Irish Beckett Samuel represents among the Nobel laureates the so-called literature of the absurd. Acquaintance with his work, in which he uses English and French, in Russian translation began with the play "Waiting for Godot". It was she who brought the first success to Beckett (in the 1952-1953 season). Currently, a fairly well-known playwright is Samuel Beckett. Plays from different years, created by him, are staged in many theaters around the world.
Features of the play "Waiting for Godot"
The first analogue that you try to grab hold of when reading Beckett is the symbolic theater of Maeterlinck. Here, as in Maeterlinck, understanding the meaning of what is happening is possible only if one does not try to proceed from the categories of real life situations. Only with the translation of the action into the language of symbols do you begin to catch the author's thought in the scenes from Godot. However, the rules for such a translation are themselves so diverse and obscure that it is not possible to pick up simple keys. Beckett himself defiantly refused to explainthe hidden meaning of tragicomedy.
How Beckett evaluated his work
In one of the interviews, Samuel, touching upon the essence of his work, said that the material he works with is ignorance, impotence. He said that he was conducting reconnaissance in a zone that artists prefer to leave aside as something incompatible with art. On another occasion, Beckett said that he was not a philosopher and never read the works of philosophers because he did not understand anything they wrote about. He said that he was not interested in ideas, but only in the form in which they are expressed. Beckett is not interested in systems either. The task of the artist, in his opinion, is to find a form adequate to the confusion and mess that we call being. It is on the problems of form that the decision of the Swedish Academy is accentuated.
Beckett's Origin
What are the roots of Beckett's views that led him to such extreme positions? Can a writer's inner world be clarified by his brief biography? Samuel Beckett, it must be said, was a difficult person. The facts of Samuel's life, according to the researchers of his work, do not shed too much light on the origins of the writer's worldview.
Born Samuel Beckett in Dublin, in a family of devout and we althy Protestants. The writer's ancestors, French Huguenots, moved to Ireland back in the 17th century, hoping for a comfortable life and religious freedom. However, Samuel from the very beginning did not accept the centuries-old religious basis of the family worldview. "My parents," he recalled, "were given nothing by their faith."
Training period,teaching activities
After studying at an elite school, and then at the same Jesuit Trinity College in Dublin, where Swift once studied, and then Wilde, Beckett spent two years teaching in Belfast, then moved to Paris and worked as an intern - teacher of English at the Higher Normal School, and then at the Sorbonne. The young man read a lot, his favorite authors were Dante and Shakespeare, Socrates and Descartes. But knowledge did not bring peace to the restless soul. Of his youthful years, he recalled: "I was unhappy. I felt it with my whole being and resigned myself to it." Beckett admitted that he was increasingly moving away from people, did not take part in anything. And then came the time of Beckett's complete discord, both with himself and with others.
Causes of discord with the world
What are the roots of Samuel Beckett's intransigent stance? His biography does not really clarify this point. You can refer to the sanctimonious atmosphere in the family, the Jesuit dictates in college: "Ireland is a country of theocrats and censors, I could not live there." However, even in Paris, seething with subversives and rebels in art, Beckett did not get rid of the feeling of insurmountable loneliness. He met Paul Valery, Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, but none of these talents became his spiritual authority. It was not until he became James Joyce's literary secretary that Beckett found a "moral ideal" in the boss andlater said of Joyce that he helped him understand what the purpose of an artist was. However, their paths diverged - and not only because of everyday circumstances (the unrequited love of Joyce's daughter for Beckett made it impossible to visit the Joyce house anymore, and he left for Ireland), but also in art.
This was followed by useless feuds with his mother, attempts to cut himself off from the outside world (he did not leave the house for days, hiding from annoying relatives and friends in a blindly drawn office), senseless trips to European cities, treatment in a clinic for depression…
Literary debut, first works
Beckett made his debut with the poem "The Bludoscope" (1930), followed by Essays on Proust (1931) and Joyce (1936), a collection of short stories and a book of poems. However, these compositions, which were created by Samuel Beckett, were not successful. "Murphy" (the review of this novel was also unflattering) is a work about a young man who came to London from Ireland. The novel was rejected by 42 publishers. Only in 1938, when in despair, suffering from endless physical ailments, but even more so with the consciousness of his worthlessness and material dependence on his mother, Beckett Samuel left Ireland forever and settled again in Paris, one of the publishers accepted Murphy. However, this book was met with restraint. Success came later, Beckett Samuel did not immediately become famous, whose books are known and loved by many. Prior to this, Samuel had to endure wartime.
Wartime
The war caught Beckett in Paris and pulled him out ofvoluntary isolation. Life has taken a different shape. Arrests and murders have become a daily routine. The worst thing for Beckett were reports that many former acquaintances began to work for the occupiers. For him, the question of choice did not arise. Beckett Samuel became an active member of the Resistance and worked for two years in the underground groups "Star" and "Glory", where he was known under the nickname Irishman. His duties included collecting information, translating it into English, microfilming. I had to visit the ports where the naval forces of the Germans were concentrated. When the Gestapo discovered these groups and the arrests began, Beckett went into hiding in a village in southern France. He then worked for several months as a Red Cross interpreter in a military hospital. After the war, he was awarded the medal "For Military Merit". General de Gaulle's order noted: "Beckett, Sam: a man of the greatest courage … he carried out missions even when in mortal danger."
The fighting years, however, did not change Beckett's gloomy attitude, which determined the course of his life and the evolution of his work. He himself once said that there is nothing worthwhile in the world except creativity.
A long-awaited success
Success for Beckett came in the early 1950s. In the best theaters in Europe began to stage his play "Waiting for Godot". Between 1951 and 1953 he published a prose trilogy. The first part of it is the novel "Molloy", the second - "Malon dies" and the third - "Nameless". This trilogy made herthe author of one of the most famous and influential masters of the word of the 20th century. These novels, which used innovative approaches to prose, bear little resemblance to conventional literary forms. They are written in French, and a little later Beckett translated them into English.
Samuel, following the success of his play "Waiting for Godot", decided to develop himself as a playwright. The play "About all those who fall" was created in 1956. In the late 1950s - early 1960s. the following works appeared: "The End Game", "Krapp's Last Tape" and "Happy Days". They laid the foundation for the theater of the absurd.
In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize. It must be said that Samuel did not tolerate the increased attention that always accompanies fame. He agreed to accept the Nobel Prize only on the condition that it was not he himself who received it, but the French publisher of Becket and his longtime friend Jérôme Lindon. This condition was met.
Features of Beckett's creativity
Beckett Samuel is the author of many novels and plays. All of them symbolize the impotence of a person before the power of circumstances and habits, before the all-consuming meaninglessness of life. In short, absurd! Well, let it be absurd. Most likely, such a look at human destinies is not superfluous.
Disputes around the literature of the absurd flared up, first of all, about whether such art is permissible and is it art at all? But remember the words of another Irishman, William Yeats, who said that humanity shouldunderstand in every possible circumstance that there is no such thing as too bitter laughter, too sharp irony, too terrible passion… It is easy to imagine what would happen to a society in which severe restrictions were imposed on the methods and means of art. However, it is superfluous to resort to the imagination - history, especially ours, knows such examples. These Procrustean experiments end sadly: the army, in which the actions of intelligence officers are strictly limited by the standards born in the offices, loses its eyes and ears, and every new danger takes it by surprise. So there is nothing left but to accept the legitimacy of the methods of the literature of the absurd. As for formal skill, even opponents of Beckett's views do not deny him high professionalism - of course, within the framework of the method adopted by him. But Heinrich Belle, for example, in one of the conversations said: "Beckett, I think, is more exciting than any action-packed action movie."
In 1989, at the age of 83, Beckett Samuel died. Poems and prose of his, presumably, will be relevant for many years to come.
