Khazar university

Introduction speaks about the creative activity of J.Galsworthy in general.

In order to evaluate the importance of the creative activity and the environment where Galsworthy survived as a writer, we should look up the atmosphere, which dominated in the English literature at the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century. The great realistic writers stepped backwards from literature and their followers were very few to struggle against the anti realistic movement which was supported by the British Empire. The weight of literature, which was fabulous and with “the happy end”, met the demands of book markets, grew day by day. From the other side, after World War I, to the stage of literature came such kind of authors as V.Wolf, D.H.Lawrence, J.Joyce, Th.Eliot, who called Galsworthy “the

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author of the past era”. They used new experiments such as J.Joyce‟s retrospectivity, V.Wolf‟s subconscious and D.H.Lawrence‟s open writings about love and passion.

John Galsworthy was a successive supporter of a real Art, believed in its transforming power and benevolent influence over the society. He was born on 14 August, in 1867, at Kingston Hill, in Surrey, England, and died on 31 January, in 1933. His father was a lawyer and successful solicitor, who had financial interests in mining companies in Canada and Rus-sia, and also, a director of several companies, who later served as a model for Old Jolyon in “The Forsyte Saga”. His mother was a daughter of a Midlands Manufacturer.

Galsworthy was a novelist, playwright, prolific author, who worked in many genres, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932, just a month before his death. But he is most widely recognized as a chronicler of the English bourgeois society during the early twentieth century. For a short period he worked at his father‟s firm, but as he had no interest towards it, he left for Canada to inspect his family mining interests. His travels became exten-sive. During his travels he befriended with his later friend Joseph Conrad, who became an important source of encouragement in Galsworthy‟s literary career. In 1894, he returned to London, within a short period he gave up his career at law, the next few years spent with writ-ing reading assiduously.

Central line of Galsworthy‟s literary activity is the theme of Forsytes‟ property. Gals-worthy devoted nearly all his creative life to the description of the Forsytes‟ world, disclosure of the psychology of a man- Forsyte, whose viewpoint is restricted by the framework of his (her) class, by the behaviors in their circle.

There are a lot of valuable quotes said by John Galsworthy, which can be interesting for us to appreciate his literary weight. He touched upon different spheres of the social life. For example: “One‟s eyes are what one is; one‟s mouth is what one becomes”, “Beginning are always messy”, “Headlines twice the size of the events”, “If you do not think about your fu-ture you cannot have one”, “A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, nothing else”- these quotes are about the general social problems of the human being, which he experienced in his time.

Galsworthy's novels, by their abstention, from complicated psychology and their great-ly simplified social viewpoint, became accepted as faithful patterns of English life for a time. Galsworthy is remembered for this evocation of Victorian and Edwardian upper middle-class life, and for his creation of Soames Forsyte - a dislikable character, who nevertheless compels the reader's sympathy.

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In 1917, John Galsworthy was offered a knighthood, but he rejected, and argued that, a writer should not accept such offers and become dependent on social institutes, but later he accepted the “Order of Merits” for his literary achievements. Also the author was a president of PEN(Poet, Essayist, Novelist), the International Writers‟ Organization, for 12 years, ho-noured doctor of Trinity College, Cambridge, Dublin, Oxford, Princeton Universities. In 1932, a month before his death, Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.