Modernist literature

Little magazines

Little magazines refer to any of various small periodicals, usually avant-garde and noncommercial, devoted to serious literary writings. They were published from about 1880 into the 21st century and flourished in the United States and England. Foremost in the ranks of such magazines were two American periodicals. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world. The more erratic and often more sensational The Little Review (1914–29) was founded by Margaret Anderson, also in Chicago. A major guiding spirit in the little magazines movement was the American poet and critic Ezra Pound, who served as “foreign correspondent” for both Poetry and The Little Review and held important roles at the English publications Egoist and Blast.

A conspicuous feature of the little magazine movement was the expatriate magazine, published usually in France but occasionally elsewhere in Europe by young American and British critics and writers. The major emphasis in this period was upon literary and aesthetic form and theory and the publication of fresh and original work, such as that of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Later magazines founded in the United States include Partisan Review (1934) and The Kenyon Review (1939, by poet John Crowe Ransom).

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Imagism

Pound also played a central role in Imagism, a literary movement that centered on a group of American and English poets whose poetic manifesto emphasizes direct and sparse language. The group, which also included H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint, formed about 1912 and was inspired by the critical views of literary critic and philosopher T.E. Hulme, in revolt against what Hulme saw as the prevalent careless thinking and Romantic optimism. Imagism was a successor to the French Symbolist movement, but, whereas Symbolism had an affinity with music, Imagism sought analogy with sculpture. Its other precursors were ancient Greek lyric poetry and Japanese haiku.

In 1914 Pound turned to Vorticism, a literary and artistic movement that rejected sentimentality and attempted to relate art to industrialization. Amy Lowell largely took over leadership of the group until it was absorbed by the larger Modernist movement. Among others who were influenced by Imagism in their own poetry include Eliot, Monroe, Joyce, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and D.H. Lawrence.

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African American culture between about 1918 and 1937. Culturally pluralistic and representing diverse perspectives and strains of thought, it was the most influential movement in African American literary history. The movement also encompassed developments in the visual arts, dance, music, publishing, philosophy, and sociology. Although it centered on the Harlem district in New York City, its impact was felt worldwide.

One of its foremost figures was the poet Langston Hughes, who early on in his writing career published an essay in The Nation that provided a manifesto for a new Black literature. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” he wrote:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of other poets, among them Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. In fiction, Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940), and Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages and journey to self-empowerment in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Other novelists included Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Wallace Thurman. Hughes, Hurston, Dunbar Nelson, and Thurman also wrote plays, as did Georgia Douglas Johnson, whose work centered on women and the folk experience. Also important to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The Messenger, a socialist journal connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black labor union. These and other publications featured poetry and fiction as well as articles about social issues.

Lost Generation

In the 1920s a group of American writers who had come of age during World War I and later established their literary reputations became known as the Lost Generation. Many of them were expatriates who made Paris the center of their literary activities. They included Hart Crane, a pioneer among queer poets, and E.E. Cummings, who became known for his unconventional punctuation and idiosyncratic phrasing in poetry. F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925), and Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of this generation.

The term Lost Generation is credited to avant-garde writer and self-styled genius Gertrude Stein. According to Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a “génération perdue.” In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, “You are all a lost generation.”

One of the Parisian hubs for many Lost Generation writers was the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, owned by Sylvia Beach, an American woman who had served with the Red Cross during the war and opened her bookstore in Paris’s Left Bank in 1919. She specialized in books published in Great Britain and the United States and played a crucial role in bringing one of the great Modernist literary works, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), to publication despite the book’s censorship challenges.

Algonquin Round Table

In June 1919 a group of literary friends met at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City for a welcome home luncheon and roast to honor the author, critic, and actor Alexander Woollcott, who had recently returned from serving in World War I. The event was such a success that it led to what has been termed “the ten-year lunch”—a gathering at the same hotel throughout the 1920s and for much of the ’30s. Known as the Algonquin Round Table—because the group eventually dined at a round-shaped table in the hotel—its participants included many of the best-known writers, journalists, and artists in New York. Among them were poet, critic, and screenwriter Dorothy Parker, drama critic and managing editor of Vanity Fair Robert Benchley, playwright and journalist George S. Kaufman, The New Yorker founder and editor Harold W. Ross, and novelist Edna Ferber.

The Algonquin Round Table became celebrated for its members’ lively, witty conversation and urbane sophistication. Although their writings were deemed “middlebrow” compared to the avant-garde work of the Modernists, many members were also the “tastemakers” of the era, publishing or critiquing the literary experimentations of such authors as Cummings, Hemingway, Stein, André Gide, and Djuna Barnes. Parker, who wrote a column for The New Yorker called “Constant Reader,” especially developed a reputation for her acerbic writing and razor-sharp views on Modernist works.

Other American Modernist writers

Many other voices contributed to American Modernist literature. Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions in which they lived—New England and the Midwest, respectively. William Carlos Williams made the ordinary appear extraordinary through the clarity and discreteness of his imagery. Edna St. Vincent Millay came to personify romantic rebellion and bravado in the 1920s. Novelist Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918). John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Gertrude Stein attempted to parallel the theories of the art movement Cubism in her writing, specifically in her concentration on the illumination of the present moment (for which she often relied on the present perfect tense) and her use of slightly varied repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation. Among her works that were most influenced by Cubism is Tender Buttons (1914), which carries fragmentation and abstraction to an extreme.

English Modernist literature

From 1908 to 1914 in Britain there was a remarkably productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era. For a brief moment London, which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound, and many of its most notable figures were American.

The spirit of Modernism was first expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of the Georgian movement (1912–22) and more authentically by the English and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, the Imagists worked with brief and economical forms. Meanwhile, painters and sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis under the banner of Vorticism, combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the example of the Italian Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature the new sensations of movement and scale associated with modern developments such as automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast (two editions, 1914 and 1915) Vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece and in Lewis, its editor, its most active propagandist, and accomplished literary exponent.

World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in Pound’s angry and satirical Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of anguish and with the wish that writers might again make form and style the bearers of authentic meanings.

In his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization in his view only too eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of industrialization upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of the fictional tradition, which he had used to brilliant effect in his deeply felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, Sons and Lovers (1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope that individual and collective rebirth could come through human intensity and passion.

Bloomsbury group

A younger and more contemporary voice belonged to members of the Bloomsbury group. Setting themselves against the humbug and hypocrisy that, they believed, had marked their parents’ generation in upper-class England, they aimed to be uncompromisingly honest in personal and artistic life. In Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic biographical study Eminent Victorians (1918), this amounted to little more than amusing irreverence, even though Strachey had a profound effect upon the writing of biography. But in the fiction of Virginia Woolf the rewards of this outlook were both profound and moving.

In short stories and novels of great delicacy and lyrical power, Woolf set out to portray the limitations of the self, caught as it is in time, and suggested that these limitations could be transcended, if only momentarily, by engagement with another self, a place, or a work of art. This preoccupation not only charged the act of reading and writing with unusual significance but also produced, in To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931)—perhaps her most inventive and complex novel—and Between the Acts (1941), her most somber and moving work, some of the most daring fiction produced in the 20th century.

Woolf believed that her viewpoint offered an alternative to the destructive egotism of the masculine mind, an egotism that had found its outlet in World War I, but, as she made clear in her long essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), she did not consider this viewpoint to be the unique possession of women. In her fiction she presented men who possessed what she held to be feminine characteristics, a regard for others and an awareness of the multiplicity of experience; but she remained pessimistic about women gaining positions of influence, even though she set out the desirability of this in her feminist study Three Guineas (1938). Together with Irish writer James Joyce, who greatly influenced her Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf transformed the treatment of subjectivity, time, and history in fiction and helped create a feeling among her contemporaries that traditional forms of fiction—with their frequent indifference to the mysterious and inchoate inner life of characters—were no longer adequate. Her eminence as a literary critic and essayist did much to foster an interest in the work of other female Modernist writers of the period, such as Katherine Mansfield (born in New Zealand) and Dorothy Richardson.

Irish Modernist literature

Important contributions to Modernist literature also were made by the Irish writers such as the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and the novelist James Joyce. Many critics today argue that Yeats’s work as a poet and Joyce’s work as a novelist are the most important Modernist achievements of the period.

In his early verse and drama, Yeats, who had been influenced as a young man by the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements, evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland in language that was often vague and grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of Irish nationalism, he had hoped to instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), however, was marked not only by a more concrete and colloquial style but also by a growing isolation from the nationalist movement. Increasingly, Yeats celebrated an aristocratic Ireland epitomized for him by the family and country house of his friend and patron, the writer and playwright Lady Gregory.

The grandeur of Yeats’s mature reflective poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929) derived in large measure from the way in which (caught up by the violent discords of contemporary Irish history) he accepted the fact that his idealized Ireland was illusory. At its best his mature style combined passion and precision with powerful symbol, strong rhythm, and lucid diction; and even though his poetry often touched upon public themes, he never ceased to reflect upon the Romantic themes of creativity, selfhood, and the individual’s relationship to nature, time, and history.

Joyce, who spent his adult life on the continent of Europe, expressed in his fiction his sense of the limits and possibilities of the Ireland he had left behind. In his collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his largely autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described in fiction at once realist and symbolist the individual cost of the sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of life in Ireland. As if by provocative contrast, his panoramic novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank and imaginatively profuse. Ulysses was a landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. Dense, lengthy, and controversial, the novel details the events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a technique known as stream of consciousness, which commonly ignores orderly sentence structure and incorporates fragments of thought in an attempt to capture the flow of characters’ mental processes. Portions of the book were considered obscene, and Ulysses was banned for many years in English-speaking countries. In his even more experimental Finnegans Wake (1939), he not only explored the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also suggested that the languages and myths of Ireland were interwoven with the languages and myths of many other cultures.

French Modernist literature

Symbolism

One of the most important movements in modern French literature was Symbolism, which originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to painting and the theater, and influenced the European and American literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolist artists sought to express individual emotional experience through the subtle and suggestive use of highly symbolized language.

The principal French Symbolist poets include Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Henri de Régnier, René Ghil, and Gustave Kahn.  The poets Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel are sometimes considered to be direct 20th-century heirs of the Symbolists.

Symbolism originated in the revolt of certain French poets against the rigid conventions governing both technique and theme in traditional French poetry, as evidenced in the precise description of Parnassian poetry. The Symbolists wished to liberate poetry from its expository functions and its formalized oratory in order to describe instead the fleeting, immediate sensations of the poet’s inner life and experience. They attempted to evoke the ineffable intuitions and sense impressions of an individual’s inner life and to communicate the underlying mystery of existence through a free and highly personal use of metaphors and images that, though lacking in precise meaning, would nevertheless convey the state of the poet’s mind and hint at the “dark and confused unity” of an inexpressible reality.

Such masterpieces as Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles (1874; Songs Without Words) and Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”) sparked a growing interest in the nascent innovations of progressive French poets. The Symbolist manifesto itself was published by Greek-born poet Jean Moréas in Le Figaro on September 18, 1886; in it he attacked the descriptive tendencies of realist theater, naturalistic novels, and Parnassian poetry. He also proposed replacing the term décadent, which was used to describe French writer Charles Baudelaire and others, with the terms symboliste and symbolisme. Many little Symbolist reviews and magazines sprang up in the late 1880s, their authors freely participating in the controversies generated by the attacks of hostile critics on the movement. In their efforts to escape rigid metrical patterns and to achieve freer poetic rhythms, many Symbolist poets resorted to the composition of prose poems and the use of vers libre (free verse), which has now become a fundamental form of contemporary poetry.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Other French Modernist writers

The governments of France’s Third Republic (1870–1940) were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition.

The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: Gide, Claudel, Valéry, and Marcel Proust, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897; Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar generations. Gide’s most influential book was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters). It deals with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest, discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming, thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addresses homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it challenges all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the relation between the fictional and the real.

The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such as Commerce (1924–32), directed by Valéry, novelist and critic Valery-Nicolas Larbaud, and the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and including literature from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts created in Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European intellectuals, not least some of the giants of Modernism: Irish writer James Joyce, American-English poet T.S. Eliot, and American poet William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in Paris, demonstrated the mutual profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the interior monologue form developed by the poet and novelist Édouard Dujardin, it influenced in its turn Larbaud’s Amants, heureux amants (1923; “Lovers, Happy Lovers”).

It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had already made her name in the first years of the century with her highly popular Claudine novels, began to establish herself as a serious writer, with Chéri (1920) and Le Blé en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed). In the 1930s she produced autobiographical writings, including autobiographical fictions that, almost uniquely, provided a female perspective on feminine experience in a male-centered age. Le Pur et l’impur (1932; The Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces Plaisirs (“These Pleasures”), is one of the first major women’s texts to be centered on lesbian themes.

Patrick McCarthy Jennifer Birkett

Italian Modernist literature

One of the main literary trends in early 20th-centuty Italian literature was Futurismo, or Futurism, which rejected everything traditional in art and demanded complete freedom of expression. Centered in Italy, Futurism emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life. During the second decade of the 20th century, the movement’s influence radiated outward across most of Europe, especially to the Russian avant-garde. The most-significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry.

The leader of the Futurists was the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, editor of Poesia, a fashionable cosmopolitan review. Futurism was first announced on February 20, 1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro published a manifesto by Marinetti, who coined the word Futurism to reflect his goal of discarding the art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society. Marinetti’s manifesto glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power, and movement. Exalting violence and conflict, he called for the sweeping repudiation of traditional values and the destruction of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries.

The writers who embraced Italian Futurism sought to develop a language appropriate for what they perceived to be the speed and ruthlessness of the early 20th century. They established new genres, the most significant being parole in libertà (“words-in-freedom”), also referred to as free-word poetry. It was poetry liberated from the constraints of linear typography and conventional syntax and spelling.

“Designed analogies” (pictograms where shape analogically mimics meaning), dipinti paroliberi (literary collages combining graphic elements with free-word poetry), and sintesi (minimalist plays) were among other new genres. New forms of dissemination were favored, including Futurist evenings, mixed-media events, and the use of manifesto leaflets, poster poems, and broadsheet-format journals containing a mixture of literature, painting, and theoretical pronouncements. Until 1914, however, output fell far short of the movement’s declared program, and Futurist poets—in contrast to Marinetti—remained largely traditionalist in their subject matter and idiom, as was demonstrated by the movement’s debut anthology I poeti futuristi (1912; “The Futurist Poets”). Only when Marinetti started grounding his avant-garde poetry in the realities of his combat experiences as a war reporter during World War I, however, did a distinctly innovative Futurist idiom emerge, one that represented a significant break from past poetic practices.

The title of literary Futurism’s most important manifesto, Distruzione della sintassi–immaginazione senza fili–parole in libertà (1913; “Destruction of Syntax–Wireless Imagination–Words-in-Freedom”), represented Marinetti’s demands for a pared-down elliptical language, stripped of adjectives and adverbs, with verbs in the infinitive and mathematical signs and word pairings used to convey information more economically and more boldly. The resultant “telegraphic lyricism” is most effective in Marinetti’s war poetry, especially Zang tumb tumb and “Dunes” (both 1914). A desire to make language more intensive led to a pronounced use of onomatopoeia in poems dealing with machines and war—as in the title of Zang tumb tumb, intended to mimic the sound of artillery fire—and to a departure from uniform, horizontal typography. A number of Futurist painter-poets blurred the distinction between literature and visual art, as Severini did in Danza serpentina (1914; “Serpentine Dance”). While Marinetti’s poetic experiments revealed an indebtedness to Cubism, he elevated Italian literary collage, often created for the purpose of pro-war propaganda, to a distinctively Futurist art form. The culmination of this tendency came with Carrà’s Festa patriottica (1914; “Patriotic Celebration”) and Marinetti’s Les Mots en liberté futuristes (1919; “Futurist Words-in-Freedom”).

A “typographical revolution” was also proclaimed in the Futurists’ 1913 manifesto; it grew out of both a desire to make form visually dynamic and a perceived need for visual effects in type that were capable of reflecting—through size and boldness—the noise of modern warfare and urban life. A diverse series of shaped poetic layouts depicted speeding cars, trains, and airplanes, exploding bombs, and the confusions of battle. Apart from Marinetti’s work, the most accomplished typographical experiments are to be found in the poetry of Francesco Cangiullo and Fortunato Depero.

Russian Modernist literature

The period in Russian literature from the 1890s to 1917 was one of intellectual ferment, in which mysticism, Aestheticism, Neo-Kantianism, eroticism, Marxism, apocalypticism, Nietzscheanism, and other movements combined with each other in improbable ways. Primarily an age of poetry, it also produced significant prose and drama. Russian Symbolism, which was influenced by French Symbolist poetry and the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, is usually said to have begun with an essay by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury” (1893; “On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature”). A poet and propagator of religious ideas, Merezhkovsky wrote a trilogy of novels, Khristos i Antikhrist (1896–1905; Christ and Antichrist), consisting of Yulian otstupnik (1896; Julian the Apostate), Leonardo da Vinchi (1901; Leonardo da Vinci), and Pyotr i Aleksey (1905; Peter and Alexis), which explores the relation of pagan and Christian views of the world.

The Symbolists saw art as a way to approach a higher reality. The first wave of Symbolists included Konstantin Balmont, who translated a number of English poets and wrote verse that he left unrevised on principle (he believed in first inspiration); Valery Bryusov, a poet and translator of French Symbolist verse and of Virgil’s Aeneid, who for years was the leader of the movement; and Zinaida Gippius, who wrote decadent, erotic, and religious poetry. Eschatology and anthroposophy shaped the poetry and prose of Andrey Bely, who was one of the writers who dominated the second wave of Symbolism. His novel Peterburg (1913–22; St. Petersburg) is regarded as the masterpiece of Symbolist fiction. The principal theoretician of the Symbolist movement, Vyacheslav Ivanov, wrote mythic poetry conveying a Neoplatonist philosophy.

In the second decade of the 20th century, Symbolism was challenged by two other schools, the Acmeists, who favored clarity over metaphysical vagueness, and the brash Futurists, who wanted to throw all earlier and most contemporary poetry “from the steamship of modernity.” Among the Acmeists, Nikolay Gumilyov, who stressed poetic craftsmanship over the occult, was executed by the Bolsheviks. Already an accomplished creator of superb love lyrics in these years, Anna Akhmatova produced densely and brilliantly structured poems in the Soviet period, including Poema bez geroya (written 1940–62; A Poem Without a Hero) and Rekviyem (written 1935–40; Requiem), which was inspired by Soviet purges and was therefore unpublishable in Russia. From 1923 to 1940 she was forced into silence, and in 1946 Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko became the target of official abuse by the Communist Party. Some consider Osip Mandelshtam, who died in a Soviet prison camp, to be the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century. Many of his difficult, allusive poems were preserved by his wife, Nadezhda Mandelshtam), whose memoirs are themselves classic.

The two most important Futurist poets were Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Khlebnikov hoped to find the laws of history through numerology and developed amazingly implausible theories about language and its origins. His verse, which is characterized by neologisms and “trans-sense” language, includes “Zaklyatiye smekhom” (1910; “Incantation by Laughter”) and Zangezi (1922). Mayakovsky epitomized the spirit of romantic bohemian radicalism. Humor, bravado, and self-pity characterize his inventive long poems, including Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers). After the Russian Revolution in 1917, which he ardently supported initially, Mayakovsky produced propaganda poems. But he also satirized Soviet bureaucracy in the witty “Razgovor s fininspektorom o poezii” (1926; “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry”). As a dramatist, he is best known for Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913), in which he played the lead role, and Klop (1929; The Bedbug), in which a philistine (a person who is disdainful of the arts or intellectualism), along with a bedbug, is resurrected into the banal communist future of 1979. Mayakovsky later shot himself, leaving a brilliantly ironic suicide note with a poem explaining that “love’s boat has smashed against daily life.”

Portuguese Modernist literature

In Portuguese literature, out of late Symbolism and saudosismo, a late 19th-century movement characterized by a brooding lyric poetry, came Fernando Pessoa, posthumously regarded as one of the most brilliant poets of European Modernism. As “the man who never was,” in the words of the critic and poet Jorge de Sena, Pessoa is the supreme example of the fragmented poet who became “plural” and universal through what Pessoa called heteronyms, or alternative personae. Pessoa’s heteronyms were presented as distinct authors, each of whom differed from the others in terms of poetic style, aesthetic, philosophy, personality, and even gender and language (Pessoa wrote in Portuguese, English, and French).

He exerted a wide influence after publishing under several names in the short-lived journal Orpheu (founded 1915); in 1935 he furthered his influence with a letter in which he explained his poetics to the poet Adolfo Casais Monteiro, a member of the Presença (“Presence”) group of writers (its name derived from the literary magazine Presença, founded in 1927). Although in his lifetime Pessoa published only four books, his literary archive contains more than 20,000 pages. He published his first book of poetry in English, Antinous, in 1918 and subsequently published two others. Yet it was not until 1934 that his first book in Portuguese, Mensagem (Message), appeared. It attracted little attention, and Pessoa died the next year a virtual unknown. His best-known work is Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), a diary-like work of poetic fragments that Pessoa worked on through the last two decades of his life and that remained unfinished at his death. Attributed to his heteronym Bernardo Soares, it was published together for the first time in 1982 and brought him worldwide attention; a full English translation appeared in 2001.

Portuguese Futurism is inseparable from Orpheu, in which the major poetry and manifestos of Pessoa and his circle were published. Pessoa’s chief collaborator on the journal was Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a post-Symbolist poet with ties to saudosismo whose books of short stories Princípio (1912; “Beginning”), A confissão de Lúcio (1914; Lúcio’s Confession), and Céu em fogo (1915; “Sky in Flames”; Eng. trans. The Great Shadow, and Other Stories) describe a bizarre scientific modernity. His Dispersão (1914; “Dispersion”) features exuberant images, an obsession with verbal constructions and metaphors, and experimentation with graphic design and fonts. The most versatile figure of Portuguese Modernism is José de Almada Negreiros, a poet, novelist, caricaturist, dancer, and actor who provoked scandal with his Manifesto anti-Dantas (1915), which ridiculed the doctor and politician Júlio Dantas, and his “Ultimatum futurista ás gerações portuguezas do Seculo XX” (1917; “Futurist Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations of the 20th Century”). Almada Negreiros’s work exudes independence and spontaneity. His poetry—the primary collection of which is A invenção do dia claro (1921; “Invention of the Clear Day”)—aims to recover a mythic ingenuousness, while A engomadeira (1917; “The Starcher”), a novel, is a precursor of Surrealist automatism. Nome de guerra (written 1925, published 1938; “Nom de Guerre,” or “Pseudonym”) is considered the first contemporary Portuguese novel. Almada Negreiros was also a visual artist who worked in a Modernist vein.

From 1939 to 1945 Vitorino Nemésio directed the literary journal Revista de Portugal (“Portuguese Review”), which broadened the horizons of Portuguese neorealism by publishing poetry that exemplified new trends and movements, including French Surrealism and English Imagism. Nemésio’s regional novel Mau tempo no canal (1945; “Bad Weather in the Channel”; Eng. trans. Stormy Isles: An Azorean Tale) is considered one of the best novels of the mid-20th century. Jorge de Sena was an engineer by profession who lived in exile in Brazil (1959–65) and the United States (1965–78). His work as a critic reflected his encyclopaedic mind and scientific training, and his poetry showed him to be the most important poet of midcentury, his works incorporating themes drawn from art and music while also sharply criticizing Portugal’s repressive sociopolitical reality.

German Modernist literature

German Modernism emerged from turn-of-the-century Aestheticism. Like European Modernism as a whole, German Modernism was in fact a cluster of different literary movements, including Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”), and Dada. Of these, Expressionism is the best known and most important. Beginning about 1910 and reaching its culmination during World War I, Expressionism was a powerful response to the chaos and suffering of modern life. Poets Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, and Gottfried Benn created terrifying images of war, urban life, oppression, and illness in their lyric poetry. Although Trakl expressed a visionary mysticism in his battlefield scenes, Heym and Benn presented reality as grotesque, distorted, and starkly unrelieved.

Expressionist drama used the same methods of grotesque distortion to attack what it saw as the soullessness of modern technology and the subjection of workers to machines. Yet Expressionist drama often took a more optimistic approach to the machine age, in part because of impulses derived from Italian Futurism. Whereas the Futurists glorified the machine, however, the Expressionists saw it more as an instrument that might help bring about a socialist utopia. The Expressionist stage became a vehicle to effect a transformation of consciousness in the audience. Die Wandlung (1919; Transfiguration), a play by Ernst Toller, depicts this kind of transformation in a young man who turns his horrific war experience into a new awareness of brotherhood; his play Masse-Mensch (1920; Man and the Masses) presents a woman’s tragic attempt to effect a mass revolution among her fellow workers and lead them beyond violence toward peaceful coexistence. The dramas Gas I (1918) and Gas II (1920), by Georg Kaiser, show how a group of gas production workers are thwarted in their attempt to gain control of technology and establish a workers’ utopia in brotherhood and peace.

The works of Franz Kafka, especially his two stories Das Urteil (1913; The Judgment) and Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis), owe much to Expressionism. But his writing is better understood as an early phase of experimental Modernism. Kafka’s central concern, like that of other 20th-century Modernists, is the problematic nature of human subjectivity and the limitations of individual perception and knowledge. His striking narrative technique, first developed in The Judgment, of presenting reality from a limited third-person point of view enables readers to identify with his oppressed and passive protagonists while also recognizing that their view is deeply flawed. Kafka’s unfinished novels, especially Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and Das Schloss (1926; The Castle), explore further aspects of the individual’s inescapable entrapment in subjectivity. Like many other Modernists, Kafka also treated problems of authority and power. His characters feel hopelessly subjugated to inexplicable forces associated with patriarchal social structures and an overly mechanized and bureaucratic modern world. The grotesque element in Kafka’s writing stems from his tendency to take metaphors literally, as when the “spineless” Gregor Samsa, protagonist of The Metamorphosis, wakes up one morning to find he has become an insect, a creature without a spine. Kafka’s love of paradoxes and logical puzzles gave rise to a highly symbolic style of writing that makes his works resistant to any single interpretive key.

A foundational novel for German Modernism is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Set in Paris and presented in the form of fragmentary jottings, the novel depicts modern city life as the multiple reflexes of a disoriented narrator who tries in vain to recapture the straightforward narrative logic he recalls from stories heard and read in his youth. Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain), a bildungsroman set in the self-contained and seemingly timeless world of a tuberculosis sanatorium, interweaves an exploration of human psychology with philosophical reflection in an attempt to reveal the subtle interplay of rationalism and the irrational in modern culture. In Der Steppenwolf (1927; Eng. trans. Steppenwolf), Hermann Hesse also developed many concerns of Modernism, depicting the ordeals of a divided psyche torn between the conventional and the artistic worlds, the feminine and the masculine, reason and hallucination. Other novelists of this period continued to experiment with the presentation of consciousness in a fractured world. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; Alexanderplatz, Berlin) by Alfred Döblin, the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1930–32; The Sleepwalkers) by Hermann Broch, and the unfinished novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–43; The Man Without Qualities) by Robert Musil use multiple techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration, montage, essayistic reflection embedded in the narrative, and experimental visionary passages to explore the problematic relation between individual consciousness and a modern world that is experienced as a threat to individual identity. All three writers also took a deep interest in the psychological and social determinants of criminality.

A substantial part of Musil’s experimental novel was written during his Swiss exile from Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Similarly, Broch’s stream-of-consciousness novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945; The Death of Virgil) was written during his exile in America, as was Thomas Mann’s pathbreaking novel on the genesis of Nazism and its relation to the aesthetic, Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus). Anna Seghers’s novel Das siebte Kreuz (1942; The Seventh Cross) depicts the escape of seven prisoners, only one of whom survives, from a concentration camp. Other important exile writers were Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig. Among the communist writers who had fled from Nazi Germany a major debate took place about the merits of realist as opposed to Modernist techniques. The issue was whether straightforward presentation of reality or formal experimentation was a more effective way of raising social consciousness in readers of literature. The main proponent of the realist cause was the theorist and literary historian Georg Lukacs (György Lukács); on the Modernist side were Brecht and Seghers. This debate was later to have significant repercussions in East Germany.