Each new cultural worker wants to bring something completely original to his work and, of course, wants to leave an indelible mark on the history of mankind. But the search for new artistic forms and meanings, for some reason, invariably led the creators to process traditions. In addition, it is known that artistic culture is a product of the intellectual and spiritual work of man in the conditions of contemporary social reality. Thus, until the end of Article 19 every artist and writer tried to create the New, while experiencing the influence of the Present and the Past. Thus, proclaiming the Future in words, in fact, they actually turned their backs to it. The modernists decided to put an end to this absurdity - they completely renounced the past and the present in order to create What That Never Had Been.
Society has responded to an attempt to destroy traditional art methods with aggressive attacks on modernists.
At the beginning of the twentieth century. the appearance in the art salons of blatantly strange works provoked a reaction of acute indignation among connoisseurs. The famous Spanish philosopher H. Ortega y Gasset explained this by the fact that the art of modernism is unpopular in nature. Moreover - it is antipopular.
What is modernism? In painting, the pursuit of innovation gave rise to three directions: cubism (which appeared in France, but invariably associated with the name of the Spaniard Picasso), futurism (persistently and scandalously propagated in Italy) and abstractionism (like a virus brought from Russia to Germany by Vasily Kandinsky).
A demonstrative and aggressive rejection of any traditions and conventions was proclaimed by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who naively considered his work an absolute innovation. However, did he have the right to claim originality? After all, he wrote his confused, stumbling poems with the help of ordinary words! Hugo Ball, the founder of Dadaism, who read meaningless verses from ... sounds on the stage, felt much more progressive against the background of such self-proclaimed geniuses.
Numerous and diverse modernist movements arose in different years, in different countries. They were not connected with national traditions and did not have international significance. Modernism in literature has become a reaction to the inhumanity of a new civilization. Artists and writers of the modernist era believed that their manifestos, embodied in life, would change the world.
Many motley movements (imagism, acmeism, expressionism, surrealism, constructivism, existentialism) were united by only one - the anti-realistic creative method.
Modernism in literature is a hellish mixture of denial of humanistic values with the display of formal signs of vital functions of organisms endowed with consciousness.
At the same time, each of the innovators considered himself the Most Main Creator of the New. In the struggle for the ideals of modern art, cultural figures of that time openly violated the principles of common sense.
Modernism in literature is James Joyce, Eugene Ionescu, Jean Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse and many other authors, singing the ode to the absurdity of being, pretending that everyone lives only to die tomorrow, no, no, too pathos word, much more precisely, it will sound like this: imperceptibly die and rot like a worm.
It is enough to read the short novel “Transformation” by Franz Kafka to get a clear idea of the creative method and ideology of modernism. Let's retell the plot in a nutshell.
A man wakes up in his bed and discovers that he is a giant wood louse, and now we need to somehow continue to live in his family, despite the fact that relatives feel undisguised disgust and hatred for him and even attempt to kill. But he looks like a wood louse only from the outside - a tender human heart beats inside, the soul is torn with pain, the brain is not able to comprehend all the hopelessness and catastrophe of what happened.
Such is modernism in literature, accusing society of complete moral and mental decay.
Modernist trends, with all their diversity, interpret the correlation of art and reality, as well as form and content. Art is more important than reality, art begets itself and exists for itself, art is life. And life is all art, sorry for the absurd statement, it is rather death, the process of dying. Accordingly, the form is more important than the content.
Modernism has entered a cultural field plowed by previous generations (trying to grow in the new social conditions either the seeds of the ancient tradition, or the seeds of the romantic heritage of the Middle Ages), in order to fill the uneven greasy chernozem furrow giving birth to unoriginal ideas with durable impenetrable and clean asphalt of the Brand New Art .
The confusion of concepts, the denial of the ideals of the past, the overthrow of authority and the rejection of all the traditional leads to the fact that modernism exhausts all sources of novelty.
Gradually, in the struggle with the old, the new art began to destroy itself. The asphalt of modernism was not so strong. Through its firmament the sprouts of postmodernism began to break through, absorbing all the power of the soil that generates all art - the history of human civilization.
Modernism and postmodernism differ only in that the latter does not seek to destroy the past (after all, this is impossible). It simply secures the transition from creativity (as the birth of something fundamentally new) to construction (as the only possible type of artistic activity).
Today's artist, writer, poet, being highly educated and well-informed, understands perfectly well that the images generated by his imagination are the essence of quotation. And he, by and large, does not have the right to claim authorship of his works: all plots, motives, and artistic means cannot be called original, because they have already been used in previous cultural eras. The author only adds a new picture from old materials.