Beckett Biography

In his unique originality of creativity with extraordinary completeness, the consciousness of a modern man was embodied. Consciousness, born of the era of world disasters, which, as the tragic experience of the century has shown, is powerless to resist both a separate personality and all of humanity as a whole. A recognized after awarding to him in the city of Nobel Prize one of the modern classics, Becquete continues to remain in the center of attention of critics and researchers, giving rise to an endless variety of interpretations.

The scatter of critical opinions, often directly opposite, indicates not only the complexity of the artistic world of Beckett, but also its inexhaustible infinity, opposing unambiguous reading. Becket was born in Ireland, in a small town of Foxrrok, not far from Dublin, where his childhood and youth passed. In the youth years, he showed interest in the theater and literature, which he took up the study of, entering the Trinity College.

Its main subject was French literature here. In the same years, he was seriously interested in philosophy, the independent study of which he continued in Paris. The hobbies, which marked the period of the spiritual formation of Beckett, not only reflected in its first works, which are literary and critical. They became the basis of its worldview, that artistic vision, which is invariably directed to ontological issues, to the most universalist interpretation of being.

It interests the writer in a purely metaphysical aspect, and his interpretation is consonant with those directions in the philosophy of the 20th century. Especially close to his worldview of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The ideas of “abandonment-in-mir”, “genuine” and “non-indispensable” existence, “existence-in-government-k-scatters”, etc., ”can only be about the fact that in his works certain facets of human consciousness, in the field of philosophy, theoretically meaningful in Heidegger, were formed.

Beckett turned to artistic work in the beginning of the X. Both he and the novel “Merphy” followed him did not arouse much interest among the public and criticism. The spiritual atmosphere, which has developed in Ireland, seemed to a Beckett incompatible with the tasks of genuine creativity due to inertness, rigid dictates of the Church, hostility to modern trends in literature and art, rejection of the experiment, and in general-deaf provincialism, narrowness of thinking and military-nationalist orientation.

In such a situation, he, like many outstanding brothers in Peru, decides to leave his homeland forever and moves to Paris, recognized by the capital of European artistic life. The Second World War that began soon, in its own way, directs Becket's life path. He becomes a participant in French resistance. Having fled from Paris after the failure of the group, Becket finds a secret shelter in Russillion, where, in an atmosphere of forced complete inaction, tormented by uncertainty and fear that gives rise to great psychological stress, again turns to creativity.

The mood that owned the writer in these years, the tragic experience experienced by him, both in the personal and historically, largely determined the further creative evolution of Beckett. The world for him is the world infinitely hostile to man, powerless in front of the machine of organized total violence, striving for complete annihilation. The absolute helplessness of a person in the face of powerful forces not subject to him, subjugated all aspects of objective being, in the most finished and generalized form embodied in the phenomenon of death in its real and symbolic significance.

The symbol of human doom - death personifies the absurdity of being, that meaninglessness of earthly existence, which is not overcome by any human effort, which itself is an effort, even the most heroic character, deprives of meaning, turns into an empty rhetorical figure, only obscuring the true meaning of the text of being. The limb of earthly existence fatally contains, according to Beckett, as a fall from the Absolute due to the irreparable inferiority of human mortal nature, and the insurmountable loneliness of a person, doomed on his earthly path only on suffering, which no one and nothing is able to facilitate and the only result of which can only be the inevitable life collapse.

This also determined the direction of the artistic search of Beckett, the creative evolution of which indicates the constant growth of generalization in the artistic implementation of the material. The fate of a person abandoned into the hostile world appears in a synthetic image, as much as possible, which is associated with individuality and does not meet the aesthetic and philosophical attitudes of the writer.

From the works of the X, still fit into the traditional form of “history of life”, Beckett from the middle of the next decade proceeds to the creation of works, the basis of which has become a separate, torn from a wide context of being a moment.In some mysterious way, it is associated with a countless set of other moments that are lost in the endless Dali of the past and even leading to the unknown of the future, but not forming together the only series of external and internal events, which embodies a unique human fate.

It does not stand out in it remarkable or significant, with the exception of two eternal constants: birth and death. Having abandoned the two most important components of the story-the plot and character-Beckett puts the hero of the storyteller to the need to bring the narrative to the end in the novels “Mollai”, Pul. All of them were written in French and made up a trilogy together, united by the paradoxical of the principles of narration, which seemed to be impossible to solve an artistic problem due to the removal of its most important components from their artistic structure.

But Becket's art world is the kingdom of a paradox. The narrative in all books of the trilogy is a symbol of the road that arises in the fragmentary memoirs of the hero, which has no idea about the goal that forced him to go on the road, or about his destination. He constantly gets off the road, chooses the wrong direction, returns back, stops, circles in place, loopes, and with it the narrative circles and loopes.

The road of life, which for Beckett is nothing more than a road to death, acts in his work as the same comprehensive symbol of the world as the theater was for Shakespeare. At the same time, the road also appears as a symbol of self -knowledge, but it is able to discover only the whole vain of his efforts to the knowledgeable, for every step reveals a multiplied number of probabilities in which the meaning of his experience can be clothed, without bringing closer to the truth.

Embodied in a word, this multiplicity turns into an uncontrollable stream of words, a volcanic phrase, designed to serve the speaker every moment that his earthly path has not yet been completed. The concrete meaning of a separate word in such a structure of the narrative loses its meaning, the connection between them becomes ephemeral, exploding internal logic, revealing a wide scope for the comic element, including the grotesque.

The narrative as a whole is not moving the development of action, but by the change of verbal conglomerates, which are linked by the principle of randomness, the commitment of which returns to the sphere of logic of a holistic work as the embodiment of the artist’s worldview. The road is the place of action and play by Beckett “Waiting for Godo”, perhaps, one of the key works not only in the work of the writer, but also in the entire literature of the 20th century.

It was this play, written in French and, like the above novels, only a few years later released in the English version, that brought Becket loud glory. The writer, whose works were stubbornly rejected by publishers and theaters, became a world celebrity. The play has two main characters - Vladimir and stage, tramps, with unchanged holes in shoes, empty pockets and empty stomachs. The beginning of the action takes them on the road, in a deserted place, the unbelief of which is emphasized by a lonely bare tree.

The road - a symbol of movement - is embodied here by a stop, and the action, respectively, is also its opposite, statics. Obviously, an inverted logic reigns in this world, but its meaning is not to put an insoluble riddle before the viewer, but to reveal the true essence of being. Vladimir and popon are eternal travelers, but until the finals it remains unclear, where they came from, where they go, because the road that these two unlucky persons wander is the road of life, in relation to which specific points are just an accident.

And the meaning of the movement into which they are drawn is not in the movement in space, in the outline of which specific features are naturally absent. This is a time in time, withdrawn from the geographical coordinate system. During the time between the meetings of the heroes in the I and II acts, leaves bloom on the tree, but the author again gives an extremely universal interpretation of time.

For him, not the period of months, years, but only the traffic itself is important. Leaves on a tree are a sign that time has passed. The final points of this movement are set by man with his browned nature: from endless non -being into temporary being, that is, life that ends with an irreversible return to nothingness. But the universal meaning of what is happening is inaccessible to the heroes.

In the same way, they are deprived of the idea of ​​the real course of time, closing only in the nearest borders the very shame of its categories, the present. For Vladimir and stage, only “yesterday” and “tomorrow” really exist.A person’s impotence to change the given course of time is symbolized in the play “In Waiting for Godo”, as in other works of Beckett, human weakness, all kinds of ailments, old age, bodily maintenance, which makes it difficult to grow into an irresistible obstacle, which subsequently leads in plays such as “Endspiel”, “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” or “Happy Days” “Comedy”, the name of its English version can be translated as “game” or “play”, to a complete stop of physical action or immobility.

In the image of Beckett, the physical suffering of human nature wear a clear physiological shade that dates back to the traditional Christian interpretation of the flesh as inextricably vicious and sinful. In the characterization of the bodily principle, Becket does not have the idea of ​​“sinfulness” in a purely religious sense, nevertheless, the main role is assigned to those manifestations of human nature, which are invariably perceived as base, including those subject to speech taboos.

In the play “In anticipation of one” to the number of such lower images, repeatedly and with great wit played, belongs to the torn and squeezing legs of the shoes, causing the hero of suffering and dooming it into immobility. In the development of this motive, in particular, virtuoso use by Becquet of traditions and techniques of the lower culture, including the musical Hall and circus clowning, is manifested.

At the same time, the writer manages to translate the “game” into a metaphysical plan, presenting the unfortunate shoes with the embodiment of the nightmare of being. Such duality also defines the genre nature of the play as a tragicomedy in which the comic and tragic principles are merged in inextricable unity. The second pair of characters is also presented in the tragicomic vein: Lacques and Obor.

In the I act, exhausted and miserable lackes, loaded over strength, “pulls” in post -hills and under the blows of the whip of a blooming OSCO. Their appearance, openly served by Becket as an insert episode, can be perceived as not devoid of satirical overtones for the image of social relations. However, the appearance of this pair in the II act with the difference that it was blinded and completely decrepit, shows that the author thought more likely as the embodiment of unpredictable vicissitudes of fate.

A wide appeal to the lower culture, inherent in the work of Beckett as a whole, emphasizes its versatility as a literary and artistic phenomenon in another, unusually important plan.

Like such the greatest geniuses as Shakespeare or Rabelais, he connects the tendencies and features of high and lower culture in his works, giving birth to a new quality, carried into perfect form. It is not surprising that the assessments of his creations are so contradictory. According to the testimony of the prominent French critic Maurice, “one sees it was said about the novel“ Swim ”, but in essence these words can be attributed to any of the works of Beckett.

Not without reason, trying to determine the originality of the artistic world of this writer, Jean Anui, his thoughts in a brilliant aphorism: "The musical-cholla sketch on Pascal's" thoughts "performed by Clowns of Fratellini." For the meaningless, as sometimes it seems, the game and clowning of involuntary Backet jesters, the outlines of the painful secret of being are drawn.

Symbolically, it is embodied in the play in the mysterious figure of Godo, which, never once in the play, becomes its semantic center. From day to day - or from year to year - it doesn’t matter, it is only important that it will be so until the very end of their life, he appoints Vladimir and the stage to appear at this place “tomorrow”. And they come, and wait, it is not known why and what.

And even - it is not known who, because the heroes have never seen one and are ready to take for him any passerby. The case is complicated by the appearance of false messengers, who, transferring the meeting on “tomorrow”, do not bring the unfortunate to the comprehension of secrets. Often, the figure of Godo, thanks to the consonance of his name with the English word “God”, is interpreted as the embodiment of God, and the play itself is identified with a mysterious action, in which Vladimir and popgon appear as a hypostasis of robbers executed simultaneously with the crucifixion of Christ, which is reinforced by the allusions available in the text.

The ambiguity laid down in the structure of the play does not exclude such an interpretation, although it does not seem the only possible. It should only be reminded that the world of Beckett's works is a world where, according to Nietzsche, "God died." The writer himself, as already mentioned, preferred a generalization of any specific idea. His Universe answers the questions of his powerless heroes to the life of the heroes, simultaneously ridiculous and tragic in their weakness and blindness, cosmic silence.

The play “In anticipation of Godo” was followed by new works of Beckett in both dramatic and prose form, invariably testified to the writer’s adamant desire to update the artistic language, which led him out of the familiar, accessible and possible. This creative obsession with Beckete has received international recognition. In the city of unusual, almost painful modesty in life, Beckett remained true to himself.Anticipating the approach of the inevitable advertising bustle and newspaper hype, he disappeared from the ubiquitous reporters in a tiny, cut off from the world of the Arab village in northern Africa and did not even arrive at the award ceremony, without leaving the corresponding speech.

In art, he was looking not for fame, but to create the opportunity. Koreneva,