Fire Earth. Eliot T.S.

This publication makes it possible to look at the work of Thomas Stornza Eliot (1888-1965), one of the legendary figures of literary modernism. This American, whose ancestors moved to America to Hul., In 1914, unexpectedly became an expert (and then a British subject). “Puritan” according to the perception of the world, Eliot was drawn to his contemporary E. Pound into the orbit of the latest literature (J. Joyce, W. Lewis, Imazhist poets). Later, this did not stop Eliot not only to become an author who found in poetry the modernist equivalent of Christianity, but also to become by the end of the 1930s a prominent representative of enlightened Christian conservatism. Traditionalism and avant -garde shocking, problems in relations with women and the chanting of their “muses” following the example of Dante, criticism of London bohemia and apology of a number of radicals of modernism. But no matter how exactly Eliot positioned himself, the poet, having replaced several public masks, remained largely a mysterious figure.

the key to the mystery of Eliot - his most famous work, the poem "Fire Earth" (1922). It was reflected in many features of the aesthetic modernism of the 1910-1920s: reflection on the “death of God”, “sunset of the West”; search for a new ideal through the ultimate disappointment; “Stream of consciousness”, transferred to the lyrics; sophisticated symbolist metaphors; rituals, myths projected to modernity; a combination of a high syllable and a lower idiom; Goddasteism; references to occult experiments, blasphemy; scandalous eroticism; The game and deep autobiographics.

The first Russian translation of the "Fire Earth" was brilliantly executed in 1971 by A.Ya. Sergeyev. However, the poem, which then withstood a lot of reprints and later translations, has never been printed in Russia entirely. In this publication, it is first published in Russian without distorting the author’s will, according to the first book edition of 1922, the parallel English text allows us to evaluate the skill of Eliot and the quality of the translation by A.Ya. Sergeeva. The publication is complemented by the translations of the manuscripts of the first edition of the “Fire Earth”, reviews and critical responses to the poem - from V. Wolf to K. Brooks, the founder of the American school of “New Critics”, as well as Eliot's Books “The Holy Forest: Essay on Poetry and Criticism” ( 1920), where he laid down the principles of understanding his own creativity and modernist poetry as a whole.

the translation of the first edition of the "Fire Earth" presented in this volume is of particular value - this version of the poem is significantly different from its final version redesigned by the Eliot On the advice of E. Pound. The text of the first edition of the "Fire Earth" and the book "The Holy Forest" are first printed in Russian completely.