also a surname. Related names: Lawrence, Lorenzo, Laurent. Name Lawrence Watt Evans (eng. Lawrence Watt Evans, 1954) American science fiction writer. Surname ... ... Wikipedia

Lawrence at 21 David Herbert Lawrence (Eng. David Herbert Lawrence; September 11, 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire March 2, 1930, Vance) is an English writer. One of the most famous writers of the early twentieth century. Famous for ... ... Wikipedia

- (Lawrence) Ernest Orlando (1901-58), American physicist. In 1930 he became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he built the first CYCLOTRON (particle accelerator). Lawrence then set about developing more powerful and larger cyclotrons... Scientific and technical encyclopedic dictionary

Self-portrait. 1787 Thomas Lawrence (eng. Thomas Lawrence; April 13, 1769, Bristol January 7, 1830, London) is an English painter, mainly a portrait painter. Lawrence's father kept a small hotel, but eventually went bankrupt and it turned out that ... ... Wikipedia

Ernest Lawrence Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901, Canton, South Dakota, USA August 27, 1958) is an American physicist, creator of the first cyclotron (1931), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize (1939). Research on ... Wikipedia

I Lawrence Lawrence Thomas Edward (15/8/1888, Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, 19/5/1935, near Clouds Hill, Dorsetshire), English scout. An archaeologist by education. In 1914 19 and 1922 35 in the service of the British Army. In 1916, 19 employees ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

one . (Lawrence), John Laird Meir (4.III.1811 27.VI.1879) Viceroy of India (1864-69). Since 1858 Ch. Commissioner of the Company in Punjab, an active participant in the suppression of ind. nat. uprisings of 1857 59. As viceroy, he focused on stabilizing ... ... Soviet historical encyclopedia

Lawrence- I, h. Lr. Piece radioactive chemical element ... Ukrainian glossy dictionary

Lawrence- a nickname * A woman is a nickname of the same type, like in one, so in a plurality they do not change ... Spelling Dictionary of Ukrainian Movies

Books

• D. G. Lawrence. Selected works in 5 volumes (set of 5 books), D. G. Lawrence, The works of the outstanding English writer David Herbert Lawrence - novels, short stories, travel sketches and essays - form an integral part of the literature of the 20th century. In the current meeting... Category: Classical and modern prose Series: David Lawrence. Selected works in 5 volumes Publisher: Kondus,
• David Herbert Lawrence. Collected works in 7 volumes. Volume 5. Women in Love, David Herbert Lawrence, The works of the outstanding English writer D. H. Lawrence - novels, novellas, travel sketches and essays - form an integral part of the literature of the 20th century. The present collected works… Category:

David Herbert Lawrence:

a rainbow of feelings and the truth of everyday life

1. WHAT IS INTERESTING FOR US IN LAWRENCE. -

HIS BOOKS IN RUSSIA. -

CONTEMPORARY OPINIONS ABOUT LAWRENCE

Our appeal to the literary heritage of D. H. Lawrence is explained by several reasons.

— Lawrence's work is a significant contribution not only to English, but also to other modern literature. Lawrence is one of the key figures in the literary process of the 20th century. He contributed to the renewal of literature, expanded the possibilities of epic and poetic forms, enriching their content with new problems related to the liberation of the human personality from the machine civilization that enslaves it; he asserted the right of men and women to realize the possibilities inherent in them by nature, suppressed and deformed by the routine of everyday life, hypocritical morality, which imposes prohibitions on the natural and free manifestation of feelings and passions; he saw his ideal in the fusion of the natural and the spiritual, in the harmony of the spirit and the flesh; in the age of the triumph of machines and technology, he came to the defense of man and the human.

- In Lawrence's books, it is important and valuable that he is a miner's son from a working settlement near Nottingham, with all his roots connected with the life of his native land, the author of the novel “Sons and Lovers”, which made his name famous, which he himself called the “miner's novel”, - did not limit himself when depicting the life of the workers' settlement and its inhabitants with social-class approaches, but included the work theme in the mainstream of the universal. Human values ​​have always been of paramount importance to him, he wrote about them, defended them.

- Lawrence - and this is also very important for us, living at the end of the 20th century and already clearly understanding all the acuteness of environmental problems - perceived man in unity with nature, as an organic part of it. Violation of this unity, its integrity must inevitably lead to a catastrophe. Man is a part of the universe, that natural principle that makes him related to everything that lives, develops, moves, and in order for this life to continue, a natural environment must exist; every flower, a blade of grass, a bird, a lizard, a clear sky and clouds floating across it, the coolness of forests and the transparency of rivers - all this is precious, and any violation of harmony in nature kills life, a person in all the richness of the possibilities inherent in it. The ecology of spirit and flesh, the achievement of their harmony, which gives birth to true beauty and love, is what is dear to Lawrence.

Lawrence turned to problems that have not only not lost their significance for subsequent generations, but have become urgent, especially important for our time: a person in the era of scientific and technological revolution, the enduring importance of universal human values, the ecological situation and the preservation of natural integrity.

Turning to the legacy of Lawrence is also important because without getting to know him it is impossible to imagine the literary process in its entirety. Lawrence's works are characteristic phenomena of the literary life of the era, retaining their aesthetic significance to this day. Without abandoning the classical models and forms of narration, Lawrence combines in his work the concreteness of vision and reproduction of the real world with generalizations and symbols of a philosophical nature. Speaking against the "mechanical civilization", he proposes a program for the revival of the "natural principles" of the human personality. He opposes to the mechanization of life the freedom of feelings and passions, the immediacy of their manifestation. In this regard, Lawrence was perceived as the creator of the "new religion".

Lawrence considers love to be the sphere of manifestation of the possibilities hidden in a person, and sees the main task of the novelist in the penetrating truthfulness of the depiction of relations between people, between a man and a woman, in the transfer of a person’s emotional life in its constant movement, communication with nature. As the infinity of this kind of relationship, Lawrence understands life. In depicting a complex range of constantly changing emotions, drives, feelings, Lawrence acted as an innovator, realizing his aesthetic program in the novels "Sons and Lovers" (1913), "Rainbow" (1915), "Women in Love" (1920), "Feathered Serpent" (1926), "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (1928), in the collections of poems "Poems of Love" (1913), "Birds, Animals and Flowers" (1923), in the stories and novellas "The Smell of Chrysanthemums" (1911), "Prussian officer "(1913)," England, my England "(1915). We have listed far from all the works of the writer. He wrote essays, literary criticism (Twilight in Italy, Morning in Mexico, Outline of American Literature), as well as plays (The Widowhood of Mrs. Holroyd, Carousel, The Married Man).

Lawrence became famous in our country in the 20s. Already then, during the life of the writer, Russian translations of some of his novels began to appear, published in abbreviated form 1 , and then, until the 80s, Lawrence's works were not published in Russian. They began to be published only from the mid-1980s 2 . They began to write about Lawrence (mainly prefaces to published novels and collections of short stories, sections in educational books, articles) 3 . Little has been done so far, especially considering that in the West the legacy of Lawrence has been studied in detail and work on the study of his legacy is being carried out intensively. Literature about Lawrence has over two thousand titles in different languages.

It is impossible not to pay attention to a very important circumstance for us, Russian readers of Lawrence: the works of this writer organically fit into the context of our domestic philosophical thought at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. represented by such representatives as N. Berdyaev and N. Fedorov. In this regard, let us name Berdyaev’s works “Man and Machine”, his articles on the freedom and slavery of man in the field of love and creativity (“Salvation and creativity”, “Metaphysics of sex and love”, “On slavery and freedom of man”), let us recall his judgments about the mortification of the human soul under the power of the increasingly gaining strength of the “mechanization” of our life, the strengthening of its “technical principle”, which kills spirituality, beauty, life. And, of course, it is necessary to speak in the same connection about another Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov, whose ideas Berdyaev was also a supporter of. Some of Fedorov's ideas, and above all the teaching that the possibilities of the intellect increase due to the awakened possibilities of intuition, echo the ideas of Lawrence. Fedorov's idea of ​​the "creativity of life itself" comes into contact with Lawrence's thoughts about the life-creating forces inherent in man, about their disclosure in love, tenderness, unity with nature.

Judgments about Lawrence in the literature about him are very different. Both during the life of the writer and after his death, disputes broke out about his works, and about his views on the tasks of a novelist, there were discussions about the role and place of Lawrence in literature. Lawrence was admired and resented for his boldness, he was praised and subverted, his novels were read as a prophet and seer in their author, and they were condemned as obscene. "Rainbow" was banned and ostracized, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" became the subject of legal proceedings.

Lawrence was declared a preacher and moralist, a poet of the world of emotions and a projector, they saw him as an innovator and criticized him for verbosity, imperfection of style, limited range of interests. Some resented his egocentrism, others were subdued by the power of his talent. He left no one indifferent. The waves of enthusiasm for his books either rose or faded, but one thing remained obvious: Lawrence had said his word, it was heard, reverberated in the hearts of his contemporaries, and then other generations.

Immediately after the publication of Lawrence's early works, they were noted by authoritative writers and critics. Henry James described the author of Sons and Lovers as one of the most promising novelists of the younger generation. This was in 1914, and in 1916 Edward Garnet remarked on Lawrence's poetry's "strength of vitality and vehemence of feeling." He wrote that Lawrence's poems are born from a stream of emotional energy seething in the surging ocean of life. It is said strongly, impressively, precisely. The views and searches of Lawrence were close to such of his contemporaries as Richard Aldington and Aldous Huxley. Both of them were his friends and wrote about him 4 . Aldous Huxley became Lawrence's executor. Virginia Woolf wrote about Lawrence's contribution to the renewal of the literature of his time in the articles "Modern Fiction" (1919), "Notes on D. H. Lawrence" (1931). Woolf put Lawrence's name next to D. Joyce and T. S. Eliot, calling them all "spiritualists," and described the talent of the author of Sons and Lovers as penetrating and strong.

Another interesting testimony of a compatriot and younger contemporary of Lawrence - Pamela Hensford Johnson, which we find in her novel "Christine". Conveying the atmosphere of life in England in the early 1930s, P. H. Johnson includes Lawrence in her panorama, whose recent death was mourned by people of her generation who perceived Lawrence as their mentor and teacher: “Lawrence forced us to look into the darkest corners of our “I” , he showed us the way from youth and showed that it is not easy.

Lawrence's students at certain stages of their creative evolution are such modern English and American writers as Alan Sillitow, David Storey, Henry Miller, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates.

2. ON THE LIFE OF LAWRENCE. -

GENERAL DIRECTION OF HIS IDEAL AND CREATIVE SEARCH

D. G. Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, the son of a miner in Eastwood, located eight miles northwest of Nottingham, one of the industrial centers of England. This city is known for its weaving mills and is surrounded by a network of coal mines. Mining villages are scattered along the hillsides in the vicinity of Nottingham. Coal mining has been carried out in these places for a long time. More and more new generations of miners descended underground, joining the hard work of miners.

David Herbert was the fourth child in the family. His childhood and youth were spent in Eastwood, whose image he forever preserved in his memory, capturing it on the pages of Sons and Lovers. The village stood on a hilltop, the windows of its houses looked out over the far-reaching valley. Its beauty already bore the marks of industrialization, and yet all these places still retained their charm. Of Eastwood in his youth, Lawrence wrote of "an amazing intertwining of industrialism with the way of old rural England of the time of Shakespeare and Milton, Fielding and George Eliot," as an era when people lived naturally and simply, and the mine had not yet turned people into machines. However, this process has already begun and is gaining momentum with greater intensity. Factories were built, railroad tracks were laid, smoking chimneys rose into the sky. The silence of the forests and meadows was broken. Standardization killed the living principle of being.

The population of Eastwood was estimated at three thousand inhabitants, the Methodist church towered over the village, shops stretched along the main street. There were mines around, they drew workers into themselves in the mornings in order to throw them back to the surface of the earth after many hours. Among them was David's father. “My father loved the mine,” the writer recalled, “he was the victim of accidents more than once, but he could not part with it. Closeness, contacts with people were dear to him, just as front-line camaraderie, male friendship, which develops in the difficult days of the war, is dear to soldiers. My father was a simple and cheerful person. He began working in the mine from an early age, could hardly read, and considered visiting a pub after a hard day's work to be the most pleasant pastime. Lawrence's mother was of a different type: she was distinguished by a fine spiritual organization, received an education, was a teacher for some time and sought to introduce culture and knowledge to her children. It was to her that Lawrence owed the fact that he became a writer. Quarrels often broke out between parents, although their marriage was concluded for love. There was no understanding.

Lawrence studied at a local primary school, then at a secondary school in Nottingham and, after graduating from it, worked for some time as a clerk. At the age of seventeen, he suffered a severe form of pneumonia, which affected his entire subsequent fate. Developing tuberculosis became the cause of constant ailments, forcing him to leave England again and again with its rains and fogs, to go on long journeys in search of warmth and sun. He died at the age of forty-five.

For several years, Lawrence worked as a teacher, first in his native places, then in Croydon, near London. He dreamed of a university education, entered the University of Nottingham, but soon left it, disappointed in professors and lectures.

Starting to write poetry at an early age, Lawrence was able to devote himself entirely to literary activity after the novel The White Peacock (1911) brought him success. He was not fascinated by experiments in art, he was obsessed with the idea of ​​​​saving a person. Its goal is to help people find themselves, to show the fullness of their individuality. Modern prose seemed to him overly intellectualized. He himself appealed to intuition and feeling, believing that by doing so he would help a person "to be alive, to be a whole living person." He considered love to be the sphere of possibilities lurking in man. Books have been written about her.

In his interpretation of the theme of love, Lawrence, as R. Aldington wrote, “differs both from the scientific point of view of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and from the social approach of H. D. Wells in his Anna Veronica 5 . A characteristic feature of Lawrence's novels is that they contain two beginnings: one is connected with the truthful reproduction of the everyday side of the life of the characters, the second is with the transfer of impulses characteristic of them, hidden in the depths and not amenable to analysis of the mind of passions and impulses. “Art serves two important functions,” Lawrence wrote in his book on American literature. - First, it reproduces the emotional life. And then, if our feelings have the courage to do so, it becomes a source of ideas about the truth of everyday life. The concreteness of the vision of the real world is combined in Lawrence with generalizations and symbols. This feature is accurately noticed by G. Howe: “His work is characterized by a constant movement from naturalism to a symbol, from reality to myth; and if the reader accepts his work, he must be ready to accept both.” 7

Lawrence is consistent in his development. For a quarter of a century of creative activity, there have been no significant changes in his aesthetic views. This does not mean, however, that they remained unchanged. Having begun to take shape in the pre-war years, they continued to take shape during the war years, and were finally determined in the 1920s, having received expression in a number of his literary and critical works.

Two of Lawrence's early letters draw attention, one from 1910 and the other from 1913. In the first, addressed to Blanche Jennings, Lawrence writes: "We all desire, passionately desire human contact" 8 . Here he also says that for their establishment, not so much ideas as feelings are important. In a second letter to E. Collings, Lawrence first laid out his “voice of blood” philosophy: “My great religion is the belief in blood and blood, that they are wiser than the intellect. Our minds may be wrong. But what our blood feels, what we believe, and what our blood says is always true. and Mind is only a bridle. What do I care about knowledge? I want to respond to the call of my blood - directly, without the idle intervention of reason, morality or anything. It seems to me that the human body is like a flame, like the flame of a candle, forever striving upward and unquenched, and the mind is just a reflection falling on what is around. But I am little touched by the environment, everything generated by the mind, I am attracted by the mystery of the ever-burning flame, the secret of the birth of which is known only to God, remaining itself, no matter what happens around it, no matter what it illuminates.

The same letter speaks of the need to be yourself, to feel your "I" and strive for its expression.

The judgments expressed in these letters introduce us to the circle of young Lawrence's searches. He remained faithful to them in subsequent years. His first novel, The White Peacock, was written as a “novel of feelings,” and his last, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, sounded like a hymn of tenderness and love. “Feeling should be studied, analyzed, known in the same way as court testimony is examined,” he wrote while working on his first novel. He dreams of creating a novel about the identity of Love and thereby helping the emancipation of women to a much greater extent than the suffragettes. “I can only write about what deeply concerns me: at present, it is the relationship between men and women. This is the problem of today - establishing new relationships or changing old relationships between men and women.

Lawrence understands love as the totality of all the various forms of relationships between people. "Sex" means for him the fullness and diversity of relations between a man and a woman. “These relationships are much broader than we think,” he wrote in “We Need Each Other.” “We know of only a few forms: mistress, wife, mother, beloved. A woman was likened to an idol or a puppet, constantly forcing her to play one role or another - beloved, lover, wife, mother. If only we could break this stability of ideas, understand that a woman is a stream, a river of life, completely different from the river of a man's life, and that each river must flow its own way, without violating its boundaries, and that the relationship of a man and a woman is the course of two rivers that are side by side, sometimes even mixing, then separating again and continuing on their way. This relationship is nothing but a lifelong movement of change. This is sex. At times, the attraction completely disappears, and the powerful stream of relations continues its movement without dying; this is the flow of ever-living sex - this relationship between a man and a woman that lasts a lifetime, and sexual desire is only the most striking form of their manifestation.

The war years were for Lawrence a period of great trials and intense searches. He condemned and cursed the war, considered it a manifestation of madness, irrefutable evidence of the inhumanity of the existing order of things. It was not personal security that worried him, he thought about the future of England and Europe. “The old way of life has come to an end, and none of us is able to continue it,” Lawrence wrote in December 1917 ... You must not think that I do not care about the fate of England. I think about her a lot and painfully. But something broke. There is no England. We must look for another world. This one is only a grave." Europe seemed to him a heap of ruins, a world gone forever into the past. Without denying the idea of ​​a revolutionary reorganization of society, Lawrence reflects on the issues of its transformation: "A new constructive idea of ​​a new state is needed immediately," he writes to Bertrand Russell 13 . He says that the ongoing war in the world will give rise to "a great war between labor and capital."

Quite frankly, Lawrence declares his rejection of democracy. He considers the “hydra of equality” to be the greatest evil, and compares the slogans of freedom, equality and fraternity proclaimed by the French Revolution with the rattling teeth of a poisonous snake. In his opinion, the state should be headed by "aristocrats of the spirit." However, he soon abandoned this idea. Over time, his desire to withdraw into himself becomes stronger, he speaks more and more often about his hostility to any forms of social and social life. "I have learned to be completely anti-social, on my own" 14 . He saw the forces transforming society not in the advanced movements of the era, but in the same power of instincts that the individual is endowed with. In the 1920s, we are already talking about the “chosen”, “strong personality”. His novels Kangaroo and Feathered Serpent are dedicated to her.

In 1919, Lawrence left England and spent the last decade of his life wandering around Europe, Australia, and America. He lived for several years in Mexico (1922-1925). And not only the disease drove him from place to place. He left England in search of a new life. He dreamed of creating a free settlement in America, he corresponded with friends about this, he wanted to gather around himself a group of enthusiasts who were ready to abandon a civilization that had become obsolete. America was pictured to him as a continent suitable for this kind of "free settlement". But when he visited there, he was disappointed, as, indeed, after visiting other countries. Neither the East, nor the West, nor distant Australia and the islands in the ocean opened any prospects for him. The idea that bourgeois democracy had outlived its usefulness was strengthened in his mind. In June 1922 he wrote from Australia: “This is the most democratic country I have ever been to. But the more I observe democracy, the more I dislike it. Everything is reduced to vulgar levels of wages and prices, electric lights and water closets, and nothing else. You have never known anything that would be so empty, nichts, nullus, niente, as life here” 15 . The feeling of an impending emptiness, a frightening "nothing", intensified. At one time, he dreamed of a trip to Russia, began to study Russian, but abandoned this thought: the events that took place killed this desire.

When Lawrence made a short trip to England in the autumn of 1925, he was depressingly impressed by what he saw. A million and a quarter unemployed, the high cost of penetrating all the depression.

Two main trends make themselves felt in the views and moods of Lawrence in the post-war years: one is associated with the search for ways to renew life, the second is generated by disappointment in the environment. One encourages action, the other rejects what is happening. Almost at the same time, he writes: “More and more I feel that not contemplation and not inner life are my goal, but an active, active life.” 1 6 “Loneliness, silence is always the greatest happiness. The more you see people, the more you feel that all this is useless. It is better to be alone in the quiet of your room.” 17

In the final novel of the writer's career, Lady Chatterley's Lover, the features of early and late works and the moods expressed in them are synthesized.

3. JUDGMENTS OF LAWRENCE ABOUT THE NOVEL -

MORAL AND ROMANCE - LAWRENCE AND TRADITION -

LAWRENCE ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE

His main works were created in the genre of the novel. E Bill rightly pointed out that for Lawrence the novel is not only a phenomenon of literature, but also the driving force of life.

Lawrence determined the place and purpose of the novel in the literary process based on the category of moral and ethical character, and in this respect it was associated with the tradition of the English novel of the 19th century. However, he himself saw his task in the destruction of the Victorian tradition of silence, which manifested itself in the image, or rather in the refusal to depict the intimate relationships of people. Lawrence was one of the first in English literature to write candidly about the relationship of the sexes, breaking the ice of prejudice and bigotry.

In the post-war years, Lawrence wrote articles about the novel - "Moral and Romance", "Romance and Feeling", "Why the Novel Matters". Without constituting a complete theory, the judgments expressed in these articles about the novel and its functions help to understand the writer's aesthetic program.

“We know nothing, or almost nothing, about ourselves”—with these words, Lawrence sets the direction of his discourse on the tasks of the novelist in the article “Romance and Feeling.” To know the unknown world of feelings contained in each of us is what Lawrence considers the most important. What is the use of knowledge in geography, economics or technology if a person does not know himself? Self-knowledge is the duty of a person, and the novelist helps to fulfill it, helps to peer into the darkness of the "African jungle" lurking in our depths.

The meaning of our existence, Lawrence considers life itself in all its fullness and versatility of manifestations, and calls the novel “the book of life”. In this sense, he calls the Bible "the great comprehensive novel." He puts the novelist above the scientist, the philosopher, the preacher, and even the poet, since each of them treats "some part of a person, but cannot cover him as a whole." Only a novelist can achieve a comprehensive understanding of man in his relations with the surrounding world, for he knows that everything is significant in a man - not only the intellect, and not only the spirit, but also his body, his hands, fingers. The novelist awakens the "life instinct". How can this be done?

Lawrence answers this question: we must abandon any kind of schemes, dogmas, pre-designed templates, as they kill life, ever-changing, in constant motion. To convey this movement, these changes - that's what's important. “My tears today are not the same as yesterday, and my yes today is strangely different from yesterday. And if the one I love remains unchanged, I will stop loving her. After all, it is only because, changing herself, she changes me, overcomes my inertness, and changes herself under my influence - only because of this I continue to love her.

Of all that can happen to a person, Lawrence considers the most terrible turning him into a living dead, and this happens when people take the scheme they create for real life. You can eat, sleep and even love, but not be alive at the same time, and the novel helps a person "to be alive, to be a living person - that's the most important thing." 21

The desire to update the novel, to enrich its pictorial possibilities, manifested itself in Lawrence's creative use of the artistic discoveries of painters. In this regard, he continued the national tradition of interaction between literature and painting, which has always been strong in the culture of England. Lawrence was endowed with a talent for perceiving life in vivid visual images. His innovation is largely based on the use of the achievements of artists. For him, paintings by Constable and Turner, Van Gogh and Cezanne were important. Just like Blake and Ruskin, Lawrence considered painting to be the kind of art that most fully and expressively captures the most significant changes in the emotional life of an individual. He was attentive to the activities of the Pre-Raphaelites, to the innovation of the Impressionists, to the search for the Expressionists and the daring challenge of the Futurists. Cezanne and Van Gogh were his teachers and mentors after his passion for Constable and Turner. Under their influence, the poetics of the novels "The White Peacock" and "Sons and Lovers" took shape, and then the system of visual means in "Rainbow" was enriched. He admired Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", as a great reformer who approved a new vision of the world, wrote about Cezanne. They are both dear to him for their ability to convey the quivering movement of life, the relationship that develops at a certain moment between the artist and the subject of his image.

The heroes of Lawrence's two early novels are artists. In The White Peacock it is Cyril, in Sons and Lovers it is Paul Morel, in whose evolution Lawrence identifies such stages as closeness to the Pre-Raphaelites, turning to realistic painting, passion for impressionism. Lawrence was an artist himself.

Lawrence repeatedly addressed the issue of achievements, losses and the current state of the novel. Have the possibilities of this genre been exhausted? Does he have a future? What are the most promising ways for its further development? Is there any reason to believe that the novel has entered a period of crisis? All these questions are raised in Lawrence's articles. In the article "The Healing or Death of the Novel" (1923), Lawrence speaks of the novels of Proust, Joyce, and the Englishwoman Dorothy Richardson as crisis phenomena. He sees the manifestation of the crisis in "painfully deep introspection", in excessive attention to experiences and feelings that are of little significance. Lawrence sees the path of the revival of the novel in its fusion with philosophy. “We have to regret that philosophy and fiction have become separated,” he writes. “They have been a single whole since the time of myths, and then they took off and parted, like a quarreling married couple ... As a result, the novel becomes bloodless, and philosophy is abstractly dry. They must reunite." 22 .

Lawrence never wrote for the elite, he addressed the general readership; he did not want to be, like Joyce, "high-browed," as he often called him, he was not fascinated by the experiments of Gertrude Stein or the futurists. “I like them, but I don’t believe in them. I agree with them when it comes to obsolete traditions and inertia. But I don't agree with them on issues of healing and liberation... Their art is not art at all, but an ultra-scientific attempt to create diagrams that reflect a certain physical and mental state. It is ultra-ultra intellectual, surpassing both Maeterlinck and the Symbolists in this. There is not a drop of naivete in their works, although there is a lot of it in the authors themselves” 2 3 .

Deeper than the 19th century, in his works on the fate of the novel, Lawrence did not look, and among the novelists of the 19th century he singles out Balzac, J. Eliot, Leo Tolstoy and Thomas Hardy; his favorite playwright is Ibsen, his favorite poets are Shelley and Swinburne. “Read, my friend, read Balzac, Ibsen and Tolstoy and think about them... they were all great people”, “Balzac is beautiful and great” 24 , he says. Balzac's "ruthless realism" wins him over. In his youth, he admired "Eugenia Grande", considered this work the best of those that he had to read. Recalling the scene with sugar, he draws attention to the mastery of using details that reveal the peculiarities of the characters of the characters in the novel.

And yet, no matter how much Lawrence appreciated his predecessors, he called contemporary novelists to free themselves from their influence, called them "exhausted." Only for Hardy, of all the English, did he make an exception. Thomas Hardy always remained close to him, and the heroes of Hardy's novels impressed him with their inherent impulsiveness, the fullness of life that never left Lawrence indifferent.

Lawrence contrasted Thomas Hardy with John Galsworthy, none of whose heroes is, from his point of view, a living being. Forsytes are "social creatures," says Lawrence, because money replaces their life and shields them from it.

Lawrence lived in an era when the interest of the British in Russian culture and especially literature was strong. Russia, as already noted, attracted Lawrence and the changes taking place in it.

The trip to Russia, for which he was preparing, did not take place, but acquaintance with the work of Russian writers continued. In the 1920s, Lawrence read V. Rozanov and L. Shestov, and he sees Russia as it appears on the pages of their books; in them he hears "a truly Russian voice."

Lawrence read translations of L. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Kuprin, Andreev, Gorky; he loved Bunin and helped his friend Kotelyansky translate The Gentleman from San Francisco into English, considering this story to be Bunin's best.

Russian writers are perceived by Lawrence "as life itself." He is attracted and sometimes repelled by Dostoevsky. He is attracted and conquered by the element of passion inherent in the novels of the Russian writer. Lawrence's judgments about Dostoevsky are contradictory. "He is a great man and I admire him," Lawrence writes in April 1915. And two months later he says: "I don't like Dostoevsky" 26 . Either he writes about Dostoevsky's selfless love for ruined and degraded beings, or he claims that there is not a drop of love in his soul, but only hatred.

In one of his letters of 1916, addressed to the writer K. Mansfield and her husband, critic D. Middleton Murray, Lawrence gives an interesting classification of Dostoevsky's heroes, while noting the trait inherent in the Russian writer: to bring the personalities of the heroes to the limit, to that highest point of their manifestation that borders on infinity. Such are Prince Myshkin, the brothers Karamazov. This is how Dostoevsky himself appears to Lawrence. In Dmitri Karamazov, in Rogozhin, to some extent in Stavrogin, sensual principles are embodied; The spiritual beginnings are most fully expressed in Prince Myshkin, Alyosha Karamazov, and in the same Stavrogin. The third group of heroes embodying rational principles includes Ivan Karamazov, Pyotr Stepanovich and Gavrila. And if the novel The Idiot reveals the highest level of Christian selflessness, then the story of Dmitry Karamazov is an expression of boundless egoism and sensuality. The ecstasy of self-sacrifice turns into insanity, the ecstasy of sensuality gives rise to crimes, and rational people, embodying "social consciousness", turn into mechanical beings, losing their humanity.

Lawrence wrote in 1926: “Recently I have been thinking that the time has come to re-read Dostoevsky: not as fiction, but as life. I'm so tired of this English way of reading everything just like literature. I will definitely order The Brothers Karamazov. 27 Lawrence has always thought of the novel as a book of life.

4. PERIODIZATION OF LAWRENCE'S WORKS. -

GENRE SYSTEM. -
EARLY WORKS: THE WHITE PEACOCK, SONS AND LOVERS NOVEL

Two main periods can be seen in Lawrence's work - pre-war and post-war; the years of the war (1914-1918) - the transition from the first to the second.

Lawrence began writing in his youth, continuing his literary pursuits while working as a teacher. His first poems were published in the English Review in 1908. A friend of the writer's youth, Jessie Chambers, secretly sent manuscripts of poems to the publishing house, their appearance in print was a surprise, inspiring Lawrence to create a novel. The novel The White Peacock was published in England in 1911 and immediately appeared in America.

In addition to The White Peacock, Lawrence's early period of work includes the novels The Intruder and the acclaimed Sons and Lovers, as well as the poetry collection Love Poems and the collection of short stories The Prussian Officer (1914).

During the war years, the novel Rainbow (1915), travel essays Twilight in Italy (1916), and the collection New Poems (1918) were published.

The post-war period opens with the publication of A Book of Poetry (1919), followed by the novels Women in Love and The Missing Girl (both 1920), Psychoanalysis and the Subconscious (1921), the novel Aaron's Rod, and the collection short stories "England, my England" (both books - 1922). In 1923, the novel "Kangaroo" appeared, poems that made up the collection "Birds, Beasts and Flowers", "Essays on Classical American Literature". The Feathered Serpent was published in 1926, Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1928; at the same time, a collection of short stories "The Woman Who Rushed Away" and a two-volume "Collected Poems" were published. In 1929, stories were published and the censored article "Pornography and Obscenity" was attacked. In 1930, stories, essays, and articles were published; in the same year, but after the death of the writer, his essay "About Lady Chatterley" was published.

Lawrence received recognition as a novelist; The novel is the leading genre in the writer's artistic system. However, in general, Lawrence's work includes many genre forms. During his youth, he also wrote plays. It is impossible not to pay attention to the fact that in some cases the disclosure of a particular theme (motive) is carried out by the writer in several works of different genres. Thus, the life of a miner's family, deployed in a wide panorama in the novel "Sons and Lovers", covering a large temporary space, is represented by a number of dramatic moments and scenes in stories ("The Smell of Chrysanthemums", 1909), in the plays "Friday Night", "Widowhood Mrs. Holroyd", the first versions of which date back to 1906 and 1910, respectively, in the poem "The Miner's Wife" (1911).

Such "approaches" to the creation of the novel as a great epic form are characteristic of Lawrence, and although each of the above works has its own artistic significance, they are at the same time a kind of study for the canvas of the novel. The connection between poetic and prose forms in the work of Lawrence, the connection between poetry and prose is also obvious. The American writer J.K. Oates wrote very precisely about this: “All his poems, not only completed, but also sketches, form an amazing unity, a kind of autobiographical novel ... emotionally more vivid and powerful than the most significant of his novels” 28.

Lawrence's poetry is a poetic commentary on his life, his fate, a poetic diary that records experiences, impressions, feelings at certain moments of life. But this is not only an autobiography of Lawrence himself, but also a kind of “universal of being”, the “philosophy of life” professed by the poet, glorification of the “natural principle”, admiration for the beauty of existence.

Lawrence perceives phenomena in their movement, fluidity, constant change. In his pantheistic worldview, there is a closeness to the teaching of the Greek philosopher Plotinus about the “life-giving spirit” present in nature. Lawrence perceives everything around him in antimony, in opposition: life - death, heaven - earth, light - darkness, water - fire, feeling - mind, man - woman, father - son.

Lawrence's poems are about nature and man, about man and civilization, about life and death, about relationships between men and women. These themes are universal, their interpretation is carried out in laconic poetic fragments that make up the mosaic canvas. The discovery of “the new inside the known” makes a fascinating impression. Lawrence writes about love, flowers, peaches, pomegranates, snakes and kangaroos, grasses and field mice, female beauty, the fragrance of fields, rowan branches... Every living creature lives in its own world and at the same time - in a single general world. The immortal mystery of nature and its beauty are affirmed. Echoing John Keats, the poet praises the Poetry of the Earth.

A supporter of the "new poetry", Lawrence acted as a champion of free verse, which brought him closer to the Imagists. Perfectly mastering traditional versification, Lawrence abandoned it, seeing in free verse an adequate expression of "the poetry of the present." In 1913, he wrote that rhyme and meter are not the main thing, because "everything in poetry is based on a pause."

The poetic beginning is characteristic of the novel The White Peacock, which opens the way for Lawrence the novelist. This is manifested in the splendor of landscapes, in the subtle transfer of the whimsical movement of the characters' feelings. The plot of the novel is the love story of George Saxton and Letty. Guided by the prejudices of her family, Letty marries "a man of her circle", rejecting George, who is unequal in origin. This leads her to spiritual collapse.

In The White Peacock, a connection with the tradition of J. Eliot and Hardy, close to him, is manifested, but at the same time, a departure from it is also visible. Eliot attracts Lawrence with the skill of constructing an “internal action” that conveys the relationship of the hero, Hardy with the ability to convey a sense of brewing dramatic conflicts behind the outwardly serene idyll of village existence.

With special force and fullness, the originality of Lawrence the novelist manifested itself in the novel Sons and Lovers. The assessments given to him by his contemporaries are different. Some associated it with the realistic tradition, others called it the first Freudian novel in English literature. Categorical judgments do not reveal the essence of the phenomenon. Lawrence's novel is full of life because it combines seemingly contradictory beginnings. He conveys the "external" and "internal", the obvious and the hidden. In the confrontation of these principles, in their interaction and movement - the originality and strength of this work. Here Lawrence came closest to achieving that balance of the two principles of being, to which he aspired, here he embodied his aesthetic ideal.

The artistic world of the novel, this “Nottingham cosmos”, as Virginia Woolf defined it, lives according to the laws created by its creator himself. Mind and feeling, intellect and instinct, material-corporeal and intuitive-emotional are in conflict interaction. Realistic pictures of the life of the mining village and the Morel mining family include the transmission of the deep world of impulses. Everything is clear and tangible, but this clarity is deceptive, it slips away, losing the definition of outlines and forms. “That’s why it’s so hard to read Lawrence for the first time,” notes critic Walter Allen. “After all, we comprehend a feeling through its external manifestation, and Lawrence just set as his goal to express emotions and deep sensations that never come to the surface” 29 .

The form of the novel is largely traditional: we find analogues to it among the predecessors and contemporaries of Lawrence. Such are the novels by J. Meredith The Trial of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Career of Beauchamp (1875), the novels by A. Bennett Clayhanger, The Burden of Human Passions by Somerset Maugham (1915). In each of them is the story of a young man entering into life, in each of them the peculiarities of the "novel of education" are refracted in their own way.

The autobiographical stream is strong in Sons and Lovers. The Morel family, the village of Bestwood, pictures of nature - all this was born of Lawrence's memories of the days of his childhood and youth spent in Eastwood and Nottingham, of his parents' house, of his first love. The images of Walter Morel and Gertrude Morel depict the father and mother of the writer; conveyed the atmosphere of the home, the relationship of parents. And Paul Morel is Lawrence himself, who grew up in a miner's village, received an education thanks to the efforts of his mother, and became a writer. Miriam portrays Lawrence's childhood friend Jessie Chambers. And yet, Sons and Lovers is not an autobiography of the author, but one of the significant phenomena in the development of English fiction at the beginning of the 20th century, a novel based on other principles of representation than those of its predecessors.

This novel contains many of the beginnings of narrative art: realistic pictures of reality, naturalistic descriptions of everyday life, impressionistic canvases, watercolor drawing, graphics, pieces of life itself and the elusive movement of sensations. All this is present in the text of the novel, reflecting the diversity of the writer's visual perception.

Lawrence pushed the boundaries of the novel, including the intellectual, spiritual, sexual life of the characters in the sphere of the image. Already in the first chapter, the forces of attraction and repulsion are set in motion, determining the married life of Walter and Gertrude, affecting their children, the relationship of sons with father and mother.

Having met with Morel for the first time, Gertrude felt the strength, warmth, magical currents of life emanating from him. She agrees to become his wife, perceives as a miracle that “burning of life”, which is alien to herself, because reason always prevails over her emotions. This marriage did not bring happiness to either husband or wife. He did not make their sons happy either. The rejection of the father and boundless love for the mother are awakened by both Paul and his brother.

The mother's selfless love for her sons, especially for Paul, is traced in the novel at all stages of its development. This strong, indestructible feeling, shared by the son and at the same time enslaving him, giving him vital impulses and at the same time keeping him from freedom of decision and choice, for Gertrude herself becomes a compensation for an unsuccessful family life, relations with her husband.

Freudian motifs are present in the novel. Of particular importance is the problem of the "oedipal complex", which determines the significance of impressions on a person's subsequent life. “Strife between parents, their unhappy marriage, causes the most severe predisposition to impaired sexual development or neurotic illness in children,” noted 3. Freud. He also wrote about how important the image of a beloved mother is for a man, the memories of which determine his choice of an object of love, and if a woman who does not look like his mother becomes his chosen one, then very often closeness does not bring happiness and ends with a break 30 . We find similar situations in Lawrence's novel.

At the same time, it should be noted that, starting work on Sons and Lovers, Lawrence was not familiar with the works of Freud; he had an idea of ​​the content of the early works of the Austrian scientist from the retellings of his wife Frida Lawrence, for whom German was native. However, the ideas of Freudianism "were in the air" and interest in his theories increased. Lawrence also showed attention to them, emphasizing the problems that interested him in the second half of the novel.

The novel presents a complex set of experiences and feelings that are manifested in Paul's attitude towards his parents - dislike for his father and painfully passionate attachment to his mother, which turns from childish tenderness into a strong and stable feeling that becomes an obstacle to Paul's rapprochement with other women. Paul's relationship with Miriam is complicated, and then there is a break with Clara. He cherishes his spiritual freedom and affection for his mother above all else. Only with her he is connected by inextricable bonds. For her part, Gertrude is devoted to her son and demands from him the same strong affection that she herself feels for him. And when Mrs. Morel dies, Paul realizes the depth of his loneliness, and to some extent the hopelessness of the situation. Everything that he was interested in before has gone somewhere, "the world has become somehow unreal for her." Hope only flickers.

5. CREATIVITY OF LAWRENCE MILITARY

AND POST-WAR YEARS: FROM "RAINBOW"

TO "WOMEN IN LOVE" AND OTHER NOVEL OF THE 1920S

The transition from early to post-war creativity was the novel "Rainbow". While working on it, Lawrence noted that it was very different from all previous novels, "written in a completely different language." In a letter to E. Garnet in June 1914, he wrote that now he was interested not in the "stable ego of character", but in the "physiological aspects" of the behavior and actions of the characters.

Narrating in "Rainbow" about the fate of several generations of the Brenguen family, about the history of several married couples, Lawrence operates with the categories of "he" and "she" to a much greater extent than reveals the originality of the characters' individuality. The heroine of the novel, Ursula Brenguin, strives for independence from kinship guardianship and all sorts of ties. She does not accept the life of the generation of her fathers; "the old lifeless world" disgusts her, she dreams of a different, full of deep meaning life, she is attracted by the "world of work and duties", she wants to "win her place in a man's life." However, she has to be disappointed in many ways: the school where she teaches is “just a training shop where they teach how to make money”, “there is nothing here like creativity and creation”; modern civilization makes soulless machines out of people; everyone is ready to serve the deity of material gain. Ursula's love culminates in a break with the father of her unborn child. And yet she looks to the future with the hope that is born in her in anticipation of motherhood. At the end of the novel, an image of a rainbow appears, symbolizing the life force inherent in human blood. Looking at the rainbow, Ursula reflects on the future: “She knew that people who were not united by anything lived in the sphere of decay, but the rainbow was already in their blood, she knew that they would throw off their hardened shell, that new pure sprouts would appear, full of strength, stretching to the light, air and moisture of the sky. In the rainbow, she saw a new creation of the earth, which would replace the noxious breath of houses and factories.

Lawrence's moods of the first post-war years are conveyed in the novel "Women in Love", which is a continuation of "Rainbow". If "Rainbow" is a novel about the organic development of life, then "Women in Love" is a book of loss of hope and a crisis of attitude. Stronger than before, the theme of the hostility of the machine civilization to the Earth and people sounds. A "spirit of total destruction" hovers over everything.

Women in Love continues the story of Ursula and her sister Gudrun, their search for independence and harmonious existence. The theme of fathers and children, the theme of the formation of a new worldview among the younger generation, the theme of female emancipation - all this could not but attract the attention of contemporaries to Lawrence's novel. It was reinforced by the fact that the moods and searches for the heroes of Lawrence's novel were in tune with the moods of a significant part of English society in the post-war years, although the time of the novel's action is the pre-war years.

New, in comparison with the former, was the construction of this novel by Lawrence. The writer abandoned the plot as the main organizing beginning of the narrative. The novel is built as a chain of episodes, which are variations on a single theme - the search for the meaning of life in conditions where "the old ideals are absolutely dead." And if Rupert Burkin, whom Ursula loves, goes to the extreme in his denial of existence, losing faith in humanity ("I do not believe in humanity ... I hate dying forms of social order - and therefore my work in the field of education cannot but be presented nonsense to me”), if he longs only for complete loneliness and isolation from everything and everyone, if he calls a person a “mistake of the universe” and predicts the inevitability of his disappearance, then Ursula does not agree with him and disputes his views; she dreams of life, of happiness, not wanting to hear about "the end and death." There are two voices, an argument is underway ... Both voices belong to the author himself - David Herbert Lawrence. The writer is arguing with himself, his consciousness feeds the thought of both the hero and the heroine. You can talk about the author's "I" in the novel, meaning both the hero and the heroine.

The relationship between Gudrun and her lover Gerald Krish is even more complicated. Their passion turns into inner emptiness for each of them, turns into hatred; the struggle between "male" and "female" beginnings has no end. Gerald finds him suicidal. Like an inevitability, like a fate gravitating over him, he accepts his death, rushing from the snowy peak into the abyss. Devastated, morally broken and Gudrun. She seeks salvation in art, which, as the German artist Loerke convinces her of this, is the true reality. Following Loerke, Gudrun considers himself an elected person, free from any obligations to people; she convinces herself that for her, as for all "great women - Cleopatra, Mary Stuart, Rachel" - love is only a means to feel the fullness of life, and the person who gives it does not matter. Now she doesn't care where and with whom to go, whose mistress to be.

The general atmosphere of the novel is gloomy and sad. There are two intertwining, fighting, colliding leitmotifs - life and death. There is no balance in this opposition, the forces of death prevail. There are thousands of lives buried in the coal mines Gerald owns, but those who gather in London's trendy Pompadour Cafe are essentially just as dead. "Exeunt" is the title of the final chapter of the novel. This Latin word sounds like a theatrical remark: "Go away." Ursula and Burkin leave the stage, Gudrun leaves, Gerald has already left. There are no prospects for the future. Neither the flickering lights that Paul Morel walked towards, nor the multi-colored rainbow, perceived as a symbol of life by Ursula Brenguin, appear in this novel. The forces of destruction take over the desire to construct a utopia.

The tone of the novel "Women in Love" is also characteristic of the works that followed it - "Aaron's Rod", "Kangaroo", "Feathered Serpent", which reflected the writer's dissatisfaction and confusion to a far greater extent than confidence in the viability of the value system put forward by him. These novels may be called books of wanderings and searches, but they are not novels of discovery and affirmation. Wherever the action takes place - in England ("Aaron's Rod"), in Australia ("Kangaroo"), in Mexico ("The Feathered Serpent") - nowhere do the heroes of these books find the desired harmony.

Lawrence writes about dissatisfied people looking for a “new life”, his characters are obsessed with individualistic aspirations, they reveal a mystical power that conquers others and is combined with the primitive simplicity of a “natural person”, but all this does not bring him satisfaction. There are breakdowns, deviations from the artistic achievements of early works. Critics are right in arguing that, before completing The Feathered Serpent, Lawrence ceased to believe in the viability of the “new religion” he proposed. M. Spilka, Harry T. Moore, G. Howe, and many others evaluate The Feathered Serpent as the most controversial work, as one of the writer's obvious failures. However, as always, there were defenders. Thus, the American literary critic D. L. Clark called the novel “The Feathered Serpent” the gospel of the future religion.

6. RECENT YEARS AND THE LAST NOVEL

"LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER"

Another and already the last attempt of Lawrence to act as the creator of the "new religion" was his novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover". This book completes the creative path of the writer, absorbing his many years of experience as a poet and novelist. The features of Lawrence's early and late writings are synthesized in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Of none of his novels did Lawrence write as much as of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Since 1927, in his correspondence there are numerous references to the novel, the work on which captured him. Again and again he explains his plan, discusses the tasks facing him. In 1929, he wrote an article "Regarding Lady Chatterley's Lover", where he sets out his views on the nature of relations between people in modern society. “Life is acceptable only when,” Lawrence writes, “when the body and mind are in harmony and when a natural balance is established between them” 31

In Lawrence's letters, there is a nervous tension of anticipation: what impression will his novel make on readers? He did not flatter himself, knowing in advance that the reaction would not be positive. He broke the Victorian tradition of silence, dared to invade those areas of life, the coverage of which was taboo. And if in France Zola, Mirbeau, Huysmans, Maupassant wrote very boldly about the intimate aspects of the life of their heroes, the English writers of the Victorian era did not invade such areas. Lawrence, like Joyce, broke taboos.

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, the atmosphere of life in post-war England is conveyed. “Our age is fundamentally a tragic age, so we refuse to perceive it tragically. The catastrophe has happened, we are among the ruins and are trying to build new walls, find new hopes. It is hard work: there is no smooth road to the future; but we go around obstacles or get over them ”(Our translation. - N.M.). These words are heard at the beginning of the novel, and the story of the heroes appears before us as the result of a catastrophe experienced.

She literally determined the fate of Connie, her husband Clifford, a former participant in the Mellors war.

Connie married Clifford Chatterley at the height of the war. Clifford again went to the front and six months later, having received a severe wound, he returned. His wife was twenty-three at the time, and he was twenty-nine. For two years Clifford was cared for by doctors. His life was saved, but he was forever chained to a wheelchair. Together with his wife, Sir Clifford settled in his family estate Rugby Hall, inherited the title of baronet, and Connie began to be called Lady Chatterley. But there was no real life, no matter how hard Connie tried to support her husband and help him. Love with all its hidden secrets was revealed to her in the modest hut of the forester Mellors.

The characters of the characters are specific and at the same time each of them is a symbol. The opposition of Mellors to Clifford is the opposition of life and anti-life, generated by a mechanical civilization. Connie has to make a choice, which determines the dramatic intensity of the story. The novel asserts the human right to life.

The image of Clifford embodies what is hostile to real life. Clifford is a victim of war and inhuman civilization, but he himself turns into one of its ugly offspring. A discrepancy between external impressiveness and internal impotence is revealed. A good-looking appearance, broad shoulders, strong arms, a will that shines through in the look of his penetrating eyes - and dead legs, the lifelessness of the body, the impotence of a paralytic, forever chained to his chair. And whatever forms of activity he seeks for himself, Clifford is dead. “What a strange creature,” Lawrence writes of him, with a strong, cold, unyielding will and absolutely devoid of warmth. One of those beings of the distant future who has no soul, but only an unusually intense will, a cold will!

Comparing Clifford to a creature from the future in the context of the novel (and Lawrence's entire work) makes a lot of sense. Here it is - the future towards which developing technism, the mechanization of existence, leads people. In Connie's perception, the image of Clifford merges with the industrial Midland, which she hates, with its coal mines, which killed thousands of lives in their underground web, with soot-covered city buildings. All this bears the sign of degeneration, death.

As a "creature from the distant future," Clifford is reminiscent of the Martians in H. G. Wells' fantasy novel The Struggle of the Worlds: "They had a head and only a head!" They walk on metal stilts, their lower limbs are atrophied, they reproduce by budding, they can go without sleep and work for days on end. We can also recall the story of another English writer - "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster, which appeared in the first decade of the 20th century. It also deals with the rebirth of people who enjoy all the amenities of civilization.

Life, humanity, warmth are embodied in the image of Mellors. He is the son of a miner and in his youth he himself worked underground. Oliver Mellors volunteered for military service, together with the colonial troops visited Egypt, India, was promoted to officer, but did not make a military career. Family life was unsuccessful. He serves as a forester on the Clifford estate, above all he values ​​\u200b\u200bloneliness, communication with nature. Life deeply wounded this man - hiding in the wilderness, he heals his wounds. Meeting Connie meant a rebirth for him too. They need each other. “Tell you what you have and what others do not have and what the future depends on?” Connie asks him. And she herself answers: “This is the courage of your tenderness.” And Mellors, in his letter to Connie, writes about what he believes in: "I believe in the light that flashed between us."

These words, heard at the end of the novel, echo the ending of Sons and Lovers. Again there is an image of light cutting through the darkness. However, in the context of Lawrence's latest novel, the words of hope sound timid.

From the pages of the novel rises the image of England, torn by war. On everything lies the shadow of death and the smell of decay. "It seemed to Connie that all the great words did not exist for her generation: love, joy, happiness, mother, father, husband - all these big words were now half dead, they were dying every day." The cult of money reigned over everything, "you simply had to have money." “It will take many years for all this to pass. New hopes are needed." Connie thinks about all this, in whose fate lies the fate of many women.

On the covers of Lawrence's books published in England, a phoenix is ​​depicted - a magical bird with wings outstretched over the flames of a fire. The Phoenix burns itself and is reborn from the ashes. This is a symbol of life-burning and a symbol of a person striving to manifest the fullness of his "I", the fullness of his personality with all its features. This drawing has become an emblem. It expresses the essence of Lawrence's work.

Notes.

1 Lawrence D. G. The Brenguen family (Rainbow) / Per. V. Minina. - M., 1925; his own: Ursula Brenguen (Rainbow) / Per. V. Minina. - M., 1925; his own: Flute of Aaron / Trans. M. Shika. - M., 1925; his own: Sons and lovers / Per. N. Chukovsky. - L., 1927; his own: Jack in the wilds of Australia / Per. N. P. Martynova. — L., 1927.

2 Lawrence D. G. The Horseman's Daughter: Stories. - M., 1985; his own: Poems. - Foreign literature. - 1986. - No. 3 and 1990. - No. 1; his own: The Virgin and the Gypsies. - Foreign Literature. - 1986. - No. 3; his: Lady Chatterley's Lover. - Foreign Literature. - 1989. - No. 9 - 11; his own: Sons and lovers. - M., 1991.

3 See the Lawrence Literature section.

4 See: Aldington R. Dapid Herbert Lawrence // D. H. Lawrence. Horseman's daughter: Stories, - M., 1985

5. Aldington R. Portrait of a Genius, but ... L .. 1950. - R. 104-105.

6 Lawrence D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. - L., 1924. - P. 297.

7. Housh G. The Dark Sun - L, 1961. - P 2S

8. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letters of D H. Lawience - N. Y., 1962. - V. I - P. 60.

9. Ibid. -P. 180.

10. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. - N. Y., 1962. - V. 1. -P. 200.

11. Poenix. The Posthumous papers of D. H. Lawrence.—L., 1936.—P. 194-195.

12. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letters. - V. 1. - P. 535.

13. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. - N. Y., 1962. - V. I. -P. 353.

14. Ibid. -P. 525.

15. Ibid. - V. 2. -P. 707.

16. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letters - N Y 1962 - V 2 - P 681

17. Ibid -V 2 -P 713

18. Lawrence D. H. Selected Literary Criticism Ed by A Beal L 1960 - P XI

19 Lawrence D. H. Selected Literary Criticism - P 105

20. Ibid - P 106

22. Lawrence D. H. Selected Literary Criticism. — P. 117.

23. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letters. - V. 1. - P. 280.

24. Ibid. -P 182.

25. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letters. - V. 1. - R. 332.

26. Lawrence D. H. Selected Literary Criticism. - L., 1960. - P. 229.

27. Lawrence D. H. The Collected Letteis. - V. 2. - R. 881

28. Oates, J. C. The Hostile Sun. The Poetry of D. HG. Lawrence. - Los An-geles, 1973. - P. 8.

29. Allen W. Tradition and dream. - M.. 1970. - S. 65.

30. Freud 3. Essays on the psychology of sexuality // "I" and "It": Works of different years. - Tbilisi, 1991. - S. 92-93.

31. Lawrence D. H. A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover. -L .. 1961. - P. 92

David Herbert Lawrence is one of the most famous English writers of the early 20th century. In his novels, he promoted his own worldview. The writer called for abandoning the influence of the dehumanizing industrial society. In return, he offered to return to a spontaneous and natural life. Do you want to know about the fate, worldview and work of this cult writer? Read this article!

David Herbert Lawrence. Biography

Lawrence was born in 1885 into a large family (he was the fourth child) of a former teacher and an illiterate miner. Because of this contrast in intellectual terms, the relationship between the spouses was strained. This had a rather strong influence on the young writer.

David Herbert Lawrence showed an interest in learning, and in particular in literature, from childhood. In 1898, the boy received a scholarship to Nottingham High School. And already in 1906, the future writer completed his education at the University of Nottingen at the Faculty of Education. Afterwards, Lawrence took a job at Croydon Primary School. It was there that he began to write his first stories and poems. Success was not long in coming. Already in 1907, David Herbert Lawrence won a short story competition organized by the popular English newspaper Nottingham Guardian. This victory brings the writer the first rays of glory.

Further activities

David continues his creative activity. His poems and stories are actively published by others. However, the writer decides to try himself in new genres. Thus, in 1911, Lawrence's first novel, entitled The Work, was published, although it did not resonate, nevertheless, thanks to him, Lawrence was able to get good money. This allowed him to leave teaching and devote himself entirely to creativity.

David's first serious work can be considered a novel called Sons and Lovers, which was published in 1913. This work is semi-autobiographical. In it, Lawrence talks about his youth and ambiguous relationship with his own parents. According to the eminent magazine "Newsweek", the novel "Sons and Lovers" deserves the 71st place in the ranking of the hundred best books of all time.

Travel

In 1912, Lawrence met the wife of his former university lecturer, who was the mother of three children. An incredible passion immediately appears between David and Frida. And after a couple of months they go on a trip. After wandering around Germany and Italy, which lasted for two years, the lovers return to England and get married. A stormy marriage inspired Lawrence to write his first collection of poems, which was called "Look! We did it!".

While abroad, Lawrence began work on a rather voluminous work called "Sisters". Later, the novels "Women in Love" and "Rainbow" were included in the project, which were written by David Herbert Lawrence in a fairly short time. The writer's books were banned from publication due to obscene content.

Emigration

Disappointed in England and English society, which rejected his work, the writer and his wife leave the country forever. Despite the devastating criticism of his compatriots, David Herbert Lawrence continues his creative activity. Thus, in 1920, a novel called "The Lost Girl" was published. This work brings the author the prestigious James Tite Black Award. After that, Lawrence publishes a couple more works that made a splash in the global literary community (for example, "Aaron's Flute", "Kangaroo", "Classical American Literature"). Also, after long travels around the world, Lawrence publishes four descriptions of his wanderings.

In the last years of his life, while in Florence, David wrote a work that can safely be called the magnum opus of Lawrence's work. We are talking about the novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover", which stirred up the entire world literature. Interestingly, this work was published in the UK only in 1960.

In 1930, the writer's health deteriorated. Lawrence was treated in a sanatorium, however, in May of the same year, he died of tuberculosis.

David Herbert Lawrence. Poems

Lawrence tried his hand at lyrics from a young age. Initially, David worked in the usual Gregorian manner for that time. Nevertheless, soon the poet developed his own, unique and inimitable style, which had some shades of imagism.

Lawrence's poetry was very bright, subtle and sensual. She was strongly knocked out of the then conservative concepts of the poem. It is for this reason that Lawrence's lyrics have not won wide recognition from critics and readers. During his lifetime, only a narrow circle of connoisseurs read David's poetry. Nevertheless, Lawrence's lyrical works are now considered the property of not only English, but also world literature. The most popular poems that you should definitely read include "Pity for yourself", "Hummingbird" and "On the contrary."