Contents: introduction chapter I literature of the age of enlightenment

2.2 Daniel Defoe
The harsh school of life that Defoe went through, his vigorous versatile activity, and the richest journalistic experience prepared the birth of Defoe the novelist. The writer was 59 years old when he published his first and most remarkable novel, which glorified his name for centuries. It was The Life and Strange, Wonderful Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Sailor of York, as Described by Himself (1719).
Defoe's book appeared on the crest of a powerful wave of travel literature that swept England at that time - true and fictional reports of circumnavigations, memoirs, diaries, travel notes of successful merchants and famous sailors. However, no matter how diverse and numerous the sources of "Robinson Crusoe" were, both in form and in content, the novel was a deeply innovative phenomenon. Having creatively assimilated the experience of his predecessors, relying on his own journalistic experience, Defoe created an original work of art that organically combined an adventurous beginning with an imaginary documentary, the traditions of the memoir genre with the features of a philosophical parable.
The idea of ​​"Robinson Crusoe" was prompted by Defoe by a real incident: in 1704, the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, having quarreled with the captain of the ship, landed on an unfamiliar shore with a small supply of provisions and weapons, and for more than four years led a hermit life on the island of Juan Fernandez in the Pacific Ocean until he was picked up by a passing ship under the command of Woodes Rogers. Defoe could get acquainted with the history of Selkirk from the book by Rogers "Sailing around the world" (1712) and from Steele's essay in the magazine "The Englishman" (1713).
This story served the writer as a starting point for a detailed artistic narrative, imbued with the poetry of travel and adventure, and at the same time containing a deep socio-philosophical meaning. Having forced his hero to live twenty-eight years away from civilization, Defoe carried out an enlightening experiment on "human nature", subjected it to a kind of test, sought to clarify for himself and his readers the decisive factors for human survival in this emergency.
In the island episode of the novel, this heroic chronicle of Robinson's "works and days", the author poeticized the history of man's centuries-old struggle for existence, glorified the indestructible power of his thought, knowing and conquering nature, glorified the element of free creative labor. Labor and hard work of thought help the hero not only to survive, but also not to run wild, not to fall into madness, to preserve his human appearance. It is the work and creative activity of the mind that, according to the writer, form the basis for the transformation of the world and the spiritual elevation of man.
Defoe embodied in the novel a typical enlightenment concept of the history of human society. The life of his hero on the island in a generalized, schematic form repeats the path of mankind from barbarism to civilization: first, Robinson is a hunter and fisherman, then a cattle breeder, farmer, artisan, slave owner. Later, with the advent of other people on the island, he becomes the founder of a colony arranged in the spirit of Locke's "social contract".
At the same time, it is important to emphasize that Defoe's hero, from the very beginning of his stay on the island, is not a "natural", but a civilized person, not the starting point of history, but the product of a long historical development, an individual, only temporarily placed in a "natural state": he armed with the labor skills and experience of his people and successfully uses the equipment, tools and other material values ​​found on the wrecked ship. Cut off from society by the will of circumstances, does Robinson never for a moment cease to feel like a particle of it, remains a social being and considers his loneliness as the gravest? from the trials that fell to his lot.
Robinson is a hard worker, but at the same time he is "an exemplary English merchant." His entire mindset is characteristic of the British bourgeois of the early 18th century. He does not disdain either planting or the slave trade and is ready to go to the ends of the world, driven not so much by the restless spirit of quest as by the thirst for enrichment. He is thrifty and practical, diligently accumulating material values. The possessive streak is also manifested in the hero's attitude to nature: he describes the exotically beautiful corner of the earth, into which fate has thrown him, as a zealous owner, compiling a register of his property.
Robinson even builds his relationship with God on the principle of a business contract, in which "good" and "evil", like profit and loss items, balance each other with accounting accuracy. As befits a bourgeois puritan, Defoe's hero willingly turns to the Bible, and in difficult times appeals to God. However, in general, his religiosity is very moderate. The sensualist-practitioner of the Locke school, accustomed to relying in everything on experience and common sense, constantly triumphs in him over the puritan-mystic, who hopes for the goodness of providence.
Interesting in the novel are Robinson's conversations with Friday about religion: the "natural man" Friday, anticipating Voltaire's "Innocent", with his naive questions, easily confounds Robinson, who intended to convert him to Christianity.
Revealing in detail in the novel the relationship between Robinson and Friday saved by him from cannibals, Defoe seeks to emphasize the noble civilizing mission of the English bourgeoisie. In his depiction, Robinson, although he turns the young savage into a humble servant, nevertheless treats him gently and humanely, introduces him to the blessings of spiritual and material culture and finds in him a grateful and capable student. Clearly idealizing the image of Robinson, the author, as it were, teaches a lesson to the European colonizers and slave traders, teaches them humane treatment of the natives, condemns the barbaric methods of conquering wild tribes.
Defoe's hero unexpectedly turns out to be a student of the enlightening philosophy of the 18th century: he is a cosmopolitan and grants the Spaniards equal rights with the British in his colony, he professes religious tolerance, respects human dignity even in "savages" and is himself filled with a proud consciousness of personal superiority over all the autocrats of the earth. "Robinson Crusoe" is connected by many threads with the philosophical ideas of John Locke: in essence, the entire "island robinsonade" and the history of the robinson colony in the novel sound like a fictional transcription of Locke's treatises on government. The very theme of the island, which is out of contact with society, was already used by Locke in his philosophical writings two decades before Defoe.
Defoe is also close to Locke's educational ideas about the role of labor in the history of the human race and the formation of an individual. It was not for nothing that Rousseau called Defoe's novel "the most successful treatise on natural education" and gave him the most honorable place in the library of his young hero ("Emile, or On Education", 1762). The ingenuous story of how Robinson built his hut, how he burned the first jug, how he grew bread and tamed goats, how he built and launched a boat, continues to excite the imagination of readers of all ages for almost three centuries. It has not lost its enormous educational value for children and youth to this day.
The exclusivity of the situation in which Defoe put his hero, removing him from the world of money and placing him in the world of work, allowed the author to most clearly highlight in the character of Robinson those qualities that are manifested in free from commercial calculations, universal in nature, creative, creative activities. The pathos of knowledge and conquest of nature, the triumph of free human labor, reason, energy and the will to live give Defoe's book an extraordinary freshness, poetry and persuasiveness, constitute the secret of its charm and the guarantee of its immortality.
The extraordinary success of the novel prompted the author to immediately take up its continuation. Thus appeared The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and then Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, with his Vision of the Angelic World (1720). Both in terms of ideological content and artistic performance, both parts are noticeably inferior to the first. The second book describes the hero's journey to India, China and Siberia. He visits his island, where he completes the establishment of an "ideal" colony. Robinson appears in this part as "an exemplary English merchant". Didactic "Serious Reflections" - typical for literature of the 17th - 18th centuries. an attempt to explain the deep, allegorical content of the previous parts. Robinson sets out in detail here his ethical, religious-philosophical and literary views.
The works of Defoe that followed Robinson Crusoe are exceptionally diverse in their genre nature: here are adventure novels that continue the traditions of the picaresque genre - Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), Roxanne (1724), and the marine adventure novel "Captain Singleton" (1720), and the diary novel "The Diary of a Plague Year" (1722), and, finally, memoir novels, which are a distant prototype of the historical novel - "Memoirs of a Cavalier" (1720), " Memoirs of an English Officer, Captain George Carlton" (1728).
All Defoe's novels are written in the form of memoirs, diaries or autobiographies. The unusual gift of reincarnation allows the writer to act on behalf of a thief, a prostitute, a pirate. Almost all of his heroes are criminals, almost all of them are orphans and foundlings who do not remember their relationship. Captain Singleton, the head of a pirate gang, was stolen as a child, Moll Flanders was born in Newgate Prison and roams all the dens and slums of England, "Colonel" Jack spends the night in glass-blowing ovens as a homeless boy, begins to steal for a piece of bread, and at the end of the novel becomes a planter -slave owner. Heroes lead a desperate struggle for existence, not shunning any means. Defoe traces their life path from infancy to old age, shows them in collisions with a cruel world, reveals the influence of the environment on their characters and destinies, and comes to the conclusion that
Of particular interest among Defoe's crime stories is the novel The Joys and Sorrows of the famous Moll Flanders, who was born in Newgate Prison and during the six decades of her diverse life (not counting childhood) was a kept woman for twelve years, married five times (of which once for his brother), twelve years as a thief, eight years as an exile in Virginia; but in the end she got rich, began to live honestly and died in repentance. Written from her own notes. Before the reader passes a life full of ups and downs, successes and failures. The daughter of a thief, who grew up among criminals, brought up at the expense of the parish, Moll suffered many sorrows and humiliations from an early age. Beautiful, smart, energetic, she stubbornly strives to "break out into the people." The poverty and heartlessness of those around her become the main reason for her moral decline and in the end turn her into a predator, who enthusiastically enters into the struggle of all against all. Gorky gave a remarkable description of the realistic image of Moll in his lectures on the history of Russian literature: “Moll Flanders is depicted as a drunken, angry, rude person who does not believe in anything, deceitful, cunning, but at the same time you clearly see in her all the feelings of a citizen free country ... you see that before you is a person who knows his own worth, a person who perfectly understands the degree of his personal guilt and the guilt of society, which forced her to live by selling her body - in a word, the author does not forget for a moment that before him is the victim of an ugly social order, he condemns her for the fact that Moll did not resist stubbornly enough,
The fate of a lonely woman, making her way upstairs, is also dedicated to Defoe's novel "Roxanne". The heroine of Defoe is an adventurer and courtesan, she rotates in various social circles, wanders around Europe, shines in Paris under Louis XIV and in London salons during the Restoration. At a time when Roxana, having destroyed, as it seems to her, all traces of her dark past, is preparing to retire and live the rest of her days in contentment, she unexpectedly meets her own daughter, once abandoned by her. An enmity flares up between them, and for the sake of profit, the mother becomes an unspoken accomplice in the murder of her daughter. In terms of drama and psychological persuasiveness, "Roxanne" significantly surpasses the previous works of the writer.
Defoe entered the history of literature as the creator of the first remarkable examples of the epic of private life, as the initiator of the educational realistic novel. He was the first to be able to see the hero of his time in the merchant and vagabond, the glorious "sailor from York", to reveal within the framework of a separate destiny the richness and diversity of real life, to give a deeply faithful and impressive portrait of an age possessed by the spirit of entrepreneurship and practical life. Defoe wrote for the widest audience and was truly a folk writer, not only in content, but also in the form of his works. The lively and direct manner of narration, the simple and artless language of Defoe's novels were close and understandable to millions of readers. By the end of the 18th century, Defoe's masterpiece "Robinson Crusoe" went through about 700 editions in England alone and was translated into almost all European languages. Defoe's name has become an integral part of the history of world democratic culture.