On the work of E. Hemingway


In his works of art, the writer first of all reinterprets what he knew well from his own life experience. However, the “truth of facts” was important to him only to the extent that it opened the way to the “truth of feelings.” Expanding the inner world of his characters, E. Hemingway relied on artistic achievements of realism of the nineteenth century. – first of all, made by L. Tolstoy and F. Dostoyevsky, as well as on the aesthetic discoveries of modern novelists: S. Anderson, J. Dos Passos, J. Joyce, G. Stein, and others.

The starting point of the mature work of Hemingway was his experience of participating in the First World War. It was this experience that formed the basis for the writer’s worldview, which found a concentrated expression in the images of the “heroes of the code” that he created. Under the code, the writer understood a set of unwritten rules that ensures the spiritual self-protection of the individual and his fundamental values ​​- human dignity, honesty, nobility, love, friendship, humane attitude to others.

A distinctive artistic feature of Hemingway’s prose is the so-called “iceberg principle”. It consists in creating a “double optics” of the artistic image, as a result of which the extremely “simple” and “ascetically” constructed plot is saturated with a complex overtones in which all the richness of meanings, emotions, psychic reactions, symbols, associations is concentrated. Thus, outwardly without going beyond the laconic, documentarily “dry” narrative, the writer embraces the deep “truth of life” hidden behind the surface of things and events.


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On the work of E. Hemingway