1.3 Virginia Woolf

Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941), English novelist and critic, whose stream-of-consciousness technique and poetic style are among the most important contributions to the modern novel.

Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, the daughter of the biographer and philosopher Sir Leslie Stephen, who educated her at home. About 1905, after her father's death, she and her sister Vanessa and their two brothers established a literary circle, known as the Bloomsbury group, that included the writer Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married in 1912. With her husband she founded the Hogarth Press in 1917.

Virginia Woolf's early novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922)—prove her determination to expand the borders of the novel beyond mere storytelling. She wanted to stress the continuous flow of experience, the indefinability of character and external circumstances as they strike consciousness. She was also interested in the way time is experienced both as a sequence of moments and as the flow of years and of centuries. She tried to convey the impression of time present and of time passing in individual experience and also of the characters' awareness of historic time.

In her next novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), plot is generated by the inner lives of the characters. Psychological effects are achieved through the use of `imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Character reveals by means of the ebb and flow (приливы и отливы) of personal impressions, feelings, and thoughts—a stream-of-consciousness technique. Thus, the inner lives of human beings and their otherwise average circumstances seem extraordinary. Although the events in Mrs. Dalloway take place within a fixed 12-hour span, both books convey the passage of time through the moment-to-moment changes within the characters—their appreciation of themselves, others, and their kaleidoscopic worlds. To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations of the major characters. The novel recalls the power of childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. One of the book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience.

Of her remaining fiction, the novel The Waves (1931) is the most evasive and stylized; In the novel she restricts herself to recording the stream of consciousness. The reader lives within the minds of one or the other of six characters from their childhood to their old age. Human experience of the “seven ages of man,” rather than character or event, is most important.

On March 28, 1941, depressed by the attack of one of her recurrent periods of mental illness, she committed suicide by drowning.

1. 4 Aldous Leonard Huxley

Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894-1963), English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence and considered to be one of the creators of the “intellectual novel”. His works were notable for their elegance, wit, and pessimistic satire. He is best known for his novels and essays, short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank.

Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominent biologist and the third child of the biographer and writer. He was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford. He worked on various periodicals and published four books of verse before the appearance of his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921). The novels Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), both of which illustrate the nihilistic temper of the 1920s, and Brave New World (1932), an ironic vision of a future utopia, established Huxley's fame.

Brave New World is the most famous novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1932. Set in London in 2540, the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning that combine to change society.

The world the novel describes is a utopia, though an ironic one: humanity is carefree, healthy and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is permanently happy due to government-provided stimulation. The irony is that all of these things have been achieved by eliminating many things that humans consider to be central to their identity — family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. It is also a hedonistic society, deriving pleasure from promiscuous sex and drug use, especially the use of soma, a powerful drug taken to escape pain and bad memories through hallucinatory fantasies.

Brave New World was inspired by the H.G. Wells utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells’ optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia". He was able to use the setting and characters from his futuristic fantasy to express widely held opinions, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future.

Brave New World Revisited, written by Huxley almost thirty years after Brave New World, was a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved towards or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future but in Brave New World Revisited he concluded that the world was becoming much more like Brave New World much faster than he thought. Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion (подсознательное внушение).

During the 1920s he lived largely in Italy and France. He immigrated to the United States in 1937.

The novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) continues to emphasize the emptiness and aimlessness experienced in contemporary society, but it also shows Huxley's growing interest in Hindu philosophy and mysticism as a viable alternative. Many of his subsequent works reflect this concern, notably The Perennial Philosophy (1946).