Eminent Victorians. Streichi L.

The eminent Victorians (1918) Litton Streichi (1880–1932) are considered to be one of the greatest biographical books of all time. Like a fresh wind, it burst into the literary world and opened the window in the coming times; The Bloomsbury group stirred (V. Wolf, E.-M. Forster, etc.) and anticipated the prose of the “lost generation”. Written at the height of the First World War, the "eminent Victorians" sounded like a chloride critical judgment about the Victorian era. Strachi acted as a teacher who explained how to relate to the past - rejecting prejudices and sympathy. Like a powerful spotlight, he grabbed unshakable pillars from the darkness, shrouded in a sacred halo: here is Cardinal Henry Manning, “Holy Askette” and the genius of humble wiser; and “ladies with a lamp in your hands”, the bright angel of the Lazaren from the Crimean War Florence Nightingale; and the great reformer of prestigious private schools Dr. Thomas Arnold; And the Christian ascetic and the hero, who died as a martyr, General Charles George Gordon, all of them, the idols of the Victorians, first appeared to the gaze of a shocked reader with not frozen sculptures, but people with their misconceptions, weaknesses and vices, and therefore alive, but at the same time alive, but at the same time mysterious.

“eminent Victorians”, for the first time offered to the attention of the domestic reader, is not just “without embellishment”, a provocative statement, a sonorous “slap in the face”, this is a milestone in the history of the genre, the sentence of “standard biographies” - mechanical reports of facts and numbers that filled the bookstores at the dawn of the 20th century.

Before us - sincere stories, read in one breath, boiling with passions. In this regard, Streichi is not only a direct heir to the great biographers of the 18th century, he is also a Prophet, who anticipated many genres of the XX-XXI centuries: a subjective report, “Gonzo-journalism”, a historical series, etc. From the pages of a famous book clearly The author’s voice sounds - the “Sphinx of English modernism”, which made a riddle on the threshold of turning point, the answer to which has not yet been found. In a capacious article of wonderful researchers of English literature, B.M. Proskurnina and D.B. Vershinina, in detail the history of the creation of this “Literature Monument” was revealed. And in an exhaustive comments that have no world analogues, historical events and realities are explained in detail, the main sources on which the author relied were revealed, light in his “creative workshop”: literary techniques, romance inserts, and author’s interpretations of the mentioned events were noted. The reader is given the opportunity to get acquainted with the documentary basis of artistic episodes born of a “historical imagination”, and separate “grains from the chases”, the truth from fiction, because many impressive characteristics and scenes from the composition of Strechi are still accepted even in serious historical works for irrefutable facts.

It is recommended the widest circle of readers.