The dramatics of Bernard Show is a new stage in the development of the English literature of the XX century

George Bernard Shaw - the largest English playwright of the late XIX -early XX century. He managed to bring the English drama out of the ideological and artistic impasse characteristic of the 60-70s of the XIX century. He gave it a social edge, a problem character and a brilliant satirical-paradoxical form.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in the family of a sales clerk. The family was mostly supported by a mother, a music teacher and a talented singer. There was disagreement in the house, children were treated carelessly. But there was no shortage of music and interesting, intellectual conversations, to which the teenager hungrily listened.

When the boy was 15 years old, his mother left the house and went to London in search of earnings. The future writer, never having received a systematic secondary education, got a job as a clerk in a land office.

His own vast knowledge Shaw acquired self-taught. He did not have to study at the university. The middle school, with its scholastic method of teaching, corporal punishment, and mechanical cramming left him with the most painful memories.

A great formative influence on the Show was his native Ireland - her poetic nature, but even more - the daily Irish reality, full of screaming contradictions.

The adolescent years of the writer coincided with the rise of the national liberation movement, which, however, never ceased in Ireland. In 1858, the Irish revolutionary organization of the Fenians arose.

In 1867, an armed insurrection broke out, which was brutally suppressed. The leaders of the movement were executed. The Irish people responded to the execution with a powerful demonstration of sorrow.

• B.    Shaw was during these events 11-12 years. He, like his whole family, fervently sympathized with the Fenians. Recalling his school years, Shaw writes: "Answering the lessons of history, I sang the praises of Ireland. The boys were surprised, the teachers, smiling, kept silence. All these teachers were secret fenya; I, too, was a young Fenius. "

It is characteristic that Shaw's first speech in the press was anti-religious. In 1875, two prominent evangelist preachers arrived in Dublin from New York. The show came out against them in the Dublin newspaper "Public of the Opium" with a witty article that had a sensational success.

In 1876, 20-year-old Shaw went to London. He found a job at the telephone company; the main goal of his life from now on was literary creativity. He earned a pittance, poorly fed and wore torn shoes, but wrote a novel after the novel and unsuccessfully sent them to the publishing house. Subsequently, he argued that his novels were rejected by 60 publishing houses.

The show was acutely aware of its difference from the English bourgeois society. "I was a foreigner," he writes in his memoirs, "I was an Irishman, that is, more than a foreigner. I was not uneducated. But all that I knew was not studied in English universities. And what was taught there, I did not know and could not believe in it. I was a provincial. I had to change the mindset of London. "* 2. Five novels by B. Shaw written in the 70s and 80s (" Immaturity "," Unreasonable Marriage "," Love of Artists "," The Profession of Cachel Byron "and" The

Socialist -one "), only literary critics are interested now. But sharp, concise descriptions, reminiscent of scenic remarks, a vivid, often saturated with paradoxes dialogue - all this foreshadows the young novelist brilliant playwright. The social color of the novels is still insignificant. So, in the novel "The Profession of Cachel Byron" the problem of equality between people gets its expression in a marriage between an educated aristocrat and a boxer. In the novel Socialist-loner, Shaw makes the wealthy Trefusis carrier of socialist ideas, trying to instill in the bourgeoisie the ideas of the inevitability and even the profitability of socialism.

In the 80 years before the Show opened the road of the publicist, and on it he achieved success. He works first as a music critic in the newspaper "Star" under the Italian pseudonym Cornot di Basseto, and then as a theater reviewer in a number of newspapers and magazines.

By the end of the 1980s, Shaw's social views also took shape, although they had a somewhat eclectic and contradictory character until the end. Initially, Shaw was carried away, like most of his Irish compatriots, by the theories of the American economist Henry George, who considered the issue of land rent to be the most important issue and proposed to arrange the purchase of land by farmers. Propagating these views, Shaw very soon encountered the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle. The just reproaches of ideological opponents in ignorance of Marxism forced Shaw to study Marx, first of all "Capital." This book made a strong impression on him. "Marx opened my eyes to the facts of history and civilization, discovered the purpose and meaning of life," he wrote subsequently. Shaw often later called himself a Marxist, but in essence he did not become a Marxist.

In 1884, Shaw, together with his wife Webb, organized the so-called "Fabian Society and became his ardent propagandist. It was a social reformist organization that appropriated its name by the name of the Roman commander Fabius Cuntator (Medlitel), who was able to deal a decisive blow to the

Carthaginian leader Hannibal precisely because he had long waited and waited a long time. Such expectant, passive tactics regarding capitalism were also suggested by the Fabians. They categorically denied the class struggle and the revolution and believed that socialism can be built through reforms, by "impregnating liberalism with socialism." They placed special hopes on the so-called "municipal socialism", on the penetration of the Fabians through elections to the organs of city self-government. "Fabian society in many ways preceded modern Labor and had nothing to do with the genuine socialist labor movement. It was a typically intellectual organization that considered the proletariat ignorant and rude, incapable of fighting for its own liberation, and therefore graciously deigned to lead this struggle. This is how Engels characterizes the Fabians, calling them "Intellectuals jar exellence".

Entering the "Fabian Society", Shaw discovered the extraordinary abilities of a meeting speaker and propagandist. He participates in all Fabian periodicals, treatises and manifestos, uses any platform.

However, F. Engels and V.I. Lenin separate Shaw from other Fabians, recognizing his subjective honesty. F. Engels described it in the 80s as follows: "The paradoxical fictionalist Shaw is very talented and witty, but absolutely worthless as an economist and politician, although he is honest and not a careerist...".

• V.I. Lenin in a conversation with an English journalist Arthur Ransom in 1918 called Shaw "a nice guy who fell in with the Fabians," and stressed that B. Shaw "far to the left of all who surround him"

Sources:

• 1.    Adams, Elsie Bonita (1971). Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8142-0155-8.

• 2.    Conolly, L. W. (2005). "Introduction". Bernard Shaw: "Mrs Warren's Profession". Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. ISBN 978-1-55111627-3.

• 3.    Smith, Adrian (2013). The New Statesman: Portrait of a Political Weekly 1913–1931. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7146-4645-9.

"Экономика и социум" №9 (52) 2018