Contents introduction chapter I. Existentialism as a literary trend

1.2 The main features of existentialism in the literature of the twentieth century
In the literature of the beginning of the century, existentialism was not so widespread, but it colored the worldview of such writers as Franz Kafka and William Faulkner, under its "auspices" absurdity was fixed in art as a device and as a view of human activity in the context of all history.
Existentialism is one of the darkest philosophical and aesthetic trends of our time. The man in the image of the existentialists is immensely burdened by his existence, he is the bearer of inner loneliness and fear of reality. Life is meaningless, social activity is fruitless, morality is untenable. There is no god in the world, there are no ideals, there is only existence, fate-calling, to which a person stoically and unquestioningly submits; existence is a concern that a person must accept, because the mind is not able to cope with the hostility of being: a person is doomed to absolute loneliness, no one will share his existence. The practical conclusions of existentialism are monstrous: it makes no difference - to live or not to live, it makes no difference - who to become: an executioner or his victim, a hero or a coward, a conqueror or a slave.
Having proclaimed the absurdity of human existence, existentialism for the first time openly included "death" as a motive for proving mortality and an argument for the doom of a person and his "chosenness". Ethical problems are worked out in detail in existentialism: freedom and responsibility, conscience and sacrifice, the goals of existence and purpose, which are widely included in the lexicon of the art of the century. Existentialism attracts with the desire to understand a person, the tragedy of his destiny and existence; he was approached by many artists of different trends and methods.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In 1939, Jean-Paul Sartre, a playwright, publicist, prose writer, famous existentialist philosopher, member of the Resistance, a supporter of the "new left" and extremism, as well as the Soviet Union, published the novel Nausea, which is an artistic expression of the ideas of the existentialists. After the war, Sartre continued to write novels and plays based on this doctrine, while at the same time promoting these ideas in journalism. Having accepted Nietzsche's idea "God is dead", Sartre in his philosophical system starts from absurdity as an objective nonsense of human existence.⁵
The novel "Nausea" is a diary of a scientist and philosophical prose of a new type: Antoine Roquentin explores the life of the ugly "Don Juan" of the time of Marie Antoinette, the Marquis de Rollebone. Roquentin is trying to prove that the Marquis had a hand in the murder of Paul I, but gradually comes to the conclusion that "it is never possible to prove anything at all." J.P. Sartre is interested in Roquentin's state of mind and attitude. This is a novel about the power of nausea, in which the scientist found himself in his natural state of isolation from the world. At the same time, the state of nausea becomes in the novel by J.P. Sartre a capacious metaphor for fear and loneliness, existence as such. This is a search for one's "I" and the meaning of being, overcoming self-loathing.
“So this is what nausea is,” Roquentin understands, “so it is this eye-catching evidence? .. Now I know: I exist, the world exists, and I know that the world exists. That's all. But I don't care. It is strange that everything is so indifferent to me, it scares me.
Thinking about suicide, but unable to commit it in his apathy, the "extra" Roquentin, as it were, anticipates the worldview of the "alien" Meursault from Camus's story. Roquentin appeared as a typical existentialist hero outside of social ties and moral obligations, on the way to gaining absolute loneliness and freedom. He proclaimed freedom from society and a meaningless world, freedom to make choices and be responsible for them, perceiving responsibility outside of social significance.
As already mentioned, the essence of the philosophy of existentialism lies in the fact that it considers the world meaningless, chaotic and uncontrollable by any laws, and a person is infinitely lonely, since he cannot understand not only reality, but also other people whose inner world is fenced off from him. an impenetrable wall. Existentialism claimed to have revealed the main thing in the existence of man - hence the name of this trend.
Nevertheless, the French existentialists (Camus, Sartre), theoretically rejecting any cooperation, in practice still recognize the mutual assistance of people. Having gone through the experience of Resistance, these writers rise to the understanding of the need to fight evil, no matter how omnipotent it may seem, courageous stoicism sounds in their works (the anti-fascist play The Flies by Sartre, 1942; Camus' novel The Plague, 1947). J.P. Sartre in his philosophy recognizes only the existence of the earth and man on it as the only reliable fact, denying both God and any objective regularity in the development of society (even the concept of society for J.P. Sartre is conditional, since society for him is a collection of disparate individuals), J.P. Sartre nevertheless does not fall into immorality, believing that a real person, conscious of his loneliness, should not surrender to the power of despair, overcome it and, freely choosing fate, choose the most worthy path, constantly improve.⁶
In 1940, while in a German prisoner of war camp, Sartre wrote the play The Flies. Three years later it was staged in Paris and was perceived as an anti-fascist play. The problems of personal responsibility, choice and freedom were solved in it on a mythological basis, as was the case in Anui's Antigone. Orestes arrives in Argos, where the palace of his ancestors is located, Clytemnestra lives there with her new husband Aegisthus. In Argos, Orestes meets a terrible reality: hordes of corpse flies, stench, strings of mourners, praying old women. Aegisthus, who criminally entered the throne, established a cult of the dead and forced the living to repent of their sins before them. Orestes intervenes in the fate of the townspeople, takes revenge on Aegisthus, but only in order to prove that a person is free. As a result, Orestes finds himself alone in the crowd, who cannot afford freedom, but goes to the end, taking the Erinnius with him and clearing the city. The tragedy "Flies" contained an attempt to oppose reason and the moral imperative to irrationalism and mysticism, which were resorted to by fascist ideology.
Albert Camus (1913-1960).
The talented writer, Nobel Prize winner in 1957, Albert Camus, who untimely died in a car accident, who in the 40s was the closest associate of J.P. Sartre, also considered his work, primarily as a means of expressing his philosophical views. “One can think only through an image. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels,” writes A. Camus in his diary.
Unlike J.P. Sartre, A. Camus did not seek to depict everyday life, his narration is most often allegorical. A. Camus is far from being interested in everyday life, in the “thickness of life”, which is so wonderfully recreated by realist artists. The creative method of A. Camus logically follows from his philosophical views: if the world is devoid of objective laws that can be comprehended by a person, then it is impossible to correctly recreate a wide panorama of life, because there is no criterion of correctness - why then try ...
A. Camus recreates only the state of a person doomed to live in his era, as if in a large uncomfortable apartment. The well-being of such a person is not pleasant - A. Camus and his characters are tormented by a thirst for clarity and at the same time an awareness of the absurdity of such a thirst. Since it is impossible to achieve comprehension of reality.⁷
The concept of absurdity, the absurdity of being, which A. Camus introduces into literature, became widespread: in the 50s. it is present not only in prose, but also in dramaturgy, where the "theater of the absurd" appears. A. Camus, to the question that tormented him - what should a person do in a "foreign world" - invariably answers: do not give up, fight as hard as if he believed in a happy outcome of the struggle. According to A. Camus, high moral qualities, which a person has shown many times in the most inhuman conditions, testify to his true greatness. In the works of A. Camus, the thought of death, of the behavior of a person in front of it, persistently varied. This could be due to the circumstances of his personal fate: even in his youth, A. Camus fell ill with tuberculosis, his life was in danger, during the war this idea finds additional weighty justification - death is everywhere.
In the story “The Outsider”, published in the darkest days of the occupation, A. Camus puts into the mouth of the protagonist Meursault the idea that all people are sentenced, only some will die earlier, others a little later, is it worth trying to prolong one’s life a little at the cost of humiliation? a little. This glorification of human freedom, which is won at the cost of contempt for death, was continued by A. Camus in the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942): "I glorify a person in the face of what seeks to crush him." A. Camus comes to the conclusion that Sisyphus is the hero of the absurd: “Contempt for the gods, hatred of death, lust for life cost him untold torment when a human being is forced to engage in a business that has no end. And this is retribution for earthly attachments.
Sisyphus, a character of an ancient legend, in the essay by A. Camus becomes a symbol of Man, his fate, doom to death and the inevitability of existence in an absurd world. A sense of absurdity, according to A. Camus, can strike any person at the turn of any street; absurdity reveals itself in the impossibility of answering the question “why does a person live”, in involuntary confusion at the sight of what we really are, because there is nausea around us (quotes J.P. Sartre, without naming him).
The story "The Outsider" is compositionally reminiscent of a short version of "Crime and Punishment" by F. Dostoevsky. It chronicles a rather ordinary crime and punishment. The Frenchman Meursault, on a hot day on the seashore, kills an Arab lying on the sand. The surname Meursault (Meur Sault - death and the sun) connects two words that sound like a refrain to the life of a hero and to Camus' concept of an absurd hero.
The key to the crime is in the personality of the hero, his attitude to the world and the style of being. Meursault is indifferent to life in its usual ethical sense. He discards all of its dimensions, except for the only one - his own existence. The hero of A. Camus does not solve social issues, there are no socio-historical circumstances, the only thing he is sure of is that death will soon come to him.
Death as a manifestation of the absurdity of existence is the basis for the release of the hero A. Camus from responsibility to people. He is an outsider in relation to life, which seems to him an absurd collection of all kinds of rituals (crying at the funeral of his mother, telling a woman that you love her, thinking about the consequences of your actions, etc.).⁸
The sun and death - the composite names of Meursault - are read in the story as symbols of joy and pain, the tragedy of human existence. It is difficult to reconcile one's own egoistic existence and the movement of the human masses who make history. Meursault is reminiscent of a pagan liberated personality who has fallen out of the bosom of the church, and a superfluous person, and an outsider who will take shape in the literature of the second half of the 20th century. The image of the "stranger" was perceived in the circles of European wartime intelligentsia as a new Ecclesiastes, which was facilitated by Camus's statement about his hero: "The only Christ we deserve."
J.P. Sartre in his article “An Explanation of the “Outsider”” says that absurdity is, first of all, “a discord between the human thirst for unity with the world and the insurmountable dualism of reason and nature, between man’s impulse towards the eternal and the finite nature of his existence. The outsider A. Camus is the hero of the era, this is the artistic embodiment of the thesis of A. Camus that freedom is “the right not to lie”.
A. Camus more fully expresses his philosophy of insubordination in the allegorical story "The Plague" (1947). The plague that threatens people means not only the defeated Hitlerism, but also any danger to which humanity may be exposed, the plague is a conventional image of hostile forces in general. The action begins with the fact that on the morning of April 16, 1942, plague rats crawl out of the sewer pipes of the Algerian city of Oran and die in masses on the streets. The city is in quarantine. Dr. Rieux courageously fights against the plague with several assistants, but they do not know how to treat the plague, they only isolate the sick. Against the general background, Camus builds 4 models of behavior of the intelligentsia, making a choice. The Jesuit priest Father Panlu believes that the plague was sent as a punishment by God for sins and the means of salvation from evil is faith. He believes in the purifying power of just punishment.
Thus, it can be noted that the main features of existentialism in the literature of the 20th century are death as a manifestation of the absurdity of existence. Comprehending the essence of his existence, a person acquires true freedom, which consists in choosing oneself and consciously accepting responsibility for everything that happens in the world.