Dubliners

In Dubliners, the aspiring writer's fascination with the writings of Ibsen , Flaubert and Maupassant , mediated, according to D. Mirsky , by the influence of the Irish naturalist J. O. Moore ^[1] . “Joyce appears in his stories as a follower of the French school, writer of the school of Flaubert and Maupassant,” stated in 1936 the Soviet journal International Literature ^[2] .

The collection appeared due to the order of the poet George Russell , who in the summer of 1904 asked Joyce to write a work for the Irish Manor magazine that could be published without disturbing the readers. Three stories (“Sisters” (first version), “Evelyn”, “After the Race”) appeared in the magazine under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus and made such an unfavorable impression on the readers that the editor asked Joyce not to send anything else.

Even then, Joyce assumed that the stories would not be separate works, but would be included in a collection united by one common theme. Initially, the collection was supposed to be composed of ten stories, but since the publication of the book did not work for a long time, its final version included fifteen stories. Their sequence is not accidental: the author has divided them into sections with the conditional names “Childhood”, “Youth”, “Maturity”, “Social Life”, but sections are not indicated in the last version of the book.

• Sisters (published in 1904 , substantially modified in 1906 )
• Meeting (completed in 1905)
• Arabia (completed in 1905)
• Evelyn (published in 1904, edited)
• After the race (published in 1904, underwent repeated editing)
• Two cavaliers (winter 1905-06)
• Pension (written in 1905, has undergone significant editing)
• Cloud (early 1906)
• Mutual additions (summer of 1905)
• Earth (autumn 1904)
• The sad incident (August 1905)
• Ivy Day in the meeting room (August 1905)
• Mother (September 1905)
• Grace of God (November 1905, edited)
• The Dead (September 1907)

In literary criticism, the opinion was firmly established that in the stories of the collection, the writer who left Ireland sought to reveal not only the reasons that prompted him to leave, but also to predict his fate, he would stay at home. Dublin appears in the book as a “cemetery of souls,” which, in Chekhov's style, tend to break out of the stuffy world of everyday life, but turn out to be constrained by social and psychological bonds. ^[3] The author is removed from the text, allowing the reader to make an opinion about what he saw. The selection of individual vignettes of everyday life in stories and their comparison allows us to judge the psychological or moral background of this or that episode. ^[four]

In the year of publication, the Dubliners did not make much impression on the reading public. True, the idol of the Irish intelligentsia, W. B. Yeats, recommended Joyce's short stories as “a wonderful book, satirical stories of great power, something similar to the works of the great Russians” ^[5] . Other authors also noted that the collection stands apart in English literature. Edmund Wilson , for example, considered the “Dubliners” to belong, like Moore’s works, to the French tradition of “sober objectivity”, although the musicality of the text is inherent only to Joyce ^[6] . Ezra Pound saw in Joyce's stories a literary correspondence with French impressionism ^[7] .

The growth of interest in Joyce's experiments in the field of short stories began after the publication of his main novel, Ulysses (1922). M. A. Shereshevskaya notes that the effect of the collection was weakened by the red tape dragging on for years with the publication ^[8] :

If the Dubliners appeared when they were written, in 1905, the Irish and English readers would have nothing to compare them with. But by 1914, the stories of Chekhov were already known in the English-language literary world. It is no accident that almost immediately after the publication of the collection Yeats pointed to their “Russian character”.

Early Joyce stories had a significant impact on the development of English-language short stories, especially in the United States , where the traditions of literary regionalism were always strong. Sherwood Anderson in 1917 began to publish stories about the provincial town of Winesburg in Ohio: it is the same as Joyce's Dublin, a stuffy and secluded world, from which, in fact, there is no way out ^[9] . Taken together, the cycle of stories about the inhabitants of Winesburg forms a semblance of a novel . In a similar way, the collection of short stories by W. Faulkner “ Come Down, Moses ” (1942) was organized: its place of action is the fictional district of Yoknapatof ^{[10] [11]} . A strictly defined (and most often fictitious) territory as the scene of a collection of realistic stories is a common thing in post-war American literature.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was not yet customary to combine novels into collections of internal kinship. The arrangement of the stories in the books of that time usually depended entirely on the whim of the compiler. In the new book, the novelist, as a rule, included all the short things written since the publication of the last collection. “Dubliners” were perceived as an integral and isolated work of art. In this regard, Joyce's book has become a model of a collection of short stories as an independent literary form, which occupies an intermediate position between the novel and the novel. This precedent took into account, for example, Hemingway when compiling the collection of short stories “ In Our Time ” in 1925, which became a classic of American literature ^[12] .

In 1987, John Houston made a self-titled film based on the Dead, and in 1999 he made his debut musical on the Broadway with Christopher Walken in the title role. The title of this book was taken by the musical group The Dubliners , and the indie duo Two Gallants was named after one of the stories in the cycle.

• Harman D. N. Address to the reader // Joyce D. Dubliners. - M .: Vagrius, 2007, comp. and foreword. E. Yu. Genius ; commentary. E. Yu. Genieva and Yu. A. Roznatovskaya. ISBN 978-5-9697-0426-8