The completion of the unification of the country, the strengthening of its economic unity, which found expression in the development of the domestic market and the gradual transformation of Paris into a major economic center, was accompanied by XVI - XVII centuries. gradual formation of national French culture . This process went on and deepened, although it was very complex, contradictory, slowed down due to the civil wars that shocked and ruined the country.

Major developments have taken place national French language . True, in the outlying regions and provinces of Northern France there still existed a large number of local dialects: Norman, Picardy, Champagne, etc. Dialects of the Provençal language were also preserved, but the northern French literary language was becoming increasingly important and widespread: laws were issued in it, legal proceedings were conducted, poets, writers, and chroniclers wrote their works. The development of the domestic market, the growth of printing, the centralization policy of absolutism contributed to the gradual displacement of local dialects, although in the 16th century. this process was still far from complete.

However Renaissance wore in France quite noticeable aristocratic-noble imprint. As elsewhere, it was associated with the revival of ancient science - philosophy, literature - and affected primarily in the field of philology. A great philologist was Bude, a kind of French Reuchlin, who learned the Greek language so well that he spoke and wrote in it, imitating the style of the ancients. Bude was not only a philologist, but also a mathematician, lawyer and historian.

Another outstanding early humanist in France was Lefebvre d'Etaple, Bude's teacher in mathematics. His treatises on arithmetic and cosmography first created a school of mathematicians and geographers in France. He inclined towards Protestantism and back in 1512, that is, before Luther's speech, he expressed two fundamental provisions of the Reformation: justification by faith and Holy Scripture as a source of truth. It was dreamy and quiet a great humanist who was afraid of the consequences of his own ideas, when he saw from Luther's speech what this could lead to.

important event Renaissance in 16th-century France was the foundation of a kind of new university, along with the University of Paris, the so-called "French College" (College de France) - an open association of scientists who disseminated humanistic science.

Imitation of antique models was combined with the development of national aspirations. The poets Joaquim Dubelle (1522-1560), Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) and their supporters organized a group called the Pleiades. In 1549 she published a manifesto, the very title of which, "The Defense and Glorification of the French Language," reflected the national aspirations of the French Renaissance. The manifesto refuted the opinion that only ancient languages ​​could embody high poetic ideas in a worthy form, and affirmed the value and significance of the French language. The Pleiades was recognized by the court, and Ronsard became the court poet. He wrote odes, sonnets, pastorals, impromptu. Ronsard's lyrics sang of a man, his feelings and intimate experiences, odes and impromptu on the occasion of political and military events served to exalt the absolute monarch.

Along with the development and processing of the ancient heritage French Renaissance literature absorbed the best examples and traditions of oral folk art. It reflected the character traits inherent in the talented and freedom-loving French people: its cheerful disposition, courage, industriousness, subtle humor and the smashing power of satirical speech, turned with its edge against parasites, quarrelsome people, covetous people, self-serving saints, ignorant scholastics who lived at the expense of the people.

Most Outstanding Representative 16th century French humanism was François Rabelais (1494-1553) . The most famous work of Rabelais is the satirical novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel", a fairy-tale form of the novel, based on old French fairy tales about giant kings. This is a grandiose, full of wit and sarcasm, a satire on feudal society. Rabelais presented the feudal lords in the form of rude giants, gluttons, drunkards, bullies, alien to any ideals, leading an animal life. He exposes the foreign policy of kings, their endless, senseless wars. Rabelais condemns the injustice of the feudal court ("Isle of Fluffy Cats"), mocks the absurdity of medieval scholastic science ("Disputation of the Bells"), ridicules monasticism, attacks the Catholic Church and papal authority. Rabelais contrasted people from the people with satirical figures embodying the vices of the ruling class (brother Jean - the defender of his native land, a peasant - or Panurge, in whose image the features of an urban plebeian are depicted). Rabelais in his novel ridicules not only the Catholic Church, but also Protestantism (papimans and papifigs).

How humanist Rabelais stood for the all-round, harmonious development of the human personality. He embodied all his humanistic ideals in a kind of utopia "Thelema Abbey", in which free people live, taking care of their physical development and spiritual improvement in the sciences and art.

The main figure in France in the late 1940s, without a doubt, was General de Gaulle, who, from an “illegal immigrant”, who arbitrarily turned to the British for help and from England to the French on June 18, 1940 (for which, by the way, he was sentenced in absentia to death by a military tribunal), turned into the organizer of the Resistance, the hero and savior of France. Therefore, when a provisional government was formed, de Gaulle became its head. It should be noted that, in addition to the liberation of France, he did one more important thing: in 1944, the general signed a decree by which women finally got the right to vote (for comparison: in Russia, if you remember, this happened in 1917, and in Finland it didn’t happen at all in 1906). However, the head of the French state quickly had disagreements with the National Assembly, and in 1946 he proudly retired to devote himself to his memoirs. Note that his attitude to France deserves special attention: in his memoirs, he speaks of her as a “princess from a fairy tale,” “Madonna who descended from frescoes”; it is destined for a great, exceptional destiny. And if something goes wrong, then it is not France that is to blame, but the French. Which statesman known to us can speak of his homeland so poetically?

However, twelve years without de Gaulle (the Fourth Republic lasted from 1946 to 1958), the parliamentary system and quarrels between innumerable political parties will not bring any stability, 23 governments will take turns pulling the country out of ruin. And yet they will pull it out: the economy will gradually recover (largely thanks to the help of immigrants welcomed in those years), no one will sit without work, prices for goods will stabilize, the birth rate will rise sharply: it will be the notorious “baby boom”, which in the late 1960s will lead the country to a new crisis. But before that there will be another crisis of 1958, when the country will freeze on the brink of civil war. That's when the French will again remember their general.

The revival of normal life was greatly helped by the American plan of George Marshall Marshall Plan- American program of assistance to Europe to overcome the consequences of the Second World War. In total, the United States allocated 13 billion dollars for the restoration of the European economy. France, in particular, received 2.5 billion dollars. which began operating in 1948. Humanitarian aid poured into France: canned food, whiskey, peanut butter, sneakers, plaid shirts, as well as rock and roll, "black" novels and the American freedom-loving mentality. Young people - mainly, of course, the metropolitan, who already in the 1940s were fond of everything American - gladly accepted all these innovations that were previously inaccessible and enthusiastically spent life in the bars and cellars of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres quarter. If in the 17th century these were the backyards of the capital, where the duels of the characters of Alexandre Dumas took place, now it is the center of Paris, the Left Bank, where intellectual life is in full swing. Among the "life burners" was a young writer, trumpeter Boris Vian, who, by the way, will become a literary idol of youth in May 1968. About Saint-Germain-des-Pres in the 1950s, Vian will write a book, or rather manual("manual" or "guide"), which will be published posthumously, only in the 1970s. In the meantime, he is known as the author of the hilarious and at the same time sad "Foam of Days", as well as the scandalous parody of the American black novel entitled "I will come to spit on your graves", and finally - and most importantly - as a jazz player whose aching heart is ready to stop at any moment.

So, already in the late 1940s, French jazz was heard in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, represented, in particular, by the ensembles of Claude Luther, Claude Abadie and the Vian brothers. At the invitation of Boris Vian, American jazz stars such as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Rex Stewart, Charlie Parker and others come to Paris. Jazz concerts, even on bulky equipment, are recorded on discs and broadcast throughout France. Jazz becomes so popular that in 1948, Jazz Week is held in Paris, and the first jazz festival is held in Nice. In the 1950s and 60s, the jazz rhythm was picked up by the French stage and such names as Yves Montand, the Jacques brothers, Gilbert Beko, Charles Aznavour and many others became known.

During these years, the French do not get tired of enjoying life, their notorious hedonism is reborn: for example, in 1945, for the first time after long war years, they recall the joys of a two-week vacation at sea (given to workers back in 1936), and in 1956 they also receive a third week in addition to the first two. At makeshift resorts, swimsuit competitions are held, and soon separate bikini swimsuits come into fashion altogether. The rail network can't accommodate everyone, so the French move around on bicycles, while the four-horsepower Renault, which by the 1960s will be the people's car, is still a luxury available to the few.

Charles Trenet, a popular songwriter and performer (very “comme il faut”, as was customary in those years, that is, packed in a strict jacket and tie, with a flower in his buttonhole), causes the French to rejoice with his song “ Sea". But rest and well-being in general are somehow connected with fashion, and in 1947, 42-year-old couturier Christian Dior, who had just opened his own fashion house, revolutionizes this area - he offers a new female silhouette: thin waist, sloping shoulders, puffy breasts and a skirt. Franz-wives, and the whole world with them, are completely delighted.

Meanwhile, the intellectual life of the French capital is in full swing - all in the same, the most popular and highly visited by Americans quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. This place is convenient because there, in the city center, near the Latin Quarter, many publishing houses are concentrated (Gallimard, Grasset, Flammarion and others), as well as bookstores and bookbinding workshops. In addition, many writers and poets live in the neighborhood. For example, Jacques Prevert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Desnos, Raymond Keno and others; by the way, some, without having their own corner, lived in hotels for years on end. One of these homeless people is Juliette Greco, discussed below. To understand why exactly there, in bars, cafes and cellars, life pulsates, one must know what role they played during the years of occupation. Saint-Germain establishments are a unique phenomenon. During the harsh war years, they saved Parisian writers, actors, artists, and journalists from hunger and cold. In the occupied city, next to empty or completely closed shops, the doors of eateries were cordially thrown open, where, it happened, the stove was on fire and the owners for a minimal fee, or even for nothing, fed and watered their wards with whatever they could. Payment of bills was postponed until better times. By the way, the owners of the establishments willingly allowed customers to leave their autographs and drawings on paper tablecloths, firmly believing that they would become famous over time.

Café Flora is notable for the fact that Jean-Paul Sartre appeared here in the winter of 1942, and with him a young teacher, Simone de Beauvoir. They settled down at different tables in the back of the hall, laid out their papers, and made themselves at home. After some time, students began to come to Sartre in a cafe, many even called there by phone. During the bombing, the owner of the cafe, who became a true friend to the writers, did not force the scientific couple to go down to the bomb shelter, but hid them in back rooms so that they could not be interrupted from their studies. And when, in 1945, Sartre delivered his epochal lecture “Existentialism is Humanism”, comically described by Boris Vian in “Foam of Days”, the Flora cafe began to be perceived as the center of a new philosophy of existentialism, and with the light hand of journalists, all the youth who spent their nights in Saint-Germain institutions began to be called “existentialists”. The newly minted "existentialists" even outwardly differed from the rest of the Parisians: they did not clean their shoes, did not comb their hair; women did not cut their hair or make up, walked with dark circles under their eyes, wore trousers and sweaters (as a rule, from other people's loins and shoulders).

One such figure-setting figure was Juliette Greco, a student of the theater studio, her appearance (the “drowned woman” style) was quite consistent with the existentialist worldview. She became the "silent muse" of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Silent - because in those years she had neither a hearing nor a voice, which, however, did not prevent Sartre, Boris Vian and, by the way, Serge Gainsbourg, who had not yet become a cult provocateur, to write texts for her, and composer Joseph Kosma - music to these texts. Those who wanted to make a star out of her (and there were many of them) succeeded: Greco began to recite, became the host of the famous cabaret "Bull on the Roof", and then a world-famous singer and actress.

Meanwhile, not everything is so joyful in post-war France: General de Gaulle settles scores with former collaborators, followed by purges and executions (more than 30 thousand people were executed). This also applies to writers who collaborated with Nazi newspapers and publishing houses during the years of occupation. How could they not cooperate? After all, this was the official policy of the French government. In occupied Paris, new publishing houses were created, old ones were opened, the Germans fawned over French intellectuals, inviting them to cooperate - in particular, to translate German literature into French. Many authors did not consider it shameful to cooperate with the authorities: these were, in particular, Marcel Jouandeau, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Paul Moran, Alphonse de Chateaubriand, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Robert Brasilyac and others. The trial of the latter was the loudest, it was widely covered in the press: Brazillac was declared a criminal and sentenced to death; the sentence was carried out in February 1945. So an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion reigned in France for a long time. No wonder: an anonymous denunciation was enough for a person to be arrested. Familiar, right?

Fortunately, not everyone was shot: some were simply imprisoned, and then either the case was closed due to insufficient evidence, or they were amnestied. So, in 1947, the case of Sasha Guitry, a well-known theatrical figure - actor, dramaturge, theater and film director, was closed. They did not touch Jean Cocteau, this multifaceted legendary sphinx, who never ceased to shock everyone with his various roles - from a poet, playwright, director to an artist. But the writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who supported the Nazis partly because of his anti-Semitism, was forced to hide for many years in Germany, then in Denmark, and returned to France only in 1951, when the passions subsided. Many writers were eventually pardoned and are now published by the Pleiades, France's most prestigious collection of world literature.

What happened in the field of theater, this exclusively mass art? During the years of the occupation, he somehow survived, strictly controlled by double censorship: Vichy and the German authorities in Paris. At the same time, Parisian theaters did not know the outflow of spectators. Meanwhile, in an effort to attract young people to theater halls, a regional theater began to develop, less subject to control. What did they put? Mostly historical dramas in the costumes of the era, which made it possible to think again about the lack of freedom of a person, about the conflict of duty and feelings. Three Jeans were favorite authors: Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux and Jean Anouille. Another Jean - Jean-Louis Barrault, a bright and original actor, director and theater director, who worked since 1940 at the Comédie Francaise, as well as at the Marigny Theater - staged Paul Claudel's drama The Satin Slipper and Racine's Phaedra. And after his release, in 1946, together with his wife Madeleine Renault, he created the Renault-Barro theater company, which became popular in France and abroad.

In the first post-war years, Parisian theaters willingly staged Sartre's plays: these are Flies, With Dirty Hands, The Devil and the Lord God. They put Albert Camus: "Caligula", "Misunderstanding", "The Righteous", "State of Siege", written especially for Jean-Louis Barro. They also put Armand Salacra. Directors rethink the problems of good and evil, despair, rebellion, freedom, death, loneliness. Camus himself puts on plays: "Requiem for a nun" by Faulkner, "Demons" by Dostoevsky. The theatrical language of the French theater still remains the same: classical tragedies, historical and romantic dramas with an outset, climax and denouement, oratorios. What is obligatory in these years is the engagement of the author. In terms of the cast, the star of Gerard Philip is already rising in the theatrical sky. And in the plays of Camus, the bright and temperamental Maria Cazares shines, and with her the actor, although not yet a bard, Serge Reggiani; as an author and performer of songs, he will become famous later, in the 1960s.

In the post-war years, the capital ceased to be the center of theatrical life, the dictator of style and forms. To the great displeasure of Paris, the theater is being decentralized. With the support of the state, national drama centers are being created in the regions, for example, in Colmar, Strasbourg, Saint-Etienne, Toulouse, Provence, Flanders, Burgundy, etc. They are often led by students of Jacques Copeau, one of the founders of modern French drama, organizer and head of the Vieux Colombier (Old Dovecote) theater.

In addition, the phenomenon of decentralization is associated with the name of Jean Vilard, who in 1951 became the head of Le Théâtre national populaire - in other words, the National People's Theater, which did not wait for the audience in the hall, but itself moved towards it, trying to attract those who were least ready to become theater spectators. The theater went to the working suburbs, to factories, to clubs, city halls, to the street, reducing ticket prices as much as possible. It was Jean Vilar who in 1947 created the Avignon Festival, which is still world-famous. The director offered the viewer Shakespeare, Marivaux, Musset - in general, the classics, but also Bertolt Brecht. In the Parisian palace of Chaillot, where he gave performances, Jean Vilar tried to recreate the atmosphere of the festival: no curtain, no ramp; a wide proscenium that brings the action closer to the faces of the audience.

But already in the 1950s, a general renewal of the theater took place. Theatrical experiments are called by critics and theatrical figures themselves "new theater", "rebellion theater", "absurd theater", "anti-theater". The essence of these experiments is the same: the very concept of theatrical art has changed, the characters are now devoid of personal characteristics, the plot is falling apart, there is no meaning, the performance sometimes resembles a clownery. Linguistic norms, moral principles are deliberately violated, logic is turned inside out. Stage directors leave the big stage for small halls that can accommodate only about fifty spectators. Some of them exist to this day: for example, the charming tiny La Huchette theater, which plays Ionesco with the same enthusiasm. In addition to Ionesco, in the 1950s, Beckett and Adamov were willingly staged.

In general, from 1946 to 1973 or 1975, France is experiencing the so-called Les Trente glorieuses(Glorious thirtieth), that is, thirty years of prosperity, which ended with the world oil crisis. However, in these years, not everything is so radiant. Things are heading towards the crisis of 1958. What happens in the field of foreign policy greatly affects the mentality of the French and the situation in the country. The ideological split is intensified primarily because of colonial problems. Since the 16th century, France has owned vast overseas territories, it was the second largest colonial power. In the post-war years, the global trend of decolonization finally reached France: from 1946, the war in Indochina raged, ending in 1954. A few months later, it is replaced by a bloody war in Algeria, which lasts until 1962. On May 9, 1958, the FLN, Algeria's National Liberation Front, shot eight French prisoners; On May 13, in the capital of Algeria, a demonstration of whites took place in the streets, demanding the protection of French Algeria from the rebels. Dramatic events followed - in other words, an attempted coup d'état. In response, supporters of France's colonial policy in Algeria turned to de Gaulle with a request to return to power and save the country from a final split and civil war. They were supported by the French government, which could not cope with the situation. De Gaulle is back, but that's another story.

The war in Algiers, however, continued. De Gaulle announced a national referendum - this was his favorite method of communicating with the French people. 75% of the French were in favor of granting freedom to Algeria, and in March 1962, the long-awaited agreements were finally signed in Evian. France, however, was waiting for another test: crowds of repatriates were forced to leave the former colony where their ancestors were born, lived and buried, and move to France, where they had nothing. It was a difficult period for Pieds Noirs, that is, "black-footed", as the French were called, who lived in Algeria, and for the continental French, who had to make room.

Decryption

“Everything that we see now ... is outrageously different from everything that was before,” said Marcel Proust in 1918, “our everything” for the French.

The 1950s-60s of the 20th century became a time of great changes in world history, economic and political crises. French literature, fitting into this universal whirlpool, is also undergoing radical changes. Of course, they do not happen overnight, but nevertheless, the mid-1950s can be considered the time when these changes materialized and became obvious to everyone. They became a literary fashion, which, having outlived itself, like all others, left not only very interesting literature, but also a deep imprint on subsequent literary work.

In order to understand these changes, let us first look at the literature, which by this time was considered traditional. It is called the Tolstoy-Balzac model. The author in these works is a demiurge, he creates his own world in which everything is subject to him: both the actions of the characters and their thoughts. He explains everything to the reader, because, apart from him, no one can do this. The author knows all the ins and outs of his hero, his relatives up to the seventh generation, penetrates into the secret nooks and crannies of his soul and presents everything to the reader on a silver platter. And the surrounding world is also reproduced to the smallest detail in order to correspond to the social status and state of mind of the hero. The reader for these writers is an obedient student, a receptive consumer of the fruits of his labor, a follower of his ideas.

The classics, who were already world famous by the beginning of the Second World War, continued their literary activity. They still criticized bourgeois society from the positions of critical or socialist realism. Among them, Aragon must be mentioned, who at that time completed his saga "Communists", wrote "An Unfinished Novel" and the famous collection of poems still quoted, "Mad About Elsa"; and Herve Bazin, who continued his sharp criticism of the bourgeois family and environment in the novels "Whom I dare to love" and "In the name of the son"; and Mauriac, who wrote one of his most outstanding novels, The Adolescent of Old Times. In a certain sense, the followers of the philosophy of existentialism, which flourished just at the time of the war, should also be included in the already familiar literature. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote dramas at this time that continued to develop his philosophical views: The Devil and the Lord God, The Recluses of Altona. He writes an excellent autobiographical book, Words. Camus publishes the final philosophical essay "The Rebellious Man", the novel "The Fall", where he calls on a person to resist the absurdity of the world for the sake of the Other. At the same time, two playwrights reached heights in their work - Ionesco and Beckett, who continued the traditions of the existentialists and created the theater of the absurd. They depart from the ideological basis openly expressed by Sartre and Camus. The world in their pro-products is really and deliberately absurd. Their plays, at first received with cheerful bewilderment, won the world stage forever. In their plays, there are often no heroes, and the situations are increasingly meaningless. They use words like no one else, returning them to their original meaning, which everyone has already forgotten, or creating incredible absurdity and nonsense due to the complete mismatch of replicas. Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Ionesco's Rhinos are still constantly cited by postmodern writers, because, unfortunately, the absurdity of theatrical situations is too often recalled in modern life.

The overall picture, as can be seen, was not at all monotonous. Since in literature, as elsewhere, nothing appears out of nowhere and does not disappear into nowhere, it is most interesting to see in the allegedly traditional authors of that time what would later acquire a name and become a novelty. As Marcel Proust said, “every work needs to create its own descendants.”

So, Francis Ponge, back in 1942, wrote the book “On the side of things”, where he, wanting to poeticize things, invites them to stand up for themselves, to defend their independence from the judgments and attitudes of people. And this was many years before the appearance of the concept of “thingism” and the novel by Georges Perec “Things”. And long before Alain Robbe-Grillet's famous description of a juicy tomato wedge “This is a truly flawless tomato slice, a piece of perfectly symmetrical fruit cut by a machine.
Dazzling scarlet, juicy and firm flesh with uniform density is distributed between a strip of shiny skin and a nest with the same, as a selection, yellow seeds, which are held in place by a thin layer of greenish jelly that borders the core. And the core itself, pale pink, slightly grainy, at the base is pierced with divergent white veins: one of them reaches for the seeds, but, perhaps, somehow uncertainly ”(Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Erasers”, translated by Nina Kulish)..

Even more interesting is the appearance in 1939 of Nathalie Sarraute's book Tropisms. And the title is incomprehensible, and the short essays themselves are unclear about what. Sarraute herself explains that the texts that were part of her first literary work were the direct expression of very vivid impressions, and their form was as direct and natural as the impressions they evoked. And only in the 1950s and 60s it will be recognized as the founder of the direction that will be called the "new novel" or "anti-novel".

These examples show that at that time there were no writers who could be considered pure followers of the traditions of Balzac and Tolstoy. Most of them were more inclassables, that is, not belonging to any particular school. In which school can you enroll the brilliant Marguerite Yoursenar? She managed to penetrate into the depths of history so thoroughly that her characters, who belong in one of the novels even to the 2nd century BC, speak naturally and convincingly not at all “our” language, they draw us into their own time. She appropriated the language of each described era. Her novels "Memoirs of Adrian", "Philosopher's Stone", her oriental stories were read both in the 1950s and in the 2010s.

Which school can Boris Vian enroll in? Rebel, musician, poet, author of the science fiction novel "Foam of Days" and several other novels and plays? Admirers of his books come to bow to him from all over the world - and not at all in order to "spit on his grave", as the title of one of his novels says. We are talking about the novel "I will come to spit on your graves" (French "J'irai cracher sur vos tombes").. Literary weeks are dedicated to him, when his jazz plays throughout the city. Boris Vian - a master of word play, a genius of word creation - wrote one of the most tragic love novels.

To which school can Albert Cohen be attributed, who, with poignant humor, close to, described a picturesque Jewish family - uncles, aunts, nephews moving from Greece to France? And then he wrote the novel "The Beautiful Lady" ("The Love of the Lord"), which tells a different love story. He was not at all restrained by the framework of formal traditions.

One can cite as an example the fantastic monologue of a young woman who takes a bath and talks to herself about everything in the world: about a beautiful boyfriend, about a bar of soap that slips out of her hands, about what to wear after a bath, and about a draft that blew from an open door. Eight pages of solid text without a single punctuation mark!

And where can you put Romain Gary? Or maybe Emil Azhar? This hoaxer managed to win the Prix Goncourt twice under different names: both times the prize was well deserved, and it was as if they were two different writers. It's hard to tell which one is the real Gary - there are so many legends about him! But Promise at Dawn by Gary and Life Ahead by Azhar are two great novels that you must read.

These examples are also important in order to make it clear that the changes in the literature of the mid-twentieth century matured gradually, little by little, no one paid special attention to them for the time being. But the moment came, the formal, external sign of which was war, the transformation of a person into something that can be destroyed by millions, and then - apparent prosperity against the background of complete depersonalization. And all the previous works suddenly came to life, embodied in a real, new, at first incomprehensible form. As Marcel Proust said, "Works written for posterity should be read by posterity."

Roland Barthes' article "The Death of an Author", published only in 1967, did not break the tradition, but only summed up the work already done by innovative writers, formulated the main change that had taken place in the works of writers. The situation gradually began to change in the 1930s. Now the author is just a scripter who writes down what he sees or feels, he himself does not understand very well the meaning of what is happening. And should not understand. According to Barthes, the text does not exist at all until no one reads it. It arises for real only when the reader picks up a book. And each time with each new reading, a new work appears. The reader has the same rights as the author: he can choose one of the proposed options, he can think of the end, he can build any assumptions in accordance with his education, life experience and just a momentary mood. Reading becomes a game that the author starts with the reader.

In these 20 years, the tradition still has many followers, but the new is confidently making its way. They coexist perfectly, imperceptibly influencing each other. By the end of the 20th century, the sharp boundary is blurred: innovators begin to write autobiographical novels, although their form is not traditional, and those who denied the very possibility of writing in a new way begin to violate the chronological order of events in the novel and quote other authors at their pleasure. Naturally, the reader also changes. At first, having difficulty understanding in general what the author was talking about, completely entangled in different stories intersecting on one page without any explanation, the reader was indignant and indignant. Now even the most furious story without beginning or end can become a bestseller, as happened in Russia with Pelevin's books.

In the middle of the century, two literary phenomena arose that must be mentioned. The first was an association of like-minded people and was called ULIPO, which is an abbreviation of the long name Workshop of Potential Literature (fr. Ouvroir de litterature potentielle). It included not only writers and poets, but also mathematicians and artists. The main idea of ​​this group was that literature has always been built on certain mandatory rules (for example, in poetry one must observe the number of stanzas, syllables, rhyme, etc., and in classical drama - the unity of time, place and action) and these rules not only do not interfere with genuine creativity, but, on the contrary, stimulate it. And they start making up different rules. Their keyword will be the word "game". Here are some examples of their work: Keno wrote the novel "Zazi in the subway", where a little girl, having escaped from her uncle, meets different people. The author uses slang vocabulary, uses phonetic writing, and invents new children's words. All this creates a wonderful mood for the viewer and gives the mind a lot of pleasure. Keno's second famous book is called Style Exercises. He composes a banal scene from everyday life in ten lines and then rewrites it 99 times in different styles, changing the narrator, vocabulary and style of writing.

The most famous representative of Oulipo was Georges Perec. He, too, unbelievably loved the game. So, he managed to write a novel without ever using the letter "e" - the most common in French. And the reader does not notice this absence, and then becomes delighted, looking for interesting game moves in the text. (The Russian translation of this book, The Disappearance, was made by Valery Kislov, he eliminated the letter "o", the most common in Russian, and this was a translation feat.) Perek's main book was the novel "Life is a way of using it." The novel is built like a house in a section: each of the 99 chapters describes one of the apartments, it's like pieces of a puzzle that the reader has to recreate. There are a lot of characters, a lot of inserted stories and just life anecdotes. All together - a huge construction, subject to rules that are unknown to the reader, but, perhaps, will be revealed to him at the end. The author suggests reading this thick book several times: from beginning to end; then - choosing chapters about the same character; then - choosing only insert stories. And there are readers who have gone through this game to the end.

It is interesting that in a conversation with modern writers, when asked who influenced their work the most, the answers were very different: from Flaubert and Proust to Hugo and Sartre. One name remained unchanged - Georges Perec. According to them, it was Perek's thirst to do the impossible in literature, his verbal acrobatics, the ability to use the most diverse reserves of language, style, genre (including crossword puzzles) - all this inspired them once to literary work.

The second literary phenomenon was not an association (there is only one photograph in which you can see them together), it was not a movement (there was no manifesto that would proclaim new principles of creativity), it cannot even be called a direction, because each representative of this genre wrote in his own way and looked for opportunities to differ from his fellow writers. They were brought together physically by the Minuit publishing house under the direction of Lyndon, in which at that time Alain Robbe-Grillet was the reading editor. The famous photograph was taken at the door of this publishing house.

The starting point that created a new form of writing was Nathalie Sarrot's book Tropisms. But only after almost 20 years this form was needed in order to express a new attitude towards man and the world. In the 1950s, post-war years, after the trauma inflicted on humanity by massacres in battles and death camps, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, in a new world dehumanized by the consumer society, it was no longer possible to write as before. Man was no longer perceived as the center of the universe, the attention of writers was not focused on his history and psychology, but rather on how to describe a coffee pot standing on the table; a book open to the same page, or a photograph of an unknown woman. How to describe time, which in fact no one perceives linearly, because only the present time is real, and everything else is just a fantasy. How to describe a place that in reality is never the same even for two hours in a row (this was perfectly shown by the Impressionists at the end of the previous century); time that everyone sees in their own way, without knowing why.

In the mid-1950s, the main books of the authors, who would later be called the authors of the "new novel", were published by the Minuit publishing house almost simultaneously. Robbe-Grillet wrote "Jealousy" in 1957, Michel Butor - "Change" in 1957, Claude Simon - "Roads of Flanders" in 1960, Sarraute - "Era of Suspicion" in 1956, Duras - "Moderato Cantabile" in 1958.

These writers are very different, but there is something that unites them. First of all, this desire and need to write differently, not in the way that the authors of “traditional” novels wrote, who built their works on the basis of a chronological sequence (any return to the past was motivated and explained in the most accurate way); in which the intrigue was carefully developed, and the characters necessarily crossed paths several times in life (they say about an unexpected meeting: “Well, just like in a novel!”).

What happens in the "new novel"? The ancestor, or, as the French press wrote, “father”, of the “new novel”, Robbe-Grillet called himself a writer of the “present tense”, because he stopped using the classic past tense for any traditional novel. Thus, the chronology, the sequence of events, was completely broken. The reader does not know when the action takes place: there are no dates to tie the action to any historical event, no data to place the action at a particular time. The same thing happens with the place that the writers of past years loved to describe in detail: there are no names; a certain abstract place is described in which the characters move, as it were, in an airless space. In a word, the character is not attached to anything, temporal and spatial indicators are absolutely relative: “often”, “later”, “soon”.

The second radical innovation is the attitude towards the character. He not only ceased to be the central figure of the narrative - he lost everything, starting with the name. Remembering the concentration camps of the first half of the century, Robbe-Grillet argues that a person can now only be identified by a number tattooed on his wrist. The heroes of the representatives of the "new novel" often do not have names at all or are designated by initials. They have no history, no relatives and friends - they are phantoms, anonymous. Moreover, the author is not interested in the psychology of their actions. After all, Freud already explained that there is so much hidden in a person, incomprehensible to himself, that there is no point in studying the psychology of fictional characters.

The third innovation is the absence of intrigue in the novel: the action does not move from point A to point B, it marks time, repeats itself with some variations, begins in an incomprehensible way and does not end in any way. And, of course, there is no ideology in the “new novel”, it is a counterbalance to the biased literature of existentialists and Marxists.

These are the innovations which, to a greater or lesser extent, are common to the representatives of the "new novel". What can the reader expect from such literature? According to Robbe-Grillet, the reader is so tired of the lessons that classical literature taught him that he must learn to take aesthetic pleasure from the misunderstanding and confusion that he experiences when reading his books. He must learn to "work" in the process of reading, take an active part in choosing one of the proposed options, complete the portrait, invent a story, create his own book. The relationship between author and reader changes completely.

For example, consider the novel "Jealousy" by Robbe-Grillet. There is a narrator who tells in the first person about minor events that happen to him, his wife A., his friend and the wife of a friend. A classic setting for an adultery novel. But nothing really happens there. The narrator remains so invisible to the end that at some point the reader begins to look in horror to whom A. holds out the glass. The reader is not at all sure that something happened between these people at all. Out of habit, we strive to finish reading the novel in order to understand what is happening, but our expectation is not justified. The novel leaves a bewitching impression due to the repetition of situations and motives, as in a piece of music with various variations.

I would also like to tell you about an interesting experiment by Robbe-Grillet. In 1961, the film "Last Year in Marienbad" received the "Golden Lion" in Venice. Director Alain Resnais and writer Robbe-Grillet worked together on this film, who then published the film's literary script. It's a classic "new novel": the characters don't have names. The action (if you can call it that) takes place in an unknown country at an incomprehensible time in some abstract castle. Heroes move like figures in a shadow theater or freeze next to real statues or motionless clipped bushes of a French park. This text speaks of love, freedom, poetry and beauty. Or maybe just about the beauty of death? Let us pay attention to the connection between the “new novel” and cinema. Both Alain Resnais and other directors made films based on the works of neo-novelists, they helped each other to express the inexpressible, elusive, blurry. Thanks to cinema, it is easier to understand the peculiarities of the writing of these authors.

Let's go back to Nathalie Sarraute. The term “tropisms” introduced by her into literature came from biology, where it denotes an unknown and mysterious force that makes the head of a sunflower turn after the sun. For Sarraute, the word has taken on a different meaning: it denotes mysterious, indistinguishable movements that stimulate our actions; words that help express our feelings. "Deeply hidden microscopic dramas", as she called them, not realized by a person, they nevertheless are the driving force of our actions, our social behavior.

She wrote the equally famous "Era of Suspicion", where she argues that "the novel is an ever-changing form", since neither a person nor his psychology can be fixed once and for all in writing. The character is a shaky substance that is constantly changing, and not a mask that writers of the previous century put on their heroes. We must lift the mask and look inside. Describing the heroine of the novel Planetarium (1959), the writer offers the reader only numerous sketches of her reaction to what is happening around. And they are just renovating her apartment. And now her mood and state change every minute depending on the color of the door handles, on the intonation of the worker, the lighting from the window, etc.

In order to achieve the effect of constant impermanence on paper, Nathalie Sarraute found a specific form of writing. It does not define anything in one well-chosen word, as Maupassant once advised. Instead, she uses a succession of synonyms that offer shades of meaning. Here are two examples: she writes about memories - “everything there fluctuates, transforms, slips away” or about pictures of childhood - they “tremble, pulsate, sway”. She endlessly interrupts the text with dots, trying to express the uncertainty, the incompleteness of the narrator's speech. In a later novel, Childhood, this letter takes on a perfect form.

Another way of expressing the ideas of the "new novel" was found by Marguerite Duras. The specificity of her writing was the use of dialogues. An example is the short novel "Moderato Cantabile". The heroine returns repeatedly to the cafe, where, as she knows, there was a murder against the backdrop of passion. She discusses the possible motives for this murder and, at the same time, the scattered details of her life with a worker, who, as she thinks, can explain something to her. Their dialogue is an example of the usual incoherence in real life: it is not at all necessary to answer all the questions asked, you can answer with a question on a completely different topic. The dialogue goes around in circles, groping its way towards an unknown goal. And these conversations never end. But after reading, after the usual bewilderment and disappointment in such cases, if you listen to yourself, you can understand a lot about yourself and about others. The feeling of incomprehension, loneliness, isolation in the musty outside world is masterfully conveyed by Marguerite Duras.

This novel was followed by her screenplay for the film Hiroshima, My Love. The film was also directed by Alain Resnais and became a classic of the genre. The characters in the script do not have names - "he" and "she". The whole film is only a conversation between two characters who speak simultaneously about two stories of love, death, memory and oblivion.

Speaking of the "new novel", one cannot but mention Michel Butor. This writer lived for almost 90 years, and by his example one can see that for many, the “new novel” was only a launching pad that expanded the possibilities of literature, inspired various literary feats. If Robbe-Grillet remained faithful to the chosen direction, then Butor constantly changed his preferences. He wrote a lot, but not novels, but essays about artists, writers and musicians, traveled a lot, was fond of photography. Nevertheless, his well-known "Change" is an important page in the history of the "new novel". The narrator of this story, who refers to himself as "you" (to "you" in the Russian translation), travels by train from Paris to Rome with a strong desire to finally break with his family and finally reunite with his young mistress, to whom he is heading. During the trip and incessant memories relating to different periods of his life, the hero changes his mind.

But the most interesting thing in the novel is not the plot, but the play with time and space. The train moves from Paris to Rome, and from time to time the reader sees through the hero's eyes the passengers entering and exiting. The hero amuses himself by inventing names and stories for them. But in his thoughts he constantly moves first to Paris, then to Rome; sometimes with his wife, sometimes with his mistress; now to the past (from the honeymoon trip with his wife to the last trip from Rome last week), then to the future, when he lives in Paris with his mistress or when he returns to his wife. This constant movement in time and space, without any explanations and transitions, can confuse a novice reader. But if you go with the flow after the thoughts of the hero, this game begins to deliver genuine pleasure.

And finally, the main master, who received the Nobel Prize precisely for the “new novel”, is Claude Simon. The writer to whom the special book "How to read Claude Simon" is dedicated. A writer whose drafts are a multi-colored ribbon, where each shade corresponds to one of the mo-ti-vs in his story.

In 1960, Minuit, where Claude Simon met Michel Butor and Robbe-Grillet, published his novel The Roads of Flanders. The background of this novel, like most of Simon's other books, is the war, the defeat of the French troops in 1940, the futility of action and the senselessness of the death of soldiers. He was a participant in military events, escaped from German captivity and experienced the horror and absurdity of military everyday life, which return in his memoirs until the last years of his life. But that's just the background. A writer can tell any story—what matters is how he does it.

What is so special about this "how" that it is necessary to specifically explain how to read Claude Simon? After all, he honors his predecessors and even in his Nobel speech recalls that a new path in literature was opened by Proust and Joyce, who always serve as his example. After all, he, like them and his beloved Faulkner, puts the language in the first place, in which every word gives rise to new unforeseen images.

Of course, Claude Simon is the embodiment of the "new novel" aesthetic. The colored ribbons in his manuscripts served him as a pointer on how best to mix, cross, displace the numerous themes of the story. It was not for nothing that Simon greatly appreciated Faulkner: his phrase, like that of an American writer, seems endless, especially since one of the means of expression is sometimes the absence of punctuation marks. To the question of how to make Simon's text out of Zola's text, the answer can be simple: combine several phrases into one, remove all place and time indicators, remove all names and replace more ordinary verb forms with gerunds, which denote only the simultaneity of actions, and not their sequence. In fact, of course, everything is not so simple. The writer seeks to combine in one text a mass of images, pictures, to place all the associations that arise in the imagination there, to convey that stream of successive impressions that captivates him. This is what Claude Simon's phrase is for. After all, it is not just long: the author interrupts it with numerous brackets, dashes, dots, and the participle is needed to stop, slow down time, carefully write out each individual moment.

Claude Simon, indeed, is not easy to read if you do not understand why and for what he writes the way he writes. Be prepared to read his books. But, like any other overcoming (comprehension of a craft or sporting achievement), the conquest of this peak gives a special satisfaction. As Marcel Proust said, “It is then that the time comes to evaluate this phrase, which previously only confused our minds with its novelty.”

The officially refined, pure "new novel" ended with the death of the last of the authors, Alain Robbe-Grillet. But in fact, the writers who were united under this name radically changed their attitude towards literary work. After them, no one else can be attributed to any direction. The writers realized that the possibilities of literature are endless, that it is possible to combine any traditions in different combinations and bring any innovations to your writing. By the end of their work, the neo-novelists themselves began to betray their principles in many ways. They "forgot" about the literature of the present time, used their talent to write autobiographical books in one form or another, that is, they began to return to their origins, to childhood and the beginning of creativity. A very characteristic example is the same Robbe-Grillet, who wrote three volumes of memoirs, where he constantly interspersed them with some kind of fictional story with fictional characters, and with each volume this fictional story grew. And to the question “How is it, you said that there is no past tense?”, smiling charmingly, he answered: “Well, why take everything so seriously!”

And those who follow them continue the game with the reader. They changed him, the reader, too. The reader has learned to appreciate the novelty of not only the plot, but also the form, the language of the book, he can no longer lazily turn the pages, waiting for everything to be presented to him in a ready-made frozen form. He tries to catch interesting literary associations, he is forced to read more in order to be at the level of literary movement forward. We can only thank these authors for our change.

As Marcel Proust said, “the work itself will grow and multiply such people, fertilizing those rare minds that are able to understand it.”

Decryption

It is difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to find any major director in world cinema over the past half century who, when asked about the decisive influences on his work, would not mention the French New Wave. Any directors, of any aesthetic trend, of the most diverse genre sympathies, invariably talk about how they were influenced by the films of Godard, Truffaut--fo, Chabrol, Eric Rohmer or Alain Resnais.

In fact, this is strange, because the "new wave" was just one of the cinematic movements of the turn of the 1950s and 60s, which updated the language of cinema, its structure and grammar. Even before the "new wave" there was the English cinema of "angry young people" and the existential Polish school, mainly concentrated on the realities of war and occupation (this happened in the mid-1950s). Simultaneously with the “new wave”, the most powerful Japanese young cinema debuted, led by Nagisa Oshima, followed by the American underground cinema, the Prague Spring school, the Swedish “new wave”, young German cinema ...

But the invariable reference point for all those who work in the cinema in the era after the “new wave” remains precisely the “new wave”. This is explained simply and paradoxically: the “new wave”, as it were, did not exist as a single movement. There is a French expression l'auberge espagnole- "Spanish tavern." In a Spanish tavern you can find a dish for every taste - just because the visitors of this tavern bring food with them. So the “new wave” unites such different directors that you can really find anything in it. From the quite classic sentimental cinematographer François Truffaut to the paradoxical surrealism of Jacques Rivette; from the sophisticated writing of Alain Resnais, which most closely resembles the contemporary literary technique of the "new novel", to Godard's blatant experiments with the grammar of cinema.

The year of birth of the "new wave" is conditionally considered 1959, when the films of Alain Resnais "Hiroshima, my love" and Francois Truffaut's "400 Blows" thundered at the Cannes Film Festival. Godard's Breathless followed in 1960, considered one of the five most revolutionary films in the history of cinema, one of the films that, along with The Battleship Po-Temkin or Citizen Kane, changed the very language of cinema. But at that moment, the expression "new wave" in relation to cinema was not yet used, although this phrase existed in the lexicon of the French mass media and French culture.

In fact, for the first time about the "new wave" spoke in 1958, a journalist and a writer, in the future - the Minister of Culture of France, a brilliant woman Francoise Giroud. She had in mind not the cinema, but the general rejuvenation, the improvement of the very social atmosphere in France in connection with the fall of the Fourth Republic and the advent of the Fifth. Giroux wrote that everything in France is being updated, as if the voice of youth is heard, new trends appear in the manner of behavior, in fashion, in music - and on the stage in the broadest sense of the word.

And only at the end of 1962, the magazine Cahiers du cinéma (“Caye du cinema”), which was considered, or rather, is now considered to be the headquarters and stronghold of precisely the cinema of the “new wave”, applied this expression - “new wave” - to cinema.

Now for us, the "new wave" is associated with no more than a dozen big names - from Godard to Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda. And then Cahiers du cinéma brought a colossal list of directors of the “new wave”: there were about 160 names in it, and the “new wave” was understood in an extremely broad way. All directors who made their debuts from 1958-1959 to 1962 were recorded as participants in the "new wave". Never before have so many young directors debuted in French cinema. There was a fashion for young people. And they said that the pro-du-cers asked each other: “Don’t you have any young man who wants to make a movie?” Like: "Could you lend me a phone? Would you mind lending it to me?"

Youth and inexperience have already become an argument in favor of a person getting a chance to debut in directing. At that moment, the creative elevators simply changed, if I may say so by analogy with the social elevators that elevated people to the rank of directors. If until the middle, until the end of the 1950s, in France, a person, in order to get the right to the first production, had to climb all the steps of the hierarchical ladder of film studios, that is, to start, roughly speaking, as the fifth assistant to the assistant to the third cameraman, and after a few years, having gained experience in practice, having tried all the cinematic crafts in his own skin, he became a director, then in the era of the "new wave" it turned out that -zhis-gray can be literally coming from the street.

Well, of course, not quite from the street, because those who were part of the most powerful group of directors of the "new wave" - ​​Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Romer and Jacques Rivette - although they did not study cinema anywhere and never worked at the studios, were professional moviegoers, that is, they were film critics. And for six or seven years, while they spoke about cinema in the pages of the magazine Cahiers du cinéma before moving on to directing, they acquired not a working, not a pro-letarian experience of film studios, but a viewing experience. And it turned out that you can do it this way: watch a movie, write about the movie, and then take and put the movie. This, of course, was a kind of revolution in the field of film production - but still not in the field of film language.

New wave directors are usually divided into two groups. We will talk about the "new wave" already in the narrow sense of the word, forget that Cahiers du cinéma classified more than 160 people as "new wave" directors, including frank artisans who then made their debut with some kind of gangster film and then for 30-40 years they successfully shot gangster films. We will talk about about twenty directors who have remained in the history of cinema under the collective pseudonym "new wave". Film historians distinguish two large groups of directors. One of them are directors who made their debut as film critics on the pages of the Cahiers du cinéma magazine, and the second group is the so-called "Left Bank Group": these are Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy - directors who already had experience in short and / or documentary films and at the turn of the 1950s and 60s simply shot their first full-length feature films.

Did the "new wave" have some kind of manifesto, some kind of theoretical basis? Strictly speaking, no. The first group of directors of the "new wave" - ​​the authors of the magazine Cahiers du cinéma, these are Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol. They were also called young yan-charms - for the fury with which they attacked the previous French cinema, and also - the "Scherer gang". Maurice Scherer is the real name of the great director, known under the pseudonym Eric Romer; he was the oldest among the authors of the Cahiers du cinéma, he willingly lent money to young colleagues and therefore was greatly revered by them and was considered their "chieftain".

They were also called the "Hitchcock-Hawksian Gang" because they passionately promoted on the pages of the magazine the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks - directors who, for the French high-browed public of that time, were associated exclusively with low commercial cinema, with time-out-of-coo-hoy. But the authors of Cahiers du cinéma just proved that Hitchcock and Hawkes are real artists, they are authors. The term "author", "director-author" was very important for the "new wave" generation, although in fact there was nothing mystical and poetic in this term from the very beginning. The director-author was simply a director who makes films according to his own scripts, which was not accepted in the French film industry at that time. Now it has become a routine, but then the director-author is a person who is fully responsible for his film, he writes the script, he also screens it. And only then the concept of “director-author” was filled with a certain sublime, poetic meaning: the author is almost a poet, the author is a director who neglects genres, who works outside genres or at the intersection of genres.

So, the gang of Scherer, young Janissaries, Hitchcock-Hawksians can also be called "André Bazin's nestlings", since Cahiers du ciné-ma was the brainchild of the great - not even a film critic, not a film critic, not a film historian - the great philosopher of cinema and, in general, the great philosopher Andre Bazin. He died early, at the end of the 1950s, quite young, at 40, but Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut really revered him as a godfather and spiritual father. For Truffaut, he was also almost a foster father. When the young hooligan Truffaut was drafted into the army, he did not want to go to the colonial war in Algeria. He deserted and turned to André Bazin, whom he read and revered without knowing him yet, for help - and Bazin, in general, saved him from military prison and accepted him into the Cahiers du cinéma team.

André Bazin was first and foremost a Catholic philosopher. And when he wrote about cinema - although he wrote brilliantly about cinema and his book "What is cinema?" remains, probably, the Bible of film criticism of the 20th century - he spoke primarily about metaphysics. Cinema was for him a mystical instrument, a means of knowing the highest truth. That is why, in particular, he idolized Roberto Rossellini, not only the father of Italian neo-realism, but also a Catholic mystic, that is why he so encouraged the interest of his "chicks" in Alfred Hitchcock - because in Hitchcock's thrillers they all saw mystical parables about guilt and redemption, about the sinister double that haunts the protagonist.

But at the same time, Andre Bazin, believing in the metaphysical function of cinema, formulated extremely important things - the thesis of the ontological realism of cinema art, what is also called the “mummy theory”, or “mummy complex”. "Mummy complex" - because, according to Bazin, cinema, as it were, mummifies reality. And, according to Bazin, the ontological realism of the cinematography meant that the screen image, the moving picture, is reality. This is the same reality as the physical reality that surrounds us. But this reality is both physical and metaphysical, and this reality is very dangerous, because it provides the widest opportunities for manipulation with the spectator's consciousness, for a harmful influence on the spectators. Therefore, the director must be extremely honest, he must be even doubly more honest than just an honest person when he makes a movie, because cinematic reality must be treated with the same care as with real reality.

It is this idea of ​​cinema as a second reality and the idea that cinema is not divided into fiction and documentary, that cinema is a kind of single body, and the idea that, as Godard would later say, that “cinema captures death at work” (meaning that cinema captures the inevitable passage of time) - all these ideas, first formulated by André Bazin, can be considered some kind of general theoretical platform of the “new wave”. Then, a few years later, in the film "The Little Soldier" the famous phrase of Jean-Luc Godard will sound that "movie is the truth 24 times a second." This means that each movie frame is 1/24 second in time. That is, this is the idea of ​​cinematography as a second reality and of the increased responsibility of the director in his relation to reality. In particular, Truffaut said: "As a person, I have the right to judge, as an artist - no." This can be considered a kind of common basis for the cinema of the “new wave”.

But it would be a mistake to think that it was precisely this confidence in the ontological realism of cinema that allowed the “new wave” to really somehow throw open the shutters, throw open the doors in a rather musty space, which was traditional French cinema, or high-quality French cinema, or, as the directors of the “new wave” contemptuously called it, “daddy’s cinema”, and let in the air of reality.

The fact is that cinema, along with architecture, is one of the two “social arts”. It is as much, if not more, industry, production, technology than art. Maybe cinema is an art even in the last place, and in the first place - production, business, politics, propaganda, and so on. And no matter how great the desires of young directors who want to finally let fresh air on the screen, they could not have done this if the technological conditions had not matured by the end of the 1950s.

The fact is that only at the end of the 1950s did light cameras appear and come into wide circulation, which could be shot from the shoulder, it was possible to shoot on the streets. Before that, it was simply physically impossible to shoot on the streets. Only at the end of the 1950s did it become possible to record sound simultaneously, including outdoors, in open space. And without these technological innovations, the “new wave”, of course, would not have been possible. It would have remained a collection of good wishes that future directors expressed in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, and a collection of curses that they addressed to traditional, old, "daddy's" cinema.

It is possible to consider such a famous (or notorious, if you like) article by François Truffaut “On a Trend in French Cinematography” as the manifesto of the “new wave”, which, as the legend says, Andre Bazin did not dare to publish for several years due to its radicalism, and only after keeping this article for two or three years in his desk drawer, he decided to publish it. In fact, if you re-read this article, there is nothing revolutionary in it, it is rather counter-revolutionary, because Truffaut curses contemporary French cinema, this is “French-quality cinema”, or “daddy’s cinema”, because it is disrespectful to state institutions, because it is disrespectful to the family, because it makes films about adultery, about adultery, that the school is ridiculed on the screen, the church is ridiculed .

Rereading this article, one may experience some shock, because for us, in hindsight, the “new wave” seems, if we talk in political terms, to be something radically left. It is clear that later experience is superimposed on this, because in 1968 the directors of the “new wave” will really be on the Parisian barricades during the student uprising and Godard will become the most left-wing among the left-wing directors, he will go to shoot films in the Palestinian refugee camps, and so on and so forth.

In addition to the Scherer faction, or the Scherer gang, which exalted Hitchcock and Hawkes, there was and was in the editorial staff of Cahiers du cinéma the so-called progressive dandy faction, which included young, also wonderful, but less well-known directors of the “new wave”, such as Doniol-Valcroze. They were in the Communist Party and fought for life and death with their colleagues in the magazine, because Godard, Truffaut and Chab-role for the left-wing cultural public were reactionaries, right-wing anar-chi-hundred-mi, kato-li-ka-mi - in general, such enraged petty bourgeois, if you use linen Indian terminology. And indeed, if the directors of the "new wave" in terms of their ethics, their attitude to social reality, were anarchists, then it really was such a right-wing, if you like, petty-bourgeois anarchism.

In addition to the desire to let fresh air on the screen and faith in the ontological realism of cinema, the directors of the “new wave” were united by the cult of asocial action. All the heroes of the first, best, loudest films of the “new wave” are people who, one way or another, by their own will or through the fault of circumstances, through the fault of fate, find themselves in confrontation with society. Cinema of the "new wave" glorified antisocial behavior in the best sense of the word. It could have been the senseless theft and accidental murder committed by petty crook Michel Poicart in Godard's breathless debut; or it could be the reluctance of the hero of another Godard film, The Little Soldier, to stand on one side or the other of the barricades in the atmosphere of a civil war that was actually going on in France in the early 1960s: he did not want to be with either the supporters of the independence of Algeria or the fascist bandits from the OAS organization OAS(Organization armée secrète, literally - "Secret Armed Organization") - an underground terrorist organization whose goal was to keep Algeria in the composition of France. The Secret Army was led by officers and ultra-right activists. In 1961-1962, OAS organized a series of major terrorist attacks and political assassinations, as well as several assassination attempts on President de Gaulle. By 1963 the leaders of the OAS had been arrested, some of them executed. and died as a result.

It could be a spontaneous rebellion of a child who is uncomfortable in the family and who runs away from the family, as in the first, beautiful sentimental masterpiece by François Truffaut "400 Blows". It could be antisocial, in general, the behavior of the golden youth, respecting no one and nothing, as in one of the first films by Claude Chabrol, Cousins. Or it could be the fate of a person who, due to an insurmountable set of circumstances, suddenly finds himself in absolute loneliness, without a roof over his head, without any means of subsistence, as in Eric Rohmer's debut film The Sign of the Lion. That is, it was really revolutionary - from the point of view of dramaturgy, from the point of view of the choice of the main character.

For the first time in world cinema, a movement appeared that not only opposed the hero to society, but did not want the hero to reconcile with society. I didn't want a happy ending. There were no happy endings in the films of the "new wave", in any case, in the first years of its existence. It was the first cinematographic direction that canceled the happy ending. And, probably, this is the main thing that united the directors of the “new wave”, because in terms of, strictly speaking, the grammar and syntax of cinematography, they were very different. Godard really broke all the ideas about the grammar of cinema, because he did not know very well how to shoot, but he knew well how not to shoot, and in his film “On the last breath” he violated all the existing written and unwritten laws of editing, writing dialogues, working with actors. Or, like Truffaut or Chabrol, the directors could work within the framework of a completely traditional form and even traditional genres, it does not matter. The main thing that united them was the challenge to society.

As for the second group that I mentioned, the “Left Bank Groups”, this is, first of all, of course, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Agnès Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, who will shoot in 1964 the famous, as it were, musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, where for the first time in the history of world cinema, simple, ordinary people from the city of Cherbourg, in general, the proletariat, will sing on the screen. They will sing the most banal phrases, but this will give a certain poetry, a certain beauty to everyday life. And through this anti-realism, the Left Bank Group also let the fresh air of French reality onto the screen, because it was, in principle, an anti-realist group.

The directors of the "Left Bank Group" made their debut in documentary films, which means they had to be much more reverent in relation to reality than Godard and company. But nevertheless, when they switched to feature films, to fiction, they turned out to be the biggest formalists in French cinema. For example, Alain Resnais made his first films – “Hiroshima, my love”, “Muriel, or the Time of Return”, and even more so “Last Year in Marienbad”, staged according to the script of the leader of the “new novel” Alain Robbe-Grillet - built a word-but modernist writer who writes the text on paper, freely shuffling time and space. And at the same time with this exquisite formalism, which Alain Resnais and his colleagues in the Left Bank Group brought to the general New Wave movement, unlike the directors of the Cahiers du cinéma group, they were very politically biased.

From the very beginning, they turned to the most cruel and urgent political problems that worried not only the French, but all of humanity. Alain Resnais caused a scandal with the film “Hiroshima, my love”, when he combined two tragedies of the Second World War in the space of one story, one discourse. One colossal, global, mass tragedy - the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and a private, almost obscene tragedy of a French girl who fell in love with a German soldier during the war, and then this soldier was killed, and after the release the girl was shaved bald, declared a German bedding and mocked in every possible way.

It was a colossal trauma to the French consciousness, in France they preferred not to talk about such things, they preferred not to talk about the very cruel, often bloody purges that followed in 1944-1945 after the liberation of France from the Nazi occupation. But here Alain Resnais dared to equate the individual tragedy and the tragedy of the whole people, the tragedy of the French girl and the tragedy of the Japanese people. And then until the early 1970s, he became more and more politically engaged.

Agnès Varda was also politically engaged, who made a wonderful film “Cleo from 5 to 7” - in general, it would seem, nothing special, an everyday drama. The heroine, a singer named Cleo, is waiting for the results of medical tests, in two hours she must receive them and find out if she has cancer or not, and for these two hours she wanders around Paris. But now her illness becomes - Agnès Varda says it openly - a metaphor for the illness of the entire French society. And a metaphor for the bloody war in Algeria, which at that moment was being waged by France. And after that Agnes Varda will go to Cuba to film the Cuban revolution. It is impossible to imagine that, say, Truffaut, or Chabrol, or Eric Rohmer went to Cuba at that time - but nevertheless, such a whim of history, as if the synchronism of debuts, unites such different groups under the common label "new wave" as the Cahiers du cinéma group and the Left Bank Group.

Of course, whatever the technological revolution that happened in the late 1950s, there would not have been a “new wave” if there hadn’t been such an amazing concentration of really evil young talents who were dissatisfied with contemporary cinema and literally burst onto the screen, burst into the history of art, into the history of cinema of the twentieth century. And no matter how different they may be, Godard and Truffaut, Chabrol and Rene, Louis Malle and Agnès Varda, all the same - there is no need to revise their commonality, there is no need to question the fact that the "new wave" existed. Because it is precisely due to the fact that they are so different that this very “new wave”, as if non-existent, continues to be, in fact, the most influential movement in world cinema over the past half century.

Thus, when this “new wave” arose in the quiet backwater of French cinema is more or less clear: when the directors of the “new wave” made their debut. When did it end? I must say that, like any cinematographic movement, the "new wave" was buried more than once or twice. But, for sure, we can say that the "new wave" as a kind of integrity, even if imaginary, ended exactly when the colossal list of directors of the "new wave" was published in Cahiers du cinéma. The end of the "new wave" can be dated to around 1963 - when Godard, the most radical among the directors of the "new wave", makes, in my opinion of his associates, a betrayal gesture: he agrees to put a film on a huge budget in a big studio, to put a film on a literary basis (based on Alberto Moravia's novel "Contempt") and, most importantly (shame on him, shame!), to make a film with such commercial stars as Brigitte Bardot and Mi Sel Piccoli in the lead roles. Godard was cursed for this, they said that he killed the "new wave", but nevertheless the film "Contempt", which was filmed contrary to all the written and unwritten laws of the "new wave", remains in the history of cinema as the greatest film about cinema, as the greatest requiem for the old cinema, which the authors of Cahiers du cinéma loved so much and which Godard celebrated. And, of course, honor and praise to Go-da-ru for the fact that in this film he made one of the heroes of the great Fritz Lang, before whom he bowed, one of the greatest German and American directors of the 1920-50s.

At the same time, say, the ideas of the "new wave", if they existed, were also betrayed by Claude Chabrol, who began to shoot, speaking openly, the devil knows what: films about special agents, "Tiger strangles with dynamite", "Tiger loves fresh meat", "Marie Chantal against Dr. Ha". But in this, in general, there was no betrayal of the “new wave” either - just as there was no betrayal in Godard’s decision to collaborate with a big studio, because the “new wave” adored genre cinema and, by making these spy films, Chabrol simply realized what he dreamed about when he was still a critic of Cahiers du cinéma.

On the one hand, one can, of course, say that the “new wave” ended by 1963, because it was betrayed by Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, who also went into the studio production system. But, on the other hand, one of the principles of the "new wave" by and large was unscrupulousness, variability, proteism. They could not betray their own principles, because they invented these principles themselves. They decide for themselves what kind of cinematography should be and what kind of “new wave” should be.

For chronological simplicity, in order not to really go too far into the chronological and terminological jungle, we will consider that the “new wave” as an integral movement ended by 1963. But obviously, the "new wave" will live as long as the last director of the "new wave" is alive. And still removes and is full of strength Jean-Luc Godard. He is 87 years old, and recently, when he was asked if he had seen the feature film “Young Godard” dedicated to him, he replied that he had not, because the past did not interest him - he was only interested in the future. And in this Godard, at the age of 87, is true to the principles of the "new wave", and the "new wave" will die only together with its last director.

Decryption

An important milestone was overcome in 1958. Due to the fact that the government of the Fourth Republic could not cope with the situation that arose as a result of the war in Algeria, in 1958, fearing an imminent civil war, President Rene Coty turned to the hero of the war years, General de Gaulle, with a request to return to power and restore order in the country. He agreed - on the condition that he was given complete freedom of action. It will take time to solve the Algerian problem, but the general undertook to restore order in the country immediately. First of all, a new constitution was drafted and put to the vote by popular referendum; 80% of the French voted for it. De Gaulle was generally very fond of asking the opinion of the people: he would resort to this method five times during the years of his ten-year reign. De Gaulle is elected president of the new, fifth French republic, which turned out to be extremely stable and flexible, as a result of which it functions to this day. The new constitution has strengthened the role of the president, who is no longer elected by parliament, but by popular vote for a term of seven years. In this post, General de Gaulle will stay for almost a term and a half, until the events of 1968.

The most important thing that has happened in the new decade is the solution of the colonial problem. Almost all French colonies in Asia, Africa and Indonesia gained independence. However, Algeria, which France cherished most of all, proved to be a tough nut to crack. In 1958, de Gaulle was not yet inclined to grant him freedom. But the Algerian war was so bloody and costly for the French budget that the president eventually leaned towards the decision "Algeria for the Algerians" and signed the Evian Accords in March 1962. One can imagine how difficult and dramatic the resettlement of the Algerian French to the continent was. Workers, merchants, entrepreneurs, teachers left their homes, feeling like Europeans in a colony, and now they find themselves in the role of "black-footed" outcasts Pieds-Noirs, that is, “black-footed,” was the name given to the French who lived in Algeria., claiming-shih on French territory and other people's jobs. By the way, the famous Enrico Macias, a sweet-voiced author and performer of songs, a virtuoso musician of Spanish-Jewish-Algerian origin, became their “voice”, and the anthem is the song “ I left my country ».

However, the new decade brought rapid development and prosperity to France. A monetary reform was carried out that reduced inflation: in 1960, the old franc was replaced by a new one at a ratio of 1 to 100; True, the French could not get used to this innovation for a long time and continued to count everything in old francs. Agriculture was modernized, mechanized and put on a cost-effective footing. The industry sprang forward, especially such areas as housing construction, ferrous metallurgy, energy, telecommunications, automotive, chemistry and the nuclear industry. Steps towards the development of the last, very important area were made in the 1950s and 1960s: nine nuclear reactors were built and put into operation, and the nuclear industry became the main source of electricity generation.

During these years, the service sector also developed: for example, in 1958, the first supermarket was opened in a small town near Paris, and in 1963, in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois (this name for us is associated primarily with the Russian cemetery and the graves of the White Guards, but it is also just a town near Paris), the first Carrefour hypermarket was opened, which means “Crossroads”. The well-being of the French is growing significantly: in every family there are such attributes of comfort as a refrigerator, washing machine, TV, transistor, record player, car.

The culture of leisure is developing more and more actively, to which the French attach great importance, because they work the least in the world and are very proud of it: for example, the working week is now 35 hours. And then working leave increased: if in 1956 the workers received a third paid in addition to two weeks, then in 1969 - already the fourth. As for Sundays, there is a special story here. Since 1906, there has been a law in France that no one has repealed and according to which Sunday is a mandatory day of rest for everyone. That is why for more than a century shops have been closed on Sundays.

But not only leisure - the whole life of France in the 1960s was marked by joy, friendliness, an increasing desire for freedom and an appetite for life. This worldview was reflected in the comic song of Gilbert Beko " Salut les copains” (“Hello Friends”), which in 1959 gave its name to a daily radio broadcast, and in 1962 to a youth magazine. Actually, the song is about a failed trip to Italy, because the hero missed the train. As for the program and the magazine, they were devoted to the stage and the new, popular among the youth of those years, the ye-ye style - in other words, the jazz-rock style. The radio station broadcast throughout Europe. The transfer lasted 10 years, while the magazine Salut les copains ended its days only in 2006. You could find everything your heart desires in it: information about co-existence in the field of music, interested in young people, about concerts, French, American and English singers (about The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, of course, in the first place); the magazine published posters, lyrics, photos of fashion shows with the participation of pop stars, portraits of idols of the era.

Who were these idols? The brightest star was and still is Johnny Holly-day, an absolute self-made, raised backstage in music halls by a Parisian dancer, because his father left the baby naked on the floor and went to drink his cradle. With such a debut, the 17-year-old teenager and aspiring singer had no choice but to change his name, taking an American pseudonym, and start imitating Elvis Presley. The success was instantaneous and deafening: in 1961, at his solo concert at the Sports Palace, the audience was already breaking chairs in ecstasy. It should be noted that such a reaction became the style of the era: Gilbert Beco (also, by the way, a pseudonym) recalled that much earlier, already in 1954, he broke the piano in the Olympia concert hall, and the audience, in turn, expressed delight, breaking chairs.

Young people poured onto the stage, and quite often they came by chance: it was not necessary to have a musical education. So, for example, the star of the beautiful Marie Laforet (again, a fictitious name) rose quite unexpectedly. She just replaced her sister at the Birth of a Star contest - and won. A whole galaxy of stars was formed, moreover international: Bulgarian Sylvie Vartan, Greek Nana Mouskouri, son of refugees from Odessa Michel Polnareff, Egyptian Claude Francois, Sicilian and Belgian Salvatore Adamo, French Mireille Mathieu, Serge Lama and many others. The most "French" of all stars enjoyed a special status - Brigitte Bardot, not only the embodiment of femininity, a sex bomb, but also the female embodiment of the Gallic spirit; not only the most filmed film actress of those years, but also a very successful songwriter. She was so pi-kant-na, impudent, provocative, natural and spontaneous, that everyone was in love with her without exception. She became the sculptural embodiment of the French Republic. Her loudest love affair was, perhaps, the story with the now iconic, but then still insecure Serge Gainsbourg; smitten on the spot, he dedicated the song “Initials B. B.” to her, in which there are such lines: “She is in high boots to the top of her long legs, / Above this cup is an unprecedented beauty flower.” In addition to boots, there was nothing on Brigitte at that moment.

However, everything we talked about is just pop music, that is, the art of performing light genre songs written by others, where the text is not so important, but the musical component is important: voice, melody, arrangement, orchestra accompaniment, in which new instruments sound (electric guitars, drums); where a new dance-y-you-wat style appears, introduced by Johnny Hallyday and Claude Francois and picked up by other performers.

This is how a youth culture is formed, which did not exist before. A fashion for young people and a new style of behavior are being formed, and in the future this trend will take on a wider scale. It will be a new wave of world perception, it will become fashionable to be young.

In parallel with the youth stage in France, another branch of stage art was developing - the author's song. This genre flourished for a long time, went back to the troubadours, trouvers and minstrels and continued to exist according to traditions that changed from era to era. These songs were performed, as a rule, by the authors themselves in cafes, bars, cabarets and café-concerts; the main thing in them was the literary text and the author's concept. In the 1950s, a whole galaxy of bright, dissimilar singing poets and sometimes poetesses formed, who, as a rule, continued to create in the 1960s and later. Perhaps, Charles Aznavour, an ever-changing star in the French sky, appeared on the stage before everyone else. He is not like anyone else, he created his own style, everyone knows him, it is not new to talk about him. But Boris Vian, who did not live until the 1960s and devoted the last few years of his life to the song, was in many ways the soil from which other bards grew. Serge Gainsbourg, for example, admitted that he would not write songs if he had not absorbed Vian's songs with their irony, sarcasm, brokenness and unique intonation at one time. The most scandalous and one of the most famous was the song " Deserter”, written as a reaction to the war in Indochina, but perceived by war veterans as a mockery of their past.

Jacques Brel needs no introduction: he is not a Frenchman, but a Belgian, which in France is not a trump card, but rather an aggravating circumstance. But his poems, which no one sang better than him, are so beautiful, and at the same time he turned out to be such a wonderful performer and actor (like Aznavour) that he conquered France in the late 1950s. He started, like Boris Vian, in the cabaret Trois Baudets (“Three Donkeys”) and took the rational French by the soul: in the middle of the concert, they gave him a standing ovation, demanding a re-performance of their favorite songs - “Do not leave me” or “Amsterdam”.

Barbara (her stage name), one of the few women in this field, who combined magnificent poetry, beautiful music that she composed herself, accompaniment on the piano (and not on the guitar, like, say, Brassens, who helped her, by the way, to enter the stage) and a magical voice, low and gentle at the same time, took to the living. She sang only her own songs.

Georges Brassens in the 1960s was already a classic of the genre, without which there would be neither the genre nor other bards. It's like Pushkin in Russian literature. Thanks to the famous singer of the 1950s Patash, he got onto the stage from the hut - and immediately, in 1954, he received the Grand Prix of the Song Academy and a pass to the most prestigious concert halls of the capital. The French have always loved anarchists, subverters of bourgeois values. Brassens was a completely uncompromising person who did not care deeply about comfort, money, social institutions, even his own health - everything except poetry. Actually, this is the only thing that he studied in life, and not somewhere, but on his own. And his songs are primarily high poetry, despite the rude humor and obscene language.

In addition to the listed stars of the intellectual genre, there were also such figures as Georges Moustaki, Claude Nougaro, Leo Ferret, Jean Ferrat and many others, but it takes a lot of time to talk about them.

The “New Wave” was formed in the 1960s in the cinema too: a large number of young directors began to shoot short films, mostly documentaries. Having honed their skills on documentaries, new directors are taken to artistic (though low-budget) films. New names are flashing: Alain Resnais, Alexandre Astruc, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard… The director becomes an author. Films are shot on lightweight cameras that can be worn on the shoulder, the cameraman goes outside, lightning-fast, quickly succeeding episodes, the glare of the sun, the flickering of the crowd fall into the lens. The most striking is Godard's "Breathless" with two young actors: the charming Jean-Paul Belmondo and the boy-like Jean Seberg.

In the theater in the 1960s, the trend of decentralization continued. Companies of young actors are being formed in the regions, youth theaters that do not have premises and compensate for everything with their enthusiasm and efficiency. Having settled in some city or working-class suburb (for example, in Nan-Terre, Saint-Denis, Villejuif, etc.), they received a subsidy from the municipality and had to prove to the Ministry of Culture that their professional and artistic level was high enough for the theater to be given the status of a “permanent troupe” and its director to be given the title of “animator”. The highest degree of recognition of the youth theater was its transformation into a theatrical center, and then into the House of Culture. The House of Culture was invented by the then Minister of Culture, writer André Malraux, who was in this post from 1959 to 1969. Among the leaders of theater troupes, such names stand out as Gabriel Garran, who works in the commune of Aubert-villiers, Gabriel Cousin, who stages performances in Grenoble and writes plays himself, and others. Stylistically, their favorite technique is the fusion of genres - songs, pantomimes, musical numbers, cinema, acting. The role of the leader of the troupe, that is, the director, is being revised: from now on, there is no dictatorship, each member of the troupe has the right to contribute to the production, express criticisms, wishes, offer their own vision. Full democracy. The themes of the performances are borrowed from the burning modernity: for example, colonial problems, the nuclear threat, the interdependence of the oppressors and the oppressed, and so on. Among theatrical authors, I hear such names as Jean Genet (with his plays Balcony, Negros, Screens), Aimé Sezer, Armand Gatti, Jean Vautier, Jacques Adiberti, Fernando Arra-bal and others. In 1964, the famous creation of Aria-na Mnushkin Théâtre du Soleil (Theater of the Sun) was born. It was a collective theatre, organized as a cooperative of workers (in this case the workers of the stage), in which everyone did everything and received the same salary. Ariana Mnushkin herself often happened to check tickets at the entrance. The theater of the sun was distinguished by stage effects, visibility of the action, mobile sets, dynamism of the production, as well as live music. Over time, the head of the theater, having played enough of democracy, will change style and return to strict directing - but this will be already in the 1980s. According to the principle of the Theater of the Sun, the Aquarium Theater and the National Theater of Lorraine (TPL) were built and operated.

In general, the most important result of the 1960s was the emergence of the so-called consumer society, the formation of an Americanized youth democratic culture and an increasing desire for freedom in its various manifestations. The world is tired of living in the old way; it was not possible to get enough of innovations. And the very large generation born during the baby boom years (that is, in the first half of the 1950s) and reaching the rebellious age by the end of the 1960s turned out to be especially sensitive to this discontent. First of all, these are students. It is curious that students showed their dissatisfaction not only in France, but throughout the world: in the spring of 1968, student protests captured Madrid, Berlin, Rome, Berkeley and even Tokyo. It was a protest against all - bourgeois or not - foundations, against the authority of the authorities, family traditions, patriarchal commandments and prohibitions.

But back to France. What were the dissatisfied with the Parisian students? Teaching style, university programs, lack of jobs at the end of the university, traditional French selection by merit, the new, uncomfortable department of philology in Nanterre, living conditions on the university campus and the dullness of the surrounding landscape, as well as the impossibility of free movement between the male and female dormitory on campus. Of course, the slogans of the rebels were more general social than practical: “Run, comrade, the old world is following you”, “Sorbonne for students”, “Let's be realists - we will demand the impossible”, “Beaches under the pavement”, “We don’t want to spend our lives making money”, “Make love, not war”. Love, or rather the freedom of love, was demanded by students across the ocean. Didn't this slogan come from the stage? "All you need is love" as the Beatles sang in 1967. The student demonstrations were very quickly led by left-wing groups and, above all, by the so-called March 22 Movement, led by the young leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit. One of the political slogans of the left groups was the following: "La volonté générale contre la volonté du général". With the loss of a play on words, it can be translated as "The general will against the will of the general." This meant that General de Gaulle became unpopular, his style of government did not appeal to young people, that is, the era of de Gaulle came to an end. And the events of May 1968 proved this.

Text 2 Nikita opened the door and sat down on the porch. A brook rolled up to the very feet, touched the feet and ran on about its business. Nikita carefully lowered the sliver-boat into its waters and looked after him for a long time. And then he stood up abruptly, smiled at the sun, at the stream. The pain receded, and a bell sang in my soul: Spring has come! (A. Tolstoy) 5

The thesis is a provision that briefly sets out some idea, as well as one of the main thoughts of a lecture, report, essay, or, in other words, this is the main idea of ​​the text that needs to be proved. Evidence is the confirmation of some position with facts or arguments, or, in other words, these are examples that prove the main idea of ​​the text. The conclusion is the result of the discussion. Usually the conclusion coincides with the thought that was expressed at the beginning of the text. Sometimes the conclusion is missing because it is obvious and the reader can make it himself. 7

Mom is the most sacred word on earth! Man is born and dies with this word. The farmer gratefully says: "Thank you, nurse-mother." A soldier, mortally wounded, whispers: "For the Motherland!" All the most precious shrines are named and illuminated by the name of the mother. 9

In Rus', gifts have always been loved, they were able to find in them a secret meaning and happy news. Numerous fairy tales speak of a donated knife, on which blood appears if its owner got into trouble across the sea. Or about how the groom recognizes his bride by the given ring. It is also no coincidence that in fairy tales the hero does not find most of the wonderful objects, but receives them as a gift: whether it is a ball showing the way or a wish-fulfilling ring. 17

What they give, they do not reproach. Whom I love, I give. Whom you love, you yourself give, but you do not love, and you will not accept from him. Accept the small, and give the big time. Don't look for small things, don't look for big things. A gift is not a purchase: they do not blame, but praise. To accept gifts, so to give away. And a small gift is not a burden. At home, it’s not hunger, but the gift is dear. A gift is not dear, love is dear. Expensive gift not asked for. Not lyuba godfather and gifts are not nice. A gift strap is better than a purchased strap. From mother heating, from father little things, and then almost for a gift. A poor guy went bankrupt: he bought a copper ring for a girl. Don't look a free horse in the mouth. Expensive testicle for Christ's day. 22

The gift is not discussed, they accept with gratitude what they give. So they say when someone received as a gift some thing that they don’t really like and that they themselves would not choose. But it is not customary to talk about this in the face of the donor. The proverb is explained by the old custom of carefully examining the horse's teeth when buying it, since it is easy to determine the age from them: an old horse's teeth are usually erased (compare the phraseological unit: to eat teeth on something they say about an experienced person who has lived a lot and experienced life, but initially this expression was used in relation to an old horse). 23

I have a granddaughter. One day she says: - Vera has a birthday on Saturday. She invited me to visit. I need to buy her a present. What would you give her? Mom began to give good advice, but then I intervened in the conversation: - And my friends in childhood had an unwritten law: on birthdays, give only what was done with your own hands. - Well, you know, grandfather! In our class they will say that I am greedy and that I am a bad friend, - said the granddaughter. 25

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A gift chosen with love is recognized immediately by the desire to guess the taste of the addressee, by the originality of the idea, by the very manner of presenting the gift. (A. Morois) Every gift, even the smallest one, becomes a great gift if you give it with love. (D. Walcot) The value of a gift is determined by its relevance rather than price. (C.Warner) Three things make up the dignity of a gift: feeling, relevance and the way of presenting. (Sommery) Give little by little - and the gift will double the price: The way you give is worth the gifts themselves. (P. Corneille) 27

1. I think (I believe, I believe) that ... In my opinion, I am right ... I am convinced (sure) that ... I cannot agree that ... It seems to me (thinks) that ... 2. I can say (argue) that ... Contradicts myself ... Firstly, ... Secondly, ... Thirdly, ... 3. I would like to emphasize (say again) ... So ... Thus ... Therefore ... I understand that ... 28

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As for the little birthday men and women, it is customary to give them toys, sweets and good children's books. In choosing toys and books, one must take into account not only the age, but also the inclinations of the child, and it is also necessary to notice what kind of toys and books he likes best. thirty

Not to congratulate grandfather or grandmother, father or mother, brother or sister, or even a close relative and even your good friend on the day of the angel would be the height of inattention and indecency on the part of the uncongratulatory. It would be especially painful for the older members of the family in relation to the younger ones, that is, if the grandson or granddaughter, son or daughter did not congratulate their grandfather or grandmother, mother or father. Forgetfulness in this case is not excusable and is tantamount to inattention. 31

If a grandson or granddaughter, son or daughter lives in different cities with a grandfather, grandmother, father or mother and the space separating them does not allow you to personally congratulate the dear birthday man or birthday girl, then the grandson, granddaughter, son or daughter must certainly send a congratulatory letter on angel's day. Moreover, care should be taken that this letter arrives just in time, that is, on the very day of the angel of the one to whom it is addressed. Of course, the letter can be replaced by a congratulatory telegram. 32

It is not customary to give gifts to someone without being related to him or being his soulmate. Gifts from strangers to ladies or girls are considered especially indecent. The only exceptions in this case are bouquets and sweets. Giving flowers is always permissible and accepted everywhere. 33