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The fiction writer presents
Rudyard Kipling (1865, Bombay, India — 1936, London)
— English poet and novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize (1907).
Born in India, in Bombay, where e His father, John Lockwood Kipling, a graduate of Kensington Art School, a sculptor and decorator, taught at an art school.
In 1875, John Lockwood became the director of the School of Applied Arts and curator of the Museum of Indian Art in Lahore, which soon turned into the world's best collection of oriental art.
He was inclined to writing, in 1891 the book "Man and Beast in India" (Man and Beast in India) was published, in which his prose and drawings are side by side with his son's poems.
The Kiplings belonged to a narrow circle of the colonial elite and enjoyed recognition in India.
Kipling spent most of his childhood and adolescence outside of his father's home.
He was in his sixth year when his parents sent him and his younger sister to England to be cared for by a distant relative.
The teacher turned out to be not a kind woman, besides, a hypocrite.
The boy, who grew up in freedom, accustomed to adoration and affection (he was raised by native nannies), was constantly restricted, intimidated and beaten.
The mother, who visited the children a few years later, was horrified by the condition of her son, who was almost blind from nervous shocks, and took the children to India.
But soon Rudyard is back in England.
He was placed in a college in Westward Ho.
In this third rate Devonshire school, the sons of junior officers were preparing for further service in the army.
The spirit of drill and violence reigned here, it was planted not only by ignorant teachers,but also by the students themselves, among whom rude and primitive natures prevailed.
Ignorant teachers and students themselves, among whom rude and primitive natures prevailed.
The one who would later be called "iron Rudyard", at the age of twelve, was a puny, small, bespectacled man.
He was an avid reader, and his stay at Westward Ho was not an easy test for him.
The school failed to break him as a person, obviously because he did not rebel against its orders.
For five years, he got used to it and even got into the taste of rude jokes and boyish pranks.
And most importantly, the teenager believed in the necessity and benefit of subordination lessons.
This allowed him to maintain his self respect.
He recognized the system of cruel education as expedient, because it had as its ultimate goal Discipline and Order, and this is the unshakable basis of the Law.
The idea of the Law as a conditional system of prohibitions and permits operating in society took hold of Kipling's consciousness very early.
A compatriot of Kipling, R. Aldington, half a century later, will see in this position the slavish "psychology of the ass of the Empire getting kicked".
Many ideological opponents of Kipling will agree with him.
Kipling himself and his heroes did not think of himself as a backside, but as the backbone of the Empire, which he was proud of.
While at the zenith of his fame, Kipling will tell about his school in the book "The Rascal and the Company" (Stalky and Co, 1899).
A keen connoisseur of Kipling, Maugham admitted that he had never met a more disgusting description of the school.
Many were discouraged by the fact that the author not only did not condemn the barracks rules of the school, but remembers them with ecstasy and nostalgia.
The spirit of the school largely determined the views and life attitudes of the future writer.
Kipling was formed very early, his moral ideals were formed in Westward Ho.
Almost from childhood, he established himself in the positions of courageous stoicism, which later will be poured into the chiseled lines of the "Commandment"
Be able to force the heart, nerves, body
To serve you when in your chest
Everything has been empty for a long time, everything has burned down
And only the Will says:"Go!"  (Per. M. Lozinsky)
Kipling was not seventeen years old when he left Westward Ho without finishing his studies.
His father got him a job as a junior editor in a Lahore newspaper.
He felt the writer's vocation early and believed in it.
"School Boy Lyrics" (1881) – the first sample of the pen, mainly imitations of the leading poets of the era.
Three years later, in the collection "Echoes" (Echoes) Kipling moves from imitation and variation to parodying all the famous Victorian poets, exposing the conventionality and artificiality of their language, reducing the" high style " with everyday themes and colloquial intonations, using their favorite genres in a different function.
"Echoes" and "Departmental Songs" (Departmental Ditties, 1886) were a serious application for a new word in poetry.
The hour of his glory is not far off.
Kipling gave seven years to journalism.
He traveled a lot around the country, where mass ignorance and prejudice coexisted with high spirituality, where one epidemic was replaced by another, where famine raged, where punitive military actions were constantly taken in response to the unrest of local residents.
The reporter's service developed his natural observation, sociability, taught him to listen carefully to the language of his childhood, and he began to speak it as if it were his native language.
The "wonderland" was revealed to him, he learned many of its secrets, hidden from most of the sahibs (as the white gentlemen were called here).
In the autobiographical book "Something about Myself" (Something of Myself, 1936) Kipling told how he extracted the material.
From everyday impressions, from the "turnover" of life, not only reports, travel notes, essays were born, but poems and the first stories that were published in the "Civil and Military Newspaper".
He observed a strict condition – to fit into one thousand two hundred words.
The best of them will make up the first collection "Simple stories from the mountains" (Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888).
At the time of his appearance, Kipling had already been working as the editor in chief of the Pioneer in Allahabad for a year.
Almost all the stories written in India were published in small paperback volumes in the local edition in the Railway Library in 1888: "Three Soldiers" (Soldiers Three), "The Story of the Gadsbys" (The Story of the Gadsbys), "Black and White" (In Black and White), "Under the Deodars" (Under the Deodars), "Rickshaw ghost" (The Phantom Rickshaw) and "Wee Willie Winky" (Wee Willie Winkie).
Kipling surprisingly quickly mastered the skill of the short story, he struck with early maturity and fecundity.
They started talking about it first in India, and soon in the metropolis.
In London, where he arrived in 1889, having made a trip around the world through the Far East and the United States, his stories were in great demand.
In 1890, two new collections "The City of Dreadful Night" and "The Courting of Dinah Shad" were published, and a year later a large volume of short stories, which included the best of the previously published ones, "Life gives a Head Start" (Life's Handicap, 1891).
In them, Kipling continued to develop the Indian theme, and the distance between the author and the material gave even more brightness to his impressions.
Upon his arrival in London, he also published a diary of his journey.
The book of essays "From Sea to Sea" (From Sea to Sea) was published in 1889.
The stunning success of the young Kipling, comparable only to the success of the universal favorite Dickens, is explained by the measure, the nature of his innovation.
He entered the literature when it needed updating.
The brilliant galaxy of English novelists has faded away.
The dull determinism, the earthiness of the naturalists, the sophistication and aesthetics of the symbolists, their mystical insights did not open up new horizons.
Meanwhile, the need for a new hero, a new idea, a new consolidating myth was growing in society.
Stevenson, an older contemporary of Kipling, caught the trends of the time and formulated the writer's task: "Unfortunately, we all play on a sentimental flute, and it is necessary that someone beat a courageous drum."
He and other neo – romantics – Haggard, Henley, Conan Doyle turned to the romance of exploits, asceticism, dragging the reader into exotic countries or the depths of history.
Kipling, in search of heroics, the longing for which always intensifies in a troubled, critical time, turned to modernity.
Many artists considered the XIX century prosaic and boring.
Balzac refuted them, showing that modern life "boils terribly", and discovered truly Shakespearean dramas in it.
Henry James had reason to see in the young Kipling the future English Balzac.
He discovered the heroics of everyday life and romanticized the everyday.
He wrote about the most ordinary people, but showed them, as a rule, in extreme situations, in an unusual environment, when the human essence is highlighted, hidden depths and previously unknown forces of personality are revealed.
In the age of despondency and apathy, at the time of the onset of decadence, Kipling glorified work and discovered the heroics of everyday creation.
Kipling made shifts in the genre hierarchy, moving from the traditional novel for English literature to a short story, from a poem to a ballad and a song.
He was one of the first to react to the growing trend of democratization (at the same time, paradoxically, he certainly preferred the idea of Empire to the idea of Democracy).
Kipling democratized the literary language and poetic style, and this is the main condition for an artistic revolution.
From the pages of Kipling's stories, a stream of unknown and unvarnished life poured into the reader.
For all the diversity of the picture, there was no "luxurious exoticism"in it.
The "Wonderland" was revealed from the inside, without embellishment, presenting itself in everyday details, the minutiae of life, the everyday concerns of its indigenous and alien inhabitants.
Instead of picturesque spectacles and largely conventional India, which appears on the pages of fashionable adventurous novels, the reader found gloomy pictures of poverty, savagery, suffering.
He populated the stories with heroes who had not yet had the right of citizenship in English literature.
These are the natives, whose customs and life philosophy are so far from the English ones ("The Return of Imray", "The House of the Sadhu", "The Tomb of his ancestors"), who are captivating with simplicity, trustfulness, and spiritual nobility, devotion surpass the white masters ("Lispet", "Georgie Porgie").
Even more stories are dedicated to the English, who were thrown by fate into this distant and alien world for most of them.
Kipling did not flatter his countrymen.
The group portrait of the" good society " makes a depressing impression: men are limited and arrogant, women are simpering and empty headed.
The colonial society is motley.
There are also conscientious idealists who take their mission seriously, but only a few stand the test of India.
The stupefying monotony of colonial life, the murderous climate, isolation from the usual civilization, loneliness, a sense of abandonment turn life into hell.
Kipling told about many tragedies ("Discarded", "The End of the Road", "Keep as proof"), but left room for the feat.
In the "Bridge Builders" there are people who, for a paltry salary, in the absence of chances for recognition, give their youth, strength, health to the work they have taken up.
"William the Conqueror" is a story about the selflessness and inhuman perseverance of several ordinary men and women who desperately fought hunger and saved a horde of children from certain death.
The author's sympathies are given to the "little man", first of all to soldiers who patiently endure all the hardships of life, carrying out their service far from home.
Kipling treats them with friendly condescension, like the tomboy boys from the book "The Rascal and the Company": they are all " notorious swindlers, dog thieves, ravagers of chicken roosts, insults to civilians and insanely brave heroes."
Kipling idealizes an army officer, especially a junior one, but the soldiers in his stories and poems often look comical, being like a prototype of the brave soldier Schweik.
In the early stories, a new literary image of the "man of action" is born, the most striking of them is Kipling's favorite and partly his alter ego policeman Strickland.
The writer contrasts him with incompetent and lazy officials who are getting fat at the desks.
Concerned about the prestige of the British in India, Kipling demanded that they know this country, only this could ensure the effectiveness of their mission.
His Strickland had achieved such success that he could easily pass for a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a magician, and a fakir.
He learned the language of various tribes, learned the songs of beggars, ritual dances, he could participate in the sacraments.
For Strickland, there were no unsolvable, mysterious crimes: the Indians believed that he had the gift of becoming invisible and commanded demons.
They feared and respected him.
The "man of Action" combines personal courage with striking modesty.
The high concept of duty was transferred by Kipling to the sphere of everyday everyday life.
The secret of the charm of Kipling's stories lies in their authenticity, and it does not come by itself.
Undoubtedly, an extraordinary talent worked.
But in addition to natural talent, "seven years of hard work" affected.
Kipling consciously uses the technique of reportage in his stories, turns reportage into a literary device, hence the conciseness, laconism, and energetic rhythm of his prose.
He prefers to tell the story in the first person, while avoiding any assessments and moralizing, so characteristic of the English literary tradition.
He hides behind the mask of a reporter, omnipresent, self confident, greedy for impressions, noticing everything, penetrating not only "under the skin", but even deeper.
He observes life and people with skeptical detachment, not without irony, giving the impression of an unflappable experienced person.
His stories are like "snapshots" that capture pieces of life.
Kipling transforms the essay into a plot novel, while maintaining factography.
The impression of vitality was also formed due to Kipling's use of a fairy tale, a lively monologue speech that preserves intonations, dialectics, jargon of the circle to which the hero belongs.
Kipling boldly introduced into prose and poetry the vernacular, the language of the street and the barracks.
The collection of poems that marked the beginning of his fame as a "national poet", he called it" Barrack Room Ballads " (Barrack Room Ballads, 1892).
"Barrack ballads", completely devoid of a lyrical beginning, are similar in subject matter and poetics to "Simple stories from the Mountains".
The reader finds himself in the rough and cruel world of soldiers.
The form of the verse was also attractive – song, marching, chastushechnaya.
In the courageous rhythms of Kipling's poems, you could hear the drum roll and the sounds of a bugle, the roar of the ocean, the grinding of metal, the trampling of marching columns.
Kipling was accused of glorifying the war, and not without reason.
But at the same time, his vision of the war and the army was purely realistic.
No parade, cheap heroics, official patriotism.
Blood, sweat, fatigue, dirt, the smell of oats and horse urine, drunkenness, fights, gambling, swearing, native concubines, floggings, executions – these are the components of his "Tommy"life.
Kipling, a poet and prose writer, was the first to address this topic and created a cruel, rude, but reliable and impressive portrait of the British army at the end of the XIX century.
Kipling's orientation towards the mass reader alienated the aesthetic public from him.
Many of his poems are really vulgar and resemble the verses of a third rate music hall.
But there are others living next to them, exciting the sophisticated connoisseur of poetry.
Only a snob or a liar would claim that there is no poetry in such ballads as" Danny Deaver "or"Mandalay".
Even T. S. Eliot in the middle of the XX century was forced to admit that Kipling's ballads are so strong " poetry of the lowest grade "(verse) that it often passes into the category of" high poetry " (poetry).
In the chiseled lines of "Barrack Ballads" and "The Seven Seas" (The Seven Seas, 1896), his best collection, the concept of man and the world was cast, to which he owes the reputation of"iron Rudyard".
This is the imperative of active action, the cult of masculinity, the idea of voluntary submission and service of the individual to the Law.
In the stories, Kipling's model of the world barely appeared, but the very nature of the poetic word contributed to its crystallization.
Glorifying activity and efficiency, Kipling romanticizes not corsairs and filibusters, like most neo romantics, but modern representatives of the" gentleman pirate family", those who forged the power of Victorian England, who turned it into a factory of the world and the mistress of the seas.
Anthony Gloucester is the most beloved of them.
This is an imperious master of his fate, such people are called self made man (self made).
Starting from scratch, taking desperate risks, keeping himself and the team in check, he ends his life as a baronet, the owner of the market.
Such as Anthony Gloucester, according to the author, keeps England.
The tragedy is that the fathers of the accumulators do not have a decent shift.
The baronet's son did not pass his father's "universities".
"Prints, porcelain and books – that's your rut," his father throws at him with irritation, realizing their mutual discord and misunderstanding.
The conflict between father and son is deeper than the domestic family drama, behind it is the opposition of a broader plan: "nature – civilization".
At the end of the XIX century.
it becomes the subject of active philosophical and artistic reflection.
A few years will pass, and it will take possession of Kipling's consciousness.
In the meantime, he praises insatiable adventurers, vagabonds, desperate thugs, eternal wanderers, languishing with an unquenchable desire for freedom and novelty.
The romanticization of the feat of pioneers, free space imperceptibly turns into the glorification of desperate, strong and daring people who laid their heads on the altar of the Empire, who paid with their blood and life for its proud right to be called an Empire over which the sun never sets.
Both "The Song of the Dead" and "By right of Birth" end with a call to the descendants to continue the work of their fathers, to be a worthy replacement, these are the verses of the testament, they have strong biblical intonations.
The 90s were the most fruitful decade in Kipling's work.
Its beginning was marked by the release of the first novel "The Light went out" (The Light that Failed, 1890-1891).
Although it did not become a great artistic success, this novel, largely autobiographical, took Kipling beyond the previous themes.
In the center of it is the drama of the talented artist Dick Kheldar.
The harsh and violent art of Kheldar developed far from England, his food was the richest material of the East and other overseas countries that Dick traveled during his wanderings.
Kheldar's originality turned out to be too bright, realism was too rude, the tastes of the bourgeois public were offended.
Defending his insubordination to the tastes of the crowd and philistine morality, Dick Kheldar argues that a real artist is responsible only to his talent, given to him by God.
Inspiration, illumination from above and masterful mastery of craft, technique – these, according to Kipling, are the two hypostases of the artist.
The fate of Dick Kheldar is deeply tragic.
The hopeless, irresponsible love for the untalented artist Maisie, who fanatically believes in her star, paralyzes Kheldar.
When, having overcome the mental anguish, having melted it into art, he completes his personal picture, he is suddenly struck by blindness, and a quarrelsome woman model destroys his masterpiece.
Kipling is harsh to his favorite characters.
Kheldar is waiting for loneliness and suffering, which, according to the author, are the lot of strong natures.
But even in his defeat, he remains the winner.
Having fallen ill in his youth with longing for distant countries, where the Southern Cross stands directly above his head, he ends his life under this constellation.
Blind, helpless, he dies like a man on the battlefield.
In 1892, Kipling left England for a long time.
This time the path of the Little Pilgrim lies through South Africa to Australia and New Zealand.
At the same time, he visited India for the last time.
The news of the death of a friend, an American Balestier, who co authored the adventure novel "Nauiahka" (Nauiahka, 1892), forced him to interrupt his journey.
After marrying the deceased's sister Caroline, Kipling settles in Vermont.
A house called "Naulakhka" was built, two daughters were born here – Josephine and Elsie and a son John.
In America, Kipling wrote the famous "Jungle Books" (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), in the center of which is the story of a human cub fed by a wolf and raised in a pack.
The reader follows with unflagging interest how Akela, the wise and brave leader of the free people (as the wolves call themselves), the black panther Bagheera, brave as a wild buffalo and merciless as a wounded elephant, the old fat bear Baloo, the keeper of the laws of the jungle, save Mowgli from the fangs of the tiger Shere Khan, how they help him out in difficult moments, how patiently they teach him the science of the animal kingdom.
The singularity of Mowgli's story, the exoticism of the jungle world are so exciting that the artistic originality and philosophical meaning of Kipling's books are not immediately revealed.
Meanwhile, in Kipling's work, there is a turn from the factual representation of specific life situations to a symbol, there is a movement from reality to myth with its universalism.
Kipling knew Indian folklore well and could draw from the untouched storehouse of native fairy tales and legends.
However, what we encounter in the "Jungle Books" is rather his own folklore, it is his personal myth about Indie I.
He is attracted by the problems of nature and civilization, the place of man in nature, he solves them unconventionally.
The books are created according to the mosaic principle.
They consist of fifteen fragments, only eight are connected with the story of Mowgli, but they are not arranged in a logically consistent whole series, as required by the canon of the traditional novel.
Next to the stories about Mowgli, the stories of the White Cat and the little mongoose Rikki Tikki Tavi, the story of the miracle of Puran Bhagat, who is the hero of many Punjabi legends and is revered as a saint.
Fragments are independent stories, but they are soldered into a single artistic world, and the personality of the author – playwright of this world holds them together.
Kipling combines poetry and prose in the "Jungle Books": each fragment appears in a poetic frame.
The idea in the thesis form is stated in the poem epigraph.
The prose text develops it, concretizes it.
In the final poem, the idea is elevated to the absolute, a mythological symbol.
This structure allows you to transform reality into a myth.
Kipling was the first to embark on the path of "neo mythologism".
The ideological and artistic achievements of the era were refracted in the" Jungle Books " in a very peculiar way.
Kipling solves the epochal problem of the correlation of "cultural" and "natural" with an eye not to Rousseau, but to Darwin and Nietzsche.
Kipling's jungle is a world of continuous struggle for existence, where the strongest wins.
The world of nature is interpreted by him as the world of instinct, which exists in two antagonistic hypostases: the instinct of creation and the instinct of destruction, life – death.
The instinct of life gives birth to the Law of the jungle, which regulates order.
The jungle world is thought of as a hierarchical world of subordinate circles: family, pack (species), people.
The pack always has a leader, whose power is unconditional, because it ensures order, hence life.
A society without a leader (Bandar Logi) is anarchy leading to self destruction.
The law of the jungle allows hunting (killing in the name of life), but prohibits killing for fun.
Wild Dogs from the Dean violate the Law, it is fraught with self destruction.
The idea of the denial of chaos, and therefore the affirmation of life, runs through the" Jungle Books " like a red thread.
According to Kipling, instinct should be guided by reason.
Its carrier is a person, and therefore nature needs a person.
Rousseau claimed the opposite.
Kipling, in the spirit of the positivists, projects the laws of nature on human society, on civilization.
He does not accept the apocalyptic concepts of history that spread at the end of the century, but he is also alien to the optimism of positivists who talk about the continuity of progress.
Kipling believes that civilization should not be opposed to nature.
Nature is the basis for civilization, the gap between them is dangerous.
In the person of Mowgli, the natural and civilized beginnings are merged: he is formed by both the jungle and the village.
The union of reason and instinct gives birth to a special power that turns Mowgli into the lord of the jungle.
In it, despite all the conventionality of the image, Kipling revealed to the world a normative hero, freed from the fragmentation of consciousness, a purposeful winner of evil, a peacemaker and a converter of life.
Kipling's belief in the salvation of the Law was formed not only under the influence of those ideological searches and disputes that occupied minds at the end of the century.
She met the needs of his nature.
Even in his youth, Kipling was accepted into the Masonic lodge, and its corporate spirit, ritual, strict obedience to secret laws, Messianism began to play an essential role in his life.
In The Jungle Books, Kipling appears as a herald of the Law, a prophet calling for the transformation of the world.
At the zenith of his fame, Kipling returned to England and settled with his family in the county of Sussex, but in 1899 he suffered a severe grief – his eldest daughter died.
Nomadic life begins again.
Kipling lives for a long time in South Africa, visiting England on trips.
During the years of the inglorious Boer War for Great Britain (1899-1902), the memory of which was preserved by the song "Transvaal, Transvaal, my country, you're all on fire", he, the only English writer of the first row, takes a frankly pro imperial position, goes to the front line to raise the morale of soldiers, sends reports to London newspapers, brands liberals and Democrats for pacifism and sympathy for the tiny Transvaal.
Only pitiful people talk about the immorality of seizing foreign lands.
Kipling solves this problem unequivocally:
We will stretch the cable from Orkney to Cape Horn
(take it!)
—
Forever and ever and today
This is our land (and we will tie a tight knot),
This is our land (and we will capture it with a loop),
We are the ones who were born here!
(Per.
N. Golya)
In the eyes of society, he turns into a "bard of imperialism".
However, after the death of Queen Victoria, and even more so after the First World War, the system of imperial values has fewer and fewer supporters.
Kipling stubbornly adheres to his own: salvation lies in the rejection of democratic freedoms and in voluntary submission to a strong government.
Being a loyal servant of the Empire is both a sacred duty and a great honor.
The idea of "serving a great cause" animates such odious poems as" The Last Song "(1897)," The Burden of the Whites "(1899), and his best novel" Kim "(Kim, 1901), in which Kipling poetizes the" Big Game", as espionage began to be called with his light hand.
The hero of the novel is young Kim, the son of the deceased Sergeant O'Hara, left to himself from infancy, or rather, India.
A boy who feels like a fish in water in these gloomy caravanserais, in noisy bazaars and dirty crooked streets, on the high road that crosses India like a deep river – is truly an invaluable find for the English.
A little Universal Friend, as he is called, Kim willingly performs the role of a messenger, he likes the risk associated with performing mysterious errands.
The fact that his success was not in sight did not upset the boy: he appreciated the romance of mystery.
Kipling tried to thicken the romantic colors: he imagined the spy as a man who plays with death every hour, but at the same time is absolutely free.
"Kim" is not a novel in the usual view, it is rather a very long story about India.
Kipling aspired to a great form, but he achieved real success using the traditional form of the novel "the high road", akin to the story.
The novel is full of a masterfully recreated noisy, colorful, disorderly Asian life.
In the center is the image of a large road.
It allows you to show representatives of various castes and tribes and provide interesting information about their customs and customs, it makes it possible to introduce a number of characters into the novel that are not directly related to the action, but their colorfulness, of course, decorated the narrative.
Kipling's literary fate was such that he created his best things before reaching the age of forty.
"Kim" is his masterpiece, it is written in blood.
At the same time, Kipling was finishing a book that would make him the favorite children's writer on both sides of the ocean.
These are "Fairy Tales for nothing" (Just So Stories, 1902).
Fairy tales were composed in the family circle, literally at the hearth.
That's probably why they have so much warmth in them.
Their first listeners were his children.
Fairy tales were written for them and, in a sense, about them.
"Iron Rudyard" was a gentle, loving father.
The Kiplings often moved, and fairy tales wandered with them from continent to continent.
The first - "The Cat Who Walked by himself" - was born in" Naulakhka " together with his favorite Josephine, but the tales about the Elephant, Camel and Leopard – after her death, in "Woolsek" (the name of Kipling's house in Cape Town).
"Fairy tales are just so "close to" Jungle Books", they lead to the world of pristine nature, where elephants without trunks and leopards without spots roam the earth.
Children enthusiastically listen to amazing stories about how a camel has grown a hump, and a rhinoceros has wrinkles on the skin, how an elephant got a trunk and what could happen if a Moth stamped its foot...
Subtle humor coexists in fairy tales with edification.
Animals are endowed with human speech, but they think and express themselves very differently.
"Fairy tales" are imbued with a homely spirit, or rather the idea of a house, which, as you know, has always been a reliable refuge for an Englishman, his fortress.
Kipling was seriously concerned that the common British House, the Empire, which had seemed unshakable until recently, began to shake and deteriorate before his eyes with the death of Queen Victoria.
He lives in the hope of preserving it and subordinates his creativity to this task.
This is confirmed by the new collection of patriotic poems "The Five Nations" (1903), which put his name on a par with conservative politicians, after which his fellow writers and the democratic minded public turned away from him.
In the 900s, Kipling repeatedly proved his ability to be extremely diverse.
Thus, the story "They", included in the collection "Paths and discoveries" (1904), born from the haunting memories of a deceased daughter, woven from deep sadness and trembling mystery, is full of tenderness, light breathing and opens a completely unfamiliar Kipling.
In 1906, having raised a gold bearing block of national folklore, he published a curious book for children and youth "Puck of Pook's Hill" (Puck of Pook's Hill), in 1910 its sequel was published.
In this fabulously epic series, Kipling offered his own, largely romanticized and mythologized interpretation of Russian history.
The "adult" ethnographic material plays and sparkles, inspired by the presence of a mischievous elf Shakespeare's Puck.
However, creative luck is becoming increasingly rare.
Endowed with a lively mind, Kipling was not a strong thinker.
First of all, he was a great artist.
Having subordinated his talent to the great – in his eyes idea of the Empire, he condemned himself to die with it.
He continued to write during the First World War, which took away his son, and after it, but he was not read.
Kipling ceased to be a prophet in his homeland.
Kipling's funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1936 went unnoticed.
Time is the best critic.
The British Empire has fallen, but the best of Kipling's writing lives on.
It's not just "Jungle Books" and "Fairy Tales for nothing".
T. S. Eliot, who was ironic about Kipling's poetry on the eve of the First World War, published his selected poems during the second World War, accompanying the volume with a large preface, in which he recognized him as a great Master of the Word.
S. Maugham publishes an anthology of Kipling's stories in the middle of the century and concludes his essay about him categorically: "Rudyard Kipling is the only author in our country who can be placed next to Maupassant and Chekhov.
He is our greatest storyteller."
This is how it will enter the XXI century.
G. Ionkis, 1997
Rudyard Kipling's books are in the Library today
Stories
Naulaka.
Kim
The lights went out.
Brave navigators.
Stories
Jungle Books
Kim
The Extraordinary walk of Morrowby Jukes
Kim
INDEX: The fiction writer presents
A B C G D E F Z I K L M N O P R S T U F X C H W W E Y I
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